You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best in paranormal talk radio
in the UK and around the world. Welcome to the Afterlife Foules, where
we investigate near death experiences, share death experiences and how they affect you online
podcasts that are just stories. We will give you a heads up on what
to look for in our conversation, and then after the interviews stick around.
We'll help you make sense of those accounts so that you can incorporate the insights
into your life. I think you'll find this video will help you answer some
of the most profound questions so that you can live life in the physical filled
with more peace and joy. I was doing research on Edgar Casey and found
Stephen A. Schwartz, a scholar who had dedicated a considerable amount of his
life researching and thinking about how Edgar Casey described the nature of consciousness. I
watched his presentation at the Vale Symposium and was blown away with how Edgar Casey,
near death and share death experiencers were talking about the same thing. Each
used a slightly different vocabulary, but their conclusions are identical. I just had
to have him on the Afterlife Files for you. Our interview begins with two
remarkable quotes, one by mac Plunk and the other by Albert Einstein. They
will make you think and make you smile. Stephen is an experimentalist. I
appreciate that he didn't spend time trying to figure out if access to non local
consciousness was real. He focused instead and how it worked and how to make
it more effective individually. And then Stephen spends the last segment of the interview
on how we can change the direction of our culture to be more compassionate,
life affirming and focused on fostering the well being of everyone because of the nature
of consciousness. In the middle of the interview, Stephen talks about how religion
re arose because of the nature of consciousness. It's a fascinating insight. Sidebar,
This is a heads up. Stephen and I try to conduct this interview
three times. Each time the internet connection was shaky, and it's slightly so
on this one too, but don't let that distract you. The audio track
is good and what he has to say is so important that you may want
to watch or listen to this interview a couple of times. I'm on my
sixth there's that much inference that can be teased out of his insights. Here
is a terrific interview with Stephen A. Schwartz. Well, Hi, Stephen,
really great to have you here on the Afterlife Files. My pleasure.
You know you are famous for saying everything is a manifestation of consciousness. So
how did you get from a young man with ordinary values to this kind of
enlightened observation of the world. Tell us your story. Well, I read
Max Plunk's interview in nineteen thirty one and the published in the Observer newspaper.
Plunk, as you know, the father quantum mechanic. Ye didn't give a
lot of interviews, so they were very glad to get one from him.
And a reporter that the Observer editor had sent to the to do the interview
said, Plunk, you know, you and Einstein are the most famous scientists
in the world. What have you learned? And I think he probably expected
to get an answer about molecules and atoms and you know whatever, but instead
what he got was Plunk said, what I have learned is that consciousness is
causal and fundamental. You cannot get behind consciousness. This is a quote.
Actually consciousness is causal and fundamental. Space, time, arises from consciousness,
not consciousness from space time, which was the materialist physiological I did that all
consciousness and physiologically based in the brain. He said, consciousness arises a spacetime
arises from consciousness, not consciousness from space time. And I read this when
I was at university in University of Virginia and had stuck with me and and
Einstein had a similar interview in which they ask him, you know, what
do you understand about reality? And he says, it's an optical delusion.
Delusion. I love that part two, And so then I was there was
a strange series of synchronicities. I was introduced to the Edgar casting material,
and I decided after I had looked at it, because the first exposure I
had to it, I end up at random, just literally. I was
taken to the aar and the organization that grew up around him, and I
pulled off the shelf one of the readings. I didn't even know what a
reading was. I didn't know anything about any of this, and I read
this reading and it was given in nineteen thirty six, Okay for a woman,
and he said she had been a member of the esteem community at Kurbet
Comran and a teacher of astrology. And I've got to tell you, Scott,
it is possible for your hair to stand on end, because I had
just recently come out of the Service and the Army. I'd been drafted when
I was working for National Geographic. And the last thing I had done for
National Geographic before I went into the Service was research on the Dinesse Scrolls for
an article that we were going to do. Oh sure, And I knew
that in nineteen thirty six, not a single person on earth knew that the
Asscene community was at Kurbet Comeran, or that women were involved with the community,
or that they had any particular interest in astrology. But all of that
is true. In nineteen forty seventy eleven years after Casey had given this reading,
a young Bedouin tribes boy had been checking rocks into a cave that he
saw and he heard something go clunk, and he went down into the cave
to see what it was and discovered what we know as the didc scrolls.
And we know from the scrolls of the obsession they had with astrology. And
we know that in fact, the but Comrun, which was at that time,
thought to be nothing more than a minor outpost of the Emperor of Especian
was in fact in the scene community. Nobody knew that, and excavation revealed
that there were female skeletons, so women had been a part of it.
Most of what anybody knew about the scenes was Josephists. An ancient historian had
said they were a scapetic order of monks, of Jewish monks, so you
didn't mention anything about women, so nobody knew who there were women. And
while I realized this, I read this stand which I had just randomly,
serendipitously pulled off the shelf. How could a man possibly know something eleven years
before it was discovered and anybody knew it? And that set me in motion
to what has become the interest of my life, and that is study of
the nature of consciousness. I am an experimentalist. That's an important point because
I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a theoretician. I don't speculate, I'm
not a theologian in that sense. I care about experimental, objectively verifiable data
and what that has taught me over the last sixty years since I started on
this was that consciousness is as trumps as a trump, as Plunk said,
causal and fundamental. What we're dealing with in reality is that information construct in
space time, created by intention consciousness, and that there is continuity of consciousness,
that is, you existed prior to incarnation, and not you as a
personality, but you as the eternal self what religion calls the soul, will
continue and that you will episodically manifest another personality, and that personality will come
in informed by informational structure, which will even impact your genetics in a subsequent
life. And my experimental research because as they say, I'm an experimentalist.
I get to that not because I think it's lovely or it's religious, or
it's spiritual or any of that, but because that's what the evidence shows us.
The problem with materialism is that they don't like the evidence, so they
don't look at it. But the fact is that consciousness does not entirely repose
in the brain. It is not entirely physiologically based. And you're also talking
about information. You called it. It is constructed, it's in a construct.
Can you talk a little more about that? Well, the two great
mystery questions to me are what is information and well is consciousness? And I
don't know the answer to either one of those questions, and nobody else does
either, because I know most of the people that do this kind of research,
and I don't know anybody that knows the answer to those two questions.
What I can say is that it is clear if you look at the evidence
again, this is all evidence based. That is the fundamental in the construct
of what we call reality is information that when you when you have physically died,
but your consciousness continues. It's not in a place that is It's not
a question of where is it, because where is a is a space time
word. But it does continue to exist. And we know from the reincarnational
work where people incarnate from an earlier life with earth marks or scar tissue or
wound tissue, you know, a wound healing from an earlier life event.
So what comes across between those incarnations it's not something physical, and it's not
something that was in space time. It was information and that this information shapes
your choice of parents, your choice of race, your choice soci economic background,
your choice of geographical location, and it also you bring across remembered patterns
of behavior an activity that come from earlier times and that we incarnate in order
to deal with informational patterns which are created through the choice as we make.
And so once you begin to see that, then you have a very different
view of the world because you realize that the most important thing you can do
in your life is to foster wellbeing at every level, from the smallest bacteria
to human beings. That the fostering of well being creates the greatest harmony and
the greatest success. It's the most efficient, the most productive, and it's
by far the cheapest choice you can make. And so my life has been
dedicated first to experimentation and then to exploring how individuals and small groups can change
the course of history to foster compassionate life, affirming wellbeing. So you mentioned
that this information architecture that carries on between our different lives was very intentional.
That we chose this life, We chose how we're going to come in and
who our parents are. I think I think that's a profound way to look
at it, that this architecture is created by our intentioned consciousness. Yes,
we know experimentally, for instance, that consciousness alone can cause an effect in
physical reality I mean to give you an example of the kind of experiments I'm
talking about. For instance, an experiment that I did. I had people
do healing therapeutic contention, okay, and while they did it, I put
on the palms of their hands little vials, little hermetically sealed vials, glass
vials, which contain water that I literally was so pure it would have been
dangerous to drink it. I didn't know there was such a thing. Okay,
Well, it was made out of the gases. That literally I had
the gases combined to make the water, and it was put in these little
vials, and using infrared spectra photometry, we measured the vials five minute vial,
ten minute vial, fifteen minute mile. Because at the time that I
did the experiment, everybody thought that the longer you did the healing intention,
the bigger the effect. That turns out not to be true, But in
any case, I measured using infrared spectra photometry, I measured the difference between
the molecular structure of the water that was exposed to the healing while they were
doing the healing and the control vials, which were in another building in another
place, which had not been exposed to healing, and what we saw was
to a very highly significant degree, the water that was exposed to healing,
and it had to do with the hydrogen oxygen bonding relationship, was molectively different
than the water that was the control vial. Another kind of experiment that makes
this point, Dean Maiden, researcher that no edches, did two experiments,
one involving chocolate, where he took out the bar chocolate and he broke it
in two and he had Buddhist monks focused their intention on the half of the
chocolate and the other half of the chocolate was kept in another place and didn't
get any attention. And he had people eat the chocolate and then report how
happy they were. And the people who ate the chocolate, now, the
people who had to control chocolate, they ate it too, But the people
who got the treated chocol clip, we're happier than the people who got the
control chocolate. And he did the same thing with tea, got a bunch
of tea, and he had the Buddhist monks focused the healing on it or
intention on it, and had people bring the tea. And those people that
had they treated tea had a different reaction to people who had to control tea.
And then I got interested in another experiment that I did. I wondered
why water and wine are so involved with religions around the world. I wondered
that too, since it was Jesus's first miracle where, yes, why why
did he choose wine for the first miracle? Exactly why water? Why wine?
H Well, the answer is I've got a bunch of toads of the
water experiment that how holy water gets created is the act of intention of the
priest, if he is sufficiently conscious to know what he's doing and just wasting
his time, you know, just going through a protocol. That what makes
holy water is the same thing that when the healers did the healing of people
and they had the little vials of water on their hand, it changed the
molecular structure of the water, and the holy water is an example of how
a priest holding intention to consciousness changes the structure of the water. Now,
I also wondered about why why wine. The answer I think is I went
out and I got the kind of wine you would the quality of wine a
cabernet that you would take, for instance, to a friend's dinner party.
Okay, you know, twenty dollars a bottle of wine, and I went
to I went to seven friends of mine over a period of several years,
and I said to them, I didn't tell them anything about the background.
I said to them, I am about to buy a big quantity of wine,
and you know it's expensive, and I want to make sure I'm doing
the best. Would you hold a taste testing for me and have invited at
least seven people to come in and taste the wines. I'm going to give
you the two candidates that I'm that I've gotten down to. I've looked at
the whole bunch of wines, and I've gotten down to two kendidates. Now
the truth is a word of that was true. In fact, I had
bought one bottle of wine and I split it into two parts. You know,
the wine is seven hundred and fifty million leads, and I split it
into two bottles of three hundred seventy five million leads. And I took one
of the bottles to a group of meditators and I said, I'm going to
put this wine on a chair in front of your circle, and I want
you to focus healing intention on this wine. I'm with you okay, and
so I randomly assigned using a random number generator. I had assigned which would
be the treated wine, which would be the control wine. So I didn't
choose that. I was randomly selected. I had to hold that for twenty
minutes to focus healing intention on this wine. And then I took the two
bottles, the two three hundred seventy five million leader bottles I had, and
I took them over to the taste testing party. I was not physically there.
I left, and I gave it. Let's say it was you,
and I would say, well, Scott, here are my two candidates,
and I've decanted them into two different bottles so that you can't see the labels
so that nobody has any bias that you know, there's not going to be
oh, well, I know that wine. That's the one, that kind
of thing. So just two unlabeled bottles. Yeah, and I and here
are seven glasses exactly the same, so that the glasses don't affect anything.
And would you please decant the wine into these glasses, two glasses per person,
and have seven people pick which is the better wine. And I'm going
to make my purchase on that basis. And I didn't tell you. I
was doing this with six other people who were having the same kind of testing
thing. And so you invited seven of your friends in and you said to
them, Okay, I've got a friend who's wants to make this big wine
buy and he's gotten it down to two candidates, and he asked us to
test it. And so I've laid it out in The glasses are all the
same so that there's no difference, and I've decanted, you know, a
portion into each glass, same portion. So would you taste them for me
and tell me which you think is the best wine? And in all but
one case they picked the treated wine. Something had changed in the structure of
the wine, or maybe just at the informational level, not in the physical
level, that made that wine tastier, just as Dean Raden's experiment with the
chocolate and the tea, where he split the chocolate bar or he split the
tea into two two groups too loose tea, and the people had a more
positive reaction to one than the other, and it was always the treated one.
And so the reason that water and wine are involved in religious ceremonies,
I think is that water, when you focus intention on it changes and it
causes a change in the way you react to it. That's what makes it
the Holy water wine in communion, same thing I mean, and that's you
know, they say the wine is transformed from from wine into Jesus's blood,
as it were, metaphorically or I don't know, some people believe literally,
although that's kind of weird. But in any case, the point being,
I think is that if you look at the world's religions, what you discover
is that they all begin because of one person who has a non local consciousness
experience. You know, Jesus is baptized by John and he goes into the
desert and meditates and he awakens. Buddha goes up to an ashram to a
teacher who teaches him to meditate, and he awakens. Sits under a tree.
Here we go. Yeah, Muhammed goes into the sacred cave of Eira,
he meditates, and he has an experience and he awakens. And so
if you look at religions, I mean, what I was interested in is
why why does religion exist? Good question? Yes, why, I mean,
why why should religion exist at all? And the answer, I think
is that from the beginning back to Neanderthals, and we know this because of
excavation of Neanderthal sites. There has been a understanding that there was a dimension,
not a dimension. That's because that's a space word. There is a
domain of consciousness independent of the physical world. Yes, okay, uh huh,
I'm with you on that. And all these religions begin because one person
becomes the prophet, has a non local consciousness experience, and experience of this
domain tells other people about it, and people listen to him, and they
write it down, sometimes years or even centuries later, and that becomes the
scripture for that religion. So when you strip away all of the dogmas that
are culturally appropriate, and you look at religion not as a not as religion
in the sense that it normally that normally is meant, but instead as a
fundamental recognition that there is an aspect of consciousness that is outside of space time.
So then you look at how religion is practiced. Think about this for
a minute, all right, I can't wait to hear this. All right.
You start with there's the sacred place, sure, the tree, the
case, a synagogue, it's a temple, it's an Etruscan sacred grove,
whatever. Those are all cultural affects, right, right, But the commonality
is that there's always a sacred place. Now why is that? Well,
we know the answer to that, all right, lay it at me,
and the answer is we know in remote viewing research that it is easier to
see a cathedral than it is a warehouse of the same size. Now,
why is that? Remote viewing is the ability to describe person, places,
events, objects from which you cannot know because you are temporarily or racially distant
from them. That is the picture I'm going to ask you to describe hasn't
been selected yet. And in any case, I'm in one city and you're
in another city, or you're in another wherever across the targets in a third
so yeah, whatever. So acts of intentioned observation informationally enrich the information architecture
physically represented by the cathedral, whereas nobody pays any attention to warehouses. And
so when we do research in remote viewing, it is much more likely that
you will accurately describe the cathedral than the warehouse. Yeah. So the people
have spent so much time in altered states of consciousness in that place exactly,
exactly, and that informationally enriches the information structure of which the cathedral is the
physical manifestation. Somebody thought of it, they designed it, people built it.
For hundreds of years, people have been going in and in an altered
state of consciousness. Okay. Now then we look at the religious service.
Okay, so we know again experimentally, we know that things which are the
word is numinous. The things which are more numinous are easier to see in
remote viewing, non local perception than things which are not numinous, meaning extra
rich in information. Yes, that is precisely what it means. Okay,
particularly when there is a heightened emotional state associated with it. Okay, Okay,
Now let's look at the religious services all over the world. Well,
when I started telling you about how religions began that begin with one person,
you will probably have noticed that in every single case, the first thing that
this person does is begin to meditate. Jesus goes into the desert and meditates
and awakens. Buddha goes to the ostrom has taught meditation and awakens. Muhammad
goes into the cave, has an experience, begins to meditate and is awakened.
And you can go on and on. I mean, I'm talking here
about long history oracle religions, not minor cults and the usual, you know.
Okay, So now we have the sacred space, which is created by
the acts of intentioned observation. You go to the service at a fixed time
that has been pre arranged, and you are drawn together and you begin by
making a statement of common belief. If you're a Christian, it's the Nicean
creed for instance. Yea, Now what does that do? That begins to
create linkage you look at now researched by a neurophysiologist named Andrew Newburgh who created
something called neuro theology, which is the study of religions from a neuroscience perspective,
And what he discovered was that when people chant, drum dance, sing
together, their brains all in train. That makes a lot of sense to
the shamanistic services that I've been to. They all start that way. You
know. There's of course there's drumming, chanting, and it goes on freaking
forever, but you better be in trained by the time that's done. So
what happens is you go to the sacred space, which has been created by
intentioned observation. You make the statement of affirmation, I'm joining this group because
we all commonly believe the same thing. Then there is a period of dancing,
chanting, singing, whatever, which causes brain in training. Then there
is a period forget about the sermons. That's all intellectual stuff all that.
Then there is a period during which some, not all, and not always
of the individuals can have a non local consciousness experience speaking in tongues, prophesying,
healing whatever. Oh that's what okay, I see where you're going right.
Then you have more singing, dancing, whatever. The link this together.
You hold people in healing intention, You pray for them. What is
prayer? It's quieting yourself and focusing intention. And you agree to meet at
another time in that same place and you do that again and again and again
throughout your life. And what that does is it reinforces it again and again.
We now have research which shows if you want to change the way your
behavior works, it's not willpower. It's creating repetitive patterns. That's interesting.
You know, I was a trainer at the Monroe Institute for thirty five years
and Monroe, yeah, great guy, And you know we have something like
that where you know there's a pattern to what it is that we do,
and very specific vibration patterns that we're in and we and we do exercises in
a certain way, and over that thirty five years, you can feel the
difference when you walk on campus if you're at all sentive. Yes, yes,
I helped Bob design that in his or very early when I first met
him. I went to several of his literally when they were still in sleeping
bags, right before they built every case. A very nice guy anyway.
Exactly, you notice when you go on to the campus, because people have
been doing these repetitive patterns again and again and again and again and again,
that there is a consciousness which you associate with the place very much. So
now let's keep going. If you look at scriptures literally the shape of the
letters, or real words versus fake words, a series of experiments have been
done in which people were asked to Gary Schwartz, for instance, did an
initial one in which he had real Hebrew words and fake Hebrew words. Okay,
that is, they were written in Hebrew, but they some of them
were real words and some of them were not. And some of them were
very old words and some of them were young words. New words okay,
And he asked people to describe just what these words were about. And what
he found was the older the word, the more accurate, the more the
old words were better than the young words of the new words, and the
real words were more strongly responded to than the fake words. And this experiment
has been replicated in Chinese in several languages and always comes out the same way.
The real words are more impactful than the fake words. And if they
make letters which look like the language that they're written, these are obscure languages
as opposed to real letters, literally the shape of the letter. Real letters
get a bigger response than fake letters. So if you look at religion,
what you see is that it is a construct to make people awaken to the
idea that they are more than animated meat. Animated meat, lovely right.
And it doesn't matter the religions are different. One god, several gods,
male gods, female gods, whatever the cultural and dogma issues, those are
different. That's the way people normally talk about religion. We talk about oh,
Christian scholars or Hebrew scholars or Hindu scholars. But when you get down
to what actually is going on, what you see is these same patterns develop
through empirical observation over centuries, and they always are the same ones. It's
all the same whether you're a Hindu or a Jew, or a Christian,
or a Buddhist, or a scientologist or whatever. Well I don't know about
scientology. About it anyway, these ancient religions, because they have been repeated
again and again and again across centuries, these same patterns, just as you
were developing at Bob Monroe's institute. Well, I'm thinking of what what Ken
Ring did, um professor at the University of Connecticut, who Yeah, he
studied near death experiences and and he talks about how the vibration of the experiences
there in the printed word. So as you as you read about a near
death experience, you are actually entering into the vibration of that experience, and
you get it, you get some of it. Not a vibration. The
only thing I would correct is it's not a vibration. What would you have
nothing to do? Well, because vibration is a space time thing. In
order for something to vibrate, it has to be in space time. Fair
enough, This is you join in informational linkage information a linkage, all right,
you read it, you're reading a near death experience. And as you
read it and you focus on it, you are linking with the person who
had the experience. You are linking not with them personally, I mean not
physically, but in the in the non local domain, Yes, that experience,
that informational experience you are doing. It's like doing a Google search informational
linkage. I like that a lot. It's um and it's been verified for
those of us who've had the experience. Sometimes you can read about a near
death experience or a shared death experience in there it's like all of the juice
has been edited out of it, and it's like that there's just nothing left
to it. And others you read it and you go, that's really close
to what what happened to that person, And yeah, there's a there's a
visceral sense to that linkage to where they were, what they experienced, yes,
and how they felt about it. It doesn't in the non local domain.
Space and time are informational enrichers, but they are not limitters. I
like that. So you can read about a near death experience that happened one
hundred years ago. The oldest near death experiences in Plato, you can read
about it and you go, oh my goodness, that's an authentic description.
You just know it. You just know it. Why because as you focus
your intention, you link informationally because of your intention with the experience. Yeah,
because everything what Edgar Casey called the Hall of Records is actually the totality
of all the informational architectures created through intention. It's all there. When I
have remote viewers, for instance, describe Cleopatra's palace and tell me where it
is that's unknown at the time, not no one in the world knows where
it is, and I have people describe it and describe things that I will
find there down to sixteenths of an inch, RIGHTM What are they doing?
And the answer is they are holding intention to answer my question, and therefore
they access, if they know how to do it, they access the non
local domain where all that information is there. And I just go to the
site that they tell me to go to on the map, and I have
people dig down or archaeologists dig and find it. So what we are dealing
with is information. Is that all this conversation about vibrations and dimensions, those
are all spacetime words. That's an important distinction. Yes, and they've definitely
outside of a spacetime. Yes, they're not in spacetime. And so when
you for instance, I'll give you an example. This is a case.
I actually studied a young boy pre seven, because at seven this seems to
close down largely. Edgar Casey, for instance, says, the soul becomes
totally incarnate in that personality at age seven. A psychologist and psychiatrists have different
interpretations, but basically the same thing. So we have a little boy,
he's about five years old, and he says in India, and he says
that he was killed. He was a money lender and he was having an
affair with a woodcutter's wife, and the woodcutter caught them and as he was
climbing out the window, the woodcutter, who had his axe with him,
killed him by striking him in the back with his axe. Now, always
is always a bad plan, too, Yeah, bad plan when you,
yeah, have an affair with somebody who's got lots of weapons? Yeah,
whose wife when her husband has a lot of weapons? There more accurate,
thank you? Yeah, So this kid says, and so I was killed.
Now the child when he's born and still has key Lloyd tissue on his
back like a wound, healing like like you'd had a wound. And he
has this strange little strip of key Lloyd tissue which turns right. Nobody knows
why he's got it, but there he's got it. So I contact a
group of people in India and this child is saying he comes from this village,
that nobody in his village has ever even heard him, let alone been
to. And the doctor goes, comes down, gets the child, takes
him to the village. He said that he came from in his previous life.
Okay, as soon as they get him to the edge of the village,
he immediately walks into the village and walks up to a particular little hut
little house, and a woman, an older, much older woman, comes
to the door, and the boy looks at her and speaks to her and
calls her by a pet name. Immediately immediately breaks into tears because that was
the name that her lover had called her, which nobody knew. Oh good,
they yeah, And the boy says to her, I've come to get
my watch. Oh really, I didn't expect that, says. She says,
what watch? And he said, well, I hit it when once
because of whatever reason, and he goes into the area where she cooks,
and he pulls out a brick that's in the little cooking area, and they're
wrapped in a piece of oilcloth. Is a watch the pocket watch, not
a wrist watch. And when they interviewed the woman, they say, well,
you know what happened, And she said, oh, I was having
an affair. My husband was a woodcutter, and he came back early one
day and he caught us in bed, and as my lover was trying to
go out the window, my husband struck him with his axe and killed him.
Confirming everything that's boy has said. Now, where does that kid get
that information? How did he know that this was earlier? Informational linkage?
I think you're going to tell me that is correct. That's right now.
The key to all of this, how you do this is that you remember
we go back to how religion started about meditation? Why meditation? Why do
they teach meditation in martial arts dojo's, or in Hindu temples or Buddhist monasteries,
or I don't know, pick whatever you like, any religious gathering.
Why do they teach meditation? They call it different things? And why.
The answer is because again through empirical observation across many centuries, they have learned.
Humans have learned dating, as I say, back before history was even
recorded. We just know this from archaeological sites. That meditation teaches intentioned focused
awareness. Whether you're using mantras or affirmations or I mean, you do it
in lots of different ways. Everybody you know thinks that this is the way
you have to do it. No, the research is very clear there's nothing
to do with what religion is involved. The key to meditation is the ability
to attain and sustain intention focused awareness, because when that happens, you open
to what religion calls the still small voice. You open to this other aspect
of your consciousness, which is the part that is not physiologically based. Most
of our time together, most of our experience in life, we're being constantly
bombarded by the sensations of our neuroanatomy. It's hot, it's cold, it's
dark, it's light, it's smelly, it's not smelly, it's noisy,
it's quiet, whatever. That's what most people think of as thinking, but
in fact, if you look at people who are known to be creative geniuses,
or people who are known to be spiritually we say enlightened. What you
find is that they all describe the same thing. I go into this state
of consciousness, everything quiets down, and I have this sense of a greater
unity of consciousness. Ponkrey says, I walked across the street and I had
a vision of how my mathematics should work. Descartes has three dreams in Ulm,
Germany in sixteen nineteen. Ironstein says he saw relativity as he was after
an illness, as he was going around in a canoe. Who did the
DNA Strand that came out of a dream too? If I remember, that's
right? The snake wives Watson, Watson, now Watson and who won the
Nobel Yeah, I can see his face. I can't think of his name
anyway. Yes, if you look at these people, or you look at
famous, historically significant religious enlightened people for one of a better term, I'm
even thinking like Edison used to do a lot of his inventions. Oh,
yes, meditative state. Yeah, yes, Tesla talks about this. I
was walking across the SUL campus with Jonas Sulk and I said, where did
you get the idea for the vaccine? And he said, in a dream.
It came to me in a dream, Kolka, and the Benzene ring
came in a dream. When you're in an altered state of consciousness, where
your normal physiological sense impressions retreat, and you held a focused intention, you
open to this non local aspect of consciousness and you get whatever it is you
get. If you're a scientist, you get an insight into science. If
you're a spiritual pilgrim, you get an insight into consciousness and spirituality. If
you are a creative artist, you know Leonardo would stare at a wall and
the pattern on the wall because of the water that had dribbled down, had
created patterns, and he would stare at those patterns and have these great insights
and do these wonderful paintings and sculptures. So if you look at this over
and over and over and over again across the course of human history, regardless
of the culture, regardless of the geography, regardless of the time, what
you see is that the key is to hold intentioned, focused awareness, which
allows you to open to the non local aspect of your consciousness. And with
your intention acting as the Google search term, you have an experience which informs
whatever your intention is. I love that. So I need to go back
for just a second. Maybe we were talking about the chocolate bar and about
the wine and how our focused intention would change them. So that's a physical
thing. I'm assuming that we can then use our focused intention to change our
cultural outlook too, if you know I talk about that. I'm glad you
got into that, because that's that is the other area of my research I've
I've been in ext I knew that as I was meditating here in the interview,
I just went, there, you go, we are linked non locally.
Yes, about four times in my life I've been involved with changing history.
Okay, I was just you know, in the civil rights era,
was just a young kid and by task was basically to show up at demonstrations
and get arrested. That seem to be it. They'd take you to the
drunk tank in charge of twenty five bucks to get out, and it was
mostly to get you off the street, got it. So that was the
fifties and sixties. In the seventies, I was asked to be the special
assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations and under a guy named Amber Elmo Zumwald,
and Jim Holloway came after him, and I was involved with transforming the
American military from the elitist conscription organization that I had been drafted into to an
all volunteer meritocracy that was gender and racially neutral, big big objective, holy
small. Yeah. In the eighties, I began working to create what we
then called citizen diplomacy, which was to create a connection between the then Soviet
Union and the United States in such a way that the Soviet Union would be
transformed into a democracy. Now I can tell you why it failed, but
nonetheless it happened for a few years with Gorbachev. Yea and yeah, so
citizen diplomacy, and then of course the consciousness movement, the consciousness research,
so about well it's getting on. Thirty years ago I began accumulating, looking
at all this stuff I'd seen in the laboratory, I thought, Okay,
that's what a single individual does, what happens when it happens at a social
level. And I happened to read a book about Gandhi, and in this
book was a transcript of an interview that he had given a reporter from the
Times of India had been set up by his editor just prior to Gandhi's assassination,
and he said, oh, gandhij Gandhi was up at the ashram.
My editor asked me to ask you, how did you force the British to
leave India? How did you force them to leave and give up their most
prized colonial possession? I mean you remember the King of England or the Queen
of England was the emperor. How did you force them to leave? And
Gandhi's answer is the key to the whole business. He said, it isn't
what we did that mattered, although that mattered. It isn't what we said
that mattered. Although that mattered. It was the nature of our character,
what I would call being this, that led the British to choose to leave
India. Now you think about this, Gandhi got independence for India without a
war. He had no troops, he had no official position, he had
no money. How did this little man in his doughty get what was then
one of the most powerful countries on earth to to abandon its most precious colonial
possession, to just get them to walk away? And the answer was the
nature of being this? And so I wrote a book called the Eight Laws
of change, which is about how individuals and small groups can do this kind
of change. How do you create because we have got to change or we're
not going to survive through climate change. And you can already see it happening
right all right, you just look at the news every day. You can
see that unless we change the way we organize our society, we're not going
to make it. So how do we do that? Well, I will
tell you and the people that will listen to this podcast, if they will
do this, they can change the course of the election in November. How
about that. I'm all ears, Let's do it, Stevin. Every day
this is called the Quatitian choice. Every day you make thousands or hundreds of
little decisions. I'm going to buy this toothpaste, I'm going to buy that
cat food, I'm going to buy this gasoline, I'm going to buy this
close whatever. We do dozens of these little changes all day long, all
these little choices. If you want to become an agent of change, you
must take this responsibility. You must do research into the things that you choose,
and you must make with every choice you make. You must choose of
the options that are available to you as you best understand it at that moment
of making the choice. Maybe you will understand differently later you understood differently before,
But at the moment you make this choice, if you choose of the
options available to you only the one that is the most compassionate, life affirming
and fostering of well being as you understand it at that moment, and you
make every choice on that basis, and you tell ten of your friends that
you're doing it as a discipline and that they should invite them to do it,
and ask ten of their friends between the fourteenth of September when we're doing
this interview twenty twenty two and November the seventh of twenty twenty two, if
the people who are listening to this podcast will make this commitment and tell ten
of their friends they're doing it as a commitment and invite them to do it,
and choose only that which is the most compassionate, life affirming and fostering
of well being, they will change the course of the election in a positive
way. Wow, that's an extraordinary way to end an interview. Yeah.
See, I think that if we can choose things that are compassionate, life
affirming and fostering of well being That will change the world and will change how
we react to each other now we react to the planet, and how we
react to ourselves. You know, Yes, it will change all our technologies
because we will make different technologies, because we have technologies that don't pollute,
that don't destroy the Earth's ecosystems, that instead foster them. We will behave
differently towards people of different races, or different genders or different religions. We
will become a different person and in the process of doing that, we will
become agents of change to change the world in a positive way of well being.
Thank you, Stephen Schwartz. This has been a most fascinating interview.
I was right, wasn't I Stephen Schwartz is remarkable. Let's dive into some
of the ideas that could you a little more clarity. Just to be clear,
these are my viewpoints. But that's why you watch the Afterlife files to
gain perspective by using more than one lens with which to view this rich information.
I appreciated his description of the information architecture being designed and built by intentioned
consciousness. Great Stephen talks about consciousness being fundamental in my research. Indy Ears
talk of a living, vibrating source of all things. That is the love
of the universe. We're talking about the same thing. I also appreciate his
correcting my use of time space words and describing non local consciousness. I promise
I will forever use informational linkage instead of vibration. Less. Of course,
I forget, because old habits can die hard, But I'll try. Here's
a great phrase that Stephan employs. Consciousness is interconnected and interdependent. What does
he mean? Andy Ears who experience the black light find that it is consciousness
that is source. Source is the vibration informational linkage from which all things material
arise. Therefore, since consciousness exists in all things, all things that are
interconnected through that source consciousness. He also says consciousness is interdependent. What consciousness
desires, if it's in the soul's best interests source puts into form. Here's
a great metaphor. Think of the replicator in the popular TV and film series
Star Trek. Imagine Captain Jean Luc Picard desires a cup of tea. He
walks over and commands the replicator, which looks remarkably like a microwave. By
the way, t Earl Gray Halt, sorry about the impersonation, then the
replicator makes it stow. Stephen is talking about the same mechanism. Consciousness,
whether human or non human, creates an idea attemplate for source to follow when
manifesting. How do you get better at accessing non local consciousness. Stephen's research
says, learn to meditate, find a way to attain and sustained intentioned focus
consciousness. Binoral beats are an incredibly effective at doing this. That's why I
use this technology on my albums and in my indie workshops and retreats. I
love how he ends our conversation with how to use our understanding of consciousness to
better our world, creating individual and cultural wellbeing. With that knowledge, we
can choose a culture that is compassionate, life affirming, and focused on well
being. By the way, I've listed links for Stephen's talk at the Veiled
Symposium and his TEDx talk on the Eight Laws of Change in the comments below.
Okay, we now know that researchers like Stephen Schwartz and those who experience
an NDE or SDE come to the same conclusions. Consciousness is causal and fundamental.
I find that remarkable. Thank you. Stephen for giving us another vocabulary
for describing the nature of the universe and how that makes a difference, and
how that brings joy into our lives. If you're watching on YouTube, like
subscribe and comment that would be a lovely thing. You can find The Afterlife
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a visit at Near Death Meditations dot com. Bye now, see you next
time, and thank you for joining us at the Afterlife Files.