S2E16: Talk Tracks Season 2 Episode 5: Dr. Neil Theise on The Afterlife

Hi, everyone. I'm Kai Dickens, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like sci-abilities. If you haven't yet listened to the telepathy tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non-speakers, and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't for long. scary and difficult birth. Breastfeeding was nearly impossible for him in those first few weeks, and I wanted to find trustworthy formula like my relatives use in Sweden. And then we discovered Bobby. It was the only formula we trusted for our son's nutrition, and we could effortlessly switch between breastfeeding and formula feeding, and Bobby is the only formula he'd drink. Bobby formulas are designed for easy digestion, just like breast milk, and made with high-quality, premium ingredients you can feel good about putting in your baby's bottle. I love knowing that Bobby thinks through every detail, every step, every test, every ounce, so we parents don't have to. Every single batch goes through over 2,000 safety and quality checks, plus third-party testing for heavy metals before it even leaves their U.S. facility. Bobby was named the top organic infant formula in 2025 by Parents Magazine, What to Expect, and BabyList. It's trusted by parents and loved by over 700,000 babies. If you want to feed with confidence, too, head to HiBobby.com. That's HiBobbie, H-I-B-O-B-B-I-E dot com to find the formula trusted by parents and loved by their babies, 700,000 and counting. Today, we're releasing the extended interview that we recorded with Dr. Neil Thies, the pathologist and author of the book Notes on Complexity, a Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being. Dr. Thies was featured in both of our energy healing episodes and the Alzheimer's episode of season two of the telepathy tapes. Not only has Neil been an amazing resource for us because he's so deeply involved in the cross sections of science, philosophy, and spirituality, but he's also just a fascinating person with so many incredible stories and life experiences. In this conversation, he tells us much more about his mother's experience with Parkinson's at the end of her life, as you heard a little bit about in episode 10 of season two. And he dives deeper into his own realizations, thoughts, and what he thinks the connection is between the world of nonspeakers, survivors of near-death experiences, and the thinning of the veil at the end of life. So here's Dr. Neil Theis. So Neil, our audience will remember you from the past two episodes as the physician slash scientist who helped us understand the biology of energy healing. You broke down kind of the cellular dynamics and what the interstitium is and how it all points to the body that is far more interconnected than we previously understood. But you're here today for a very different reason. And it's because your science mind kind of led you somewhere that maybe you weren't expecting to go into a kind of inquiry that involved not just data and, you know, microscopes and everything that you kind of, you know, walked away from, but death and the end of life and what happens when the brain, when the brain begins to break down. So I guess, you know, I kind of started diving into a little bit of the book and your mother, but why don't we first just back up and explain to me your mother's diagnosis and some of the things that you started noticing about her at the end of her life? Sure. So she had become a widow in 1996. My father passed away, begged my brother and I to come back to New York and not leave her in Florida where my father wanted to be living. And she came up and was very robustly engaged in New York life. She had a job working for my dentist, manning his office. Everyone loved her. She would wander the city, seeing shows by herself. She read voraciously three, four books a week. and was quite fine and active. But she developed Parkinson's and it was very mild. It was very slowly progressive, but that intruded on her ability to get around. But then she started falling and she had some severe hospitalization. She became afraid of getting around. She became very fragile. And because of her steadiness, we really needed her to have home care, eventually needing 24-hour home care. because what started to happen then was she kind of lost her short-term memory. It happened over like a day, it seemed. I went to visit her one evening, and we had dinner, and I set her up to watch TV for the evening. And as I was leaving, she said, oh, wait, before you leave, can you help me find my glasses? And she was holding them. And, you know, I said, oh, I do this all the time. I'm looking for my glasses while I'm wearing them or they're on my head. But it's a different thing when they're in your hand. And within a few months, it was clear she could not remember like five minutes ago. And it became dangerous for her to be at home. And we wound up getting 24-hour home care. And then she developed a skin infection. And we know with little old ladies, if they get an infection, it can really whack out their immune system, probably cortisol. The stress hormone goes nuts. And we couldn't clear the infection. And then she sort of lost all sense of where she was, who she was. And I called up the doctor, hurt the geriatrician. We had already decided she did not want any special measures. She never wanted to be in a hospital again, did not want to. If anything happened to her, she was fine and, you know, just supportive care. But she clearly needed antibiotics. But I wasn't going to put her in the hospital because we agreed not to. And the doctor suggested we take her to hospice care and Bellevue hospice. And in the ambulette to hospice, she started ignoring me and talking to dead people who were behind me. My dead father, a couple of her dead sisters, and stopped communicating with me at all. And we put her into hospice. I was supposed to go that night to that year's science of consciousness meetings in Stockholm. and I thought I had to cancel the trip. And the hospice staff and my husband were both like, she's not going to die tomorrow. You need to go do what you were going to do. So I went home, packed, flew to Stockholm while my mother's in hospice care talking to dead people. And the first morning of the consciousness meeting, I hear Peter Fenwick talking about people having end-of-life visions. And I realized that's what's happening, which was remarkable because my mother's talking to people and also really disturbing. Oh, it's the end of her life. How did we suddenly get there? I came home. She was in home hospice for six or seven months. Aside from talking to dead people, she had stopped walking, talking and eating generally. If I heard her talking to some dead people, I would try to come in. She would stop. I tried sneaking in, crawling along the floor, even if she wasn't facing me. The dead people would tell her, Neil's listening, stop talking. And then after six or seven months, she started walking, talking, eating again, just spontaneously. I got a call from her home attendant saying, Mr. Neil, come quick, your mother's in the kitchen asking for a cup of tea. And she was British, so that was significant. And she continued to talk to dead people for the rest of her life, which is about six years. It started with relatives. Then some of them started bringing friends. Friends started bringing relatives. Strangers started showing up. People wanted favors from her. People wanted healings from her. This went on the entire time, and she would talk about it. The only cognitive thing going on is she couldn't remember five minutes ago, but she knew who everybody was. She could recall things very clearly, and she was happy to talk about it because we asked her and we made it okay for her to talk about it, which I think is significant to what we're going to talk about. We never embarrassed her. We never said, oh, that sounds crazy or that can't be mom. Just explored what was happening. Eventually, she started traveling out of body, which I knew because a friend of mine is a shaman who's skilled at traveling the astral plane and called me up one day and said, so I met your mother last night and She had a whole life, it turned out, for the next two or three years, traveling up and about. And when I asked her about it, she was kind of pissed off that she had been found out. But she would talk about that. Spirit guides from the universe showed up. Spontaneous enlightenment experiences, which from my Zen Buddhist practice, you know, I've read like Dogen, the scholar who brought Zen to Japan from China 800 years ago. what he was describing, my mother is describing. So what was she describing? This is one of my favorite experiences. I went in and she was lying on her back on her bed, wide-eyed looking at the ceiling. I said, what are you looking at? She said, space. I said, really, what's that like? She said, well, it's not at all what I expected. And it's just so beautiful. I said, well, what's it like? She said, she made this gesture with her hand like she was chopping carrots. And she said, well, it's not smooth. It's like chopping carrots. It's in pieces. And it's just so beautiful. And time is like that, too. It's not smooth. It's in tiny little pieces. I wish you and Mark and the kids could see it the way I do. It's just so beautiful. And this is a classic. Buddhist teachers talk about this, that the particulate nature of material existence. That's kind of like quantum theory. My mother's experiencing the quantum particulate nature of the universe, but she has no short-term memory, and she's just, you know, 78 years old. Wow. That is fascinating. Yeah. And during this time, you know, I grew up with her, obviously. She was a very anxious woman. She spent—her life was pervaded by anxiety. And during this time, there was no anxiety whatsoever. and one day I said to her Ma you know you even smiling when you sleep how do you stay so happy And she said well I don really worry about the future anymore And I can remember the past So all I have is the now And when you live in the now you happy Wow And that was her last six years of her life. And she died at home comfortably in bed on her own schedule. She a couple of times decided she was going to go and stopped eating. No disturbance, no discomfort at all, just stopped And then she changed her mind, stuck around, and then she didn't. And she departed in the middle of Hanukkah in 2016 in a bliss state, really. Yeah. And then she appeared to us after because she's not entirely gone. Do you want to hear that? Yes. So my husband, Mark, doesn't believe in any of this stuff, okay? Well, he didn't used to believe in stuff. And if I talk about it, he's like, okay, whatever you need. But the morning, we knew she was going to die, you know, any day now. We went to bed Thursday night. Friday morning, I get a phone call. It's the home attendant telling me she's gone. And I tell him he's lying in bed next to me. And he says, oh, my God. I said, what? He said, well, I've been lying here awake for the last 20 minutes. And all of a sudden, I felt like your mother was in the room, like physically in the room. And in my head, I said, are you here, Sarah? And I heard her say, yes, darling, I am. And then the phone rang. And I said, this is real to you. In this moment, you actually felt like you felt her here and you heard her here. He goes, absolutely. And I said, you are so screwed because in five minutes you're going to deny this happened, but you told me. And he doesn't realize this anymore, you know. And yeah, I have a sense of her sometimes less so than I used to. She seems for me to become more of a, you know, faded into a generalized divine feminine kind of thing. But friends and family still report hearing her voice or feeling her presence. This just happened like three weeks ago. Someone said they heard her talking and they told me what she said. I was like, yeah, that was probably her. This is exactly what she would have said. On our show, you've heard us talk about the science behind energy healing, and there's so many benefits for people exploring it or trying it for themselves. Luminara.care makes it simple to experience energy healing for yourself with private one-on-one sessions that you can do from the privacy of your own home. Luminara connects you with vetted, highly experienced energy healing practitioners with proven results, which is backed by scientific research and studies. And what surprised me most was how grounded and tangible the experience felt. I noticed a deep sense of calm afterward, better sleep that night, and a real softening of tension in my body, but especially my back. What I also appreciate about Luminara, which is HIPAA compliant, is how safe, supported, and approachable they've made this kind of healing. Each session is private, personalized, and designed to support your body's natural ability to rebalance. When you're looking for support with stress, pain, sleep challenges, mood shifts, hormone changes, digestive issues, and emotional well-being, the benefits are real. So if you're curious about energy healing and ready to experience it for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session for listeners of the telepathy tapes. Just go to luminara.care. That's luminara.care. And use code TAPES20 at checkout for 20% off your first session. On this show, we've talked a lot about consciousness, connection, and the ways humans have sought to access deeper layers of reality for thousands of years. And if you listened to episode 7 of season 2 on psychedelics and consciousness, where we did a partnership with Schedule 35, We explored that lineage from indigenous ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon to ancient Greek rites to modern research showing how psilocybin can open windows of neuroplasticity and support deep healing. That episode wasn't just about substances. It was about remembering that these substances have been used as sacred tools and spiritual technologies meant to expand perception, reconnect us to ourselves, and help us make meaning of being human. That's why I really appreciate Schedule 35's approach. Schedule 35's mission is simple, to enrich lives with deeper meaning, clarity, and connection through microdosing psilocybin. I personally know so many people who've had beautiful experiences with Schedule 35, feeling more present, more creative, and more connected with themselves and others. Schedule 35 is the trusted name in psilocybin products, offering precisely dosed capsules, gummies, teas, and chocolates with guides that make microdosing simple and approachable. They verify age, ship discreetly, and take a science-backed approach to everything they do. These are connection tools, not party drugs. Get 15% off all orders with code TAPES at schedule35.co. That's 15% off at schedule35.co and use code TAPES. This episode of The Telepathy Tapes is brought to you by Graza. I love to cook for my friends and family, and lately what's taking my food to the next level is Graza. Graza is my olive oil of choice. It's delicious, easy-to-use extra virgin olive oil at an affordable everyday price. And Graza's always fresh. They pick, press, and bottle all their olives in the same season. You can even see the harvest date on every bottle. Graza has not one, but two extra virgin olive oils to stock up your kitchen. And you can choose between squeeze or glass bottles. There's Sizzle, their everyday cooking oil that's perfect for roasting, sautéing, and, well, anything you cook. And then they have Drizzle, a super punchy, flavorful finishing oil that's great for dipping bread, whipping up a salad dressing, or even drizzling over ice cream. It's seriously my favorite olive oil to use. Healthy eating and cooking is something I'm prioritizing this new year. And olive oil is the timeless classic healthiest fat to add to my meals. It's so good for the heart and brain. You'll get 10% off your first order of any olive oil on their site. But I wholeheartedly recommend the Graza Duo. You'll receive two bottles of extra virgin olive oil, sizzle for cooking, and drizzle for finishing with an extra kick of bold flavor. So head to Graza.co and use tapes to get 10% off and get to cooking your next chef-quality meal. So, Neil, does she, when people were coming through and other spirits were coming through, like, did they have messages that turned out to be true or evidential? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. No, and that's kind of one of the things I loved here. So, for example, one of the people who started showing up was the rabbi we grew up with, Rabbi Bodenheimer, and they were really best buddies. But he was kind of overdoing it in these years. And I'd come over and I'd say, have any visitors? Because I always asked her and she'd go, yeah, Rabbi Bodenheimer was here. He really stayed for too long. And that was sort of getting to be a pattern. And so I went over and I said, any visitors? And she said, well, Rabbi Bodenheimer was here. I said, I hope he didn't bore you. And she said, no, he couldn't stick around. He had to be going because his sister was going to be arriving and he had to welcome her. And I thought his sister, that was Mrs. Brown, she must be over 100. And she must have died by now for sure. And then I went home and got a phone call from my hometown. Mrs. Brown had died that day at 102 years old. Wow. And your rabbi had since passed. So he was dead in these visions. He was long dead. Yeah, he was long dead. Wow. But there were other things that happened, but it wasn't necessarily dead people. And this to me was more surprising. So I have a friend and teacher who's a shaman who's very skillful at traveling the astral plane. I am not. Though I've done it a few times, and it's been very vivid, and I've seen things I couldn't have seen otherwise. But he's an addict. And there was this situation where my mom had some kind of nightmare, we think, and she suddenly got this idea in her head that I was going to be killed by somebody. And she got very frightened. And I got a call from her home attendant telling me to come over. My mother was almost inconsolable. wide-eyed with terror. I gave her a little anti-anxiety pill that we kept in the house. She got a little bit better. I went to work, got a call in the afternoon. It's worn off. She's terrified. Have to go back. Gave her another half of a pill to get her through the night. And this went on for two weeks. And it was extremely stressful that I had to be visiting her twice a week. Mark offered to go over, but she wouldn't accept it. She had to see me with their own eyes that I was okay. And then after two weeks, I went over. And at this point, I was not being very kind. I was very upset and tense and anxious. And I walked in sort of sternly. And she had a completely different expression on her face, just bright eyed and bushy tailed. Honey, you've come to see me. I was like, yeah. She goes, are you upset about something? I said, well, you know, and I told her why I was upset. She goes, oh, I don't worry about that anymore. I talked to your friend last night, and if you trust him, I trust him. I'm not going to worry about that anymore. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I thought, okay, you know, she had another dream. Fine. This isn't going to be going on longer. A few hours later, I got a phone call from this shaman friend of mine who told me that he was hanging out in his habitual place, that he likes to hang out at when he gets away from things on the astral plane, and said that he heard someone coming towards him. He's in the military. He's a soldier. And he sort of got up into warrior stance, wondering who's coming through, what kind of astral bad guy. And this young woman with red hair and a sundress comes through singing with a British accent. He didn't know my mother was British. He didn't know she had red hair back when she had hair color. He didn't know that she was a beautiful singer when she was younger. and she sees him, charges over to him, fingered into the shoulder, poking him, going, what are you doing to take care of Neil? And he said, I already promised him. I'm watching over him. I'm protecting him. Well, you didn't promise me. Promise me. And so he said, okay, okay, I promise. And he called me up and he said, so I met your mother last night and he related this story to me. And I realized, oh, that's the friend she'd been talking to. A little while later, he told me, you know, she's got this little English cottage she's set up for herself here. And my mother, as I mentioned, was British, and she grew up during the war years. They were very well-to-do, and they lived in this country house in Northampton, 18-room mansion covered with wisteria, very well known for just being covered in purple wisteria with a little rose garden to the side. And I said, really? She's got some sort of English? She goes, yeah, it's very nice. It's covered with purple wisteria, and there's this rose garden to the side. It wasn't a big country house. It was just a little cottage. And he could not have known that stuff. During this time, she had started displaying a little bit of an altered state that was nude, not awake, not asleep. She'd be sitting in a chair, eyes half closed, but not nodding off, not snoring. And so after he told me this I sat down next to her and leaned in and watched her for a while And then finally I said so are you visiting your little English cottage And her eyes opened and she said, who told you about that? And she was very upset that the story had gotten out. And from then on, whenever I saw her there, I said, are you visiting your little cottage? And she'd just smile and nod. And as long as I didn't ask her questions about it, she was fine. And Neil, just for our audience members who don't know, can you explain what you mean when you say astral travel or astral plane? What generally people mean by that is there are non-material planes of existence that are related to our material plane of existence made of solid stuff, matter and energy, space and time. And yet there are other planes that are not made of the same stuff. And some aspect of us, whether it's our consciousness or whether it's something people refer to as an energy body, and I don't have definitive ideas about what these are, can move between this plane and that plane or many other planes potentially and have experiences there. What I do know, both from what I've been taught by this guy and from my own experience, experiencing, which are less extravagant than hers or his, but I've still had some, is that those places and the beings you meet there appear very dreamlike. So they're hard to make solid. You know, it's like, how do you describe a dream? Sometimes it's not easy. But for them, in their world, their world is solid, and we're the ones who are dreaming. And what I think, now I'm going to put my science cap on. I'm one of those people who thinks that brains do not make our minds. Our minds are like transmitters or radios that sample the big C consciousness, big M mind that underlies everything. Some people might refer to that as God. Some people might refer to it as the absolute. Some people like me and my collaborators call it fundamental non-dual awareness, that there's some aspect of a universal mind that emanates what eventually becomes material reality as we experience it, as well as these other non-material realms. And, you know, you don't expect to open up a brain if you're listening to the Beatles and find a little Beatles band inside. The radio is sampling the infinite radio waves, and if it's finally tuned, then you'll find the station that's playing Beatles music. Tune it a little different, you might get Beethoven. If you can't tune the radio, what do you get? Static. Static doesn't mean less information. Static means more information. And so I wonder in the mind of someone like my mom or someone who has some form of dementia, the broken brain that can't be fontuned, are they in fact having greater access to what lies beyond this material reality to sampling what's going on in that more fundamental mind or awareness? And so it sounds like static to those of us here who are still stuck in our little human stories of I'm me and you're you. But to someone like my mom, she's actually having greater perceptive capacity. And this sort of where I started thinking about this was in relationship to those end of life visions that she had at the very beginning of this journey. curves. Everyone's heard of people at the end of their life seeing dead people that they knew from the past. It turns out it's way more common than people generally think about it. There's a prospective study done by a doctor, a hospice doctor named Christopher Kerr, who's the medical director of Hospice Buffalo in New York, has written a book called Death is But a Dream, reporting a prospective study of nearly 1,200 patients who came into hospice to die where they were asked by him and his team specific questions as to whether they were having end-of-life visions or not. And it turned out that nearly 90% of them reported very detailed end-of-life visions. They're not haphazard occasional things that lucky people get to have. They seem to be part of the normal experience of dying if you're gifted the chance to die in bed, not by violence and be aware. And those experiences seem to invariably, according to his data, lead to a transforming moment so that the patient, the person who's dying, who might be facing death with fear, anxiety, loneliness, regrets, all the complex stuff humans bring to their lives and deaths, understand that everything is just as it should be, just as it is, including their death. And they're profound experiences that are utterly transformative, not like an insight you get in a therapy session, but go from great terror at the end of your life or great regret or great sadness into something of acceptance and lack of fear, etc. And what I think is happening there is that in the dying brain, the filtering of the greater consciousness that underlies everything, the filtering is diminished. You're getting more pure reflection of what underlies everything. And, you know, this will touch on spiritual stuff that I think about and practice and engage in from Jewish mystical traditions I'm related to, Zen Buddhism I'm related to. But I think the fundamental nature, one aspect of the fundamental nature of that underlying reality is compassion or love, whatever word you want to give it. And if that's what the dying brain is perceiving, it may be a dying brain, but still a human brain trying to make stories. And so it will perceive that compassion, that love that's filtering through and have to name it. That's my mother. That's the child I lost. That's the father I miss. That's my husband. And so we tell ourselves in those last days or hours in reflecting that compassionate underpinning of existence that we name it. Because human minds make human stories. That's what we do. So people with my mom say, why did your mom have these experiences? And for years I've been thinking, I don't know, is it her spiritual practice? Is it part of her heritage? Is it what kind of person she was? She was such a good person. But what I've started to wonder is people whose minds or brains are broken in the way they might be in advanced Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, Lewy body disease, etc. Are they really perceiving less or are they perceiving more? My mother maybe wasn't different than all these people. Maybe it was simply that she was in a safe environment where we asked her and made it safe for her to tell us. I wonder if my mother wasn't uncommon, but maybe more common than not, the way the end-of-life experiences turn out to be more common, and that if we made it safe and were interested and curious about what our elders were experiencing, maybe some of those people who we say have dementia, in other words, their brains are filled with meaningless static, maybe some of them are really profound psychonauts. And if they're not functioning well in this world, maybe it's because they're busy exploring other worlds. And when you're doing that, the idea of feeding yourself or cleaning yourself may not just be on your mind. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about rest, real rest, the kind that lets your nervous system finally exhale. I kept hearing about Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers from friends and experts, and they all said the same thing. This one is different. Most magnesium supplements just use one or two forms, but Magnesium Breakthrough combines seven different forms of magnesium, plus key cofactors that actually help your body absorb and use it. People talk about feeling calmer, more relaxed at night, more restored in the morning, and better supported in their daily rhythms. I don't recommend anything I haven't tried personally, so I started taking Magnesium Breakthrough myself, and I want to invite you to try it with me. Here's my challenge. Try it, track your sleep, notice how you feel, and see what shifts. And there's truly no risk. Buy Optimizers offers a 365-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. That's a full year zero risk. So far, I've woken up feeling more rested and notice I'm less sore from workouts. If you want to join, go to buyoptimizers.com slash tapes and use my exclusive code tapes to get 15% off any order. Make 2026 the year that you finally start sleeping great again. Quince is all about elevated essentials that feel effortless. Designed for layering and mixing, each piece helps build a timeless wardrobe made to last. With versatile silhouettes and thoughtful details, they're the kind of styles you wear again and again. They've got the wardrobe staples with quality that's made to last. 100% organic cotton sweaters. Premium denim made with stretch for all day comfort. Luxe cotton cashmere blends perfect for the changing of the seasons. Everything you need for a wardrobe that actually lasts. Quince works directly with safe, ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen so you're not paying for brand markup. Just high-quality clothing. And Quince uses the highest quality materials like 100% European linen and organic cotton. Everything is built to hold up season after season. The stitching, the fit, the fabrics, these are pieces you'll reach for over and over again. I love the Mongolian cashmere crewneck sweater and bought it in four colors because it can be dressed up or down. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash tapes for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash tapes to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash tapes. Wow. Oh, my gosh. OK, so then, you know, I don't I was looking over your book this morning. I read a line where you were talking about people at the end of their life often saying their their experiences felt more real than here more real than real which really struck me because we talked about that in our season premiere this year about near death experiences Can you just touch on that How people are describing these Do they feel more real than their lives here on Earth From my perspective I think deathbed visions are the brain opening itself up to a more fundamental reality It wouldn't surprise me that the more fundamental reality is going to feel more fundamental and real than this one we construct for ourselves where we walk around thinking we're separate from each other. I think, you know, people's walking around on planet Earth as these lonely, anxious creatures thinking we live on this rock. Well, I get that because I'm one of those people, but I also know both scientifically and from my various meditation practices that the other way to think about it is that we are the substance of the Earth that in three and a half billion years has self-organized itself into beings that think of themselves as separate. Those two things are both true. They don't contradict each other. You just have to select which view are you going to take. If you only see yourself, and in our culture, we only pretty much see ourselves this way, as separate and lonely, then this is what you've got. And if you experience a reality that says something richer, deeper, more connected, more vivid, it's going to feel more real, maybe because it's a better reflection of reality, not conditioned by our culture's views about what we should think of as real and what we should think of as not real. So I think you mentioned in your book that Reverend Harper, and, you know, he talks about a truer, purer self being what remains. Like, do you think dementia can, you know, sometimes just strip away the ego then and leave something closer to our real essence? So it's not just, Maybe it's not erasing a person. It's erasing the ego and leaving us with our essence. Like, is that a stretch or how do you feel about that? That's exactly how I think about it. The most fundamental essence isn't about what you worry about or hope for for the future. It's not what you long for from the past or regret from the past. It's what's in this present moment. And for some people, the broken brain, in quotes, is actually a refined way of perceiving what your true nature is. And what our true natures are, are seamless expressions of the entire living conscious universe in this moment, absolutely perfect and pure. That's real. That's true. And I cannot do that from a deeply Western scientific and mathematical perspective. At the same time, it's utterly true that we are tiny infinitesimal pieces of this vast universe. And it's very easy to fall into that and go, nothing has meaning. I'm unimportant. It's terrifying. That's also true. To me, the aim of spiritual practice is being able to move back and forth between those and understand that both realities are true. and a complete understanding needs both of them. You need the combined view. And I think some people with dementia, some people on their deathbeds, some people just through spiritual practice of various kinds can reach the state where their own personal stories aren't that important. They just fade into the larger truth that everything is a seamless, miraculous whole. My mother, if you saw the look on my mother's face in her last days, and actually a couple of times Mark and I each visited, we thought, oh, she's dead. We got in really close. It's like, nope, she's still here. And she gave me a kiss. She was in a bliss bubble. It was no distress whatsoever. It was one of the most beautiful things. And I've been gifted the experience of seeing that few times. So I think what's fascinating, you know, when you're talking about this is that it reminds me a lot of the exploration we've done with nonspeakers who have apraxia, who feel less connected to their body, less connected maybe even to their past, present, or often unable to, you know, engage due to something different about their neurology. And does that surprise you? Because currently we're, you know, talking about telepathy and those who experienced it, whether they were caregivers or medical professionals or loved ones or even mediums, saying that they were able to connect with people with dementia from a telepathic state. And is that something you've come across with your mother? And if not, does it surprise you? Or I guess, you know, how do you make sense of any of it? I think that people who have brains that filter the larger underlying consciousness of existence in different ways than are typical, sometimes they get less information. Sometimes there might not be much there, but we would be making a mistake to assume that's the case. I think sometimes their brains, their minds are actually having greater access to things that the rest of us who function easily in the world are able to clothe and dress ourselves, feed ourselves, etc. It takes a lot of energy, time, and focus to be able to take care of ourselves in the world. If you don't have a mind that's focused in that kind of detail, telling yourself human stories about who you are as a person and how you have to behave in the world, then you might have the opportunity to experience other things. it might be that people who experience that kind of stuff are less able to take care of themselves. And so in our society where we don't value people who have different experiences of the world and treat them as beings that need to be warehoused or seen as burdens, but they may in fact have greater access than any of us can imagine. Some of us are like that for a lifetime. Some of us have glimpses of it, maybe through some practice that develops trance work or the use of psychedelics. Some of us may have openings because you've had a near-death experience and you survived it, and yet part of your mind remains open to what you saw. Some of us, only it seems most of us, get a chance to experience in the last hours or days of life if you're gifted the chance to die in bed, not by violence. And I think all of these things are potential for every human. It's just how much do you value them, yearn for them, cultivate them? How much do you honor them in yourselves? And how much do you honor it in others? Yeah. And then if the conscious continues to open and connect, even when the brain is failing, how do you think that might change the story we tell ourselves about what it means to die or even, quote, unquote, disappear, which is, I think, is most people's fear around death, right? One of the things in Christopher Kerr's book that he mentions over and over again that I think is one of the more profound lessons of his research is that in those final moments, these deathbed visions, even when they're scary ones or disturbing ones, which can also happen, it seems as though the universe is giving you the vision that you need to, in a moment, understand that it's all just fine. The universe, that underlying consciousness, meets you precisely where you are with all your psychoses, with all your crazy worries, with all your beliefs and conditionings that you carry into those last moments so that you're lying there in whatever state you're in. The universe shows up and presents you exactly the right medicine for you to understand in a transforming moment or a series of moments that it's all just fine. Yeah, it's beautiful. As far as what you witnessed and, you know, what it seems like Kerr witnessed as well. I mean, do you think that validates this idea of a soul, that we have a soul that continues? Or what would you say about that? And what do you think your mother would say? My mother would speak in terms of the soul if you asked her, because she comes from a Jewish tradition that talks about soul. So she'd be easy with that. Or she might have looked at you in her later years and said, what? And pretend not to have a clue. I don't know what the soul is. What I think I understand is that the universe actually arises from your consciousness, your awareness, and is nothing but your consciousness, your awareness. and the appearance of solidity to our material world is merely an appearance. It's a misapprehension that comes about from conditioning, cultural conditioning, but also the conditioning of I'm a human baby and I have to survive to adulthood. And the best way to do that is to think the world is real. But fundamentally, if the universe is entirely consciousness, then what's the difference between me and an angel and a demon and a god or a goddess? They're all just constructs of consciousness in the larger consciousness. They're just the dreams the universe is having when it contemplates itself. And so there's not soul or not soul. It's just what's the perspective through which you're experiencing the universe in this moment? And what's the perspective of the universe experiencing you in this moment? That's it for this episode of The Talk Trax. But new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones, that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. Thank you to my amazing collaborators, our executive producer, Jill Pacheznik, our producer, Catherine Ellis, and associate producer, Selena Kennedy. Original music by Rachel Cantu. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth P.W. Original logo and cover art by Ben Kandor Design. The audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma. And I'm Kai Dickens, your writer, creator, and host. Thank you again for joining us.