Peter Novak’s The Division of Consciousness argues death splits the mind into rational and emotional halves, with the conscious mind losing identity while the unconscious judges past memories, creating subjective "heaven" or "hell." Bell cites cases like children recalling past lives (e.g., Jessica’s account at age three) and Ian Stevenson’s research, while Novak dismisses demonic possession claims. The theory aligns with ancient myths—like Judgment Day—and fringe phenomena such as tape-loop ghosts, though Bell questions continuity between reincarnated souls. Novak’s work, rooted in Freud/Jung’s duality and books like Of Two Minds, challenges modern brain-centric psychology, proposing souls may reintegrate within living minds rather than exist separately. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning, wherever you may be across this great land of powers commercially from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands southwest, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, South and South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
This is Ghost to Ghost AM and I Ghost Beyond in worldwide broadcast.com and of course in Pole at the moment, as we continue our experiment in streaming videos, streaming video, is it streaming video?
Listen, you can go up to my website and you can get the G2 software in charge.
Cost you an American set either.
And then come back and click on streaming video, and here I will be dancing about doing my show, and you can both see and hear what goes on.
Richard C. Hogan, good news to report.
At least tentative good news.
Richard did make it through surgery.
Richard Richard is going to But he did make it through surgery, I repeat.
And I haven't had a lot of communication from the people in Miami.
My guess is, I've had a little bit.
My guess is that they're all pretty whipped.
And once he got through surgery and was no doubt totally conked out, they all took the opportunity to go get a little bit of sleep.
But I did get word that he made it through the surgery, so thank you all.
I guess we can at least tentatively, cautiously conclude, grand experiment number seven worked.
Or at least it's not an obvious failure.
Richard lives.
So I want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart who participated in the effort.
You never know.
I guess you can call these things as you will, but we have now done seven experiments, and all seven have come up winners.
I guess you could calculate the odds of that one with regard to rain or ET showing themselves or people recovering from insurmountable difficulties, certainly the case with Daniel, and a good helping hand with Richard.
So I don't know.
You know, what do you conclude about many minds concentrating in a single effort?
I have not yet concluded anything except that I'm leaning heavily toward believing that it actually works.
Listen next hour.
You're in for a treat.
Peter Novak will be here.
And he claims to have solved the oldest mystery of them all, the secret of death itself.
And he has written a book called The Division of Consciousness.
The Division of Consciousness.
And he will explain, I guess, the nature of what he believes consciousness to be, and in its understanding, unriddles the mystery of death.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urges Congress to delay votes on Kosovo until peace talks are completed, suggesting the warring sides would interpret a lack of U.S. resolve as, quote, a green light to resume fighting, but the House Speaker has rejected her appeal and scheduled a debate for tomorrow on a resolution on the possible deployment of U.S. troops.
Now, I wonder why they would do that.
Seems to me not to be a brilliant idea to deploy U.S. troops until they're sure they've got some kind of agreement.
Otherwise, we're sending our guys into the middle of a hot zone.
A man down in Louisiana walked into a church in the middle of a church service and opened fire as he walked down the aisle, killing two people, wounding four others.
Minister said the gunman's wife and baby were killed.
He also reportedly shot and killed his mother-in-law before going to church.
Incident occurred at New St. John Fellowship Baptist Church in Gonzales, 20 miles east of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Parish deputies there shaking their head.
They have no idea why this occurred.
Great.
Into church, right down the aisle with a gun blazing away.
This is really, really interesting what I've got here.
It is from Gene.
And Gene sent me emails saying roughly the following.
Art, I sent a message to SOHO, you know, the people with the satellite that watches the sun, asking them about the probability of a super flare, flashback to last night, super flare hitting Earth and what it would do if it did.
And I got an amazingly uncommunicative response, which I have quoted below.
So here's what she wrote to the people at Soho.
CNN reported recently that other star-like stars have been seen expelling super flares.
How likely is it that the sun might send a super flare our way, and what exactly would be the consequences?
Now this is sent to Soho, right?
And so you can see the trail of email once Gene's letter got to Soho.
It reached first a man named Steele.
That's S-T-E-E-L-E Steele, who said, Steele, can you take this one?
Thanks.
And you can see that it was kicked, thanks, Jean, and Jean kicked it over to somebody else.
And finally, it's hard to discern who sent this.
The answer that came back to my emailer was the technical answer she got back from the Soho people was on the possibility of a major flare.
Gene writes, as you can see, my message got bumped from scientist to scientist, who would normally answer questions, and finally to their PI guy, Soho Media Specialist.
The PR guy then proceeded to just throw me a cryptic McCartney quote, no mention of the chances or the possible outcome, as I had asked.
This to me expresses an attempt to hide something.
Can the PR guy really answer my question about supernova flares better than the scientist?
Yeah, all right.
So again, a serious inquiry made of the people at Soho kicked past several of the scientists there.
Finally, with an answer, tomorrow may rain, so follow the sun.
All right.
I mentioned this the other morning, but I didn't give it much play because I just didn't have time the other morning.
On Tuesday, last week, this is in the Night Ritter newspapers, a dangerous asteroid whizzed by Earth in a cosmic close call.
Similar near misses are expected March 18th, March 26th, and April 1st.
Astronomers are discovering killer asteroids at a record pace.
Now, they've already added 55, by the way, this year.
More than any other six years combined.
Anyway, it goes back to what I've always said about this.
The really close calls that we get are never seen until after the fact.
In other words, they never run a story saying Earth is about to have a close call.
Tomorrow or the next day, something is going to come whizzing by and it's going to be really close, folks, but no cigar.
Or can't you do that cigar thing anymore?
We never get a notification ahead of time, always, well, we just, guess what, we just had a close call.
And here's an interesting story from Philadelphia, the Inquirer there, the Philadelphia Inquirer, a very well-respected paper.
Deformed calves, discolored crops, purple pigs dying by the hundreds, then decomposing quickly.
Sounds like the X-Files, doesn't it?
It isn't some Old Testament pestilence.
It's here and now, and a mystery that has driven one farmer in western Montgomery County out of business and has others in the area scared for theirs and for their health.
Thus far, the long series of reported problems first noted in the early 1990s has absolutely confounded environmental and agricultural officials.
EPA did its most recent round of soil and water testing on the farms in January.
More tests to come.
But, quote, the data we got back thus far does not indicate any kind of environmental or Human health emergency out here.
We're looking at what needs to be done from here on out.
And apparently, it's not exactly isolated either.
Throughout the mid-Atlantic region, according to Lynn Campbell, an EPA spokesperson, farm animals are dying, and we don't know why.
We're not going to make any kind of connection we can and try to figure out what's going on here.
Everybody is very tight-lipped on the story, but I trust the Philadelphia Inquirer is following the story, and we'll get some kind of update on it.
pretty weird stuff huh The priest was preparing a man for his long day's journey into night.
Must be a hard job for priests, you know, going to people who are dying.
You ever think about that?
That's what Daniel does, too.
Whispering firmly, our priest said, denounce the devil, son.
Let him know how little you think of his evil.
The dying man was silent.
The priest repeated his order.
The dying man still said nothing.
The priest then asked, Why do you refuse to denounce the devil and his evil?
A moment goes by and the dying man replies, Well, until I know exactly where I'm heading, I don't think I ought to aggravate anybody.
All right, one more here that I can do tonight now that I feel a little better, considering Richard made it through.
Now, don't stop.
He continues to need great assistance in the next 48 hours.
You know, they're going to be watching Richard very carefully.
And they are, of course, tentative hours after you have come out of surgery.
So for those of you who have been thinking good thoughts, don't stop, please.
But I thought you should hear this.
A few months ago, there was an opening in the CIA for an assassin.
The highly classified positions are rather hard to fill, as you might imagine, and there's a lot of testing and background checking involved before you can even be considered for anything like that.
After sending many, many applicants through the background checks and the training, testing, they finally narrowed the possible choices down to two men and one woman, but only one position was available.
So two were to be disappointed?
Anyway, the day came for the final test to see which of those final qualifying persons would get the extremely secretive job.
The CIA man administering the test took one of the men aside and handed him a gun.
He said, quote, we must know that you will follow your instructions no matter the circumstances, end quote, he explained, pointing to a door and said, quote, inside that room, you'll find your wife sitting in a chair.
Take this gun and kill her.
The man got a shot.
Look on his face, as you could imagine, said, you can't be serious.
I could never, never shoot my own wife.
Well, said the CIA fellow, you're not the person for this job.
And he was disqualified and sent home.
The CIA man took the second fellow aside, handed him the gun, and told him precisely the same thing.
The man looked a bit shocked, but took the gun and went in the room.
Everything was quiet for about five minutes.
Then the door opened.
The man came out with tears in his eyes.
I tried to shoot her, he said, but just couldn't pull the trigger.
I couldn't shoot my own wife.
I guess I'm not the right guy for this job.
No, said the CIA man, you just don't have what it takes.
Again, for those of you who might not have heard or tuned in late, Richard Hoagland has made it through surgery alive and needs to be watched carefully by the people at the hospital, the doctors, and you.
So let us not let up in our well-wishes mentally for Richard in grand experiment number seven.
But that's the good news, folks.
He's through the surgery and still with us.
They'll be watching him very carefully, as they always do in these cases over the next 48 hours or so.
Maybe before you know it, we'll have Richard here telling us all about it.
And just one more little item before we go to the phones in open line.
Spring Hill, Tennessee, ever get so mad at your car that you just could shoot it?
Gee, I would never consider such things.
Actually, I've considered shooting computers.
Anyway, a guy in Spring Hill, Tennessee did, please say Boyd Kelly's car just died on him Saturday night.
So he blasted it right there in the middle of the highway, pulled out an AK-47 assault rifle, and emptied three 30-round clips into the poor 88 Oldsmobile, now departed.
A sheriff's dispatcher says that several people called to report the bizarre scene of this man firing round after round into the tortured body of this Oldsmobile.
Kelly, of course, is now charged with a weapons violation, but the olds...
Again, a question about the possibility of a flare, a Steel Hill Soho media specialist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, replied to my emailer.
To quote Paul McCartney, tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.
I'm not going to get over that one for a while.
One more little car story, and then off we go.
Knoxville, Tennessee.
Where was that other story from?
It was from Spring Hill, Tennessee.
Hey, what's going on in Tennessee anyway, with you people?
Listen to this.
Knoxville, Tennessee.
Honk if you say I do.
There's a man in Tennessee.
We just, of course, read about one who shot his car three clips in an AK-47 into the Oldsmobile.
Anyway, there's another man in Tennessee who wants to marry his car.
We apparently feel about our cars the way we do about our women, huh?
This guy actually wants to marry his car.
Buster Mitchell says that he has been brokenhearted and hung out to dry, so he figured he might as well marry his only other true love.
His 1996 Mustang GT.
He calls it doing the good old boy thing.
He's going to have to settle for a driver's license because officials in Knoxville say only men and women could get marriage licenses.
A marriage license.
It was sometime after he listed his fiancé's birthplace as Detroit, her father as Henry Ford, and her blood type as 10W40 that his plans began to sputter.
Mitchell, though, is not giving up.
He plans to try at a couple of wedding chapels in the great Smoky Mountains.
Well, Fritz, most recently, of course, if it had not been for Richard, there would now be concrete where something in excess of 2,000 years of age is now being preserved.
I was going to ask you, what do you think of the connections of the holy books of really all philosophy of religion and them maybe being like a primitive form of alien contact to humans?
What do I think of the various holy books as far what?
For example, the Quran and the Bible and so forth.
I think that all are as likely to carry you to an ultimate path on the other side as another.
In other words, I don't necessarily favor one above the other.
I think they all may take you to the same good place if that's where you're going to go.
unidentified
Of course.
I mean, I was actually speaking more in terms of an actual alien to human transfer of knowledge almost.
Because I've heard from people that I've talked with, they have perspectives on it.
Like, they look at it as maybe it was a way for a higher species of thinking, of thought, you know, to leave messages for us how to live, but yet it couldn't be handed to them, you know, handed to us just blatantly open.
George Bush, what do you think of George Bush and the other, I don't know if you've heard about the committee he got together that wants to go to Egypt for 2000 and also the connections that Egypt has with the book of Revelation?
I'm not sure how you would confuse a green beam with a launch.
Launches are really specific.
How do you identify a launch?
Well, for example, when they occur at Vandenberg, you will see a quickly rising rocket with a tail, a plume behind it.
And then, if done around sunrise or a sunset, you will see this, or even after, this really cool, twisty kind of curly cue thing that might give you pause for a moment until you realize it is a launch.
They leave pretty typical trademarks as they ascend.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Good evening, Eric.
unidentified
This is Rick from Issaquah, Washington, listening to you on KOMO.
The STS-80 video is going to send anybody scratching their head, walking away.
There's no way you can look at what was on that video and not know that you saw a weapons test of some kind or a vehicle leaving Earth at a real clip.
unidentified
And then the objects, one thing that I noticed was that they would, as Richard Hofman would call it, station keep, they'd move into your frame of vision and then stop and fly with the space shuttle, same speed, same distance.
And only things that can do that are intelligently operated aircraft.
Look, if you really want to thrill, try and get hold of the entire STS-80 video.
And what you've really got to do to put the whole thing in perspective is watch the entire thing.
It goes on all about 20 minutes or so.
And from that, you get a feel of what NASA is doing intentionally and what they're not doing when they're just sort of letting the cameras capture whatever might be out there or, you know, pulled back so you've got a wide-angle view.
And then the obviously specifically zooming in in expectation of something to occur in a very small area.
And then, of course, it occurs.
So whatever was going to happen, they were aware it was going to happen.
Earlier today, driving home from work, just before dusk, and it's a cloudy, hazy day with a high ceiling, and out of the corner of my eye, out of the window of my vehicle, I see a flash.
And as I look up, I see what I can only best describe as a white ball, for lack of a better term to compare it to something.
It looks like a brilliant light bulb with green color in it flying at an incredible clip.
And what you are now talking about sounds at least somewhat similar.
In other words, the way two people might perceive a single event.
unidentified
Right.
Now, you know, trying to dismiss any other options here, I don't know what to describe it as other than that as I did, but trying to figure out what I saw today.
It obviously was not an airplane.
It was a big ball Of fire, but what I'm wondering is, is it possible that a meteor could enter our atmosphere?
Now look, there's no point in denying that I'm a Freemason because nobody believes it, A, and B, it would remove what little light Bill Cooper has.
So the answer is yes or no.
We're going to talk about consciousness here in a moment.
Again, just one more time, because this blew me away probably more than anything else that happened during the day other than the good news about Richard.
For those of you joining at this hour, this lady, this very nice lady, Jean, after hearing our show about solar flares yesterday and noting that CNN had a report, sent a facts off to the SOHO people, you know, the people at SOHO, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and she sent them an email and she simply said, CNN reported yesterday that other stars have been seen expelling super flares.
How likely is it the sun, she says, will send a super flare our way and what would the consequences be?
Now you would think of that as a fairly legit, honest science question, right?
Well, the people at Soho took it and you can look at the trail of email here going from one scientist to another with comments like, I wouldn't do a good job with this one.
Maybe Terry or Barbara.
And each one of them doesn't comment until finally at the end, it gets to a Soho media specialist.
And the only answer our lady gets back to her question is, to quote Paul McCartney, tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.
That's what our lady got, and he was a little blown away by it.
you Peter Novak may have solved the oldest mystery of all, the secret of death itself.
Peter had never had a personal afterlife experience.
Never has.
Had no memories of any past life incarnation, no encounters with ghosts, apparitions, angelic beings, or demonic spirits, not even a single near-death experience.
Nor does he claim to see, hear, or otherwise communicate with the dead.
People who do have such experiences, Novak is quick to point out, tend to be powerfully prejudiced in favor of the specific form of their own afterlife experience, often at the expense of discounting contradictory reports of quite different experiences.
Now that in itself would be a show.
After studying psychology at Purdue University, Novak spent six years as a psychiatric counselor in a small Midwestern hospital, all the while becoming increasingly impressed with how fundamentally relevant the division of consciousness seemed to be to human culture.
How profoundly this division seemed to impact, even mold, human experience by the end of six years.
He was convinced that no other challenge the human race faces can equal the interior challenge of the disassociation and alienation between conscious and unconscious that exists in the human psyche.
All other problems, he suspects, were but symptoms of the first and greatest problem.
Devastated by the tragic death of his wife, Novak walked away from his clinical duties, setting himself on an ambitious but seemingly rather futile quest to decisively determine and understand the true nature of death.
Yes, I could understand that.
Despite the world's many different and seemingly contradictory reports about death and the afterlife, Novak suspected that a single simple truth lay hidden behind all, and he resolved to find that.
For the next ten years, Novak poured body and soul into independent research, exploring every conceivable approach to understanding the nature of death in the afterlife, studying psychology, archaeology, physiology, history, theology, comparative religion, mythology, folklore, many varieties of modern parapsychological research.
He examined and compared the afterlife beliefs and religious texts of hundreds of cultures, old and new, interviewing and consulting with hundreds of near-death experiencers, past-life regression subjects, ghost reporters, after-life researchers, parapsychologists, theologians, religious scholars around the world.
As Novak suspected from the beginning, there was a single truth, and it could be discovered.
His book, The Division of Consciousness, is the story of that search and that discovery.
demonstration of the motion i'm asking these questions because we're struggling of course to understand what consciousness And one day we may get a conscious computer.
And so would a computer simply being aware constitute a conscious computer, aware of its surroundings?
Well, there may be the distinction between consciousness and self-aware consciousness might be that's probably an important distinction.
I think that most people would describe self-aware consciousness as being, They would equate the two as being consciousness.
But I think that there would be such a thing as consciousness without being aware of being conscious.
Like in some lower animals, they could very easily be aware of a number of things in their environment, but they've never actually realized that they are conscious.
And I don't think I have any question in my mind about the fact that a cat is conscious, aware of its surroundings, certainly aware of itself, aware of its needs, sometimes so amazingly so that I kind of go, oh, this is one smart cat, you know, thinking, obviously thinking about things.
I have to look at a couple of my cats, and I can almost see their little cat brains, the wheels turning, you know.
Anyway, a division of consciousness, however we accept consciousness, a division, what do you mean by that?
Well, if we refer to the distinction of the conscious and unconscious habits of the mind, the conscious, the science says, is logical and rational and objective.
And it's the side of the mind that makes the decisions that has free will.
The unconscious is pretty much the opposite.
It's subjective and emotional, and it possesses the memory, but it's not logical, and it does not have free will.
Well, at first I concluded that there were very many different stories about life after death, and none of them seemed to agree with each other.
But then at one point I realized that plugging what science has discovered about the nature and functions of the mind into the equation, all of a sudden, all the different stories and legends and traditions and reports about the afterlife suddenly seemed to make good sense.
I realized that a simple theory would account for the majority of phenomena that are being reported.
And that theory was that the two halves of the mind, the conscious and the unconscious, would divide apart at death and each would go on alone experiencing the afterlife separately, cut off from the other.
Well, I think that the reincarnation scenario is related to the conscious mind if it were separated from the unconscious after death.
If the conscious and the unconscious habits of the mind divided apart, the conscious would be left without any memory whatsoever, in total amnesia, but still in full possession of its free will, still able to make new decisions and initiate new experiences, free to start a whole new life and a whole new identity.
And that sounds an awful lot like reincarnation to me.
And the one problem that I've always had with reincarnation is the fact that there is no continuation of consciousness of memory and of a self-awareness.
Of any sort of self-awareness at all.
That occurs only seemingly at the unconscious level.
And you know, when people do hypnotic regression or something like that and deeply probe into a person's background, they find they may have lived another life, but never does the consciousness know it has lived another life.
Never.
And so I always wondered, what good is that?
We'll be right back.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 10, 1999.
I am blue, see that girl, watch that scene, digging, standing green.
Friday night and the lights are low, looking out for a place to go.
We're the place of art, music, getting in the swing, you come to look for a thing.
Anybody could be that guy, night is young and music high.
We're the people of us, music, everything's fine, you're in the mood for dance.
What the people need is a way to make them smile.
It ain't no way to do it too well.
Gotta give a message, get it all through.
Oh, now mama's gonna do that to why.
Oh, oh, oh.
It's a music.
Oh, oh.
It's a music.
Oh, oh.
It's a music.
All night.
Well, I know you don't care about everything I say.
Meet me in the country for a day.
We'll be happy every day.
Oh, oh.
We can do a thing.
Feeling good.
Feeling fine.
Oh, oh.
Baby, just feel me great.
Oh, oh.
Just feel me great.
Oh, oh.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 10th, 1999.
To quote Paul McCartney, they finally said, stumped, tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.
Listen to this.
Death flares.
This is from Discover Magazine, April of 98.
A Yale astronomer, Bradley Schaefer, has some interesting news for those of us who live here on Earth.
He recently discovered that several nearby stars that closely resemble our very own sun can become violent, shooting off flares powerful enough to fly a planet more than a billion, that's a billion with a B miles away.
These things are 100 to 10 million times larger than the biggest solar flares ever seen.
That's from you.
Tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.
I'm going to remember that forever.
Back now to my guest, Peter Novak.
We're talking about consciousness and actually a little bit about reincarnation.
And where I left off with you, Peter, was that I've always pondered and I sort of leaned toward the concept of reincarnation, but I wondered always what good is it in the sense that I have no memories of any prior life, none whatsoever.
And without those memories, what have I learned and how am I progressing?
There are a number of creation stories from cultures all over the world that start the story of existence, the story of the beginning of Mankind and earth and all that with the same idea of a very early primordial division in which there was a single godlike being or
a single substance which divided apart into two parts and then these two parts start to interact with one another.
There's a lot of different legends that describe this but the most familiar to our culture would be the story of Adam and Eve in which Eve is taken from Adam's side.
If you actually look at the original Hebrew that the Bible was taken from, you find that the word that is most commonly translated as side or as rib can actually also be translated as side, in which case the story is saying that one whole side of Adam was removed from him.
I think that was the beginning of the human unconscious.
Why is it that our minds are divided into two parts?
When Freud first introduced this idea to the scientific community, the idea that the mind has this lower level that we're not familiar with, this unconscious, he thought it was an aberration.
He did not think it was natural.
He said, it obviously exists, there's so much evidence supporting it, but there's something very wrong about this.
Isn't that something, because I would have thought it the other way around, that that would have been an artifact, those would be artifacts of the conscious mind, not the unconscious.
Well, according to what science has been discovering and describing for the last century, that that is the distinction, the division of labor in the mind, is that one half is this logical half, and the other side is the side that has the emotion and the memory.
Okay, but if these two parts are not merely differentiated to the point that they can interact, but if they're actually disassociated and alienated from each other, well, then you have problems.
And I think that when people go through their lives and they're forever alienating themselves from their own unconscious, ignoring their own emotions, their own feelings, their own pangs of regret and intuition?
All that.
I think that every time you push these things back, pushing them back down out of your conscious mind, you're splitting your own mind apart a little bit more, and then when you die, you finally discover what you did to yourself.
Well, actually beyond that, if you read the reports about past life regression and you read reports of what people have said when they were regressed to a point in between lives, they describe that exact thing.
They're sitting there, they're floating in nothingness.
They recognize nothing around them.
They don't recall their name.
They don't recall actually ever having had any other life or any other existence other than floating.
And all that, all of those details are exactly what you would expect them to experience if they were a conscious mind that had been broken off, separated from their unconscious mind.
I would conclude, my studies would conclude that people do experience heavens and hells.
I don't know that there is a single one of each.
I think there may be an infinite variety of experiences.
But what's interesting about the near-death experiences is that if when people first leave their bodies in a near-death experience, very, very commonly they will report floating above their body, being very calm and peaceful, unperturbed and dispassionate, watching people trying to revive them in many cases, all kinds of things.
So you would imagine that I think that this is another piece of evidence suggesting that their unconscious, the half of their mind that produces emotion, has been separated from them at that point.
I think that the characteristics of the mind, of the unconscious, would absolutely insist that that sort of a memory review would occur if the mind divided apart at death.
If the unconscious divided away from the conscious mind, it would be cut off from all logical thought processes, which would effectively isolate it from all objective reality.
Its experience from that point on would be limited to subjectively reviewing, processing, and reacting to its own inner contents, its stored-up memories.
Okay, but these are all subjective processes that I think would occur automatically.
The unconscious, one interesting, very interesting thing to me about the unconscious mind that science has been saying for the last hundred years is that the unconscious mind contains within itself, it's hardwired into the system, that it has a moral awareness, a moral quality to it, a natural awareness for issues of right and wrong.
So I think that when the unconscious found itself isolated and alone and didn't have anything else to do but go back and start reviewing its memories, as it did that, it would become acutely aware of all violations of its own moral sense as it was going through those memories.
And the unconscious is also emotional and reactive.
It's automatically emotional and automatically reactive.
And so as it was going through those memories and it was judging them, basically saying, this is right, that was wrong, this is right, that was wrong, it would react to those judgments emotionally.
If the judgments that it saw, that it felt, were good, it would react by feeling good.
If those judgments were poor, it would react by feeling poor.
And then we also know that the unconscious is very imaginative, you know, it's very fertile.
And so as it was going through these memory reviews and these judgments and these reactions, it would build up elaborate dream world fantasies revolving around all of those things.
I think it would create its own heaven out of its sense of joy from those memories and...
It would then, in effect, sentence itself to a period of joy or a period of, I don't know what's the right word, a period of, I don't know exactly like punishment, but self-inflicted agony over the guilt.
Time after time, do we just keep coming back and doing it again?
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 10, 1999.
To face and darkness has turned to crack.
Watching through windows, you're wondering if I'm okay.
Secrets stolen from deep inside.
Music If you could read my love, what a tale my thoughts could tell.
Just like an old-time movie about a ghost from a wish him well in a castle jar or a portrait strong with chains upon my feet.
You know that ghost is me.
And I will never be set free as long as I'm a ghost you can see.
If I could read your mind, love, what a tale your thoughts could tell.
Just like a paper back in the hole, the kind of drugstore sell.
When you reach the part where the heartaches come, the hero would be me.
Heroes of the day.
You won't be.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premiere of Radio Networks, the night of on-core presentation of Ghost to Ghost AM from March 10th, 1999.
care to respond to that in any way at all well actually would tend to agree but if you would I would tend to agree, but I think that, again, you have the division that has to be taken into account.
In the Bible and a number of other traditions, God seems to have two different sides to him.
In the Bible talks about God having both a soul and a spirit.
And it's interesting that they describe these as being very similar to the way that modern science describes the conscious and the unconscious.
God's spirit is very often shown to be speaking or thinking or acting, whereas his soul is shown to be feeling or to be remembering.
These are all classic characteristics associated with the conscious and the unconscious.
Well, I'm not entirely sure that in an NDE, because they do come back, I don't know that there is a final, an absolute division that does occur between the conscious and the unconscious.
But some of the things that people do report do reflect this division in process.
Like when they first separate from the body and they describe not having any emotion or feeling, that suggests that there's been some division and the person at that point is speaking from the perspective of the conscious mind alone.
Parts of it were and parts of it did not seem to be.
The unconscious does seem, the experience of the unconscious after death, it would seem to be that thoughts would form its reality very quickly, right?
Whatever it thought about, that would be immediately what it experienced.
Very, very much a subjective thing, very much like in a dream.
As soon as you think of it, there it is.
But on the other hand, if this division does occur, then in that unconscious dream world, there isn't any such thing as choosing or deciding.
I would expect that people who do that are more divided, or as divided as a human being can be, and I would consider it very unlikely that they would end up.
If there is such a thing as a division between the conscious and the unconscious after death, I think there would be some of the people most certain to go through that division.
So that somebody who might take their own life, for example, would be seen as certainly not getting it right and would be more likely to divide and return.
Yes, and again, I found them to be a lot of the reports seem to be very similar with this concept of the mind explaining the different kinds of ghosts.
You know, one of the most commonly reported kind of a ghost is the sleepwalking ghost, the haunting ghost, the one that goes through the same motions over and over and over again, wearing really, really old clothing, walking through old buildings, going possibly even through old floor plans that don't even exist anymore.
This is exactly the sort of behavior that you would expect from an unconscious if it was separated from its conscious mind.
It would be left without any rational intellect, totally subjective and isolated from objective reality, running on full automatic, reviewing its memories, experiencing them again and again and again.
So what kind of transition did you make in your own mind as you began Investigating all of this.
Do you think that you arrived at the conclusions you arrived at because you wanted to or because of objective research?
You understand the nature of that question.
Obviously, you were emotionally impacted by the suicide of your wife, and so have you ever wondered yourself, Peter, whether your conclusions are a result of your experience?
I have been very reluctant to embrace these conclusions simply because, you know, basically what I'm saying is that I've discovered an explanation that makes sense of all the different afterlife reports and traditions, and that's a very big claim to make.
Yes, it is.
And so I have reviewed the research and the material and the data again and again and again, and still I have been hesitant.
You know, when I first discovered this and I first came across this theory that seemed to put it all together that make sense, I thought I was going crazy.
I thought, this isn't possible.
This kind of answer people are ever going to find.
No one is going to find this answer.
That's a belief that a lot of people have today, and it's a belief that inside of me, I guess I had a little bit.
I was very reluctant to even consider the fact an answer that I would have found it anyway.
So I kept on looking and reviewing the research.
But the fact is that the material out there, the afterlife reports, as well as the ancient traditions from religions, they all fit into this pattern.
According to this one little idea, that the conscious and the unconscious divide of heart, it explains virtually all the evidence I have encountered.
How do you think the traditional psychology, you studied psychology at Purdue, how do you think the traditional psychology community would react to your findings?
Well, about 50 years ago, they would have been a lot more interested in them than they would be now because for the last 50 years, 30 years anyway, the study of psychology has gone a lot more into trying to explain everything in terms of brain function, in terms of just a piece of meat.
But earlier than that, the origins of psychology with Freud and Jung described the mind as being independent of the body.
And they described their research described the two halves of the mind that I'm interested in, the conscious and the unconscious.
That was back, what, in the first half of the century.
Now that view of the nature of the mind got a big boost about 15 years ago with the book "Right Brain, Left Brain," which again supported the idea that there were two very different halves of the mind that functioned in these ways.
And then that view got another big boost just last year with the book "Of Two Minds" written by Frederick Schiffer, a professor at Harvard, which again is talking about the mind having two...
I fell in love with your show on a road trip to Atlanta last year and been listening ever since.
Say, you know that online auction site, eBay?
Well, I was paying them my daily visit the other night and discovered the strangest thing.
People selling their souls.
Some souls are getting upwards of $10 million.
Some souls even come with bonus cat souls.
If you do a search for a human soul, you'll see what I'm talking about.
What are you looking for?
He goes on, now, I'm not the one to say if this is all humor or if it's for real, but can you imagine if people are actually paying for other people's souls?
Please respond in any way you can.
If you can get online during a show, I suggest you do it and read a couple of the auctions on air.
For instance, one human soul slightly damaged due to lightning strike.
Thanks for your time and good night.
Scott in Boston.
Well, I'm going to have to give that a try, Scott.
I don't know.
What are you looking for?
Hi there, Peter, welcome back.
Hi, thanks.
I want to give you an opportunity.
We're going to go to the phones here in this segment, but I want to give you an opportunity to plug your book, The Division of Consciousness.
Is it possible, or did which side of the brain do you think, if it's possible, form first, the right of the left?
I would say would be the right form first because it found out it couldn't survive without the left.
You couldn't wrestle a rhino to the ground with the feelings.
You have to have some logic on the left-hand side.
And if my theory is true, would the two sides now be working and evolving toward a third, let's say a third of a third of a third of a brain instead of just two halves?
In other words, you have been sort of preaching throughout all this that a separation between what the psychologists are now looking at in modern day as the meat that we are, the physical meat that we are, versus the immortal aspects of ourselves, yes?
All right, in that case, we'll not discuss the other part.
One quick question before we go back to Hones, and that is, that man who walked around here a couple thousand years ago described in the Bible allegorical or absolutely?
Well, I think that that was not only a true story, I think that's the whole linchpin of history and the linchpin of this theory that I'm talking about.
If this theory is correct, and we do divide, the most people divide apart a death, we keep on losing our souls.
We keep on losing our unconscious minds and all of our memories and all of our egos life after life after life, and they keep building up and building up and building up in the collective unconscious, I assume.
And they would be forever lost to us if not for what that man did 2,000 years ago.
I don't know if I can explain it all over the phone, but I believe that what he did allowed was the thing that allowed the Judgment Day prophecies to actually be possible, that they could be fulfilled.
And which, of course, you know, that one of the most important things about that is that all the dead from all past history is supposed to rise back up again.
But what's interesting is that if this theory is true, if reincarnation is true, then all those people, all those past dead that are supposed to return again in the last day, they are not going to return in separate bodies, but instead they're going to be popping up from within the backs of our own minds, popping up back up to consciousness within our own skulls.
And we're going to suddenly have, what, dozens or hundreds of other people floating around inside of our own bodies at the same time.
Because a lot of the Old Testament prophecies about Judgment Day describe that very thing.
They talk about an invasion.
The Judgment Day would be the time of a great Invasion and they describe the invading army as being ancient and enduring, the most ruthless of all peoples.
And if it was an army of the recently risen from the dead souls, they would be both ancient and enduring.
And as people who quite literally knew what it meant to be dead, they would indeed be very ruthless.
That man you're talking about that existed 2,000 years ago, it talks about him in the book removing demons from people who are possessed.
Now, these demons can move from person to person, and they don't die.
They just keep moving down the line.
In the Bible, it's written that everyone is to be born in the flesh only once.
Now, my idea on this is the fact that these demons possess memories, and they can go into one person, bring the memories from the last person they were in to that person.
And this is the general consensus that most Christians have, because, of course, most Christians don't believe in reincarnation.
So, in other words, what he is thinking of reincarnation, you view as a demon jumping from one mortal to another.
unidentified
And bringing those memories and fooling the person into thinking they were that person, even though those memories were brought to that person by that demon.
Well, I think that such themes as demons do exist, and in fact, I think that they are composed of composites of discarded souls within the collective unconscious.
But I think that most people, when they do, I don't think that, first of all, there's very many people that do recall their past life memories.
But what's interesting is that most of the people that do seem to be, they don't seem to present any indications of being possessed on the country.
They seem to be people of exceptional integrity and honor and even spirituality.
So I think that it would be a poor argument to make to say that these people are possessed when they actually seem to have some of the highest examples of human...
I saw on a program, I think it was called The Other Side, where if you asked a child that was three or under if they remembered their having died, that a lot of them could.
She told me, yes, that she remembered three men broke into her house and they were trying to take her, and she all of a sudden dropped her head and she says, Grandmommy, I wished I hadn't screamed and woke mommy up because they killed mommy.
There's a book that's been written on this, on the past life memories of children.
I don't remember the name of it, actually, but it's something that came out within the last few years.
Yeah, I think that kids seem to be able to have more memory of the past lives than adults do.
Very fascinating.
Again, this would support the idea that in order to obtain these memories, you have to have some degree of integrity, which kids do and they don't lose really until they get older.
And I'm not sure whether to say you have random anecdotal evidence and whether you shouldn't have asked that question or whether you really do have something significant.
That's really something.
unidentified
I didn't want to believe in reincarnation until she was so sincere about it and went into such detail about it.
Well, as far as being able to retain, you know, what you've done over the course of a life, yeah, sure, that would be better.
I don't know it's a matter of everything being designed this way.
I'm pretty much convinced that the whole division and the loss of memory was a mistake.
It's an error that has been introduced into a system that was working properly before that error occurred.
I think that the whole biblical idea about history, about there being a fall from grace, and then Jesus came to correct it, and then at judgment day, everything is going to get restored to the way it was before.
I think that all fits into this.
That the fall from grace was when we first started doing this dividing, and things haven't been working right since.
Well, it's the conscious, or both the soul and the spirit.
You know, whether you're talking about the spirit weighing in between lives or the soul in its dream world, neither one seems to experience time the same way that we do, according to the reports.
unidentified
Yeah.
I think the unconscious, if that's eternal, that would be like the Kashik records that the Indians talk about.
Right, right.
So that would be the eternal thing.
And then our consciousness we get from birth because we enter this three dimension with time.
Oh yeah, and then what you were talking about before, the grace, that would be like when we're in this another dimension that's beyond time, before we're born.
If you go back to the lady who was on the air with us a little while ago, who was so fascinating, I think it was Brenda.
If you were to do a more involved investigation, if you didn't get freaked out, and I'm like Brenda, I would have freaked out.
If you could actually get a name and a place and a time to go with what occurred, the way you were killed or died in the prior life, then you could actually do research and you could endeavor to prove that.
And you do that from a two or three year old.
And baby, I'm not sure how you argue against that one if you do the research.
Ian Stevenson from University of Virginia has spent his whole life compiling data along those lines of memories of past lives and then trying to follow up with actual data that supports those stories about people and places and events from the past.
It has been a pleasure to have you on the air, Peter, and you've given me a lot to think about.
And the high point of the night for me, I discuss this kind of thing all the time, has been the explanation, rather elegant I must say, of what I call the tape reel or the tape loop ghost.
No one has ever, ever, ever answered that one for me until you came around.
That is Peter Novak, and his book is The Division of Consciousness.
And that is indeed something to consider, isn't it?
All right, what we are going to do with the remainder of the evening, another couple hours, is nothing but open lines.
Unscreened, unpredictable, the complete unknown.
Brenda was a particularly interesting call, wasn't she?
If you would like to respond to what Brenda had to say, if you have an answer for that that would make some sense, I'd like to hear it.
Because I just can't imagine any reasonable answer to what a three-year-old would say about just an immediate response with an absolute story about how she died.
That really is eerie, isn't it?
All right, we're going to break here at the top of the hour, and when we come back, two hours of the absolute unknown.
So if you've got something you'd like to slip in, here we are from the high desert.
Richard has come through the operation intact and is in recovery.
And we're going to have to watch him very closely for the next, oh, 48 hours, let's say, and get him out of the woods.
So if you've been thinking good thoughts, don't stop.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 10, 1999.
Music Music Music Music Never be what you wanna be.
Everything who you gotta be.
Take the long way more.
Take the long way to go When you're up on the stage, it's all unbelievable Oh, unforgettable I may adore you But then you're watching to think you're losing your sanity
Oh, calamity Oh, there's no way Oh, yeah
'Cause you feel that your life's become a catastrophe Premier Radio Networks Pretends Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight's program originally aired March 10th, 1999.
And he said that he saw some sort of plasmic energy type being thing falling through the ceilings, and the cats could see him, and people could see them coming out of the corner of their eyes.
Not out of the corner of their eyes, but you could see that.
I sat down and I concentrated really, really hard on what to say for Dreamland, how to frame what Dreamland is about, which also now really is what Coast is about too.
Listen to the words in the opening to Dreamland.
Listen to what I say.
Because I thought hard about it before I wrote it, and it's right on the money.
Welcome to Dreamland, a program dedicated to an examination of areas in the human experience not easily nor neatly put in a box.
Things seen at the edge of vision, awakening a part of the mind as yet not mapped.
And yet things every bit as real as the air we breathe but don't see.
I guess is Dreamland.
I thought really hard when I wrote that about what I wanted the program to be, what I wanted the whole concept to be, and that explains it very well indeed.
And that's really what we do here now as well.
Things seen at the edge of vision.
And there are a lot of things like that, aren't there?
Whether you see them for real or see them in your mind's eye, sometimes you catch a glimpse of them at the edge of vision.
Sometimes it's just a metal thing.
But they're as real as the telephone lines blinking in front of me.
Okay, I sent you a little email just a little while back indicating that on July 5th, Wednesday of 1999, you're going to receive a vision that is going to unlock understanding.
They probably say something to you like, dear, you've been spending too many hours on the road.
unidentified
I know.
It's just like that.
And they don't want to listen.
And I think, well, listen, there's this really valid point here.
I start trying to talk something about mitochondrial DNA and they look at me like I'm just sick.
So I just think it would be nicer if a lot more of the people that listen to your show would come to the chat clubs wherever they're at and give people like me who are not.
And it's some beautiful things going on and some scary things going on.
And the second thing I wanted to address was Y2K.
I went in my bank today and I'm just all happy because I'm getting all ready for it and I'm looking at some property and I'm considering all my storage.
Anyway, I'm pretty much preparing myself.
And I was in my bank going, oh yeah, and excuse me if I don't put any more money in the bank, ha ha.
And I was actually talking to the bank manager at the time and I'd known her for a couple years because I've banked there and she just looked at me like I was sick and she says, oh, I can't believe people are still going.
We were Y2K compliant back in December and we're just testing now.
Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
We were compliant back in December.
Now that implies that the end of testing has come and the verdict is absolute compliance.
Now, so what do you mean we were compliant then and we're testing now?
unidentified
Yeah, she was saying, well, we were done with the Y2K readiness, whatever they were doing, on December this date, and all of the banks had to be that way, and all the banks are ready now, and we're all in the testing stage now.
I said, well, you know, I think that this is not right.
And so if something happens, which inevitably it does, we're reading it in the news every day about people without power, people in floods, people in all kinds of trouble.
They're ready.
Or worst case, they eat their investment or whatever.
Maybe nothing will happen.
And that would be the best of the extremes, wouldn't it?
In fact, I think that's what I was just listening to.
But the comment that I wanted to make about reincarnation, I've been working with death transformation for a number of years, assisting spirits on, if you will.
But back to the lady that called earlier about her grandchild, when my daughter, who is now 25, when she was three years old, one day she suddenly looked at me and said, gee, mommy, I remember when I used to be a big blonde woman and I liked to drink beer.
I've loved cats all my life, and I had a cat named Yezu who died in my arms.
It was so sad.
Anyway, I have felt the presence of Yezu, but, you know, I have to imagine the possibility that Yezu was an artifact or is an artifact of my mind,
that Yesu indeed lives On, in the sense that he lives on in my mind, in my memory, and that I'm projecting that fact and wanting to keep Yesu alive in that manner, consciously or subconsciously, probably.
So you can't rule that out.
Well, here I am, surprised again, or not so surprised.
A doctor, a friend of mine, writes Discovery Channel Art, or one of the Time Life Channels, did a special, cocaine mummies.
Fascinating.
So it's true.
They've tested and found cocaine in mummies.
Now, maybe when you die, your body no longer processes the cocaine, so it remains to be tested.
Because that could certainly be.
A little nose crust or something.
Who knows?
I don't know how they would do that testing, but my God.
Cocaine in mummies.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
All right, Bill, I talked to you about your website.
You remember when I was talking a little while ago to somebody and I said, be a man, tell her to leave the room.
You're going to listen to our buddy.
Remember that?
I got a fax here.
It says, shame on you, Artie, because you're stealing husbands from their wives at night.
Poor, lonely wives laying all alone in tears because you broadcast.
She goes on, well, it's okay.
The wives can still be abducted by aliens and get their business done that way.
unidentified
Not this wife, boy, I want to stay here.
I'll tell you what.
I was in show business all my life, and I traveled all my life.
My mother, father, and I together.
And I'll make this quick.
One night I was on my own after my father passed away and my mother, and I was doing an act by myself, and I traveled all night driving like the son of a gun to get to the next state.
And I got in this hotel room and lie in bed, and the next door they were having a party, and I was having such a time sleeping.
So I thought, oh, gosh, I've got to get to sleep.
I've got to get to sleep.
Finally, I dozed off, and then this bright light came in my face.
Bright, bright light.
And I got up and looked, and it was Christ standing there with my father standing behind him, waving at me to come with him.
And I sat up in bed, and I thought, oh, my God, this can't be true.
And so I got out of bed, washed my face real good, got back in bed, and looked, and he was still there.
They are, the last I've heard, he's continuing to recover.
His website is down.
Don't let that worry you.
He continues to recover, and they're watching him like a hawk.
They won't let anybody near him, and they sure as hell won't let anybody interview him.
And I understand that.
So he's recovering, and with the help of God, we'll have him on the air again.
unidentified
Okay, because I was wanting to ask when I was in the Air Force, I was stationed over in England, and I believe it was in 1990, it was October 31st, Halloween night.
The only thing I wonder is, a vampire hunter, let's think about that a little bit, a vampire hunter.
If a priest found what he considered to be a vampire and did the traditional stake-through-the-heart business, and the cops came, and the priest is there, and he's telling them why he drove a stake-through this guy's heart, in this modern day and age, there would be a problem, wouldn't there?
There'd be a trial.
Anyway, he sounds like he'd be an interesting interview.