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Jan. 11, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:14:12
Edition 283 - Dr Piero Calvi-Parisetti

This time - after-life researcher Dr Piero Calvi-Parisetti...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for bearing with me into 2017.
Nice to know you there and also great to see that I've picked up an awful lot of new listeners both to the online show and the radio show recently.
Lot of emails from new people.
If you email me through the website, theunexplained.tv, that's the way to do it.
Please tell me who you are, whereabouts in the world you are, and how you listen to the show, how you use it, okay?
Always good to know those things.
Don't worry, I'm not keeping a file on you.
It's just nice to know, just so that I know how to target and roll the show forward.
I'm going to do some shout-outs.
It's about time we did some, isn't it?
I'm not going to be able to get around to everybody, but do as many as I can.
Before we get to the guest, a man called Piero Calvi Parisetti.
He's a medical doctor, but he's also done a lot of research that I think you're going to find interesting in what happens when this life comes to its inevitable end.
So he's on the show this time around.
Piero Calvi Parisetti, Italian-born Scottish author and speaker, is on here.
Check him out online if you want to, and I think you'll see some interesting stuff.
Let's do those shout-outs before we get to Piero.
Uve, your email just dropped into my inbox.
You're making a suggestion that a lot of people have made, and that is that we should get a search facility on the website.
A problem with all of those things is they involve money, and the show, in fact, my entire life runs on an absolute shoestring.
I don't even want to think about it.
But we are looking at this, and I think I may have some news for you in the next few months.
So I'm not saying no because there is a possibility we're going to do this, but I have to work out a way.
Stuart, great suggestion.
Thank you.
Harry Whitfield in Liverpool, good to hear from you.
Simon Wheeler, great points about the radio show and the online version, Simon.
Nick says, how about having some local interest format for towns and cities in the UK, like Paranormal Chester, Paranormal Exeter, Paranormal Leeds?
I like that idea if we can spread it out for different places around the world, like Paranormal Cape Town.
If you're in Cape Town, by the way, number one, you're very lucky to be living in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
But number two, if you know any strange stories, anything we should be covering here, I'd like to hear from you.
But look, anywhere, really, from Singapore to San Francisco and all around the world, we can feature those.
So, Nick, good idea.
Trudy in Brisbane, Australia.
Nice to hear from you.
Seem to have a lot of listeners in Brisbane.
In Brisbane, says I normally listen to your show while walking the dog.
It's good company and I love your show.
Fourth year listening.
That's nice, Trudy.
Thank you.
And my most favorite guest is David Icke.
He will be back.
Annabelle in Seville, Spain.
Thank you very much for your email.
And you, like Trudy in Brisbane, enjoyed the show with Damon T. Berry.
Vince in Australia also liked Damon T. Berry.
Alex in Albuquerque thinks the same.
He liked the last show with Damon T. Berry.
Says, I was riveted to my earbuds.
The information he presented was fascinating and thought-provoking.
But I have to say, I don't think anybody has ever divided my audience, not even Richard C. Hoagland, like Damon T. Berry, because 50% of you loved him and 50% of you didn't.
Sherry in the US is one of those emails, said, Damon T. Berry, this guy sure has a loose grip on reality.
Please do us all a favor, says Sherry.
Vet these folks before you give them your airtime.
And you call it babble.
But you see, the problem is, Sherry, that it's different strokes for different folks.
You know, a lot of people liked him, and I will admit to you that some people didn't.
But maybe if it's 50-50, maybe we're getting it right.
I'm not sure.
James Sklar thought Damon T. Berry said nothing that could be backed up.
Dave Sandrovitz said Damon was full of nonsense, and Steve in Ohio said he was upset by the show with Damon T. Berry.
But like I say, it splits weirdly 50-50, lovers and haters.
So, you know, maybe that's part of the gig that, you know, we've got to offer some people who will split opinions.
Dave and Tash, nice to hear from you, says me and my girlfriend have been traveling around South America and Central America.
We started listening to your podcasts just before we went away and have continued while we've been away.
They're perfect accompaniment for the long bus trips.
Oh, yeah.
I wish I was on a long bus trip somewhere warm right now.
Michael Reed, in his office in Brisbane, kind thoughts from you, Michael.
Thank you and happy new year to you too.
Jay Nunes, good suggestion.
Dakota listens on the commute in Southern California, Dakota.
Nice to have you there.
Javi Carusa.
I hope I've pronounced that properly.
Says it's time to call out Richard C. Hoagland.
Okay.
I've had a few emails, good and not so good about Richard, but then he always divides opinion.
Ryan enjoyed Katie Manning, and so did Mick Ryan.
Katie Manning was one of Doctor Who's assistants who we had on as a bit of light relief around Christmas.
Patrick says, great episode with Damon T. Berry.
There you go.
You see, it's always hard to know whether a guest is going to play with you or not.
My girlfriend and I, Kerry, are wishing you a wonderful new year in 2017.
Hope whatever ailment you've been dealing with that you've alluded to in your recent episodes gets better soon.
I hope so too.
Thank you.
Tom Hora in Green Bay, Wisconsin, loved Katie Manning.
Not so fond of Richard Hoagland.
Phil Samuel, though, loves Richard C. Hoagland.
Nice thoughts by email from Juan in South Africa.
Nice to hear from you, Juan.
Nicole Bizich, longtime listener.
Thank you, Nicole.
Nice to hear from you.
Marty, your good wishes.
Right back at you.
And that's about as many shout-outs as I can fit in right now.
If you want to get in touch with the show, please know that I see every single email that comes in and some of them I reply personally to when I get time to do it.
So please go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
And thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on the website and getting the show out to you.
Right, let's get to Italian-born Scotsman, author and speaker Piero Calvi Parisetti.
Piero, thank you very much for coming on the Unexplained.
It is a great pleasure being here, Howard.
And whereabouts are you, Piero?
Are you in the city of Glasgow?
Where are you?
I am indeed, South Glasgow.
I know it well.
Years and years ago, I was trained by, and then many years later, I went to train journalists at Radio Clyde.
All right.
Oh, yes.
So that's very much at the heart of Glasgow.
Actually, Pollock Shields, which is a conservation, nationally known conservation area for Victorian gardens.
It really is a beautiful part of town.
And if I may say so, before we start our conversation here, you have the most fantastic A voice and B accent, which is a hybrid Italian-Scottish.
It is superb.
That's a great conversation starter, isn't it?
Anybody ask me.
Actually, you would not believe the number of people who ask me if I'm from the islands, Orkney or something like that, because there's something in my, you know, the Italian inflections that reminds people of the island accent.
So that's really bizarre.
I trained to be a journalist with a woman who was from the islands, and I know exactly what they mean.
She had a very lyrical kind of, but she tended to say, instead of saying S, she would say shush.
It was like that, shush, like that.
And they have, and we can't talk about the islands, but they have some amazing music up there that I seem to remember hearing.
English language is a strange thing, isn't it?
Never mind.
I mean, it's so elastic, so chewing them.
True, and that's a lovely way of putting it.
I'm from Liverpool, as my listeners know, and they know that occasionally I lapse into Liverpool and talking like that, you know, because that's how a lot of my relatives and people that I grew up with.
That's where you belong.
Ah, it is.
Very much so.
But I'm down in London, have been for years.
Okay.
Talk to me about you, because, according to your biography, you're a medical doctor.
I am indeed.
I graduated long ago.
You still hear me all right?
I'm hearing you loud and proud.
You sound so good.
I was wondering if this had cut up.
Yes, I graduated as far back as in 1986.
And then I was for about seven years a junior GP.
And then I had a sort of a conversion, you know, like St. Paul.
I saw the light on the way to Damascus because I went to visit a friend who then was working for the International Red Cross in Kenya, dealing with large-scale refugee assistance operations.
And I said, wow, that's what I want to do in my life.
And I did, and I went on and I did.
I took a master's degree in public health in Cardiff.
And then I later joined myself, the International Red Cross.
And to cut a long story short, I had one of those careers when you're young and enthusiastic and lucky.
And you believe that you will soon be the Secretary General of the International Red Cross, then of the United Nations, and then, I don't know, Pope or Imam or King of the world.
I remember somebody at university saying to me years ago, his name was Gerard.
We called him Jed.
I remember Jed saying to me, I've completely lost touch with him.
Maybe he's hearing this now.
Who knows?
But he said, you come to the point in your life where you realize that nobody's going to be putting up a statue to you.
Well, but I mean, for a few years, I went fast and I climbed fast because I thought I was saving the world and I wanted to save the world better and blah, blah.
And that, you know, in this inflationary growth, then I ended up in New York, the United Nations.
And that put an abrupt end to my, you know, my dash for being king of the world because as a born and bred Red Crosser, I was not ready for the environment of the United Nations.
I did not like it a single bit.
And that had stripped me not only of my desire of being king of the world, but unfortunately of my red-hot enthusiasm for that line of work.
And very healthily, I must say, as a consequence, my ego had downsized to a small P, a garden P, which is a good thing.
So what was it?
Was it the bureaucracy that got you there?
Yes, yes, the bureaucracy and the motivation that draws most people there and the motivation that keeps most people there.
That's not exactly, I mean, there's a lot of interest for personal power and prestige.
And if it was the big politics, it would be bad enough.
But unfortunately, in my own experience, it's the small politics.
It's people's politics and ambition and career and power and prestige and all that.
And that really does not speak to me.
It's a part of mankind, as a part of being human that I don't like and it's not me.
And so at the end of 2000, I pulled the plug.
So no being king of the world anymore.
I left New York, I left the international organizations and I started a late academic career.
I started teaching first and then taking up the coordination of a master's degree in international aid management.
And then I ended up then as a visiting professor in several other universities.
And in fact, I kept this going for 16 years.
I'm doing this still to this day.
But this is going to be the last year because I have left the activists, because I mean, in parallel to my academic career, I remained relevant to my students because I was not carrying out research in an academic environment, but I was working as an independent advisor, mostly for the United Nations, but for some governments as well and other international organizations.
So as a policy advisor, I remained very much plugged into the system and that world.
So what I was telling my students was still relevant, current, and good.
And that's not the case anymore because I came back to Glasgow a couple of years ago and I basically retired from that part of my life so it's also time to give up teaching which is what I'm doing in 2017.
As you know, there are a lot of people, and what a fascinating life story, Piero, there are a lot of people who are saying that this world of ours is going to be facing all sorts of challenges, natural disasters and all sorts of things.
So, you know, who knows, those skills in disaster management and relief that you learned and, you know, the work that you did at United Nations, you might still be using it yet.
Probably not myself, Howard.
I'm 50.
I'll be 57 this year, and there's a time for, you know, for everybody.
And I mean, for the last 16 years, I trained scores of very good students.
I mean, these people are fantastic.
They come to university, and particularly this is further education, because they themselves have a red-hot enthusiasm, and they really look forward to working out in the field, in the world, and make a difference.
And they are the ones who are going to take up the baton and do.
Me, these days, I'm a full-time musician, and I love it.
Okay.
Now, this has all been part of a process of transition for you, from what I see, because according to this biography, which is very good that I'm looking at here, things started to change for you around about the turn of the millennium, around about 2004 or thereabouts.
And according to this, it says, a simple anecdote narrated by his wife triggered an intellectual interest at first, and then a true scholarly passion for psychical research.
Talk to me about that.
How very true.
Yes, I know.
And I understand for your listeners, and that's the case with many people I meet.
I meet, and I mean, it takes them a little while to take me in, because me, I'm a Gemini star sign, and I don't know if there's any truth to that, but it's true that I love diversity, and I love having many things, and I have this great luck, the fortune of being able to pursue very different things in my life.
life I've been an academic and a professional musician and I managed to you know read as you might have read in my short bio since getting this bug of psychical research I reckon I read about 30,000
pages of scientific literature and I became a member of a few scientific research organizations and I've even written a few books of my own and I produced this this course for the belief we might be talking about later on.
So that was absolutely life-changing, but it changed a part of my life.
Other parts of my life went on as before in this very diverse lifestyle that I've always had.
So that was basically it.
You captured that very well.
Remember, as a Western educated medical doctor, it was inculcated into me that anything that's not measurable, anything that you cannot touch, see, and particularly measure, simply does not exist.
And more to the point, it was self-evident to me that we are our brain, that consciousness is simply the product of the electrochemical activity of the brain.
And obviously, I mean, when that activity stops, the mind stops.
We stop.
We die.
There's nothing else.
And so I always regarded people who believed in funny things with this stiff upper lip and contempt that a Western educated medical doctor would have.
And boy, was that to change.
And that changed.
Please.
No, I was just wondering if there was a catalyst, but I think you were probably about to tell me.
No, yes, there's a catalyst.
I mean, I came to the conclusion, sadly, that in this incarnation of mine, I'm not to experience such things.
My way of understanding is through learning, through thinking, through critically examining evidence.
And this is exactly what happened.
I did not have a paranormal experience.
I did not have an enlightenment.
I did not convert to some religious sects.
That anecdote that my lovely wife told me so many years ago simply pushed me to say, let me see if anything serious has ever been written about all this, you know, what words I would be using, but I will not be using because we are on air.
But I mean, all these stupid things.
And sure enough, I did find somebody extremely serious, extremely well qualified, the sadly late and very prematurely departed Professor David Fontana, who was a top-level academic.
So that satisfied my stiff upper-lipped attitude.
And his book, Is There an Afterlife question mark, 575 pages I remember to this day, really did change my life.
Because I realized that all those things that I considered, you know, ridiculous stuff for intellectually inferior beings had been studied by the brightest scientific and intellectual minds on the planet, including five Nobel Prize winners.
And the collective weight of the evidence for the preposterous idea that we survive physical death is colossal.
It's simply colossal.
It is impossible to convey to the inexperienced.
Now, if it is colossal, Piero, why do people still argue about it then?
Because we are at several obstacles, I believe.
Number one, although we are all, and that's my humble analysis, I don't claim to have the truth.
And I've reflected a lot, and I don't think I have a comprehensive explanation.
However, I think there are a few bits that are there, that are at play in this drama, because I consider this a drama.
Number one, we're all scared by death.
Certain psychoanalysts would argue that our entire lives are actually built around our fear of death and our attempts to surpass, to overcome that.
And although we're scared, or perhaps because we are scared, we tend to remove.
We don't think about it.
We think that death is something that happens to others.
So several people have told me, you know, I don't like to delve into, I understand there's evidence there, but it scares me because it talks about death.
So there's a big scare business at play, which is one big limiting factor.
The second big limiting factor is religion.
And by religion, I mean two kinds of religion.
One is the established common, how could I say, common meaning religion, whereby particularly the Catholic Church has been very outspoken in its condemnation of anything spiritistic and contact with the afterlife and after-death communication and all that.
And I have a lovely, I cannot mention, a lovely person, because I cannot give any more details, who's been suffering very badly for the premature loss of her husband.
And when I said, you know, but I mean, I happen to know a thing or two about this and I've written a few books and perhaps your beloved husband has not disappeared entirely.
There's something...
Well, now that's interesting, though, Piero, because I was brought up in Liverpool.
And let me tell you, my background is half Protestant and half Catholic.
And you understand what that means because you're in Glasgow, where, you know, there is that same Protestant-Catholic thing going on.
So, you know, I see things both ways.
But, you know, a lot of my Catholic friends in Liverpool would say, I can't be getting involved in any of that because it's the devil's work and all the rest of it.
But actually, a lot of those people on the choir were fascinated by these ideas.
Absolutely.
But then they might be a precious few because I believe, I mean, again, I don't claim to have universal knowledge, but I did meet quite a few people who claimed that to be a blocking factor.
So religion, established religion, I think is a limiting factor.
Also, because remember, Howard, what we're talking about here is not faith, it's evidence.
I mean, if you're raised, if religion is meaningful to you, you're not used to question reality.
There are certain things which are taken as a matter of faith.
I mean, they're true because God told them in the Bible or in the Holy Quran or in the Bhagavad Gita, whatever you have.
So those things are learned, are not questioned, are not thought about.
Whilst we in the psychical research circles, we say, hey, listen, there's evidence.
The conclusions we draw about the possible survival of human personality are not based on faith, are not based on a holy book, are based on the knowledge and critical evaluation of evidence.
And this is something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
But before we move on, let me tell you the other side of religion.
Because here in the West in particular, we have witnessed the rising of a new sort of religion, which I called scientism.
And scientism, that's basically what I said in the beginning.
Anything that exists is matter.
Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, touched, and seen does not exist.
With the corollary that, as I already said, mind is simply the product.
Consciousness is simply the product, they say, an emergent property of the physical brain.
And that worldview, which seems to dominate the academic world in reality, that is not entirely true.
Because then when you dig into the research and you see the percentage of serving academics actually, quote unquote, believing in psychic powers, for instance, is quite high.
So it is presented as just a one position, that's the only thing that exists in academia, but it is actually not true.
However, the extremists of these positions remember Daniel Dennett saying you are but a biological robot in a meaningless universe.
He says consciousness is an illusion, which is, I find, intellectually atrocious.
I mean, ridiculous, but never mind.
So these people seem to dominate, literally dominate a lot of channels of public information.
You've certainly heard, for instance, About the Wikipedia wars.
And I mean, Wikipedia is a source of information for a large part of the population in the Western world.
Try to learn something unbiased about psychical research on Wikipedia.
Try to learn something about the survival hypothesis on Wikipedia.
Impossible.
Wikipedia is completely dominated by these guerrilla skeptics who either ignore, in the best case, or most frequently actively suppress and falsify scientific empirical evidence which counters their materialistic worldview.
But if that is so, Piero, does it really matter?
I mean, if you have the truth and you've seen the truth and you're convinced of the truth, then, you know, what people say on Wikipedia or post on forums doesn't matter.
But that's me, because I have taken the pain of going through my 30,000 pages of literature and I've taken the pain of going through, I mean, this cognitive dissonance.
And the very professor Fontana speaks about this.
It's not easy.
It's not that you read a book and say, oh, you know, everything I believed up to this point in my life is not true.
It takes pain.
It takes, you know, you read something, you read a new piece of research, a new piece of evidence, and you say, bloody hell, but then that's true.
We actually survive physical death.
And then the next morning say, no, come on, there must be a logical, a rational explanation.
This is not possible.
So you dig more and you find more evidence about the fact that we actually survive physical death.
So it's a long process that lasts, in my case, lasted for a year until I eventually gave up and said, yes, unless other evidence comes up, which disproves this idea that we survive physical death, I surrender.
My reason and my rationality forces me to say that survival is actually a viable hypothesis.
Many people, I'm afraid, are not interested in these intellectual pains.
You know, they read articles in the paper.
Let me make one example.
We all have heard about near-death experiences, isn't it?
And I consider near-death experiences as one of the pillars.
There's perhaps about 12 areas of evidence which I consider strongly suggestive of survival of personality after death.
And NDE research is one of them.
Perhaps with after-death communication, the most solid, the most rich and deep in terms of quantity and quality of the evidence.
Now, look at the way in which NDEs are treated, not only by the scientific media, because people don't read scientific media.
People, when I say people, I mean common people, the masses we were talking about, because we started this discussion with you asking, how is it that everybody now knows this and is convinced about this?
Well, everybody doesn't read The Lancet, arguably the most respected and revered peer-reviewed scientific journal in medicine.
And The Lancet has published in 2000, I don't remember, but I mean the famous seminal article by Dutch cardiologist Pem van Blommel on his prospective study of near-death experiences.
And the conclusion is that there are no materialistic explanations for the masses of evidence we have for near-death experiences.
But as a medical man, Piero, if we want to talk about near-death experiences, funnily enough, on my radio show, just a few days ago, I had Dr. Penny Sartori, who you may know, and she's done extensive research in the health provision field into near-death experiences.
And she put forward for me some astonishing stories from her direct research.
But people can always come back at you as a medical person and say, well, perhaps this is just some kind of artifact of the human brain, which is quite an amazing thing.
It is not, Howard.
It is not.
That is the problem.
I was...
So people do not read Dr. Van Lomel's article in The Lancet, because nobody reads The Lancet, apparently, unless you're a medical doctor.
You don't.
And in that particular argument, sorry, in that particular article, which is already maybe now 15 years old, Dr. Van Lommel demolishes exactly the argument you've made.
We may get into the depth of it, but I mean, there are, the conclusion is that there are no explanations compatible with the materialistic model of mind.
Now, you and I, as a member of the general public, how do we know?
How do we learn about near-death experiences?
We learn through this litany of articles and news items basically telling ND is explained.
It is the dying brain, an idea that had been done away with scientifically 20 years ago.
Oh no, it's the lack of oxygen, an idea that has been thrashed by evidence 18 years ago.
Oh, it's an accumulation of carbon dioxide.
Age-old explanations, which the experts have demolished already 20, 25 years ago are continuously regurgitated and presented as an explanation.
So you, and I say you, And I mean, the member of the general public, why should they bother going?
Ah, okay, then it would have been nice, you know, ah, NDE, this near-death experiences, it would have been nice, but obviously it's all wishful thinking.
They have been explained.
That's the line you get from mainstream media.
But that's not true.
Near-death experiences are the biggest possible wedge into this paradigm that brain creates mind.
And I mean, if you or anybody of your listeners should ever be interested, there's a mini series of articles I've written and they're available on my website, drparizetti,
drparizetti.com, and they exactly address the fact that NDEs are utterly, fundamentally incompatible with the paradigm brain creates mind and are very suggestive of survival of personality after death.
And all the issues, I mean, there's a range of issues, a range of explanations that have been proposed.
They're all explained and the evidence is presented to show that these explanations don't work.
Okay.
Of course, you know that there will be people who will disagree with you and your interpretation.
And, you know, when I was reading about you before we started this conversation, I saw some stuff written about you that said basically you were a crank.
So you know that not everybody's going to agree with you.
Right.
Okay.
So first of all, who writes that I'm a crank?
It's Rational Wiki.
And RationalWiki is, hello, it's like if you go to the RationalWiki website trying to learn something about, and I mean, me, I'm nobody.
I'm absolutely nobody.
Look at the entries for, I mean, gods of the scientific world who have dared countering the materialistic paradigm.
I mean, that's a shame.
Me, I'm expendable.
Me, I'm a Mr. Nobody in this world.
I mean, look at that.
Never mind.
The problem, the problem, Howard, is that science is not a set of beliefs.
Science is a method.
Do you agree with me?
I do, and I think every scientist listening to this will also agree.
Very good.
So science says, go out, find out what's happening, propose explanations, and see if these explanations fit with the reality, fit with the empirical evidence.
So it's not a matter of interpretation, right?
The fact.
Okay, let me try to make this simple because we don't want to spend all night talking about this particular issue.
But what happens near-death experiences happen in a range of conditions.
But the best known, the best studied, because it's replicable, because we have a lot, a lot of evidence and cases about that, is cardiac arrest.
Have you ever fainted yourself?
Luckily, no.
No, okay.
It's an interesting process.
I did once, and there was just a loss of blood pressure because I had low blood pressure that day, and you just fall down.
And basically, the loss of consciousness is so quick that you do not even realize having fallen down.
Between the time when you're standing and the time you hit the ground, your consciousness is out.
And that is exactly what happens.
The heart stops beating in a cardiac arrest.
And within two seconds, consciousness is out.
Within 10 seconds, you stop breathing.
And that has always been used in historical times as the legal proof of death.
When there's no heartbeat, because you had a cardiac arrest, and there's no breathing, you're legally dead.
Well, there can be no dispute about that, can there?
No, I don't think this is open to interpretation.
Then let's go one step forward.
You put electrodes on this person's skull and you record no electrical activity in the brain.
It means that the brain is out.
At that stage, you are clinically and legally dead.
But let's not play around with words and legalistic terms, etc.
The fact is that there is no functioning brain.
Ah, says the skeptic, who has been cornered because all the age-old explanations have failed for reasons that we don't have the time to explore now, but have been explored a lot and are available in this particular series of articles.
Let's stay with the electrical activity.
It says, ah, but EEG, the electroencephalogram, only measures the electrical activity of the outer part of the brain.
Yes, exactly that part of the brain that materialistic science tells us is necessary for consciousness.
Okay?
So that part of the brain does not work, period, because there's no electrical activity.
But they say, oh, but perhaps deep down in the lower strata of the brain, there's still some activity.
I'm sorry, my friend.
Go back to your neurophysiology books and read them again because you're ignorant.
This is not a matter of interpretation, it's a matter of fact.
Within 20 seconds, 20 to 25 seconds from a cardiac arrest and the end of the perfusion, that is the blood flow to the brain, very, very deep brain reflexes, like the corneal reflex, you touch the eye, you touch the cornea of the person and the person is dead.
Or the gagging reflex, you probe the back of the throat and the person doesn't gag.
These reflexes are absent.
It means that the brain is off.
There is no brain.
Period.
If one neuron is still active, can one neuron be conscious?
Can one neuron be hungry or angry?
I think it's very, very difficult because all what we are told in the neurophysiology and consciousness studies book is that in order to have conscious experiences, you need the full functioning and coordination of a large number of structures of the brain.
During a cardiac arrest, there is no brain, let alone any coordination.
During this time, people report conscious experience.
Conscious experiences, which, as you know, as you've certainly heard from Penny and others, people, the experiencers describe as more real than reality.
Not only they have conscious experiences, but they produce, they create long-term memories, which are recalled in minute, precise details 20, 25, 30 years later.
Now, I don't know how old you are, Howard.
I'm 57.
We're the same generation.
Right.
Okay, thereabouts.
So we went to school, let's say, between the late 60s and the 70s.
Imagine the number of hours we spent studying and revising a geography or take any subject.
And that was using our full consciousness, the full functions of the brain, and with the intention of remembering.
Where has that gone?
I don't remember a thing.
I remember maybe 0.5% of everything I've digested at school.
And I think that's everybody's experience.
And now you tell me that whilst there is no brain, long-term memories are produced, the details of which are recalled 25 or 35 or 30 years later, as I said, in precise details with no faults.
Houston, we have a problem.
So what you're saying, Piero, is that what we regard as being...
These are facts, facts which stand in the way of the materialistic explanation.
All right.
So what you're saying is that what we regard as being sentient and alive and awake, there may be much more to it than most people think.
That's the least we can say.
And excuse me, much as I am convinced that the materialist paradigm has been falsified by NDE research and a number of other areas of evidence, and I'm convinced of that, but I am very honest, I do not have an alternative explanation.
And the world is full of people who say, oh, of course, it's the quantum field and it's the zero energy and this and that and everything is connected.
And to tell you the truth, my stiff upper lip comes back big time and my toes curl inside my shoes because, I mean, this is balloony.
We do not have an explanation.
We have some tentative metaphors that have more explanatory power than the materialist paradigm, but we do not have a fully fledged theory of what consciousness is.
One of these metaphors for you, but I'm sure you've come across this before and many of your listeners will have heard about this.
Compare the physical brain to a radio receiver.
And anybody who I've actually watched with my wife last night, we watched an interesting movie, which tells the story of a famous jazz guitarist, Pat Martino, who has at some stage, sort of in mature years, has a brain hemorrhage.
No, sorry, undergoes a brain surgery because he has a tumor and basically he loses all memories and critically his musical skills.
So the story tells is actually a documentary, tells the story, tells his having to relearn not only who he is as a person, but his artistic skills and trade and everything.
And the conclusion anybody would draw on the face of it is, of course, we are our brains.
And Interestingly, the very learned consciousness research neuropsychologists say, ah, you know, Pat Martino's tumor was in the left temporal lobe, and that is where memory is located.
Excuse me?
Where is memory located?
There is no evidence whatsoever, Howard, that memory is located anywhere in the brain.
There are no physical modifications of the brain.
There are no biochemical processes which have been demonstrated to be linked with memory.
So memory, like consciousness, remain a huge mystery.
It remains a mystery for us non-materialists and is a mystery for them materialists.
Nevertheless, in the documentary film, the neuroscientists tell you, that is the public, oh, Pad Martino lost his memory because he had this tumor in the left temporal lobe.
Well, what if the left temporal lobe was the part of a radio receiver which accesses memory?
Okay, so you're saying that the way that we work, it's a little bit like the cloud, what we talk about in computing and email and data storage now, that we're connected to the cloud.
Perhaps I do not, I absolutely do not claim that this is the explanation, but I claim that this hypothesis, which is nothing more than a metaphor, has actually more explanatory power than the materialist hypothesis.
So the brain, if we follow this line of thinking, the brain is like a radio receiver.
It tunes into a field of consciousness, which is actually outside our bodies.
And this is very compatible with all these neuroscience experiments because they tell you, oh, you know, if you damage that part of the brain, then this particular mind function disappears.
Oh, sure enough, if I open a radio receiver and damage one particular transistor, a function of the radio receiver dies.
But that does not mean that the voice you hear from the speaker is produced inside the radio.
The voice comes from elsewhere, and the radio is an instrument, is a tool to translate that field, in that case is a radio frequency field, into sounds.
And what if our brain was in fact a transceiver, so transmitter and receiver that helps the physical reality and the physical body we live in to communicate with this postulated field of consciousness?
I find this fascinating.
I absolutely do not maintain that this is the explanation, but this is compatible with survival of personality after death.
This is compatible with all the evidence we have from a number of areas in parapsychology.
And, you know, this is compatible with psychical powers.
This is compatible with children who remember past life memories.
This is compatible with people who are deeply hypnotized and seem to remember past lives.
As I say, all these things which whether our materialist friends like it or not have been established beyond reasonable doubt.
Okay, I have to ask you this because I have a lot of people who are skeptical who listen to this show, very skeptical, and a lot of people who will say, absolutely, Piero, you're on the money.
You've clearly assimilated an awful lot of words.
You've taken in an awful lot of research that people have done.
What are the circumstances that you personally have experienced that have convinced you of your belief that we go on and that there is survival of memory, of experience, and all the rest of it?
I'm talking about direct personal research.
None whatsoever.
Not only I did not have any experience myself, I did not see a ghost.
No, no, but you must have interviewed people and come into contact with people who have experienced these things.
Right, but sorry.
I did not have experiences myself and I did not produce any original research myself.
But my God, I mean, as I say, I've read volumes, volumes.
My bookshelves are loaded with books.
There are books, but there are also scientific publications and peer-reviewed journals.
And then I trained personally with Dr. Raymond Moody, and you may remember Raymond Moody is the first one not to have carried out research on NDEs, because actually that existed already in the mid-70s.
He is the first who came out and spoke about this.
Remember, Raymond Moody is somebody who earned his second PhD by the age of 24, a PhD in medicine and then a PhD in philosophy.
Then he went on to be, up until recently, a psychology professor at Georgia University.
And in 1975, he came out with this bombshell, Life After Life, which was the first book which presented, in a systematic way, research about near-death experiences and then sold 25 million copies.
But then he went on and researched other things and in particular he researched a form of what is called now induced after-death communication.
And I'm happy to talk about this, but this would take quite some time.
And you primarily worked with him?
You knew him?
Oh, yeah.
No, I knew him because he is one of the gods of this sector.
So I wrote to him and told him, Dr. Moody, can I come and visit you?
And would you train me in this psychomantium technique that you have successfully thought of and experimented?
And he said, yes, come here.
So I went to Alabama and we sat together for a few days.
And so I could see first-hand this technique and all that.
But then, remember, I'm a member here in the UK of the Society for Psychical Research.
And if our skeptical friends took the time to look at the board of who sits in the board of directors of the Society for Psychical Research, who is the current president, and the list of the past presidents,
they would quickly realize that this is a professional scientific research organization which has the highest caliber of scientists available today.
In the US, the Society for Scientific Exploration, sorry, I'm messing up.
That's the Journal of Scientific Exploration of the Society for the Advancement of Science.
Sorry, don't quote me on this now.
I'm getting there's an equivalent society in the US and the requirements to get into that are very, very strict.
And I find it funny that many of these so-called skeptics are in fact scoffers.
People who don't know the evidence, don't care about the evidence, have less than 100th of the intellectual and scientific weight.
I'm not talking about myself, eh?
I'm called myself completely out of this.
I'm talking about the real people, the real researchers, the ones who are sitting in these societies.
And so this skeptic says, oh, but that's all, you know, that's all baloney.
That's all fake.
That's all fabricated.
What do you know?
Who are you to say this?
Well, like a lot of things, Piero, it comes down to interpretation, one person's interpretation.
Now, when you went to America, to Georgia State University, and you were with Raymond Moody, what was the most compelling thing that he said to you about all of this?
The thing that made the biggest impact on you?
He said, you know, what we were discussing is the fact that it's a well-known fact.
If you look at research, again, not interpretation, but research, facts.
It's a well-known fact that people, bereaved people who have an experience of reunion with a deceased loved one have a range of psychological health indicators substantially improved.
And so Raymond, who's primarily a medical doctor and like many of us, is concerned with improving the well-being of people, said, what if we found a technique, a psychological technique that could facilitate, could give people the experience of a reunion with a deceased loved one.
And so, well, this is a long story, dug up this ancient Greek technology called technology.
It's not a procedure, it's not a technology called psychomantium, and modernized it.
And basically, his idea is that you take a person, you go through basically half a day of psychological preparations with the person.
The person is a bereaved person.
You go through, as I say, half a day of preparation, and then you put them in a darkened room on a recliner.
And they're asked to gaze.
The room is completely dark.
There's a tiny light behind the seat, the recliner where the person is laying down.
And so it's really like being in a cave.
And there's a huge mirror hanging.
And that mirror reflects the darkness.
And I've sat in it myself, and it's quite mesmerizing because you stare into a pool of translucent darkness.
I'm not sure I can really describe it.
And Dr. Moody's research then replicated by a number about half a dozen of other research groups and everybody had Grosso model the same results.
A percentage between 40 and 80 percent of people who go through this procedure report an experience of reunion with the deceased loved one.
And I remember Raymond saying, you know, when I started this, it had never crossed my mind that actually people would see their deceased loved ones and let alone have a two-way conversation and communication.
And this is what exactly happened in a number of cases.
I remember him telling him about this colleague he had, who was an ophthalmologist, whom he described as annally retentive and so strict with himself and uptight that he had a crease.
His forehead had a big crease.
So it was really, I mean, the word enally retentive, I think, like after saying.
Yeah, he was uptight by the sound of it.
Exactly, exactly.
And he tells me, Piero, This guy came out of the psychomantium and his crease was gone.
And he looked at me and said, I have seen my mother and I spoke with my mother.
And that was extraordinary.
Funnily enough, years later, I experimented myself with a variation because, I mean, induced after-death communication can be done through the psychomanthium technique or can be done with another technique introduced by Dr. Alan Botkin, who's a clinical psychologist, called formally IADC induced after-death communication.
And you use a psychological technique called EMDR.
And I apologize with your audience for all these acronyms, but unfortunately we live in a world of acronyms.
EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a very well-known evidence-based psychological technique that apparently speeds up the processing of information during formal psychotherapy.
So people having normal psychotherapy and these eye movements improve faster than those who don't.
And Dr. Botkin was working with veterans as far back as the Vietnam War and then the first Gulf War and later wars of the United States.
He was working for the VA, the Veteran Administration, and he was very successfully utilizing basically cognitive behavior therapy paired with EMDR, this enhancing technique.
And to his utter astonishment, or I would say devastation, at some stage using this technique, his veteran patients started reporting experiences of reunion, very vivid experiences of reunion with deceased loved ones.
And again, like Raymond Moody, so Alan Botkin are adamant in saying they do not claim that people actually talk to the dead.
But then if you talk to the people themselves, they are 100% sure that they were in the presence of their deceased loved one.
And this is very interesting.
So and again, to Botkin's surprise and delight, his patients were improving spectacularly.
So these traumatic experiences they've had in war basically vanished.
I mean, the sequels, the consequences, the psychological ailments they were suffering from vanished after these experiences.
So he went on experimenting.
There's a caseload in excess of 10,000 now documented in clinical practice by himself and by the school is created.
And that's very interesting.
So, sorry, I'm making a long story, but I'm coming to conclusion here.
I decided to try it myself.
And I had a few cases, volunteers.
I mean, I said, listen, let's do this as a fun.
Let's see what happens.
And I mean, let's not make it too heavy.
Let's not have expectations at all.
Let's see what happens.
In a couple of cases, absolutely nothing happened.
In a couple of cases, there were reportedly meaningful experiences of reunion.
But then, and this is perhaps, I should have said this at the beginning, because this was really the one experience which I witnessed, which was humanly transformative for me.
Because we're talking about a Greek American, talk about a hardened man, right?
A Greek American in his mid-50s, high official at the United Nations.
At that moment, that was a few years ago.
I was still living in Geneva in Switzerland, where the headquarters of the United Nations and the Red Cross is.
And so this guy, whom I knew from my main business, got to know that I was interested into these things and said, yeah, I could be interested.
Why don't we have a session?
So he comes to a late afternoon, comes to my place and we do our preparations.
And what happened is that he had lost his mom and dad 10 years previous to the events I'm telling here.
And yes, he missed them, but it was not.
They died late in life and that was expected.
And so he had just sadness and a little bit of the grief, which is expected, but nothing pathological.
There were a couple of things, a couple of psychological issues relating to the death.
The two parents died within six months from each other.
And there were a couple of things that still annoyed him.
And we don't want to also for privacy concerns to get into details, but minor things that he wanted to work on.
So we work on this, we start and we attack the first problem he had and we talk and then I give the eye movements and I ask him to go back and relax.
And so we go on for a couple of hours, at the end of which we sort of take stock and he says, no, listen, I mean, if in terms of psychology, I think we've made progress because those issues that that particular issue we attacked does not annoy me anymore.
I understood a few things, so that was good.
And I tell him, do you Want to leave it at that.
I think this was already a success.
And he said, Come on, I've come all this way and we spent some time together.
Why don't we go on and see if anything else happened?
And I tell him, Ah, it's very good, yes.
So we start attacking the other problem.
Remember, he had two little things, small things that he was uncomfortable with.
One, we seemed to have made progress.
The other one, we start attacking.
And we talk, and then I give the eye movements, and I tell him to go back and close his eyes and relax.
And during one of these cycles, if you want, he tells me, oh, that's very strange.
I have a clear image of the kitchen where we used to have our meals in the family home.
And I tell him, that's really interesting, how curious.
And I tell him, open your eyes and come back to me and say, now, as you go back, try to focus on that image and try to remember what the color of the tablecloth was, where people would be standing and where did the light come in from the window and everything.
And then I administer the eye movements and then tell him, now you go back, close your eyes and stay with that image and tell me what comes up.
And he goes silent for a good 10 minutes, which had never happened before.
Before, I mean, he would, you know, mutter things and maybe after a minute or two, would come back and tell me.
He goes really quiet with his eyes closed for 10 minutes.
And then he jerks up as if he had been stung badly in the back.
And he sits, it actually stands up.
He was in a recliner.
He stands up and for a good 10 seconds he look around and he doesn't know where he is.
Then he looks at me, his eyes well up with tears and sobbing.
This mid-50s high official of the United Nations has a hard career person as you could think of.
He hugs me and says, I've seen them.
I've spoken to my mom and dad.
They were there and they told me exactly what I needed to hear.
And two adult men and I started crying myself and we were standing, both of us and hugging and he was crying because of his experience and I was crying because I had read about all these experiences in the books.
I had spoken about this with Raymond Moody and now I was seeing this happening in my presence.
And that was really quite something.
Again, I do not claim this is evidence for survival.
My explanations are two.
Number one, this person really had a reunion with the discarnate personalities of his mom and dad, which is extraordinary.
Number two, inside our brain there is a magical doctor who's capable of conjuring up a hallucinatory experience out of nothing, which is totally credible and conveys a sense of reality.
The next day, he wrote me a letter in which he says, I am in no doubt that I was in the presence of my deceased mother and father.
And so perhaps there is this magic, this we doctor inside our brain who's capable of producing these experiences out of nothing.
I find both alternatives extraordinarily fascinating.
And I found the story that you just told me extraordinarily fascinating too, Piero.
We're out of time, but just to ask you this finally, and I know your work is ongoing and we will talk again.
What sort of a difference has all of this made to your view of your own mortality?
Any residual, I mean, I'm like anybody.
I was scared of dying and I'm not anymore.
I'm really not anymore.
I mean, it's in many ways I envy near-death experiencers because they had a direct first-person experience of this.
They're not scared of dying because they've died already and they know what awaits them.
I didn't.
I never, I mean, what I just told you was the closest I've come to an experience and it was somebody else's experience.
So my conviction that we go on living comes from who I am.
I'm a rational person.
I'm a person who reads, learns, thinks, challenges and draws conclusions.
And I'm always ready and I'm always on the lookout for elements of evidence that would disprove what I have come to believe.
Because for me, intellectual honesty is very important.
I would not be happy with myself if I was not intellectually honest.
So I'm always open to change my mind.
For the time being, I have not found anything against this.
And I would invite, I always ask our skeptic friends, you think this is not true?
Show me the evidence.
Show me the scientific paper that says that what I'm saying is not true.
Show me.
I mean, I can show you.
And then if your interpretation is that what I'm saying is not true, go ahead.
Show me that this experiment is not well done.
Or this 100 or this thousand experiments all saying the same things are not well done.
Show me the proof.
Show me other experiments which came to other conclusions.
And I'm afraid most of the time they fall.
But let me conclude because there's a little corollary to the very important question you asked me, which is my own attitude about mortality.
I'm not scared of dying anymore.
To the best of my intellectual honesty, I'm not.
But to tell you the truth, that is not even the most important thing.
For me, humanly, the most important thing is that intuitively I think I have come to realize some truths is a big thing.
But let's say that I strongly feel that I have learned what I had to learn in this life.
All the rest is, you know, it's free time.
I don't know, I'm not sure if I make myself clear, but I mean, having learned all this and the implications of all this about life, universe, and everything, I am satisfied that I have learned what I had to learn.
I've enjoyed speaking with you, Piero.
We'll talk again, and thank you very much indeed.
Just before you go, remind me of that website address.
drparizetti.com drparisetti.com.
Piero, have a good evening and thank you very much for speaking with me.
I found it fascinating.
Thank you.
A massive pleasure for myself.
Thank you, Howard.
The thoughts of Piero Calvi Parisetti.
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My name is Howard Hughes.
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Thanks very much.
Take care.
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