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April 28, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:31
Edition 540 - 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.
Well, I hope that life is going okay for you.
Maybe wherever you are in the world, you're seeing some nice weather now.
I don't know how it is in like Norway and Sweden.
I think things are clearing there.
The nice thing about being up in Scandinavia is I think you have clearer skies, even if it's colder than the UK.
You don't get the rain and the cloud that we get here.
You know, it gets really depressing when you have, as we had here, a winter that is very, very cloudy and you don't see the sunshine.
So at the moment, the fact that we've got some spring conditions in London is making me a very happy man indeed.
If you'd like to make a donation to the Unexplained to allow the online show to continue, then thank you very much if you have recently.
And you can always go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam Cornwell, and you can send me a donation or a communication from there by following various links that are very clear on Adam's fantastic website.
And you always tell me how much you appreciate that, and he likes to know that.
So that's the website, theunexplained.tv.
There is also the official Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes that is gaining more and more traction.
And I'm very, very grateful for that.
All of this goes to show that the little independent guy, that is me, can make some inroads and headway.
And it doesn't all have to be down to the great big corporations and the media giants in the USA.
Other people can do these things.
And I'm one of them as I sit here in my little garret in isolation doing these things.
The guest on this edition is a return of somebody that you greatly enjoyed.
And I've had requests to hear him again only recently.
So it was great that he got in touch recently and we caught up.
And we're about to catch up here on the podcast.
His name is Dr. Piero Calvi Parisetti.
He is in Scotland.
And we're going to be talking about the afterlife and his latest thoughts and research into that.
I think this is a perennial topic for us here at the Unexplained.
How many people have never thought about what happens when you cease to exist on this plane?
Is it oblivion?
Is it like turning out a light and is it then darkness and forget it?
Or is there something else to which we move?
That, I guess, is the eternal question.
And many people have a take on this.
I would like to believe there is more to all of this.
You know, when the time comes for the door to close on me and everything that I was and everything that I did, I'd like to think that I would go somewhere else.
And maybe in the next place, the things that went wrong might go right.
And some of the nice things might recur.
That's my hope.
But I don't know.
Maybe you do.
So that's the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Again, the website, theunexplained.tv.
That's the way to communicate with me.
Thank you for your nice emails recently.
Let's get to Dr. Piero Calvi Parisetti.
We're going to talk again about the afterlife.
Piero, nice to speak with you again.
How are you?
It is such a pleasure for me too, Howard.
I am battered, like most of us.
This has been a very long year, but we're coming out of it slowly and it will be a long healing process.
But bottom line, I'm okay.
Well, that's good.
I think that's the best that any of us can say, and I very much chime with what you say.
Now, look, you're a man of medicine by training.
The work that you do, have you been able to continue with that during this period?
Oh, no, actually, I've not practiced medicine for a long, long time.
I'm a public health person.
I have a degree in medicine, but then I took a master's degree in public health.
And when you do that, actually, you stop treating patients and you start treating populations.
You deal not with individuals, but with large populations.
Well, that's the situation we're in right now, isn't it?
It's a public health crisis.
Absolutely.
But me, I'm a public health in emergencies, not this kind of emergencies, but large population movements, humanitarian emergencies, refugee crisis, natural disasters, all that.
But that's behind me.
You know, I actually have done that until what?
Year 2000.
And then I moved on to a late academic career and I taught that for 17 years.
And for the last seven years, I have been essentially an early retired professor of public health.
So no practice in medicine, no.
But doing what you've done for a big portion of your life, I guess you're as affected as all of us are by the terrible scenes from India.
Oh, God.
Honestly, it's, I mean, it can't bear watching, isn't it?
I mean, a billion and a half people, one of the fastest developing countries in the world.
And it's terrible.
It really is terrible.
And the scale, the scale is, mind you, let's not forget Brazil talking about fast developing countries, eh?
No, true enough, true enough.
I'm just thinking of my listener, Gurudat, in Mumbai, who I've mentioned before on this show.
Gurudat's family have been affected.
Gurudat has been affected by this.
So just as we mentioned this, Gurudat, if you're hearing this, you know, I think things have begun to improve from your last email.
But, you know, I hope all is better, better than it was with you.
Okay, back to you.
Talk to me then about your background and how that background mutated and developed into an interest in what we might call the afterlife.
Aha, yes, this is an interesting.
That's been the story of my life, really one of the most important things that have happened to me.
Because there's no mystery about it.
I'm a Western educated medical doctor.
That is, I'm a product of a system of education and a certain understanding of science that maintains that anything that can possibly exist is matter.
If you don't see it, if you don't touch it, if you cannot measure it with your instruments, it simply does not exist.
And honestly, I was very happy to go along with that worldview.
And in fact, for a big part of my life, I held in some contempt, you know, religions, religious people, and anything paranormal, because that's what you've been educated to be.
And then what happened is a cute episode, and I like telling this because it's true, as a real life event, because I was living in Geneva at the time in Switzerland, and we're looking at probably 2006, 2005, 2006, so quite a while ago.
And my lovely wife happened, we were having tea in the kitchen, I remember, and my lovely wife happened to tell me a little spooky story that had happened to her in Glasgow.
She's a Glasgow lassie, and she was still in Glasgow at the time, a late adolescent, just about to leave the family.
And there was a rapping thing that went on for quite some time.
And then there was a connection with ashes.
And when the ashes were disposed of, the rapping stopped.
It's a cute story.
It's not, it's nothing earth-shattering.
And to tell you the truth, Howard, if anybody else at the time were to tell me that story, I would have, you know, shrugged it off and say, all right, right, okay, let's move on.
But I could see that Angela, my wife, was still quite perturbed after so many years.
And so that sort of triggered a curiosity.
And I said with my stiff upper lip of the time, let me see if anything serious has been written about such stuff, quote unquote.
And well, you know, immediately as I started searching about afterlife and survival, I stumbled upon the 575 pages of the treatise.
Is there an afterlife question mark by a super credentialed psychology professor, the late and much missed David Fontana.
And, you know, that sort of immediately went over my boggle threshold because I said to myself, if somebody of such high scientific caliber writes a book of that kind, that might be interesting.
And so I bought the book and I read it.
And those 575 pages were followed by about 30,000 and counting.
That has really triggered a personal interest and which then became a scholarly interest for what is called psychical research, which is a term you will agree with me is a bit out of fashion.
Nobody knows these days what psychical research is.
And psychical research essentially is what we call parapsychology.
That is the study, the research of extraordinary human potentials.
And indeed at Edinburgh University, there is the curse the chair of parapsychology that is flourishing.
Absolutely.
And I'm sure you've had connections with it.
There are people like my friend Callum Cooper, Cal Cooper, at Northampton.
And indeed, indeed, an interesting, and I open and close a parenthesis, then I go back to my story.
There's a group of sociologists now which have taken the button and British-based sociologists who have taken up the button in a way from the psychologists and are bringing forward the survival part of psychical research.
Because as I say, the term psychical research includes parapsychology, but also includes the study of evidence for life after life.
So have you done the sort of touristic things that include going to Edinburgh's, the areas of Edinburgh that are said to be incredibly haunted, all of those things?
Or are those the sort of things that are not for you?
No, not for me, Howard.
For the better or the worse, I'm a person of intellect.
Yes, I'm a scholar.
I do not consider myself a scholar, but I say that I have a scholarly attitude.
My way in this incarnation is not experiencing, unfortunately.
You know, I've been at this for now well over 20 years, and I cannot say to have had any direct experience myself, not that I particularly looked for, but still.
And so I understood that, as I say, this incarnation, this life of mine, is about understanding, is about learning and understanding.
And I dare say that I've done quite a lot of that.
You know, there's been all the reading, the researching.
And then I became a member of the Society for Psychical Research in the UK, the International Association for Near-Death Studies in the US.
And these are professional scientific organizations dedicated to the study of the things that I love.
And I went as far as training personally with Dr. Raymond Moody, whom yourself and your listeners will certainly remember as the 25 million copyseller author of Life After Life, the first one to come out in the open about near-death experiences in the 70s.
And so I went and trained with him on this fascinating induced after-death communication technique that him and others in parallel have developed.
So that little anecdote from my wife really changed my life.
And today, despite my Western medical and scientific education and I would say indoctrination, today I, to the best of my intellectual honesty, I am convinced of two things.
Number one, mind, what we call mind, is certainly related, very Closely related to, but cannot be reduced to the electrochemical activity of the brain.
There's more to mind than neurons and electrical charges and chemical and neurotransmitters and all that.
And this is a pretty big stance because if you accept that, then you can open the door to accepting the big thing.
And the big thing is that the only conclusion that an unbiased observer who has taken the time to engage with the evidence can draw is that in a way we do not yet understand, human personality does survive physical death.
There's no two ways about that.
There's no other way to account for the colossal amount of evidence.
Evidence that comes to us from about a dozen different fields of investigation, evidence which has been collected for over 150 years, in fact, by some of the brightest scientific minds of the planet, including five Nobel Prize winners.
And this mass of evidence, very diverse, but at the same time, very consistent, very internally consistent, it all points to the survival of personality.
So are you saying in what you said, and I'm sorry to be jumping in here.
Go on, you go.
Are you saying in what you said then that your belief is that the essence of what you and I are is portable, rather like you would these days port across a telephone number, mobile phone number, if you wanted to move networks?
You know, if you can, you can imagine that dying is a little bit like moving networks and that your phone number, your existence, what makes you you, is something that's almost external to us.
And when we cease to have use for this body, then whatever that is, goes to another network.
Absolutely.
This is such a beautiful, it's a beautiful metaphor.
I've never heard about it.
And I just made it.
You have to copyright it because it's really well fitting and also very modern and fitting with our modern world.
Yes, absolutely.
We have, unfortunately, this instinctive identification of ourselves with our bodies.
And that also is very much driven by a certain interpretation of science and scientific research.
And so we think that when the body dies, when particularly the brain dies, there's no ourselves anymore.
But in reality, I invite your listeners to reflect a little bit on certain things.
We never think about this, but the fact that our body is not the same object, not only from a year to the next, that's obvious to anybody who's unfortunately aging.
Oh, that'll be me then.
Exactly.
And me too.
Welcome to the club.
Our body changes hourly, every second.
There are enormous transformations.
So we cannot call ourselves our body because our body is not the same object that it was a second ago, an hour ago, and it will be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
So it's in continuous transformation.
But the fact that we are decaying, changing, shedding skin, cells are altering all the time, that doesn't extrapolate into the fact that, okay, the ultimate end of that process is that we become something else.
We go somewhere else.
No, no, I don't agree with the view.
I think that we remain what we are essentially.
And that's what I was talking about, is a misperception, is taking the snake, taking a rope for a snake.
We think we're our bodies, but there's this little, how could I call it, you know, I had a little bit of enlightenment that I had one day.
In fact, pardon me, but I have to say this, and I apologize with your listeners.
I was in a toilet in Switzerland.
I was not meditating on a mountain or something.
And I was sitting going about my business.
And this thought come into me.
And that encapsulates, captures so well anything that I've ever understood about the business of life.
And the thought goes, we're not a body with a consciousness we lose at death.
We are consciousness with a body we lose at death.
When the body goes, we keep on being what we already are.
And if you think about it, what we really fear about losing is our mind, is our memories, our affections, our sense of being alive, our perceptions.
And all this, it's abundantly clear, goes on existing once we've shed the physical body.
So there is no, in a way, no real transformation.
There's continuity in the sense that we go on being what we already are.
Well, thank you for sharing the location where you had that profound thought.
In all the years that I've been doing this, I don't think I've ever been told that somebody's had a really profound and moving thought in the most basic of locations.
But I think it adds to the story, though, Piero.
But what happens then?
I mean, this question has just come to me.
I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the scourge of all civilizations These days, one of the scourges is Alzheimer's, the deterioration of the mind as people get older and they live longer and physically we can keep people alive longer.
But in many situations, and it's happened in my family, it's probably happened in every family of people hearing this now, you see the tragedy of people ceasing to be, little by little, the jigsaw of what makes them starts to fall apart and they cease to be quite the person that they were.
They may look similar, but inside they're not, and it's tragic.
Now, how does that equate with this process of moving along this line of development and change until you actually move away?
Have you ever given that thought?
Absolutely.
And there are, this is a crucial element of the puzzle.
This is a very big puzzle.
It's a 12 million pieces puzzle.
But this is an important one.
And I will address your question with two lines, in a way, of answering.
The first, have you ever heard about terminal lucidity?
You mean that people close to death suddenly wake up and they're just as they always were for a period?
There you go.
And we have well-documented cases of Alzheimer patients who were non-communicative, non-responsive for months, if not for years.
And we know this is a tragedy.
My wife's mum died like that.
And we did, you see that then when you start scratching, things come up.
And I said, I never had experiences.
That's not true because we did see a glimmer of terminal lucidity in that particular woman.
But if you look at the scientific literature, there's people who literally wake up after not having said a word for a year or so and being essentially what you perceive.
Forgive me for the terrible metaphor, but I mean like a plant, you know, as you say, the person that once was is not there anymore.
Well, that particular person who's not been there for a year or so wakes up and says, oh, by the way, the key to the safe that I meant to give you is in the second drawer to the left of the chest of drawer in the bedroom and has a full conversation and then dies.
So what has happened then, Piero?
Do you believe with your, you know, with all of the research you did with people like Raymond Moody, do you believe that they are gripped, that they are taken over by something in that moment of lucidity and they then are re-energized?
Is that what you think happens?
I would say that the exact opposite happens.
That is, the stronghold then the physical brain has on the non-physical mind relaxes in proximity to death.
So let me, this is my second line of answering to your question.
And I think that the best way, I certainly do not claim or pretend to have an understanding of what consciousness is.
Please, I don't.
However, there's another metaphor, another, you know, something that's intriguing, that's telling.
And it's liking, so sorry, not like, it's equate, not equating, sorry, I dug myself into a hole.
Let me start again.
Take a radio receiver and you hear the voice of a speaker coming out from the speaker of the radio.
And you may be authorized to think that that voice is actually generated inside the receiver.
Not only that, but if you go and tamper with the transistors and break something in the circuit, the voice becomes distorted.
And at some stage, if you do enough damage, it goes away.
And that reinforces your false belief that the voice is generated inside the radio.
But that's not the case.
The radio is a transducer.
The radio makes audible something which exists outside the radio, in this case, the broadcast.
And so I think that consciousness is something like that.
I'm not making, you know, easy, easy parallels here, but I think it's a good way of visualizing something which exists outside the brain.
And the brain is a transducer, it's like a receiver that tunes into that field of consciousness and makes it interact with the physical world.
So now the brain is like, I don't, you're almost like a smart speaker then.
You're picking up Bluetooth energy from somewhere else.
Rather than that being internal to you, while you're here, you are connected.
Almost, I'm seeing like, I don't know if you remember the old American comedies, Rowan and Martin's Laughing, but Lily Tomlin on a switchboard, old-fashioned switchboard with plugs.
It's almost like you're plugging in for a while to a particular line on an old-fashioned American switchboard.
Fantastic.
And when your time is done, then you plug into something else.
Or you don't plug into something else rather.
What is there, what you were plugged into, is plugged into something else.
It's the reverse of what I might have thought the process was.
And I would say that not only when the body actually dies, but before the body dies, because terminal lucidity is a particular case applied to Alzheimer patients or patients with dementia.
But the broader field of investigation is end-of-life events.
We know about deathbed visions.
You know, let me quote, because this is so, so, so interesting and so fascinating.
Research tells us that about 10% of people are conscious at the moment of their passing.
Of these 10%, about two-thirds, I mean two-thirds, report constantly visions of what appears to be the afterlife.
They interact with deceased relative.
In some cases, deceased relatives they didn't know were dead at the moment the vision takes place.
And this is so well known in the medical field that this is even taught in university courses for nurses and to the personnel working in hospices and care homes, because this happens all the time.
So here again, like in the case of dementia patients, in which the radio receiver is severely damaged, but for reasons that we don't understand, coming close to the end, there's an opening.
The transmission comes through regardless of the broken radio.
And the same thing seems to be happening in the deathbed visions cases.
As long as we are incarnated in this body with this brain, we only see a very narrow spectrum of that radio broadcast, what you plug into, to use your words.
But then as you come close to actually dying, 24, 36 hours before the actual death, that filter widens and people become lucid again and people see what awaits them,
people see visions, as I say, or what appears to be the afterlife and see people and they have long complicated conversations with people who are actually not seen by others in the room.
It happened to my grandfather, my father's father.
You know, I was just a boy, but I vividly remember it.
And it was something that was just talked about for a long time in the family after he died.
He died a painful death of cancer, sadly, in an era when there were not the therapies and treatments and drugs and assistances that there are now.
But he definitely had that experience, I know, because I was there.
So that leads us to the question then, if these things are happening, what's the source?
If it's a radio station that you're picking up, that is, you know, you pick up the essence of you, who's transmitting it?
Well, now you're sort of driving me into terrain where we move from, you know, I have what I call a rational belief in life after life.
And a rational belief is not a belief based on faith.
I do not believe in survival because of a spiritual tradition or because of an experience.
I believe in survival because I looked at the evidence and I challenge the evidence.
And that's the only conclusion I can take.
I do not claim to have an explanation for how this happens.
However, I like to think certain things.
And here we move from a rational belief into a belief.
So to answer your question, I'm now moving into what I like to believe, because it's consistent with all I heard, it's consistent with my studies of the philosophy of consciousness.
And I like it aesthetically because it's a concept that has reverberated as we found it all throughout human history, starting about 30 centuries before our era,
5,000 years ago in the old Veda, Vedic scriptures of India, and all the way down to the neurophilosophers of some of the neurophilosophers of our contemporary age, like Bernardo Castro.
Essentially, the concept here is that the ultimate ground of reality is not matter, is consciousness.
This is monistic idealism in philosophy.
And it says that if you look deep enough, that what appears as the world, including ourselves, are simply temporary and changing manifestations of an underlying reality.
And this is one, that everything we can possibly see and experience and the stupendous variety of objects we see in the world are actually all manifestations of a single underlying reality.
And that reality is consciousness.
But we don't understand consciousness.
We don't know where it comes from, do we?
It is essential.
It is like, you know, it's non-reductible.
It's like one of the, we don't understand gravity.
We don't understand electromagnetism.
These are the fundamental components of our reality, and you cannot go below that.
Again, another interesting image that I like to use is the one of the sea and the waves.
We see a stormy sea and we see waves and we might be tricked into thinking that those waves have an individuality, they have a history, they have features, they're individuals, they're particular.
They form, they develop, they exist and then they seem to be dying.
But if you look just under the surface, the wave is simply a manifestation of the ocean.
The wave, before it was formed, was the ocean.
As it is formed because of the wind and it changes and, you know, it rolls and everything, it still is the ocean.
And then when it crashes, goes back to being what it always was: the ocean.
And I think that this is a very fitting image for ourselves.
We are temporary manifestations of what, for instance, Bernardo Castro calls cosmic consciousness.
Of course, we don't know.
I never claimed to have an explanation to say, to tell you what that is, but I like to think that that is the ultimate nature of reality.
That is the stuff that makes up the world.
But if we're giving people some reassurance that we go on, you know, I would like to have a little bit firmer evidence that some of what makes me me, flawed though I am, deeply,
as many people are, but, you know, I know my manifold claws, I'd like to think that some part of the essence of me goes on from here, so that some of the things that I've got wrong, or some of the things that have happened to me which haven't been nice, can be rectified in the next phase, in the next chapter, in the sequel.
And have you got anything that would give me proof that those things are going to happen?
And for a lot of people hearing this, that would give them boundless reassurance, I think.
Tons, Howard.
So far, we've talked about the big systems and philosophy and blah, blah, things that we don't necessarily understand what cult consciousness is.
I believe that it's the ultimate nature of the world.
But again, we're in the big systems area.
Now, let's bring this back to us and what happens to us when we die.
And I cannot help, I'll ask your forgiveness to plug my, because I used the long months of the COVID crisis and the lockdown and everything to dig into my books and research.
And I came up with a new book, which just came out on the 1st of April.
And it's no April full.
It's certainly no April's full.
Because so far I've been writing with the bereaved people in mind.
My previous books and the video courses and everything, they were targeted mostly to people who have lost a loved one and are in pain.
And because we know that a rational belief in life after life is very helpful for people who are in pain because of a loss.
The latest book, which is called Step Into the Light, is aimed at people who might be scared, might be in fear of death, their own or a loved ones, and to people who maybe are not exactly scared but are curious.
They would like to know what happens when we die, what happens when we shed this changing body that we happen to inhabit.
So instead of exploring what religions say and what philosophies say, I looked at the sources we have from psychical research and particularly what people say during deathbed visions,
what people say after a near-death experience, and what people say when they are dead and they communicate with us through mediums and other channels of communication.
Right.
So are all of those things consistent then with each other?
Very much so.
But before we get there, and I'm happy to try to a big, big, big brush, you know, give you a greater scheme of things picture of what happens.
But what I do in the book, because, you know, we can take what these people say at face value, but we don't know if these people, these sources are who they claim to be.
And so the first part of the book is actually a little scientific detective story that looks at the phenomenon of deathbed visions, the phenomenon of near-death experiences, and the huge field of after-death communication through mediums and other channels.
We look at all possible explanations that have been proposed, and we see that none accounts for what happens in reality.
And therefore, we conclude, and I'm really summarizing a lot here, we conclude that these sources are indeed who they claim to be, and therefore it is reasonable to trust them.
The second part of the book looks at the process of death and what happens afterwards as described coherently and consistently by a ton of sources, by many, many, many sources in these three big groups.
And so chapter by chapter in the book, I look at what happens before death, what happens at the moment of death, what happens in the early stages of the afterlife and in the later stages of the afterlife, because it appears that we move from a very material dimension that we inhabit at the moment to a spiritual dimension which at the beginning is very close to the reality we know at
the moment.
And then by a natural organic process or inevitable process of soaring, we go up several levels into continually less, progressively less material, more spiritual, more rarified, higher realms.
But at some stage, the reincarnation process kicks In this cycle of earthly incarnation, or let's say of life on the earthly plane or in a material plane, broadly speaking, and life in the various levels of the spirit world starts again.
And you go back to an earthly incarnation, and then you die again, and you move again to spiritual realms.
At the end of the day, according to these sources, all this huge, gigantic picture of hundreds, if not thousands, of incarnations and cycles and everything has one goal, one aim, one soul scope, and that is to have experiences.
We have experiences in the earthly plane, which we can only have here in the material world.
That's the reason why we incarnate, and that's to some extent answer your question.
So I'm sorry, once again, I'm doing this.
I'm sorry to jump in, but that means that we always have to come back.
There is not an end to the coming back.
There is.
I mean, I had terrible experiences at school.
I don't want to go through that again.
I'm sorry.
You will have to.
Probably not the same, probably not as bad.
But it appears, and what happens is that what I say that the goal of this process of life in different realities, if you want, has the purpose of giving you experience.
And that experience is incremental, you see.
And at some stage, when you have wisdom enough and experience enough, at that stage where you would go back into an incarnation, you don't.
And you progress finally and you merge back into what?
Into this cosmic consciousness or ultimate field of reality.
Religious people call it God.
I'm not personally comfortable with that definition, so I call it cosmic consciousness.
And the most interesting thing, very difficult to explain or understand, but this is what we're told clearly, is that even at the moment when you go back, you don't incarnate anymore, or you go back and you soar to the ultimate realms of consciousness, you do not lose your individuality.
You are still yourself.
And this is, I find this absolutely fascinating.
With the memory of dozens or hundreds of incarnations and long period of developments in the spiritual and in the various levels of the spiritual world.
So I really, I find this fascinating.
And if I had not investigated the sources as I did, and people much more learned than me and have done before me and are doing as we speak, and establish that these sources are credible, all this sounds too good to be true, to tell you the truth.
But this is what comes back to us.
And in the book, I quote a lot, but I do not only quote, I try to put the quotes into context so that the reader has a line to follow, because otherwise, if you just move from one quote to the next, you're left to draw your own conclusions.
I'm not drawing conclusions for the reader, but I'm helping the reader putting these things into context.
And so we learn, for instance, that a lot of people are scared of dying alone.
And you don't die alone.
You die welcomed and accompanied in the process by either deceased relatives or spiritual beings who are saved, as I say, to come and help in the transition.
And the transition itself, this is the most fascinating thing, and the readers, you will find a lot of quotes to that effect, the moment of death is a non-event.
There is no separation.
There's no sense of interruption of the continuity of experience.
So that many people take quite a while to understand that they've actually died because they say that's still me.
And I feel myself and I have all my perceptions and my memories.
And they find themselves in these lower levels of the spirit world in which they still have a pretty good understand perception of what goes on in the material world.
But what about those?
And again, I'm doing this because there are just points that I think we just need to amplify.
Absolutely.
What about those people who die in plane crashes?
They're shot.
You know, they die abrupt deaths that may be painful, very painful, may not be.
I mean, at what point are you...
I loved it.
And at some point, the guy who was living somebody else's life in a different era flashed into the next thing and became somebody else.
Quantum Leap is a fantastic series if you haven't seen it.
Is dying in those circumstances, for example, and not dying peacefully in your bed, is there a point at which the director of your life says, cut?
No.
So in order.
The most noticeable thing about dying for people who are in pain, who are suffering before the moment of shedding the body, is that the suffering ceases, stops.
And that's the thing that makes people understand what the heck is going on.
I was in such pain and such suffering and it's gone.
It's gone.
And I still feel Myself without all the pain I felt before.
And there are quotes, for instance, from a guy from South Africa in the book who dies in a car crash and describes the typical process, like in NDE, of watching the immediate aftermath of the car crash and seeing people coming to rescue and he sees his deceased fiancée, unfortunately, who has also died in the car crash.
So it's not that a sudden or traumatic death is in any way different in terms of what is felt at the moment of death.
It's a non-event.
It's amazing.
But there has to be a point at which you make that transition.
You know, there has to be a point at which you are switched off and you go to whatever else you go to.
The moment in which the biological body stops functioning.
Of course, that's the moment.
When you flatline or whatever, and in fact, what happens in near-death experiences is exactly that.
The physical brain is not functional anymore, but the individuality, the observer who has the witness, who has experiences as an individual, goes on being and has a near-death experience.
Okay.
Now look, my mother died in 2006.
You never get over the death of your mother or indeed your father.
Absolutely.
I'd never experienced anything like that.
I was very close to my mother.
We were great friends, apart from, you know, mother and son.
She was a wonderful person and we weren't expecting her to go.
And the hospital took us into the room where she was lying.
And I got the feeling that although she was dead in front of us, and I find it terribly traumatic to recall the scene at this point, and that's why I try not to think about it.
But I had the feeling as I was in that hospital side room in the peace and the quiet with my sister and my father, that she could hear us.
Could that have been so?
Sorry, are you talking about before her passing?
After, well, this was two hours after she'd passed.
Of course, she was there in the room with you.
And I mean, you have only have to look at the quotes.
And I mean, they absolutely, for a variable period of time.
And the problem is that although the pattern is exactly the same, the speed at which, let's call it a soul, for lack of a better word.
And I use a word, and I use this in a non-religious or, I mean, okay, let's call this whatever essence that goes on living, let's call it a soul.
And the speed at which the soul goes through the various phases in the afterlife is not the same for everybody.
And certain souls remain closer to the earthly plane for longer, and other ones soar much faster.
And this, we are told, has to do with the level of quote-unquote development, the wisdom, the age of that soul, how many times that soul has gone through the process.
But for a period of time, everybody remains close to the earthly plane and sees what happens.
And unfortunately, you know, our pain in having lost somebody is mirrored by the pain on the other side at seeing our pain.
Your mom, bless her soul, if she was in the room and saw yourself and your family so distraught, she suffered.
And it's inevitable because she still is the same person she was when she was incarnated.
And so another book I've written is called Love Never Dies.
It's not only our personality that survives, it's our affections that survive with us.
And this is one of the most, how could I say, of the strongest point of evidence, because if what survives was only a sort of a memory, you know, something imprinted in some cosmic memory, as a big hard disk, I don't know, this could account for a large part of the evidence, but it would not account for the intentionality in the spirit communications.
The spirits do not only remember who they were when they were in body, in the flesh, they are aware of what goes on in our lives and they wish us well.
They still love us and inevitably they're distraught if we are distraught.
I hope that partly answers your question.
Well, I always had the feeling that she was in that room with us still.
And if she or anybody who's just died has to experience the suffering on this side, if there is some cosmic force dictating things, why would that cosmic force make things that way?
So that not only is there suffering here, but also there's suffering on the other side?
It seems sad and traumatic and pointless.
No, we should not think that there's somebody, there's a big movie director that has chosen for things to be in a certain way and could have, he or it or whatever could have chosen things in another way.
And in fact, dying is really good.
If I have to sum up all what these sources tell us is that what happens after the demise of the body is a very interesting and largely, largely, largely pleasurable experience.
It is inevitable, Howard, if you do not question the fact that you suffer at the death because of the death of your mum, why should you question why she feels momentarily sorry for you and suffers from you at seeing you in the flesh missing her and suffering from her for her loss?
But then she moves on, quickly.
She moves on to spheres and realms, which we don't have the time to get into now, but they're really great.
I mean, it's not by chance that people speak about paradise and unearthly realms.
As I say, it's difficult to, because I don't know what to say, because if we get into, we start getting into descriptions and analysis as a long thing.
But dying is good, essentially.
And life in general is good.
Is that we don't accept the fact that this grand scheme of like we would like to be always happy.
We would like to be to never suffer.
And I, for one, I'm somebody who squirms and rebels, not only if I suffer, but if I'm less than okay.
But the fact is that there is a reason why we experience suffering.
And earthly life is not only made of suffering, there's plenty of joy as well, and there's plenty of diverse experiences.
And it's a small part of a much grander dance of existence.
And that's the way things are.
Because I think, I mean, here I speak about beliefs.
I mean, we move from evidence to beliefs.
And I don't think that there's anybody who's decided that things are that.
That's the way things are.
Because this cosmic consciousness is fundamental and it has this innate, this unquenchable thirst for experience.
But again, I've done that because I know that you could have started talking at the beginning of this and I could have gone to have my dinner and I would have had a perfect podcast at the end of it without this.
So I don't want to be spoiling your flow of narrative here.
We can't be sure of any of this, though.
Can we?
I mean, it's very reassuring.
It's very nice to hear.
I think a lot of people hearing this are going to want a bit of certainty.
But I guess you can't have certainty in these things.
I guess there comes a point where you have to pick what you believe, and then in the fullness of time, you're going to find out whether you were right.
Correct.
But there again, there are different forms of beliefs.
There are different levels of belief.
Many people, you know, many religious people believe certain things because that's their tradition.
That's what they were taught.
And they believe in the Bible or the Holy Quran or certain scriptures.
And, you know, that's as far as it goes.
What I am proposing is what I keep calling a rational belief, which is no certainty.
We have, although, I mean, we may discuss what is proof.
And I think that really, I mean, if you look at the collective way of the evidence, the facts, what happens, the collective way of the evidence points to survival.
No question.
There are certain elements in these big puzzles of evidence, which for me are so strong that that in itself should be enough.
Near-death experiences, for instance, they are every single medical researcher I can think of and virtually anybody who's dedicated their life to the study of near-death experiences from a science point of view is indeed convinced that they are suggestive of life after life.
And this is telling because again, we're talking about medical professionals and scientists who start from a very different point.
You know, they start like me from the point that, you know, all this doesn't exist, all this is ridiculous.
And then they study the evidence, they study the facts, and they are compelled by the facts to believe in life after life.
And then that's one element.
And then there's, as I say, another about 12 different fields and all point to the survival of personality.
Now, what I tried to do with the book, with Step Into the Light, is to go one step further.
Yes, we have understood that there is survival, that it is reasonable to believe in survival based on the knowledge and critical evaluation of evidence, of facts.
You cannot be sure of anything, but you can have a pretty strong reasonable belief if you look at the facts and the evidence.
And what I try to do in my book is to go one step further.
And I repeat, pardon me for repeating myself, but we have sources of information on the process of death and what comes afterwards.
And let's start by establishing the credibility of these sources.
Is it reasonable to trust spirit communicators?
Well, yes.
You know, several replications, for instance, of a quintuple blind laboratory experiment in various, carried out in the last 15 years in various universities around the world, tell us that, yes, the bottom line is that mediums do talk to the dead.
End of story.
Okay.
I would just anecdotally, I would suggest that not all of the people who say they're mediums actually do do that.
I suspect from my researches and interviews and things that some of them do.
Oh, exactly.
But that's, you know, you start with the anecdotes from the experience people have and the stories people tell.
And of these, there's a gazillion if we look at after-death communication.
Anybody who said, I've had, I went to see Gordon Smith, the famous Scottish medium, who's unfortunately much less active today, and he completely blew me away.
It's extraordinary.
The level of detail, the depth of the information, amazing.
But all those are anecdotes, are experiences people have and stories people tell, which are very important because they point us in a certain direction.
And as scholars and researchers, the next step is investigations.
You start saying, all right, okay, the medium says this and that, but is it possible that he or she acquired that information by other means?
For instance, cold reading or, you know, general guessing?
Or is it possible that the medium is telling things which are so generic that they would apply to anybody?
And so there are investigation procedures to eliminate all these explanations.
And still, the anecdotes are confirmed.
And then the top level of the research is laboratory, because in the laboratory, you have control on all the parameters of a certain phenomenon.
You exclude all other possibilities.
And if you get certain results, it confirms what anecdotes say, what investigations say.
Bottom line, mediums do speak to the dead.
So the dead speaking through mediums, it is reasonable to believe that they are who they claim to be.
Now, let's go and see what these spirit communicators tell us.
And that's what I do in my book.
It is reasonable to believe near-death experiences.
Let's look at what NDEs tell us about the other side of life.
It is reasonable to believe what happens in what is reported in deathbed visions because we look at the facts, we analyze the facts, we look at the research, and there are no other explanations for what happens.
So let's look at what deathbed visions tell us about the process of dying.
And that's humbly what I tried to do in my book and paint a picture based on this testimony.
Okay, we're coming to the end of this now.
One thing occurs to me.
If the process is that we're constantly coming back until we reach a certain point, do we always come back and have to experience the same people, even if I don't know who I was before and they don't know who they were before?
Am I always having to come up against the same people?
Because I have to tell you, and I'm sure there are going to be people nodding their heads to this.
There are one or two people who played a part in my life, only one or two, thankfully, who I really don't want to see again.
So it's a little concerning to think that I might have to encounter them again, even if they don't know who they are, and neither do I. The answer is yes and no, if I really have to strip down to the bare essentials.
So apparently there are key figures in our life now that were with us in previous lives under typically very different circumstances, but important figures keep crisscrossing.
And I cannot tell you is for one or two or 10 or 20 incarnations, I don't know.
But what we're told is that, yes, there is a little bit of crisscrossing, but the negative people that you've encountered, I dare say that they were there for a reason.
Well, yes, you know what?
I think, and neither of us can know it 100%, but I suspect that probably in life, that's so.
And the fact that I'm actually recording this now and have learned the digital technology, I learned some of that, maybe, from a person I probably wouldn't want to meet again.
But the fact that I'm doing this now and learned how to do it is probably partly down to that element of my life.
Absolutely.
Maybe it's a wonderful thought that ties everything together.
I hope it's like that, that everything has a purpose.
Sorry, you were saying.
It does, yes.
But forgive me for pointing out that again, you're so positive and I love that because you want to turn somebody who's been a negative person in your life and see whatever good you can squeeze out of that person, which is marvelous, absolutely.
The point I'm trying to make to you, especially to myself, and here I try to preach to myself because it's difficult to digest negative experiences.
And it's difficult to digest.
It's not the person, it's the negative experience that the person has given you.
And this happens to all of us.
And we don't want to live that anymore.
And we don't know why we're having this experience.
There is a reason.
That person was in your life for a reason to give you that negative experience because that has taught you something that you don't necessarily understand now.
And it likely goes well beyond your digital skills, which are very good and we're very fortunate for.
Oh, they could always be better.
Piero, I think it's important that we have conversations like this because I think we may come to realize one day that they're the most important conversations and they transcend all of the day-to-day nonsense that pervades our lives.
The book is called Step into the light, isn't it?
Step into the light.
Correct.
Yes.
And do you have a website people can consult?
Absolutely.
It's DR like Dr. Parizzetti.
Dr. Parizzetti.
Paris, like the town in France, E-T-T-I-A-D-N.
DR Parizzetti.com.
DR Parizzetti.com.
Correct.
Dr. Parizzetti.
We will speak again before we both transition, I think.
Any time, Howard, it's such a pleasure.
You're a very stimulating, inquisitive interviewer.
I love it.
Well, I'm sorry for jumping in at times in the interview.
Not at all about that.
Not at all.
But I'd love to see you give a lecture.
I think you'd be really, really good at that.
But that'll be when we're all free to do these things, Piero.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
Thank you.
You've been hearing the words and the thoughts of Dr. Piero Calvi Parisetti on the afterlife and related topics.
Your thoughts upon this and anything that's said on the unexplained, always gratefully received.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
That's theunexplained.tv.
And you can send me an email from there.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, whereabouts in the world you are, and how you use this show.
Information gratefully received.
What did they say on the prisoner?
We want information.
But it was very different in the way that they wanted the information.
Okay, I'm totally out of time.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Unexplained Online.
Till next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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