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Nov. 1, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:48
Edition 587 - Professor Etzel Cardena
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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 life is treating you really well right now.
Weather, bit weird here in London.
The night that I've just been through was driving rain and howling winds, which were not particularly in the forecast, although some parts further north of where I live certainly got a lot of that.
But it came here last night.
Now it's decided in the last half hour to declare a truce, and the sun is shining and the trees are looking good, and it's as if it was a kind of spring day.
So hopefully I've got a lot of work to do here today, but hopefully I'm going to get a walk a little bit later.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for continuing to get the shows out to you.
Couldn't do it without Adam.
And thank you to you for being part of the shows.
Thank you for all of the emails.
And the nice thing is to hear from people that I've never heard from before, but who tell me, and that's a continuing theme with your emails, that wherever you are, whether you're in Australia, the United States, Canada, the UK, you've been listening for years, sometimes as far back as my talk sport radio show that was back in 2004 to 2006, but you've never told me before.
So it's nice to know that there are so many people who are listening and I didn't know about them.
You know, there's a great feeling of kind of being supported there, I think is the way that I would describe it.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody from my radio show, who I think is definitely interesting and provides food for thought, and a take on this subject that I don't think you will have heard before, quite in this way.
Professor Edzel Cardeny is a parapsychologist, and in the world there aren't a whole lot of those, and certainly ones who are very much in the public domain, like Edzel Cardenya.
He is parapsychologist at Lund University in Sweden, originally from Mexico, and I think you'll find him interesting in everything that he has to say.
So I'm going to bring you that conversation.
And don't forget, of course, your guest suggestions.
Always welcome.
I'm doing the guest booking for the podcast myself now, so it's taking me a little bit of time to consolidate everything and keep it all going.
But we'll get there in the end.
And thank you for the suggestions that you've made.
If you'd like to make a suggestion for a guest on the podcast, then you can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam, and follow the link and send me an email from there.
Okay, I don't think I've got any more to say now, which is probably a blessing in disguise.
Let's get to the guest now from my radio show.
This is my conversation with Professor Edzel Kardenia.
He served as president of the Society of Psychological Hypnosis and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.
If you look online, you will see many learned and academic papers and a number of books that are attributed to Professor Edsel Kardenya, who's online to us now from Sweden.
Edsel, thank you very much for coming on.
How are you?
Thank you for the invitation.
I am doing well except for the weather.
We're doing well otherwise.
You know, the Brits are obsessed with the weather.
Well, we've had bouts of cloud, rain and sunshine here.
How are you doing in Sweden?
For the time being, these last couple of days, rain and rain and rain.
But it should get better.
At times, we may get a really sunny, nice, beautiful day, even in the midst of winter or fall.
I've been to Stockholm in my life, and I loved the weekend that I spent in Stockholm.
I remember going to a place that is a national treasure, a garden called Skansen, that basically tells the story of Sweden.
They've built old homes and bakeries and all sorts of things there to illustrate the story of Sweden.
So I know Stockholm.
I don't know, whereabouts are you?
I am much more to the south.
So the weather is much better here in the south.
Not as much cold.
It doesn't get as dark as it does in Stockholm.
So very nice.
I think probably weather-wise, not that different from what you would find at Edinburgh with the place of my good friend and colleague, Caroline Watt, whom you mentioned earlier.
I did indeed, and a great friend of this show.
Okay, we can dive into it now.
First of all, parapsychology.
I've looked online.
There are different definitions of parapsychology.
And we have to say that, you know, we need to hear a little bit of your story too, because I understand your father was a parapsychologist as well, which is quite rare.
But how do you define parapsychology?
Yes, I would say it is the scientific study.
And I will get into that more in a second, but it is a scientific study of the hypothesis that organisms can be affected by events that are distant, either space-wise or time-wise.
In more lay people's terms, that things that may happen somewhere else affect you even if you are unable to know about them through the senses or through reason or just by randomness.
So there's a hypothesis that we are affected by them.
And the other second aspect of it is whether intention, whether mental intention may be able to affect matter directly, not through mechanical energy means.
So those are the two main aspects.
What people might understand is that this really goes to the heart of events that ordinary people may experience not that uncommonly.
For instance, that they had not thought about Aunt Emma in a long time and then they suddenly get a hunch that something really nasty happened to Aunt Emma.
And they check and they find that precisely around the time that they felt that, Aunt Emma had had an accident, a really nasty accident and perhaps had died.
So, you know, prima facie on the face of it, it would seem that somehow, in some way, that hunch had something to do with an event that you should not have been able to know about.
So perhaps psychology studies events such as this to see, do they have any validity?
How can one explain them?
Now, science in the past, and I'm talking about around the time when perhaps you and I both started to get interested in these things, maybe two, three decades ago, Science has been very dismissive about these things.
And I get the sense by reading the newspapers that science is becoming less and less dismissive and is starting to allow for the possibility that there may be external factors or simply factors that we don't understand at play sometimes.
Yes, I think what has happened, first thing, is that throughout its history, this study has had ebbs and flows.
There have been a times when perhaps psychology seemed to be almost accepted by mainstream science, maybe in the 40s or 50s.
Then it went down, then it came up again.
Then it was looking pretty dismally around the beginning of the 2000s.
And now I think it is starting to look a bit better.
And I think the reason why now more people are talking about it not dismissively is that just ordinary mechanistic, reductive materialist science has come to a complete dead end when trying to explain what consciousness is, how we are able to have experiences that come from as far as we can say just electrochemical impulses in a mass of brain.
So if we cannot even understand what the nature and the origins of consciousness is, so then the notion is that perhaps we should be a lot more humble and think that there are characteristics about mind or consciousness that we really do not understand well and that we may need to have an expanded view of the mind that can accommodate that, that may accommodate psi phenomena.
So increasingly in the last few years, eminent philosophers, eminent neuroscientists, some who started as being dismissive, have sort of turned around and at least said, well, I think we should look into these matters.
It is something that should be looked into rather than dismissed a priori.
Before we dig into specific topics, including consciousness and near-death experiences, those sorts of things, I just want to get a little bit of a sense of your story and your journey.
You're in Sweden now at Lunt University, I know, and it's a very beautiful country.
It is very supportive of academic research.
It's a great place to think.
But, you know, you are originally from Mexico, aren't you?
And I think parapsychology runs in your family.
Yes, to an extent.
My father was a psychoanalyst and an agastroenterologist.
He started as an MD and he did what one might call amateur or informal experiments in parapsychology.
I'm sure that he would not like at all my saying that they were informal or amateur, but he was not a trained experimentalist or researcher.
So I think he tended to just say, well, this happens and we'll try it this way and we will have no controls, no scientific controls.
We won't be careful about this.
And sometimes there were amazing things that I witnessed, but also sometimes there were things that I witnessed that were not impressive.
What were the amazing things?
Okay, I'll tell you the one that I would say strikes me most.
And it had to do with a friend of the family, a woman who remains a friend of mine and her family.
And we would do sort of a game slash, my father would have said more experiments, but where we would end up writing just the name of a person who had some kind of sickness, serious injury in some way or another.
And then we would give people that name and they were asked to concentrate, to sort of go inwardly, and then start talking about what they think was wrong with that person, just from their names.
And I would say that for most of us, our performance was something that perhaps might be explained just by random guesses at times, nothing that was that impressive.
But this friend of the family was very good.
She would end up coming with sort of very impressive guesses, might say something like, well, I can see that this person is missing a toe on the left foot, for instance.
And it would be accurate.
That's very specific.
Yes.
And she wasn't as specific as that all the time, but she was at times as specific as that.
And so after that, I thought, well, this is not something that I can easily think.
Well, perhaps when one talks about heart, there are many people who end up having problems because of heart functions or diabetes or whatever.
This is really unusual.
And she is coming to a very accurate description.
So that would be the one thing that struck me the most.
And of course, if you're analyzing these things scientifically, which you ultimately decided to do, and as you say, you can do this in a sort of happy amateur type of way.
But if you do it scientifically, it's very complicated.
And sometimes it's too complicated for most scientists, which is why they don't do it.
Because I presume in the case of the woman who knew just from a name the specific complaints and problems of a person that she was detached from, you know, you'd have to know whether that person had perhaps had some connection with that person that we hadn't previously known about, whether there was any other way of her getting that information other than by telepathic or psychic methods.
You are absolutely right.
And there are two sides that I see.
First, what happens in everyday life should not be dismissed.
Because there are some guesses that one could say, well, yes, to say that tomorrow will be a better day weather-wise is not really saying much.
Because I could be right or wrong about 50% of the times.
So guessing right is not impressive.
But on the other hand, if in my everyday life something happens, let's say I have a dream about something very specific, and this happened to me not so long ago that I was in Skansen, by the way.
I haven't been there in years, but I was with my family in Skansen and we were seeing animals and suddenly there was A seal, and I remember in the dream being surprised because that is not the kind of animal.
Yes, we have to just say, for listeners who've never been there, if you ever go to Sweden, you have to go to Skansen in Stockholm.
It is this huge park that is laid out to tell the story of Sweden through history, and it's a very beautiful experience.
I have to say that I was there in about 2005, 2006.
I did not see a seal.
Yes, no, and seals are not common here.
We have a zoo park very close by.
There are no seals.
There were no seals in the news on that day.
But I remember having a dream that suddenly there was that seal around animals that would be expected animals in the zoo that is close by.
And I was surprised by that.
And so I remember my dream.
We have a three-year-old, so we get woken up very often at night.
So I can remember more of my dreams.
And then the following day, I end up talking to my wife.
And she tells me that the previous day, she had not told me about this, but the previous day, her father had told her about the news that they had found in the Netherlands a dead seal in the beach.
And it had been so outstanding to him that he had told her or written to her about it.
And I thought, is this just coincidence?
And to me, at least, it seemed that no, I think there was in some way that my dream was somehow affected by something that was striking to her.
Now, this is not the first time that that has happened.
It has happened similar things a number of times.
So that is why I also feel more comfortable at concluding that this is likely that I was somehow affected by what she had heard.
But one can never be sure, exactly for the reasons that you really intelligently put it.
Because, well, can we be absolutely sure that there was no news whatsoever the previous day in any of the web pages that I look at that had to do with seals?
Could it be that I sort of just on passing, there was actually a news of that seal?
It's extremely difficult to know.
And I did not recall at all that my wife had told me about it.
But can we be sure that I do not have amnesia, that I do not have bad memory?
And in everyday life, one cannot be sure of those explanations.
Or in scientific lingo, one would say, one cannot control for those alternative explanations.
And that's the problem in your field, isn't it?
Because it is, and I mean this in a nice way, but it is so nebulous a lot of the time, it's very hard to pin it down.
I mean, you may well have been picking up your wife's brain waves if she hadn't really discussed that seal with you and her conversation with her father.
But how can we know?
And also, and you will know much more about this than I ever will, the fact is we're learning more and more that the brain records things all the time, sometimes things that we are not consciously aware of, or maybe we've been consciously aware of them for a fleeting second.
That fleeting second is erased because it's unnecessary to the moment.
So it may be in the system.
You just may not know it.
Absolutely.
You know, I'm grading exams in my course, and one of the questions was that it had to do with memory, with sensory memory erasing from consciousness events that we do not pay attention to.
But coming back to the most important point with regard to this is for everyday events, we cannot be sure.
But that's not the problem with the topic, because when we do experiments, we can control for those things.
I presume you would have to, I'm sorry to jump in, but I suppose one way that you could control for it is to have a group of people who you would almost keep under house arrest for a period, but you would have control over their inputs for a week or whatever.
No, there is a much easier and legal way to do it.
That would not be a COVID lockdown.
And that is that what, for example, in an experiment we have done here and dozens of experimenters have done it across the globe, what you do is that the person who is in another building have to somehow guess what I am experiencing.
But what I'm going to experience comes out of a computer selecting at random one film clip.
So when that film clip comes, I'm watching it.
And we know that film clip is it.
I had not watched it before.
The person who's supposed to guess it had not watched it before.
And then eventually, that person has to choose between four choices.
And if she chooses around 20 correctly, around 25% of the time, we would say there is nothing here.
Go home.
There is no sigh.
People are not choosing better than one would choose by chance.
But what research has shown in many studies is that on average, people do significantly better.
By significantly, we mean people do better than would be expected by chance.
Much better.
Did you say that more women were able to do this?
No, I did not say that.
Sorry, no, I missed...
That people, I said that people...
Yes, and it may be that, well, yes, more women tend to be interested in this topic.
I'm not sure whether there's a study about women in general doing better than men in control studies.
But I can tell you that if you meditate or engage in some kind of mental concentration practice, like being an artist and practicing in the piano for hours, you will do better than when you are engaged in other activities.
Now, isn't that amazing?
That means that by focusing on something, we can make sometimes the remarkable happen.
And I suppose the big question is by making the remarkable happen, are you opening portals to other things and other places Or simply unearthing abilities within yourself that you didn't know you had, and that's the fascinating bit, isn't it?
Okay, Professor Etzel Kardenia in Sweden is here.
We're going to talk with him some more about fascinating topics like hypnosis, consciousness, NDEs, and much more.
Stay here on the Unexplained Talk Radio.
Professor Etzel Kardenia in Sweden is with us here on The Unexplained at Talk Radio.
We're talking about a lot of things that could be put under the banner of psi, PSI, that strange word that you probably see from time to time in articles about these things.
Etzel, how do you define that, first of all?
Well, I would say, as I did in the first section, that there are events that do suggest that we are able to become aware of things that are not mediated by the senses and that we just don't reason about it.
Right.
Another way of putting it is that we are more interconnected than we know and that very likely we are unconsciously processing a lot more information, including that information.
That is that perhaps things that are happening to those who are near and dear to you, who are not close by, may be affecting you and you become aware of them only when something amazing happens.
Somebody gets in an accident.
Somebody has a child that you did not know about and suddenly you say, oh, I don't know why, but I suddenly had the image that this friend of childhood had a child.
Let me check.
And that is the case.
So that is what I would say with Sai.
I do not like to use terms like telepathy, clairvoyance, and recognition, even though that's what mostly people have heard about, because, you know, that, for instance, has an assumption that, well, these are different processes.
And very likely all of those are the same, that in some way, limitations that we think exist with regards to space and time are not as complete as we think they are.
Overarching all of these things, then is consciousness.
Consciousness is that thing that you and I both are exhibiting at the moment.
We are in the same moment in different places.
We assume we're experiencing the same thing.
I'm assuming that my experience of this conversation is the same as your experience of this conversation, but I don't know.
And people have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to define consciousness for many years and then to try and understand what is it?
Is it something that's external in a grid hanging above us?
Is it something that's magically within that piece of meat in our heads?
Or is it something else?
Talk to me about consciousness.
Yes, with one small qualification, and that is, of course, we use the term consciousness, but we really should use the term mind.
Because when we talk about consciousness, we are talking about something that you and I are both aware of.
But it may be that when we talk about sight, there are things that are being affected and you're not even aware of them.
Maybe you are affected physiologically.
And there are studies that have shown that when, for example, a person is receiving mild electric shocks, that your physiological response to an extent parallels that of the other person, if that is your intention.
So mind, including what is conscious and what is not conscious, but is somehow being processed in some way by us.
And having said that, that qualification, that it is not only what we are conscious of, but also what we are not conscious of, it remains a mystery that some people think can never be solved.
I have been reading a very good book by a friend who is a Buddhist preacher, a Buddhist priest, sorry.
And he thinks, well, he's in a new mysterion because in his view, we are so limited.
We have ended up developing a certain kind of mentality that serves us for everyday things fairly well.
But it does not mean at all that we are able to understand everything or even perhaps some core aspects of it.
So he thinks that we will never be able to have a full grasp of it.
And I am sympathetic to that view, particularly when I hear some academics speak as if they already knew it all.
And if you are in these areas, one thing that should strike you very early is that the more you know about them, the less you know about it.
That is the more you realize just how difficult it is to get a grasp on them, of what consciousness is, what states of consciousness are.
So you end up becoming perhaps better at knowing what questions to pose rather than coming up with definitive answers.
So when you get someone like, let's say, Pinker, who writes as if he knows at all about every area, it becomes sort of unnerving to read and think, really, there are so many holes that he's not considering.
Or in the case of parapsychology, in his latest book, Rationality, he's basically coming to the conclusion, well, that these events are impossible.
Duality cannot happen because parapsychological phenomena do not exist.
Why?
Because they're impossible.
And then you think, well, how do you know that they are impossible?
Particularly when there are good scientific studies carried out that show evidence for them.
Do you really know what is possible and impossible overall?
Do you have a God-goddess mentality that knows at all?
And I would say if you have any piece of insight, any atom of insight, you should say, not at all.
And again, the more, in a sense, the sort of more we know, the less we realize.
The French philosopher Pascal had the notion of this is like a no, I think it was a balloon.
So when you have a small balloon, the surface is rather smallish.
But as the balloon increases, sort of as you know More about it.
Yes, your knowledge increases, but also the surface of those things surrounding the balloon also increase.
So the more you know, the less you know in some ways, but perhaps the more you realize in what ways you do not know things.
And to say such things are impossible automatically sweeps aside pieces of research that we both know about, including the ones that were very powerful, suggesting that quite a lot of people around the world, including myself, I have to say, had dreams in the nights and days preceding 9-11 about events that were roughly analogous to the events that happened on that terrible day.
And nobody's been able to explain them, but they've certainly been able to chronicle the fact that, you know, people like me had dreams of a plane crashing into a large area of ground, which happened in Pennsylvania a few days later.
I was very shocked to see that that three days later really unfolded.
You know, that was not an uncommon experience.
So to say that such things are impossible discounts that.
Yes, and there is just so much more in existence, in what happens, than we really do not have a clue about it.
But at least the dream you had is something that we can discuss about, that we can theorize about, that we can look at controlled research, all of which would tend to support, yes, that is a possibility.
And when people just dismiss it by saying, well, that is just an anecdote.
Well, anecdotes, life is made of anecdotes.
Life is made of events that occur.
And we need to try to explain them.
If we can.
If we can, absolutely.
You're right.
And sort of the fallback position to say, well, that was just a random event.
Well, you need to look specifically at each event and try to understand it.
So to say that it is random, we would need to say, well, Howard, how often did you dream about planes or disasters or crashing into buildings or into other places?
So if we had a good dream diary of Howard Hughes, we could say, well, he had not dreamt about such things in the last year or two years since we started it.
I never dream about accidents or disasters or anything like that.
I didn't then.
I don't now.
Yeah.
And you know that.
And other people do not know that.
But it is not fine to discount it just because it happened to you outside of a laboratory.
You have to try to guess a sense.
Is Howard Hughes somebody who's credible?
Does he come out with, yeah, and I have to say, these are things that also need to be taken into consideration.
Because at the same time that I would tell you, yes, there is good experimental scientific support for psych phenomena, there are also many things that some people say that to me just enter into the file of that's punk.
So yes.
Once a month I get an email from someone who tells me, sorry, I am a great telepath.
I know that my neighbor is sending me bad thoughts telepathically and I need some defense to it.
And as a psychologist, having, I would say, a good grasp on what we know from life events, from experiment, I would say, do I think that this is a likely event that that person is a great telepath?
Or do I think that that person is likely to be paranoid and not be a good telepath, but just have some disturbing thoughts that have nothing or very little to do with psy?
So one just analyzes things and tries to describe and tries to come up with good explanations rather than dismiss them as saying, well, maybe it's just randomness.
Am I going to discuss how randomness could, you know, explain Howard Hughes's and a number of other people's accounts?
No, instead of doing that, I just dismiss it.
And that is exactly the unscientific stance.
Back to consciousness, if we may.
I'm conscious of the time factor here.
So I'm going to get back to consciousness.
You've done a lot of research in things that change consciousness, that interfere with consciousness, that mold consciousness.
One of those things I know that you're heavily involved in is hypnosis.
I've never really understood hypnosis.
I don't understand what it is and what it does really.
I've got some very good friends, one in particular who's very famous with hypnosis and using it to good end.
I am not suggestible.
People have tried to hypnotize me before.
They can't.
So hypnosis, what value is hypnosis?
What does it do?
And what do you think it's unlocking within the human mind?
Well, all those questions, those three questions are complex ones.
So let me start with the easy one.
What is its value?
And let me divide it in two things.
First, the clinical value.
What we know is that using hypnosis as a technique can help people who have a variety of psychological problems, such as anxiety or depression or post-traumatic symptoms or irritable bowel.
It can also help people who have a number of medical conditions, including warts, which is very good for increasing chronic pain, helping people come out of the hospital after surgery faster and with fewer complications than if one had not used hypnosis.
So there are many things for which it is used for, or it can be used for.
Having said that, do I mean that it helps everyone every time?
Easy answer, no.
There's nothing that does that.
There is no medication, no surgery that will help everyone in every circumstance.
But what research has shown, for example, is that when you compare using psychotherapy as usual, let's say cognitive behavioral therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy plus hypnotic strategies, the people who receive CVT plus hypnosis on average do clearly better than the others.
So we know that.
Now, what, going to the third question that you had posed, what does it tell us?
Well, here I would say that there is a certain overlap also with psych phenomena, and that is that what hypnosis shows is that we have overall, perhaps not so much Howard Hughes, who is not very hypnotizable.
Okay.
Not at all.
People who are more hypnotizable.
What it shows is that we have greater capabilities than we tend to have.
So, for example, one thing that we know from both hypnosis and the use of biofeedback is, let me take the second one, biofeedback.
We know that humans and non-humans are able to control the firing of single neurons.
How?
You know, they get a feedback, for example, a tone, and they are asked to keep the tone as long as they can.
And that tone is related to the neuron firing.
And people can do it.
But if you ask them, how do you do it?
How are you able to somehow make one of the neurons of your brain become more active?
We would have no idea.
How does that happen?
No clue.
And this goes in a sense back to the mystery of mind consciousness or the mystery of parapsychology, where we know that there are a number of things that do happen that we have evidence for that are not impossible.
But we really do not have a good clue of how they happen.
And we may never have.
I do not know.
But maybe in the third section of the interview, I will have all of the answers and I will tell you.
We're looking forward to that part.
Just quickly to round this off on hypnosis, because I know that you've done a lot of work on that.
I have spoken with many, many people over the years who claim that under hypnosis, they have either regressed to previous lives or they've regressed to experiences like, for example, abduction by alien creatures, possibly from another dimension or planet.
You know, how does that work?
I suppose the question around that would be, are they accessing something within themselves or are they unlocking something external to themselves?
What, in your belief, happens when people come out with, I remember that I was a duke in 15th century England, or I remember when the alien Greys seized me from my bed and took me to a spaceship?
Yes, that's an easy one because I have looked into work on this area.
And that is that I would tell that 99.9%, notice that I did not say 100%, but I would say that 99% of the cases can be explained, of people coming with these reports can be explained by the fact that in hypnosis, what we imagine, what we experience has a patina of reality.
That is, we may end up having an imagined event.
And it is imagined, it is created by our mind, but it feels so real that we tend to think, yes, this did happen outside of my mind.
And that is how hypnosis works, but it does not mean that it did actually happen outside of my mind.
How about those people who specifically come up with details of a past life?
And some of those details, now these are rare cases.
Check out.
Exactly.
That is why I did not say 100%.
But they are very rare.
I mean, some of those cases, you might think, well, perhaps this is information that is in the air, that if you had been reading newspapers or a book, even though you may have forgotten about them, they may still come and end up furnishing your imagination, if you will, and you come up with that information.
So that is what occurs.
Now, in the very rare case, for instance, there are a couple of, an article and a book on what was called the Tarasi case.
And there was a person who ended up coming with very detailed information that was extremely difficult to find when it was first revealed to the therapist.
It was a patient who came with these ideas of having had a previous life.
So the therapist had to end up going to little monasteries in Spain to look at records and so on and found corroboration to very arcane, difficult details before we had the net and people could check many things.
Now, when I read the Therac case, to me, I have about only two explanations.
One, the person did end up getting that information in ways that could be sighed, either because the person did have a previous life like that, or because that information somehow is in the universe and the person accessed it.
Or it was fraud.
It was fraud by the therapist who invented it all.
So to me, those are the two options because the details are so clear, so specific, so difficult to figure out, to find out, that I do not see ordinary explanations as being able to account well for those events.
So that is again why I did not say 100% of the cases can't be explained away.
There are very few cases that really are more challenging.
But most of them, one thing that you will find out is that people do not have many details or come up with details that are clearly wrong, even though they may experience it as something that is very real to them.
But as you say, it's the tiny percentage, the fractions, that make all of this interesting.
We're talking about, in the broadest sense, psi.
What is it?
How does it affect us?
Is it a real thing?
I mean, that's, you know, three huge questions for starters.
So, Edzel, let's talk about those.
I mean, all right, let's give you a paranormal experience here.
My listeners know that I did experience, I'm convinced I experienced a ghost.
I was working in a place.
I was doing a radio show.
I went out to take a toilet break, came back down to the studio.
This was one o'clock in the morning.
Looked in the corridor, and standing opposite me, as clearly as anything, was what we call here a watchman, 1960s style, a man who would be looking after a building site or a building, wearing the clothes of that era.
I can describe his shiny boots.
I can describe his cap.
He looked at me and disappeared.
Now, that to me is a prima fasci case of a paranormal experience, but you might tell me it's something else.
Well, it could be a number of different things.
Let's start with sort of the dismissive explanation.
And that might be, well, just Howard just hallucinated something that wasn't there.
Why did he do it?
Maybe he ate too many hamburgers for lunch.
Well, no, I was living on junk food at the time because I was working away from home, but I have to say that I was later told that many, many people who work in that place had exactly the same experience.
I knew nothing of it.
I was only somebody who appeared for the odd week every so often to do a late-night radio show.
I had very little interaction with anybody else.
I could not have known about that.
Great.
So now that is the first dismissive one.
Then what you just said made it more interesting.
Because then when we have independent people who have not communicated with each other, who have experienced the same thing, then it becomes a lot more interesting.
Because then we can say, no, it wasn't the junk food that Howard was eating.
Because the other people were not eating the same thing and were experiencing the same kind of apparition or had the same kind of experience.
And then I think one has to entertain the notion that somehow, in some way, people got that event, perhaps because of something that happened at that place early on, that in some way, as one person who works in this area would say, ends up leaving some kind of imprint.
Now, one of the things that to me is particularly interesting is that you work in radio.
I used to work in radio.
I have been a professional actor.
And in a theater back in Mexico, I had an experience that wasn't a ghost, but it was a very unnerving experience in one theater where suddenly something, there was a big shadow.
And I was with a friend, so it wasn't only my experience.
And we could not explain it through ordinary means.
But what we both agreed to is that it was time to get out of that theater.
So we left.
We were typically with the group, but we had stayed longer.
Well, that sounds to me to be, sorry to jump in, sounds to me to be possible evidence of a shadow person or some kind of spirit or entity or something that has left an impression, not necessarily a person, but a thing.
Yes.
And we really have no good grasp on what that might be, other than when it happens under the circumstances that you're talking about, then it becomes more interesting.
And it is not unusual to find reports in theater.
Since you are in the UK, Sir Patrick Stewart has among many actors, and I think Ian McKellen also said it, but I'm sure Patrick Stewart was talking about also seeing the ghost that was well known to appear in one of the theaters that he was working on.
So it is not that unusual for people to say it.
And when you hear it beforehand, it is not as impressive because it may be that you already have that expectation.
It may be that you ended up interpreting sort of a vague perception, a vague stimulus in that way.
But when it happens, when you do not have those expectations, when other people independently have experienced the same thing, I think you need to remain open to the notion that there is something there, either in the place or in the minds that are communicating with each other, that cannot be just dismissed.
You've done research into people who believe that they are possessed.
Every so often I'll get an email from somebody that will concern me.
And unfortunately, I'm not a scientist or a psychologist.
I have no answers.
But, you know, that person will suggest to me that they feel that they are overtaken by something.
What have your conclusions so far about this been?
Well, let me say I have done a number of studies on spirit possession, but spirit possession in the sense that there are a number of ecstatic religions in the world, including Pentecostalists who talk about the gifts, including Haitian voodoo, a number of other religions in Africa, in Brazil, and so on.
And in those circumstances or in those practices, people want to be possessed.
People want to have the experience that someone or something else is taking over their minds and bodies.
And it is welcome.
And what we have shown, along with a number of other researchers, is that on average, the people who experience this are fine.
They are psychologically as stable and healthy, at least as the referent group around them.
So this is not, per se, a sign of any kind of pathology.
Having said that, if a person is having some sort of experience like that that is disturbing, then one I think should be wise to try to get some help from a counselor, a therapist, at the very least to try to sense where this sense of other may come from.
Because, you know, sometimes there are people who possess us in the sense that early on in life, they ended up doing things that were not necessarily fine for us or that were dismissive or injurious.
And we have not been able to integrate that kind of injury with who we are now.
So it may be, I would say, that it is useful in the cases Where people are feeling that they are in a bad place because of it, that they are distressed, that they do communicate with a reasonable therapist or counselor that will listen to this experience respectfully and help the person come to grips with it, not feel as distressed, and go whichever way will be most helpful for the person.
Have you come across a case, and again, here I am jumping in, just because I'm conscious of time, forgive me.
Have you come across a case or cases of claimed possession that you really haven't been able to put a psychological template over?
In other words, it's suggested to you that they might well be possessed.
Well, I have done field work in Haiti, where people were possessed.
I saw some rather unusual things in Haiti.
I would not necessarily say that those were strong indicators that they were being possessed by another spirit, but at the very least that they were able to do unusual things.
So to give you an example, in one of the rituals in the countryside of Haiti, I remember people who were possessed, this one individual, one gentleman, who would be flashing, flailing around, and then would end up face down in the mud and remain there for a long time.
And I did not count how many minutes the person was there, but the sense to me is that it was a long time and that it was not something ordinary.
Now, do I know that this person had not trained before to be able to hold the breath for a long time?
No idea.
But I can tell you that it was far longer than what I would have expected.
So that I have seen personally.
I have read about mediums who have come with information that they claim came from another spirit.
That was fairly accurate.
But having said all of that, I personally have not witnessed someone who I would say, yes, this person is definitely possessed by some entity that is someone else or something else that is identifiable.
Does not necessarily mean that it does not happen.
I just have not seen or experienced that.
You've also done a lot of work, Edsel, on near-death experiences.
Again, I have a story.
My mother had one when she was a little girl.
She went to a very beautiful place that had incredible colors and forests and trees and she didn't want to come back.
She was 10 years of age, very sick, you know, on the verge of death, but she was in a crisis.
She could have come back and survived what she did or died.
And she says, she said to her dying day, in fact, that she went to that place and she was told that she had to come back here.
That's a very common experience.
A lot of people have such experiences.
What do you make of them?
Well, first, thanks to your mom having that experience, probably we're having this conversation.
True.
It was a felicitous one because you might not have been born.
That matters turned out poorly.
Well, I have not myself done research on near-death experiences.
There is one chapter by the world expert Bruce Grayson in one of the books I edited.
So I'm speaking here third party.
But having reviewed the literature, I think that there is something, as I write, by the way, in a review that is coming out, that near-death experiences continue to defy our understanding.
I think looking at the evidence, both from theories that try to explain them away as some kind of particular functioning of the nervous system, as well as theories who state that near-death experiences are proof, and I mean 100% proof that we survive, when we look at them, I find them both not quite explaining all the observations that we have had.
I think there is something that remains still very much in question and being challenged.
And when you look at all of the evidence honestly, I think you have to say, well, there are some instances in which people not only have these wonderful experiences that change their lives, but they also seem to come to have some information that they should not have.
And this brings us back to the first segment of today's conversation, which is that every once in a while, they come with information that is supportive of sign.
That is, they come with information that seems to be distant in time or space.
For example, they find someone in their near-the-experience that they did not know had died.
Unbeknownst to them, that person had died.
So somehow in their experiences, they know that.
How?
Is it because they went to some kind of heaven where that person continues to live?
That is a hypothesis.
And I don't think it is a stupid hypothesis.
But another explanation is, well, that information was something that the person non-consciously had through signings.
And it just flourished when the person had the near-death experience.
So neatly at the end of this, then, we can float the idea that we've sort of been talking around here, that science is coming to look at the notion that there might be something above us, like a kind of natural internet, that therein resides our consciousness and every event that has ever happened before or ever will happen in the future, it's all out there to be accessed.
And that is seen by some as the universal explain all factor that once we discover it's there, and that's the hard part, will give us the answer to everything, all of these things.
Yeah.
Yes, although I think that's one possible explanation.
And from the research that has been done, you can maintain that as a hypothesis that can be rationally maintained.
It does not mean that it is a correct one.
And here I am also a bit of a mysterian.
I think we have no good clue about how mind Works, how consciousness works, what is its relation to reality, shall we say, to the universe.
But what I have no doubts about is that there is a lot more than we have been able to understand or even probably to conceive or perceive.
Which is why it's worth doing this research.
And just a brief word, if you can do it in a minute or so, that would be great, Edsel.
About the critics.
I get the feeling from talking with you, you feel people who are critical about all of this sort of research need to take a second look at it and maybe a second look at themselves.
Yes.
And let me here divide two kinds of critics.
There's a type of critic, for example, Chris French, who is in the UK.
He is knowledgeable.
He is informed.
He has looked at the evidence and he is not persuaded by it.
And he puts, he's been on the show many times.
He's a very cogent thinker and an excellent guest.
Yes.
But he gives his reasons for it.
He does not dismiss the evidence.
He says why he's not persuaded by it.
I think those critics are completely respectable.
And they are, in fact, helpful because sometimes a person like that may see some things that those of us who are more swayed by the evidence may not have seen.
So they are useful.
They are part of science.
So let's keep them.
On the other hand, I would say there are the II critics.
And by II, I would say the ignorant and intolerant critics.
And these are the critics who are just respond, who are just repeating cliches, such as there is no research on parapsychology.
Parabpsyologists have been doing the same thing again.
There has been no development in parapsychology.
And they never support what they say.
They just keep repeating it.
And at the end of the day, they may say, well, we are not going to look at the data because these things are impossible.
So basically what you're saying is that we need to keep our minds open.
Yes.
I think there's nothing better than that.
There is no better discipline.
And what is the point of any of this if we don't do that?
So, Edzal, if my listener wants to find you, I'm guessing they can do that by searching your university, Lund University.
Yes, that is correct.
And I can send you a webpage that has at least a list of my publications and my main interests.
I have been, quote unquote, working on a personal webpage, but I put it in quotation marks because I haven't done much in years, because I haven't had time.
So nothing like that.
I am in no social media, thank God.
Well, I think that's no bad thing, let me tell you.
Etzel, we're totally out of time.
I'm going to be in trouble if we don't stop now.
Thank you very much.
I hope we talk again.
And please go well, as they say.
Thank you.
Same to you.
And I don't know if your mom is still with us, but my greetings, because it is wonderful that she had such a transcendent experience.
And it has been a pleasure talking to you.
And you too, Etzel.
And that experience absolutely shaped my life.
Your thoughts on that conversation gratefully received.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link for communications, and you can send me an email from there.
And if you'd like to make a guest suggestion and you maybe have the contact details for that guest, then I will definitely get onto it.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
It is still...
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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