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Feb. 21, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:12:16
Edition 613 - Jim Alexander - Who Believes Hypnosis Holds The Key To Many Of Our Problems And Maybe Even To Our Past Lives...
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of my show, for the emails that you keep sending, the feedback and thoughts and suggestions gratefully received.
I'm going to name check a few people in just a moment here, but thank you very much.
Thank you to Webmaster Adam for his work on the show, too.
This time, we're going to talk about hypnotic regression with somebody who did this and has been doing this for 40 years or more, Jim Alexander.
More about that in just a moment.
Just to say that the weather, as I record this, looking out of the window, which is rain spattered, is pretty awful.
It's very gusty and blowy.
And I think if the news reports are to be believed, we're in line for another pummeling from at least two more storms here.
So watch the news, and as they say, batten down the atches, as they say in all those old films.
Pirate films.
It's stormy out there.
We've got to batten down the atches.
I think we definitely have this week.
Okay, shout-outs before we get to the guest on hypnotic regression, Jim Alexander.
Alan in Gardena, California.
Nice to hear from you, Alan.
Nice email.
Also, Matt from a place in Essex called Messing.
Great name.
I have to say, and I should be ashamed of myself because I know most places, I'd never heard of Messing until now.
Linnell in Michigan says, I'm sending you this message from Snowy, Michigan.
I'm an avid listener of your podcast.
Thank you for the hard work.
I listened to the interview with Isabel Maxwell, the medium.
I love and in fact prefer your interviews with mediums, psychics, and anything paranormal related.
I'm sending you good thoughts and positive energy.
Boy, do I need it, Linnell?
Thank you very much indeed.
My good thoughts to you.
Hi, Howard.
Just a brief message to say thanks for the podcast.
Over the past couple of years, I've been struggling a bit and the podcast has helped distract me from ruminations.
I think it's kind of had that effect for a lot of people, and I'm glad that it does, Chris.
Thank you for that in Sussex.
And Stephen says, are you going to the Ancient Aliens Convention in Blackpool in June?
I have to say, Stephen, I know nothing of it.
I will check it out.
That's all I can say.
I'd love to see Blackpool again.
When I was a little kid, a day out would always be a trip to Blackpool, a ride on the trams, maybe a donkey ride if they still do those on the sands.
Maybe I'm just out of date about that.
And as I got older, on the fair ground with my dad and also going up the Blackpool Tower, which is a kind of mini Eiffel Tower.
You have to see that.
I love Blackpool.
My very first holiday when I think I was four was to Blackpool.
I still kind of remember the tram trips then.
Happy days, as they say.
So maybe it's time for me to get to Blackpool.
I don't know.
Sorry, I'm just rambling on about my childhood now.
Sometimes in the quiet, those memories come flooding back.
Do you find this?
I find that as I'm getting older, the early memories are just pouring back, and they're very sustaining at the worst possible times.
Memories of my dear mum and dad.
But, you know, maybe you've been through this too.
All right.
Let's get to the guest on this edition of the show.
Somebody that I have to say I don't know a lot about.
And sometimes it's worth taking a punt.
He suggested himself for this show 40 years of experience in hypnotic regression, some very famous and very involving cases.
His name is Jim Alexander.
He's recently written and published a book about this called New Lives, Old Souls.
And just a read from the blurb about it.
This book has got two objectives.
Number one, to reveal the truth about memories of previous lives.
Two, to briefly look at how some established approaches to anxiety could be changed to increase effectiveness and efficiency.
Okay, well, I'm not sure whether we're going to get time for that bit.
But let's see how we do.
So thank you very much for all of your feedback and your emails.
If you'd like to make a donation to the Unexplained podcast, please go to my website, designed and created by AdamtheUnexplained.tv.
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All right, let's get to the guest now, Jim Alexander.
Jim, thank you for coming on my show.
It's a pleasure, Howard.
Nice to talk to you.
To my eternal shame, Jim, I don't know that much about you, but you were kind enough to suggest me your work and your book.
And I took a look at all of it and I thought, yeah, let's do this.
Absolutely.
And it transpires that I really should have known about you because you've been doing what you've been doing for 40 years or more, haven't you?
I have.
I think it's simply that I haven't written the book before.
I became involved, yes, back in the 70s, really, although I've been interested in other things, if you like to call them that, the paranormal, since I was very small.
I mean, I saw a ghost when I was seven.
I think that's probably what started me off.
But since then, I've been interested in all sorts of paranormal things.
And I became focused on the world, I suppose, of past life regression when we were living in a different place from where we are now, a bit further south than Huddersfield.
But we met with Joe Keaton, who was much more famous than I ever will be at that time.
He was based in Liverpool and did a lot of work.
You probably have heard of him.
Don't know if you've met him or did meet him when he was alive.
You know, even being a scouser, I saw him on television and know about him, but I never actually met the man.
All right.
Well, I spent two years with him, more or less, because my wife kind of also very interested in all these subjects.
And she learned of a meeting that he was holding near us.
And we went along to it, met him.
And after that, went along to his home in Liverpool a couple of times a Week for the next two years, which is a remarkable amount of time to spend with somebody.
My wife was quite good at regression, but we saw lots of other people that did it and saw the other things that he was doing.
I was in a position where really I could only learn from what he did and the experiences we went through.
And it was a fascinating time.
But eventually I got fed up with just being a bystander and I became involved and started to gradually do experiments myself and meet people and help them to discover whether they'd had a previous life or whether there was something they needed to discover in their own minds.
And it went from there, really.
Had an article in a local paper, got picked up by the local radio, well, Radio Piccadilly in Manchester, in fact, and did a two or three hour show for them one night where hopefully my brain worked as well as it does today.
Remember things.
I'm hoping you've got some really good questions.
And it began from there.
And I met a lot of who produced another show a couple of weeks later on which a lady went back to her experiences in Leaves, which is covered in the book, and other people on that show as well.
So it's been a fascinating time.
I've discovered a lot.
And eventually, I thought, well, perhaps I should just write this down in a book before I do disappear altogether, because it might just help people.
That's essentially why I've done it.
I'd like people to think about things, to think about life, to perhaps be a bit logical, and not just dismiss the idea that there is more to life than this just physical body and this mind that we seem to think is just electricity.
I could never accept that.
And I think the fact that I was prepared to go off and do my own research, get myself trained and be responsible about my involvement.
You know, I don't want to mess with people's minds.
So I was very careful.
Well, that's the danger of it, of course.
I don't know what the rules are for those who do hypnotic regression.
I guess you have to be qualified to do this.
You can't just leap into this thing, can you, without proper qualifications?
It would worry me if you could.
Then I should be worried.
I'm afraid you can.
There are really very few rules.
The biggest rule, I guess the biggest safety net is the fact that your mind is there to protect you.
And if you find yourself in a situation where somebody is doing something you don't like and you're in hypnosis, you will come out of it.
So there is a safety net.
But unfortunately, the fact that anybody can do this means that a lot of people do it who shouldn't do it, or perhaps haven't thought deeply enough about what they are doing.
And that worries me because, you know, I don't like the idea that people turn up to a room somewhere with 40, 50 other people in it, and somebody at the front of the room says, okay, I want you to imagine you're back 2,000 years ago.
And tell me where you've been, have this wonderful remembrance that you've got.
And in the end, ask me any questions.
And I think that's irresponsible, to be frank.
Well, I think we would always err on the side of caution.
And if anybody's listening to this thinking of getting anything like this done, then of course they've got to check out the bona fides and credentials of the people that they are hoping to get involved with extremely carefully.
We would never lead them down any path other than that one.
Having said that, though, Jim, hypnosis has always fascinated me, partly because in my experience of it, I'm not suggestible.
I've had people try and I think I'm just kind of maybe I'm too full of nervous energy to be suggestible in it.
You're too interested in it.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe I'm thinking of the nuts and bolts of it and I'm not actually surrendering to it.
I'm not sure.
But I do know that there are people who can do that.
In fact, I worked for quite a few years.
He's a friend and former colleague with Paul McKenna, who's very known for hypnosis around the world, internationally famous, known everywhere on television, radio, all the rest of it.
So, you know, I know that this is a thing.
I don't think I could ever practice it myself, but I'm fascinated by people like you who do.
Let's give ourselves a definition first then of what is, before we go into regression, what exactly is hypnosis?
What are you doing?
You are opening up a part of your mind that you normally keep subdued.
That might be the very shortest definition I've ever given.
But clearly, the worries are that people think they're going to be taken over, they're going to be under somebody else's control.
And that makes it difficult for you to release what you have to release, because most of the time we're aware of our conscious mind, which is what we're talking through at the moment.
But underneath that, there is a part of you that is deciding the next words you're going to use, or what you're going to listen to, or what you're going to ignore, or what might be happening inside your body.
You know, is my heart expanding or is it going faster than it should because we're in a strange situation?
So all of that sort of gets in the way.
And I think another way of explaining it is to say that what you're doing is moving from your conscious part of your mind more into your subconscious part of your mind.
So it's like a switch over in a way.
You're subduing the conscious part and allowing the subconscious mind to take that space.
And it's in the subconscious where you can do many more things much more quickly than you can ever do in your conscious.
It's where everything is stored, all your senses that are external, you know, touch, sight, sound, hearing, et cetera, taste, they're all links from your conscious mind to your subconscious.
The other way of defining hypnosis is that it is an altered state of consciousness, which sounds a bit fancy and it's probably what's put you off because you think you're going to be in some kind of trance.
In fact, you're just relaxed, listening to the therapist or hypnotist, deciding for yourself that you want to go along with it.
And in that way, it just works better.
You find yourself in a very comfortable situation where you're quite prepared to talk.
You can even open your eyes and draw things.
And you've seen on stage, you know, that you can do lots of things under hypnosis.
And it's all real.
It's not fake.
But it is an altered state of consciousness that you achieve and that the hypnotherapist or hypnotist simply helps you to achieve.
And I always say it's a bit like turning down, say you're listening to two radio stations, radio one and radio four.
If you Listen to both of them together, there's a cacophony.
If you turn one down, the other comes up, and vice versa.
So, think of it that way: that it's just a part of your mind that actually you do use all the time, because everything you're doing is actually much more involved with your subconscious than it is with your conscious.
The conscious only gets what the subconscious decides it should be aware of.
So, if you're in danger, the conscious will perceive that before your conscious ever could, because it's listening, it's smelling, it's doing things, seeing things that you're not aware of being focused on.
If something nasty happens, it will tell you to run or to fight or to do something special, to take action.
That's the conscious versus the subconscious.
And what hypnosis does is put the conscious to sleep, wake up the subconscious with all the sort of facilities that it has within it, which are many.
I'm going on now.
Okay, no, it's fascinating.
I just, you know, I could hear you talk about this all day, Jim.
Is it true that we are constantly recording everything that happens to us, that every detail of our lives is stored away, but because that would fill up the hard drive way too quickly and way too disturbingly, most of it has to be suppressed in order that we can get on with the daily business of living?
Oh, absolutely.
Yes, and I'm one of those that do believe everything we do goes in because, you know, we're listening to everything, we're hearing everything.
It all goes in.
But you selectively, or your brain, your mind tells you to select which things to pay attention to.
If you were to try to drive a car and be aware of everything you were doing whilst driving that car, you would soon crash.
Because you just couldn't cope with all that information.
If you're driving along, describing everything you're seeing and everything you're doing, what other users are doing, where they might be at danger, how fast you're going, whether you need to indicate, whether you need to brake, am I within the speed limit, et cetera.
What's my friend saying to me in the back of the car?
All those things, that would be like a conscious cacophony.
And the world would be like that if we weren't deciding which bits to pay attention to.
So we have to filter.
We have to actively do that, or rather inactively do that.
And listen, I'm absolutely on side with you with all of this because about a year or two ago, I was talking to my sister Beryl, and we were talking about our childhood, and we had a wonderful childhood, loving parents.
We did some superb things together.
And a part that are things that I will treasure.
But she mentioned a dog that apparently we'd had when I was about eight or nine.
And I think something bad happened to that dog because I have no recollection of having the dog, which is terrible, really.
How can a whole chapter, how can a whole episode of your life simply be missing?
Well, presumably it's missing.
And my sister did explain that the dog, I think, had an accident or something.
It was bad.
And I was a kid and I loved the dog and I'd suppressed it and all the rest of it.
I have no recollection of it.
Even now I'm trying to think about it.
It's as if I've edited that portion of my childhood out.
Yes, that's exactly what you've done.
I mean, the memory is clearly there because the dog existed.
It did happen.
You didn't make it up, or she didn't make it up.
But the fact is, something has happened, and this is often the case, and this is a really interesting thing for me, is your mind will make an instant decision to protect you.
And it happens so quickly that you don't know about it.
But basically, your subconscious thinks this is harmful to you if you are involved with it or think about it anymore.
Therefore, it will go into a box and you will never see it again unless you are able one day to find that box and open it.
At which point, all those memories will come flooding back.
There'll be a huge outpouring of emotion, but a moment of enlightenment that says to you, hmm, I understand now why I can't or couldn't remember that, the existence of that dog.
This is what the harm to me was going to be.
I was going to be upset, very emotionally disturbed, and your mind thought that was too much for you to cope with, so it hid it.
The weird thing is, it keeps on hiding it, even when the time comes that you could cope with it.
Because as you grow older, you become more mature, you're an adult, you could cope with that sort of emotion now, but your mind hasn't made a decision to let you see it.
And so you have this situation that for a lot of people, that's where their problems begin.
I'm sorry, I'm getting into the medical side now, but that's where their problems begin.
Because what happens is the mind will create all sorts of distractions.
And those can come out in the form of a phobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder, something like that, an anxiety issue, or even overeating, undereating, being obsessed about something.
They are all essentially, or a lot of them, most of them, are there to stop you thinking about the thing that your subconscious doesn't want you to think about.
And that's why they can become all of a oneness, if you like, the sort of solutions that are possible.
And for yourself, it would work.
I mean, if you could accept going into hypnosis, which most people can and which you could under the right circumstances, you could go back to it and look at it, see what it was that caused it, and all of the emotional turmoil would be released, removed, and the need for, if you like, the obsession or the behavior that's been caused by this anxiety would actually disappear.
I know it sounds like a miracle, but for me, that is a much better solution than putting people on pills for life or putting them through a 12-year program of psychotherapy, trying to get people to do things like, ah, I'm getting to it already, but I hate the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Point is, is getting people to think about something that's making them behave strangely when they will never get to the point of understanding why it happened.
So you're saying the key to the behavior lies in the subconscious.
And in your view, you have to access that and work through it in order for it to be purged from your experience.
I'm not totally convinced about that, Jim.
I think the idea Of reliving a trauma in my conscious state right now is pretty horrendous.
Yes, and there are cases where that wouldn't be appropriate.
And I'm not suggesting it for everybody, but I think there are at least a third of the cases where people are undergoing long-term treatment or long-term pill taking where they don't need to, because they could do what I've seen many people do, go back to the situation and have a quick cry, come out of it again, and suddenly think, oh, gosh, is that what it was?
And it can be something surprisingly trivial, but your mind made that decision.
And the mind, the subconscious, is much more powerful than the conscious.
So it's stuck.
But yeah, you have to be careful.
I would not want to put somebody through something which I feel cognitive behavioral therapy does work for, which is like war experience.
People see their friends blown up.
That is not something you're going to want to see again.
And I don't think you will ever learn to cope with it.
But when you're doing this, Jim, though, how do you know what's going to come out?
You know, you say that there are some things I don't want to go to.
But when you get somebody sitting there or lying there or whatever they are, how can you know what's going to come out of their mind?
Good question.
You're absolutely right.
I can't.
I'm not psychic.
Well, I might be, but I don't have enough evidence of that.
But basically, you have to go back.
You go back a bit at a time.
You go back to find a point at which the memory stops, where people can't see anything earlier than a certain point.
And then you slowly get back towards it.
Again, it comes into a sort of self-help bitter bit here or self-protective side, because if the memory is still too powerful, your subconscious will not release it.
But if it's something where you can say to the subconscious, say, look, what we think is that you've kept this hidden for too long.
The person you are protecting is being harmed by the protection you're giving it.
And it could be more appropriate for them to understand what happened so that they can put it into perspective.
And if you like, make a more complete picture of their own life.
You know, say your life is a jigsaw puzzle.
There are bits missing from it to do with the dog.
Without them, your picture isn't complete.
And you're going to be more affected by that picture not being complete than you would be by remembering the dog and remembering what happened to the dog.
Okay.
Now, that's not it is.
It's not the only family.
All I have is myself as an example here.
I don't have any other reference points.
But in my life, one of the most traumatic things that ever happened to me, if not the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to me, was the death of my mother.
We were very close.
I was very close with my dad, too.
But my mother died in hospital.
We didn't expect her to die.
I mean, this happens a thousand times a day, I'm sure, around the world.
You know, somebody close to you goes into hospital.
You don't think that they're going to die there.
And they do.
So the overall details of the days over which that happened in Southport, of course I can remember them because they were recent memories and I was an adult.
But the actual specifics of it, part of me cares not to recall those and they're hazy to me.
Is that the same mechanism?
And it's traumatic.
You know, even thinking about just the overall fact that my mother has died and that kind of thing, I find traumatic.
The idea of opening up the details of those days scares me somewhat.
I guess all of those details are in there somewhere if we believe that we record everything.
I don't think I want to go there.
And that's not surprising.
It's a very emotional thing to have happened.
It's something you don't experience more than once in your life, you know, with your mother dying.
And it's not really necessary for you to go back through it all.
What happens is there is something there that has had a strong effect.
Obviously, everything has a strong effect and a lot happens in that time and a lot of surprises came up.
But as you say, your mind is probably able to cope with it.
The strange thing is that what could happen is you have an emotional, or emotional things that upset you in later life after, let's keep it hurt, the loss of the dog, are going to be more effective than they would otherwise be.
Because you are missing a certain amount of your early experience that would help you to cope with your later experience.
So in a way, you've got an exaggerated reaction to the dreadful things that happened to you, but they are not caused by the subconscious in the same way.
The subconscious, it's a bit like saying you put your hand in the fire, you have now learned it's too hot to put your hand in, and you never do it again.
That's a very protective element.
And things that can happen to you, I was thinking the other day of another example.
I thought, well, have you ever had a bad car accident?
Yes, I did.
In fact, I was, I mean, look, this isn't all about me, but the experiences that I've had are the only ones I can recount, really.
I had a very bad car accident when I started work at Capitol Radio.
I had a little Nissan Micra, and I loved that car.
It was the most reliable car in the world.
And I hated driving in London.
And I had to drive home via a roundabout, very famous one in Shepherd's Bush.
And it's funny you should mention this.
But I was driving home.
I hadn't been at Capitol Radio very long.
I stopped at this roundabout and I saw in my mirror, everything went into slow motion.
I saw in my mirror there was a truck behind me.
And that truck was carrying cement, which is a heavy load.
And even in a split second, I recalled the details of seeing the guy driving it reading a map.
In the days when there were no sat-navs, this is 1993 or 4.
He had a map on his steering wheel.
He wasn't paying attention.
So this enormous truck went into my tiny little car, forced it and me forward with the most horrendous bang that I can still recall to my mind.
The noise of it was terrible.
So yes, the short answer is, I know exactly what it's like to have a car accident.
Yes.
And you've actually answered or done my job for me because you've talked about split seconds, things happening so fast, even things slowing down because you could see them and your mind is working so quickly because it's there to protect you.
This is your subconscious activity coming and telling the conscious, something's wrong, look out, you've got to get protected.
But what happens is that the decisions are made in a split second and the subconscious is able to do that much faster than your conscious would ever do it.
And so it kind of gets it out of the way.
But you are left with the decisions that it made in that split second that will affect you later on.
Because you could end up being scared to drive and not quite knowing why.
Well, I didn't drive.
I'm sorry again, I'm jumping in, but I didn't drive for one whole year.
Right.
So clearly, that's why, because obviously you're thinking, blind man, you know, what's going to hit me that I don't expect?
Because when somebody does something like that, it's so irrational that you find it difficult to explain it to yourself.
And therefore, you can't get over the idea that it might happen again because you're left with the thought anything can happen.
And this is your subconscious, again, telling you or trying to make sure that it protects you.
And that's why you didn't drive for a year because your subconscious is saying, don't forget, anything could happen.
I don't want to come to that sort of harm again.
So I will introduce some behavior that I feel is protective.
And what you have to do at a certain point is tell the subconscious, it's no longer appropriate to make me behave in this way.
In that case, you're talking about the behavior of avoiding driving.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know how I got around that?
I went to see, in the end, the doctor sent me to one of the hospitals that deals in these things because it was becoming a real problem.
You know, you need to be able to drive in this day and age.
And I was a young guy, and I had a car that I was paying for.
It wasn't going anywhere.
It had been rebuilt by Curry Motors at the time, and it looked like a brand new car, but I didn't want to drive it.
So the advice that I got was that I should get a grip on this, essentially.
And rather than go through the whole process of treatment, I just thought, right, time to pull yourself together, Howard.
This is not something that I recommend for everybody.
You know, if you have to have treatment, have the treatment.
And little by little, bit by bit, I started by driving around the corner.
And then I'd drive a little further, drive to the supermarket, then I'd drive a little further.
And eventually, I was ready to drive, which I did, down to Sussex to my sister's wedding, which was about 50 miles, 45, 50 miles away from where I lived at the time.
For a good reason, yeah.
And I did that one thing, that one drive, and it purged the fear and the flashbacks.
I was getting flashbacks that were all clearly buried in my subconscious and coming up from time to time.
It removed most of it.
But I can still recall the noise of that impact, of that truck, basically turning my car into a metal concertina.
I had half a car at the end of that.
I'll never forget it.
So look, we've established here then, Jim, that the mind is an astonishing thing and a wonderful thing in many ways, but it can go wrong.
You know, I'm sure there are times when people's traumatic memories that they have in the subconscious are thrown up for them, not in hypnosis, but in all the wrong times and places.
It takes a long time.
That's the only point I was going to make after your story, which exactly you've illustrated terribly well.
It takes a long time to do it yourself, to do it, even to do it with therapy from the established external sources, if you like, where they will tell you, yes, okay, let's take spiders.
You know, you're scared of spiders.
Don't pick up a big one straight away.
Let's look at a small, let's look at a dead one.
Then let's look at a slightly larger dead one.
Now let's look at a live one.
They go through a process which is so long that you either get fed up with doing it or you decide to pull yourself out of it, as you did, and therefore there's a solution.
The alternative is a therapist using something the medical profession didn't like for an awful long time, but they're getting more used to it now.
And I wish they would get more of it, to actually go back and look at that accident again in your case.
Go back, look at the accident, see what happened, see what you could have done about it, see if you were any way to blame.
Think if it's something that's likely to happen again.
No, it isn't.
Therefore, come out of it and you're done.
And in a way, I'm really being quite glib about it.
But if properly handled early after that accident, that incident could have gone away in a flash because your subconscious would have made a different decision.
Right.
Well, it was, as anybody who's been involved in something like this, was quite a traumatic thing that had effects.
And I promise my listener that will get away from this, but maybe my listener can relate to this.
Even years later, I remember going to visit my parents in Fornby, Freshfield, near Southport.
And I was driving back to London as I did on a Sunday evening or driving back to wherever I was living at the time, maybe Worcestershire.
And I actually saw on the M57, I think it was, in Merseyside, I saw somebody else have an accident.
Okay, somebody else had an accident completely unrelated to me in a different lane.
It was nothing to do with me.
And yet after having had the accident in Shepherd's Bush in London, of course I was driving back to London.
Having had the accident in Shepherd's Bush in London, I started to feel that in some way I might be responsible.
How weird is that?
That is weird, isn't it?
But this is, your mind plays funny tricks on you.
And I guess it picked up something recognizable and thought, I had better tell you to be careful again, just in case.
And so it sort of said, well, you, yeah, slow down a bit because you might be a part of this problem.
And it's just, again, trying to be protective.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
You know, your mind is there to protect you, but only ideally in appropriate ways.
And ways that, let's say, for example, going back to your dog situation again, you were young.
You were nine years old, you said earlier on.
And you really don't want to have your life controlled by the decisions that have been made by a nine-year-old.
You know, when you're whatever age You are now, you wouldn't have the same thinking processes that you had when you were nine.
So, are you saying, James?
And again, it's important we bring this point out, I think, just before we go further.
You're saying that the idea of the notion of bringing this out through hypnosis, however, you bring it out, allows you to view the incident again with the intellect and the rationality of somebody older, rather than the intellect and rationality of somebody who had that experience when they were eight or nine.
Absolutely right.
Yeah.
And that's why going back to something that is created by an adult experience is much more difficult and much more likely to be, let's say, unsuccessful in this way.
And you will have to get used to the fact that you went to war, you know, but that was because the decisions were made as an adult and nothing very much has changed since then.
So why would your behavior change?
If you think of something that happened when you were young, then yes, your behavior now is likely to be inappropriate.
But thinking back to something which is fairly recent, why would there be a difference in your attitude to it?
You can't, just because you're in hypnosis doesn't mean to say I can persuade you that an apple is an onion.
You know, you can fake it for a bit, but you know it's not real.
Whereas the thing that you're thinking about when you were thinking in terms of your dog, that was real, but it's now, it's different.
You can see it differently now.
You talked about doing hypnotic regression on the radio, on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester, you know, which I grew up with and still know a lot of people who were involved in that.
Might have listened.
Just out of interest, there are very strict rules on radio.
I know about this doing a radio show.
There are a lot of things that you cannot talk about and a lot of things that you can talk about, but you're very strictly regulated in the way that you talk about them.
One of the things stipulated, apart from seances, which I once did on the radio and we had to find a way of doing that, is hypnosis and hypnotherapy and hypnotic regression.
You're not allowed to do the act on radio.
Go through the procedure on radio.
Otherwise, you're broadcasting those things to people.
How did you do it?
Well, you're exactly right.
It's the procedure that you're not allowed to do over the air, because if you do that, there's a risk that listeners will follow along with it and be left in a state of hypnosis, which they find a little difficult to get out of.
They will come out of it, but it might mean going to sleep for an hour or so and then waking up normally.
And of course, it may be too late by then.
Yeah, well, it could be, as long as they're not driving a car.
Obviously, you don't hypnotise people when they're driving.
But clearly, yeah, so the procedure itself was done beforehand.
And all I had to do on the show, in fact, was to give people the signal that I had, if you like, implanted in them earlier, which in my case was very often I just gave them a touch on the shoulder and said the word relax.
And for them, because we'd been through the procedure before, that helped them to go straight back into where we wanted to be.
And then we could begin the regression experience and go back in time in the memory and establish certain things and ask them questions and get answers.
So the rest of it was all right because it wasn't running the risk of hypnotizing anybody who was listening.
You know, and doing the research for this conversation today, reading various articles and comments from people, that a lot of people, although they might believe that hypnosis is a thing and it works, are very, very, very skeptical about the idea of hypnotic regression, sometimes because the details that are brought up are unverified later, are not very specific.
And sometimes people say that all that you're recalling is a movie that you saw 20 years ago.
Maybe you saw the bridge on the river Kwai, and you suddenly think yourself into the role of Alec Guinness.
It's not a real memory.
What would you say to that?
It happens.
It's a thing called kryptomnesia, which is where you bring together all sorts of things you've read, experienced, watched, been told by other people, all sorts of things, and you bring them together and you weave them into a plausible story, given the situation where your mind can run wild, if you like.
So if your imagination has been allowed to run wild, you might be able to make up a story.
And I have to say, I don't like most of the regressions that have been done.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm wonderful.
But again, as I said before, I wouldn't take a lot of people into a room and suggest they go off back 2,000 years or suddenly become Cleopatra's handmaiden because there must have been a lot of them around, or that they are Henry VIII or something.
There are people that do that.
And I don't like it being done.
And for me, it says that, okay, a lot of regression is imagination.
And it can't be proved, or it's much more likely that it can be proved to be wrong.
But much as with all sorts of paranormal experiences, most of it is explicable.
Most of it is perfectly natural.
You know, the bumps in the night are just the floorboards creaking due to a change in the temperature.
But sometimes they're not.
And that's what's fascinating.
If 95% of it is rubbish, 5% of it is not rubbish.
Can't be explained away.
Hasn't been done by allowing people to go into flights of fancy, which is often quite difficult to keep up.
I can't imagine people doing some of the things that I've done and being, you know, not being terribly good at film world.
They should be actors.
They should be very famous because they're doing things much more sophisticated than many of the people being paid to do them are.
But the point is really that you try to go back without allowing the use of imagination or cutting it out.
And a lot of the things I did after the radio show, you know, thousands of people wrote in, wanted to become part of the research.
A lot of them were using imagination.
A lot of them were going back to things they'd thought about or getting information from a film they'd seen, just as you say.
But some of them were not.
Some of them I couldn't explain.
Were you ever able to verify any of the stories?
I have a dim recollection of these programs on Piccadilly Radio, but were you able to verify the memories that were brought out from anybody?
Yes, well, funny thing, verify is interesting.
One of the Cases was a girl who went back to being in Leeds, and she's in the book because there's a lot of evidence for it.
The long and the short of it is what she said, we don't know where she got it, but who she was, we can't confirm.
She gave names, you know, of her own name and her friends' names, and so on, and her boyfriend's name, and I couldn't find those.
We spent a lot of time trying to find them, couldn't find them.
The people, it seemed, didn't exist.
But this lady gave me some names.
She talked about streets, she talked about people.
And when I went through the records and listed down all the things that she said that I thought potentially could be checked, because for me, analysis is the important part.
I don't just want to let people have a bit of fun.
I want to verify and find evidence for myself.
And if I find that, then maybe it's useful in a book one day.
But she gave me the names of many things in Leeds, 30 or 40 things, at least she named that turned out to have been streets in Leeds in the 1930s, 40s, which is not long ago.
But it's a place she had never been to.
She hadn't studied maps of Leeds.
This particular bit of Leeds called Little London was actually mostly torn down in the early 50s when she was a baby in this life.
Sorry, get confused now.
When she was a baby in this life.
But it is not on maps today.
It doesn't exist today.
And yet she told me all these names.
And if you put them all together, you've got much more chance of winning the lottery than getting this right by listing lots of names that were actually on the map of Leeds that I managed to find from the time, from a planning organization, I think it was, for when they were knocking it all down.
And the equally fascinating thing is that she didn't give me a lot of names that weren't on the map.
So if you were using imagination and just making up names and hoping for the best, that didn't happen.
And were you satisfied in later researches, although she didn't give specific names that you could verify, she had a lot of specific knowledge about Leeds at that time.
Were you able to be satisfied as far as you could be that she hadn't read a book about Leeds, seen a TV programme about Leeds, or maybe been through Leeds and forgotten?
Yes, she'd never been to Leeds.
We did go to Leeds as part of the research after we'd finished doing aggressions and thought, well, we've not got any more to get out of this character.
Let's see if we can find something out.
So we went up and we looked in parish records and drove around the area a bit to see if anything was recognisable.
There wasn't anything out of the ordinary that she knew as herself.
It was all strange to her.
And yeah, I have to trust what she says, but I do, that she never actually did a project on this little part of Leeds at school, never read a book about it.
I don't know that there is a book about it, and certainly hadn't seen any maps.
I mean, these days, obviously, with Google and everything, you can get maps galore.
But in those days, no, this wasn't easy to check up, and it certainly wouldn't have been easy to manufacture.
Was she able to recount any of the events of her previous life?
Not necessarily how she died, but maybe that was part of it, or anything, any notable events from that previous life in Leeds?
Notable is sometimes difficult because it was a life that wasn't well off.
She wasn't well off.
She was quite poor.
It was a bit of a downtrodden area, if you like, of Leeds that she lived in.
And she didn't do an awful lot.
She had a bike, and they would get around and she talked about the work that went on, the work she went to do in munitions in the war, but nothing that you would say you could look up in the newspapers and say, oh, that's an event, you know, that why would she have known about that?
But then people would have said, well, maybe she looked at the newspaper then.
The proof isn't going to be there.
It's things like saying, well, I went for a ride.
We went to the zoo.
And it took us a while to get there, about 20 minutes maybe, on the bike.
And this zoo was here.
It was up north of where we are.
And they had, what did she say?
They had monkeys and birds, she said.
The only thing she did say.
And I have only recently managed to discover, sounds odd because it was probably a well-known place, but there's a zoo called Round Hay Park, which is north of Leeds, by about 12 miles.
And I found a newspaper article that happened to verify that they had monkeys and birds.
And I thought, well, why are they mentioning these things so specially?
But it must have been a special thing.
And in a way, it's a lot of little things building up rather than saying, yes, somebody was at the coronation in 1953 and met the Queen.
I mean, these are events that would be tremendous if we could find them, but they're not always there.
And other stories of people who went off in the Boer War and died two days later kind of thing, they have a similar pattern.
They tell me an awful lot about what went on, but you can rarely find the person.
And it's a strange thing, in a way, it's a thought that drives some of my thinking, is that maybe we're just not meant to know.
Maybe these questions we ask are meant to be asked, but we're not meant to get the answers because it takes you back to thoughts about why do we exist?
Why are we here?
You know, that's the fundamental driving question for probably you and for me.
What's it all about?
What's life for?
I get that.
So if you knew the answers to those questions, you wouldn't really make much of an effort here and now.
That's right.
You might not as well exist.
You know, the whole planet could just go away because the only reason in my mind for a physical existence is so that we can experience things that we would not experience in a non-physical existence.
Go back to your accident.
Obviously, that created a certain amount of pain for you as well, but you wouldn't have experienced that if you were just a spirit somewhere, if you were just a soul.
And that experience has taught you something.
Every experience we go through teaches us something.
And if that teaching that we're getting is to be of any use at all, it can't just be for this life.
You know, I have a feeling that we're teaching, learning lessons, learning to be humble, learning to love, learning to do whatever we do, picking up something, but for some reason, our soul needs to learn.
And if in one life you pick up lots of things, I don't think you're going to be able to pick up everything that a Soul might be able to learn.
So, some of our proclivities and some of the things we're afraid of, some of the things we like, you're saying that those things may have been implanted in a previous existence, even if we don't know how that happens.
Not so much saying that, but sometimes that has happened.
I think a lot of most of the time, actually, most of the time, I think that the problems that we have are in this life.
Things like phobias, for example.
I don't think we're afraid of water because we drowned in a previous life, most of the time.
Sometimes, maybe that happens.
And if it's a carryover thing that you feel as though you haven't finished the job, as it were, then sometimes a thing that happened to you in a previous life may carry over into the current one.
But most of the time, what's going wrong for you in this life has been caused in this life, and you can fix it in this life.
But in other things, let's say in the way you deal with other people, you know, if you've been a nice person, maybe that's something your soul needed to learn from.
If you've been a nasty person, and even nasty persons have souls, they needed to learn from that too.
So it's more of a, it's a deeper level, if you like, a deeper level than just the existence we have and thinking everything about us is physical, therefore that's all there is.
I'd like people to open their minds a bit and think, well, actually, if there's a reason for me living, perhaps it's to feed something to the part of me that seems extra to my body, that is elsewhere, that would explain a lot of other things that we do, other paranormal things, too.
Storing up a lot of experiences for future reference, for the greater nurturing of your soul.
You said also paranormal things.
Yes, because I think, you know, when people mind read, when they get a message from a friend that says, I'm going to, you know, something's happened to me, please call.
And people call up and say, what's the matter?
And the person says, what, how did you know?
You know, these things where we connect in different ways, or even where we see ghosts, or where people run seances and so on and get messages from the other side.
You know, although, as I said before, maybe 95% is rubbish.
There's a 5% that is not rubbish.
Those are things that perhaps are more explicable or understandable if we think there is more to us than just a physical body and a physical mind run by chemicals and all the result of some accident.
I just don't believe life is accidental.
And I believe this physical part of us and other physical lives that we lead are meant to be building somehow the soul.
But I also think I'm being vague because if we think we know everything, we don't.
There's always something we don't know.
But if we knew everything, if the soul knew everything, why would we have a physical existence at all?
You're being vague but refreshing, I think, and that's a nice thing.
In terms of recollections that come out in these things, and let's go back to that case in Leeds just briefly.
I mean, there seems to be a multifarious ways.
That's a way of putting it.
Multifarious ways that those recollections might get there.
If they're not just recollections of something that you've seen on television or read in a book, then are they within your DNA?
Are you accessing some kind of universal consciousness that rides above all of us, which a lot of people believe exists?
And I certainly have a lot of time for that notion.
How exactly are they getting there?
Well, I think in regression, the hope is that under hypnosis, you're reaching another level of consciousness and you're able to contact your subconscious.
And it's from your subconscious that you make the connections.
So if you like, when I'm regressing somebody, I am sitting here, I'm talking to their physical selves, to the bit of them that can hear me.
They're taking that down to a deeper level.
And if you like, moving out from there.
And my theory is that what they're contacting is the part of them that has contact with the soul.
Let's say the soul.
And each of us has a soul.
And at some level, it may become a universal soul.
But for the time being, if you like, with the limited thinking that we're able to do, our soul is dependent on us to feed it with some information.
The soul may have other things to do.
It will have lots of other things to do.
And it may well be contacting other souls.
It might be working with the universal subconscious or unconscious, who knows?
But I'd like to think that somehow we are an element of the soul, but we have a physical part to us.
Maybe that's a better way of thinking about it.
I would say looking through the other end of the telescope, try and see things, not from the viewpoint of a physical person, restricted to the physical things, but think of yourself as a soul living this life through a physical existence that you need to experience it, to experience love, hate, pain, comfort, pleasure, all the things that we go through and all the lessons we have potentially to learn in this life.
And the connection is there.
And if that's the reason we're doing all this physical stuff, I don't think there's enough time in one lifetime.
So that's just the logical point of view that says, well, sure, we can't learn everything we need to learn in one life.
I don't think we can.
You're not going to experience being male, female, young, old, rich, poor, powerful, weak, weak.
You know, all of these things don't happen in one lifetime.
They happen a bit sometimes.
But a lot of the time, I think perhaps we're just put here to learn one little thing.
And we spend 70 or 80 years doing it if we're lucky.
And then we take out this empty light bulb and go into another one and live another life to learn something else.
And we may have to do that millions of times.
Let's hope it's a progression, Jim.
I'd hope to help.
I hate to think rather that the bad experiences that we have in this life, they might be worse in the next one.
I hope things kind of get better as we go on.
Yeah, it's pretty bad here at the moment, isn't it?
It's not great.
Yes, I'd like to think there's something good coming.
But yeah, and hopefully there is.
I mean, I don't know how much time we've got left.
Well, you know, we've got it.
How long is a piece of string?
We've got about a quarter of an hour or thereabouts.
As you said, there's so much to talk about because, I mean, one of the other things in the book That I guess is going to cause a lot of attention was the case of Jenny Cockle.
Jenny Cockkell.
Yeah.
Were you aware of that before?
I was.
In fact, Jenny Cockkell, the most famous, just for listeners who may not remember it or may never have heard of it, Jenny Cockkell, probably the most famous person involved in regression.
An English woman, and I'm reading this now, claims that even before the age of four, she felt she'd previously be called Mary, I think in Ireland, and appeared to vividly remember the details of her death in the 1930s.
I think, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, Jenny Cokell even featured in one of those strange but true programs that David Frost did back in the day.
Am I right about that?
Yes, it wasn't David Frost.
It was, oh, another guy, good-looking guy, Michael something.
But yeah, I too was in that program, strangely, because we were involved with the same case.
I was the hypnotist involved with taking her back to try and understand more about these memories that she already had.
Because this is one way of trying to cut out, if you like, the imagination part of this.
Well, if we investigate memories that people already have, perhaps we can elaborate, extend the information, get into depth and find something checkable.
So that's what I was trying to do with Jenny.
And we went through several sessions of hypnosis.
And we went back to this character and a few others, mainly focused on this particular character, which Jenny was really quite keen on understanding more about, understandably.
It's the one that she had dreamt about, the one that she thought related most to her.
Eventually, she went to Ireland and looked into it and came back, wrote the book, Yesterday's Children, which is quite a good book.
And there was a film made called Yesterday's Children as well in America.
And she went on a tour, a pretty extensive tour, I'm sure, talking about this and telling people about her experiences and her beliefs, which was interesting.
And I was quite happy with all that.
I didn't feel totally comfortable with it because we hadn't done it, hadn't had a chance to do enough research into the other names that she mentioned.
The problem for me has come, and it's sad to say it in the book, I have what I would call pretty substantial proof that it isn't actually real.
The fact is that Mary Sutton, who was the character that she thinks she was, did exist, clearly, died in childbirth at the local hospital, having had about eight, five or six other children anyway, and was worried about those other, Jenny was worried about those other children being looked after, not by the husband, but by some other people, or what would happen to them.
And that's the thought that was as why was that carried over into this life?
And the theory is that Jenny needed to solve that problem before she could put it to rest.
Sadly, what I discovered, because the first book I wrote was back in late 2019.
And at that point, I had just related the story of Jenny as I understood it, put the regressions into the book so people could read it and decide for themselves, and said, you know, there's not a lot more to be said about it.
We can't find this person because that wasn't what she was called in the book.
She wasn't Mary Sutton at the time.
And we can't prove that she existed.
So I left it at that.
Jenny wasn't happy with that.
Long story short, I tried to talk to her about it.
I tried to get her involved, but she wasn't really interested in being involved in something that was going to, if you like, pull the story apart.
It's not my intention to do.
I couldn't help it.
The truth is the truth.
Well, of course, she's not here to speak for herself, but she's still with us, isn't she?
She is.
Yes, she's still very much around and still holds strong views, still publishes books.
But I found that when I looked into it, the Mary Sutton, who did exist, had almost no similarity with the things that had been talked about in the regression sessions or even in Jenny's earlier dreams.
I was disappointed.
You know, I have to admit, I would love to find the proof that all this is real.
But again, I don't think we're supposed to know.
That's an aside.
But I held the book back from being sold for about six months while I did some very extensive research.
I added about 80 pages to the book, lots of information that I managed to dig up.
But the end result of it, and I know I'm giving this away, but I really don't care.
The end result of it is that I have to say she was not Mary Sutton.
She may have been somebody else, but we never had the chance to find out enough about that person to be able to look into it and do any decent research.
So you think in this case, and again, I'm jumping in, sorry for that.
In this case, you think that more research is needed and perhaps she was recalling other memories, not of Mary Sutton, but of somebody else.
I think there's a quote that I'm looking at here, quotes, I had tiny fragments of dozens and dozens of memories, but there were four past lives that came through the strongest and the memories of Mary were the strongest of all.
Right.
In a way, that's the way Jenny understands it, and I can see that.
But if you look at it from a very dispassionate point of view, what Jenny did was go to Ireland to try and search it all out, see what she could find.
It was actually suggested to her that she was looking for Mary Sutton.
Another person said, oh, this is a lady who lived down the road here and had nine children and died in 1935, whatever it was.
And her name's Mary Sutton, and that's who you're looking for.
And that's the first time that the name Mary Sutton appeared in Jenny's life.
But she picked it up and ran with it, if you like, to say that.
She adopted it, thought it worked.
The beauty of it is that it managed to find the family of Mary Sutton, some of whom weren't in touch with each other since then, and bring them together.
And that was a lovely story, and that made good television as well, I have to say.
But it wasn't hers.
That's the sad thing.
It was a story that she picked up, was prepared to accept what Other people said about Mary Sutton's life, and if you like, adopt them as her own.
That's the best way I can put it.
She did not do anything deliberate, she was not trying to fool anybody, she was telling a story, but she was led down the wrong pathway by some people.
And fascinating, nonetheless, I'm just reading here in one account online, Chris French, who's a professor who studies the psychology of paranormal belief.
He's been a guest many times on my shows over the last 20 years or so.
I don't know, but I'm well aware of it.
Well, he believes, according to this write-up that I'm looking at, that it is an example of what you said, a sort of confirmation bias.
So the more information you put in, the more what you're discovering gets confirmed.
I mean, I would love to speak with Jenny Coquell if you're listening to this now and you know her, she is still around, then I would be very keen to speak with her about this separately.
Okay, so that's that case.
For you in your career then, in the 40 odd years that you've been doing it, what is the most convincing case or the most shocking case that you've come across?
I think I have to go back to the Leeds case as the most convincing because there's so much information there that could not really have been, couldn't have been made up because she would have made up a lot that didn't fit, but everything she said fitted.
Everything she said was very convincing, even though I couldn't confirm who she was.
It's as though there's some little bit of the jigsaw is being held back.
But yeah, she, I think, is the most real one.
In my experience, in other experiences, there were good stories from the ones that got me interested in the first place, from the blocks and tapes back in the 60s or 70s, I think, from the story of Bridie Murphy, from other stories that have been around since.
And there are a number of good stories, but there are also a number of ones which I would agree with Chris Fench about, that they've either been made through cryptonesia, imagination and bringing things together, or they have been this business of confirmation, as he says.
And it's fascinating as it is, they're really, There's a lot of interest, but you have to search hard for real proof.
There was something you said earlier that I wanted to pick up on again.
And I can't remember what it was, so maybe it'll come back to me.
That's the way the subconscious works, you know.
Okay, well, let me say this then.
If it is also inexact, though fascinating because there are aspects of mind that we're discovering, if it is so hit and miss, and we can't be sure that there's not confirmation bias happening, you know, we can't be absolutely certain that what people are recalling actually happened, although there are many cases I know, and I'm sure my listener will email me with more cases where people have come up with stuff that it has been possible to confirm.
And, you know, we've no idea how that can be, you know, not necessarily involving hypnotic regression.
There was the little boy who believed that he'd lived on the island of Barra in the north of Scotland and knew some very, very specific things about a past life that he'd had there.
And many, many other cases.
The case of a young man in America who believed that he'd been a movie star called Malty or Marty somebody.
The name escapes me right now.
It's my age, you know, the memory.
The memories fade.
That's an aspect of my brain.
All Marty Martin or Malty Martin or something like that.
Marty Martin case.
So they're all fascinating.
They don't necessarily involve hypnotic regression, as far as I'm aware, but my listener will again correct me about that, I'm sure.
But if it's so inexact, this is getting to the point now, if it is so inexact, how can we ever develop this and how can it be useful going forward?
I think you have to distinguish between methods and things like that, because I hate the use of hypnotism in entertainment, but that's where most people know about it from.
And in the same way, I hate the use of regression to entertain.
It needs to be proper research.
It needs to be carefully done with no leading questions and so on.
You know, oh, we're in the Second World War, aren't we now?
You know, that sort of thing.
You have to ask people, which war are you in?
And then they'll tell you something.
So you don't ask questions that would lead somebody to a particular route through this.
And really, it's just, I guess the theory I had was if we can talk to people who have already some experience, they've experienced something, then hypnotism can be used to expand it.
I'm not so keen on the idea of hypnotism creating it, although I'm, you know, quite a lot of what I've done, I guess.
But certainly when you come across something that you can look at and say, well, that's proof.
Like, you know, if I had twins, if twins want to phone in and volunteer, identical twins that is, then we can see whether they actually go back to being the same person in a previous life or different people.
And it might help us to understand something of it.
But there are cases where people have had experiences, they remember something.
I mean, if I go back to the Leeds case yet again, that lady had a recurring nightmare.
And we sort of discovered what that was about and it disappeared.
She stopped having it from that moment on.
And it was a very violent recurring nightmare that she and her husband were worried about.
She would have been a rampage around the house and rip off doorknobs and things like that.
But we discovered what it was, and that did come from a previous life.
So I'm not averse to that idea.
And what exactly did she say?
Just to go back to that, what exactly did she experience that made her have those nightmares?
What was it?
Well, it was a very violent father, who in the end, we believe, killed her.
And that was what caused that.
And perhaps there was a carryover.
And again, it's one of these things where maybe something was never finished.
It was never resolved.
So somehow, through the subconscious and into her conscious, this story appeared that kept on at her, in a way, to say, let's finish this.
And it just wanted to, you know, the subconscious or the unknown part of us, if you like, wanted to get this thing out of the way because it was holding it up.
So I'm just speculating at the moment.
But that's a fascinating thing.
The other odd thing, which you might be interested in, I know you'd like to meet Jenny Kocau again, but the Leeds lady actually rediscovered me.
And I am in touch with her.
It was only since she bought the book because she thought, what's this book by Jim Alexander?
I remember what we went through.
And she read the book.
And then, because my email address is in it, she emailed me.
And this is only last year.
And I thought it was a remarkable coincidence.
I thought she'd gone to America.
I thought I would never hear from her again and we'd never go any further with it.
But we did.
And we've been in contact.
And it was due to her that I'm in contact with you, strangely.
So fate is a funny thing, too.
How strange.
What she heard my shows and told you about them or something.
She listened to your shows.
Her husband listened to her shows.
And then she said, oh, you should be on that.
So I said, oh, right.
And we did.
And as I said, strangely, I'm in touch with her.
And again, if you wanted to talk to her, you could do.
I'd love to.
I think that is something that we have to do.
Maybe we could do a sort of group call, digital hookup.
If we can agree a time between America, Huddersfield, and me in Southwest London, then I think that would be a very good one to do, Jim.
I think we have to have other conversations.
And, you know, apart from the ongoing communication with the woman from Leeds, are there any other bits of research that you're currently involved in?
No, you've got me there.
I mean, COVID has stopped a lot of things.
And obviously being so involved with the book has stopped a lot of things.
And there are other things that came into life that I won't go through that kind of stopped my progress back from those early days a little bit for a while.
But, you know, we go through these traumas, don't we?
As we've been talking about, as long as we learn something from them, that's okay.
There has to be a point to it all, I guess.
And the other thing is that I've been watching reruns on a TV channel here in the UK called Talking Pictures TV of a program that used to be repeated all the time when I was a little kid called The Human Jungle with Herbert and Mom.
Yes.
Which had a wonderful John Barry theme to it.
If you want to look that out now, it goes, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum.
That was when I was a little tiny boy.
That was on ABC television at the weekends.
And I was fascinated by this guy.
And even though the stories by our definitions today are simplistic, the things that they throw up about the human mind and the things that you suppress and the things that have happened to you that you don't want to know about and those things that you need to change are utterly fascinating.
The point of me telling you that is that we don't seem to be representing what you've done in your lifetime and what other people do, the hypnosis, hypnotic, we don't seem to be representing that too much in fiction these days.
And I think we should.
I agree with you.
And I think I watched those programmes as well.
And I saw one recently where, yes, probably the one you watched as well, where he really was talking about the mind and the subconscious and the things that we've talked about today.
And therefore, it was much more accepted then than it seems to be now.
And I think that's very sad.
But it's possibly the result of us being, what can I say, medicalized rather too much.
You know, too many solutions have to come from the existing services.
And as wonderful as they are, and I really do think the NHS is wonderful, and we should all be very grateful, they tend to think they need to do everything and they don't.
And in fact, if they would focus on the things they were truly great at and leave some of these other things to people who have more experience or have been involved for longer, rather than them trying to do something where they've had perhaps half a day's training on hypnosis in seven years of becoming a doctor or five years, that really is a side issue for them.
They're much more used to diagnosing physical problems and producing physical results for helping them.
And for me, as I said earlier, it takes an awful lot longer than it should take to get people better, to get people out of these things that have been created within them that can be resolved within them as well.
And I have to say from all of my years of doing broadcast radio, I use the same rules and regulations for my podcast here.
It has to be said, as it would be said on air if I was doing a show or anybody, that if you feel you have any issues, the first port of call has got to be your general practitioner, your GP.
And that's something that we say as a caveat on air, and I think it's important.
And I would love it to be the case that the doctors are prepared to work with the hypnotherapists and that they work with good hypnotherapists because again, I have to say, not everybody's perfect.
There's so much that we could talk about.
I hope we get an opportunity to do that.
I think we should do a part two.
I think we should get...
Her name is Jill.
First name is Jill.
Well, she's in the book, isn't she, anyway?
I'm happy to pass on her information to you, which I'll send you in any matter.
Well, let's make a date in a month or two to reconvene, see if we can get Jill, you, Jim, and me, Howard all together, and we'll take it forward because, as you say, there are so many other things that we can talk about.
In the meantime, though, the book is called New Lives, Old Souls.
Talk to me about how we can get that.
I think the easiest way to find it is to simply put into Google, New Lives, Old Souls, Jim Alexander, and you should be taken to the appropriate Amazon site that will be at the book.
And it's nice to read the reviews of the book.
I mean, you've got some honest and detailed and considered reviews of your book.
It's nice to see that.
I better give a warning.
There is one there that I'm very suspicious about.
Well, no, we don't know that.
But we know what it is.
But your average is extremely good.
It's new lives, old souls, available, as they say, through Amazon and I'm sure various other portals.
And Jim, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
I hope you have.
Thank you.
I'm left feeling there is so much more to say, but obviously we have limited time today.
And I think if you're open to this, if your listeners or listener has any questions, maybe they'll come to you as well.
And then we can deal with that at the same time.
Indeed.
And would you be open to them coming to you if there's anything pressing that somebody wants to contact you about?
Yeah, by all means.
And my email, which is in the book, is jim alexander.books at gmail.com.
I've enjoyed this to be continued, as they say, on TV.
Me too.
Thank you, Howard.
You've been hearing Jim Alexander.
Your thoughts, as ever, welcome on him and any guests that we have here on The Unexplained.
Just go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me an email from there.
And I love to get your emails every day.
Let's hope by the time we speak again, the weather is better than the rain pounding on my window right now.
Once we've been through the storms, of course, once we've, didn't that song say, I've made it through the rain, once we've made it through the rain.
You know what I'm saying?
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is still Howard Hughes.
This is still the unexplained.
And please stay safe, stay calm.
And whatever you do, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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