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Jan. 15, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 693 - Jim Willis

As requested, Jim Willis in South Carolina - on his decades of deep research into topics like our ancient origins, NDEs and dowsing...

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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'm looking out of the window now.
	It is round about mid-January by the time you're going to be hearing this, and the sky is a kind of, well, watery grey.
	I just, you know, I'm hoping that one of these days we will see the sun again.
	I know it's there somewhere.
	It's just not anywhere I can see it right now.
	So that's where we're at.
	Two months and counting, roughly to spring.
	And, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do.
	When they say it's the first day of spring, I think I'm going to run round the park cheering to myself.
	Because it's been a long, not necessarily cold.
	We had one little short phase of extreme cold in the UK.
	For us, extreme cold.
	Like minus 6, 7, 8 in London is a lot at night.
	And then that went away very quickly, just before Christmas.
	And we've been stuck in this kind of moderately springtime, early springtime temperatures, very damp, loads of rain, some parts of the country having flooding.
	That's where we're at.
	That's the weather report.
	Hope everything is okay with you.
	I'm not going to do shout-outs on this edition of The Unexplained.
	I will do some in future.
	If you want to contact me, you know how to do it.
	Go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
	Nearly forgot what it was myself then.
	Designed and created by Adam.
	No, I didn't.
	And you can follow the link and send me an email from there.
	And if you'd like to make a donation to The Unexplained online to keep it going, 17 years it'll be in March, then you can do that through the website theunexplained.tv too.
	Do not forget, of course, at all times to check in on my official Facebook page.
	That is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the one with my official logo on it, and the one that is represented by me and controlled by me, with Adam checking in on it from time to time.
	That's the official Facebook page.
	And anything that happens with me, anything that might be about to happen with the TV show, any news, is going to be there first.
	So if you want to know where I am, what's going on with the show, what's coming up, then you can find it at the official Facebook page of the Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	Every so often, I'll get a listener suggesting a guest that I should have on the show.
	And quite a lot of the time, the guests that are suggested are very good and people that I've overlooked or never heard of.
	One of those suggestions came from a listener who suggested and kept suggesting, and I'm glad that he did, a man called Jim Willis, who I've never heard of, I have to say.
	And we'll be talking with him about a whole range of topics, including ancient civilizations and the perhaps hidden truth of our own past, where we came from, what we are, and also dowsing.
	We're going to talk with him.
	He covers a vast array of subjects.
	I think we're even going to get some references to Mars in here.
	Now, Jim Willis, let me tell you about him before we meet him.
	He got his master's degree in theology, is an ordained minister and has been for more than 40 years.
	He's also taught college courses in comparative religion and cross-cultural studies.
	He is very, very open-minded, as you're going to hear about a whole bunch of things.
	His books include, and the titles will display that, Ancient Gods, Lost Histories, Hidden Truths and the Conspiracy of Silence, Supernatural Gods, Spiritual Mysteries, Psychic Experiences and Scientific Truths and Lost Civilizations, The Secret Histories and Suppressed Technologies of the Ancients, and apparently his location is in the woods of South Carolina with his wife Barbara.
	South Carolina seems to be a very popular place to go and live and be at the moment.
	I don't know why that might be.
	But I think I'm also witnessing in the United Kingdom.
	There are people who are leaving the cities now.
	They don't want to be in the cities.
	And I've been in London for years.
	You know, that I wasn't born in London.
	I'm a liverpuglian.
	And I lived near the sea for my first 22 years with my wonderful parents.
	And I've lived here in London for more than that now.
	But even I've thought recently, maybe it's time to go.
	You know, if you weren't born here, if you don't have family here.
	But what I'm saying is that there seems to be a move both sides of the Atlantic for people to get out of the great big cities like New York and Washington, D.C., Los Angeles to some extent, and the other big cities.
	And, you know, maybe there's something going on.
	Maybe people have decided that something a little more, a little less, yeah, less frenetic is what's required.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I'm going to give it some consideration, you know, because I still have to have my humble abode refurbished and brought into this century.
	So maybe I won't do that.
	Maybe I'll just sell up and go.
	I don't know.
	Just thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.
	Tossing out thoughts as they come.
	All right, more importantly, you don't want to hear any of that.
	More importantly, let's get to the guest now in the United States in South Carolina, Jim Willis.
	Jim, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	Good to be with you, Howard.
	How is South Carolina?
	You're in the rural part, aren't you?
	Very rural.
	And by design, when I came, when I decided to come up here, I was living down in Florida, right near Daytona Beach.
	So we were surrounded by growth.
	And we used to say the national bird was the crane because cranes were building these great high-rises all over the place.
	And it was just so crowded and so noisy.
	And when I retired, I wanted to retire someplace where I could get in touch with reality.
	And that's what brought me to South Carolina.
	It was kind of fun because I hadn't planned on necessarily retiring up here right away.
	I was only 62 years old and not old enough really to retire.
	I couldn't really afford it.
	But I drew a circle about six hours out from where we were down in Daytona Beach.
	And this, because I knew with more than six hours, it would be hard for me to get up here as much as I wanted to.
	And so I, you know, I found this place.
	It looked kind of interesting On the map, and I wrote some letters out to some real estate agents.
	And one of them responded and said, I think I had just what you're looking for.
	I wanted to find out a little about what the area was like, so I went online and discovered some local newspapers.
	And one of them was writing a religion column.
	Well, I was at the time an ordained Christian minister.
	And so I started reading the column, and it was based on the ABCs of religion.
	A is for Aaron, B is for Baptist, C is for Catholic, that kind of thing.
	And this particular one was, U is for Unitarianism on this particular day.
	So I read the article, and I remarked to my wife, boy, that's this local newspaper up there.
	You know, they're writing this article on these articles on religion, and this guy seems to know what he's talking about.
	And she started laughing.
	And when I read it to her, she said, well, he ought to know what he's talking about.
	You wrote it.
	And I said, what?
	And sure enough, down at the bottom, the credit was Jim Willis, author of The Religion Book.
	Wow.
	And so.
	So you didn't, hang on.
	You didn't realize that you were reading your own work.
	No, I had written it some, oh, I don't know, 15 years, maybe 10 years before.
	We've got to say that you're pretty prolific, so I quite understand.
	I've got stuff that I did years ago.
	People sometimes play it to me, and I can't believe it's me either, but that's amazing.
	By the way, what was H for?
	Is it Hellfire?
	I'm not even sure.
	The religion book is kind of a one-volume encyclopedia, so it goes A, B, C, D, E, and all of the different religions or philosophies or metaphysical or whatever under A and then B and then C. So it was ready-made for a series of articles like this, but I really didn't remember writing it.
	One of the things, for a man who's been a minister for 40 odd years, according to your biography, one of the interesting things that you say that sounds almost counterintuitive, really, compared with other people of similar backgrounds I've spoken with.
	You said in one quote in an interview that I watched today that you regard science and religion as actually being the same.
	How is that?
	Well, I think they're both looking for truth.
	But before I do that, I guess we have to kind of explain science and religion.
	They're the same in good ways and they're the same in bad ways too.
	In the good way, I think science is looking for the truth.
	Who are we?
	Where do we come from?
	What's out there?
	And I think religion is doing the same thing at root, except they're using different techniques.
	One is intellectual, one is intuitive.
	One is data-based, and one is more subjective in line.
	In that sense, they're good.
	But in another sense, I think they share some bad traits too.
	Religion, as we all know nowadays, especially, has divided.
	I'm not comfortable using the word religion very much now today, except in certain contexts, because I'm more comfortable with spirituality, because to me, spirituality unites.
	Religion, as we well know by looking at the news, it divides.
	And I'm afraid that religious people can establish denominations which say we are right and you are wrong.
	They can produce fundamentalists, which say these are the fundamentals and you have to believe these or you won't belong to our club.
	Unfortunately, I think science has done the same thing.
	Science, it has certain denominations and they tend to circle their wagons and say this is the way it is.
	And you've either got to accept this or we don't accept you.
	And I always thought, you know, that science, and I'm a big one for science.
	I've known and spoken to many scientists over the years, and I have a lot of time for it.
	You know, we're a scientific society.
	However, I was shocked recently when one of my guests told me that because of his differing views, there were scientists who'd abused him.
	I don't know whether it was in the email era, I think perhaps verbally face to face, and threatened him in the use of threatening gestures and whatever, because he differed from them.
	Now, when you start getting there, then you start becoming more doctrine than science, don't you?
	You start becoming less questing and more entrenched.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Classic example is what we're going through right here in American archaeology and anthropology right now.
	For 100 years, Clovis I was the scientific anthropological idea, system that everybody grasped.
	Clovis I simply said that some 14,000, 16,000 years ago, a group of people came over here on the land bridge across from Siberia, across Beringia, which is now underwater, but then it was above water, and they came down through the ice sheets and they populated the world and they invented this wonderful Clovis first weapon, spear point, which was named because it was found near the town of Clovis, New Mexico.
	And it was found in the same strata, matter of fact, within the same body of an ancient mastodon that apparently this projectile point had killed.
	And so it was said, you know, America was 14,000, 16,000 years old, and the Clovis people were the first ones, and that was it.
	And this went on for 100 years, except they kept on finding these anomalous sites all the way down in Peru, for instance, and in Chile.
	Here about 20, 30 miles south of us at the place called this Topper site.
	They were discovered right on the banks of the Savannah River, a site where it showed undoubted debottage and even some stone tools, which were chipped out by ancient people, except they were in a strata that was almost 50,000 years old.
	And it was tested and tested and tested, and it always kept coming up the same.
	And the man who was responsible for the site, who I have since talked to many times, actually had to tell his students, he said, We're finding all these Clovis things, but we're going to go deeper.
	However, I have to warn you: if we find human artifacts deeper than Clovis, your careers are in jeopardy.
	They will hound you out.
	You won't be able to get any money.
	You won't be able to get tenure.
	You won't be able to get teaching positions.
	They will hound you out of the business.
	And what a horrible way for science to act.
	But that's the way it was.
	And that's the way it was, but things are changing a little, aren't they?
	Sorry, I jumped in there.
	No, no, no, no.
	Feel free anytime.
	I have a tendency to get passionate about these things.
	Yeah, they're changing a lot.
	And thanks to people like Graham Hancock, for instance, who has really torn open the whole thing about this.
	His recent Netflix series on apocalypse is just wonderful.
	And it's scientifically based.
	He raises all these questions that fundamentalist scientists want to scrape under the rug.
	And the same thing was going on in religion.
	Fundamentalist religionists, there were certain Bible verses that didn't fit, and they wanted to sweep them under the rug.
	It's a very common human thing, and it shouldn't take place, but it does, and it has ruined reputations, and it has ruined people's lives and ruined their careers.
	And it's just a terrible thing.
	So we started out by saying, what do science and religion have in common?
	Well, this is one of the things.
	They're both looking for truth.
	That's great.
	But when you say you have to find truth according to my doctrine or my dogma, then it's not so good.
	Yes, the tendency to become dogmatic.
	But nevertheless, the light of changing thoughts gets into the news.
	This is a very clumsy way of putting it, but gets into our newspapers from time to time.
	And I was interested to read because I have to put together a news segment for my television show every week.
	And recently I read that there was another little glimmer of difference from the way that we've thought of things in the past, revealed recently.
	The idea that the Neanderthals and our descendants, our predecessors, that our predecessors and the Neanderthals mixed much more than we thought and shared tools and ideas and perhaps interbred to some extent.
	And that's something that we hadn't really allowed for.
	Yeah, more than some extent.
	If you're not of pure African heritage, you probably have Neanderthal DNA within you.
	Just about all of us do, in small amounts, mostly in small amounts, sometimes larger amounts.
	And not only Neanderthal, but now, of course, with the discovery of Denisovans, another cousin way back there in the family tree, that we probably interbred with them.
	We are probably a mixture of Chromignon or however, you know, whatever particular name is on right now with Neanderthal and with Denisovan.
	And this new species developed down in New Zealand and around that area of what they're calling the hobbit, because of their small stature.
	Branches of the human tree that we didn't even know were there.
	When I moved out here to the woods 15 years ago, many of these things were not known.
	Gobekli had just been discovered and just started, Gobekli Tepe had just started to be talked about.
	It's an exciting time.
	And I thanked television for it.
	It used to be in the old days that when you wanted to get your word out, you had to pass muster by publishing something that couldn't be published unless it passed a peer review.
	And most of your peers who were reviewing it probably disagreed if it was brand new research.
	And you couldn't get your word out.
	But nowadays with television and radio and work like you're doing, frankly, I mean, you're at the forefront of this kind of thing, you and your colleagues, because people are able to talk to you and bring out these ideas that would have just been buried in academia if they had lived in an earlier time.
	So this is an exciting time to live.
	And knowledge is a dynamic.
	It is something that constantly changes, and we sometimes forget that.
	And you mentioned this obliquely just before.
	I'm glad that you record some of the mile markers and some of the articles and people who've made these points.
	You say in the book in April 2017, it's only six years ago now, Kate Wong in Scientific American reported on a story published in Nature that recorded the discovery of the broken bones of a mastodon that are at least 130,000 years old.
	Old mastodon bones alone don't really prove anything, you say, but the significance of these is that they show evidence of being hammered apart by human beings in order to obtain bone marrow.
	The hammer stones were discovered right alongside the bones themselves.
	The only way a human species could have arrived in California at that time was by boat along the coast.
	So that once again indicates that all is not the way that we thought it was.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And how this was taken over by the academic community.
	I have a beautiful story to illustrate this.
	A couple of summers ago, I took some time off.
	I was really busy researching the mound culture, the mound-building culture along the Mississippi River.
	And it began at Watson's Break down in Louisiana.
	And so after having a road trip where I visited a lot of mounds and went into a lot of museums, I got right down there to where it began, Watson's Break in Louisiana.
	And it was the holy ground where probably the first mound was built.
	And I walked into the place first thing in the morning.
	I had got a motel nearby because I knew I was going to spend a lot of time at this site the next day.
	So I walked into the place and there was the archaeologist, the docent, so to speak, who was running the place.
	And I was all alone with him.
	And so he came up to me and he said, do you have any questions?
	Well, this was His home.
	I didn't want to insult him or anything like that.
	So I just asked a couple of softball questions.
	And along the time, Graham Hancock's book, America Before, had just come out.
	And so I said, I imagine you probably got a lot of visitors here now that Graham Hancock's book has come out.
	And he huffed himself up, pulled back his shoulders and said, I don't read any of Graham Hancock's books.
	I've never read any of Graham Hancock's books.
	And I said, oh, how come?
	And he gave me the scientific explanation.
	He said, because Graham Hancock is an idiot.
	Well, there are many, many millions of people who would disagree with that assessment.
	But, you know, that is the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?
	The reason that Graham Hancock, and I know that he's been on my show a number of times and you admire him and I find his work and his take on things utterly fascinating.
	But he's been willing and able to open his mind.
	And so have the many people who look at his work.
	But some people don't want to open their mind.
	And that's why I do this show.
	Not everybody that I speak with, I believe, is telling me the absolute gospel truth, not because they're trying to deceive me, but because they might be incorrect.
	But I want to hear what they have to say in order that I can sift it all through that mush between my ears and come to some kind of conclusions about what I feel about the world.
	But that's a very funny story.
	And what was your reaction to that?
	What did you say?
	Oh, I'm afraid I was very sarcastic.
	I said, oh, well, I hadn't considered that point of view.
	And thank goodness somebody else walked in the front door and he went to speak to them right away and I didn't see him for the rest of the day.
	But more and more and more, we get information coming out.
	And our knowledge of the past is not entirely what we thought it was.
	Sorry, again, I must let you speak.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	That's okay.
	I had a story one time, something that happened to me as a minister that it was just so important, and it illustrates this so well.
	I had a person in my congregation whose father died about two months before he was born in a car accident.
	And his father died in this accident.
	And so the boy grew up not knowing his father.
	And he was always, of course, curious.
	And his picture of his father was built around the reports of family members.
	And people would tell him stories at holidays, gatherings, and all this kind of thing.
	And so over the years, he developed this picture of who his father was.
	Well, his mother finally passed away as well when he was quite a bit older.
	His mother passed away, and he had to go and kind of pack up her belongings.
	And while going upstairs to the attic, he discovered in a trunk up there a bunch of his father's diaries that he had never known were there.
	He'd never read them.
	And now he was hearing firsthand from his father who he really was.
	It changed his complete perspective of who his father was.
	I think that we have, in effect, grown up not knowing who our father was.
	We have not known who our predecessors were.
	And I think now archaeology and anthropologists, they are beginning to release some of those diaries, some of those early diaries that say maybe our history isn't what quite we were.
	Graham Hancock likes to say we are a culture with amnesia, and I have to agree with him.
	I think there is at least one, and I'm sure there are many more, great periods of our past that we have simply forgotten.
	We don't know who our father is, but we are beginning to find in the anthropological and archaeological record the diaries that our father left behind.
	I think it's tremendously exciting.
	I think that's a beautiful way of putting it.
	And, you know, increasingly we're learning that our forebears, whoever they may have been, traveled more than we thought that they could.
	They traveled vast distances, and there is this thing that you refer to in the book called diffusion.
	That's the spread of DNA, the spread of information, the spread of how to use tools and how to do this and that.
	You know, we like to think that we're too cool for school these days, that we are the ultimate.
	And yet, the past is beginning to tell us, and has been all through the last century, that perhaps our forebears or our forefathers knew a hell of a lot more than we ever were willing to give them credit for.
	And that's interesting.
	And you say there's a history to this.
	I mean, you quote a piece, I didn't actually write down the details of it, but in the book, The Hidden History book, you talk about a piece that started this ball rolling to an extent that was published in the Illustrated London News in 1937, before World War II.
	So people were beginning to ask questions.
	Yes, yeah.
	There was a time when, as you're seeing in the late 30s, when this was really all of a sudden starting to catch on.
	And then, of course, came the war and it set everything back.
	You know, not a lot could be done during the war.
	I mean, obviously we had much bigger things on our plate.
	But it was there.
	And what bothers me and what frightens me a little bit is that this modern age in which we live right now is so fast and so loud.
	It offers great blessings in the sense of, as you said earlier, being able to get this information out.
	But it doesn't give us the time, or we don't take the time, we don't wrestle the time to really contemplate some of these things.
	And as a result, a person can make a tremendous discovery that would change everything.
	And it makes headlines one day, and the next day those headlines are crowded out by something else that's even more important.
	Frankly, that's why I had to come to the woods of South Carolina.
	When I retired from active Christian ministry, I was also a musician playing in the West Coast Symphony in Florida and a lot Of jazz gigs and stuff like that.
	Wow.
	I was in doing some part-time carpentry, and also I was teaching in the local university too.
	I was teaching music there.
	And having taught a bunch of courses in comparative religion and earth religion in general, I was just so busy that I never took the time to do what I originally went into ministry for.
	I had this crazy idea, like most of us did way back in the early 70s when we were young and didn't know any better.
	I had this crazy idea that when I joined a church, I was going to become a join a community that was interested in spiritual growth.
	And we were all on the same page and trying to grow together.
	And any clergy who are listening to me right now know it's not like that.
	You get out there and you become CEO of a small corporation.
	You have to worry about budgets.
	You have to worry about buildings.
	You have to worry about getting, you have to worry about the next meeting.
	You have to worry about the next teaching.
	And it just, all of a sudden, your life goes by and you realize what you're doing, especially me as a college professor teaching about world religions.
	I never had taken the time to really experience that which I was teaching about.
	So I came out here.
	I had a goal.
	I was going to live for one year in the woods.
	That was 15 years ago.
	I'm still here.
	But I had to build the road to get my back.
	I had to put in power and we had to drill a well and do all that kind of stuff.
	So it was in a place where no one's ever been.
	And I even had a Bible verse in mind.
	It came from the Old Testament.
	And your listeners will get a kick out of this when I tell the postscript of this story.
	The Bible verse came from the Old Testament book of Genesis, the Hebrew scriptures.
	And Jacob and Esau had been parted, for those of you who remember the story, they had had to go all their separate ways when Jacob stole Esau's birthright.
	And he had been separated from his brother for many years.
	And he finally came back.
	And they were going to be reunited on the next day.
	And Jacob didn't know what was going to happen.
	And so he was worried, and he was pondering and walking back up and forth on his side of the river, knowing that Esau was over on the other side of the river and not knowing what tomorrow would bring.
	And so the Bible says a strange thing.
	It says, a man appeared to him and they wrestled until daybreak.
	And why?
	I don't know.
	You can't make a lot of logical sense out of a lot of these metaphors in the Bible.
	But here was Jacob wrestling with this man all night long, couldn't defeat him.
	And finally, as the dawn began to break, he realized he was wrestling with God.
	And so he said to him, I will not let you go until you bless me.
	And that was the verse that was in my mind.
	I wanted to come over here and spend a year in the woods on a retreat.
	And I wanted to wrestle with God saying, I will not let you go until you bless me.
	And for you, the blessing is what?
	The blessing is the freedom and the peace to be able to quest in the way that you're questing in your books and your research?
	Well, actually, God answered my prayer, just not in the way that I expected.
	Not through Christianity, but through paganism, through shamanism, and that's in earth energy.
	And that's where I finally found the divine that I had been preaching for my whole life.
	But I have to tell you the postscript of this story.
	A number of years ago, I was asked to come over to Cornwall.
	And while I was in Cornwall, I met with a wonderful group of people called the Parallel Community and gave a talk to them about the roots, the shamanic roots of all world religions.
	Had a wonderful time, did a lot of dowsing, a lot of Standing Stones and the Merry Maidens down in Cornwall and a lot of the sites down there and did a lot of dowsing and really got really close to friends, which I still have.
	As a matter of fact, just last couple of months ago, I did a Zoom conference with five different chapters of the British Society of Dowsers.
	And I still consider some of those people some of my great friends.
	But when I, since this was my first trip landing in London and being in England for the first time in my life, I had to go up to this little town northwest of London that I'm sure is familiar to many of your people from that, many of your folks from that part of the country, a little town called Fenney Compton.
	And the reason I had to go there was because my ancestors, my great, great, great, great grandfather, I don't know how many greats were there, he was actually, he and some of his sons too were clergy in the Church of England.
	And he preached in this little stone church, which still stands up there in Fenney Compton.
	And I just had to see it.
	So I drove up there.
	I rented a car, had to learn how to drive on the other side of the road and had to learn how to drive on the other side of the car.
	Had a terrifying experience when I hit my first roundabout, driving what felt to me the wrong way around.
	Well, if you lived in Florida, you have a lot of four-way intersections, but you don't have roundabouts.
	And you're in Warwickshire, you've got loads of roundabouts there.
	And when you hit roundabouts, driving on a different side of the car, on a different side of the road, going in a different direction, that's an experience.
	But at any rate, I got up to Fenney Compton and I stayed at a wonderful little bed and breakfast up there.
	And the next day, I had arranged to meet the town historian, and she took me in to the end of the church, and she showed me the plaque where it said Willis, and that was where my ancestor preached.
	I walked up to his pulpit where he stood and preached on Sunday mornings, and I looked at the stained glass windows that he looked at.
	They were still the same.
	Lo and behold, the window that you can best see from the pulpit is a stained glass window.
	And I've never seen this pictured in stained glass before.
	It was a picture of Jacob wrestling with God.
	Now, how did you feel about that?
	Did you feel that that was in some ways preordained?
	I think so.
	The hair stood up on the back of my neck.
	I mean, it was magical.
	To think that he had looked at that picture and somehow his spiritual DNA was somehow passed on to me and that Jacob wrestling with God saying, I will not let you go until you bless me.
	That of all the Bible verses there are, that was the one that I had to pick out when I came up here to mark the last stage of my life, last stage of my spiritual growth up here.
	Oh, I mean, I want to tell you, it was magic.
	And you made that discovery at the home of your ancestors in Warwickshire, Fenny Compton.
	Yes.
	Well, I mean, you're a wonderful storyteller.
	That is a wonderful story to tell.
	I'm sure you have a million like that.
	Look, your way of looking at things doesn't sound we've been, how long have we been talking now?
	We've been talking now for nearly half an hour.
	And from what I divine of you and what I've been reading about you today while I've been doing some research, you know, your view of everything is very different from those people that you spent 40 odd years with in the ministry.
	You know, how do your contemporaries in that field regard the way that you now look at things?
	It's hard to say.
	To a great extent, I've fallen off the map.
	I'm sure there are many Christians who don't believe I'm a Christian anymore, even though I still identify myself as a Christian minister.
	I'm still in the book.
	I still have the name Reverend in front of my name and all that kind of thing.
	But to tell you the truth, I haven't stepped foot in a church for 15 years now.
	I've been very disappointed with, at least over here in America, I'm not sure how it is around the world, and I'm not sure where it is, how it is with where you are.
	But here in America, our church has just become totally divided and so political.
	And it's very difficult.
	Churches are closing.
	Oh, I can't even tell you how many a day over here.
	Religion is really on its way out.
	Well, I have to say that, I mean, if these are your views and that I would say that the guests who come on here, that's why we have these conversations.
	But there will be a lot of people who look at life from a religious span.
	I mean, I'm old.
	I was nominally brought up in the Church of England because the schools that I went to were then.
	But I am in no way religious, and I very, very seldom went to church, and I never do now.
	And I don't, you know, I think there might be a God.
	I'm not sure.
	But that's how I look at things.
	But there will be people hearing the words that you say now who might, they won't be offended, but they might be rancored somewhat by it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I can completely understand that.
	I would never, ever suggest to anybody that they follow my path.
	They have to follow their own path.
	And I still read the Bible just about every day.
	I still study a lot.
	When I wrote the book, Censoring God, I really delved into the Dead Sea Scrolls and the whole Qumran community.
	And, of course, the latest biblical scholarship.
	And like I say, I still identify myself as a Christian, although it's certainly not the kind of Christian I used to be when I was a fundamentalist or even an evangelical, where I used to say my way or the highway.
	Now I see Christianity as one important way.
	Joseph Campbell, I think, had a wonderful way of doing this.
	He talked about religions as being the software to access the hardware.
	The hardware is the spirit.
	It's God.
	It's source.
	And all of the religions are the various softwares you use to access that.
	And all of them work as long as you stick to it.
	The problem is one software doesn't speak to the other software.
	They don't communicate.
	And that's a huge problem, I think.
	And so when people say, gee, do I have to drop out of my church?
	I say, absolutely not.
	Stay and just go into it more deeply.
	A classic example, when I wrote the book, Quantum Akashic Field, which was about out-of-body experiences, I had a lot of my Christian friends say, what are you talking about, these out-of-body experiences and seeing entities from other dimensions?
	And how can you talk about that as a Christian?
	And then at Christmastime, we've just come through the season when people stand up and sing full voice, Hark the herald angels sing glory to the newborn king.
	And angels from the realms of glory wing your flight o'er all the earth.
	What are they singing about?
	They're singing about entities from another dimension that come with good news and singing in vibration to contact us.
	So in other words, they are singing and glorifying in their song the very thing that they disagree with when I start talking about other dimensions and entities and all that kind of thing.
	So what do you, when people have out-of-the-body experiences, and you have written a lot about this, I think you've even written about ways that people might be able to have them, might be able to encourage themselves or put themselves in the state where they can have them.
	What do you think happens to people when they have those?
	Where do they go?
	Well, the word go is a tough word because that word was invented on our side of the perception fence.
	You know, we have the five perceptions of sight and smell and hearing and taste and touch.
	And it's a fence that has been built around us through evolution.
	And I think it's an important one because it filters out a lot of the information that comes to us that we would not, you know, it would just be totally overwhelming if all of the information would just be dumped on us.
	So that filter out a lot of that stuff.
	But the word go is a word that's invented on the inside of this perception fence.
	It means go from here to there, from one place to another.
	And when you get out of body, now you're in the world of the quantum.
	You're in the world of entanglement, where all of a sudden you're not bound by things, even like the speed of light doesn't work over there.
	On the other side of the Higgs field, it's just pure energy.
	And when you begin to enter that place, I'm not sure you go someplace.
	You just become aware of something, a reality that is really too big for us to even comprehend, let alone put into words.
	And is that the key to death?
	Do you think that's what happens when people die?
	That's where they go.
	Yeah, I definitely think that.
	I've said go, I'm sorry.
	Yeah.
	What else can you do?
	You have to use the language we have.
	I use it too, so don't feel bad about it.
	You have to use the language that we're left with, but we have to understand the limitations of that language and the material perception realm.
	Scientists, you know, and this isn't just a metaphysical idea.
	I mean, I'm trying to base my ideas in real science.
	And scientists have just discovered the newly discovered Higgs field at CERN, the particle accelerator laboratory there.
	And they have developed, understood the Higgs field.
	And you try to ask scientists, what is the Higgs field?
	And they try to say, it's a place where it's a field where energy going through the Higgs field slows down and takes on mass.
	By saying slows down, over here in America, they tend to talk about the Higgs field in terms of molasses.
	In England, they tend to talk about it in terms of treacle.
	But it slows down and takes on mass.
	And Einstein gave us the equation for that, E equals MC square.
	Mass is the same thing.
	I mean, mass times the speed of light squared is the same thing as energy.
	And when we leave this material realm on this side of the Higgs field, and when we go in, how do I want to say it?
	It's not thought, it's somehow more than that.
	It's not intuition, it's somehow more than that.
	When we transfer ourselves outside of this material presence, we become aware of the basis of what I like to call reality.
	And it's so hard to explain.
	It's like waking up from a very complicated dream and trying to explain it to somebody.
	Not only can't you do it, but the person you're explaining to usually finds it boring.
	So it's difficult.
	But once it happens, you know.
	I've talked to a lot of people who have been over the other side and come back.
	As a minister, I've had to stand there at their bedsides and talk to them.
	And sometimes they have been clinically dead, and the nurses and doctors push me out of the room, and they're flatlined, and all of a sudden things start going again.
	And the people will tell me the same story over and over again about the light and seeing entities and seeing that which they cannot describe.
	And it's even in the Bible.
	In 2 Corinthians chapter 11, the Apostle Paul talks about his out-of-body experience.
	And he said he was transferred to a place where he was not even permitted or didn't even have the words to describe what he saw.
	He said, I was either in the body or out of the body.
	He said, I don't know.
	God knows.
	So this is a relatively common phenomenon.
	But because it flies in the face of our rigid intellectual left-brain thinking, it hasn't been given the study that it should.
	It is interesting, isn't it, that when people tell stories of what they've experienced, and my own mother, I've told the story on this show many times before, but my own mother at age 10 had a very serious illness for which there were not the drugs and therapies and treatments that we have now.
	And she nearly died.
	The doctor came round, and the doctors, in the days when doctors made house calls like that and said, she's going to go through a crisis tonight.
	She's either going to make it or not, effectively.
	This was in old Liverpool and it was a different time.
	And she was extremely ill that night and went to a beautiful place, she said.
	Here I am using the language of going because we don't have to go.
	How can you not?
	But she was in this wonderful place that was greenery and she was in contact with something that we might call a being.
	And they said to her over there, you have to go back.
	And she said, and you've heard this before, I don't want to go back.
	And they said, but you must go back.
	And so they made, I mean, I've lost her now, sadly, but they made her return.
	And, you know, I'm here now, and so's my sister.
	So we wouldn't have been here if she hadn't returned.
	But that is a story that is so common.
	So my gut, that's all I have.
	And it's the stuff that I read and the stuff that I take in.
	But my perceptions, my troll through all of these things and my own mother's story suggests to me that there is something else and it's there.
	We just currently don't have too many tools and many of us can't use the one that we have anyway to access it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There are very few places who are looking into this regularly.
	One place that comes to mind right away is Dean Raden's work out at the Noetic Institute in California.
	He and I have corresponded quite often.
	Very interesting man.
	Yeah, tremendous scholarship.
	The other place is right up here in Virginia, the Moody, not the Moody, Robert Monroe, the Monroe Institute.
	That's it.
	That's it.
	It's about Hemisink, the Monroe Institute, UK.
	I'm sure.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I can't believe I didn't remember.
	All I could think of was D.L. Moody for some reason.
	But at any rate, I spent a week up at the Monroe Institute studying with William Buhlmann, who I think is probably one of the foremost teachers on out-of-body experiences in the world today.
	He's just wonderful.
	And although it didn't really work for me while I was there, probably because I was expecting too much and trying too hard, and also probably because, as you might have guessed, I'm a bit of a loner and don't function in groups as well as I should.
	But it was great laying the groundwork with him up there.
	And he had given us some advice.
	He said, if you really want an out-of-body experience, he said, you have to work on it.
	And he had a bunch of techniques that he teaches.
	And he said, and you have to do this.
	Make it first priority.
	30 days every day, 30 minutes a day.
	And if I had stopped at day 28, I wouldn't have had my first out-of-body experience.
	And so I think he was absolutely right.
	Well, I'm on their website here.
	It says Hemisync, short for hemispheric synchronization.
	I know very little, if anything, about this.
	It's an audio guidance binaural beat technology developed by consciousness pioneer Robert Monroe.
	Through extensive brainwave research, Monroe And his team observed that specific sound patterns could safely and gently guide the brain into various states ranging from deep relaxation or sleep to, and this is the point, expanded mindfulness or extraordinary states.
	And that's after your 28 days or more.
	That's where you went.
	Yes, that's right.
	And that was about, oh, probably 12, 13 years ago.
	And since then, through meditation and using Hemi-Sync, it's become a very common experience for me.
	But it is hard at the beginning because we tend to try to think, especially those of us in the West, we try to think or reason our way into these things.
	And you just can't do it.
	That mind, that monkey chattering all the time in the mind, you know, it just takes us off in places.
	And it's very difficult for a lot of Westerners who are living in this fast, noisy, speeded up world to develop the techniques.
	For me, I had to come all the way out here to the woods where I live basically in a 24-hour meditation every day.
	Not everybody can do that.
	I was very fortunate in that regard.
	But I'm not saying it has to be done that way.
	I'm sure there's many other ways.
	Although some people have experimented with everything from old magic mushrooms to LSD to ayahuasca to a lot of other things that tend to short-circuit those mind connections that we've just grown so accustomed to.
	I've never used anything like that, so I don't know anything about it.
	With me, it's just been meditation and hemi-synchron.
	I'm afraid I'm one of those people who I'm so caught up in this technological modern world and living in London that I find anything like that really, as much as I want to, I find it so hard to do.
	When you did, and when you do, what is it that you experience then?
	It's hard to describe, except that I can say the common experience is that 98% of the time, I too say, I don't want to come back.
	You can't really describe colors because anything we know as color inside our perception realm, anything we know as color is a pale comparison to what is there.
	That's what my mother said.
	Yeah, anything we know as sound is a pale comparison.
	And almost invariably, there comes the time when I know, somehow I just know I've got to come back.
	And I don't want to come back, just like your mother.
	I don't want to come back.
	But so far, I've had to.
	I'm hoping that when death comes to me, it'll be just like that, except I can say, I don't want to come back.
	And they'll say, okay, come forward instead.
	I'm hoping for that.
	But you're not sure of it.
	I'm not sure of how I'm going to die.
	I'm sure of what's there.
	Matter of fact, to be honest, I have absolutely no fear of death anymore.
	I don't say that in a morbid way at all.
	I'm looking forward to it.
	I really am.
	I had a very good friend of mine one night.
	He was older than me.
	His name was Bradley.
	He was a parishioner.
	He was a churchman.
	He was a pillar of the church, a pillar of the community.
	He had PhDs in two different subjects.
	He had retired to our little community and was very active.
	Everybody loved him.
	And I got a call about two or three o'clock in the morning from a nurse at the hospital saying, you know, Bradley's here.
	He's probably not going to make it through the night.
	He's calling for you.
	Can you come?
	And I said, oh, absolutely.
	So I put on my clothes, got in my car, and drove to the hospital and walked inside.
	And there's Bradley laying in the hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and all the wires and everything else.
	And the nurse had said, he's probably not going to make it.
	So I walked in and Bradley and I were good enough friends.
	I didn't have to beat around the bush.
	I could say, Bradley, are you ready to go?
	And he started to cry.
	He was just crying big tears.
	And I said, Bradley, what's wrong?
	And he said, Jim, you know I've accomplished a lot in my life that I'm really proud of.
	And I said, well, you have every right to be proud.
	You lived a great life.
	He said, I've done everything I've ever wanted to do except the one thing that was most important.
	And I said, what's that, Brad?
	And he said, I haven't prepared for this moment.
	Well, we were lucky.
	He made it through that night.
	He made it through 10 more.
	And during the next 10 days, I spent a lot of time every day with him.
	We just talked.
	We talked about everything.
	Sometimes I would read the Bible to him.
	Sometimes I would, one time I even brought my guitar and sang some hymns.
	And when Bradley died, I'm still not sure to this day how much I was able to help him.
	But I do know he was able to help me a lot.
	And I've since had this experience with a lot of people.
	Even as recently as last week, some people came to visit me.
	And the people who came, his mother had just passed away.
	And he was in the room with her.
	And she said, oh, who's that with you?
	And he looked around the room.
	There was nobody else in the room.
	He said, Mom, it's just me.
	Nobody's here.
	And he said, oh, I can see two or three people.
	I don't know who they are, but they look very nice.
	And that was her last words.
	And she died.
	Again, another story I've told here, but my grandfather, my father's father, went through precisely that experience before he passed.
	Now, I'd like to take you back, if I may, just simply because in podcasts and television and everything, time is always ticking down.
	Right, right.
	But you consider there is a section in your hidden history book about Mars, about the face on Mars.
	Now, I know and know very well Richard C. Hoagland, who was the man who introduced the idea of the so-called face on Mars to people.
	And I want to talk a little bit about something that's been in the news connected with Mars.
	Only in the last couple of days, I spoke to Professor Harvey Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist, the founder of the Galileo Project, and a man who is not afraid to think out of the box.
	And I'm so pleased that he does think that way.
	Wonderful man to speak with.
	But he is floating another idea, the idea that this Earth of ours may have been terraformed by Martians because they had to get out of where they were because of cataclysm there.
	And essentially, the Martians are us, and they terraformed this chunk of rock.
	Have you given Consideration to those sorts of things.
	I wonder if you saw that news story or have considered our connection with Mars.
	Yes, I did, and I find it absolutely fascinating.
	Because it's not my field, all I can do is be a journalist and read what other people write.
	But what I read is, I think, extremely compelling.
	I have a series of experts out there that I always consult before I write anything.
	And one of them, two of them rather, are biologists.
	And when I was writing my book about how we possibly came to be and what happened and how we were, you know, how we, you probably hear the noise in the background.
	That's my telephone.
	I forgot to turn it off.
	Sure, it's sufficiently quiet.
	I think.
	If you're happy to just carry on and you could pick up the message later.
	And one of the things that I had to push by them in one of my books was, how did DNA develop?
	I mean, is certainly evolution is a reality.
	We know that.
	But how did it begin?
	DNA itself has to have all of these moving parts, so to speak, that give information to a developing organism.
	But sometimes in order for something to develop, it has to have a whole bunch of those parts in place all at the same time before it can work, before it can become an advantage.
	And they all say the same thing.
	They said, well, it's a deep, dark secret of biology that we hope students don't bring it up too much.
	But on the other hand, sometimes it's inexplainable when we figure how did life begin?
	And one thing that I tend to really go along with is the whole idea of penspermia, that we were either terraformed or this was a congenial planet that was more congenial than Mars or some other planet even, and that somehow the first life began from somewhere else.
	The only problem I have with that was that just kicks the can down the road, so to speak.
	How did it begin there?
	Well, on and on we go.
	That leads to my whole concept of the idea of the book I wrote called Supernatural Gods.
	Could it be that we came from Mars?
	Could it be that we are the aliens that we seek?
	All I know for sure is as soon as it was humanly possible for our culture, for our civilization to get something up in space, the first thing we did, we sent Voyager 1 and we sent Voyager 2, and we sent them up into space and we sent along with them a record of our existence.
	We said, basically, this is who we are.
	This is our picture.
	This is what we sound like.
	And we said, if you're out there, here we are.
	Now, if we did that, who is to say that other people, other cultures haven't done that?
	And perhaps that's where we came from.
	I'm not saying we did.
	I'm not saying we didn't.
	All I'm saying is that it certainly is an interesting idea, and I'm fascinated by it.
	You visited the UK, and I had this thought when I was reading about you coming to the UK, and I want to talk at the end of this in just a couple of minutes about dowsing, because you sent me a news release or a flyer, as we call them here, about the Devon Dowsers and the Tamar Dowsers and various other dowsers who invited you to talk to them.
	We'll talk about that.
	You know, you're familiar with this country, and we've talked about your Warwickshire connection.
	But I'm guessing if you went to Cornwall, you probably had to pass Stonehenge.
	And something said to me this morning, I've got to ask Jim, and I've no idea why, because it was in none of the research notes I looked at.
	I've got to ask Jim about Stonehenge.
	When you saw it, what did you think?
	Oh, one of my favorite pictures is hanging on my wall of me at Stonehenge.
	I'm just, I'm fascinated by the place.
	I have been reading about and studying Stonehenge for 30 years.
	I'm just absolutely amazed.
	And when I actually got there and stood there, again, I probably, in a sense, kind of torpedoed myself because I went with expectations.
	And I didn't sense what I expected to find.
	I didn't expect that, I mean, I expected to sense something that was very real.
	But on the other hand, there was a deep, dark, and I don't mean dark in the sense of evil, I just mean unknown, a sense of depth that I felt there that I just didn't want to leave.
	I wanted to sit and sit and sit until I was able to break through, but I just didn't have the time.
	I only had a couple of hours.
	But in the time that I was there, and of course I was surrounded by tourists the whole time, but in the time that I was there, I just sensed that there was something that I really wanted to experience.
	Strangely enough, I was down in Salisbury, staying down there, and I went back and that afternoon, or the next morning rather, I visited the great Salisbury Cathedral.
	And I still had Stonehenge on my mind when I went in there, but I had the idea that there was something, some connection that spoke over thousands of years, of course, to the builders who built both places, that they were trying to get in touch and trying to express a reality that was very real there.
	And when I went into a little, oh, I hesitate to even say this because I don't know how it's going to turn out.
	But again, Salisbury Cathedral was filled with so many people.
	And I went and I found a little chapel that I walked into and I just sat there for the longest time.
	And I almost had an out-of-body experience there.
	It was something very real.
	And yet, when I finished the tour and came back and had the little map, I wanted to circle where that chapel was and I could Not find it on the map.
	So someday I want to go back to England and I want to visit Stonehenge with plenty of time and I want to visit Salisbury Cathedral and find out whether that chapel was actually there or whether something very mysterious happened that day.
	Well, whatever happens, please let me know.
	And if it was mysterious, then we need to be talking about that for a long time.
	But I love Salisbury.
	The cathedral is the absolute focus of that city.
	And when you're driving in from, I used to live on the south coast when I worked in radio down there.
	And I would periodically go across on the A36, I think it is, to Salisbury.
	And, you know, you can see the imposing figure of the cathedral for a long way away.
	It is just so dominant there.
	So it's an amazing place.
	Now, I want to get to dowsing just at the end of this.
	And I've got this flyer or news release.
	The Devon Dowsers, Tamar Dowsers, Trent Crom Dowsers, Somerset Dowsers, Thames Valley Dowsers, all of them hosted a talk that you gave in November about dowsing in quantum reality.
	Just talk to me, if you would, briefly about what you told them.
	Oh, it was fun.
	If you would like to hear a lot of it, if people want to hear, if they go to my website, which is just www.jimwillis.net, and then down at the bottom, there's the little Facebook icon that takes you to my Facebook page, but there's also the YouTube icon, and you can click on that.
	And you can find a bunch of YouTube videos that I have up.
	And one of them is a talk I gave to the American Dowsers about dowsing in quantum reality.
	It's about 45 minutes long, maybe an hour long, and it's up on my YouTube page.
	And I think that would probably be the easiest way to go into it in any kind of depth.
	But what I shared with the dowsers at the last Zoom meeting was the whole idea of quantum reality has completely changed our whole idea of what real is.
	And dowsing is one of the ways that we can get outside of the material realm because the very cells of our body are entangled and they have information that we are simply not aware of.
	But dowsing goes through that.
	Dowsing reveals to us through a series of yes and no answers when you use dowsing rods as I do.
	It reveals things that we experience, but we don't realize we are experiencing them.
	I like to use the example of the old television sets, the old black and white television sets that had the rabbit ears on the top.
	And when the picture wasn't very good, you would pick up the rabbit ears and turn them this way and that, and all of a sudden you could see the picture change on the television.
	And you realize that these television waves were going through your body.
	Your body was aware of them all the time.
	But you didn't know it until you picked up and you became the dowsing rod, so to speak.
	Or the rabbit ears became the dowsing rod, and you could actually change the picture on the screen.
	And that's what dowsing does.
	It introduces you to the reality that is underneath the reality that we experience here in this perception realm.
	All right.
	We can talk more about dowsing, I think, on a future conversation.
	We've come up to our hour here.
	We're 59 minutes and 12 seconds of recording, and we've covered a ton of ground, and there's a lot more to do.
	So my thanks to the listener who suggested you as a guest.
	I'm glad that we finally got to do this.
	I hope you come to the United Kingdom soon, and I hope you answer the question about Salisbury Cathedral.
	For my listener, if they want to reference the vast body of stuff that you do and have done, what's that website again?
	It's www.jimwillis.net.
	And on the opening page, down at the bottom, you'll see the icon to take you also to my Facebook page and also to my YouTube page.
	And of course, all the books are up on Amazon.
	If you just go to Amazon and plug in Jim Willis, you'll find all kinds of things.
	And I just want to explain one thing to my listener.
	There is a periodic slight beep that appears your end every minute or so, just at the very end of our conversation.
	And I'm just assuming it's something telling you that the battery's running down or something and needs charge.
	No, I don't know.
	And I didn't stop you.
	I didn't stop you talking.
	My telephone rang, and that's the answering machine telling me that you're not going to be able to do that.
	Telling you that there's a message.
	Okay, audibly.
	I knew that was happening.
	It wasn't very loud.
	My listener may have noticed it.
	And I didn't want to stop you in full flow again.
	So, well, thank you.
	Some things, as Paul McCartney sang, some things you've just got to let them be.
	Let them be.
	Let it be.
	Jim, listen, nice to have this conversation.
	I hope we have it again.
	Give my love to a place that one day I'd like to see, South Carolina.
	Take care.
	Bye-bye.
	Oh, I hope so.
	Bye now, Howard.
	The thoughts of Jim Willis, your thoughts on him, gratefully received.
	Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me a message with your thoughts if you want to there.
	And remember, I get to see all the emails as they come in.
	If your email requires a response, please tell me very clearly in the email or in the subject line, reply, response required.
	And then I will know that.
	And if you've expected one and you haven't had it, please give me a reminder.
	Life is getting very interesting at the moment for a whole bunch of reasons that will eventually reveal themselves.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained Online.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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