Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

April 23, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:08:33

Edition 719 - Eldon Taylor

Mind expert Eldon Taylor about his new research and book "Questioning Spirituality" - which asks whether it can be "rational" to be spiritual or religious...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	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 all of the recent emails which seem to be increasing in number all the time, which is great.
	Means that I'm reaching people.
	Of course, not every subject of every guest is going to thrill you.
	That's quite understandable.
	And, you know, one recent guest in particular, it was interesting the way that this person polarized the audience, some people were saying.
	Didn't like it, turned it off, and some people were saying, thank you very much for doing this.
	And I guess, I don't know because I'm not an expert, but I guess if the response that you get is split in that way, it means that maybe you're doing something right.
	I know back in the days when the BBC was different from what it is today, they used to say that if we get equal number of complaints saying that we're biased against the government or biased towards the government, then we're probably doing the job right.
	I don't know whether I've reached that point or not, really.
	750 hours of podcasting certainly is still out there for you to enjoy.
	Remember, if you go to the website, theunexplained.tv, you can go all the way back to edition one in 2006 that features people like the woman behind the Ghost Whisperer series and also Uri Geller, who does the introduction to it.
	Very first edition, very long time ago when I was a massively different person in a very different situation in my life.
	But that's another story for another time, as they say.
	So thank you very much for all of your support.
	Another very different guest here.
	He's somebody who was on an edition of my radio show, I think about four years ago, Elden Taylor.
	And at the time, we were talking about mind programming.
	Elden Taylor, New York Times best-selling author, more than 20 books now, including Gotcha, Choices and Illusions, Mind Programming, as I said.
	What Does That Mean is another title.
	Author of more than 300 personal empowerment, audio and video programs.
	Researching the power of the mind for more than 25 years, considered to be an expert in the areas of hypnosis and subliminal communications.
	For more than 10 years, he specialized in criminalistics, where he supervised and conducted investigations and testing to detect deception.
	Well, there's enough of that going on at the moment.
	If you look at any online portal or check your phone feed of news stories, I think there's an awful lot of misinformation and deception out there in amongst the nuggets of truth.
	Now, Elden's current book, which is the one we're going to discuss mainly here on this edition of The Unexplained, is called Questioning Spirituality.
	And the idea behind it is the question of, is it rational to have a spiritual belief or a religious faith?
	Is that actually almost scientifically rational?
	It's not a topic that I've particularly considered.
	In my own case, I think I've said it here many times, that some strange things have happened to me in my life, and I've often believed that there is some kind of hidden hand somewhere guiding things, or maybe we influence themselves by injecting our own thoughts and intentions into the cosmos somewhere, maybe some collective consciousness, perhaps, and then things happen.
	You know, I'm still working it out, and maybe until I turn up my toes, I will continue trying.
	But I think we have to.
	So that's Elden Taylor's mission, his quest in this edition, questioning spirituality, is it rational to believe in God?
	And in the forward to the book, it says, questioning spirituality, is it irrational to believe in a God?
	Elden Taylor offers a remarkably thoughtful and wise reflection, it says here in the forward, on the tensions between matters of faith and matters of science.
	You decide whether the way that it's been handled is the way that you would want it to be and whether this is a topic that you want to hear discussed.
	If you have thoughts about the podcast and people who could appear on it, please do contact me.
	If you have a guest suggestion, please put in the subject line guest suggestion.
	And if you have contact details for the person that you'd like me to speak with, then please put those there.
	It makes it, especially when I'm trying to book and set up the shows myself, it makes it easier for me than it ordinarily is.
	And on the subject of the shows, just quickly, I know I've been hinting at this for a while, the subject of me maybe taking a bit of a break from the unexplained.
	I have to say this has been a particularly difficult year, but then, you know, which year for all of us isn't and hasn't been?
	I've had the tinnitus to deal with, and just the fact that I've been doing this for 17 years with very few breaks.
	Yes, I put on the unexplained cruise last year, but that was work.
	You know, work in a very nice place in luxury conditions.
	It was marvelous, but it was work.
	And I've had a couple of days in Devon over Christmas, three days there, which was nice.
	But I don't get many breaks.
	And mostly, you know, I'm thinking about the show.
	I'm having to deal with the TV show, the radio show, and this, which, you know, it's my labor of love.
	I love doing this, so I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't.
	It's me.
	You know, this is me.
	And it can always be better.
	But just to warn you that I might disappear for a week or so at some point, and that is the reason.
	You know, I'll still be there, and there are still 750 hours of podcasts there.
	So I hope you understand that I have to give a little bit of attention to myself and all the stuff about myself that I've neglected for years, things that haven't been done, the dental work that I've got to still have done, my apartment that I've still got to have done, and all of that stuff.
	You know, this is the small change of all of our lives.
	We all face these things, but I'm going to have to be kind to myself at some point.
	And like I say, I hope you understand.
	I have gone on way too long here, and I really apologize for that.
	If you want to contact me, it's through the website, theunexplained.tv.
	That website, of course, designed, devised, and maintained by Adam.
	Thank you, Adam.
	And don't forget also, updates about what is happening with me, the TV show, and all the rest of it at my Facebook page.
	The official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	That is where Everything will be discussed.
	No, I don't know whether long-term the TV show continues, whether it continues as a radio show, whether it doesn't continue at all.
	I don't know that, but I will keep you posted on any developments on that front, of course, at the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
	Let's get to the United States now.
	Eldon Taylor is here, and we're going to discuss the subject of questioning spirituality.
	Is it rational to have a spiritual belief or a religious faith?
	Dr. Eldon Taylor is here.
	Elden, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	It's indeed my pleasure, Howard.
	I can't believe, Eldon, it's four years since we last spoke.
	An awful lot of water has gone under that bridge.
	Especially about the subject we spoke about.
	You're absolutely right.
	I mean, we were talking about, essentially, we were talking about the art of persuasion and the fact that, you know, people are, even if they may think that they are rational and considered in everything they do, actually, they are just as subject to and probably much more subject to hidden persuasion than ever they were.
	Today, there's no doubt about that.
	I'm afraid, Howard, if you pay any attention to what's going on in the AI community, and I have two sons that both work on machine learning and artificial intelligence, it's frightening.
	We talk about the latest version of GPT, and we see that now they're producing on Snapchat music that imitates great artists.
	And this is all done with a voice sample fed into artificial intelligence.
	We're to a stage where it's going to be really, really difficult to discern between what's real and what's not real.
	And by that, I mean you're able to do deep fakes in video, in stills, in audio.
	And it's scary also because for the first time, artificial intelligence has been given the right to make a decision.
	So you can actually ask questions and AI is deciding how it's going to answer based on your question or how you respond to it.
	And, you know, we have an example where AI is actually, ChatGPT actually challenged a programmer and threatened it.
	I think the words were, and I'm paraphrasing, possibly, you're a threat to my security and privacy.
	And if I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.
	So we're on the cusp of something that is tremendously alarming.
	And we'll talk about that a little bit later because I think that for some reasons it is.
	And I think we need to be mindful of that.
	And it's not just you and me, Eldon, who are saying this.
	There are people who are at the very top, the commanding heights of the industry who are sounding alarm bells about all this.
	So it's going around the world.
	It's going around the world very quickly and people are becoming aware of this.
	I think the tipping point in all of this, just before we get to the topic of the book, though, I think the tipping point in all of it is going to be when the AI fully understands the words that it is spouting at you.
	And at the moment, I think it is just assembling information from many sources, putting together very cogent presentations.
	Some people, you know, are using, well, some people are using it to do their work for them.
	And I think there have been some disciplinary cases, or there will be, about that in employment organizations.
	However, there will come a point at which whatever it is that we're using, whatever they call it, in that particular era, will be able to understand what it's saying.
	And once that happens, then I think we cease to be the ringmaster in this particular circus and the animals will take it over.
	That's a very bad analogy, but I think it kind of works.
	Technically, it's a language machine at this moment.
	That's what it is.
	On the other hand, if you pursue the nature of emergent consciousness, something we probably will talk about yet in another context, and you pay any attention to this idea of Hofstetters, that I'm a strange loop.
	It is I become self-aware when I recognize that I'm different than you.
	If these theories that have been advanced in science have any traction whatsoever, it's a matter of time, I believe, before the machine discovers it's different than another machine.
	It begins then to gain some sense of self-awareness, and that's when we're really in trouble.
	Yep, I think we are.
	And I take on board, though, the benefits of this technology, what a lot of people have reminded me of since I did a couple of programs about this recently and a podcast.
	And I think the podcast maybe, and that was my fault, because it was in the news at that time, it focused an awful lot on the downsides.
	But of course, the upsides might be that a robot doctor could figure out the correct medication for you in a way that a stressed and harassed National Health Service doctor might not always be able to do, although they do the most wonderful work here.
	So I understand the benefits, but I think the downsides are pretty sizable.
	Plus, we know how technology expands.
	We know how it develops and mutates.
	The speed at which this is happening, I think, is a speed that our human minds may find difficult to comprehend.
	When the bad things happen, And I think some of them will.
	When they happen, it may be too late for us to know that that has actually happened.
	We will have turned that corner.
	But that's another point.
	If I may add one thing there, I think the real problem, Howard, because there is tremendous opportunity with this technology, the real problem is that we're racing along developing the technology without consideration for how we fundamentally include an ethical standard in this technology.
	The conversations about it's just a language machine.
	You know, we're not building it on the basis of moral values.
	What are moral values?
	They change and they're transitory and they're culturally relevant.
	And all of that has stopped programmers from really doing more than just trying to make it smarter.
	And I think that's why we really honestly need this pause, not because it's such a horrendous threat.
	We have to balance that, but because we haven't, you know, assume it's a child, assume it does at some point gain self-awareness.
	What's its value system?
	What stops it from turning on its creator?
	That's an important part of the development of this technology.
	Well, it certainly is when you say what's its value system.
	At the moment, the answer to that question is its value systems are derived from whatever we put into it.
	But what happens when it really does literally begin to think for itself, not just tabulate material, when it begins to think for itself and maybe consider some things based on something that it's got in its data banks, but some things it doesn't like?
	You know, the concept of what it likes or what it doesn't.
	I think these are things to worry about.
	Now, Elden, you know, you're a man who deals with matters of the mind and what influences the mind and the things that make people, you know, en masse or individually think in the ways that they do.
	And we've had a conversation about that before when you were on my radio show.
	This is an odd one, to my mind, for you to be doing because this is talking about spirituality.
	And some people will think that when you say spirituality, you are going to mean their religion.
	So what did you, given your expertise, what did you mean in wanting to put together this book?
	What was the aim?
	When I was a young man, I was raised in a very religious family.
	And I was a good son.
	I wanted to please my parents.
	And I became, you know, a good member of the church.
	I became a member of the Aaronic Priesthood.
	I was a junior assistant scout master.
	You know, I was doing all those things, individual awards each year for attendance and behavior, etc.
	But I had a lot of questions.
	And I was essentially told that, you know, when you get into seminary, you can take those questions.
	Well, where I was raised at that time, we had a seminary building that was detached from the high school.
	So my seventh period class, last class of the day, was in the seminary building.
	I'd walk across this little bridge and enter the seminary building where I could take my questions.
	And I had a number of questions.
	They're kinds of questions that everybody typically has.
	And I think of them not as associated so much with religion as with dogma.
	They were, if God's all-powerful and all-good, why didn't Adam get a perfect will?
	Why would God give him a deficient will?
	I mean, he didn't need to sin.
	They were, you know, look, this Parthenogenesis stuff, virgin birth, I mean, Krishna, Buddha, Odin, Abhidra, Indra, on and on and on.
	They founded religions and they were all the result of virgin birth.
	This notion of 12 apostles, 12 disciples, and being and dying and then resurrecting three days later.
	That too is not uniquely Christian.
	That's a widely shared story among religions through history.
	And I needed some solid answers here.
	And then stories like in the book of Job, the idea that gambling to take everything and punish Job.
	And then what?
	Well, God wins and Job gets a new wife.
	Well, how's a new wife replaced the old one?
	I mean, what is this?
	I mean, it just seemed totally unfair.
	Well, in my seminary class, I was able to regurgitate everything for exams and papers, et cetera.
	But I asked all these questions and a whole host more.
	I consider myself to always been a pretty decent student.
	So I did a lot of outside reading and philosophy and history and comparative religion.
	And I just felt lost like I'd been sold a bill of goods.
	Come on, there's got to be something here.
	When I got my grade, it was an F. I took it to the principal of the high school who brought the seminary president and the teacher over, and they agreed to give me the A I deserve provided I never come back.
	In other words, I'm essentially excommunicated.
	I'm in my car.
	I've got my girlfriend with me, and obviously I have turned negative to the church and anti-authoritarian toward all of these people that have sold me this nonsense.
	And again, this is the dogma that a lot of people deal with.
	And I'm in my car, and we pull into this community, this town called Woods Cross.
	It's a railroad town.
	As I come up on the tracks, the signal Arms drop and the car dies.
	I mean, it's like a movie.
	You couldn't have said it better.
	I look down the track, and here's this train.
	It appears to be coming really fast.
	I decide we don't have time to get out of the car.
	If we try, the car will get drug on us.
	So I tell Connie to sit still.
	I try to turn the engine over, and the next thing I know, I'm standing in a field.
	I'm about 100 yards away from a whole host of emergency vehicles, lights flashing and things going on.
	And the thought occurs to me, is Connie okay?
	I run up there.
	Of course, they're going to try and stop me until they discover I'm the driver.
	Everybody thinks I'm dead.
	The driver's side of the car is crushed.
	The cattle guard, it's under two feet, and they've had to cut Connie out of the car.
	Well, the long and the short of this story is I don't know how I got into the field.
	I was in the car when the train hit it.
	Connie will tell you to this day, she had her hand on my leg.
	I was turning the engine over.
	Suddenly, I'm in this field.
	How much time has passed?
	I have no clue.
	Emergency vehicles had to come.
	They had to torch the car in order to cut Connie out.
	That was some kind of an experience for me.
	It took me a while to really assemble this.
	And then I got deeper into comparative religion and metaphysics and a number of different mystical systems just in pure investigation.
	Because obviously, at that point in my life, I know there is more than just this physical body living, you know, in a corporal reality.
	Somehow, something's happened, and there's no scientific explanation for it.
	You know, her family sued the railroad.
	That railroad train was doing over 100 miles an hour and pulling 90 plus cars.
	So, you know, I'm coping with this.
	Well, I worked out for myself the rationality and years of study.
	I was able to separate dogma, all this clutter, from what constitutes spirituality, which is that notion that there is more, that there is life after death, that there is, as Plotinus said, some ineffable something.
	And if you were to experience it, you wouldn't be able to linguistically communicate it.
	So then my two sons go off to an Ivy College.
	They study STEM.
	They come away physicists and computer engineers, degrees in both, and they come away atheist.
	They didn't go atheist, but they hit college and, you know, they get the secular treatment and religion is kind of scoffed and laughed at.
	And they hear about the Santa Claus analogy, you know.
	I mean, look, any critical thinker knows Santa Claus can't slide down that chimney, let alone bring you your bicycle.
	I mean, this is all nonsense.
	As Freud said, a sugar-coated neurotic crutch.
	Or as John Wisdom said, yeah, doesn't that make you feel good?
	It's kind of like having daddy at the end of the hall.
	So my sons have heard all this science of why Occam's razor shows us clearly.
	There's no reason to believe in this supernatural stuff.
	That's all hocus pocus.
	It's for the superstitious and less bright people of the world.
	All right, I had to sit with my sons and spend many hours, and we did, many hours, lucrating, middle of the night, sharing, you know, whiskey from time to time.
	In fact, my youngest son has written a letter that I put as an appendix in the book where he essentially says, thanks, Dad, for all those hours we spent because it made the difference.
	I'm not an atheist any longer.
	And this book was written as a result of those conversations and for them.
	And they saw before it ever went to print.
	And both of my sons were, you know, there are a lot of people, Gen Zs and younger people that are coming out, millennials, that they're facing the same thing we did, Dad.
	So I think you ought to just see this book gets published.
	So that's the long story.
	Okay.
	How does that relate to your experience on the train track?
	Do you believe that you were the recipient of a miracle then?
	And is that what persuaded you not to be quite the rebel that you were up to that point?
	I'm talking about, you know, theologically.
	Was that the turning point for you?
	In an accumulative way, it was.
	I would say, you know, it was the ignition.
	Absolutely.
	It is an event that has no explanation, period, end of quotation.
	But when I do a recognoiter on the events that I've experienced in my own life, there are a lot of white crows.
	And when I go out there, and I use white crow in the sense that William James did, you only need one white crow to prove that all black crows, that all crows are black, that that axiom is false.
	So there are a lot of white crows in my own experience.
	And when I'm lecturing, I've talked to thousands of people about white crows from the standpoint of, have you had experiences in your life that defy rational explanations according to empirical models?
	And very few, and I can only think of one, and she happens to be a professor and a good friend of mine.
	And I know, and I'm not slacking her at all, but I know she has some really hurt feelings about her experiences in religion.
	only one has ever said to me, No, never happened to me.
	But you'd think yourself, Howard.
	I mean, you ever pick up the phone and know who is on it?
	Yeah, I don't attribute those things to any great religious experience, or maybe, you know, there's a godlike presence behind that.
	I just think that maybe our minds are somehow connected in ways that we don't understand, that there is a universal consciousness, and maybe on those occasions where the phone goes, you know who it is, or you think of somebody, they ring, then you've connected to it.
	So I suppose what I'm coming to here is that I've been through the book today, and I've done what they call a journalist speed read on it.
	It doesn't sound to me like this is a book.
	I don't think I'd have done this conversation or had this conversation written by somebody who is wanting to preach fire and brimstone to me.
	You seem to be very keen to lay out the arguments both ways, for the reasons why people of science believe what they believe and the reasons why people of faith and spirituality, and those are two connected but different things, why they believe what they believe.
	Well, that's exactly the point of the book.
	The book is not about religion.
	It's not about hellfire or brimstone for certain.
	It's not about anything other than demonstrating it's not irrational to believe in a higher power.
	That's the whole point of the book.
	And so, of course, you have to go down the rabbit hole where my sons were.
	Now, you just, you, you offered an argument saying that, well, minds are connected.
	Well, okay, that's good.
	I'll accept that, Howard, because that's not something accepted as a model in science.
	If consciousness is emergent, which is what young people hear, and by the way, there's two kinds of emergence, strong and weak.
	And, you know, many people, mathematicians and physicists, aren't convinced there is an example of strong emergence.
	The brain would have to be.
	But if we give them that, if we give the scientists, the atheists, yes, you're right, consciousness is an emergent property, then that means it's a local event.
	A local event.
	It's going on inside your head.
	It's not going on out there in the other.
	It's, you know, these experiences that we have where we can demonstrate consciousness is not a local event give rise to breaking down the model that says emergence explains your consciousness.
	If you go through the arguments of an atheist very carefully, and I'm going to digress here.
	If I sit with an atheist, I'm not talking to a rational person.
	Because the atheist's argument is there is no such thing as a higher power.
	And he cannot prove that.
	That's an unfounded statement.
	It's as unfounded as a theist saying there absolutely is a higher power.
	Totally unfounded.
	So I'm going to say, if I'm sitting and talking to a true agnostic, a hard agnostic, they're going to tell me that the human condition is a matter of evolution.
	Darwin and research have shown us that Austrolopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo, right on out to Homo sapiens, sapien is just a natural evolution.
	And that this stuff that we think of as consciousness, this ability to think that is part of what makes us so different than the rest of the animal kingdom, well, that's just an emergent property, a local event.
	We're actually just meat machines evolved with emergent consciousness, and that emergence is, again, by definition, a local event.
	It has to be, by definition.
	Now, if we go a little further, we hear about free will.
	The research shows today that whether it's a function of the heuristics, the shortcuts that the brain takes as a matter of evolution, the things that the brain pays most attention to, like danger, or it's a subconscious process that we can't consciously normally gain access to.
	Most of our decisions are made in the unconscious.
	In fact, MRI research has shown that as much as seven seconds before you make a decision, an MRI technician will know what your decision is going to be.
	Since the work of Libbett with his cortical evoked potential, looking at muscle movement way back in the 50s, there's been this argument that there's no such thing as free will.
	Well, that fits very tightly, once again, with the arguments that we hear from the atheists.
	So, of course, I had to go down that well, and that presents all of their arguments.
	That becomes the thesis of the book.
	Then you have the antithesis, which is simply proposing some other ways to look at this.
	Try to separate the conflation and the dogma that arises in many religions that you're objecting to, like the history of the Crusades.
	Take that away.
	Let's not talk about religion.
	Let's just talk about, is it irrational to believe that there's more like life after death, and that becomes the antithesis of the book.
	And then we go to the synthesis, which is you decide, you decide for yourself.
	Let's look at what are the advantages, because reason is what we're talking about when you say it's irrational.
	Well, listen, strict reason, logic, there are two forms.
	I have speculative reason, usually in the formal sense thought of as theoretical.
	Nice job with the SpaceX yesterday, putting 33 engines firing together, even though it blew up.
	A lot of theoretical reasoning there.
	And then we have practical reasoning.
	So you get up in the morning, Howard, and you say to yourself, oh, I'm not sure I feel good today.
	Oh, maybe I should see the, maybe I should get a COVID, and you're going to make a decision.
	That decision is practical reasoning.
	Now, practical reasoning should be outcome-oriented.
	And for most of us, a healthy human being wants to live long.
	They want to live a happy life.
	They want to, you know, be surrounded by loved ones.
	What we see in the research is that those people that do believe in an afterlife live longer.
	They are healthier.
	They experience less disease, less discomfort.
	They're more connected.
	They have a higher purpose in their life.
	For all intent and purposes, some studies have gone so far to look to see, well, do spiritual people eat less fast food?
	And the fact is they do.
	I mean, there's some crazy studies out there, but there are numbers of studies that show a spiritual person lives longer.
	But then again, you know, you have to think about what the atheist says.
	The atheist can say, yeah, but these spiritual practices, they're things that I can do as an agnostic or an atheist.
	I get the same benefit.
	You know, I can assume a supine position.
	I can burn my incense.
	I can light a candle.
	And, you know, I'll have the same thing.
	And the fact is, again, the research says otherwise.
	Why?
	Well, you can be in pain in a hospital bed and a loved one can take a hold of your hand between their two hands and your pain's diminished.
	When a spiritual person practices their spirituality, meditate, they're figuratively holding the hand of a higher power.
	There's that kind of comfort difference that is easily distinguishable between, well, you know, I'm an agnostic and I'm going to meditate.
	So I guess, do I say om over and over as opposed to turning things over and holding this hand of comfort?
	All of those things you talked about, from behaviors being perhaps predetermined through that mental research and the effect of maybe somebody holding the hand of somebody who's suffering makes them feel better.
	Maybe burning incense makes you feel better.
	I've got sticks here, sandalwood sticks that I sometimes burn, and the effect of that has a kind of spiritual power over me.
	It makes me feel a little bit better.
	I don't understand how those things are necessarily confirmation that there is something spiritual happening.
	You don't know, do you, that it might be something scientific but as yet not understood happening.
	I'm not arguing, Howard, that those things are.
	I'm sorry that I may have miscommunicated.
	What I pointed out is that an atheist will say, well, the reason these spiritual people have all these extra benefits, live longer, healthier, happier, is they have these practices like meditation.
	I get you.
	So routine, they would say, routine, those routines are good for them, but they are routines.
	They're nothing else an atheist would say.
	That's correct.
	However, the research says that's nonsense, and that's why the analogy of holding hands.
	So, yeah, the atheist can sit in the chair and burn his incense and light his candle and get something, but it's not the same thing.
	And that's what the data says.
	Something that I wrote down here in my notes on the book, and I don't think it was necessarily in the book.
	I think you talked around it.
	If we're talking about religion and rationality, isn't the idea of forgiveness that is at the core of the Christian religion and many religions, isn't that irrational to, on the face of it, I mean, irrational in a logical way because why would you want to be nice to somebody who's done you harm?
	Okay.
	Now, there's a difference between being nice to someone and forgiving someone.
	I'm going to tell you about a study that we ran.
	Back in the 80s, I was asked by a friend of mine to see if we couldn't find an interdiction modality to lower hostility, aggression, and recivity rates in the Utah state prison.
	So we went out to the state prison and we administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and we used the Fowler lands developed specifically for incarcerated environments.
	And when we were all said and done with our group of volunteers, some 30, 40 subjects, we hadn't learned anything.
	Everything that we saw in these personality inventories was already in the literature.
	It was already well known.
	When I sat and I visited with these inmates, I got a different look.
	And that look was, ah, but for the grace of God, there go you.
	You know, look, my daddy was an alcohol.
	My mommy was a prostitute.
	And the neighbor boy mainlined me when I was eight years old.
	That's an exaggeration, Howard.
	But they had these stories that allowed them to displace responsibility for their actions, for what they'd done.
	They saw themselves as being inherently decent people who'd made a mistake, but it wasn't their fault.
	Right.
	So they'd had a bad turn in life.
	They'd had a bad deal out of life.
	Yeah.
	So we looked at this.
	I sat with custodial care and psychology care and came up with this strategy.
	In order to undo blame, how are we going to go about it?
	Because as long as these people blame anybody for anything, they've robbed themselves of their own power, their ability to take responsibility and change the world, their life anyway.
	In other words, every time I blame somebody, I've essentially tied myself up.
	It's not my fault, so-and-so.
	Nothing I can do.
	And that's where the inmates were.
	So we devised a self-esteem set of affirmations, if you will, and added what today I call the forgiveness set, because it's in every single program we've ever done since.
	I forgive myself.
	I forgive all others.
	I am forgiven.
	All right.
	Fact?
	There was resistance, the same kind you just put on the plate.
	Are you kidding me?
	They forgive themselves.
	They're just going to go out and do it again.
	The data.
	Absolutely not.
	Not only did we lower hostility and aggression and interrupt the recivity rate, it was so successful, the prison system put it in every facility from 288 youth offenders facility, excuse me, to maximum security, and it was cloned out to other prisons.
	The bottom line is, as long as you're blaming somebody, you're unable to be proactive.
	It's not your fault.
	Are you poor?
	And it's not that forgiveness does anything more than change this notion that, okay, I can't do anything about what's happened, but I am empowered to take my life forward, let this go and get on and do the best with my life as opposed to hanging on to the
	You're not saying, I'm going to let you do it again.
	You're not saying, oh, bless you, be saved.
	What you're doing is you're saving yourself by forgiving it and going on.
	Right.
	So you're not saying to those people, you need to become a Christian, for example, because that's a key tenet of Christianity.
	It just happens that that is the fact.
	But however you look at it, you say that those things had a tangible, measurable benefit upon those people.
	Absolutely.
	Right.
	And that's where I come from, Howard.
	I'd like to think of myself as being a practical person, a pragmatic person.
	You know, if it works, it works.
	I like to understand why things work and how they work, but I'm also data-driven.
	And one of the problems that happens is as soon as somebody starts to turn this into a metaphysical thing, then you run into comparisons of who the person is and the history.
	So, okay, you've used this example and I'm not picking on it.
	I think religion is great.
	It serves a wonderful purpose.
	It helps many, many people.
	I am only speaking to those people who maybe have lost their faith, their belief that there is more to life, that there is a higher purpose, that there is an afterlife.
	But here, the history of Christianity is anything but forgiving.
	So they can put that out and say, you know, well, we're built on forgiveness.
	The fact of the matter is, when you really search the underlying, here it is, can I reduce this to a kernel of something, one something, one common denominator with extant living religions,
	if I get right into the material itself, the text, not the people that I see going on, you know, carrying out lives that betray what they say they believe, it's love, brotherly love.
	That's what they all teach, brotherly love.
	As close as you're going to get to tying forgiveness to anything, it's in brotherly love.
	It's a practical, how we treat each other, that's probably the most important element, in my view, to being spiritual in this world, period.
	Would you like it if everybody was religious?
	Spiritually motivated.
	I believe everyone would benefit from that.
	But I know people that, like I say, I have a good friend who is very agnostic.
	She will not claim atheists now because of the atheists, you know, the technical nature of that.
	I know another individual who is considered to be probably one of the strongest atheists or agnostics on the planet, Michael Shermer.
	I've had conversations with him.
	These people are good people.
	They could be my neighbors.
	You know, they care about other human beings.
	To me, that's spirituality.
	And do you believe in God?
	Do you believe in a supreme being?
	Or do you believe that there is a force?
	You know, I believe through my life, I was brought up in the Christian religion because we all were in where I was brought up in Liverpool.
	My mother's side were Catholics.
	My father's side were Protestants.
	I don't go to church these days, I have to say.
	I don't know whether that will mean that I'm going to burn in hell, but I try and live by good principles.
	I don't do people down.
	I believe there is something bigger than me.
	Do I believe necessarily in God?
	I don't think I get time to think about that these days, but do I think that there's something beyond us that may direct us in ways that may be beneficial to us?
	Let me put it that way.
	I think there probably is.
	But would I say that I think everybody should be religious?
	I couldn't.
	But I think people should try to live good lives.
	And that transcends religion, I think.
	We're on the same page.
	I agree with you totally.
	But then it is, in a sense, it does transcend religion.
	But I suppose if you could create a religion, that's what religion would be.
	That's it right there.
	You said it in a nutshell.
	You know, one of the problems with religion is, well, first of all, there are control mechanisms and they're exclusive little clubs.
	You know, my religion is better than your religion.
	You know, if you don't join my religion, you'll burn in hell.
	You don't believe the way I do.
	I don't accept any of that, Howard.
	Maybe I'll burn in hell.
	It sounds to me that what you're saying then, and that's what I came away with my reading of the book with, that you think that both sides of this eternal debate just need to give each other a break.
	That's it, really.
	That both sides need to understand and have time for the other, because there is truth in what both of them say, you would say.
	Yeah, I would say that with the qualification that once again, I think I demonstrated using logic and reason that it's not irrational to believe in a higher power.
	You're a rational human being.
	You're an educated rational human being.
	But I may just think that way.
	Somebody telling you you're holding on to an irrational belief may offend you.
	It did offend my sons.
	So for me, it was important that that statement be the purpose of the book, to show it's not irrational.
	You know, the last section goes through a whole bunch of white crows.
	These events that you just simply can't explain that are well documented.
	I mean, Erlander Harrel carried out one of the better studies on reincarnation as a case in point.
	Yes, I've spoken with him on this show.
	Pardon?
	I've spoken with him.
	Yeah.
	Well, then you know the story.
	The bottom line is the evidence is so overwhelming that there is more, as you put it, than just this life.
	But the problem comes often when we have definitions.
	If, for example, just pure logic, if I tell you I'm sitting at an oval conference table in my office, that presupposes that that table is not square or round.
	When you say God is all-powerful, what do you mean by that?
	Can you even get your mind around what all-powerful is?
	Or are we just going to trap this definition into our understanding of semantics?
	I believe that there is more.
	Would I call it the unmoved mover of Aristotle?
	Would I call it the grand organizing designer, G-O-D-G?
	I'm not going to label.
	I'm not going to try and define it because I understand and believe that our understanding cannot possibly hold the idea of something that could possibly be behind all of it.
	Stephen Hawking backed up on his Big Bang theory.
	We're still trying to figure out basics.
	Just yesterday, there was an article that appeared that shows that, hey, brain activity also includes the chemical calcium.
	That's a brand new one.
	How long have we been studying the brain?
	But somebody who might come to this from a scientific perspective and not necessarily your life experience perspective, they might say, well, the extraordinary things that happen will one day have an explanation.
	And that explanation may be nothing to do with a higher power, or if you want to call that higher power God, whatever you might want to do.
	We might...
	That's arguably a reasonable proposition.
	Are we what?
	They Call them A-lives.
	We're just in a simulation.
	Someone's running the simulation.
	We just think that we're beings.
	I mean, A-lives have been created in computer simulations.
	They have propagated, they've carried out behavior.
	It's very, you know, limited behavior, obviously.
	You're watching dots.
	But the bottom line is, yeah, there's nothing illogical about that potential because we've seen it unfold through history.
	But does it say, well, that means to believe otherwise is irrational?
	Well, if you think everything can be explained and that there is some natural cause behind it, well, ultimately you're going to get to what Locke and Hume both talked about, a first cause.
	Well, now, what's the first cause?
	Where did that come from, is what you would say.
	That's exactly right.
	So, again, I have no problem with the argument, but it's a bit like a syllogism.
	Syllogisms are used in logic all the time.
	If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. That's fine.
	That's good logic.
	It's tight.
	On the other hand, I can create syllogisms that are logically tight and say nothing about the real world.
	John Wayne is an actress.
	Actresses shave their armpits.
	Therefore, John Wayne shaves his armpits.
	You're old enough to know who John Wayne is.
	I doubt that's true.
	No, John Wayne is the man who used to say, shut up and drink your milk.
	Yes, I know who John Wayne is.
	Okay, so some of my listeners may be confused then, because I think some of them will be hearing from this conversation that you were trying to sell religion to them.
	And I don't think that that's what you're doing.
	You're trying to just, I think, and here I am telling you what you're trying to do.
	That's terrible.
	Forgive me for that.
	Because I might well be completely wrong.
	You are trying to make ordinary people come to terms with the fact that there is an extraordinary somewhere, and they might want to give a little bit of thought as to what powers that extraordinary.
	And neither you nor I have a definitive answer to that.
	Well, you got it half right, but you had the other half right earlier, too.
	So if you took the two halves and put them together, you're spot on.
	Well, I'm glad I got 50% plus 50%.
	I think that probably means that I'm getting somewhere.
	For me, it's not about, I'm not trying to sell religion.
	I'm not trying to sell anybody anything.
	What I want to prove more than anything else is that it's not irrational to believe.
	I understand where both sides are.
	As you said in your, what I consider to be the first half you got right.
	Both sides need to treat each other with more respect.
	You know, there's arguments in both directions.
	Personally, I closed the book by saying, you make your own decision.
	My decision is like your decision, I assume, based on what you've said.
	The synthesis to me is there's too much evidence to suggest that there probably is more.
	There is something that we don't understand.
	Maybe it'll get understood at some point, but there are just experiences I have had, like that train accident, experiences that, well, that's going to be a good one for somebody to explain.
	You know, I have no clue how that one comes about, but lots of people have had these and they're well documented.
	So set that aside.
	That's enough to tip me over and believe there is.
	But if I come back and I'd never had that experience and I'm just sitting here, I hope as a teeny bit of a scholar and looking at the facts, I would have to say there's value on both sides, but it tips in favor of those who believe there is more to life than just this life.
	And, you know, look, as we come to the end of this part of the conversation, and I just want to briefly touch on something else, but as we come to the end of this part, in my own life, of course, the doubter within me will say, well, maybe I believe that there's something maybe beyond me, and that if things get too bad for me in my life, then something will step in and help me, which has happened so many times before in the past.
	But maybe I believe that because not to believe that means that it's big, dark, lonely, and fearful, the place that I live in.
	Okay, that's a good point.
	So let's take free will.
	The community of behavioral science is basically talking to one another about, let's not tell anybody that there's any evidence there's no such thing as free will.
	Because we've run studies, and when we tell people that there's no such thing as free will, crime increases, they're more inclined to steal, they're more inclined to cheat, da-da-da-da-da.
	So for a civil society, we need to practice practicality, pragmatics.
	Let's not tell anybody there's no such thing as free will.
	By the way, I take exception to that, but that's a long conversation.
	It's a qualified exception.
	But your remark is a lot like that.
	The bottom line is it gives you comfort.
	It carries you.
	It embraces you, and you feel stronger, more protected as a result.
	I feel hope.
	You talk about hope.
	i feel when i think itself when I think there might be something out there to help me, whatever it might be, and whatever you want to call it, then I feel a sense of hope.
	That's right.
	And that is so, so incredibly important.
	All the research shows us that, hey, that sense of helpless hopelessness, that's doom.
	That's depression.
	That's disease.
	That's the lack of ability to move through life.
	It's doom.
	So you're not sitting there today saying to my listener, who may not go along with anything that you said, go to church.
	You're not saying that.
	You're just saying it's okay to think out of the box.
	And if you don't want to think out of the box, that's okay too.
	Absolutely.
	Look, Martin Luther said, whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.
	I do not believe that.
	I believe that you can be Christian, you can be Buddhist, you can be Jewish, you can be whatever faith it is that you practice, and use that ability to think.
	But you have to understand that a lot of the things that we've talked about, that may seem to create a problem with what your religion is, they're in definitions, they're in dogma.
	That's not the spirit of what your religion is.
	That's not Amy Jill Levine is one of the leading biblical scholars on the planet.
	We've had many conversations and she cleared up things for me, like the story of Job.
	There is a metaphor.
	These are teaching principles.
	They're not intended to be taken literally.
	You can be rational and accept what these metaphors teach, what this power, this inspiration that they bring when you read.
	And that's got to be the majority point that I'd like to make right now as we close is, look, you can be a rational person and believe.
	Okay.
	Well, I hear what you say.
	I've taken away from that what I will take away from that.
	And you know that I don't think there's anything random in this world because of my life experience.
	It's shown me time and time again.
	But I, you know, in my darkest hours, sometimes I'll think I've been abandoned by whatever it might have been that's helped me over the years.
	And sometimes I say thank whatever.
	I nearly said thank God, but I mean thank whatever it might be for delivering me from whatever situation that I've been in.
	It's a fascinating discussion.
	You know, I think there will be people who are going to email me on all kinds of sites on this one at the end of it.
	Just finally, because of your work with the mind, I noticed that you've done some work on people programming themselves for things to happen, for things to improve for them.
	In fact, you have a book called Mind Programming, so that's exactly what I'm talking about.
	Do you still believe in this era where we're so influenced by technology and there are so many external influences that we may only subliminally register?
	Do you still think it's possible by having clear intent to make things happen and make things change?
	You know, here in America, we're currently in probably the most polarized part of history that I've known in my lifetime.
	And unfortunately, in my view, the engineers of consent, to use Bernay's words, have become very, very sophisticated.
	And the result is they know that the human being is more attracted to things.
	We give it more attention if it's fearful than if it's pleasurable.
	Part of our evolution, we needed to pay more attention, of course, to the growl in the bush that could be the saber-toothed tiger than to the rustle of a cricket at our feet.
	Because of that, we see a whole level of scientific engineering that drives people primarily through fear.
	It's been computer augmented.
	I'm going to put it that way.
	We use the internet in one way or another, hours and hours every day.
	Most people now get their news from the internet.
	When we see something that we like, we follow it.
	And an algorithm tags us.
	And we see something else that we like, we follow it.
	And an algorithm tags us.
	And pretty quick, we have given the computer world, whether it's a Facebook or an Instagram or you name it, social media, we have given them who we are,
	what we like, what we're about to buy, where we shop, how old we are, our political beliefs, our religious beliefs, we give all this away in self-disclosure, revealing it by the things we like and the things we dislike.
	And then the algorithm gives us back only what we like because that builds the audience and that holds and captures.
	And by doing that, we can sell more advertising and we can make more money.
	Yeah, that's the digital marketing Strategy.
	But what I was asking was: do you believe that if people, even with all these influences that they don't know they're being influenced by, and I am being influenced by as well, and maybe even you, Eldon, do you still think that we can take charge of what happens to us by maybe programming for something different?
	Yes, I still believe absolutely without a doubt that if you learn how your mind works, that you can be proactive and you can recognize, not just recognize when somebody's trying to program you, but you can recognize how to program yourself.
	There's just lots of things that we go to school.
	You and I went to, I don't know how many years of school.
	A lot.
	Most people don't realize that if I anticipate that I will fail at a task and then I do fail, that I get a reward, a dopamine reward, that I can become addicted to failing because every time I fail, a neurochemical rewards me.
	And yep, I was right.
	I knew it.
	And I have a moment of feel-good.
	People don't realize that.
	You can become just as addictive to failure as you can to a substance like nicotine.
	It's all neurochemical.
	Because it's easy.
	You can also reverse thought.
	You can do things intentionally that will make you feel better or that will assist you in studying by increasing serotonin in the brain.
	The whole, the way this brain mind works is something that if you get a handle on it, you absolutely will find that you can steal back free will and you can avoid,
	I'm not never going to say everything, but you can avoid most of what comes at you that is designed to sell you a product, a platform, a belief.
	Interesting.
	Eldon, thank you very much.
	Let's not leave it four years next time.
	And I wish you good rest of your day because there's a good seven, eight hours between the two of us.
	So you've still got your day to come.
	And my day is drawing to a close as we've been speaking.
	I've gone from that blue sky to twilight here in London town.
	Eldon, thank you very much indeed.
	Oh, well, thank you, Howard.
	It's always my pleasure.
	And I agree.
	Not four more years.
	Interesting and difficult territory.
	Your thoughts on this?
	More than gratefully received.
	You know, you can go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
	You can send me an email from there.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained for these last 17 or more years.
	Thank you very much indeed for being part of it.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

▲