The Telepathy Tapes - S2E49: Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove: The World's only Parapsychology PhD | Talk Tracks

Starting point is 00:00:03 Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and welcome to the Talk Tracks, brought to you weekly by TTT Media. In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, consciousness, and even unexplained phenomena. Because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show, we do just that. There are so many people sitting on an idea for a business because actually getting it off the ground feels overwhelming. You might know exactly what you want to create, but then comes the website, payments, inventory, and all the technical stuff that can make you wonder where to even begin.

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Starting point is 00:03:23 Today's guest is Dr. Jeffrey Mischlove. Dr. Mishlove is the world's first and only PhD in parapsychology. For those unfamiliar with the term, parapsychology refers to a field of study concerned with the investigation of paranormal or anomalous psychological phenomena. Dr. Mishlov has spent the last 50 years deeply ammeshed with the world's top minds of frontier science, interviewing leaders in fields such as physics and psychology for his show New Thinking Aloud, while authoring books of his own such as The Roots of Consciousness or the P.K. Man. On today's episode, we talk with Dr. Mishlov about how a shared death experience started him on his path to parapsychology.

Starting point is 00:04:00 So without further ado, Jeffrey, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? And maybe you can even talk about your life growing up and how it led you to pursue such an unusual career path. Sure. My name is Jeffrey Mishlov. I have a doctoral degree in parapsychology. It was awarded from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. As far as I know, to this day, I have the only doctoral diploma that actually says parapsychology on it ever awarded anywhere in the world by an accredited university. But I have to qualify that right away to say there are probably two or three hundred people who have done doctoral level research in the field of parapsychology.

Starting point is 00:04:49 They just have diplomas that say other things on. them. So my degree is unique because it was through an individual interdisciplinary doctoral program that I designed myself. So I was able to envision parapsychology the way I'd like to see it, which includes the entire history of mysticism in all cultures going back to ancient shamanism. And I see parapsychology as part of that larger tradition rather than simply. a branch of experimental psychology. I had a pretty normal upbringing. I was raised in the Midwest in Fondalac, Wisconsin. My father ran a furniture store and was also in the real estate business. And I imagined I probably do something like that when I got older. But as I got into college in the

Starting point is 00:05:47 1960s, it was a time of enormous social upheaval, a time of social protest because of the Vietnam war and people questioning authority and also the use of psychedelic drugs is beginning at that time. So you might say I had my mind blown open as an undergraduate in college. And in fact, I wrote a senior honors thesis at the University of Wisconsin on the psychology of religious mysticism. I had that interest, even as an undergraduate. Then I enrolled in graduate school at Berkeley in criminology. And I was, if you had known me in 1972, you would have seen a person who was doing field work at Sam Quentin Prison, working in the psychiatric unit, doing group therapy sessions with murderers and rapists.

Starting point is 00:06:47 When did you go from criminology to pursuing parapsychology? Well, when I had the first and probably only major mystical experience of my life, it occurred in March in 1972 when I was asleep. To be honest, it was about 7.30 in the morning. And my great Uncle Harry, who was in his 80s, appeared to me in a dream. And it was the most powerful dream of my life. Uncle Harry and I had an in-depth conversation. I can't really articulate exactly what happened.

Starting point is 00:07:23 It was beyond words. But when I awoke from the dream, I was crying tears of joy. And I was singing a sacred song, a very sacred song from my own religious background of Judaism. And so I wrote home, I said, how's Uncle Harry? I had a dream about him. And my mother called me immediately when she got my letter and said, how did you know? Uncle Harry had just died.

Starting point is 00:07:51 And when I checked the records, it appears that he died exactly at the moment I had that dream. So that threw me through a loop. I began asking my professors, what do you know about this sort of thing? And I quickly discovered they didn't know anything. So what Dr. Mishlov had experienced is commonly referred to as a shared death experience or STE. And we just did an episode all about shared death experiences. So please check that out. But in short, a shared death experience is when a loved one or caregiver experiences what appears to be the first stages of entering an afterlife along with the person who is dying or has

Starting point is 00:08:28 just died. And again, if you want to hear more about this, please check out our last week's talk tracks episode, which does a deep dive into this fascinating event. So Jeffrey, after you had your shared death experience, how did you feel about it? it. And, you know, how did you change moving on after such a profoundly mystical experience? I felt it was so big in my life, so important that it was worth finding out. I had to, I had to explore this. I had no real choice. And I agonized and agonized about it for months, actually. Like, how am I going to do this? I'm in criminology. And I realized, well, I'm looking at human deviants from the negative side, psychopathology and crime. But what if I were to switch

Starting point is 00:09:15 and study human deviants from the positive side, which would be mysticism and parapsychology, intuition, creativity, maybe I can just switch. I talked around at the university. There really weren't programs of that sort, but I persisted in thinking about it and wanting to make this change. I desperately wanted to make the change. I couldn't continue on this same track any longer. And one day, it's like I woke up in the morning with a certainty, a knowledge, that I was going to find the answer to my quest in a dream. And the dream was going to happen that night. And like all day long, I just knew, tonight's the night. The dream is going to come. And sure enough, at night, I had a dream. And in the dream, I'll tell you the dream, if I may, I was just visiting some friends who lived across

Starting point is 00:10:12 town in Albany, California, but the other side of Berkeley, married student housing, I knew them well, I knocked on the door of their apartment, no answer. And in the dream, I found a key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room, and there, flat on the living room floor, all laid out was a magazine. I picked up this magazine, which in the dream was called I, E-Y-E, and was paging through it in the dream when I woke up with this feeling of exhilaration, this is it, I am the answer.

Starting point is 00:10:49 And the funny thing is, I was certain I had the answer, but I didn't have a clue as to what it meant. So I put on my tennis shoes, this is the days like before running shoes even, and I ran across town five miles to this apartment, I got there, I knocked on the door, and as I had dream, no answer. And it turned out, I did know where they hit a key. And I took the key, let myself into their apartment, walked into the living room.

Starting point is 00:11:20 There in the middle of the living room floor was this, a magazine all splayed out. I picked it up, and the name of this magazine was Focus. And it happened to be, for people in the San Francisco Bay Area, they'll know. it's the magazine of listener-sponsored radio and television, KQED. As I'm paging through the magazine, it dawned on me for the first time in my life, I could pursue my interests by getting involved in the nonprofit sector of the media. So what Dr. Mishlove experienced here is what's often referred to as clear cognizance. And claircognisance means clear knowing, which is a psychic or intuitive ability where a person

Starting point is 00:12:04 suddenly just know something without any logical explanation or proof. Okay, so, Jeffrey, you have the stream that kind of leads you to a radio station. Which was an odd thing for me, because back in those days, I had long hair, I had a beard, I was a hippie, and not only that, I didn't believe, I didn't own a radio or television, and I was certain that they were all phony baloney. I wanted nothing to do with electronic media. I thought the only authentic human interactions were face to face, but I changed my mind right then.

Starting point is 00:12:41 And I went over to KPFA Radio, which was listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio, in Berkeley, California, where I lived, and said, I'm here to volunteer. And they said, oh, good, here we need somebody to sit at this desk, And when you hear the buzzer, press this button and let people in the front door. And even though I had my master's degree at that point in criminology, I gladly did it. And within three weeks, I had learned how to produce a radio show, which was called, if I remember correctly, you don't have to be from out of town to be psychic.

Starting point is 00:13:24 and because I had a lot of local friends who were part of the community in Berkeley. And so the program director liked it so much, he said, we've got a slot, a regular slot for you every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. Would you mind hosting this interview show called The Mind's Year? And like within three weeks of my dream, I'm sitting at a table with world-class experts from all over the world passing through San Francisco on their book tours and coming to KPFA, which had a 50,000 watt transmitter and covered, you know, all in Northern California. And I had a resource that I could have in-depth people like Robert Monroe were passing through the author of Journeys Out of the Body and many, many luminaries.

Starting point is 00:14:20 And that's what gave me the confidence to go back to the university and create my own individual, interdisciplinary doctoral major in parapsychology. So that's how it began. That's incredible. So you're interviewing some of the biggest names in consciousness studies within weeks of following a literal dream. It's almost like that was your schooling, right? Like the radio show was your education. And you were able to receive this like firsthand primary knowledge from, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:50 these amazing people. Oh, yes. And for those of you unfamiliar with Robert Monroe, he's really the definitive modern researcher on out-of-body experiences and astral projection, which is where your consciousness separates from your physical body to travel through a non-physical dimension called the astral plane. Robert Monroe also started the Monroe Institute, where Tom Campbell, who we've had in the show, really pioneered a lot of his field research into astral projection. Okay, so I digress. So, Jeffrey, can you tell us a little bit more about some of the people you interviewed during that time? What was it like to be a part of all that? because this field has been controversial for so long.

Starting point is 00:15:23 Well, you know, you have to imagine what it was like in the 1970s, in the San Francisco Bay area. It was a wild and crazy time. Synchronicity's happening everywhere. You're talking about world-class physics being done, and David Kaiser wrote a book called How the Hippies Save Physics. Well, those guys were all my friends. friends, and I'm even mentioned peripherally in that book. So it felt like the revolution was about to happen, that the whole world was going to wake up to what's going on in parapsychology.

Starting point is 00:16:11 I was invited in those years to live with Arthur Remyon, the inventor in the Bell helicopter, who founded the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, which became a hub of all the people who were interested in these things. And Arthur Young himself, was a genius. So we were surrounded by geniuses. He was involved in funding some of the early research with Erie Geller at SRI International, a major industrial military think tank. And I sponsored Erie Geller's first major public event in the United States. We filled Zellerbach auditorium on the Berkeley campus. 1800 people came. I was sponsoring some postings. I was sponsoring symposiums, Andrea Pujarich showed up. It seemed as if, you know, this was going to change the

Starting point is 00:17:05 world at the same time, but the internet was just getting started. Arpanet, people like Jacques Follet were a part of our group studying UFOs. And it was a very strange time. It was also the Patty Hurst kidnapping took place just a few blocks away from the Institute for the Study of consciousness and KPFA Radio, where I was doing my show at the time is where the Symbionese Liberation Army was sending their messages. So we had the world media camped right outside the radio station. The whiplash between mainstream, world-changing technology, and fringe mysticism occurring in the exact same place is incredible. And this was a volatile moment in the 1970s when the boundaries of physical reality, material science, and social order seemed to be. just cracking wide open. So Jeffrey, you know, with the world seemingly on the cusp of something new,

Starting point is 00:18:00 with new consciousness studies being explored in the popular culture, how did we lose momentum? Well, as I say, we thought it was going to change the world. And Jock, who was working on ARPANET, said he also realized the internet was going to change the world. We can look back now and say, yes, the internet did. And parapsychology and consciousness had a huge cultural impact, but it didn't achieve the kind of expectations that I had and many of us had back then. When I think of it now, I go back to the writings of William James, the founder of American psychology, who was also deeply involved in this field. And he said, we cannot expect progress in what was then called psychical research, decade by decade as we do in other disciplines. Because the implications, the

Starting point is 00:18:55 implications are so deep, they're metaphysical. He said, we have to instead look by the century and by the half century to measure progress. So it's just, it's happening, but at a different speed, because it's truly far more profound than the internet. And the internet is changing everybody's life. So, okay, if we go with that quote from William James, then you'd think there'd be a lot of progress, right? And acceptance made around, you know, consciousness and kind of the unseen world. So since it's been around 50 years since you started in Consciousness Studies, do you see any difference between now in 1973? Oh, yes. There is a difference for sure. The very fact that we're having this conversation is a reflection of that difference. It's being much more widely talked about. As far as I know, the telepathy tapes, it's like the number one podcast. So, yeah, that reflects a difference.

Starting point is 00:19:52 It's like things are getting better and worse altogether at the same time, where humanity is, I would say, we're kind of at a tipping point. It's like many people would say it's incumbent upon us to make a leap of consciousness or we're going to perish because things are heading in some levels in a very bad direction. and if human beings don't learn how to navigate this in a healthier way, we're probably going to end up destroying ourselves, and it'll be our fault. Okay, so then what does your family think of your career in parapsychology? You know what? If it wasn't for having a supportive wife, I wouldn't have been able to have had this career because it was very difficult. There were times when, you know, nobody wanted to hire me. So I was very fortunate to have a family who believed in me and would support my work. I think people who want to go into this field need to be aware that you have to have a real passion for it because even today, well, things are opening up and there are many more opportunities than there used to be.

Starting point is 00:21:02 It's still kind of controversial and there are going to be people who are vehemently opposed. As soon as I got my degree in parapsychology, the skeptics were all over it. They call themselves skeptics, but they're not really. A true philosophical skeptic is more than anything skeptical of themselves. These people, they call themselves a psychops. They were not skeptical of themselves. They were certain that they had the absolute truth. It was a religious belief for them and basically in materialism and that all this psychic stuff, had to be nonsense. So they put enormous pressure on the University of California to withdraw the degree that had already been awarded. And when they failed at that, then they tried to libel me. And I had to fight a libel suit for six years. So it's a good thing that I was also credentialed as a clinical psychologist. Why do you think some people are so bothered about scholars studying, you know, the unseen world or the paranormal? What makes people so scared of even just researching something like telepathy from your point of view.

Starting point is 00:22:21 Why is telepathy threatening to people? The thing is, if we look at it in a deeper way, let's take a look at Freud. For example, the pioneer in depth psychology, he came up with the idea of defense mechanisms. Well, what are defense mechanisms all about? We're defending ourselves from knowing who we really are. We don't want to know what's inside our own. minds and the idea that somebody else might be able to look and see what's happening inside of our mind, things that we don't want to know, is terrifying to some people. And so it manifests itself,

Starting point is 00:22:59 in my opinion, in these irrational skeptics who call themselves skeptics, but they're the least skeptical people of all when it comes to questioning their own ideology. But they represent a social force that is trying to tamp down the potential expansion of telepathic abilities in the general population. They don't want it to have any legitimacy whatsoever. That's why I'm the only person after 40 years with a doctoral degree that says parapsychology. It should in their minds never have the legitimacy of science or the legitimacy of a major public institution because after all, well, I'll give you the perfect archetype for this, back in the days when Erie Geller was getting a lot of publicity. Arthur C. Clark, the great science fiction writer, who has written some beautiful books like Childhood's End, in which he writes rather positively about the paranormal, came out publicly and he said, you know, Geller's a fraud. And at the same time, he was giving a talk at Berkeley. And I was in the audience. He's giving a talk. He's giving a talk. in the student union, and he finished his talk. I raised my hand. I said, Mr. Clark, do you believe in ESP? And he said,

Starting point is 00:24:23 this is very telling. He said, no, I do not, because I don't want anybody to read my mind. So I want to change topics here just a little bit and talk about what you've been up to recently, because you were the grand prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay competition, presenting the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. So congratulations on that win. Thank you. Well, I tell you what was really an interesting synchronicity is that the award ceremony took place at Bigelow Aerospace Facilities in Las Vegas on my 75th birthday. So it was a wonderful birthday. What was your essay about? Because I know that there were some incredible essays out there looking at this stuff.

Starting point is 00:25:11 The theme of the essay was for the best evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. The just of my essay, the thrust of it, is that there are nine different lines of evidence, each independent of the other, all pointing to the idea of human survival. You might say, well, no one of them is conclusive. But when you look at all nine, everything from mere death experiences to reincarnation, evidence to people who use these voice boxes and get electronic messages, signals from the dead going back and forth, two-way communications to mediums, physical medianship, like materialization of deceased people, for example, or voices that come out of the air, it's called direct voice mediumship, not to mention the deathbed experiences, where people sometimes see their loved ones

Starting point is 00:26:10 waiting for them on the other side as they're dying, and occasionally they had experiences of seeing someone they didn't know was already deceased. So you've got all of these lines of evidence, and they're all pointing in that direction. So you have to look at the accumulation, and they're very good examples in each of those paddivores. I've been doing interviews on this topic for decades. So I can go back to some of my old interviews, for example, of the Nobel laureate, Francis Crick was talking to me about the possibility of life after death. He didn't believe it, but he said it's possible we haven't ruined it out yet. He admitted on camera for me that it's totally reasonable within what we know of science today,

Starting point is 00:26:59 that there could be an afterlife. So again, congratulations. And then, you know, since then, is there anything you've been working on? I've been a whole series of interviews 10 now with a very interesting case. I'd refer to it as two soles in one body. We were talking about a 37-year-old man and 18-year-old female sharing a body together. I am working with a teen of scientists to study this case because of it, conventional speaking, would be called a case of dissociative identity disorder, what used to be called multiple

Starting point is 00:27:33 personality disorder. I think of them as really two different people. it doesn't matter how you view it. The key here is they've learned how to switch back and forth instantly. They're shared a body as a result of doing a lot of work on themselves, a lot of deep meditation. So at this point, even though it's been problematic, they have to do psychotherapy. It's now become not a disorder, but simply a condition, maybe even a healthy condition. But brain researchers are interested in understanding what happens in the brain.

Starting point is 00:28:10 These two personalities shift back and forth the way they do. So I've helped to organize a team of researchers, multidisciplinary, who are planning to do some extensive research on that case. Well, I am very excited for what conclusions your team finds. Dr. Mishlov, thank you for chatting with our team. You've walked so that others that follow you can really run when they do this work. So do you have any final messages for our listeners? Well, yes, I wonder when I look back at my life and see how I was guided by dreams to pursue the life that I've lived,

Starting point is 00:28:46 and I would have to say, Mal, I'll be 80 this year. I can look back and say it's been a great mouth. It's been very fulfilling. I would wish that everybody could feel and fulfilled as I do, knowing that the work that you're doing is helping other people and getting you, an enormous amount of satisfaction. So I wonder, you know, what's, what's it all about? Why did I receive those dreams that pointed me in the right direction? And it occurs to me that the universe is conscious, and we are conscious. We are part of a conscious universe. And each of us has a unique destiny to fulfill. It's different for each and every person. But ultimately,

Starting point is 00:29:29 the universe wants each of us to become the very best version of ourselves. And if we commit to doing that, the universe is going to reach out through dreams, through synchronicities, and doors will open. So I encourage everybody who's listening to this podcast to think about what does it mean for you to become the best version of yourself? That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks. But new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our backstage pass by visiting our website.

Starting point is 00:30:14 With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, ask me anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our telepathy tribe discord, and hear and see exclusive content from the telepathy tapes vault. Visit our website at the telepathy tapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our backstage pass. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. This episode was produced by Ryan Bechart, technical directing audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole,

Starting point is 00:30:42 opening and closing music by Elizabeth P.W, and original logo and cover art by Ben Condora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

The Telepathy Tapes - S2E49: Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove: The World's only Parapsychology PhD | Talk Tracks

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