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Marieta Pehlivanova is a research scientist at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, which is better known as DOPS.

DOPS was founded in 1976, and it is a highly unique and rigorous research group that investigates the mind’s relationship to the body, and the possibility of consciousness surviving physical death. They study children with past-life memories, and people who have near-death experiences and who report other extraordinary and unusual phenomena. It’s fascinating stuff! And I think their work has such great potential to change and shape our understanding of…well, why we’re here in the first place, and what the meaning of our lives really is.

Today, Marieta and I talk about all of this.

Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at University of Virginia

Dean Radin, PhD’s episode on Pulling the Thread:

ELISE:

Well, it’s really nice to meet you. This conversation has been a long time in coming, and it’s funny, I’m sure you’ve listened to The Telepathy Tapes like everyone else in America, and I would say I have been having these conversations for so long and it was fun to hear everyone reemerge. I’m like, oh, hi, Jeffrey Long hi on The Telepathy Tapes. So how long you’ve specifically been working within this space?

MARIETA:

So I have been at DOPS, the Division of Perceptual Studies for eight years now or a little bit over eight years. And I started right after I got my PhD in experimental psychology. But I’ve known for a while that this is what I wanted to do, I would say for about 20 years, and I’ll go as far as saying that is the reason I got a PhD. I wanted to get involved in this work.

ELISE:

What was it for you? What was the spark? What was your flip moment or the inciting event that made you have these big questions?

MARIETA:

Sure. This is a big question. I’m going to try to keep it simple, but I was going along my academic journey. So 20 years ago I was getting a bachelor’s in statistics. So I was in school kind of on this academic educational path and I cared about that, but I also cared about my spiritual interests. And I had become interested in these topics probably since I was a teenager. And I tried to explore that on the side as much as I could. And at some point I got this realization that I could be using academic scientific research tools to study some of these topics and to be applying these tools to the study of consciousness or the metaphysical, if you will. And it was an insight, but it’s also something that came to me as an idea or an insight after I started meditating about 20 years ago. So that’s how the insight originated. But my path had been leading toward these interests for a number of years,

ELISE:

And I feel like people who have been paying attention to this space for a while know about DOPS at UVA. It’s sort of one of the oldest longest enduring. Do you call yourselves an institute? I mean, you’re a division I guess within a very highly regarded academic institution, but it must be hard. It’s hard, right? I mean, you can go to ions, there’s dos, but it must be difficult to find an academically rigorous environment that takes these incredibly important, incredibly philosophical, very beautiful questions. Seriously, how many programs are there?

MARIETA:

You are, right. We are very unique in terms of being a research division at a mainstream R1 university, and we are currently housed in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the School of Medicine. And we are in that department for historical reasons because our founder, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who founded DOPS in 1967, he was at the time the chair of the psychiatry department. So we are here in the psychiatry department for just because of the legacy that we have, and we are indeed very unique. There is a few other research centers, ions that you mentioned here in the United States. They’re amazing and very productive. But in terms of this focus on specifically what we would call the survival hypothesis, that investigating this idea hypothesis that some aspect of human consciousness continues or survives beyond death with this focus DOPS is very unique in academia, not just in the United States, but also in the world.

ELISE:

And people who are listening are probably familiar with Jim Tucker and some of that incredible work, those breakthrough, I think that they broke through to the mainstream, but what do I know? But the stories about these kids who have these memories that end up through just the most wild inexplicable circumstances, this belief that they are a fighter pilot and they know their call sign and they know their friends call sign and they know exactly what happened, and they’re too, and they’re in the closet. I’m trying to remember, there have been movies, there have been plenty of articles, but is that still a substantive part of the work that you guys do? Is working with children who have these not really wild imaginations, but evidence, have memories of their previous lives that are then?

MARIETA:

Yeah. So historically, I’m going to go back to the history of DOPS. Initially, when DOPS was founded in 1967, that was the sole focus of the operation, if you will. It was the beginning of dos and the legacy of DOPS to investigate this particular phenomenon of very young children talking about what looks like past life memories. However, over the years we’ve expanded to looking at other kinds of phenomena. There’s been a lot of work here, mostly done by Dr. Bruce Grayson on near death experiences. So we very much still continue this work, and I’m involved in that. And we also study other phenomena like out body experiences, purported after death communication, so perceptions that someone is communicating with the deceased loved one. We also have a lab portion of DOPS where we do experimental work. So a lot of the other phenomena that we study could be called spontaneous because we cannot control how and to whom they happen. But there’s also an experimental research program where we could look at high or psychic performance in the lab in terms of various pre-cognition tasks or there’s been a study with mediums and looking at what’s happening in their brains in terms of brain activity as they’re retrieving and reporting information about disease people. So we have a broad range of phenomena that we study.

ELISE:

And what feels within DOPS, like it has the most energy or is the most productive in terms of, I mean, I understand why you’d want a wide application, but what’s the largest ambition? Is it to prove theoretically that consciousness exists after death? And what do you guys see as the most fruitful part of that search?

MARIETA:

That’s a great question. So we try to abstain from the word proof because there’s very few things like there’s proof in mathematics, but in terms of experimental science or empirical sciences, we try to gather evidence for the survival hypothesis. So in that sense, yes, the work on kids’ past life memories is the most fruitful, I guess you could say. And is also, again, it’s tied to the legacy of DOPS. So there is a lot of excitement among the general population, and even people who donors who come to us and want to support this work, many of them have a very specific interest in this phenomenon because in terms of evidence, it has produced very compelling evidence and was very, very meticulously investigated by Dr. Ian Stevenson. I do want to say currently there’s also excitement on this topic because we’re starting or have started a new research program that takes this work in a different direction where we try to answer different questions.

And historically, a lot of this work has been this sort of forensic type investigation. Family comes to us and the parents usually the mother report, my kid has been saying this, that and the other thing since they were very young. And sometimes kids talk about very specific details, like I used to be that other person. This was my name, this is where I live. This was the name of my wife or my kids, or whatever. And in some cases, the kids provide very specific details that could be used to try to identify that person. And so a lot of these forensic investigations have consisted of first interviewing the family, interviewing the child, if they’re willing to talk of corroborating the statements of the child from different sources. Is that really what the child said? Did they have access to a movie or some other source that could have given them that story?

But again, a lot of times we’re talking about very young children, age three or younger, sometimes starting at two or even earlier. And after that, the investigator would try to identify a unique deceased person who matches the details of what the child is saying. And in a lot of the cases that we have in our collection, such identifications have been made with a high degree of certainty. We call these cases solved. And then once you identify that person, there’s also the opportunity to do some more controlled tests, like the investigator could try to find some more information about that deceased person and then bring it to the child and try to do some kind of say, recognition test. Let’s say they found a relative of that purported deceased person, and they might get a picture and get a couple more similar pictures unrelated and ask the child, okay, do any of these people look familiar?

And in many of these cases, the kids are able to identify that person related to the deceased person they claim to have been. So historically, this is a lot of what these investigations have consisted of, and a lot of the work that has been done at DOS related to kids’ claims of past life memories, and this is important work, what produces this evidence that maybe in some of these cases, kids appear to have knowledge of the life of a deceased person that they should not have any way of knowing. So we’re still planning on continuing to do this work, but we’re also trying to ask some other questions to understand this phenomenon. And one of those big questions is why is it that some children talk about past life memories, but not other children? So what is it that makes these children different or receptive, more willing to talk or remember or have this knowledge, whatever it is.

And so we started this new research program last year where we’re trying to understand a little bit more about how this may work, and we’re looking at several sort of hypotheses. One of those hypotheses has to do with memory. Maybe it’s a different memory process, and maybe as provocative as that sounds, maybe it is the case that some of these children have extraordinary memory, especially autobiographical memory, which is memory for the events of one’s own life that somehow seems to go beyond the memory of this life. And it’s crazy, right? I mean, it is, again, very provocative, but it is something that could be tested because memory as a process has been studied very extensively in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience. There’s a lot of knowledge about this process from many decades of research that we could bring in. And we want to do experiments where we look at kids who talk about past life memories and measure their memory performance and compare them to demographically matched children who do not show such memories.

So that’s one avenue that we’re exploring. We’re also looking at the role of trauma in this process because in many of these cases, kids seem to talk about a traumatic death, which is an interesting feature of this phenomenon. The lives and deaths that people that these kids talk about, they’re rarely are people live to be 90 and died peacefully. In a large percentage of the cases. We’re talking about some kind of unnatural death depending on how you slice it. It’s around 65 to 70% of the cases we’ve collected. And in some of these cases that could lead to distress in the child or nightmares. So we’re trying to explore that connection with trauma. That’s another mainstream literature that we can tap into in general, people who are traumatized behave differently than people who are not traumatized. So we want to see in these children, if we can demonstrate that there’s no trauma in this life, does it seem that they behave as if they were traumatized, at least in some of these cases where they talk about traumatic deaths. So we’re really trying to expand the work from not just gathering that evidence, but also trying to understand the process. Why is this happening? How is it happening? And of course, there’s also factors that may relate to the family environment that we’re also thinking of. None of this happens in a vacuum. The child is the child with their cognitive personality, whatever characteristics, but there’s also the family and the environment, and we’ve never looked at that before. So sorry, I gave you a very long-winded

ELISE:

Answer. No, no, it’s great.

MARIETA:

There’s a lot of excitement around this research program.

ELISE:

I have a few questions, but one question is when you’re talking about the trauma, the question is whether the traumatic death from the past life is re-traumatizing the child currently, or whether there’s a carryover of trauma that would be distinct from anything that they had experienced in their current life? Is that the question?

MARIETA:

All of it. All of it.

ELISE:

Okay.

MARIETA:

I think with this one, our hypothesis with trauma is a little bit less specific than our hypothesis, the memory, several ways this connection can go. But yes, one of those again, seems pretty provocative and crazy, but it is something that we could look at to some extent empirically does there seem to be some transfer of that trauma to the current life where the child may appear to be traumatized even in the absence of traumatic exposure in the current life? And this is all something that we can measure via validated research questionnaires and tasks in the laboratory.

ELISE:

So interesting in the context of, I mean, these are very extreme cases, but you think about intergenerational trauma, you just think about these things that we discuss in the culture, and obviously we know through Yehuda’s work that we do pass on trauma in our genes. But it’s interesting to think about it as a psychic phenomenon too, and for those who are listening, it feels with these kids, I’m going to just say this and you can tell me if I’m wrong, but one theory or question, is this reincarnation or is there a process that we go through when we come into bodies in utero where our previous lives are wiped clean, or is this sort of a system error where that didn’t fully happen? I think that’s one theory, at least in the popular culture. Then I guess you’re talking about are these kids essentially young mediums where they’re picking up information that doesn’t belong to them and owning it or claiming it? Because it also seems, from what I remember about all of these stories, at a certain age, they grow out of this, it leaves, it gets integrated, it resolves. They’re not 40 years old and still thinking that they were buried with the swimming pool in Beverly Hills. I can’t remember that particular person’s name, but Ryan, when he went and met his sister, so crazy.

MARIETA:

Yeah. So you asked me a lot of questions. I want to try to

ELISE:

I know I do that. I’m sorry. It’s

MARIETA:

Okay. It’s okay. It gives us stuff to talk about, but I want to address a few of those. So in terms of how do we explain this phenomenon, so we don’t use the word reincarnation lightly.

ELISE:

I’m sure you don’t. Yes.

MARIETA:

Even term coined by Dr. Stevenson when he first started writing about these cases is cases of the reincarnation type. And we use that, that’s how we use court is the acronym that we use internally, and that’s also the acronym that people in our field use. But the idea there is we’re not sure this is reincarnation. It kind of looks like it may be, but we’re not sure. So we’re not going to call it reincarnation, but we’re call it of the reincarnation type.

ELISE:

That’s why I’m calling it reincarnation for you, so you don’t have to say it. I’m just kidding.

MARIETA:

Yes. But even that aside, the claim of reincarnation is very, it’s almost a metaphysical question. We don’t know when you die, does your soul go somewhere in some kind of holding place and then it reincarnates? Some of that is beyond our ability to observe empirically because it’s not happening in this physical world. What we know is that some of these kids, especially in the very, very good cases, very strong cases, appear to really have access to the consciousness or memories of a deceased person. And then there’s this sort of debate within parapsychology. I mean, I don’t know that the debate is necessarily alive at this point, but there’s different, okay, maybe it is reincarnation or maybe it is what we would call super sci, which is this hypothesis that the kid is not a reincarnation. They themselves are not a reincarnation of this person, but through some still anomalous and extraordinary process, they seem to have access to these memories of this deceased person. Now, that would still be extraordinary because our current understanding of consciousness of how memories work, they depend on a living functioning brain. So even if it were not reincarnation, it’s still something extra ordinary happening that in terms of our current understanding of these things and current views in neuroscience and neurology, we cannot explain.

Now, there are certain that are extra ordinary features of this phenomenon, even more interesting perhaps than the child having memories or verbally saying things. There seems to be, in some cases, a connection with biology. And that’s a big thing that Dr. Stevenson also researched. There is in some of these cases, birthmarks or birth defects, when the child is born that appear to connect with the story the child is saying about how they died, wounds that they got from which they died, and in many of these cases, the birth defects or birthmarks are found way after the child has started sharing their story. So that connection with biology is really, I guess, very compelling for that reincarnation hypothesis because that becomes harder to explain away as just, well, somehow you have access to these memories. And you also asked something else about whether some kids fail to forget.

We’ve also internally had a lot of interesting conversations around that. So there’s this idea that I favor to some extent, I’m not claiming that it is empirically supported, but I do think in some cases, having these memories appears to be a glitch in the system that maybe even if we claim that people do reincarnate, that even if that happens hypothetically, that we’re not supposed to remember that we’re supposed to just get a clean slate, live the life that you have right now and make the most of it, and learn the lessons here. And maybe that’s how it was supposed to be, but in some of these cases, this protection from previous memory sort of breaks down. It’s just an idea. Again, I cannot support it empirically. On the flip side, there are cases where maybe the memory is adaptive in some way and it will bring some growth to the family, maybe helping them change their perspectives. It’s really hard to say, but you could kind of see arguments for all of these different configurations. The reason I’m inclined to sometimes think of the glitches, not all children remember traumatic stuff, but many of them do. And what’s the point of that?

It’s not good for the child, it’s not good for the family. What is the point? I will mention some current research that we’re doing with our postdoc who’s supporting this research program. Her name is Dr. Sadegi, and with my collaborator, Dr. Kino, and we’re looking at what we call the intermission times. So this is coded data. What’s the time period between identified verified cases when the previous person died and when the child was born? So in many of these cases, we have that coded as quantitative data, and we’re looking at those intermission times. And basically what we found in a very robust analysis, controlling for all kinds of confounding variables is that if a previous life was associated with some kind of trauma, then the intermission period was shorter. So there is trauma in that previous life, again, assuming some kind of linear causality or at least linear progression of things. We live in the physical world where time only moves in one direction, that traumatic deaths are associated with coming back quicker or faster, which is interesting. And it argues again, if we accept that any of this is real, it argues for in those cases of traumatic past lives or deaths, it argues for some kind of urgency to come back and I don’t know, maybe re-experience something or we also colloquially call that the unfinished business hypothesis. This is,

ELISE:

Yeah, although it’s interesting to think about that in the context of the fighter jet pilot being reincarnated into this young boy. There was a really beautiful ending to that story. He went to Japan and there was some closure that this young child who was able to get, but that must be quite rare. So the unfinished, what are the chances that this young child and this family can process whatever needs to be processed?

MARIETA:

It

ELISE:

Feels like more of a glitch than, you know what I mean?

MARIETA:

Yeah. And actually now, when you asked me, I realized there was another part of your previous question that I wanted to touch on regarding that case that’s an exception to this short intermission period, because that was a very decades long intermission period. So of course, I’m talking about averages. There’s always exception.

ELISE:

What is the average then? Like 10 years or something?

MARIETA:

Oh, no. Well, we look at a different way to measure that. We look at the median rather than the average, because the median is a little bit less affected by statistical outliers. So the median intermission time is between 16 to 18 months, so fairly quick, less than two years. And I mean, this may reflect certain biases. If someone died more recently, you’re probably more likely to be able to identify them through available records than someone who died, say 70 years ago. So there’s probably some other factors that come into play. But I wanted to go back to something you were talking about earlier in terms of the memories fading. So indeed, even if a kid is very, they really want to talk about the past life or who they were at some point. In most kids, this seems to sort of fade, and whether it’s gradually or abruptly, they seem to stop talking about the memories usually around the age of five to seven.

And we used to say the memories fade, but now we don’t know. And I think maybe it’s more accurate to say they just stopped talking about the memories. We don’t know if they fully forget. A few years ago, we did a study where we followed up in adulthood with American cases. So kids who had been studied here when they were young children, I think it was on average 36 years later, we went back to our collection over several decades and identified these people, tried to search for them online. We found a lot of them who were still alive. Then we reached out to them and asked them to participate in this follow-up study where we basically wanted to know what is the impact of this phenomenon on your life? And many of them didn’t even remember they had taken part of that study, but still, I’m forgetting the exact numbers, but I think it was about 45% who still remembered something, which it’s still kind of high.

Nobody claimed to have very vivid memories, but some people really did remember a bunch of what they had said. And overall, we found that those people were normal, well-adjusted adults with jobs and families, just regular people living life. And we found that some of them had been impacted. It seemed like having had this experience in childhood sort of gave them a more openness toward a bigger nature of reality, I guess you could say. And maybe a bit more openness in terms of how they think about death and the belief that maybe once you die, that’s not the end, and maybe you’re still going to encounter some of your deceased relatives.

ELISE:

Yeah, this feels like deeply purposeful paradigm shifting work that you guys have all been engaged in. And it’s wild. I mean, it’s so many decades. This is long before Google. This was long before there was information about us so readily available. And you think about how for so many people, just having any legacy was the imperative, right? I got to get my name on a building, and meanwhile, our digital records are just so vast. It really changes this research in a way. But when you think about the value of this work in terms of the consciousness of the collective reshaping our relationship to death, hopefully taming some of our fear, it feels to me at least and why I get so passionate about it, having had a flip in my own understanding of the world in my thirties, that it calmed me down, but gave me this much wider perspective in order to understand some of the shenanigans happening, which I find I’m like, even if this is all there is, it’s been useful to me, I will say. But what do you guys internally talk about as the great promise for us to gather enough evidence that this is held as a mainstream understanding? Of course, consciousness is larger than any of us in our sort of meat suits, and yeah, we all know that. It doesn’t mean we don’t value this temporal physical experience, but what do you think would change?

MARIETA:

You mean what do I think would change if there’s a paradigm shift?

ELISE:

Yeah.

MARIETA:

Okay. Well, I do want to start out in answering by telling you things to me feel palpably different than even two years ago.

The work has been here, as you mentioned for many decades, but I do think we’re in a different phase now where I think that there is a lot more openness, interest in society in general. And I would even say maybe a little bit more openness among open-minded academics. I’m not going to say we’ve made it still for your listeners. What we do is still very controversial. For many people. People have taken professional career risks to be here and be doing this work, like real risks. But that aside, I think even in academia, I think things are very slowly changing, but there’s the level of interest that we have seen in the past year or two, even in terms of the media interest that we’re getting. It was never like that two years ago. I think there’s a real hunger for this material and a real promise for how that can change people’s lives.

And I think there’s some factors that go into this. I think the pandemic people being faced with death and mortality a lot more, I think that kind of made a lot of people try to seek more about this topic to wonder about what happens after we die. I think that’s a big factor that contributes to this whole shift. I think also now with psychedelics, that also leads straight to near death experiences. So if there is a shift, which I think is coming, I just couldn’t tell you, we’re probably at the inflection point, but I couldn’t tell you the exact trajectory of it. But I think it has huge implications. But before I fully answer this, I do want to bring in near-death experiences because even more so in my opinion, than the work on children’s past life memories, near-death experiences, and the messages and the research on that speaks to some of these bigger questions even more directly in terms of should we fear death?

What is the meaning of life from studying near death experiences? This is where we get a lot of wisdom that directly addresses these questions. How should we be treating each other as individuals? So if there is a paradigm shift, I think it would change a lot of things. It would change again, how we live, how understanding, a big message that we hear from near death Experiencers is in terms of an inside they’ve had. It’s all about love. That’s the only thing that matters. We’re all one. So what you do to another person, you’re doing to yourself, it would also lead to perhaps changes in end of life care thinking in terms of if someone is truly at the end of life, should we really be trying to prolong life at any cost just to keep them here? If what awaits that person after death is not really that terrible.

ELISE:

I

MARIETA:

Mean, really a paradigm shift even in academia would just, I feel like it would change everything. It would give people more hope.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think an expanded, I mean, there’s a difference I think between that satori, that waking up experience that happens seems to happen with near-death experiences and psychedelics to some extent, that’s different than the psychological maturation growth that we need to do as people in this horizontal world. I think sometimes people are like, I’m so enlightened, but Ken Wilber says, that’s how you get sort of enlightened Nazis, which I think is accurate, who haven’t grown up. But I don’t think that the whole world having sort of a waking up experience, or at least that being the understanding with which we operate and raise our children could ever really be a bad thing. And it might push us for that psychological growth and that emotional growth of how do we become better citizens? How do we take care of each other? How do we take care of our planet? And so how are we going to make every, I’m just kidding, near death experiences for

MARIETA:

Everyone. I know that that’s personal journey. And let’s take near death experiences, for example. So there is some research that shows that just reading about near death experience, research can transform people in some of the same ways that it can transform the people who have them, but a lot relatively small magnitude compared to having the real experience.

And so learning about this work can decrease fear of death, which is the most common transformation after an nd. It can make people more compassionate, which is also typical or something that we see in many people who have near death experiences. It can give people more. So nowadays the information is out there with the internet, with YouTube. I mean, one can go and pretty much self-educate themselves on just listen to these stories, read some of the work, read some books about this phenomenon, and it will transform people. But we cannot, I don’t think we can force someone to change. Like I said, it’s a very personal journey. However, if people around you are changing or becoming open and exploring these topics, I think there’s a certain, perhaps low level of contagion.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I agree.

MARIETA:

And I mean, sometimes people talk about maybe there’s a critical mass of, I don’t want to call that enlightenment. It sounds, I don’t believe it sounds very pretentious, and I don’t want to use that term, but I think there’s some accuracy to the fact that if a certain percentage of the population starts becoming open to these things, then it will sort of serve as a center of gravity pulling

ELISE:

A hundred percent

MARIETA:

People towards it.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s like an agent, an active agent in the culture, and people feel more comfortable. And yeah, I’d say reading about these things, listening to things like the telepathy tapes, I’m happy to see that gain so much mainstream pickup, just even as ideas to contemplate. But I have friends who are exceptional world-class mediums who often do sort of events that are galleries and where it’s like a hundred people or 200 people who have gathered for the event, and maybe five people end up having an experience. But that alone, it doesn’t really matter. And you hear this all the time from audiences and attendance, whether they heard from their person or not, it feels like all the readings are collective, and just watching people have that experience is almost as impactful as having it yourself.

MARIETA:

It

ELISE:

Is infectious for sure.

MARIETA:

And this reminds me of something that’s an important part of this shift. I people knowing that it’s okay to talk about these things, this normalization of these experiences, not having to worry that someone will think you’re crazy. I think that’s also making a big difference, and that will get more people to be interested when it feels like it’s safe to explore this,

ELISE:

Which

MARIETA:

For the longest time hasn’t really felt safe. And I think that’s, we often adopts talk about normalizing these experiences, normalizing the people who have these experiences, normalizing the research that it’s not only, but it’s necessary to do research on these experiences. And I think this is an important part of this work, and I’m particularly very passionate about educating healthcare professionals about near death experiences because a lot of these experiences happen in clinical settings and doctors don’t know much about them. And that’s actually detrimental to a lot of people

ELISE:

When you need in that moment to be able to share and be validated. But yeah, I agree more people talking about it. The other thing that I love about it personally is the way that it has shifted me, and some of this might’ve been my own maturation, but it just feels less like the universe is cause and effect and more like you have an active relationship with the world and what’s beyond us, and I think that’s good. It’s good not to feel completely at the victim of random happenstance and circumstances and more, what am I supposed to learn here and what am I doing here and how can I move myself forward? How can I collaborate with the universe or the other side or whatever it is in a way that’s helpful.

MARIETA:

Yeah, and I think that also relates to a lot of these insights from near death experiences where people, a lot of times there’s this feature of an NDA called the Life Review where you review events from your life. It could be stuff that you knew was important, stuff you didn’t realize was important, but it affected, it impacted other people in ways that you didn’t even realize. But a lot of times in that life review, people seem to come out with this understanding that they chose this life, whatever life circumstances that they were dealing with, where you were born, which family you were born into, what happened to you when you were a kid, how did your parents treat you? A lot of near death Experiencers come out with that understanding that it was of their own choosing, that this particular set of circumstances was best suited to help them learn specific kinds of lessons or grow in specific ways. And it is a very powerful insight, and many of them would even say, well, I don’t know, maybe not many, but I’ve encountered this where they say, I even designed that near death experience. I needed that to happen. It was part of my life plan.

ELISE:

Beautiful. Well, thank you for your work. Thank your colleagues for all of us too. We’re grateful that you have sort of staked your reputation on things that are, I think, the most interesting questions. Thank you. If I had a scientific mind, I’d be applying to be your intern. I would not be very helpful though. Never know my

MARIETA:

Next career. Well, you are truly helpful by giving a platform to this topic, really.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it’s my favorite conversation, so thank you, and hopefully our path will cross again. I’m grateful for the people who do this work, particularly when it still encounters a lot of resistance beyond, beyond, okay, show me your evidence resistance, but real resistance. But it’s changing. I really believe that it’s changing too. It’s funny that she mentioned how we design our lives. I firmly believe that. I think we choose our parents, we choose our siblings, which might be hard to hear for some of us. I have been told that I had a lengthy rider, which makes me laugh that I was very specific about the parameters in which I would come back. When I heard that, it was so comforting, because I’ve probably shared this with you all before, but apologies if I’m being redundant, but when I was a kid, I just had this feeling, which of I cannot believe I’m here again, and just irritation and a little bit of rage.

Even though I had the most amazing childhood, I just had this feeling of, oh God, I can’t believe I’m hearing it. All right, let me, I need to do the thing that I’m doing. I know I’m here to do something specific and just put me in, let me do it, which feels accurate. I do feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and I don’t have any more information other than that. But that was a big theme in my childhood. I didn’t share it with anyone, but I just had that like, oh, childhood again. Yeah. Anyway, I will in the show notes include other relevant episodes like Dean Radin from IONS, the various mediums that I’ve had on the show. Obviously, that includes significant portion of the pulling the thread catalog, but I will include some links in case you want to keep listening. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing, so thank you.