Video: Mark’s father, Dr. Richard Ireland demonstrates his psychic abilities on the Steve Allen show in 1969.

Play it:

Download MP3 (37:13 min.)

Read it:

On this episode of Skeptiko, Mark Ireland, author of Soul Shift:

“As I was saying, he put the tape on and then three black blindfolds over it and then more tape, and people would write messages and send them up from the audience. And he would answer them and often go off of what was on the paper and tell them many other things. One of the other specialties he had was people would sometimes send up a bill, a dollar bill, a five, ten, whatever, and they would record the serial number and then ask him to recount the serial number. He would get it right about 99 times out of a hundred.”

Stay with us for Skeptiko.

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on today’s episode of Skeptiko, I have coming up a very interesting interview with Mark Ireland, someone whose life was affected very tragically by the loss of his son while he was a teenager. This tragic loss led him to a real spiritual journey that has many interesting twists and turns in it, not the least of which is Mark’s re-discovery of the work of his father, Dr. Richard Ireland, who as you’ll hear, was quite an accomplished psychic medium. So it’s a very interesting book. It’s called Soul Shift and Mark Ireland is coming up on Skeptiko right now.

I’m joined today by Mark Ireland, who’s written a book entitled Soul Shift. Now Mark has a fascinating story that has many, many facets to it. I think we’re going to have a very interesting dialogue. I think this story starts as the book starts, very tragically with the loss of your son, Mark. Do you want to kind of just jump right in there and tell us a little bit of background about you and how this story begins, your journey?

Mark Ireland: So, Alex, my story begins going back to January 10, 2004 when I lost my youngest son, Brandon. He and his buddies had decided to go on a hike that particular day to the top of the McDowell Mountains, which is a mountain range in North Scottsdale, Arizona, behind our home. I was concerned about it. For one thing, it was a windy day and secondarily, it was a very challenging hike. It was a steep hike and somewhat treacherous. So it was probably late morning when he and his friends took off, and simultaneously my wife and I went to the other side of town to visit my brother and his son who was appearing in a rodeo at the time.

But I worried about Brandon all day long, and it was later in the afternoon I received a phone call that I was hoping was from Brandon to tell me he was back from his hike. But it was actually from my older son, Steven, who had received a call from the other boys who had been hiking with Brandon on the mountain, telling me that Brandon was in trouble and that they needed help. So that’s when I knew that things were going haywire and I called 911 and tried to get some assistance up there by helicopter. From that point, we drove home across town and by the time we were driving up kind of the base of the mountain, we could see fire trucks, ambulances, helicopters – it was just a nightmarish scene. Probably within 30 minutes of that we were notified that our son had passed.

Alex Tsakiris: And, I’m sorry, your son Brandon had an asthma problem, right? A pre-existing problem with asthma?

Mark Ireland: Yeah. The interesting thing was that he had asthma but it was fairly mild. He never had a really severe attack or anything like that and he’d been on medication. He’d taken Advair, which is kind of a preventative medicine. But he also had an inhaler that you would take during an attack to lessen the symptoms. But what was interesting that day, we didn’t really know the cause of death. Brandon’s best friend — his name is Stu — had described symptoms that seemed unlike any other asthma attack. Rapid heartbeat, numbness of limbs, things we were unfamiliar with.

Alex Tsakiris: Uh-huh (yes). So it was really a mystery at this point. And I can’t even begin to you know, approach understanding as a parent myself, how you must have felt, and just the shock wave of trauma that must have gone through you and your entire family. It sounds like from reading your book, this was also the beginning of a very interesting journey that this sent you on, so I guess that’s the next point of this story. What did you do after this, after you tried to kind of pick up the pieces and…

Mark Ireland: Well, as you say, once the shock of being told your son has passed hits, then kind of the next thing after that you’re wondering, is am I going to be able to go on? What meaning will life have for me and my family? Will I ever feel joyful again? So you go through a lot of emotions. But one thing I had going for me that I felt I could rely on or go back to was my family lineage, which is rather unusual. My father was a psychic medium years ago, and although my father had passed in 1992, my uncle was still alive and he had similar abilities. So one of the first people that I called was my Uncle Robert, and he asked if he could do anything for me. And I just said, “Yeah. You know, if you get anything pertaining to Brandon that you can share, I would really appreciate it.”

Alex Tsakiris: Now Mark, you know, I have to interject here because one of the things I’ve found interesting in your story and again, I just read your book so I don’t know your life, but this is a personal story so I guess I have to ask personal questions. It almost seemed from reading your account that you had just an extraordinary upbringing with your father because he was not just a medium or a stage magician/mentalist.

He was quite famous, both in the spiritualist church where he was a minister, and in shows all across the country and Las Vegas. I mean, he was a big, big deal on all the night-time TV shows and all that. But the other part of that story that I found so fascinating is, that you had been exposed to all that as a kid but it seemed like as an adult that wasn’t really a big part of who you were, either spiritually or I guess, on a day-to-day basis, having any kind of connection with any psychic abilities. Fill in the blanks there for me?

Mark Ireland: Well, it’s kind of like this. I guess if you grow up and your father has this presence and people around him all the time, and I didn’t want to be my dad, I guess. I wanted to be my own person. And so my identity was someone more practical and more – I don’t want to use the term worldly, cause I did have I guess, a spiritual side to my feeling about who I was – but at the same time I was more interested in going to college, getting a degree, getting into the business world. I did all those things and had a family. And my father was proud of me for succeeding in that vein as well.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s really great and I guess what is remarkable to me in reading this story, and I guess we have to go back and tell people what your dad did, because it’s an amazing, incredible story about him having an accident at an early age and developing or coming to appreciate this incredible psychic gift he had. And then repeating that psychic gift over and over and over again, both from a spiritual setting inside of a church and also on stage as a performer. So can you tell us about what your dad was able to do and what you saw him do just over and over again?

Mark Ireland: Sure, and I’d like to eventually do a biography on him. I’ve captured a lot of stories from people that are just mind-blowing. But going back to his beginning, at the age of five he went into the Columbus, Ohio Children’s Hospital for surgery on his eyes because he’d been born cross-eyed. So after the corrective surgery had taken place, his eyes were cupped and bandaged so that he couldn’t touch them. He was actually restrained in a bed. And this particular nurse felt sorry for him and said, “I’ll let you up out of the bed if you promise me not to mess with the bandages.” He agreed. So she went strolling around the hospital and came back later only to find him bouncing a ball against the wall and catching it.

She immediately assumed the bandages were taken off so she freaked out, but then she checked him and saw they were still intact. So then she was even more freaked out. After that she called in these doctors to say, “Look at this kid. What’s going on here?” Then they ran a series of kind of experiments of their own making there. Put him in bed and one doctor would stand at the foot of the bed while another would throw a voice from, say the doorway, and ask who was standing in front of him. He would get it right every time. So that was kind of the early beginnings of it.

I spoke to my grandmother about his early childhood and she said she noticed this kind of on-and-off all the time, but it wasn’t until – I think it was the age of 12 — when my father stumbled into a spiritualist church in a suburban town outside of Columbus and actually saw a man who was able to do what he later did.

What it was, was it’s called “blindfold billet” in the spiritualist circles. In his case I know that from what I’ve heard there are people who say, “Okay, anyone who uses the blindfold, here’s the technique, and whatever.” But my father, his was a very thorough process that would not fit any of those explanations that a skeptic might come up with. He used ten strips of Johnson & Johnson medical tape, sealed his eyes completely with this over the bridge of his nose and he would have skeptics that would inspect this. So…

Alex Tsakiris: As you recount in the book, he had many, many, many skeptics during his life and during his career come and challenge him and he had them apply the blindfolds. He was open to every kind of scrutiny available. And the other part that you relate that I found fascinating is, it gets into his career when he took this into show biz. He would go to these venues and the folks would say, “Okay, hey, on the sly, what kind of setup do you need for your trick?” “I don’t need any setup. It’s not a trick. I really do this.”

Mark Ireland: Right. There’s this gentleman here in Phoenix named Tony DePrima who later became my father’s attorney. So as I was saying, he’d put the tape on and then three black blindfolds over it and then more tape, and people would write messages and send them up from the audience. Again, this is the technique that he first saw demonstrated by this man in 1944 when he stumbled into this church. That man had predicted my father would later do this, too. He also gave him a secret code message from a buddy of his that had died, and that really stirred him to think about this.

But back to his process. He would have all these blindfolds and tape on. People would write down messages or questions and he would answer them and often go off of what was on the paper and tell them many other things.

One of the other specialties he had was people would sometimes send up a bill, a dollar bill, a five, ten, whatever, and they would record the serial number and then ask him to recount the serial number. He would get it right about 99 times out of a hundred. Well, Tony DePrima, who I mentioned earlier, he and two of his partners wanted to test my father so on three different occasions they actually took a 20 dollar bill, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and sent it up with their message. In each of these cases he still got the serial number correct.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, that’s incredible. And do you want to just real quickly tell the Steve Allen story? I mean, it’s way old-time TV but those of you who don’t recall can quickly find out that Steve Allen was the pre-cursor to Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. Tell us a little bit, quickly, that story.

Mark Ireland: Well, first off, people can actually see that in video. I’ve put it on YouTube.

Alex Tsakiris: Oh, great!

Mark Ireland: And it’s also on…

Alex Tsakiris: I want to see that!

Mark Ireland: So it’s on my Web site as well, which is soulshiftbook.com. But essentially, he did this demonstration on live TV in 1969 and these questions were sent up and he answered people. I guess what I’d like to do is talk about what skeptics might argue. One is they might say, “Well, those are plants in the audience.” Well, in an average demonstration he might have 100 people in an audience. He’d answer 50 of them. So it’s a little untenable to say that you’d have 50 plants out of 100 people.

But in the Steve Allen case, he was answering these people and during the middle of the show Steve Allen brought up a series of questions that he and panel members had written because they were impressed. Apparently they were not going to send them up initially, and they changed their mind. Well, while he’s standing up there, my father actually said, “What’s this?” And he reached into Steve Allen’s pocket and pulled out a five pound note.

Alex Tsakiris: Because Steve Allen was trying to set him up a little bit. Steve Allen was a skeptic about the whole thing, right?

Mark Ireland: Yeah, completely. So it was a set up between their drummer on the show and Steve Allen to try and trick my dad. I guess he was going to pull it out himself later and ask him what kind of money it was. Well, my father headed him off at the pass by reaching in his pocket, pulling this out, identifying that it was a five pound note, and pretty much blew them away. Then in addition, he gave a message to the panel members who had dropped off cards later on, too. So that was rather interesting. I mean, if it was a setup then everybody was in on it, including Steve Allen.

Alex Tsakiris: So back to our story. You have this remarkable, amazing father and in turn you had a pretty remarkable upbringing yourself. You saw your dad probably hundreds of times on stage, and in the book, we can’t go over all the stories, but you have a very heartwarming story about your first date with the woman who then becomes your wife. And there’s a lot of very interesting reading there. But let’s pick up the story back as it kind of turns now to you trying to come to some understanding of what has happened to Brandon, your son who has passed away, and how you might connect with him.

Mark Ireland: Yeah, so the first source of comfort I had, I guess I would say, is just recalling my childhood and not only the psychic demonstrations that my father did but he also demonstrated mediumship as well. He started out in the spiritualist church but later formed his own non-denominational church because he wasn’t a real dogmatic person. His church was more, I would say, based on the teachings of Jesus but not so much the dogma of Christianity. But anyhow, drawing on that, the first thing I thought of was contacting my uncle, and as I mentioned earlier, I called him and asked him to share anything he might get.

It was a day or two later and I was at the mortuary and my uncle called me and he said, “I want to share something with you.” I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Well, last night I tried to get something. I tried really hard and I got nothing. But this morning I was doing my meditation and your father came to me. He told me to let you know that when Brandon passed, he was somewhat confused but he was there to help him adjust. He wanted you to know you are the best parents he ever could have had.” Now every parent wants to hear that. But what he said in addition to that was that, “Your dad said that Brandon died due to a lack of oxygen that caused his heart to fail.” Now keep in mind, at the time we had no idea what the cause of death was.

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Mark Ireland: But it was later that week I spoke to the autopsy physician who had told me that Brandon had died of a severe asthma attack that in fact had reduced his blood oxygen level to the point that his heart failed. So my uncle hit the nail on the head with that. And then after that I kind of embarked into some other areas of exploration on my own.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, let’s talk about that. So now you’re in the process – we can only imagine you’re still with this tremendous grief and dealing with all these things. You’re maybe stirring up some old embers inside of you in terms of this spiritual connection with those who have passed away through this other dimension. How does that then lead you to the next phase of your journey in terms of trying to connect directly with Brandon through some medium?

Mark Ireland: Well, initially, for the first few weeks I was actually trying to do more meditation on my own and see if I could have any sort of direct connection, if you will. Not that I had my father’s ability, although I’d seen flashes of it through my life here and there. But not anything like my father had. So I tried that and I had some things that I would say were significant to me, but not necessarily worthy of sharing here on the air.

But after that, I guess the first significant event happened about six months later. My wife and I, along with our older son and Stu who had been Brandon’s best friend, went on a Mexican cruise.

The day that we came back my wife was sitting at the foot of our bed and she felt Brandon’s presence to her side and actually saw a shadow figure out of her peripheral vision. So a skeptic might say, “Well, it’s a hallucination or wishful thinking.” But interestingly, the very next day we got a call from a musician friend.

Now this particular friend was someone we later learned had been hiking on the same mountain as Brandon and came up upon Brandon when he was on his back, and tried to help but it was too late. So anyhow, this musician friend, when we left for our cruise, he asked if he could borrow Brandon’s bass guitar. Brandon was a bassist.

And this gentleman, James Linton, was a guitar player and singer. He needed a bass to do this recording. So Jim calls my wife, again the next day after her vision, and says, “Susie, I’ve got to tell you something, but I don’t know how to tell you.” And she’s assuming he’s going to say, “Well, I dropped the bass and broke it,” or something. But he said, “Well, I was doing this recording of this song and while I was in there doing this, I felt like there was someone in there with me. And I saw a shadow figure out of my peripheral vision. And then I saw like flashes of white light in front of me and moving around. And I thought, okay, I need some water, I’m dehydrated.”

So he went and drank water. And he’s like, “I need something to eat. I need to take a shower.” So he did all these things but he came back and he kept feeling the presence and seeing that. Then eventually he felt pushed to take the song he was doing and totally revise it. In the end he felt like he had brought through an inspired song that was a gift from our son to us. So that was rather remarkable to hear of back-to-back accounts that were so similar of having this peripheral vision view.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. Especially inside the larger context of how many times stories like that have been reported and you have to go no further than like Diane Archangel who’s a hospice worker and has collected, along with her hospice colleagues, literally tens of thousands of stories that match perfectly, exactly with what you’re saying. So there’s a large body of collected accounts of that type. So please go on.

Mark Ireland: So that was I guess, the first really significant thing that I can bring up. Now, going back to February of ’04, which is just a month after Brandon’s passing, something happened that enabled me to get a reading with Allison DuBois in August of 2004, and this is the real-life person that the show “Medium” is based on.

Well, in February I get a call from one of my father’s old friends, a man named Jerry Conser, who had worked with my dad back in the 1980s. Actually my dad had helped him find some oil and do some wildcat drilling based on where he told him oil was located. So anyhow, Jerry said, “I know what you’re going through and I think I know somebody who might be able to help you.”

And he says, “Her name’s Allison DuBois and she can give you a reading,” blah, blah, blah. And interestingly, it was just one night earlier that I’d seen a feature about Allison in a lab experiment that she participated in at the University of Arizona prior to that time. So I thought, wow, this is just too coincidental for me to get a call the day after seeing that, when I was impressed with what I saw in the clip. So I called and got on a wait list for a reading with her, which happened in August of 2004.

It was the first of a series of four readings, three of which I facilitated on my own independently, and put as many controls in place as possible to keep the medium blind to anything about me or my circumstances. In the fourth I actually got into the Human Energies Systems lab at the University of Arizona. That was in early 2005.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. So you also in the book do a very good job of telling the story about those readings and I think you did a very reasonable job of applying those controls. That’s something we’ve talked about on the Skeptiko show in the past, for anyone who is interested. You know, it really isn’t very hard — and maybe you can comment on this — to discipline yourself to have a reading and apply those kinds of controls and not answer questions. You may not get as good a reading as you would otherwise, but it really is highly evidential I think, for most people to see that this information really comes out of nowhere with no cues. That’s basically what you found, right?

Mark Ireland: Right. And you know, in the case of Allison I’d also verify with Jerry that he had not spoken to her and she didn’t know anything about me. She did know that I had a father who was a psychic but that’s all. She even told me that she wanted to know nothing in advance and wanted to have me come in blind. Then the other people were pretty much completely blinded. But I think the key thing is to understand some of the techniques that skeptics would point out as being reasons aside from fraud.

One is cold reading or that’s the most predominant explanation which is you know, you’re dealing with someone who’s astute at reading body language and cues of your emotions and then asking some kind of general questions and seeing how you react. And then narrowing that down into something that seems meaningful but it’s more of a manipulation than it is factual information. But so many of the things that I was told were highly specific and there’s no way that cold reading could apply.

In addition, I had some validations that overlapped. Something that was very specific, but I got it from multiple mediums as well.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. Right, that is interesting that you were able to receive the same message from multiple mediums. And I have to say, you know, we just wrapped up a show and I’m not sure it will air before this one or not, where we did an on-air demonstration of a medium reading – a very profound medium reading – and I acted as the proxy sitter, passing information back and forth. There was no information back and forth.

I gave you know, the first name and the month and day, not even the year, of the person’s birth, and it was highly, highly evidential. So this notion of cold reading really needs to be challenged and anyone who claims cold reading needs to be able to prove it. Because at this point there hasn’t been a good demonstration of how someone would get this kind of real specific information through cold reading techniques. It doesn’t make any logical sense. It certainly hasn’t been demonstrated that anyone is able to do that.

Mark Ireland: And I had a really good example with my father because what he told me was, one of the real measures of how good a medium is, is that you should just be able to go in and sit down and they should speak to you and tell you everything for an hour and then at the end you ask any questions that may be left. In his case, people usually didn’t have anything left that he hadn’t already touched on. So that’s kind of what I looked toward and expected.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. So Mark, tell us after going through this process, tell us where you’re at now, today. You’ve written this book and tell us who you’re trying to reach with the book. And also, where you see your journey taking you from here on out.

Mark Ireland: Sure. I guess I would say first off, I’m trying to reach lay people. I’ve tried to take more I guess, scientific concepts and also personal experiences and put them into a format that the average person could read and understand. They may have no experience with understanding anything about psychic phenomenon or mediumship. Really, what I’ve been told, it’s interesting, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Debra Martin. She’s a fairly prominent…

Alex Tsakiris: Sure.

Mark Ireland: …medium down here in Phoenix who has been tested by Julie Bichon and been accredited or certified. She’s now referring a lot of people to my book, especially men, because she’s finding like fathers who have lost kids or whatever. In general it seems men are more skeptical than women on the whole. I’m not trying to cast off a generalization there, but that’s what I’m seeing, based on the feedback. She mentioned that as well.

She’s found that my book is really helping reach people who maybe wouldn’t necessarily be convinced by a book written by a medium, and may not be interested in reading something that’s too scientifically oriented or too complex, or not kind of an enjoyable read. This being a first-person account of someone who has lost a child and they can relate to, but approached it more in a pragmatic and logical way, but yet an open-minded skepticism. And that, I think, I’m really trying to reach a broad audience. I’m also trying to make people think that science and this are compatible and that we just need to broaden our horizons a little bit in terms of the investigations that we do into these phenomenon.

Also, I touch on some things in there where I’m trying to bridge a gap with people of a more traditionally religious background to say, hey, this isn’t necessarily bad or evil stuff, taking into consideration some passages or whatever in scripture that they might look at and say, “Okay, well maybe this stuff is okay and I shouldn’t be afraid of it or think that it’s bad.”

Alex Tsakiris: Well, that’s an interesting topic. It’s one that I’m not sure we can cover to any depth here because it really deserves its own show. I plan on doing a show on that. The whole issue of spirit communication in the Bible, as you point out with some of your references, there’s quite a religious tradition inside the Bible of spirit communication.

Mark Ireland: Yeah, it’s very true. I mean, one example is the transfiguration story where two deceased individuals, Moses and Elijah, are said to have appeared to Jesus and he communicated with them. The disciples recorded having seen this. There are many others. An example of clairvoyance is when Jesus is said to have spoken to a Samaritan woman at a well and told her things that no one else knew, and she confirmed those to be true.

And then some people of a traditional bent might say, “Well, that’s Jesus doing that, not you.” But there is a passage in John where he says, “All the works I do, ye shall do and greater works than these.” So not to go down that path, but I just wanted to open it up so people wouldn’t be afraid or think this is wrong or bad. I think that’s more a cultural thing that’s tied to the evolution of Christianity going back to probably the Second Century…

Alex Tsakiris: Absolutely.

Mark Ireland: …and the initial divisions between what we now call Gnostic Christianity and what evolved as the predominate form of Christianity.

Alex Tsakiris: Absolutely. And that’s what I was going to interject. I mean, you’re kind of doing the nice, Sunday School version of it there. The more hardcore history — one of my favorite podcasts by theway — version of it is that all this stuff was in there and then it was pulled out because it didn’t conform with what they thought would be a good, saleable, controllable religion going forward. And that’s really just the direct reading of the archaeological evidence that has come up in the last 50 to 100 years.

Mark Ireland: Yeah, and I’ve done similar reading, too. Even the four gospels, if you know and you’ve read about this, the oldest of the four is Mark, but it wasn’t written until about 40 years after the crucifixion. And then the others – Matthew’s considered by most to be the next oldest then Luke and John. John was written they think around Year 100, which is almost 70 years after the crucifixion. So you could also say okay, are these the literal words that were spoken? And you can’t prove that.

Alex Tsakiris: The whole Bible thing is just too – there’s too many tentacles to try and corral them all in and get them into a conversation. And as soon as you do, you just have a lot of people who just shut down automatically. I’ve said it before on the show, I’m not a Christian, I’m very spiritual and I embrace a lot of the fundamental teachings of Christianity, but that’s not my thing. So we don’t even need to go into it.

Mark Ireland: No. And really, all I was trying to say is that I was trying to defuse some of that for people that are of that background, so they might read it in an open-minded fashion. In the Eastern traditions, they’re very open to these sorts of things. It’s rather interesting to see the dichotomy there.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, right. And tell us a little bit about your involvement in research in this area and where you see that going in the future.

Mark Ireland: Well, again, I’m not a scientist, but I have an interest in research, and actually conducted one experiment on my own that I’m going to have a summary of in a second book that I’m working on now. But I worked with Dr. Don Watson, who’s a retired professor from the University of Kansas, who helped me facilitate this.

What it involved was my sister Robin had passed back on the evening of Thanksgiving in 2006. Prior to her passing, I talked to her and said, “Would you like to try and do something that might be able to help other people?”

And the concept was essentially like the Houdini experiment of sharing a secret coded message and then finding a medium who could relay the message. But in her case, what I’d suggested after reading that, and the flaw in it really seemed to be that any living person knew what the message was. Because then allegations – some people believe in psi phenomenon and telepathy, but not necessarily mediumship, so they might say, “Well, since you knew that, the person could have read your mind.”

So what she did was, she wrote a secret message, put it in an envelope, sealed it, and no one saw it. And then I sent that envelope off to Dr. Watson and we held it for a period of time, reached out to a number of mediums and got responses back. What I would say, and I don’t want to ruin the story when I get it out there in detail, but in general I would say it was a partial success, a moderate success. There’s not an outright success.

Alex Tsakiris: So, Mark, is there anything else that we haven’t covered in the book that you feel we might want to talk about?

Mark Ireland: Well, I just didn’t know if people would want examples of some of the hits, but I could touch on a few of them just briefly, to give you a feel for the type of information. One thing that two different mediums got was that my son was relaying “Happy Anniversary” to us and it wasn’t just “Happy Anniversary,” it was “Happy 25th Anniversary.” In the case of Allison DuBois, that reading occurred just 45 days approximately after my 25th anniversary. Then about five or six months later I had a reading with Jamie Clark, who shared the same thing, “Happy 25th Anniversary.”

Lori Campbell, in a single blind lab experiment had shared a number of things. She described my son’s cause of death in immense detail. In addition, she said a number of other things that were right on the money, one of which was to make mention of the fact – she was asked, “What would the deceased person –in other words, Brandon, my son — have to say to the sitter — being me — that would identify him as being tied to the sitter?” She had mentioned, “Well, I feel like there’s a book being written, and it’s about the deceased and it’s being written by the person sitting behind me.” And in fact, the book that you just referenced is the very book that I was writing at the time.

Jamie Clark had mentioned to my wife that my son had been with her in the grocery store the day before and he saw her digging for something in her purse and it was like she couldn’t find her credit card or something. Well, lo and behold, she had mentioned that she’d left her debit card at home and she was at the grocery store at the checkout line and was digging for this and couldn’t find it.

Allison DuBois had mentioned a feeling tied to my son’s death that was like a drowning or like an asthma attack, and she had said that it just felt like the lungs were filled with fluid. As it turns out, the autopsy physician had made mention of the fact that Brandon’s lungs had been nearly touching in the middle, which only occurs in cases of severe asthma or drownings. So even the description there was rather interesting.

Back to Lori Campbell, one last thing and I’ll make this it because I want them to read the rest of the book, but Lori Campbell had thrown out the names Shirley and Linda, Linda, Shirley. Well, Shirley’s my mother and Linda is my aunt, who’s my Uncle Robert’s wife. Now my Uncle Robert by the time of this experiment had passed. So it was rather interesting to hear the names of both my father’s and my uncle’s wives mentioned at that.

Alex Tsakiris: The other thing that we should mention is that your father comes through in these readings, as well, particularly in the reading with Allison. So there’s some interesting tidbits and connections there that I think folks will find interesting.

Mark Ireland: Yeah, and kind of the message in all of this is that this is kind of my path, to actually through this to be able to reach out and help other people cope with this information and provide this sort of evidence. It’s really been very fulfilling in my life. I still have a regular day job, but I’m doing more and more work around this and now I’ll actually be working with a medium, Jamie Clark, speaking to people in Laguna Hills, California on June 6th.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. Well, I don’t know if we’ll be out before or after that on this broadcast, but I’ll try and get it out before then so that people can check it out if they’re interested. That’s right in my backyard. Maybe I’ll come up there and see you.

Mark Ireland: Yeah, and I’ll make sure that it’s on the Events page of my Web site which again is soulshiftbook.com.

Alex Tsakiris: Soulshiftbook.com. We’ll have a link in the show notes as well, and encourage everyone to check it out. Mark, thanks again so much for joining us.

Mark Ireland: Thanks for having me, Alex.

Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Mark for joining us today on Skeptiko. If you’d like additional information about Mark’s book and also a link to that video clip that we talked about of his father appearing on “The Steve Allen Show,” please visit the Skeptiko Web site. That’s skeptiko.com. You’ll also find links to all our previous shows, a link to our forum, and an e-mail link where you can drop me a note.

I appreciate all the great, kind words of encouragement I’ve received. Please tell as many people as you feel appropriate about Skeptiko so we can get the word out there. That’s going to do it for this time. Take care. And bye for now.

Play it:

Download MP3 (48:38 min.)
Read it:

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode of Skeptiko, I have a very interesting interview with Dr. Yvonne Kason. She’s a physician and a teacher with over 25 years of experience at the University of Toronto School of Medicine, but she also has had several near-death experiences.

She’s expanded that personal experience into an extensive amount of research on transformative spiritual experiences. Her book and her interview are not only important for validating the scientific legitimacy of these experiences, but also I think to help anyone who’s had such an experience normalize it and put it into some kind of context that we can understand from an everyday, Western perspective. Here then is my interview with Dr. Yvonne Kason.

I’m joined today by Dr. Yvonne Kason, author of Farther Shores. Thanks so much for joining me, Yvonne, it’s been a pleasure getting to know you over the last couple of weeks while you’ve been here in Southern California on retreat.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Thank you, and thank you very much for interviewing me about my book.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, it’s an amazing book and we’re going to dive right into it. It’s quite brave, I mean, the first thing that strikes me is here you are a highly regarded medical doctor, and you taught as well…

Dr. Yvonne Kason: I taught at the University of Toronto for over 25 years.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. So when we were talking before one of the things that I think you said, tongue-in-cheek but really not kidding, you’re probably the only person in the world who is both a near-death experience researcher as well as a near-death experience experiencer. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the background of the book and your personal experiences with spiritually transformative events?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Sure. I have been researching near-death experiences and other types of spiritual experiences, Kundalini, mystical experiences, for over 25 years and what got me interested in it as a medical doctor was actually my own personal experiences.

You know, when I was in medical school in the 70s I was focused on pretty well on what most doctors are when they’re training – diseases and heart attacks and medical technology, etc. So it really was not anywhere within what I was being taught in medical school, spiritual experiences, near-death experiences, Kundalini.

But when I was finishing my residency at the University of Toronto, I was sent up north to Northern Ontario to work with the Native Indian communities. One day when I was there in March of 1979 when we were doing a medievac, a medical evacuation in a small airplane of a critically ill Native Indian woman, the plane crashed. I was in a plane crash, and I was almost killed. In the process of that experience, of the plane crashing, I had a profound personal mystical experience, which I now know was a near-death experience.

At the time that it happened, I had no idea what had happened to me. I knew it was profound, I knew it had changed me, I knew it was positive, but I didn’t even have a word to explain what happened to me, the profound experience. So that’s what launched me initially, just as a human being with a profound spiritual experience to research, to try and figure out what on earth had happened to me. In addition, because I was a doctor, I also felt I wanted to medically understand what was happening to me. I wanted to understand – I knew it wasn’t a hallucination or something pathological. I wanted to…

Alex Tsakiris: How did you know that? How did you know that it was – what aspects of it connected with you spiritually, number one, and then how did you know this wasn’t some hallucination, some aspect of your brain playing a trick on you?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Yeah, well I knew that by the effect it had on me. Let me go back and just describe very quickly what happened to me in that plane crash and then the aftereffects and that’ll, I think, help answer that question. The plane flew into a blizzard. It was a small twin-engine airplane and the air filters froze over, they figure is what happened. So the propeller stopped and the plane started going down. As the plane was going down, I immediately, I think like anyone would in a plane crash, went into intense fear and panic. In that moment of fear and panic as the plane was going down to the ground, my heart just sort of called out in a prayer to God, I guess, intense prayer, “God, help! I’m going to die!”

After that intense call for help went out of my heart, something extraordinary started happening, and this was actually before the plane crashed. What started happening was, this feeling of peace and calm started descending over me, and it was like it was coming from above and pushing down and pushing out the fear and all of a sudden I became peaceful. I became calm. I was no longer afraid, and somehow in this extraordinary peace and calm I felt there was no need to fear death. And that all would be fine, whether I lived or died. I heard in my inner mind, what I now call “the inner voice,” I heard an inner voice say things that I was not even thinking of. It was just like it poured through my consciousness.

What poured through in the inner voice was, “Be still and know that I am God. I am with you now and always.” And I felt calm, I felt protected, and in that calmness I turned and I was tending to the patient as the plane continued to crash. The plane finally did manage to do a crash landing onto the surface of a semi-frozen lake and then quickly sank into the water. So quickly we scrambled the nurse, the pilot, myself, we scrambled out of the plane as it sank.

We tried to pull the patient out, were unsuccessful, she unfortunately died when the plane sank into the water. Then I was stuck in heavy winter clothes in a semi-frozen lake and the voice in my mind said, ”Swim to shore.” I was maybe 200 yards away from the closest land and it was open water with a strong moving current, and the voice repeated, “Swim to shore.”

To keep the story short, I’ll leave out a few of the details I have in the book. I eventually followed the wisdom of that inner voice, started swimming to shore, and it was a long and very difficult swim. I went under several times, and lake water in my lungs and I was starting to drown, and as I was becoming colder and more hypothermic and near drowning, all of a sudden my experience shifted and I heard a “whooshing” noise, and suddenly it was like my point of perception was no longer in my body and I was maybe 20 or 30 feet above my body. This sense of peace and bliss and comfort expanded now and I was in a place that was filled with light.

It was like being at the top of the clouds as a plane is going from darkness and up to the top and is almost breaking through into the sun, that bright sparkly sort of cloud sprinkles right at the top of the clouds is what it was like. In that soft, sparkling light-filled place, the love expanded and it was like I was merging with this ocean of love and this ocean of intelligence. What I call God. And I absolutely knew…

Alex Tsakiris: Let me mention something there. A question. Because this comes up frequently with Skeptiko listeners. It’s an obvious question, but I’m going to ask it nonetheless. Why did you connect that experience with God?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: It’s not a why, it’s an experience. It’s like how do you know the ocean is wet? Well, when you’ve gone in the ocean you know it’s wet. You just do. It’s an experience and it’s just obvious. That’s what this was like. It was, nobody had to tell me. It was an experience. I just felt it and knew it to the core of my being that this, I was being held by the loving power behind the universe. You can call that “The Force,” you can call it Buddha Consciousness, you can call it Yahweh, you can call it “The Creator,” you can call it God, but the name isn’t really what matters. It’s what it is. It was the experience of the loving, loved beyond imagination, unconditional love. Bliss. Incredible intelligence. Power behind the universe. That’s what the experience felt like. So it’s an inner knowing, and the word that I put to it is “God.” And it wasn’t…

Alex Tsakiris: I don’t think that’s the word – I think that’s the word most people would put to it, so I don’t think there needs to be a lot of confusion. I think when we introduce – when we try and deconstruct the near-death experience phenomenon, and that’s an unbelievably awesome story that I will never even be able to come close to, really understanding it because it’s so experiential…

Dr. Yvonne Kason: It is.

Alex Tsakiris: But as us who are trying to learn from the experiences of others and approach it intellectually and study it as well as we can, I think that the accounts matter. I think the details matter. I think the stories matter. But I think the sum total of them all is what’s really significant from a research standpoint. The fact that your story does correlate on so many aspects with accounts that just innumerable people have had when they’ve come close to experiencing death, and as your book points out, well that really kind of picks up your story. So let me just kind of lead you into that.

You recover, thank goodness, from this horrible experience, and you become then somewhat of an expert on these kind of experiences. Just pick up the story from there.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Okay. So for your listeners and people reading this, of course there are more details about the near-death experience and how I came back in my body, etc. in my book. But I’ll go on with your questions. After my near-death experience, when I started coming back to work as a doctor, I had to take some time off to heal some frostbite, etc. I started telling other doctors about what had happened to me, this profound experience, and asking if they’d ever heard of such a thing, if they’d read about such things. Back then, the early near-death experience researcher, Raymond Moody, had said that you had to be clinically dead for it to be a near-death experience.

Now as I told you, my experience started when the plane was going down, it continued while I was swimming to shore and throughout my rescue until I was resuscitated. I was never dead. So initially I thought this couldn’t possibly have been a near-death experience because I had never been dead. It must have been something else. So what was it? So as I asked around, and at this time I already was a student of yoga, and I had read a little bit about Kundalini and Eastern traditions. The best explanation I could find on what had happened to me was that I’d had some sort of mystical experience when I was close to death. So I started researching mystical experiences.

I noticed within myself that I was also having a lot of symptoms that sounded like Kundalini. As an aftereffect, after this near-death experience, I was noticing a lot of rushes of energy up my spine, particularly when I was meditating, when I was praying intently, when I was contemplating God, when I was having some sort of spiritual insight, I’d be getting these rushes of energy up my spine. As I was going into deep meditative states I would be having experiences of light, and the rushes of energy up the spine, the light and inner sounds. I was also having inner sounds.

These are all symptoms of Kundalini that I had learned about through reading the writings of Gobi Krishna. So I wondered, ha, this is interesting. I’ve had a mystical experience, I’m having symptoms of Kundalini, and I was close to death. So I was researching…

Alex Tsakiris: Let me stop you right there because I don’t want to leave too many people in the dust, or too many people are going to switch off their I-Pod and say, “Whoa, wait a minute.” We’re introducing these terms that I know for some people are brand new. Kundalini and Kundalini experience.

How did you approach that as a medical, Western-trained person. Did you have your foot kind of in two worlds? Or was this easily resolved for you? This idea that there is this kind of foreign experience called Kundalini and there’s this energy field and all these things. How did you then, and how do you still resolve these kind of two worlds that you’re really talking about and you’re kind of flowing back and forth very fluidly. For a lot of people that’s not a path that they can make.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Yes, absolutely, it was a real struggle for many, many years. It was really like I was living a double life, that one stream was the traditional Western medical practice. I was a doctor, right, and the Western medical model. The other part of me was happening mainly in my personal, spiritual quest to try and understand what had happened to me. But what happened over the years is that more and more patients started coming to see me as a doctor because they heard about me through the grapevine somehow, how these things happen, or they heard me on a radio interview, or something. Since my book came out in Canada, they heard about my book and therefore would come to see me.

They, too, had had a spiritual experience of some kind and they had been struggling and unable to find an understanding that was not pathological, you know, that this is a hallucination. There was not a welcome interpretation for people who’d had powerful spiritual experiences, so they wanted to talk to a medical doctor who could help them even find a name for what had happened to them. This paralleled what I was personally going through, trying to understand how to name what had happened to me and what was continuing to happen to me, the aftereffects of this near-death experience.

Alex Tsakiris: I think that is such an important point. I want to stop and emphasize this. You are a medically-trained doctor. You’re working as such. People start coming to you as a physician because they’ve experienced these spiritually transformative experiences. Give us some idea of the kind of experiences that people reported when they came to you. Put on your best Western doctor hat, and tell us what it was like to encounter these people.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Well, I felt for about 10 or 12 years after the near-death experience it was sort of unofficial that people who had heard of me by word of mouth would come and see me in my practice. They would have everything from a near-death experience to a spiritual experience when a loved one dies — that’s something I call a “death-watch experience,” to past life recall, to mystical experiences brought on by intense prayer or intense practices of yoga and meditation. Sometimes mystical experiences just as a gift of grace, walking out in a beautiful scene of nature, people overcome with the beauty and suddenly having a profound mystical experience. Kundalini, the spiritual energy experiences.

All of these types of experiences people were coming into my office with this broad spectrum. I realized, this is much bigger than just near-death experiences. Near-death experiences are just one of many types of spiritual experiences people are having today. So around 1990 I felt as a physician that I actually had a moral obligation to start becoming more public about this, to inform other medical doctors, because I’d heard so many terrible stories of people who’d had spiritual experiences who tried to tell their doctors about them but had been immediately labeled as, oh, this is a hallucination and you need some tranquilizers, or this is mental illness.

Or also, that they tried to speak to their church person, their clergyperson, and similarly were told, oh, no, this can’t be real, this only happens to the saints and to Jesus or the Buddha, depending on whatever your path was, or Moses, whatever. This must be your imagination or the work of the Devil. So they were not getting validation either from the medical community or from their spiritual community.

I felt since I personally experienced it and I had a certain amount of credibility as a teaching physician while established in the medical community, people knew I wasn’t crazy. I had to become public about the fact that yes, I had had this experience and I’ve had several spiritual experiences now, and also I needed to come public about the fact that there are many people out there right now having these experiences. They are not crazy.

And I felt the obligation to share the vocabulary that I came up with. That’s a lot of what I outline in my book. These are some of the common types of mystical experiences that people are having today. This is what a Kundalini or spiritual energy experience is like. These are some of the symptoms. And these are some of the psychic phenomenon that people are experiencing. This is what a near-death experience is, or a death-watch experience is. I outline the symptoms so that a medical person or a counselor that someone who’s had an experience might turn to, who reads my book will have some – I use a medical model – a diagnosis of something that’s not a disease, right? A diagnosis, the symptoms of a positive experience.

This is not a disease, this is not a hallucination. This is a peak human experience, as Abraham Mazlov talked about, that many people are having. It’s been written about in all of the great spiritual traditions, in Christianity, in Hinduism and Buddhism and Judaism, in Islam. There’s great mystical traditions in all the faiths and it’s time that science and religion sort of bridged a little bit here to realize that it’s not that all the mystics through all the ages were mentally ill, doc. [Laughs]

It’s that modern medicine until now did not have a vocabulary or diagnostic criteria for spiritual experiences. So my book is my humble first-step, based on my experience and my research, into offering a vocabulary, some definitions for spiritual experiences. And also I have a chapter in there on how to differentiate that from mental illness.

Alex Tsakiris: Great, which would be a necessary part of really diagnosing it, right? So from a medical perspective I think that’s a great contribution. Can you also tell us a little bit about the survey work that you did and some of the other findings that you had when you talked…so one, the survey work you did, and two, what happened when you spoke with other physicians when you tried to share what you were learning with other people in your profession? What was the reception like?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Okay, let me start with that question. At first, immediately after the near-death experience, when I spoke with other doctors, I mean they knew me and they knew I wasn’t crazy, so that sort of got put aside. They all then thought it was a bio-chemically-induced hallucination. That oh, you know, you must have had an electrolyte imbalance from swimming to shore, or it must have been a hallucination brought on by the direct effect of cold. So there was all this biological hypothesis of some sort of biochemical or cold-induced hallucination.

Now I knew that wasn’t true. I absolutely knew to the core of my being that wasn’t true, because I’ve seen many patients with hallucinations. Hallucinations are not growth-promoting. This experience was growth-promoting for me. It helped me grow up psychologically. It helped me grow up spiritually. It incredibly deepened my spiritual yearning. It made me, I would say, grow up radically very quickly. So I knew this was not some transient hallucination. It was something positive and something powerful.

So as I kept researching and as more patients came to me and then as you mentioned, as I started doing surveys, various types of survey assessments of the patients coming to me, to try and begin to document a little bit what types of experiences people were having. I began to speak around 1989, 1990 at certain medical conventions. I would speak to doctors and I also got invited by certain lay groups to speak to lay communities. I would present some of this information, particularly to the medical community because you need data and research to talk to doctors and to have them believe what you’re talking about. You have to have some sort of evidence, right?

So what I found was that the doctors initially who came and who listened were quite receptive. Usually that was because either they had already had patients come to them who had told them about these types of experiences and that had made the doctors interested in trying to find out more so they could help their patients, and or sometimes the doctors who came to those early talks themselves had had an experience that they’d been not willing or frightened to tell anyone about because of their reputation as a doctor. Or sometimes a loved one, a family member, might have had a powerful spiritual experience.

So they already knew about spiritual experiences and were wanting to understand more about it. That was a very welcome receptive audience when I first started speaking to doctors about it, which helped give me the courage to start speaking to less-receptive audiences, and going to other venues where doctors maybe would have heard less about near-death and spiritual experiences.

What I found as I spoke at bigger and bigger medical conferences was that during the ‘90s there were several books that came out that became quite famous about people who’d had near-death experiences, Betty Edie, Dannion Brinkley, and so the near-death experience now was becoming known in the lay community. Not in the medical community but on television and these people being interviewed on “Oprah” and things like that.

So the doctors maybe had heard about it from the lay press but didn’t have any medical information about it. That then created a window of opportunity for me because I was like the first doctor in Canada researching near-death experiences and other spiritual experiences. That created a window of opportunity for me to educate doctors, look, this is a phenomenon, there’s books written about it, these people are being interviewed on “Oprah,” and doctors should know something about it. That created an opportunity for me to talk to doctors about both my personal experience and some of the experiences of patients that I’d counseled.

Alex Tsakiris: What’s been the result of that educational experience in the whole? How do you think that’s going? Is it changing the culture within the medical community?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Well, I think slowly, slowly, slowly yes, by incremental, baby steps. One of the really big steps that happened was some colleagues and friends of mine, Dr. David Lukoff, Dr. Francis Lewb and Dr. Robert Turner, submitted a submission to The American Psychiatric Association for our diagnostic bible we have for psychiatric disorders, the DSM, that there should be a category created for religious and spiritual experiences that is not a symptom of mental illness. They lobbied for this in the ‘90s and actually in 1994 in the DSM IV, and I mention this in my book, a new category was approved and created in the DSM IV for religious or spiritual problems which is not a symptom of mental illness.

This is a huge breakthrough because until that point, there was no where in the medical texts that a religious or spiritual experience was not either a symptom of a mental illness like schizophrenia or a symptom of a physical illness like a hallucination or a seizure disorder. So this was a huge breakthrough in 1994. Now although that appears in the DSM, I think the training that medical doctors and clergy receive today is still limited as far as being able to diagnose a spiritual experience, but at least I think a toe is in the door.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s interesting. One, it’s interesting that it took until 1994, but hey, that’s great that it happened in 1994. Do you have any sort of statistics on how often that diagnosis has been applied to folks?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: No, I don’t, and that would be a very interesting piece of research. You know, with medical documentation all being confidential, that would be very difficult to pull together.

Alex Tsakiris: Because of course, what I have to wonder is, is anyone using that diagnosis?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: I think some people are, but one of the other things that happens in medicine, and I’ve found myself doing that with the patients that were in my office, is that even though files are confidential, you know other people might somehow get access to them. So there’s a tendency to be cryptic or only put the minimum that’s absolutely necessary into the chart. Sometimes people’s experiences are much, much, much richer and more detailed than what is actually documented in the medical chart. For example, I’ve now had four near-death experiences, my most recent being in 2003. If you were to look at my medical records for three of them are in accidents where I was in hospital, probably none of my medical records even mention that I had a near-death experience even if I did mention it to the doctors.

Alex Tsakiris: So a physician would normally enter in something like that, or would it only be a psychiatrist or a psychologist?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Well, it depends. It depends. Sometimes it’s the people themselves who’ve had the experiences who are reluctant to share it with their doctors because they’re afraid of being mis-labeled, as having a pathological experience. Sometimes they end up sharing it with the most unlikely people, like the cleaning staff, who are much less threatening. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: Right. [Laughs] I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on that last point, because it’s going to freak people out that you’ve had four near-death experiences. You just kind of talk about it in a very casual way, but certainly your first near-death experience was a plane crash. I mean that’s hard to get too much around that. I know just briefly in our previous conversation you touched on that you had a very serious fall a few years ago that led to a near-death experience. Can you just mention a little bit about the circumstances surrounding the other two near-death experiences?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Yeah, I now realize that the near-death experience I had in the plane crash in 1979 was actually my second near-death experience. I didn’t realize that until actually quite recently. I was in a serious motor vehicle accident when I was about 10 or 11 and I had a head injury and I lost consciousness. I was evidently unconscious for two or three days. I have always had very clear memory of floating above my body and watching them trying to resuscitate my body when I was a kid and had this head injury, and being sort of in this light. But I never realized or thought about it as a near-death experience.

Alex Tsakiris: Sure.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: But now as I look back, particularly since I’ve had two more near-death experiences since the plane crash, I realize, huh! My plane crash actually wasn’t my first. That as a child this floating above my body and this light-filled place was actually my first experience. The plane crash near-death experience was much deeper, much more profound, much more dramatic, and totally changed the course of my life. That’s the one that I’ve really focused on. Now a number of years later, 16 years later — in however many years later it was, 1995, I think that was 16 years later – I was in another near-miss plane accident, believe it or not.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow. [Laughs]

Dr. Yvonne Kason: And yeah, and again had – I’ve not yet written or spoken publicly about it – but I had another dramatic near-death experience which was actually more intense and more transformative than the one I had in 1979. It seemed to launch me the next step forward. It was the aftereffects of the 1995 near-death experience. I felt like a window to God had opened in my consciousness and that it never shut completely again. It was a most profound, a most beautiful on-going experience for about two months after that experience.

Then in 2003 is when I had the slip and fall accident where I hit my head on cement and had a serious brain hemorrhage, a brain injury, and died. This near-death experience is different than the other three because in this one, the most recent, I actually felt that I died and that I was completely gone. The body was dead or unconscious and I was completely gone and in the light. In my last experience which was the only one in which this occurred, I was actually given a choice of whether or not to return. And I’m back! [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]

Dr. Yvonne Kason: And it has been the most transformative of the four. I feel like it was a progression. Each near-death experience was deeper and more profound than the one before.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, let’s dig into a couple of things there, because one, certainly that is an extraordinarily rare and uncommon occurrence, at least I’ve never heard of people other than Dannion Brinkley, I guess I’ve heard. It’s not like there’s a pattern for many people of having multiple near-death experiences, or this being some kind of progression of spiritual growth, right? I mean, that’s not as common.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Well, as far as I know, it’s not as common and I’d be certainly interested in people who have had multiple near-death experiences if they want to contact me, because I’m clearly interested in that now. I have, I know of, I mean Dannion Brinkley is one and a couple of people have contacted me who have had multiple NDEs so I know there are a few other people out there who’ve had multiple NDEs, but from my many years of counseling people of near-death experiences I would agree with you that this is much more rare.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. That’s just really a side note because what I really want to dig into, and I think it’s important to get this information out there. In our prior conversation I think it’s one of the driving forces for you in terms of helping people and that’s to let people know that some of the other aspects of this transformative experiences that you have are common and do happen more frequently to folks who go through this.

In particular, what I’m thinking about, and you mentioned it earlier, is the increased psychic abilities. So that’s one aspect. Do you maybe want to just go through several of the other aspects of this experience that people might encounter, so if they do encounter them and they’re wondering, “Oh my God, am I going crazy?” maybe we can help them kind of normalize that experience a little bit.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: One of the things that I discovered both from my personal experience, my patients’ experiences, and also from my research of the literature, because I don’t think I’ve mentioned that yet. I did a lot of research into the Christian mystical traditions. Evelyn Underhill wrote an excellent book on mysticism. Richard Morey’s book, Gobi Krishna wrote about Kundalini and the Eastern tradition. There have been a number of writers from the Yogic and Buddhist traditions who have written about mysticism and Yoga. From all of them…

Alex Tsakiris: Written about it not just from a theoretical standpoint, but saying here is someone who had this experience. I know I’ve read one of those books. I told you about the Kundalini experience that someone had and they document very carefully exactly what happens.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Exactly. So there’s a vast literature, both Eastern and Western, that I also researched to some extent. I mean, there’s so much that you can’t research at all. What I found from all of these is that when you have a powerful mystical experience, whether it be a near-death experience or if the mystical experience is brought on by prayer or meditation, or whatever the cause of the mystical experience, it’s not just an isolated thing and then you’re back to your old life afterwards. It’s that it seems to begin a long-term spiritual transformation process that I talk about in my book.

In the mystical traditions this is sometimes called the “mystical path.” In the East this is called, “Kundalini-driven transformation of consciousness.” So there’s a change that happens that people notice. It’s like it didn’t stop. The door was opened, they have this in their consciousness, they have this profound expansion of consciousness where they perceive mystical and paranormal realms. But then the door doesn’t shut all the way. That’s the metaphor I’m using. So there’s still something changed in your consciousness and you find yourself more open to further mystical experiences, particularly if you’re doing practices of meditation, prayer and Yoga.

You find yourself open to psychic experiences even if you perhaps were not having psychic experiences before this. But oh my goodness, you’re starting to have premonitions. You’re starting to have clairvoyant episodes. You’re starting to have cognigence where you’re picking up on the thoughts and feelings of others. Other people spontaneously start unblocking past lives. If all of this is foreign to you and foreign to your cultural model, this can be very frightening and you can think that you’re going crazy. But it’s not that you’re going crazy.

I mean, in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali this is a Yogic text, this was described very clearly that people undergoing the spiritual transformation will start unblocking past lives. They will start having intuitive and psychic experiences. It’s all written as part of the process. So I’ve definitely seen this happening to people today, that this is true.

Other changes that happen to people are not in the psychic realm, but are in the physical body. People wonder, why am I having these bodily sensations? People will notice, as I did, sensations of energy rushes in their body or energy rushes up their spine, or sometimes people will notice sensations where in the East is called the “chakra points.”

They might notice energy vortexes or they might notice colors. They may hear inner sounds. They may notice that suddenly they have the inner urge to change their diet – that maybe they were big meat eaters before and suddenly find after their spiritual experience that they’ve lost their taste for meat, particularly for red meat. They have an inner urge to have a lighter diet. To give up alcohol and drugs is another thing that happens. To stop smoking, that happens to people after they’ve had a spiritual experience.

It’s how is this possible, one wonders, if it’s only in the spiritual and psychological realms. But according to the Eastern model that Gobi Krishna put forward, there’s also a biological component to spiritual transformation of consciousness. Body, mind and spirit. So some of these things are due to a change in the physical body. Some of these things are due to changes in our subtle body or astral body. But we feel them physically in our body as changes in our body.

Alex Tsakiris: Now, Yvonne, let me interject something. When you’re saying this, are you saying this from your experience in counseling people as a physician, or from your experience in reading what others have said about it?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Both.

Alex Tsakiris: Both. So this is real in the sense that you’ve seen folks who’ve come in and said, “I had this spiritually transformative experience and I’ve changed my diet. I’ve become a vegetarian.”

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Exactly. They’ll say, “You’re going to think this is weird, Doc, but…” and then they’ll tell me their story. “I couldn’t put a cigarette to my lips anymore,” or “I had to stop drinking,” or “I just could not eat that steak anymore. It started making me sick, and I used to love steak.” So my work was all led by both what I experienced and by what my patients experienced. Then I found it corroborated particularly by the Eastern mystical literature. The leading edge is what people today are experiencing.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. Well, it’s just an amazing story. It’s really an important book, and I hope a lot of folks get their hands on it, Farther Shores. Where do you take this from here?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Well, you know, my last near-death experience as I mentioned happened in 2003 and I’ve had to retire from the practice of medicine as I am healing from the traumatic brain injury. So I’m hope…

Alex Tsakiris: Just to tell people, I mean, it’s easy to make light of someone who’s had – it’s really not, but I mean, it just sounds strange, someone who’s had four near-death experiences. You had a very, very close brush with death from a very severe injury on this last incident, right?

Dr. Yvonne Kason: That’s right.

Alex Tsakiris: You were in the hospital for a long time and it wasn’t clear that you would recover at all from this.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: I am disabled in terms of practicing medicine. I’m left with pretty severe chronic fatigue and some problems with my short-term memory, etc., related to my last near-death experience. So I can’t practice medicine anymore.

It’s been a very intense healing struggle over the last five and one-half years, but spiritually this has been a profoundly deep and rich time. It’s been like the opposite. [Laughs] I tell people, it’s like swimming through a dirty swamp on a bright, sunny day.

At the worldly level it was horrible and difficult and full of struggle, like leeches and weeds attacking my legs, but if I look up, it’s a bright and sunny day. So if I meditate and turn my eye to God, it’s spiritually profound and beautiful, deepened by the depths of my last near-death experience. I choose to look up. I choose to focus on the positive, and that has kept me going and optimistic as my body continues to heal.

I’m hoping in the future God willing, perhaps I’ll be able to write again, write another book. But for now, I’m delighted to be healed enough in body, mind and spirit to be able to promote Farther Shores, which is available in the U.S. for the first time. So I’m just really, really delighted that I’m able to do that at this time.

Alex Tsakiris: Well I’m so glad that you found us and that I connected with you and to have this chat. The book is a real gift and I hope a lot of people enjoy it and get as much out of it as I did. So thanks again, Dr. Kason, for joining us today.

Dr. Yvonne Kason: Thank you for having me.

Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Dr. Kasan for joining us today on Skeptiko. If you’d like more information about her book, please visit our Web site, skeptiko.com. You’ll also find links to all our previous shows, a link to our forums, and an e-mail link to me.

Much more Skeptiko coming up in the next few weeks. I’m actually switching to publishing every week here for a while, because I have so many really great interviews that I want to get out.

As always, if you enjoy the show please feel free to tell your friends about it. Blog about us, write about us, do whatever you think is appropriate to get the word out. That’s going to do it for today. Take care. Until next time, bye for now.

Guest: Marilynn Hughes, performs an out-of-body travel experiment for a mother grieving the loss of her daughter.

Play it:

Download MP3 (49:45 min.)

Read it:

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode we’re going to look at the psychic medium experiment that we’ve been doing. I haven’t spoken much about it in the last few episodes, but there’s been a lot going on, really for the last few months.

Let me take everyone back to the beginning, at least the Skeptiko beginning. Let’s start by maybe defining terms a little bit. I think everyone who’s listening to this show is probably familiar with psychic medium communication. If someone’s lost a loved one they go and talk to a psychic or a medium and they try and connect with that loved one through some anomalous means that we don’t fully understand.

Now keep in mind that the skeptical take on psychic medium communication, and this is certainly the position of mainstream science as well, is no way, no how. Never been proven. You get a lot of this hundred years of nothing stuff. So once again, and I really feel a need to point this out, we are faced with this absolutely insane disconnect between what science is investigating and what people care most deeply about. I mean, let’s face it. What happens to us after we die is something we all think about, and we all care deeply about.

In terms of this experiment, it really started about 18 months ago when I appeared on, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” show with Dr. Steve Novella. I challenged those folks to do a public demonstration of psychic medium work to show that it really does happen. You may recall that we had a lot of communication about that, but it never really came to pass, at least for a year it didn’t. Then near the end of last year, in 2008, I decided to tackle this project on my own. Or at least to dig into it and that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve updated you several times on the progress that we’ve made, but this is going to be a little bit of a different update. The project has personally taken a couple turns for me that I couldn’t have expected, but have been wonderfully enlightening. I want to share a little bit of that with you.

First, this whole thing has been terrific. I mean, it’s been fascinating to speak with so many psychics, mediums, and out-of-body travelers. One thing you run into right away when you get into this is that you find that the labels we sometimes throw around don’t sit well with the folks doing the work. I want to respect that.
So that’s been amazing. It’s also been amazing to connect with so many folks who are dealing with the death of someone close to them. It hasn’t always been pleasant and fun, but it’s been rewarding on a different level.

In the last few months as I’ve been running these trials, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes, and then I’ve kind of come back and learned some more. Then a couple of months ago, I reached a little bit of a turning point. I had run about three trials on the medium experiment, and the way that I was doing it, I had achieved some mixed results.

Some of the experiments were showing extraordinary results – a million to one above chance levels. Others were not. Some of the readings were personally transformative for the people who were grieving, others were not. Now along the way, all along the way, I kept asking our mediums how we could improve the experiment, how we could make it better. The answer I got, and I got this a number of different ways, but ultimately the way I came to understand it is that I have to slow down and do these experiments, these trials, one at a time.

It’s funny, because I came to appreciate at a deeper level something that Julie Beischel said a while back. It’s something that I initially kind of bristled against. That’s that you have to serve everyone involved, the living and the dead. Now I know that sounds a little bit strange, but hang in there with me because that’s what this show is all about. It’s about one reading. One gifted person who’s somehow able to connect with people who have died. It’s also about one grieving mother. And it’s about one young adult who tragically decided to take her own life.

The story starts back in January of this year, ’09, when I was in the process of recruiting mediums for this experiment. I ran into Marilynn Hughes of the – get this, skeptics, you’re going to love this – the Out-of-Body Travel Foundation at outofbodytravel.org. Now if you’re wanting to snicker at the name, just wait until you dig into what Marilynn has to say. For many of us, even believers, the idea of God sending people on a journey through countless levels of spiritual realms in order to aid lost souls, all a little hard to take.

But two things that drove me forward with Marilynn were, one, I’m no longer put off by folks who believe in strange things that I don’t have any experience with. Heck, if Skeptiko has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of very down-to-earth people, like skeptics, believe in all sorts of things that they don’t have any experience with.

The second thing that drove me forward is that there was just something very engaging about Marilynn. I don’t know, I just really liked her, almost immediately. So I was really thrilled when Marilynn agreed to an interview. When we first started talking about the experiment and what we might be able to do together scientifically, I had some real doubts it was going to work out. I think you’ll see what I mean from this first clip.

Marilynn Hughes: Well, it’s an interesting question and I’ve been thinking about what I would say to you in terms of like how I think it could be done, and I think a thing that I would share is that from what I’ve experienced, this is where the challenge lies for science. When we leave our bodies and we go into different spiritual states, we enter worlds that have different laws than third dimensional reality. So in order to take science into that study, somehow we have to integrate and include those different laws of existence.

Alex Tsakiris: Different laws of existence? Isn’t this the kind of woo-woo stuff that just drives skeptics crazy? But you have to ask yourself one question. What if it’s real? And that’s the question I asked. So I pushed forward with Marilynn. I told her about the trials we’d already done. I told her about some of the other out-of-body experience research that had been published. So my dialogue with

Marilynn continued, and we started to kind of hone in on something that we might be able to do. Here’s Marilynn again.

Marilynn Hughes: You know the one thing that I think is more likely to be workable in terms in what my situation is, is utilizing out-of-body experiences for messages for people. I don’t know how far we can take it. I do receive — in out-of-body travel, I don’t have the mediumship thing like a John Edward or someone like that. I receive messages and people come visit me in out-of-body experiences. That sort of thing is actually fairly common, so common that I don’t even really document it. There are a few people that I could bring forward that could share some of the things I’ve told them that I can remember or that I still have contact with.

A lot of times it’s someone who randomly comes across my site and asks for help and I just tell them I’ll pray and If I get permission I’ll let them know what I hear. Then I’ll tell them what happened and they’re happy and they move on and I don’t keep track of them. But I could start keeping track of them and then you’re talking about probably doing it in a controlled environment. I think, ironically, one of the things that is much more powerful with these experiences is that personal contact. So if you’re doing it in a university setting or something, and you have a pool of people who have some kind of needs or whatever that I can actually face, talk to, touch, and just see them, it’s much more likely to happen that way. Does that make sense?

Alex Tsakiris: That’s awesome. So let me make sure I understand what you’re saying. You generally, because you attract so many people with your message and through other ways, people come to you and say, “Marilynn, can you please help me with connecting with so-and-so?”

Marilynn Hughes: Right.

Alex Tsakiris: Then in your experience a lot of times those messages are answered and then you pass those along to the folks.

Marilynn Hughes: Right. See, what happens is, is it’s not just that, though. And that’s one thing I’m not sure how far we can go with it. In a situation like that because it is God-directed rather than me-directed, it can happen in a number of ways. Somebody might want to have contact with a relative who’s passed on but yet it might be one of the guardian angels who comes to me and says, “Well, this is what they actually need to know. So we’re not sending Dad to see them today. I’m coming to tell you this.”

Then there are other times, too, when they have problems or issues that are going on in their life that will be shown to me in some way, shape or form and how they might best handle it. So it can be in a variety of ways that it would happen.

Alex Tsakiris: So at this point I was starting to get a pretty clear idea about we might run an experiment with Marilynn. I was really impressed with her openness and her willingness to do this. I’ve spoken with a number of mediums, and when you really get down to brass tacks about doing a public experiment, really putting them on the spot, they sometimes get reluctant. I understand that. It can be a real set-up to take something that is this extraordinary and try and put it under a spotlight and say, “Do it now.” It just doesn’t happen that way. But that wasn’t where Marilynn was coming from. She just wanted to push forward and find the best way to do it. So I started asking her how we might refine it. How we might find the best possible candidates.

Marilynn Hughes: I don’t know why I didn’t think of mentioning this before, but I work at the Catholic Church, and so of course we do two or three funerals a week on average. One of the things that seems to happen, and this can sometimes even happen while I’m awake, where the person will just all of a sudden be with me. All of a sudden they’re just talking, talking, talking. I’ll just be – sometimes I’ll do this without even letting the people know that I feel their presence because not everyone’s open to this. It still helps them when you tell them these things because the deceased person knows what those family member believed beforehand and they present it to me in a way that they know the family can hear and listen to.

So what I have found is that it’s the unresolved ones that are more likely to come through. That’s part of the reason I’ll pick these people up just driving down the street. If you drive by a car accident and there’s some souls that are still there and they have this unresolved stuff — there can be a lot of things, murder, suicide, accidental overdoses.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, this was a good little twist, a good little insight into Marilynn’s process. I wanted to follow through with that. So I took some of the other points that Marilynn had mentioned and we talked a little bit further. We nailed down the particulars and how we’re going to run this trial, and I set off on finding us a participant.

Now I’ve been running an ad in Craigslist looking for participants for the last several months, so I have a pretty good database of potential sitters to choose from. When I sorted these people by the criteria that Marilynn and I had talked about, I had four or five people that I thought would be pretty good. I wound up picking Michelle. I’m not going to reveal her last name because it’s really not necessary.

Michelle had lost a daughter to suicide at age 20 and she was looking to connect and had volunteered for the experiment. I e-mailed Michelle and then eventually wound up talking to her on the phone. I asked her if she wanted to not only participate in the medium experiment, but participate in this more in-depth public trial. She agreed. So here’s the protocol we set up.

I asked Michelle to send me an article of clothing that her daughter had worn. She did. She sent me a hat that was very special to her. I also asked her to send me some photographs. She did that, as well. I collected some general information about her daughter. First name, date of birth, date of passing. This is all information that Marilynn had said she would like to have during the reading. Now I was acting as the proxy. All information would be sent to me, and then I would send all that information along to Marilynn. Then I would receive the reading from Marilynn and I’d pass it along to Michelle.

Since all the readings came through in e-mail, this was an easy thing to do in terms of controlling exactly the amount of information that went through to Marilynn. So here’s what happened, and this is an amazing part of the story number one. While Michelle was in the process of sending me the hat and the photos, I passed along a little bit of information to Marilynn. I want you to put yourself in Marilynn’s position for a minute. Here’s the information that you received. You don’t know who I’ve selected. You have no idea. But here’s the information you receive.

First name, Megan. Then I’m going to give you the month and day, but not the year, that she was born. I’m going to give you the date that she passed, okay? So that’s all you have. You have that information.

Now I was going to send her the rest, I was going to send her the hat and I was going to send her the photographs, but I hadn’t done that yet. I had just passed along that information that I gave you. So next

I want to share with you the first e-mail reading I received from Marilynn based on that limited amount of information.

Marilynn starts out, “Megan is a soul who definitely wishes to make contact with her family and apparently has some level of permission from God to do so. I have some random things to share that she showed me. I don’t know what they mean. We’ll let the family see if they mean anything.“

Let me interject that even though she gives me this information and I pass it along to the family, I never give Marilynn any feedback on any of that information. I never tell her what’s a hit, what isn’t. So here are some of the things that she has to say.

“First, she showed me what appeared to be a college environment.” This is, in fact, correct. Megan was in college right before she committed suicide. She was about 20 years old when she died. Again, she had no way of knowing that. Back to her reading. “The next part was definitely not what I was expecting. I don’t know what this means, but I watched her begin on campus, and then somehow get lost. She ended up not being on campus, but I didn’t feel like she was that far away. She wandered off with a woman who was definitely very clearly lesbian. It seems that Megan wasn’t sure for a very, very short time of her identity, but she soon realized that she was not a lesbian and she refused to participate. My sense was that she was definitely showing me a time in the late teens, early 20s. I’ll find out when the pictures arrive if this is an appropriate age at which she died or not.”

Well, it did turn out to be an appropriate age. It was the exact time when she died, and the university angle does play into this as well, because Megan was raised in a major university town and this kind of interplay comes back and forth in the reading over and over again. So these couple of facts were really, really important and they became even more important after Marilynn received the photos and Megan’s hat and then continued with her second reading. Here I’ll share with you some of that.

“Megan told me that her death was very, very hard on her mom, and that she really loved her mom and had a very close relationship with her. Now before you scoff at this, I have to tell you I’ve done a bunch of readings at this point and it’s certainly not a given that there’s a strong bond between a daughter and a mother. Sometimes there’s a lot of animosity there.” So this is also a hit. A minor hit, but it’s a hit.

Also, since I hadn’t revealed to Michelle that it was Megan’s mother who was trying to connect, or even the name of the person who was trying to connect with her, whether it was a male or female, it makes it even more interesting. Before you kind of dismiss some of these things and go, of course, of course, because you already know the end story, think back and remember the information that you had. You didn’t have any of that information.

Okay, next we have a couple of points that turn out to be very, very significant to the family in terms of understanding Megan’s death. The first is, Marilynn reports that “Megan experienced a returning home to her faith, like she had been somewhere else for a while.”

Marilynn’s reading says,”It was like she had been somewhere else for a while, maybe off to college or a different location, maybe she just went away from the church, and she came back. She was very happy to be back.” She goes on to say, ”It was kind of a calm before the storm.”

This is Marilynn again. “Yes, I’m hearing from her, underlined, a calm before the storm. She thought she had found her way back home, but something else was going to happen.” Then she said, “The woman told me a different story. Something she told me wasn’t true.” She emphasized this again and now writes this, ”Now I know all of that might sound a little bit cryptic, but it’s very important, very relevant to the story, because as it turns out, this is exactly the kind of spiritual crisis, if you will, that Megan was going through.”
It doesn’t matter what you think about a spiritual crisis, it’s her experience, and it’s what her mother recalls her going through. So she had somehow drifted away from her spiritual tradition, then she had found her way back. She was back reading the Bible and in a Christian group because that’s what was important to her. But then that was the calm before the storm and then the storm, of course, is her eventual suicide. I don’t think that’s really reading too much into it. That’s pretty much what the reading says. As you’ll soon hear, Megan’s mom confirms this is actually what happens.

So back to Marilynn’s reading. Marilynn writes that this case reminds her of another case she worked on where a family had come to her and said that they’d lost someone through an accident, but the police had never figured out if this had been an accident or a suicide or a murder, and it caused a lot of pain in the family. She goes on to say that, “Megan’s case sounds something like this to me. There’s something about Megan that the family does not fully know. But based on the way she’s presented this to me, I’m not sure that the family knows that there is something they don’t know yet.”
Now this part of the reading turns out to be very significant to Megan’s mom. In fact, it was the primary reason she contacted me.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I only knew it after I revealed this reading to her and she came back and said, “I have to tell you, Megan’s death has caused a major divide in our family. Her death was clearly a suicide, but there’s a part of my family that isn’t willing to accept that she really killed herself, and they think that there’s other reasons behind it. She was on medication, antidepressant medication. She had gone through some car accident and was on pain medication. And they want to believe that there are other reasons behind it, and it’s caused a real divide in our family.” So that is certainly a very, very unusual set of circumstances, and I have no way of explaining how Marilynn could possibly tune into that.
Marilynn provided three more e-mail readings for the family. Two of them were very brief, and one of them was pretty long. The amount of factual, verifiable data in them is relatively small, but they altogether had a very, very profound effect on the family. There is one other little verifiable fact that came through that I think is amazing in the way that so many of these readings are amazing. It’s a very, very small point, but it had great significance to the family.

It’s in the last reading that Marilynn provides, and she says, “I see Megan and she’s smiling, and there are these flowers all around her face. It’s a strange symbol.” Then she goes on to say, ”I think these flowers are peonies.” Now the only reason this point’s important, and the only person at this point that is important too, is Megan’s mom. Right around the time that she received this message, she had been talking to her husband about planting a garden specifically for Megan, to honor Megan. She was asking her husband what kind of flowers he thinks she should plant in there. Just about this time, she gets this message. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Who knows? Just another point to add to the whole story.

You’ll hear more about that a little later when we talk to Megan’s mom. First I want to go back to my second interview with Marilynn. This is a follow-up, the trial’s basically over, I’m ready to share the results with Marilynn, and I also want to talk about the process that she went through in arriving at this rather remarkable data.

Alex Tsakiris: So what was your process in terms of connecting with Megan?

Marilynn Hughes: Well, you know, with Megan it was almost instantaneous. You had given me, I think it was via e-mail – I don’t know if we spoke on the phone or I think you gave it to me by e-mail. Then I asked for the date of death, because sometimes it’s very important and helpful when you know how long someone has been crossed over. There are different stages in death, and so different types of timing you’re going to be more likely to reach them in different locations. But with Megan, as soon as I got her name and you gave me those dates, I could feel her. She was just all over me. And it was like, “Wow, this girl wants to talk to her family, you know what I mean?” [Laughs] Then it was that very night.
The process is really not something that I control. It’s a process where when I go to bed at night, I have these out-of-body experiences and then the person who is deceased will show me things. A lot of times they show you — and I believe I experienced based on what you just shared with me — her moment of death. In the last reading I think that’s when she probably died, because I had woken up bone-cold. I don’t know if you recall this – she was in a room, and I woke up bone-cold and that’s what felt like, oh, she must have died then.

So the process is going out-of-body, the person takes you on a visual where you almost experience it with them. It’s almost like you become them in the experience, where you’re experiencing part of their life as them so you can feel their emotions, their feelings. Everything that’s going through their mind. That’s part of the process that is very important for the remaining family members because a lot of times in a situation like this, the difference is exactly what was it that this person was confused about. Because the families always blame themselves, and it’s always helpful for them to know, if it’s possible, what was it that led to the moment of their death? What were they thinking? How did that come about? Who were the people that led them there?

What was the actual – and a lot of times, too, it’s about taking that personal responsibility which they always do after death. We all have to take the personal responsibility for our own decisions and stuff. There’s so many things involved in it, but it’s primarily something that is led by – I believe that it’s led by God, and he allows people to do this when it’s helpful for their spirit and for someone who might be left behind.

If you recall, in our first conversation I said the one factor that I have no control over is whether or not it’s allowed. A lot of times in a situation, because I don’t control it and I don’t just conjure it up and stuff, it comes to me or it doesn’t. Generally, in a situation where someone has some unfinished business after crossing over, there’s more likely a chance that they will be allowed to do this and to share this kind of experience and come back through someone who has a gift like this, than if there’s not any major unfinished business.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, it’s interesting and it’s also interesting that you’re talking about God and the religious mysticism aspect of it. It’s particularly interesting in this case, and it’s going to be very controversial and very challenging for a lot of folks. These are just the facts of this case. One of the things that you reported in your reading was this struggle that Megan was having and how she had gone and drifted away from her spiritual path and had run into some pretty bad people along the way. Then she had found her way back on her spiritual path and was, I don’t know if you said specifically that she was reading the Bible or not, but…

Marilynn Hughes: She was back in a church…

Alex Tsakiris: Back in a church, well…

Marilynn Hughes: …and was back in a group, a religious group of some kind. The way she presented to me it was the face of her youth.

Alex Tsakiris: This is exactly what happened in Megan’s case. So again, this is…

Marilynn Hughes: Wow, okay.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, while she was at the university she had befriended this woman who was really kind of a bad news person. This woman was somewhat of a psychic but was running a psychic scam and had kind of a bank of phones. This woman also had a Wicca background, whether that’s good or bad.

Marilynn Hughes: That explains a lot, explains a lot. Yes.

Alex Tsakiris: This relationship was quite troubling to Megan and to her family, but her mother reports that near the end, she had come back to her Christian faith and was trying to get back into that and was reading the Bible regularly and that.

So again, these are just the facts, and they match perfectly with the reading that you gave and there really isn’t a good or reasonable explanation for why you would connect any of that or why you would provide any of that information.

Marilynn and I went over a number of other points about her reading. I’m going to skip ahead a little bit in our conversation.

Alex Tsakiris: You’ve given a lot of information here. It’s not like talking on a phone. [Laughs]

Marilynn Hughes: Right. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: I’m sure it isn’t for you, but it certainly isn’t in terms of the information you’re getting. Some of it is allegorical and has kind of other kinds of meaning that has to be kind of teased out of it. Some of it’s very specific…

Marilynn Hughes: Right, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: …so it’s kind of giving a summation. I’ll tell you one specific thing that you gave that had tremendous meaning for Megan’s mom was the flowers.

Marilynn Hughes: Really?

Alex Tsakiris: Yes.

Marilynn Hughes: She made a big deal about the flowers and I was almost hesitant to even write it because it was like, how could this mean something? [Laughs] I said, okay, I’ll just say it. That’s interesting. What meaning did that have?

Alex Tsakiris: Megan’s mom was in the process of building a flower bed specifically for Megan, to kind of celebrate Megan, and had been talking to her husband about, you know, I really want to start a little flower garden…

Marilynn Hughes: Wow, I’m getting slammed. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]

Marilynn Hughes: Now I understand, because she had the flowers around her head. It was just kind of like it didn’t quite make sense, you know, but now it makes perfect sense that the flowers would be surrounding her. [Laughs] Wow.

Alex Tsakiris: And those specific flowers that you said, I can’t say, I can’t pronounce it.

Marilynn Hughes: Peonies? Were they peonies?

Alex Tsakiris: Oh, peonies, okay. I can’t remember but Megan’s mom was so moved by this that she went and researched these flowers and found that they were exactly the kind that you were looking for. They were indigenous to Texas. They met all the criteria that she had laid out in her mind in terms of how to construct this flower bed to honor her daughter. So I think this is…

Marilynn Hughes: Wow. That’s so exciting to hear that. One of the interesting things about doing an experiment like this is that most of the time when this sort of thing is happening, I know a little bit about the family. Sometimes I don’t know a whole lot, like in that particular instance that I mentioned where it reminded me of where they didn’t know if it was an accident, suicide, or murder, but I didn’t know that until the deceased person had come and told me, “Tell my brother it was an accident.” And then he said, “Wow. That’s really great because we didn’t know if it was an accident, a murder, or suicide. The police could never figure it out.”

So most of the time I know a little bit about the people or they’ve written to me and they have information, so I have a little bit to go on. And then they give me feedback. So this was actually very interesting for me to do, as well, because of the fact that there was the no feedback rule so it was kind of running blind and just hoping that you’re catching what she’s saying correctly and seeing things correctly and translating it correctly. You know what I mean? So that’s really exciting to hear of so many of the things that she had shared with me, that I got it right. And that it was helpful, you know what I mean?

Alex Tsakiris: And I think you can tell me if this is typical or not, and this is also going to be very, very challenging for a lot of folks who aren’t comfortable with this whole idea. Beyond the specific data that was evidential — and there was a lot of it — there were a lot of just uncanny coincidences that happened with Megan’s mom during this process, during this…

Marilynn Hughes: Really?

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, in terms of e-mails that she got, in terms of lights going on and off completely in a way that she had associated in the past with Megan’s presence being close to her. And in terms of her just knowing and feeling Megan’s presence and feeling resolution to these things. So I don’t know if that’s typical, but it sounds like, to me from talking to Megan’s mom, that this process that she went through in working with you without even knowing your name or knowing who you were…

Marilynn Hughes: [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: …but the process was very transformative for her.

Marilynn Hughes: A lot of times it does happen like that. Not necessarily always like lights going on and off, where there’s physical phenomenon, but a lot of times people will actually have – of course, this will happen more with people like may have been to my Web site and they know what I look like. They’ll see me in dreams and I’ll tell them things, or things like that. There will be kind of a mutual – where there’s information that’s kind of moving through both parties at the same time.

Of course, I think in Megan’s case, she obviously – it was so strong, and it’s interesting because just yesterday I was meeting with somebody who really wants to make contact with a daughter who had died about 16 years ago. I didn’t feel a thing. It might be something where it comes up in a week or two, because I mentioned to you in our first conversation, sometimes it happens immediately, sometimes it takes three months, sometimes it takes six months, and sometimes it never happens. It’s all up to the will of God, not me. It was very interesting with Megan because she was just immediate. She really wanted to communicate with her mother. She made a lot of effort to do so.

It was almost difficult to keep up with her because there were so many interesting twists in her story, and knowing nothing about the story it was like, okay, well, I think I might have mentioned this in my first e-mail. This is either really right on or just really crazy stuff. [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: [Laughs]

Marilynn Hughes: Because I had no idea about all these interesting twists and turns, but that’s what kind of ironically makes doing an experiment like this very interesting, too. Because she had a case where it would be highly difficult to guess that all the circumstances around it. When she was showing them to me, it was a little bit, well, this is kind of a little far out.

This is probably – it was kind of difficult just receiving it and saying well – and you know even with the issue of questioning her sexuality and the woman who was a lesbian, you don’t want to make things worse with the family if this is something they don’t know about. Or, if it’s not correct. [Laughs] So this was actually probably a very interesting case to utilize because it had so many interesting facets to it.

Alex Tsakiris: I think we stayed very true to our original goal of keeping it blinded in a scientific…

Marilynn Hughes: Totally blind, yes.

Alex Tsakiris: And I think it’s also – it’s been a learning process for me, too, in terms of how to do these experiments. I think so many things came out of this process for me. One of the big things that came out is just how important this work is for the people involved. I want to make sure that going forward, I really honor that and I really respect that and do that work from that. You do this experiment, which is important, the scientific part of it is important, but going forward I really want to make sure that we do this from that place. From that place of honor and respect, because there is some kind of higher meaning to all this. That’s that we have to honor that while we discover it.

Marilynn Hughes: It’s really important that people know that — a lot of people hear about the people who will just say they connect with the dead for random purposes. It’s really important for people to know that when this kind of contact is actually allowed, it’s for what