Full Transcript for Every Confusing Thing About Life Between Lives Explained Slowly (For Sleep)

the same 38 00:02:56,078 --> 00:02:59,560 field, and the bodies just lie there for days. 39 00:03:01,635 --> 00:03:05,680 Ten days later, the army comes back to collect the dead. 40 00:03:07,700 --> 00:03:12,140 By then the bodies are decayed as you'd expect, except for Ur's. 41 00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:15,200 His body hasn't rotted at all. 42 00:03:15,680 --> 00:03:20,560 They carry him home and lay him out on the funeral pyre, ready to burn. 43 00:03:23,290 --> 00:03:30,320 Two days after that he sits up, 12 days dead, lying on a heap of wood, 44 00:03:30,820 --> 00:03:34,289 and he opens his eyes and starts talking, and what 45 00:03:34,290 --> 00:03:37,500 he says is that he's been sent back with a message. 46 00:03:39,670 --> 00:03:41,800 Here's what he tells them. 47 00:03:42,720 --> 00:03:46,840 His soul left his body and travelled with a crowd of 48 00:03:46,841 --> 00:03:50,640 other until they reached a strange and enormous place. 49 00:03:51,800 --> 00:03:53,480 It had four openings. 50 00:03:54,840 --> 00:04:01,400 Two were in the ground, side by side, and two were in the sky, directly above them. 51 00:04:02,254 --> 00:04:04,380 Between these openings sat judges. 52 00:04:05,850 --> 00:04:11,180 As each soul came before them, the judges decided where it would go. 53 00:04:12,830 --> 00:04:17,160 The just were sent up through the sky openings on the right. 54 00:04:18,120 --> 00:04:22,960 The unjust were sent down through the earth openings on the left. 55 00:04:25,360 --> 00:04:29,200 Then Ur came forward, expecting the same treatment. 56 00:04:30,700 --> 00:04:32,420 But the judges stopped him. 57 00:04:33,700 --> 00:04:35,940 They told him he wasn't going anywhere. 58 00:04:37,760 --> 00:04:42,900 He was to stay right where he was, and watch and listen to everything, 59 00:04:43,470 --> 00:04:47,300 so that he could carry the whole report back to the living. 60 00:04:49,450 --> 00:04:51,300 And that's why we have it. 61 00:04:52,415 --> 00:04:55,140 Ur wasn't a philosopher or a priest. 62 00:04:55,820 --> 00:05:01,540 He was a soldier who was told to look closely, and then sent back to say what he saw. 63 00:05:03,420 --> 00:05:10,080 Now let's talk about what people report when they leave, because Ur isn't alone. 64 00:05:10,875 --> 00:05:15,770 In 1975, a philosophy student turned doctor. 65 00:05:18,600 --> 00:05:22,420 Named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After 66 00:05:22,421 --> 00:05:26,580 Life, and in it he gave this experience a name that stuck. 67 00:05:27,780 --> 00:05:29,500 The near-death experience. 68 00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:36,400 He'd spent years collecting accounts from people who had been pronounced dead, 69 00:05:36,905 --> 00:05:40,580 or came very close, and then came back. 70 00:05:41,180 --> 00:05:45,540 And he noticed that their stories kept lining up. 71 00:05:47,315 --> 00:05:48,320 Here's the pattern. 72 00:05:49,930 --> 00:05:55,220 First, people find themselves outside their body, looking at it. 73 00:05:55,820 --> 00:05:59,678 Then comes a sense of movement, often through a 74 00:05:59,679 --> 00:06:03,260 dark space that people describe like a tunnel. 75 00:06:05,180 --> 00:06:08,276 At the end of it, there's a light brighter than 76 00:06:08,277 --> 00:06:11,750 anything they've seen, but it doesn't hurt to look at. 77 00:06:14,545 --> 00:06:17,720 And somewhere along the way, there's some kind of border. 78 00:06:19,050 --> 00:06:23,718 A line, or a gate, or a river, and the person understands 79 00:06:23,719 --> 00:06:27,460 that if they cross it, they won't be going back. 80 00:06:29,345 --> 00:06:35,000 Picture a man on an operating table, heart-stopped, surgeons working. 81 00:06:38,300 --> 00:06:43,482 He rises, he's near the ceiling, and he can 82 00:06:43,483 --> 00:06:47,900 see the top of the monitor drawing a flat line. 83 00:06:48,770 --> 00:06:49,920 He isn't scared. 84 00:06:50,910 --> 00:06:56,900 He's curious, almost detached, like he's watching a program about someone else. 85 00:06:58,040 --> 00:07:03,400 Then the walls of the room seem to fall away, and he's moving toward a glow. 86 00:07:03,935 --> 00:07:08,020 And the strongest feeling in him isn't fear, it's recognition. 87 00:07:09,740 --> 00:07:11,040 He knows this place. 88 00:07:13,380 --> 00:07:16,240 That last part comes up again and again. 89 00:07:17,480 --> 00:07:23,800 A doctor named Jeffrey Long runs a huge archive of these accounts, thousands of 90 00:07:23,801 --> 00:07:31,860 them, collected through detailed questionnaires from people all over the world. 91 00:07:32,910 --> 00:07:36,516 And when his experiences try to describe how it 92 00:07:36,517 --> 00:07:40,280 felt, many of them say it felt like going home. 93 00:07:42,070 --> 00:07:48,320 Not arriving somewhere new, but returning some of they'd been before and forgotten. 94 00:07:50,570 --> 00:07:51,700 You know the feeling. 95 00:07:52,690 --> 00:07:57,860 You've been away for a long time, and you come up your own front walk, 96 00:07:58,380 --> 00:08:01,509 and your hand goes to the door without 97 00:08:01,510 --> 00:08:05,220 thinking, and the smell of the hallway hits you. 98 00:08:06,305 --> 00:08:09,400 Nobody has to explain anything to you. 99 00:08:10,235 --> 00:08:12,460 Your body already knows where it is. 100 00:08:14,205 --> 00:08:20,580 That's the quality these people describe, except it's a hundred times stronger. 101 00:08:23,255 --> 00:08:25,960 Now here's why the pattern matters so much. 102 00:08:27,140 --> 00:08:32,419 These accounts don't come from one country or one religion. 103 00:08:34,270 --> 00:08:38,360 They come from believers and from people who believed nothing. 104 00:08:39,419 --> 00:08:43,518 They come from children too, who haven't absorbed any 105 00:08:43,519 --> 00:08:47,060 ideas yet about what dying is supposed to look like. 106 00:08:49,265 --> 00:08:52,420 And the steps

keep coming in roughly the same order. 107 00:08:54,609 --> 00:09:02,560 Leaving, the tunnel, the light, the proofs, what's actually happening. 108 00:09:05,674 --> 00:09:09,598 You can read these reports as a dying brain, doing 109 00:09:09,599 --> 00:09:13,450 strange things, or as the first steps of a real journey. 110 00:09:14,154 --> 00:09:17,796 But either way, you've got people in very different 111 00:09:17,797 --> 00:09:22,390 places and times describing the same opening moves. 112 00:09:24,639 --> 00:09:28,213 And that's the thing worth noticing, because if 113 00:09:28,214 --> 00:09:31,410 there is a road, this is how it seems to begin. 114 00:09:33,660 --> 00:09:37,330 Next, let's talk about what happens when you arrive. 115 00:09:38,449 --> 00:09:41,270 Because the light isn't the end of the story. 116 00:09:42,590 --> 00:09:46,530 In the accounts that go further, somebody is waiting. 117 00:09:49,399 --> 00:09:55,950 This is the heart of a book called Journey of Souls by a hypnotherapist named Michael 118 00:09:56,199 --> 00:09:59,190 Newton, published in 1994. 119 00:10:00,650 --> 00:10:03,510 Newton started out as a skeptic. 120 00:10:04,070 --> 00:10:08,567 Then, a client under deep hypnosis went past her 121 00:10:08,568 --> 00:10:12,430 last death and began describing a place beyond it. 122 00:10:14,210 --> 00:10:19,210 And he spent the next few decades asking thousands of people what they saw there. 123 00:10:20,719 --> 00:10:24,190 And one of the first things they described was a welcome. 124 00:10:25,075 --> 00:10:26,090 Guides come. 125 00:10:26,995 --> 00:10:28,310 Loved ones come. 126 00:10:29,435 --> 00:10:31,710 They're simply there when you arrive. 127 00:10:34,225 --> 00:10:37,090 Picture it the way his clients tell it. 128 00:10:38,369 --> 00:10:43,870 A soul comes out of the dark, a little dazed, not sure what it's standing in. 129 00:10:45,149 --> 00:10:49,970 And the first face it sees is a grandmother who died when they were ten. 130 00:10:52,044 --> 00:10:57,290 Or an old friend, or a dog, or someone it hasn't thought about in 40 years. 131 00:10:58,450 --> 00:11:04,810 They look the way the soul remembers them, or younger, or lighter, and there's no 132 00:11:04,959 --> 00:11:05,959 awkwardness. 133 00:11:06,705 --> 00:11:09,470 Just a sort of, oh, there you are. 134 00:11:11,679 --> 00:11:18,050 Now there's an older and stranger account of arriving, and it comes from Tibet. 135 00:11:19,569 --> 00:11:26,030 It's called the Bardo Thodol, usually known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. 136 00:11:27,719 --> 00:11:31,205 It's a text meant to be read aloud to a person who 137 00:11:31,206 --> 00:11:34,830 has just died, and its first instruction is startling. 138 00:11:36,729 --> 00:11:41,050 The very first thing that appears isn't a person at all. 139 00:11:41,665 --> 00:11:45,890 It's the clear light, a pure, bare brightness. 140 00:11:47,170 --> 00:11:52,790 And the text says it shows up at the moment of death, before anything else does. 141 00:11:54,295 --> 00:11:56,810 What's the soul supposed to do with it? 142 00:11:57,865 --> 00:11:59,290 Recognise it. 143 00:12:00,329 --> 00:12:05,830 The teaching is that this light is your own mind, stripped of everything. 144 00:12:06,795 --> 00:12:10,590 And if you know it for what it is, right there, you're free. 145 00:12:11,910 --> 00:12:13,250 Nothing more is needed. 146 00:12:15,410 --> 00:12:18,050 But here's the catch, and it's a human one. 147 00:12:19,410 --> 00:12:21,610 Most people don't recognise it. 148 00:12:22,389 --> 00:12:26,430 The light is too bright, too empty, too much. 149 00:12:27,099 --> 00:12:31,359 It has no face, no warmth, nothing to hold onto, 150 00:12:31,360 --> 00:12:35,170 so the soul flinches and turns away from it. 151 00:12:36,630 --> 00:12:42,470 The text knows this, and it gently keeps calling the person back, telling them not 152 00:12:42,471 --> 00:12:46,410 to be afraid, that this is the best chance they'll get. 153 00:12:48,410 --> 00:12:53,190 Think about that for a moment, because it sets up something we'll come 154 00:12:53,339 --> 00:12:54,339 back to. 155 00:12:55,869 --> 00:13:02,630 In one account, you're met by familiar faces who ease you in. 156 00:13:03,470 --> 00:13:09,170 In the other, you're met by something so vast and unfamiliar that you run from it. 157 00:13:10,425 --> 00:13:15,190 Both are describing a threshold, and both agree that how you meet it matters. 158 00:13:17,314 --> 00:13:19,010 Which raises a question. 159 00:13:22,239 --> 00:13:26,300 If you do get past this first moment, where do you go? 160 00:13:27,754 --> 00:13:33,120 It turns out there's a place where souls gather, and the traditions describe it 161 00:13:33,121 --> 00:13:36,260 very differently depending on who's telling the story. 162 00:13:39,450 --> 00:13:42,140 Now let's look at the places souls gather. 163 00:13:44,144 --> 00:13:49,140 And we'll go back to her, because after the judges sent him off to watch, 164 00:13:49,689 --> 00:13:55,540 he followed the crowd to a meadow, and what he saw there is surprisingly ordinary. 165 00:13:57,550 --> 00:13:58,740 It's a reunion. 166 00:14:00,115 --> 00:14:05,040 Souls who've come down from the sky, and souls who've come up from underground, 167 00:14:05,840 --> 00:14:07,300 arrive at the same field. 168 00:14:08,339 --> 00:14:14,000 And they greet each other, like travellers who've just got off long trains. 169 00:14:14,999 --> 00:14:21,920 They run up to the ones they know, they ask questions, and mostly they talk, 170 00:14:23,725 --> 00:14:28,220 each one telling the others where they've been and what happened to them. 171 00:14:29,689 --> 00:14:33,740 They stay there for seven days just swapping stories. 172 00:14:36,469 --> 00:14:38,480 But the stories aren't the same. 173 00:14:40,754 --> 00:14:44,830 The souls coming down from the sky tell about

wonderful 174 00:14:44,831 --> 00:14:48,120 sights and a sweetness he couldn't put into words. 175 00:14:49,820 --> 00:14:55,840 The ones coming up from underground, dirty and worn out, cry as they talk. 176 00:14:57,280 --> 00:15:00,196 They're remembering everything they suffered 177 00:15:00,197 --> 00:15:03,940 down there, and the telling hurts all over again. 178 00:15:06,309 --> 00:15:12,120 So you have this meadow, where the happy and the broken sit side by side, 179 00:15:12,380 --> 00:15:14,500 and everyone's being listened to. 180 00:15:15,170 --> 00:15:17,340 There's no judge in the field. 181 00:15:18,225 --> 00:15:20,340 Nobody's marking anything down. 182 00:15:21,550 --> 00:15:23,140 They're just telling it. 183 00:15:25,569 --> 00:15:29,840 That's one way to picture where souls gather, and it's a gentle one. 184 00:15:31,334 --> 00:15:34,320 Now here's the dark version of the same idea. 185 00:15:36,160 --> 00:15:40,246 The Gnostics, a family of early Christian era movements 186 00:15:40,247 --> 00:15:44,280 from around the second century, told it differently. 187 00:15:45,999 --> 00:15:50,380 In their accounts, the way back up isn't a meadow at all. 188 00:15:51,599 --> 00:15:55,674 It's a series of levels, and each level is guarded 189 00:15:55,675 --> 00:15:59,320 by a ruler, a power the texts call an archon. 190 00:16:02,280 --> 00:16:04,470 These rulers don't welcome you. 191 00:16:05,130 --> 00:16:08,429 They stand in the way, and each one wants 192 00:16:08,430 --> 00:16:11,690 something from you before it lets you through. 193 00:16:13,530 --> 00:16:15,410 Here's how it works in the texts. 194 00:16:16,405 --> 00:16:19,950 A soul rises and comes to the first gate. 195 00:16:22,354 --> 00:16:28,090 The ruler there blocks the path and puts a question to it, or a challenge, 196 00:16:28,780 --> 00:16:30,430 and the soul has to answer. 197 00:16:31,145 --> 00:16:34,490 And the right answer isn't a good deed or a clean record. 198 00:16:34,940 --> 00:16:35,940 It's knowledge. 199 00:16:36,590 --> 00:16:41,750 The soul has to know what it is and where it came from, and say so. 200 00:16:43,750 --> 00:16:49,490 In one text, a teacher actually coaches his student on the exact words to use, 201 00:16:50,079 --> 00:16:53,290 like a man handing over a script before an exam. 202 00:16:55,120 --> 00:16:57,870 Give the answer, and the gate opens. 203 00:16:58,785 --> 00:17:03,450 Fumble it, and you're held, then sent back down to start again. 204 00:17:05,609 --> 00:17:08,270 So look at the two pictures side by side. 205 00:17:09,185 --> 00:17:12,430 In Erzmeddo, arriving means being heard. 206 00:17:13,339 --> 00:17:16,950 In the Gnostic gates, arriving means being questioned. 207 00:17:18,169 --> 00:17:24,750 Same journey, but one is a homecoming, and the other is a checkpoint. 208 00:17:26,129 --> 00:17:31,970 And that difference between a welcome and a gauntlet is going to keep showing up, 209 00:17:32,979 --> 00:17:37,690 because it turns out to depend on a surprisingly personal question. 210 00:17:39,749 --> 00:17:44,390 Not what's out there, but who you think you are when you walk in. 211 00:17:46,350 --> 00:17:50,710 Let's talk about the part everyone fears, the review. 212 00:17:51,769 --> 00:17:56,387 Because sooner or later, in almost every one of these 213 00:17:56,388 --> 00:18:00,570 stories, someone sits you down and looks at what you did. 214 00:18:02,799 --> 00:18:05,890 Go back to Erz's four openings for a second. 215 00:18:07,059 --> 00:18:10,290 The judges sitting between them weren't just pointing. 216 00:18:11,330 --> 00:18:16,810 Each soul came before them, and they weighed what that soul had done in life, 217 00:18:16,924 --> 00:18:19,170 and sent it up or down accordingly. 218 00:18:20,509 --> 00:18:21,690 Then came the bill. 219 00:18:22,929 --> 00:18:28,830 For every wicked deed, Erz says, the soul paid a tenfold penalty. 220 00:18:30,110 --> 00:18:34,201 A journey lasted a thousand years, and that thousand-year 221 00:18:34,202 --> 00:18:37,190 trip was repaid ten times over for each wrong. 222 00:18:38,410 --> 00:18:43,910 It's a ledger, and it's blunt, and it was meant to be. 223 00:18:45,814 --> 00:18:47,490 India has its own judge. 224 00:18:48,629 --> 00:18:54,990 His name is Yama, the Lord of the Dead, and in the Indian accounts, he keeps a mirror. 225 00:18:56,274 --> 00:18:58,110 It's called the Mirror of Karma. 226 00:19:01,189 --> 00:19:02,770 And it doesn't flatter anybody. 227 00:19:03,804 --> 00:19:06,061 Every deed you ever did is shown back to you 228 00:19:06,062 --> 00:19:08,850 in it, the small ones along with the big ones. 229 00:19:10,279 --> 00:19:12,950 There's no argument you can make against a mirror. 230 00:19:14,014 --> 00:19:15,090 You just look. 231 00:19:17,524 --> 00:19:22,070 Now picture what that might feel like, the way the accounts hint at it. 232 00:19:23,884 --> 00:19:31,190 A soul stands before the glass, and the scene that rises up is one cruel moment. 233 00:19:32,470 --> 00:19:36,241 Maybe a sharp word to someone who was already down, 234 00:19:36,242 --> 00:19:39,050 or a favour refused to a person who was begging. 235 00:19:41,409 --> 00:19:43,710 At the time, it cost nothing. 236 00:19:44,695 --> 00:19:46,770 You walked off and forgot it. 237 00:19:47,679 --> 00:19:51,470 But now, the mirror shows it from the other side. 238 00:19:53,004 --> 00:19:55,050 You're not watching yourself anymore. 239 00:19:56,150 --> 00:20:00,243 You're the one on the receiving end, feeling the sting 240 00:20:00,244 --> 00:20:03,370 land, feeling how long it lasted after you'd gone. 241 00:20:06,264 --> 00:20:09,080 The Tibetan version is close to this. 242 00:20:10,320 --> 00:20:15,680 Remember that in the Bardo Thudol, the dead person comes before Yama too, 243 00:20:16,349 --> 00:20:20,980 and the text says the dead person's own deeds are laid out and

weighed. 244 00:20:22,140 --> 00:20:27,540 White pebbles for the good, black ones for the bad, in one telling. 245 00:20:30,754 --> 00:20:35,200 But the text keeps adding a strange instruction right in the middle of it. 246 00:20:36,134 --> 00:20:37,280 Don't be afraid. 247 00:20:38,659 --> 00:20:41,700 This is your own mind showing you your own record. 248 00:20:42,799 --> 00:20:49,420 The judge, the scales, the pebbles, all of it is being projected from inside you. 249 00:20:51,839 --> 00:20:55,960 That's a different feeling from a ledger kept by someone else. 250 00:20:56,599 --> 00:21:02,920 And honestly, it's something most of us have already tasted in a small way. 251 00:21:04,459 --> 00:21:08,980 You've probably watched yourself on a security camera video at some point, 252 00:21:09,860 --> 00:21:14,400 a clip from a shop or a doorway, and felt a jolt. 253 00:21:15,449 --> 00:21:16,700 That's how I walk. 254 00:21:18,304 --> 00:21:21,500 That's what my face does when I think nobody's looking. 255 00:21:23,989 --> 00:21:26,400 It's not that the picture is false. 256 00:21:27,359 --> 00:21:32,220 It's that for once you're seeing what everyone else has been seeing all along, 257 00:21:33,304 --> 00:21:38,400 with no flattering angle and no inner narrator softening it. 258 00:21:40,994 --> 00:21:43,858 Now, notice what these old accounts share, even 259 00:21:43,859 --> 00:21:46,880 though they come from opposite ends of the world. 260 00:21:48,610 --> 00:21:53,280 The review isn't random, and it isn't hidden. 261 00:21:54,205 --> 00:21:55,205 It's a showing. 262 00:21:57,180 --> 00:22:02,640 Your deeds are brought out into the open, and you face them, whether the one doing 263 00:22:02,641 --> 00:22:06,415 the judging is a stern figure with a ledger, a 264 00:22:06,416 --> 00:22:10,540 god with a mirror, or your own mind laid bare. 265 00:22:12,659 --> 00:22:17,260 But the oldest versions are also the harshest. 266 00:22:18,399 --> 00:22:22,400 They've got penalties and weights and punishments. 267 00:22:23,660 --> 00:22:26,514 The modern accounts tell it differently, and 268 00:22:26,515 --> 00:22:29,320 the difference is worth looking at closely. 269 00:22:31,039 --> 00:22:34,760 And the first thing you notice is that the tone changes. 270 00:22:36,094 --> 00:22:38,020 Nobody's holding a ledger. 271 00:22:40,080 --> 00:22:43,949 In Michael Newton's book, the soul is brought 272 00:22:43,950 --> 00:22:47,980 before what his clients call a council of elders. 273 00:22:49,494 --> 00:22:56,380 It's a small group of advanced beings sitting in a half circle, and the soul's 274 00:22:56,381 --> 00:23:00,340 own guide is usually standing right beside it. 275 00:23:00,914 --> 00:23:03,180 People walk in, expecting a courtroom. 276 00:23:05,700 --> 00:23:09,147 What they describe instead is more like a long 277 00:23:09,148 --> 00:23:13,120 conversation with people who've been where you are. 278 00:23:15,029 --> 00:23:20,920 The soul presents its life, goes through what it intended, what it actually did, 279 00:23:21,320 --> 00:23:26,920 where it stumbled, and the elders mostly ask questions. 280 00:23:28,424 --> 00:23:31,440 Why did you stay in that situation so long? 281 00:23:32,224 --> 00:23:34,220 What did you think you were protecting? 282 00:23:35,799 --> 00:23:37,260 What would you do differently? 283 00:23:39,554 --> 00:23:42,260 That's the part we keep coming back to. 284 00:23:42,824 --> 00:23:45,060 Nobody hands down a sentence. 285 00:23:46,674 --> 00:23:49,160 The questions are the whole method. 286 00:23:49,780 --> 00:23:56,840 A sentence closes a matter, but a question opens it up, and leaves the work with you, 287 00:23:57,124 --> 00:23:59,280 where it can actually do something. 288 00:24:02,125 --> 00:24:05,640 Raymond Moody's accounts add the other half of this. 289 00:24:06,869 --> 00:24:11,760 From the people who came back, he describes what he calls a life review. 290 00:24:13,359 --> 00:24:15,680 And it doesn't work like a slideshow. 291 00:24:17,140 --> 00:24:23,500 The whole life plays back almost at once, in an instant, every scene there together, 292 00:24:24,239 --> 00:24:25,980 and the feelings are attached. 293 00:24:27,584 --> 00:24:32,427 You don't only see what happened, you feel what you 294 00:24:32,428 --> 00:24:36,100 felt then, and often what everyone else felt too. 295 00:24:38,409 --> 00:24:40,440 Here's how people describe that part. 296 00:24:42,060 --> 00:24:49,780 Someone watches a moment from decades ago, a small unkindness, say, a joke at a 297 00:24:49,781 --> 00:24:52,360 co-worker's expense that got a laugh in the room. 298 00:24:54,779 --> 00:24:56,600 At the time it felt like nothing. 299 00:24:57,980 --> 00:25:02,980 Now the scene replays, and suddenly the hurt is arriving in your own chest. 300 00:25:03,999 --> 00:25:06,580 You feel the heat in the other person's face. 301 00:25:09,094 --> 00:25:12,040 You feel them deciding not to say anything back. 302 00:25:12,879 --> 00:25:16,686 It's not a punishment, but it's exact, and it's far 303 00:25:16,687 --> 00:25:20,040 harder to sit through than any lecture would be. 304 00:25:22,959 --> 00:25:28,480 And here's the finding that shows up across these accounts, again and again. 305 00:25:30,444 --> 00:25:33,400 The harshest judge in the room is the soul itself. 306 00:25:34,760 --> 00:25:39,951 The elders are gentle, the guide is patient, and the person 307 00:25:39,952 --> 00:25:43,580 being reviewed is the one who won't let anything slide. 308 00:25:45,999 --> 00:25:53,320 People come out of these reviews saying nobody condemned them, and that they 309 00:25:53,321 --> 00:25:58,000 condemned themselves more thoroughly than anyone else could have. 310 00:26:00,049 --> 00:26:02,760 You've felt a tiny version of this. 311 00:26:03,659 --> 00:26:05,240 It's two in the morning. 312 00:26:06,949 --> 00:26:11,640 You're lying

in the dark and an old conversation starts replaying. 313 00:26:13,284 --> 00:26:16,680 Something you said years ago, a clumsy phrase. 314 00:26:17,985 --> 00:26:21,580 A moment you were short with someone who didn't deserve it. 315 00:26:22,159 --> 00:26:24,100 You cringe at your own voice. 316 00:26:24,979 --> 00:26:28,180 You wince at the version of you who said it. 317 00:26:30,500 --> 00:26:37,880 Now, take that wince and take away the sleeping house, the pillow, the option of 318 00:26:37,881 --> 00:26:40,700 rolling over and thinking about something else. 319 00:26:42,204 --> 00:26:45,780 Make it complete with the other person's side included. 320 00:26:47,989 --> 00:26:53,100 That's about the closest ordinary life gets to what these people describe. 321 00:26:55,209 --> 00:26:59,880 Notice what a strange fit that makes with the older accounts. 322 00:27:01,129 --> 00:27:06,080 Er's judges and Yama's mirror assume someone outside you is keeping score. 323 00:27:08,120 --> 00:27:13,220 The modern reports say that once you see clearly, nobody needs to. 324 00:27:14,549 --> 00:27:16,780 The scorekeeper was inside all along. 325 00:27:19,309 --> 00:27:25,580 But if that's what the review looks like, there's a bigger question hanging over it. 326 00:27:26,764 --> 00:27:29,660 Where does all of this actually take place? 327 00:27:33,119 --> 00:27:36,000 Now let's talk about where this place is. 328 00:27:36,720 --> 00:27:43,620 And for that we go to Rome, about 50 years before Christ, where the statesman Cicero 329 00:27:43,621 --> 00:27:49,780 wrote a short vision and tucked it into the end of his book on government. 330 00:27:50,679 --> 00:27:56,300 It's called the Dream of Scipio, and he built it on purpose to echo Er. 331 00:27:58,909 --> 00:28:04,140 A young Roman general named Scipio is visiting a king in North Africa. 332 00:28:05,094 --> 00:28:09,560 That night he falls asleep, and his grandfather appears. 333 00:28:10,619 --> 00:28:12,340 This isn't just any grandfather. 334 00:28:13,914 --> 00:28:19,980 It's Scipio Africanus, the man who beat Hannibal, and he's been dead for years. 335 00:28:21,329 --> 00:28:26,800 He takes the boy by the hand and lifts him up to a high place, full of stars, 336 00:28:27,639 --> 00:28:31,800 and from there he shows him how the universe is built. 337 00:28:34,214 --> 00:28:37,380 It's nine spheres, one inside another. 338 00:28:38,145 --> 00:28:40,600 Earth sits motionless at the bottom. 339 00:28:41,044 --> 00:28:44,780 Above it come the moon, then the planets and the sun. 340 00:28:46,104 --> 00:28:49,939 And the whole thing is wrapped in the outermost 341 00:28:49,940 --> 00:28:53,000 sphere, the heaven that holds all the others. 342 00:28:54,320 --> 00:28:59,440 And running through it is a pale band of light, the Milky Way. 343 00:29:00,819 --> 00:29:04,900 The grandfather tells him that's where the souls of the just go. 344 00:29:05,919 --> 00:29:07,020 It's their home. 345 00:29:08,549 --> 00:29:11,600 They came from the stars, and they return to them. 346 00:29:13,679 --> 00:29:14,960 Here's a detail I love. 347 00:29:15,934 --> 00:29:17,540 The spheres make music. 348 00:29:18,489 --> 00:29:24,580 As they turn, each one hums at its own pitch, and the moon, being closest to 349 00:29:24,581 --> 00:29:30,120 Earth, makes the lowest note, while the outermost heaven makes the highest. 350 00:29:31,485 --> 00:29:33,100 Scipio can hear it. 351 00:29:33,239 --> 00:29:36,080 So great and so sweet, he says. 352 00:29:37,269 --> 00:29:40,620 The grandfather explains why the rest of us can't. 353 00:29:42,339 --> 00:29:45,380 Humans have been deafened by it since birth. 354 00:29:46,599 --> 00:29:50,940 The way people who live beside a waterfall stop hearing the roar. 355 00:29:53,444 --> 00:29:56,120 Now the part that stays with you. 356 00:29:56,760 --> 00:30:02,020 Standing up there, Scipio looks down at Earth, and it's small. 357 00:30:03,099 --> 00:30:06,564 Then he looks for Rome, the empire he's been 358 00:30:06,565 --> 00:30:10,500 raised to serve, and it's a dot on a speck. 359 00:30:11,109 --> 00:30:12,600 He's almost embarrassed. 360 00:30:13,820 --> 00:30:16,713 All those wars, all that glory fought over a 361 00:30:16,714 --> 00:30:19,680 patch of ground you could cover with your thumb. 362 00:30:21,264 --> 00:30:23,980 That's the message of the dream, really. 363 00:30:24,284 --> 00:30:27,800 The body is a posting, and home is up there. 364 00:30:28,660 --> 00:30:30,440 Cicero says it plainly. 365 00:30:31,169 --> 00:30:32,400 You are not mortal. 366 00:30:32,924 --> 00:30:34,420 Only your body is. 367 00:30:36,209 --> 00:30:39,860 Now, a Roman dream could easily have been lost. 368 00:30:41,044 --> 00:30:45,896 It survived because of a man named Macrobius, who 369 00:30:45,897 --> 00:30:50,220 around the year 400 wrote a long commentary on it. 370 00:30:52,549 --> 00:30:58,140 His book became one of the most copied texts of the Middle Ages, and through it 371 00:30:58,141 --> 00:31:04,120 the starry home stayed alive in European thought for a thousand years. 372 00:31:05,204 --> 00:31:09,000 Long after the empire Scipio saw as a dot was gone. 373 00:31:10,914 --> 00:31:14,760 But Rome wasn't the only place with an address for home. 374 00:31:16,625 --> 00:31:19,540 Other traditions put it somewhere else entirely. 375 00:31:22,160 --> 00:31:25,857 They give this place a different address, and the 376 00:31:25,907 --> 00:31:29,460 first one I want to look at is surprisingly literal. 377 00:31:30,809 --> 00:31:32,220 It's a storehouse. 378 00:31:36,090 --> 00:31:41,810 In the Talmud, the collection of ancient Jewish teachings, there's a belief that 379 00:31:41,859 --> 00:31:46,650 all souls were made at the very beginning, all of them at once. 380 00:31:48,119 --> 00:31:54,630 And they're kept somewhere in heaven, in a treasury, a sort of vault of the unborn. 381

00:31:56,609 --> 00:31:59,010 The name for it is the Guth. 382 00:32:00,730 --> 00:32:04,272 Souls wait in there, each one set aside, until 383 00:32:04,273 --> 00:32:07,550 its turn comes to be sent down into a body. 384 00:32:08,690 --> 00:32:11,876 One teaching even says the Messiah can't arrive 385 00:32:11,877 --> 00:32:15,310 until the last soul in that treasury has been born. 386 00:32:17,399 --> 00:32:21,310 Now go to West Africa, to the Yoruba people of Nigeria. 387 00:32:22,279 --> 00:32:24,110 They call the other world Orun. 388 00:32:25,139 --> 00:32:31,210 It's the realm where a soul lives before birth, and where it returns after death. 389 00:32:32,390 --> 00:32:35,907 Earth, in contrast, has its own name, IA, 390 00:32:35,908 --> 00:32:39,010 and a Yoruba saying calls it the marketplace. 391 00:32:39,754 --> 00:32:42,930 You go there to do your business, and then you go home. 392 00:32:45,049 --> 00:32:46,390 Orun is home. 393 00:32:48,319 --> 00:32:54,490 In the Yoruba teaching, before a soul comes to the marketplace, it kneels. 394 00:32:54,990 --> 00:33:00,450 It kneels before its maker, Olodumare, and it picks its destiny. 395 00:33:01,530 --> 00:33:07,950 The word for that, Akunleyam, means roughly what was chosen while kneeling. 396 00:33:10,249 --> 00:33:14,050 So the place you come from isn't just a waiting area. 397 00:33:15,269 --> 00:33:18,548 It's where the most important decision of 398 00:33:18,549 --> 00:33:22,010 your life gets made, in a posture of humility. 399 00:33:22,874 --> 00:33:24,230 With the maker listening. 400 00:33:26,584 --> 00:33:31,170 Then there's a third version, from a young American religion. 401 00:33:32,634 --> 00:33:35,670 The Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons. 402 00:33:36,870 --> 00:33:42,330 Their teaching is that every human being lived before birth as a spirit. 403 00:33:43,899 --> 00:33:49,090 In the presence of God, with nobody yet, but with a mind and a personality. 404 00:33:51,039 --> 00:33:57,430 They knew each other there, they grew and learned there, and Earth is the next stage. 405 00:33:58,490 --> 00:34:02,004 A stretch of time away from home, where those 406 00:34:02,005 --> 00:34:05,630 spirits come to receive a body and be tested. 407 00:34:09,470 --> 00:34:12,936 Three traditions, three continents, no contact 408 00:34:12,937 --> 00:34:15,880 between them, and look at the shape they share. 409 00:34:17,390 --> 00:34:19,699 In each one, you came from somewhere. 410 00:34:21,060 --> 00:34:26,659 It's a real place with a real population, and the only thing that's new is the trip. 411 00:34:29,150 --> 00:34:34,699 We usually treat life as the main thing, and whatever comes before as a blank. 412 00:34:36,549 --> 00:34:38,580 These accounts reverse it. 413 00:34:39,375 --> 00:34:43,960 The place before is the main thing, the settled, familiar home. 414 00:34:45,314 --> 00:34:48,260 And Earth is the journey you took away from it. 415 00:34:49,660 --> 00:34:52,543 So we've got a home with an address, and a map 416 00:34:52,544 --> 00:34:55,590 that keeps changing depending on who's drawing it. 417 00:34:57,180 --> 00:35:01,160 But now we run into the strangest problem of the whole subject. 418 00:35:02,315 --> 00:35:06,720 And it's one that quietly hangs over everything we've covered. 419 00:35:08,914 --> 00:35:12,480 Every one of these stories assumes things happen in order. 420 00:35:13,840 --> 00:35:15,900 First this, then that. 421 00:35:17,680 --> 00:35:22,400 But what if, in that place, there is no order at all? 422 00:35:24,015 --> 00:35:27,560 Now we hit the most confusing part, time. 423 00:35:29,195 --> 00:35:34,300 And I want to say up front that the sources genuinely disagree here, 424 00:35:34,950 --> 00:35:37,840 so I'm not going to pretend they line up neatly. 425 00:35:39,815 --> 00:35:41,320 Start with Er. 426 00:35:42,390 --> 00:35:44,820 His afterlife is full of clocks. 427 00:35:46,040 --> 00:35:49,179 Seven days in the meadow, four more days of 428 00:35:49,180 --> 00:35:52,780 walking, journeys that last a thousand years. 429 00:35:54,124 --> 00:35:58,780 It's a place where things happen one after another, just like here. 430 00:35:59,564 --> 00:36:04,120 So in the oldest account we have, time goes right along with you. 431 00:36:06,190 --> 00:36:12,880 But Plotinus, writing about six hundred years after Plato, says that can't be right. 432 00:36:14,380 --> 00:36:18,260 He had a very particular idea of what time is. 433 00:36:18,960 --> 00:36:24,900 Time, he said, isn't a container sitting out there that everything happens inside. 434 00:36:26,740 --> 00:36:32,080 It's the life of the soul itself, as it moves from one activity to the next. 435 00:36:33,855 --> 00:36:36,380 Time is what that movement feels like. 436 00:36:38,320 --> 00:36:42,860 So where the soul comes to rest, in the highest part of itself, 437 00:36:43,460 --> 00:36:45,340 time simply stops. 438 00:36:46,489 --> 00:36:51,320 Nothing happens in sequence there, because there's nothing to move between. 439 00:36:52,354 --> 00:36:54,400 Everything is present at once. 440 00:36:56,770 --> 00:37:00,980 A 20th century voice says nearly the same thing. 441 00:37:02,830 --> 00:37:09,080 In the Seth material, a set of books channeled by a woman named Jane Roberts in 442 00:37:09,081 --> 00:37:15,640 the 1960s and 70s, Seth says all your lives are happening at the same time. 443 00:37:16,980 --> 00:37:23,200 The line you seem to walk along, birth, middle, death, then the next one, 444 00:37:23,834 --> 00:37:26,380 is just how it looks from inside a body. 445 00:37:27,800 --> 00:37:30,940 From outside it's all laid out together. 446 00:37:33,640 --> 00:37:37,713 And Dolores Cannon, the hypnotherapist, reported 447 00:37:37,714 --> 00:37:40,860 the same kind of thing from her clients. 448 00:37:42,210 --> 00:37:49,060 People under hypnosis described living several

lives at once, not one after the 449 00:37:49,061 --> 00:37:52,120 other, like windows open on the same screen. 450 00:37:54,350 --> 00:37:57,140 Here's a small way to sense what that might mean. 451 00:37:59,030 --> 00:38:04,140 People who've come back from a near-death episode often say the life review took 452 00:38:04,141 --> 00:38:08,380 what felt like seconds, and yet it held decades. 453 00:38:09,580 --> 00:38:13,878 Every scene, every feeling, all of it, packed 454 00:38:13,879 --> 00:38:17,660 into a moment that was somehow also enormous. 455 00:38:18,609 --> 00:38:21,980 Whatever that is, it isn't clock time. 456 00:38:23,875 --> 00:38:25,060 Now, here's the puzzle. 457 00:38:25,805 --> 00:38:28,620 Against all that, we have a real number. 458 00:38:30,860 --> 00:38:37,300 The researchers Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker spent decades collecting cases of 459 00:38:37,301 --> 00:38:43,660 children who say they remember a previous life, and they could measure the gap 460 00:38:43,661 --> 00:38:48,080 between the earlier person's death and the child's birth. 461 00:38:49,550 --> 00:38:54,820 Across the cases, the average comes out to about 16 months. 462 00:38:56,490 --> 00:39:01,400 That's a clock time figure, checked against dates and records. 463 00:39:03,080 --> 00:39:04,400 So which is it? 464 00:39:04,555 --> 00:39:07,120 16 months or no time at all? 465 00:39:09,350 --> 00:39:11,560 One way to hold both is this. 466 00:39:12,955 --> 00:39:15,300 The soul has no clock over there. 467 00:39:16,580 --> 00:39:19,758 16 months is simply how long the wait looks from 468 00:39:19,759 --> 00:39:23,140 down here, because we're the ones with calendars. 469 00:39:24,420 --> 00:39:29,460 From our side, a year and a bit passes between a death and a birth. 470 00:39:30,580 --> 00:39:34,640 From the other side, there may be no between to measure. 471 00:39:35,560 --> 00:39:38,580 The number belongs to us, not to them. 472 00:39:40,180 --> 00:39:41,920 You've had something like it. 473 00:39:42,820 --> 00:39:48,200 You nap for 10 minutes on the couch, and in that time you dream a whole day. 474 00:39:49,400 --> 00:39:55,100 You go to a different city, you have a long conversation, you get lost, 475 00:39:55,360 --> 00:39:56,440 you find your way. 476 00:39:57,284 --> 00:40:01,920 And when you wake up, the clock says barely, any time has gone by. 477 00:40:02,674 --> 00:40:04,120 Both things are true. 478 00:40:05,195 --> 00:40:09,280 The dream lasted hours, and the sleep lasted minutes. 479 00:40:11,045 --> 00:40:12,460 And neither is wrong. 480 00:40:14,540 --> 00:40:21,000 All those stages we've walked through, the arrival, the review, the choosing, 481 00:40:23,170 --> 00:40:24,620 they sound like a schedule. 482 00:40:25,540 --> 00:40:31,500 They may be better understood as layers, all there at once, that we can only 483 00:40:31,501 --> 00:40:35,483 describe one after another, because that's the only way 484 00:40:35,484 --> 00:40:40,120 language, and a mind in a body, knows how to tell it. 485 00:40:42,850 --> 00:40:46,020 Which leads to the next question, and it's a bigger one. 486 00:40:46,840 --> 00:40:51,160 If part of you sits outside of time, who exactly is that? 487 00:40:52,210 --> 00:40:54,080 Who are you in that place? 488 00:40:56,495 --> 00:40:58,720 Plotinus says part of you never left. 489 00:41:01,260 --> 00:41:03,040 His idea goes like this. 490 00:41:04,009 --> 00:41:08,840 When the soul comes down into a body, it doesn't come down all the way. 491 00:41:09,920 --> 00:41:14,340 The highest part of it stays up, in what he calls the intellect. 492 00:41:15,870 --> 00:41:17,820 The realm of pure thinking. 493 00:41:19,050 --> 00:41:22,414 And it keeps on contemplating, while the lower 494 00:41:22,415 --> 00:41:25,300 gets on with the business of being alive. 495 00:41:26,950 --> 00:41:31,200 You don't notice it, because your attention is down here. 496 00:41:32,634 --> 00:41:35,720 With the hunger, and the bills, and the traffic. 497 00:41:37,330 --> 00:41:41,452 But it's there, at the very centre of you, and it has 498 00:41:41,453 --> 00:41:45,400 never been out of that other place for a single second. 499 00:41:47,590 --> 00:41:50,000 So picture a whole life going by. 500 00:41:50,865 --> 00:41:57,320 A person is born, goes to school, falls in love, gets hurt, grows old. 501 00:41:58,555 --> 00:42:03,160 And all that time, one part of them stays untouched above it all. 502 00:42:04,084 --> 00:42:08,060 Watching, the way you'd watch a game you aren't playing in. 503 00:42:08,730 --> 00:42:11,300 It doesn't get dragged around by the fear. 504 00:42:11,924 --> 00:42:13,700 It doesn't get its heart broken. 505 00:42:14,460 --> 00:42:18,120 It's simply there, calm, holding the view. 506 00:42:20,410 --> 00:42:25,300 A completely different tradition arrives at nearly the same place on its own. 507 00:42:27,260 --> 00:42:33,000 Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical teaching, describes five levels of the soul, 508 00:42:34,720 --> 00:42:36,960 running from the lowest to the highest. 509 00:42:37,800 --> 00:42:42,920 And the top levels, it says, don't enter the body at all. 510 00:42:44,350 --> 00:42:49,560 They stay rooted above, same shape, reached by a totally different road. 511 00:42:50,720 --> 00:42:54,812 Inside a religion that was otherwise very much 512 00:42:54,813 --> 00:42:58,540 about a hierarchy, and a God who sends you down. 513 00:43:00,880 --> 00:43:07,280 Then there's Michael Newton, whose clients, remember, were ordinary people 514 00:43:07,281 --> 00:43:12,040 under hypnosis, mostly with no background in any of this. 515 00:43:13,300 --> 00:43:19,320 They kept reporting that a soul brings only a portion of its energy into a body. 516 00:43:21,100 --> 00:43:26,340 The rest stays behind in the spirit world, going about its own business. 517 00:43:27,455 --> 00:43:30,160 While one piece lives out

the life on earth. 518 00:43:31,780 --> 00:43:37,620 Some of them said it felt strange to go back and find that, part of themselves, 519 00:43:37,845 --> 00:43:40,540 still sitting there, waiting. 520 00:43:44,510 --> 00:43:47,300 Think about what that does to the idea of death. 521 00:43:48,810 --> 00:43:53,232 We usually treat dying as the soul leaving the body, as though 522 00:43:53,233 --> 00:43:57,200 it had been fully poured in and now has to be poured out. 523 00:43:58,660 --> 00:44:04,880 But if the highest part never went in, then death isn't an exit for all of you. 524 00:44:05,780 --> 00:44:09,650 It's the lower part setting down its work and 525 00:44:09,651 --> 00:44:12,760 rejoining what was never really separated. 526 00:44:14,374 --> 00:44:16,220 Plotinus put it this way. 527 00:44:17,400 --> 00:44:22,800 The soul's higher nature was never really born into the body in the first place. 528 00:44:23,800 --> 00:44:26,700 You can't lose what was never fully here. 529 00:44:29,120 --> 00:44:33,280 If that's even partly right, it raises a natural question. 530 00:44:35,550 --> 00:44:40,580 If a piece of you stays above, is there someone up there who looks after 531 00:44:40,680 --> 00:44:42,240 the piece that came down? 532 00:44:44,765 --> 00:44:47,900 Now let's talk about the guide who stays with you. 533 00:44:49,680 --> 00:44:55,400 The oldest version comes from Plato, and it sits right at the end of Er's story. 534 00:44:56,420 --> 00:45:02,980 After the souls have chosen their lives, each one is handed a guardian spirit, 535 00:45:03,130 --> 00:45:07,600 a diamond to watch over that life and see the choice through. 536 00:45:08,820 --> 00:45:15,460 The souls get it at the spindle of necessity, just before they cross over to 537 00:45:15,560 --> 00:45:16,560 be born. 538 00:45:16,920 --> 00:45:23,080 So before you ever draw a breath, somebody has been assigned to you. 539 00:45:24,460 --> 00:45:25,860 But who is that somebody? 540 00:45:27,794 --> 00:45:30,240 Plotinus had a surprising answer. 541 00:45:31,190 --> 00:45:34,765 He wrote a whole essay on it, and his claim is 542 00:45:34,766 --> 00:45:38,580 that the daemon isn't a separate being at all. 543 00:45:39,290 --> 00:45:41,740 It's the next level up of your own soul. 544 00:45:43,070 --> 00:45:46,176 Whatever part of you you're living from right 545 00:45:46,177 --> 00:45:49,100 now, the guide is the part just above that. 546 00:45:50,100 --> 00:45:54,820 It's you, one floor higher, with a better view of the street. 547 00:45:56,820 --> 00:46:02,840 The Yoruba say something very close, and they say it through a person's head. 548 00:46:04,060 --> 00:46:08,200 Remember Ajala, the potter in heaven who makes heads. 549 00:46:09,600 --> 00:46:13,228 The one you choose from his house is your Ori, 550 00:46:13,229 --> 00:46:16,600 your inner head, and it holds your destiny. 551 00:46:19,545 --> 00:46:27,420 A Yoruba saying, holds that no Orissa, none of the gods, can bless a person 552 00:46:27,421 --> 00:46:29,820 without the consent of that person's own Ori. 553 00:46:33,400 --> 00:46:35,030 Think about the weight of that. 554 00:46:35,510 --> 00:46:40,950 Here's a whole crowded heaven of powerful beings, and the final vote on your life 555 00:46:40,951 --> 00:46:43,350 belongs to the self you chose while kneeling. 556 00:46:45,790 --> 00:46:51,630 So in both traditions, the guide isn't an employee sent from outside. 557 00:46:52,380 --> 00:46:57,710 It's your own deeper self, standing slightly ahead of you on the road. 558 00:47:00,075 --> 00:47:03,550 Now what would that look like in an ordinary life? 559 00:47:05,150 --> 00:47:07,310 Say someone's going through a rough year. 560 00:47:08,890 --> 00:47:16,170 A job collapses, a relationship ends, nothing is working, and one evening 561 00:47:16,171 --> 00:47:19,390 they're about to sign on to something that looks like a rescue. 562 00:47:20,910 --> 00:47:27,990 A quick deal with an old acquaintance, easy money, everything on paper says yes. 563 00:47:29,820 --> 00:47:33,490 But there's a small, quiet no somewhere in the chest. 564 00:47:35,190 --> 00:47:37,550 It doesn't argue and it doesn't explain. 565 00:47:38,680 --> 00:47:42,470 It just sits there, steady, and they don't sign. 566 00:47:43,980 --> 00:47:47,121 Two years later, they find out what that deal 567 00:47:47,122 --> 00:47:50,410 turned into, and they can't say how they knew. 568 00:47:52,985 --> 00:47:56,930 That's the kind of thing these traditions would call the guide at work. 569 00:47:58,000 --> 00:47:59,010 It doesn't shout. 570 00:48:00,020 --> 00:48:04,610 It tends to speak in the smallest voice in the room. 571 00:48:06,095 --> 00:48:12,050 And you probably know it from your own life, your driving somewhere, and at an 572 00:48:12,200 --> 00:48:16,930 intersection you suddenly feel you shouldn't take the usual road. 573 00:48:18,914 --> 00:48:22,690 No reason, you just turn the wheel the other way. 574 00:48:23,710 --> 00:48:30,810 Later you hear there was an accident on that stretch, or maybe you never hear 575 00:48:30,811 --> 00:48:38,570 anything at all, but you remember the pull and how it came before any thinking did. 576 00:48:40,850 --> 00:48:42,890 This idea changes the question. 577 00:48:45,230 --> 00:48:49,211 We usually ask whether we have guides, as though they were 578 00:48:49,212 --> 00:48:52,390 visitors we might or might not be lucky enough to get. 579 00:48:56,000 --> 00:48:59,919 The older answer is that you were never without one, because 580 00:48:59,920 --> 00:49:03,450 the guide is built into the structure of who you are. 581 00:49:04,680 --> 00:49:08,410 The only real question is whether you're listening. 582 00:49:10,900 --> 00:49:15,970 Which sets up a bigger puzzle, because not every tradition agrees that 583 00:49:16,120 --> 00:49:17,710 this guide is equal to you. 584 00:49:18,870 -->

00:49:22,450 Some say it's above you, and you're the student. 585 00:49:24,690 --> 00:49:29,876 Others say you're already the master, and that disagreement 586 00:49:29,877 --> 00:49:33,710 turns out to run much deeper than it first looks. 587 00:49:35,854 --> 00:49:38,910 Here the traditions split on a big question. 588 00:49:39,845 --> 00:49:43,190 It sounds simple, but a lot hangs on it. 589 00:49:43,830 --> 00:49:47,770 When you arrive in that place, are you a child or a master? 590 00:49:50,305 --> 00:49:52,650 The first answer says child. 591 00:49:53,530 --> 00:49:56,210 You're a young soul in a very large school. 592 00:49:57,160 --> 00:50:00,890 There are levels, and you're near the bottom of them. 593 00:50:01,990 --> 00:50:08,550 Others are further along, and they teach you, advise you, and sometimes correct you. 594 00:50:11,090 --> 00:50:16,150 Michael Newton's clients described soul energy in colours, white for the 595 00:50:16,151 --> 00:50:23,790 beginners, then yellow, and on up through blue and purple for the most advanced. 596 00:50:25,890 --> 00:50:28,626 You grow, you graduate, and one day you might 597 00:50:28,627 --> 00:50:31,430 be the ones standing at the front of the room. 598 00:50:33,650 --> 00:50:39,610 Plenty of the near-death accounts have this flavour too, where a being of light 599 00:50:39,611 --> 00:50:44,190 looks at the person and calls them, my child. 600 00:50:45,455 --> 00:50:50,850 That's a loving thing to say, but notice what it is. 601 00:50:56,350 --> 00:50:58,570 The second answer says master. 602 00:50:59,094 --> 00:51:00,530 You're already whole. 603 00:51:02,170 --> 00:51:05,403 You were never a beginner, and nothing has to 604 00:51:05,404 --> 00:51:08,510 be earned, because there's no ladder to climb. 605 00:51:10,470 --> 00:51:16,210 The life you're in is a part you're playing, and the guides are simply friends 606 00:51:16,660 --> 00:51:19,250 who happen to have a better view of the road. 607 00:51:20,640 --> 00:51:24,485 Plotinus sits on this side, and so does the Tibetan 608 00:51:24,486 --> 00:51:28,870 teaching that every judge and every deity is your own mind. 609 00:51:29,829 --> 00:51:31,710 Nobody outranks you. 610 00:51:32,350 --> 00:51:33,350 You forgot. 611 00:51:33,700 --> 00:51:34,700 That's all. 612 00:51:37,490 --> 00:51:42,220 So one picture is a school, and the other is a stage. 613 00:51:43,800 --> 00:51:48,120 And I think the sources aren't really arguing about what's out there. 614 00:51:48,800 --> 00:51:52,120 They're arguing about who you are when you get there. 615 00:51:54,060 --> 00:51:57,798 Now here's where the Gnostics come in, because their 616 00:51:57,848 --> 00:52:01,440 trap is what this divide looks like when it goes wrong. 617 00:52:03,365 --> 00:52:05,520 Remember the rulers at the gates. 618 00:52:06,770 --> 00:52:12,360 In their telling, the soul that doesn't know what it is gets held. 619 00:52:13,900 --> 00:52:20,320 The

lower powers can't touch a being that knows itself, but they can keep one that 620 00:52:20,470 --> 00:52:21,470 has forgotten. 621 00:52:22,350 --> 00:52:24,200 So the danger isn't a monster. 622 00:52:25,434 --> 00:52:28,300 The danger is a case of mistaken identity. 623 00:52:30,410 --> 00:52:32,880 A soul arrives, a little dazed. 624 00:52:33,549 --> 00:52:35,760 It isn't thinking of itself as vast. 625 00:52:36,384 --> 00:52:40,420 It's thinking of itself as the small person it just was. 626 00:52:41,400 --> 00:52:47,120 With that name, those worries, that one face, and in the confusion, 627 00:52:47,604 --> 00:52:51,560 a voice appears and tells it where to go and what to do. 628 00:52:52,420 --> 00:52:54,320 It sounds sure of itself. 629 00:52:54,890 --> 00:52:56,140 It sounds helpful. 630 00:52:58,300 --> 00:53:03,482 Because the soul sees itself as someone small who needs 631 00:53:03,483 --> 00:53:07,580 directions, it follows the first voice that offers them. 632 00:53:08,949 --> 00:53:11,040 Nobody forced it. 633 00:53:11,520 --> 00:53:14,924 It just took the first hand that was held out, 634 00:53:14,925 --> 00:53:18,360 and the hand led somewhere it never chose. 635 00:53:20,280 --> 00:53:21,660 That's the whole logic of 636 00:53:28,430 --> 00:53:32,919 The higher being who knows better can be a gentle parent or 637 00:53:32,920 --> 00:53:37,260 a handler, and from the child's seat you can't tell which. 638 00:53:39,055 --> 00:53:43,020 The fear only makes sense if you're small enough to be fooled. 639 00:53:45,440 --> 00:53:51,140 A being who knows it's the author of its own story has nobody above it to be 640 00:53:51,290 --> 00:53:52,290 tricked by. 641 00:53:54,220 --> 00:53:56,960 That's why this question matters so much. 642 00:53:58,960 --> 00:54:03,340 Who you think you are on arrival doesn't just colour your mood. 643 00:54:04,009 --> 00:54:08,040 It decides what you see and who gets to handle you. 644 00:54:10,250 --> 00:54:15,830 And if that's true at the doorway, it's even truer at the next stage, 645 00:54:16,674 --> 00:54:18,170 where you're offered a choice. 646 00:54:19,860 --> 00:54:25,450 Because a choice is only worth anything to the person who knows they're allowed to 647 00:54:25,600 --> 00:54:26,600 make it. 648 00:54:29,180 --> 00:54:32,100 Now let's talk about whether you choose your next life. 649 00:54:33,120 --> 00:54:37,155 And the oldest answer we have is that you do, 650 00:54:37,156 --> 00:54:40,820 and that it goes about as well as you'd expect. 651 00:54:42,600 --> 00:54:45,180 Back to __________. 652 00:54:45,615 --> 00:54:49,054 After the meadow and the long walk to the spindle of 653 00:54:49,055 --> 00:54:53,580 necessity, the souls are lined up and handed lottery tokens. 654 00:54:54,930 --> 00:54:57,320 The tokens don't decide what you get. 655 00:54:58,570 --> 00:55:00,220 They only decide your turn. 656 00:55:01,280 --> 00:55:05,064 Whoever draws number one steps forward first, 657 00:55:05,065 --> 00:55:08,360 number two goes next, and so on down the line. 658 00:55:10,820 --> 00:55:14,420 Then the lives are laid out on the ground in front of them. 659 00:55:15,264 --> 00:55:19,960 Plato calls them patterns of lives, and the range is huge. 660 00:55:21,340 --> 00:55:27,920 There are lives of animals, lives of tyrants, lives of famous men, lives of 661 00:55:27,921 --> 00:55:34,900 quiet ordinary people, rich lives and poor ones, healthy ones and sickly ones. 662 00:55:37,040 --> 00:55:41,112 And there are more patterns than there are souls, so 663 00:55:41,113 --> 00:55:44,700 even the last one in line can find something decent. 664 00:55:46,180 --> 00:55:52,220 The spokesman tells them so, and adds the line that sums up the whole scene. 665 00:55:53,340 --> 00:56:00,040 The responsibility belongs to the one who chooses, and the god is not to blame. 666 00:56:01,845 --> 00:56:03,480 So who goes first? 667 00:56:04,660 --> 00:56:08,320 A man who has just come down from a thousand years in the sky. 668 00:56:10,100 --> 00:56:13,667 Remember, the souls who went up were rewarded, 669 00:56:13,668 --> 00:56:16,440 and this one had it easy the whole way. 670 00:56:18,070 --> 00:56:24,740 He walks along the rows, spots the biggest life on the ground, a great tyrant's life, 671 00:56:24,999 --> 00:56:29,740 power and wealth, and a palace, and he grabs it on the spot. 672 00:56:31,070 --> 00:56:34,700 He doesn't hesitate, and he doesn't read any further. 673 00:56:36,920 --> 00:56:38,320 Then he looks closer. 674 00:56:39,320 --> 00:56:43,558 Tucked inside that pattern, among other horrors, is 675 00:56:43,559 --> 00:56:46,800 the fact that he'll end up eating his own children. 676 00:56:48,020 --> 00:56:54,020 He starts to wail, and beats his chest, and blames the luck of the draw, 677 00:56:54,845 --> 00:56:59,440 blames the gods, blames everyone but the person who picked. 678 00:57:02,335 --> 00:57:06,200 And Plato's explanation is the part worth sitting with. 679 00:57:07,850 --> 00:57:09,460 This soul wasn't wicked. 680 00:57:11,040 --> 00:57:16,220 It had lived well in its last life, but out of habit, not understanding. 681 00:57:17,420 --> 00:57:20,354 Its comfortable thousand years in the sky never 682 00:57:20,355 --> 00:57:23,140 taught it to look past the surface of anything. 683 00:57:24,760 --> 00:57:30,200 So when it finally faced a real choice, it had no practice at choosing. 684 00:57:32,840 --> 00:57:35,580 Compare the ones who came up from underground. 685 00:57:37,900 --> 00:57:43,720 They'd suffered, and they'd cried through that meadow, and now they stood in front 686 00:57:43,920 --> 00:57:46,620 of the same rows, with their eyes open. 687 00:57:48,045 --> 00:57:50,480 They read every pattern slowly. 688 00:57:51,240 --> 00:57:57,580 They'd learned what a bad life costs, so they weren't dazzled by the shiny ones. 689 00:57:59,840 --> 00:58:04,380

That's why Ur says, fortunes tend to flip between lives. 690 00:58:05,580 --> 00:58:10,900 The ones who had it easy, often choose badly, and the ones who had it hard, 691 00:58:11,089 --> 00:58:12,140 often choose well. 692 00:58:14,410 --> 00:58:19,023 That first soul is just that story at a much larger 693 00:58:19,024 --> 00:58:22,960 scale, with a life on the table in place of a dinner. 694 00:58:25,200 --> 00:58:32,300 And if that's how the Greek tradition tells it, the interesting question is how 695 00:58:32,301 --> 00:58:38,720 other cultures handle the same scene, because West Africa has its own version, 696 00:58:39,400 --> 00:58:41,220 and it comes with a potter. 697 00:58:44,070 --> 00:58:47,260 Let's look at how the Yoruba tell this story. 698 00:58:48,865 --> 00:58:54,480 And in their version, nobody's standing in a field reading patterns off the ground. 699 00:58:56,569 --> 00:59:00,920 The choosing happens at a house, and the house belongs to a potter. 700 00:59:02,700 --> 00:59:07,640 His name is Ajala, and his job in heaven is making heads. 701 00:59:08,785 --> 00:59:13,740 Every soul that's about to be born goes to his house to pick one. 702 00:59:15,280 --> 00:59:21,040 And remember, in Yoruba thought, the head isn't just the thing on top of your neck. 703 00:59:22,025 --> 00:59:26,740 It's your ori, your inner self, and it carries your destiny. 704 00:59:27,745 --> 00:59:32,340 So picking a head is picking the shape your whole life will take. 705 00:59:34,044 --> 00:59:37,000 Now here's the catch, and it's a good one. 706 00:59:37,974 --> 00:59:39,780 Ajala is careless. 707 00:59:40,960 --> 00:59:43,640 He's forever distracted, forever in debt. 708 00:59:44,090 --> 00:59:50,920 And some of the heads he fires come out flawed, cracked, or underbaked, 709 00:59:51,024 --> 00:59:53,800 or warped in some way you can't see. 710 00:59:54,714 --> 00:59:57,940 And the floor isn't always visible from the outside. 711 00:59:58,634 --> 01:00:03,360 A head can look perfect on the shelf and still be bad clay inside. 712 01:00:06,130 --> 01:00:10,332 That sets up the old story the diviners tell, about 713 01:00:10,333 --> 01:00:14,780 three friends who go to Ajala's house together to choose. 714 01:00:17,180 --> 01:00:19,220 The first one walks in slowly. 715 01:00:20,310 --> 01:00:25,360 He looks at the heads one by one, turns them over, asks questions, 716 01:00:26,060 --> 01:00:29,309 and before he decides, he stops to consult 717 01:00:29,310 --> 01:00:33,240 the oracle and make the offerings it asks for. 718 01:00:35,330 --> 01:00:37,600 The second one is in a hurry. 719 01:00:39,580 --> 01:00:41,842 He's already thinking about the road back, 720 01:00:41,843 --> 01:00:44,720 and he grabs the first head that looks good. 721 01:00:48,090 --> 01:00:54,470 And the third one picks the most beautiful head in the room, a head that gleams, 722 01:00:54,850 --> 01:00:58,850 and he doesn't ask a single question

about what's inside it. 723 01:01:00,230 --> 01:01:07,130 In some tellings, two of them end up with poor heads, one by haste and one by vanity. 724 01:01:07,950 --> 01:01:11,574 In others, it just happens by accident, a 725 01:01:11,575 --> 01:01:15,290 cracked head that no one noticed in the rush. 726 01:01:18,520 --> 01:01:19,910 The point isn't subtle. 727 01:01:20,870 --> 01:01:25,408 The head you pick shapes the life you get, and the care 728 01:01:25,409 --> 01:01:29,330 you take at that moment is the only protection you have. 729 01:01:31,550 --> 01:01:35,370 Now picture two friends who grew up side by side. 730 01:01:35,850 --> 01:01:41,370 Same town, same school, same age, same family friends. 731 01:01:42,874 --> 01:01:47,250 One of them sails through life, and the other keeps hitting a wall, 732 01:01:47,510 --> 01:01:53,430 job after job, year after year, nothing sticking, no matter how hard he works. 733 01:01:54,530 --> 01:01:57,510 People shake their heads and call it bad luck. 734 01:01:59,650 --> 01:02:02,710 The Yoruba story offers another reading. 735 01:02:03,595 --> 01:02:07,690 It says, look further back than the town and the school. 736 01:02:09,314 --> 01:02:14,190 It started at the potter's house in a hurried moment nobody remembers. 737 01:02:16,810 --> 01:02:23,910 Now the accounts that show the choosing in detail, and the most detailed map of all 738 01:02:23,911 --> 01:02:30,310 comes from Tibet, in the Bardo Thodol, the text that's read aloud to the dead. 739 01:02:32,380 --> 01:02:38,250 By the last stage of the journey, the dead person is drifting, restless, 740 01:02:39,220 --> 01:02:44,330 a mental body that can pass through walls and go anywhere in an instant. 741 01:02:45,690 --> 01:02:47,850 And then the visions begin to change. 742 01:02:48,970 --> 01:02:52,881 The person starts to see couples, men and 743 01:02:52,956 --> 01:02:56,330 women together in the act of making a child. 744 01:02:58,705 --> 01:03:00,650 Those are the future parents. 745 01:03:02,170 --> 01:03:07,250 And the text describes exactly what happens inside you as you watch. 746 01:03:08,230 --> 01:03:12,770 You feel drawn toward one of them and pushed away from the other. 747 01:03:13,950 --> 01:03:21,190 That attraction and that aversion are hooks and they're what pull a soul toward a womb. 748 01:03:23,390 --> 01:03:25,110 Here's the strange part. 749 01:03:26,610 --> 01:03:29,788 The teaching doesn't tell you to dive in, it 750 01:03:29,789 --> 01:03:33,030 first teaches you how to close the womb door. 751 01:03:34,370 --> 01:03:40,450 You're supposed to recognize that these visions are projections, that the pull you 752 01:03:40,451 --> 01:03:44,890 feel is only your own habit and to refuse it. 753 01:03:46,890 --> 01:03:52,190 If you can't manage that, the text switches to a second set of instructions 754 01:03:52,940 --> 01:03:54,070 and they're practical. 755 01:03:57,095 --> 01:04:00,210 Look at the

signs, turn away from the lower realms. 756 01:04:02,055 --> 01:04:06,750 Choose a good human birth in a place where you'll be able to practice. 757 01:04:08,770 --> 01:04:10,830 So picture a soul in that state. 758 01:04:11,970 --> 01:04:16,689 It sees a couple and something in it leans forward, 759 01:04:16,690 --> 01:04:20,010 warm and eager, like a moth toward a window. 760 01:04:20,910 --> 01:04:25,410 The instruction is to stop right there and ask what exactly is doing the leaning. 761 01:04:26,930 --> 01:04:30,010 Is that a choice or is it a reflex? 762 01:04:32,170 --> 01:04:40,170 Only after you've asked, do you look at the parents, the house, the country and 763 01:04:40,171 --> 01:04:43,630 decide whether this is a door worth going through. 764 01:04:47,380 --> 01:04:52,350 Michael Newton's clients describe something that looks very different on the surface. 765 01:04:54,700 --> 01:04:59,087 They talk about a room they call the ring of destiny, where 766 01:04:59,088 --> 01:05:02,950 souls sit and watch possible lives play out on screens. 767 01:05:04,770 --> 01:05:10,690 Several lives side by side, each with its own body, family and set of challenges. 768 01:05:12,595 --> 01:05:15,470 And here's the detail I find most interesting. 769 01:05:17,090 --> 01:05:21,430 The soul can step into a scene to try it out before it commits. 770 01:05:22,590 --> 01:05:29,530 It can walk around in that life for a moment, feel what it's like and step back out. 771 01:05:33,400 --> 01:05:39,280 It's like watching trailers before you pick a movie, except you can walk into the 772 01:05:39,281 --> 01:05:42,720 trailer and stand inside the film for a minute. 773 01:05:44,394 --> 01:05:47,780 And one of Newton's clients gave a picture that sticks. 774 01:05:49,350 --> 01:05:55,780 He compared the whole place to a video store, shelves and shelves of lives. 775 01:05:56,560 --> 01:06:03,840 And the soul walks the aisles, picking up boxes, reading the back, putting them down. 776 01:06:04,995 --> 01:06:06,840 Some people grab the blockbuster. 777 01:06:08,480 --> 01:06:13,178 Others, like Odysseus in Ur's story, walk right past 778 01:06:13,179 --> 01:06:17,220 the loud covers and pick the quiet one nobody wanted. 779 01:06:18,500 --> 01:06:22,900 The life of an ordinary private man, tucked in a corner. 780 01:06:23,760 --> 01:06:27,160 He says he'd have chosen it even if he'd gone first. 781 01:06:29,800 --> 01:06:33,605 Two accounts, almost 15 centuries apart, from 782 01:06:33,606 --> 01:06:37,020 cultures with nothing to do with each other. 783 01:06:38,424 --> 01:06:42,060 One says the pull is a trap to be examined. 784 01:06:43,200 --> 01:06:46,960 The other says the options are a menu to be browsed. 785 01:06:47,310 --> 01:06:49,440 But both agree on the same thing. 786 01:06:52,884 --> 01:06:56,660 Before you go down, somebody shows you the possibilities. 787 01:06:57,720 --> 01:07:01,180 And there's a moment when you stand at the door and decide. 788 01:07:03,234 --> 01:07:06,500 Next, a study that tried to count the answers. 789 01:07:07,820 --> 01:07:12,046 In 1979, a clinical psychologist named Helen 790 01:07:12,047 --> 01:07:16,380 Wambach published a book called Life Before Life. 791 01:07:17,970 --> 01:07:23,800 Before her, most of this material was one dramatic story at a time. 792 01:07:25,339 --> 01:07:27,460 Wambach did something different. 793 01:07:29,110 --> 01:07:36,460 She sat 750 people down under hypnosis, took them back to the time before their 794 01:07:36,461 --> 01:07:41,420 birth, and asked every one of them the same set of questions. 795 01:07:43,190 --> 01:07:44,860 Did you choose to be born? 796 01:07:45,515 --> 01:07:47,740 Did you know who your mother would be? 797 01:07:49,639 --> 01:07:52,220 When did you actually enter the baby? 798 01:07:53,990 --> 01:07:55,700 Her thinking was simple. 799 01:07:57,560 --> 01:08:01,267 If these were just individual daydreams, the 800 01:08:01,268 --> 01:08:04,680 answers should scatter all over the place. 801 01:08:05,520 --> 01:08:09,680 If something real was underneath, patterns should show up. 802 01:08:11,749 --> 01:08:12,860 And patterns did. 803 01:08:14,214 --> 01:08:17,439 About 81% said they chose to be born. 804 01:08:17,885 --> 01:08:19,859 Not assigned, not sent. 805 01:08:20,345 --> 01:08:21,420 They chose this. 806 01:08:22,100 --> 01:08:24,100 Then came an unexpected number. 807 01:08:25,700 --> 01:08:29,863 About 89% said they didn't join the fetus 808 01:08:29,864 --> 01:08:33,979 until the sixth month of pregnancy or later. 809 01:08:34,830 --> 01:08:40,286 Before that, they described hovering nearby, drifting in 810 01:08:40,287 --> 01:08:44,180 and out, picking up on the mother's moods from a distance. 811 01:08:45,750 --> 01:08:52,460 A third said they didn't fully arrive until just before or during the birth itself. 812 01:08:55,270 --> 01:09:00,000 Now here's the detail that makes this more interesting than a simple yes. 813 01:09:01,675 --> 01:09:03,600 Many of them weren't excited. 814 01:09:05,865 --> 01:09:08,842 When Wambach asked how they felt about coming, 815 01:09:08,843 --> 01:09:11,500 a lot of the answers sounded reluctant. 816 01:09:15,500 --> 01:09:21,420 Earthly life looked hard from over there, and the commonly quoted figure is that 817 01:09:21,421 --> 01:09:25,520 only about a quarter were actually looking forward to it. 818 01:09:26,510 --> 01:09:30,994 So a big majority did say yes, but most of them said 819 01:09:30,995 --> 01:09:35,040 it the way you'd say yes to a task you didn't love. 820 01:09:38,710 --> 01:09:40,529 You know that kind of yes. 821 01:09:41,795 --> 01:09:45,870 Think of the volunteer who signs up for something because it needs doing, 822 01:09:46,710 --> 01:09:52,350 and then, once the date gets close, wonders what exactly they were thinking. 823 01:09:54,970 --> 01:09:58,351 Picture one of her

subjects lying on a floor 824 01:09:58,352 --> 01:10:01,910 in a group session describing what they see. 825 01:10:02,710 --> 01:10:09,490 They're looking at a small body, a cramped, heavy, slow body, and they feel dread. 826 01:10:10,810 --> 01:10:14,230 The sense of going from wide open to tightly packed. 827 01:10:15,550 --> 01:10:21,250 Heavy limbs, a narrow field of view, a long list of things that are going to 828 01:10:22,500 --> 01:10:24,670 hurt, and still they say it quietly. 829 01:10:26,090 --> 01:10:27,350 I agreed to this. 830 01:10:27,554 --> 01:10:28,554 I know why. 831 01:10:28,890 --> 01:10:30,690 They weren't tricked into it. 832 01:10:31,410 --> 01:10:34,910 They looked straight at it and went ahead anyway. 833 01:10:37,955 --> 01:10:40,790 It's the feeling of the night before a big new job. 834 01:10:42,320 --> 01:10:43,810 You asked for the promotion. 835 01:10:46,480 --> 01:10:47,850 You worked for it. 836 01:10:48,210 --> 01:10:49,770 You're proud of it. 837 01:10:50,090 --> 01:10:55,850 And at ten o'clock, you're lying awake with your stomach in a knot, half thrilled 838 01:10:55,851 --> 01:11:01,430 and half sick, knowing you'd say yes again and wishing you could skip tomorrow. 839 01:11:05,650 --> 01:11:09,570 Now, there's a fair caution to add here. 840 01:11:10,510 --> 01:11:15,970 Wambach's subjects were mostly middle-class Americans in group hypnosis, 841 01:11:16,725 --> 01:11:19,949 and critics point out that suggestion and 842 01:11:19,950 --> 01:11:23,010 shared expectations could shape the answers. 843 01:11:23,950 --> 01:11:28,554 Her own defence was how consistent the replies were 844 01:11:28,555 --> 01:11:32,430 across hundreds of people who couldn't hear each other. 845 01:11:34,030 --> 01:11:37,850 But notice what her numbers do on their own terms. 846 01:11:39,110 --> 01:11:47,110 They describe a choice, but a reluctant one made with eyes open, which raises a 847 01:11:47,111 --> 01:11:50,390 question this whole chapter has been circling. 848 01:11:52,690 --> 01:11:54,950 Is that reluctance a sign of freedom? 849 01:11:55,400 --> 01:11:58,610 Or a sign that the choice wasn't entirely ours? 850 01:11:59,430 --> 01:12:04,570 Because several traditions say flatly that there was no choice at all. 851 01:12:06,830 --> 01:12:14,610 Now to the other side, where the answer is no choice, and the clearest version comes 852 01:12:14,685 --> 01:12:20,630 from the Jewish tradition in a collection of teachings called the Midrash. 853 01:12:22,920 --> 01:12:25,990 In that telling, the soul doesn't want to go. 854 01:12:27,215 --> 01:12:30,446 It's living in a pure place close to God, and 855 01:12:30,447 --> 01:12:33,430 it has no wish to be squeezed into a body. 856 01:12:34,515 --> 01:12:36,030 So it's sent anyway. 857 01:12:37,770 --> 01:12:44,790 An angel escorts it, shows it paradise and the place of punishment, then lays out the 858 01:12:44,791 --> 01:12:49,030 whole life ahead, where it will live and where it will die. 859 01:12:50,865 --> 01:12:52,430 And the soul protests. 860 01:12:53,295 --> 01:12:58,090 It argues, it pleads, it says it would rather stay. 861 01:12:59,345 --> 01:13:01,190 The angel's reply is blunt. 862 01:13:01,865 --> 01:13:05,410 You are formed against your will and you will be born against your will. 863 01:13:05,835 --> 01:13:09,650 Another saying in the same tradition puts it in one breath. 864 01:13:10,750 --> 01:13:16,210 Against your will you are formed, born, live and die. 865 01:13:17,725 --> 01:13:21,010 Then the soul is born and the memory is gone. 866 01:13:23,765 --> 01:13:26,550 India gives a version from inside the womb. 867 01:13:27,970 --> 01:13:34,450 A short text called the Garba Upanishad says that in the ninth month the child 868 01:13:34,451 --> 01:13:40,410 remembers thousands of past births, all the wounds it has passed through, 869 01:13:40,755 --> 01:13:43,910 all the deeds whose results it now has to carry. 870 01:13:45,550 --> 01:13:47,290 And what carried it here? 871 01:13:47,730 --> 01:13:52,890 Karma did, not a decision, not a visit to a potter's house. 872 01:13:54,555 --> 01:13:59,850 The weight of what it had done simply swept it toward this particular mother. 873 01:14:00,790 --> 01:14:07,330 And the soul, remembering all of that, begs to be let out of the cycle for good. 874 01:14:09,600 --> 01:14:15,670 A living teacher, Sadguru, makes the same point in modern words. 875 01:14:16,570 --> 01:14:20,175 He says that when you die, you lose what he calls 876 01:14:20,176 --> 01:14:23,850 discretion, the ability to weigh things and decide. 877 01:14:25,660 --> 01:14:31,570 A living person who's grieving can eventually say, enough, I'll move on. 878 01:14:31,890 --> 01:14:33,770 A dead person can't. 879 01:14:34,415 --> 01:14:37,110 Whatever tendencies you had, keep multiplying. 880 01:14:38,295 --> 01:14:41,670 And they carry you toward the life your karma points at. 881 01:14:43,215 --> 01:14:46,310 No browsing, no standing at a door. 882 01:14:47,130 --> 01:14:48,750 Momentum does the choosing. 883 01:14:51,140 --> 01:14:53,090 Even ______ hints at this. 884 01:14:54,090 --> 01:14:57,530 Remember that most of the souls picked a life out of habit. 885 01:14:59,430 --> 01:15:06,430 Plato says, the ones who'd lived decent, middling lives, chose middling lives again. 886 01:15:07,325 --> 01:15:11,870 Not because they were wise, but because they'd never done anything else. 887 01:15:12,930 --> 01:15:17,410 If your choices are made by habit, how free are they really? 888 01:15:19,500 --> 01:15:20,530 Think of a river. 889 01:15:22,280 --> 01:15:27,550 You can swim hard or float lazily, you can pick which stroke to use, 890 01:15:28,350 --> 01:15:32,090 and you can feel completely in charge of your own arms. 891 01:15:34,320 --> 01:15:38,890 But the current is going where it's going, and when you climb out downstream, 892

01:15:39,060 --> 01:15:41,410 you're not where you aimed to be. 893 01:15:42,380 --> 01:15:45,810 You had effort, and the water had direction. 894 01:15:47,960 --> 01:15:50,250 That's the picture these sources paint. 895 01:15:51,370 --> 01:15:55,485 Choice, if it exists at all, is a small thing, 896 01:15:55,486 --> 01:15:58,850 sitting on top of something much larger. 897 01:16:01,670 --> 01:16:06,710 So now we've got two stories that seem to flatly contradict each other. 898 01:16:07,260 --> 01:16:11,550 A soul that kneels and picks, and a soul that's carried. 899 01:16:12,500 --> 01:16:15,150 Let's see whether they can both be true. 900 01:16:17,150 --> 01:16:23,250 Let's put both sides together, and the way I do it is with one idea. 901 01:16:23,945 --> 01:16:27,430 How much you choose depends on how awake you are. 902 01:16:28,945 --> 01:16:30,930 Look back at what we've got. 903 01:16:32,555 --> 01:16:37,490 Ur's souls pick their lives, but the careless ones pick badly. 904 01:16:39,260 --> 01:16:43,217 The Tibetan text teaches you to choose your womb, but 905 01:16:43,218 --> 01:16:47,410 only if you can see through your own pull toward it. 906 01:16:48,520 --> 01:16:54,550 Sadguru says discretion is gone at death, but he also says that someone who keeps 907 01:16:54,551 --> 01:17:00,090 awareness while losing the body has a very different passage. 908 01:17:02,490 --> 01:17:10,430 Every source, even the ones that say no choice, leaves a little door open for the 909 01:17:10,580 --> 01:17:12,070 person who's paying attention. 910 01:17:13,680 --> 01:17:17,150 So the question may not be whether choosing is on the table. 911 01:17:18,635 --> 01:17:21,150 It may be whether you can read the menu. 912 01:17:23,095 --> 01:17:27,750 Picture two souls arriving in the same place at the same moment. 913 01:17:29,010 --> 01:17:30,070 One is awake. 914 01:17:31,415 --> 01:17:33,390 It knows what it's looking at. 915 01:17:33,710 --> 01:17:38,890 It can tell a pull from a decision, and it reads the options one at a time. 916 01:17:41,130 --> 01:17:45,116 The other is dazed, still wrapped up in the last 917 01:17:45,117 --> 01:17:48,830 life, grieving or frightened or simply confused. 918 01:17:50,140 --> 01:17:52,470 The same options sit in front of both. 919 01:17:54,920 --> 01:17:57,730 But only the first one can actually read them. 920 01:18:00,080 --> 01:18:04,678 The second one drifts toward whatever feels familiar, 921 01:18:04,679 --> 01:18:08,910 and from the outside it looks exactly like being carried. 922 01:18:09,910 --> 01:18:15,270 Same place, same offer, and a completely different amount of choice. 923 01:18:16,810 --> 01:18:20,350 That clears up a lot, but it leaves a harder question. 924 01:18:21,430 --> 01:18:23,170 Why would anyone come at all? 925 01:18:24,495 --> 01:18:29,710 If the place before is home, and a soul is whole there, what's the draw? 926 01:18:32,330 --> 01:18:36,070 Two thinkers give

answers that sound almost like one. 927 01:18:37,970 --> 01:18:44,030 Origen, an early Christian teacher in Alexandria, said that in the beginning, 928 01:18:44,510 --> 01:18:49,090 all souls were equal minds, fixed in contemplation of God. 929 01:18:50,810 --> 01:18:52,290 And then they got full. 930 01:18:53,025 --> 01:18:55,990 His word means something like being glutted. 931 01:18:58,430 --> 01:19:02,321 They grew tired of the good, their attention slackened, 932 01:19:02,322 --> 01:19:06,730 and they drifted away, each one to a different distance. 933 01:19:08,369 --> 01:19:09,950 Nobody pushed them out. 934 01:19:10,910 --> 01:19:12,070 They wandered off. 935 01:19:12,930 --> 01:19:16,070 For that the church later condemned his teaching. 936 01:19:18,455 --> 01:19:24,350 Plotinus, his near contemporary, has a word for the same impulse, ptolema. 937 01:19:25,640 --> 01:19:27,590 It means audacity, daring. 938 01:19:29,900 --> 01:19:33,329 It's the soul's wish to belong to itself, to be 939 01:19:33,379 --> 01:19:36,270 a separate someone instead of part of the whole. 940 01:19:37,380 --> 01:19:38,910 He didn't see it as a crime. 941 01:19:40,050 --> 01:19:43,030 He saw it as something close to nature, the 942 01:19:43,031 --> 01:19:46,050 way a young animal eventually leaves the nest. 943 01:19:48,890 --> 01:19:51,370 So here's one way to answer the question. 944 01:19:52,705 --> 01:19:56,277 A whole being has everything, and the one thing 945 01:19:56,278 --> 01:19:59,670 it can't have is the experience of being a part. 946 01:20:01,550 --> 01:20:04,637 It can't know what it is, to be small, to be 947 01:20:04,638 --> 01:20:07,830 unsure, to reach for something it can't see. 948 01:20:08,920 --> 01:20:11,790 The only way to find that out is to try it. 949 01:20:12,515 --> 01:20:14,390 Coming here is the experiment. 950 01:20:16,340 --> 01:20:19,670 That's what a child does at an open front door. 951 01:20:20,890 --> 01:20:26,830 The house is warm, there's food on the table, and nobody has ever been unkind. 952 01:20:27,885 --> 01:20:32,830 And still the child looks past the door frame at the street, at the noise, 953 01:20:33,850 --> 01:20:37,632 the strangers, the loose dog down the block, 954 01:20:37,682 --> 01:20:41,590 and wants to go see what it's like out there. 955 01:20:43,395 --> 01:20:45,310 Nothing is wrong with the house. 956 01:20:46,450 --> 01:20:48,850 The street is just much more exciting. 957 01:20:51,150 --> 01:20:55,170 If that's the reason though, a question follows. 958 01:20:58,170 --> 01:21:02,790 A soul that sets out on purpose, knowing what it signed up for, 959 01:21:03,050 --> 01:21:05,070 would never take any of it seriously. 960 01:21:06,280 --> 01:21:11,470 So something has to be done about what it remembers, and every tradition we've 961 01:21:11,620 --> 01:21:16,550 looked at has a promise on the table before that happens. 962 01:21:20,575 --> 01:21:23,810 Now let's talk about the agreements made before birth. 963 01:21:26,010 --> 01:21:30,238 Because it turns out that before you forget everything, a 964 01:21:30,239 --> 01:21:33,730 lot of traditions say you were asked to promise something. 965 01:21:35,645 --> 01:21:39,890 The cleanest version is in the Quran, and it's a single scene. 966 01:21:41,000 --> 01:21:46,470 Before anyone was born, God draws out every human being who will ever live, 967 01:21:46,955 --> 01:21:51,470 all of Adam's descendants at once, and asks them one question. 968 01:21:52,315 --> 01:21:53,610 Am I not your Lord? 969 01:21:54,490 --> 01:22:01,150 And every one of them answers, yes, we bear witness, that's it. 970 01:22:01,375 --> 01:22:03,630 One question, one answer. 971 01:22:05,890 --> 01:22:09,914 The verse even says why it happened, so that on 972 01:22:09,915 --> 01:22:13,350 the last day no one can claim they never knew. 973 01:22:14,440 --> 01:22:18,288 The scene has a name in Persian poetry, the Day 974 01:22:18,289 --> 01:22:21,430 of Al-Ast, after the first word of the question. 975 01:22:23,170 --> 01:22:27,370 And Sufi poets built whole lifetimes of longing on it. 976 01:22:28,490 --> 01:22:32,783 They say we all said yes on that day, and ever since, 977 01:22:32,784 --> 01:22:36,270 we've been trying to remember what we agreed to. 978 01:22:38,530 --> 01:22:43,250 The Talmud has its own version, and it's more of a pledge than a question. 979 01:22:45,110 --> 01:22:50,370 In the teaching we looked at earlier, the unborn child is taught the whole 980 01:22:50,371 --> 01:22:56,070 Torah, and then, before it's born, it's made to swear an oath. 981 01:22:57,044 --> 01:23:01,090 The oath is to be righteous, and not to be wicked. 982 01:23:02,710 --> 01:23:06,011 Then the angel taps it on the lip, and the 983 01:23:06,012 --> 01:23:08,930 oath goes with everything else into forgetting. 984 01:23:12,100 --> 01:23:16,890 And in the Gaba Upanishad, the vow comes from the child itself. 985 01:23:18,660 --> 01:23:23,030 Remember that in the ninth month, it remembers thousands of lives. 986 01:23:24,065 --> 01:23:26,290 In its distress, it makes a promise. 987 01:23:27,250 --> 01:23:31,736 If it's allowed out of this womb, it says, it will live 988 01:23:31,737 --> 01:23:36,750 well, turn toward the divine, and work to end the cycle. 989 01:23:37,680 --> 01:23:41,910 And then comes the wind at birth, and it forgets that too. 990 01:23:43,990 --> 01:23:51,370 Three traditions, three very different gods and teachers, and yet the same small shape. 991 01:23:52,850 --> 01:23:58,310 Something is asked, something is promised, and then the memory is switched off. 992 01:24:00,435 --> 01:24:04,790 Let's slow down on that last one, because it's the strangest. 993 01:24:05,930 --> 01:24:13,170 Picture the soul in the ninth month, with every past life laid out in front of it. 994 01:24:14,800 --> 01:24:18,170 It has a kind of clarity it will never have again.

995 01:24:19,050 --> 01:24:24,790 It sees the pattern, sees its own mistakes, sees exactly what it would do differently. 996 01:24:25,820 --> 01:24:29,790 And it says, quietly, I'll do better. 997 01:24:30,720 --> 01:24:32,270 It means every word. 998 01:24:33,055 --> 01:24:34,090 Then it's born. 999 01:24:35,000 --> 01:24:39,249 And a few hours later, it's a screaming, hungry baby, who 1000 01:24:39,250 --> 01:24:43,810 couldn't tell you its own name, let alone what it swore to. 1001 01:24:45,960 --> 01:24:48,890 That may be the point of all three stories. 1002 01:24:50,490 --> 01:24:53,310 The promise isn't there to be recalled. 1003 01:24:54,590 --> 01:24:59,050 It's there to be lived out, without anyone looking over your shoulder. 1004 01:25:00,520 --> 01:25:04,550 And these are the solo versions, one soul and one oath. 1005 01:25:07,130 --> 01:25:11,430 Other accounts show these agreements as something done in groups. 1006 01:25:14,130 --> 01:25:17,630 In some accounts, the agreement isn't made alone. 1007 01:25:18,850 --> 01:25:21,190 It's made in a room full of other people. 1008 01:25:22,005 --> 01:25:23,890 And everyone has a part to play. 1009 01:25:26,900 --> 01:25:32,200 The Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, teach what they call the Council in Heaven. 1010 01:25:34,200 --> 01:25:40,160 Before the earth existed, they say, the Father laid out a plan to all the 1011 01:25:40,161 --> 01:25:44,695 spirits, they would go down, get bodies, forget where 1012 01:25:44,696 --> 01:25:48,220 they came from, and be tested by living on faith. 1013 01:25:51,040 --> 01:25:56,060 The plan depended on free choice, which meant you were free to fail. 1014 01:25:57,070 --> 01:26:00,340 Then every spirit had to decide whether to come. 1015 01:26:01,375 --> 01:26:04,880 And the story says most of them said yes. 1016 01:26:06,070 --> 01:26:10,432 So here the promise is a vote, taken in a crowd, and 1017 01:26:10,433 --> 01:26:14,700 everyone who's ever been born is someone who raised a hand. 1018 01:26:16,545 --> 01:26:20,900 Michael Newton's clients describe something smaller and more practical. 1019 01:26:22,270 --> 01:26:25,580 They talk about what he calls a recognition class. 1020 01:26:26,770 --> 01:26:30,252 It's where souls who are about to be born near 1021 01:26:30,253 --> 01:26:33,920 each other sit down together and agree on signals. 1022 01:26:35,140 --> 01:26:40,460 A particular look, a phrase, a smell, or a song. 1023 01:26:42,360 --> 01:26:49,020 Something small and strange enough that you'd notice it on earth without knowing why. 1024 01:26:51,380 --> 01:26:58,020 The idea is that in the confusion of a new life, with no memory left, you'd still 1025 01:26:58,021 --> 01:27:03,660 have a few small tripwires to tell you someone you know is nearby. 1026 01:27:06,205 --> 01:27:10,100 Dolores Cannon heard the same thing from the other direction. 1027 01:27:11,595 --> 01:27:17,113 Her clients, speaking under hypnosis as their own deeper 1028 01:27:17,114 --> 01:27:21,800 selves, described signing contracts for a life's lessons. 1029 01:27:22,940 --> 01:27:24,200 Who would be the parent? 1030 01:27:24,820 --> 01:27:26,000 Who would be the partner? 1031 01:27:26,365 --> 01:27:28,520 Who would be the one who walked out? 1032 01:27:29,110 --> 01:27:30,980 The hard roles included. 1033 01:27:32,500 --> 01:27:39,760 Someone who hurt you in that telling may have agreed beforehand to play that part. 1034 01:27:42,520 --> 01:27:48,140 The Yoruba have the darkest version, and it's worth hearing, because it shows 1035 01:27:48,141 --> 01:27:51,400 an agreement can be a trap as well as a gift. 1036 01:27:52,440 --> 01:27:58,212 They talk about Abiku, spirit children who've made a pact 1037 01:27:58,213 --> 01:28:02,760 with their companions in the other world to come back early. 1038 01:28:04,250 --> 01:28:08,100 These children are born, and then they die young. 1039 01:28:09,655 --> 01:28:15,062 And then they're born again to the same mother, over and 1040 01:28:15,063 --> 01:28:18,760 over, because they promised their friends they'd return. 1041 01:28:21,105 --> 01:28:23,060 The families fight it. 1042 01:28:24,520 --> 01:28:31,000 They have rituals to break the pact, and names meant to hold the child here, 1043 01:28:31,500 --> 01:28:36,800 and marks cut into the body so the spirit companions won't recognise it. 1044 01:28:37,780 --> 01:28:43,900 A promise made in another world, still pulling against a mother's grief in this one. 1045 01:28:46,110 --> 01:28:50,820 Now take the gentler version, the one Newton describes. 1046 01:28:52,695 --> 01:28:55,960 Two souls sit in a room and agree on a signal. 1047 01:28:57,270 --> 01:29:03,000 Say it's a certain way of tilting the head when they laugh, or a half-remembered tune. 1048 01:29:04,380 --> 01:29:08,157 Then they're born, on a different day, in different 1049 01:29:08,158 --> 01:29:11,000 towns, and they forget the promise entirely. 1050 01:29:14,305 --> 01:29:19,290 Thirty years later, they're sitting at the same crowded table at a stranger's wedding. 1051 01:29:20,310 --> 01:29:26,190 One of them laughs, tilts her head, and the other stops mid-sentence. 1052 01:29:29,090 --> 01:29:31,170 Neither of them could tell you why. 1053 01:29:32,050 --> 01:29:34,630 They just know the whole evening has changed. 1054 01:29:36,690 --> 01:29:39,130 You've felt a smaller version of that. 1055 01:29:40,490 --> 01:29:46,410 You meet someone at a party, a co-worker's friend, a stranger on a train. 1056 01:29:47,830 --> 01:29:51,450 And within ten minutes it feels like you've known them for years. 1057 01:29:52,510 --> 01:29:54,870 You finish each other's thoughts. 1058 01:29:56,280 --> 01:29:59,070 You can't explain it, and you don't try. 1059 01:30:00,060 --> 01:30:03,510 You just feel, quietly, that you've done this before. 1060 01:30:05,630 --> 01:30:10,230 That feeling, in these accounts, is the

signal going off. 1061 01:30:11,260 --> 01:30:15,150 And for it to go off, the memory of the room had to go first. 1062 01:30:17,120 --> 01:30:19,350 Now, let's talk about coming down. 1063 01:30:20,190 --> 01:30:26,830 The agreements are made, the choice is in place, and what's left is the trip. 1064 01:30:27,600 --> 01:30:34,370 And for this, the best map we have comes from a Roman writer named Macrobius, 1065 01:30:34,875 --> 01:30:36,710 around the year 400. 1066 01:30:39,820 --> 01:30:43,690 He wrote a long commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio. 1067 01:30:44,570 --> 01:30:50,110 And in it, he describes the descent as a staircase through the planets. 1068 01:30:51,110 --> 01:30:57,290 The soul leaves the Milky Way and passes down through seven spheres, one at a time. 1069 01:30:58,045 --> 01:31:02,410 And at each stop, it picks up something it will need. 1070 01:31:04,100 --> 01:31:09,430 From Saturn, the highest and slowest, it gets reason and understanding. 1071 01:31:10,460 --> 01:31:13,650 From Jupiter, it gets the power to act. 1072 01:31:14,219 --> 01:31:17,630 Mars gives it boldness, the heat of passion. 1073 01:31:19,330 --> 01:31:25,550 The sun gives it the senses and the imagination, the ability to see and to picture. 1074 01:31:26,530 --> 01:31:28,110 Venus gives it desire. 1075 01:31:29,350 --> 01:31:33,350 Mercury gives it speech, and the knack for explaining things. 1076 01:31:34,000 --> 01:31:39,590 And the last stop is the moon, which gives it growth, and with growth, 1077 01:31:39,745 --> 01:31:40,745 decay. 1078 01:31:41,950 --> 01:31:48,170 The moon is what makes a body that can be born, get bigger, wear out, and fall apart. 1079 01:31:50,220 --> 01:31:51,430 So picture it. 1080 01:31:52,180 --> 01:31:58,130 A soul that began as pure, unclothed awareness drops through the heavens, 1081 01:31:58,975 --> 01:32:01,930 and at every sphere, another garment goes on. 1082 01:32:02,695 --> 01:32:06,430 By the time it reaches the moon, it's fully dressed. 1083 01:32:07,125 --> 01:32:11,190 It can think, act, fight, feel, want, and talk. 1084 01:32:12,005 --> 01:32:13,830 And now it can also age. 1085 01:32:14,410 --> 01:32:17,410 That last item is the one that makes it mortal. 1086 01:32:18,090 --> 01:32:22,706 The soul takes on a body that's built to grow and 1087 01:32:22,707 --> 01:32:26,710 built to end, and the ending is part of the outfit. 1088 01:32:28,795 --> 01:32:32,610 And on the way back up, the garments come off in reverse. 1089 01:32:34,030 --> 01:32:37,909 At death, the soul sheds them one by one, until 1090 01:32:37,910 --> 01:32:41,090 it's bare again at the top of the staircase. 1091 01:32:44,240 --> 01:32:46,830 But he leaves one thing out of the staircase. 1092 01:32:51,310 --> 01:32:57,190 And the next section is about everything that goes into it. 1093 01:32:58,530 --> 01:33:03,970 Now the forgetting, and every way the traditions describe it. 1094 01:33:04,730 --> 01:33:10,590 Because once you start collecting them, you realise nobody agrees on the method, 1095 01:33:11,215 --> 01:33:12,510 only on the result. 1096 01:33:14,850 --> 01:33:17,770 The oldest is a cup, and the last one is a cup, and the last one is a cup. 1097 01:33:18,470 --> 01:33:24,590 In the Orphic account, the soul is handed the cup of Dionysus on its way down, 1098 01:33:25,050 --> 01:33:28,085 and Macrobius keeps the idea alive, placing 1099 01:33:28,086 --> 01:33:31,130 it near the boundary of the crab and the lion. 1100 01:33:32,375 --> 01:33:35,490 The more the soul drinks, the more it loses. 1101 01:33:38,125 --> 01:33:40,370 Plato turns the cup into a river. 1102 01:33:41,800 --> 01:33:46,730 After the souls choose, they cross a burning plain called Lethe. 1103 01:33:47,380 --> 01:33:49,370 Which just means forgetfulness. 1104 01:33:50,395 --> 01:33:55,090 And they camp beside the river Aemeles, the river of carelessness. 1105 01:33:56,085 --> 01:33:57,910 Everyone has to drink some. 1106 01:33:58,645 --> 01:34:01,570 The unwise drink too much and forget everything. 1107 01:34:02,775 --> 01:34:04,470 And the sensible ones sip. 1108 01:34:07,190 --> 01:34:09,470 The Talmud does it with one finger. 1109 01:34:10,850 --> 01:34:14,872 The angel comes at the moment of birth, and taps the 1110 01:34:14,873 --> 01:34:18,830 baby on the lip, and everything the child knew is gone. 1111 01:34:20,160 --> 01:34:24,590 Folk tradition says that's why we have the little groove above the upper lip. 1112 01:34:25,530 --> 01:34:26,850 India has a wind. 1113 01:34:28,465 --> 01:34:33,150 In the Gharbar Upanishad, a wind of birth touches the child. 1114 01:34:34,360 --> 01:34:39,910 And every past life and every vow fades out like breath off a mirror. 1115 01:34:42,200 --> 01:34:46,910 The Gnostics hand over the cup too, but they're not being kind about it. 1116 01:34:48,530 --> 01:34:55,650 The rulers of the lower spheres give the soul a cup of forgetfulness, so it won't 1117 01:34:55,651 --> 01:35:01,350 know where it came from, and they keep refilling it, life after life. 1118 01:35:03,740 --> 01:35:05,370 The Yoruba use a gate. 1119 01:35:06,905 --> 01:35:11,190 The soul passes from Oran into the world through a gatekeeper. 1120 01:35:12,700 --> 01:35:17,530 And somewhere in that passage, the choice it knelt and made is lost. 1121 01:35:18,630 --> 01:35:23,910 And the Mormon image is a veil, a curtain that drops over the mind at 1122 01:35:23,911 --> 01:35:29,170 birth, so the pre-mortal life is still there, only out of sight. 1123 01:35:30,600 --> 01:35:35,450 A cup, a river, a finger, a wind, a gate, and a curtain. 1124 01:35:36,310 --> 01:35:37,950 Six pictures of one event. 1125 01:35:40,790 --> 01:35:45,710 And then there's __________, who's the reason we're talking about any of this. 1126 01:35:47,195 --> 01:35:52,050 When the other souls lined up at the river, he wasn't allowed to drink. 1127 01:35:53,300

--> 01:35:55,530 He just stood and watched them go. 1128 01:35:56,845 --> 01:36:01,250 And when he woke up on the funeral pyre, he remembered everything. 1129 01:36:02,255 --> 01:36:07,130 Plato says so outright, that's why the story wasn't lost. 1130 01:36:09,770 --> 01:36:12,138 The one man who skipped the water is the one 1131 01:36:12,139 --> 01:36:14,830 who could tell us what the water was for. 1132 01:36:17,180 --> 01:36:21,590 So why does every tradition put the forgetting right at the doorway? 1133 01:36:24,220 --> 01:36:27,910 You'd think a soul would do better remembering everything. 1134 01:36:29,520 --> 01:36:32,610 But think about what remembering would actually do. 1135 01:36:35,450 --> 01:36:37,190 The life has to feel real. 1136 01:36:39,030 --> 01:36:45,210 If you walked into this world knowing you were whole, knowing you'd chosen every 1137 01:36:45,211 --> 01:36:52,290 piece of it, knowing it ended in a warm room with friends, then nothing in it 1138 01:36:52,440 --> 01:36:56,410 could frighten you, and nothing could matter much either. 1139 01:36:58,420 --> 01:36:59,790 A loss would be a scene. 1140 01:37:00,445 --> 01:37:02,410 A betrayal would be a plot point. 1141 01:37:03,150 --> 01:37:07,570 You'd be a spectator in your own life, nodding along. 1142 01:37:09,360 --> 01:37:11,190 Try it with something small. 1143 01:37:12,750 --> 01:37:15,619 Imagine sitting down to a board game where you 1144 01:37:15,620 --> 01:37:18,790 already know every move your opponent will make. 1145 01:37:19,755 --> 01:37:23,270 Every card that's coming and exactly how it ends. 1146 01:37:24,360 --> 01:37:25,710 You could play it. 1147 01:37:26,470 --> 01:37:28,070 You just wouldn't want to. 1148 01:37:30,230 --> 01:37:35,970 There's nothing to decide, nothing to risk, and no reason to lean forward. 1149 01:37:37,385 --> 01:37:40,170 The game only works because you don't know. 1150 01:37:42,380 --> 01:37:44,410 That's the logic behind the forgetting. 1151 01:37:45,895 --> 01:37:50,495 The lessons can only be real if the stakes feel real 1152 01:37:50,496 --> 01:37:54,810 and the stakes only feel real if you can't see the exit. 1153 01:37:56,730 --> 01:38:01,790 The choices only count if you don't know which one was supposed to be right. 1154 01:38:04,125 --> 01:38:07,650 And notice what that does for the agreements we just covered. 1155 01:38:09,670 --> 01:38:15,390 The oath, the signal, the contract all work because they're hidden. 1156 01:38:17,035 --> 01:38:21,810 A promise you can see in front of you is just a chore you're following. 1157 01:38:23,630 --> 01:38:27,969 A promise you've forgotten has to be lived out of who you 1158 01:38:27,970 --> 01:38:31,590 are, and that's the only version that proves anything. 1159 01:38:33,790 --> 01:38:40,390 It's like a note you hid in a coat pocket for yourself, and you're only surprised by 1160 01:38:40,391 --> 01:38:45,090 it months later because you'd forgotten you

left it. 1161 01:38:48,320 --> 01:38:50,970 There's a small version of this you've already met. 1162 01:38:52,555 --> 01:38:56,890 You watch a good movie for the second time and something is missing. 1163 01:38:57,955 --> 01:39:02,630 The twist lands on you flat because you're waiting for it. 1164 01:39:03,670 --> 01:39:09,250 The scary scene doesn't scare because your body knows what's behind the door. 1165 01:39:10,730 --> 01:39:15,327 You can admire how it's made, but the surprise is 1166 01:39:15,328 --> 01:39:19,490 gone, and the surprise was the original experience. 1167 01:39:21,970 --> 01:39:25,574 The traditions are saying, in their different 1168 01:39:25,575 --> 01:39:28,630 languages, that a life is the first viewing. 1169 01:39:30,460 --> 01:39:33,690 For it to land, nobody can have read the ending. 1170 01:39:36,225 --> 01:39:38,870 Which raises an uncomfortable question. 1171 01:39:41,150 --> 01:39:47,110 If the forgetting is that complete, how would we ever know any of this was true? 1172 01:39:47,990 --> 01:39:51,268 And the strange answer is that a few children 1173 01:39:51,368 --> 01:39:54,750 don't forget as completely as the rest of us. 1174 01:39:56,715 --> 01:39:59,530 Now let's talk about the ones who didn't forget. 1175 01:40:01,245 --> 01:40:06,847 Because the forgetting we just looked at is nearly total, 1176 01:40:06,848 --> 01:40:10,650 but nearly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. 1177 01:40:11,910 --> 01:40:15,718 Every so often, a very small child slips through 1178 01:40:15,719 --> 01:40:19,190 the curtain with something still in their hands. 1179 01:40:23,190 --> 01:40:27,803 The man who spent his life following those children was Ian 1180 01:40:27,804 --> 01:40:31,770 Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. 1181 01:40:33,810 --> 01:40:39,290 He started in the early 1960s, travelling to India to interview one 1182 01:40:39,291 --> 01:40:44,690 child, and found 25 more cases in about four weeks. 1183 01:40:45,870 --> 01:40:48,230 After that he never really stopped. 1184 01:40:50,510 --> 01:40:54,237 Over 40 years he collected around 3,000 cases of 1185 01:40:54,238 --> 01:40:57,850 children who said they remembered another life. 1186 01:40:59,820 --> 01:41:07,470 India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Thailand, Burma, and also the United 1187 01:41:07,471 --> 01:41:13,070 States, which in one early count had more cases than any other country. 1188 01:41:15,090 --> 01:41:17,590 And the pattern is almost always the same. 1189 01:41:19,130 --> 01:41:24,910 A child, usually between two and five, starts talking about another family, 1190 01:41:25,790 --> 01:41:28,630 another house, another name. 1191 01:41:29,710 --> 01:41:34,030 Sometimes it's just a few sentences said in passing at dinner. 1192 01:41:36,590 --> 01:41:42,990 Sometimes the child insists, gets upset, begs to be taken home, and then, 1193 01:41:43,430 --> 01:41:46,516 around age six or seven, the memories fade 1194 01:41:46,517 --> 01:41:50,370 like a dream that thins out as the day goes on. 1195 01:41:52,730 --> 01:41:55,630 Think about what that looks like inside a house. 1196 01:41:57,350 --> 01:42:03,930 A little girl, barely old enough to tie her shoes, tells her mother over breakfast 1197 01:42:04,055 --> 01:42:06,230 that this isn't her real home. 1198 01:42:07,840 --> 01:42:12,081 She says she has a husband in another town, and 1199 01:42:12,082 --> 01:42:15,830 a shop, and she's worried about who's running it. 1200 01:42:16,305 --> 01:42:17,790 Her mother laughs it off. 1201 01:42:18,990 --> 01:42:22,779 Then the girl says the name of the town, which nobody 1202 01:42:22,780 --> 01:42:27,130 in the family has ever been to, and names the street. 1203 01:42:27,905 --> 01:42:29,350 The laughing stops. 1204 01:42:32,235 --> 01:42:34,790 Stevenson's whole method was to go and check. 1205 01:42:36,150 --> 01:42:41,130 He'd write down what the child said before anyone went looking, then travel to the 1206 01:42:41,131 --> 01:42:45,750 village, find the family the child described, and compare. 1207 01:42:46,835 --> 01:42:48,070 Did the house match? 1208 01:42:48,955 --> 01:42:49,955 Did the names? 1209 01:42:52,220 --> 01:42:55,750 Did the person the child talked about actually exist? 1210 01:42:56,655 --> 01:42:59,530 And did they die the way the child said? 1211 01:43:00,595 --> 01:43:02,250 Some cases fell apart. 1212 01:43:04,570 --> 01:43:07,750 His critics have pointed out a lot of problems. 1213 01:43:08,670 --> 01:43:10,930 That families often knew each other. 1214 01:43:11,480 --> 01:43:14,490 That stories got retold before he arrived. 1215 01:43:15,710 --> 01:43:18,630 And he never claimed to have proven anything. 1216 01:43:20,750 --> 01:43:24,870 He said the evidence was suggestive, not flawless. 1217 01:43:26,355 --> 01:43:29,677 But he also said the strongest cases couldn't 1218 01:43:29,678 --> 01:43:32,670 be explained any other way he could find. 1219 01:43:34,980 --> 01:43:37,430 Now here's the part that sticks with people. 1220 01:43:38,930 --> 01:43:45,770 When Jim Tucker took over the work in 2002, he looked across the whole 1221 01:43:45,771 --> 01:43:49,530 collection and found something that's hard to shake. 1222 01:43:52,700 --> 01:43:56,423 In about 70 percent of the cases, the person 1223 01:43:56,424 --> 01:43:59,760 the child remembers died an unnatural death. 1224 01:44:00,260 --> 01:44:01,500 Car crash. 1225 01:44:02,230 --> 01:44:03,230 A drowning. 1226 01:44:03,325 --> 01:44:04,325 A murder. 1227 01:44:04,455 --> 01:44:05,455 A war. 1228 01:44:05,630 --> 01:44:09,900 It was violent and it was cut off before it was finished. 1229 01:44:12,900 --> 01:44:16,150 There's an old feeling in nearly every tradition 1230 01:44:16,151 --> 01:44:19,620 that a death like that doesn't settle cleanly. 1231 01:44:21,860 --> 01:44:26,380 The soul is pulled out of the body so fast it

doesn't know what happened. 1232 01:44:27,900 --> 01:44:33,220 It hasn't had time to look back, to say goodbye, to let go. 1233 01:44:34,345 --> 01:44:38,500 And so it carries more that life forward than it normally would. 1234 01:44:39,450 --> 01:44:42,972 Like a traveller who had to run for the train 1235 01:44:42,973 --> 01:44:46,780 and left the house with every light still on. 1236 01:44:48,515 --> 01:44:50,200 Then there are the birthmarks. 1237 01:44:51,800 --> 01:44:57,320 In a number of Stevenson's cases, the child is born with a mark or a 1238 01:44:57,321 --> 01:45:03,260 malformation that matches something that happened to the other person's body. 1239 01:45:05,220 --> 01:45:08,060 He studied about 200 of these. 1240 01:45:10,330 --> 01:45:16,520 A boy with small round marks, one on the chest and a larger one on the back, 1241 01:45:17,015 --> 01:45:19,480 who talks about a man who was shot. 1242 01:45:21,250 --> 01:45:24,338 A child born with missing fingers, who says he 1243 01:45:24,339 --> 01:45:27,300 remembers someone whose fingers were cut off. 1244 01:45:28,980 --> 01:45:35,620 A girl with a three centimetre scar around her skull, who says she was a man who'd 1245 01:45:35,770 --> 01:45:36,860 had brain surgery. 1246 01:45:39,520 --> 01:45:46,120 And in many cases, Stevenson tracked down the autopsy report or the witnesses and 1247 01:45:46,121 --> 01:45:50,820 the wounds on the dead person's body seemed to line up. 1248 01:45:53,035 --> 01:45:56,440 It's as if the life didn't just leave a memory behind. 1249 01:45:57,250 --> 01:45:58,560 It left a signature. 1250 01:46:01,070 --> 01:46:04,460 Let me give you one case that Tucker followed himself. 1251 01:46:06,400 --> 01:46:12,820 A little boy named Cameron McCauley, living in Glasgow, Scotland, starts 1252 01:46:12,821 --> 01:46:18,660 telling his mother at around two years old about his other home. 1253 01:46:19,930 --> 01:46:21,720 It's on an island, he says. 1254 01:46:22,620 --> 01:46:28,760 It has a white house and the beach is right in front and the planes land on the sand. 1255 01:46:29,790 --> 01:46:34,360 He talks about his mother there and a father he misses. 1256 01:46:35,660 --> 01:46:38,360 He's very clear that he wants to go back. 1257 01:46:40,040 --> 01:46:44,740 He says it with the kind of homesickness you don't expect to hear from a toddler. 1258 01:46:46,400 --> 01:46:50,780 His mother, Norma, had no idea what to make of it. 1259 01:46:52,080 --> 01:46:58,560 She eventually realised he was describing Barra, an island in the Outer Hebrides, 1260 01:46:59,360 --> 01:47:06,020 where the airport really is a beach and the planes really do land on the sand at 1261 01:47:06,170 --> 01:47:07,170 low tide. 1262 01:47:07,790 --> 01:47:09,460 The family had never been there. 1263 01:47:13,610 --> 01:47:19,372 So in 2006, Tucker travelled to Glasgow, met the boy and then 1264 01:47:19,373 --> 01:47:23,310 went with the family on a long

journey out to the island. 1265 01:47:24,390 --> 01:47:29,610 And when they got there, Cameron led them to the house, the White House, 1266 01:47:29,895 --> 01:47:32,590 near the shore, just as he had said. 1267 01:47:33,540 --> 01:47:39,790 It was real and the description of it was accurate, right down to the layout. 1268 01:47:42,480 --> 01:47:43,970 Not everything matched. 1269 01:47:45,215 --> 01:47:50,750 The family name Cameron gave, Robertson, did ring true on the island. 1270 01:47:52,615 --> 01:47:55,073 But when they went looking for the man Cameron 1271 01:47:55,074 --> 01:47:57,970 said was his father, they couldn't find him. 1272 01:47:58,445 --> 01:48:00,390 That's the honest end of the story. 1273 01:48:02,465 --> 01:48:07,070 Some details landed, one didn't, and nobody could say why. 1274 01:48:09,240 --> 01:48:15,850 But there's a stranger group than the children who remember an earlier life, 1275 01:48:16,980 --> 01:48:21,290 and these ones remember something different, the time in between. 1276 01:48:24,429 --> 01:48:27,790 Stevenson's cases mostly deal with the life before. 1277 01:48:29,715 --> 01:48:33,050 A different kind of child shows up in other collections. 1278 01:48:34,570 --> 01:48:38,130 A child who talks about where they were before they were born. 1279 01:48:38,900 --> 01:48:42,190 Not the last life, but the waiting. 1280 01:48:44,490 --> 01:48:49,170 And those accounts are much closer to everything we've covered here so far. 1281 01:48:51,265 --> 01:48:59,150 In Japan, two researchers, Akira Ikigawa and Yasuo Okado, went looking for this. 1282 01:49:00,090 --> 01:49:05,430 They asked thousands of parents and children about memories from before birth, 1283 01:49:06,580 --> 01:49:10,250 and they found a surprising number who had them. 1284 01:49:11,310 --> 01:49:15,010 Some described floating in a dark, quiet space. 1285 01:49:16,350 --> 01:49:19,970 Some talked about time before they were even in the mother. 1286 01:49:21,995 --> 01:49:24,070 And a pattern kept showing up. 1287 01:49:25,450 --> 01:49:28,897 Children saying they'd been up above the house, 1288 01:49:28,898 --> 01:49:32,430 looking down, deciding which family to go to. 1289 01:49:33,790 --> 01:49:38,950 Picking a mother, in some cases, and being very specific about why. 1290 01:49:41,280 --> 01:49:43,290 Some of these children go further. 1291 01:49:44,730 --> 01:49:51,470 They describe a place with other beings, sometimes with a guide, sometimes with a 1292 01:49:51,620 --> 01:49:53,310 group of other children waiting. 1293 01:49:54,720 --> 01:49:56,970 They describe a moment of deciding. 1294 01:49:58,420 --> 01:50:02,610 A few say they were sent, and a few say it was their idea. 1295 01:50:04,890 --> 01:50:10,890 Now, notice how closely that lines up with what we've been tracing from the beginning. 1296 01:50:11,950 --> 01:50:14,910 Ur's souls, lined up and choosing. 1297 01:50:16,570 --> 01:50:19,864 Helen Wambach's subjects, saying they chose to be 1298 01:50:19,865 --> 01:50:23,010 born, even when they weren't thrilled about it. 1299 01:50:24,210 --> 01:50:27,950 The Yoruba, soul kneeling before the maker. 1300 01:50:28,880 --> 01:50:32,370 The Tibetan text, with its visions of future parents. 1301 01:50:35,390 --> 01:50:38,701 And here, a child in a bedroom in the 21st 1302 01:50:38,702 --> 01:50:42,350 century saying, I looked down and I picked you. 1303 01:50:45,980 --> 01:50:47,850 Nobody taught them that. 1304 01:50:49,190 --> 01:50:51,710 These aren't children raised in a tradition. 1305 01:50:53,095 --> 01:50:58,130 Many of them are growing up in houses where nobody would know how to talk about it. 1306 01:50:58,920 --> 01:51:02,810 And the parents are just as surprised as the rest of us. 1307 01:51:04,810 --> 01:51:09,270 The memories, like the earlier life ones, tend to fade. 1308 01:51:10,390 --> 01:51:13,790 By six or seven, most of it is gone. 1309 01:51:14,750 --> 01:51:19,130 The curtain finishes closing, the way the old teaching said it would. 1310 01:51:20,310 --> 01:51:25,490 The cup was just slower for these ones, the finger tap a little softer. 1311 01:51:27,380 --> 01:51:29,710 But that's what makes them so useful. 1312 01:51:30,480 --> 01:51:32,690 They aren't telling us what to believe. 1313 01:51:33,480 --> 01:51:36,510 They're showing us that the forgetting isn't a wall. 1314 01:51:38,730 --> 01:51:39,750 It's a curtain. 1315 01:51:40,530 --> 01:51:44,483 And every so often, a small child leans on 1316 01:51:44,484 --> 01:51:48,110 it and the light comes through for a moment. 1317 01:51:50,090 --> 01:51:54,630 And then they grow up and forget, like the rest of us. 1318 01:51:56,385 --> 01:51:58,190 Go back to that quiet room. 1319 01:51:59,650 --> 01:52:02,370 The daughter is still in the chair beside the bed. 1320 01:52:02,990 --> 01:52:05,270 And her mother's hand is still in hers. 1321 01:52:06,410 --> 01:52:08,410 The last breath has come and gone. 1322 01:52:09,630 --> 01:52:11,130 The machines are off. 1323 01:52:12,850 --> 01:52:17,530 The light through the curtain has gone grey, and the room is very still. 1324 01:52:18,840 --> 01:52:24,830 If you could rise a few feet above it, you'd see two women, one lying down, 1325 01:52:25,075 --> 01:52:26,510 one bent over her. 1326 01:52:27,770 --> 01:52:32,030 And nothing else that tells you where the story goes next. 1327 01:52:33,970 --> 01:52:36,170 Now turn away from that room. 1328 01:52:37,310 --> 01:52:41,208 Somewhere else, far from there, in a hospital full 1329 01:52:41,209 --> 01:52:45,930 of noise and bright lamps, a baby has just been born. 1330 01:52:46,745 --> 01:52:48,990 Her face is crumpled and red. 1331 01:52:49,910 --> 01:52:52,050 Her fists are closed tight. 1332 01:52:52,950 --> 01:52:55,090 She can't hold up her own head. 1333 01:52:55,715 --> 01:52:59,850 And her neck wobbles when the nurse shifts her to the mother's chest. 1334 01:53:03,080 --> 01:53:06,463 She doesn't know her name, or the language 1335 01:53:06,464 --> 01:53:10,410 she'll speak, or the people looking down at her. 1336 01:53:11,045 --> 01:53:12,790 She knows nothing at all. 1337 01:53:13,750 --> 01:53:18,206 And the woman holding her is crying and laughing at once, 1338 01:53:18,207 --> 01:53:22,490 saying something nobody else in the room can quite hear. 1339 01:53:25,030 --> 01:53:28,810 Maybe those two rooms have nothing to do with each other. 1340 01:53:31,805 --> 01:53:34,560 Maybe they have everything to do with each other. 1341 01:53:36,275 --> 01:53:39,840 The daughter by the bed doesn't know where her mother has gone. 1342 01:53:41,165 --> 01:53:45,320 And the mother in the delivery room doesn't know who she's holding. 1343 01:53:46,760 --> 01:53:53,000 Each one is standing at an open door, looking into the dark on the other side. 1344 01:53:55,300 --> 01:54:00,860 But the old accounts all describe what happens on the far side of that door. 1345 01:54:02,040 --> 01:54:07,380 And they describe it as a road, with no real start and no real end. 1346 01:54:08,980 --> 01:54:12,560 People leave through one door and arrive through another. 1347 01:54:13,340 --> 01:54:18,760 And on the way they're met and shown things, and asked questions. 1348 01:54:20,090 --> 01:54:22,260 And given a little time to rest. 1349 01:54:23,480 --> 01:54:28,780 Then they're sent out again, small and forgetful, into somebody's arms. 1350 01:54:30,760 --> 01:54:34,259 So the baby's wobbling head and the old woman's still 1351 01:54:34,260 --> 01:54:38,820 hand might be the same person, at two different stops. 1352 01:54:39,845 --> 01:54:43,980 What's strange is how ordinary it looks from here. 1353 01:54:45,090 --> 01:54:51,080 A hospital room in the morning, a chair, a blanket, a cup of cold tea. 1354 01:54:52,980 --> 01:54:55,840 And somewhere between the two, life goes on.