Mindflex- Evidence For The Jewish View of The Afterlife- Rabbi Yaakov Astor

welcome everybody thank you to project inspired rabbi burnett for sponsoring this tonight's topic um about the afterlife different aspects of the afterlife evidence what it is um i want to start with a story that's actually found in this book called closer to the light by dr melvin morse he's an md who studied near-death experiences in the 1980s 1990s and the unique angle that he did as a as a professional md he studied the near-death experiences of young children three-year-old four-year-olds and um the reason he did that is because it was it's harder for a three-year-old four-year-old to make up a story so um that made that his uh his experiences and his information you know much more i thought authentic it's an interesting book it's a fascinating book i may bring some other examples in it but there's one particular point that he makes that i wanted to start this this information this lecture with and he says there that and i'm going to get into how this ties in with my book soul searching um but he says there you know there are various types of near-death experiences that have been documented over the years since since the 1970s my book soul searching actually compares the the evidence or the information about near-death experiences in the 1970s and since then to ancient jewish teachings that uh show parallels between the two so these these experiences have actually been documented over thousands of years but dr morris talks specific one of the things he talks about is the light experience so in a near-death experience a person that is clinically ill typically there's four major experiences it's four major experiences um they have an out of body experience they have what's called a tunnel experience they have what's called the light experience and then they have what's called a life review so when it comes it's interesting that dr morris and his studies found out that um not everybody all these document all these doctors that documented near-death experiences they discovered that not everybody has who claims to have near-death experience and there was a gallup poll in the 1980s that eight million americans have had near-death experiences but um not everybody has all four or all multiple experiences what he found fascinating was that the light experience was a key for how how the experience would affect the person if a person didn't have a life light experience didn't see a light in part of his experience of a near death he went on with his life and it nothing changed much but those that did have a very real light experience experience of a light which light could be a being a sense of something higher those that did have you know he did a study and he found that they were healthier and had fewer psychosomatic complaints they were happier they had stronger family ties more zest for living greater diminished fear of death interesting here no almost no suicide attempts to kill themselves again some of the people he had studied were teenagers who actually tried to commit suicide um and they failed and those that didn't have the lie experience would tr statistically would try it again and those that did have it all of a sudden didn't so they're here people that already on the edge and the light experience turn their lives around so it's very interesting because the question that um i started looking into and when i i'm gonna get to about the history of this book um looking into about 30 years ago was um you would think one would think that if a person has a near-death experience and it's a wonderful experience not all are but it's a wonderful experience like seeing the light one might think that a person would come back and say you know what i don't want to live anymore there's no purpose in this life but dr morse has has the book and others specific have shown otherwise that when a person does have a real serious near-death experience and according to dr morris especially with light involved that changes their life they have a new zest and a new a new outlook on life and the goal of this class and the goal of my book and the goal really of everything that we do in torah is to try and capture that zest without having to go have a near-death experience you know i don't recommend near-death experiences if you can avoid them um if you have them then then you know you'll you'll that's that's the way you know hopefully it was a it was something that was very good in your life but if the question here is can we capsulize the effects of a near-death experience in our everyday lives through what through what methods and the reality is is that yes we can and that's exactly what torah teaches and that's really what i'm going to hear talk to you about tonight some of the evidence that have been that has been uncovered and some of the ideas of what to do once that evidence isn't covered and how we might use it and incorporate it into our lives now it happens to be that for whatever reason about 30 years ago um the idea of an afterlife was something that i gravitated toward or it gravitated toward me and in 1994 i wrote this book at that point i was working for a very great and important american rabbi in outreach called rabbi ezreal tauber and he was very um involved in um teaching people in this these seminars called seminars and he set up a yeshiva in muncie new york called but um for six years i was able to work with him hand in hand and i wrote about 13 books for him so it was a great experience apprenticeship for me really actually one of the things that happened in 1994 is that i noticed that these seminars that they were given that were very popular they talked about all the different proofs or evidence of judaism of the torah on mount sinai the revelation and and all different aspects to the torah but it did not and they and the lecturers did actually talk about um afterlife but there was no books about it so with rabbi talbor um i decided we decided to go ahead and do a research research into this book and essentially the idea here is that um soul searching seeking scientific ground for the jewish tradition of an afterlife the purpose of this book was first written initially written for people that were not observant yet people that were not believing in in in torah and so to help people um understand what's going on or how people reach uh get to the next level what i did is i studied a lot of um near-death experience the literature and near-death experiences um and as well as um there's a dr ian stevenson we'll talk more about that about reincarnation and i took those ideas that have been in the literature since the 1970s especially and i compared them to sources in the torah and i found that i was uncanny again and again these things lined up this is one of the pieces of of evidence let's say um that i had been researching it's interesting in 1994 i wrote this book and with rabbi talbert it sort of fell out of his project um and i went and tried to publish it on my own and i did i had an inside person at simon and schuster and she was a high level type of uh agent and i got in to talk to her and she said she loved the book but it was a little too jewish for her you know the secular sources was good but the jewish part connecting it to judah was too jewish for her and her readers next i took the book and i went to a jewish publisher i went to several jewish publishers they said wonderful book fantastic yeah but too secular for us the science and the second it doesn't work for us it took ten years before our um target press and the rabbi zombie looked it over and said you know what this is the perfect combination of a secular and a and a and a religious point of view that ties them together and in fact it's interesting that rabbi zombie said that he he decided to publish the book not i did not primarily for a secular or a non-observant yet type of community but actually religious ones he felt that a lot of them young women and young men this book was would be a great benefit to them so this book was published in 2004 after 10 years lying around and it has had an interesting life in terms of reaching out to people of all different types people that are not observant people that are not yet believing in in the tenets of the torah and people that are um i've seen some interesting comments of people over the years uh one woman even converted to judaism she says as one of the books that helped to do it other people had told me it's helped them tremendously a friend of mine who works as a chaplain in the hospital um you know he said that he's given that book to his people that have been dying and has given them a lot of insight well this was in 2004 a few years ago um i got involved and i work um closely with um the with the material of this rabbi avigdor miller and um a couple of years ago i published this book with victor miller on omaha i've about i have a lot of books out there about 25 30 that i've written or edited or published um and this has been my best seller this the way i look at these two books and i'm going to mention it here is that this is the book for a person that that is not there yet and needs the evidence to show that there is such a thing as a natural life this is a book after you've come graduated so to speak from this book this would be the next book to go into i would not necessarily recommend this for beginners but i would say that if you're beyond the beginner stage then this is an interesting book the combination is basically evidence to help a person even with a secular background feel that it's not that that think there is a rational basis for believing in an afterlife and then what do you do with it and that's really the bigger question here because what you do with it as we saw from the beginning from melvin morse from the light the idea is to use the the the principles and the thoughts about an afterlife to improve our lives to create this tremendous zest for life and in fact one of the classic jewish writings the duties of the heart written about a thousand years ago he says that the most important um part of our belief our amuna of our belief system is the belief in the afterlife if the yetzer hara which is this tendency this evil inclination um had um his first and most important or his last and most important attack is on the belief if he of an afterlife that the soul somehow leaves on beyond the body and if he can get the person to disbelieve in that he knows he's got him all these other things he could say he believes in the torah from scientific believe in these other things if he doesn't believe in an afterlife you know everything else well it falls apart so we have some serious sources that this is not just a a side it's not a footnote of judaism it's a toll court idea the belief in the afterlife and uh and what to do with that belief now i'm not going to go into the sources there are a lot of sources i have in the book about for instance in the tanakh we see this from and in the talmud we see this from but we're going to go over some of the things here i'm going to go into the book and then we'll see how far we can get with um going into other areas but basically here um it's interesting uh the uh the um in in 1984 my first actually was still in yeshiva and i got a job writing a show called taste-to-toe as a radio show and um and the narrator i would basically put together different lectures from two different rabbis and then i put together an added narrator and it would seem like one seamless type of thing so the we had a narrator a guy named paris eichler a wonderful voice and parrots his innovation was is that before we started take a tour every night or every week when it was on he'd say you know what he'd say you give us 40 minutes we'll give you the world to come there was a famous uh radio station called wrans says you give us 20 minutes we'll give you the world parrot said you give us 40 minutes we'll give you the world to come so that's sort of what this idea is about give us 40 minutes and we'll give you the world to come now the um as i said earlier there are there are different aspects to the near-death experience but the their i'm going to mention there's four we're going to go focus into maybe just one or two of them the first one is the out-of-body experience and that is when a person and there's a lot of literature out there about people that claim to have near death experiences and they had out-of-body experiences so a person's lying on the operating table and they and they their heart stops for a few minutes um and then when they come back to life they claim that they had seen certain things they floated above the body seen certain things one of the interesting things that caught my attention early days was a woman that claimed to have floated above her hat of her body that was on the operating table out the window was a hospital up on the 20th floor whatever it is and there on the ledge on the 20 floor was a was a shoe one shoe no one could see it from the ground and no one could really see it from no one could see it from the window so afterwards the doctors and the nurses went to check in fact if the shoe was there because no one could have seen it in a normal situation and it was so this stuff like that um different stories like that um does judaism believe in that of course we do um we fact that we have um we not only um we have statements that say that when a person is uh before the person's um is in the is buried his body floats above it and is above it is watching and listening to everything that's happening that said um as at his funeral which is a very profound idea because at the funeral a lot of people are are grieving um the close relatives and so forth but here you have we have the actual person's soul is grieving because he's also watching it in fact when when a person is a we have to do in jewish law when a person dies there's the body has to be cleansed and um and while the while the people are that are very trained to do this are cleansing the body excuse me while they're cleansing the body they have to apologize oh i'm sorry for doing this i'm sorry for doing that that only makes sense if they believe if their belief is is that the body is floating nearby so we clearly have um these studies that have started in the 70s that are talking about outbody experiences this is old material in the jewish role this is an example of what i wanted to show a parallel types of things um i mentioned the light experience i want to talk about the fourth one and then we're going to move on to a different topic but basically again the idea here is to show that there are parallels so the fourth major experience near death experience is what's called the life review um and this is experience it's been reported by a lot of people so a person has a near-death experience there on the operating table they floated above the body above the body they've gone through this tunnel a tunnel experience is one of the common things judaism has an idea that every soul before it goes up to its heavenly abode goes through the cave where abraham and sarah buried in hebron um sort of like a tunnel anyway tunnel experience the light experience they see light sometimes the light is a being sometimes it's relative sometimes it's an indescribable thing and then they often come to what's called the life review where they're actually um some some somehow there's either a judgment or something happening but that their life was reviewed i want to read you one or two quotes from again these are secular sources that scientists have documented um over the years there's lots of different books they mentioned in my book you can go into further detail in there let me read you one or two to get a clear idea of what the life review is and then i want to compare it to the jewish sources um here this is from the book heading toward omega um quote it was like i knew everything that was stored in my brain everything i'd ever known about from the beginning of my life i immediately knew about and also what kind of what was kind of scary was that i knew everybody else in the room in this afterlife knew i knew and that there was no no there was no hiding anything the good times the bad times everything i had a total clear knowledge of everything i realized that there are things that every person has sent to earth to realize and to learn every single thing that you do in your life is recorded and that even though you pass it by not thinking at the time it always comes up later for instance you may be at a stoplight and you're in a hurry and the lady in front of you when the light turns green doesn't take right off she doesn't notice the light and you get upset and start honking your horn and telling her to hurry up those are the little kinds of things that are recorded that you don't realize at the time that are really important it was very interesting because you know if you're familiar with it the book of um in judaism we have the book called the ethics of the fathers these are famous stating statements by the rabbis from 2000 years ago that are actually for based on an older tradition and and one of one of the statements in the in the book and the ethics of the fathers is that all persons these are written in a book and just like this person says here that everything is being recorded now here this sounds a little bit on the scary side because she's saying well this person is recording that everything's there and if you may if you pushed you're honking at the little old lady in front of you and you feel bad about that um there's a there's other stories for instance that um one person had a live review and all of a sudden she remembered the time that she was in a department store and a little girl was alone and not by herself and crying and she went over and took that little girl to the counter and waited there until her mother came and she said in her life review she the pleasure and of the good deed there was just magnified in a way that was unbelievable impossible to describe and so the life review is a review of the good things and the bad things and the ultimate idea is to is to purge the bad and to come to reconcile it um some of these near-death experience people have called it psychoanalysis in the tenth in the umpteenth degree um and and the idea is is that a person needs to cleanse that which he need that that was that he did not or she did not do right in this world and you need to emphasize the good as well it's a matter of counting down when you when you experience the bad and you acknowledge it it's sort of like cathartic and it reduces the pinch and the bad and at the same time you're emphasizing the good things that you do um which is a very important thing sometimes we get so people are so super critical that they forget the good we have good and bad and we need to do that on our everyday lives the life experience is that experience times a million it's it's a it's a different level one of the things that thomas says is that who testifies at once judgment after death in the gomorrah and the talmud answers one's own soul which is very interesting you would think that it's this fire and brimstone and there's outsiders that are doing it but the process and the goal of the life of you is for the soul or the personality itself our keep our own essence to admit and acknowledge both the good and to acknowledge the good the bad and the good and therefore to hopefully be something cathartic about it um it's interesting that um the jewish idea of gehennam which is a which is a um um which is where the life you could say the life of you is is done um we know we have the word gehenna and the it's not not really properly translated as hell it's really properly translated as purgatory it the talmud tells us that this is ultimately for the vast majority of people not more than 11 months and it's a place where the negative things are purged that's why it's called purgatory from the soul it's um it could be a very painful process psychologically or spiritually um and it has to go and everyone has to go through it um maybe if a person and the person lives his life here maybe that's minimal maybe they don't have to go and experience it all the great saints and that become you know don't experience don't have to experience but the rest of the majority population does probably to some degree and that's part that seems to be something parallel to this life review i say this with a caveat by the way i don't i know this is not to say that everything that you read in these books about near-death experience is the same that's happening you know in the torah explanation of things but the parallels are very interesting to study and that's brings up evidence about common experiences you know from today and from thousands of years ago now it's very interesting that in this week um on the on the portion of the week that we read on the sabbath um and this sabbath we're going to read about how joseph was finally revealed himself to his brothers you know they had he had for for many years he had been they thought he was they thought he might have died and they didn't know where he was and he knew who they were but he was holding back and not telling anybody who he was and all of a sudden this week's parsha his brother judah yehudah is saying you know my father really can't afford to lose his one child he's he's already lost one he can't lose another one you know and then joseph all of a sudden says i am your i am joseph my father alive and they were quiet quiet they says they beheld they had a bahala they were confused quiet they just were totally shocked you can you know you can only you can imagine um and there's a midrash there's a teaching an oral teaching that says that that that this experience that the brothers had when joseph revealed and said i am joseph is similar to what the soul the experience of the soul when it gets to the next world you know we live within a world where we rationalize the probably more than eating and drinking um we live our days with rationalizations um justifying things that may not be so good you know to rationalize the t is to tell rational lies and everybody has to it seems like it's a very natural thing for people to do um but when you come to that world where the when where everything else is stripped away it's like joseph that's why the brothers could not and cannot even speak to him they were completely naked now all the things that they had done they couldn't fool this person he was the person that they had sent sent away into slavery so so too the soul in the afterlife we live with our rationalizations and we think we get away with you know we're getting away with things but coming to the next world it's something that's very serious and and yet very um cathartic and purging you know for purgatory so that's the idea of a life review you know and the idea here in this world is that if we if we do chuva if we do repentance in this world we can already preempt the process of the next world you know that's the ultimate process of chuva in the next world a life review in this world we're trying to think about things and improve ourselves and we can we can improve ourselves in this world there's one moment of repentance in this world is better than all the pleasures in the world to come so this is one of the motivating things when you learn about these things it's not to to make someone some depressed it's quite the opposite trying to make someone very active now in improving themselves improving their character improving their behavior toward others and improving the favor to themselves and toward god so this is part of the purging process part of the life review i want to close the life review part of my speech here um with a quote from melbourne ari kaplan now if you don't know rabbi kaplan you must read his books if you're new to or you're new to judaism you know he is uh robbie alright kaplan died unfortunately as a young man who's 48 years old um but he wrote many books and one of them is called the immortality and the soul and he writes a very fascinating thing here um there was a philosopher henry bergson whose idea was is that the soul actually sees everything when we come to this body it's like it's reduced it's like this static and and everything is um staticky it's not it's not that we our minds are actually a restriction of what a bigger subconscious or super conscious um that has you know and understands everything we're here in a restricted world in a in a world where the the the truth is is is covered by by by noise white static and noise static um so robert kaplan writes here um a fascinating thing in this book again immortality in the soul imagine standing naked before god with your memory wide open completely transparent without any jamming mechanism or reducing valve to diminish its force you will remember everything you ever did the memory of every good deed would be the sublime mr pleasures but your memory will also be open to all the things which you are ashamed they cannot be rationalized or away or dismissed rationalize they can't tell rat they can't rationalize telling rationalize doesn't work you will be facing yourself fully aware of the consequences of all your deeds we all know the terrible shame and humiliation when one is caught in the act of doing something wrong imagine being caught up in one's own memory with no place to escape again these are these ideas to teach us you know maybe then we should go back and and apologize to that person we might have hurt maybe we should improve our ways and the whole patterns of life that's the idea here the idea here is that if it happens in this world in a smaller way but in a way we have the free will to make the impact even greater and it's ultimately in a place in the next world so this idea of of um of of um these are some of the parallels that again are in the book soul searching about near-death experiences um one of the topics that i got into um back then also was reincarnation and it's interesting how this came up so i mentioned the rabbi ezreal talbot israel talbor um was a um jew um all the you know yiddish and a big great scholar and um and a very broad-minded person but yet one morning he told me when i came into work he said you must read this book and it was shocking to me because it was a secular book and it sounded very strange it was a book by a man named dr brian weiss and it's called many lives many masters and i couldn't believe that rabbi talber actually recommended that i read it well um i read it i took it home um he gave me a copy and i took it home and i expected to uh you know read a little bit here read all over there i got into it and i just i stayed up half the night reading it uh sometime in the middle of night my wife woke up says what are you doing why why are you staying up so late you're gonna be exhausted in the morning i said i couldn't put down the book so the next morning you know i was pretty exhausted and the next night um she said well what is the book i said well i wanted to read a little bit you know i don't have to stay up the whole night so about 3 4 in the morning i woke up and turned over and there's my wife she's reading i said put it down you're going to be exhausted in the morning no but it was a fascinating book so back rabbi talbert gave me this book um and again i'm not going to go too much into it there's more in the book but i do want to share something and i also have to say a little a little bit of a caveat here that this is fascinating material that dr weiss had bring there but there are certain things about dr weiss's um post um you know our experience with him you know i met him and and rabbi talber spoke together with him and there are certain things about dr weiss that i would say that have gone off the way from judaism however the basic idea has been pretty fascinating let me tell you what what his if you don't know his story is pretty fascinating many lives many masters so dr weiss is a yale trained psychiatrist you know not just a md not just a a psychologist but a md is like a psychiatrist and he's trained in them trained in the best universities and he was actually um the head of the department of psychiatry i believe in science hospital in florida so he had written papers and he considered himself he called himself the original skeptic a real big skeptic in terms of afterlife and religion in total um and in the 1981 i think it was 8081 a patient came he was given a told to a patient that was going to come into someone from the university there this woman was having tremendous phobias and and dr weiss and they thought that dr weiss could help her he called her catherine that's not her real name but he called her catherine in the book and he came in there and he documented you know her problems she has she has to she was so many phobias and everybody has fears but phobia means they're really extreme so she was so afraid that she'd wake up in the middle of the night and go into a closet and fall asleep she was terrified of the doctor she'd go into the closet she was terrified of the water and could barely you know use a use a shower so she had these terrible phobias and dr weiss one of her phobias by the way was she had a fear of drowning and swallowing this was terrible for the psychologist because he really liked to give pills you know you give a pill and all of a sudden puff the person somewhat better but he couldn't do it because she was afraid of choking so he decided that he was experimenting then with something called with hypnosis and he decided to use hypnognosis to try and help her so the very first session he did hypnotize her and um and she went back to the early childhood you know where she had some traumatic experience she almost found in a pool and she had a situation with her father with her father abused her so it was really traumatic situations um in a dentist's office someone she remembered someone putting some uh cloth over her face and dr weiss thought after this is done you know she's gonna come back a little better next week because we've uncovered these deep-seated memories that she repressed and these things seem to be involved with her choking and all that but she came back the next week and she was just as bad she's had a terrible week so dr weiss put her in induced her into it not a state again and he said you know listen katherine go back to the point where you're where your symptoms begin and all of a sudden she goes back to about two thousand four thousand years ago and she's this woman named miranda in sort of like an indonesian type town they have thatched root thatch roofs huts shooting and she has a baby and she loves the baby and all of a sudden she remembers in her hypnotic state of a tsunami coming and a huge wave is coming and the villagers are running away and she's running away and it gets up to her ankles and her knees and all of a sudden the camp it's it's she's in she's being swirled around and the baby's being ripped from her arms and then she sort of dies in this hypnotic state then she sort of floats up and doctor wife weiss is uh you know um just listening um and he doesn't believe she's having any real past lives so she um that's it he brings her out of the state fine next week she comes back dr weiss you wouldn't believe it all of a sudden my fear of joking and water you know it's it's basically gone i don't have it anymore and that's the wife's wife thought that was strange but you know he didn't yet believe in an afterlife or souls or certain reincarnation but he said you know what let's do it again let's let's hypnotize you with some more so it's a really fascinating book she goes back in in various different times and where she's um anytime she goes back in the time and he and she experiences something it seems to relieve a phobia in this life during one of her sessions though she goes back and she's up she's she dr weiss would have her experience that life then she'd experience the death in that life and then he'd say okay she'd float above her body should have like an in-between state before she goes into the next body and all of a sudden one day she closes and one in one session she closes her eyes and she starts swinging their heads from side to side she says in a husky voice they're a master their eyes eyes they are masters they tell me they're master spirits all of a sudden she started talking very philosophically now this was not catherine back to why i said and he felt that it was something that was different and um and he had a nice philosophical conversation with her when she came out of the trance you know she said catherine what do you what do you think about the masters she says you know the golf tournament the masters and she knew nothing of that well whereas the other past lives like aranda and these other things she did remember this in between states she didn't remember and that device says this is getting stranger by the by the session but you know what she's getting better let's continue with it so he continued then he brings her to a past life and again she dies and she's an in-between state and all of a sudden he said something and this changed the doctor's life she said doctor your father and your son is here your son says you'll know it's him because his heart is backwards like a chicken he says his debt his death satisfies his parents debts and told you that on medicine can only go so far yes and also by the way she said your father avraham is here now avraham this is a catholic woman she didn't say abraham or abe and she didn't say his nickname reds she said avraham this was the age before the internet so you couldn't look up dr weiss's family and um and so she knew nothing no way of accessing this information um especially about the child now a year earlier there they had a child that did die 23 days and it was such a traumatic thing they even the close family didn't know about it and he died after 23 days of a of a heart defect where in fact the idea that your your heart backwards like a chicken where the there was was rooted in in the wrong way behind it was a perfect description of it and because at that point he was in medical school and he was thinking should he become a psychiatrist when when met he saw that medicine couldn't save his child he said you know what i want to go into medical school school and he did in fact change his life he told them that medicine can go and go so far she said so at this point he said now this is not anything that she could know and he he said the room got cold and the bottom line is is that now he changed all of a sudden he became a changed person and he began to believe that in fact the past past lives that she was having were in fact real and they were improving her now dr weiss says that a person like catherine um phobias come into so bad it's very rare that they get cured or certainly maybe they get improved a little bit but the fact that they can get cured in fact she not only cured by the time she was done with the dr weiss they went i think for a year or so um but she was now radiating a new life like this that right at the beginning when i mentioned about the closer to the light you know she was having a personal personality revolution that she became sort of like a very magnetic type of person and dr weiss himself now changed and so the interesting thing about this book what a lot of interesting things one of the few things about this book is that dr weiss at this time was a was very very respected in the in the quote orthodox medical psychologist world he was publishing in journals he was the head of the a major hospital psychiatry department he had degrees from harvard from yale he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by publishing this book in fact and then back in the 1980s if you published a book if you're a psychiatrist like him you published a book on reincarnation you could lose your reputation in fact that is what happened he i'm he's told me and we've seen several times that he was not invited back to be the chair of different departments and for a while he was very ostracized and while he was being ostracized in the medical world actually students of psychiatry and universities were telling him that the teachers are secretly teaching his book even though they're you know it's not officially it's not it's not a recognized thing so he risks his reputation to come out with this book it's there's an inner layer of authenticity to his experience and in fact um you know and talking to dr weiss he did meet him i do believe that uh these these are authentic experiences and um he's a he's an authentic person um again i don't as i said a lot of his ideas since then he goes he's going off the deep end he's in in terms of in terms of um from a jewish point of view you know we we have a long tradition which when uh there's a there's a concept that once you're spiritual now everything is true once a person goes from a very material person a very spiritual person they think that everything in the spiritual world is true and judaism teaches that's not so there are a lot of things in the in the in the spiritual world that could be untrue and what judaism is it's a it's a guideline it's a it's a it's a map to the spiritual experiences and if you don't have that if you if you don't look at that you can go off into areas that are not so kosher not kosher at all even so again i question people in reading dr weiss um but this book in terms of his experience is is really phenomenal and he has some other books i mean i just want to briefly talk about um briefly talk about some of the other things i mean one of the one in one of his other books he talks about a woman that came to him and had back pains her whole life years and years of background pain and nothing could solve it she got chiropractic she took therapy she's a massage nothing ever helped this so she went to dr weiss for other things i think it was somewhat something else and he induced her into a hypnotic state and she went to a past life where she was actually a soldier in um attacking a medieval castle and this her army lost and she was captured and they took her and the fellow soldiers captured soldiers up to the top of the castle and they stood and they tied their hands and their feet and they stood at the edge of the top of the castle over the moat and someone threw a spear into them from the back and they toppled over and died down in the moat and she experienced this this memory so to speak in her hypnotic state when she came out of it you know she was crying and emotional uh she came back next week and her back pain was gone you know these are a lot of stories like this and there are people that do these types of things um you know regression therapy um i met some doctors that actually do it again i'm not sure i'm recommending it or not but uh such things do happen and dr weiss does document them one other book i want to mention with dr weiss is that he has something called a book called only love is real and that's the idea of soul mates these are you there's a whole section on this you know judaism does believe in soulmates you do believe that at the time of conception there's a there's a voice that goes out a spiritual voice a bosco goes out and says this person is destined for that person we do have an idea of destiny between soul mates we do have an idea that a person can lose their destiny soul mate we do have an idea that you can find your deaths and soulmates if you don't work in your relationship it becomes a failure and people that are not destined can become have loving tremendous relationships but there is a concept of destiny in a soulmate really such a concept so dr weiss and only love israel i'm going to be very brief about this you know he has two patients he calls pedro and elizabeth and they're both um having very successful people lis uh elizabeth i think is a uh is a um i think she's some sort of medical professional and pedro was a successful businessman um and they don't know each other and they come to this office his dr weiss's office different times but over time all of a sudden realize they're having interesting past life experiences that seem to be similar but from a different angle so so pedro for instance has a past life where he goes back to jerusalem in the time of the romans and the romans have come into his town and they're taking him and they're tying him up and they're tying to a horse and they're driving him over rocks and he's dying and he dies there in that past life in the hands of his beloved daughter and and his name i think is eli um or ellie you know and then elizabeth in another dream another past life she's the little daughter back in jerusalem she remembers her father dying in mother eli dying in her hands it took a while for doctors to think that you know what this could be two people with similar things and they seemed to be successful people but not happy bottom line is that he had he had a ethical problem to to bring them together and to tell them the privacy laws did not allow him to reveal to them you know each other's um what dreams and he did arrange it that they should come into his office one after the other he felt that he and he went out there to see them you know one i think was catherine's first and then pedro vice versa and he did notice that there was a look you know they pass between themselves but nothing else and um and after they left um you know it seemed like dr weiss's plan to bring them together was not going to work and he wasn't going to do anything to push it along and then it turns out that they perchance happened to be at the airport going to going to uh at the same time to uh to a certain location had not did not plan it of course um and then they because they had seen each other in his dr weiss's office they decided to take seats next to each other and their relations began and the the bottom line is that they did get together dr white says they you know lived happily ever after again you could have a soulmate and not live happily ever after um but this is a wonderful story that dr y says you see the idea of a reincarnation now you don't have to believe this dr weiss does and there are a lot of things that dr weiss has so these are types of things called evidence i don't like to say proofs