Jim Elvidge | Digital Consciousness, Decoding Reality, & Unpacking The Paranormal

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00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times From 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a fresh conversation I'm Greg Carlwood These are the Hireside Chats. It's the end of the world as we know it, Hireside Chatters! And I feel fine... From sunny San Diego, I'm Greg Carlwood and i'm still surprised by how little attention we give to the experience of life and how weird is that were even here Any of us are exhausted by demanding jobs frustrated with rush hour traffic or addicted to being entertained and deeper questions about this overall experience often times just go untouched

01:56 Well, when the mainstream academic and scientific communities ignore clues like out-of-body experience near death experience remote viewing telepathy and other side research It's hard to get much further down the road to understanding consciousness or what we even are Maybe they want it this way. The quarantine around entheogens and the lack of any sort of deep spirituality might suggest so, and sure you're free to meditate as much as you want if you can somehow offload the stress imposed by our society within the system in the shallow razzle dazzle digital screens Our culture does not make it easy And many of us probably struggle to cite even just a few examples of our friends and family that we think have evolved beyond the basics...and thats saying something

02:40 But here to say a lot more, blow open the doors of perception and get those rusty mental wheels turning is returning guest Jim Elvidge. Jim was kind enough to join me all the way back in 2013 for THC's 80th show and again for our 100th episode special to talk about the very interesting research on reality that he did in his book The Universe Solved And now we sit down to talk about his latest book, a follow-up of sorts called Digital Consciousness A Transformative Vision. In it he lays out all the details for the things he's decoded under reality's hood and seeks to answer all the big questions Why are we here? What's the deal with death dreaming and drug trips? What's behind paranormal experiences? How do we explain the Mandela effect?

03:27 If you don't recall, Jim is an electrical engineer by trade with years of research into consciousness quantum mechanics eastern philosophy information theory and artificial intelligence which puts him in prime position to be the guy who knows the things. So let's unpack Pandora's box the universe solver and decoder of digital consciousness Jim my man welcome back to The Higher Side Oh my gosh, thank you so much Greg. Really nice intro and I'm kind of humbled by that. I am certainly not an expert in any of those areas but I do like connecting the dots and sometimes people focus on a very narrow area and then they miss the bigger picture and maybe that's what I bring to the table in terms of some of these books or some of these ideas. Awesome to be on your show again! Always love being here

04:14 Thank you, man. I'm psyched to be doing this too hard to believe it's been six years. I definitely think about that last show I still get the occasional email asking when you might be back and I really enjoyed this latest book Honestly, I was glad to see you wrote it But I saw digital consciousness and thought, ah okay. I get it simulation theory holographic universe the VR analogy of life and it took me a little while to really crack it open but I'm glad I did because you cover so much more than that and its going on my shelf next to Dr Dean Radin's Magic is Real because you include study after study of all these strange aspects and features of consciousness You include the Russell Targ SRI research

04:57 plenty of studies on near-death experience and out of body experience, insights from mystic yogis talking about aspects of the other side. And I've always thought that these stranger qualities of life are where the clues really are. You learn the parameters of something by reflecting on the anomalous things on the edges not the mundane qualities in the middle and if a person's theory of everything just dismisses those aspects then it doesn't work and I'm sure you'd agree with that right? Yeah absolutely, i think all of the interesting things are on the edges. In your intro you talked about how we don't have time to meditate our culture doesn't make it easy and its so true were in this cycle of work and entertainment

05:43 Sleep and there's not much time for anything else myself I used to meditate and I got pretty good at it. I got to the point where I could have some out-of-body experiences I could just close my eyes start meditating and feel myself slip into a different space, and I lost it I lost it over the last few years just because of you know being busy And I really want to get back into that because that is where the interesting stuff Is that's where the clues are? And it's so easy to just kind of stay in the mainstream, believe what you see and hear and read. But then when you get on the edge like he said there is stuff that just doesn't fit. It's that stuff I think is clues as to what its all about

06:23 Indeed, and it seems that you've gone deeper than most even if you lost it. I mean even a sliver is further than a lot of us get and I know you've dealt with the maybe unintended ideas that digital consciousness invokes It sounds kind of cold and mechanical And I almost thought you were gonna be writing about the transhumanistic goal of transferring consciousness to a hard drive and thankfully it's not that at all But I'm sure I'm not the first one to think that And let's correct that notion and maybe you can flesh out some of the groundwork we need to understand this overall perspective, and why you still find digital to be the best term despite it being a bit problematic.

07:04 Yeah, good points. I mean when coming up with the name for the book the first book universe solved I mean it's kind of hard to beat that yeah And I didn't want to just be universe all two or return of universe solved or something like that you know and The two key areas is of the research that I've done in the ideas that lead to some of these conclusions are the nature of reality our apparent reality, is it digital or is it continuous or analog? And then the nature of consciousness. So those two things together and I do believe probably deep down our apparent reality at least as digital and I believe that the underlying reality probably is as well but

07:46 But every word that we use comes with so much baggage and so much connotation. You say the word God, people immediately visualize a guy in the clouds with big white beard. If you say the word digital people immediately think of laptops and iPhones and cold calculating computational systems But it doesn't have to be that way. Movies, pictures of flowers, art that's been reproduced can evoke beautiful emotions in people even though they've been digitized and we're talking about layers beneath

08:22 our apparent awareness that's so far down. You know, in other words we're dealing with atoms and things like that and subatomic particles and then oh I don't know maybe strings or whatever it is getting even further down than that it appears to me that the you know fundamental construct of reality is information and information is digital but it doesn't change anything in terms of how warm our reality seems to be, it's just the way that it is presented to us. And then consciousness again so much has been done talked about in terms of consciousness emanating from the brain and I don't believe that for that reason there are more two realities, we live in a virtual reality most likely

09:11 There's much more to it than the apparent, you know reductionist view of the materialists. And I think that the transhuman movement with some exceptions, and there are some people who are allowing for the virtual experience as well but a lot of the transhumanists are actually materialists and they think that The only way to attain immortality is to upload your consciousness to something that lives longer than organic Humans do and I don't think that's true at all. I think we're already immortal because I believe we reincarnate so the whole premise behind H plus and life extension and transhumanism is questionable to me

09:54 Mm-hmm. Yes, and you can simply just look at all digital media movies television video games we see a final product but we know that it comes from somewhere else and What it really is Is just a signal its data Its true nature is not what we're looking at and that's kind of the point right? Yeah Absolutely even the way the brain works You know The Brain is Just signals in those signals are again you know, instance of firings that are effectively binary in a way. Did this neuron fire? Or did this synapse fire? Did it not fire? You know and what's the network of patterns that go on there so The way we experience everything, you know does have a lot of digital nature to it So if the word digital bothers people call us something else call it information based or call it, you know non-continuous for something like that so

10:52 I wouldn't be afraid of the term digital consciousness in terms of like uploading consciousness or something like that. It's really just combining two concepts that our consciousness is separate from the brain and deep down reality is probably information based, and when there are results of those ideas actually turn out to be pretty astounding Indeed, and you kind of just touched on a few of them but in the book you have four tenets or principles of digital consciousness in this overall theory. Can you tell us about those? How do they break down? Sure so the first one is that consciousness is fundamental and primary again like we talked about before The use of words when people say consciousness they think oh it's when I'm awake You know I'm unconscious when I'm asleep

11:40 I'm talking about something different and it's not even self-awareness. It's the deeper sea existence that we have. So consciousness is sort of fundamental to that and it's not just an artifact of the complexity of the brain nobody can figure out how to make something so complex that is suddenly become self-aware unconscious I don't believe that it can be done, I think it's possible that we may at some point say okay this silicon based construct here is complex enough to serve as a vehicle for my consciousness and if I have way to, you know occupy that, that's cool but it still the free will of my consciousness make that decision. It is not that it will come automatically out of complexity of that system so I think its fundamental to universe and again universe is another word we think in universe what we see when look up at sky

12:43 But when I say universe, I mean all that there is. The deeper underlying reality plus this probably virtual reality that we live in so it's fundamental to the deeper reality and its more like the source of our experience or reality itself So thats the first thing, consciousness is fundamental and primary The second tenet is that matters information and the forces or rules about how this information interacts with each other. And we can, I'm sure we'll dive deep into that as well

13:20 The third item is the idea that the reality that we experience is somewhat illusory. And you can use the word simulation, another word that comes along with a lot of baggage but it's the most common word that's used but you know illusory means there's something else deeper than that, that its not the real reality that we think it is other people will use the word virtual because it's separated from the deeper reality so and there is a purpose to that, it's the reality that we experience this apparent physical reality. It's designed for us to learn and evolve our consciousness and when I say designed I don't mean necessarily by

14:02 You know an ET physicist or by a god or whatever it could have evolved to be designed like self evolution That is something that you know, it's still hard to determine The fourth tenet. Is that the system itself? is digital the deeper system consists of a minimum all of the individual consciousnesses yours mine everybody we see animals and that's whatever plus this apparent physical reality that i call learning lab just kind of construct within that deeper system

14:42 and that it's driven by a fundamental rule of continuous improvement. So, it is constantly trying to get better to elevate itself And, you know we can go into more detail on this point too but I think the way that it makes sense to elevate itself is to say I'm going to separate myself into these individuated consciousnesses and have them elevate themselves. You know its a lot easier to do that than force the entire system to be elevated in some way so thats why are actually all connected. You know, what the ancient mystics said were all connected

15:22 that's why we're quote part of God if you want to use that word and yet we are individuated in that we can act independently each other so it ties that whole idea together. So those are the four basic ideas I love it man, and you refer to reality as learning lab this system were in and we've heard that earth is a school before but your for this has all matter galaxies everything physical and We should think of it as a virtual reality software program running on the All That Is system. I know computer analogies for reality can get a bit tired, but when you have a virtual reality room It has physics coded in and it has a hardness to objects you encounter. It's not real But you can't run your character through a wall or anything there are still rules but what it is is ultimately code or information as you've been saying

16:16 which is how we should look at the material world, right? It's basically just data at its core and most things are empty. Yeah exactly and I think analogies are important it can be you know not perfect to use analogy for something somebody will say oh well that doesn't necessarily translate to what were experiencing or whatever but it's really a good tool learning pool it's a good cool to kind of appreciate concepts So the analogy of the virtual reality that is created by some programmer is a good one. It's a good analogy for the reality that we live in, you know? One example is as you say if you're like in a virtual space that has been programmed by some individual who has created this fantasy world something like one of these massively multiplayer online role-playing games

17:10 You're in that space and it has a bunch of rules in terms of how things work if I pick up an object in this case, throw it is going to follow a particular trajectory and usually those rules are consistent so everybody experiences the same kind of rules now imagine. we were all in that space experiencing these rules and we said, and then we had no idea that we were in a virtual reality like let's say our minds were set aside for a moment. Our memories were archived or something like that when we found ourselves in this virtual space and that's all we knew

17:51 We would start exploring that. And we would say, well you know it's kind of odd that this thing falls to the ground at the same speed as something else I drop even though they're different weights or... You know what I mean? We'd start investigating and come up with science and equations for things. Those equations would map to actual equations encoded in software So I think that's exactly what we've done. We have equations that are encoded into the way our reality works and we're discovering those now as we're getting deeper and deeper, we're starting to hit the edges of things that are giving us an indication there is more to it than a materialistic world. And that's where things have gotten really interesting

18:39 Mm-hmm. And this is good context for how you explain paranormal encounters and the strange things people seem to see every so often aliens Bigfoot Mantids Mothmen these sorts of things the mainstream model just says no it's impossible But how do they fold into your overall ideas sure and let me just go back a couple hundred years here there was a time in the 1800s when People were experiencing something that was outside of the accepted view of reality and what that was, you know rocks falling from the sky. Meteorites so when

19:21 particles or large rocks or something from interstellar space come into our atmosphere. If they're small enough, they just burn up and then it's this streak across the sky that we call a meteor but if they're big enough, they get hot—they'll show like a trail and a tail but burn up entirely and then it'll land in the ground like the one that landed in Russia in the early 1900s. Some of them are small, some are huge size of a bus so might be just little pebbles or whatever but people have seen these things and the scientists in the 1800's were saying no impossible you know rocks can't fall out of this guy this doesn't happen you people are crackpots and this is paranormal

20:04 there's no explanation for it. Well, the only reason they were calling it paranormal is because at that time they didn't have an explanation for it. Now they do and so now its normal. So I think that You know, we're in a state where that we have things that we categorize as normal and things that we categorized as paranormal. Anything that we call paranormal is something that is not easily repeatable like these rocks falling from the sky you couldn't conjure that up you can say well let's go out tonight and record a rock falling from the sky and pick it up and it wouldn't happen! It just happens very infrequently

20:45 So I think some of the paranormal things that occur in our reality now are occurring according to rules of the way our reality is formed, but they're not in the subset of rules or equations that constitutes known science. And that's okay! For example if you're standing at a street corner and a car goes by and you both look at that car say that as a blue Toyota Corolla that consensus that people have in how our reality works is part of what makes it feel hard and certain. You know the fact that everybody sees the same thing pretty much now there have been some studies that show that people see different things and even

21:33 At the atomic level, two different observers can observe completely different realities in a very scientific rigorous scientific setting which tells you that there is no real true physical underlying reality. That's a different topic we'll probably get into later but my point is this lack of consensus can be the source of some of the paranormal confusion. Well, I experienced a ghost and somebody said well I was there and didn't experience it so therefore the person who experienced it we say is crazy but that doesn't mean all that is is just an experience everything that we experience is just that its just subjective experience thats processed by our consciousness

22:19 So when people experience an abduction or something odd that they're seeing, you can't really discount that. Now you could discount it sure if one person in the world has claimed abduction and nobody else has I would question that but when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands have a kind of common experience i'd say there's something going on there is just not something that can be explained with our Set of scientific rules and equations. Mm-hmm I like the explanation, I mean just to use the video game analogy again if you make a program or a coded reality And it has its rules of physics

22:59 You could still have other scripts running in that environment that have different rules. If you play a video game and you get to level 10, maybe everything is felt mundane up to that point and then suddenly there's a flaming sword floating in the sky It's still in the game it just defies the physics up to the point which you've gotten so To me it just makes a lot of sense its really not hard to conceive of that there are some rare programs in the environment like the matrix and the maravich being in charge of all the wolf men and vampires there kind of, programs that have been decommissioned in a sense or something to that effect yeah i think thats really good way to put it another way could be say that.

23:44 As an analogy again, I'm not saying this is the way it actually works but as an analogy if you're a character in the game and you have greater than 50 spiritual points then now your Open to seeing certain things that people who have less than fifty spiritual points can see or it could be more like Everybody can see these things that fall outside of the normal set of rules, but they fall on kind of a bell curve of probabilities. And some people tend to see them more than other people that probability can be easily programmed by the system into each character's experience It is not hard to do

24:26 Yes, and as you've said you're trying to add clarity and completeness to the overall digital consciousness case in the book. But a lot of these ideas have been known I mentioned your study of Eastern philosophy in the intro how big a factor has that been? How much inspiration did you get from Eastern philosophy or even ancient long-gone civilizations that seem to have a better understanding than our big brain mainstream thinkers have today Actually a lot and honestly, I've been influenced quite a bit by my girlfriend who is you know She was brought up in or born in India. She was kind of steeped in Eastern philosophy understands it a lot better And you know she reads my book and says You know In the Western world people are gonna be kind of like arguing about this but in the Eastern world It's all makes sense

25:22 It's basically what we've been talking about for millennia. So, you know I think the idea behind this is that it's a mistake to discount the learnings of ancient cultures because they weren't following a rigorous scientific method and those learnings have some commonalities here again i'm thinking kind of a little bit in terms of statistics if I look at, say 20 different cultures and they all have a completely different way of looking at reality. Then i'm going to tend to believe that none of them are right but if I look at 20 different cultures it came from different parts of the world, different time frames and most likely didn't have a whole lot of influence on each other

26:14 And they came up with some very common ideas. We're going to take those ideas a little more seriously or maybe a lot more seriously, especially when you realize that the reason some of these ideas came about had to do with spiritual and mystical experiences that people had And I've done enough research on this that i feel that these are real things. It's not like some strange storm in your brain that makes you feel like you're having such and such an experience, it's more real than that! And it's real because sometimes they corroborate real things... Like an out-of-body experience for example. You can corroborate that with the actual objects that exist when you see them out of body

27:02 These mystical experiences that people have, they're kind of the source of where a lot of religions come from. Now man takes the religions and throws a bunch of dogma on top of it and tries to control people via that religion but the spirit of the religion, the pure spirit of the religion when you get back to that they're all really similar They talk about reincarnation, they talk about interconnectedness. You know being part of him or God or whoever talking about Hinduism Buddhism Sikhism They talk about virtual realities Maya. It's an ancient Sanskrit word that means illusion it was a central theme in both Hinduism and Sikh ism according to the ancient text the human experience is like an interplay between eternal consciousness and Maya The temporary illusory world well, that's our incarnation so if the temporary illusory world is just the

28:02 the incarnation that we have, but there's really an eternal consciousness to us. That sounds very similar to the idea that our apparent physical reality is illusory and again physicists are coming up with this conclusion as well so all of these things they fit really really well you know, the idea of consciousness. In Hinduism the word Brahman is considered to be the ultimate reality of the universe and its meanings described as something that sort of translates to bliss-consciousness being And so again they came up with the same ideas What I'm coming to the conclusion here isn't necessarily all that new It's just new in the context of the Western world

28:51 And fortunately, it's been supported by a lot of the research that's gone on in the western world as well. For sure yeah great points! A phrase that came up recently on the show was decolonize your thinking because sometimes within the Western bubble we forget that other cultures around the world might be further down the path of understanding than we are or at least on equal footing with us and You write that there are a few possibilities as to how it all began, but you lean towards the idea that our reality was not necessarily created by some particular conscious entity but rather has been evolving according to some sort of fundamental evolutionary law from the very beginning. And then later in the book you mention, As soon as one door closes another one opens... It's almost if the universe wants to be understood

29:43 And I find that pretty provocative. Maybe you could talk to us about how these two aspects relate, or what's driving this thing? And is synchronicity some sort of breadcrumb-laying subprogram that tries to unfold the story for us if we play along? Yeah, I think it is and... ...and I can't certainly take credit for the concept of fundamental continuous improvement. I give Tom Campbell a lot of credit for that one It's possible that somebody out there created the reality we're talking about and we're in this virtual space, and maybe we do reincarnate as it appears that we do. But it doesn't evolve in any way. However that just strikes me as being kind of pointless especially

30:32 Again, when you look at the Eastern mystics who gave a purpose to and talked about a purpose as did Jesus and other sources of religions You know purpose to our existence To love to serve to evolve in that way Tom Campbell talks about it as improving the quality of consciousness and The eastern religions talk about the idea of karma and how what you've learned in this incarnation will affect what you do next time so next time around maybe You know, you need to learn to be more patient or you need to learn humility Or whatever that thing is. Why would you be learning these things if it wasn't to improve your consciousness in some way? So there seems to be this underlying driving need to continuously improve and It all kind of fits together if you think of a system that starts

31:29 at a very kind of low state and then creates over time, evolves over time to be complex enough to be subdivided into individual consciousnesses. And then beyond that like using an analogy in the matrix where the architect created different matrices and you know finding the one that fits right so the reality we're in now is something that is working pretty well for us it's a good place for us to interact with others learn these things that we need to learn can't necessarily do them in kind of ethereal consciousness space because we know what what is there would be like no why don't I need to anything different

32:18 but when you're grounded in something that seems physical and seems, let's say permanent in a way like our physical reality. It seems like we have an end point or going to die so there is a little bit of urgency to take our experiences seriously that provides a good framework for us to learn. And so, I think that's good evidence for the idea that the underlying construct is continually improving. Yeah i think that's a good explanation and it definitely jives with the couple of weird experiences I've had with things. That seem to be maybe on the other side where they have alluded to the value of life is that you get to experience what chocolate tastes like or what love is like but, it does sort of seem like all this just to

33:17 Teach us to love each other and be nice to each other i mean is this the most effective way it seems pretty big epic. And over the top to get that message through. Yeah doesn't use an analogy in the book of a heat lamp another analogy could be you want to run for president or run for office something like that how do you get people behind you so we'll use that one let's say, I'm a nobody and I want to run for office in the country that has 300 million people. How am I going to do that? I'm going to go knock on doors, it'll take thousands and thousands of years for me to knock on every door and convince every single person that they should vote for me or at least 50% of the people." Obviously impractical. Instead what I do is create a network. Create a network of people who believe in me who go knock on doors or maybe several levels of that network hierarchy of sorts

34:13 which starts looking like a political organization, which is exactly why we do it that way. That's the analogy in order for something big to happen you have to break things up and give those things the self-organization and empowerment to go forward and evolve in their own way I think that what you want to use the word God or all there is The system, that's what it did. It broke itself up into little pieces and said okay each one of you pieces is going to evolve in some way Is it gonna happen fast? I mean...I don't know..I don't learn lessons all that fast sometimes Sometimes if it takes me hit over the head ten times before I get something I have to read a book ten times before I get the concept

34:59 I think change is naturally difficult for us, for our consciousness and so it is going to take some time for us to evolve. Is there an end to it? Not sure! That's getting pretty far out there but we're certainly not at an endpoint now and there are plenty of room for people to evolve in terms how they view each other or their place on the world Well cheers to that and absolutely we hear the lesson, we intellectualize the lesson of love and unity and being kind to each other but do we really live it? I don't know. Right And uh that was going to be my next question though is how do you conceptualize our graduation what happens when we do get the message and spend a lifetime actually living it

35:50 Well, I'm not sure that means we've learned everything we need to learn. So maybe we've really devoted our lives to service of other people or animals and something like that and maybe we got that and it's really good but were still not very humble people or were still you know not seeing something else Our next incarnation may evolve us even further You know this a lot of this is a little bit speculative. I mean or you could say a lot speculative certainly it matches again what the Eastern mystic says and it also matches the near-death experiences that people around the world have and sometimes out-of-body experiences, you know It matches the message that they receive so

36:39 Again, because of the statistical commonality of this I feel like there's something significant there that there is this evolution of consciousness. That's going on it just makes more sense to me now as far as an end point though you asked about that and some Some religions believe that you achieve some state of Nirvana And your goal is to get out of this constant cycle of suffering as the Buddhists would say You know other experiences that people have had who have done more astral traveling or whatever. And I take some of these somewhat seriously, especially when they're pretty credible or their data is backed up by common experiences with other people are again corroborating evidence. What some of those folks have said is that

37:27 There are different roles. Some consciousnesses may have a role where they incarnate, they constantly evolve. Others may have a role where they help people find a path when they're outside of the cycle of suffering so other people or other consciousnesses may never incarnate at all. So I think The scope of that is definitely pretty speculative, but it's kind of interesting to consider that we might not all be going through the exact same path of continual reincarnation and ultimately achieving Nirvana. It could be something different. Right yeah these are the things that are the toughest to know pretty much impossible from our vantage point inside the system but

38:12 maybe our incubator isn't the only one. You know, we might just move on to Learning Lab 2.0 for advanced students! That could be too... When we have some evidence for that I'll write another book For sure and i wanted to get deeper into some of this stuff in your Evidence for Consciousness chapter because it's so rapid fire and full of the sort of things We love around here-the anomalous stuff that's clearly explainable in your digital consciousness model. What might be a personal favorite of yours when it comes to these things on the edges and what they can tell us? You know, on the consciousness side I think my personal favorite really has to do with quantum mechanics

38:55 The studies that are going on these days, and a lot of them are involved with an experiment called the Double Slit Experiment. They're just mind-blowing! And some of the results indicate things like reverse causality. In other words something happens after or before the stimulus that should cause it to happen. These have been published, peer reviewed, analyzed A guy named Anton Zeilinger in Austria is very much on the cutting edge of this kind of research.

39:34 you know, objective reality simply doesn't exist and that they've determined that to 80 orders of magnitude of certainty which is way beyond what most science considers certain. I think they might consider, you know 5-9s or 99.999% sure but the other 0.001 percent could be due to chance or some experimental error or something like that we'll still consider it certainty, you know pretty much fact. But the results of these quantum experiments that show that there are different realities, that objective reality doesn't exist, that locality doesn't exist... These kind of things tell us we're in a virtual world So that's actually my favorite one And then on the completely opposite side of spectrum You've got past life experiences

40:28 psychic phenomena, out-of-body experiences things like that and near death experiences that there have been a lot of studies on. And one of those studies also line up a lot of common aspects of those experiences that indicate we're in the virtual world Yes there's some really funky stuff going on in quantum mechanics and the idea of retro causality is so interesting to me I think about that all the time in my own life. And where am now it's like did I back cast some of those ideals and experiences, get me here just works out in such a nice

41:07 Story nice to sing little story you'd see it from hollywood and its archetypal in a sense and so i do wonder sometimes if maybe even when i'm fifty years old i'll have even more insight to the prospect of. Possibly things in two decades in the future had affect today is very strange but we think about life that way, it does sort of inspire you to think deeper about it i think yeah definitely so you know, there are two aspects to this retrocausality idea. One is at the quantum level and they've shown that that really does exist you know that you can kind of reverse the result of an experiment after the fact That's been shown over and over again Then people will say okay well We're in a macroscopic world we're not in a quantum world but that's not really true because even macroscopic objects You know they've shown that

42:03 atoms and molecules, and things that are getting more and more macroscopic start following the same quantum anomalies that the subatomic particles did. The only reason we can't see it is because the measurement equipment is not sophisticated enough for us to see a perturbation in a macroscopic level But then if you, you know kind of step up a level and say okay what about our subjective experience could there be something like retro causality in our subjective experience? Well I don't know. I mean i read all the time about people and I've known people who have had hunches that were so powerful to them that they've never had it before in their lives You know I should slow down before I go into this intersection or something like that

42:53 the typical skeptic argument is that, oh well they received some kind of subliminal indications that there was about to be an accident that happened. And that makes some sense except when you start reading about some of these it's impossible given the time frame and given the situation they're in in a lot of cases it's impossible for them to have received anything indicating something was about to happen heartfelt talking about one time when he just had he was compelled to walk over to his window and look out the door because He knew something was going to happen to his car And as he's standing there staring at the street, you know a car came down the road and smashed into his car so these kind of things indicate some You know precognitive

43:42 experience and what would explain that? I mean there's nothing really in science that explains that, but there is definitely something in this simulation idea that explains that. If we're running a simulation, we could theoretically say let's run a bunch of simulations on what could be happening right now based on the current state of the world and where the branches that they all go off on, based on the free will of all the people involved. And wow! A whole bunch of these are indicating that something is probably going to happen I better look out for that." So you see what i mean? There there's an explanation for precognition in a simulation world that actually makes sense

44:24 Yeah, weird science indeed. And I thought this was interesting but Dr Kenneth Ring professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut wrote a book called Mindsight and investigated 31 blind people who had near-death experiences Most reported visual experiences unlike anything i've ever had yet, why people don't have visual dreams and that's just a curious thing but what is the say to you. Yeah me what it says to me is there's a difference between dream and a.

45:01 near-death experience, but I think that there's like a continuum of these kind of experiences. So a lot of our dreams probably have to do with the fact that you know as our control center of our consciousness slips away when we go to sleep We are able to kind of fantasize or play out various things still in the reality that were in and so that is consistent with the idea Blind people don't tend to have these visual experiences when they dream. If they're congenitally blind, they never experience the idea of a visual experience However if they have near-death experience They have to be going somewhere else They can't just in their head and receive

45:47 a visual experience, it has to be something else. So to me it says that there's something more significant about an NDE than just something that is coming from your brain Yeah, yeah. There's definitely clues there and that's exactly the kind of science I think we should be doing And we know about insights from near-death experience but what about shared death experiences? I don't even know that I've ever heard this term before But it covers a lot of strange things that people who are spending time with others at the moment of their death apparently experience sometimes

46:24 What's this about? Apparently it covers mist at death, beautiful music a change in the geometry of the room feeling a strong pull upwards on the body sharing an out-of-body experience seeing a mystical light co-living the life review of a dying person being greeted by the beings of light and encountering heavenly realms and a boundary in that realm. That's the list you give in the book but how How do we fold these in to increase our understanding? Yeah, sure. I mean one of the arguments against the idea of really getting out of your body and a near-death experience is that what a lot of material scientists will say is you're losing oxygen as oxygen deprivation it's causing these kind of hallucinatory things you know closing down of your field of vision is what makes it look like you're going through a tunnel and seeing a light at the end

47:21 So that's the common argument. Unfortunately, when you start looking at different categories of experiences it shoots holes in that argument One way to shoot a hole on is to say that when people aren't having near-death experience but losing and having an oxygen deprivation to their brain they don't see these things these mystical realms deceased ancestors, these ideas of seeing a point where if they cross they can't come back. These are common experiences in the near-death experiences but fighter pilots who hit 6Gs and lose oxygen to the brain don't have those kind of experiences or people who have been in centrifuges or something like that where you've lost oxygen into their brain they do not have near death experiences

48:09 So that argues against that idea. The other way to argue against the idea is people who have a similar experience and have never had any kind of oxygen deprivation because they're not dying. So you're sitting next to somebody who is passing away and you experience the same thing that they are experiencing, you experiencing aspects of this near-death experience like the deathbed visions or seeing deceased individuals seeing a light

48:44 having the feeling, the deep feeling of being connected to something bigger. People sometimes have these when they're in proximity of somebody who is passing away and there's no explanation for that in terms of oxygen deprivation so it rules that scientific explanation out And that's what I think the significance of those studies are. Another thing is, you know children... You know one of the arguments has been that reason people see deceased individuals is because a wishful thinking That's who they want to see. They want to see their grandparents who passed away or something like that But children are also seeing deceased people they didn't even know very well

49:28 And nobody ever seems to see in a near-death experience, nobody seems to see people who are currently alive. That's a very strange anomaly Absolutely absolutely and also speaks to why some people who dabble in magic or some indigenous cultures they will tell you to get right with your ancestors to pay attention too. The generations that came before you and maybe it's for this very reason so you can recognize friendly faces on the other side but it does go back to that thing we talked about about the universe, Wanting to be understood it's kinda like we have these near-death experiences and then we find some way to dismiss them in the universe is okay so you're not gonna take that clue let me. Provide it to people who are undergoing the actual death experience and see how you deal with that and it just fits yeah I mean again think of it as a analogy in a video game if your inner video game,

50:25 shooting monsters and doing whatever it is that you do over and over again, it gets pretty boring. And you'll move on to a different game with a different scenario but if the creators of that game or let's say its neural network reinvents itself periodically They keep on adding Easter eggs into it or new paths for exploration. Oh, here's an island that we didn't find before! Here is a kind of monster that we never saw before... It keeps things interesting and it keeps people learning interacting evolving their minds And that seems to be what happens in our reality. It happens as science all the time

51:04 People back, I think it was Mickelson said in the late 1800s. We've discovered everything we need to discover in science There's nothing more to discover other than getting a few more decimal points of accuracy and our measurements and then boom along comes relativity and quantum mechanics And you know that just kind of blew the doors off of that idea and over time? we always Learn more and we have to realize how much we don't know We always think we know most everything and there's a little bit more to discover But that's not the case, you know time immemorial There's been more than we don't understand then. I'm sure you've seen that pie chart that shows

51:48 this tiny little sliver of things that you know, and then there's another slightly bigger sliver of things that you know you don't know. And then there is a huge part in the pie chart that says things you don't know you don't know. I think that is how our reality is so yeah the system universe God all that there is whatever you want to call it to keep things evolving has to be adding these aspects to make us learn and discover more I agree i agree and i think it was either poppy bush or rumsfeld who gave that known unknown speech and a lot of people just scratch their head but this is exactly what that kind of referred to me not be seen in more political context but it is interesting.

52:35 I wanted to ask you a little bit about manifestation too, because this is clearly a thing that is real and any model would have to fold it in. Of course just the basic understanding that matter is derived from mind rather than the other way around and that matter is mostly empty space those things work to kind of demystify this manifestation thing but how do you try to understand it and explain the mechanisms behind it? Tell me what you mean by manifestations The idea that we can kind of create our reality that you do these kind of. Mental cycling like bill banks work where are u uh take ten images of things you want and use cycle in your mind's eye all the time and then, you find further down the line that some of these things start to pop into your life okay yeah no i

53:25 I didn't know if you were talking about like manifestation of physical objects and things like that, but no. To me if you accept the premise that our fundamental fundamental reality is soft, that we have free will and that we're working with a construct that is flexible. Then that opens the possibility of our intent influencing that doesn't it? I mean if it was fixed and deterministic in you know the way some people still think as idea super determinism that everything has already been predetermined and we're just going along for the ride our consciousness just appears to be... It appears

54:03 We're just following the patterns of particles in our brains and so forth. Unless you believe that, you have to believe that there's something softer to the underlying construct and therefore if it is soft – certainly software information is – you can modify it. I think Tom Campbell also had a good analogy here You can't modify something that a whole lot of people are counting on. So for example, let's say I want the stock market to go up tomorrow by 10 points or 100 points so that i can make a lot of money but there is lots of other conscious intent out there that wants it to go down because they're selling short. So you cant force something buy yourself to happen however if theres not

54:52 One of the aspects that might make it more possible to manifest is the fact that you are the only one who's going to get value out of it. So things that are very personal to you like becoming a better tennis player or something like that There's no competing intent against that. Therefore, there is probably more likely that you can make that happen and you can kind of mold the underlying construct to make that work so that's one thing another thing is how far away it? I want to be a better tennis player tomorrow That's probably not going to happen but if I wanted over longer period time It makes sense or let say

55:34 I've gotten a test that have early stage of cancer or something. If i want that eradicated Within seconds I might not be able to do that but through meditation through manifestation Through visualization it seems like I can have an influence on that over time. So given time and given the lack of competing intent, I think these things are possible which is what explains the placebo effect what explains power positive thinking Visualization the secret all of that kind of stuff

56:10 Yeah i'm curious do you ever think about this in the context of your own journey because if i think back six years ago i just started a podcast you had just written a book and. Through those actions we cultivated an audience let's say more people knew of your name after they read your book and more people knew my name after they heard my show. And then maybe there is a bit of the snowball effect because when i read a book or see something that I like in media, i want it to do well i want to improve and its almost as like if you can gather some type of audience and they like what you do and you can attract more consciousness is to. Hoping that your story progresses in you have successes i mean maybe that is kind of how it works in the trajectory of a person's career or whatever could be affected by just that yeah absolutely i mean we're all know eight billion others are however many there aren't right now

57:14 And again, assuming that we all have free will. There could be some zombies walking around out there I don't know if you want to go that far but assuming we all have free will and individuated consciousness We've got this amazingly complex set of intense and desires in things that all work together and the system has to be incredibly complex, make sense of it all you can kind of watch it all out nobody gets anything they want or it could be sort of random and say everybody get a couple things. They want everyone smile but is much more nuanced and much more complex than that so

57:56 When people have a strong will to do something and believe in it, you know i think that's the best force that makes it manifest that makes it happen you believed in your podcast you got a little bit of feedback it kept you believing. You know any room from there and now its influencing other people so it's taken off My first book was a surprise to me that it did as well as it did and got us many sort of adherence and people talking about things. Between that, Tom Campbell's book and some things that Brian – I can't remember the last name from New Zealand had written

58:37 Nick prosterum, you know there's only a few of us ten years ago that we're writing about this kind of stuff now You see articles in Newsweek and Science Today and basically every periodical about the possibility of stimulation And a lot of universities are having digital philosophy departments now, and it's just totally taken off. Was it because of us or was it because of the Wachowski brothers movie? Or was it because of Philip K Dick's ideas 30 years ago? It's really hard to say I don't think anybody should ever take credit for any of it but you know its this complex confluence of things that has really changed the way we look at things

59:18 Mm-hmm. I definitely don't mean to bore people with a conversation about how well we're doing, but if we're trying to find something that people can use in their own lives it's kind of a jailbreak in the sense that maybe we walked into as say independent media figures broadly because compare that journey to the journey of someone in middle management at Verizon. How many people are concentrating on your success versus how many people in that microcosm actually don't want your success they want your job they want that promotion over you think about the resistance to climbing a corporate ladder as opposed to creating something of your own

1:00:05 other people are enjoying and no one can take my place, no one can write the book for you. So that's kind of moot but people if they enjoy what you're doing and your I guess living your true will to use a cliche phrase maybe that amplifies everything because it definitely... You can see the dichotomy of the corporate world in how all these mechanisms would be completely out of whack Yeah and interesting you bring that up my role in the corporate world is to fight against those kinds of ideas, play against the competition for resources teaching managers how to empower software developers teams.

1:00:44 And it's there is huge resistance to it and the resistance of these ideas because of fear you know if im a manager like he said at verizon, my value in being smart and being experienced and telling people what to do you suddenly tell me that I can't tell people what to do that i have to power them. Well, that just takes away part of what I used to do. Now what do I do? And showing them a path that brings out the best in people is a challenging thing especially when you've spent 30 years living in a scientific management paradigm

1:01:26 bureaucratic structures, hierarchical management and things like that. I could go on and on about this but we've lived that because our society had the Industrial Revolution and there was a period of time where factories were the predominant sources of employment for people. Well factories are very mechanistic kinds of places. This person did that, it passed on to this person and assembly lines or everybody had a well-defined role and it kind of made sense that maybe there were some management structures put in place to bring out the most efficiency of that organization but that's not what companies are now. Companies are now trying to innovate and they're full of creative people and people who are thinking freely and trying to collaborate together

1:02:11 And you can't use the old ways of managing structures and factories on the new companies. And so that's a huge change that's happening in our corporate world. Well, it's a noble goal you have for sure! I definitely find it harder to change a corrupt system than it is to just step out of it but obviously we can't do that all the time but I would just say to people, i guess if we understand these mechanisms try to arrange your life so that they work for you rather than constantly battling upstream against the will and manifestation of people in a competitive environment. People have a lot of fear about taking a leap to doing something that is maybe a dream of theirs hopefully this kind of makes it a little bit of a softer landing for people...I mean..i don't know i'm intrigued by it

1:03:06 Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Alan Watt had a speech once – there are some videos you can find on YouTube about – and I think the title is something like what would you do if money were no object? And it's really very inspiring. It's the idea that we build a wall around our possibilities because we think we have to pay our mortgage, we have to pay our bills, we have to live well, we have to do all these kinds of things It's human nature to spend what you have, so we always feel like we're extremely tight. Most people do anyway but he is saying if you follow your passion, you will find a way to make that your life. I've known people who had passion about art or music or animals or whatever it is and

1:03:58 If they follow that, they find a place and it actually ends up working out and they're very happy. So the thought that you have to be in the rat race and be disappointed with your job and your career aspirations is not necessarily the case. We feel like we have to compete for all of these resources – that we have to compete for jobs, we have to compete for homes, we have to compete for spouses if you You take the things that we're talking about today and the things in my book at more than face value you realize there's a bigger purpose is a bigger picture to it and then there's no such thing as competition it's not necessary your goal in your life is not too, accumulate a lot of stuff and pass it down to other people because you passed on they passed on you live a different life next time.

1:04:51 It might be a good thing, I suppose to do that but it takes away a little bit of the competitive edge when you realize that. It gets people out of their belief traps and gives them more of a peaceful harmonious kind of point-of-view Here, here and cheers to that. So right on well Jim it is such a treat to have you back I suspect You'll get a bit more of a response than he did six years ago on dear old episode 80 but thanks for taking the time then and now Remind the fine folks about your website or any info about buying the book that you might want them to have

1:05:27 Oh sure, thanks for that opportunity Greg. I really appreciate it and again thanks for asking me to come on the show you know i love being on your show and you know i love your topics your audience your vibe the whole thing i think is great as far as the book i have a website the website is theuniversesolved.com It's a little bit out of date but it has linked in my blog on there we have 100 or so blogs posted about various things there's a link to the book There are two books, The Universe Solved which was the original about 10 years ago and Digital Consciousness. If you're going to pick one book I'd pick the more recent one, Digital Consciousness because it covers a lot of what The Universe Solved covers and does it in a more scientific end with some visual models that I think are pretty useful. And then it goes beyond that but the first one has some provocative ideas that I didn't repeat as well so they're both okay

1:06:20 And you can get those on Amazon. You can order them from any bookstore, most bookstores don't carry them on the shelves but it's certainly be ordered from the stores and there are Kindle versions of both and Universal was converted into German so that's available in the German market as well Awesome. Well, I do appreciate what you do mind-blowing stuff digital consciousness is such a great book as we said the illusion can be persistent so when it is you pull this book out and there's plenty of studies and Data to bring it back to the weird side So definitely check it out And I'm glad you cracked the case man keep doing what you do and take care out there Thanks very much Greg

1:07:06 The power of Christ compels you people! There it is, the long-awaited return of Jim Elvidge. I am definitely happy we had him back. I like the way he looks at reality He's not afraid to go after the weird stuff and find a way to work it into the model And he's pretty comfortable with even the weirdest of questions from me Even if they really aren't in his arena of study specifically As I kind of mentioned, his book does hit on a lot of that strange consciousness science and data that almost defies logic when you see some other results. But people are always sort of saying that you have to believe for this stuff to work and it's reading about the breakdowns of those studies that actually gets me over that belief hump i think

1:07:58 i'm sure a lot of you guys feel the same way at least when you read some that stuff then maybe, if you like he wouldn't be wasting your time if you were to put conscious attention into certain things are try couple of these practices but being about a boom next thing you know your change in the world not only was i not really expecting that to be in jim's book. He also hits on research I hadn't even read about before, and it was awesome to be able to fold a lot of that into this conversation. We've heard phrases like the Earth is a cosmic school before so The Learning Lab is pretty easy concept to grasp but its the way he conceptualizes consciousness interacting with The Learning Lab that really ties it all together though

1:08:49 So I would expect THC fans to like a show like this every once in awhile. A guest whose focus is on trying to map and model our reality using all the available information, building a picture that does actually include a lot of the things that have been left out or the model they construct for The Masses Because we've seen the declassified CIA documents that prove their construct of reality looks a lot more like Jim's than Ray Kurzweil's, and it has for decades. But they're more than happy to prop up these false idols and let you think that these are the brightest minds of our time, that these guys have all the answers

1:09:32 Meanwhile, we see occult aspects of the Empire and massive amounts of symbol usage and perception management. So it seems like their concept is a bit different too! And we really are playing catch-up when it comes to knowing who we are or where we are why we are These ARE the biggest secrets in the system right? I care way more about that stuff than I do who the President was mean to this week The whole thing's a goddamn mystery. Although I do think we get closer and have a clearer picture as we whittle down our own models, but it's still our best guess and we are kind of on our own because nowhere in mainstream culture are we having this conversation? It's freaking sad!

1:10:24 We can debate who knows what, but it's no secret that the masses are steered away from ever even really considering the big picture. So we owe it to ourselves to explore as much of it as we can without being initiated into secret orders or having the lock code to the Vatican archives and being able to crack open privileged information So to me what Jim does, which really just seems to be a pure passion is actually also a real service to humanity. And as he said, he's not claiming all these ideas are original or completely new or unique but he's pulling together a lot of the off-the radar clues A lot of indigenous knowledge or very long standing eastern spirituality traditions

1:11:14 A lot of modern science as well, and saying with the info we have right now this is what it looks like. And I appreciate that if i had to guess one of the first things you learn about when you see a secret society degree that matters is this very kind of stuff forget what you've been told here's the real deal with this life thing and I think the more you understand a model like Jim's It's not hard to walk it backwards and see why it would be kept behind the curtain, and how the control structure achieves its goals in a lot of ways. But since that last interview he has had several more years to dig and flesh out big ideas, I was definitely captivated by both the book and conversation. I actually have a very big guest coming up who is also known for his understanding of reality

1:12:09 We've talked about his work with a guest before, but I never thought we'd be able to get the man himself. But it fell right into my lap thanks to that previous guest and...we'll keep referring to him as HoloFractal Joe just to give you a little clue there for the people who are pretty familiar with The THC Archive. But i am really looking forward to that one as well! Of course, with this show and every show I do the first hour is free. It's out there no ads No bullshit just for you to enjoy and hopefully if you like what I do You come over to the higher side chats plus And you sign up for the full two-hour shebang An extra hour with every guest In this episode with Jim some of the things we talked about were

1:12:56 the resisting and restricting of new models we see in the scientific community, how many standard theories actually fail to meet the criteria set up for scientific acceptance? What memories really are where they're stored. Jim's thoughts on the Mandela effect phenomenon and how he explains it pyramids in the potential to enhance consciousness effects And the age-old question of if royal families or secret societies have ever jailbroken The Learning Lab. Is it even possible? Of course, for better or worse that's where my mind goes but I really had a great time In higher side news the website consolidation is still happening on August 5th Watch your bookmarks and RSS feeds for any hiccups or changes But i'm sure we'll be fine We'll be well past the rough space weather at that point

1:13:52 And I guess it's just a waiting game till then. Of course, they got one more show coming out in the next 48 hours and then we can call it a wrap on July but I'll see you then! Big thanks again to Jim for bringing the heat. I've done my part your move consciousness deceivers reality concealers and keepers of the secrets behind The Big Curtain... You're fucking weird. Sweet dreams to the elite We're calling on THC uncovering secrets and conspiracies everybody's looking for something some of them want to use you some of them want to get used by you some of them want to abuse you some of them want to be abused THC

1:15:01 Sweet themes on DHC Who the hell could disagree? We know the rabbit hole goes deep Everybody's digging for something Some want to use you Some of them want to get used by Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be your proxy.