#E43 Connecting With Loved Ones After Death With Robert Ginsberg

About Robert Ginsberg.

Robert Ginsberg is the author of The Medium Explosion and is currently featured in the Netflix Docuseries Surviving Death. For almost 20 years Bob has been investigating various types of evidence that there is life after death - like Mediumship, Near Death Experiences, Deathbed Visions and After Death Communication and Signs. After a personal experience made it his mission to figure out the truth of what happens to consciousness after death.

Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.

[02:20] Briar: Hi everybody and welcome to Hyperscale. Today I've got Robert Ginsberg, or Bob as he likes to be known as on the call with me, and I'm very excited to have him here. And we are going to be talking about all things life after death. Welcome to the show, Bob.

[02:39] Robert: Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here today.

[02:42] Briar: So, looking into your background and I've seen the Netflix series, Surviving Death, and I read about your personal story and how you got into this. If you could start there just by walking our listeners through, how did you start exploring life after death?

[03:01] Robert: Briar, if we had this conversation 22 years ago, it would be quite different because I thought that the notion of life after death was akin to believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, a nice story, but no basis in reality. And on the morning of September 1st, 2002 we were asleep and about 3 o'clock in the morning, my wife popped up in bed and she was trembling, and she was ashen white, and she couldn't even talk. And I said, "What's the matter? What's the matter?" And she didn't say anything, she just stared, and she was like in a different state. And I said, "Tell me what's the matter?" And she finally said that something horrible was going to happen today. And I said, "Well, what does that mean?"

[03:58] Robert: And she said, "I can't tell you exactly, but our lives are going to be changed forever today." And even at that point, even though I didn't believe in things like, premonitions or messages or whatever, we had been married for 30 years at that point. And there were times during our life together where she would have these intuitive-type visions, I'll call them. They didn't happen often, but every time that she had one, the events played out exactly the way that she said. So logic told me if she was right then, she could be right now. And I took that very seriously, and I did what most parents would do. I watched over our three kids, I kept tabs on them. One of my daughters was away at college for a week.

[04:53] Robert: And my oldest, my son, I was getting ready to drive him back to his university and my youngest one was working on a part-time job. I called my daughter at school, everything was fine. I checked on my oldest son during the day, he was fine. And at night I kind of let my guard down and we all went out to dinner, and we had two cars. And I let the whole vision fade from my awareness. And of course, what happened was that we had two cars, and my son and my daughter were in one car and we passed them. On the way home we saw an accident. They were in a horrible accident. And my daughter didn't survive her injuries and my son had significant injuries himself. And I was obviously in a state of shock for a month.

[05:45] Robert: But eventually when it became clear that my son was going to survive his injuries, he came out of the coma. I remember that morning and I said, "Wait, wait, how did Fran, how did my wife know?" Because she knew that something was going to happen that changed our life. I couldn't figure out how she could possibly know. So that started me on a journey of traveling across the United States, meeting with medical doctors and scientists and researchers that studied consciousness and studied the mind, because I wanted to find out if there was any real possibility that my daughter could survive in some form. So the person that I am today is quite different than I was then, so that's the long answer. The short answer to your question is trauma, personal loss is what triggered my exploration.

[06:42] Briar: Wow. Thanks for sharing that with us. So when we're talking about life after death, so I'm on this almost personal mission to see if I can prolong my lifespan. And some of the experts are saying potentially the human species could live forever. And I guess when I was doing research into you and learning about you and obviously one of the reasons why I was so curious about speaking to you today, I wonder if by prolonging our lifespan, if we're going to miss out on what's next. So with that in mind and bearing in mind your sort of learnings and what you've learned, and you never used to believe in this and now you do believe in this. What is it, what have you found out from speaking with all of these people? What is your personal experience that leads you to believe that there is something when you didn't believe this before?

[07:46] Robert: Yeah, some might argue that we already live eternally, just without a body. But yeah, my journey, if you want to call it, was slow. I mean, for the first seven years, I would say seven or eight years refusing to acknowledge this and I was somewhat of a hypocrite because here I was giving talks to people about what I've learned, the evidence that I've learned and I didn't fully buy into it myself. So I think that people go through the stage of a vague hope, which could be based upon religious views or teachings and so forth. And eventually they move into this belief stage. And if they really are lucky, they get into this knowing where there's no question that there's a world beyond. But for me, now, some people can get to that knowing stage by having a profound personal experience.

[08:43] Robert: It could be a near-death experience. It could be some sort of event that happens in meditation or an after-death communication, but something that changes, it flips their view of life. For me, it wasn't like that. For me I needed the evidence. Everything had to be evidence-based, so I started learning about telepathy and remote viewing and intuition and then near-death experiences and mediumship and after-death communications and reincarnation and electronic voice phenomena. I mean everything. Plus believing, starting to believe that this stuff was real opened me up to having personal experiences, before I was rejecting everything that was happening to coincidence. That's the way I would explain it. But it reaches a point where you have to, I had to relent, because if you're going to follow the evidence and the evidence is pointing you that way, at some point I had to give up and say, okay, this stuff is real.

[09:51] Robert: So some believe that this physical world has a purpose and there are certain experiences in this vast continuum of life that we can only experience in this physical realm. But a lot of people believe that even though we no longer have a body, we still have a mind or a soul or a consciousness. I like to use those terms interchangeably, to me they're the same thing, that continues on. And not only did as it continue on, but it continues on with some memories and personality intact. So you don't totally lose your identity. The fear of death can be paralyzing to a lot of people. And I mean to me, I was deeply troubled by that for my childhood and a good part of my adult life, the thought of being extinguished forever was horrible.

[10:56] Robert: And it can affect the way people live their lives. So I know you mentioned the possibility of technology being able to extend our lives indefinitely, so I guess the question would be, like you hinted at, are you missing something by not moving on? And secondly, if you extend your life indefinitely, would that be without disease and without your body, falling apart? So I don't know but I see that the life, the expected lifespan of people in my lifetime has gone up in 10, 12 years. And I would imagine it's going to continue to go higher and higher. But personally, with what I know, I really don't have any desire to have a physical body, for so many years. I mean, I look around and I see what's going on in the world and all the grief and the trauma that people have. So I guess living forever would have to go hand in hand with living a quality life, without the strife and the disasters and the horror of war and things that go on in this physical world.

[12:22] Briar: Absolutely. And you're so right when you talk about how we are living longer, but I guess with living longer, there are more old age diseases that are out there, such as Alzheimer's and cancer and dementia and things like this. And I'm completely with you as well - if we're going to be sticking around in this world, it better, well be a world we want to be living in.

[12:48] Robert: Absolutely.

[12:50] Briar: Yeah. So when you are talking to people, you mentioned you've been speaking to a lot of experts. You weren't a believer and you've said as well that there is potentially this soul that stays on earth with us or consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. But is this perhaps the general consensus? Like what kind of proof or what kind of stories do we have that show us that this could possibly be the case?

[13:22] Robert: It depends, what I used to believe was that we are our brains. Consciousness is a product of our brain, and therefore, when we die physically, our brain is no more, our bodies are no more, so that's it. But there are many things that suggests that our minds can act independently of our brains. And how do we know that? Well, if our consciousness is limited to our bodies, if consciousness is contained in our head, things like telepathy and intuition should not be possible. I mean, how could our brains extend, beyond our body. But yet science has shown us beyond the shadow of a doubt that telepathy is real. Psychokinesis is real, the mind affecting physical matter. I conducted my own remote viewing experiment in 2005 and for those not familiar with it, a remote viewing is where people can, for lack of a better term, they can extend their mind, their mind can travel to a distance site and actually be at that site.

[14:41] Robert: The United States recruited remote viewers during the Cold War with Russia and because they wanted to find out more about missile sites and secret factories and so forth in Russia. They would give these people coordinates latitude and longitude, that's all they would give them. These people would visit the site and draw accurate depictions of what they saw. Remote viewing was going on 60, 70 years before that. So I had read about all this stuff, and I decided to do this. I sent out notification to our foundation members that I was going to conduct an experiment and the instructions were simple. I asked everybody whether they thought they had any ability or not, to at 9:00 PM exactly 9:00 PM Eastern Time for five consecutive nights, to tune in to my wavelength.

[15:45] Robert: And I was going to draw a picture, that's all I said. And then at the end of the five days, the instructions were for them to physically mail me their drawings, which I would match up to what I drew. And every night I wouldn't even think of what I was going to draw. I wanted to try to eliminate the possibility that they were reading my mind. So like at five seconds before nine o'clock, I draw something, and I'm a horrible artist, but I would do the best I can with as much detail. And I'm making all these drawings and on the last day I said, you know what? I'm going to mess with everybody. I'm not going to draw a picture. I'm going to draw a geometric shape. And I drew a dot with concentric circles around it. So people start sending in their things.

[16:30] Robert: I'm opening up the envelopes, and frankly, I was disappointed. There was really nothing, some were a stretch, but nothing that was significant evidence. But the very last envelope that I opened up, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Out of the five drawings, three of them, she drew exactly the way I drew them, including the geometric shape. So I said, well, wait a sec, how is that possible? Here's Bob sitting in his house in New York with Bob's brain and Bob's skull, and here's this woman sitting in Oregon, 3000 miles away with her brain sitting in her skull. If consciousness was limited to our own bodies, how is that possible? It's not possible, but yet it happened. The interesting thing is in remote viewing, like time and space don't really mean much. So I drew those geometric shapes on Friday, that geometric shape. She drew it on Wednesday, which then raised the possibility of who was remote viewing who? So that simple thing, it wasn't a scientific experiment with blinded, protocol, but yet I controlled it. I knew there was no fakery or deception,and that really was a turning point for me to believe that we're much more than our physical bodies.

[17:59] Briar: What did you say to her when you discovered this? What did she say? Did she have some kind of intuition that she had these powers, so to speak?

[18:09] Robert: Yeah, it's a good question, because that's exactly what I was thinking. So the first thing that I did is try to get in contact with her. I didn't speak with her on the phone, but we were emailing, and she told me that her whole life, she had all of these intuitive abilities, which were very troubling to her in her childhood, which is, what I found over the years, that's very common. People don't know how to assimilate that, especially children into their lives, because we're taught that things that are non-physical are things to be feared, things that we can't perceive with our own physical senses. I mean, the media, our religions, the movies that we watch, our education, they instill those feelings in us. So a lot of people suppress their abilities for fear of being judged or labeled or put in the category.

[19:05] Robert: So she didn't talk about it much, she had incredible gifts, not only intuitive gifts, but mediumistic gifts, which she would be able to talk to discarnates in another world. So it's a shame, because she never wanted any publicity or to take part in any other experiments, and she wanted to keep it to herself. That's a shame. I think that when we as a society start sharing these experiences that we have, not trying to convince anybody, but just sharing what we know and what we experience, that will go a long way in changing worldview about death because people would say, wait a second, how is that possible? And since we started doing this, 22 years ago, I've seen a big change already.

[20:01] Robert: 20 years ago people used to call our foundation and they'd be whispering and you could barely hear them. So why are you whispering? Because, if God forbid anybody hear what they were saying, they would be labeled as a nut or something to be feared. And so they would not, but now it's changed, look around, there are so many different documentaries and movies and things that have a theme of not only afterlife, but sort of telepathic type of experiences. So it's becoming more accepted, I think.

[20:39] Briar: I think it's interesting speaking about these sorts of things, and even just thinking about consciousness. They know so little still about consciousness. We don't really know. I spoke to a gentleman who'd spent 40 years studying consciousness, and I feel like after speaking to him I had more questions afterwards than when I started, because it's just such a fascinating thing. And you're so right with what you're saying, anything to do with this kind of mediums or afterlife or consciousness or tapping into your brain or just doing anything like this, it's not celebrated at all. In fact, it's not encouraged, because exactly as you said, you get labeled as being crazy, because that's the way, I don't know, we're kind of brought up in hearing about it. So it is a bit backwards really, when we think about why aren't we able to explore these things? Why has culture made it so that we shouldn't, that if anything that makes me think that we should, what's there to hide, I think is what I'm trying to say?

[21:49] Robert: Yeah. I asked the same question every day, what is it about these things that just, as I mentioned before, I think that it's instilled in us, that you should only believe things that you perceive with your physical senses and those are unknown senses. That's it, we have no other non-physical senses and to say that we do is going against science and is going against what's right. So I'll tell you a quick story. After my daughter passed about probably two, three years later, I went to a family doctor, well, who I knew, he was a family friend. I don't remember what ailment I had. But he said, "Bob, how are you doing?" I said, "Okay." He said, "Well, what have you been up to?"

[22:44] Robert: I said, "Well, if you really want to know, I've been studying survival of consciousness." And he looked at me and we went on talking for another 5, 10 minutes. He says, "Can I ask you something?" And I said, "What?" He said, "What's survival of consciousness?" And I said, "Well, some people believe that after we die, a body dies, that our minds or our soul or our consciousness continues on." Then he just looked at me and went on talking more and more. And then in the middle of a conversation, this nurse walked in the room and it turns out she had just lost a child to crib death, an infant. And she was very interested in the conversation and we're talking about another 20 minutes. The people in his waiting room are having a riot, because the waiting room is filled with people, and we're just talking.

[23:31] Robert: And then finally the nurse leaves and he closes the door, and he has a serious look. And as says, "Bob, can I tell you something?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "My father died eight years ago" and he said that "I had a lot of patients in the hospital that were in critical shape. And I had to call my answering service after my father died." And when I called the answering service the person said, "Oh, doctor your father called?" And he said, "What?" He said, "Your father called," he says, "My father died at nine o'clock this morning." And he said, "Oh, I'm so sorry, doctor. I'm so sorry. We must have gotten the message wrong. He must have said, your father-in-law." He says, "My father-in-law as been dead for 16 years." He says, "What time did the message come in?"

[24:22] Robert: And he said, "9:10." I said," Read me back the message." And the message was, "Frank, it's me. I'm okay." So he held that in for the eight years. He never told his wife, he never told his colleagues, obviously, he never told his children, but after talking to me, it was a safe environment. So he felt okay to share that with me. And I guarantee you, in the 16 years since then, he's never mentioned it to another soul. But the point of that is, that's sort of an incredible thing that you really can't explain. And he felt forced to hold that in instead of sharing that with other people. And that's a shame, because what we were talking about before, he's a man of science. So if he talked about things that shouldn't be possible that yet happened, he would be judged and labeled and possibly ostracized.

[25:28] Robert: And that's something that we find with a lot of the scientists and medical doctors that we work with, that they do this work on the side, a whole lot of them, because they can't jeopardize their so-called traditional careers because these things violate all the principles of science that they've been taught their whole lives. And the thought that these things may not be true, is frightening to them. So you're right, there is still a pervasive feeling among the general public that these are things not to be discussed or even feared and we're hoping to change that.

[26:14] Briar: And we spoke a little bit about children before, and when children are quite young, sometimes there have been reports about the fact that they remember things from their past life. I was reading an article about this little boy who was in some helicopter crash and he reported this back to his mom and then they did some research and they discovered it was all quite real, so to speak. What kind of things have you heard from children? We spoke about the soul, sort of, I guess being with us on earth, but is it a case of we live in these different lives? Do we live our lives among the same people that we presently live it with, but in different forms? Or how does it work based on what you've learned from people?

[27:02] Robert: Yeah. I love hearing accounts from children, especially young children, because they have not been indoctrinated into society yet. So they will say whatever they experience. They have no fear or judgment. So a lot of children report in our work seeing deceased relatives, seeing grandma. I mean, we've talked to children who they're looking through a photo album and they'll see somebody that passed before they were born, and they'll say, oh, there's Uncle Joe or there's grandma. And they would identify him and describe them. And then what you were talking about, there's been extensive research into past life memories of children. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia studied it for 40 years with thousands of cases.

[28:06] Robert: And now Dr. Jim Tucker at the same university continues his work. And what happens is that the scientist becomes a detective. The children report a past life memory and then the researcher pulls medical records and county records, sometimes autopsy reports, police reports and if they're lucky, if the children can identify where they used to live and the family, they'll even visit the family that the child says they were once a part of and they piece together. There are thousands and thousands of these cases accumulated. And it really suggests that reincarnation is real, at least for some people because I don't know any other explanation. You can make the argument that it's a psychic thing where the children, they haven't lived a life before, but they're pulling information from a vast field of information. Some people call it the Akashic records, where there are these storehouses of information and some people are able to extract this information. But I think what makes the most sense is that reincarnation is real. That was the one piece of the puzzle that I couldn't wrap my head around because it's really, quite extraordinary. I think people have a choice of whether to reincarnate or not, but the phenomenons appears to be real because you can't argue with the thousands of cases that have been studied.

[29:51] Briar: And can you pick who you might want to be reincarnated with or the people that you might be surrounded by

[30:00] Robert: Yes, supposedly you can. And my problem with reincarnation was, I'd say, well, why the hell would I want to come back and live a life of poverty or trauma or famine and violence, and why? And of course, the spiritual answer was, well, because we're looking at it from a broader perspective, the perspective of an over soul. And this was another experience that you need to complete your journey, through the universe. So it's a hard thing to wrap your head around, why people would do this. Plus the fact, I always said to myself, okay, I come back to this physical plane to learn a lesson, but I'm not told what that lesson is. How am I supposed to know what to learn if I don't know what I'm here to learn about? But again, the spiritualist will say, well, you don't know in the physical world, but your greater soul recognizes and the pieces won't come together until you reach that point.

[31:12] Briar: So when you've found out about this potential afterlife and life extension, so to speak, has there been anything from your personal life that has made you see it? Have you had any inklings of your daughter being around?

[31:34] Robert: Well, my wife had a tremendous number of extraordinary things. And then once I was open to this, I started to have things that happen around me too. One of the things that people believe… the most common form of after-death communication or what's called dream visitations. And the theory is that when we're in certain stages of sleep our chatter mind is set aside and there's a pure conduit for those energies of consciousness in the afterlife to get through to us. And dream visitations are quite different. I mean, what I call normal dreams. In a normal dream, it's very disjointed. You're all over the place. Some things don't appear to make sense, it's just your subconscious mind rehashing things that have happened.

[32:27] Robert: But a dream visitation, it's quite different because you could see your loved one, you could talk to your loved one, you could touch your loved one. It's as if they're there. And you don't forget the dream when you wake up. Most dreams you forget as soon as you wake up. And I didn't think I had any intuitive ability, but I had 74 dream visitations from my daughter over a five-year period. And I would write, because my wife had urged me to do so, every one of them down. And if I were to look back over those, it's quite extraordinary to have that many. But we had so many different experiences that are mind-boggling. The way I think, you might laugh, but when I would write down all of these extraordinary experiences and I thought the odds against chance of these happening were incredible.

[33:31] Robert: I actually took 20 of these experiences to a professional statistician, and I asked the statistician to calculate the odds beyond chance of each one of these things happening. And when I had 20 experiences with odds against chance, exceeding a million to one, I had to step back and say, okay, I could no longer question any of this, it's real. And some of these things, I mean, I'll tell you one example. You of course are familiar with apparitions, most people term them as ghosts. I don't like the term ghosts because it sort of has a sinister kind of scary theme to it. But a lot of discarnates are able to manifest themselves in physical form for you to see them. When we moved to our last house in New York where I no longer live, my daughter was really, really upset.

[34:33] Robert: She really loved our neighborhood. She loved her school, she loved her friends and she was very angry with us that we moved. And for a couple of years, every month, she would ask my wife to drive her to our old house so she could see her old room. She loved her room. And my wife would explain, Bailey, we can't do that. It's not appropriate. We can't knock on the door and ask to see, we don't own the house anymore. It's not going to happen. She'd be persistent. Every month, the same thing, constantly. Take me, take me, take me. So after my daughter passed, my wife's first cousin was at some sort of affair or wedding or something and she happened to know the people that bought our old home. And the woman who bought our old home went to my wife's cousin and said, can I talk to you privately for a minute? She said "Yeah."

[35:25] Robert: She said, well, I have to tell you that my daughter who had the same room as my daughter who was around the same age, came down or knocked on my door at night, and said that she just saw a young girl walk across her room. And the woman said that my daughter never ever had a bad dream or never had any type of, so-called paranormal experience and she thought this was odd. So she said to her daughter, go back to sleep. This was just like a bad dream. And the daughter said, I wasn't dreaming and dismissed it. So the next morning, they're all sitting at the kitchen table and the newspaper was there and they were having breakfast and they looked… glanced at the newspaper.

[36:14] Robert: On the front page of the newspaper was the story of the accident that my children were involved in. And as it turned out, their daughter saw the vision of the young girl walking across the room about 15 minutes after my daughter was pronounced dead. And I heard that, and I said, wait a second. You take a girl who was obsessed with seeing her old room, where would the first place she would go be when she was free of a physical body? That made perfect sense to me. And the timing of it, I couldn't question. So that was one of the experiences that I eventually took as fact because I couldn't think of any other physical explanation for it. And I had so many of these. So yeah, I've had a great deal, if not, some direct contact and some just third hand accounts.

[37:16] Briar: So when we're talking about a direct contact, is that something that we would potentially refer to as like a dream visitation? Does that count as a direct contact? What counts as direct and what counts as something else?

[37:31] Robert: Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I once did a survey and I asked people, would you prefer to talk to your deceased loved one directly or through the services of a medium? When I posed the question, I was convinced that the vast majority of people were going to say, I'd rather get the communication directly but it wasn't the case. The people said, I'd rather get it through a medium. And then I started to question that. And the reason for that is some people were fearful, we were talking about before, of getting things that they weren't supposed to, information that they weren't supposed to get. But even more importantly, a lot of people said that if I get the communication directly, I would question it, am I imagining it? Whereas if they get the information from a professional, from a medium, then they would trust it more.

[38:30] Robert: So that was interesting. But a direct communication, yes, a dream visitation will be a direct communication because the person in spirit is communicating directly with you through a dream. A lot of people have, we call them signs, things that happen, synchronicities where two seemingly disparate events occur, but they come together to form meaning. So I mean, I caution people, not everything is a sign from a loved one. A lot of people, especially in the spiritual community, say that there are no coincidences. I don't believe that. I believe that there are coincidences, but there are also things that aren't, that are direct communications. You may have heard of electronic voice phenomena where people in spirit are able by some process that we don't know, imprint their voice onto a recording device.

[39:37] Robert: And I've listened to thousands of things. Some of them I dismiss because they're not intelligible and you can't clearly make out the same, but some of them are as clear as a bell. And if you can eliminate the possibility of fraud and deception, which you can in most of these cases, it's quite incredible. I've gotten messages from my deceased wife that way. I had a medium who was a friend, one of our certified mediums was a friend of Fran and myself. And she asked me, because she dabbled in this electronic voice phenomena, if it would be okay if she asked my wife in spirit a series of questions every week. And one of the questions to my wife was, what is the name of the organization that you founded? And you hear on the tape Forever Family Foundation, clearly. And another day it happened to be my birthday and the person, the medium said, do you have a message for Bob? And you hear, you play back the tape, “Happy birthday.” So those things are pretty convincing because it's tangible evidence. I can perceive that evidence with my physical senses. I can hear it.

[40:59] Briar: Did it sound like her, Bob? Did it have her voice, or did it sound like a bit different?

[41:04] Robert: It sounds different. I mean, some people claim that it's the voice of their loved one. To me, it almost sounds like a computer-generated voice. It's not the actual voice, at least in my case, but yet you hear the words clearly.

[41:22] Briar: So you spoke about mediums and how majority of people would feel more comfortable communicating through a medium. How could we find a medium that is good? I'm sure there are some mediums, just like anything in the world, any kind of job, there are people who are amazing at their job, and then there are people who suck. What kind of things should we look for if we are wanting to go out there and communicate through a medium?

[41:50] Robert: Well the first thing that I'll say is you're right. And in my book, in The Medium Explosion book, I stated that based upon my research and my own experiences, my own observations, I thought that 85 to 90% of the mediums in practice today cannot do what they claim. And to use your term, a lot of them suck. So that's one thing. Also, bear in mind that to be a medium, there's no certification. There are no regulatory boards, there are no ethical guidelines, there's no continuing education. I mean, tomorrow I can open up and put a sign on my house, Bob The Medium and start charging people, whatever I wanted and go through it. So I'm not saying the mediums are fraudulent, some of them are, but most of them are not.

[42:44] Robert: They have some intuitive ability, as we all do but having honed skills to be able to communicate with the dead. And there's a difference. There are some people, mediums are psychic so they can get information from other living minds, but some of them can't communicate with discarded entities, it seems to be like it's a different skill set. We started evaluating as a service to the public on the controlled conditions of mediums. We've been doing it since 2005 and 90% of the mediums who have gone through the process over those years have not gained certification. So we've been doing it now for 18 years, and I think we have 27 mediums that we certified over 18 years. It's not a lot.

[43:46] Robert: So how do you identify and, well, there aren't many organizations that certify mediums. People can check the list on Foreverfamilyfoundation.org, where we have a list of them. A lot of people will ask friends for recommendations, but bear in mind if your friend got a great reading from a medium, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to get one. There's some sort of synchronicity or resonance that has to take place between the person and spirit, the medium and you. So if all those things are not matching, it's not going to happen. And even the best mediums in the world sometimes don't connect. I mean, they almost always do, but it's not a guaranteed science. So it's really difficult to answer your question of where to turn. If you're going to a site where they've been vetted, that's one resource. 

[44:39] Robert: I know the Wind Bridge Institute had done a similar thing. There are many books written by mediums in which you could read and then make your own judgment or you could ask for recommendations from friends. I guess if somebody got a good reading, you have a good chance of getting a reading, but not a guarantee. So it's a difficult thing because there are no regulatory bodies and it troubles me because mediums are sitting with people in deep grief most of the time. And a lot of these people, they're on the fence, whether it's really true or it's a bunch of crap that you live after physical death. And if they go to a medium and they get a bad reading with no evidence, they're going to walk away from that reading in worse shape than they were before they went, which is not the purpose. So I think that mediums have a tremendous responsibility that they have to take very seriously.

[45:37] Briar: So you spoke about one service that the Forever Foundation offers. So how many years has it been now, 18 years since the Forever Foundation was founded?

[45:48] Robert: We started Forever Family Foundation in 2003. So it's been 20 years. I'd say the foundation is like a convergence of science and spirituality. So we're evidence-based. We have an academic advisory board. We have a science scientific advisory board. We have a medium advisory board. And our purpose is just to educate the public about evidence that we're more than our physical bodies. And we just want to provide the information. We're not looking to convince anybody, but we want people to retain an open mind and evaluate things and come to their own beliefs about what's real and what's not. The Medium certification process is one of our services. We have grief retreats. Right now they're only in the United States.

[46:45] Robert: We have a radio show that we've been airing since 2005 that deals with all of these topics. We have various webinars and events. And I mean, right now I think membership is approaching 15,000 and more and more people that, like me, that are the baby boomers, for the first time in their lives are starting to question their own mortality. So they don't come to us because they're, in grief, they come to us because they're starting to question their own mortality. Is there a possibility? Is there credible evidence?

[47:23] Briar: Interesting. Has there been any difference between people signing up before Covid time and after Covid? Have you seen any kind of market shifts based on that quite, life-changing event for people?

[47:38] Robert: Yeah, I think we have it, I don't have any direct numbers on that, but during COVID and with so many people dying that shook a lot of people to become interested in this stuff. So, yeah, I think that did have an effect where people just want to learn more. There have been many studies that have been published in peer-reviewed journals that show that people that believe that they live on after physical death do better in their grief than those who don't. And that makes sense to me, because what could give you more hope and comfort than thinking that your loved one still survives in some form, gives you a reason to keep going. So there's a value to that, if one comes to the understanding that this is just a physical blip and that after this physical experience we live on, I think that can allow them to live their lives more fully, with more meaning and purpose without being shut down and paralyzed by fear of being extinguished.

[48:59] Briar: What would be your advice to someone who is listening to this and perhaps grieving over losing a loved one?

[49:09] Robert: Well, there are personal things that I used to go through in my grief. I used to say to myself, okay, so I can curl up in a ball and I could shut down and I could live my 30 years miserable. And then what's going to happen? Then I'm going to die. And then I'm going to see that I still exist. And the first thing that I'm going to say is shit I wasted 30 years of my life because I was paralyzed by this grief for no reason. But I think that people in grief should just read. There's a term bibliotherapy, that it's… therapeutic value in reading about life after death… and learn as much as you can and be open and embrace these personal experiences and hopefully come to an understanding that you're going to see your loved one again.

[50:19] Robert: This is just a brief, interlude. We are conditioned, we have this illusion of permanence in our lives, which is kind of extraordinary considering that we live on this spinning orb that's suspended in space and spinning at a thousand miles an hour. And we think that's so permanent. But nothing in our lives [is] permanent. I mean, everything is temporary, which is something that has a great interest to you, in discovering how we could live, forever, but you have to treasure and experience things now because what's here today may not be here tomorrow. About a year and a half ago, the island that I live on in Florida took a direct hit from Hurricane Ian and the entire island was under, six to eight feet of water.

[51:20] Robert: So houses were all destroyed. So, I mean, not only did I sustain massive damage to my house, but I lost all my personal belongings. I had six feet of water in my house, and even the upstairs, the roof blew off so everything was kind of destroyed up there. And understandably, all my neighbors and everybody on an island, they were just, oh, this is the worst thing in the world. And, they were having a really hard time. But I was surprisingly calm throughout the whole process, which is not like me, because I worry about everything. But I had this calmness about me and the reason for that is I knew that grieving the loss of possessions is profoundly different from grieving the loss of the loved one. Material stuff can be replaced.

[52:14] Robert: So having so much loss in my life gave me an advantage, so to speak over everybody else because I was like, eventually you're going to get all this, replace all this stuff. So I think that grief gives you a certain sense of freedom in that I'm no longer troubled by, I mean, I used to lead a life where material things were so important to me, I had like the perfect life with all the toys and all the things and the big house and the cars. But I no longer value those things because it's not truly important.

[52:56] Briar: What were you doing in your past life?

[52:59] Robert: Yeah, I mean, it was a totally different… I was an English major in university. I always wanted to be a journalist and I turned out owning an insurance agency for 40 years, totally unrelated. And even while I owned the agency, none of my clients, knew about it, unless they discovered it by accident. I kept that part of my life separate from the rest because it was a corporate environment. I didn't want to deal with all the crap of people, judging me or questioning. So I just didn't really discuss it, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. I should have embraced that opportunity to educate people but I didn't. So of course after I retired from that I was able to devote a hundred percent of my time to the foundation.

[53:53] Briar: How do you think that we can be reducing stigma? We spoke a bit before about how people have expressed to you that they're afraid to speak out. They're afraid to share what they've discovered, because they're fearful of being labeled as you were, as you just explained to us. How can we reduce the stigma that people feel?

[54:17] Robert: Well, as I mentioned, I think that the only way is to encourage people to share and discuss. I mean, if more and more people start sharing these extraordinary experiences, it'll become mainstream. We used to hold discussion groups, physical discussion groups, afterlife discussion groups, small gatherings. And I used to see people, they used to come in and they wouldn't say a word throughout the whole two hours, not one word. And then they'd come to another meeting, the same thing, not one word. And by the third meeting, they'd feel comfortable in their surroundings and they'd start opening up and tell things that are so extraordinary. You just want to shake them and say, why didn't you say anything? Because they didn't feel safe but if we keep sharing these experiences, people will feel safe and it will become more mainstream and we can change worldview.

[55:20] Briar: And what about someone who has a worldview that doesn't believe in this, but they're open to the possibility? They're not so close-minded that they're like, you know what, I'm just going to turn my back on it or whatever. Maybe they're listening to this and they're thinking, you know what, I kind of want to go out there and maybe see, they’re curious. They want to see if this exists. I guess for me and more sort of selfishly as well, if I'm going to be signing up to live forever, I want to know, is this the right route that I'm going down?

[55:53] Robert: Yeah, of course. A lot of people believe that this whole physical experience is a learning thing in preparation for what's to come. But yeah, there's a difference between being a skeptic and an open-minded skeptic. I think it's important. A skeptic will not acknowledge the evidence, I mean, you put it right in their face and they'll say it doesn't exist. An open-minded skeptic, which is what I am, is somebody that just questions things and then learns about them and then evaluates the evidence and comes to a decision. So people that are open-minded skeptics, I would encourage them just to keep exploring and learning and see what they resonate with and what they don't. You have to be proactive in this. We tell people at the grief retreats, it's great. And they feel great after the retreat is over, and then they go back to the real life and I want them to keep it going. And we have a lot of resources that, from our Family Foundation, we have recommended reading. There are workbooks on grief and videos and there are many resources that people could turn to.

[57:10] Briar: So I could go out there and start to potentially tap into my mind a little bit more. Maybe I ask people to draw some pictures, and I'll draw some pictures as well, similar to what you did, and maybe do a few things like this in order to see... There are a few things out there that might change perspective.

[57:33] Robert: Yeah. Well, those things can be fun. I mean, I do those little exercises with my 9-year-old grandson, like psychic exercises. Being psychic or intuitive doesn't prove an afterlife. It just shows that we're all intuitive, and we have some intuitive abilities, but I think being intuitive [opens] you up to communication with the other side. There's a difference between the two. But those games are intuitive exercises that you do. You have to start questioning how they're possible. Because if they are possible, then it shows that our minds can extend, we're all connected. So if we're all connected, the question is, do we remain connected after physical death? And it appears that we do, because some mediums, some extraordinary mediums can communicate information that's so obscure that nobody knew, including… they take on the personality, if you're lucky enough to get an extraordinary reading like that, it can really change your view, profoundly, because there's no other explanation for it.

[58:55] Robert: Of course, now, since anybody could find that information on anybody, it's important to take certain precautions. You don't want to give the medium any information, other than possibly your first name, because you have to question it. In the 20 years I've been doing this, I never personally got a reading from any of our certified mediums over those many years. People find that extraordinary, because I know that they're good, but the reason is because I can't trust the information because they know too much about me. For me, I have to make sure that I have to eliminate any possibility that they might be repeating something that they found or they heard. So I think that people should, if they're going to visit a medium, be guarded in the information that you give them upfront because we've caught mediums - fortunately none of the mediums that we have certified - that in preparation for a reading, they'll pull up the person's Facebook page and just spit back information that they see.

[1:00:08] Briar: So true. It's so easy these days to stalk people, really, isn't it? People could probably just type in Briar Dubai, and I will come up which is, I know my name's not especially common, but it is quite crazy how almost little information you need in order to find out stuff about people. You spoke earlier about the science and the medical professionals and stuff like this. Who are some people that you've spoken to that you feel have almost the most compelling evidence towards this? Like is there any medical evidence? Is there any scientific evidence? You obviously spoke as well about how some people in this industry are these things and then do this other stuff on the side because they feel that it goes against what they've learnt over the years.

[1:01:03] Robert: Yeah, I mean, one person for example is Dr. Bruce Grayson. He's a medical doctor.

[1:01:08] Briar: I've started reading his book. I love this. 

[1:01:12] Robert: At the University of Virginia. He's on the board of the foundation and he's worked for decades on this. And near-death experiences are so compelling because you have people that meet every definition that medical science has for death. They have no brainwaves. They have no respiration, they have no heartbeat. They have no reflexes. Medical science says that they are dead. And yet when they're resuscitated, they report these experiences. Not everybody has the same experience, but there are certain commonalities, such as seeing people that are deceased or levitating or going outside of their body and to see what's going on. And they report things that are very similar. Some report the classic thing about going through a dark space or a tunnel and moving to a light. They report, the beauty that they have and the knowledge that they're given and depictions of what it's like on the other side.

[1:02:24] Robert: The most important thing, I think, is that they go through a life review, many of them, where their whole life flashes before them. And the interesting thing about that is that they experience all of the good and love that they exhibited towards others and that's a good feeling. But they also feel all of the harm that they caused to others, whether intentionally or not, that's not such a good feeling. So the importance of that is we judge ourselves. And when we move to the next world, we're among like-minded people. I don't think that there's any deity that says, okay, you go here or you go there, but because of the actions that we took in the physical world that determines kind of who we hang out with, on the other side.

[1:03:23] Robert: And I think once there, there's a progression, but the important thing about near-death experiences is that on the evidence side, there are people, for instance, that have been blind since birth. And yet they come back and they describe everything that went on in the operating room, the colors, the equipment because they could see when they were outside of their body. There were reports of people. One thing you may have read about, I don't know if this one was in the Netflix documentary, but there was a woman who was profoundly dead and then left her body. And then she saw on the seventh floor of the hospital, outside the window on the ledge, there was a pair of sneakers. And she described the color of the sneakers and the placement of the laces.

[1:04:16] Robert: Of course, that's not physically possible. And so one of the nurses decided to humor her and went up to that room on the seventh floor and on the ledge she saw a picture exactly the way that the woman described it. So, I mean, you could say, okay, well, somehow she was on the roof of the hospital before and she looked down, but that's not really a plausible explanation. So how do you explain that? The way you explain it is that our mind or our consciousness is separated from the physical body, which is what happens at death and has a different vantage point. So I think that near-death experiences are an excellent example that shows that our brains are not truly who we are.

[1:05:03] Briar: I've enjoyed the parts of Dr. Bruce Grayson's book that I've read. And there's one particular story that really stuck with me. And it was similar to what you described in the sense that there's someone, I think it was a lady [who] was on the operating table and was declared dead and then Dr. Bruce Grayson went down the hallway with another doctor and had a conversation with them. There was no way that even if the person was going to be awake, that they could have heard this discussion. And he had like spilled coffee down his shirt or something like that. I don't know if you remember reading this, if you've read his book, and the person recounted all of this and spoke about the coffee stain and everything. And I think Dr. Bruce Grayson was a little bit frightened by it, because it was one of the more earlier experiences within his career that really made him go out there and think, you know what? I need to do more research into this. I need to speak to more people. Because he was not a believer before, was he?

[1:06:07] Robert: No. I mean, he was classically trained in science and this should not be possible based upon his education and everything that he was taught. So that kind of shook him. But it also propelled him to learn more because how is this possible? He witnessed it, but it shouldn't be possible, and there's got to be more to it. So he's one of those people that's an explorer, kind of a pioneer in this type of research.

[1:06:39] Briar: Is there anyone else that comes to mind that someone listening to this who maybe you've piqued their curiosity and they're thinking, you know what, I need to go out there. I need to do some more research. I need to read some more books. I think Dr. Bruce Grayson is a very good example. Who else?

[1:06:58] Robert: Well, I would point people to the recommended reading list on our site, but at the same time you mentioned Dr. Jim Tucker, he also was featured in the Surviving Death documentary. He has written a few books about past life memories of children. And his research is tremendously insightful. There are many books that have been written about some of the after-death communications that we've been talking about, which is quite extraordinary. So there are also books, some written by doctors who had worked in hospice, who witnessed these end-of-life experiences that people have when they're close to death. They have visitations from deceased loved ones, sort of like escorts to the other side. And they start talking to these deceased relatives. And I've experienced that personally with my own relatives, as they were dying.
[1:08:09] Briar: What was your experience? I'd love to hear a little bit more about it.

[1:08:12] Robert: Well, for example, when my mother was getting ready to pass, it was about a week or two before she was sitting in a reclining chair and the family, we were sitting around her in a semicircle of chairs. And she wasn't very communicative at that point, but we just wanted to be with her. And then the chair that was directly in front of her was empty. And my mother, who was 89, reached out her arms to that chair, and she said, mama, mama. And it was clear to my wife and I that she was talking to her deceased mom that died many, many years before. And everybody else in the room figured, okay, this is a hallucination, it's not real. But I knew it was real. And while she was doing this, my father walked out from the other room and he saw the empty chair.

[1:09:14] Robert: So he went to sit in it, and my mother, despite her semi-vegitative state, started screaming at him, get up, get up, get up. My father didn't realize that he sat on his mother-in-law and of course tried to explain that to my dad, but he got up and walked away. I experienced that also with my mother-in-law when she was near death, she started talking in her native language, which was Hungarian to her own mom. It seems that moms are the ones that have come through a lot. And this happens in the window of about, it could be days or it could be two weeks before they pass. And that's how people who work in hospice know when a patient is getting ready to cross over because they have these experiences. I personally believe that everybody has kind of an escort to the other side. People see their deceased loved ones. They may be past the point mentally or physically where they can express it to others, but yeah they see their loved ones in that window of time.

[1:10:29] Briar: We spoke earlier at the start of our discussion about how some people don't want to live forever because of the way the world has gone, obviously our bodies deteriorate over time. When you've been speaking to people who are potentially about to go to the other side, like what kind of things do they express to you, whether it's about their life, whether it's about their fears, like regrets they might have had? What's been your experience about this?

[1:11:04] Robert: Yeah, I mean, I don't have a lot of direct experience with people that are getting ready to pass. But from what I've learned, a lot of them have a lot of things that you mentioned. Some people are very fearful because they believe that they're going to be extinguished forever. Other people have faith, like a religious faith, so they believe that they're going to a better place or fear that they're not going to a good place. But I know from talk. I've talked to a lot of people that work in hospice settings and a lot of death doulas who work with the dying and they say the best thing that you can do is just to sit and listen and be a comfort.

[1:11:54] Robert: And if they engage you in something. I mean, if somebody engaged me, I would tell them and I did to my mom. I told her, you're going to a better place. And at that point, she had already seen her mom, so she knew she was comforted and calmed down. When people have these end-of-life experiences, that's the thing, all of a sudden they go from fear to comfort. They enjoy, they're not afraid of where they're going. They kind of embrace it and that's an easier death. Having the experience, my wife passed three years ago and she had pancreatic cancer and it was a horrible disease.

[1:12:43] Robert: And, I sat with her and she was in, horrible, horrible pain. No matter what we gave her, couldn't get her out of pain. Back when I was a kid I used to think that Dr. Kevorkian, if you recall who he was, he would assist people to die. And I used to think that was a terrible thing. I thought he was an evil guy. Now I think he's a hero because I think that it reaches a point when there is absolutely no quality of life where there's just pain and there are no more lessons to be learned. And I think that people should be free to pass on and get out of their pain. My wife also, even knowing everything that she knew… I mean, she was talking to her deceased aunt who helped raise her.

[1:13:43] Robert: And that I wasn't surprised by. But one thing she said to me, she said, there's a line. And I said, what do you mean there's a line of people like waiting to get in? She said, no, there's a line, and they won't let me cross the line. And that was kind of troubling to me. I mean, a lot of near-death experiences they're sent back to the physical life after they're resuscitated, because they still had work to do. And there was like no choice to remain and they're really angry about that. Because they're in this kind of beautiful place with no pain, and they're forced back into a body where they're rack in it with pain. And so they're really upset about that, and it really affects them when they come back.

[1:14:32] Robert: So I always wonder about that. So what did that mean? Why wouldn't they let her cross the line? I still don't understand that, like why wouldn't they let her in? Then I'll talk to people and I'll say, well, that's because she still had, even in that state, she still had things that she had to teach you. But I kind of don't, I don't buy that. I think all the teaching was done already, sitting with her for six months. So there are no answers. I do know that there are people from our work that become defined by their grief, that they are their grief. And if you suggest the possibility that their loved ones still exist, they find that hurtful, because somehow in their mind, it diminishes the depth of their grief. How dare you suggest that my loved one still survives? My loved one has gone forever. And I understand that and a lot of people like that. Nothing that we're able to do or say or provide information for will help them. That's the way they'll live the rest of their lives. But some stuff starts to seep in and they change their outlook.

[1:15:49] Briar: What would you like people to take away, since we're wrapping up this podcast, what's kind of the one message you would like to end on that you just really want people to take from all of the work that you've done these many years?

[1:16:06] Robert: I would encourage people to recognize that they are more than their physical bodies, that this blip of existence is one small smidge of a greater continuum of life. And they need to live their physical life to the fullest. I think they need to treasure their relationships. If you love somebody, tell them that you love them. Look at everything. Now I try to look at everything as if it's not going to be there tomorrow, and that could be just watching a sunset or walking in nature or listening to a piece of music or interaction with somebody. But I know that nothing is permanent. And if you live your life that way, you can live a full life and treasure what's put before you. And that's my simple advice.

[1:17:09] Briar: I think that's a really nice message. I've started doing something in my day-to-day life, where if I feel like I'm not being as present, maybe I'm a little bit distracted by my phone or just like the craziness of everything going around me. I like to imagine myself as being dead and then I like to take that feeling and just live with so much more appreciation and excitement for everything that we've got around us. So yeah, your thought really resonated with me

[1:17:42] Robert: That's great.

[1:17:44] Briar: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Bob. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you and thank you so much for your time and sharing your very personal story with us.

[1:17:54] Robert: I appreciate it and it's a pleasure being with you.