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March 10, 1999: Division of Consciousness - Peter Novak
Published 1 year, 9 months ago
Description
Art Bell welcomes researcher Peter Novak, whose book The Division of Consciousness proposes a unified theory of the afterlife built on the psychological distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind. Novak, driven by the tragic suicide of his young wife, spent ten years studying hundreds of cultures' afterlife traditions, near-death experiences, ghost reports, and past-life regressions, concluding that a single mechanism explains them all.
Novak argues that at death, the conscious and unconscious minds separate. The conscious mind, stripped of all memory and emotion, enters a state of total amnesia before eventually reincarnating with no recollection of prior lives. The unconscious mind, cut off from rational thought, retreats into an automatic review of its stored memories, generating its own heaven or hell based on moral self-judgment.
The theory elegantly accounts for commonly reported phenomena, from the emotionless calm of early near-death experiences to the repetitive behavior of haunting ghosts. Art also shares an update that Richard C. Hoagland survived his surgery, reads a dismissive response from NASA's SOHO team about solar super flares, and takes a remarkable call from a grandmother whose three-year-old granddaughter described memories of a previous life and death in vivid detail.
Novak argues that at death, the conscious and unconscious minds separate. The conscious mind, stripped of all memory and emotion, enters a state of total amnesia before eventually reincarnating with no recollection of prior lives. The unconscious mind, cut off from rational thought, retreats into an automatic review of its stored memories, generating its own heaven or hell based on moral self-judgment.
The theory elegantly accounts for commonly reported phenomena, from the emotionless calm of early near-death experiences to the repetitive behavior of haunting ghosts. Art also shares an update that Richard C. Hoagland survived his surgery, reads a dismissive response from NASA's SOHO team about solar super flares, and takes a remarkable call from a grandmother whose three-year-old granddaughter described memories of a previous life and death in vivid detail.