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Eldon Taylor - Questioning Spirituality · Destination Unlimited with Victor Fuhrman

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My name is Victor Furman. Some call me the Voice. I've always been
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fascinated with human nature, spirituality, science, and the crossroads at which they
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meet. Join me now and we will explore these topics and so much more
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with fascinating guests, authors and experts who will guide us to Destination Unlimited.
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In a world where material science appears to reign supreme and many have turned away
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from faith, is there a pragmatic case to be made for the rational viability
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of a spiritual belief in a higher power? My guest this week on Destination
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Unlimited, New York Times best selling author Eldon Taylor makes a compelling case that
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the scientific worldview is inconsistent with people's experiences of themselves and is not nearly as
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rationally superior as it is so often presented. Eldon Taylor is considered to be
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an expert in the area of preconscious information processing and has served as an expert
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trial witness with regards to both subliminal communication and hypnosis. He has earned doctorates
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in clinical and pastoral psychology and is an ordained Interdenominational minister, a Fellow in
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the American Psychotherapy Association, and a certified Master chaplain by the American Board for
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Certification in Homeland Security. His website is Elden Taylor dot com and he joins
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me this week to share his fascinating path and latest book, questioning Spirituality.
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Is it irrational to believe in God? Please join me in welcoming to Destination
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and Limited Elden Taylor. Welcome, sir. It's my pleasure to join your
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victor. I'm looking forward to our discussion. Thank you, Eldon, for
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our listeners meeting you for the first time. Please share your early path and
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how it laid the foundation for your work and callings. That's a pretty broad
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subject, but I'll give it a quick try. I was raised religious,
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and I was a very good son. Pursued the church that I was raised
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in to the best of my abilities. So I became a priest in the
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Iranic Priesthood. I had individual awards annually, and I was a junior assistant
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Boy Scout Master. And then one day I was some history and I discovered
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that parthenogenesis was not unique virgin birth, indeed accompanied a whole host of just
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about everybody, that it was connected to the foundation of any religion. And
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I'd had some questions prior to that, so I looked forward to getting some
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answers, and I was going to do that by seminary classes. Now,
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when I was young, seminary was attached to high school. So my last
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period of high school, seventh period was seminary class. And we left the
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high school, walked across this little bridge and into a separate building that was
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seminary, And there I took my questions, If God is all powerful,
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can he build the rocks so large acam lifted? What is this story?
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I mean Buddha was his mother was touched by the trunk of a white elephant,
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and that's what conceived him virgin birth, and so forth I could go
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through a whole host of him. I do discuss many of them in my
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newest book. But the point is when it came grade time, I got
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an f Now I regurgitated everything that had been given to me. I had
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a's on all my examinations, and so I immediately took this to the principle
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of the high school, and he called over the seminary president and this particular
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seminary teacher, and we had this discussion, and the discussion ultimately came down
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to this. I was a disturbance in the class, and I could have
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my a if I never came back. So for all intent and purposes to
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me and said, I'm a teenager, you know, like sixteen years old,
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and I'm effectively excommunicated from this faith that I've been attending faithfully since i
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was eight years old and baptized. Well, that put a bad taste in
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my mouth, and I became rather anti religious as a result. And that
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anti religion, I would say, had me very definitely thinking atheism and agnosticism.
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Clearly, you know, religion, as Freud said, as sugarcoated neurotic
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crutch. As John Wisdom said, Oh, doesn't it make you feel good?
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It's like having Daddy at the end of the hall when you have a
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bad dream. But as life would deliver itself. I was with a young
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woman and we were going to go to a dance that evening, and I
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was driving my car into this little community called woods Cross, and it was
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basically a railroad community. And as I entered the tracks, my car stalled,
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almost like it was a Hollywood script. The arms came down, signal
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arms, train hit the car. I know that the train was doing over
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one hundred miles an hour and had nearly a hundred cars on it. Because
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the woman that was with me was injured and her family sued the railroad and
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there was a court case, and of course I testified in the court case.
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But here's the point. I was in the car when the train hit
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the car. I was the driver. Connie had that was the young lady
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with me, had her hand on my leg. I told her, you
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know, sit still, let's not try to get out of here. I'll
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get the car started. I had no idea that that train was coming that
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fast, but I was afraid that if we tried to get out of the
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car, it would get drug over one of us. So when the train
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hit the car, it smashed the driver's side. The driver's side of the
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car wasn't any higher than two feet. Connie was pinned in the car and
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had to be cut out. Time passes. I'm standing in a field.
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I'm looking at all sorts of emergency vehicles that surround the smash of this car
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and on the highway, and it occurs to me, Connie, is she
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okay? So I run to these vehicles there may be one hundred hundred and
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fifty yards away. They try to stop me from getting to her. They're
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just taking her into the ambulance until I tell him I'm the driver. Now
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here's this story, Victor. I don't know how that's possible. I was
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in the car when the train hit the car. It crushed the car so
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badly, dragging it down the tracks, the cattle guard hooking into the driver's
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side and tearing the frame apart. I should be dead. How I got
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into that field, not a scratch or a mark on me. I have
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no way of accounting for, at least no way of accounting for in the
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empirical sense. I'm a scientist, and so when I say in the empirical
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sense, I'm thinking of science itself. I have a great reverence for science.
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But there are unexplainable events that occur, and they occur to many people,
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and this was one. Well. It was a turning point to me,
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a turning point in the sense that I could no longer just assume that
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who were a part of the world that has evolved, and evolution destines us
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from dust. We are to dust, we will become, and that's the
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end of the ball game. I could no longer be in that place.
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So for years as advocationally, studied as much philosophy and comparative religion as I
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could get my hands on, and in fact, my minor and my undergraduate
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I had almost as many hours in philosophy as I did in my major.
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I found myself, by way of vocation, a criminalist. So I'm using
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my education, my degree to practice light detection. There was a licensed light
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detection examiner supervised investigations and do the work of law enforcement in the course of
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that, and I talked about some of this and Choices and Illusions another of
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my books. But in the course of that process, I became pretty jaded.
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I guess that's the best way to say it. I mean, here,
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Victor. I one day I was feeling so often I just needed to
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cleanse myself, and I sided go to church the next day. And come
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Sunday, I went to a church. And it wasn't a church that you
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know, was one I'd ever attended before. And I arrived a little early,
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and they had a little kind of a bookstore set up at the back
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of the of the church itself. And I was over there and I see
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a person that you know, I know I'm going to be involved with in
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the next week. This individual is not, you know, the nicest person
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in the world from a standpoint of what shall I say, maintaining reverence for
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the law. And then I see the people that are going to be bringing
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the basket for donations down the aisle, and I recognize the female and there
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too is in is And I can't stay at church because at this point I'm
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looking at people as though they're all criminal. They're all they're all liars,
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they're all cheats, they're all and sly the church. Well, I decide
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I'm going to go on this little bit of a sabbatical, and I do,
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and I have a friend of mine dropped me off in the middle of
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the Mahabi desert and I spend a weekend in that desert three days. And
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in that process, I guess I could say I had a deep change that
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came about. Some people would call it a dark knight of the soul.
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I'm not going to put a name to it. But when I came back,
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I decided that I had to do something else. And what I was
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doing practicing criminalistics. And at that point a friend of mine said to me
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at the Utah State Prison, I know that you're working on this technology,
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and you've been using it in your light attection do you think this technology could
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assist us at rehabilitating inmates? That technology today is called inner talk, but
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it's a form of dichotic masking that the public would just think of as subliminal,
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not subliminal as in buried not there, because you will detect voices.
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It's an audio illusion. But it's a pattern of technology anyway, At the
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time, it wasn't. I had just been using it in the light detection
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practice to relax the subjects that came in and to minimize inconclusives and hopefully to
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encourage confession rates, which it had done very well at and other agencies were
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using it. So I agreed with Lee Liston and the Utah State Prison to
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attempt a good study and we'd run a study out there and we'd see if
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this technology could possibly interdict recivity rates at least lower hostility and aggression. I
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enlisted a friend of mine, Charles McCusker, who as a state psychman,
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and using you know, computer facilitation augmenting the Fouler Lands, we delivered the
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MMPI to the Minnesota Motorphasic Personality Inventory to an m population who had volunteered to
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participate in this study. I'd gone through an explanation of what was going to
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be involved and how it was going to be involved, so they knew everything
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that was going down. They took the pretest. They took the protest in
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the basically the MMPI, and the pretest didn't tell us anything. So I'm
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getting ahead of myself. So at any rate, we then had conversations with
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them, and these conversations essentially came down to they did not accept responsibility for
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their actions, but for the grace of God, there go you. It
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was a matter of you know, you heard stories like my daddy was an
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alcoholic, my mommy was a prostitute, the neighbor boy mainline me when I
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was eight years old. But you could have two brothers come out of the
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same home, Victor. One would be a surgeon and a teaching hospital and
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the other could be in the prison system. It was not about their environment
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as much as it was about their choices and their failure to take responsibility for
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it. When when I determined that and my cohorts agreed with me, we
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developed a program and we used three specific messages. Now this is going back
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long before the idea of forgiveness became as accepted as today. We're back in
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the early eighties. I forgive myself, I forgive all others. I am
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forgiven that forgiveness set. There was some that question, look, if they
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forgive themselves, aren't they just going to be reoffended? But no, the
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whole idea was, as long as you blame someone, you've effectively tied yourself
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up. It's not your fault, so there's nothing you can do about it.
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Society did it to you. It's an unfair world, mommy, daddy,
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even whatever else you can come up with to displace responsibility all right.
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Bottom line was it worked. It worked very well enough that the prison system
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installed a voluntary library for all inmates, and they installed it in the different
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facilities youth defenders to max, and it was cloned out to other prison systems.
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That was a turning point in my career. People started asking me about
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what it was, how we did this, And the net result was I
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wrote a book and then people wanted the technology. Well, if you can
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do this, well, we had discovered in the prison system. To digress
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just a tiny bit that when you create a voluntary library, what the inmates
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want to do is build muscle strength, or become more athletic, or master
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their ged. So you need to create programs that aren't just about lowering hostility
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and aggression minimizing anger. You need to create programs that are about satisfying a
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need that will encourage them to come and get the program. And as we
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did that, we use this standard what we now call the Forgiveness Set and
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every single program and we put good self esteem and anger management and whatnot in
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there, but we also focused on the specific title that these inmates might be
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interested in. Well, then other people wanted programs, and the next thing
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I know, I was in a new career. We'll be discussing your latest
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book, Questioning Spirituality, but first please tell us about your New York Times
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bestseller, Choices and Illusions. How did I get where I am and how
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do I get where I want to be? What inspired that book and what
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ideas do you share with your readers? Well, pretty much laid the foundation
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for what inspired the book. It was this story that I have just told
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you and the people that I interacted with who had a problem with accepting the
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idea that the self responsibility is really liberating. Now I define self responsibility and
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choices and illusions a little different than some people might say. So I'm gonna
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I'm gonna share a little story with you. M I moved my offices over
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to Las Vegas, Nevada, in the late eighties, and I had to
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go to the post office every day. So the first day I go to
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the post office, there's just a horrible attitude. Everybody is nasty to each
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other. The line is out the door, it's one hundred and ten in
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the shade. By when you finally get up to the postman, they're they're
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nasty themselves. What do you want? They're kurt and And after that first
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day, I left and and I thought to myself, I'm not going back
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there. I'm going to send my secretary. That would be pretty unfair,
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but I did honestly have that thought. Instead, I decided, I'm gonna
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try something a friend of mine told me about when I visit the post office.
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I'm going to be chipper. I'm just going to have a big smile
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on my face. I'm going to take responsibility for changing the environment i'm in.
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I'm going to see if this will work. I'm going to greet everybody.
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I'm going to smile and I'm going to persist that, and we'll see
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over thirty days what happens. Now. Initially, you know, I felt
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like a clown because I'm the only one there with a big smile and a
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high hand. And how you're doing nice day to day? You know,
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here, we're gonna okay. But I promise you by the end of the
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thirty days, I could step up to that counter and that postpers hi doc
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how going to help you? Today? It was an entirely different environment.
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That's what I mean by taking responsibility. There are things that I have the
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power to influence, and when I do, I should and thank because I
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have no power to influence and so all right, that's not my responsibility,
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and I need to know the difference. But where I'm concerned, responsibility comes
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down to empowering myself to be a catalyst that improves the quality of life,
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not just for myself but for others, all others that I may engage.
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So taking that notion, spelling it out, putting it together with the idea
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of forgiveness, they were the inspirations for writing Choices and Illusions, and Choices
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and Illusions comes with a free inner talk program. Please share with our listeners
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about that it does. Indeed, it comes with a program that is a
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self esteem program is designed to not just build self esteem, but also facilitate
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with eliminating self sabotaging behavior. And a lot of people say, well,
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yeah, but I don't have any self sabotaging beep. We all have self
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sabotaging behavior. One of the things that I spend time in a great deal
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of time and choice and illusions is explaining how your psychology works. You know,
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here's another little story. I once spoke to a young well he wasn't
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so young at the times, in his mid thirties, young to me,
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but he was telling me about some difficulty he was having, and as we
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talked, it basically came down to, you know, well, he was
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considered to be the stick in the mud. He was just too stoic.
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When we spend a little time talking about how this happened to where it happened,
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he had an uncovering. And the uncovering essentially, he was a boy
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and he was with a group of friends and something funny occurred and he just
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burst out laughing. And the way he laughed the way his face muscles are
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made, one side of his mouth does a funny curl. So his friends
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began to laugh at him. And as they laughed at him, he felt,
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you know, humiliated. So not consciously, he did not say to
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himself, that's it. I'm never going to laugh again. He went away
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humiliated. A defense mechanism. He essentially says, the way that will avoid
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rejection humiliation is will become stoic. Once he had that uncovering, everything changed.
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I had my own early in life. As I explained earlier, I
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get started in this career and people are asking me to speak. I'm terrified
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public speaking, Absolutely terrified. I'm fine in an interrogation room, I'm fine
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with a few law enforcement officers, but I am terrified of getting up in
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front of a crowd. While I was asked, as coincidence would have it,
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I don't believe in coincidence. We'll say serendipity to create a custom program
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for a public figure and an entertainer, all about performance anxiety. And I'd
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created the program, and as it turned out, I finished it on a
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Friday evening and I thought, well, I'll just go ahead and I'll take
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this with me in those days. It was a cassette. I'll take it
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with me, and I had reservations at a cabin down in a southern Utah,
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and I'll listen to a quality check down there before I ship it off
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to her on Monday. So I took it down to the cabin and I
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put it on a little Walkman player and it's playing. And I sat down
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with some paperwork I had stretched out on the bed, and it was late
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at night, maybe you know, eleven o'clock, and I fell asleep,
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the program playing in the background, and I had a dream. And in
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the dream, my mother took me by the arm, put me out in
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the middle of a family gathering and said, my son sings. And I
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sat straight up in bed. When I was a boy, I wanted to
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be a singer. Now I'm seven six, seven years old, and there
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was a television show called Hit Parade where the number one songs were played,
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and the current number one was Vio Kum Dios. Well, I had learned
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Vio Kum Dios and I was singing it in the shower. I was singing
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it to everybody. But when my mother put me out with all these older
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people, uncles and grandmothers and great grandmothers and aunts, and I was terrified,
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just terrified. My voice broke up and I ran out of the room.
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My own unconscious process is what stopped me, or what caused me to
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be so fearful of public speaking. Once I had that uncovering, I was
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able to understand where the fear came from, and as a result, I
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was able to do what I'm doing now. Radio shows with you are a
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whole lot of public speaking over the last I guess what is it now forty
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years. His new book is called Questioning Spirituality? Is it irrational to believe
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in God? Elden Taylor, Please tell our listeners where they can get your
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book and find out more about you when your work. They can get my
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book at any bookstore, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Online. Of course
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Amazon has it on sale. I was just notified and it is back in
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stock. It's sold out quick, but it is back in stock. You
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can reach me at Elden Taylor. That's eld O N. Tay l O
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R at Elden Taylor dot com. You can email me at Elden eld O
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n at Elden Taylor dot com. I do answer my own emails for the
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most part. It may take me a little bit, but I do get
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to them and I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Victor. My
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pleasure and we'll be back with more after these words. On the Home Times
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Radio Network, the Cutting Edge of Conscious Radio HOMETIMES Radio IOMFM. Home Times
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Magazine is one of the leading online content providers of positivity, wellness and personal
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co creating a more conscious lifestyle. Back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this
28:22
week Eldon Taylor, his new book Questioning Spirituality. Is it irrational to believe
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in God? Eldon? What was your inspiration for this new book? Well,
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you know we talked earlier about my own personal experience with the church I
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was raised in. Well over time, you know, we've seen a real
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change in education since the sixties and prayer coming out of schools and separation of
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church and state. The idea of discussing spirituality or religion, or having a
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connected in any way shape or formed. A public education universities for that matter,
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unless they're private schools, is violation for all intended purposes of church and
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state, the separation. So we see that universities particularly have become more and
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more secular in their approach. And I've got two young men to find,
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boys and my sons that went off to an Ivy League public university where they
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obtained their stem degrees in engineering, computer engineering, and physics. And they
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left very spiritual young men, connected doing great work and having their own regular
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spiritual practices, and came home atheists. So there's there was my motivation.
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I need to sit with my sons. I need to understand why they're in
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the place they're in. What is it that they've come to associate with that
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now gives rise to their disassociation from a sense of there being a higher power.
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And what it comes down to is they're educated that it's irrational to believe
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in a god, it's irrational to believe in a higher power. Indeed,
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that's a Santa Claus analogy. You know, educated people are more capable of
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critical thought, and they're educated and capable of critical thought a certain elitism attached
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to it. You know, when you're capable of critical thought, you look
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at that, you know, rotunned fellow in his red and white costume,
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and see that he is way too big around to slide down your fireplace chimney.
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And some of those gifts you get, like that bicycle, there's no
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way it goes down that fireplace chimney. So to think that Santa Claus is
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real is nonsense. Well, to think that there is such a thing as
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an all good God and look into the world and see everything we see that
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is starvation and plagues and natural disasters. What do you mean by all good
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God? That you know? To look at the dogma and to read the
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Bible is a case in point. And see job deprived of his family,
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his wife, his children, They're all taken. He's beset with pain and
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despair. So the Lord can win a bet and then giving back everything what
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the replacement wife replaced his first wife. I mean the kind these are the
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kinds of attacks that are made on what I think of a dogma, and
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I mean dogma in the sense that Amy gill Levine is considered. I'm digressing
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a tiny bit here, Please bear with me. Victor amy Gil Lavine is
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considered to be one of the leading scholars biblical scholars alive today. Professor Levine
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and I've had conversations, and here's the bottom line. If I read the
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Bible literally, then I'm going to come away with a point of view that
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is unrealistic. I'm sorry to say that, but it just simply is.
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If I read the book metaphorically and contextually, I get a whole new perspective.
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So if, for example, historically I look at the second Book of
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Leviticus and I see that a woman is unclean and can enter the temple for
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seven or fourteen days, depending on the instance. Contextually, I can understand
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that. I understand that. You know, the Old Testament is, after
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all, a record of Yahweh's intercourse with the Jewish people. So we're looking
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at a time when understanding disease and bacteria and so forth is quite different than
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what it is today. We're looking at cleanliness issues, we're looking at superstition.
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Contextually, I understand the Book of Leviticus, but if I look at
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it literally and make it apply today, it's nonsense, simple nonsense. If
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you say that the Bible is the literal word of God. Except for this
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verse or except for that verse, Well, then you're not you know,
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you're not being true to what you're trying to say. So when we look
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at it metaphorically and we see the story of Job, we can come away
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with an entirely different metaphor. And the metaphor has great teaching power. And
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so to me, I look at this book not as literal, but as
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a instrument that is full of great values, truths, not unlike, oh
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not unlike many of the other books we read. In the Appanishads and the
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Vadas of Arginas is a case in point. Goes to Krishna. He's in
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a situation where he's the general, he leads the armies, but there's a
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revolution and it's coming from members of his own family against the emperor, and
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then the members of his own family, and he's related to and there are
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friends, and he goes to Krishna and he says, Christian, what do
35:45
I do? How do I lead an army against my family and friends?
35:50
And the message comes down to duty. What is your duty? That's what
35:55
you do? Well, that's a great teaching metaphor. Okay, if we
36:02
use these things as metaphors, and we look at them in context, there's
36:07
tremendous value. But if I say the Earth is only seven thousand years old,
36:15
I've got a problem, and science has a problem. And I just
36:22
walked out on a plank. And I know there are many people that say
36:27
that. But you know, if I say, and there are there are
36:31
religions, Christian religions, that well, let me put it differently. Martin
36:38
Luther said, whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of
36:45
his reason. In other words, reason is an enemy of religion. Now,
36:51
there's basically three positions you can take with regard to is there a higher
36:57
power? Is there not a higher power? Science and religion? You see,
37:02
you can say science and religion are inherently in conflict, and boy,
37:06
that I just ever gave you conflict a kind that they gave my sons in
37:10
school. But there's a second position, and that science and religion are inherently
37:15
not in conflict. Well, that's just false to fact through history. The
37:22
position I take a third one is that science and religion are potentially in conflict.
37:31
It's not irrational, and indeed I demonstrate that it is more rational to
37:37
believe in a higher power using logic, reason and science, than not to
37:45
believe in a higher power. But I digress for a sec Again, there
37:51
are two kinds of reason when you look at logic. We have theoretical reasoning,
37:57
and we use theoretical reasoning for men any things, including how we put
38:01
somebody on Mars. And there are practical decisions that are made every day by
38:09
each and every one of us, and that's called practical reasoning. Okay,
38:15
I wake up in the morning, I'm not feeling the best. I wonder
38:22
if I've got some new flu and I hear that's going Maybe I should see
38:27
the doctor. Yeah, maybe I could get an antibiotic and I could stop
38:32
it. Well, but I've got work to do today. Yeah, I'm
38:37
probably I'm going to make a decision. Do I see the doctor or not
38:42
see the doctor. That's a practical decision. I'm gonna make a practical decision
38:45
every single day. Practical reasoning should be outcome oriented. In other words,
38:57
as a result of the decision i'm do I go to the doctor or not
39:01
go to the doctor, I should have advanced my optimal health, wellness,
39:08
longevity, happiness, etc. That makes perfect sense. When I look at
39:16
spirituality from a practical reasoning standpoint, I discovered, Well, let's see,
39:24
you'll live longer, you'll be happier, there'll be fewer divorces, You'll enjoy
39:36
greater health throughout your life. Your blood pressure will be lower, your anxiety
39:45
levels will be lower, depression levels are much lower. Self esteem issues are
39:52
much higher. I mean self esteem, your general sense of self esteem is
39:57
higher. In other words, from a standpoint of quality of life, I'll
40:06
have a higher quality of life, a live longer, be healthier, endure
40:10
fewer diseases, etc. If I do believe in a higher power, I
40:16
will have a warmer sense of community and a stronger sense of purpose, a
40:24
meaning that underlies my life. If I do believe in a higher power.
40:32
Okay, well that's just straight practical reasoning. There are other reasons as well
40:39
that go beyond health, wellness and happiness. All right, but those are
40:44
that's a pretty big area. My son's also said to me, well,
40:49
okay, when we got through all these studies and we talked about this difference,
40:53
they said, well, okay, but Dad, you know they're there
41:00
these other issues. You know, It's like the spiritual practices that help people
41:07
do better in life that you're talking about. Maybe if you just do that
41:13
yourself, you know, without having to believe in a higher power, it
41:17
would work. I mean, you know meditation, I can meditate and I
41:22
don't need a higher power. I mean, you know I can do some
41:24
of this. Myself said, Yeah, sure. You can light your incense,
41:30
you can burn your candle, you can dim your lights, you can
41:37
assume your supine position, laid back on your reclainer or your sofa, and
41:45
you can even in tone home or sottamata or whatever. You know, we
41:53
can give you some moodras to go with it, and you'll get some benefit.
41:59
And there's no doubt about that. Will you get the same benefit.
42:04
Let me point this out to you. If you're in pain, you're in
42:09
the hospital, and your loved one sits down on the bed next to you
42:14
and takes your hand and holds it between theirs, your pain diminishes. That's
42:23
just fact. Studies have shown that the touch of another human being babies.
42:34
Years ago, I was involved in a preliminary study at Primary Children's Hospital where
42:38
we were looking at how important it was just to touch newborn children, just
42:45
touching them, stroking, them on a regular basis. Keeping them connected changes
42:52
the outcome of how long they're in special needed care, or how fast they
43:02
grow and so forth. When I'm in that recliner, in my supine position
43:12
as a secular mechanic who believes that life is just we're just meat machines,
43:16
part of the evolution of everything. You know, we're not much different than
43:22
our ancestors, you know, old Australopithecus, or Homo habitlists, or Homo
43:30
erectus, or home or Neanderthal right on out here to almost sapien sapien,
43:37
and we're just going to, you know, become one withal in the sense
43:43
that one we end, our atoms will be in trees, and they'll be
43:47
in water, and they'll be in air, and they'll be in rock,
43:52
and we're just meat machines, just part of the evolutionary process period end quotation.
43:58
If I'm in my recliner, that's what I believe. I'm not holding
44:00
anybody's hand. But if I'm in my recliner and I'm meditating with Mike handle
44:05
with my hand sense or all alone, sitting on a cliff edge looking at
44:12
the water the river running below, I close my eyes and I meditate,
44:16
I'm holding the hand of a higher power. There is a tremendous physiological difference.
44:28
His book is entitled Questioning Spirituality. My guest Eldon Taylor, will be
44:32
back with more after these words on the Own Times Radio network. Humanity Healing
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International is a small nonprofit with a big drain. Since two thousand and seven,
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HHI has been working tirelessly to bring help to communities with little or no
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but they bring the reassurance then no one is alone and that someone cares to
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learn more. Please visit Humanity Healing dot org. Humanity Healing is where your
45:06
heart is back on Destination Unlimited. My guest this week Elden Taylor, his
45:19
book Questioning Spirituality. Is it irrational to believe in God? Elden? Is
45:28
the concept of quantum nonlocality in physics? Would that explain some of the anomalous
45:36
experiences that you refer to in your book as white crows and offer a challenge
45:39
to material science theoretically? And I say theoretically because there's there's little argument that
45:55
consciousness is not just a local event but stretching one into the other I hesitate
46:08
to do and the reason, and there's several reasons for it. First of
46:12
all, I've got a son and it's a physicist, and he would say,
46:15
under no circumstances, father, should you do that? Because you're talking
46:20
about apples and oranges. And so I'm just going to leave that there and
46:24
say, it's one thing for somebody to say, well, let's take the
46:30
classical split view experiment, where I can look at it at one moment and
46:42
I have a particle, and I look at it at another moment and I
46:45
have a wave form, and because of this split split and consciousness acting with
46:52
it, I suddenly get the notion that consciousness is acting on it. And
46:59
they're for if I expect it to be, well, that's erroneous. It's
47:06
how you set the experiment up that determines whether or not it's going to be
47:13
a particle or a way. So businesses there are. You really got me
47:22
into a complicated one here, Victor. The school of thought at large is
47:31
that there are some folks out there who will hang physics as an explanation for
47:39
consciousness based on propositions such as those that have been discussed at this point.
47:50
The problem with that is when you I hate the name names Fred Allenwolf,
48:00
then you push them, they agree that it is their conjecture that takes them
48:07
to that conclusion. It is not the science. The hard science itself rejects
48:15
it. And so in a sense, we've got this, this new age
48:20
notion that quantum physics is demonstrating providing us evidence of how consciousness acts without an
48:31
object, how consciousness acts at a distance, how two consciousnesses may share across
48:39
the globe, ideas, And I'm not going to say that's not true.
48:45
I'm just going to say it's not supported by physics at large. When those
48:51
statements are made like that without the underlying support from the science itself, then
49:00
they're attacked in the same way that some of the dogma that we talked about
49:07
in the last segment is attacked. They're treated as frivolities, people that don't
49:17
understand, people that aren't physicists, and or outlayers who for all intent and
49:25
purposes, and I've interviewed them, will admit under fire that it is their
49:31
conjecture, not their evidence. But I will say this, when it comes
49:40
to white crows, there's no question but what they exist. When it comes
49:45
to the disposition of consciousness. The theory accepted by most scientists is emergent properties.
49:54
Emergent properties, well, you get into this whole question of emergence,
49:59
and we talked to little bit about that during the break. But I'm going
50:01
to skip fast forward and say, if it is just emergent property, which
50:07
is what the skeptics, the agnostics, and the astheists want to call it.
50:16
If it is, then emergent property is a local event when you have
50:25
an instance of mind to mind communication, over distance telepathy. And we have
50:35
several studies, solid studies that show this occurs. When you have that taking
50:43
place, you have evidence that consciousness is not just a local event when you
50:53
have psychic experiences. In Victor, I would really encourage you to share with
51:00
your audience the one you told me about when you were in Korea, but
51:05
I'll just share one of mine when you're When I was a boy, I
51:10
love to shoot marbles. Now I'm in kindergarten and I'm shooting marbles and we're
51:16
at recess, and I went a bunch of marbles from the other kids,
51:22
and my pockets are stuffed with them. The bell rings that I run inside
51:25
and I'm looking at them, and I've got cats. I've got some beautiful
51:30
marbles. I'm really excited. And then I can't find my taw. My
51:36
ta's missing. That was hey, my tall was my shooting marble. Without
51:42
it, I can't shoot. I mean marbles, they can be too slick
51:45
or too sticky. This was the perfect shooting marble. I'm in a near
51:51
panic school. That's out. I go outside. I go right to where
51:57
we were shooting the marbles, and it's nowhere around. I walk around.
52:00
I'm searching for this marble. Now I'm just a you know, I guess
52:06
I'm maybe six years old, and and I'm just really wrecked with emotion that
52:13
I've lost this tar marble. All these marbles I want weren't worth that tar.
52:19
And I stop, and I hear this inner voice, close your eyes.
52:25
So I closed my eyes, and then these directions take eight steps straight
52:32
ahead. I take eight steps whatever, I don't remember how many steps.
52:37
So I'm just telling a story. Now stop, turn to your right,
52:43
go four steps. Stop. Look down. I do, and there's the
52:49
marble. And I'm doing this with my eyes closed. I'm here. Okay.
52:54
That's that's the kind of thing that we think of as a white crow.
52:59
You. I had the good opportunity to talk to Erlando Haroldson, and
53:02
he's one of the leading researchers in reincarnation, and he's interviewed hundreds of young
53:09
people. In fact, he's got a study that more than a hundred young
53:15
children were involved in. These are children under the age typically under the age
53:19
of ten. They recall details, so so many details about prior lives that
53:28
when they're taken to a home where they say they lived and their brother still
53:36
lives maybe, And they go in and they've named the uncles and the aunts,
53:42
and they identify some in pictures, and then someone comes in and they
53:47
say, oh, I understand, will you know me? I was your
53:52
great aunt? You used to that overtly trying to trick these children. The
53:59
children looked at them and say, no, you're not. I don't know
54:02
you. Some really incredible research now reincarnash maybe they reincarnate it, but maybe
54:13
also they're just picking up though forms whatever. We're demonstrating that consciousness is clearly
54:20
not a local event. It's connected in a much larger scheme of things.
54:25
Those are the kinds of things that evidence consciousness to be much more than some
54:32
emergent property, like our young people get told nowadays by agnostics and atheists,
54:39
or how they explain that this meat machine, this evolutionary byproduct of millions of
54:47
years of evolving, has come to exist and have the degree of consciousness that
54:55
we do have. Absolutely, my guest, Eldon Taylor, his new book,
55:01
Questioning Spirituality? Is it irrational to believe in God? Eldon? One
55:07
more time? Please tell our listeners where they can get your books and find
55:09
out more about you and your amazing work. Well they should. They can
55:14
get my books anywhere all the brick and mortar bookstores. I understand Amazon online
55:19
has it on sale right now, but Amazon, Barnes, and Noble are
55:23
both back in stock. We sold out initially very quickly, but we are
55:28
back in stock, and I hope you do go out and get the book.
55:31
I think it's a good read for anyone and everyone, whether you're questioning
55:37
your spirituality or you know someone that is questioning it, And you can reach
55:43
me at Elden Taylor e L D O N Y L O R Elden Taylor
55:49
dot com. Eldon, my gratitude to you for joining us today and sharing
55:53
this work. It's been my pleasure, Victor, and my gratitude, do
55:59
you, sir. I have really enjoyed our conversation, especially or not especially
56:07
both on the air and off the air, Victor anytime. Thank you so
56:12
much, Eldon, and thank you for joining us on Destination Unlimited. I'm
56:15
Victor, the voice Furman of a wonderful week