 What's the game plan Kevin was a nice run care had a close-out someday nobody wins them all What are you oh I have so many names See call me dad Nobody plays a deal-making devil better than Al Pacino and no one plays an unsuspecting dupe better than Keanu Reeves It's from the movie the devil's advocate and it fits perfectly with today's Controversial and just incredibly amazing and for me paradigm-changing interview with Dr. Tom Zinser As souls we have the choice and evil does not Run our life evil does not have power over us and so as souls we do have that power to deal with evil To stop it To refuse it It's one of the reasons I said that distinction between darkness and evil is so important So our natural state is to have likes and dislikes that Inadvertently not our fault, but it happens We block that light in one way or another and sometimes we connect with those blockages more than we connect with the light And it all becomes a confused state What I heard you saying then is that we can begin talking about Evil darkness as just blockages of the light that of course you always had the power to Remove those it makes them a lot less scary and and we do need that We've grown up in our Western culture to be frightened of darkness and evil to think of it as so powerful To stay away from that topic for fear that it's going to get us People need to know it doesn't have that power Well, and I hope this came through in the interview is this idea of the contract Because that is not only a method of deception that seems to be in play But it's been enshrined in our culture through books movies as being Don't make that contract with the with the devil you could never break it And what Jared says and you prove in your work is that oh no, there's no there's no such contract It's null and void. They're there. It's unenforceable just all you have to do to say No, I choose to go to the light and it's all over. That's right. Yes Welcome to skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers thinkers and their critics I'm your host alexa carers and today we're joined by tom zinzer in 1987 Dr. Tom zinzer was a clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist in grand rapids, michigan and Like a lot of therapists like a lot of people helpers Tom wanted to see His patients get better But they weren't at least they weren't getting better as quickly or as often as he felt they should So tom as he tells it was almost to the point of giving up Then a part-time secretary in his office named kathryn came to him with a rather Remarkable proposal that we're going to hear about and what followed was a 15 year collaboration that Changed tom's practice certainly changed the lives of hundreds and hundreds of his clients And completely Changed his worldview as well now. I'm not so sure What it did for his reputation as a clinical psychologist among his colleagues But that's almost another story. Maybe one we will get into as well Because tom's 15 year collaboration turned out to be with a spirit enemy Name jared who consulted with tom about the problems his patients were facing and suggested specific ways to help them overcome traumas relieve anxieties and generally live A happier more fulfilling life Dr. Zinzer's book again is titled soul centered healing A psychologist's extraordinary journey into the realms of sub personalities spirits and past lives It's I use the term game changer too often But it it's an unbelievably Significant piece of work and i'm super excited to have him here today tom. Thanks so much for joining me Well, you're welcome and thanks for inviting me. I uh said i'm a long time listener So it's a pleasure to meet you at least in video if not person Yeah, I was I was blown away to think that you've been listening to this show when I dug into your Your experience that you've had here and the kind of clinical work that you've done We're going to get into that in a minute But I think that's a big part of the story that I want to get out there Right off the bat is you're a clinician A highly trained professional and you're doing all the stuff that kind of normal Psychologists do people come in and talk to you about their problems And then all of this other stuff we're going to talk about that it's kind of layered on top of that So that might even be a good place to begin doctors answer tell people a little bit about your background your training your credentials just so people know That part of who you are Yeah, I think even to be clear from the start as I practiced psychology and the early 80s Once I began working with Jared That crossed a whole different line in which I really Was not practicing psychology as such any longer What I was learning from Jared was layered in a sense On top of that in terms of the psychic and spiritual dimensions the energetic dimensions So in the beginning I worked as a hypnotic therapist Mainly focused on dissociative kind of disorders But I just want to interject here. I just want people to understand because I when I got into your your stuff This is the process I always go through. I'm usually super excited and blown away And then a little alarm bell goes off in my head and goes wait a minute Wait a minute. There's a lot of kind of shady people out there Is this guy legit in the way that normal people would just come at it? Does he have An advanced degree. I mean did he go through the proper training? Is he is he legit in that way? And and and so I have those questions And for me those questions were answered, but I'd like you to kind of answer them again What are your professional credentials? Well, I did my undergraduate work at the university of Notre Dame And that was in basically was called the great books program a very broad field humanities But then I went on afterwards to get my master's degree with an emotionally disturbed children And after gaining my master's in teaching for a year I went on for my doctoral studies at Texas A&M in counseling psychology So I finished my dissertation and began practice As an intern here in Grand Rapids in 1975 And then worked at the psychiatric hospital for several years before entering private practice And it's in private practice that I really practiced hypnosis and Really attempting to work with people who had been traumatized Whether in childhood or adolescence Or even later And then that led you as you just mentioned a little little bit ago into this work with dissociative disorders which is in and of itself highly controversial I kind of gleaned from your book that it wasn't quite as controversial when you first started It's not like you were jumping into some trend you had just kind of discovered it On your own so dissociative disorder so people know Split personality or multiple personality as it's portrayed in the movies is how it's been popularized But from a Kind of straight on psychological clinical perspective. It's now recognized that people do have different kinds of Disassociative disorders that lead to stress in their life. So do you want to kind of help people understand that whole thing? When I began I learned About an approach to therapy called ego state therapy And this is an approach that recognizes that we all have sub personalities The multiple personality which was the term back then In a sense is an extreme case of sub personalities So the issue was treating people through hypnosis Making contact with these sub personalities and helping these sub personalities to Relieve the pain or hurt or distress or fear that they carried And it's these personalities that we were bringing back to integrate with the self So multiple personality is an extreme, but it's basically saying we all Have sub personalities created I kind of gleaned from the book that there was this kind of continuum We all love ego states. We all love the gatekeeper. We all have the protector. We all have that it just Hasn't gone to the extent that it has or is that not really a good way to look at it? Is it really something kind of completely different when it becomes a problem for people? No, we are talking about a continuum And Most of the people that I worked with as clients They were not multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder as we talked today They were what we want to talk about normal every day But as in childhood and in adolescence especially The ego self the identity is not well formed And those are very vulnerable times and so when a child or an adolescent is overwhelmed by Just say they got embarrassed or humiliated at some point at eight years old or or they've had an accident and Just normal traumas, but if they are overwhelmed Then a part may be created to take over Until things can restabilize And so the I think that one of the questions you're implying Alex We cannot predict what Self-personality will be created for a person It is a unique creation out of that person's own mind the situation What kind of distress is involved? You just can't predict What you can predict Somewhat is in trauma when overwhelmed a sub personality will be created In a way even that part of the book was very empowering to me in terms of understanding Just general psychology why I get angry when my chrome doesn't refresh as fast as I think it should and I'm looking I go that's rather irrational or why I think the weather should be the way that I need it to be and I look at the irrationality of that and I step back and wow What was that reaction and I think you're your book and even just because I wasn't Familiar with this kind of egocentric kind of approach It just It kind of clicked for me in a very normal way that didn't scare me or make me feel like I was Strange in any way But just that this was kind of a normal process that consciousness does to deal with things that come up So that's I don't want to make too big the deal out of it But I guess I we want to make kind of a big deal out of it because I think it is the foundation for This clinical work that you do and again folks. I can't stress enough You know Dr. Zinser is doing clinical work. He's trying to make these patients More effective in their life and what I love about this guy Is he's constantly looking for new protocols and he's testing those in an appropriate way With his clients to see if it's more efficacious than the last so I don't know. I think we do need to get all that out there Well, I would agree with you Completely sub personalities. I think is an extremely important concept for understanding ourselves But I would emphasize that sub personalities whether what we might call ego states Limited all the way to multiple personality Where you have extreme ultra personalities that whole continuum It is not necessarily accepted fully by all the psychology Or psychiatry Hold on right there. I want you to speak to that because part of what you're saying completely flies in the face of what a lot of people in the quote-unquote Psychology community psychiatry community mental health community They are not on board with this and and you really raise this point very powerfully in your book and that is this What I always slam on is what these guys don't even have a meaningful understanding of consciousness And I'm not just throwing stones. I'm saying it isn't coherent Inside of their own framework. So here you are doing hypnotherapy There we don't have any model for how or why Hypnotherapy should work. So we let that into the tent and then at the same time we go Yeah, but it's all brain-based biological robot meaningless universe stuff. It's not really coherent Well, I would make the distinction first between the clinician And the academician there are a number of therapies that are they that accept sub-personalities And they call it parts therapy. They call it transactional therapy Asagi all are called it psychosynthesis There are a number of approaches that have recognized sub-personalities But almost all of them or maybe all of them come that come out of the clinical tradition When you're actually working with people And in in the work you see these people kind of split The the academic and the empirical scientists side of psychology They can't get a handle on this unless they want to come into the clinical And so you're not you're going to find less acceptance in the academic and in the empirical science Schools than you're going to find in the clinical So that's one big distinction. This the clinical area of psychology you're going to see sub-personality Be a more accepted concept I'm glad you made that distinction between the clinical and the academic the boots on the ground folks See it. They're not Incline to completely deny it and pretend like their experience doesn't matter So they're trying to explain it. We see the same thing With near-death experience where the people are really making headway is the cardiology says I can't deny the fact that the person was dead That they're hard to stop and then and then I can't deny the fact that they came back and recounted their resuscitation In a way that doesn't make any sense. So I have to investigate that and then meanwhile you have the Cognitive science people and the other people saying well that just doesn't fit in our paradigm So we don't have to deal with it. So the the related question of that and this is something I hammer on All the time on skeptical, but I really wanted to get your Take on it and that is How do they manage to hold on to such a silly ridiculous outdated View of consciousness. So I hope you get what I mean there, but tell me I think I clearly get it because it's one of the things that has really preoccupied me since I finished my last book is what I would term this paradigm shift And in response to your question about what it is about these folks My sense Alex is that when it comes to the psychic and spirit dimensions of self and reality ourselves as soul It leads to an all or none kind of line You're either all in Or you're still hedging And the empirical scientists today The cognitive psychologists the people who really fight against these kind of other dimensions They're facing that all or none line Because if you cross it If you cross it your world is going to turn upside down If you if you consider yourself to be a soul who has past lives has lived past lives That is going to change your way of thinking about who you are Why certain things go on for you the way they do What you may be about where you're headed All of that changes if you cross the line and say, yeah, I think I've been around for more than one lifetime I really believe That that line is implicitly Known by these folks at an unconscious level It's known and it scares them They resist it Do you think it might be known at a conscious level? And is not crossed because the implications for Social engineering social control manipulation In either a positive or negative way Yes, I believe that ultimately there is the concern that if people really Began to understand the power they have as conscious beings I would believe that the powers that be would not want that to be given for freedom so Jared had said a long time ago to me thought is the most powerful force in the universe So if you can imagine people opening their thinking to other conscious realms I would see governments. Yes being threatened to somewhat by people discovering that kind of power And that's funny. I totally hear you and I am jumping ahead here, but I can't resist speak to Responsibility that goes with the power Well, yeah, that's a big jump I mean the jerry's message is we every one of us each of us is a being of life We are a soul And that is in itself powerful that we are powerful as a soul Jared's view is that We come and live our lifetimes in order to awaken as souls And by that he's talking about awakening to one's own power He's talking about the power of light the power of knowledge Not not a power to use against others But the power to create to be that that pure light that you that we are So Yes, there is a responsibility I guess I have to approach it a different way and that is Each of us born Created with absolute free choice Our responsibility is to not violate others free choice We have free free choice. We keep that free choice So the issue in terms of responsibility is that we not violate Others free choice But jerry will say that as In incarnations as humans we explore all kinds of things between the light and the dark That's that's what that's what awakening is about Responsibility is in not violating others It's awesome and we did take a big jump. So let's back up and let's Go right back to the beginning of this story because I kind of left a little bit of a cliffhanger there so You're a practicing clinical psychologist hypnotherapist And this woman who you know because she works in your office, but you don't know her that well Comes into your office Because she's overheard because you're kind of an open-minded guy and you're exploring hypnotherapy So some of the guys in the office are talking about Robert Monroe and out-of-body experiences and you haven't played around with that and she hears that and she sees an opening So she comes in And what does she talk to you about and what happens next? Well Catherine offered me an opportunity To have a session with the spirit entity that she channeled How does that how does that conversation go? How does somebody sit down with you and say i've been channeling this spirit and uh, he might be willing to talk to you Well, but something i never considered with everything i did But she came in said she had overheard the conversation in the lunch room And it brought back to her that as a much younger woman she had an experience Where jared had approached her mentally And she she had shut it down And when she heard uh me talking about out-of-body experience and these kinds of things She said she sat down again with her husband and went into her trance and jared was right there She wasn't quite sure what to make of it. So she approached me As a way to maybe validate or help her Be clear on what exactly this jared thing was and what happened And meanwhile she was offering me an experience With one of these paranormal or anomalous sorts of experiences So I was open. I sat down what I have to lose you you were open tom But you know, let's let's dive into that a little bit further because You're a smart guy. You're thinking about a lot of things. You're reading a ton of books. So I'm sure at this point you're also leery skeptical careful about Channeling spirits. We've all heard this it can lead to a lot of confusion at the very least it can lead to just misinformation and being Trickstered or even worse kind of thing. So as you approach this what kind of Not just safeguards, but how are you thinking you will approach this as a clinician? Well, let me give an example of my first conversation with jared and The case that came up and that was a fellow I was working with he was around 40 and In trying to identify his sub personalities that were getting in the way here I was getting communication from the inner world And as I tried to pin down Can I interject here with it? I want you to clarify something for me. Is it idiomotor signaling? Right. Did you go ahead and explain to people what this particular kind of hypnotherapy technique is The idiomotor response is an old old hypnotic technique And it is a way of communicating with the unconscious through signals Rather than verbal interaction So we want to put people in a deep trance so we can get to that deeper part of the subconscious Even though we don't know what any of these terms mean. We don't really know what hypnotherapy is doing We don't know what deep consciousness would be. We don't know any of that But we're just as a clinician you're saying hey, this is effective get to a deep trance state get the verbal part of the whole Brain thing out of it and just see if I can get really simple kind of signals, right? Yes Asking yes or no questions And getting signals. Yes. No stop or I don't know And this technique using signals and I use finger signals It is a very quick way to bypass the conscious mind Get the verbal self out of the way so that the client consciously is not responsible for anything. I'm asking I am not asking them. I'm asking their unconscious mind So the idiomotor response is what I'm using with clients back then So you go to talk to Jared and how does that go? Well, it took a while for Jared and I to develop a language and an understanding But in that first session I did bring up a case This one where I kept getting contradictory answers And he gave me information and he said that there was a spirit present with this client Who was interfering with him and confusing him and That was a bit of a shock to me But I did take it back in the next therapy session with this man And I started asking questions as if Jared's information were correct that there was a spirit present Hold on right there, Tom. This is a huge leap and you alluded to this at the very beginning of this interview That it almost sounded like you felt a little bit guilty that you went off reservation like this in terms of the normal protocol that's being used But I love The clinician in you in the way that you approach this is you are going to take this information And with all your training background and experiences, which is very substantial at this point You are going to test this In a real way. Did you worry at all at this point that you might be leading yourself into A state of where you might be diluting yourself when you go talk to your clients As I said, I had been communicating with this client trying to the unconscious getting these contradictory responses When Jared gave me this information when I went back to my client I was already in in the habit of a question And working with him Before with all the contradictions. I did not feel I was communicating all of a sudden with Jared's information reframing it And asking the questions I began to get responses that made sense to me Now, let's make sure we're explicit about this reframing because as I understand it and again Tom, please correct me because I might have misinterpreted things Is that your that the hypnotherapy technique that you're using this signaling You shift now from talking to the ego part of this person to A separate spirit entity that is somehow communicating through this person And that leads to it leads to what what does it lead to? Wow, no, we're talking 32 years ago here I Went through a communication with this spirit When my client was in trance But he was also consciously getting things coming to him And so he would intermittently also be reporting things to me verbally and He could feel this he could feel what was happening and he also Had his own sense that this was not him. And so he was he was shocked as well I mean we both were shocked by this because he wasn't expecting it. That's for sure So it was my first attempt to engage and communicate In a way with what appeared to be a separate entity and I Felt that I received enough confirmation enough back and forth communication with this entity And the information we finally had is that it was willing to leave So it's not like I came out of that 100 convinced But but it had talked to me when for so many sessions it hadn't and That was a step forward So that begins this process that you enter into with jared where You were actually consulting with him about clients And as strange as that might sound and as for some people it might sound Unprofessional it might sound like you have crossed some boundary there that you're not supposed to cross Although again, I would again take this back folks and say What boundary do we think we're creating if this is the greater reality? And we found a way to access that greater reality and possibly apply good Scientific methods to it. Why would we want to hold off from doing that for just some arbitrary reasons? We've said but I don't want to bury the lead here You as you document in this Incredible book that people need to really really get and and fully experience what went on here You get specific information from jared about clients that you're then able to use Clinically, what was that process like? I'm sure it was confirming to you. We just talked about the first case But you have hundreds and hundreds of cases, right? Yes. Yes and I mean basically after my first session with jared and my going taking it back to my clients I was so intrigued with this possibility. I asked katharine Months later for another session, which she agreed to and I talked with jared again This was really done in automatic writing. It wasn't done verbally talking with jared Well, after that second session with jared a month later I asked katharine if she would have another one because this information was it just was right on So about four months after I met jared Matthew and I agreed on forming this collaboration with jared So I began meeting with katharine once a week during the week with clients I kept a list of questions on my legal path So I would write down questions about where we got stuck with the client Or what was happening? I also wrote down metaphysical questions on that legal pad And then at the end of the week, I would meet with jared with my questions there go over all of those I would go home and during the week I would transcribe that session and Take that information back to the sessions with my clients Using that information with each of those individual clients Then I would take that communication that get no therapy work and See if I could engage see if I could get a communication and it happened Over and over and that leads to as we learn in the book It leads to you developing more of a I don't want to just say intuitive but an intuitive sense of What might be going on so your questions to jared as we read in the book are more pointed you kind of know Hey, I think this is going on. Can you confirm that rather than what the heck is going on? Let's just stop there Well, it was kind of the process of jared identifying something Am I going and testing it out? I mean you got people with pass life stuff. You got people with spirit attachment. You got people with just their own sub personalities all of these different clients I would follow up with him and Then take that information back and all the different situations and see if I Could have ongoing communication But he would identify something at first and I feel a need to bring in here that One of the things he identified was that part of us sell ourselves that he called the higher self and That higher self according to jared knew so much of the person's inner world Was aware of their soul history was able to be a conduit of light for each of us in our present life This higher self became more and more a central figure That I worked with with each client that I would establish communication with their higher self Now jared has said When I and I explored this deeply with him about higher self He pictured the higher self as though the soul projected a piece of itself into the present life when the person is born And in projecting that piece of itself that higher self knew it was part of the light It knew as part of the soul And it was for this person's lifetime In a sense a beacon of light An inner guide and I began to work with that higher self To be a part that could explore And identify parts of the self that were in trouble or had problems To make it even to me even more impressive the higher self Could communicate directly to the ego states the subpersonality It's as if the higher self could go to where the subpersonality was And communicate to it directly And higher self could also bring that subpersonality the divine light From the soul and from the creator could bring the light to that subpersonality And this is another one of those confirmation things and I would tell you it's one of the most powerful I have worked with thousands and thousands of subpersonalities 99 percent of the time Once higher self brought the light to a subpersonality It changed its attitude and its perception almost immediately. It became agreeable with the healing process It became agreeable with heal sharing its trauma even though that was painful When you see something like that happen 99 percent of the time To me, that's a scientific finding It's a consistent finding the significance is out of the ballpark And but that still happens today Now we have a bunch of skeptical questions that you just kind of raised the skeptical drill here or so Nothing nothing to be surprised about Well, one thing is you're going to trigger a lot of people. I hate that word, but it's the right word You're going to trigger a lot of people with certainly with divine With god with creator with even higher self These are all words that are highly charged In our society and our culture particularly because of the religious connotations to them So can't but as part of a way to dive into that Talk to me about religion and how you understand Religion fitting into what became your Larger worldview your larger understanding of the extended consciousness realms I basically think in terms of spirituality and spiritual realm. I look at religions plural as forms Attempting to help humans Come to know and understand their divinity their own divine light their soul Okay, but let me interject a question here because I just talked to a guy maybe two weeks ago A terrific guy his name is david ditchfield. He had this increase from the uk He had this incredible near-death experience where he was dragged under a train and you know left his body And he met god and he saw jesus And he came back and he was meeting with With a person at a spiritualist church who had Abilities to see and understand these extended realms and she said you met jesus, didn't you? And he goes, yeah, I met jesus and I was talking to david and I said, what do you think about that? How do you understand that idea that you met quote unquote jesus because if we look for jesus historically We don't always find jesus and if we look at what some people have done with her with their jesus We don't really feel so great about that And yet this was he felt very confident that this was his experience in this extended realm and that experience was mediated by A higher spirit guide that was interested in his good and it sounded like It sounded all good. He wasn't he didn't come back and do a bunch of evil stuff To the contrary he came back and seemed to be changed for the positive. How are we to understand? For example that guy's experience or millions of other people's experience with A jesus that may or may not be historical in the sense that we think about You're asking big questions. Alex the in the spirit realm of light where souls exist There are spirit guides There are those departed loved ones that all of us have who have passed on those souls in the light can also be aware of us and Jared had said that from the beginning the promise and he used the term light or god That the promise was made that Each of us who incarnated every soul who incarnated would have a spirit guide and So my view is we all have at least one spirit guide. We may have different guides during our lifetime And at times we may have more than one guide involved with us So when we talk about In the near-death experience when we talk about people who are close to death in hospice Who are getting ready to make transition? They will see departed family members come to them. That is so common and Thing is in spirit realm And at our unconscious soul level There's more that's known than we do know consciously The person who sees jesus As opposed to the person who sees muhammad As opposed to the person who Sees another kind of being of light that presentation is for the person Who's having the experience hold on pause right there and tell me We've heard that we've heard that so many times Tell me specifically How that fits into what you learned Working with your clients because there does seem to be a little bit of a disconnect for me in terms of if this Jesus figure is Because i've talked to him again a number of well-meaning Spiritual people who have a direct experience with jesus which i'm always okay with But when i try and say well As i understand it you in the experience with christ consciousness They're like no alex you don't get it i had an experience with jesus And it is jesus of the bible and that's just it and don't tell me otherwise i would say That these beings who come to meet us In different situations Are conditioned By the person who's having the encounter If you grew up with jesus and in your own mind and heart Jesus becomes a symbolic figure and by that i mean a sacred symbolic Figure for this person That figure is imbued with energy also And it makes connection to the spirit realm And when that person whatever the situation happens that calls for that kind of encounter especially near death or death itself Or an outer body trauma Jesus may be the one and i'm not even sure that this figure comes forward and says i'm jesus But it may come forward and appear To the person with their symbol is calling for I don't myself working with people I don't need to answer the question whether this being of light is in fact jesus personally Because there are all kinds of beings of light who've come to meet The people i've worked with and there's all kinds of beings of light who came to meet these people with near death experience So i guess i would say it's more conditioned by what the person is ready for Or the way they perceive things or the way they need to see things in order to make the the contact But i think taking from your work and again i want to emphasize this because it's like Kind of one of my main things i put up on the screen something that you wrote from the book So you're saying past lives as with near death experiences There are too many reports from too many sources and too many reputable studies to just be flukes or fantasies We're talking for example about children who possess very specific past life memories and details of people and places And events from previous lifetimes that were investigated and corroborated in ways that left no room for doubt Now i shared that earlier on the screen, but i wanted to read that into the show because here's where i go with that The level one discussion is Is that true? Can we rely on the university to virginia and jim tucker who did The follow-up work from ian stevenson and compiled thousands of these past life accounts and publish them In an organized systematic way and we're totally open to review and criticism and withstood all that That's level one and you just stand up to anyone go well if you don't understand that i just nothing i could do There's the data you'd they're up to deal with it or not and then level two is Why are we conditioned and kind of Led to look away from that if it is that solid as we said in level one But level three is what really gets me excited and it's the reason why your book And the possibilities of your work get me so excited Because level three says okay. I'm really not going to worry about just proving whether there's an extended realm Which in your case is like hey, you read my robert munro. You did your own out of body experience You worked with all these clients. It's like okay. That's really an answered question. I don't need to spend all my time just trying to debate with someone and then Question two you kind of said well, I don't really worry about if What other people in the community are are kind of thinking or what academicians are publishing? What you did is said, how can I develop a protocol? That might be Efficacious for helping my clients move forward. I think that is so Awesome and so important and so unique So I want to move into talking about your protocol because you have some very specific things that you developed over time in terms of how to deal with people who are experiencing this trauma how to Deal with these different entities however We want to understand them or identify them and then in particular how to deal with The evil darkness thing which is the original reason I contacted you and you have a very very important distinction that you make between darkness and evil And that's what I want to get to next but I want to start out by talking about Your protocol that you developed and why you developed it the way that you did Well, I have to go back again and emphasize the clinical nature Because all of these start with the client's own story I look at my work and with Jared Is basically identifying those things within or about a person that blocks the light from them And ego states sub personalities are often blocking the light Because they carry pain Or hurt or fear or distress If you bring them light they can refuse it Because they are part of the soul and and therefore They have some level of choice Well, they often refuse this light love energy because it brings up their pain And if you're going to bring up their pain, you're going to have to be able to offer them relief or else forget it Don't bring up their pain just to have them be in pain So the protocol developed for the ego states this make the contact communicate with them Make it safe for them to receive this light love energy Once they receive it as I said 99% say whippy I love this. I don't want to be without it And then they will move through the sharing and release of what happened to them For spirit attachment outside entities. It's a different protocol They don't belong with the person they need to leave And so again and working with Jared it was understanding how to approach these spirits To gain their cooperation to leave my client And in the worst cases Protocols designed to get to a point where they could be removed forcibly So that's a different protocol Hey, Tom, can you help me and help folks? Link those two because I think those two are also related in some important ways that you talk about in the book in terms of trauma frustration anxiety and this separation that we feel can be An entry point for Some of these other entities that come in and hang around and disrupt people. Do you want to speak to that at all? Well, there are there are a number of ways people might be vulnerable to external intrusion or attachment or interference But one of the primary ways is through subpersonalities Because subpersonalities carry pain and stay away from the light These outside entities Can't connect with them through their pain As I said guides the higher self can communicate to subpersonalities Well, these spirits can communicate to them also And if they find a subpersonality that they can threaten or intimidate or trick Offer them something That is an entree Into this person's energy through the subpersonality I had one I think I wrote about in the book one young kid. Maybe 12 years old was offered a knife a pocket knife By a spirit he took that knife And felt now he could protect himself and he was kind of Stronger now with this knife, but it turned out that the knife was A device used to keep the door open as long as that child kept the knife He had connection to the external one so we had Convince him to give up the knife Before we could break the connection with that spirit Because as long as the kid kept the knife he was given permission for the spirit to stay connected Wow, I mean we could go into a full discussion on that for at least an hour Because it one it launches us right into A net flick streaming horror series that we all hear about and that's okay because it suggests that Fiction is imitating reality in ways that are even more Real than we dare to even think about You have to read the book folks to understand the process that Dr. Zinser went through here But it was kind of pains takingly step by step as he talked about meeting with a client Taking notes Transcribing thinking about it deeply then quote unquote channeling this spirit However, you want to feel about that and then going back and doing the hard work with the client One of the things that really came through in this book that made me feel more confident of what you're talking about Is you emphasize over and over again that this is not a quick fix 30 minute exorcism walk out like a new person It's more about the journey that you are on Your soul journey if you want to use that Corny phrase and it's it's a process and you engage in it and you keep moving forward and you realize decisions that you've made and you remake decisions and and talk about the work If you would that is involved in this process both on your part and on the part of your client I'd have to say in terms of the healing method itself it begins With basically hearing from the client what their difficulties are what the symptoms are what the struggles are The first thing I do And I learned this from Jared is to contact what I call the protective part of the mind The protective part of the mind Is a part of ourselves that is conscious in the present We think of our conscious self as they will think forward and backward past future The protective part of ourselves is a consciousness But its consciousness is limited to the present It's not thinking about what we're going to do tonight or what we did yesterday Its focus is in the present That's where its consciousness is When I work with somebody I learned to connect contact the protective part first to get permission To go forward and work with trauma I found out that the protective part was often the part blocking me before I met Jared Because the protective part saw me as a bull in a china shop Bringing up trauma bringing up pain So the protective part finally agrees then I will make contact with higher self When I make contact with higher self There's a number of things in the protocol to make sure the communication is with higher self and that it is free Higher self is free to communicate When I'm convinced of that when I'm assured of that Then I will start with higher self looking inside And start to review these issues or problems or symptoms that the client has talked about And it's through higher self then that we will identify and see if higher self Can identify a source So if a person let's say has intense anxiety panic attacks We will ask higher self to look inside and see if it is able to locate the source Of the panic attacks You may find by the time it's done Six or seven sub personalities that are involved in an anxiety pattern, but from different experiences You might find that there is also a spirit present who kind of gets all these sub personalities afraid and upset You just don't know This is going to freak people out a little bit, right? I'm sure you go to conferences and meet with colleagues and they think it sounds flaky. I'm sure Well, I'm afraid this is part of that issue that if you cross the line You're looking at a whole different kind of reality And this goes back to sub personalities also I came to the point and work in my work with chariot Where I came to understand the sub personality at least in my mind I best understand them as psychic beings They're not just memories. They're not just Kind of associated states. They are actually psychic beings They're able to communicate They're able to receive light. They're able to make a choice when you tell them they have a choice They do have feelings They're beings And the issue is helping this being be relieved of whatever pain or distress it has So that it can join And integrate with the conscious self I know this challenges people because I mean talking about the protective part is a different consciousness Talking about sub personalities is different consciousnesses of ourselves The higher self is a different consciousness of ourselves. These are all different levels of consciousness And our modern psychology wants a unified identity. It is an egocentric paradigm And when you get past the ego They they just want to reject that So with that, let's talk about something really controversial because we haven't talked about anything Let's talk about evil and the darkness And this is a huge topic to Explore your book is very systematic. You methodically go through the protocol You go through your experiences and how one leads to another But one of the things that comes up in your work is that there are some spirit attachments that are Basically based with confusion. The spirit is attached and is harassing this person, but it isn't Manevaline in the way that like you're saying if you're able to connect with that spirit and communicate with that spirit And offer them a better option which is to go for the The light which is always shining and willing to accept that spirit. They go wow, that really is better I'm sorry. I was confused and stuck here. I'm ready to move on But then you experienced some that were not You say go to the light and they go No, I'm not I know the lights there. I'm not going there Where to start about darkness the reason I Sent you the email I did originally Was about the distinction between darkness and evil And we all have to deal with darkness and Jared's information to me was that this physical reality Created by the light by the creator whatever you want to call it Made a level playing field between the light and the dark And that level playing field is what gives souls free choice Your understanding of evil though Is truly unique and for me was truly revolutionary in terms of understanding some of the subtle ways That evil comes into play and interacts with that darkness Going from darkness to the spirits who have entered darkness and operate from darkness and have become evil in the sense That it is their intention to violate souls And they can violate souls here in the physical who have incarnated And as Jared pointed out every soul in darkness is a Soul of light that light may have become very covered over Very buried but every soul is a soul of light Let's really try and think of a case because like when you talk about the case Of the boy with the knife the 12 year old boy with the knife We get that we like that's terrible. Why would you do that? Why would you create this false contract with someone? Which we've heard over and over again people are convinced that they've made some Deal with satan, which again historically there is no satan, but it's real on some level We have made some deal. I've sold my soul and what Jared tells us very importantly And this is a very important part. He says no, there's no such you can't sell your soul It's just another form of deception that a being that is attracted to the darkness Likes deception likes to screw with people likes to drag people down So they will create these ideas that you have this obligation, but you don't have this obligation That's a very important point from your work So speak to that but then also speak more broadly to why why there is this connection to the darkness Well, first of all It has souls of light even when they're in darkness. These souls need light They need the light And they do not want to go to the spirit realm of light to receive it for a number of different reasons Explain some of those reasons because I think that'll help people lock in what you're talking about Well, there are souls that have died with tremendous feelings of guilt Whether it's because they've murdered people Where they've laid waste to people Betrayed loved ones. There's different reasons like that They were in war and became enraged and violent And when they die in that state They may be afraid of being judged Afraid of being condemned by this god they believe in They may be angry at this god for for what god allowed to happen So there's something that originally separates them from the light their anger their hurt their confusion But the issue here is that there are souls in in a hierarchy of darkness They've been in darkness a long time And they've learned to operate that way and in that operation they gather to themselves These souls that have gotten into the dark and kind of confused or kind of Floating around or not sure what's going on these dark souls that know more Will in one way or another attempt to entangle them And this is where what we would call the higher level dark ones are able To almost it is like a mafia. The mafia is a very very good analogy As below so above I mean as above so below but as below so above I just I struggle with people who are like in the occult community the esoteric community and have a problem with this or want to Explain it away or minimize it. It's like are you kidding? Just look on Look on our planet look in the worst parts of our our existence as it is We see the same thing. We see hierarchies of evil We see people that do horrible things and that grow comfortable with that So that they don't feel comfortable being Normal and ordinary. So to me Your incredible exploration just was confirming that yeah, that's what I see here That makes total sense that that would be what's going on in these extended realms Well, I would say in working with clients where these kind of dark spirits were present It wasn't trying to remove them or get their cooperation to leave that we found that As as they got closer to maybe agreeing to take the light They were starting to be threatened and that's when I would ask them Are you being threatened? I would get a yes And what turns out is they're being threatened by those up above Who want them to stay in line or further below? Yeah Yeah And so they're threatening them to keep them in line and I have to Work with those spirits to let them know that that's all a ruse. They don't have the power to keep them in line If these ones I'm working with want to go to the light. They have every power In right to do that. So you're kind of breaking Breaking the chain there Could you think of a case when when that came came about? I think we want to know What it was like that that process of encountering someone was Nasty, benevolent was completely Destroying someone's life or trying to destroy someone's life But then you were able to move through The process of moving them to the light and maybe even in ways that that wasn't easy because Again, your protocol is the first say do you see the light and then the next part of your protocol is say Well, you can't see the light. Okay Do you see the light within you and that sometimes that works? And then sometimes you bring spirit guides or loved ones and say here Would you be willing to talk to one of your loved ones and they'll help you see the light And then you keep going down the protocol, which is just gets awesome Give us a case that kind of brings that to life Well, I mean the the clearest examples For me, Alex have been my work with cult victims cult victims Who have been intentionally and in an organized way abused for specific purposes and That abuse is the intentional creation of a dissociative personality When I worked with cult victims These kind of person many of these personalities were created And many of these personalities Were entangled with dark spirits And I could basically understand exactly Cult's activity to damage these children To create trauma for these children to dissociate them Create a fragment so that these spirits these dark spirits would have an open door Into these children and their souls So you're saying what I've heard over and over again both on this show and in reading That some people in these cult groups and in these satanic cult groups where they label themselves as satanic Again, whatever that means because it's kind of a tricky word historically But they've actually have a systematic way where they say Gee if we can create this disassociation that is going to serve our goals at this Extended consciousness level now. I had never made that connection I had heard about it, but I had never made that connection until I read your book And you're offering confirmation of that that that there would be a reason for them to do that Absolutely And some of them do know consciously what they're doing and why they're doing it And they're kind of allegiance to these dark souls There are others who don't know They carry out this kind of dissociative trauma for the child In the belief and and for the purpose of bringing that child under their control So that in the future These abusers can control a subpersonality And and they have these techniques and methods developed to control people In that way through their subpersonalities They're not necessarily aware of the other level where there are dark souls very involved But some people are some of these abusers are aware of that level What has the process been like in terms of working with these people? And again, I really appreciate that you can look at this from a broader perspective Everyone is of the light. Everyone has the ability to return to the light people can get off the path We have the whole past life thing to work into sometimes children are entering into this because of Some stuff they're bringing from the past life. I'm again complicating things can't ask a straightforward simple question But I'll go back to that first question then How effective have you been able to be in terms of helping people overcome this kind of really severe spiritual interference spiritual disruption I would say it's been very successful is very methodical And it's been very successful Because basically what you're doing is working with higher self to find any obstructions Or interference of the light. That's the process Have you had clients in particular cult victims who you've been able to Effectively treat and have told you gee I've been trying to work with this with therapists that Aren't looking at this from a deeper extended consciousness realm and I haven't had any any luck Is that your your understanding or what do you think about that? Yes, I feel like Again learning from Jared and going through this with Jared Was able to learn the the kind of ins and outs of dealing With this kind of trauma and entanglement So yes, I believe been successful helping these cult victims Basically break the ties break the chains and connections to these dark souls One of the things you have to say about the darkness that I think is very important Is that it is there for a reason it is a part of our growth And the way you describe it in the book is that All your clients regardless of the level of trauma they've experienced are moving into And out of the darkness and the trick I guess is to maybe not get too Drawn into it or what would you say with regard to that? I would and this is again one of these things about the distinction between darkness and evil Souls that are evil do intend to violate us The darkness itself would like to destroy the light it would like to do that But the darkness has to in a sense obey the boundaries And it will not violate Those boundaries or else the light Will have recourse So the darkness in some sense It might want to seduce you or convince you or draw you in or Or you may want to make a deal with darkness Which will cost you but it won't come in and violate because if it tries to violate The light which is also a soul It will have repercussions And and it is aware of that Unlike souls Who do intend to violate they are trying to take another take other souls energies And harness other souls and use them So the darkness won't do that it will shelter The evil ones And it will draw those evil ones and this is probably part of the problem It will draw all those evil ones in darker deeper and deeper Until those dark ones really Have no sense of themselves as a light as a soul they've forgotten who they are The darkness is more than happy to do that But the darkness is not an angry violent kind of force. It's just It just is what it is Here's what Jared had to say From your book. So this is Communicated to you about the dark spot in all of us and he's talking about suicide. He said People who are prone to suicide or are contemplating suicide Are usually locked into that dark side. They are not moving well enough towards the light They have stopped so much in that dark place that they can't get out. It doesn't mean they are evil It doesn't mean that they are bad. It oftentimes means they have abandoned hope And they've let go of the idea that they are purposeful and that they have meaning Do you want to speak to that at all? I think when we look today just as somebody who has suffered a long-term depression When when you live in depression, you're living in darkness And Jared defined darkness as the place that lacks light love and knowledge He said in the darkness. There is no trust these dark spirits don't trust each other It's it's a network based on power So Living in depression can be living in darkness. It's not that you're bad and evil But you've lacked that feeling of love maybe or that lack of connection or that lack of connection to a higher power Or you've become you've lost hope about things You take a young kid who's grown up in a family that where one of the parents Or both are abusive and that child every day has to be afraid whether it's going to come at them That's living that's living in a dark place So darkness is that place where you don't have love and light and knowledge Living in ignorance living in and ignorance that there's a darkness there When we learn we're we're we're getting light So darkness understood is the place that lacks light love and knowledge We know there are a lot of people who live in such a place For different reasons But a lot of it is trauma the result of trauma Tom as we talked about earlier before we first started recording you've Retired from clinical practice. You obviously put Everything you had into it. You worked really hard at it. You were very It just sounds like a great therapist for your clients doing everything you can to help them But that can be draining. I don't know. I know it's there's a High dropout rate and I think you went longer than a lot of people can in terms of helping that many people What do you want to do in the future with what you've learned? Well for me the main issue in Learning all of this and developing this method Is that it's the clinical method and so I would like to see it able to be practiced But at the same time it is complex It does go very very deep depending on where the client is But I would like to do some training And it would be in it kind of an in-depth training I'd also probably like to do more speaking I do believe this issue of accepting The spiritual dimension is of the of most importance today Tom one final question and it it may take a little while to sort this out I I hadn't really thought of it, but I think it's really important to my project to the skeptico kind of thing and that's Where do you see clinical psychology fitting into this transformation that people might go through in connecting with extended consciousness because when we step back we say well, this has always been the domain of churches Very cultish churches Mainly what we experience that are more interested in controlling people and manipulating people than doing much else But it's always been in their domain or now we have a kind of a shamanistic Kind of thing or the magic and occult realm they'll tell you how to deal with these extended consciousness realms Do you think there's something unique that clinical psychology can bring to that My feeling is clinical psychology Is in the same dilemma we talked about with others and that is they're facing this line also and crossing this line As I said earlier, we have a very ego centric psychology and psychiatry And we're talking about something that transcends the ego And when you start threatening the ego Like that with the loss of power that it's not the end all and be all The ego gets pretty threatened So the soul centered approach is saying to the ego you've got a place You've got a very important place in this incarnation But soul from a soul level you you're playing a part and When we cross over If I were to say one of the most important things today is for people to understand there is no death That when the body dies we basically walk through a door Into another level of consciousness now The crossing over you're going to cross over with the Mindset or the psychology you have when you cross over There are people who will see the gates of st. Peter There will be people who have a heavenly kind of abode to be in But I would suggest that that's going to be limited while that soul awakens to who it really is There are other souls who are ready when they cross over They're going to move right into their soul consciousness. They're going to understand what just happened We're going to we're going to understand that lifetime in relation to the other lifetimes of which it carries So so even that crossing over has all the individual differences But there is a soul consciousness. I think that we move into Once we cross over and we're ready to let go of this lifetime this body You know buddy, I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up I love what you said particularly at the beginning there Our guest again our guest again has been dr. Tom Zinzer. His book is titled soul centered healing A psychologist extraordinary truly is extraordinary Journey into realms of sub personalities spirits and past lives. It's a book you could easily get on amazon Right very readable very well written. He also has other books up there for clinicians people who are hypnotherapists or Clinicians trying to help these people tom. It's been great two hours. I could talk for another two Will you come back and join me sometime in the future? I'd be happy to Very happy to have the time with you A good hour to talk about Strange things and big things so it's Thanks again for having me Well awesome very very good Truly truly remarkable work These things are never accidental your email coming at the time that it does publishing a book And the title of the book is why evil matters how science and religion fumbled a big one So this has gone right in the book Well, I I do think that is probably the bottom line issue is as souls we have the choice And evil does not Run our life evil does not have power over us evil cannot just waltz into our life without an access And so as souls we do have that power to deal with evil to stop it to refuse it It's one of the reasons I said that distinction between darkness and evil is so important Because people don't make the distinction and then it gets all confused I love that and I love it in the way in the book. It really comes across as Not a kind of macho aggressive way of saying that Because what I hear you say that I think is so central and so important is Okay, folks. Here's the basic structure It's light. We're all part of the divine spark. It's in within all of us. So our natural state is to Have likes and dislikes that Inadvertently not our fault, but it happens We block that light in one way or another and sometimes we connect with Those blockages more than we connect with the light and it all becomes a confused state But it's an addition by subtraction thing removing the blockages Releases the light and that's all we really want So what I hear you saying then is that now we can begin talking about Evil darkness as just blockages Of the light that of course you have the power You always had the power to remove those it makes them a lot less scary Puts them in proportion not that we shouldn't be concerned but just Puts them in a proper perspective And and we do need that We've grown up in our western culture to be frightened of darkness and evil to think of it as so powerful To stay away from that topic for fear that it's going to get us And that only only gives it power that kind of thinking And people need to know it doesn't have that power And I think what's particularly powerful and I hope this came through in the interview is this idea of the contract because That is not only a method of deception here that seems to be in play, but it's been enshrined in our culture through Books movies as being You know, don't make that contract with the with the devil you could never break it And what Jared says and you prove in your work is that oh, no, there's no there's no such contract It's null and void. They're it's unenforceable just all you have to do is say no I choose to go to the light and it's all over That's right. Yes Thanks again to tom zinzer for joining me today on skeptico You know, I could talk for a long long time about this interview and if you listen further to these shows I'm sure I will I'm going to be playing clips from this guy for the next 100 shows This is everything that I'm about everything and I'm after right now is some kind of reasonably complete Model for how these extended consciousness realms might work and a suggestion a hint For how we might actually I don't know test some of those ideas out Don't get me started But do get me started with one question that I hope you'll join me in trying to wrestle to the ground and that is What are we to do with channeled material that's used in this way highly controversial, right? I mean, here's a guy professionally trained psychologist completely goes off for reservation says hey I'm getting such amazing information from this channeled Spirit that I am going to start using it in a methodical way just as I would Talking to some colleague. I'm going to use that in these clinical sessions What are your feelings about that is that's so out of bounds? I mean, what are we to make of that? What do you make of that and I'm saying how I think that's a tremendous leap forward and maybe trying to understand this thing Is it a tremendous leap backwards? I don't know you tell me Join me in the skeptical form or otherwise drop me an email and let me know your thoughts Because I really do like when you come over there and I like hanging out with you also Please Do so and if you haven't responded to the call check out the skeptical form or over there We're having some good conversations about all this deep deep big big pictures stuff. So Join us over there. I have a lot of shows coming up I think some of them are really good. Please stay with me for all of that until next time. Take care and bye for now