 Now Richard Wiseman talked about a few of the tendencies that people have who believe in the paranormal like Barnum statements which we're gonna unpack here in a second but I think it's important to be very clear about what we mean by these paranormal experiences and paranormal phenomena and as Danny Kahneman said during our interview it's very important to be able to recognize these, to see them in action in order to recognize them in new situations. Yep and towards this end you and I spent an entire day at the Mind Body Spirit Festival. We spoke to a few people there to to get at some of the claims that are being made here and to get get these firsthand and see if we can try and disentangle some of the general cognitive mechanisms that are operating when people are trying to deal with this stuff. Can you tell me about what you're up to here today? Yeah what we do is we give healers so we're healers on a macro level and on a micro level. The micro level represents hands on healing to individuals and the macro level is we give, send healing out to the world. The way we do that is by manipulating the universal life force or chronic energy which comes from the sun through the condition by the sun and bring that out through the medium of prayer and we can actually store that energy into physical batteries. We call them prayer power batteries and quantify exactly how much energy is inside those batteries and then at a particular time of a natural disaster or a man-made disaster we can discharge those batteries through radionic apparatus which were designed by our founder Dr. King to trouble spots around the world whether it be an earthquake or a tsunami and so on. So that energy through those radionic apparatus can be pin pointed to the destination so we drown it out and from the time that those peace talks were going on I think it was in the Hague and we we cranked up our spiritual energy as well, our spiritual radiators as well, why? They're talking peace from the point of America being about to lay eggs on them and so on and so forth. It was very nasty at one start. How can you tell though? I mean how can you tell what the outcome was so if you didn't have the prayer things on and they were talking peace or how do you know if it's the prayer that's actually having the effect rather than just people wanting to be peaceful or something like that? Well that's right. You could turn around and say it's all a great coincidence but we've got coincidence after coincidence after coincidence I could give you a book full of these stories and they're before and after situations so we can track we've stopped hurricanes coming into you know in their formative stages. You've stopped hurricanes. Oh, absolutely. Oh wow. Absolutely and we can show you how we've done it. You can show the tracking of the hurricane coming in over the north of Australia about to come into Windham or somewhere like that and we can say this is when the SEIs were started. This is what happened. It was forecast that there'd be a category five hurricane over Derby or somewhere like that and it just dissipates over the end line. Gotcha. Have you ever had the opposite though? So a cyclone comes in and you put the prayer out there but it actually does develop into a cyclone? Yes but it's a less intense cyclone. Hi there Matt. How you doing? Tell me a little bit about what you do. Well I'm doing past life regression sessions here at the festival and they're actually 20 minute sessions for people to have an introduction to past life regression. So it's very interesting work. It's like a meditation that people go into and they're able to through a meditative state access a memory of one of their past lives. Can you tell me about the process? How do you elicit these memories from past lives? Well it's really something where if we ask our consciousness to do something like that then it will form a response. So what I do is I help people to get into a very relaxed state and there's a very simple process. I just do it with a door really for them to go into the past life and by suggesting that and asking the person to do that. Generally they find that that happens. But because I've been doing the work for 25-26 years I'm very much aware of the of the signs and signals when that person is starting to access the past life. So I can focus on that with them and ask questions to help bring the experience out from inside of them. We interviewed another woman called Elizabeth Loftus. I don't know if you've ever heard of her. She's a memory researcher and she seems to be of the opinion that the research suggests that much of our memory even for very recent events is quite reconstructive. So it might not be such the the recollections that we have might not be accurate descriptions of what actually happened. But what you're suggesting is that we're able to access memories that are hundreds of years old even before we were born. Is that right? Yes and they do seem to be quite distinctive memories and if a person returns to that life there'll be coherence and consistency about it as well. And the things which are very convincing to people like for instance a person today went through a past life where at some point the animal that they loved very much and themselves died. And it was just suddenly the person felt the emotion of that and they burst into tears. And it's like they were so much connecting with the experience that that's what happened. And that was something which they didn't really have any time to construct that. It was just really a completely spontaneous memory that revealed itself. So you take that sort of genuineness that emotion as good evidence that these are real memories. Yes well I'm a therapist so I work to help people through this and to make a meaningful and to help facilitate a meaningful process for them. What people make of this and what conclusions they make of it is up to them. So what would you say finally to someone who's skeptical about this who says there's very little evidence for past lives or retrieval of these things? What's your take? Come and try it. Get an experience and see what you think then. Okay. Cheers. That's great. Everything from lights in the sky to where people see craft up close give a really good close descriptions. Sometimes they see the man sometimes they see occupants getting out. So and sometimes people are having what they refer to as alien abductions, you know, which has been around the media for quite a while now. So they're taken on board a craft and they have some samples taken from them DNA samples and then returned. But yeah, it's all sorts of things a whole plethora of people who appear to be extraterrestrial origin who look very human looking. And they were being invited on board a craft. Then through the 90s we have the emergence of these abduction experiences where people were meeting ETs that were about three and a half to four feet tall. They had inverted pear shaped heads, large dark eyes. Didn't really communicate much. And and a lot of those reports people quite traumatized by those experiences because they really were alien looking, you know, whole thing like rotating on a leaf, the whole lights flying out all different colors, you know, like, and all while this is going on like massive light show like I've never seen my phenomenal no sound. It's like your brand doesn't compute that when you're looking at such a fantastic light show and performance. And there's no noise. It sort of confuses you. We do get astronomers who see them. But, you know, you know, in scientific circles, it's not the appropriate thing to talk about these things because you lose your funding. You know, so they tend to keep them out shut. But you know, there is no real classic contact as portrayed in the media or on, you know, various TV shows. We've always received a wide range of descriptions of beings that people are interacting with. Give me a wave of I guess a little stronger current people that might have control for you. We do astrology. And we do proper proper astrology. I call it proper astrology. You probably know what your sun sign is. Yeah, the only capricorn is actually smart. Oh, really? Yeah, right. Yeah, usually it's capricorn. Anyway, when when you're looking at a birth chart, somebody's chart, you're looking to see where all the planets are when they're born, because you have a moment in time that's specifically yours, time in place. So it's based on your date, time in place. We take a snapshot of the sky at the moment of your birth and from the place of birth. And then we say, well, where are the planets? What do they mean? What is it? What kind of angle to the maker? They all bunched together? What sign is the moon in the moon tells us? I mean, you know, your sun signs capricorn, which a moon sign, which is your emotional side, it's your, it's what you need in life can be very different. So you might meet a capricorn that needs a lot of sensitivity and another capricorn that doesn't. And so depending on the time, the date, the place, that combination of planets says, why you, Jason, are different from all other capricorns. You've got your moment in time. What we do here is we then take basically your one of these, which doesn't mean much to most people, analyze it, and we print a booklet like this, but specifically about you. And Astrologer is an expert at pattern recognition, because I'm looking for patterns in here. So you look at that kind of pattern, you look at what sign is something is in. So you're looking at the sign, the house, which is the part of the sky. And are there any angles with it? We do kinesiology. So kinesiology is a modality that works with responses from the muscles. So Dr. Anna Ross in the PhD did a thesis on the phenomena of the accurate indicator muscle, which through clinical trials show the validity of unconscious responses through somatic muscles. Once you muscle monitor and tap into that level of muscle response, you start to actually access this thing which we broadly call the innate awareness. And this innate awareness can give you very, very specific and diverse information in relation to the causes of stress in a person's life. And that stress can be, as I said, very diverse relating to structural alignment, relating to physiological function, in relation to triggers behind emotional trauma that aren't even remembered. And in relation to a lot of bizarre esoteric and metaphysical stuff as well. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here? Sure, posture health, we're doing spinal screenings to assess whether some of the people coming through the festival are nice and straight, nice and strong, assessing whether they might have any symptoms associated with their spine and then maybe offering them some suggestions afterwards. Cool. How does it work? Well, basically, we use the SAM machine. The SAM machine is a very simple analogue machine which gives us balance and we use the measurements to determine what type of shape you've got going on. From there, we can determine whether there are any weak points in the spine and then offer you some solutions after that. Now, if there's a breakdown in communication because of a subluxation, for example, the signals aren't getting through to the body. And before you know it, you end up with symptoms. Of course, most people go to their medical doctor to say, I have a symptom and the medical doctor goes, well, I'm trained in medicine, so here's some medicine to fix that. It's not always appropriate. A chiropractic can get the joint free, allow the nerve to do its job. Your body is an amazing piece of engineering and it can heal anything given the right conditions. In 21st century society, we don't live in the correct conditions. So we pay a service mechanic to keep us straight and level and balance. So when you say anything, I mean, so cancer, do we have? Yeah, the body can heal anything given the right conditions. Anything from the common cold through to full blown cancer. We've just got to give it every opportunity to do that. What would you say to people that are skeptical of of alignment of of health interactions with spine? Yeah, I like skepticism because it makes people think and when people think they take responsibility for their own health, there is there is no recorded evidence of a chiropractic causing damage. In fact, doctors of chiropractic are trained to heal you and they do that specifically with the spine. Your medical doctor also wants to make you well as well. But he's trained in a different area as our surgeons. Surgeons are trained with knives and scalpels. That's how that's the area that they specialize in. Everybody has a specialty. Yes, there are skeptics out there. I'm okay with that. At the end of the day, chiropractors do what they do because they have a love of humans and they want to try and help them. You just have to choose which of the sciences that you want to use to do that. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're doing here today? It's a practice from Japan. It hasn't been in Australia for very long, about 20 years in Australia. We wear an ochre cut, what's called an ochre curry, which is a parchment with calligraphy in it that the founder obtained. It was his way of being able to give people a really strong healing. So I'm just a vessel. I'm not doing anything. We don't diagnose. We don't ask necessarily about a person's condition. So the light goes where it needs to go. The light comes through me and it is directed to the person through their forehead and the top of the head. They're the two main points that have been effective to receive the light and it goes to where that each individual person needs it. So you might have a certain sickness going on, but I'm not going to direct it to that part of your body. It will just naturally go there. Okay. So where does the light come from? It's coming from the highest source, whether you want to call it the universe, God, whatever label you want to put on it, but it's all coming from the same source. Now there were several very specific claims that were being made at the Mind, Body, Spirit Festival and we spoke to lots of people about prayer batteries, healing, memories from past lives, kinesiology, UFOs. There seem to be several general cognitive mechanisms that were operating here throughout our conversations and we're going to try and disentangle those in the next session.