Afterlife Research with Oliver Lazar

Oliver Lazar, DrMed, received his doctorate in the natural sciences of medicine. Since 2012, he has been a professor of computer science in Düsseldorf, at Germany’s largest private university. After the tragic accidental death of a classmate of his then 13-year-old daughter in 2017, he underwent a complete life change combined with profound personal spiritual experiences. As a result, he conducted the EREAMS Study (Empirical Research of the Effectiveness and Authenticity of Messages from Spirit). He is author of Beyond Matter:

Here he tells his life story and describes the details of his research study.

00:00 Introduction
01:53 Scientific education
03:07 Life changing events
24:08 EREAMS study
42:00 Value of spirit mediums
50:50 Conclusion

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.

(Recorded on November 2, 2023)

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Thinking Allowed – conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is afterlife research. My guest is Oliver Lazar, who has the German equivalent of a doctoral degree in medical science. He’s not a practicing physician, but a scientist.

He is the author of the new book, Beyond Matter, the moving experiences of a scientist with the spiritual world and his afterlife research. Dr. Lazar is based in Essen, Germany, and now I’ll switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Oliver. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. Hello, Jeff.

Nice to see you. I’m really delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you. So thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to talk to you as well. I think a good way to begin, of course, is with your life story, because you went through a radical transformation.

At one time, you thought of yourself as a conventional materialist scientist. So let’s start there. Let’s talk about your education and your scientific background. Yes. So 43 years of my life, I really lived in this very materialistic or natural world view.

And I studied medicine and I studied computer science, so very down to earth. And especially during my medical studies, I had a lot to do with biology, physics, chemistry, biochemistry. And I really thought everything that I was taught at school, at university, this has to be true.

And that everything is based upon matter, you know, so everything we are, not only our body that I can touch here, so our emotions, our love, our feelings, everything is based upon, I don’t know, electrophysiological processes. And yeah, that was what I trusted in, because everything was gathered by PhD professors

And scientific methodologies. Why should I question things like this? And it really needed some kind of an update on version 2.0. That’s what I always call it. Because it was the 9th of October in 2017, when everything changed. It was really a tragic story behind it, which

Really changed my life and my worldview. It was that I was driving my then 13 years old daughter to school, and we witnessed a car accident, a fatal car accident. So there was this huge concrete mixer truck turning right. And I think due to the blind spot, the

Driver didn’t see a girl riding on her bike. So the truck ran over her. And in the afternoon, we knew the girl has died as a consequence of this accident. But in the moment when we arrived at the moment, as we arrived at that place, we didn’t exactly know who was involved.

So I didn’t know that it was a classmate of my daughter. But it was Yoma. Yoma, she was one of my daughter’s classmates, and she died in the afternoon. My daughter just came home in the morning. A few hours later, she came in, ran into our house, and she was crying and shouting.

It was Yoma. It was Yoma. And I was directly going to my laptop, reading the news. And in the early afternoon, there was this message, the girl has died as a consequence of the accident. And the moment I found out, something happened to me.

It was a grief that I have never felt before in my life. And of course, you might say, Jeff, it’s a usual reaction to feel grief, to feel empathy. But what I felt went far beyond that. It really pulled the ground out from under my feet.

My heart was torn apart, and I’ve never felt such a grief before in my life. And what is curious about the situation is that I didn’t know that girl at all. So I really had contact to almost every other child of my daughter’s class, but I never spoke to Yoma.

But after her passing, I had this one memory in my mind. I didn’t know that I had a memory of that, but it came into the front of my mind. It was a situation at a school event where we passed by, and our eyes met for a split second.

This picture really flourished in my mind. Very interesting, because I didn’t know her at all, and I felt so connected to her. But I can remember that I some kind of became depressed. I have withdrawn, and my family didn’t recognize me anymore, Jeff. So my wife just recently said to me, Oliver,

At that time, I thought our marriage wouldn’t survive this, because she said, you are sitting at our table, we’re having lunch, we’re having dinner, but you were here only physical. With your mind, you have been somewhere else.

And she was right, because day and night, I was thinking of Yoma, I was thinking of her parents. And I would say three or four weeks after the accident, I sat in my office, and I was very sad, and I closed my eyes.

I was thinking of Yoma, and now comes the moment that has changed my life. Because I was sitting here thinking of her, my eyes were closed, and somehow I felt that I wasn’t alone anymore. So something or some kind of energy was approaching me from the outside.

And on the inside of my body, there was some kind of a vibration. And I had goosebumps running up and down only on the left side of my body. And it came to me in such a realness, in such a pithiness that I really don’t have had to

Question it, because it was so real, Jeff, as if I would go to you and grab your arm. You don’t question it, because it is so real. And I perceived that someone has touched me in my hair and on my cheek.

And the most important part was that I was flooded with such an infinite love, a love that I couldn’t find words for. I think in my book I have written, no matter what adjective, what language you would choose,

You can’t even come close to describe the intensity of the love that I have felt in that moment. And I would describe it maybe as a divine love. So David Lorimer, for example, he always calls it a cosmic love. And anyone who has had a near-death experience

Always describes quite the same, that this is some kind of a love, the quality of the love is different from the love you know here on earth. And I would always say that here on earth, the biggest love you can feel would be the love to your own children.

But the love that I felt at that moment went far, far beyond that. So it was really some kind of a roller coaster ride of emotions, because I was so sad, in a deep grief, and suddenly I was the happiest person on the planet, because I felt so loved.

And it somehow felt as if I was at home, I had seen light, not physically, my eyes were closed, and it felt like home. So a very, very special moment that has changed my life, I would say. I directly knew, now my life is different. I directly knew someone has opened the door,

And here’s your new path with spirituality. And you have to understand, I have never had to do with spiritual topics, they were not important in my life. At that moment, I didn’t really know what it was. So there were a lot of question marks in my head.

I mean, I knew that there might be something called a spirit guide or something like that. By now, I know what it was, it was a soul contact to Yoma. But at that moment, I didn’t know.

And this was the starting point for me to read, to read, to read and to watch YouTube videos, because I was so interested in it. And I would say in the next three to four weeks, I have read so many books, more than in my whole life before combined, and I have

Read a lot of books, I can tell you that. But I was so interested in the first answers I found, where people were talking about their near death experience. And they also speak of this divine love of the light and things like that. So there I found my first answers.

And it took me four months that I have booked an appointment with a medium here, a very famous medium in Germany, because I wanted to know more. And the idea was to book an aura reading.

But the idea behind it was that I just want to get in touch with the medium and to ask her questions. So what was it? What have I perceived? That was the idea. So I did not book an afterlife contact.

But after four months, as I was sitting in her office, the aura reading started. And after four or five minutes, she said to me, Oliver, I have to stop here. There’s nothing I can tell you. So in the first moment, I was very disappointed.

But on the other hand, I knew I came here for something else. I wasn’t there for an aura reading. But I didn’t exactly know what it was. But the medium said to me, Oliver, now I’m opening, I open up for the spiritual world.

Because she had some kind of an on off switch for the spiritual world. And then she said to me, Oliver, I can see a girl showing me a bicycle. And she says that she died in a bicycle accident. Do you understand this?

And the only thing she knew about me was my phone number and my first name. And even if she had googled me, if she knew my surname and she had googled me, she never would have found any contact or that I had a contact to Yoma. But suddenly she said, she’s here.

And I was very, very happy. I was so glad that she was there, but I couldn’t believe in it. I thought I was not entitled to have an afterlife contact because she was a complete stranger to me. I didn’t know that girl at all. And suddenly she was there.

And the medium described her outward appearance very precisely. So she had long hair. She was very tiny person and so on. So that was correct. And the most important part now was that she said she’s now showing herself riding on a horse. And I knew that.

I mean, I didn’t know really much about Yoma, but I knew that she was a passionate horse rider. And then she said she’s showing herself riding a horse. So that was wonderful evidence. But after that, she said, now she’s showing me two number ones, two single number ones.

She said she’s drawing these numbers here in front of my eyes, a number one and another number one. Do you understand this? And I said to the medium, no, I’m sorry, I do not understand this. And she said, well, that happens quite often, that I don’t know, that I don’t know what

It means. The sitter, so me as the participant, do not understand it. But this will clarify afterwards. And this is the most important part now, because this is the basis for our later study. Because she was right, a few weeks after this appointment, I was meeting Yoma’s mother.

And I asked her about the two number ones. And she said, I don’t understand it either. And then I said, well, shortly before that, she showed herself riding a horse. And then I can remember it very exactly. Yoma’s mother was watching me with big eyes. And she said, yes, now I understand it.

Because shortly before her accident, she won first place twice on an equestrian tournament or a horse show or whatever you would like to call it. So twice the first place. Here we have the two single number ones. Because the medium emphasized it is not an 11. There are two number ones.

And I checked her phone number and her address, nothing matched. But here you can see that, well, I think that this message was meant to be clarified by her mother. It was a message for her mother, not for me. But the question is, what is the source or

Who is the originator of this highly specific piece of information? It can’t be the medium, it can’t be me. So there must have been a third person, mind or soul or whatever. And the question is, who could it be? So who has the information? It is Yoma.

And who has a motivation to talk about it? It is Yoma. Because she wants to show, hey, I’m still here. And for me, this is inference to the best explanation that it is obvious that it has to be Yoma who has brought on this information. So this was really a very wonderful moment.

But that was not all. As I was sitting there with the medium, she continued and she said, Oliver, now she’s showing me that in a previous life, you once have been her father. And in that previous life, you also had to deal with her early death.

And at that moment, it felt totally right for me. I didn’t question it. I just understood. I understood why I felt. So everything made sense. But this has changed on my way home. As I was driving back home in my car, I became the scientist.

I just said to myself, hey, Oliver, you have been to a medium telling you really an extraordinary story, but you don’t have to believe in this. She was talking about a previous life and I found out that three weeks later, there was a seminar in my hometown here in the Ruhrgebiet in Germany.

In my hometown, there was a seminar about reincarnation. It was made by another medium. And I booked this seminar and we were sitting there in this room, maybe 20, 30 people. And there was this introduction round. I think you call it like that when everybody says his name and introduces himself.

And I was the last one in line. And I was sitting right next to the medium. And I said, hi, I’m Oliver. And I witnessed the car accident of one of my daughter’s classmates. And then she interrupted me. And she said, yes, Oliver, I know. And the girl is standing right behind you.

She has long blonde hair. And she says that in a previous life, you once have been her father. And in that previous life, you have witnessed her early death. But you shouldn’t experience it again in this life. And I just looked at her and I couldn’t believe

In it because she was a complete stranger to me. And I know that she doesn’t know the other medium. So they couldn’t talk to each other. And there was the second completely strange woman to me telling me exactly the same story about this previous life.

I mean, if both mediums had said to me, you once have been her father in a previous life, I would have said, OK, maybe this is association. They wanted me to understand why I feel like I feel. But both of them have said that I also had to

Experience her early death in that previous life. And I find this is really a very specific piece of information. And the second medium continued. She described the whole accident. So she was describing the truck, the color of the truck. This was correct. She said that she didn’t die at the place

That she died in the afternoon in the hospital and several other things that I didn’t know. And I was talking about all the details with Yoma’s parents later on. And I would say that 80 to 90 percent of the details, she said, were correct.

And that was the moment where I said to myself, OK, Oliver, even if you’re a scientist down to earth scientist, but I can’t explain it any longer with my materialistic worldview. And I felt how comforting it was for me, but also for other parents. There are a lot of other orphaned parents there,

And they also have received their messages right from the spiritual world with really high evidence. And I have seen how these orphaned parents suddenly could smile again. So they had hope they could go on with their lives.

This was the starting point for me to say, OK, what if I could find out that I’m not the only person who has received a message like riding on a horse and two single number ones? So what if there are more stories like that and I could maybe do some research on it?

This would be wonderful for parents, especially for parents, but also for other people who have lost a loved one. And this was the starting point for me to say, now I’m taking a look at it from a scientific point of view. And well, they started the ERIAMS study. Yeah, that’s the story, Jeff.

That’s quite a powerful story. And I wonder about the reincarnation piece of it. Have you come to accept that you did have a past life with a Yoma? Yes, I absolutely did. I’m absolutely sure about it because I’ve read a lot of books, seen a lot of videos about reincarnation.

And there is so much evidence. I think Jim Tucker is his name in the United States, right? Here in Germany, we have a guy called Dieter Hassler. He is working hand in hand with Jim Tucker, as far as I know. There are so many stories, especially children, who can remember their previous lives.

And I’m absolutely sure about this previous life. And the second medium told me some details about this life. It was in the end of the 19th century. And I was an artist working for the Moulin Rouge. And I was part of the circle around an artist. I can’t remember his name right now.

So they met in a cafe in the north of Paris called Café Chat Noir. And I was part of this group of artists there. But I couldn’t find any evidence about me in that previous life. So I had no names or things like that.

Because sometimes you have names and you really can do some research on it. But I wasn’t successful. Now, you mentioned that your wife was concerned that your marriage might break up. How has your family adjusted to the new 2.0 version of yourself? It was a process. It really was a process.

I mean, my wife was spiritual before I was. She was spiritual all her whole life. And I think she was the first who understood after a few weeks what’s going on. And she was very open and she understood my love for this child or for this family. Because it’s really difficult when suddenly

There is a strange person coming into your life, into your family, and you feel a very deep love. I mean, it’s not a love between a man and a woman. It’s really it’s a hard love. It’s a love like a love between a father and a daughter. And it’s really very difficult.

But I think my wife, as I said, was spiritual and she understood. And now she’s become one of my biggest supporters. And I’m very grateful for that. And she gave me books and she sent me links to interesting videos. And now we’re working as a team.

But the first few weeks or month was very difficult. And we didn’t tell our own children. I think it took about two years, two or three years that we are talking about in our family. And I was telling it to my two daughters. I mean, they are grown up.

My oldest daughter is 23 and my youngest now is 19. And yeah, they were very open to it. It wasn’t a big deal. They said, yeah, it’s cool. That’s it. And then they went on doing different stuff. Was your daughter very close to Yoma? No, she wasn’t. I mean, she knew her sometimes.

They were talking, but they were not really deeply connected. Well, let’s go on now and talk about the study that you did. I’m sure as a researcher, you made a point of familiarizing yourself with the literature regarding similar studies of work with mediums. Yes, yes, absolutely.

And what I found was always quite the same study design, namely working with blinding, for example, the study by Julie Beischel or Tresoldi et al. from last year from Italy. And their study design is always like there is the medium on the one side and the sitter,

That’s what we call the participant here, is on the other side. They are in different rooms, so they really do not meet. They do not see each other. And the medium gives messages. And afterwards, the participant has to read transcripts or transcriptions of the messages and they have to identify their own sitting.

So there might be pieces of information in the transcripts that they are familiar with. So they see, ah, this piece of information belongs to my deceased one or this piece of information belongs to me. So they recognized it and said, hey, this is mine. And in 66% of the cases, it went well.

So that’s what Julie Beischel and Tresoldi found out. For example, Julie Beischel had, I think, 58 participants and they always gave two transcripts to the participants. So there was a 50-50 chance and they have to find their own transcript. And it came out in 66% of the cases, they were correct.

They found their own transcript. And now you can say, or you might say, maybe there was a connection between the medium and the bereaved one, the participants. So that doesn’t necessarily have had to be a deceased person, because the information that you find in the transcript was also known to the participant.

So you might say, you don’t need a deceased one here. And that’s why we went one step further. And I always consider our own study as a complement to, for example, Julie Beischel’s study, because we focused upon those kind of messages that neither the medium nor the sitter knew, like

The two number ones and the horse riding. And that was the focus of our study. And the second focus was how comforting it was. So what was the effect? What was the effect of orphan parents, for example? Yeah, and that’s what we did. So we designed a questionnaire.

Maybe I can tell you something about our study design and what we did. And we designed a questionnaire with about 13 questions. So we didn’t want to make it too long so that it could be answered in five to 10 minutes or something. And yeah, we had 500 participants from all

Over the world, mainly from Germany, but also Switzerland and Austria, but from the United States, from India, from Luxembourg, Denmark, France and so on. So a very international study. And most of the meetings took place face to face. So the medium really met the bereaved one. So they have had direct contact.

And after Corona came up, there was the need to do it via Zoom. So online. And there were 192 sittings online. But all in all, there were 500. How did you identify the participants? So we had no funds for our study and we had to deal with what we had.

So we just used the usual bookings, the usual bookings of the participants, and we just gave them the questionnaire after on. So we asked the participants in how far they were already convinced beforehand or if they were skeptics, because this was very important. We had 71 skeptics who joined the study.

And I think this is the most important group, because skeptics tend to say, yes, it’s clear that a person who believes in this and goes to your study, they will always tick, yes, very good, very good, very good. But we also had 71 skeptics in our study.

And most interestingly, there was no difference between those who were convinced beforehand and those who were very skeptic in the end. They all gave quite the same level of answers. Very interesting. And yeah, so we had 500 and there was no contact beforehand. So the mediums didn’t know the participants.

They just met them quite seconds before they started with the sitting. And we said to the participants, it’s absolutely OK when you book an appointment with a wrong name. Just use the wrong name or the name of your friend. Use another email address that you usually don’t use.

So the medium doesn’t need anything. No photo, no name. You’re contacting the participants in advance of their sittings? No. They booked an appointment on the home page. So they had booked it on the online shop. And there is a description. There’s a description. They could read how they can book the appointment.

And that’s the suggestion. You can use another name. You can use another email address. We don’t need anything. So we didn’t talk to them. There was no active contact to them. They booked and they had to read the suggestion on the home page.

They booked the appointment through a web page that you set up? No, it was the management. The management of the two mediums. So there was another person. He’s the manager. He is responsible for all the booking processes and the home page. And he cares for that.

So the participants had contact with the manager, but they never had contact in advance with the mediums. And I gather these mediums were well known and well respected. Yes, absolutely. At least here in Europe. And they had, well, combined more than 12,000 sittings. So very experienced mediums.

And they are working according to the British spiritualism, which means it is evidence based. So they really have to deliver evidence. So the proof that the deceased one really is there. And that’s how they work. Yeah, I was a little confused because earlier I understood that you sent the questionnaire

To them after the actual reading for them to respond. Yeah, that’s correct. The questionnaire was sent three to four weeks after the sitting to the participants. So the participants, they have booked their appointments. So they were waiting for the appointment.

Then they went to the medium and the medium gave their messages for about 45 minutes. And then we waited three to four weeks before we sent out the questionnaire. So we sent out an email with a link to a questionnaire where the participants could

Answer how it was, how they felt during the sitting, how accurate the information was and things like that, how comforting it was. And it was a mixture of quantitative and qualitative questions. So sometimes they could stick very much or just a little and sometimes they could describe

What they have received, what messages they have received and how precise they were. The question is, why did we wait three to four weeks before we send out the questionnaire? I mean, we could have asked the participants directly after the sitting. There are two reasons for that.

First is we wanted them to think about the sitting, to reflect it. Because maybe after a few minutes after the sitting, you would say, wow, this was really great and I believe in it. But after a week, you might have found out that all these pieces of information could

Have been found on the internet or something like that. And that’s why we gave them time to reflect it critically. And the other reason is we wanted to give them time to do some research because there might have been an information like the two number ones and the horse riding that they

Had to do some research that they had to ask relatives or to take a look into a photo album or documents. And maybe I can give you an example for another evidence, for another message that a mother has received during a sitting.

And this is my favorite one that I always use in my lectures. So there was this mother who has lost her son who was 13 years old. And during the sitting, this son gave the information that on my funeral there was my favorite teacher and he wore an orange college jacket.

And the mother said, I didn’t know who the favorite teacher was. And of course, I didn’t know who was wearing what kind of clothes because there were about 500 people on the funeral. There was this Bavarian village. The whole village was there. And on that day, she didn’t see anything.

I mean, she has lost her child. So you really do not see who is exactly there on the funeral. So she was asking the other pupils and she found out who the favorite teacher was. And then she met the favorite teacher and she asked him, what clothes did you wear on the funeral?

And he answered, I wore an orange colored jacket. So at the end, it came out the information was correct and precise. And the question is, again, who is the originator of this piece of information? It can’t be the mother because she didn’t know the teacher.

She didn’t know that he was wearing an orange jacket. It couldn’t be the medium. So what is obvious from my point of view, it is obvious that it has to be this 13 year old boy who still wants to show his mother, I’m still here.

I mean, what would I do if I was dead? I would do exactly the same thing. I would deliver messages with highly specific pieces of information so that my family knows, yes, this must have come from my deceased one. And we have 183 documented cases in our study.

So not everyone has received such kind of a message. 331 participants have received such a message with neither the medium nor the sit anew. And 183 of them could be verified correctly within the first three to four weeks. Of the people who you sent questionnaires to, how many actually responded?

Well, 500 have responded. I don’t know how many I have sent out. I would say that about 70% of the people have answered because they were quite interested in it. But I have not a precise number for that. I think it’s really a good number. 70% have answered. It’s very good.

It would be interesting to know any data about the ones who didn’t answer. But with regard to the ones who did, you probably have some demographic information. Yes, I have. So it was international. I already told you about that. And the youngest person was 17. The oldest was 86.

And we started in September 2019 and ended in September 2022. And we had about 90% or 88% were women and 12% were male. And this is quite interesting, I think, but it’s typical. Very typical. Because I think that women are very open for emotions and for feelings.

And a man has to be tough. A man has to be the strong person. And he might not admit that there is something else that matters. When we take a look at how many people are studying the natural sciences and how many female and how many male students we have, we

Can see that mostly, at least here in Europe, we have male students in the natural sciences. And what do the natural sciences teach us? They teach us there is only matter. So why should a male student or a man say, hey, there is something else that matters?

And I think this is shown in the percentage that we have 88% female and 12% male participants. And I gather the participants, the ones who did respond, were largely positive about the experience. Yes, that’s correct. But we also had some disappointed clients, of course, because that’s what we always say.

We can’t guarantee a good afterlife contact. It’s not like an experiment in a laboratory. You can’t repeat it, like bring water to the boil. So you can make it 100 times. It will always be with 100 degrees Celsius. But an afterlife contact is different. So we humans or a soul, it’s not repeatable.

And you never know why an afterlife contact doesn’t succeed. Maybe the medium has a bad day or it is the wrong time or whatever. So you can’t guarantee it. And yeah, we asked also about a very highly specific piece of information in the messages that could be directly verified.

And we had here 86% of the participants said, yes, I have received such kind of an information that the medium could not possibly have known. And a further 10% said rather yes. So combined, there was about 96% of the participants who said, yes, I have received such a highly specific piece of information.

And even the skeptics said it, even the skeptics. And we had 11 hardcore skeptics who said no way, absolutely no way. And these 11, no, it were 10, 10 of these 11 at the end were so happy and they ticked always very good, very good. And they couldn’t believe it.

And there was this one interesting story about that man. He was very skeptic, but he had to promise her dying wife that when she has gone to the other side, when she has passed, he should go to a medium and he had to promise her.

And so he went to a medium, but he didn’t believe in it. And he said, no way. But after the sitting, he had written in the comments section, I’m so happy about it. And I’m so happy that I trusted my wife and I couldn’t believe in it.

I was so skeptic, but I have received messages that nobody knew, just my wife and me. It has to be my wife. That’s what he said. So that’s what we found out. It didn’t matter if you were a skeptic or if you believed in it beforehand.

So I have to assume based on this experience, you would recommend that people take advantage of the service of mediums, particularly mediums with acknowledged reputations. Yes, absolutely. Because the second main question in our study was in how far it was comforting for them.

And I think with a really good afterlife contact, you can find healing. You can find comfort in healing. And when you take a look at the classic treatment, medical treatment, for example, you can’t really find healing. I can remember a lot of very, very touching and warm comments in the comments section

Of the questionnaire where people said, well, if we didn’t go to the medium, if we didn’t have received these pieces of information, we would have conducted suicide. How do you call it? We have conducted suicide. Is this correct? Sometimes we say committed suicide. Committed. That’s the word. Right.

I knew there was a C in it. So they said we would have committed suicide. And the afterlife contact really saved our lives. These days, I’m told that the phrase committed suicide is becoming unpopular. And it’s more like I would have died by suicide. Well, I think that’s because it’s sometimes

Considered the effects of depression or maybe addictions of various kinds. And when you say somebody committed suicide, it implies a moral judgment. And I think people are trying to get away from making moral judgments about it. So there was this one woman who said, my husband would have killed him.

Have killed himself if he didn’t go to the medium. And I think it is an additional treatment. It’s not an alternative to the classic treatment. I think it should be considered as a compliment. And 82% of the participants said that it was very comforting. And another 14% said that it was rather comforting.

And I think there is no pill on the market who could give you so much comfort. And even if there was no truth in it, even if there was no truth in it, you can see the effects. The people say it is comforting. I have found consolation. That’s very impressive.

You have to remember, because skeptics always say, of course, an orphan parent who goes to a medium, he wants to be comforted. I mean, it is clear that a mom or a dad who has lost the child, they would say, yes, I believe in it.

And I take always very good, very good, very good. But what the skeptics do not understand is that orphan parents, or especially orphan parents, are the most critical people of all. They don’t want to lie to themselves. They do not suddenly become naive or stupid or gullible. No, it’s exactly the opposite.

There’s no one more critical than a father or a mother who has lost the child. And this is something that skeptics haven’t understood. They always call it confirmation bias. According to the motto, yes, I confirm everything because I want to be comforted. But it is not like that.

That’s a very important point, Oliver. Let me ask you, since your original contact with the two mediums, have you had any further ongoing communications with Yoma? Yes, I have been, I think, three or four times to this one medium. And I have received a lot of messages.

And a few of them have come true. So there are messages about the future, for example, and about the previous life. And yeah, but I think the most important sitting is always the first sitting. Because this is the most impressive one, I think.

And the third or the fourth one isn’t as impressive as the first one. And we also started measuring brain waves during such a sitting. So I have measured the second medium where I was. And we found out that especially the very slow delta waves are interesting,

Are important during a communication with the spiritual world. So shortly before this medium gave a message, a mediumistic message, we could see that especially on the left side in her brain, the delta waves arised significantly. And we are not the first ones who have measured the left side of the brain.

There’s, for example, Dr. Raymond from New York. I think he did quite the same thing with Theresa Caputo on the Dr. Ross show, as far as I know. And we just found out quite the same. I think it’s very interesting because delta waves you have when you’re unconscious.

So when you’re unconscious, there are delta waves. And Theresa Caputo and the medium, Bettina-Suvi Rode, it’s her name, they give messages, they are awake, they’re walking around. And even if you’re a skeptic and you would say it is all a code reading technique, for example, so psychological tricks, I

Would say you have better waves in your head because you have to be focused, you have to be concentrated. But here we have delta waves. So it’s really a complete different thing. That might be a further confirmation that they are obtaining information from some other unusual source. Yes, absolutely.

And it is not a psychological trick where you really have to be focused and concentrated. I think it is quite the opposite. You don’t have to think, you have to stop your thinking, you have to stop your brain, and then you can have contact with the spiritual world.

Have you felt, as you did in the life-changing experience, it was a direct contact? You didn’t seem to need a medium. And I assume when you said somebody touched you on the forehead and on the shoulder, that that was Yoma. Yes, yes. And I practice it every day.

And there are ups and downs. There are days where it goes very well. And I really practice it. So I really try to receive pictures in my mind or even messages or words. And I have made an apprenticeship with the second medium. So I really learned how it is to be a medium.

I know how it is to have a telepathic connection because it’s telepathy. Or some kind or some form of telepathy when you are communicating with the spiritual world. And I am not good at it, but I know how it is.

So I would never go into public and say, here, you can book an appointment with me. I’m a medium. There are a lot of better mediums than me. But I think it is important for me as a scientist that I understand how it works. And that’s why I think I have felt Yoma.

So this was some kind of opening the door to make my first steps. And I think I don’t have to be a medium. I think I should stay a scientist and show the people, especially those who are in a deep grief

And who are stuck in a materialistic world view, that we will really have evidence. And that it is not a madness or that you have to be crazy when you are dealing with these topics. Well, Oliver, this has been a fascinating discussion. You’re doing pioneering work.

And I want to let our viewers know that we also have a follow-up interview planned. Well, we’ll go more into scientific theories because I know your book, Beyond Matter, deals very largely with the question of how can we incorporate this knowledge into our scientific understanding.

And you have many ideas about that in terms of quantum physics, in terms of the physiology, in terms of questions relating to biogenesis and so forth. Yes, that’s correct. Because I think it’s not important only to show the ERIAMS study. I think it would not be enough to convince a

Person who is stuck in a materialistic world view. Because you really think that everything you have been taught at school or at university, it has to be true. So I think I really have to shake the materialistic world view. And that’s why I spent so many pages on these topics, biogenesis and evolution

And things like that. Because when then you understand, oh, there are a lot of questions still to ask, you might be more open to the spiritual world and to my ERIAMS study. That was the idea behind it. Well, Oliver, thank you very much for reaching

Out to me and taking the time today for this interview. It’s been a great pleasure. I’m delighted to be able to share your work and your findings with the New Thinking Allowed audience. I have to thank you. I appreciate it very much. Thank you, Jeff.

And for those of you watching or listening, thank you because you are the reason that we are here. I imagine that by now many of you already realize that in conjunction with White Crow Books, we’ve just launched the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues book in print and our first title

Is, Is There Life After Death?