Body, Mind, and Death with David Lorimer (4K Reboot)

Summary

David Lorimer, longtime program director of the Scientific and Medical Network, argues that well-documented phenomena like crisis apparitions, near-death life reviews, and mediumship cannot be explained by the assumption that the brain produces consciousness. He traces this view through the visionary scientist Emanuel Swedenborg, William James, and the early Society for Psychical Research, and even describes an automatic-writing message said to come from the late skeptic Bertrand Russell. Lorimer concludes that if all minds are connected at a deep level, then harming others is harming ourselves, which gives the research a direct ethical meaning.

Key takeaways

• 1The Scientific and Medical Network was founded in 1973 by George Blaker, Dr. Peter Leggett, Sir Kelvin Spencer, and Dr. Patrick Shackleton, who were brought together by the Polish priest and sensitive Father Andrew Glazewski. All of the founders reportedly had mystical experiences.
• 2The Galileo Commission backed a 2018 report by Professor Harald Walach that challenges scientific materialism. Its name refers to scholars who refused to look through Galileo's telescope.
• 3Emanuel Swedenborg reportedly sensed a fire in Stockholm, about 300 miles away, while at a dinner party in Gothenburg. He also predicted the month of his own death in March 1772.
• 4Immanuel Kant tried to debunk Swedenborg in 'Dreams of a Spirit Seer', yet his own philosophy may owe a debt to Swedenborg.
• 5The medium Rosemary Brown produced automatic writing said to come from Bertrand Russell after his death, in which 'Russell' admits he survived. She also produced music in the styles of great composers.
• 6'Phantasms of the Living' (1886), by Gurney, Podmore, and Myers, documented crisis apparitions in about 1,200 pages.
• 7Freeman Dyson wrote a foreword to Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's 'Extraordinary Knowing', which describes a lost harp being found through map dowsing. Fellow scientists attacked him for it.
• 8Lorimer's book 'Resonant Mind' (originally titled 'Whole in One') argues that psychometry, the near-death life review, and mystical oneness all point to a single universal mind.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

So let's just take the example of crisis apparitions, which is when someone who's dying appears to someone who knows them closely, but without that second person knowing that the person is dying, and generally only finds out two or three days later, and then you sort of put the jigsaw puzzle together. And so what you can do, obviously, is to check up and make sure that you've got the account straight that wasn't made up, and you check, did the person tell other people before they learned that actually the person had died, and so on. So there are all sorts of procedural and investigative matters that you can look into. But at the end of the day, this is really quite a well-established fact that there are crisis apparitions, and so my argument is that you have to understand or construct an interpretation of reality and the nature of consciousness, which can account in some way for this phenomenon. Keep watching to learn more. The New Thinking Allowed magazine, Issue 10, on UFOs and UAP, is now ready for free download, and you can also order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering Distant Learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tartt, 70 Years of Exploring. Consciousness, Consciousness, and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. ...

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Aug 17, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.