Every other month, I host the Mind & Meaning Institute‘s online conversation series, the “Meeting of the Minds.” We invite a well-known experiencer or researcher to join an intimate gathering of 20 Zoom attendees and devote an hour and a half to doing nothing but answering their questions. And you’re invited to be part of the conversation!

Our next guest, on Monday, October 14, 2024, will be Dr. Scarlett Heinbuch, a Reiki healer who met her husband, David, in a shared near-death experience. You may have seen her on the History Channel’s The UnXplained or at the Archives of the Impossible conference at Rice University. Scarlett began doing energy work on David when they were complete strangers and all she knew about him was that he was comatose, in multiple organ failure, and expected to pass on at any time. While working with him, Scarlett found herself suddenly out of her body and present with David’s spirit in a realm of incredible love. Despite never having met each other on earth, they suddenly felt they knew each other deeply. This energy work and otherworldly meeting resulted in David’s miraculous recovery. When David woke from his coma, he knew that Scarlett was going to be his wife. And Scarlett and David have been married for the past 18 years! Scarlett has written about their story in her book We Met on the Other Side. Scarlett will join us on October 14 to answer your questions about their shared near-death experience, energy healing, and the other intuitive experiences that have filled Scarlett’s life from a young age: sensing spirits, receiving telepathic information, and getting a telephone call from her deceased aunt. I hope you’ll join us for a stimulating Meeting of the Minds with Scarlett!

Then, on Monday, December 9, 2024, the Meeting of the Minds will welcome afterlife researcher and UFO journalist Leslie Kean. Leslie is best known for breaking what are arguably the two most influential UFO-related news stories of the 21st century: the 2017 frontpage New York Times article “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” (co-authored with Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal) and the 2023 Debrief article “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin” (co-authored with Blumenthal). Leslie also wrote the 2010 New York Times bestselling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record and is a consulting producer and on-camera expert for the National Geographic docuseries UFOs: Investigating the Unknown produced by Break Thru Films, Season 2 of which will air and stream in January 2025. Leslie’s reporting on UFOs — now called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) — is renowned for its objectivity, thoroughness, and groundbreaking impact.

But Leslie’s curiosity about the hidden layers of reality has led her to explore other phenomena as well: notably, psi abilities and the ability of consciousness to operate independently of the body. Leslie’s 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife was the basis for the 2021 Netflix docuseries Surviving Death. In that book, she examines the evidential qualities of near-death experiences, children’s memories of past lives, mental mediumship, apparitions, and physical mediumship, which can involve materializations that some believe are attributable to the spirits of the deceased. 

Leslie will join us on December 9 for a fascinating discussion of all the varied evidence she’s gathered regarding the reality of consciousness — human and nonhuman — beyond our earthly bodies. Please join us!

You can find out more about the Meeting of the Minds on the Mind & Meaning Institute website.