WE Inherit Memories?! Did this butterfly just prove reincarnation?

Most of us have wondered — does something of us survive? Does love, memory, connection... continue?

What if a 10-year-old boy in Japan and his butterflies just gave us the first scientific thread to pull?

This episode was not the one I planned to record. It found me. And I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

A few things you'll walk away with:

• Why what carries through metamorphosis might tell us everything about what carries through beyond death
• What two unforgettable readings taught me about what the soul actually brings to the other side
• Why Jo Nagai's butterflies might be the first breadcrumb toward proving reincarnation

This is science, spirit and wonder — all braided together.

And isn't that just like the spirit world — to hide the biggest answers inside the smallest, most unexpected places.

Show Notes: 

 A Curious Birb on YouTube— the video that started it all: "Genius 10 Year Old's Research Shocks Scientists Around the World"

www.youtube.com/@CuriousOwl-l5p

Get Joy's Free "Sign Magnet" 3 Day Mini Course HERE https://www.joyfulmedium.com/sign-magnet
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Facebook Group: Joy's Soul Spa
YouTube: Psychic Medium Joy Giovanni 

Transcript

Unknown: 0:01

Joy, hey, beautiful soul, welcome to spirit. Speak Easy. I'm Joy Giovanni, joyful medium. I'm a working psychic medium, energy healer and spiritual gifts mentor. This podcast is like a seat at the table in a secret club, but with mediums, mystics and the spiritual luminaries of our time. So come behind the velvet ropes with me and see inside my world as I chat insider style with profoundly gifted souls, we go deep, share juicy stories, laugh a lot, and it wouldn't be a speakeasy without great insider secrets and tips. You might even learn that you have some gifts of your own so step inside the spirit speakeasy. Hey, beautiful soul, welcome in for another episode of spirit speakeasy. I'm glad you're here today, because this episode, I have to tell you, this, is one that has been living inside of me all night. It's not the episode I was going to record today. It's something that inspired me out of the blue, something that just serendipitously came across my path, and I have been really just thinking about it since the moment I saw it, and I knew immediately I had to share this inspiration with you. Okay, let's get into it, because today I want to start with a question, what if a memory, not just the idea of a memory, but an actual lived experience, actual emotional imprinting. What if that could survive complete and total transformation of the physical body, not metaphorically, not spiritually, but scientifically. What if a living creature could be essentially dissolved, broken down to its most basic biologic components and rebuilt entirely into a different form, and still carry something forward from before, from before that breaking away. And then what if something carried forward, not just in the transformed creature, but into the next generation and the generations after that. I know what you might be thinking, Joy. Are we going to talk about reincarnation again, sort of, but I'm going to get there through the most unexpected door. I want to tell you about a special little boy or young person, I should say, named Joe Nagai. I came across Joe's story through a YouTube channel called a curious Burb, B, I R, B. I'll link the specific video in the show notes, because it is a wonderful, incredible, carefully researched piece of content, a video. It's like its own little mini show. It's like a 15 minute show. This episode that they did about this person, Joe Nagai, he on this channel. The creator of the channel, has some amazing content researched about animal behavior. And this particular video, I watched it yesterday as I'm recording this. And today I'm recording this on the Friday before it's going to be released on Monday. And when I watched this video last night, it had only been out for three days, and it had over 1.1 million views in just three days. So clearly, something about this story is landing for people in a very big way. And I think by the end of today's episode, you'll understand why. So Joe Nagai, picture a sweet young boy in Japan, glasses serious eyes, but something very kind about his demeanor in his face, the kind of child who notices things that other people just walk right past. Well, from a young age, this boy, Joe Nagai, was fascinated by insects. I was fascinated by insects too, but not to this degree. And he was fascinated, not in the way that most kids are, where you might pick up a bug, look at it for a few seconds and then move on. Joe was different. He would find these rhinoceros beetles, which, in the video you'll see, if you watch it, and again, I'll link it below. They show these beetles. It looks like a beetle with these rhinoceros horns. So they had those outside where he lived in Japan, and he would watch them for hours battling each other with their insect horns, or there would be dragonflies hovering by a near pond. And instead of just collecting them or taking pictures of them, he would stay he would observe. He would document. He would watch them for hours and hours and hours, tracking their patterns and their odd behaviors. He you'll see in the video, there are all of these sketches that he did, of the studies that he was having, of them and the observations documented notes, pages and pages and pages, and he tracked them over a period of time, including watching their patterns and habits. You. Know, just throughout time. So he really was looking at things that most people didn't even notice about these insects, including most trained scientists would have just overlooked these things entirely. And his very favorite of these insects, above all the others, was the butterfly, specifically the swallowtail butterfly, which is like a really beautiful, large, dramatic yellow with some black markings, stunning wings. It's a creature that has one of the most radical life cycles in the world. And by the time that Joe was in kindergarten, kindergarten, you guys, he wasn't just watching butterflies. He was doing his own scientific research. He decided to not only observe these butterflies in nature, and the reason that he said he chose these swallowtail butterflies is because he noticed they had a much more rapid life cycle, and were cocooning and birthing into butterflies much faster than the other species, which is quite an observation for a kindergartner. So he also decided, as part of this to start, I don't know what the right word is, hatching, raising his own butterflies at home. So he was having the butterflies in nature and the butterflies at home. He designed his first experiments in kindergarten to test how long the swallowtail could survive if it got stuck inside its own chrysalis. You know, sometimes, as they're transitioning from Caterpillar to butterfly, they can get stuck in that little cocoon. So he wanted to know how long could they live if they get stuck in there in the first grade, Joe Nagai documented a species of caterpillar that he discovered would molt more often than usual. And again, this is that swallowtail butterfly, and it was an unusual finding that actually won him an award. This is the research that led him to see okay, this type of butterfly is unique in the way that their life cycle moves. And by the time that Joe was in second grade, eight years old. You guys, Joe had already accumulated hundreds of pages of observations, notes, documentations, drawings of these life cycles, hundreds of pages at eight years old. And somewhere in all of these pages, something began to catch his attention that he couldn't quite explain in his brilliant, little scientific mind, he noticed that the butterflies that he had raised himself, the ones that he had watched and tended to and hand fed, from the very beginning, from the egg to the caterpillar, to the chrysalis, to the butterfly, these butterflies that he raised himself behaved differently around him than the ones that he caught in the wild. So even after metamorphosis, even after they had been through all of the becoming and that transition of, you know, butterflies, they're when they're in that chrysalis, their Caterpillar bodies melting away and transforming into what then becomes the butterfly. So even after all of that, when he would then, after his experiments, take them out to release them into the wild, he noticed that what that they were doing was different, was that they would flutter back towards him. No matter how many times he tried to release them, they just kept coming back to him, and he felt like they seemed to know Him. And Joe thought, maybe my friends remember me, because he didn't think of them as a science experiment. He's eight years old. These are his friends. So he thought, oh my gosh, maybe my friends remember me. And people told him, that's impossible, that's wishful thinking. These are insects. They can't remember you that memories just simply couldn't even survive this metamorphosis that they went through. They're a totally different creature. They're not a caterpillar. They can remember you as a caterpillar. They certainly can't remember you after this transition, and they just kind of adults dismissed Joe, many of us can remember being dismissed as a kid, but Joe said, No, the science is clear. Even though he was eight years old, he decided he wanted to find out for himself. He didn't just give up at that point. Now, before I tell you what Joe discovered, I want to make sure that we all truly understand what this metamorphosis actually is because I think many of us carry this vague, beautiful image of a caterpillar going into the cocoon and emerging into a butterfly after a restful, beautiful sleep, like a soft transformation, a costume change, like just kind of shifting into a new outfit. It is so much more radical and strange than that what these caterpillars go through to become this butterfly. When the caterpillar enters the chrysalis, I've learned a lot in the last 24 hours. It doesn't rearrange itself. It doesn't restructure or reorganize. It processes enzymes, chemicals in its body that essentially digest most of its own body from the inside. It out, it dissolves itself into what scientists describe as kind of a biological soup, which I know is such a strange thing to call it a liquid, almost nothing of the original physical structure of the caterpillar remains intact. And then from that liquid, that biologic soup, from that near total dissolution, something rebuilds a completely different body takes shape, different legs, different eyes, wings that never existed before, a creature that will eat different food, live an entirely different life, no longer on the ground, crawling, but in the sky, flying so a totally different being and will move through the world in a completely different way. But the caterpillar and the butterfly share DNA. Even though they share this DNA, almost nothing else physically connects them. So when scientists said, memories cannot survive metamorphosis, they weren't being dismissive. They were being logical. What would even carry the memory? There's no structure that still remains. So how could this memory possibly survive? And there's a scientist named Martha Weiss at Georgetown University that had already been quietly exploring this very question for many years. She had trained these moth caterpillars in her experiments to associate a specific scent with a mild electric shock, essentially teaching them to kind of fear that smell. And when those caterpillars dissolved and rebuilt and emerged as completely transformed adult moths weeks later, they still avoided that scent that she had trained them with those shocks to avoid. So the memory of the electric shock being associated with that smell had survived the caterpillar soup that they went through. And as Joe was asking his question in his mind, his second grade brilliant mind, he was thinking, well, maybe there's research on this already. So Joe did his own research and went online and found Dr Martha Weiss's research. And he was looking very specifically at her papers on butterfly memory, doing what any serious researcher would do. And when he read her findings, something lit him up, because if moths could do this, he thought, well, certainly, why couldn't his swallowtails do this? So in the spring of 2022 he writes to Dr Weiss and decides he's going to send her all of His current research, all of his data, and he condensed it down to like a four page handwritten letter. So the second grader writes this esteemed, established scientist at Georgetown, this very sweet four page handwritten letter, including his data, his research, his drawings, and sent her this large envelope, and he as he wrote to Miss Martha Weiss, hello. My name is Joe Nagai. I live in Kobe, Japan. I'm in the second grade. Along with this letter, of course, he had pages of data that he collected over the years. He included photographs of himself, all of this that original creator that inspired me. It's all in the video. And you get to see her. You get to see him. You get to see this letter. It's beautiful. So highly encouraged. So she reads the letter, of course, and thinks like, oh, this a very cute kid with glasses. And she describes him as like, looking through a magnifying glass at his butterflies and two pages of data and figures. And He told her he was so impressed by her research that he wanted to replicate it with his own butterflies. And later, there's a bit of an interview in there. Dr Weiss said it was the most fun letter she had ever received. But this is where Joe's story gets even better, because Dr Weiss, while she was like, Charmed, she was like, this is a second grader. This is lovely. But like, okay, she probably assumed, like most people, that an eight year old replicating a university level science experiment at home was not going to really happen. So she wrote him back very sweetly and thanked him and suggested that he try something simpler. There was another very basic experiment she had done, showing that certain butterflies prefer certain colors. And so she was like, why don't you try this simpler exercise, my dear little sweet second grade friend. And then I love this part. He wrote back and told her that he had already begun adapting her experiment and his home setup, and had started several of the protocols to prepare for the scientific experiment on his own. I love this boy. I don't know him, but I love him. And then he not only did he say like, Oh, I've already begun the protocols, and I'm setting up the experiment. I just wanted you to know, he then also questioned her methodology. Specifically, he questioned her choice of this chemical that she chose. It was a. It's called ethyl acetate. And he was like, I don't understand why you use this chemical. Surely, you know, sweet, respectful, but like, you know, intense, when he said it in the way she describes it. Surely you know that this is used in pesticides, and this is a common killing agent for insects, and maybe they would have a natural sensitivity to this, had you considered that? And she it's kind of funny, because in the interview, she says, like she kind of even in her reading the email or the letter, was like, we did our own protocols and we tested and it was fine, but she had a little chuckle that he even wanted to build on her experiment, and he wanted to use something more neutral to kind of just in case the caterpillars might have a natural aversion to this, like chemical smell, or recognize the chemical smell from pesticides, he felt like it needed to be something that was more of a natural smell that they wouldn't have prior experience with, or a natural aversion to. And again, she said, You know this, Dr Weiss trained scientist with decades of experience and a high level researcher later said she felt a little defensive when she had read him being like, why did you use this chemical? And then she admitted like, well, he had a point. The eight year old scientist had a point and improved on her experiment. So she agreed to design to help him, like, with his design of the experiment so he could do it properly. And over the following months, the two of them, a second grade boy in Kobe, Japan, and a Georgetown professor in Washington, DC, exchanged ideas regularly. There's some sweet pictures of them in that original video too. How to adapt her methods for his home set up some potential improvements that he had wanted to make to her original study back and forth across the world by mail, and by the fall of 2022 just a few years ago, Joe wrote saying the study was finished, and this time, he sent 33 pages of his research. Here is what he had done, Joe raised these swallowtail caterpillars and trained them to associate the scent of lavender oil with a mild electric shock. He also didn't agree with the severity of the shocks that were used in the university experiments and trials, so he wanted to have them a more gentle shock, a more gentle smell. But even in this, Joe brought something the original study hadn't. He didn't want to hurt the caterpillars, because, remember, these are his friends. He's in second grade. He saw them as creatures that he loved and his friends that he had spent so much time with. So rather than selecting that shock intensity at random or just putting the highest shock. This little machine with the little pads did 15 levels of shock. He started at the lowest possible level and watched and increased it. And just like watched them so carefully for any signs of distress, and at only level four of these shocks, the caterpillars extend this little it's like a defensive organ. It's very interesting in the video. It's this little thing that comes out of their forehead. It's kind of looks like a Pokemon character. It's this little orange it's a defensive organ, and it means that they're starting to feel distressed. So at level four, they were extending that little defensive organ out of their forehead, and he said it was a clear signal that they could feel it. And he stopped right there, because he didn't want to harm them. And also, when he was doing the experiment, instead of applying the shock directly to the caterpillars, he put the caterpillar on his little arm, and then put the pad on the caterpillar and his arm, because he wanted to also feel the shock to monitor to make sure that it was not at a harmful level. I just am obsessed with this little boy. Hopefully you can see why the story is so incredible, even in this and even in this far and because he's using his own arm, of course, he felt every single shock himself. And he also had a control group, like any good scientist would, a group of caterpillars who received no training at all, no exposure to the lavender, no shocks, no training, just regular group of caterpillars that he was raising for his control group so he could properly compare them. And then he waited and he watched them in their chrysalises. And as part of this experiment, he built this plastic it's like a maze, almost like three tunnels, but they shape like a y, so one primary hallway that they start in, and then it branches off to these two other plastic tunnels that kind of looks like a y, and it serves like a maze for them, right? So they start in that initial arm, and then that initial hallway, and then it splits into a V, and they either get to choose the side with a little pad of lavender scent, or the side that does not have the lavender scent, because the intention is, you know, you put sugar water on both sides. One side has that cotton pad with the lavender. And when they finally emerge from the chrysalis, you put them in the maze, and you see which side they go to. The untrained butterflies, the one he didn't do any, you know, exposure to the lavender or the shocks. The untrained butterflies, they split 5050, so in every experiment, 5050, on either side of that V from the original tunnel, 50% went towards the lavender. 50% did not go towards the lavender, sugar water on both sides. And what happened to the trained butterflies? If the untrained ones seem to have no preference, the trained butterflies, around 70% avoided the lavender arm. So the memory of being exposed to that lavender with the shock as caterpillars had completely survived the metamorphosis, and even as butterflies, 70% knew not to go towards the lavender scent, to go away from it. How incredible is that the majority had remembered the experience of the caterpillar had carried through this dissolving through the biologic soup and was present in the butterfly on the other side. Joe was the first person in the world as a second grader to demonstrate this in swallowtail butterflies in the second grade. This is amazing to me. Dr Weiss said she was a flabbergast, and she was delighted. She was like, Oh my gosh, he's a real scientist. He's figuring out new stuff. This is incredible. Most researchers, most adults, would have stopped there that finding alone was extraordinary and won him a lot of awards. And you'll see in that video, it shows him on all of these different news programs and talk programs on Japan. In Japan, it's very cool, but he didn't stop there. He, like was still curious, and we haven't even gotten to the part of his experiment that shook scientists around the world. Okay, so one day, sometime after completing this, this experiment, Joe was spending time with his family, and he noticed something. He noticed that his mom and his grandma all suffered hay fever and migraines, kind of the allergies, right? And migraines, three generations, same condition, something neither his mother nor his grandmother had taught him to have right? This question that I have to tell you made something go very quiet and very still inside of me when I heard it, because this is the question that changes everything. Joe spent the following summer raising a new generation of caterpillars, the offspring of the butterflies he had already trained. So those butterflies from that lavender experiment, they made baby caterpillars, and then he's going to raise them, and he's going to do some experiments with them, these new caterpillars, because they're the next generation. They'd never been exposed to the lavender they've never felt a shock. They never learned anything about any of this. He hadn't trained them at all because they were brand new baby caterpillars. And while other kids played outside and did their summer activities, Joe replaced leaves and tended to his new baby caterpillars and sat with them in these little tents all day in his house. It's very sweet. He described them as feeling like his children, and and by late summer, they emerged as butterflies. And so he was like, I'm going to do the experiment again and place them in that same wine maze with the lavender on one side and the nothing on the other side, sugar in both sides, to see which side they would go to. And do you know what happened? They avoided the lavender, not quite as strongly as the first generation, but significantly, statistically meaningful, the experience of the parents had left a biologic trace that carried forward without any direct exposure. So only through the biology would these butterflies have known to avoid this lavender. He didn't expose them to it at all. So Joe bred them again, a third generation, grandchildren of the original trained caterpillars, two generations removed from any direct lavender, any direct shock. And you know what happened? They still avoided it. They still went away from the lavender, even the third generation, the grandkids of the original experiment butterflies. He also began to notice that this inherited behavior appeared more strongly in the male offspring than the female offspring, a potential gender linked pattern that he noted carefully, but with the wisdom to acknowledge that his data set was still small, he would need more trials and experiments before he could draw a strong conclusion on this one, he was 10 years old and already practicing scientific restraint, so instead of just going for that conclusion, he was saying, well, his data sets too small. I need to do more control. Experiments. And Joe presented his research at the International Congress of Etymology In Kyoto in 2024 so a big bug convention. He was in the fifth grade at the time, so this would have been last year, or maybe a year and a half ago. At the time, scientists who had spent decades in the field lined up to speak with him at this huge convention. He was invited to present his work privately to the Crown Prince of Japan. And in December 2024 Joe finally met dr Martha Weiss in person, his pen pal, mentor, scientist whose papers had inspired him and started all this the woman he had written from across the world as an eight year old little guy with hundreds of pages of handwritten notes and questions he refused to let go of as of right now, Joe's research is being prepared for official publication, a real scientific paper with Dr Weiss helping him through the process, and the two of them are already designing new experiments together. The work's ongoing. The story's still unfolding, and I just need to pause here, because beyond everything this means scientifically, can we just take a moment to be with Joe Nagai, who is a beautiful soul, his self, this child, this little kindergartener, initially, who noticed something beautiful and refused to be told it wasn't real, who reached across the world to a scientist that was more than four times his age that he admired, and said, I think you might be on to something, and so am I, And I think I can improve on your research. A little boy who builds mazes out of materials he found at home, who felt every shock himself because he didn't want his Caterpillar friends to suffer unnecessarily, who tended to and loved these friends and practiced scientific restraint at 10 years old that many adults wouldn't be able to do. The creator of the video that I mentioned, that introduced me to Joe's story, said something at the end of the video, it's only like a 15 minute video that I haven't been able to stop thinking about either. He said the whole thing wasn't born out of ambition. This is the part that moved him the most. The creator of the video. It wasn't it wasn't born out of ambition Joe's like experiments this wisdom or the pursuit of scientific breakthrough. It was actually simply a 10 year old trying to figure out whether his butterfly friends could actually remember him after this metamorphosis, this soul to soul. Connection with a butterfly was what really sparked this whole thing, not an ambitious pursuit, and that is a soul following its own thread, that is pure, uncorrupted curiosity. And what it found was this child in his backyard in Japan, maybe one of the most quietly profound discoveries of our time, because here's where I want to bring you with me. When I first watched Joe's story, I watched it a couple of times I felt something I can only describe as like a quiet internal glimmer or niggle or nudge or tickle. You know that feeling? It's not like a lightning bolt, it's not loud, it's not like a giant outside revelation. It's more something in you that goes still and soft and says, pay attention. This thread goes further than you think. And my mind, my whole system, really started pulling at that thread, because what Joe had discovered in his home in Kobe is this memory, lived experience, emotional imprinting, learned response, can survive complete biologic dissolution. It can survive the total transformation of physical form, and it can carry forward, not just the same being, but into the same, into the next generation. So you know just how the baby butterflies were aware not to go towards the lavender. Emotions and things that have been learned can be carried not just from one form to the next of this single butterfly, but also into the generations after that. Now, as many of you know, I work with the spirit world I have for more than a decade, and what I witness in that work again and again is something that deeply rhymes or flows with what Joe found in his butterflies, what carries through from the other side is not the body, it's not the illness, the limitation, the struggle, or the challenges of the physical form, what carries through is something more essential than any of that, personality, love, memory. Memory, humor specific, like the themness of a person, not a fading recording of someone, not an echo, something present, something alive, just like Joe's butterfly friends still remembered him after their metamorphosis, so too does our soul continue on and remember us after the dissolution of our physical bodies. This reminded me of a couple of client stories. I'm going to share them briefly, and I'm going to keep them General. They're sensitive stories and their kids stories, especially inspired by Joe this first story that really dropped into my mind as I was experiencing this video about Joe and these beautiful, incredible butterflies, is this client that I had I was working with a parent and a grandparent of this lovely person on the other side, and what I came to know that she shared through the reading was that she suffered a lot in her physical body as part of her human experience. She let me know that her mind processed differently, not the typical processing level that she processed at an age and capacity that was younger than her physical years, so she was processing, I believe it was like at about a kindergarten or just slightly lower cognitive capacity, although her physical age, she did make it to just before 21 and she also shared that She had a condition from birth, a couple of different conditions that made it very hard for her to control her muscle mobility, so she was in a wheelchair. In her life, she really didn't have a lot of ability to control her vocal cords, to communicate in a very typical and traditional way, and to be able to move around and use her body in a typical, traditional way, and as a part of all of her medical challenges, she would have different versions of seizures that would happen quite frequently to her. And even though I knew this part of her story, and she did share with her parent and grandparent to just let them know that it really was her. I could also feel her communicating at such a profound level that was not a kindergarten level, it was a wise soul level. And not only did she share the story about the medical part of her experience, but she let me know that she did have quite a sassy personality in life, and she, even though she couldn't, maybe communicate verbally in a typical way, she did communicate, and she did get her point across. She had a sense of humor. She liked certain people and disliked certain people, and she would show me how her parent that was caretaking her. They would have these like dance parties in the house, especially in the morning, because she wasn't so much a morning person. She didn't love getting started in the morning, and so her parents put on these special musics for her, and they would do kind of dances together, and she would get laughing and get happy, and it really made her day. And her mom had a special way that she would pick out clothing with her, because she did have preferences, and she did have things that she liked and disliked and wanted, and some days she wanted, you know, something over another thing, so she really could express the fullness of her personality. And the other thing she let me know, and wanted her parent and grandparent to know was that the physical challenges were part of her physical body, and once she was not connected to that physical body anymore, once her physical body had passed on, her soul continued on, and her soul was the fullness of who she actually was, just like in Joe's story, the struggle of the caterpillar didn't define what carried through to the butterfly. Something much larger did. The dissolution of the caterpillar wasn't the end of the story. It became the butterfly, and so too with this beautiful girl, the challenges and short and maybe seemingly difficult life that she had here was not the totality of her she really did have all of these wonderful experiences and personality traits and sense of humor and the totality of her soul continued on In a much bigger way. And she shared things about her parent and her grandparent, things they had just been talking about a trip they recently took, a trip that they wanted to take with her, but they couldn't get her medically strong enough. So it really, to me, is such a lovely parallel. And I do feel like Joe's work. With the butterflies can unravel, and if we keep pulling these threads, I do believe one day science might catch up with the spiritual, spiritual work and let us know too, that our souls do carry on. Now, I know I talked about at the beginning this reincarnation question. So here's the question that I'm sitting with, that I am inviting you to sit with with me here on your own, and I want to be honest with you, I don't have a definite answer. I have my experiences through my work and those of other teachers, but I don't think anyone has a definite, at least not scientific answer yet. But I think it's a question worth asking out loud and asking seriously, if a memory can survive complete biologic transformation from that caterpillar into that butterfly, if a lived experience can carry forward, not just through one metamorphosis, but into the next generation, right the child butterfly and the grandchild butterfly, or with Joe and his grandma and mom, if things can carry through, if lived experience can carry forward, right? Is it such a stretch to wonder whether human consciousness, human memory, human love, human essence, might do something similar. If a butterfly remembers after its transformation from one body to the next recognizes, even if it's not in a conscious level, something in its soul recognizes, couldn't, to them be true that something in us, human beings, a totally different life form, could also do something similar. Reincarnation is one of the oldest spiritual ideas that carries across every major tradition and culture on the earth. So the notion that the soul or consciousness or essence, whatever language resonates with you, doesn't simply end at our physical death of our actual body, but continues, transforms and potentially enters a new life, a new form, carrying something forward, science has understandably been skeptical, but, you know, I don't think we have to put that down just because science is skeptical. Because how do you design an experiment for something so vast? I don't know, but I think Joe's butterfly experiment could be the first thread in starting to help understand and prove maybe even reincarnation. But Joe Nagai, in his home in Kobe, with his butterflies, asked a smaller version of that question. He asked, Can something essentially survive complete transformation in the body, can it carry forward even into a generation that never experienced the original event? And the answer, at least for swallowtail butterflies, appears to be yes. What scientists are beginning to explore is something called epigenetic inheritance. It's the idea that experiences can alter how genes are expressed, and that those alterations can be passed to offspring generations without any change to the underlying DNA sequencing. It's a relatively young study in science and a still evolving field, but it's legitimate, and it's expanding rapidly, and it suggests that the boundary between one generation and what the next generation carries is far more permeable than we maybe once assumed. So for those of us in spiritual communities, this is not entirely surprising. In spiritual work, in many traditions, we teach that we carry on not just our own soul's history but the imprints of our ancestral line, right? That ancestral healing, the patterns that held in the family, can be transformed by one person willing to look at them clearly. That healing work done in one generation can ripple forward into the next. I believe it can also ripple backwards into the former generations. But what Joe's butterflies opened up, at least for me, sitting quietly with this is something even bigger than ancestral patterns, if memory and experiences can survive the complete disillusion and rebuilding of the physical body, if they can carry forward into generations with no direct experience of the original event, then the question of what happens to human consciousness after death of the physical body starts to feel less like a matter of faith, right for the faith community, and a little more like a genuinely open scientific question. I'm not saying Joe proved reincarnation. He didn't. He proved something about butterflies. But I'm a medium. I can tell you what I have witnessed. And you know, I think about another kiddo that I worked with early on in my work. I often don't remember my readings much later, usually if i. Have a few clients in a day. By the end of the day, I may have forgotten even the first session that I had, but there have been a few sessions or clients or spirit loved ones that stay with me over the years, in my heart and in my memory, and I'm thinking about another little person that also crossed over very unexpectedly, and this young boy also passed away in an accident on a beautiful, perfect day out of nowhere. And it was a vehicular accident, and no one else in the vehicle passed away, but in this family group reading this, this young person came through with ease and with humor and with wit and charm and everything that he was in his under 10 years of life, that he got to experience in that body on this Planet, and he came through in so much fullness, and he did acknowledge that his parents had been with him in the vehicle, and siblings, and he was the only one that was traumatically wounded. And they did take him to the hospital. And in helping me understand that scene at the hospital, he was really just acknowledging all of the trauma and hurt that each of his family members were experiencing through this, but also was sharing that the trauma didn't define what he carried through to the other side, the trauma was part of his human experience, But something much larger carried on, just like Joe butter Joe's butterflies didn't carry the shock of the experiment into the next generation. They carried something older and deeper, something that persisted, not because of a painful experience, but in spite of it. And that's often how I feel the loved ones who have these more tragic, traumatic passings. They don't carry scars from those passings on their soul, just like this boy that came through or communicated to his family about this accident that took him to the other side, he acknowledged the accident, but it didn't scar his soul. It wasn't a part of defining what he was able to experience on the other side, if anything, he came through with playfulness and a little bit of sarcasm. Even he was quite intelligent. He was the youngest of the siblings, and was in the reading even giving me details, sharing details with me about his siblings, like teasing his siblings and giving them a hard time, and he acknowledged that one of them had recently started playing an instrument, like a school, you know, school sometimes lets kids play instruments, and he was teasing them because he was like, they're not very good yet, and they sometimes say they're practicing when they're not. And it was just very funny, and the whole family was laughing and was like, Oh my gosh, that's just like him. He's, he's very mischievous, and he's, you know, in the best possible way, just such a special, important member of the family. But I just thought it was so incredible, because he didn't carry with him all of that pain. He carried with him who he was as a soul. So where does this leave us? I think about Joe Nagai and his family in Japan, watching him in his science experiments, watching his butterflies flutter back and forth toward him, and watching the scene in the video when he is trying to release these butterflies and they keep flying back to him, keep flying back and landing on him. And I think about what he was really asking in his curiosity and his experiments, he was asking, does something of me still live in you to these butterflies, right? Does what passed between us in those early days when I was taking care of you and loving you and when you were still becoming what you would be, does any of it remain? That was really his question underneath of it all, and he found Yes, it remains. It carries it moves forward, even into lives that never directly knew the original experience. I work with people who are asking a version of that same question every single day they sit across from me, hoping that some sign of what they shared with someone they loved didn't simply stop or disappear, that the love, the memory, the connection, that something of it remains somewhere in the ethers, right In the beyond. And what I can tell you, for more than a decade of sitting with the spirit world, is what comes through is not a diminished version of a person. It's not a fading trace of their soul. It's something that feels again and again, not just preserved, but expanded uncomfortable. Contained is the word I have for it, as if whatever form consciousness takes after our physical death is not smaller than what it was, it's somehow more, not unlike the butterfly in Joe's experiments. I know, I don't know exactly how it works, right? I have ideas of of the spirit world, but I know I'm only glimpsing just such a tiny little crack in the proverbial window. I don't know exactly how all of it works. I don't think anyone does, not yet, but I do believe that we're living in a moment where science and spirit are beginning to ask the same questions from the same direction within many of us, and somewhere in the middle, in that space between that 10 year old Jonah guys handwritten letter and that Georgetown professor's mailbox, between a Y shaped plastic maze built out of household materials and tape And a standing ovation at an international science convention, something's being revealed here. Joe Nagai picked up a thread, and I believe if we as humanity, if scientists, follow it far enough, it could unravel something really extraordinary about the nature of consciousness, of memory, and what it means for our souls to continue on, isn't that, just like the spirit world to hide the biggest answers inside the smallest, most unexpected places, a boy, a butterfly, a scent of lavender and a question that just might change everything? I hope this episode's given you something to sit with, something to wander wonder about. I know it has for me, and honestly it still is. It touched my heart and gave me hope. Mr. Joe Nagai story. So if Joe's story moved you, and I really hope it did, please go and watch that video that introduced me to this. The YouTube channel is called a curious Burb, B, I R, B, and I will link that specific video directly in the show notes. This creator makes beautiful, carefully researched content, and this video in particular is just stunning. Give it a watch. Over a million people have. Give them a follow. I definitely will people who put that kind of love and care into sharing knowledge with the world I believe really deserve our support. And a couple of exciting updates worth mentioning. Joe is Oh, the other bit is in that YouTube video in the pinned comments, this creator has said that they will continue to give updates about Joe, which I think is so cool. So one of the updates that this same creator has given is that Joe is the research is currently being prepared for official scientific publication, with Dr Weiss helping him through the process, and the two of them, again are already designing new experiments together to continue exploring how memory is transmitted across generations. This is not a finished story. This is a story that is just beginning, and if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs it, someone who's curious, someone who's grieving and wondering, someone who's always had a quiet feeling that there's more going on than what we can see, or even just someone that needs a little hope or inspiration. I certainly needed this because I believe there is more going on than what we see. I think Joe Nagai might be helping us prove it. Follow the pod wherever you're listening, and you can always find spirit speakeasy on your favorite podcast platform. Please leave a review or give me a like if you feel called or a follow. It genuinely helps more people find this community, and I will see you in the next episode. I have some exciting announcements coming up, so don't miss the next episode, because I'm going to be doing a little bit of a personal share that I know you guys will want to hear about. And let me know if you are really excited to learn more about how our soul continues on. I'm wishing you a flood of butterflies and inspiration in your life, and I am hoping for a full flood of butterflies and inspiration in my life. Big hugs. Lots of love. Bye for now. From inside spirit, Speak Easy. You.