Dr. Eben Alexander on his Remarkable Near-Death Experience (NDE), and his Journey into the Science and Spirituality that Supports NDE’s.

2:45PM Apr 18, 2022

Speakers:

Andrew Holecek

Eben Alexander MD

Keywords:

experience

consciousness

world

book

universe

brain

coma

realize

fact

meditation

beautiful

point

reality

scientists

terms

talk

tremendous

deep

quantum physics

indie

So Eben Alexander MD was an academic neurosurgeon for over 25 years, including 15 years at the Brigham and Women's Hospital Children's Hospital in Harvard Medical School. In Boston. He experienced a transcendental near death experience and MBE, during a week long coma from an inexplicable brain infection that completely transformed his worldview. A pioneering scientist and modern thought leader in the emerging science that acknowledges the primacy of Consciousness in the Universe. He's the author of The New York Times number one bestseller Proof of Heaven, the map of heaven and living in a mindful universe, all of which I've had just a fantastic time reading or read the first book when it came out. I think 2008 or so right. That was in 1202 1012. We your experience was 2008. Right? Correct. Yeah. But Evan, thank you, I know how busy you are. It really means a great deal to me that you would take time out of your busy schedule to chat with us. So I really appreciate your time here,

my friend. Well, Andrew, thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here.

Yeah. I want to explore Well, first of all, I have to thank you at the outset for the absolute courage, the bravery of your books, especially Proof of Heaven because I can imagine some of the dissonance that you have received as a scientist as an academic neurosurgeon from your peers on the scientific community, to speak this radical truth that is so antithetical to so much of the Western paradigm, this materialistic, physical, holistic view. So first off a big deep of gratitude for your extraordinary courage and writing this book and the follow up books which all of which are really just completely enjoyed and I want to explore with you with your permission and a couple of things after maybe you can tell us a little bit about your experience. People can read your book, you have a tremendous amount on your very active website about this. But I think some people may not be that familiar with what you went through. And so perhaps we could go through just a few minutes of a recap of your life changing experience. And then what I'd like to explore with you are two kind of related things. One is how we can use the insights that you've gleaned from your experience to transform our fear of the end of life and the transition into the thing we call death. And then deeply connected to it but in I guess we could say almost a little bit more philosophical, but I often say it's really only philosophical because we haven't experienced it yet. This this challenge to the Western prevailing worldview of degraded reductionist, physicalism and materialism and how we can look at the world more in terms of idealistic premises and purposes, and I think both of those will come together in a really mutually supportive way to give people a great deal of practical refuge, a place where they can really go during challenging life situations and archetypal ly what's more challenging than the end of life? So maybe give us a little bit the elevator pitch in terms of this extraordinary experience that you had. So some people that may not have read your book can kind of get on the same page with us. And then I have a set of questions that I'd certainly like to put in your direction.

Okay. Well, I think the most important thing to start with is to point out my origins as a scientist in a very scientific family, my father very influential in my life, I was adopted and my father was a world renowned neurosurgeon, and that was a tremendous influence on my life. I always knew that science is a pathway to truth. Now, interestingly, my father, who was very scientific, he was the head of a neurosurgical training program. But he also had a very strong belief in God and empower prayer and that was important to him in every day of his life as a healer as a as a surgeon who was trying to help patients. Now for me, though, I saw some conflict and I really, you know, in, in training up through the 54 years of my life before my coma, I thought that the materialist or physicalist worldview, that only the physical world exists in the brain must somehow create consciousness, more and more. I was thinking that was the case. I mean, that's what we were studying, even though there were examples. of occurrences that could not be explained. And that suggested a primacy of consciousness and a reality to the soul. And that's why I think my journey was so important. And the main thing to point out to people here is from the viewpoint of of neuroscience and kind of the idea that the neocortex is so crucial with all the detailed elements of conscious awareness. My journey showed just the opposite, that the brain is not the creator of consciousness at all. And in fact, we're conscious in spite of our brain, and that's why I think my journey was so important to the scientific community. And it's not just the book Proof of Heaven where I went to a lot of the medical details, but 10 years after my coma experience in September of 2018, there was a medical case report on my medical records that was by three physicians not involved in my care, but absolutely astonished by my miraculous recovery because when you go through the medical details, that is what strikes any physician, or anyone aware of medical science, who reads my case report is like what in the world? How do you explain this?

And in other words, the doctors who wrote the case report made it very clear that my brain was in no shape to put forth any kind of dream or hallucination that those parts of my brain were demonstrably gone inactivated and that's why the case is so important. Especially in a world it's filled with cardiac arrest and clinical death, but without much in the way of damage to the brain and the documented damaged my brain was so extensive, that it makes that kind of miraculous statement of how did any kind of phenomenal experience happen. That's point one. And point two, is the doctors in that case report make it very clear that I should not have had a full recovery. I mean, I went from a 10% chance of survival to 2% chance over that weekend coma, but with no chance of full recovery by the end of the week. And that's the part that really gets so many physicians and medical scientists takes them by storm with his particular case. Now the important elements of the case for people to understand. One is that I was amnesic. That's very unusual for an indie but it's what I have to live with. It was the part of my journey. That was an exception to the rules even though by and large, my nd followed the rules beautifully, so that on the 32 point maximum score of Bruce Grayson's into E scale, I score a 28 or 29. So it's an extraordinary anything over seven is an indie E now the elements my nd that are so remarkable. It started what I call the earthworm, sideview primitive course unresponsive realm, like being a dirty jello. But I was rescued from that by the slowly spinning white light that came packaged with a perfect musical melody, and it opened up like a portal up into this rich, ultra real gateway Valley. Of that was I compare it in many ways to Plato's world of ideals, there was no death or decay anywhere. tremendous joy and festivity in these 1000s of beings that were dancing in this meadow, all dressed in simple but very colorful garb. And I was witnessing all this because I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were millions of other butterflies but I never had any body awareness at all during any part of the journey. Zero. And one of the most beautiful aspects of my story is that I wasn't alone on that butterfly wing and witnessing all this beautiful dancing and festivities going on below me in this lovely meadow that was rich and lush with plant life, blossoms, buds on trees, flowers, all opening in this rich dynamic fabric of being alive. And beside me on the butterfly wing was a beautiful spiritual companion. Those who've read Proof of Heaven will realize how crucial she was four months after my coma, because when I came back from my coma, I knew her so well because of this deep telepathic connection we shared and yet I also knew that I had never met her in my life and I never had read the MBE literature before but as I read more and more of it, after recovering from coma after recording 20,000 words by

of my story because my older son who was majoring in neuroscience in college, when I went into coma, he came home two days after I got out of the hospital gave me a big hug said it was like there was his light shining in me I was far more present than I'd ever been before. I told him it was way too real to be real. My doctors had already told me they had no idea how I was coming back to this world. And to me, they were just telling me that I had to have some big hallucination so I was taking their word for it. But wow, what a hallucination. I didn't realize yet how damaged my brain was and how incapable it was of supporting any such hallucination but that became clear over the next weeks and months, but anyway, deep in the coma experience, that beautiful girl in the butterfly wing her message me I think was the central message I was to bring back to this world. And that is shared with all fellow beings who are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear you're deeply cared for. And that was the gift of the journey. Now it turns out that in witnessing all these beautiful kind of earth like scenes in that spiritual realm of the gateway Valley, it was all being fueled because up above were these spiritual orbs that were emanating chants and anthems and hymns and when I wrote it all up weeks later, I call them angelic choirs. And that was what was fueling this incredible festivity and joyous adventure that was going on all around me. But then, I witnessed all of that collapsing down all of kind of the lowest four dimensional space time realm, so the material world collapsing down and then all of that spiritual world of the gateway Valley, the place where we would reconnect with higher souls. So with souls of departed loved ones go through life of us plan, next incarnations, all those major kind of elements of our deep spiritual essence that would occur, that kind of heavenly realm, all of that collapsing down and and important point out that there's a different ordering of time that applies to all those and that's what allows for something like a life review. A life review is not to vague CPU attended remembering of events. It's a reliving of events in a very detailed fashion. And once you realize that with this level of power, the universe can show us those aspects of our lives in that theater of operations, then you start to realize that's totally outside of what we call here and now in our kind of spatial references in these material bodies. But all of that collapse down as I ascended. through yet another musical portal provided by those angelic choirs, and that gateway Valley collapse down until I was all the way out in what I call the core, infinite inky blackness, but filled to overflowing with the Divine and healing love of that God force. And when I came back to this world, I call that deity arm, because to me, the word God was way too puny, a word that didn't remotely do justice to the power and majesty and the personal nature of that God force. But I also realized that you know, it's a moot point if you're going to discuss and debate whether you want to call that force, God or Allah Brahma and Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, a great spirit. I mean, in essence, we're trying with our puny little human minds to limit and define something that is far grander than we could ever imagine. And that is that healing and loving God force of, of acceptance, mercy, forgiveness, and I came back to this world realizing that there's a lot to be said for a unification of religious beliefs around a deity that's absolutely real, has described in near death experiences going back 1000s of years now, it turns out that in that core realm, I was told you're not here to stay. We'll teach you many things, but you'll be going back and there were tremendous lessons there about reincarnation about life reviews about progression and transformation, evolution of all consciousness throughout the universe, and we can get into all that the discussion, but just a short shortened this version of the story so we can get to that discussion. I'll say that I cycled through these realms multiple times. And what would happen is I would tumble back down to that earthworm eye view, but I quickly learned it by remembering the musical notes, the melody, I could conjure up that portal. And so music or what we remember is music. Of course, you must realize in those realms, you know, what we experienced his music is far more than what in this world limited by our ears and by our brains, we would consider to be music there is kind of an idealized form of kind of music and experience that occurs in that realm. You know, knowledge through identification is what I often call it.

But in that gateway Valley, I would I would tumble back down and then ascend my way back up by remembering these musical notes. Going back into that beautiful gateway Valley always reassured by that loving messenger, that beautiful woman with a sparkling blue eyes and high cheekbones, high forehead broad smile who never said a word, but her message to me was very reassuring, affirming and refreshing. And there came a time when I could no longer conjure up the musical notes to move back up into that gateway Valley. To say I was sad at that point, would be a bit of an understatement, but I also knew I could trust that I would be taken care of. And that was one of the most beautiful gifts of my journey is this. Now lifelong trust in that the power of that healing, loving, infinitely comforting God's source to be there for us and to bring us that love of the more we love this world and serve as a conduit for love. Of that God force, the bore, it kind of bathes us and that beautiful healing force. So it turns out that at this point in the journey when I'm now kind of banished to the Earth where my view, I saw 1000s of beings going off into the distance heads bowed like that. murmuring energy coming from them many with hit hands up like this, like candles. And that burning energy was surprising to me because it brought the very same love, comfort and kind of personal spiritual home reassurance of this environment that I was now in, but we were no longer in the beautiful kind of spiritual gateway Valley and call realm but now down in these lowest routes, and yet these beings were bringing this loving energy to me and when I call that in my writings, weeks later, I said it was the power of prayer. That's what I was witnessing was this beautiful kind of Symphony of chorus of this prayerful energy even though I didn't understand the words, but it was very comforting. And it was then that I saw the six phases that would appear to me and they come up out of the muck, say a few words that I didn't understand. Then they disappear again. And I remember those faces right now as vividly as if the whole thing happened this morning. And it all happened on November 16 of 2008 When I was coming out of coma, but I saw those faces, and it turns out that five of them were physically present in the ICU room the last 24 hours I was in coma. So they served as what's known as a vertical time anchor, to basically show me the vast majority of the COVID journey happened between days one and four or days one in five. I explained all that improvement pattern, and also especially in the follow up living in a mindful universe. And it was really one of those faces was it Susan wretches, she was the only one who was never physically present, but she is as real to me as those who are physically present. Turns out she had channeled to me on nights four and five of my coma. She was an old family friend going way back she had taught in high school with my former spouse, Holly, and now the family remembered her work channeling with patients to help heal them, and so they asked her to intervene. But it was really the sixth phase that made the big difference to me, and that was of a 10 year old boy, and that was on day seven of coma on Sunday. Morning. They'd kept the worst in the news away from bond for most of the week. But now we overheard the doctors in conference, saying that it was time to stop the antibiotics let nature take its course. He knew that was horrible news came running down the hallway into ICU major, a 10. I'll pull it up in my eyelids. They've been taped shut. I was on the ventilator that I've been on for seven days and he was pleading with me Daddy, you're gonna be okay, Daddy's gonna be okay. As if somehow that would make it so, even though I did not understand the words. I certainly did not recognize them. But I sense this deep connection. And that's what drew me back to this world was a sense of responsibility that I had to another soul to come back to this world. I had no idea what I was coming back to because my amnesia was still in full force. But it was really to come back here to help bond to be with that soul that was so important to me. And of course, I came back and initially when I was waking up in the ICU room on day seven of coma, I didn't even recognize my mother, my sons, my sisters at the bedside. I had no idea who these beings were. But my words and language came back very rapidly over hours. I've childhood memories over days, and all my semantic knowledge of physics cosmology. Neuroscience came back over about two months time. And so the rest of it has been an incredible 13 and a half year journey now since my coma, making sense of it, working with scientists around the world, and realizing there's a complete revolution in the scientific community all about the nature of the brain mind connection and the nature of consciousness. And that's exactly what this is all about. And as much as my indie matches so many other indies out there, and as I've been gifted what by 1000s people sharing their stories with me, the bottom line is is really about a revolution in human thought, that is going to leave, you know the bleak and paltry fiction of materialism or physicalism in the dust because it's not true. And there's a much deeper and richer truth about our spiritual nature and the spiritual nature of the universe. And that is what I came back to share and luckily found hundreds of scientists around the world who are already far along that pathway of discovery.

Wow, I mean, you know, I can just simply say remarkable I read your books, and I've listened to some of your other presentations and hearing it. I don't know how many times now every time it's like OMG. Right. Just amazing. So a couple of things. Cecil wills for unpacking here. I took some notes here. It's interesting, and I'm sure we can unpack some of these sorts of things. You said at the outset in relationship to your father and how sciences is the avenue to truth and I think one thing that we could perhaps explore is what we know as science is an avenue to a particular bandwidth of truth. And that if we subscribe excessively to science that it perverts into scientism, which is this colonization that's taking place on the world that basically we acquiesce to the high priests, of the arbiters of truth these days. The scientists they are who we turn to unlike previous ages, when we would take refuge and religious authorities now we take refuge in scientific authorities, and therefore whether we know it or not, we're all unwitting members in the cult of scientific materialism. And so therefore, what you went through that I really want to unpack in a few minutes is a kind of detoxification of that view. But a couple of the things, your questions and comments. I mean, first of all, very interesting that your son's name is Bond and that somehow appropriately named that that brought you back in. Thank you for noticing. That's a really interesting thing. And also, just the, maybe let's just start with the ultra reality. The Ultra reality of this because I have not had a literal N D. But I would say I have had meditative nd ease when I did my three year retreat, some 20 years ago. Somebody can do your experience. It was a radical before and after experience where I Andrew who I was actually I was handy back then I came out my name was changed that was chunked up for a while and it came back to Andrew. Andy died on that retreat and someone came out of that and so I have had meditative near death experiences. And we can talk about this later because I think this is one of the ways with your two hours a day of meditation that you're working to enhance, stabilize, propagate this experience within yourself and others. But talk to us a little bit just for starters, there's so many things to unpack here, too. What do you attribute the ultra reality because, again, when I've had what are called Hyperloop Hyperloop dreams I can relate and also deep meditation experiences. I can relate to having experiences where I come out, for instance, from a hyper lucid dream, and this seems like the foggy dream, right? I was was more real than now. So I come out of a samadhi experience and this then appears to be the deluded dream. And so speak to us a little bit about both your scientific understanding, and also perhaps phenomenological. What do you what do you attribute the the ultra real aspect and therefore the veracity, the authenticity that makes it just unequivocal to you? It's it's so central and stamped into the core of your being that it's like it says one of the liturgies I recite that it says even if the Buddhas of the three times rose up against you, you will remain and the indestructible Vada and nature. In other words, you're so convicted by what you experienced on what level it doesn't matter what anybody says. So talk to us about that.

Well, that's the real beauty of it. And I think it really gets right down to this whole kind of thing we call consciousness which is awareness, awareness of being awareness of existence, and it just so happens that in these material bodies, much of what we experience as consciousness has been heavily filtered, filtered by the mechanisms of our sensory organs like our eyes and ears that are actually very limited in the kind of range of what they can perceive our brains do a tremendous amount of filtering. And it really is true that we're conscious in spite of our brains, our brains are really working hard to kind of minimize and limit that conscious awareness. But that's why in meditation and an indie E and any number of modes of being where we're liberated from the shackles of the brain and body, we start to come into a much richer form of consciousness. And I would say often it's what I call knowledge through identification in these journeys like in a dream journey. For example, sometimes in a psychedelic journey, certainly in an indie E. Or spiritually transformative experience, where it's like drinking consciousness from a firehose and it's it's that becoming thing that's why for example, life abuse can happen. Because when you when you listen to a number of indie ears who have had life reviews, what you actually discern is this pattern where they experience it from the emotional perspective of others around them. In other words, they're reliving events of their life, but not from their own perspective, from the perspective of others. So it's kind of this expanded version of the one mind and are sharing the dream of the one mind so it's a much bigger form of consciousness. It takes our little ego mind which is so kind of focused on it on here now in a sense itself, and it shows it to be false shows our very being to be grander than that and simultaneously, kind of encompassing and becoming these other beings that are made clear, for example, in a life review, that we're sharing this much bigger story, and that's where I think it's you know, we often hear these experiences are ineffable, that our language you know, our language is very good for describing a trip to Disney World. But our language has not really evolved to describe these kinds of spiritual journeys, at least most of our language is not. And so we try and share them. It's one of the reasons why Karen and I decided in our book living in Maya universe, not just to share the scientific principles of this objective idealism and the primacy of mind, but to also offer people tools in the form of meditation, like with sacred acoustics, sacred acoustics.com has tools people can use for deep, conscious exploration and of course,

one of those is free 20 minute on file, just listen through headphones, but I think if you look at the testimonials page, sacred acoustics.com You'll see a lot of people who've never had an ND e are starting to achieve the kind of connection with that grander sense of self and that kind of spiritual identity with the universe. That you're talking about. So I would be the first to say that it doesn't take an indie II. To fully get this. You just need to be familiar with exploring consciousness and questioning the limits of what our culture says. Our limitations, our beliefs, in many ways are very empowering. But they can also be very constrictive. And I would say that many of the beliefs in our material of society are very falsely restrictive and constricting, and they prevent us from truly manifesting this much grander power of freewill. And for me as a physician a beautiful example of that freewill writ large we believe a placebo effect. Yeah, you know, and for six decades, we've used placebo effect is a gold standard for assessing any new medical treatment or modality and placebo effect is the admission by medical scientists that our beliefs thoughts and attitudes have tremendous power and influencing are healing and they do and it goes much further than just a sugar pill and a headache. If you go to noetic.org and CEO of Noetic Sciences website, put in the search term spontaneous remission, you'll find a book they published in the mid 1990s With more than 3500 cases of people healing advanced cancers, infections, things like that far beyond any medical intervention, by using what we normally would label the spiritual factors, how we deal with our kind of emotional truths, enhance our positive truths. Properly process any negative emotional realities we have adopting some purpose in life and a more spiritual approach to life, going within meditating prayer, things like this. These can all open doors to a much grander sense of our freewill. And its ability to manifest the universe of our dreams. And this is where I think this revolution and understanding is so important for humanity. Because in many ways, we've kind of painted ourselves into a corner a collective gift of desperation to borrow a phrase from addiction and alcohol is more but I'm very optimistic about the future of humanity with that optimism comes in seeing the possibilities for us to grow from many of the negative experiences of our addictions, to materialism, to fossil fuels, to profit motive, all these things that have kind of corrupted human spirit. But now it's time to grow back into that grander soul we truly came here to be, and that's why I think much of this discussion can lead

is remarkable. And I was thinking of Huxley's famous famous phrase of the brain as a reducing valve right? And then once the reducing valve is actually removed, the mind literally expands to the extent that you explore in your book and that also the great Yogi's mystics have explored where literally, the mind merges with the universe though the Unity the oneness that you're referring to. And so, so many things so that you're talking about really, really compelling one is this knowledge to identification. I had a very interesting conversation Evan with Christopher Bayh, she you quote him in one of your books, He recently wrote this you know Professor of Philosophy wrote is quite revolutionary book called LSD in the mind of the universe. And in this my conversation with him, we talked about my languaging or kind of gnostic pedagogy, where what Chris was referring to is, when he was going through these these sessions, he didn't talk about them as trips because they really weren't trips they were spiritual inquiries into the nature of mind and reality. That it really involves a kind of a hyper pedagogical technique where you learn things in a non dualistic way you learn things by becoming those things. And this is one of the things I wanted to circle back to a little bit that I found really interesting what you said in your first set of comments. About there was no fundamental body awareness and I wanted to ask you along these lines, whether when you went through the experience there was any sense of self referencing whatsoever, in other words, is most of what you're sharing with us a post script integration when you are having these experiences were you actually able to register the ease in a self referential way in terms of I am having this or was it in fact, this very absence that you didn't have a body like what Freud say ego is first and foremost a body you go if you didn't have a body? Were you actually experiencing things in this kind of non dualistic way? And then PostScript and I say this from my meditation experiences, because when when we when one has these kinds of non dualistic experiences, they're utterly ineffable, indescribable, there's nothing you can really say when you're in them. The commentary so to speak the integration in conventional terms happens post experience where you come out, and then the apparatus the understanding conventional ways of integrating start to come into play in a certain way you retrofit current understanding to inevitable prior experience. So say a little bit more if you would, when you had this experience. There was no body present. Was there any sense of self reference taking place any sense of referring the this the enormity, the experience back to the self? Or was it really for lack of a better term a non dualistic pedagogical, and therefore,

well, it was definitely an experience of non self where I was complete I mean, ego Eben Alexander's ego was gone from from my awareness completely for that week. And that was in retrospect, it took me months, if not a year or more, to really kind of understand why how, you know, what would be a purpose of such a major disconnect? Because obviously, my nd II was incomplete in the sense that, I believe if I had been going through a complete kind of death experience that I would have come back into alignment with those memories. But an important lesson that I gleaned from it and this is discussed in great detail in our book living in mind for the universe, including an appendix you alluded to it is the fact that memories are not stored in the brain. This is one of the biggest nails in the coffin of materialist neuroscience. And yet my experience was a beautiful example of that because it took me two months to recover all the semantic knowledge I gained over 54 years of studying the scientific world. It took two months for all that to come back. It was like a gently falling snow. And not only that I based on detailed conversations, both long after the comb and long before the comb with close family and friends. I realized that the memories After their return two months post coma and beyond, were more complete than the memories had been before coma. So there's a very important set of lessons there about consciousness and memory not being resident in the physical brain itself that was made crystal clear to me in this journey, especially as I unravel all the medical details in my case, and that includes the unraveling by those doctors who wrote the case report. So it's, you know, an extraordinary kind of way of looking at consciousness and objective idealism, is the model we're talking about emerging here, this primacy of consciousness of this kind of top down ordering of causality, and that's where I think the real power of this kind of story of indie E's at large. That's what what they bring to us and the power to bring change to this world in a very positive direction. That's where I think so much of this is leading.

And I think really the one one thing that I have to put an exclamation point on in terms of my initial charter for our conversation was this and I want to practice with you now. Obon is this extraordinary discovery of the matrix of reality being really the fabric of love, and that I love what you say in in Proof of Heaven that that was really perhaps the central message that you took away from this and this to me is unparalleled importance when it comes to things like the end of life because I think was Donald Winnicott, right? The post Freudian, British pediatrician, psychiatrist who coined the term holding environments, this notion that is highly intuitive in a conventional way that if a if a infant is held properly archetypically in the womb, and then a proper holding environment to the Ord family of origin, then natural growth, healthy growth occurs and and I often think that the the same critical importance of holding environments at the beginning of life maintains for holding environments at the end of life and even beyond. And often when I'm teaching I write a lot about this stuff. I work a great deal of hospitals. I often talk to people about or when they asked me like, well, what's the best thing I could do for someone when they're dying? I share with them well, think of the feeling that you get when someone that you really love just gives you a big warm hug. You can't help but open relax and let go. And so for me, holding environments are hugging environments. And so what you're talking about here and that is just extraordinary. Is the holding hugging environment of the cosmos itself. That if we can replace this degraded materialistic view, with a kind of, you know, replace reductionism with it's a neologism but you get at elevation ism. The world isn't made of matter. Or like my friend Ken Wilber says frisky dirt everything has to play a frisky dirt. Now, everything's a play of heart, mind, spirit. Kokoro. And so if we really understand that, whoa, does this change the way we relate to the end of life, that when we actually release the self sense, this thing that is uncompromisingly brought about us through this thing called death, that this ultimate hugging holding environment, which is the love of the cosmos, that's all is waiting there to hold you. I mean, what a radical transformation in relationship to the end of life that is, and therefore conjoining that with this other deeper notion of an idealistic reality, which is totally connected here, that's in a very real way when we go, there's no place that we can go that is not conscious, there is no place that is not mined. So this is why is all mine and so this is why in the Buddhist languaging they talk about death very interesting terminology and they use the phrase the dream at the end of time, they talked about three types of dream, a nocturnal dream, the primary Dream, which is this waking reality, and then interestingly enough, the dream at the end of time and I always talk about dream is kind of cold language for manifestation of mind. And so therefore, I'm throwing a lot of noodles against the wall here. Really, when we can answer the question that's often asked, Where do we go when we die? Well, we just transition from one dream to the next from one manifestation of mine to the next. And if we really know this in our hearts and in our bones, then the single central most important instruction for a good death naturally takes place which is what, open, relax. That's it. All you have to do is get out of the way let nature simply dissolve the self sense spontaneously and you will dissolve into this fundamental, beautiful, loving, hugging holding environment. And so let's talk a little bit more about that. Because if people can really get this in their system, whoa, is this a game changer? Instead of dreading the end of life? We actually now have something to look forward to a radical reversal of our conventional degraded views.

Well, I love what you're what you're bringing out because to me, it just reminds me that that

one of the biggest surprises I would say, and looking back on my whole experience, was that in a territory that sounds so foreign is that Earth where my view and the gateway valley in the core, that in fact I would find it to be so welcoming as a spiritual home with such familiarity. And so in many ways, you're right there's this big embrace this holding by the universe, this embrace of bathing and God's love in that spiritual realm that you know, that's why people have into ease and come back to this world and no longer fear death because they realize it's it's not an Obliteration I mean, that's what of course scares, you know, a materialist who might consider it that they predicted the as the brain goes dark, so does the mind. Well. It's the exact opposite of that is the brain goes dark and the body goes dark, the mind actually is greatly enhanced. I love how you brought up Aldous Huxley's reference to the reducing valve to amazing how we often use technological metaphors, depending on the main technology of the day. Back then they had steam engines as their big technology. Nowadays, people mistakenly pretend that computers are like brains. That's not true at all. You know it no more No more so than steam engines are like mine. So this whole idea of the reducing valve, though, is very valuable. And it points out that William James, you know, back in the head of site psychology at Harvard, way back at the turn of the 20th century, 19th to 20th century and then of course, Orenburg saw in France also discussed filter theory of Frederick W. H. Meyer, in England, a very big proponent of filter theory. And then of course, Huxley as you pointed out, and many others now are taking up the banner big time of scientists of consciousness studies in the current era, like Ed Kelly at UVA who is a huge proponent of Frederick Meyers work and this notion of the reducing valve. And so in our book, Living demand for universe we took that notion of primordial mind of objective idealism that we were supporting from many different lines of inquiry, and kind of bring it to the fore with this notion of the brain as a filter. or reducing valve. I would say it's more like a transceiver. But ultimately, what we realize is that the brain is not the ultimate home of consciousness, or of memory. They really reside in an information field that is outside of the brain and the brain is important for accessing memory and kind of conscious awareness, but it is certainly not generating it de novo and that's why when the brain and body die, you get such an apparent liberation of conscious phenomenal experience and that's what so many described now in for your audience who need more objective knowledge of proving the reality of this afterlife. I would point out that there was a contest held in the year 2021, hosted by Robert Bigelow, and that contest was asking scientists who study this question, what's the best evidence for conscious awareness beyond permanent bodily death? And they received 204 essays? In response to that question, all of the people who wrote them had to demonstrate at least five years of professional work studying the question of the afterlife. And then 29 essays won awards and first place was Jeffrey Mishlove. Beautiful essay and I would highly encourage any and everyone out there, go read these essays begin with Michelob and you can find them all at Bigelow institute.org. That's the website they're all free. They're available. Those who have a very heavy scientific bent, might want to dive into Bernardo Castro is offering it's a beautiful masterpiece that doesn't rely on any kind of parent paranormal or para psychological data whatsoever, but just on kind of modern mainstream science that's very quantum informed. Bernardo kastrup was one of the endorsers of our book Living in a mindful universe, as was Ed Kelly, Bruce grace and Jim Tucker of Larry Dossey. A lot of other scientific minds, Dean Raiden have endorsed living in a mindful universe and it's all about making the argument for idealism that we're sharing this one mind that is what is really coming to dominate a lot of the discussions of consciousness studies in the current era. And it's a very exciting time because what it does is it deletes that fiction nonsense of materialism that falsely separates us into individual beings. And instead of we're all in this together, just as near death experiences make very clear through their life reviews. The life review is like the golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated, written directly into the fabric of the universe. And that's where I think this world needs to grow up this modern science of consciousness studies really leads us definitively towards witnessing this kind of one mind nature of reality. And then if we heard another, we're hurting ourselves, and this lesson should not be lost on the current world, especially when we're lost in our addictions to wealth. to fossil fuels, things like that. We really need to take care of each other and have a much more sustainable future of energy and of of love and compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance, and when necessary, forgiveness. These are all deep and beautiful lessons of this emerging science of consciousness that really teaches us of the oneness that we share with the universe at large and with each other. And ultimately, we'll have to do a better job taking care of our animal friends because they're a huge part of the spiritual world we're talking about.

These are remarkable statements. And I have to say at the outset, how big a fan I am of Barnardos work. I think he's borderline genius with his ability to bring from a purely logical, rational scientific approach, a decimation of the materialistic view encapsulated by his wonderful book why materialism is baloney. I refer to Bernardo now as the Bologna man, he's so brilliant, and his ability to really love that. He talks a lot about analytic idealism. But this is let's talk about this because this is really the heart essence. Of perhaps your journey and our conversation. And then to tie this a little bit of into the the power of belief, or placebo effect, which I'm also a deep student of, and conversely the no SIBO effect and what I mean by this is that because we are unwitting subscribers, we don't even know that we don't know talk about a blind spot that we unwittingly subscribe to the cult. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to talk about it as a cult of scientific materialism. And I believe this does bring about a kind of no SIBO opposite of the placebo effect that degrades everything in this really pathetic worldview, that then they less than just be relegated to philosophical I'm sharing. No, this is why we fear death. We fear death, because it's revelatory of our subscription to the reductionist materialistic view. And so if you're afraid of death, it's because you're subscribing to this whether you know it or not. Right, so let's talk a little bit about this is Lama Yasha Rinpoche talks about overthrowing the tyranny of appearance. What else we can do to put dance in this really outdated operating system, where everything mine is reducible to brain brain is reducible to, you know, the, the cascade, right the neurons to fundamental, basically, there's, you know, emptiness nothingness, but talk to us a little bit about more about how we as is interested, practitioners journeyers on this path, can really work more with his idealistic approach and use it to really transform our relationship not only to the end of life, but as you were intimating earlier also, our relationship to the entire phenomenal world because another untoward consequence of this view, is seeing the world is solid, lasting and independent. dualistic is a natural resource to be exploited. And therefore this so called philosophical view, is destroying the planet because we subscribe to this and so what we're talking about here my languaging is a kind of translational spirituality. It's not just sitting on the cushion, not just going through an MBE not just going through psychotropic agents and entheogens. But really, in this day and age, taking what we're doing here, translating it into enlightened activism in the world because my big thing these days if we don't do it, not only is our spirituality going to go extinct, but we're going to go at stake we are at a punctuated equilibrium point is you know, I'm preaching to the choir here. But again, a lot of noodles on the wall. But what what else can we do based on your experience? To really break down the door have this really outmoded way of looking at reality, and start to explore things as they truly are?

Well, I think it's important to take some time every day to go with it. I mean, so much of the disease and toxicity of our modern era and this false sense of separation comes from little ego minds that keep perpetuating a bleak and paltry fictional story from materialism. So the more we can kind of go within mind, explore mind and start to discover I mean, mind can contain infinity and eternity, with ease of maybe not with ease, but certainly better than the physical world can ever do. And so practicing going within is very important. And that's why for me, a daily practice of meditation that I started more than 11 years ago has become so crucial to me and as I think you point out, a lot of my progress has been not just from having had the nd E. But from this daily practice of meditation. But then, of course, there's everything else we do because the true growth of a soul in this world is what we do, as you know, out here in these bodies living in this physical world, and and so it's not just about meditating and going within and and cultivating our connection with that primordial mind with that kind of neutral observer that Karen and I often talk about, but it's really about coming to kind of glean lessons. From that broader sense of self. And again, it's one that intentionally leaves that little ego mind behind, because in meditation when the first things I learned and one of the most important things for me to do, is to let that little voice Eben Alexander's little voice in my head can make us state a request or ask a question, but then that little voice goes into timeout, and that's one of the most important parts of my meditation that I can teach is that that little voice in our head remember what Michael singer calls that voice in your head? The Annoying roommate in his book The Untethered Soul, he labels it such and that's what it is. And I know Eben Alexander's little ego mind is nothing more than an annoying roommate. But there's a higher soul aspect of me that's come to recognize that over more than a decade of deep daily meditation, so it's it's really a gift to kind of get to that point, this experience of non self within a meditative state. But it's also an opening up to the kind of floodgates of that firehose of conscious awareness that we talked about earlier, and many creative minds throughout history. No matter what their position on spiritual matters have come to gain great creativity and insight from the universe through similar techniques of opening up their kind of hypnagogic awareness to this kind of greater aspect of self. And for example, Einstein would float around in a boat looking up at staring up at the clouds, often to where the Harbor Patrol had to kind of come and rescue him and bring him home at night. But that's where he began gleaning these deep mysteries of the universe or Thomas Alva Edison, by the technique of dropping weights in his hands when he was really tired. He'd get a few micro naps and and then his creativity would be sparked and his inventions would flow. Robert Louis Stevenson had a similar technique for when he was nodding off to get in that hypnagogic space. So it's all about learning to better utilize our access to all the full spectrum of conscious awareness through intentional meditations. And I promise you that over time, that my normal daily wakening consensus, participation in reality has been shifted in a very powerful way with these daily meditations. That helps me to do a much better job of kind of intuition and with empathy to kind of bring a lot of that connectedness with others into my normal waking consciousness. So there are many ways we can kind of integrate this process of meditation going within, seeking wisdom from different directions from the universe, through cultivating these kinds of hypnagogic spaces of expansion of our conscious awareness, but then also paying big attention to the lives we're living here in this material world because in many ways, this is where our souls actually do the growing even though they have to do it partially kind of dumbed down with his program forgetting of not remembering prior lives and between lives, you know, is the doctors who study past life memories and children's suggestive reincarnation, like the group at UVA, who study more than 2500 Such cases will tell you, you have to harvest those memories before age. Five or six, because there are natural processes that cover them over beyond that point. And this is where things like an indie II or our intentional meditation, etc, can help us to uncover those memories because I'm sure that a lot of what I witnessed in my deepest moments of meditation that seemed like beautiful kinds of seeds for dreams, lucid dreams, what have you are in fact of part of my soldier, maybe reflecting another lifetime that I actually live but putting all of that information together is very important and I can do it by this very kind of open process of engaging with the world including active meditation, which starts to then impinge on my dreams, face and sleeping. But then also, of course, that plays a tremendous role in my understanding the world in my normal waking consciousness. So all of this is part of the awakening we're talking about, and certainly the scientific knowledge supporting the one mind idealism. I know in the second place, Bigelow essay that was by Dr. Pim Van Lommel. He wrote an excellent essay. I can highly recommend it, but towards the end of his essay, he's making the point that this one mind is a very real concept that will help this world to grow up to mature in terms of our spiritual understanding, in essence will take care of each other by acknowledging this one mind, and he lists four resources Pim Van Lommel does at the end of his essay supporting the one mind idea. One of them is the book spiritual science by Steve Taylor. Another is that beautiful book by Dr. Larry Dossey, called One Mind, which I highly recommend. A third is a paper by Bernardo kastrup. And I think it's a journal of consciousness studies. I don't recall the journal came out, I believe in 2018. It's called the universe in consciousness. It's an excellent essay. Roy hits nail on the head. And the fourth source that he mentioned is our book Living in a mindful universe. We were very honored at Pim Van Lommel acknowledged our book in that fashion. But I would also say that Pim Van levels book consciousness beyond life is a beautiful expos a of indie ease and how they show us this reality of the one mind and of consciousness surviving bodily death. So this is really an important part of the revolution. It's where the science is going. The more people understand this, the more they can help in their own journey of manifesting the free will of their own mind. Remember, the material of science would scoff at you for claiming to have free will, because that conventional materialist scientific science or scientism, as you pointed out earlier, basically says that only the physical world exists. It's all chemical reactions, electron fluxes in the brain, so there's no place to actually insert any kind of spirituality or freewill at all. They look at it in that kind of Bleak materialist fashion, mechanistic fashion, which is absolutely false with the advent of quantum physics, we realize that ions and ion channels in the brain are not acting like billiard balls on a billiard table. This is not some Newtonian deterministic model of reality. But in fact, when you realize the quantum nature of ion channels in the brain, you start to appreciate the full bore power of quantum effects and that wide open momentum vector as to whether or not it fires, it's all being dominated from the realm of consciousness. And that is the important lesson that the modern world needs to learn and grow from.

It's amazing to me and I want to just emphasize two narratives that I think really are core here. One is this narrative of inferiority, that I think one way to answer my own question that we can overthrow the tyranny of a parents is by continually not violating the natural curfew, in breaking out in subscribing to external appearances, always pulling ourselves out. And away from ourselves. And so it's very interesting is it not that when we age, get sick and die, it's it really is a type of force non negotiable interiority. We're actually being forced to deal with the internal agents and it's like, it's like a Soviet bursting one says playfully happiness is an inside job, while discovering the nature of reality isn't inside jobs is totally when you had your N D E in a certain way. This was a forced interior journey. You took this labyrinth into the center of your central self, right really discover the nature of things and so I really want to in fact, it's so central and in the Buddhist arena that in the Tibetan language, the word for Buddhists is non Pah, literally transliterated as insiders, right to really cultivate interiority. So I think that internal journey is absolutely critical. It's one reason I'm such a fan of the nocturnal meditations by languaging, which includes hypnagogic, liminal, dreaming, lucid dreaming, Dream Yoga, sleep yoga, which by the way, when he talked about the inky black darkness, that is the experience of sleep yoga. And then the last of the nocturnal meditations, of course is Bardo yoga, the tremendous literature in Tibetan Buddhism on planetology working with these principles, and so I really resonate, and that's why he's subscribed to these nocturnal meditations as vectors for this interiority. The second thing I wanted, I'd love to solicit a comment from you around this. The second read or rather massive narrative for me is that of openness that in a real way, my favorite definition of meditation these days is habituation to openness. And in fact, it is the archetype of the ego, just this arrested form of development, this reducing valve that contracts out of fear, fear of the truth fear of in Buddhist languaging emptiness, and it is in fact this, this contraction that pulls us away from the infinity the eternity that is reality, shrink wraps it into this thing called self and therefore, samsara ensues upon that type of contraction. So the question I want to ask you, I mean, is when you had your experience of of no self, in the end, ie, I would suspect that openness because it's it's you use that term, a great deal in all your books that openness is central to the entire affair. And I'm also wondering that if in fact had you indeed referred some of these experiences to Central Headquarters, that that would have been translated is fear and contraction. So in fact, the reason perhaps, again, I'm conjecturing that you felt such wander off in just beauty I wouldn't say bewilderment. Just tremendous radiance in this experience, was precisely because you didn't contract precisely. You didn't have a sense of reference, someone actually experienced it. Otherwise, I would think that perhaps if you did, that this could in fact, have elicited a contraction that would have pulled you out of that experience because of fear, and then hurled you back into some involuntary kind of incarnation of form. So talk to us a little bit about if you would, that where the narrative of openness and contraction fits in in this experience and whether that languaging speaks to you.

Well, that's a beautiful way of putting it and in our book Living in a mindful universe, Karen and I discuss what we call the supreme illusion. Yeah, beautiful love and the supreme illusion. In many ways, we talk about subjectivity and objectivity in that book, and we go very far towards making the case that the only thing that ever truly exists is subjectivity. We might make claims about a claimed objectivity, of agreement in our consensus reality, but in many ways, we can never know the deep truth of any kind of overlap along those lines. But the main point we're making about the Supreme illusion I think is very important to get is as much as I sit here and I look out on the world and I sense all the things out there around me as the physical world out there, never forget that what you're actually experiencing is a model within mental space that is supposed to represent something that is out there and some of the biggest and most profound, that kind of mysteries that have come out of quantum physics and psychology in the last few decades, is enough to cause us to question every bit of what we perceive to be out there. In fact, one of the deep lessons in quantum physics is that there is no external objective physical reality independent of the observer at all. That's why quantum physics has been so absolutely difficult to kind of unravel. It seems to defy some of our most fundamental kind of assumptions about the nature of reality. And yet this one is very important to question at deep levels, that supreme illusion, because once you realize that all of the out there for all of eternity has never been anything more than an internal construct within the mental space. That's when you can start to liberate yourself from the from the full nature. Of that illusion. So to get the supreme allusion deeply into explore it in meditation is a tremendous gift of openness, as you're talking about and, and to me, it was interesting to find that this this process that people assume is going within within within mine is actually going out out out into the universe. I mean, that's what we're doing because it all is ultimately mental top down, causal derived, and so it kind of shifts the way we look at our relationship with the physical world with causation. With our sense of will, but also opens up possibilities when you realize that all the external world is in so many ways in the internal world. That is a world that you certainly have some influence on. And what you start to realize is there's tremendous possibilities. To express manifestation in that external world By altering your beliefs, thoughts and attitudes about your world at large and that includes, you know, out there in there because all of it ultimately is really in there. So it's it's a different way of looking at it but a way that greatly expands your sense of agency, in being able to kind of, first of all glean information from this world at large but also to influence at large and that includes distant healing power of prayer, healing others, praying for the world at large. I mean, meditators showed decades ago that just having like 3% of a community, active meditators can dramatically alter the overall ambience of that community and bring a lot more kind of peace and harmony to it. So it's not like everyone on earth has to meditate. But the more of us who participate in bringing peace and harmony and prosperity to all of our fellow beings in our meditative space, the more likely it is to start to manifest in our consensus reality.

Yeah, this is why I remember the book some 20 years ago called The Maharishi Effect, you remember that? That's why they talk about this kind of connective tissue of consciousness, right? Basically using morphogenetic fields in the light that what we do, because we are, in fact, it's very revelatory, because we tend to think and maybe I'm just being confessional here that that's our our mental effective emotional processes are ineffectual because we subscribe to this materialistic view. If I'm thinking something against Mount Everest in the background, I'm not going to affect Mount Everest. But if I realized the world is made of the fabric of mind, heart spirit, the same thing I'm made of, than what I do in here, so to speak, has implications out there, but it has the power of prayer and things like that and so I've also remembered you referenced John Wheeler in your book. I'm a huge fan of his. He famously says there is no out there out there, right. And it's an amazing summation of this whole thing. This cannot be overstated, and I do this as a thought experiment frequently now for myself and for people what I'm instructing them on these views. Is there really pause for a second and reflect? The only thing you ever really have is experience. Right? That's it. Everything else is inference. And so, so many implications here. It's astounding and so one thing and I think Kelly writes about this as well, okay, well, how do you then explain things called like matter? Well, matter is just a term we append to the regularity of experience, right? And so this is where the genius of Barnardos work comes into play. And really, again, trying to kick in the doors to this incredible view. One thing I want to return to here, before I forget is, you mentioned this over and over in your books. And today, in in your talks is is the role of sound, and I don't want to completely put to decide the idealism thing, because that really is core. But before I forget, I want to talk to you about the role of music and sound because I'm a musician by training. I'm a trained classical pianist. I have a tremendous connection to mantra. I interviewed on my podcast cluey Chowdhury, who wrote this wonderful book, sound medicine, how to use ancient science of sound to heal the body and mind. So it to me it's really compelling that when you return to the core, your experience of the Godhead was auditory acoustic on this has tremendous part in the play on words resonance with things like string theory that now particles can actually be gleaned does actually knows of vibration and reality. This is a game changer. So both in terms of your experience through your NDA, ie your work with sacred acoustics and what you if in fact, whether you play with Montra on your own and talk to us a little bit about the place of sound on your path and your experience and how we can cultivate this type of relation to Sonic principles.

Well, I would certainly point out in the last few decades, I've had a lot of interaction with sound, the very job I was working at when I went into coma, I was promoting global research and focused ultrasound surgery of form of using ultrasound for its therapeutic effect, not for visualization. So that's what I was doing when I went to coma and then of course my coma. What I discovered was sound was absolutely crucial what we remember as Sam what we remember as tunes or melodies what have you conserve a tremendous role in helping to guide our spiritual journeys in those spaces. So sound was absolutely essential. Now crucial point out that in those journeys, those are not sounds, you know, limited by what is available to your ears and processing in your brain. I mean, those sounds are a much more idealized form of perfect sound that I was encountering. But then, of course, to me and looking back on it all. It's just amazing how within two years of awakening from my coma, I realized that if I was going to make any sense of any of this, I had to explore consciousness actively. And the first modality I encountered in terms of deep meditative techniques was differential frequency, Brainwave Entrainment in the form of binaural beats, which had been discovered in the mid 1800s as a phenomenon in the late 20th century. binaural beat and the brainwave entrainment they were associated with was found to enhance out of body experiences and remote viewing of you know, the ability to discern information across time and space at a distance, like in some of the psychic spy programs and other modalities of using remote viewing. But sound was always right there at the key and, of course, in this discussion of sacred acoustics, we're talking about slight differences in frequencies delivered to the two years and the fact I believe it has such a powerful effect on our conscious awareness is that unlike most sounds you've ever heard, like a chant or anthem or hymn that might have influenced a transcendental state of awareness. Those are all processed in the acoustic cortex of the temporal lobes, circuits that for the most part have come about the last few million years, say three to 5 billion years in primates and homosapiens. Very different are the sounds of sacred acoustics and other binaural beat brainwave entrainment. They are processed in the lower brainstem in circuits that arose more than 300 million years ago. And there's a general principle in evolutionary biology that if you want to get at a function, the roots of a certain functions for example, consciousness, you want to look at the anatomy of associated structures, for example, the brain going back through evolution, and what we find is preservation of this circuit over 300 million years and it's still serves as an active localization. So if I hear a snap behind my head, that circuit calculates where it is based on sound waves going 1000 feet per second hitting my eardrums at slightly different times few microseconds apart but what we're doing with sacred acoustics as we're harvesting, kind of the power of that deep brainstem circuit and just like people use slow visual of oscillating stimulus say for hypnotic induction, people use EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization reprocessing for post traumatic stress disorder. This is using movements of the eyes with a associated with a lower midbrain circuit. So we're always kind of driving these oscillations in the lower brainstem. The sacred acoustics is just going to a more primitive level down in the medulla to drive that superior Olivary nucleus complex and oscillate back and forth, say at four hertz and five hertz, three hertz, what have you in the deep kind of alpha and theta delta range? And that's where I believe we get such a profound effect is because it helps to disconnect conscious awareness from the normal business of kind of cycling rhythms in the brain that attach to consciousness. But this is a way of separating our conscious mind kind of as it's done in, in dreaming, sleep, but even more effective at leaving kind of a will of of soul in power during those times when when you're disconnecting so actively from the brain and body in the here and now and since itself.

So, so I'm curious as a purist, do you think this is cheating? I mean, I want the whole right in engaging in these technologies and I'm with you on this one, I really love the incorporation of modern technologies and using really neuro phenomenological approaches right where when we particular states of mind have neural signatures and therefore in a bidirectional way, you can work with the neural correlates as a way to bring about phenomenal states of mind. But do you see this as any way? What a near enemy of this being a crutch that eventually could become limiting?

No, in fact, I look at them as training wheels. And you know, I made the point earlier that I'm sure that by normal kind of participation in a consensus waking consciousness has shifted as I've gotten away from the ego focus of me before coma, to a much more kind of primordial mind focus me after coma through meditation. And I believe that these techniques for me they seem very natural. And again, it's not as if I feel like I have to depend on binaural beat Brainwave Entrainment To get in the States. But the more I practice it, you know, day in and day out year after year, the more I find a natural ability to just exist in those very same modes. So I don't look at them as an unnatural mode at all. I must say I often have to make the argument that I believe that some of the benefits for example, there's there's recent work using psilocybin and other serotonin to a type psychedelic substances plant medicines in theologians as what I like to call them, meaning you know, engendering God within that kind of thing, and I bring them up because lately for example, in treating alcoholism, addiction and also terminal, patient terminal cancer patients debilitating fear of death, both those things strong addictions, opiates, nicotine, etc. And the fear of death had been treated with psilocybin, it's one or two doses. It's not as if you have to keep taking the psilocybin. And my point would be, I believe that you can actually get a better benefit from using meditation instead of this the plant medicine in the first place. The plant medicine shows us two important things. One is that by engaging kind of our Higher Mind and traversing the veiling function of the rain, we can bring healing into our lives that will ease us out of addictions eases out of a fear of, of death, and that that can be accomplished through one or two doses of psilocybin in a proper therapeutic setting. The other important thing that psilocybin and similar plant medicines are showing us today are the scientific papers that show that the brain goes dark when you take such substances. To anybody who's ever taken LSD DMT you know, an active principle of ayahuasca, psilocybin, magic mushrooms, etc. You might think that your brain must be lighting up like a Christmas tree to explain those extraordinary phenomenal experiences. But in fact, the opposite is happening your brain is going dark, there's not a single neuronal population in your brain that's increasing activity. They're all taking the night off. And that is a very important statement, because the brain is not ultimately the creator of such experiences, just like it's not ultimately the creator of any conscious experience. And that's why we need to wake up to this kind of bigger reality and start understanding how the non material realms and our interactions with them can help us to facilitate a much richer manifestation of the world of our dreams in this consensus material realm. But it's all because of top down causality and the role of mental, the mental layer of the universe in causing what emerges and appears in this world. But I would argue strongly that meditation is a much more effective and powerful way than using psilocybin to try and get that kind of healing in your life. Through, you know, this whole program of understanding, just as we explained in our book Living in a mindful universe.

Yeah, I think that's really an important point because it's it's more green, it's more organic, these other pious skillful means, in a in a Hindu and Buddhist languaging and they talk about pointing out transmissions or in this case, you could say pointing in transmissions where a particular teacher and empowerment or whatever certain environments will be brought about that point out particular ecstatic states of mind. So called altered states, which parenthetically I would argue those are not altered states. This is the altered state when you're having a very altered state. Yeah, what this is, I think, really important. I had this conversation with Chris bass that when he was engaging in his 20 year LSD machines, that it's very easy to think that somehow at least these you have to go somewhere outside of here to within the states and so here, it's all here and this is right here, right right here right now rom dot set it and you talk about a beautifully, and I think map of heaven, where and this is really important that when you talk about these seven principles, that fundamentally it really in a certain way, these are pointing out transmissions. For you could say, this isn't the right term, but I think you get the idea, the ultimate heaven, that you're in it right now, that it's really a matter of removing the cataracts of confusion. Where's that narrative of opening again? If you simply release the contractions? I think the Supreme illusion is born from the Supreme contractions, that you're actually in heaven right now. You're enlightened Buddhist. languaging you're in a pure land right now. We are and it's our fear, our belief systems, all these these things that the Buddha's path and others work with that fundamentally allow us to open relax and realize, hey, we don't have to have an MD E to experiences. We don't have to experience 20 years of LSD. We simply need to relax open our hearts and minds, and voila, we've been in heaven all along. We just didn't know that hide. Absolutely. Hiding in plain sight. I think that's one reason we don't see it in the Mahamudra tradition. They say so obvious you don't see it. So simple. You don't believe it so easy, you don't trust it. So therefore we have all these machinations all these different teachings and approaches and whatnot, to fundamentally as TSLA as a return to see things as if for the first time. I can say a little bit more about that and how then, this incredible life transforming experience is, in fact, being metabolized, digested and incorporated into your daily life because just like when I was talking to my friend, Chris, this to him as the central challenge after doing 20 years of these amazing machines, these LSD sessions, coming down off the mountain, coming down from heaven, are all from heaven. In in realizing the inseparability of samsara and nirvana that Heaven and Earth are really right here. It's really the path is more perceptual than actual, is it not, you're not really going anywhere.

No, you don't have to. It's because it's all right here. The Big Bang happens here. All of the end of the universe happens here. All of the kind of transformative evolution of consciousness happens right here. I would say the whole reason the universe exists, is to know thyself, just as his written on the entrance to the Temple of the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, know thyself. But what we're coming to realize as the self awareness we experience as sentient beings is a property shared with the universe at large. Yeah, the universe is self aware, and we each get this little piece of that, but we can expand on that piece tremendously with this kind of awareness and this bigger discussion of the nature of existence in reality, and really, it's all about that binding force of love and the more we feel how natural that love is and compassion, kindness, mercy for all of our fellow beings, the more our world seems to come into alignment and we realize that the now that we exist in is a really perfect now and it is absolutely swimming in that beautiful sense of love and connection. And this is something that for me is part of my consensus reality that I would say emerged from my indie but also has a huge amount to do with my daily meditations, and I believe is available to any sentient being. You don't have to have an MBE to fully get this kind of deeper layer of connection, that binding force of love and its importance in determining the emerging reality that we share.

So therefore, he entered circumambulate, back then this whole notion of holding environments and we're talking about at the beginning of life or end of life, really the the immediacy of that narrative altogether, that if we simply open up that's what I that's one of the ways I look at death now, is a kind of non negotiable, uncompromising forced relaxation. Right? You're, you're being a vacation, forced to relax, it's open. So to me this is it is such a game changer. And again, it's revelatory for us in the West, that this is so difficult for us to believe, again because of our subscription to the degree to materialistic view. And so therefore, we need to hear it over and over and over again, all these different ways this chorus of sanity through logic and pharmaceuticals and all these different agencies and agents to really conspire to bring about this fundamental, irreducibly, unbelievably simple dictum, which is just open and relax. You are held by the beloved right now you are you're held by this universe of tremendous kindness, compassion, intelligence and love. And the shamans know this, the mystics know it scientists are begrudgingly almost being forced to know this do the implications if they're legitimate science. Scientists have their own work. But this I think, cannot be overstated that we it's already right here right now. We simply have to open our hearts and minds and there it is.

And I would point out that there are millions of experiences around the world not just near death experiences, but just experiences of life, who are following exactly the pathway you're talking about. They don't need the scientific world to tell him this is true. They found it through personal experience. And in fact, that is what I think is going to drive this tremendous revolution is so many people are having their own kind of personal experiences showing this grander reality of living of this universe that we can all experience together and that is what ultimately will will push it. I like discussing the scientific arguments because I think that it helps a certain segment of our population who has been kind of sucker punched by scientism into falsely believing conventional materialism as being true. And yet there's a much broader quantum informed science of consciousness being pursued by groups like the Galileo commission at Galileo commission.org and also the scientific and medical network in England. They have their own website you can find but these scientific groups are absolutely kind of helping to usher the scientific community in this direction. It's because this is where all the evidence leads. That's right. It doesn't lead us back into the that paltry fiction of materialism, but it leads forward into a much more optimistic and empowering version of human human interaction with the universe. And this is good news for all of us because it gives us much greater power over our own kind of destiny and unfolding of reality. But the more we embrace that sense of love and compassion, kindness and mercy for others, the more of those beautiful ingredients of wholeness are brought into our lives, too.

And I think really, this is just the genius of your of your gift in this life is that you you act is this truly unique bridge between these usually disparate worlds of science and spirituality that have been so unnecessarily kept apart and it really is you are used so elegantly. It's the unification of science and spirit that you embody through your experience. You can speak to both sets of communities and there are very many people that can do it. And I think therefore using the central paradigm of the West, the scientific paradigm, understanding of being able to talk the language and talk to scientists, that's no small thing, because again, because we take such a refuge in the alleged supremacy of this type of knowing, even though it's very limited then with the knowing your ability to mingle to work and get in there and take the shots. It's like my, I can't remember where I heard this, but it's a good one. You know, you're a pioneer. And you can always tell the pioneer who the Pioneers are, because they're the ones with all the arrows in their back. And I always say it's because of those shot behind them. And so you know, you've had a lot of arrows shot into your back, I won't name it's true. I tried to be polite, I won't name names, but we know the people who have come after you. And I find it really revelatory, like why is there such almost violent resistance to this? I would argue it has to do it's based on fear and levels of psychological

it is ABS you are correct. It is based on fear. This is tremendous fear and you gotta wonder where that comes from. I mean that their work is irrelevant or something you know, once they've done the homework and they realize that materialism is dead. I mean, ultimately you know, the big challenge for our scientific community has been trying to integrate general relativity with quantum physics. I mean, the two just don't mix. They're like oil and water. You get these strange infinities out of the equation. So where you need something more sensible than that so in essence, I would say that science and spirituality really can only move forward with each other. You know, for the materialist scientist who keeps insisting on you know, that there is no spirit to the universe. They can find a home and whoever it's 1957 many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, you know, infinite parallel universes unfolding in every instant of space time where a sentient observer makes an observation. And for them, it's wonderful, you know, infinite parallel universes, and you don't have to then explain consciousness at all. But that's not the universe we live in. It's kind of like the old days of the Ptolemaic epicycles. And yeah, you could explain planetary motions. It was very cumbersome, but you could do it. And then when Copernicus cases put the sun at the center of it all, as opposed to the earth, all of a sudden everything made much more sense. The same is true today. Objective idealism is the best way to make sense of the measurement paradox in quantum physics, you know, entanglement superposition these things can be explained through objective idealism and viewing the brain as reducing valve or filter but not the ultimate originator of conscious awareness. And so really, for science to move forward, it's got to embrace this kind of richer view of our spiritual nature and our connectedness, because that's where the answers lie. They don't lie in this crazy mythical position of infinite parallel universes. They don't really seem to be there, but they explained the bath and the physics well enough so that you don't have to explain consciousness. I mean, the whole thing is just pathetic. It's really and I love how Bernardo really goes after idiocy of those positions because they are just numb that wrong. And Bernardo, luckily he knows a lot more about it. I'd be we make a lot of arguments in our book Living to mind for universe concerning the quantum physics, but it was really after that book was published that I came to realize a much simpler pathway. And it's really called a rebellious relational interpretation of quantum physics combined with Barnardos metaphysics, which are very much in alignment with what we propose and living in mind for universe. So I said earlier, Bernardo was a big supporter and endorser of living in mind for universe as his Pim Van Lommel, and other scientists who study consciousness. But sooner or later, you got to realize it's the only way to preserve our sanity and understanding is to realize the consciousness is fundamental. I mean, it's something so many people have felt the reality of their soul. And yet the material of scientists would scream out if you don't have a soul. There's no such thing. Right? Well, you know, we're starting to find it. There's a lot of scientific evidence the reality of something like a soul, and that we are so seem to be related by a very powerful principle of love, compassion, kindness, mercy and forgiveness at the core of the universe. So from a scientific perspective, just in terms of understanding reality, it's good to open our minds to these kinds of concepts.

Yeah, it again, it's like Idiocracy, the, the science scientists. This is important. There's a difference between science and scientists. And that's what we need to understand on one level, I can't remember who said it. Science proceeds advances funeral by funeral

Yeah, that's Max Planck who said that the you know, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics one at a time.

Exactly. But you know, to embark Bernardo I love the way he gets on this because he has the chops to do it, how it's completely non scientific, and it's not parsimonious. I mean, the the gymnastics they have to go through to try to explain things like reincarnation through the work of Steven sentience and Tucker, the Andes, the what they have to go through just try to fit that into their materialistic view borders on comical but it's comical because it's tragic. Yeah, their inability to really be scientific and look at the facts and not their presumptions and hopes and fears of what those facts would be. And I would argue that the one of the principal reasons they're afraid, psychologically, is because there's no place for personal identity in the universe. That's being described here. We're talking about an egoless dimension of reality. And dufry. John talked about scientists to solid types blinded by luminosity of their own minds, where they literally I think, underneath it all, they're just afraid there's nothing to push against if there is no other and so by immediate implication, and then how dualistic world you can't have self without others. So if you dissolve this the seeming sense of duality into a world made of love, and and these really noble qualities, the awakened heart mind, there is no place for the self sense they are and I think underneath it all is there's subliminal psychological terror, that hey, wait a second, wait a second. If I really subscribed to this, that fundamentally means I don't exist, therefore they freak out against it.

Well, that's that's certainly I mean, the the big culprit in addiction and alcoholism work is the ego and therapists often see that, you know, the ego would rather see itself, its host dead compared to the ego dead. And that's why you have to have a ritual sacrifice of the ego in a therapeutic setting, to allow it to be reborn in a much healthier, more all accommodating state, and in many ways, that's what I think we're facing now. And you're pointing it out very well that their kind of ego sense feels so threatened. And the ego will fight like hell when it is threatened like that. And that's kind of the dynamic we're seeing of materialists trying to protect scientism, and what it says about the material world and materialism. And basically, the evidence is very strong that it's going the way of the dodo it's going extinct. And that is what brings such extreme fear into their hearts.

Well, it's interesting, it's not because if you if you profess a materialistic view, you're professing ground in territory and this is for them. This is a turf war. You're basically fundamentally challenging their hood, their territory, you're invading it and therefore I think psychologically, they bristle and I've heard some really esteemed scientists really say point blank, I wouldn't believe it, even if it was

true, right. Exactly. Like Daniel Dennett. Exactly, yeah. Who is such a strong proponent of of materialism. He says, None of us are conscious. We're all zombies. But and he's on record as saying if it were true, he'd kill himself. That sounds about as unscientific as you can possibly be. If you discover the truth, and you're forced to kill yourself because of that truth. I mean, what the heck,

I think what he needs to suicide here, he needs to kill his ego. I mean, that's fun. Yeah, that ego

could easily stand some rebirthing you're exactly right.

Oh, this is too great. As we start to close up and this is so rich, I could spend so many hours with you but I want to respect your time is we start to close up. What are some of the biggest surprises when you when you take away you look back on 15 years now have something that really was a gift and ugly wrapping paper right? I mean, this unbelievable transformative experience.

Well I consider a beautiful wrapping paper beautiful wrapping paper. Yes, because it was a should have killed me seven day coma from bacterial maningo encephalitis, doesn't mean it wasn't a beautiful experience.

That's fantastic. So looking back over that. biggest surprises biggest takeaways, I mean, in so many ways we've picked on these already but as we start to kind of sum up some of the central narratives of what we're exploring here. Give us some some further final takeaway messages. Yeah,

I would say to me, one of the biggest surprises and looking back on the whole process has been how much farther along the scientific world was at explaining all this than I knew at the time when I came out of canola. I had no idea the tremendous evidence of work that had been done by scientists going back more than a century. To kind of put this whole thing in perspective. In fact, of for example, when you read those Bigelow institute.org essays, you'll find I think it was Michael noms paper, where he basically said the whole question was settled in the late 1800s. Nobody ever should have doubted the reality of an afterlife beyond that point. Because of Frederick Myers and other investigators with the various pair of psychological associations had done so much good work proving the reality of an afterlife and yet, obviously our culture has has kind of a program for getting built into itself and the successes of materialist science through the 20th century were very remarkable, but so were the the aspects of the ugly underbelly of those excesses, climate change addiction to fossil fuels, economic polarization, warfare, tremendous violence in our streets, conflict between people. I mean, a lot of this is just due to that false sense of separation. that's inherent in materialist thought. And yet materialism from a scientific perspective, was pretty much disproven almost a century ago with the advent of quantum physics. So, you know, there's this huge mismatch in our modern culture between kind of intelligence and what we truly know about reality, and what our culture seems to understand about reality. And that's where I think this awakening is so absolutely essential for our very survival. The status quo will kill us and there's no question about that, in fact, not only homosapiens, but probably a good third to two thirds of the species of plants and animals on Earth are threatened in the near term because of the actions of Homo sapiens in terms of toxicity, plastic pollution, other types of pollution and our addiction to fossil fuels and global warming. I mean, we really need to wake up. That's essentially what needs to happen. Humanity needs to become wise, Homo sapiens, the word Sapiens means wise, but I would say when I look at what this one little species is doing to our planet, and the extinction that it's driving there's nothing wise about that. And it really is time for us to wake up to this deeper, more comprehensive reality about the nature of our existence, and the very purpose for humanity and sentient life throughout the cosmos.

If I can be just a little bit of a devil's advocate here for a second, while I completely applaud and appreciate and celebrate your optimism I truly do. And I believe in the basic goodness of humans and the basic goodness of the fabric of reality itself. I'm also somewhat aware of developmental matters in structures of evolution in terms of one's ability to even consider what we're talking about here. And so, on one level, philosophically, I maintain this optimism but when I look at things, I sometimes get a little bit discouraged that are we really thinking pipe dream that somehow there will be this kind of collective massive awakening in time, or is the center of gravity, you know, so developmentally so low that we're going to capitulate to that and I also studies have shown that one can argue yes, when things fall apart, we have the capacity to kind of reorganize into higher levels, but some studies have shown that when things fall apart, the default is usually regressive. Not progressive, the default is to try to get Humpty Dumpty back together yet again. And so maybe give us a little bit cause because I love your optimism, but but I have to say that over the last couple of years when I read all the data what's happening and what's taking place there, it's hard for me to maintain my optimism, my long term, as they say, on Tibet, because there's so many forces of the dark side. And this developmental thing really does concern me. I mean, even if you even if you have a Buddha living in your household, a Christ living in your neighborhood, how many people are really going to be open enough to receive that wisdom in time or basically just capitulate to reestablishing and reinstating their comfort zones

their pride? Well, what I will say is I've seen tremendous progress in this world just in the last a decade. I know when we were at a Karen and I were presenting at a scientific meeting in Belgium back in 2018. And one of the neuroscientists there from Steven Laurie's group got up and gave a talk, where she made the point that basically there had been a fourfold increase in the number of scientific papers around the world on the topic of indie ease, after the book, Proof of Heaven came out compared to the 32 year annual rate before Proof of Heaven came out. And they were making the point that that book was a catalyst that did that. I don't know if we can claim that at all, but it certainly was published at a very opportune time, because the world was getting ready to really wake up as evidenced by this rapid fourfold increase in the number of scientific papers about nd ease since the book Proof of Heaven came out. Now I'm very optimistic just based on the observations I've made about this awakening, I think the scientific community is rapidly waking up. The rest of the world will follow rapidly because of that enthusiasm of the scientific world. But if worse, comes to worse, and you have to default to wolf of Max Planck's, you know, one funeral at a time. Do remember that our corporate leaders and political leaders who have participated in get is getting us into this whole rific problem of climate change and toxic pollutions and corporate greed that we're in now. Those people are dying off. So there is good news. They're being recycled, their souls will come back as much younger souls. And when I look at Greta Thornburg and other of the youth of today, I'm very optimistic they can certainly inherit the political and corporate control of this of a world a lot quicker by my vote. Let's get these old guys out of the way because they're clearly destroying the world to their inept ignorance, and it's time for the young ones to take over and do a far better job sorry, we're having to charge you with that difficult and challenging position to all the youth of today. But the reality is, we know enough now, nobody should be stupid enough to think climate change isn't an emergency happening on our watch and that we all need to act. Every choice we make moving forward about energy about buying a car about what we do in our daily lives should be toward sustainable energy away from burning fossil fuels and biomass. Because those are a curse that is already leading us into superstorms. Super droughts, wildfires beyond historical record, floods that are unprecedented. We're really getting ourselves into deep trouble if we continue in this blind and ignorant fashion. But I think, luckily, the noise being made by the youth of today won't allow for that kind of willful ignorance to destroy this planet. And lead to the extinction of fowl 1000s of very important species that support Homo sapiens, in our existence on this planet. So we're gonna wake up by hook or by crook, and the more people pay attention to this kind of podcast and these kinds of discussions the more they can wake up and participate in helping this world to avoid a catastrophe.

Oh, yeah, and I couldn't agree more. It's actually why we launched this podcast is a way like I mentioned earlier, my languaging translational spirituality, applied spirituality, and it's a great place to close. It's like Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master famously said and I love this, strictly speaking, there are no enlightened beings. There's only enlightened activity. And so we take these teachings, we incorporate them, we digest them, and then we just don't keep them to ourselves. We bring them into the world. This is such desperate need and we do so in a loving, altruistic capacity as a way to rouse people from their collective slumber. And to that extent, I have to say you've been just a majestic voice and this rising chorus of sanity and it's been a total delight for me to become more acquainted with your work and with with you personally. And so as we really finally closed up, what are you working on now? How can people learn more about you? How are we can we support you, my community in your endeavors? Tell us a little bit about what's on the horizon for you and how we might be able to just step in behind you.

Well, I think the best thing is to just follow me at Evan e in alexander.com. And certainly people can communicate with me there there's an active reading list recommended reading, links to books, links to a lot of interviews, presentations, etc. In addition on Eben alexander.com There's a 33 day journey. into the heart of consciousness, which is a free course that we offer to people that started a worldwide community that now has more than 10,000 members in it. So just go to Evan alexander.com. And when you see that banner, the 33 day journey into the heart of consciousness, click Yes, leave an email and first name and you're off and running. Likewise, sacred acoustics.com is an excellent resource for people who want to learn more about meditation. Also, our books have Proof of Heaven map of heaven and especially at third when living in a mindful universe which goes a long way towards helping people to understand the scientific revolution and also participate with their own kind of meditative input. And also, I would like to suggest to people another way you can kind of keep in touch with us. This is Karen's brilliant idea. During the pandemic. Every two weeks we recorded interviews with some of the people that we would have been seeing other scientists studying consciousness, other experiences, etc. And that whole set of interviews is available for free at United in hope and healing.com. Go to that website. Start looking at those interviews. You'll find a lot of our friends and colleagues interviewed there and it really helps you to put together the big package of what we're talking about here. So there's a lot of material there at Eben alexander.com that can help people get going in this and just stay in touch. You know, we're building a community of like minded thinkers and people who want to enjoy kind of helping to change the world for the better and united and hope and healing.com is an excellent resource for people to get involved with that kind of activity. It also includes a mental health practitioner training course, that we did with Dr. Anna usum. She is the she wrote the peer reviewed medical case report supporting sacred acoustics use in anxiety in a busy Manhattan practice her case, her pilot study, showing 26% reduction in anxiety symptoms over two weeks versus 7% controls that came out in February 2020 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental diseases. So all these are resources for people who want to help others and help themselves and help this world at large to grow up mature, become wise, and Let's rescue all these species from extinction. And help this world be a far better place.

It's amazing. All the other links and references to texts and supporting material is tremendously appreciated. And I want to close with something that you frequently mentioned in your books that is so appropriate here. And that is the power of gratitude. That to be grateful for the good karma, that we have the good situation that we have the auspicious ability to share in work like yours and so from my end, a deep deep bow of gratitude personally on behalf of my community, and just a continued sense of profound appreciation for everything that you've done and continue to do. It's a marvelous gift in this world and it doesn't go unnoticed. So deep, deep gratitude.

Thank you, Andrew and very grateful to you for all the work you do to get this kind of message out to the world at large, helped make this world a far better place and bring a lot of peace and harmony into people's lives. So thank you for that.

More than welcome. So until next time, all the best to you and let's definitely stay in touch. Thank you.

So all right. Thanks a lot. All right. Great. Talk with you. Bye bye now. Bye. Until next time.

Thank you so much, everyone. That was awesome. All right.