The Vital Veda Podcast: Ayurveda | Holistic Health | Cosmic and Natural Law
The Vital Veda Podcast is a show for people who intend to live the most evolutionary life at their highest potential, while experiencing total wellness and bliss.
Our host Dylan Smith brings you the most inspiring interviews with thought leaders and experts from around the world in the fields of health, spirituality, personal development and natural law.
Dylan Smith is an Ayurvedic practitioner, holistic health educator and exponent of Vedic wisdom. He is devoted to learning, sharing and radiating this profound knowledge for everyone to utilise and enjoy.
Enliven your natural capability to tune into your own body and mind, awaken your instincts and engage in life in a frictionless flow.
Find out more at www.vitalveda.com.au
The Vital Veda Podcast: Ayurveda | Holistic Health | Cosmic and Natural Law
Proof of Heaven: Insights From Near-Death Experiences | Dr. Eben Alexander #137
What if a near-death experience could radically reshape your understanding of life?
In this episode, Dr. Eben Alexander shares the profound insights he gained from his own extraordinary NDE (Near Death Experience), following a week-long coma induced by a rare E. coli bacterial meningoencephalitis. Dr. Alexander takes us on a journey through otherworldly realms, including a light-filled portal and encounters with angelic beings. His experience, alongside remarkable NDEs from figures like Anita Morjani, Dr. Mary C. Neal and many others, offers a compelling challenge to conventional materialist views on consciousness.
Transitioning from a successful neurosurgeon to a prominent speaker and author, Dr. Alexander explores the scientific and spiritual implications of moving beyond materialist preconceptions. He delves into scientific studies on NDEs, consciousness and the afterlife, shedding light on the profound interconnectedness of consciousness through love.
This episode offers a hopeful perspective on the power of love and collective consciousness, emphasising the potential for spiritual awakening to foster peace and harmony in our world.
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
✨ Introduction to Dr. Eben's Journey and NDE
✨ Challenging Conventional Views on Consciousness
✨ Groundbreaking Research on NDEs & Consciousness
✨ Transformative Practices for Deepening Awareness
✨ The Power of 'Life Reviews' and Deep Time in the Afterlife
✨ Personal Reflections and Lessons Learned
✨ The Immense Potential of Spiritual Awakening
✨ Closing Thoughts and Further Exploration
ABOUT OUR GUEST: Dr Eben Alexander
Dr. Eben Alexander, a former academic neurosurgeon with over 25 years of experience, including 15 years at Harvard Medical School, has treated numerous patients with severe brain conditions. In 2008, he experienced a week-long coma caused by a rare bacterial infection. During this time, he had a profound near-death experience that transformed his understanding of consciousness, suggesting it exists beyond the brain.
His journey is documented in his bestseller "Proof of Heaven," which stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list for over a year. His subsequent books, "The Map of Heaven" and "Living in a Mindful Universe," further explore the intersection of science and spirituality.
Dr. Alexander has been featured on major media outlets like The Dr. Oz Show, Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday, and ABC's Good Morning America. He continues to share his insights through lectures, interviews, and collaborations with co-author Karen Newell, focusing on the deeper connections between science and spirituality.
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This fortnight on the Vital Veta Podcast.
Speaker 1:It's kind of an extraordinary journey and a real gift that I never would have expected. To come out of a week-long coma due to a bacterial meningoencephalitis that should have killed me. One would not expect any kind of dream or hallucination to be possible in that brain. I was way too sick for that. I was way too sick for that.
Speaker 2:29 essays that were written by scientists and those 29 essays beyond any reasonable doubt established the reality of the afterlife. I went up through a light portal associated with music into this brilliant ultra-real gateway valley on a butterfly wing, with a beautiful woman beside me, thousands of beings dancing below, angels above. We ascended through the angelic choirs so that all four-dimensional space-time collapse. We may come into this world with memories of past life and between lives, and children will often talk about such memories, but by the age six or seven those memories are being covered over by natural processes. For the last six decades, they've studied more than 2,500 cases of reports of past life memories in children, and of those cases, more than 1,700 are what are called solved, that is, they actually found the person who lived before.
Speaker 1:Dr Eben Alexander, thank you for joining me on the Vital Vader podcast. Very excited you are now how many years post your coma experience, which also included a near-death experience which really changed your life radically, and now we're speaking on Zoom, I think. How much years later?
Speaker 2:Dylan, it's great to be with you today. Thanks for having me on and we're now about 15 and a half years out from my coma Great, I was in coma for one week, november 10th to 16th, back in 2008. And it dramatically changed my life and I would say in many ways. I think the world has changed a lot since then, uh in very positive ways, in terms of this kind of information and the scientific nature of, of the reality, of uh kind of primordial consciousness is uh working its way into the mainstream. So I'm so glad I've been part of that whole awakening. But it's a kind of an extraordinary journey and a real gift that I never would have expected to come out of a week-long coma due to a bacterial meningoencephalitis that should have killed me. But I look at it as a wonderful gift and I think the more we get into the story we'll realize why.
Speaker 1:How common or how rare is it to get meningitis in the brain?
Speaker 2:Well, these kind of meningitis are not very common. What I had was E coli, and E coli meningitis is extremely rare in adults. In fact, almost all the cases of E coli bacterial meningitis occur in newborns. It's very rare beyond the age of three months. And so my doctors, you know they had many mysteries facing them. But one extreme mystery was how in the world did I pick up a disease that almost always happens in newborns, just kind of out of the blue, and that's where it seemed to come from. But the real rarity of my case is the survivalship, the fact that I came back from it completely. In fact, there is a medical case report written about my medical records, and it was written by three doctors who were not involved in my care but were absolutely fascinated by my recovery, and that medical report came out in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases in September 2018. It's by Dr Serby Khanna, lauren Moore and Bruce Grayson.
Speaker 2:And the interesting thing for one thing, they made the case. They greatly strengthened the case I made in the book Proof of Heaven because they spent a lot more time going over my medical records. They were objective. You know I had lived through the things. It was kind of hard for me to face up to a lot of it. But what they discerned was that the evidence for damage to my brain was so extensive that one would not expect any kind of dream or hallucination to be possible in that brain. I was way too sick for that. And of course, the other main ingredient to their contribution is when they were challenged by the peer review editors of the scientific journal how do you explain this case? It's unprecedented in the medical literature for someone to have e coli meningoencephalitis with these kind of neurological parameters and to spend a week in coma and then make a full recovery. And they said it's because he had a near-death experience and that was scientifically reasonable as an explanation to these peer review editors. All of them the authors and the editors knew of other cases of miraculous healing in the setting of NDEs. So I think the big lesson for all of us is it starts to show us the power of mind over matter and the power of spirit you know, of our kind of our soul, our spiritual essence to actually influence these kind of events as they unfold and to work in our favor in many of these cases.
Speaker 2:The other cases I would mention that come to mind other NDEs with miraculous healing not just my case, but Anita Morjani. She wrote the book Dying to Be Me and she had an advanced lymphoma. She was deep in coma when she had her NDE, shouldn't have lived more than 12 hours and yet she came back to this world and recovered fully. Her cancer disappeared.
Speaker 2:Likewise Dr Mary C Neal, who had an over 30-minute warm water drowning while kayaking in Chile in the late 1990s. She's an orthopedic surgeon and she was driven to the bottom of the river, her legs broken, pinned down under boulders, and was there more than 30 minutes before they pulled her to the top and she was dead. But they resuscitated her and she ended up having a full recovery. She also had a very profound spiritual near-death experience. So it just wakes us up to the potential power of our kind of spiritual nature and identification as elaborating ways that we can manifest our free will for our highest good, for our highest and best kind of survival in these kinds of circumstances, because it truly is a case of spirit over matter. And spirit, of course, as we'll get on in this conversation, is really a unified form of consciousness that we all share.
Speaker 1:Right, so powerful so it's. Without that spirit the body in such a sick, near death state probably would have perished or, in your case, perhaps got brain damaged, even if you did recover. But due to that influence of that light that's really allowed that not only a a recovery but a significant evolution for that individual. Exactly like seeing the cancer go like that, like was that what happened? It just went from then uh in anita borjani's case it basically?
Speaker 2:uh, her doctor kept insisting on biopsies. They kept doing biopsies when she awoke from this coma and was recovering and the biopsies kept showing no cancer. Interestingly enough, I don't have the full pathology reports, but what I was told was that there was no major inflammatory response the other kind of things that we might postulate as doctors, as medical specialists, would occur, but that the cancer just disappeared, the cells just died off. There are natural processes called apoptosis. Where that occurs, it's especially important, for example, in embryogenesis, when we're going from a single fertilized egg into an infant. And we're going from a single fertilized egg into an infant, you know, in that nine months in the mother's womb, there's a lot of apoptosis there, programmed cell death. But it appears that that's kind of what happened in Anita Morjani's case, although again, I'm not speaking from having seen her pathology report, but only heard from others who were involved in her care about that report, but only heard from others who were involved in her care about that Right.
Speaker 1:So just to give some more background, you wrote a book, Proof of Heaven, which is primarily about near-death experiences. You're a neurosurgeon by trade. Are you still practicing neurosurgery?
Speaker 2:Well, no, actually, what I was doing at the time I went into coma was I was working for a group called the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation. I was supporting their global research efforts. So I was traveling around the world to the various laboratories that had focused ultrasound surgery available and helping them to work through research protocols and that kind of thing. And that's when I went into coma was in that line of work and my boss at that time, the head of that foundation, who was a neurosurgeon when he heard about my illness, he knew I was gone, that I would never be back, I was going to die from it.
Speaker 2:End of story, and said, yes, I could actually lead. It was actually a trip that I was hosting with the board of directors of that foundation to witness a procedure, and it was to happen on December 18th of 2008. And we'd been planning it for more than six months, and when I called him up and said I could do the trip, that was, you know, about two weeks after he'd heard that I was doomed with this meningitis and he was absolutely shocked but elated to have me back in the saddle. So, anyway, I did that. Then I, within three months of waking up from coma, I was back at work full time.
Speaker 2:And that is something that is really shocking for that kind of high level of work. But ultimately what ended up happening was I then ended up going back into neurosurgical practice in a private practice that a group I'd worked with in Lynchburg. I was working with them in a proctorship in the OR, getting ready to go back to all of that. But I'd been giving talks about my near-death experience for more than a year at that time and I really had to make a decision, because you cannot do neurosurgery part-time and the demands from this speaking tour of telling my story were getting me so great that I had to stop neurosurgery as a clinical practice and go full-time into this and just sharing this story, working with scientists around the world trying to understand nature of consciousness. I've written several other books. There was a book called the Map of Heaven, which basically talks about the commonality of these experiences, and also a book called Living in a Mindful Universe, and that book is the real proof of heaven. That is the scientific spiritual odyssey that unites science and spirituality greatly through my own personal story, plus, you know, thousands of other stories that we reviewed and my contacts with other scientists around the world studying these phenomena. All of it has been a very kind of promising and positive and uplifting journey of discovery. But it means we must reject our simplistic and false materialist preconceptions. I mean scientific materialism. You know that the physical world is the only thing that's there and you somehow must explain conscious awareness as being fully derived from the brain, the physical brain itself. You know that is a myth. It's no longer true and the scientific community has moved beyond that. There's still a few scientists who are stuck in the falsehoods of materialism and its false sense of separation, but many other scientists if you go to Galileocommissionorg or to scientificandmedicalnet those are both scientific groups I'm on the advisory board for and you'll see that the scientists have been some of my biggest supporters. People often think this is science versus spirituality or science versus religion. And yet it turns out that, waking up to this much grander vision of the universe where consciousness is fundamental and primary, all of the physical world emerges from consciousness and we're all connected through that consciousness, through the binding force of love, that's where you start to realize the power of this kind of scientific revolution.
Speaker 2:And for those who really demand more information from a scientific viewpoint, I would recommend you go to bigelowinstituteorg and what you'll find there are 29 essays that were written by scientists, all of whom had to prove at least five years of experience researching the afterlife question. And those 29 essays, beyond any reasonable doubt, established the reality of the afterlife and, in fact, a very strong set of evidence supporting the reality of reincarnation, that our souls come back again and again. But the thing is there is a program for getting, so that we may come into this world with memories of past life and between lives and children will often talk about such memories. But by the age six or seven those memories are being covered over by natural processes, so that by the time we're teenagers most people don't remember readily just spontaneous memory of life events, previous lifetimes where they might have had those memories as a child. And when you go to uvadopsorg is another example, university of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, which is about 12 miles from where I'm sitting right now, you'll find that for the last six decades they've studied more than 2,500 cases of reports of past life memories in children, and of those cases, more than 1,700 are what are called solved, that is, they actually found the person who lived before.
Speaker 2:So if you go to bigelowinstituteorg, start reading those 29 essays, go to uvadopsorg. Start studying all the academic papers and scientific books published by this group, you'll start seeing where this is going. And, of course, in our book Living in a Mindful Universe, we bring all these resources together. And I'll also point out that there's now a 10th anniversary edition of the book Proof of Heaven that has 36 additional pages in it, and those pages cover a lot of what's happened in the 15 and a half years since my coma, showing the reality of the afterlife. I mean, it's scientifically proven beyond a reasonable doubt and the arguments.
Speaker 2:The theoretical understanding involves quantum physics, which is deeply important in understanding this. It involves neuroscience, the hard problem of consciousness, the binding problem, and philosophy of mind. That is the apparent unity of consciousness in the individual of mind. That is the apparent unity of consciousness in the individual. All the evidence for non-local consciousness out of parapsychology, like telepathy, remote viewing, near-death, shared death, experiences which are just like near-death but happen perfectly healthy people after death, communications, all these past life memories and children, the entire body of evidence fully supports the reality of the afterlife and reincarnation.
Speaker 1:It's very clear your what we call dharma, your role in the evolution of life is to merge this science and spirituality. Coming from such a scientific medical background, I mean it's clear. I think everyone can see it cleaning yourself obviously, and on that, everyone can see it cleaning yourself obviously, and on that you just have talked about so many things I want to touch base on. But I want to just go back again to the beginning of coming from a neurosurgeon background. So in the early chapters of your book, what I loved about the book was the neuroscience talk. To be honest, I'm a medical practitioner. I mean there was so much about neuroscience and brain so, like I really like that. And you analyze you and and re-account your acute neurological coma in your book via incredibly radical near-death markers and parameters, as you mentioned. So I want to ask, as a neurosurgeon, how did it feel to view and reflect on these extreme parameters of such a detrimental case, when you had the capacity to look at what actually happened?
Speaker 2:Well, I really do look at all of it as a gift. One thing I've come to realize in my journey is that the hardships and the challenges in life as hard as our little ego mind might have in accepting it, but they are really gifts. I believe that they're mileposts. I truly believe there's a concept in spiritual traditions that our souls basically select our circumstances in life, that there's kind of a soul contract or soul agreement is a better word, and I think that that agreement often takes the form of the hardships that we'll be facing. And I think that we do that as soul groups. We plan incarnations with our fellow members and who's going to play what role, what kind of lessons we're going to try and learn more about, because it's all about a very open ended process of learning and teaching, basically the mind of the universe discovering itself, and we're all participating in that extraordinary drama, and I think there's a tremendous amount to this. But it also involves admitting that the hardships and difficulties might be planned and also might be a gift. I know this is something Anina Borjani tries to convince a lot of her audience of, and especially cancer patients, and when she tries to tell them that in some form they selected before this lifetime to have cancer as one of their challenges. A lot of people, when they're mainly in their ego mind, say hell, no, I would never have picked this. And yet when you look back over your life and especially a life that has been kind of fully lived and richly lived and you've faced up to hardships and grown from them, you start to realize how important they were in shaping your character and shaping your soul growth. And that's why I think it's so important for us to embrace those challenges and difficulties. And for me in my life, the two that I often point to that were major challenges but I think in retrospect were tremendous gifts.
Speaker 2:One was the fact that I was adopted. My birth mother was 16 years old. She was unwed In 1953, there was no way social services was going to let her keep me and so they basically took me away when I was 11 days old. But my birth mother was not willing to let me go, so she wouldn't sign the papers. So I got stuck in a baby dorm in a children's home for four months waiting for her to finally release me, and that was a challenge. Now I was adopted into a wonderful, loving family. I couldn't have been more fortunate in that. So I'm not asking anybody for sympathy, but I'm simply pointing out that even though my adoptive father, who was a globally renowned neurosurgeon, in which you would expect to know a lot about memory, he used to tell me there's no way you remember anything that happened to you when you were only a few weeks and months old, and I took him at his word. But I came to realize in later years, especially going through all of this, that in fact there'd been kind of a dark rejection from the world buried deep in my psyche it was in my subconscious about whether or not I was even worthy of love if my own birth mother had left me behind. And that's where the NDE and its aftermath and everything around my life has contributed so greatly to my understanding of this love that I share with the universe. That there's no doubt about that, in spite of that kind of smoking crater from my early life with my birth mother leaving me behind. So that adoption abandonment wound was a tremendous gift in many ways, because I had to come to a resolution of it through all of this process and that includes meeting my birth family. Finally, one year before my coma, I met them when I was 53 years old and then at age 54 is when I went to coma back in 2008.
Speaker 2:Now, the other main gift that I'll mention just along this topic was the fact that I was born alcoholic. I stopped drinking back in 1991. It was very early on in my training. I never had any trouble with alcohol at work, but I knew on my nights off call I would lean pretty heavily on that scotch and so, with help of family and friends, I stopped drinking in 1991. And I've never regretted that.
Speaker 2:It's always been a tremendous gift to me and some I like to share in telling of this bigger story, because I know there are a lot of people out there who have trouble with addictions alcohol, drugs, addiction to sex, addiction to love. I mean there are all kinds of addictions and that abandonment wound, and so by opening up about my wounds and the hardships and how they've contributed to my growth, I think will help a lot of people who have similar issues in their lives to face up to those and realize these can be gifts when you look at them properly and when you escape the demands of the ego mind and realize you know that that little voice in your head is not who you are. That's your kind of ego mind. I love how Michael Singer, in his book the Untethered Soul, he calls that voice in your head your annoying roommate. That is not your consciousness. Your consciousness is the awareness of existence and that is a much bigger kind of identity for us to grow into.
Speaker 2:And that's where meditation, centering prayer these are so important. Because once you realize that the mental realm is not created, you know by that three and a half pound gelatinous mass floating in a warm, dark bath between your ears but that that that is the brain is only serving as an access, a transceiver to this primordial mind, this field of consciousness throughout the universe, that's where things start to make a lot more sense and that's where meditation and centering prayer can be so useful. And for anybody who needs a powerful tool for meditation, I would simply recommend check out sacredacousticscom. And Sacred Acoustics is what I use an hour or two every day and have been for the last 11 or 12 years for meditation, and I've used it to re-explore my NDE many a time and it's helped me to come to a much richer understanding of the whole experience. Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Do you still use that or other methods to explore your NDE and gain more insight?
Speaker 2:I basically, within two years after waking up from coma, I'd read about 150 books, quantum physics, spiritual traditions, east and west, etc. Trying to make sense of it. But I finally came to realize that the only way to really start to understand my experience was to explore consciousness. And at that time I was aware of binaural beats. Binaural beats were discovered by a Prussian physicist in the 1800s. Pure tone in one ear and a slightly different tone anywhere up to 25 hertz different in the other ear.
Speaker 2:And what you do is you generate the lower brainstem a very powerful signal that has the same frequency as the arithmetic difference between the two. So 104 hertz in this ear, for an example, 100 hertz in this ear, will give you a four hertz wavering tone deep in the brainstem. And there's an old principle you know with hypnosis, to use a pendulum, where you're using eye movements, using the midbrain to drive left, right, left right for the eye movement. Same thing in EMDR eye movement desensitization, reprocessing which has been used very successfully against post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions. But now what you're doing with sacred acoustics and other binaural beep, brainwave entrainment, is you're going to an even more primitive level of the brain to generate this left-right oscillation using auditory signaling, and so I was aware of that whole phenomenon. I knew about the kind of neuroscientific implications of that kind of neural driving deep in the brainstem and how it might influence overall levels of conscious awareness, and so to me, binaural beats was the way to go and, wow, I've never looked back. It's an incredibly powerful technique and, again, to learn much more about binaural beats, you can read Living in a Mindful Universe, our third book.
Speaker 2:That was co-written with Karen Newell, who's the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, and you can also go to sacredacousticscom and learn a lot more there. She has a lot of instructional pages on her website and, in this era of anxiety, especially important to know how powerful that can be. There's a scientific paper in the journal of nervous and mental diseases that fully supports the role of sacred acoustics in alleviating anxiety in a busy manhattan practice in new york city. Dr anna useum wrote the paper it came out in I think it was February of 2020, journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, and she found a 26% reduction in anxiety symptoms over two weeks of listening, versus only 7% reduction with people who received standard talk psychotherapy for anxiety. So in our very anxious world, if nothing else, sacred acoustics is an extremely powerful and scientifically validated tool for relieving anxiety, but I promise you that's only the beginning, because where these tones go in terms of giving you relief from anxiety is a tremendous awakening of your spiritual essence and your connection to the universe at large.
Speaker 1:It's been a while since we've had so many resources in a podcast, so these are all going to be all these papers, these books, these meditation practices. We're going to be listing these. You are full of knowledge, dr Eben, just so rich with different aspects. You've touched on addiction trauma. One thing I want to ask is back to your trauma of 11 days old being taken away from your mother. I mean that's huge.
Speaker 1:We know now from science like that it's very established in the body. I mean, even before the baby's born it's, it's in the cells. So it's a common thing for and as you've highlighted in different resources, a lot of these near-death experiences. There's a lot of commonalities between them. People are experiencing similar experiences and journeys. One of them, which I believe you did not experience, is a review of all the past of your life actually a review of the life, by the way, also on this show, which I kind of forgot about when we spoke before off air, one thing we've also done is we've interviewed different people from having radical kundalini awakenings, uh, spiritual experiences that are overwhelming, and you know you could say to some extent similar to these near-death experiences.
Speaker 1:Some extent, one of the things which is also experienced is this past, not past life, current life review, reviewing every single part, second of your life, not in a rush, it's just a lot of time. You have to see every little bit. So I guess there that would be an opportunity to see being taken away from your mother at 11 years old. Besides Times like that or experiences like that, I mean, have you personally remembered? I mean, I don't think anyone that I've spoken to would remember what happened to them when they were 11 days old or even six weeks old. Is that possible in today's? Is that possible?
Speaker 2:I think it's very possible and you bring up some multiple interesting points here. One is I always have to point out to people remember that the near-death experience serves one purpose and that is to help promote the soul growth of the individual soul who's having it. So these NDEs are always tailor-made. As you pointed out earlier. There are a lot of common features. I mean people often, you know, discuss moving from darkness into light. There's a moving into a new realm. There's an incredible sense of love and the healing power of love and the life review that you bring up is very important. But in my NDE there was a unique feature. It's something that I really haven't heard of strongly in anyone else's NDE. So I think it was there mainly to kind of instruct me about kind of memory and cognition and the brain-mind relationship et cetera, and that was amnesia.
Speaker 2:I had no memories whatsoever during my entire experience of Eben Alexander's life before Now, or knowledge of earth my language was gone. I mean I really started with an empty slate. Knowledge of earth my language was gone. I mean I really started with an empty slate. Now, of course, when I first came back from all this and was trying to explain it all, I realized how badly the meningitis had damaged my brain, at least during that week, and when I first came back the brain was still damaged but I recovered quickly and in fact over two months had a full recovery.
Speaker 2:But interesting, if you know, I've told my story many, many a time. I don't want to spend too much time on it here. But the important things to mention in terms of this life review you're talking about is I did witness life reviews in very powerful fashion, but it couldn't be an Eben Alexander life review because of the amnesia. The amnesia was there for an even more important lesson for me to come to understand about the nature of memory and the brain-mind relationship. But it turns out that the visions I had as I ascended you know I've told it many a time so people can find out.
Speaker 1:Some people might not have heard. A lot of people might not have heard your story.
Speaker 2:I'll just briefly share that. It started in what I call the earthworm's eye view primitive, course, unresponsive. But I went up through a light portal associated with music, into this brilliant, ultra real gateway valley on a butterfly wing, with a beautiful woman beside me, thousands of beings dancing below, angels above. I mean all of this is a big story here, but I'm not going to take too much time now. Let's move it along.
Speaker 2:We ascended through the angelic choirs so that all of four-dimensional space-time collapsed down, all of that spiritual realm with this whole different ordering of time that I call deep time or meta-time. That's what allows for life review, because in deep time, birth, death, everything in between is simultaneously presented. Some people use the term spatialization of time. In other words, it's like you can look around in time back and forth and see all those elements. And in that kind of a setting, yes, you could see things all through this life and in fact you can see in the past life. Some people claim you can see in the future lives. But that gets into a whole big, big discussion of free will and predestination. I do believe free will is a huge part of our existence, but I also believe there's a lot of kind of poor planning, as I've said before, but in my transition up to the highest level that I ascended to, away from that gateway valley, is all that collapsed so that the entire universe for all of eternity was there as this teaching tool that I call the oversphere.
Speaker 2:All this is mentioned in Proof of Heaven, but the reality is in that journey twice. First time it's called the flying fish vision, where when the fish were down in the water, that's our material lives, and then they come up out of the water, that's when we are between lives and soul groups, reunite, plan next incarnations, etc. That was one vision. But then a later, far more powerful vision, after multiple cycles through these realms I've talked about, I re-entered the core and experienced what I call the Indra's net vision and that was something that was an incredible vision of this tapestry, interwoven threads of our lifetimes, basically almost like inhale. Exhale would be incarnation between lives, incarnation between lives. But all of this weave of this beautiful tapestry was leading toward this incredible gold center. So this is not a view of reincarnation kind of like Buddhism, where it's a blind wheel of suffering that you're trying to get off of but in fact is filled with notions of grace, transformation and becoming more one with the God force, a pure identity with that divinity that occurs over multiple lifetimes. And so it was a much richer vision that showed me the power of reincarnation, of life reviews, how important they were for serving as course corrections to allow us to realign, kind of redefine our soul group kind of goals for the next few incarnations and allow us to kind of understand that in a much richer sense. To me it was a very clear vision of reincarnation, but it was something that I was still so early on in the process of dissecting out through meditation that it was not included in Proof of Heaven or in the later books. It's in a lot of my early talks about all this.
Speaker 2:But that vision was very important and the points I would like to clarify about the life review that you brought up, which is very, very crucial here, and this data comes from a paper by Bruce Grayson. Bruce Grayson is an MD, a skeptical psychiatrist, who studied MDEs for more than 45 years and he's written more papers probably than any other MD on this particular topic. He's at uvadopsorg so you can learn a lot more. Get his papers right there, but he wrote one paper in the Journal of Nervous, I'm sorry it in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in the autumn of 2021, where he talked about his almost 700 life reviews in several thousand near-death experiences in his data files and the important things he points out.
Speaker 2:One is that something like 74% of those life reviews said that when you go through it, you relive the events from everybody's perspective everyone involved. That's very important because it shows us the golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated is written right into the fabric of the universe Because in those life reviews, three quarters of people who have them feel the events of what they did to others. If you hand out pain and suffering to others, if you're greedy or selfish, in the life review you get to feel what that feels like from the other's perspective. Perfect example of how we're all sharing the dream of the one mind. We need to live together and take care of each other, because when you hurt another, you're hurting yourself. You find that out in the life review. Now, the other thing is something like 45% of his almost 700 life review cases.
Speaker 2:People said it was more like a reliving of events, not remembering, and sometimes the details are so.
Speaker 2:I remember one account that I read not long ago where a man said he could remember an event that happened in early childhood where he could actually count the mosquitoes in the air around him.
Speaker 2:So, yes, big, incredible, detailed, reliving, not remembering. In fact, I'm right now looking through a book by Steve Taylor in England. It's not published yet but I'm planning on endorsing it. But it's all about time, and time is a fascinating topic that is not remotely understood by modern physics and it figures in heavily to a deeper understanding of life reviews of the nature of reality, of near-death experiences and these spiritual journeys, of the capabilities we find in meditation and centering prayer. I mean all of this opens up to a far more exciting world of possibility when you see what's going on in the current era, and certainly the scientific community is finally waking up to this deeper reality of the primordial mind, of how we're all accessing it. We have shared meaning and purpose and to understand our universe and ourselves, that relationship to the universe, it's absolutely crucial that we come to a much deeper understanding of all these kind of topics we're talking about right now.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned okay, ideally you're completely loving and kind to everyone Any bit of negativity, anger, aggression, jealousy, all those things you will face potentially in your death of the body, of this body and I think some people may be thinking, okay, all right, I'll just continue being selfish and egotistic so I can enjoy this life and then I'll deal with it when I'm dead, maybe, hopefully for a little bit. So what would you say to that? Is it really just? Oh, we'll just deal with it when we drop this body and we go through this whole transgression thing.
Speaker 2:Well, you know the thing is when you have to experience something like 30% of those people in Bruce Grayson's study said their entire life was part of this process. So don't expect it to be a cursory little ooh you bad boy kind of thing. No, it's not that at all. You're reliving it and you're feeling it from the perspective of others. You know so if you were hurting other people, especially if you really brought pain and suffering to others. When you feel that the life review it's not good and that I think in fact our ideas of hell come from people who have life reviews where I recognized after my coma and especially in the years since then as I've processed all this is how grateful I am for having that instruction build up a lot of kind of positive karma by loving and taking care of others, showing generosity, kindness, compassion, mercy, acceptance, you know when necessary forgiveness, but really treat others well. You know like I'd like to be treated and I promise you at the end of my life that is going to be a very comforting realization that that's kind of the currency I'll be addressing in my life reviews.
Speaker 2:In fact, my partner, Karen Newell, often says why not just do a daily review?
Speaker 2:And she's busy with daily reviews all the time, as am I on her advice, but really don't build this stuff up.
Speaker 2:You know, make amends to people, help people, show loving kindness to animals, to our fellow beings. I mean, this is really about living the life where you know that puts us in the best position. You know, when we get to that final stage and are leaving. I mean the worst thing in the world would be to be a hardcore militant, atheist, materialist and get to the end of my life and figure out I had it all wrong all along and then I have to go back to square one in the next life because I didn't learn any of the lessons I came here to learn so much. Better to kind of open our minds to this, start meditating and using centering, prayer and other modes of going within, but then living that life, because the important thing is what we do when we're awake and interacting with our fellow beings, how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, how we think of ourselves and others. All of that is very important in the bigger scheme of things.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, especially in the Vedic communities. It's kind of what's missing. They're going to meditate, they're doing their practice, but it's about establishing being, then perform action.
Speaker 2:That's the key. Vedic saying the action is absolutely critical because our soul growth doesn't really happen in the spiritual realm. That's where we have life reviews, we get some readjustment kind of plan, next incarnations et cetera. But the actual growth comes from what we do when we're in these bodies, living these lives, even though we're temporarily dumbed down to a lot of the knowledge of that higher soul. Now a lot of it obviously carries on lifetime to lifetime. That's how souls grow and improve, but it seems to be at our current level of human development.
Speaker 2:There's something about having full knowledge of your multiple lifetimes and higher soul purpose is not necessarily seen as contributing to your ability to grow.
Speaker 2:That's why we have program forgetting and that's why we have buy-in to this lifetime as we get into our you know ages eight, nine, 10 and beyond to live these lives. But we do glean some of the information of higher soul between lives. So it's not a complete deletion. But you can imagine if you came into this world and were fully aware of everything about these journeys and multiple lifetimes et cetera, that it would be a different kind of way of learning these lessons. I think it might sound a little confusing the way I'm explaining it, but I've seen it. It makes a tremendous sense to me, especially in in deep meditation, why we would have this program forgetting and what it does to kind of set the stage for us to really learn as much as we can in these lifetime. That doesn't mean you let your ego mind run berserk. Uh, it's certainly a good time to be awakening to your higher soul and it's connectedness with the rest of the universe.
Speaker 1:I have so much to speak to you about. We'll see how we go with time. One thing all right. So I want to talk about the concept. We've talked about memory, so I'm going to bring two questions to you and you can elaborate. So one is you spoke about, okay, some people remember past lives, some people don't. Most people don't. So, from what I've seen in my practice as well, it also depends on the kind of nature of that person, or we can say, their astrology chart, their constitution. Are they kind of that more vata, that more air and space into the subtle? But mostly based on the astrology, what is a big influence on whether they're kind of those people that are open and receptive to those subtle things?
Speaker 1:but mostly I personally think it's not really relevant. I find it interesting how some people are trying to find out their past lives and chase them. I think it maybe it's just more relevant to just be in the present and just on the present. I also want to say of, instead of waiting to your past life review to cop the downfalls of your negativity, when we see time as present and vertical and that it's all happening now, as one experiences in a past life, then it's like okay, actually all the harm I'm doing to others is not only going to hit me in the end of my drop my body, it's actually right now. If you're really feeling the expansion of time now, how you are then is how you are now, how I was, at 18 years old, abusing this person. That's influencing how I am right now.
Speaker 1:So it's not just I gotta wait till I drop my body. I just wanted to add that. So, yes, back to back to memory. How relevant is it to remember past lives, to maybe experience them, as you said, as the people do in a life review? And also I want to just talk about I'm interested to hear your perspective on memory in general as a neuroscientist, as a neurosurgeon, because I think memory can get a bit overrated. When people are especially hitting their elder years, they get really worried. I'm like actually it can be a blessing You're so present when you're forgetting all these things.
Speaker 2:I think memory for one thing and this is a topic we cover in detail in our book Living in a Mindful Universe memory is not stored in the brain, and that is one of the biggest nails in the coffin of materials neuroscience. So you don't hear it discussed much in scientific circles, and yet neurosurgeons have known for decades that in spite of more than a century of brain resections, there's never been a reported case of any long-term swathes of long-term memories disappearing after a brain resection. Now it's well known from the early 1950s that if you operate on somebody's brain and you damage their medial temporal lobes, hippocampus, intertemporal cortex, areas like that, especially if they have bilateral damage, you can get into deep trouble because they seem unable to convert short-term to long-term memory. They still have access to old long-term memories before the injury, but you can really kind of interfere with memory formation. But that's not the same as saying you found where memories are stored, and especially when you start to acknowledge the reality of that giant database, not just University of Virginia and their 1,700 solved cases of reincarnation but other reincarnation cases around the world. Obviously in the reincarnation cases you don't have memory preserved in a brain because it's between one lifetime and another, one body and another, and 80% of those cases, in the UVA database at least, are not hereditary, in other words, they're not the same family. Only 20% are hereditary relationships. So there's no way you could try to postulate a DNA mechanism of memory, et cetera, et cetera. So memory is not stored in the brain and I would say it's stored in an information field, the Akashic record, the quantum hologram there are many different names for that information field. It's a field of all potentialities for the possibilities in our lives and that's where, I would say, those memories are stored.
Speaker 2:In my own efforts, you know, I've witnessed what I think are past life visions of my own past lives in deep meditation.
Speaker 2:I've had that happen multiple times.
Speaker 2:I've also been through some past life regressions, but for me, the challenge in that setting is being able to identify elements that are distinct enough so that you can go back in history and prove the reality of that, just like in these cases of claimed reincarnation where they find the person who lived before. For me personally, I'd like to know that some of those visions I have. How am I going to line that up? And so far I really don't have the kind of tight, high quality information for my past life vision to allow me to come turn around and improve that in an objective form. So it's been. It's been challenging and I think that's one of the challenges for personal exploration and kind of a similar issue with the past life regressions that I've done with hypnotherapists and I've had some kind of interesting hits there. But again, for me as a scientist I really struggle with how to connect the dots in a way that I can make an objective, powerful conclusion and so far I haven't hit that kind of quality of information in my own perceptions of past lives.
Speaker 1:With ignorance growing in the collective. Today, in the Vedas we call, we're part of the Kali Yuga. This is the age of ignorance, and one way to wake up people to greater compassion and love is through experiencing an NDE. And as we think, in this Kali Yuga of ignorance, with everything happening, do you think nature's intelligence is organizing more and more people to experience NDEs?
Speaker 2:Well, I think nature's intelligence is organizing more and more people to have all kinds of experiences and insights that allow this growth of knowledge. As you're pointing out, I do believe there's a lot to this idea that we've had greater knowledge in the past and some of that knowledge has then been covered over. I agree with you that we're emerging from a real dark age. I mean the 20th century and early 21st century. As much as we look at all the scientific progress and there the benefits, say, to medicine, medical care, the benefits to transportation, to communication, things like that, the benefits of modern science and technology are quite remarkable. And yet when we look at the much bigger picture, for example, I see climate change as a tremendous, devastating catastrophe and human-caused climate change. We are really digging a deep hole here and getting in way over our heads, and that's a direct effect of our scientific progress, but it's scientific progress with an ignorant kind of drive to it. That is the ignorance. I can show you an article from the early 20th century where a scientist pointed out that the burning carbon fuels you know, I think this paper came from 1912 and they said burning carbon fuels will ultimately heat up the planet. If we keep doing it, the planet will heat up to a point where life will not be possible. That was from the early 20th century, so we've known this for a very long time and the facts now are in our face. When you see these wildfire seasons that are completely unprecedented unprecedented floods, droughts, these super storms, rising sea level, you look at the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, which is very unstable. If that glacier goes, that's going to be about a two-foot rise in sea level right there. But the bigger worry is behind it. There are other major glaciers in Antarctica. Once the Thwaites Glacier goes, the others will start to collapse in too. When they do, that 'll be 11 feet of sea level rise. There are more than 400 cities around the world that will be underwater with that kind of effect. And yet it's going to happen. If we keep burning fossil fuels, it's absolutely guaranteed that that will happen. All those cities will go underwater.
Speaker 2:You know people complain about the cost of mitigating climate change. Well, I promise you the cost of not mitigating it will be a hundred times as horrible and will also result in the end of civilization as we know it, if not the end of all humankind. So we're in a deep trouble from the ignorance that has been unmasked through our scientific prowess and understanding. I wish we were wiser in all ways and would not get ourselves into this trap. So my point is, I think that this kind of wisdom, this awakening to greater responsibility as stewards of the planet, is right at the heart of this awakening and right at the heart of this identification of consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe that we all share, that brings us all together through these forces of love.
Speaker 2:And I would say that religions have had more than 5,000 years to teach us the golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated, to greater or lesser effect. But now we have a scientific revolution around the nature of reality that's addressing the brain-mind question, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, etc. Everything I've talked about, and in our Living in a Mindful Universe. In that book we consolidate this argument and point out why it's so important for humanity to awaken now.
Speaker 2:Our deep slumber of ignorance is going to kill us and this whole planet if we don't take action. So it's time to be much more responsible for stewardship of this planet. Move away from burning carbon-based fuels. Plant trees. If we plant a trillion trees, that would do a tremendous job of alleviating the planet warming effects of carbon dioxide, do a much better job with managing methane, things like that. And there are many steps we can take. But it's time for us to wake up and smell the coffee and realize we are in deep trouble if we don't start coming into wisdom now.
Speaker 2:And I would say that the 20th century, in spite of those kind of oases of wisdom in technological and scientific growth, by and large showed gigantic ignorance, especially with materialism taking over the world and people believing our existence is birth to death and nothing more. That materialist science would also scoff at your claims of free will, because they think that consciousness is nothing more than chemical reactions and electron fluxes in the brain, giving us an illusion of self-awareness, an illusion of free will. But the exact opposite is the truth that emerges from quantum indeterminacy and a quantum-informed science to explain the brain-mind relationship. And that's exactly what our book Living in a Mindful Universe does. That's where a lot of this work is headed. It's high time that humanity woke up.
Speaker 1:How has reaction been from the science and medical community since you've written the book, since you've started doing this work, especially for your physicians, your age, your generations? They I would generalize that they are a bit less progressive than some of the arising physicians today. Do they even bother to read such a books?
Speaker 2:You. You would be surprised. A lot of my former colleagues still, you know, stay in touch and a lot of them are totally on board with this. I mean neurosurgeons. We see all kinds of things and a lot of the stuff we see proves to us that our conventional materialist notions of the brain and mind and that relationship and completely pinning on the brain don't work. They do not cover the kind of realities we end up encountering. And what I think has really been lacking has been a powerful theoretical model, you know, a kind of worldview structure that will accept all this.
Speaker 2:How do brain and mind interact if the entire physical universe emerges from the realm of the mental, If our free will actually has tremendous influence on the world? And the greatest examples I would give of that are these examples of spontaneous healing or tremendous healing in the setting of near-death experiences and in response to prayer and other things. I mean that's where you start to find this dramatic evidence for the power of spirit over matter. It's more than just mind over matter, because this acknowledges that none of us have little individual minds. That's not the way it works. Our mind is an eddy current of consciousness that comes from that primordial mind and the brain is somehow filtering and allowing for that little eddy current that looks like just my little consciousness. And yet things like telepathy can be readily demonstrated. If you read Guillaume Playfair's book Twin Telepathy, you'll find that more than 35% of identical twins have such powerful telepathic experiences that if one twin touches a hot stove, the other twin a thousand miles away can feel pain and develop a blister. That is a powerful connection. Yet these have been documented. So all this evidence for non-local consciousness and kind of shared mind is very real and very scientifically validated from a scientific fashion. You'll find a lot of the support there comes from this evidence of non-local consciousness and certainly from quantum physics, from neuroscience, philosophy of mind. All of those fields contribute to this deeper understanding.
Speaker 2:But this is really where the scientific world is headed and that's why scientificmedicalnet, galileocommissionorg are beautiful websites to show people this scientific revolution is very real and it's one that's very promising and can fill us with optimism, because it's a revolution that points to the powers we have to help each other, to benefit our fellow beings and to benefit this planet at large, that those can be dominant in our discussion, those can be dominant in our worldview and not this crazy paranoid fear. Polarization in political circles, the kind of madness that seems to dominate our headlines, is not what we have to accept as the only reality going on in this world. There's a tremendous amount of spiritual and scientific growth that promotes this notion of the one mind and of our connectedness, and of the power we have to help each other and to bring peace and harmony and prosperity to this world at large, for everyone. There's no reason it should be limited, and this is where the real promise of this revolution, the scientific revolution around the primacy of mind, is so important, wonderful I've got two more questions.
Speaker 1:One is around dying alone in this relative world. This, especially, we were seeing during covid pandemic, when people were not allowed to be with their loved ones by their side. I experienced something like this, not even even in the same room, sometimes right during death. This is like one of the biggest crimes against humanity, potentially because even in the military, if a soldier is dying, no matter what, they will recover the body, they will be there, they will risk their lives for that. But what's your view on how that experience?
Speaker 2:works? That's a very good question, and what I would say is nobody ever dies alone. And one major point here Gregory Shushan has written extensively about near-death experiences in primitive Aboriginal cultures, and the thing that strikes you as the most prominent is the fact that family members, loved ones and close friends who have passed on and left the physical plane before are there first to greet you front and center. Now, of course, before my coma, as a materialist neuroscientist, I would have told you oh yeah, that's wishful thinking. You see who you want to see on the way out. Well, that's one reason. Who I didn't see, who I might have wanted to see on my way out? If I had scripted my NDE, it would have been my adoptive father, who had passed over four years before my coma. But no, he wasn't the one.
Speaker 2:The guardian angel was that beautiful woman on the butterfly wing, and those who've read Proof of Heaven realize how important she was when, four months after my coma, I discovered her identity. But my point here is that our loved ones are there to welcome us over. In fact, it happened with my own mother, my adoptive mother, who passed over at age 99 in April of 2019. And she spent the last four days and nights of her life unresponsive, with a fever and a pulmonary infection Very typical in that age group that you're gone when that kind of thing happens. But two nights before she passed she woke up and she woke her nurse up. She got out of bed, which the nurse said was impossible. She said my mother's here, my mother's here to welcome. Oh my God, she's here, she's really here, call my children. And she said all that but it was 2.30 in the morning so the nurse did not call us.
Speaker 2:I heard about that when I arrived there late the next day and that's when I knew we were really in for it, because if you study cases of terminal lucidity or paradoxical lucidity, which happens in people who might have been demented for months or years, they wake up right before they die and communicate. You know, memories, everything intact, talk with loved ones at the bedside, and then they die with a smile on their face because they're being welcomed over by loved ones who are very real. This is not imaginary, it's not hallucination. That is what happens when we die, is our loved ones come to escort us over, and when you hear that kind of story or when somebody is reporting that, you know the end is truly near.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful, so beautiful. I'm going to read a quote from your book. You said the unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made or will ever make. Okay, unconditional love you're experiencing during your NDE. Why is it still the most important experience you have today and for the rest of your life, because ultimately, that's it.
Speaker 2:All there is is love. That's what we find on these deep journeys. When you study near-death experiences in large numbers, you find that 90% plus of near-death experiencers, no matter what their prior belief system many of them were formerly atheist militants, what have you but more than 90% of them come back believing in a loving personal force at the core of the universe. Now I knew from my journey it doesn't matter if you want to try and label that force as God, allah, brahman, vishnu, jehovah, yahweh, great Spirit. I don't care what names we try to apply to it. The fact is, at the center of these experiences, at the core essence of what these millions of people are reporting, is a great sense of love and connection. It's not as if you get to the center of the universe, to the origin of it all in these journeys, and find some battle between good and evil. What you find is pure love and the binding force of love and that's the thing that stands out so much in those life reviews is the more love you've handed out. That's what makes the life review effortless. And these life reviews go back a long time.
Speaker 2:You can read about one in Plato 2,400 years ago, an Armenian soldier named Ur, killed in battle, dead on the battlefield, several days. When they put him up on the funeral pyre at the end of that particular battle, just before they lit it up, he woke up and what he told his fellow Armenian soldiers is when you die, your life flashes before your eyes and what you find is the only important thing is how much love you were able to bring into the world. So he knew that 2400 years ago. It's as true today as it was then, and this is similar to other stories you would find in the battlefields of today. And it's the core of the universe is made of that loving God force, and there's no competing force of Satan or hell.
Speaker 2:Now, that's not to say that there aren't some kind of spiritual forces that can appear dark in these journeys, some kind of spiritual forces that can appear dark in these journeys. But once you know and realize in your heart your connection with that loving source of the universe, that God force, you have absolutely nothing to fear. And that's why it's important to live our lives living that love for others to the best of our abilities. Love, kindness and compassion to the best of our abilities. Love, kindness and compassion.
Speaker 2:You know we need to be taking in the refugees, not rejecting them. We need to be taking care of each other, the least, the last and the lost, and this includes animals. Animals are a rich part of the spiritual realm. They are not separate from it. It's not just a human spiritual realm. In fact, our humanity, our linguistic brain, does a lot of work trying to persuade us it doesn't even exist, you know. So that's why it's so important to kind of follow your heart and realize this is all about love, and the binding force of love is what is so obvious to people who have had these kind of experiences.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for the reminder. I'm going to end with a few quick fire round questions, if that's okay. The first one is what's your morning routine? What's your daily routine, your self-practice rituals?
Speaker 2:Well, what I do is get up and catch up on news, which I probably should stop doing.
Speaker 1:You read mainstream news.
Speaker 2:Even I pay attention to it. It's because I care about stop doing you read mainstream news. Even I pay attention to it. It's because I care about this world. And you have to pay attention to the news to kind of know where people are thinking and going and what they're doing. So it's important for me to stay in touch with that. But I always reserve my late mornings for meditation and for me it's an hour, two, three, if I feel I need that Going deep, as I said, sacred to explain all this and come up with better theoretical models, kind of the experimental empirical data that supports this worldview of the primacy of mind. And just, you know, karen and I do a lot of gardening now, which is great this time of year. We have two dogs, I have 18 koi fish in the koi pond and we do, as I said, a ton of gardening. Karen's really gotten into that lately and that's kind of how we spend our days, so Love it Fantastic, did your son, eben the fourth, go on to be a neurosurgeon?
Speaker 2:Well, eben the fourth is he just finished his training. He's actually going into physical medicine and rehab, into physiatry. He's an excellent healer. Already he had three years of fitness training as a fitness teacher in Washington DC before he got his doctor of osteopathy and now he just finished a pain fellowship up in Pittsburgh. He's going out to Colorado where he will be starting a very active practice and I'm sure he will benefit tens of thousands of patients out there in Colorado and he's going out there to join his younger brother, bond. Bond is now. He finished college out in Colorado. Bond majored in computer science and cybersecurity, so he's working in that field out in Colorado and they're both doing very well. They've learned a lot from my journey. They're both very interested in things like meditation and past lives and all that kind of stuff. So they've grown tremendously, as have a lot of other family and friends Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Did you ever listen to music during brain surgery? All the time? What music did you listen to? I listened to a lot of classic rock.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. Classic rock is I mean Pink Floyd, led Zeppelin, beatles and then of course some of the more modern stuff too. You know Goo Goo Dolls, and it turns out I also love classical music, true music, so I do listen to that too. But in the operating room for the most part it was, uh, it was classic rock and some jazz.
Speaker 1:That was kind of it do you like, do the surgery to the rhythms of the music no, no, the music almost.
Speaker 2:Uh, I don't even notice the music when I get in deep in the middle of an operation. I mean, when you're operating you get into a flow state Literally an hour can seem like 10 minutes because you really get into it and I'm so focused on what I'm doing. The music is just there when I get started, but as I get into the operation, nothing else matters but what I'm doing in that operation.
Speaker 1:And what's coming up next for you, even what projects? What are you excited?
Speaker 2:Anything, Well, I am absolutely fascinated by mechanism. I want to for all those materialist scientists out there who know that materialism is false but they're looking for how do we look at this brain-mind relationship and make sense of it and our notions of free will and all of that in this new, evolving mindset. And I would say that the worldview we're promoting is idealism, primacy of mind or more specifically I would say, evolutionary panentheism, which is kind of the notion that that God force, that God mind, is in all of this. You know, the whole universe is in that mind of consciousness, and so we kind of have it inverted and we think we're these little isolated pieces of consciousness, separate from the rest of the world, and we don't realize we're actually sharing the mind of the universe, of the world and we don't realize we're actually sharing the mind of the universe. And how that works and how, especially how quantum physics and how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied at the level of synaptic junctions, neurotransmitter release, all that kind of thing is right at the core of it. I want to come up with a much richer explanation of every bit of that.
Speaker 2:How does time work? I mean time is one of the greatest mysteries in modern science. We have absolutely no idea what time really is, and especially when you open the door through life reviews and people reliving their lives not just remembering, but reliving them. In these extraordinary spiritual situations, there's tremendous room for us to expand our knowledge and the more we can come up with some driving mechanisms to allow people to get into these deep states, I'm convinced meditation is the best way to do it. Now I'm also aware of of people using psychedelics for this purpose and there's a lot to say about that. For one thing, psychedelics show us when you image the brain, you realize the brain is not causing those phenomenal changes. When you take psilocybin or LSD or DMT, the brain is getting out of the way, it's going dark. Don't expect to use brain imaging and studying the neurons and the neural correlates of consciousness to ultimately explain those phenomenal experiences under the influence of those entheogens or psychedelic substances.
Speaker 2:The other important thing about psychedelics that I would point out is the work of Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins. Sadly he passed from this world last October, but he's the one who really kind of opened the door to restudying psychedelic substances in the modern era in the United States. And just to quickly mention, he had a beautiful study where one dose of psilocybin was effective, even one year post-treatment, at alleviating severe addiction. Alcohol, opiates, what have you? 80% success rate at one year after one dose.
Speaker 2:So that's not taking it as a medicine on a regular basis and what I would argue is that one dose in a proper therapeutic setting is giving people access to their higher soul, the kind of aspect of them that is not limited by the kind of ego thinking but is much grander, and that is the part that's where all that healing comes from. That's where the healing in the miraculous healing and in the ease comes from. So the more we can all awaken to that kind of presence in ourselves, the more we can all contribute to our own kind of healing and growth and coming into wholeness.
Speaker 1:When people are meditating and they're doing brain scans, then is the brain kind of turning off again, like what happens with the psychedelics.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting question. You find multiple things happening with the meditation and different areas lining up, but it's not quite the same as psychedelics in terms of a global shutdown of these, like the default mode network, which is a network that basically bridges throughout both anterior and posterior aspects of the brain, and that's the network that we think is most active for the daydreaming self who's not doing any kind of a chore at all but just being in the moment. But that default mode network disappears under psilocybin, lsd and DMT Very important point and there are similar changes that occur with meditation, but not quite the same and not quite as extensive. But I think that once you get into kind of deep resonance with that lower level of the brainstem, for example through sacred acoustics, that you basically bypass whatever is going on in the brain, I think that's where our consciousness really is set free and people showed back in the late 20th century that bina our consciousness really is set free. And people showed back in the late 20th century that binaural beat brainwave entrainment could be very effective at helping people get into states for successful remote viewing, discerning information at a distance, like in the psychic spy programs, and also for out-of-body experiences.
Speaker 2:They found that these tones could be very powerful and I think a lot of that effect is something that is so primordial down at the level of the lower brainstem that you might not even see those effects up in the cerebral cortex. Although I would love to do that study and you know I don't have ready access to laboratories and functional MRI in my current environment, but I do work with other physicians who do, and I think that would be a fascinating study to do I'd love to look at people under a deep influence of binaural beat, brainwave entrainment and see what are the changes we're noting in their cerebral cortex. Functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, other techniques like that, but with psychedelic substances. It's very clear that no part of the brain is increasing its activity under those substances and that's quite remarkable. If you've ever taken them, you kind of understand, you know what's going on there and it's not happening because of anything going on in the brain other than the brain getting out of the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it so good. Thanks so much, Dr Eben. You've spoken about so many things and there's a lot of resources, a lot of areas of interest. I'm particularly fascinated about these resolved reincarnation cases, the 1700 or something.
Speaker 2:It is incredible stuff. So thanks for doing what you do, dylan, getting this out to the world and maybe we can talk again someday. It's been wonderful talking with you and you have a wonderful. For me it's evening, I guess, for you it's morning.
Speaker 1:Morning. Yeah, yeah, thank you, you too, and I just want to say on that, like with all this information, it can be a bit overwhelming. I mean, you could spend a whole life, fulltime, more than full-time studying the abundance of literature and communities all around these topics. But, as Dr Ibn said, really the fundamental is going in your own consciousness and expanding and experiencing this through meditation, through practices that's really, rather than intellectually researching the accounts. Then you're going to really open up to these realms. Absolutely Beautiful, well said. Thank you so much, dr you've been in.
Speaker 1:We'll chat soon, all right thanks a lot, bye-bye thank you for listening.
Speaker 1:If you made it all the way, well done in exploring these realms of consciousness. If you want to listen to something similar along the line, you can check out another podcast, episode number 62, honoring Our Ancestors for Celestial Support in Life, with Dr Robert Svoboda, a Vedic scholar, doctor, amazing person, and that is really discovering and understanding practices that we can do to connect with our ancestors on their ancestor realm. So check out episode number 62 of the Vital Veda podcast and check out other episodes of the Vital Veda to learn about consciousness, spirituality, the Veda, which are the laws of nature. Thank you for listening. If you want to support this show, please, as you've noticed, we've kind of slowed down a bit on the podcast episodes, but we're still going. We're going with interviews and you can leave a review, you can share this, you, you can subscribe.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is that's going to reciprocate the flow of energy that's going to cultivate the conversations, more expansive conversations, and actually take action on the wisdom we're receiving. Right, if you got this from this interview with dr even alexander, let's take action. Let's really practically practice this loving, compassionate kindness. Practice it. Practice it. That's what's going to really transform and get us out of these dirty habits and these remnants of ignorance that lead us to these patterns of other than loving, compassionate kindness, and things that we're going to have a tough time metabolizing now as well as in our past life review or current life review. So thank you so much for listening. I really really appreciate you, especially if you listen to the end and until next episode. Tune in much love.