With the neurosurgeon whose near death experience exposed him and
the world to transcendent reality and the observed truth
of his own soul. This is Neon Galactic.
I'm James Falk, Thanks for joining us. 1st, Please remember
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When the show ends, the conversations are just getting
started. Doctor Even Alexander was a
successful neurosurgeon, a scientist trained on the
geography of the brain and in the science that believes the
brain's complex systems work to produce conscious experience.
He was a physicalist and expert in the supposed mechanisms of
mind, and a surgeon capable of penetrating physical layers to
perform reparative interventions on the most complex organ in the
known universe. Then his own brain got switched
off and that silence produced by a deadly case of bacterial
meningoencephalitis. The world dissolved and the
doctor was launched on a journey of spiritual discovery.
That adventure has since rearranged his worldview and
inspired millions of people through the sale of his best
selling books and the hundreds of interviews that followed in
their wake. When a man trained and how the
brain responds to trauma and approaching death is suddenly
thrust into the heart of a profound near death experience,
we're all blessed with a unique and informed perspective on
whether those experiences are to be believed.
He understood the processes that should have kicked in, the
phases of dysfunction and the lack of a coherent signal, but
what he experienced belied those conditions.
A hyper real space suffused with love full of beings and the
radiant sense of belonging from a worms eye view of being to
what ultimately seemed like the beneficent source of all
existence. The Doctor's journey was an
odyssey of spirit that left him transformed.
He survived the meningitis despite a dire prognosis.
He achieved a full recovery and began the revelatory task of
processing his experience and sharing his new found insight
with the world. And today, he's here with us.
It's an honor to have him on the show.
Well, James, it's a joy to be with you today.
Thanks so much for having me on. No problem, it's my absolute
pleasure. As I mentioned to you before the
show started, I've been covering the anomalous from UFOs and
spiritual experiences to near death experiences.
And I think a lot of these phenomenon are hinting at the
same neighboring reality that we've kind of come upon in
various guises over, you know, the history of humankind.
Your book dropped like a bomb, I think, and in this space,
because you're obviously a trained medical professional
with a deep, intimate knowledge of how the brain works.
And yet despite what you knew, how the brain should have been
behaving, you had this experience that seems
absolutely, you know, miraculous.
So maybe we can just start there.
I know you've told the story a lot, so I apologize for that.
But for viewers who may not be familiar, can you describe for
us what happened to you and then a brief overview of where you
went and when you had this experience?
Sure. Well, it's important to point
out, as you did in the introduction, that I was raised
in a very scientific family, my adoptive father.
And note the word adoption, because of the fact that I was
put up for adoption at age 11 days by my birth mother, who was
unwed, is a very, very important part of my entire big story.
But at any rate, I was adopted into a wonderful, loving family.
That father was a mentor, incredible inspiration to me,
and he was very scientific, fully aware of Big Bang
cosmology and all that, and yet I still have it, my bedside, the
pocket Bible that he took with him to World War 2, basically 2
1/2 years overseas. He had this New Testament and
Psalms tucked in his pocket and I think it was his strong belief
in God and power prayer that brought him back to this world
pretty much unscathed. And he headed up a a
neurosurgical training program was very successful in his
scientific and healing endeavors.
But like many of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I was, you
know, always knew that science is the pathway to truth.
But like so many other people, I made the mistake of thinking
Newtonian deterministic science was a pathway to truth as
opposed to realizing that when it comes to brain, mind and the
nature of reality, you need to be deeply into quantum physics
to even begin to understand what's going on in quantum
physics for more than a century has been screaming at us that
mind is fundamental compared to matter.
So anyway, that's kind of the backdrop of it all.
I wanted to believe what I've been told in that Methodist
Church in North Carolina all those many years my dad took me
to church. And yet in those many years
working as a neurosurgeon, I was very confused.
How in the world could conscious awareness survive the death of
the brain and body was a big mystery to me.
That's why I think I needed a really deep dive.
And that's what happened to me in November of 2008, very
suddenly, out of the blue, at 4:30 in the morning.
Horrific back pain, headache, soon grand Mal seizures, deep in
coma. There's a a falsehood out there
perpetrated by an irresponsible writer that tried to claim I was
in a medically induced coma. Nothing could be further from
the truth. This was a meningitis induced
coma. And that makes a giant
difference to the medical community because meningitis is
a perfect model for human death. It wrecks the outer surface of
the brain, the neocorteur, the part that contributes to every
bit of detailed conscious human awareness.
And in fact, in my case, the medical parameters are so
damning. The Glasgow coma scales of 5-6
and seven. Anything below 9 is deep coma
and any and and a corpse gets a three.
So 5-6 and seven are pretty bad and then in absent oculocardiac
reflex. All the features are mentioned
in a medical case report of my medical records and that case
reports very important for anybody trying to understand the
the depth and the power of my case.
Case report was written by three doctors not involved in my care
but fascinated by my recovery. Case report is published in a
journal of Nervous mental disease September 2018.
The important things to get about the case report is any
physician who reads it will quickly realize that that brain
that they're describing, my brain was in no shape to harbor
any kind of dream or hallucination, much less this
profound extraordinary spiritual experience that I had.
And even a deeper mystery is how did I make a full recovery from
it? My doctors estimated I went from
10% chance of survival early in the week down to a 2% survival
by day 7 of coma on the ventilator.
And that that's when they were recommending to the family stop
the antibiotics, take him off the ventilator.
We need to let him go because he has no chance of of actual
recovery. They recommended that.
They actually recommended that to your family.
Yeah, that's what was going on. Day 7 was to take me off the
ventilator and there was discussion going on around all
that when I started fighting the ventilator and coming back to
this world. But at any rate, So what I want
to do is share with you what I've been through that week and
and also eat into what I was actually experiencing when I
woke up because it's not what people would expect.
My brain was still horribly impacted by the meningitis.
But the important point I'm making about that case report is
that the the peer review editors of the scientific journal
challenged the authors and said this case is absurd.
It's unprecedented in the medical literature.
Somebody this I'll from E coli bacterial meningoencephalitis to
make a full recovery after a week in deep coma with those,
you know, neurologic findings. How do you explain it?
And they said it's because he had a near death experience.
That's what allowed for this profound healing.
And that's the place where people, and that's where the
scientific review editors, actors are showing a tremendous
wisdom just because it doesn't fit the materialist model, you
know, they were running with it because they recognize this is
an absolutely extraordinary case.
It need to be out there. So anyway.
There is AI would point out that Wikipedia does try to like
minimize your case. Like I read through the article
on there and they quote someone saying it's a medically induced
coma. But I've read your books and
I've had heard you on other interviews sort of make the case
that that is not true. Well, so I appreciate you
clarifying that. Well, the reality is there is a
Gestapo bunch of editors in Wikipedia whose job it is, is to
stomp out any hint of spirituality anywhere out there
with a scientific basis to it. So they were stomping all over
my case. So to me, Wikipedia is a
laughable entry. I mean, it's just pathetic, but
that's what you expect from a dictionary where any Tom, Dick
or Harry can come in and make an edit to it, and you get these
militant editors who don't do anything but edit Wikipedia and
forget it. It's it's.
They're trying to enforce a worldview.
That's all they're doing. And so it's they're not
interested in. The, you know, the last laugh is
going to be on them because they think they're so smart, but
they're willfully ignoring a tremendous amount of data that
steers us in a different direction.
So that's their own problem. I'm not worried about them, but
I am worried about people who read that article and think,
well, now I understand Evan Alexander and then they move on
to for the next case. I think that's tragic that that
horrible, you know, anyway. Hopefully, hopefully
conversations like this will help dispel that as best we can.
And I, I've talked to a lot of people who've been profoundly
moved by your experience. So your legacy, I think is is
intact. Well, thank you, I I hope when
somebody writes my obituary they don't refer to the Wikipedia
page. I think we can all say that.
Yeah, really. Well, anyway, let me get back to
what was going on in this coma. Important to point out, there
was one very atypical feature of my coma that some people worry
about when they hear this. And I, I, I tell you, don't
worry. You don't have to be concerned
about amnesia. I had a complete amnesia.
I mean, I had no knowledge of Earth, humans, it's universe,
certainly no memories of Evan Alexander's life.
All my language was gone. And of course, when I first came
back to this world in those weeks and months after coma, I
tried to explain that amnesia as simply being, you know, a
consequence of my prior belief that memories are stored in the
brain. I, I in our third book, Living
in Mind for Universe, we talked about how neurosurgeons have
finally come to realize that long term memories are not
stored in the brain. They can't be based on all the
operations we've done, etcetera. So we know that memories not
stored there. At any rate, that was my kind of
initial assumption to explain the amnesia.
But I think the amnesia was really there to serve as a much
deeper kind of lesson about the brain, mind, nature of memory,
nature of consciousness, their interactions and all that.
Because my journey definitely gave me a whole different view
of how all of that is interconnected and works
together. Now in this very amnesic state,
I found myself in what I call the earthworms eye view.
Now I never had a body image of any sort anybody awareness
during any part of this journey. I was simply a speck of
awareness. And the speck of awareness was
began in the earthworms eye view was kind of murky, like being in
dirty jello, kind of like roots or blood vessels all around me.
It was kind of a noxious, foreboding sounding place, and
yet I knew nothing else. So to me, hey, this is it.
I accepted it and just thought, this is the way the world works.
But then there came a slowly spinning white light out of that
murky darkness, and it had fine silver and golden tendrils
around it, and it was spinning very slowly as it approached me.
And it also came with a perfect musical melody.
And music or vibration frequency are very dominant themes of both
my journey, my spiritual journey, and of a lot of the
work I've done since then. In terms of meditation.
Because I use sound in the form of sacred acoustics.com, which
is a form of binaural beat, brain wave entrainment to get
into deep transcendental states. And I've been doing that for
more than 13 years now to help reconnect and cultivate my
relationships with this profound realm that I first found in my
near death experience. So at any rate, but the slowly
spinning light turns into a portal and it leads me up out of
this kind of ugly earthworm. I view realm up into a rich,
ultra real gateway valley. And this is where things really
kind of get into the NDE world. Because it's important to point
out that's where we would reunite with souls of departed
loved ones, where we go through life reviews, plan next
incarnations, the challenges and hardships and all that that we
wanted for the kind of soul growth that we're we're going
for is higher souls. And at any rate, it's a timeless
realm. That's the important fact.
I can discuss much later of life reviews and and how they inform
us so much about all of that. But the reality is in this
beautiful gateway valley, it had many earth like features, but it
was also a very rich and spiritual world.
I often say it was like Plato's world of ideals, but for the
individual soul. It's kind of a world of
templates of potential perfections and potentialities
so that we can bring into our lives as kind of higher souls in
this. I'm sorry, did you?
I said, yeah, I was just marveling at your story.
Go ahead. I'm enjoying it so much.
OK. But anyway, so I was a speck of
awareness on a butterfly wing. That was my my kind of position
in in witnessing all that was going on around me.
There were millions of other butterflies and they were
looping and spiraling in these vast formations, incredible
rivers of pure color. And color is beyond the rainbow.
I mean, the beauty of the scene completely escapes my linguistic
abilities to try and describe it.
And I remember witnessing around me the earthly features.
There was this tremendous forest.
There were sparkling waterfalls and the crystal blue pools.
There was this Meadow down below and there were thousands of
beings in the Meadow, dancing, joy, merriment, children
playing, dog jumping, incredible festivities.
It was all being fueled because up above would be swooping orbs
of angelic choirs who were emanating chants and anthems,
hymns that would just Thunder through my awareness with this
incredible sense of of kind of awe and majesty.
And yet oddly enough, with all these words I'm using, it felt
like home. It was familiar.
And in fact, I think it's that kind of background sense of
familiarity that resonated with so many people who read the book
Proof of Heaven. I think that's the reason why
thousands of people reached out to me to give me feedback about
their own journeys, because it's something about that wording
allowed them to remember something that maybe had been
suppressed or was subconscious, but now it became part of their
journey. And it's because these journeys
are so common that I think ultimately this world is waking
up very rapidly to that incredible truth.
I remember there was a point early on, and when I'm on this
butterfly wing, witnesses all these incredible joy and
merriment and festivity. When I witnessed a soft summer
breeze. It blew through.
And I remember in my writings weeks later, I called that the
breath of God or divine wind. It was my first knowing in that
amnesic state of the presence of that infinitely loving Co
creative God force. So that's that's what comforts
so many near death experiencers. In fact, more than 90% of near
death experiencers over thousands of years across all
belief systems, many previously atheist diagnostic, but more
than 90% of them come back to this world, not just believing
in, but knowing in the reality of this loving, intelligent
force at the core of the universe that seems used to have
a personal interest in them. That's what that interaction,
interaction of the near death experience is all about.
And that's what I was just beginning to discover this.
But this incredible sense of that loving God force was so
comforting. And the best part about all of
this is that I wasn't alone. On the butterfly wing there was
a beautiful young woman, my spiritual guide.
She had sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, my forehead,
broad smile. She looked at me with a look of
pure love. She never had to say a word, but
her reality, her knowing, her deep lesson to me that came into
my mind as a pure conceptual mind meld flow that I converted
into translated into words many weeks later.
The message was you are deeply loved and cherished forever.
You have nothing to fear. You're richly cared for.
You can do no wrong. And I that last phrase, I wish I
had explained better in the book Proof of Heaven, because some
people misinterpret that and they haven't figured out that
we've got into this incredible realm of light and love where if
you've ever done any greedy, selfish things, hurt other
people, etcetera, it looks especially bad in that light.
So in other words, the more we align with light, love,
kindness, compassion, and mercy, the more we have an effortless
flow through that level of the spiritual realm.
But if we've been handing out a lot of pain and suffering to
others, that can end up looking a lot like hell.
And that's a discussion we can get into shortly in Life
Reviews. But anyway, getting back to my
journey, that message to me was so complete and pure and
comforting and refreshing. I cannot tell you how much that
kind of liberated me on this journey.
And it was then that I remember those angelic fires above the
music, the chants and hymns would then become yet another
portal. I remember seeing all of four
dimensional space-time, which were you could vaguely sense
beneath the spiritual level, all of that collapsing down.
And then all of this rich spiritual realm, the gateway
valley with all of its kind of eternal access to all the
eventualities of our lives and how they all contribute to each
other. And it's far more powerful as a
lesson when you can see it all simultaneously like that.
That's one of the reasons Ndes are described as ineffable or
beyond our language is we really don't have a good way of
describing that kind of overview of of the events of our lives
and potentialities, the kind of soul lessons, all of that kind
of thing. So at any rate, all of that
collapsed out and I was ascending to another light
portal and that led me up into what I call the core.
The core was an infinite inky blackness.
It was filled to overflowing with an ocean of unconditional
love of the creator for the creation that God force.
Important to point out, the God force is not something that
judges us in those realms, but it, it really kind of provides
that assurance that the highest and best and loftiest goals of
love and light and passion are something we can accomplish the
more we align with that force. And So what would happen is
every time I entered that core realm, there was a message,
you're not here to stay. You'll be going back.
We'll teach you many things again, not as words, but as pure
conceptual flow that I've been translated into words as I was
trying to record all this weeks later.
And in the core realm, there were many lessons, and in fact
one of them I'll get to in a minute, but I have to explain
that I would also. Stumble back down from that
realm, all the way back to where it all began.
That earth were my view. And by remembering the musical
notes of the melody, going through that musical cadence in
my mind, I would conjure up the light portal and it led me up
again. And I went through that journey
many times with many lessons at all the different levels, but
that was kind of the general backdrop of what I was going
through. And all of it, importantly,
seemed way too real to be real. This world is very murky and
dreamlike by comparison. That's one thing where I think
some people who haven't had an NDE kind of missed the missed
the point. They think that Ndes must be
vague and murky. No, not, not that world.
That's why it serves as such a perfect kind of ideal world for
all of us. And that's why for me,
meditation, centering prayer are so important.
At any rate, I would go through these multiple levels multiple
times. I'd even come to think that all
I had to do was go back to the earth.
From my view, that's what they meant by you're not here to
stay. But there came a point after
several passages through these levels where I could no longer
conjure up that musical melody that would lead to a light
portal taking me up to the gateway valley.
And to say I was sad at that point would be an
understatement. But also, no, I could trust.
I knew I I would be taken care of.
I've been promised that every time by that beautiful guardian
Angel. And that was a message.
It was greatly reinforced in the core realm.
And I remember one of the very last passages through the core,
I had one of the most fantastic visions, and this is one that's
taken years to unravel. But that vision was one, I used
to call it the Indra's net vision, because that was a term
borrowed from Hindu cosmology, but it doesn't really match
perfectly. And and what I saw in this
vision in the core were these interwoven threads.
And there was this beautiful web and weave to their structure.
And they all contributed and LED to this golden center, kind of a
perfect horizon. And the way I interpreted that
after, you know, years of meditation and, and trying to
make sense of the vision as it occurred to me, is it so those
interwoven threads are our lives of so a lifetime and then a
death. And then going through life
review, going through the between lives phase where we
reunite with souls of departed loved ones and have these
beautiful connections and then plan next to, you know, soul a
transformation, dive in. And then, but we come back again
and again. That's the important thing.
And I, before my coma, I had no scientific knowledge of
reincarnation and thought there was no such thing.
But since then, I've learned about a lot of the work, for
example, done at University of Virginia, where they've studied
more than 2500 cases, past life memories over the last 65 years.
And of those 2500 plus, they've solved more than 1700.
That is, they've actually found the person who lived before.
And when you start reading that literature out at University of
Virginia and anybody can get it, go to UVADOP, s.org, University
of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, dot.
Org description for folks. Good.
We'll. So at any rate, and that's where
you start finding a lot of this information.
But to me and reading through that work from Ian Stevenson,
who did it originally and then Jim Tucker more recently, it's
absolutely overwhelming. Reincarnation is part of the
human condition. Period.
There's, there's even, there's even descriptions of people who
died of a particular kind of wound and then they're
reincarnated soul is born and their scars precisely where that
that wound occurred on the previous incarnation.
You're just. Absolutely.
Like, yeah, I mean, you can't argue with that.
I forgot the figure in Ian Stevenson's original series, but
it was somewhere between 20 and 35% of the cases had the exact
birth wounds that you're talking about that corresponded to the
mortal wound of the previous lifetime.
I mean, it's absolutely astonishing stuff.
But the other thing to get, as Stevenson and Tucker will tell
you, is you must harvest these memories from the children
before age 6 or 7, because usually, not always, but usually
after that, these memories are covered over.
So by age 8 or 9, children don't remember past lives.
Even the ones who've been heavily written about, they
don't remember it anymore. It's a process I call programmed
forgetting and that is that for whatever reason, there's some
some pieces of knowledge that are not supposed to be conveyed
necessarily by a given soul at a given level of development.
I would just put it that way. And that's why most of us don't
have memories of past lives and between lives, although they can
be readily recovered through hypnotic progression, through
meditation, through having a near death experience, are many
ways that past life memories can be uncovered.
And in my own case, I know I've uncovered many of them through
using Sacred acoustics.com, binaural beat, brain wave
entrainment. But at any rate, the you know,
the, the way this all unfolded was I had that incredible vision
that I now call the living tapestry.
And the thing that's very important to point out about
that living tapestry vision, which I think aligns with a lot
of other kind of NDE type account, is this is not the same
interpretation of reincarnation, for example, that you get out of
Buddhism. Because there it's about getting
off the the the wheel of suffering, you know, ending that
kind of chain of multiple incarnations to get away from
the suffering. Whereas in fact, the vision I
had is far more kind of brace filled and promising, especially
because of that golden center. It's like all of this effort of
sentient beings living these lives and going through this
kind of slow approach through multiple lifetimes towards that
oneness with the divine and more complete understanding of the
nature of the universe. And given that we're all sharing
the mind of the universe, that's what our mission is in existence
is know thyself, but basically know the mind of the universe
and. That's like filaments of God
going out into creation to know its own self.
Basically, which is also leading somewhere.
That's the important thing. I think the best of phrase I
would use to describe the philosophical position is
evolutionary panentheism. You know, pantheism, the notion
that God force a unified mind, is shared amongst all of us.
The brain serves as a filter transceiver that dissociates a
little Eddy current of that God mind that we use.
But you can show through all the effects of parapsychology that
our mind is not as much ours as we'd like to believe.
Telepathy, for example, occurs in 35% of identical twins.
Gileon Playfair wrote a beautiful book called Twin
Telepathy about all of that phenomenon from his scientific
research. And remote viewing is one of the
most kind of proven fields of kind of non local consciousness.
And in this world, remote viewing has been around since
the, you know, the mid and late 20th century.
I love, you know, there are plenty of stories of remote
viewing with intelligence communities like spying on
others, etcetera. But I love some of the big
stories. For example, Ingo Swann, who is
a very renowned remote viewer back in the 70s, was able to
remote view the blue ring of Jupiter six years before the
Voyager spacecraft saw the blue ring of Jupiter.
So we confirmed it by science, yes.
Exactly. And Stefan Schwartz, who's a
friend of mine, he's done a lot of work using remote viewing and
archaeological digs. In fact, of course, our our
friend Wikipedia says remote viewing is pseudoscience, but
that's because Wikipedia is a pseudo encyclopedia.
Jessica Utz, who was the head of the American Statistical
Association in 2015, gave a beautiful presidential address
to thousands of fellow scientists and statisticians
from around the world where she said that after studying more
than 20 years worth of data on remote viewing and on
precognition, that those effects were proven beyond any
reasonable doubt from a scientific perspective.
So anyway, it's. I believe she also said that if
it were any other science, the question would be dropped by
now, like we've established it by by statistical analysis.
But because it's, you know, rejected knowledge, you know, we
won't accept it, which. Is, well, another, another
interesting part of that story is she also asked the assembled
audience what would change your mind, more data or a personal
experience? And their answer in large
numbers was a resoundingly personal experience.
In other words, they're they're kind of bored looking through
the data, or maybe they'd never studied the data.
They wanted to have their own personal experience.
And I can certainly understand that fact.
Sacred Acoustics is a wonderful way to start getting into that
personal experience. Well, that's the, I mean, you
know, it's like one of the things that challenges I think
that we're going to face moving forward is if people are wedded
to the materialistic worldview and we're going to need a way
to, you know, engender that experience and, and other folks
for them to understand the reality of it all.
Well, that's a very good point. And also again, another topic we
can get into in more detail in a few minutes if you'd like.
But it has to do with psychedelics because a lot of
people in the current era are, for example, signing up for
ayahuasca retreats and using a psilocybin and LSD and things
like that. And I'm very happy that that's
all back in the world of scientific research.
But my advice to the average person is that meditation will
be a much more reliable way of getting you where you want to go
in spiritual journeying compared to the psychedelics.
And that that comes from my own personal experience and kind of
understanding of this and a lot of what I've witnessed in the
last few years. But the the meditation is a very
powerful way to get there. And in fact, I think the key
goal of both of them, what's been revealed in scientific
papers in recent years, is that the interesting thing about
psychedelics like psilocybin magic mushrooms, is that the
brain under the influence of those substances goes dark.
The brain gets out of the way. The default mode network, which
is something that we can visualize in the brain with
magnetoencephalography, with functional MRI.
That network, which is supposedly the network that is
most active in our kind of ego daydreaming, eyes closed, no
particular task state, that network dissolves under the
influence of psilocybin, LSD, DMT, etcetera.
They all. And that's an ego dissolution,
which I think is where the power comes from.
So many of us live our lives, the little ego, the voice in the
head of running our lives and all the kind of fear and
anxiety. The ego uses its tools and
ultimately that's not who we are.
And so for psychedelics to turn off that ego network is very
important, especially when you acknowledge that also in long
term meditators, you can readily demonstrate with the same
imaging techniques that in deep meditation, those default mode
networks disappear. So it's it's there's a lot of
commonality and from my experience with a lot of people
in our workshops and things like that and that we've met who have
been big fans of ayahuasca and other psychedelics in general, I
think maybe a trip is OK. But I think anybody who's
depended on multiple trips, I kind of wonder, you know, if
they're really going to make the kind of progress they think
they're going to make. And my advice is go mainly with
meditation. There's there's clarity there,
I'm sure that you, you might not get when you're under the
influence of, you know, psychedelic drugs where that
experience might get, you know, that sort of refracted through
the chemicals. Right.
And, and also, if people have any kind of of ragged, kind of
unkempt edges around there, you know, when they're kind of
spiritual or mental selves, those things can unravel pretty
quickly with a powerful dose of psychedelics.
So I'm not as big a fan there. I do like the work, for example,
of Christopher Bache. He did 73 those LSD trips and I
think he had a very disciplined approach as a as a professor and
and he's written some beautiful summaries of that kind.
In the Mind of God, I think is one of his books and it's.
Absolutely From heaven. Yeah, that's the subtitle.
It's a it's a great book. He's I also love his book Dark
Night, Early Dawn. That book was written back in
the 90s and one reason I I love it is chapter 5 in that book is
actually a direct head to That is, Bob and Roe did a lot of
work without a body experiences using vinyl beat brain wave
entrainment similar to but not as powerful as Sacred Acoustics.
But he compared it with his own work using high dose LSD.
And at least in that particular chapter, he was very favorably
impressed with how far Bob Monroe had been able to go with
with binaural beat brain wave entrainment.
So I I think and in from my perspective, as I said, I think
the binaural beats are an incredibly powerful way to get
deep into transcendental states of conscious awareness.
So at any rate, should I get back to my story or?
Yeah, yeah, let's let's get back to your story.
Whatever. Yeah, let's finish it up,
please. I'll.
Move it along. So anyway, that living tapestry
was kind of the last major lesson of my journey.
And so I find myself in this earthworm I view.
I can no longer conjure up the musical port portals up in the
higher levels of light. And that's when I saw thousands
of beings going off around in the distance, heads bowed
somewhere holding candles, this murmuring energy coming from me,
from them. But because of my amnesia, I
still couldn't understand any of that murmuring.
But it brought me great comfort, which was surprising because now
it's back in that earth from my view, and I'm getting all this
tremendous comfort from these beings.
And that's when I had the final vision of my NDE that was of six
faces that bubbled up out of the muck.
Five of them were people who were physically present in the
ICU room the last 24 to 48 hours of coma.
And importantly, there were many family and friends there earlier
in the week who are not my memory.
So those faces served as what are called vertical time
anchors. They helped me to understand
that the vast majority of the coma journey had to happen
between days one and four or one and five of the seven day coma.
And I explained all the details of that in the book Proof of
Heaven and in Living in the Mind for Universe.
At any rate, it was the 6th face that really got my attention.
That was the face of a 10 year old boy.
And I didn't recognize him at the time, but it was my son,
Bond. They had protected Bond from the
worst news during this week. But that Sunday morning, Day 7,
when they held the conference saying I'd gone from 10% to 2%
chance of survival, no chance of recovery, he realized they
hadn't told him the whole truth. And now it was much worse than
he thought. He came running down the
hallway, pulls open. My eyelids were tape shut when I
looking there. When I looking over there,
neither pupil working. Anybody in medicine knows that's
a horrible picture, and I'm certain I did not see him with
my eyes or hear him with my ears because I was far too gone from
this world. But deep in that spiritual
realm, I could sense his pleading Daddy are gonna be OK,
Daddy are gonna be OK. As if somehow that would make it
so. And throughout this entire
journey, I had thought, this can all continue and can cease.
Doesn't matter because my amnesia indicated no connection
or responsibility to any other soul.
But now with that face and that pleading from Bond, all of a
sudden it mattered and was probably the most terrifying
moment of the entire journey because now a realm I didn't
understand at all, I had to some way navigate my way back to help
him with whatever it was he needed so deeply and and much.
And that's what brought me back to this world.
And I don't have any kind of specific memory of entering my
body except that I was struggling against the
ventilator and fighting the ventilator.
And that's when they pulled out the tube and I said thank you.
Now, at that time, my brain was still very impacted by the
meningitis and this amnesia. In fact, my mother, my sisters,
my sons at the bedside, I still didn't recognize who those
beings were. All I knew was that incredible
journey that I've just been on, that weakened coma that seemed
like months or years of the spiritual journey.
And I remember early on, the first few days, trying to
explain it to my doctors, and they were just shocked I was
even coming back. They would pat me on the back
and say, well, thank God you're coming back.
Your brain was soaking in pus. We don't even know how you're
coming back. But you can forget about it
because the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks.
And that's why it's important we have that medical case report
because a deep dive by experts showed a much more dire
circumstance going on with my brain, even though my doctors
had no expectation that I recover.
They were like, wow, who? We don't understand it, but at
least it's happening. And it took me about two months
to get all my memories back. I spent 36 hours after
excavation kind of in and out of a paranoid, delusional,
psychotic nightmare. But at any rate, the interesting
thing is the nightmare visions, I knew they were delusions when
they happen. And that's very different from
the deep coma experience, the spiritual.
Quality was totally different, like there's yeah, reality
versus brain induced. Absolutely.
Illusion. Or whatever.
Yeah, and, and it was and also those memories were much more
resilient. The spiritual memories of the
deep coma are as sharp today as if it all happened yesterday.
Whereas the memories of the ICU psychosis, I'm glad I wrote all
of that down way back in those early weeks because those
memories disappeared within a few weeks.
So a very different quality to their their nature and kind of
all of that. But the bottom line is that's my
story. I've spent 18 years as a
scientists, working with other scientists around the world as
well as thousands of other experiencers trying to make
sense of it all. There's no question we are in a
tremendous scientific revolution, a paradigm shift
that is unprecedented, but in many ways fascinating that some
of the deepest messages coming from this journey and from the
scientific revelations are oneness, unity, and the binding
force of the love. So in many ways we're just
returning like that TS Eliot poem where, you know, at the end
of the long poem, you get back to where you started.
We find out, well, we're, we've always been right there at the
beginning anyway, and we're just getting into this deep wisdom
through the scientific investigation of ND ES and
consciousness. And yet, ultimately, we're
getting into the same kind of truth that spiritual leaders
have known for thousands of years.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's basically the
perennial philosophy that, you know, has been sort of winding
its way through various human religious ideas for for
thousands of years. And you're absolutely.
Right. It's comforting that it's, it's,
there's a, you know, deep truth to that, I think.
I, I agree and it's, it's, it's just fascinating that this is
kind of where it's all coming and people can get to their own
discovery of this through personal experience, through
meditation, through going within.
This is one of the reasons why Karen Newell and I, she's the
co-author of my, of the book living in the mind for universe,
our third book. And also Karen's my wife.
She's my partner in this work and she's also the Co founder of
Sacred acoustics.com. So Full disclosure.
Anyway, it's been an incredible journey and I'd love to
entertain any kind of comments or questions you might have.
Yeah. No, I know I have several.
You mentioned life reviews. Can we talk a little bit about
what your life review consisted of and then how the experience
might be different for different folks?
I mean, is there, you mentioned that there may be sort of a
hellish kind of perspective people get depending on the
lives they LED before they before they passed.
I think it's important to point out because of my amnesia, I did
not have an Eben Alexander life review, but I saw life reviews
in very grand form, especially in that living tapestry vision.
There was no way to escape both reincarnation and life reviews
in that incredible vision I had in my last passage through the
core. So that's the important kind of
disclaimer about Evan Alexander's life review.
I could, I really couldn't have one.
But of course, I also had some incredible features in my
journey. The very identity of my guardian
Angel was, was deeply tied to my life and had to do with my birth
family and adoptive history. So life reviews are, you know,
an incredibly important part of this and also reincarnation.
As I said, the life review is really just a natural course
correction so that we don't have to necessarily repeat all the
lessons that went unlearned in this life, but we have an
opportunity to kind of Polish it off a bit before we dive into
the next incarnation. And that's why the life review's
so important. But the main discussion points
for life reviews I glean from an article by Bruce Grayson.
And he's a skeptical psychiatrist at UVA who's
studied Ndes for the last 45 or 50 years.
And he wrote a beautiful paper in the journal Near Death
Studies in the fall of 2021, where he classified something
like 700 life reviews out of his database, more than 1000 near
death experiences. And the important points I'd
like to make about the life reviews from his study, what is
it, 34% or 37%? So roughly 1/3 involve their
entire life and most people say, wait a minute, how can you go
through your entire life during a 10 minute cardiac arrest?
Well, I can tell you it's the timeless nature of that realm.
Once we're there, we're completely removed from earth
time and much more identifying with the with the eternity of
our souls. And so a complete life review
that admits nothing is easily something I can imagine
occurring to a soul that in that realm, in that complete realm of
eternity. Now, about half of them, 47%
said the events were relived as if they're still ongoing, not
just remembered. So in other words, this is
showing us that that serves as kind of a course correction and
an opportunity to learn lessons that we were meant to learn in
this lifetime, maybe didn't quite get.
But we can pick them up through the life review if we simply
acknowledge that. And that's where of course, the
the hellish NDE is also important because I don't
believe there's any such thing as an eternal hell.
That would make zero sense with with that loving God force that
I encountered that any soul would be so imperfect as to be
LED into an eternal damnation. So you can throw that one out,
but I think life reviews where somebody's handed out a lot of
pain and suffering to others that could easily be a vision of
hell. Now in, in Bruce Grayson's work
in those in that paper that I'm referring to, about 3/4 of
people, 76% stress that the life of you was from the perspective
of everyone involved. Now that's one of the most
important facts of this. This disclosure is more than 3/4
of these people. It's, you know, the golden rule.
Treat others as you would like to be treated.
Really the script and experience what you they you put people
through, right, that sort of thing exactly that's.
That's the point. And so we learn to treat others
as we would like to be treated. And this, you know, religions
have had thousands of years to teach that lesson.
I must say I'm very encouraged that this discussion that we're
having is based strongly in science, quantum physics and
neuroscience, philosophy of mind, parapsychology, non local
consciousness, you know, and the quantum physics has been a
driver for a long time, but that's been a deep mystery in
its promotion of the notion of the primacy of mine but to.
Me, can we, can we dive into that a little bit?
The the connection to quantum physics?
What is what is the mechanism through which all of this is
taking place scientifically? If if that's something you can
break down, sure. That's a great question.
And the way I would put it, the simplest way to get it is we've
been looking at the wrong way, you know, bottom up causality.
That is our expectation in science that if we understand
all the rules that govern the subatomic particles, you know,
photons, quarks, electrons, etcetera, that make up this
world around us and then build up those rules and understanding
that explains how this world emerges.
But one key piece that they're missing is none of us are
experiencing a deep naked reality.
Quantum physics teaches us first and foremost that an objective
physical world does not exist independent of the observer.
That's a very important point. And for example, John Archibald
Wheeler, who is a famous quantum physicist, is involved in
Manhattan Project. He was at Princeton in physics,
and he came up with a participatory anthropic
principle to try and explain some of the deepest mysteries of
something called the delayed choice quantum eraser
experiment, if anybody wants to look it up.
But it's a real mind Bender of an experiment.
And from Wheeler's point of view, you had to invoke mine.
You can't escape it. And mind is something primary,
not as derivative from matter. And so mind is absolutely
essential to all this. And past Paul Jordan, Erwin
Schroedinger, Max Planck, all of them have made statements about
the primacy of consciousness. So it was that mystery that the
subatomic particles seem to know whether or not they were being
observed. And the mental choices of the
observing scientists made a tremendous difference.
So that's kind of the starting point of the mystery.
But what I'll tell you is that what it really boils down to is
the brain mind connection is right there at the neuronal
level. And neurons are not Newtonian
deterministic machines. They are quantum computers.
Everything a neuron does is dependent on ion channels and
ions that are quantum particles and say, you know, molecules and
synaptic vesicles that are all quantum particles completely
obeying the principles of quantum physics, superposition,
entanglement and tunneling, things like that.
And so once you start recognizing that, you start to
realize, well, this relationship between brain and mind has much
more to do with kind of top down causal effects.
There's a fellow mathematician, George Fr Ellis, who has written
extensively about the top down causality in quantum systems.
And I think that's really where the answers lie is looking at
this top down causality. I mean for the same reason that,
for example, a mystery in the philosophy mind is the apparent
unity of consciousness. You know, everything that I see
here, smell, feel, body sense and awareness, sensing my
surround, putting that together with past memories, projecting
future events, executive function, every bit of it's
unified as one. How is it that multiple neuronal
populations can do that? Well, the way they do it is
because consciousness is unified as it's filtered in.
As I said earlier, the brain works as a dissociation
mechanism that dissociates little Eddie current of that God
mind that allows us to use it. But the interesting thing is
when we die, when the body dies and that that little Eddie
current is reunified back into the, the great cosmic mind.
It maintains a certain sense of selfhood.
And that is proven through all of those reincarnation stories.
The past life memories in children show us that just in,
in going back into the, you know, the, the ocean, a drop in
the ocean. And this is where I'm reminded
that beautiful poem by Rumi where he says you're not a drop
in the ocean, but the ocean in a drop.
And boy, does that say a tremendous amount that God mind,
that universal mind is within all of us.
The holographic principle is very active here where the mind
is a hologram, the universe is a hologram.
And they refractals tremendously.
Yeah, refractals. Of the whole.
It's more top down causality. So I'm answering your question
by saying there's a unification from that mind over matter,
spirit over matter that causes all of this kind of physical
world to emerge. But you know, the deepest
interpretation of quantum physics is like each of us is
wandering around with our own complete physical universe of
perception of and yet they don't necessarily overlap.
If you, you get dive deep into Wigner's friend experiment and
you'll start understanding the, the kind of strange twist of
that and why of the the proof is there that we're we don't have
an objective physical world existing out there independent
of our existence. And of course, anybody who's
paying attention to all those facts that I just delivered
about life reviews must acknowledge that we need a
complete revision of our notions of ontology.
I mean, how is it that the universe is able to do that?
You know, in 700 cases of life review in a more than 1000 Ndes
where you have these very dominant themes of people
reliving the events from the perspective of everyone involved
in a fashion that's more real than when they occurred in this
lifetime. You know, we need a big revision
and materialism obviously fails tremendously and is really falls
apart with this. And this is where evolutionary
panentheism starts to emerge as a very powerful philosophical
system. Evolutionary means we do have
free will and I think the quantum indeterminacy is, is
right at the heart of our human sense of free will, a very
important kind of concept, but that ultimately our our mind
determines the emergent course of how we see the material world
flow. And this is where mind over
matter, power of prayer, meditation, centering prayer,
all these things start to emerge as powerful mechanisms by which
we can, as sentient beings interact more with this world
around us. Learn more about our kind of
shared meaning and purpose to create.
In some sense. Right.
I'm sorry. To create.
It's very comforting, you know, because our souls are eternal
and the the thing that binds us together is not kind of hatred
and and hardship, but love, kindness, compassion, mercy, you
know, and anybody who says, well, wait a minute, you know,
ND ES, I want to know what happens when you really die.
I would steer them to work of Christopher Kerr.
Kerr, he was head of Hospice Buffaloes.
He didn't care about ND ES, but he cared a lot about people who
were dying and so he reported a lot of what they went through.
And you find the very same things that happen to people who
have near death experiences. Likewise, there are something
called shared death experiences which have been written about by
William Peters and by Raymond Moody.
Raymond Moody really coined the term shared death experience.
Not just near death experience, but anyway those are cases where
perfectly healthy normal people, their soul can get taken along
on a journey witnessing a full blown life review of the
departing soul before the bystander soul comes back to
this world. I mean so many pieces of
evidence that say this is how the rule really works.
You're not fooling yourself. And ultimately, those
reincarnation stories are some of the strongest evidence we
have that we need a complete we reworking of our ontology if we
have any hope of understanding the nature reality.
Yeah. I wonder if you mentioned
neurons as a quantum machine. Are you familiar with the OR JAR
theory of Penrose and Hammer off and microtubules?
You think that's a mechanism also?
Well, what I can say about that, and we discussed that in our
book, Living in a Mind for Universe.
And for those who don't know of Roger Penrose, he's a very
renowned Nobel laureate in physics, Physics, very
respected, beautiful book in 1989 called The Emperor's New
Mind, which I highly recommend. Anyway, he and Stuart Hameroff
and anesthesiologist friend out in Arizona, they got together
back in the 90s and came up with orchestrated OR objective
reduction. And it's 1 of 16 or so main
models of interpretation of the measurement paradox in quantum
physics about that intersection of mind and and matter.
And I think it's, you know, they invoke microtubules.
I mean, the problem was people recognize that quantum states
are very difficult to maintain in the warm, wet biological
world. In fact, when I came through
training in the 70s, eighties, they said that any quantum
effects were only relevant down within a few degrees of absolute
zero. So the extremely cold world and
subatomic world was the only place you'd find them.
Well, since then, biologists have found that quantum effects,
especially quantum tunneling, are absolutely essential to
explain photosynthesis. You know, the very fact we that
plants convert sunshine into stuff we can eat.
That depends on quantum tunneling in the chloroplast.
I mean, it's absolutely astonishing and it wouldn't work
without quantum mechanics. Likewise, our sense of smell in
humans is very dependent on on quantum physics.
That's how come we can discern literally millions of different
smells. And likewise migration of the
European Robin has been investigated.
Turns out the Robin can actually see the earths magnetic field,
doesn't see it pole to pole, but it sees it pole to equator.
Basically the inclination line of the magnetic field compared
to the surface of the earth. And the birds use that for
migration and that is a quantum mechanical tunneling effect.
So yes, a quantum mechanics is alive and well in the modern
biological world. In that context, you've got
Penrose and Hameroff coming up with this brilliant idea of
using microtubules, which are a natural structure in cells.
And certainly they're, they're prominently featured in neurons
and they construct an environment where you could
actually preserve quantum effects long enough to use those
effects for consciousness. And it's, it's really kind of an
extraordinary model. Now, one, I'll backtrack one
tiny piece, and that is that Rodger Penrose in his physics
wisdom muses over what causes that collapse.
And he talks about the one graviton limit.
I won't go into all that, but he's trying to associate gravity
with collapse of the wave function.
And so he's not invoking some mind, some God mind, you know,
running the world through these principles.
And that's where I would say that I'm not so convinced that
orchestrated OR is the complete picture because I believe
there's much more to be invoked about this top down causality of
a mental spiritual nature that's really running the show.
But I think that the microtubules is a brilliant idea
and that's what really allows for quantum effects to be
preserved long enough to be used for computation in a big field
effect system like a brain. And remember that these brains,
the quantum field is all throughout the universe and
that's what connects is the entanglement field, I would say
in many ways is the mental spiritual field.
And I'm sure they're quantum physics physicists who would try
and demote me for saying such a thing, but I would say they just
don't understand and enough about the challenges of
consciousness to get why that kind of top down causality in
the quantum entanglement field would explain so much about the
nature of the consciousness writ large.
That is the consciousness we're talking about.
Like occurs in these life reviews.
Yeah, I, you know, so your book and your testimony is something
that's has resonated I think over thousands of years.
I mean, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, they have allegories that are constructed around what
seemed like in your death experiences.
I talked to anthropologist Gregory Shushen, who is
chronicled a lot of those, you know, tales or stories or myths
that have resonance with what people now describe as as a near
death experiences. My concern, and I think other
people have this concern, is that religion has not always
been a positive force in human society.
It spirituality, it could be argued, is something different
than religion. Religion represents control and
institutions and whatnot, but how can we accept this reality
and, you know, sort of live in a universe that accommodates the
spirituality without falling back into all those old tropes
that have led us to problems so often in the past?
Well, I think what we can do is follow the lead of this
particular revolution that we're talking about and just pay
attention to personal experience, you know, meditation
of these ND ES, all the related phenomena and, and just focus on
that. And I'll point out several
things. One is that there's a saying in
the NDE literature and people often come back from a near
death experience, more spiritual but less religious.
Now for me, you know, I have great respect for religions as a
kind of a principle when they can be used to enhance humanity,
and that is to elevate us to our loftiest possibilities.
And as you point out, that is not necessarily the goal of
religious systems. In fact, many of them have
devolved into control mechanisms to for humans to control other
humans. And to me, that is a very sad
state of affairs. But my own personal experience
in both the Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church has been
that the church leaders that I've come to know and love in
those institutions have always walked the walk.
They were always filled with the love, compassion, kindness.
They were completely inclusive of all.
To the extent that religion maintains that that kind of high
wisdom of the actual knowledge of the prophets, that's all
inclusive and loving and compassion and kind and not
controlling and exclusive, that to that degree that religion is,
you know, following the proper pathway.
But Karen and I often define spirituality.
You don't need religion for spirituality at all.
In fact, in our definition of spirituality, you have three
ingredients. One is an acknowledgement of
this mental connection. That's the scientific piece
that's coming out very largely that our minds are all connected
through this incredible field of that entanglement field.
And so it's a sense of connection mentally and
spiritually with with our fellow beings and with that God force
of the universe. But also a sense of shared
meaning that we can share with each other in terms of, you
know, the whys and hows of of how we we live these lives.
And also the purpose kind of the general over the horizon look of
where is this all headed and why are we doing this?
And so I think people can use a personal program of meditation.
For example, if you go to sacredacoustics.com, there's a
free 20 minute on file download that listen with headphones or
earbuds because the power of binaural beats is by splitting
the signal to the two ears. They do work through speakers,
but they're more powerful when you split the signal in your ear
headphones. And so I highly recommend people
give that a try. If you're just needing relief of
anxiety, there's a beautiful. A pilot study in the peer
reviewed literature by Doctor Anna Yusum looking at sacred
acoustic tones and she found that over 2 weeks of listening,
there was a 26% reduction of anxiety symptoms in her busy New
York City practice versus only a 7% reduction in the control
group that got standard talk psychotherapy for two weeks.
So a three fold improvement in the in getting rid of anxiety
symptoms. And I promise you there's much,
much more going on with binaural beats than just a relief of
anxiety. And in our workshops, people can
readily connect with souls of departed loved ones, have
incredible experience with guidance, etcetera and the and
the magic to the binaural beats. I'll just cut quickly to the
chase. And we go into a lot of detail
about that in our a book Living in a Mindful Universe.
But it's causing a powerful oscillation in the lower brain
stem. And that is a similar principle
to say hypnosis where you use eye movements following a
pendulum or EMDR eye movement desensitization reprocessing,
which is a very powerful technique to help with post
traumatic stress disorder. And again, those are very rapid
eye movements and you're, you're oscillating in the the midbrain.
And with sacred acoustics and binaural beats, we're actually
going 150 million years back in evolutionary biology way down
into the lower brain stem, causing a powerful oscillation
there. That's one of the reasons why I
think people get such incredible transcendental experiences using
binaural beats. If you learn to ride those
tones, you can get extraordinary kind of phenomena of
transcendental levels of consciousness.
I mean, doesn't work in everybody, but it certainly
works in a lot of people. And if you go to
sacredacoustics.com, you'll find a lot of kind of clues on those
pages about how to do all this. And one other resource I'll
mention on evanalexander.com, there's a 33 day journey into
the heart of consciousness, completely free program.
More than 14,000 people have taken it.
They all leave their thoughts, their experiences, their
recommendations on those 33 pages.
So if people go to evanalexander.com and click on
that 33 day journey, leave your first name and a e-mail address,
you'll be off and running on a powerful 33 day journey that
explains so much of this and has a lot of corroboration from
thousands of participants. And not only that, it comes with
four free sacred acoustic sound files that people can use for
meditation. So 33 Day Journey at
evanalexander.com is a great resource.
OK, you mentioned your website. I'm going to read a quote from
it that I wanted to ask you about.
We often talk about this is me, first preamble.
We have to talk about how, you know, we are pivoting as a
society or as a species to begin to accommodate these truths,
whether it's, you know, science is coming to terms with the with
human consciousness and what it might what it might mean.
But I'm as I sit here today looking at the state of the
world, I have a hard time envisioning what that would look
like when these things, you know, sort of get realized on on
a societal level. So stating that, I want to read
your the quote here. My coma taught me many things.
First and foremost, near death experiences and related mystical
states of awareness reveal crucial truths about the nature
of existence. Simply dismissing them as
hallucinations is convenient for many in the conventional
scientific community, but only continues to lead them away from
the deeper truth. These experiences are revealing
to us. The conventional, reductive,
materialist physicalist model embraced by many in the
scientific community, including its assumption that the physical
brain creates consciousness and that our human existence is
birth to death and nothing more, is fundamentally flawed.
At its core, the physicalist model intentionally ignores what
I believe is the most is the fundament of all existence,
consciousness itself. Ndes such as mine then represent
the tip of the spear in a rapidly progressing
enlightenment of the scientific community around the mind, brain
relationship and our understanding of the very nature
of reality. The world will never be the
same. My question to you is, first of
all, beautifully put. But what does that world look
like? How do you think if tomorrow
they realize that consciousness is something that's, you know,
spread throughout the universe and we're all sourced from it,
How do you think that that changes humanity?
Does that lead to an ontological collapse among if people, you
know, their religious systems or scientific systems are
undermined? What do we, how do we get there?
Well. I wouldn't say the scientific
system is undermined. It's actually going through a
radical shift that'll make it far more applicable to the real
world. So we're, we're kind of, I mean,
to me of seeing this unfold, I mean, I, I know it seems
especially problematic in the current era because you read the
headlines, you look at what's happened in the world and I know
none of us have seen this much polarization, conflict and
friction in our lifetime. So, but I would say that's a
symptom of what happens when the world is going through a
paradigm shift. The fundamentalists recognize
it's of some conscious level that their days are numbered,
they're coming to an end, and they just kind of hit panic
mode. And so that's why it all looks
so frothing and kind of frightening right now.
But don't let that bother you because ultimately, underneath
it all, there is a tremendous revolution going on, fueled not
just by scientific knowledge, by this kind of integration and
assimilation of all of this kind of information we're talking
about, but also there's a groundswell of grassroots
support because of human beings having these experiences.
And they're, you know, absolutely not going to accept
some materialist pseudo explanation that denies the
reality of what they went through.
So these people are driving the revolution, too.
We were at a meeting in Belgium in 2018 where one of the
neuroscientists and a group from Belgium got up and showed a
slide where they made the point that there was a four fold
increase in the annual number of scientific papers addressing
near death experiences that started in 20/12/2013.
They attributed that four fold increase to the publication of
the book Proof of Heaven. Now, I don't know if if that is
true or if I was just fortunate in my timing, but the bottom
line is there has been a huge increase in the kind of
scientific interest in this and certainly a lot more books about
it. People are, you know, starting
to really kind of put these big pieces together.
And I think the issue is, you know, as we've kind of discussed
here, you need a pretty big overview and a lot of knowledge
of many disparate parts of of the puzzle.
That's the only way you can put it together.
I mean, you can't, for example, just focus all on Ndes.
We're going to study Ndes intensively, but you got to look
at everything else too. You got to look at telepathy, a
past life, memory in children, suggestive reincarnation of
philosophy, bind in the binding problem.
I mean, all these things add up. And that's kind of the case we
make in our book Living in a Mindful Universe, because it's a
multidisciplinary approach to trying to make sense of all
this. But the world that I see
emerging from it is 1 where more and more people are paying
attention to this. They're realizing that they do
have much power over their lives that has to do with rising above
their ego self. I love how Michael Singer in his
book the the untethered Soul, because that voice in your head,
your annoying roommate, well, that's mainly the voice of your
ego mind. But what, what I've learned is I
can kind of separate out my ego mind from what I consider higher
soul. The kind of higher aspects of
me, the part that wakes up between lives and is part of,
you know, the accumulation of, of the soul knowledge over
multiple lifetime. That part is something I can
cultivate through daily meditation.
And that's what I've been doing the last 13 years is sacred
acoustics, meditations, an hour or two a day.
Of course, a big part of this is bringing that back to this
world. The knowledge, the kind of
information we glean about our connections with others, our
shared meaning and purpose is something that we only really
achieved through living it here in these bodies, in this
material world. But never forgetting that our
ultimate home and our origins are in a an eternal realm of
interconnected soul and spirit and, and that it's ultimately
leading somewhere good. That's the important thing.
We're leading towards a world of harmony, peace, prosperity for
all, all inclusive, where we take care of each other.
And you know, to me, it's, it's such a kind of a natural way of
being. I mean, first of all, for being
a physician and, and taking care of people seems like a natural
thing to want to do anyway, especially when you consider
just the basic day-to-day gift of that kind of interaction with
the world. And I think ultimately, as this
kind of discussion gets out to the world, more and more people
will start realizing that they don't have to buy into the crazy
making headlines of the day and just think that's the full story
on this world, but that they can actually make a difference.
And with every smile, with every kind of interaction with fellow
beings, with more time and meditation, centering prayer,
and then spending more time bringing that kind of love and
light into this world and our daily actions.
I mean, that's, that's how we improve, that's how we grow as
souls, and that's how ultimately I think the mind of the universe
grows. In fact, I've become a huge fan
of Pierre Taylor de Chardin wrote that book, The Phenomenon
of Man in the mid 20th century, where he recognized as a Jesuit
priest, but also a paleontologist.
So a scientist with billionaire time scales that evolution was
happening, but on the scale much bigger than just Darwinian
evolution on Earth. And he saw all of consciousness
evolving. And that's what I think is
happening. That's what I saw in that
golden, you know, living tapestry vision deep in the core
round. And I think it's something that
I see echoed in many other writings in the current era as
we acknowledge that our old conventional thinking is
completely outmoded. The very fact that the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 2022 was for entanglement was a final
admission by the Nobel Committee that format 4 dimensional
space-time is no longer the ultimate theatre of operation of
causality within a scientific framework of understanding the
world. But that kind of mental aspect
or a mental spiritual aspect of the entanglement field shows a
lot of how this can can unfold. And some of the hinting for the
language I'm using in this can be gleaned from a paper in the
the esteemed scientific journal Nature in 2005 by Richard Kahn.
Henry, the head of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins.
And he wrote a one page essay called Mental Universe.
And he makes it clear at the way science quantum physics was
headed at the time that it was becoming clear to everyone in
the field that the universe was fundamentally mental and
spiritual. Enjoy.
Exclamation mark. That's how he ends the essay.
But that's the point. And I think we're only proving
that more and more as all of this information is consolidated
and people try and come up with a far more complete,
assimilative, integrative model of that takes all of this
information and tries to put it into a useful form of
understanding about the nature of reality.
Fantastic way to end it. I mean, enjoy.
That is perfect for both the essay and the show.
Thank you so much even for coming on the show, for all the
work that you've done. And I'd love to talk to you at
some point and get in the future and I'll follow everything you
do because I think that. 'D be great.
Well, James, thanks for having me on and yeah, let's talk
again. And what I'd suggest, if you're
interested, is let's get Karen involved because she has a lot
of wisdom about meditation, about consciousness.
I would love to. I would love to, yeah, talk
about the practical application of these ideas into a way of
life. I think that that's the next
frontier, you know? All right.
Well, James, thanks for having me on and thanks for doing what
you do to get this out there.