32 | No Soul Left Behind - Alive Again

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia pictures
and iHeart podcasts. So you see a movement and a
growing interest in the consciousness studies, near death experiences, and
even psychedelic research as signs of conversation beginning to shift.
Do you think that so it is happening? You think?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I think that's the biggest lesson from NDAs and from
the science of consciousness, that we have shared meaning and
purpose and also a shared connection and come to realize
that all that emerges in the physical world is ultimately
determined by our willful interaction.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
With the universe. Welcome back to Alive Again. I'm your
host Dan Bush. Today I'm honored to be joined by
someone whose story and work offers a quantum leap into
the way many of us think about consciousness in what
lies beyond this life. Doctor Evan Alexander is a renowned

(01:04):
academic neurosurgeon who spent over twenty five years teaching and
practicing at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in
the world, including Harvard Medical School. For most of his career,
he had a conventional materialist view of the mind and
brain until his own near death experience and remarkable recovery
challenged everything he once believed about the nature of reality.

(01:27):
His journey from the world of materialist science to a
deeper understanding of consciousness has become a beacon for anyone
seeking to understand what it truly means to awaken, to heal,
and to come fully alive again. Doctor Alexander's best selling
book Proof of Heaven, a neurosurgeon's journey into the Afterlife,
became a global phenomenon, offering millions of readers a deeply

(01:50):
personal and scientifically informed glimpse into the possibilities beyond death.
He has since authored several more works, including The Map
of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe, bridging neuroscience, spirituality,
and philosophy in a way few others can. Today, we'll
explore not just doctor Alexander's extraordinary journey, but the transformation

(02:11):
it's sparked, a transformation of understanding of purpose, of heart
and mind. We'll talk about the mind's role in shaping reality,
the illusion of separation, how profound experiences, whether through trauma, loss,
or near death, can transform us, and also about the
powerful transformation that can happen when we step beyond our

(02:32):
fear and into a larger view of existence. What drew
me to doctor Alexander wasn't just his near death experience,
although that's extremely powerful on its own. It's the fact
that he has since become one of the leading voices
in a growing movement to reimagine the relationship between consciousness
and reality through science, philosophy, and personal experience. I've been

(02:54):
searching for voices that are willing to challenge this sort
of materialist view of consciousness, which is the idea that
our awareness is nothing more than brain activity. Doctor Alexander's
story and research offer a radically different perspective that consciousness
is not produced by the brain, but is in fact universal,
something that we all have access to and can tap into.

(03:16):
As someone who's always asking questions about the mysteries of
life and death, I was inspired that his message actually
resonates so deeply with my own beliefs that our sense
of separation is an illusion created by an ego mind,
and that beneath it all is something profoundly unifying, something loving.
So while this episode focuses on doctor Alexander's specific experience

(03:39):
and viewpoint, I also hope that Alive again will serve
as a space to explore many different perspectives. But doctor
Alexander does draw on more than his own experience of
his end, and he's at the forefront of this new
research that's not dismissive of these ideas. In talking to him,
I was really happy that his experience has led him
to an inspiring and hopeful message about the true nature

(03:59):
of reality as one that reflects love and compassion. I mean,
our show is all about where human experience brushes up
against mystery and how those intersections transform us. So it
is a true privilege to have doctor Alexander with us
to share his journey and his insights. It really is

(04:23):
a true privilege to have you, doctor Alexander, on our show.
Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Well, Dan, it's a real pleasure to be with you today.
I appreciate your getting this out to the world, and
I can tell you're very knowledgeable about this and have
the right kind of interests. I mean, this is the
kind of interview I love doing.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
If you could take us back to the beginning of
your near death experience and how did it begin to
transform your understanding of not just life and death. But
I'm interested in your shift in yourself and your sense
of purpose. You have described your coma and your near
death experience as more real than anything you experienced in
waking life, and so I'm extremely curious about how this

(05:04):
may have shifted your sense of self and your purpose
once you came back, and more importantly, what parts of
yourself would you say that you left behind? Like what
I often ask people what did you lose and what
did you gain from this experience? So maybe maybe we
can start with that.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
All right, well, those are excellent questions. I think it's
important to point out that when all this happened to
me back in two thousand and eight, which is when
I went to a week long coma due to meningitis,
I was basically, you know, a reductive materialist neurosurgeon. I'd
spent fifteen years teaching at Harvard Medical School teaching neurosurgery.

(05:42):
Thought I had some understanding of brain, mind, and consciousness.
Now it's also important to point out that a deep
part of the background of my story is that I
was adopted. My birth mother was sixteen years old, unwed,
and in fact, I demonstrated what's called failure to thrive
as an infant and was hospitalized at age eleven days.

(06:04):
And I think part of that may have been due
to my kind of sensing the great discord at home.
I said, my birth mother unmarried, her her father was
often unemployed. You know, he'd had trouble with alcohol, et cetera.
So there were many issues at home. And so I
was born into a home that was somewhat troubled. And
then Social services took me away when I was eleven

(06:27):
days old, but my birth mother had to sign the
release papers and she didn't do that. She didn't want
to let me go, and so that put me in
kind of purgatory for four months in a baby dorm.
I'm just putting that out there. That's the starting point
of my story, and it is important because as much
as my adoptive father, who was a globally renowned neurosurgeon,

(06:48):
would certainly know about things like memory, he used to
reassure me there's no way I could remember anything that
happened back when I was that age. And I know
now that he was wrong. That I had a deep,
kind of smoke looking crater memory, and it was so existential.
It had to do with whether or not I even
deserved to exist my own birth mother left me behind,

(07:10):
and you find that animals left behind often go on
a hunger strike, you know, left by their mother, and
so that's what was going on. So early on I
had that kind of traumatic event that led to what
I believe were some subconscious wounds that were greatly healed
through my NDE. And so when I tell the story,
think of it in that context as an adoptee who's

(07:32):
trying to come to some kind of sense of his
reason for being in the universe. But suffice it to
say that in November tenth, two thousand and eight, when
I went into Comba very suddenly in the early hours
of that morning, I've had basically towed the line as

(07:53):
a materialist or physicalist neuro scientist by believing the brain
creates consciousness. That was the fun bent falsehood that was
going to now be exposed in my journey, because my
journey could not have happened according to the tenets of
modern neuroscience. It couldn't have happened, and yet it did happen.
And that, of course, to me, has been incredibly powerful

(08:16):
incentive to get to a deeper understanding of the nature
reality because trying to pretend that my old philosophical system
of materialism could explain it didn't work at all, and
that has to do with the medical details of the case.
So to kind of briefly go into the important features
of my journey, first of all, I'll point out that
I was in a state of amnesia. That's very unusual

(08:39):
be completely amnesic. I had no knowledge of Eben Alexander's life,
of humans, of this universe. It really was an empty slate. Now,
when I first came back to this world and my
science knowledge was not yet returned. It took about two
months post coma for a lot of that to come back.
But when I first came back and I tried to
tell my doctors about my spiritual experience, which I'll get
to in a minute, they would just say, well, your

(09:02):
brain was soaking in pus, we can't even believe you're
coming back to us. But you can forget about it,
because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. So
I thought, oh, well, the doctors say that that's what
dying brains do. I was shocked by the ultra reality
of the experience. But I remember even telling my older
son eb and fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience in college.
When he came home two days after I got out

(09:24):
of the hospital, I told him it was way too
real to be real. That was kind of the lesson
I'd gotten for my doctors, that that striking kind of
alter reality of it was due to that. But I
had only just begun investigating my own medical records, which
would completely defy that thinking. If the brain and the
neocortex played the role in consciousness that we normally think of,

(09:48):
then there was no way I could have had such
an experience given the devastation to my brain. And that
is all elucidated not just in my medical facts presented
in the book Proof of Heaven, but also in a
medical case report on my medical records that came out
September twenty eighteen in the Journal of Nervous.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
And Mental Disease.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
And anyway, the important thing is that journal article made
it very clear that my brain was way too damaged
to allow any kind of enhancement of activity. If anything,
you would expect great diminution in that brain's ability to
do anything because the entire neocortex was involved. And that's
why my case is so important to the neuroscience community.

(10:29):
And they take it quite seriously. Many people who study
consciousness pay big attention to this because it completely defies
those materialist models, and they basically become impossible of hopeless
arguments to defy my experience. And then, of course you
have my recovery. And that another challenge from the scientific

(10:51):
peerview editors of that journal was, how do you explain
this case? It's unprecedented in the medical literature to have
somebody that ill from bacterial innenguin cephalie. I is in
coma for a week, with all the medical parameters of
my case, the neurologic exams, etc. How could that all
happen and then have this complete recovery? And the doctors

(11:12):
who investigated the case said, it's because he had an NDE.
That's why he had this miraculous recovery. And so science
is now paying attention to spiritual encounters as profound explanations
for recovery that has no other explanation. So given that preamble,
I'll now take you briefly through what I went through,
starting what I call the earthworm's eye view, a primitive course,

(11:34):
kind of unresponsive realm, like being a dirty jello of
you know, I remember roots or blood vessels. I had
all kinds of sensory information coming into me, but I
never had any body awareness during any part of the journey,
and that I think is important. Luckily, I was rescued
from that kind of subtraining existence by a slowly spinning

(11:55):
white light that game packaged with a perfect musical melody,
and that open up like a rip in the fabric
of that ugly earthworm eye view realm that I'd first
started in, and led me up into this ultra real,
kind of sharp crisp reality that had many earth like
features but also many spiritual features. And for example, there

(12:16):
was this lovely meadows surrounded by a forest, sparkling waterfalls
into crystal blue pools. There were thousands of beings dancing
in this meadow, lots of joy and merriment, and children
playing dogs, jumping, incredible festivities, all being fueled because up
above the spiritual elements were these swooping orbs of angelic
choirs that were emanating chants and anthems hymns that would

(12:39):
just thunder through my awareness. I mean, it was a
scene of amazing beauty. In many ways. I describe it
as kind of Plato's world. Of ideals, kind of a
world of perfection that serves as a guidance as a
template for our kind of spiritual growth. And that's kind
of the way I sensed it as I entered it. It
also seemed to be very familiar. And I know thousands

(13:01):
of people wrote me after reading Proof of Heaven or
hearing my talks and said that somehow my words and
my depiction of the story reminded memories in them, very
deep and subconscious memories brought to the surface about their
own kind of life experiences between lives and past lives,
et cetera. So a lot of people resonated with what

(13:21):
I was saying in describing that now in this beautiful
gateway valley, I was witnessing it because I was a
speck of awareness on a butterfly wing, and there were
millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling in vast formations.
Some people make the mistake of thinking, oh, these are
symbolic of something. No butterflies, hummingbirds, owls. There are many

(13:42):
animals that are kind of totems for the spiritual realm
and play a big role in our human interpretation of
all that. And this is not something you know, I'm
kind of making up now whether they were actually butterflies
or flying carpets, I don't know. It was such a magical,
powered altra reality that the words kind of pale in

(14:04):
trying to describe it all. But the best description I
could have was that it was like these intelligent butterflies,
and that's what we were flying around on. And the
best part was I wasn't alone on that butterfly wing.
There was a beautiful young woman and she had sparkling
blue eyes, high cheekbones, my forehead, broad smile. She never

(14:26):
said a word to me, she never had to. But
her telepathic message to me, delivered as our minds melded
together in that beautiful environment, was the message was you
were deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear.
You're richly cared for. And I cannot tell you how
comforting that message was at that time. And I remember

(14:47):
sensing all of four dimensional space time, kind of this
lower level beneath us, but then the spiritual realm, where
there's something operative called deep time. This is a very
important concept. When you hear people talk about life reviews,
they often say that you relive the events and that
they're more real than when they were initially lived, and

(15:10):
owing that you relive them from the perspective of everybody involved.
So it's a very kind of cosmic consciousness view of
what happens during a life review. And the life review
is really kind of the Golden rule treat others as
you would like to be treated, written into the fabric
of the universe. And that's exactly so.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
You're experiencing your life reviews. You're experiencing these events not
just from a singular perspective, but you're experiing them from
multiple participant perspectives, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
In fact, there was an article by Bruce Grayson, a
skeptical psychiatrist who studied in these for the last forty
five years. It came out in the Journal of Near
Death Studies in the fall of twenty twenty one, and
it made it clear that something like three quarters of
people believed that reported their life review. And this was
in his reported involved seven hundred life reviews. There's six

(16:03):
ninety eight, seven hundred or so life reviews, right, and
the interesting thing is that three quarters of them said
it was from the perspective of everybody involved, you know,
as I often say, if you heard another, you're hurting yourself.
The golden rule treat others as you would like to
be treated, is right there with this incredible kind of

(16:24):
commonality of reports. Now, I couldn't have an Eben Alexander
life review because of the amnesia, but I saw life
reviews and reincarnation in these very grand visions that happened
at the next stage of the journey. Just as kind
of that musical melody had given me a light portal
up from the earthworm's I view into the Gateway valley, likewise,

(16:45):
a musical portal was about to expand again, and that
was one that was due to the angelic choirs above
in this Gateway valley, and so all of that deep time,
of that whole realm of time listeners, I would say,
they're not stuck in Earth time. That's why some of
these experiences are so hard to explain, and yet they

(17:07):
make so much more sense when you just acknowledge that
those are real effects. They're not vague memories of events.
It's a reliving. It's from all perspectives. It's kind of
shows us we're sharing the dream of the one buy,
that we're all in that together.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
It's interesting because the point of like one of the
reasons I set out to do a live again and
to create the show, it wasn't for any sort of
I wasn't looking for any like, you know, particular spiritual bent,
and I wasn't looking for any specific, scientific, deterministic look
at near death experiences. I was simply wanting to hear

(17:41):
the perspectives of the people who had gone through them.
And it has kind of developed since then into more
generally stories about human fragility and trauma and resilience and forgiveness,
and in so doing, I've really leaned into an understanding
of the mission of our show, which is to unify right,

(18:01):
and that we tend to not get into something a
lot of the people were affected by different politics that
affected their situation. We don't get too much into that
because I don't I want everybody to understand that there's
a shared human condition. We're all We're all going to die,
everyone we know on this planet, everyone that has ever existed,
you know, passes on. And so the point of our

(18:22):
show is to is to help people to hear stories
that unify us and give people a sense so that
they're maybe not as scared.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
You know, I think that that's really the beautiful lesson
that comes from all this. And when you consider that
this is not about any kind of religious kind of
posturing or ideologies, but more just about what happens to
people in the modern era. What do people report, and
how does that inform us about what we should expect
to happen when our own bodies coming to an end.

(18:50):
And what I will tell you is the evidence for
the afterlife is overwhelming. I should probably finish off the
little bits I was going to say about my plea
story and then we can get into all that. So
I just wanted to finish by saying that, you know,
I ascended to this higher level. I remember seeing all
of the material realm collapsing down, all of that deep time,

(19:10):
that spiritual realm with its kind of whole different ordering
and causality and apparent connections across the time, all of
that collapsing down until I entered what I call the
core now. The core was an infinite, inky blackness. I
often describe it as a dazzling darkness. It was a
complete resolution of all paradox. You know, we live in
a world where everything is in kind of a spectrum

(19:34):
of activity. You have darkness, light, you have good, evil, masculine, feminine,
all these different kind of ranges of possibility, and yet
in that realm, what happens is everything kind of coalesces
into that oneness.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
And for me, the core.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Realm was a realm of kind of coming into oneness
with that pure source of consciousness, that God force that's
at the source of all of our conscious awareness, and
recognizing I was never separate from that at all, I
could pool myself into thinking I was separate, but that
was kind of my ego mind and some of the

(20:10):
more human aspects kind of losing track of this deeper
connection with kind of cosmic source. And that also has
to do with causality. We are kind of prime movers
in determining the direction that our life will take, and
it's unfolding and that's very important.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
You know.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
In fact, the materialist side that I had worshiped before
my coma materialist or physical scientists will scoff at you
for even claiming to have free will, because they think
all just chemical reactions, electron fluxes in the brain, giving
an illusion of awareness, an illusion of willful interaction with
the universe. But that they've got it completely wrong. Every

(20:49):
bit of this is about kind of a soulful, a
purposeful reflection, and that indicates where mind over matic can
really occur. And we can get into that a little
bit later because I've got much more about it, but
just to kind of finish off my journey going into
the core, I had two visions on two separate passages
because I would cycle through these levels multiple times, and

(21:10):
the later one I think is more important. That's the
one I'll discuss. It was called the Indra's Net vision.
And in that vision, I saw our lives as these
interwoven threads in this beautiful, silvery, golden tapestry leading to
a golden center. And what I recognized there was the
threads represented in our lifetimes over multiple incarnations, as higher

(21:32):
souls that we are, indeed eternal souls that are contributing
to this growth of consciousness, this evolution and transformation of
the mind of the universe itself, that godmind. It's growing,
it's learning, it's teaching, and that's what we are all
part of. And to see all that. So not only

(21:53):
did I see the life reviews as a course correction,
but also the process of reincarnation is one where we
move closer to this, and I didn't realize that. You know,
there was a huge scientific basis for reincarnation before my coma.
I only did that homework afterwards. But for example, at

(22:14):
the University of Virginia, they've studied more than twenty five
hundred cases of pass like memories and children suggestive reincarnation
over the last six and a half decades, and over
those twenty five hundred, more than seventeen hundred or what
they call solve that is, they actually found the person
who lived before. But they also will point out to you,
doctors Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker, who did all that work,

(22:36):
that you must harvest those memories before age six or
seven because their natural processes in all of us that
cover over those memories of past lives. I guess it's
to give a skin in the game. You know, at
this stage of human development, for whatever reason, we need
to have a little more skin in the game that
were not these eternal souls, but to kind of buy

(22:56):
into this physical incarnation of so we don't dismiss or mistreated.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
Right risk of doing that. A lot of what I
want to begin to discuss with you after in just
a few minutes. We'll get to it in a bit. Is
is uh, huge questions I have about why why we
have We'll get into this in a little bit, but
why we have this this maya or why why is
there this ego that you call the supreme illusion? Why

(23:25):
is this built into our evolutionary process, or why even
in our cultural you know, biases. And I'm just really
interested in like the function of the default network and
the function of the ego as as creating the sense
of separateness. And I'm really curious about why would that
even exist for us? You know, what's the function of that?
We can get into that.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
But we can get into all that in a few minutes. Uh,
It's those are fascinating and very important questions because that's
where the kind of deeper meaning and reasoning behind all
this starts to crystallize out. But I'll just finish my
indie here to interrupt.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
No, that's quite right.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
But at any rate, so that vision was incredible, and
also that vision showed me this is not reincarnation in
the kind of blind mechanistic get off the wheel of
suffering and Buddhism, but much more of a grace filled
and progress and transformation filled. And that's where I think
we'll find some answers to your question, is because of

(24:26):
where all this allows us to lead our emerging reality,
and where human sentience and sentience of other of beings
throughout the cosmos is leading towards this progression and a
kind of a grace field growth towards oneness with the divine.
So it's not pointless at all. It's kind of about
a shared meaning and purpose. But at any rate, getting

(24:47):
back to my journey, there were many lessons. I mean,
we could talk for hours about so much of what
I learned and what was shown in various different ways.
But the important thing to get is that I would
cycle through these levels. As I said, I'd tumbled down
from that core level all the way back down to
the earth orm my view, and learned that by remembering
the musical notes of the melody, I could conjure up
that light portal that took me up and then they

(25:09):
always welcome by the beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing,
and then escorted up through the core into the deeper
lessons in that timeless realm of pure oneness. At any rate,
there came a time, as I'd often been told, going
into the Core, you're not here to stay, You'll be
going back. And there came a time, after multiple passages,

(25:29):
where I tried to conjure up the musical notes of
the melody to escort me up out of the earth
form my view, and it didn't work. So to say
I was sad at that point would be an understatement.
But also I knew I could trust that I would
be taken care of. And that's one of the most
beautiful things that anyone can gain from hearing these stories,

(25:50):
is a sense of trust in that loving God force
at the core of the universe. And from that point on,
one of the last visions I had in my Nde
was of thousands of beings going off around me into
the distance, arms up like that, some holding candles, some
with hoods, and this murmuring energy coming from them. The

(26:11):
fascinating thing was, even though I was back down in
this kind of murky earth for my view where it
all started, now they were all this kind of mirth
and joy that I sensed in the Gateway Valley and
the Core in earlier passages was now present at this
lowest realm and I realized. I called that the power
of prayer in my writings when I came back to

(26:32):
this world and a few weeks later was trying to
record it all. That's what I sensed as those thousands
of beings go around me, because it was kind of
guiding me back towards the earthly realm. And then there
were six faces that I saw at the very end
of my journey. They were very important. They serve as
what are called vertical time anchors, because in looking back
on it, the five of those faces were only of

(26:56):
family and friends present in the ic room the last
twenty four to forty eight hours of coma. So in
other words, those faces showed me that the vast majority
of the spiritual journey had to happen between days one
and four one in five and I explained all that
timing and proof of having and especially also in the
third book Living in a Mind for Universe or go

(27:17):
into some of that, and that's where we really bring
the science and spirituality together. One of those faces is
important because she was not physically present. That was a
good friend of mine all the way back to Freshman
English nineteen seventy two at UNC Chapel Hill, Susan Rinches.
That's when I'd first met her. We lost touch. And
then when I was a resident neur surgery in the

(27:38):
nineteen eighties, she was a co teacher with my former
spouse at a school in Raleigh, North Carolina, and so
they got to know Susan again, and at that point
they realized that Susan had done channeling work, and she
wrote a book called Third Eye Open about her work
where she had channeled to people like in coma and
other things to help them. And she came to me

(28:00):
because my former spouse and a good friend of her, Sylvia,
called Susan and asked her to intervene, and so on
nights four and five, she channeled to me. And so
when I was waking up in the ic room and
I say, you were there, and you and you, but
where was Susan, They said, well, Susan wasn't physically here.
She channeled to you from one hundred and twenty miles away.
And of course to me, I just knew, well, of

(28:22):
course that realm is non physical and so distance is
no object. So it made perfect sense that she had
channeled to me. But it was the last of those
six faces it's the most important. It was a ten
year old boy, and I didn't recognize them at the
time because my amnesia was filled very much. In effect,
it was my son Bond. That was a Sunday morning.
It was day seven of coma. That's when the doctors

(28:44):
held a conference where they told my family I'd gone
from a ten percent chance of survival early in the
week but was now down to two percent chance of survival,
but with no realistic chance of recovery. A week in
coma with a severe meningitis like that with a through
or spinal fluid glue coast level of one where years
of mine might be eighty, anybody with bad big turium

(29:05):
and andingitis might get to twenty. Well, none of the
consultants had ever heard of that, but my CSF glucose
was only one. They'd run out of sugar to eat
and they were eating my brain. So and of course
any neuroscientists today would look at me and say, well
you can and that's it, because look how well you're doing.
But that begs the question that misses the point that
was made by the three authors who wrote the case

(29:27):
report for the Medical journal that I had an NDE
and if you don't count that, then you really have
no way of understanding how I had this miraculous recovery.
So it's all that's a big important lesson for all
of us about the nature of free will and healing
and all those kind of things. But ultimately what happened
was in seeing that face of my son but not

(29:49):
recognizing him. He was pleading with me, Daddy's going to
be okay. Daddy, He's gonna be okay. Is if somehow
that would make it so? And that's how I came
back to this world. I don't understand the mechanics of
it all, and it was the most frightening aspect of
the whole part of the journey, because you know this,
I had thought throughout the NDE, this can continue, it
conceis doesn't matter. But now everything did matter. I had

(30:11):
a big sense of responsibility to this other soul and
really had to be there for him. And so it
was soon thereafter that I was fighting the ventilator and
trying to come back to this world. And I still
was in and out of a thirty six hour paranoid, delusional,
psychotic nightmare as I emerged from coma. But that was
very important because the memories of those events disappeared within weeks,

(30:33):
whereas the memories from the deep Comba experience are as
strong and resilient and solid today as if they just
happened yesterday, completely different from imagination or dreamed events. That's
why we need to take these stories so seriously at
any rate. So I did wake up came back to
this world. Initially, it was a very rough go for

(30:54):
my family because in those first minutes an hour or
so of waken up, I wasn't even recognizing love into
the bedside like my mother, sisters, sons, et cetera. But
those memories came back very rapidly, language, very rapidly, and
within a day or so I was getting a whole
lot back. But it did take, as I said, two
months to get everything back. And during that time, you know,

(31:15):
I was first of all writing down everything I could remember,
after my son advised me to write it all down
before I read anyone else's indie account. That was very
smart advice. Therefore, I had twenty thousand words that I
wrote down and I hadn't read indie accounts before. So
that was really my story without any kind of influence
from outside or anybody else. And then of course I

(31:38):
was going to the hospital, talking with my doctors, going
through my scans, CTSMRIS.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Et cetera.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
And it wasn't lining up. That brain was not just
playing tricks because it was dying. That brain was unable
to host any kind of dream or hallucination. That was
quite clear from the documented damage of the Glasgow coma scales,
the neurologic exams, as Kilo cardiac reflex, things like that.
It was this was a brain far too gone to

(32:05):
be hosting extraordinary, a rich and memorable and transformational spiritual experiences.
And so that's why it's important, is as I tell
in the book Proof of Heaven, that incredibly a mind
bending point four months after my coma, where I'd been
so shocked, you know, I realized if I had scripted this,
my adoptive father would have been the soul, would have

(32:27):
been the spiritual guide, and yet he was nowhere to
be found in And we describe all that in our
third book, Living in a Mind for Universe, where I
talk about encountering my father's soul two and a half
years after my coma in meditation. And that is a
very important point because when I encountered his soul. He
made it clear to me he couldn't be apparent to me,

(32:48):
as he put it with his sense of humor, Because
if that had been the case, in spite of one
in ten million diagnoses of equal imeningitis and an adult
in spite of one in a billion recovery, if my
adoptive father had been there, if his soul had been there,
I would have been a little more tempted to dismiss
it all as oh, you see who you want to

(33:08):
see on the way out. The universe kind of doubled
the ante and gave me a whole different level of
understanding through the identity of that guardian angel that I
only discovered four months post coma when I got a
picture in the mail from my birth sister who had
only met a year earlier, of another birth sister who
we had lost.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
And I won't say.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
More kind of spoiler alert for the book Proof of Heaven,
But when I recovered the identity of that guardian angel,
it brought me to my knees and I went, oh,
seemed way too real to be real, because it really happened,
and it's almost says if she's looking at me in
that picture saying, do you finally get it? I guess, Betsy,
I'm finally getting it. And since then, sixteen years of

(33:52):
hard work as a scientist, working with fellow experiencers other scientists.
It deeply involves quantum physics and how neurons are basically
quantum computers, and a deeper understanding of kind of top
down causality to begin making sense of it. But most importantly,
my spiritual journey has shown me that, you know, the

(34:14):
hardships and challenges and difficulties in life are gifts, and
it's how we respond to those and how we are
energized by those hardships and challenges, illness, injury, what have you.
That's what enables our incredible soul growth. And the soul
growth happens with what we do in these bodies, with
that temporary dumbing down and not necessarily remembering all the

(34:35):
knowledge of a higher soul than involves prior lifetimes, et cetera.
So there's a lot going on here, a lot of
moving parts, but it hurts to make a lot more
sense as you put this much bigger picture together. But
the bigger picture emerging in the scientific community is absolutely
one of a primacy of mind. That is what is
so reassuring that we're all truly in this together and

(34:59):
just as Inde have been trying to tell us for
thousands of years, you know, we're bound together through forces
of love, and love brings us into healing and wholeness.
And that's true for any one of us as individuals,
although no one's ever a quote individual. We're all part
of soul groups and none of it ever happens with
an individual soul, but it always happens with groups evolving together,

(35:22):
and we're all doing that in large measure, you know,
with sentience throughout the cosmos, and that includes sentience thence
also comes in and out of kind of material bodies,
but is ultimately much more than that. And I think
that's the biggest lesson from NDASE and from the science
of consciousness, that we have shared meaning and purpose and
also a shared connection through our mental space and come

(35:46):
to realize that all that emerges in the physical world
is ultimately determined by our willful interaction with the universe
at a mental level. And this is why centering, prayer,
and meditation are so important. If you just live in
this material world in your little ego mind. The ego
only uses fear and anxieties its main tools. The ego

(36:07):
was absolutely tied up with all addictions and dysfunctions. And
this is about coming to recognize and cultivate our relationship
with our higher soul. That is thank you so much.
That's such an elegant and probably very condensed version of
the big story and your transformation and your journey all
the way through that. I have so many questions to

(36:29):
ask you about so many parts of it. If that's okay,
we can sort of start to unpack some of it. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
I will say that Bruce Grayson got back to us recently.
We asked him for an interview and he said he
would be delighted, but apparently he had suffered a stroke
and so he said he was in no condition to
do an interview at this point in time, which was heartbreaking.
But another thing is I'm also a Chapel Hill graduate.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Really, oh, I love that. Excellent, fantastic, Well, I've absolutely
some of my finest memories of life were those chapter
eight years in Chapel Hill. I was there from seventy
two to seventy six.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
Oh wow. Yeah, And I'd like to just for our
listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the idea or the
term of I guess it's materialism or materialistic science that's
the dominant, the currently dominant view in science that consciousness
is purely a product of brain activity, and that it
ceases when brain when the brain stops functioning. But Eben,

(37:30):
you and others have offered this new definition of consciousness,
and I want to talk about that first. I want
to I want to ask you a little bit about
your healing process. So, when you were cycling through these
different realms in your near death experience, and when you
were in this other, even more vivid, more real than
reality space, would you say that that there was healing

(37:52):
happening to you in that space? Were you being healed
or were you in what was it an emotional healing
or was it a physical healing? Secondarily very strong emotional healing.
And I would say it's the same kind of healing
that I think is widely available to us when we
go to prayer and meditation. And I'm talking specifically about

(38:15):
centering prayer, which is a form of kind of defocused
prayer that really just kind of allows one to connect
with that God force of healing and the wholeness and love.
It was something that was just flowing through me and
also one of the reasons why I continue to meditate
and for anyone who needs a tool for meditation, and
meditation to me very simply involves acknowledging kind of the

(38:40):
higher aspects of soul that we are and putting that
little ego voice into timeout. You know, look how Michael
Singer in his book The Untethered Soul, he calls a
voice in your head, the annoying roommate. Roommate that is
absolutely on target. Now your consciousness is your awareness of
that voice. Now, that part is quite magical, and that's

(39:01):
an alignment with the universe at large. And that's what
I think is so important to get. But it's why
meditation is so important. And for anybody who needs a tool,
I can recommend one, and that is Sacred Acoustics. And
it's a form of buino orbeat brain waven trainment.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Full disclosure. Sacred Acoustics as a company, you know, Sacred
Acoustics dot Com was co founded by my wife, Karen Newell,
who also is a co author of that third book,
Living in a mi Own for Universe. She's a great
spiritual mentor who I've been with for about twelve years now,
and she has been a tremendous guide to me. And
she also knows a tremendous amount about sound and how

(39:39):
it can be used to achieve transcendental states of conscious awareness.
A pilot study by doctor Anna Yusam in the peer
viewed scientific literature supporting sacred acoustics for a leaf of anxiety,
she found that in her busy Manhattan practice, she had
a twenty six percent reduction in anxiety symptoms over two weeks,
versus only seven percent in the control group. Control group

(40:02):
got standard psychotherapy for anxiety, but just by listening sagred
acoustics tones, twenty six percent reduction over two weeks. That's
a pretty powerful result. In the Journal of Nervous and
Mental Diseases January of twenty twenty, that anti usum study
came out. But much more is going on than just
relief of anxiety. And that's what happens when you start

(40:23):
connecting with that higher soul and putting your ego in
the back seat where it belongs, where it's not trying
to drive right, and that's where so much healing can come.
But that's exactly the kind of thing I was feeling
deep in my coma as I was going through This
was healing, coming into wholeness. It's interesting because a lot

(40:44):
of my work, everything, even in the fiction world, is
all about sort of how people compensate for what they
perceive as a lack of a sense of belonging. And
I believe, I believe truly that, you know, anthropologically, the
need to belong is greater, a greater force than the
need to survive or to preserve life throughout throughout history

(41:04):
and humanity, and a lot of there's there's sort of this.
I believe there was a study done where they, you know,
an addiction study, where have you heard of this with
the rats or the rats are mice in a cage?
And I'll have to go back when I'm done with
this interview to tell the listeners exactly what this was.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
But the the rat they give them, you know, the
traditional addiction studies, they would give them cocaine or heroin
in one dropper, and then the other one was just
pure water. And then and they tended to just over
use the cocaine or the heroine until they died. And

(41:41):
then this one person said, this one reach's researcher said, well,
that's they're isolated in a cage by themselves, so they
choose this sort of morbidity. He said, why don't we
change the environment. Let's put them in a a in
a rat paradise where there's you know, wheels and colors
and lots of other animals there, and its social interactions.
In that case, they didn't. They avoided the cocaine and

(42:04):
the heroin laced water and they went for the healthy water,
or almost one hundred percent. And so it points out
the idea that you cannot look at addiction and you know,
this need, this hunger for dopamine. You can't look at
addiction without also also understanding the need to belong and
that unity a beautiful point.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
And I think, you know, especially when you look at
where consciousness studies are going now, the signs of consciousness
of explaining many of these incredible events after death communications,
deathbed visions in the hospice, you know, not just near death,
but shared death, which share death experiences happen in perfectly

(42:46):
healthy people. They are usually a healthcare worker or a
loved one who can be one thousand miles away from
somebody who's passing, but in a shared death, their souls
come together and the bystander soul can even witness a
life review before it comes back to this world. So
the interesting thing in light of your comments about kind
of community and society and relationships with others, is you

(43:08):
find that ultimately every bit of our progress is about relationships.
It's about how we treat ourselves, how we treat others,
how we interact with them, and that is absolutely the
material by which our souls make any kind of progression
and contribution to the evolution of all consciousness is through
these relationships. They are what matter. And ultimately you find

(43:33):
from the NDE community especially that the tip of the
spear is really one of the binding force of love. So,
in other words, as you get closer and closer to the
kind of the spiritual core of the universe, you find
there's not some battle between good and evil going on there,
but that it's pure love that God force. And this
comes out when you look at the incredible variety of

(43:56):
how love manifests and near death experiences. When I say
that talking specifically about, for example, Nancy Evans Bush, who's
written extensively about negative or hellish indies, Now they may
only be about five or six percent of all indies,
but I think they're an important category. It turns out
that they also lead the participant towards love, kindness, compassion,

(44:19):
and mercy. So they have the same transformational effect as
the positive indies. We you find, like even in a
prison community where you've got basically murderers and rapists and
they're serving as hospice for their fellow prisoners, you find
the same thing that as they approach death, it's making
amends and acknowledging the wrongs they've done to other to

(44:41):
other beings, and kind of a sense of commonality and
realizing that to hurt another was truly to hurt oneself.
That's the context in which they're growing. At the very
end of their life, they're gleaning these lessons, and the
lessons don't let them off the hook for what they've
done to others, but by making a men's seeking forgiveness

(45:02):
and forgiving oneself is an important part of it. And
I also point out that for our world at large,
a forgiveness of the perpetrator is an important step to take.
You don't even have to ever tell the perpetrator you're
forgiving them. But to release your own heart from the
travesty of keeping yourself imprisoned with a revenge mode, you know,

(45:26):
is just it's it makes no sense. And so there's
a far better way of looking at positive progression, at love, kindness,
at making amends and working towards the next lifetime where
you can make far better contributions to the overall higher good.
And that's what I think are the main lessons that
come out of indiease is we're all in this together.

(45:48):
We're here to use that binding force of love to
help our fellow.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
You know, souls.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
It really is all about manifesting kindness, love, compassion, mercy
when necessary, forgiveness and of course never forget gratitude. And
this again is the main argument for centering prayer and meditation,
because I would argue that you don't have to have
gone through what I went through to come to the
same kind of understanding of our deeper nature and our

(46:16):
spiritual nature.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
You can use prayer.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
And meditation, and if you do that on a regular basis,
you'll start to realize that we do have these connections
with that loving God for us, and that ultimately it
gives us tremendous power to come into healing and wholeness
in our lives, but that involves serving the higher good
and taking care of others. Ultimately, there's no way that

(46:39):
an individual soul, a selfish, greeting, narcissistic, egocentric soul, makes
any kind of real progress in this world. And to me,
it's saddening to see souls like that get to the
end of their life and have made no progress at all,
right because they're doomed in their life review. Whatever they
cannot fix and make amends for, it's going to be
repackaged in the next life, so you know, and.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
They say, you know, hate is like drinking poison and
expecting the other person to get sick, exactly, you know
I and you know I also wanted to mention we
interviewed you. Have you heard of David Ditchfield In his
story David Ditchfield was He's a British fellow who was

(47:24):
dragged underneath the train and horribly injured and had a
near death experience. But in his in thee he had
a similar experience to yours, where this you know, resonant sound,
the symphonic for lack of a better way to describe it,
he heard this symphony and it played over and over

(47:44):
and over, and when he came back, he composed without
any prior musical training, composed a symphony based on what
he had experienced. That's so it's beautiful. It's pretty many
you can check it out, but it's pretty very beautiful,
and it's a beautif full symphony. I mean, it's just
gorgeously just washes. It's a bath that washes over you.
And he he was able to get an entire orchestra

(48:07):
to perform it. Oh, that's amazing. I'd like to take
to sort of shift towards looking at, you know, getting
past the materialistic scientific viewpoints, and how you and your
journey towards bringing what you gleaned into the you know,

(48:29):
the scientific community afterwards. And I know that there was
probably some tension there, but I also want to talk
a little bit about sort of this this definition of
consciousness that's starting to that it exists independently of the brain,
and that the brain may act more as a filter
or a transceiver, as you've said, for a larger non
local consciousness, and this everything you've been talking about. I

(48:51):
don't mean to just be reading my notes here, but
can you just walk us through your shift and understanding.
I mean, you've done that, but just specifically with any
previous dogma that you might have had in the materialistic
side of the scientific training that you'd had, and also
in what I'm interested in, what ways your medical background

(49:11):
has helped or complicated your effort to share this to
validate the legitimacy of ndies in the scientific community.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Well, I would say certainly of you know, something that
may come as a surprise to some of your viewers
is that my greatest support has been from the scientific
community in huge measure. And that's once they, you know,
if they take the time to read the case report,
start learning more about my illness, they realize why I

(49:40):
was so befuddled by all this and why I was
so challenged, you know, because just recovering from that kind
of illness makes no sense. It doesn't happen in the
medical literature. But you find many other inde cases where
you have a miraculous healing, and to me, these are
some of the best examples of kind of mind over
my You know, that whole discussion as a healer, as

(50:02):
a neurosurgeon, as a physician can start with placebo effect
because we've recognized for thousands of years as healers that
the belief's thoughts and attitudes of the patient and of
the healer and of everybody else involved can play a
tremendous role in what happens. Do you actually get healing
or not, And so beliefs are incredibly important. The whole

(50:25):
thing has been an incredible journey of understanding, and it
basically led to one hundred and eighty degree flip. That
physicalism or materialism that you mentioned, that's really kind of
the conventional science that we were all taught in the
twentieth and early twenty first century, and in many ways
it devolves into a kind of Newtonian deterministic science. And
this is where I'll point out a quote, one of

(50:47):
my favorite quotes from the quantum physics community. This one
came from Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize I
think in thirty two could be off on the year,
but he won it for his uncertainty principle. And Heisenberg said,
the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will
lead you towards atheism, but at the bottom of the

(51:07):
glass God is waiting for you. He knew exactly what
was going on. Many other quantum physicists like Max playing
Erwin Schroederger Paswal, Jordan and others have talked about how
consciousness had this kind of primary presence in the universe
and was not the emergent property of brain that so
many kind of physicalists thought it was, but that we

(51:30):
had to reach much deeper to understand conscious experience. And
he knew that quantum physics was actually saying that because
before that science had this notion of a deterministic universe.
That's what Newton's laws told us. If you understand the
state of the universe at any one time, then you
can know where it's headed by under those laws that

(51:50):
govern the interactions of all these subatomic particles and then
larger assemblies of such particles. Interesting thing is, when you
get right down to that subatomic level, none of it
has that kind of predeterministic level at all. There's you know,
Schrodinger's equation is about an evolution through time, but it
takes observation to make things crystallize out. And that's a

(52:14):
really shocked quantum physicist was how this act of observation
kind of a mental choice of what to look at
and how played a gigantic role in what emerged from
your findings. Correct in fact, was so strong that Pascual
Jordan said, not only do our observations, you know, report
to us about reality, they actually change and create that

(52:36):
emerging reality. And that's exactly what we're finding in the
modern era. And it couldn't be more true than the
mind of a matter that we see extending beyond placebo effect,
which is showing us how important bleafs are. But you
can get into the realm of spontaneous remission. For example,
if you go to noetics dot organ Institute of Noetics
Sciences website, put in spontaneous remission as a search term.

(52:58):
You'll find a book that they published in the mid
nineties by Carole Hirschberg and Brendan o'reagan that has more
than thirty five hundred cases people with advanced cancer, advanced infection, etc.
Who would basically come to the limits of any medical
treatment and then started invoking spiritual type things like emotional engagement,

(53:21):
you know, processing negative emotions, fostering positive emotions, taking on
a more spiritual approach to life, seeking kind of meaning
and purpose in life.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Things like that.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
It led people to be able to heal those advanced
cancers and infections that had not been fully cured with
various medical interventions. So you know, in other words, free
will is alive and well. And when you start acknowledging
the power of prayer and meditation, you start realizing how

(53:55):
all this can lead to our benefit. Now, one resource
I'd love to point out year of Audience, and this
is a resource that forever dispels the silly notion that
this modern idea of privacy of consciousness and fundamental nature
of mind and free will and the afterlife is fully

(54:17):
supported by modern science and afterlife and even reincarnation. If
you go to Bigelowinstitute dot org, that's the website I'm
talking about, you'll find twenty nine essays at Bigelowinstitute dot
org that basically from scientists, all of whom had at
least five years experience investigating the afterlife question. And all

(54:37):
twenty nine of these essays, coming from many different directions,
support the reality of the afterlife and of reincarnation. So
a much bigger scientific view of who we are and
what this is all about and the very nature of
will and of the spiritual realm, etc. Comes with light
as scientifically supported at Bigelow Institute dot org. So highly

(54:58):
recommended people start reading those essays. That first place essay
by Jeffrey Mischlav incredibly powerful. But there are many other
scientific essays too, Bernardo Castrup's essay, Julian Weischel, Dean Rayden,
Jeffrey Long. I mean a bunch of scientific essays in
I don't want to limit it, because all twenty nine

(55:20):
essays are extremely good.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
They take us.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Beyond the point. So any materialist or physicalist who tries
to tell you, oh that that you know in the
ease or nonsense, you know we've proven scientifically that's not true. Well,
they're telling you that they are basically wilfully ignorant.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
They haven't even bothered.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
To read any of the Bigelow essays, because once they're do,
they'll realize that their simplistic dismissal of the spiritual rem
in our spiritual nature is very unwarranted by the evidence.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
I love how you've put that. There is so much dogma.
I don't know if it's coming out of fear. I
don't know if it's coming out of some you know,
I have to look back at when I was so skeptic,
and you know, and I'm really more questioning now. I
don't have the answers, but I'm comfortable in my ability
to not have all the answers, but to be in

(56:11):
that's the state of questioning and to be open to it.
But I don't know what that dogma comes from and
why people cling so much to it. And I don't
know if it's a stigma that is born in culture,
perpetuated by the powers that be, or what have you.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
But well, it's interesting. In the twentieth century there was this,
you know, heyday of success of materialist science. But also
I will point out, for example, the chemists committed their
sin in World War One inventing high explosives, machine guns,
and poisonous gases. The physicists committed their sin in World
War two and they created atomic bombs. I don't know

(56:49):
about World War three, but if it's ever fought, world
War four will be fault with sticks and stones paraphrase
from Einstein. And it's absolutely true. There's no way to
have any kind of winnable warl world War three. It's
time to get rid of the nukes. But the bottom
line is, yes, our science has been wonderful in progress
in medicine and transportation, communication, and yet it's there's an

(57:13):
ugly underbelly of that science and our addiction of fossil fuels,
and you know, global warming, which absolutely is human calls
by our addiction to burning carbon based fuels, and it
is time to take responsibility and to come into some
level of maturity. We call ourselves homo sapiens. Sapiens means wise.

(57:33):
But I would say, given the big picture of where
I see science now, with you know, the nuclear weapons
and all the modern warfare enabled by science and our
addiction of fossil fuels, et cetera, I start questioning just
how wise we've been to date. And I would say
that absolutely what we're talking about now is a turn

(57:54):
towards wisdom. It's a turn towards acknowledging the oneness of mind,
the binding force of law. There's a healing force in
the universe. They're all truly in this together, and we
need to be much better stewards for the planet. I mean,
as it is, there are thousands of species who are
threatened with extinction. Who can look at one spiece is
the culprit?

Speaker 1 (58:14):
I mean, it's it's it's born out of I would say,
I would offer that it's born out of that dualism
and that dualistic thing like it. So if we are
separate from each other and separate for if we have
and it's the ego mind that that's causing this situation
where we're thinking that we are separate, we're perceiving ourselves
to be separate, you know. And then in a classical sense,
if we're born, you know, we're made in the image

(58:36):
of our creator. That means what you know, an old
white man or something you know. So so does that
mean that that then the entire world and everything around
us becomes you know, something exploitable, and it is, and
we don't see ourselves in in each other. We don't
see ourselves. It allows for things like, you know, environmental disaster,

(58:58):
It allows for things like races, It allows for these
these horrible sort of thought patterns. Absolutely, I'd like to
talk a little bit about that with you, because we're
getting into my big question here of you know, many
people describe their brush with death or their profound trauma

(59:19):
as a kind of forced awakening, like an invitation to
turn inward and do some of the deep inner work.
And you've been talking about, you know, the power of
prayer and the power of mindfulness and meditation. Are those
the main key opportunities that you would see for people
for awakening this sort of understanding of a larger group consciousness.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
I guess well, I think that's a lot of it.
You know, always remember that our true spiritual growth as
souls occurs in these bodies in the material realm. This
is where we make the progress. The life review which
occurs mainly in the spiritual realm, and that timeless aspect
of the spiritual realm, that's really where you kind of

(59:59):
make corrections and try and reshuffle the cards in the
most kind of empowering way in the next life. So,
but the living of it is what makes a difference.
So it's not just resorting to prayer and meditation and
going within. That's very good for helping us realize that
we're much more than our physical body in our little

(01:00:21):
ego mind. But it's all about getting the work done.
The getting the work done is manifesting this love, showing
love for others and living that life. And that's what
I think is happening. I think there's a tremendous amount
of people. I love how in a lot of younger audiences,
you know, I see a lot of passion. And in fact,

(01:00:42):
I was just reading an article how in the generation
Z is now seeming to turn a little more towards
religion and spirituality than like the millennials did, et cetera.
Maybe there's some shift. And in fact, the article I read,
and I think it was Vox, was trying to explain
all this, and they weren't looking at the kind of

(01:01:04):
explanations we're talking about, and that is that as the
world is discovering, in approaching truth and trying to come
to a deeper understanding nature of existence, that were actually
hooked together through mind, and that in fact, our existence
doesn't end with the death of the physical body. In fact,
our awareness expands tremendously. I mean, that's basically what indie

(01:01:27):
ears are telling you, when their awareness expands so much
that they can witness their entire life bert to death
as one continuous, interactive set of events that then make
much more sense when viewed from that kind of lofty perspective.
You start realizing that we've kind of fooled ourselves into
thinking we're much smaller than we actually are. Much less

(01:01:51):
important and much less influential and isolated world. And what
I see happening is a grander sense of coming to
recognize is the power we have over our lives and
over the world at large, especially as we focus on
the higher good and on taking care of the least,
the last, and the lost. I know in some political

(01:02:12):
circles that's not necessarily the direction forward, but I would
say from this spiritual perspective, there's no doubt that it's
all about taking care of the less fortunate society. And
the point you were making earlier is when I often
make that the false sense of separation that is inherent
in materialist or physicalist thought is really a doom. You know,

(01:02:36):
that false sense of separation leads us into this kind
of nonsensical realm where we think we're always in competition
with others, and then it's a zero sum game and
if you don't win it all, then you lose it all.
And that kind of thinking, and a lot of that
discussion in the twentieth and early twenty first century was
also kind of bundled with discussions of Darwinian evolution were misleading.

(01:03:01):
In the mid twentieth century, a lot of that discussion
of Darwinism and neo Darwinism was focusing on survival of
the fittest and that you outcompete your enemy, your nemesis,
what have you. And I would say that biologists have
come to recognize that by and large, collaboration and cooperation
are far more powerful principles in the natural biological kingdom

(01:03:26):
for success and thriving that the sense of competition in
beating up the other and you know, zero sum game,
et cetera. And it was those discussions together that were
so damaging, you know, the materialism, false sense of separation,
darwinning competition, as opposed to coming to acknowledge what all
of that research has shown in recent decades, which is

(01:03:49):
that it's all about collaboration and cooperation. You see species
interspecies like for example, of dolphins serving as midwives in
the birthing of whales, calves, things like that. So you've
got species helping other species things done. And in that environment,
I look at all these poor animals that are stuck

(01:04:10):
in forest fires and in droughts and floods. You know
that in many ways are human cause with global warming,
And say who is the bad guy here? And it's
you know it's us human with our false sense of
separation without competition and kind of destroying the environment for
profit motive. I mean, all of that is extremely misguided
and incongruent with where I see the world headed, with

(01:04:33):
this notion of primacy of mind and the binding course
of love as a force of healing and wholeness and
restoration and allowing us to become the souls we came
here to be. So to me, this is a revolution
that's gigantic in scale. It's not just something that's a
resolution of a few decades worth of human interaction. It's

(01:04:53):
thousands of years of human interaction that is now being
kind of realigned, reassessed, and I think brought more into
a closer alignment with truth and the nature of reality,
and that is one that reflects the love and kindness
and compassion and that were really here to serve as
better stewards for this planet.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
So you see a growing interest, You see a movement
and a growing interest in sort of the consciousness studies
and near death experiences and even psychedelic research as signs
of scientific conversation beginning to shift. I do think so
it is happening.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
I see it and then you've got to remember that
in the background to all of that, which I think
is a true revolution. I remember, it's just an example
of Karen and I were at a conference on indies
and neuroscience in Belgium in twenty eighteen, and one of
the speakers from the Lori's Lab showed a slide of

(01:05:48):
the number of indie e papers in PubMed globally increasing
fourfold after twenty twelve twenty thirteen. But there's a question
that the scientific community has turned dramatically more in favor
of this, and you find less and less of the
materialist person getting online to provide that argument, because really

(01:06:09):
they're not following the data. And that's the good news
is the data really leads in one direction, and that's
towards a much more enhanced view of spirituality, of oneness,
of that body, force of love, and after death communications,
deathbed visions, nd shared death past life memories and children.
All of this gives us a tremendous reason to be

(01:06:30):
optimistic and hopeful about the human condition, the eternity of
the soul, and how we're contributing to these evolution of
consciousness throughout the cosmos. I mean to me it's all
really good news, and it has to be rejecting that
kind of bleak and paltry fiction of materialism that used

(01:06:52):
to be there. That is, you know, you're a meat robot.
You have no free will, Your existence is burned to
death and nothing more.

Speaker 1 (01:07:00):
How fun is that? Yeah, you're giving me great hope
in your passion for this gives me great hope. And
you know who knows? Maybe you know, who are we
to say that you weren't you didn't have this experience
specifically so that you could bridge the gap between the
sciences and the spirituality, you know, I mean that's part
of it. I certainly have become the messengers. So it

(01:07:20):
makes sense.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
Well, I'm a messenger. I mean to me, I the
You know what, one of the best benefits to me
has been by going public with my story. There are
thousands of people around this world who have shared their
stories with me, and that is that's a gold mine. Now,
we tried to turn a lot of those stories into
a book. That's what the book Map of Heaven is

(01:07:43):
all about. That stories that were just showing that this
doesn't just happen to some you know, Harvard neurosurgeon who
then comes back these claims, But in fact it's happened
with millions of people around the world, across cultures, across languages,
across absolutely and once you pay attention to it. And
don't you know, the materialist scientists through much of the

(01:08:05):
twentieth century, we're just saying that stuff's nonsense. We've disproven
that scientifically, there's no such thing as a spiritual realm.
They said it with such confidence, and yet they were lying,
who were absolutely lying? So read go to Bigelowinstitute dot org.
Start reading those twenty nine essays. You realize how much
the scientific community is actually affirming and validating the reality

(01:08:28):
of our existence as spiritual beings in a spiritual universe.
Science and spirituality help each other, They strengthen each other.

Speaker 1 (01:08:36):
I don't know how much more time you have. I
just I really wanted to get to my big question,
which is sort of trying to unpack or get to
the mechanics of and this is probably just me a
fascination of mine, but to get the mechanics of you know,
where's the genesis of this false sense of separation? Like
is this you know, why do we have this default

(01:08:58):
network in our brain? And why do we you know,
what is the function? And from your perspective and from
what you've experienced, what is the function of ego? Let
me just read these notes real quick. So it's like, so,
from your perspective, why do we have the kind of
brain and mental structure that we do. Why the filtering,
why the ego? Why have we evolved or adapted to

(01:09:20):
have this perception of separateness and beyond our perception? What
is the purpose of this deeply convincing experience that there's
separation and individual identity. I'm wondering where that, how did
that evolve and what function did it have for us
as a species.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
Well, I would say at kind of a primary level
that the kind of ego mind and that ego sense
of presence and existence is there to support the biological
needs of the body. So, in other words, of kind
of the ego mind manages the programming that allows us
to take care of ourselves in terms of you know,

(01:09:59):
eating and re producing in those kinds of things. But
I would say that from my perspective, you know, it's
really hard to kind of fully explain that way that
there seems to be this sense by which, you know,
when one gains a much more enlightened kind of spiritual

(01:10:20):
approach to understanding. It seems to be very rewarding, especially
in facing things like death of the of the body
and emities. You know, it turns out that our higher
soul kind of awareness is something that's not always so
obvious to our ego mind at all. And that's one
of the reasons why in meditation I work so hard

(01:10:42):
to kind of turn off my little ego voice. I'm
turning it over to the universe to kind of show
me what I need to know in that grander spiritual sense,
and that I think gives us a tremendous advantage in
terms of where we're headed, where humanity is headed, where
sentience is headed, because it's a much more kind of
open ended field of possibility for soul expression and that

(01:11:06):
kind of thing. But it is kind of mysterious how
this program forgetting even works. You know, it's interesting when
you study these children who remember past lives and they
can have such vivid kind of phobias and behaviors. Some
of them even have birth marks they were I think

(01:11:27):
it was twenty percent of Ian Stevenson's original series had
birth marks that were related to the prior mode of
violent unexpected death. And that's another important thing to say
is that seventy percent I think of those cases that
were reported by Stevenson and Jim Tucker had a violent death.

Speaker 1 (01:11:48):
So, in other.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):
Words, it was premature, it was unexpected, it was sudden,
and that might explain part of why it's so memorable
into a next lifetime, that it was so trumatic that
they left with so many things unfinished, that you know,
they remembered that those kind of features of an earlier
life are still with them in a new lifetime. And

(01:12:11):
yet by age six or seven, as Tucker and Stevenson
have showed, those memories start to disappear. And why is
that that we would bring those memories in as a
higher sol early in life that they would still be there,
and yet as we mature and become the person that
we're going that's going to live this life, those memories
of the past life disappear. And I think again it's

(01:12:32):
a statement more about where humanity is and their understanding.
I think there have been times in human history where
we had a much more natural and kind of broad based,
spiritual understanding of things, and of course.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
Or maybe even an intrinsic knowing maybe that we've you know,
there was a lot of intuition, a lot of like
there's a statement in the kind of Indie literature, especially
when you look back across indigenous cultures, that occasionally in
those cultures you don't even find a life review. And

(01:13:09):
I would say that that circumstance is probably one that
arises more in these aboriginal cultures that have much more
of a sense of connection with each other and don't
have some time goo an ego conflict. But for example,
the societies where women share caring of infants and they

(01:13:29):
basically hand them around all the time, and they basically
as a group, these women feel the needs of the
infants and take care of them, you know, as a group,
and they're much more efficient doing that. And I think
that only happens in a society where you don't have
a lot of boundaries of egos trying to protect individual agendas,

(01:13:50):
but you're much more focused on the higher good and
the social agenda of the group at large. So it's funny,
it's just sort of like what we desperately need long
for this to, you know, to reaffirm the sense of
belonging and the sense of interconnectedness, and yet we sit,
you know, alone on our devices in social media, struggling

(01:14:11):
for just that, trying to trying to find some outside validation,
trying to belong, trying to connect with these people in
this in this sort of and in this world of
noise and of sort of honestly more disconnected social media.
You've spoken a lot about love being the foundation of reality,
and I'm curious, how do you see that truth showing

(01:14:34):
up in you know, in your work today, and so
when you more specifically, when you write and speak and
connect with people, what would you have to offer anybody
who's still living in that sort of materialistic science, the skeptic,
the ones who maybe even our feared death or you know,
or struggling with grief and loss. What would you have
to say to them? What? What's something you can offer

(01:14:56):
to those people who are still in that sort of cynical,
skeptical or even fear based mindset.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Well, what I would recommend is take a little vacation
from your ego, and by that just very practical and
simple tool is to take fifteen or twenty minutes a
day just out in nature, you know, kind of walking, meditation,
just putting the ego in all of its little fear
and anxiety and kind of addiction tools out of your

(01:15:26):
mind and just let yourself bathe in that kind of
pure consciousness in the moment, in the breath and breathing,
you know. Adopt a program of meditation where you spend
fifteen or twenty minutes a day. I try to spend
an hour to a day when I can meditating. And
if you need a tool to help you quiet that

(01:15:47):
little monkey mind voice of the annoying roommate in your head,
I would recommend sacred acoustics form of binaoral beats. The
reason I was attracted to it about two years after
my coma, I read an article in Scientific American by
Gerald Auster from the early seventies on binaural beats in
the brain, and I realized that the anatomy and physiology

(01:16:08):
was there to allow us to basically escape from the
kind of slavery of the ego mind in our daily
existence in these material bodies. And it does it by
oscillating a circuit in the lower brain stem in what's
called the superior olivary nucleus. And we talk about a
lot of this in our book Living in a Mindful Universe,

(01:16:28):
if you want to learn a lot more about the
physiology and the anatomy of that kind of meditation. So
take a little time out for yourself in the form
of meditation, centering, prayer, going within. And I think the
more people can do that kind of thing to escape
the kind of slavery of the ego mind and its
demands on us and start realizing that they're much more

(01:16:51):
positive and optimistic ways forward that involve engaging our kind
of higher soul and our higher self, but doing it
in a way that we can kind of open our
minds to the hints and suggestions from the universe about
what are the best steps forward to achieve that life
that we came here to achieve. Certainly, if you're facing

(01:17:13):
eternal diagnosis, facing potential death of a loved one, or
recent death of a loved.

Speaker 1 (01:17:19):
One, etc.

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
These kinds of tools can be amazingly powerful. Because one
thing that I heard very often in my early talks
about this even before Proof of Heaven came out, because
I started giving talks about two years before that book
came out and was getting a lot of feedback from people,
and people would often come up to me after my
talks and say I've never told anybody this before, but

(01:17:42):
and then they'd share a story with me that would
change the world. It was be an after death communication
from a loved one who had passed or maybe during
their time of passage a past life memory something like
that that been a sense and then lined everything up
for them. They're tremendous insights that we can glean, you know,
in that kind of unexpected realm of the subconscious and

(01:18:02):
the deep conscious state of meditation, and that's where I
think people can start getting a lot of benefit. But
never forget that the actual change we bring to the
world is what we do living these lives in these bodies.
So it's not just a game of you know, going
into a deep meditative state and gleaning some answers from
the universe, but really putting that to work in terms

(01:18:27):
of how we live these lives and the choices we
make and where we choose to put our energy in
terms of helping the higher good in various forms that
we all can do. So to me, it's a very
kind of optimistic and kind of beautiful pathway forward that
brings a lot of positive growth and certainly helping other people,

(01:18:49):
never wears out. It's a positive energy for what it
brings back to us. And really, in many ways, the
universe gives back to us whatever we put out to it.
So the more I can serve as a conduit for love, kindness, compassion,
occasional forgiveness when necessary, and never forgetting gratitude, the more

(01:19:10):
I can help other souls to optimize their kind of
life and growth and contribution to the evolution of consciousness itself,
which I think is ultimately what is going on here.

Speaker 1 (01:19:23):
We talked to Aaron Ralston, who's the subject of that
film one hundred and twenty seven Hours, who had Conary
Canyon and had to cut his own arm off to survive.
And he had so much to say because he had
all of these experiences that happened to him in the
cave and all this gratitude that came to him and
helped him to survive miraculously after six days without water
or food or amazing. It's an amazing story. And he

(01:19:44):
said this, he said, you cannot hold despair and gratitude
in your heart at the same time, right, It's impossible.
And Martha Back also reflects that too. She talks a
lot about that. But it's but yeah, I guess you know.
Is there anything else that you would like to add
to the conversation today before?

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
The main thing is that no soul left behind. This
is a major revolution and understanding it's going to have
a tremendous impact on humanity at large. We've taken huge
steps backwards in the last few years with warfare and
with violence and with disregarding the rights of human beings.
It's time to reverse every bit of that and start

(01:20:27):
acknowledging this much deeper lesson that's coming to the fore
about the nature of our existence and how we're really
all in this together. And to hurt another is to
hurt oneself, and no soul should be left out of
this transformation, and we can all contribute to the higher
good moving forward, and it's very rewarding for the individual soul.

(01:20:47):
So I highly recommend to your audience get on board
with this, start learning more about these kinds of cases
as kind of literature. People can certainly keep up with
what I've done At Ebenlexander dot com. There's a recommended
reading list there, a lot with hot links to the
scientific papers involved. There's also an FAQ page that I

(01:21:08):
think is very important for the kind of public perception
of my contributions to all this. And then also thirty
three day Journey. Right there at Eben Alexander dot com
there's a free thirty three day Drip email campaign that
will get you right up to speed on every bit
of this quickly. It also contains four Sacred Acoustics meditations

(01:21:29):
that come packaged with that free thirty three day journey.
You don't have to spend a penny. It's a mint
as a workbook to go along with our third book,
Living in a Mind for Universe. But there's a huge
community that's formed up around this thirty three day journey
from around the world. More than twelve thousand people have
taken the course and they leave comments, and you'll be

(01:21:51):
part of that community just by signing up for it,
So get going.

Speaker 1 (01:21:56):
No reason not too.

Speaker 2 (01:21:57):
You'll learn a tremendous amount about yourself and nature, reality
and our power of will to kind of determine our
future as an unfold. These are all beautiful gifts for
the individual soul.

Speaker 1 (01:22:11):
Well, I'll take this moment to say that I can't
thank you enough for coming on the show with us,
your work, your books, and your spreading of your message
and in the telling of your journey as well as
your challenges to looking at it. You know, hopefully a
new paradigm of understanding of us, of ourselves as not separate,
as as interconnected and with the foundation of love. I

(01:22:35):
can't thank you enough for your work and your time,
especially with us today. Well my pleasure, Dan, and thanks
so much for what you do to get this out
to the world. It's high time and encourage people to
just stay in touch with me through Eben Alexander dot com. Well,
thanks for you to Dan, I appreciate you too. Thank
you so much. Next time I'm alive again, we meet

(01:23:05):
Alien Lloyd. Her story highlights persevering in the shadow of
generational trauma and a legacy of suicide and her family.
This is the ultimate betrayal.

Speaker 3 (01:23:15):
He sent me over the edge and sent me right
down the whole like shoot where I almost became the
third kid that off themselves. I didn't recognize trauma on
my own family, my trauma.

Speaker 1 (01:23:32):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelba. Music by Ben Lovett, Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and

(01:23:52):
Nuams Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhardtslovitchka, Brent Die
and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Love and Alexander Rodriguez.
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Alive Again is a production
of IRT Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a
transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear

(01:24:12):
your story. Please email us at Alive Again Project at
gmail dot com. That's a l I v e A
g A I N p R O j E C
T at gmail dot com.

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