We’re all truly part of one Collective Mind
Una Meistere
An interview with Eben Alexander III, American Academic neurosurgeon with research interest in phenomenon of consciousness
What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? Does the death of the body and brain also mean the end of consciousness? Is memory located in the brain? These are questions that American academic neurosurgeon Eben Alexander III was regularly confronted with in his everyday work. Over an active career spanning twenty five years, he performed more than 4000 neurological surgeries, helping hundreds of patients suffering from severe alterations in their level of consciousness. He also taught neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston for fifteen years, authored or co-authored over 150 chapters and papers in peer-reviewed journals, and authored or edited five books on radiosurgery and neurosurgery. In his work as a practising neurosurgeon, he also encountered patients’ stories of near-death experiences (NDE). But, being a committed scientist with a healthy sense of scepticism, he likened such experiences to hallucinations and did not delve into them much or try to understand their meaning.
That is, until 2008, when his life turned upside down. Alexander contracted meningoencephalitis and spent a week in a coma, hooked up to a ventilator. The neocortex of his brain – the outer surface of the brain, the part that makes us human - completely shut down, and he was given little chance of survival. Even if he were to miraculously remain alive, doctors said he would be a “vegetable”. However, to the great surprise of his colleagues and everyone else, Alexander began to awaken on the seventh day of his coma. When he eventually woke up, he remembered nothing of his life before the coma, but he had vivid memories of the seven-day journey he had just been on – deep into the realms beyond our known physical universe. At that moment, those realms still seemed much more real to him than the reality he had re-entered. Over the following six weeks, he wrote in full detail about what he had experienced while in the coma. Later, after having regained his former memory, he was astonished by the commonalities between his own journey and what so many other near-death experiencers have reported across cultures, continents and millennia.
Alexander’s complete recovery was inexplicable from the viewpoint of modern Western medicine, and his story was featured in a series of medical articles about NDEs, including in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. His first book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, was published in 2012 and became a New York Times bestseller, remaining on its top ten list for more than a year. It was followed in 2014 by The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion and Ordinary People are Proving the Afterlife and in 2017 by Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, which Alexander co-authored with his partner Karen Newell. Along with musician Kevin Kossi, Alexander and Newell have founded the Sacred Acoustics brainwave entrainment audio meditation platform, which develops and distributes innovative NeuralHelix brainwave entrainment audio recordings with binaural beats for meditation and personal growth.
Since his near-death experience, Alexander has devoted most of his time to sharing information about NDEs and other spiritually-transformative experiences as well as what they teach us about consciousness and the nature of reality. He readily admits that his own personal story was transformative and revised his previous views relating to science, consciousness, spirituality and the very nature of all existence. Even though there is no lack of scepticism from others regarding Alexander’s story, he beseeches us to shun dogmatism in all aspects, including science and religion, and keep our minds open. He is convinced that “we are on the verge of the greatest revolution in human thought in all of recorded history, a true synthesis of science and spirituality”.
One thing I found very interesting in your book Living in a Mindful Universe is that near-death experiences (NDE) have been reported for millennia, but a major ramp-up has taken place since the 1960s, when doctors first developed techniques to save patients who had suffered cardiac arrest. Before that, most such patients went on to die. The result is that we have now populated this world with a huge number of souls who have been to the other side and come back. Sixty years have now passed since then, but the process of putting meta back into science is still very slow. Why?
Well, I think part of it is, you know, at the deep end of this mystery about consciousness you’ve got evidence from neuroscience, you’ve got evidence from philosophy of mind, especially the apparent unity of consciousness, which is a big mystery that defies the materialist model of brain-created consciousness. You’ve got all the evidence from parapsychology showing the reality of nonlocal consciousness, that is, telepathy, precognition, things like remote viewing, the ability to discern information at a distance, out-of-body experiences (OBE), near-death experiences (NDE), shared death experiences, which are just like near-death, but they occur in people who are perfectly healthy, usually a relative of the one who’s leaving the physical world. There’s also the scientific literature on past-life memories in children suggestive of reincarnation. If you go to med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies, the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, you’ll find a tremendous wealth of information and scientific validation of much of what I say (Supporting evidence for reincarnation is found in the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker – Ed.), but also of great note are the 2500+ cases of past-life memories in children for which reincarnation is the most straightforward explanation.
So, once you start studying all this scientifically collected data about nonlocal consciousness, afterlife studies, reincarnation, you realise that, as a scientist or philosopher today addressing the nature of reality and human consciousness and the brain-mind connection, we need a much bigger theatre of operations. The simplistic materialist notion that the physical world is all that exists and that you can fully explain consciousness based on what we know about the brain and its working in the physical world, that’s false, that’s absolutely untrue. There’s a much bigger set of possibilities for explaining human consciousness, and it really validates the reality of the soul and the nature of the spiritual aspect of the universe. And that’s where the modern science is so important.
There’s a much bigger set of possibilities for explaining human consciousness, and it really validates the reality of the soul and the nature of the spiritual aspect of the universe.
You brought up this whole notion that we’ve mentioned in our book Living in a Mindful Universe about the fact that the game really shifted for the universe in the late 1960s. I’d say that all of our religious systems going back thousands of years originated in near-death and similar experiences. People who had such extraordinary experiences, it showed them the material world is not the be-all and end-all of human existence. There’s much more to it. Some of those religious systems came out of prophets and mystics and people who had had such experiences, but experiences like that were not very common. Most people who had cardiac arrest, for example, were going to die. And that’s why it was so important when in the late 1960s doctors developed techniques for cardiac resuscitation, because what that means is we can go beyond just the... Well, you know, you can use prayer and personal experience based in meditation to get to the same places that the prophets and mystics have been, but now you’ve got millions of people who have had a near-death experience, and that completely changes the game; the world is now populated by millions of souls who have been to “the other side”. One of the reasons I wrote the book Proof of Heaven was to help open the door from a scientific viewpoint for people to share these stories and to help educate the medical community about the reality of NDEs and what they tell us about the bigger scale of human existence.
Now you’ve got millions of people who have had a near-death experience, and that completely changes the game; the world is now populated by millions of souls who have been to “the other side”.
In your book you write that you believe we are on the verge of the greatest revolution in human thought in all of recorded history, a true synthesis of science and spirituality. Your wrote that before Covid-19. What role could the pandemic could play in this?
I think the pandemic actually plays a very powerful and useful role. For one thing, it’s been a challenge to us. I mean, the fact that we’ve had millions of people die from this viral pandemic. The fact that it’s caused a great economic calamity with a lot of hardship, especially for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. We’ve been deeply challenged. Death and bereavement and all of these kinds of challenges, from my point of view, represent a kind of collective gift of desperation.
Death and bereavement and all of these kinds of challenges, from my point of view, represent a kind of collective gift of desperation.
There’s a notion in working with addiction and alcoholism that often the depth of the challenge of living the addicted life can take you to a bottom that is so bad that it basically energises your ascent back up to become more of the soul that you came here to be. I believe the hardships and challenges in life are always gifts; they’re energisers that help us to grow, because they strengthen us. And I believe the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic challenges – and certainly in the United States, we’ve also seen an associated demonstration of racial disharmony at the core of our society in terms of police brutality against certain minority groups – all of this is a challenge to us that I believe can energise our growth. I believe that by facing these hardships, by merging together, having had Covid-19 reveal the kind of shoddy underpinnings of our society in which we really are not here to take care of every single soul, we can truly grow. Because, essentially, I believe that this is our goal if we consider ourselves Homo sapiens. Sapiens means ‘wise’, but I don’t see a whole lot of wisdom in the present climate crisis, our addiction to fossil fuels, plastic pollution, economic polarisation, etc.
Certainly in the United States, we have a collection of tremendous wealth at the very top of the ladder among a very few people, and in my view, the revolution that’s coming from the scientific community regarding consciousness is one that reveals the absolute reality of our connectedness, that we’re all truly in this together. It seems there’s really one mind. And although we have this apparent self-mind, there’s plenty of evidence in science that at the edges, things like telepathy and all of these spiritual visions like deathbed visions, after-death communication and near-death experiences, all of this shows us that we’re part of a much bigger and very real spiritual community that involves oneness of mind.
As any near-death experiencer will tell you, that one mind is an infinitely loving, compassionate, merciful God force. And I don’t care if you use the word God, Allah, Brahma and Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit or whatever, the words don’t matter; they actually get in the way. The reality is that the mystical traditions of all the great ways agree on this merciful, infinitely loving and healing force at the core of the universe. And as the science more fully supports the reality of near-death experiences, of reincarnation represented in past-life memories in children, I think that science will help lead us into a new era in which we take much more responsibility for the souls of each other.
In my view, the revolution that’s coming from the scientific community regarding consciousness is one that reveals the absolute reality of our connectedness, that we’re all truly in this together. It seems there’s really one mind.
Another major part is the realisation that animals and even plants are in many ways part of this beautiful system within the one mind of infinitely loving consciousness that God pours out. So we really need to reassess how we live as human beings and be much more compassionate and merciful towards all of our fellow beings. And that’s something that will naturally emerge from the scientific revolution.
After your coma experience, you studied and researched the phenomena of nonlocal consciousness. Have we got closer to the deep mystery of the observer, or “higher soul”? What is it? And what role does the heart play in this mystery?
That’s a beautiful question. And it really has to do with approaching this notion of the one mind. Again, in addition to our book Living in a Mindful Universe, I can recommend a beautiful book by a friend of ours, Dr. Larry Dossey. It’s called One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters (2013), and it’s a very excellent scientific analysis of consciousness, pointing out the sharing of mind between all sentient beings. It’s an extraordinarily rich book that helps us to come to this deeper understanding of our connection through that infinitely healing, loving force. And I believe this is what is emerging from the scientific study of consciousness as we validate a lot of these afterlife stories, near-death experiences, the reincarnation literature, etc. We start coming into the healing force of that one mind, and it really is about a heart consciousness, to get to your question.
When I came back from my journey, of course I knew full well from having basked in that ocean of pure love, in that experience, the power of love, and I would really attribute my life partner and co-author of our book Living in a Mindful Universe Karen Newell, who kind of insisted with me that this is about all that love. Like many scientists today, I tend to focus on the cognitive aspects of that one mind. But Karen reminded me over and over again and proved, in great depth, the power of emotional engagement. That this is all more of a heart consciousness, that you can’t get too much in your head about this. Because that kind of isolates the cognitive, intellectual version that emerges from, say, quantum physics and neuroscience now, but it ignores the real depth and emotional power of these personal stories of people’s journeys that reveal the infinitely loving heart.
It’s important to remember that emotions have skin in the game. The important thing to remember is your consciousness is not that little running stream of thoughts in your head. That’s the voice of your ego mind.
Anyway, it’s important to remember that emotions have skin in the game. The important thing to remember is your consciousness is not that little running stream of thoughts in your head. That’s the voice of your ego mind. And that little linguistic brain, it’s no bigger than that (shows a tiny space with his fingers – Ed.), in the Wernicke’s area of the brain (Wernicke’s area is located in the temporal lobe on the left side of the brain and is responsible for the comprehension of speech – Ed.). All of these ideas and everything is put together, and our language really kind of frames how we look at the world. For example, as described in her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (2009), Jill Bolte Taylor had a vascular malformation in the Broca’s area (which controls the ability to create speech) and the Wernicke’s area (which controls the ability to understand speech). It was a very isolated haemorrhage, but as it destroyed her linguistic system she experienced life without language or memories, and her boundaries of self expanded outwards to include the room, the clouds, the trees outside the window. She felt “at one with the vastness of the universe”. She very eloquently described this incredible sense of loving the oneness in a TED Talk, which I highly recommend listening to.
But that shows you how much even our language kind of conspires to give us this notion of being a self and a “here and now” and not realise that in fact with our consciousness we have access to a tremendous amount of wisdom in the universe. A great source of creativity is learning to leave that little linguistic voice behind, that little voice of the ego, the running stream of thoughts in the head. I love how in his book The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (2007) Michael Singer calls that voice in our head “the annoying roommate” – and that’s about as much credibility as we should give it. That’s why in meditation, which I do daily for an hour or two and find to be a great source of creativity and insight about the universe, the first thing I do is turn off that little voice in my head and put it gently into timeout, because the universe can offer much greater wisdom.
A great source of creativity is learning to leave that little linguistic voice behind, that little voice of the ego, the running stream of thoughts in the head.
Another thing we discussed in Living in a Mindful Universe, for example, is that Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Robert Louis Stevenson, Salvador Dali and many other great artists, philosophers and scientists have learned to get into that hypnagogic space between awake and asleep, to get into creativity, into a creative mode that goes far beyond what that little voice in your head will lead you to. And that’s where I believe a lot of the scientific truth comes into this, too. That’s why, for me, meditation has become a crucial aspect not just for recovering memories of my NDE, but for developing a much richer relationship with the various guides and entities and that infinitely loving God force. All of that is something I’ve achieved through meditation, in which I use Sacred Acoustics (sacredacoustics.com) differential frequency brainwave entrainment to accomplish that.
In your book you mention the HeartMath Institute’s research leading to the realisation that our hearts interconnect and exchange information with others: “Remarkably, the heart’s toroidally shaped electrical field is sixty times greater than that of the brain, and its magnetic field is 5000 times greater than that of the brain. The heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, and its pumping action transmits powerful rhythmic information patterns containing neurological, hormonal, and electromagnetic data to the brain and throughout the rest of the body. The heart actually sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.” How does this all challenge our common belief that “brain creates mind”?
Well, it challenges a lot, and, given your reference to HeartMath (Founded in 1991 by Doc Childre, HeartMath has developed a system of effective, scientifically based tools and technologies to bridge the intuitive connection between heart and mind and deepen our connection with the hearts of others – Ed.), Karen often discusses exactly those features that you’re talking about, about how important the heart is in the system. I think what it shows us is, as René Descartes said, “to define is to limit”.
I just pointed out how our linguistic brain does a tremendous job of limiting and framing our conceptualisation of the universe in ways that are often very misleading. And so, returning to that kind of pure consciousness and that observer is very important. It shows us, of course, that the heart is where we often feel emotions and love for others; that’s how people have described it for thousands of years. And that’s because consciousness cannot be limited to any kind of structure, certainly not any structure within the body. But our consciousness is a much grander aspect, even though it seems to be focused and kind of a here and now and sense of self, and in your casual, everyday observations. But probed scientifically, probed through meditation, centering prayer, and through spontaneous epiphanies and human experience, we begin to realise that consciousness is a much bigger thing than that. And it’s a real joy for people involved in creative thought, whether they be artists, musicians, scientists, writers, philosophers or whatever their line of work – opening up to this much richer version of one’s conscious awareness and developing a richer relationship with that neutral observer can be a tremendous benefit in the creative flow and in coming to a deeper understanding of one’s own relationship with the universe.
What is the role of the individual in the co-creation of global consciousness?
Well, first off I’d say that, to me, the evidence that we truly have a scientific revolution about the primacy of consciousness is absolutely beyond doubt. I think this is an extraordinary move in a positive direction. You know, we’ve had at least 5000 years of various religious systems trying to teach us these lessons of love and the “oneness of body and mind” from various prophets and mystics who brought our religious systems to the world. And yet, they haven’t really been able to accomplish that. One reason is that sometimes religions tend to degenerate into very conflicted systems; as the message moves beyond the original prophets and seekers, other humans try to control the message to control populations.
The evidence that we truly have a scientific revolution about the primacy of consciousness is absolutely beyond doubt.
Long before the book Proof of Heaven came out, in the spring of 2010 I started giving talks and made a DVD in which I spoke about these topics. As I circulated the DVDs around, I’d hear back from people, and especially from practitioners of the meditative traditions of all the great faiths. I heard from Christian mystics, the Abrahamic faith of Judaism, Islamic mystics, Buddhists, Hindus... all these various faith systems around the world. These were people who practise deep meditation and prayer within their faith, and they told me that the story they heard me talk about resonated deeply with them and represented the core of their faith. And I came to realise that this is really universal.
So this revolution in consciousness that has a tremendous basis in science, this is about scientists studying consciousness. If you go to galileocommission.org or med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies or noetic.org, all of those sites will educate you regarding the scientific aspects of this revolution, which is astonishing. And it’s taking the scientific world by storm. Although you wouldn’t know that from reading the science section of The New York Times – at least not yet. That’s because some of the big media outlets in this world still tend to think within the model of materialism, that the brain creates consciousness and our existence is birth to death and nothing more. That’s false. But for those who are aware and study the evidence, philosophically there’s no question that there’s a tremendous revolution going on and it’s for the betterment of humankind.
Some of the big media outlets in this world still tend to think within the model of materialism, that the brain creates consciousness and our existence is birth to death and nothing more. That’s false.
The evidence emerging from quantum physics and from the deepest study of the nature of consciousness and the mind-body problem indicates that we’re all truly part of one Collective Mind. And as the world grows into this deep scientific truth and it’s shared around the world, we come to realise that we’re responsible for all of our choices, and what truly matters, given that we’re bound together through the forces of love, as any near-death experiencer will tell you, is that this loving force and unity of consciousness is very apparent on these deep journeys. And the more we realise that’s true and that’s the nature of this universe, the more we’ll truly behave in a wise fashion, which involves treating all of our fellow beings – and again, this includes the animal and plant kingdom within consciousness – with much more respect, kindness, acceptance and love.
Another interesting question is about memory, because we now know that memory doesn’t completely reside in our brain. But where does memory reside? Is it in the body or outside of the body?
Well, I’d say that there are aspects of the body and the brain that involve memory, that involve a kind of manipulation of memories, for example, converting short-term to long-term memory. But the interesting thing is that memories themselves do not seem to be stored in the brain at all. We’ve talked about this a lot in Living in a Mindful Universe; the whole appendix and a chapter in the book are devoted to how memory is not stored in the brain.
But you can go back, for example, to the work of Dr. Wilder Penfield, one of the most renowned neurosurgeons of the 20th century. He was Canadian, working out of Montreal, and he wrote a book summarising his career studying the brain and awake patients with electrical stimulation. In 1975, he wrote a book called Mystery of the Mind and was extremely well positioned to comment on the brain and mind because of his work as a scientist and in the operating room. I’ve done a lot of those cases myself, stimulating the brain in awake patients. But I defer to Penfield’s very erudite observations about such work. He said: “There is no way as a neuroscientist that you can pretend that the brain creates consciousness out of physical matter.” To him, this was very affirming; it showed the reality of the spiritual realm. And that’s one of the gifts of that book.
Since then, the evidence has piled up supporting that memories are not stored in the brain. Penfield came to the conclusion that they couldn’t possibly be stored in the temporal neocortex, which is where most scientists still would think that memories are stored, but Penfield had plenty of evidence that that is not the case. Towards the end of his life, he postulated that maybe memories are stored in the brainstem. But that really doesn’t make much sense when you think about the complexity of memory and the efficiency of memory; there’s something about memory that defies any kind of dependence on a material system that degrades over time, such as the neural networks of the brain. I mean, how can I have such profound, deep and detailed memories of distant events that occurred early in my life other than realising they’re not really stored in the physical brain.
The evidence is very strong that memories are not even stored in the brain. That’s one of the biggest nails in the coffin of materialist easy science.
Neurosurgeons had suspected that for decades, because, in spite of millions of resections of various parts of the brain for myriad pathological conditions (brain tumours, epilepsy, aneurysms, malformations of the brain’s blood vessels), never was there an example in which huge swathes of long-term memories were lost. It is true that if you operate in the medial temporal lobes – the hippocampus and those areas – you can alter the ability of the patient to consolidate short-term memories into long-term memories. But that doesn’t mean you’ve identified the site of long-term memory. And so the evidence is very strong that memories are not even stored in the brain. That’s one of the biggest nails in the coffin of materialist easy science. That’s why you don’t often hear that discussed much.
So, you ask where they’re stored? To answer that question, we really have to question where everything is when you realise that space-time seems to be emergent from consciousness itself. We can’t get around that and pretend that there’s a physical world out there independent of consciousness. This is one of the deepest, most profound and challenging but true lessons of quantum physics that’s out there – that the notion of an objective physical reality independent of the observing mind doesn’t seem to exist. So, all of this experience that I’m witnessing around me is something that was constructed within consciousness. The best way to look at it is that the information field that provides experienced memory is something I’d refer to as the quantum hologram. Some people call it the Akashic Record, which is basically an information field that consists of all of the history of everything that’s ever happened, and all future potential. And consciousness, as we see it here, provides the stage on which it reads from the quantum hologram that kind of infinite potential, and then it creates the possibilities out of the mind. I mean, all of this is really an acknowledgment that the mind has great power over matter.
This is one of the deepest, most profound and challenging but true lessons of quantum physics that’s out there – that the notion of an objective physical reality independent of the observing mind doesn’t seem to exist.
We’ve known that in medicine for more than six decades. I mean, look at the placebo effect. Ask Big Pharma if that’s real, and they’ll tell you yes, it is. And to them that’s terrible, because they have to overcome an average of a 30% barrier of benefit. That can happen just because the patient believes that they’re taking something that can make them better. And this is not just about a sugar pill to fix your headache. If you go to noetic.org and enter the search term “spontaneous remission”, you’ll find a book that the Institute of Noetic Sciences published back in the mid-1990s covering more than 3500 cases of people with advanced cancer, infection, what have you, who completely defied the expectations of Western medicine by recovering beyond any of the therapeutic efforts from Western medicine. That database is now being upgraded because there’s twenty-five more years of data, and I’m glad they’re doing it, because I think that database is a very important repository to show us mind over matter.
We have tremendous power to heal ourselves. That’s not only about the placebo effect and spontaneous remission, but also near-death experiences associated with miraculous healing, like my own case of healing from severe meningoencephalitis and spending a week in a coma. Read Dr. Bruce Greyson’s new book After, in which chapter 10 is devoted to my case and extraordinary recovery and also the documentation of damage in my case. There’s a medical case report that came out in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in September 2018 that covers fully what a shock it was that I had any experience at all. That’s what amazed me when I came back was, given the damage to my neocortex, how could I have experienced anything, much less the most robust, ultra-real and memorable experience I’ve ever had. My brain was documented to have tremendous damage through all eight lobes, which should have disabled any kind of dream or hallucination. My doctors estimated a 2% chance of survival at the end of my coma but no real chance of recovery. And yet, over the course of two months, I had a complete recovery, and, shockingly, my memories seemed to be more intact after the recovery than they had been before the coma. That was evidenced by many deep conversations with close family and friends about early childhood memories.
We have tremendous power to heal ourselves. That’s not only about the placebo effect and spontaneous remission, but also near-death experiences associated with miraculous healing, like my own case of healing from severe meningoencephalitis and spending a week in a coma.
What role do you think the current psychedelic revolution and ongoing psychedelic research could play in understanding the phenomenon of consciousness?
Excellent question. First of all, I will point out that I do not recommend the casual use of those plant medicines and psychedelic substances, because if you have any kind of spiritual, mental or emotional unbalance, they can kind of tip you over the deep end. So it should only be done in a proper therapeutic setting, or in a proper spiritual setting, say, with an experienced shaman or someone like that.
But I’m very glad that scientists are now studying those plant medicines again, such as psilocybin and magic mushrooms. A lot of work has been done with LSD, one of the most potent of the serotonin-type of psychedelic drugs. There are also investigations, for example, into DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, the active ingredient in ayahuasca. The interesting thing about these scientific studies is that the papers using functional MRI, magnetoencephalography and other techniques of assessing the brain’s activity show universally that under the influence of such powerful psychedelic substances the brain’s activity diminishes, decreases, the brain goes dark. That resonated with me tremendously, because I experienced the same thing but in a much grander fashion when the E. coli attacked eight lobes of my brain and destroyed much of my neocortex. Of course, neuroscientists who look at me today say, wait a minute, that can’t have happened, because look how well you’re doing. Well, they need to look at my medical records and review the case report, and they’ll see, exactly as Dr. Greyson and the other physicians who reviewed my case came to realise. They were not involved in my care, but they were fascinated by the recovery.
So, psychedelic drugs basically confirm the same thing – that you have to actually suppress the brain, turn off all of its major centres, and that’s when you start to get these ultra-real experiences that are so memorable, such as a near-death experience. So, that’s one point in how these modern studies show us scientifically that the model of “brain creates consciousness” is false.
The other important point I’d like to make is regarding some of the recent work, specifically with psilocybin and magic mushrooms, that places like NYU in New York City, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, UCLA and other centres have done. What they’ve found is that, in the proper therapeutic setting, a single dose of psilocybin can have a dramatic and unprecedented beneficial effect. For example, in cancer patients with a severe fear of death. In many of those patients – 80% or more – one dose of psilocybin will provide a tremendous comfort level with the concept of depth. And I would postulate that that’s the case because they do exactly what Karen and I teach people to do with binaural beat brainwave entrainment using Sacred Acoustics (sacredacoustics.com). It’s a technique of basically traversing the veil and getting more in touch with your higher soul, with that neutral observer that we’ve talked about. And I believe you do that with meditation, with different frequency brainwave entrainment.
I think we’re leading the way with these studies with psilocybin, because they’re showing a similar thing. But ultimately I do not believe the psilocybin is accomplishing it. It’s by traversing that veil and connecting with our higher soul that we’re able to manifest the healing.
The other scientific study with psilocybin has involved addiction, very powerful addictions, such as alcoholism, opioids and nicotine, which is one of the toughest addictions to break. And again, a single dose of psilocybin in a proper therapeutic setting can lead to years of abstinence in someone fighting addiction. In addiction studies they often talk about the concept of 12-step programmes such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and so on. There are many such 12-step programmes, and they’re all based on this notion of turning it over to a higher power. And that higher power doesn’t have to be God; it just has to be somebody else other than your ego. So, these are ways of taking your ego out of the driver’s seat, which, as we said earlier, is the very first step.
We advise people to use Sacred Acoustics for deep meditation to get in touch with that neutral observer, that higher soul and primordial mind that gives you great power and healing. And that certainly applies to addiction. Of course, addiction can be much more than just substances. People can get addicted to working out, they can get addicted to work, they can get addicted to sex or love; all these things can dominate your life. And yet, when you connect with your higher soul in a very profound way, and when that higher soul converges with the primordial mind and you feel that heartfelt connection with all sentient beings, that’s where I believe we can start to recover this deeper sense of our connection with the universe, our sense of purpose and meaning. And all of that hinges dramatically on this notion of the binding force of love, that we’re all truly in this together. That’s something we all find out when we leave the physical world and go through our own life reviews. But why not work on it now? Because the deepest lesson from near-death experiences is not what happens when we die. The deepest lesson is how we use that knowledge and the infinity of our soul and the importance of our relationships with others, and the importance of our choices and behaviour, how we use that to live a much better life now.
The deepest lesson from near-death experiences is not what happens when we die. The deepest lesson is how we use that knowledge and the infinity of our soul and the importance of our relationships with others, and the importance of our choices and behaviour, how we use that to live a much better life now.
I wanted to ask you more about DMT. There’s the notion that DMT levels in the brain rise during the birth and also the dying process. There have been studies examining DMT brain levels in dying animals, and a recent study by the University of Michigan (2019) measured DMT levels increasing 600% within thirty minutes following cardiac arrest. Is there any biochemical correlation between NDE and DMT?
Well, I personally don’t believe so. But I do believe that those plant medicines offer a rich “doorway” into the same realms that NDEs do. I have personal experience with 5-MeO-DMT, which I did because of this question of how much overlap there is between it and NDE. And what I can tell you is that, for me, the DMT experience was like looking through a keyhole and trying to discern this incredibly rich environment out there that you can sense and glimpse little pieces of. The NDE, by comparison, was more like being granted access to the penthouse suite with panoramic views of all of reality as opposed to being forced to look through a tiny keyhole at that same world.
So do not assume that the DMT experience or other plant medicine experiences duplicate or give you a full-blown NDE. I actually think you make more progress using differential frequency brainwave entrainment. Dr. Christopher Bache, who wrote a beautiful book about twenty years ago called Dark Night, Early Dawn, compared his own personal experience with high-dose LSD work in a spiritual setting with his use of binaural beat brainwave entrainment. And I’d consider what he was using at the time to be not as advanced or powerful as Sacred Acoustics. But, as he reported in his book, he was still able to discern that you can make as much progress using differential frequency brainwave entrainment to get into a deep transmitted state. I would argue the reason for that is, when you think about it, those psychedelic substances are basically impacting serotonin receptors throughout the neocortex. That’s a very superficial way to try and alter conscious awareness.
The technique of binaural beats was discovered in 1839 by Prussian physicist and meteorologist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, who found that the presentation of pure tones of slightly different frequencies to each of the two ears (varying by anywhere from less than 1 Hz to ~25 Hz from each other) engenders a wavering sensation in the perception of the sound. He found that if you put, say, a 100 Hz tone in one ear and, for example, 104 cycles per second (Hz) in the other ear, the brain somewhere generates a wavering sound at 4 Hz, the arithmetic difference between the two tones. Investigators in the late 20th century found that the ability to have an out-of-body experiences or to remote view distant targets was enhanced through such binaural beat brainwave entrainment, although they weren’t sure why it happened. Various benefits of binaural beats include a reduction in constant mind chatter, improved sleep, less anxiety, emotional release, spiritual guidance and enhanced intuition.
Karen and I have utilised this technique in workshops around the world. In fact, Sacred Acoustics has been shown to be very beneficial in the treatment of depression and anxiety. A pilot study by Dr. Anna Yusim, published in February 2020 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, found a 26 percent reduction in anxiety in its patient population that listened to Sacred Acoustics versus only a 7 percent reduction in those who had talk therapy alone. But my point is that I think it’s because of the influence in the lower brain stem, which is where binaural beats seem to have their influence at the much more fundamental level of our conscious system. Even though the brain is not creating consciousness, its participation in allowing consciousness in involves systems that have evolved over literally millions of years. And that lower circuit we’re talking about here, which Sacred Acoustics uses, is a circuit that arose more than 300 million years ago – its origin predates the rise of mammals on Earth.
Various benefits of binaural beats include a reduction in constant mind chatter, improved sleep, less anxiety, emotional release, spiritual guidance and enhanced intuition.
Your book includes a story about your connection with Robert Monroe, who spoke a lot about the powers of Hemi-Sync. In the meantime, the science underlying binaural beats is still not solid; there’s no scientific proof that they actually work. What, from your own experience, is the power of binaural beats, and are there any risks in long-term use of binaural brainwave entrainment?
I don’t believe so. It’s not anything that we’ve seen or heard about. By and large, binaural brainwave entrainment seems to be very safe and profoundly effective. I think it’s because it really opens a doorway to a kind of higher soul and a kind of healing aspect that is so revealed through the placebo effect. Or through miraculous healing and NDEs, like in my case of healing from meningoencephalitis, or Dr. Mary Neal, an orthopaedic surgeon who drowned for more than thirty minutes in a kayaking accident in southern Chile but recovered fully, again, through a profound near-death experience. I think all these stories reveal to us the power of accessing our higher spiritual self. And that spiritual nature, because of the power it has to heal, leads to wholeness. So, from my point of view, these tones are amazingly effective and have no obvious side effects or detrimental effects with long-term use.
I use Sacred Acoustics for an hour a day, and I’ve been doing so for more than a decade. I think that over time it has simply altered the efficiency of my mind, my creativity, my intuition, insight, empathy – I feel that all these things have improved through my use of Sacred Acoustics on a regular basis. And again, I want to point out that for me, the use of binaural brainwave entrainment is a mode of getting into a very deep form of centering prayer in which I’m always connecting with that infinitely healing and loving God force that brings the highest and best good to all involved. And I believe that’s a very helpful ingredient to have that kind of love and compassion for the universe and sense of role and purpose that aligns with the universe.
I believe that’s very beneficial to me. But, of course, I always look at it as the benefit to me is only going to depend on my benefit to others. And I can serve as a conduit to help bring this love and healing into the universe, bringing these benefits to everyone, because all souls deserve this. “No soul left behind” is one of Karen’s and my mottos about this world. For people who want to join an ongoing discussion about that “No soul left behind” principle, I’d encourage them to join our bi-weekly webinars at unitedinhopeandhealing.com, which will help them get right into it. We have wonderful guests there who help us scientifically, philosophically and from the experiential level to share this message with the world.
Please elaborate a little bit on psychic influence on microelectronics – by living minds and minds that are no longer entangled with physical brains in our earthly realm. You’ve admitted that, before your coma experience, “the professional side of me was not ready to accept the possible reality of communication from the spirit world”. But you tell a story about Stuart, a close friend and colleague of yours who suddenly died, and, while visiting his home shortly after his death, you found that his Macintosh computer was still on and was inviting you to play Maelstrom, a game you two had often played together. Strange things have happened… and later on you quoted this story as “a perfect example of how ‘the other side’ can contact us through the world of microelectronics”.
Yes, it’s a beautiful question. I share that personal story also in Living in a Mindful Universe. That, to me, was an absolute shocker. It was an event that happened back in 1994, when a very close friend of mine passed over. The point to make here is that microelectronics, because of their quantum nature, are a way that souls of departed loved ones can communicate with us from the spirit realm. There are many ways they can communicate with us – in dreams, in our conscious awareness and on an everyday basis. But microelectronics are certainly one of those ways as well.
In fact, when Karen and I were at a neighbourhood dinner party about three or four years ago, two of our neighbours, who were certainly not into any of this kind of thing, one of them described a phone call that involved somebody who had left the physical world, and another described a text message that came back in the same kind of setting. These events can be very shocking, but just pay attention to the reality of it.
There’s a beautiful book called Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World written by Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne, who were the lead investigators of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab. They wrote this book back in 1987, and it’s an extraordinary book about how they demonstrated the overlap of the world of consciousness and the extending conscious mind and microelectronics. They amassed an extensive body of data correlating human influence of a specialised mircroelectronic random-number generator, a device that generates sequences of zeros and ones. In these experiments, participants showed that their minds could significantly influence what numbers would appear. Meta-analysis performed by Dean Radin, citing 490 studies, identified the odds against chance for such results were 3050 to 1. These data clearly demonstrate the active participation of consciousness to be affecting the behaviour of physical systems. Although this example is one of living minds, the broader implications include interactions of minds that are no longer entangled with physical brains in our earthly realm. And that work has just been amplified in recent years. It’s really extraordinary. But the important thing for people to remember is that microelectronics can be used as a form of communication from “the other side”.
In fact, a colleague of ours, Dr. Gary Schwartz (a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona and the director of its Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health – Ed.), is working on a project called the “Soul Phone”, which is a concept that’s based partly on the idea that there’s a physics of spirit, and he and his colleagues are developing a technology to help bring that to the mainstream. I think it will be an extraordinary feat if they can bring it to fruition, but it looks like they’re making a lot of progress. But this all involves the quantum nature of microelectronics and how that can be manipulated by the forces of consciousness, including those of souls who have left the physical plane.
How has your NDE experience changed your personal relationship with death?
I think there’s a lot of sickness in our society that has to do with an unwarranted fear of dying as if it’s a termination of our conscious existence. And I think that’s probably the biggest blessing that will come out of the scientific study of consciousness.
Now, it’s very important to point out that the deepest and most powerful rules of the spiritual realm that are revealed to have a concrete reality through all of this is that we’re not meant to take life away. So homicide, suicide… in many ways, these are violations of the deep principles of the sanctity of life. We really are here to take care of each other. Now, as a physician, it’s true that in situations in which people are suffering in the terminal stages of illness, if there’s no way to alleviate that suffering, it is important to consider euthanasia. But that’s only a very extraordinary circumstance. With suicide, in general when somebody commits suicide or tries to commit suicide and fails, if they have a near-death experience or any aspect of a near-death experience and come back to this world, they never try suicide again. The reason is, they come to appreciate the sanctity of life and the very purpose and love that surrounds their life that they might not have been aware of when they tried to commit suicide. But as I said earlier, I think the greatest gift of NDEs is not the realisation that when we leave the physical plane it’s not the end of us, that our relationships with loved ones continue and that we come back, reincarnated, often with loved ones reshuffling the roles or what have you. Instead, the greatest gift is in the process of growth, in the evolution of consciousness itself.
It’s true that in situations in which people are suffering in the terminal stages of illness, if there’s no way to alleviate that suffering, it is important to consider euthanasia. But that’s only a very extraordinary circumstance.
I would say the big process here is exactly that, like Dr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talked about in his book The Phenomenon of Man in the mid-20th century – evolution is much more than just this puny little Darwinian biological evolution we see on Earth, which is currently still not very well understood for what it truly is. But de Chardin realised as a scientist (he was a paleontologist and a French Jesuit priest) that all of consciousness is evolving. He theorised that the progressive growth of consciousness itself is ultimately the purpose of our existence, and each of us plays a crucial role in this process.
So when you look at reincarnation – and that’s been scientifically demonstrated in the University of Virginia reincarnation research – you realise it’s not a blind mechanistic wheel that you’re trying to get off, as in some religious interpretations of reincarnation, but it’s much more filled with grace, with a promise of evolution and a purpose and meaning going forth to that God Point or Omega Point that de Chardin talked about (Omega Point is a term coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [1881–1955] to describe the evolution of our universe. He argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into Himself. – Ed). But it’s universal; this is not just about Christian ideas. It’s about the universal principles that we mentioned earlier that bring all the traditions together, the principles of oneness, of love, of mercy, acceptance, kindness, of taking care of each other. That’s the deep lesson that emerges from the science. And getting rid of a fear of death is a huge part of that. Because there’s a lot of toxicity in our culture that arises, there’s a lot of material possessiveness that’s unwarranted. We realise that it’s much more important in this bigger scheme of our higher souls through these multiple incarnations to be much more loving and merciful and kind to ourselves and to each other.
Have you managed to find out who you are and what it means to be human and alive?
It’s such a gift. It’s such a beautiful gift. I mean, coming back from my coma, for a while it offered me a tremendously refreshing view of who I was. But I’ve spent twelve years working very hard to align that more completely with myself. And the interesting thing is, it all aligns beautifully. In fact, it answers so many questions that I didn’t even know existed before my coma.
There’s a tremendous spiritual awakening. And for me it’s very endearing to see it happening in scientific engineering.
But much of the process has been better and better questions, and I believe we’re actually starting to get to a framework that even includes the horizon, the evolution of all humanity, because of this revolution that’s coming to the world now. For me personally, yes, it’s been extraordinarily rewarding, but the best part about it – and I also realised this through the work that Karen and I do with groups around the world, in our workshops and webinars – is that all the world is evolving towards this. There’s a tremendous spiritual awakening. And for me it’s very endearing to see it happening in scientific engineering. You know, physicists and a lot of those type of high-end scientists are very grateful for this more comprehensive worldview that allows them to have a tremendous, ongoing scientific understanding of the nature of the world, but one that’s blended with a deep and rich spirituality. That’s very rewarding on a personal, individual, sentient-being level.
Thank you very much.
