Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - RESPONSE TO: She Met God & Saw the Future

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Will you take the red pill with us?   Join Mayim and Jonathan as they reflect on our widely popular episode, "She Met God & Saw the Future", where Elizabeth G. Krohn details her near-death experience after being struck by lightning, her 2-week experience in heaven, and the newfound knowledge and abilities she returned with.   Mayim and Jonathan discuss transformative experiences that challenge our scientific understanding and open doors to new realms of consciousness, from aura reading and near-death experiences, to the non-linear nature of time and the curious phenomenon of déjà vu.   Discover powerful reflections on interconnectivity and expanded consciousness on this special Thursday Edition of MBB!   Check out our fascinating full episode with Elizebeth G. Krohn & Jeffrey J. Kripal: https://youtu.be/HQhOb63E_do   Check out our full episode with Corey Taylor: https://youtu.be/FlJCr1-xCfc   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think most people want to wake up and know that they're in total control of everything that's happening. They want to believe that everything that's happening they can explain or ask a doctor about it. Or if it feels uncomfortable, they want it to go away. And that's how you get up and punch the clock. If you have an expanded consciousness, you will not behave in a way that is organized and obedient. There are people who have an ability to perceive something that we, have not yet been able to quantify. And if I allow myself the exercise of leaning into it,

I learn more about myself than if I simply say, I don't want to know about it. What if I remove all the layers of what rational culture has told me that my science training has given me? And what if I allow myself to say, what am I not hearing that either I'm afraid to hear, or that feels too scary or that feels too confusing because it's in that dissection

that I think we actually get somewhere and can literally advance as a species. It's my ambiolic's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.

Hi, I'm Myambiolic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place, this is a place where everything gets crazy. We are going to dismantle our understanding of consciousness. We're entering or actually exiting the Matrix. We've taken the red pill and we're going to show you how you can all take the red pill to. This is an episode that was supposed to be the outro to the episode we recorded with Elizabeth Crone and Dr. Jeffrey Kriple based on.

their book changed in a flash. Elizabeth Crone was struck by lightning in 1988 and was on the ground, watched herself being on the ground, and had a near-death experience. She believed she was gone for two weeks, came back with not only amazing stories to tell, but a set of physiological changes

and a set of perceptual changes to her understanding of reality. Jonathan and I have been so intellectually stimulated by this book and this conversation that it gave birth to the episode that you're about to listen to. I think one of my favorite conversations I've had with Jonathan in the 13 years I've known him, and for sure, one of my favorite and most thorough and honest explorations of the intersection between science and spirituality. Jonathan, do you have anything else to say before we let everybody take the red pill with us?

People just have to dive in. Dive in with an open mind. We're really curious about what your experiences of these phenomena are outside of our current limited perception of reality. And we think that by exploring our understanding of what reality is and what perceptions are possible, people will have tremendous benefit. We cannot wait for you to listen and we can't wait to see what you think. Break it down. Here's the thing. there's something about Elizabeth's story and the way that she tells it that seems to touch on a larger struggle that I have.

And it's one that we engage in actively here. Some might say it's part of why we started this podcast. I want things to be really simple. Like I'm a scientist. and I want it to be like, this is true, I can explain this. And then there's this other category of things that are not true, and I can't explain them. But because I'm also a person of faith, I know that there are things that I experience, that I believe, that I live by, that can't necessarily be quantified in a scientific way.

but Elizabeth, this woman, this experience, seems to be crossing too many wires because it's not like we had someone on who was like, I discovered religion and I had a come to Jesus moment and now my life is totally different. That's one category of person and they're allowed to have that. It's also not like we had someone come on who is like, I did ayahuasca or I did shrooms and I see the world different. And you can be like, okay, you had an experience and it makes you see the world different. This is a person who had a tangible and scientifically verifiable thing happened to her. She was struck by lightning. And she acquired things about her, some of which we can explain. and then she acquired a set of beliefs,

a set of knowings, and a set of very curious abilities that I cannot explain. And I can't even explain them by saying she had a trippy experience, and that's her experience. She is interacting and interfacing in the world in a way that I both cannot explain

exclusively scientifically, and I also cannot dismiss as simply something of the spiritual realm. She is living at an intersection that makes me uncomfortable and intrigued. People who go off and do a psychedelic, they often come back with a different perspective, but they don't come back with different senses. They don't come back. Correct. Totally changed in terms of their cognitive abilities, the way that they interact with the world, the way they see things, the way they sense.

things, pre-cognitive dreams or nightmares, whatever you want to call them. So we understand changes in consciousness, but we don't really understand changes in full function or ability. First of all, Jonathan, I really appreciate you saying that because it feels like you understand where I'm coming from, and I appreciate that. The next thing I want to tackle to add on to this is I've been doing a little bit of a deep dive as a recreational hobby into, understanding some of the historical basis of experiences that tend to fall under the psychedelic umbrella. And in particular, I've been studying some of the early Greek, they call it the mysteries with a capital

M, which we know is, you know, well documented in Greek literature. And, you know, there's there are, there's a strain of academics and apparently much of Greece. that understands that, you know, the ancient practice of the mysteries involved a brew that did things to people that if you speak to someone who does shrooms and has a great time, they have a lot of the same experiences. So what kind of classical scientific theory and psychology would say is that there are archetypes, right? And this is a term that comes up in psychology. It comes up in Youngian psychology, even Freudian psychology.

There are archetypes. There are things that the brain will produce, right? There are things that are so common to the structure of the Homo sapiens sapiens brain and existence that they will keep occurring in certain environments, right? So when I think about the kind of things that Elizabeth experienced and what she now believes, leaves. It's as if she has been educated in like the archetypes of the, you know, philosophical structure of like our cultural existence, meaning the notion of the, the impermanence of time, the notion of a loving presence that holds us. You know, these are things that people for thousands and thousands of years have experienced from

different entry points. And she experienced it without wanting to. She experienced it without studying. She experienced without having any structure of philosophy, religion, physics. It's like her brain got, like everything got downloaded to her. And the reason that I am so fascinated with her is she's not a person who was into this stuff. She was, as she describes it, just like a normal 28-year-old mom of two in a parking lot on the way to a synagogue that she didn't even feel that connected to spiritually. The way it normally happens is people get introduced to an idea like a loving presence or we're all one and maybe they read about it or maybe they hear a lecture or it's talked

about it and they kind of feel it and I'm like, well, I kind of intellectually understand it or Or they're searching it. Like, I need to have an experience or I'm really depressed. So, like, I need to shake things up. They're seeking something. She wouldn't seeking anything. And then once they get the idea, sometimes they intellectualize it, but they don't really feel it or it doesn't resonate with them throughout their entire being. Other people have described getting this information when they do psychedelic experiences, but often they have the notion already implanted through some intellectual.

reading or study or something like that. And so then they take psychedelics and all of a sudden they understand it at a whole different level and their consciousness has changed from an intellectual understanding to what we sometimes call an embodied understanding. And so they're like, oh my God, I'm totally different because now I kind of understood that thing before, but now I'm living in every moment I see that I'm no different to this other person or I'm interconnected or that really there is only two states of fear or a love. And, you know, they begin to say, say, oh, well, I used to see that in a book, but now I actually feel myself contracting when I'm in fear, and they can, you know, again, it's like the embodiedness of their understanding.

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You even get your true biological age that you can track over time. Superpower used to cost $499.99. Right now, it's $199 for the full experience, which is much more affordable than anything else out there. Make this the year you stop guessing about your health with superpower. Superpower. Not only did Superpower reduce their price to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. The category that I know is understandable and quantifiable is that I believe that people have experiences that we classify as near-death experiences. And also, this is something that has been cataloged in literature for, like, this is just a thing that happens. And, you know, we also, humans used to, like, die at 25.

So, you know, the experiences were very different. The way you died was different. But we know, this is something that as a scientist, like, I have no problem believing this. This is not like, I don't need you to believe in God. You don't have to believe in the spirit. When people are in a critical physiological state, there are experiences that they have, which, again, I don't need them to be true.

I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying that when they return to us, there's a striking similarity of an explanation of visions and a light and this, that, the other. Now, I'm not saying that what they are experiencing is heaven. I'm not saying it's hell. I don't need to say that. As a scientist, what I can say, the least that I can say is that when your brain is in a compromised state, when your body is in extreme danger and trauma, you know, all of these situations where near death experiences happen

tend to be interesting and significant, that you come back with a report. And it doesn't really matter if you if i believe that you actually went somewhere you are reporting with you know your your your motor cortex your you know your linguistic centers your cognitive centers they're all converging it's like a the thalamus is working hard it's integrating everything and you spit out this story and that story is true because you're reporting it to me right i don't need to say you experienced heaven i don't need to say god exists you know there are people who say like, oh, God has to exist because of all these things that people say when they have a near-death experience. I'm not going there. And also like, I know God exists. So I don't

need her to tell me that he does, but they do. It needs to be gendered about it. But again, what is fascinating to me about Elizabeth's experience is she didn't just come back with a story. she came back with a knowledge that I cannot explain and she came back with an intuitive sense that also was accompanied by physiological changes synesthesia is a thing that's a scientific thing we know about it but she came back with it in a mystical package my reference for that is the Old Testament it says that when when when we stood at the base of Mount Sinai, that we were able to see sounds. And this is not me saying that the Torah is right. And it's not me saying that God exists. I'm saying that that is one of the oldest reports that I know.

And even if you say like people wrote the Bible a thousand years ago, great, it's a thousand years old. I don't care. We have a report from a long time ago, which is a lot more than a thousand years ago. And we know that from extra biblical sources. we have people having mystical experiences that we are told or accompanied by synesthesia. So this is something that it has existed in all of these forms.

And yes, when people started experimenting with LSD and synesthesia was experienced and it was this mystical thing, we could dismiss it. It's like, oh, that's the druggies. But what Elizabeth is sitting at the intersection of is a spiritual and synesthetic experience that also is accompanied. by things that I absolutely cannot explain. I don't know what oras are. I don't know what she's seeing, but she's seeing something that people all around the world who are in touch with this say that they see too.

If you take away the explainability factor and you think about the relational factor, meaning you've heard her story, where are the points where you're like, yes, that makes a lot of sense to me outside of the scientific explanation. And what does it mean for the nature of reality and human ability in general? It's really hard for me as a scientist to be able to say that there are certain people, I'm just going to say this, who see oras, meaning, we know that those people's eyes are working just like, everybody else's eyes. This is not an optical experience. So, for example, when people have visual hallucinations, we, we know they're not seeing something with their eyes that we're not seeing.

Their brain is producing a visual image that, you know, is being interpreted as there, you know, in the visual field, right? But there's nothing different about the eyeballs of people that, can see oras. And I don't know if anyone has scanned the occipital lobe and looked at the visual map of people who see oras. That's the study I would do if I was actively in the neuroscience field right now. My guess is it's not going to show up in the occipital lobe. So the question is, and there are places that, you know, might be interested in doing this kind of research, my question is, is there any way to quantify what these people have in common that they are expressing as I see oras? What is it? I really want to know.

We know that, you know, there is no objective reality. We are all making our own perception of the objective or seemingly objective. So there is, you know, the first step is to realize whatever your experience, experiencing in this moment is not the same as what I'm experiencing in this moment. And there is some overlap, which we call a shared experience. But for the most part, we're living individual experiences with some overlap. So if you start there, then the people who are experiencing oras are just on one spectrum, one side of the shared experience. And then the question is, are the people who have a shared experience, let's say,

over here, and I'm just positioning to the left, but not meaning any sort of political statement. And the people over here on the right who are at the far end of perceiving oras, are they accessing something that everyone else could access if they were to adjust their internal perception a little bit? And if not, then, you know, what do you make of it? Okay. So that's beautifully said. this is sort of, I mean, this is the source of the question. Meaning, it is easy for me. And I really, you know, having an 18-year-old is a very humbling experience because he thinks he knows almost everything. And he's very rational.

He's very logical. So it's very easy for him to show me what the other side would say. So if I were to say to him and I have, you know, this lady says she sees Oras. He's like, that doesn't exist. That's BS. She's nuts. I was like, okay, that's not helpful, right? That's not helpful.

So what is helpful? What is helpful is for me to acknowledge that there are people all over the world, all over the world who claim to have access to a sense of perception that I don't have. Okay? That's the kindest that I can be. That's the simplest I can be. There are people all over the world who claim that they have a sense that most people don't have. And it is very easy to dismiss that as crazy. Literally, I'm not using the word lightly.

It's not, it's very easy to dismiss that as that's a bunch of hooey that like they read by some, you know, energy healer who just wants to make money. because usually that's where people, when people find a belief that they don't like, they often will say it's either the establishment or that person's just trying to make money. And, you know, in many cases they may be right, but that's not my issue right now. So what I would be willing as a scientist to open up to is to say there is there are a set of abilities that involve perception. And perception is a neuroscience topic. not this is not like, uh, Eldous Huxley like, oh, perception, like it's all relative. No, I'm talking

about perception, consciousness, right? There are people who have an ability to perceive something that we have not yet been able to quantify. That's the best I can do. And if I allow myself the exercise of leaning into it, I learn more about myself than if I, if I, I simply say, I don't want to know about it. I learn more about the world. I allow myself to listen to someone like Elizabeth Crone and say, what if I remove all the layers of what rational culture has told me? What if I remove all the layers that my science training has given me?

And what if I allow myself to say, what am I not hearing that either I'm afraid to hear or that feels too scary or that feels too confusing because it's in that dissection that I think we actually get somewhere and can literally advance as a species. Is that open-mindedness and is that ability to say what if

and I can suspend disbelief in order for a greater cognitive good? So you want the red pill, not the blue pill. The red pill and the matrix for those would enable Neo to understand what was actually occurring outside the illusion created by the matrix. And so what we're saying is

we're all living in some version of the matrix. There are some people who are outside of that version. And each of their experiences of being outside of the matrix have similarities, but differences. and we cannot explain scientifically exactly how they are able to access information outside of the current matrix that most people are living in. But it is possible, and you learned,

what I hear you saying is that you learn about yourself by not totally dismissing those experiences. So when you explore these ideas, you know, you've talked about oras. So what is it when you think about an aura? Are you, you know, begin to... That's hard. That's a hard one.

It is a hard one. This notion of oras have come up in a few other episodes, actually. Corey Taylor talked about seeing oras. Keeps coming back. It keeps coming back. And he's like, well, if you just like thermal image, a human being, you see waves of energy coming off of them. And so, you know, he's sort of described what he believes oras to be.

So when you consider that someone like Elizabeth can see them, Do you believe, oh, wait a second, we do have internal energy systems, which are explained by Chinese medicine for thousands of years, and we have meridians in our body. And so, of course, outside of our body, we have systems that may not be perceivable to the regular eye, but are there, and that we don't just stop at the edges of our skin. But, you know, how would it be that we are operating with all of this function inside of our skin and yet we immediately stop and are not connected to the environment around us. Of course, as Neil Thi said in his episode, we are all part of a larger system. So there, of course,

is invisible interaction between us and the environment. When you explain it like that, yeah, I can, I can dig it. I can dig that. I think that the, you know, in terms of aura is like this notion of like colors and meaning is a little bit harder for me to get my, head around and I also know that you know the the place that I've allowed myself to be open is with two women in particular both of whom have passed on they were women who studied a variety of practices I I went to both of them not believing meaning not feeling I that I needed to believe what they were supposed to do. I was sent to them by someone that I trusted very, very much who saw that I was struggling in ways that she believed Western medicine could not

help me. And so both of these women, I was sent to one and then she ended up moving away and I went to the other. Both of them had a complete understanding of their ability to perceive oras and energy fields and things like that. And I was like, this, this feels crazy to me. Like, I don't, because this was, I didn't understand it. I've had several people, including other practitioners of the craniosacral and somatic experiencing variety, who have said things about me and about what I allow in in terms of other people physically entering my space, even when I literally think I'm just like laying with my eyes closed quietly. I've had enough practitioners say that to me that I believe there's,

there is something there that they perceive that I cannot. In terms of the color and the meaning, I don't know. So when you're saying you have practitioners saying that you don't let people into your space, what you're talking about is an energetic field, a resonance. They say that I don't let you in. A boundary around yourself that is not part of your physical body. that they're standing in a room and they're saying, does the essence of Maim allow me to walk closer to her?

And they're saying there is a force field. I mean, I don't know how else to describe it because force field is a little bit of a, you know, science. I mean, it's getting Star Wars. Yeah, it's getting a little Star Wars. It's getting a little sci-fi. But what they're saying is that you do not stop at your skin. there is actually energy that is a part of your body around you,

and they're sensing that and saying that you have a boundary that, for those just listening, why? What? They're not just saying that I, I have had more than one practitioner tell me, not just that I don't stop at my skin, but that I prevent other people from going beyond my skin. So, yes.

And what I'm suggesting then, well, I've heard the saying you enter a room, not you specifically, but people enter rooms before they walk into it. Or the notion that, you know, you think of someone they call. Or someone is on our minds and then we realize like two days later, oh my gosh, they were going through something really intense during the time period that we how many times do people dream about people and then it like leads to a phone call and it's like oh my gosh and like how many times do you want to have a coincidence before you are willing to believe that there are things you do not understand do you remember when we were watching the mushroom documentary and there was all the interconnecting

layers uh and what they had a name that i forget so uh so yeah so underneath mycelium Underneath the earth, there is a network that allows the incredible world of fungi to communicate. And there's not to use my mother's mescaline reference, it's almost like they breathe together. Like the earth essentially has an entire ecosystem. And, you know, if you think of the planet as like a macrocosm of the human body, you know, just like the trees or the lungs, like there is a fascia. and the fascia are essentially fungi. I mean, that's how I interpret it. The illusion is that we are all separate,

but the fungi do not believe they're all separate because they have this visible interconnected layer. And if you've ever heard someone say, oh, you need to energetically cut a cord from someone, oh, you're tied into someone else. What's really happening, and Neil Thies explains it really well, is that we are all interconnected,

and we have a web of interconnection that in our limited matrix version of our perception, we haven't been able to see or quantify. And the notion of aura may be an individual energy surrounding a person, but in a more complex state, it's actually the interconnected web that each of us is tapped into and communicating with. When you say that like, oh, someone enters a room before they enter a room, I instantly thought of Elizabeth Grown saying that time is like a layer cake. And I don't mean to like be in that hippie place, but we are always in all states at once,

meaning the totality. I mean, this is like, this is the level that she came back with after literally being on the ground for, I don't know, four minutes. Like we don't even know. The totality of that understanding is that we are like, what if you live? your life as if everything has already happened and is happening at the same time. Like, what if you lived your life like that? As she said, you'd be much nicer to your children.

You would waste less time worrying and you would spend more time being the person you want to be and not who other people think you should be. So when you were talking about the practitioners who said to me, like, I can't get close to you. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. The first thing I thought is people are like, they just want to make money and make you come back. Like, I hear it. I know it.

I was raised with it. We're conditioned with it. But the similarity and experience between people who have no connection to one another, they're not all on the same grift. Like, they, there's something that they are sensing that is a core to you that is similar. So that's the coincidence. Let's go to time for a minute. And the notion of the layer cake, and firstly, if it is a layer cake, I want the chocolate and the strawberry layer.

But we don't know the flavors of the layer cake. What does it mean? That's interesting. Hold on a second. Without thinking, what do you picture when she says time is a layer cake? What does it look like? Go. I mean, I just see all these layers of different flavors.

There's the chocolate. There's the vanilla. There's like the cream in the middle. I don't like that layer. Then there's the sponge. Then there's like another like maybe there's a gram cracker, but it's gluten-free. That's pretty good. I pictured a completely uniform.

I don't even like vanilla cake, which might be the most controversial thing I say in this entire episode. But I pictured, that's all I pictured. I pictured a vanilla cake with like butter cream frosting. Like, yeah, like, you know, kind of really tall. But I think that's interesting. Like, I like chocolate and I pictured vanilla. The reason I picture the multiple different flavors is because, you know,

if you look at any sci-fi movie. And the thing I come back to with sci-fi is that the collective vocabulary of sci-fi is drawing on some truth. You know, we've dramatized it to make sense and to deliver it to the masses in a way that is understandable. Oh, it's someone's imagination

that is dipping into another reality. That's what creativity is. And so what we're, but I, what I, why I'm going back to it is that we are, we are drawing in those movies on something that is real, beyond our understanding that the mystics have spoken about. So when you think of, you know, the recent, the spider verse, when they talk about,

oh, I'm in the wrong timeline. Yeah. It's like similar but different. So it's like, oh, it's like the chocolate versus the, you know, it's still cake and there are still the people, but the flavor is different and the way that it's come together is different. So when I think about time as this layer cake, or it all. existing at once. I don't actually think about it like that. And I don't necessarily know that

there are these parallel universes where there's other versions of me playing out. But I do think there are multiple ways that my life can go and I have some choice in it. And I think there is some preordained pieces that I have the ability to manifest or to play out. And then there are variables that come into play, which is, you know, some form of free will. But when we talk, when she talks about it, when Elizabeth talks about it and says, you know, she has the ability to know these things, which I think are the ability to know some of the core pillars that are the unchangeables, how does contemplating the nature of time as this permanence or this continual, I don't even know what to call it, but the way she describes it as it's existing all that

ones, how does that change for you, your experience in the now? I mean, I think there's two levels. There's the practical level of if you believe that, what else do you let yourself believe? Meaning it opens up a different notion of consciousness, which people who have profound psychedelic experiences will say that that's what it looks like for it to change. Like, everything looks different. Meaning, what if you had an experience that changes literally the way you structure how the world even exists, how time exists, right? It changes everything. That's sort of like the, that's the meta level, but the practical level, you know, I think for her, it relieved a lot of anxiety. And I think it also allowed her to be more open to anything, meaning things that she

otherwise would have dismissed, she all of a sudden was open to on a practical level. my interest when we talk about this new perception of time is like I want to do I want to do what we did with oras to what does it mean for someone to have psychic ability because a lot of times if you think about psychics they could just be guessing they could be guessing right and you know unfortunately you know statistically speaking as she kind of spoke about, the kind of people who are seeking that are often in situations that for her were kind of predictable, meaning they're asking about money or they're asking about, you know, relationship. But I'm more interested in...

She was struck... Let's just be really clear about it. This is a woman who was struck by lightning, had a near-death experience, and after that, believed that time existed in a way that certain people can simply dip into it and know what happened in a time that's not happening now. That's, I'm sorry, I can't just dismiss that.

It's too complicated. And I don't want to get into, oh, some of her premonitions didn't come true. That's not how this works, people. And I'm speaking to you, my 18-year-old, who doesn't listen to the podcast because he already knows everything I'm going to say. It's not that simple. You cannot just dismiss it and say that's a bunch of hooey. It is more complicated than that.

So what does that do to an 18-year-old's brain to say that things are knowable that have not yet existed or knowable across time and space? Why are our brains mostly wired that way in this culture? I mean, I think most people function that way. I think most people want to wake up. know that they're in total control of everything that's happening. They want to believe that everything that's happening they can explain or ask a doctor about it. Or if it feels uncomfortable, they want it to go away. And that's how you get up and punch the clock. It's how you join the army. It's how you go and kill innocent people. I mean, that's like, that's what people say is,

like, the government realized if enough people have expanded consciousness, we cannot send them to Vietnam. Like, I'm not making this up, people. This is like a real thing that happened. is that if you have an expanded consciousness, you will not behave in a way that is organized and obedient. So what does that mean to an 18-year-old? So, yes, they won't be able to punch the clock because they'll see the hypocrisy in the matrix or the status quo of society.

But what does that mean for them to realize or to begin to think that time is nonlinear in a practical sense? What does that do to them on a daily basis? Well, again, like the mom in me is like, maybe they wouldn't go to school. Maybe they wouldn't get an advanced degree. Like, that's what I think a lot of people fear.

I know that they're, you know, groovy children and teenagers, just like they're groovy adults. You know, I would like to say that there's a balance between wonder and responsibility. You know, I knew a lot of people who did a lot of drugs in junior high and high school. And they definitely seem more chill. But in many cases, you know, people are seeking those experiences.

I'm not saying in all cases, but in many experiences, people are seeking those experiences because there's a discomfort with their personal reality. So I think that there's also a balance here. And I think that's why the work of Rick Doblin and people like that, who are trying to form a legitimate conversation around, what it means to have transcendental experiences and what it means to not just alter our consciousness, but to change the rigidness

with which we approach the human experience. That's more interesting because I do believe it leads to more compassion, less judgment, less anxiety, and I mean, the fact that there might come a time when people could say, I don't agree with you, but I don't feel the need to fight about it, or is there a way to have a political structure, a community, a city, even in your own home? Is there a way to function that is not full of animosity, rage, and defensiveness?

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be like everybody needs to microdose because I don't believe that that's the answer. But there are many other ways to expand our consciousness, and I don't mean getting struck by lightning. There are many other ways for us to have an understanding. And one of them is to be open to listening to conversations like the one that Jonathan and I are having right now. I totally agree. I think a lot of searching often comes from a dissatisfaction or a pain in the present. And as we open our consciousness, you know, there are those who are like, well, let's burn the current system down. And I think there's a balance between being able to operate in the current system and function and not isolate oneself with,

trying to build a new structure and change things and integrate this new sense of consciousness. I'm going to come back to a specific, have you intuited or perceived events in the future that have been accurate? Have you basically had an experience yourself of seeing time as nonlinear? I'm nervous to say yes. I'm going to say... Why? Why are you nervous to say yes? I'm nervous to say yes.

I'm nervous to say yes because of ridicule, because of judgment, especially because I'm a person of science. I'm nervous also as a public person. It's hard to talk about these things. You know, I've heard people describe deja vu as like as a potential looping back of time. And then, you know, as someone who's studied memory, literally, like the, you know, the neuroanatomy and physiology of the memory system, like, that was a big goal of mine every time we would come to it, either as an undergrad or as a graduate student, like, is this deja vu?

Is this neuron? Is this, is the CA3? Like, is this region? Is the hippocampus? Is it doing? You know, like, and I really, like, I want to find it. Like, what's that groove? How do you explain it? And part of me is, like, what if we're dipping? Like, I had deja vu this morning. I was making lunch for my son. which Jonathan tells me I shouldn't do because he's 18. But, you know, I was a working mom for many years and didn't get to have that experience. And my kids were homeschooled their whole life except for, like, recently. So it's fun to make lunch. Anyway, I had this new container, this new glass partitioned container that I was putting his lunch in.

And I had very specific deja vu, like, like very specific. And the reason that like now I have chills and might cry, the reason that I know that I've never put food in this container before is I just got the container yesterday, meaning I never have had this container in my life. This is the first time that I've held this container. It was given to me by my Kundalini yoga teacher. And I literally, so I had deja vu where I was like,

I've never even stood at the sink with this container. It didn't exist. It's never been in my life. And I'm holding it in my hand. And I was like, is that it? Like, what if, what if that's it? What if I just, like, slice through? And I think that the vanilla cake has funfetti.

You know, like, it's like, it looks like a party. Like, I just sliced into it. I had intense deja vu the other day where I was in my backyard. And I've only been in this house two weeks. I haven't really taken calls. in the backyard where I'm pacing and I was on the phone and I turned towards the house to walk up the back steps and I was like, whoa, I've been here before. I have experienced this. I was like, was I meant to be in this house to like be in this phase of my life? Like it was and the conversation

was about something significant that was going to happen in the future that we were making plans for. And it was, it kind of totally freaked me out. And I've had, intense moments of those deja vu experiences at different points that have all turned out to be pivotal and it's different than like a small deja vu moment where it's like oh this kind of feels familiar versus like a striking moment where there are actual physical chills and I take that as a barometer of being on the right track that something intense is happening and that there's a signpost I had something very similar when we started this podcast I had something similar before in 2019, I had a series of them before I started the company that I co-founded.

I've had them in interesting markers of my life where then something significant turns. I also had them in 2019 right before you reached out to me. And that's a story we tell on the podcast about having, you know, feeling like time had just passed, but it had turned out to be eight years and you had vocal cord surgery and reached out about Michael Singer. And then you reached out about a book that I had just been talking about, like literally days before, like the day before. So I have also had a really interesting experience when I got to Ashland after a series of

like a year and a half of intense uproot and turmoil where I got there and I walked downtown and realized that the downtown was like identical to a recurring dream I had had. for many years, multiple times a week before my son was born, and then didn't have it when he was born. So it was like eight years of not having that dream. And then I got to the town of Ashland and was like, holy goodness, I've seen this place before. And it was in a dream that I had had on repeat for years,

but hadn't had it in close to eight years. It was unbelievable. Jonathan, there's one more thing I want to touch on. So we've done oras, we've done time, we've done psychic abilities. There's a notion that Elizabeth, however short you believe she was gone for, even however long you believe she was gone for, even if I were gone for two weeks, I would not have the kind of information. I don't believe that I could have the kind of information.

And I don't mean information like truth. I mean, she came back with a specific set of, concrete, fully fleshed out beliefs that came from very, very few experiences. So the fact that even her perception of time was that she had more conversations in her head about what she thinks happened when she almost died, then I could even imagine fitting into the amount of time that she was laying on the floor, that we know she was laying on the floor. So I cannot explain.

No one can explain that. That is inexplicable. They even had to make up a different word that didn't have the word explain in it. That's how inexplicable that is. But she believes that something happened to her that allowed a downloading of information. It wasn't about a new set of beliefs. It was that she now had a confidence about knowing things, which I think anyone who's had a profound on spiritual, transcendental, mystical, or psychedelic experience can probably understand.

As a scientist, I am fascinated by what that is when information is, is it that like, so many, I'm going to see, here's the dumb answer that I'm going to give you. So many synapses are firing at the same time. And like, that's not how the brain works. But there's something about a stimulation, my guess, a stimulation of some center of integration. that allows such a vast variety of information to come together. And, you know, people write about the God gene, right? Like Sam Harris talks about this.

Like, are we, you know, like is religion, is mysticism? Is that something that lives in us? Something is getting stimulated when people have these experience. And this happens all over the world. It's happened for thousands of years. This is not a new phenomenon. Something is happening where a massive sense, of integration is occurring that also instills in the conscious experience a certainty and a comfort.

Because when you meet people who are like, I'm so certain God exists and like, you're all sinners and you're going to die, I'm always alarmed at how certain they can be. And that is sort of where we can use that certainty, you know, as an oppositional force. But what Elizabeth describes and what many people that I have spoken to have described is that it's almost like something gets downloaded. It takes, you know, you watch the bar go, and when the bar is over, you just know it's in there.

There's an internet meme, and Nikki Glazer actually says it in her episode that we've been pressing not now on the upgrade to our brains for, you know, the last, however many years, hundreds, thousands of years, We have this hardware that hasn't had updated software in it for a really long time.

And the question is, is the information just available? Do we need a conscious introduction like we were talking about? Like I need to read a book. Then I need to practice it. Then I need to sort of feel it out to know if it's true. Then I need a psychedelic experience to expand my ability to feel because I'm really shut down in how I feel because I've been trained in condition. I think it's out there.

It's out there. The truth is out there. The truth is out there. And what I hear people talk about in the consciousness realms is that, you know, we talk about the evolution of the human being, right? Not just from cave person to person who uses a cell phone and is tapping all the time, but that, you know, the information is out there. And some of that is in intellectual form, but that are open.

and our ability to integrate new information is vastly expanding. The reason we know this is Dr. Krippel's asteroid example in his explanation of phenomenon that we not only so easily would dismiss, but that historically we have burned people at the stake for the notion that rocks don't fall from the sky, those farmers are out of their minds, right? And then, oh, wait, it just took a minute for us to be able to say, like, oh, like literally asteroids, it's a thing, like rocks fall from the sky. Or the notion that it was considered heresy to not believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Like, for real, yo, it was heresy. And the fact is our knowledge and our conscience,

are still evolving, but mostly it's our consciousness and mostly it's our resistance to change. Gerta Keller, who believes that volcanoes were a larger part of extinction of the dinosaurs and not just climate change, was booed off of stages and spent a career in shame until, forgive me, some dude was like, oh wait a second, I think she was right. Those are small examples of what I do believe is a larger evolution of perception of consciousness. And now, you know, if I can extrapolate and this may not be as widely accepted, but it's becoming more accepted, that there is no mind without the body, these are all one system, that depression, anxiety, bipolar, even schizophrenia are often symptoms, not actually

end diagnosis and that there are causes underlying them that can be looked at through much more advanced measures than we've ever looked at them before, that our ability to perceive senses or perceive information outside of our traditionally understood sense of consciousness is just a part of the human experience and that we can all have access to it. We don't necessarily need to be struck by lightning. What I take from someone like Elizabeth is a, a model of what's possible, not as an anomaly of, oh, my gosh, something was totally rewired by that lightning experience. I think, well, if the brain is this unbelievable organ that has all of this potential that most of us are never really accessing, how do we move beyond limited

beliefs and limited sensory experience to access more? And, you know, how do we, better understand the human mycelium of interconnection and how does science begin to catch up with that and as more and more people get this idea introduced to them then their senses begin to open up and then their somatic experience of these ideas begins to change and what I think is happening in the world is that as information is disseminated faster and faster the literal collective consciousness is more and more open to these spiritual ideas and this down. unloading notion is that people are pressing the update now button in different forms, whether it be through breath work, whether it be through challenging themselves physically,

whether it be through therapy, through talking it out, through listening to conversations like these. So then the question goes to where people go is, are we in a simulation? Where is it that this is all an experiment to see how quickly or, what the collection of circumstances are that allowed the human being to update. And, you know, to round this out, if you look at my favorite poster of what the hippies were right about, you know, how, I mean, how many ways do we need to be told we're hurting the planet? How many ways? How many ways do we want to be told? What other evidence? And I'm not even trying to get

political and climate change, blah, blah, blah. If you cut down enough trees, you will kill the species that live in those trees. You will upset the entire eco-like that we are hurting the body of the planet. And how many other ways do you need to be told? That's just like one example of what an understanding of the world as our mother, as our holder, as the potential for. love and safety. Like, how many other ways do you want to understand that consciousness? And also, in the same way that I don't need, I don't need to hit update to understand what gravity is.

It's there all the time. That's what I mean. Like my exfile shirt that says the truth is out there. That's what I mean when I say the truth. I'm not, you don't have to believe in God, but like, there is a system of gravity on this planet. You don't have to believe in it for it to be out there. that is what I believe Elizabeth Crohn accessed. That is what she grabbed. That's what grabbed her. You know, Jonathan, I could talk about this with you forever, and I hope that we get the opportunity to do so.

But I think, you know, this is, I really appreciate this conversation. I hope that I cannot wait to see the comments for what we just spoke about. I think a lot of people probably would love to talk more about this. That's something I'm really looking forward to doing. Maybe that conversation is, happened in some parallel universe and that we've done an entire series on the unstructured

nature of time and expanding of consciousness to help us take the red pill everyone. Well, at the least, this episode of the breakdown has officially been your red pill. So thank you for listening from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We're going to see you next time, which is also a time that has already happened. She's gonna break it down for you She's got a neuroscience PhD or two One fiction one now she's gonna break down So break down

She's gonna break down she's gonna