Sense of Soul - Eben Alexander NDE and the Consciousness

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

It was our pleasure and honor to have the most amazing conversation about Near Death Experiences and the consciousness with the renowned academic neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander.  A pioneering scientist and thought leader of consciousness studies, New York best selling author of the book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeons Journey into the Afterlife transcendental near-death experience, which spent more than a year atop the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list and is published all over the world. His book Proof of Heaven was written after years of during a week-long coma from an inexplicable brain infection completely changed his understanding of how the brain worked. A book that inspired Mande so much after her NDE.  His AMAZING new book LIVING IN A MINDFUL UNIVERSE : A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, shares the next phase of his journey to comprehend the true nature of consciousness. Purchase Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness  Order here on Amazon www.ebenalexander.com www.sacredacoustics.com www.becomingmorewhole.com Next episode we interview the co author and co founder of Sacred Acoustics (binaural beats) Karen Newell. We have a lot of new amazing workshops online, check them out! If you want to help support Sense of Soul Podcast, please donate to the coffee fund or rate, subscribe and review! Thank you! www.mysenseofsoul.com  

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart and soul. It's time to awaken. It's our pleasure and honor today to welcome the renowned academic neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander. He is a pioneering scientist and thought leader of consciousness studies. He's the New York bestselling author of the book, Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife Transcendental Near-Death Experience. He has been a guest on Dr. Oz, Oprah, and many other national, international media programs. We are super honored and thankful that he joined us today on Sense of Soul podcast. His new book, Living a Mindful Universe, a Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, shares the next phase

of his journey to comprehend the true nature of consciousness. I would like to give Mandy the stage. She actually wrote you something. I did. To Dr. Alexander, I am forever grateful for you. You quieted my fear. You quieted the voices saying it was hallucinations. You quieted the anxiety that paralyzed me in my hospital window. You helped me wrap my head around why I felt less alive on earth and more alive when I was dead. I was alone. I was scared. I wanted to go back home, home to the love of that divine vibration that I had felt. I couldn't hardly hold my hands up. I had tremors. I had no taste buds. I lost 40 pounds of muscle and was bones and saggy skin. I couldn't go to the bathroom without help and without a walker. My throat hurt from the tube that kept me alive for nine days in my coma. My body was bruised from being poked and stuck with needles. My neck had bandages from the main line and my lungs crackled from the holes left in them. I was tired. I was so tired, but

mostly I felt alone, alone in my experience, alone in this beautiful journey that I had just gone on when I was in my coma. Then my sister-in-law walked in with your book. She read me a few pages. I cried and I felt an instant connection to you and the truth. It took everything in me to turn each page after she left. Each page felt like it weighed 200 pounds because I was so weak and shaky, but I was determined to keep turning those pages because I had felt like you had written my story. Your book allowed my damaged lungs to relax and breathe that night. Your book helped me finally sleep with serenity for the first time in weeks from awakening from my coma. I was no longer scared to close my eyelids.

Your book helped me trust myself in my experiences. Your book validated that I did see my brother in another dimension surrounded by the same gold dust that you described and that he was more real there than ever that I felt him here on earth. Your book motivated me to stand and be strong in my story and in my voice and not let the world and its conditions take that from me. Your book was the love I needed in a moment of weakness and it gave me strength to continue sharing my near-death experiences. Thank you, Dr. Alexander, for being a friend and for hugging me through your book's words when you were miles away and didn't even know me. You held my hand through my recovery and for years after on my journey to the awakening of my soul. Thank you for reaching me and being brave enough to share your journey so you could help other people like

me. And thank you for taking time to be with us. I'm so honored. Well, Mandy, thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, we are all truly in this together. And that was one of the main reasons for getting Proof of Heaven out there was helping to unite all of these millions of souls who have been to the other side and witnessed this extraordinarily rich spiritual universe, and then come back to this world to share the tale. And what I can tell you is that that kind of message from you that really energized my journey and my willingness to share it with all. So Shanna and Mandy, it's so good to be here. And Mandy, thank you very much for that opening. Thank you. You were brave to do this

because it's not like you were just always in the spiritual world. I mean, being a neuroscientist, who were you before? Well, you know, I was very influenced by my father growing up, my adoptive father. He was the head of a neurosurgical training program. So he was very scientific, very knowledgeable about cosmology. He was also very religious. His own father had been a general surgeon in Eastern Tennessee and had taken my dad to that Presbyterian church every Sunday of his life. So my dad was very, very religious or spiritual in a very real sense. And so he was a very crucial kind of source for my growth. But like many who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I knew that science is the pathway to truth. And I promise you, I term lightly because in fact, reductive materialist conventional science is a faith-based religion that actually has less to support it than many

of the faith-based religions. It is not yet truly awakened to the deep message of quantum physics. And that of course is where we go with a lot of our message and books. I work with scientists around the world trying to do this, but essentially before my coma, I was a card-toting kind of reductive materialist neuroscientist who believed the brain creates consciousness and that our existence is birth to death and nothing more. And my journey showed me that that's completely wrong. In fact, in many ways, that conventional science has everything backwards, thinking the brain creates mind, whereas in fact, in many ways, that conventional science has everything backwards, thinking the brain creates mind, whereas in fact, mind and consciousness create all of emerging physical

reality. That's really the best way to look at it now. And this is a scientific revolution that's not going to go back to those dark and bleak days of materialist nonsense, trying to pretend that we're not even really conscious. That's where, like Daniel Dennett, who is one of the proponents of that conventional view, would put it is consciousness is an illusion, an epiphenomenon. He would say you don't have free will, that it's all chemical reactions and electron fluxes in the brain. And that's where that conventional science had it so wrong. And yet quantum physics was screaming at them, trying to give them the answer that consciousness is fundamental in the universe.

And we are finally getting to a point where neuroscience, philosophy of mind, quantum physics, personal experience, human experience are all really pointing to this much grander role for consciousness, which is very good news for those who would like to believe there's truly an afterlife and even reincarnation. Every bit of that is fully supported by this scientific revolution that's ongoing right now. Would you say that soul is consciousness? Well, I would say yes. Really, the best way to look at this kind of brain-mind relationship and this emerging scientific revolution is to realize that our concepts of soul, you know, that we have an identity that transcends the identity of our bodies, of our brain and body and thoughts,

and even our life experience in this birth to death incarnation, that our soul is something that indicates a much bigger aspect of us. It's an aspect that really swims through multiple incarnations in this process of evolution of consciousness itself. And there's the whole world of transpersonal psychology that's opened up over the last few decades, led by people like Dr. Stan Groff, Charles Tartt, Michael Newton, Brian Weiss. These are all brilliant clinical investigators who realized that the only way to make sense of the events in our life and our kind of psychological challenges and the issues we face is to realize we've all been here before and we'll be here again in different incarnations and that it is a progressive growth of the soul. The soul is a very real concept. The science that I studied all those years at Duke and then taught at Harvard Medical School did not necessarily involve an

acknowledgement of soul. I now realize we cannot talk about any of this without understanding this deep kind of spiritual existence each and every one of us has as soul, and that also the scientific revolution around consciousness is pointing out that not only are we a soul that, you know, is temporarily in this kind of human form as part of our grander growth, but that all of our souls in many ways are interconnected. And it's not just about humans. This is an interconnection with all life on earth and beyond, and it has to do with the evolution of consciousness. This is a grand mission. It involves work both done in this material realm and done between lives in the form of life reviews, reuniting with souls of departed loved ones, planning next

incarnations. It's a very big operation that cannot be the simple little notion that I used to have of birth to death, living in a physical body and identifying with that running stream of thoughts in my head, you know, the ego voice, which serves a purpose, but it certainly is not leading us into this higher knowledge. We really need to leave the little ego voice and the little petty concerns of the ego with fear and anxiety as its main tools. We have to leave those far behind in this effort of growing into who we truly are. And that's why I think meditation, going within, centering prayer. I use sacred acoustics for meditation. We can talk more about all that. But the reality is

the answers lie within us all, even though we get the work done here in these physical bodies, living in these incarnations. But in many ways, this is where our growth occurs. But it also, it's important to understand that we don't have the knowledge of our higher soul. There's a programmed forgetting where we're intentionally not enabled to remember everything our higher soul has ever known in multiple incarnations. It gets covered up. And there are reasons for that. It has to do with buying into this incarnation, but there can be much greater growth when we realize that that does not limit who we truly are. I didn't go to Duke University. I'm just a suburban mother of four

and, you know, taking my kids to school every day. And I learned all this in meditation. All over the world, we're all receiving the same things. Coming from a Christian background as well, you know, just really focus on faith and belief, right? And then all of a sudden starting to question myself, oh my gosh, how much of what I actually believe in have I been just told to believe in rather than have experienced for myself. And then going through experiences and then not becoming real to me, whether anybody else experienced or not. It seems like when you went through your NDE, that experience was like this huge moment in your life that changed your way of thinking.

Absolutely. And I love the point you made at the beginning. You know, you're just a mom of four out there in Colorado, none of these big academic degrees. You don't need academic degrees. In fact, the academic degrees can get in the way. Believe me, I have gone through my own transformation having worked 15 years at Harvard Medical School. I know how a lot of that thinking works. I know how that science works. I know how that whole culture of trying to determine truth works. But I also realize how we've been led so far down a wrong pathway. But you bring up an excellent point. The truth lies within. We all have access to this deeper truth. Meditation and centering prayer are what I would argue are very powerful tools for getting in touch with that deeper truth. But of course, it's really in how we live these lives that we come into that

truly higher soul that is promised to us by those kinds of visions. But having that ability to go within and leave the ego voice behind, that's a very important step. The little voice in our heads, that stream of thoughts, it's important to label it properly. I like how Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, he calls that running stream of thoughts in your head, your annoying roommate. And I think that's a very important way to look at it. I love that voice, you know, trying to use fear and anxiety and setting up conflicts with others.

And I'm not good enough. And all these other little personal myths that we run along our lives with and realize, no, we are very, very grand souls indeed, especially through our connections with the God force at the core of the universe. And that is where we can all awaken to that kind of deeper sense of reality. But it involves, by necessity, kind of joking with your little ego mind and telling it it's

not as important as it thinks it is. And then joining forces with your higher soul and really kind of discovering more about who we are. But those academic degrees, unfortunately, in this day and age, academia, in many ways, has defaulted to the simplistic, low-hanging fruit of materialism. And when I say that, I'm talking mainly in a scientific view of physicalism, that only the physical world exists. And that is terribly misleading. I mean, even something as simple as placebo effect, which is the medical sciences acknowledgement over the last seven decades that minds, beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes can play a tremendous role in our healing and in bringing us into wholeness. You know, that is an admission by medical science of the power of our thoughts and of mind over matter. And yet many people just don't understand what placebo effect really is. They think, oh, you fool somebody into taking a sugar pill and their headache goes away. No, there's far more to it than that. And it's a profound

demonstration of the power of mind over matter, which is exactly what we're promoting in Proof of Heaven and especially in living in a mindful universe, is that our minds have tremendous power to kind of adjust and modulate our emerging reality. Our beliefs and our thoughts are tremendously important. And remember that in our culture, the vast majority of accepted societal beliefs are falsely limiting. So that's where by going within, we can start to discover the powers of mind in our own journey.

We've put so much limitations on us. And I've been thinking about this a lot, you know, like only five senses. Come on. I know I got several more. I know Mandy's got even more than me. I think like experiences with synchronicity and how that plays in, in our worlds. I would love to just get your opinion on it. Certainly have a lot to say about synchronicity, the fantastic kind of quality of life that can show us the reality of that deeper meaning and our deeper connections. It's so amazing to me that we have all these little signs from the universe

supporting us down this amazing journey. Right. That's just more evidence of the primordial mind of that God force that we all have access to leading you in the right direction. My son, who is in Louisiana right now, he sent me a picture. He was playing Xbox and it said two, two, two, two, two, two. He knows that my numbers are twos and I'm always feeling guided. I was like, what? Because he's so not totally aligned with the stuff that I talk about all the time, but he's getting there. And just the fact that he did that and he's like, I've been seeing him all day. I'm like, uh-huh. Yeah. That's your mama missing you. Yeah. Great. Did you find that your expectations of your children shifted when you went through this? Because I know for me, it did. It was like, at first I was like college, college, college, degrees, degrees, degrees. And now I'm

like, I just want your soul to be happy. I could care less if you, I told my daughter last night, if you sell hot dogs on 16th Street Mall. Totally. I agree with you 100%. And after my coma journey, especially as, you know, it took me about two months to kind of get back to ground level here. It was, my brain was really fried and my mind needed to recover.

But one of the greatest blessings was realizing in many ways, I felt like I knew both of my sons much better. You know, part of it was the intuition and the empathic connection that was grown tremendously through the NDE. But another part of it was realizing kind of our connection of soul journey. In many ways, I've come away from my experience thinking that both of my sons have souls that are very advanced and likely more advanced than mine. I think they were here to help me through certain phases of this. And both of them in their professional careers, my oldest son, I'm very proud of both of them. My oldest son, Evan, is now doing a residency in

physical medicine and rehab. He's going to be an incredibly great healer, and he is deeply into consciousness. He's already recognized the contributions from his past lives into his current life. Then my younger son, Bond, he's out there at Fort Collins, majoring in computer science, interest in cybersecurity, and a big interest of his in the cybersecurity, his leapfrog beyond to quantum computing and a much deeper understanding of quantum entanglement through the academic study of quantum computing and cybersecurity, which is his thing. And both of them have gotten into sacred acoustics, into the meditative mode. And I mean, I've really just, that's one of the reasons

why we dedicated Living in a Mindful Universe to our children, is we came to realize they are really taking the mantle and rising up to the occasion now to take this world to the next level. My generation, I'm kind of embarrassed for how my generation has led us into climate change and a lot of the other problems but I have great faith that our children will absolutely rule the day and we're just trying to hand a little bit of knowledge or whatever knowledge I think is useful from my generation to them to help them in their journey yeah and you know you do have to kind of make mistakes in order to figure it out you know I know, we've learned that with each generation. Yeah. And just a little shout out to your son, Bond, up in Fort Collins.

If he ever needs a home cooked meal, he's welcome to our house. I know those college kids get sick of drive-thrus. Well, thanks so much. I'm sure he will appreciate that. Yeah. Wonderful. I will pass that on to him. I'm sure he will appreciate that. Yeah. Wonderful. I will pass that on to him. I'm sure he will love hearing that. It made me feel comfortable when my son was off in question

in State University, knowing that I had someone close by if he needed help for any reason. Well, thank you all for being there. I will certainly let Bob know. Yes, of course. I would love Mandy to share her story with you. I really want to hear. I mean, these are what I live for. So I'm going to give you the short version, but I had a near death experience in 1994. I had a respiratory failure, an asthma attack. I was 18 years old. My parents called 911 and station six came to the rescue and they intubated me. And I literally walked out of the hospital within 48 hours. I was very lucky. I will tell you that after I got out, I felt like I needed to go thank them. So I went and got a bunch of meat and headed to the station and to thank them.

And I met a wonderful man by the name of John Woodruff, senior, we became friends, he passed away shortly after, you know, during that experience, I did not transition to another dimension, I was floating outside of myself, I could see the ambulance workers, I could see my neighbors standing outside wondering what was happening. But I could see infinitely, I could see all the way around the neighborhoods, I could see my mom, my mom was nervous, she was doing the dishes for some weird reason. And that was my experience. And the extent to it, there was no big jolt back into my mom. My mom was nervous. So she was doing the dishes for some weird reason. And that was my experience and the extent to it. There was no big jolt back into my body. But after that, I was changed. I felt oneness and more connection with nature and air and wind and water. But I shut it down. I didn't like it. I mean, I was 18 years old. So then fast forward 18 years later, I had moved five different states and I came back to Colorado and I lived in a different area. It happened again, the same month. Yeah, exact same thing. Complete respiratory failure

from an asthma attack. This time I landed in a coma for nine days. I transitioned to another dimension. I saw lots of things that you described in your book. And it was station 13. I went back after I got out of ICU to thank the gentleman. And the guy who was the engineer on the fire truck was John Woodruff Jr. So it was his son. Okay. Yes. And that was station 13. I woke up on 6, 13, 13. And then

shortly after that, I started getting messages from his father who had passed away to give to him. And that was my first experience with mediumship and was very spot on. And now me and John Woodruff Jr. are super, super good friends. And there's this crazy soul family connection. The experience about the gold dust really freaked me out that you talked about, because when I saw my brother on the other side, he passed away in 2007 in the war. He had gold dust and orbs all around him. And I've drawn this and I painted it. And then just a lot of other similarities in your story. Wow. Yeah, that is absolutely beautiful. That's certainly one of the things that has gotten my attention is the similarities, especially when you kind of open your mind and realize what that extraordinary environment is like, the kind of ultra reality, the fact that we step completely outside of the here and now, you can experience things over a great extensive time and space. I mean, just an

extraordinary mode of knowing. And yet, you know, when people tell those stories, it just all comes right back to me. It's one of the beautiful things about sharing them together and about having a community. That's why, for example, the group IANDS, International Association of Near-Death Studies, IANDS.org is a beautiful kind of community and meeting spot for people to share their stories by the tens of thousands. And it really, that's an important part of all this

because as you know, my God, it's so astonishing when you go through that. It's so unexpected. You know, how do we explain it? Many people come back thinking maybe they're crazy or maybe their doctor will think they're crazy. So they don't want to talk about it. But luckily, the culture is changing. So we're inviting more and more people to share those stories. It's not that you're crazy at all. These are about all the different levels of experience available to sentient beings. Andinations. They're not dreams or some confabulations. These are profound, ultra real evidence of a deeper nature of reality that applies to all of us. From your perspective,

having this experience where you've like, I got to figure out what just happened. How do you explain what happened happened what is your views on the science part of what's happening in your brain a lot of people talk about dmt releasing really quick and that's why it's so you know um very similar to the experiences of people like on ayahuasca or some you know um other hallucinogens or deep meditation what do you think's happening what do you think happens in that moment well i i think I have to point out that I've come to realize that the brain does not create consciousness at all. So the brain serves as a filter that allows primordial consciousness in. But what I think is going on here is in these, like an NDE or these profound spiritual epiphanies,

there are many different ways that they can come to us. And a lot of it can be gleaned just through meditation. But I think what we're doing there is we're simply traversing through the veiling function of the brain and allowing our conscious awareness to be out in the whole, that ocean of kind of infinite possibility, what some people would call the Akashic record. I think another name for it would be the quantum hologram, basically a field of information of all potential of all things that can happen. And we actually have a tremendous amount of ability to influence our pathway through that information space.

But this is just a way of realizing that that conscious awareness that we've always had and maybe assumed was kind of a very private form that seemed to be generated in our brain and be personal to us and not shared by others. But modern scientific investigation shows that's not so. That there's tremendous evidence for non-local consciousness,

things like telepathy. Read Guillaume Playfair's book on twin telepathy, and he's a very good scientific researcher. You'll never doubt the reality of telepathy again. Of course, in twins, it's very easy to demonstrate, but telepathy happens in other people too. Certainly anyone with a close connection can have a strong telepathic connection. But then there are all other modes of non-local consciousness, like precognition, that we can know the future, remote viewing, that we can discern information halfway around the world or across the solar system, outside of time and space, that we have access to that kind of information. And then you get to the very rich stories, not only of near-death experiences, but say of shared death. They happen in people who are physiologically normal. They're just like NDEs, but you can't default to any simplistic medical pseudo-explanation about a lack of oxygen tension or a buildup of CO2 because these are healthy people. It's often a very close relative that is passing. They may be a thousand miles away, but their soul comes through

and takes the bystander soul along. These are all examples of liberating our conscious awareness from the shackles of the physical brain and the illusion of the here and now and of a sense of self. Because when we go out into this ocean of consciousness, we maintain a certain stream, I call it a viscosity, so that even, you know, in dying and going through life review and reuniting with departed loved ones, planning next incarnations, coming back into this world, there's program forgetting. So that Jim Tucker at University of Virginia, who studies past life memories and children indicative of reincarnation, and for your viewers, for interest, go to uvadops.org. That's University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies. But Jim Tucker will tell you that you've got to harvest those memories by age five or six, because after that,

those memories start to vanish. They get much harder to uncover. You can uncover them through hypnosis and various techniques, meditation going within, but they're not readily and others have shown us very clearly how you can have techniques to get into all that and go deep into it. But I think what's happening here is you're just basically able to thin the veil. The brain presents us with this kind of apparent physical reality around us, but ultimately it's dependent on mind and dependent on soul. Those are very key ingredients. None of it exists independent of mind and soul. And so all this is showing us is that we're bigger creatures than just birth to death, this body, this incarnation, this kind of Eben Alexander sense of memories and sense

of self. My consciousness is much grander than that. And that's what we're exploring in these kinds of journeys and experiences. And the good news, as Shanna pointed out early on, is that you can go within. Meditation, centering prayer, we all are conscious, sentient beings. So we all have the power to access this. But a lot of it involves shutting down the noise and the kind of illusion of that little ego voice and what it's telling us about this physical world and this physical life and expanding ourselves to a much grander knowing of self and the meaning and purpose of our existence. We had on someone who had that shared death experience with her brother.

Her name is Paula Lenz. She's an author here in Colorado. Actually, she wrote a book about it called Driving Into Infinity. Well, I think the shared death experiences are very important. There are a lot of them out there. They're not as common as near-death experiences. I would say they're roughly one-tenth as prevalent, you know, in the people that I meet at presentations and things like that. But it's a very profound experience. And in fact, I first learned that term, shared death experience, from Raymond Moody. He wrote a book called Glimpses of Eternity. But that book is all about shared death, nothing in it but shared death experiences.

And again, since they normally happen in people who are very healthy, physiologically normal, as opposed to people who have near-death experiences, shared death is a profound example of human experience that proves the reality of the spiritual realm. For our listeners that have not read your books, let's talk about your near-death experience for a moment, because my brain always goes in this direction, and I'll just lay it out there. I had brain activity. I was on life support. I went for a

long period of time without oxygen and a long period of time with very low oxygen, but I didn't like flatline. You, on the other hand, your brain was damaged profusely. So how is it that people that have near-death experiences that don't completely die or flatline or don't have that brain damage like you to their neuro cortex, how is it that we're all experiencing this leaving of the body? or don't have that brain damage like you to their neurocortex. How is it that we're all experiencing this leaving of the body? I think it's because there are many, many different ways to allow your consciousness to separate from its apparent localization in the body. And that's what happens in an NDE.

I mean, you told a beautiful story of how your consciousness was no longer contained within your body, but actually was witnessing a lot of events going on in the world at the time. So I think that's kind of a crucial aspect of understanding all of this, is that our consciousness is not really limited to this body. In fact, the form that is in this body, that very filtered form, is very limited. And that's why meditation is an important way to get kind of in the zone, to get out of body and remote view and all these other aspects of non-local consciousness that can be so readily demonstrated. And it really is just a way of acknowledging that we've never experienced

anything other than the inside of our own consciousness. As much as we like to believe that we're experiencing a world out there, and we talk about this in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, and call it the supreme illusion, because in fact, none of it has ever been anything more than a mental model. Now, the mental model is quite good, and that's why it fools us into believing that physical world out there is its source of information. And yet quantum physics, one of the deepest and most profound lessons in quantum physics, is there is no objective external physical reality that is independent of the observing mind. And that's the crucial realization about all this. And that's where we

then can then start developing our sense of soul, this notion of traversing through multiple lifetimes, process of growth, start seeing much more in the way of meaning and purpose to our existence, that it's not just some random chaotic accident, which is what materialist science was trying to tell me it was, you know, that there was no such thing as consciousness, that it was just chemical reactions, electron fluxes in the brain. And what I've come to realize is that's completely 180 degrees off from the truth. And that's why the truth becomes apparent to us in so many different ways. But in sharing these stories, we start to see they're reflecting a

very deep truth. And it's a deep truth that not only is confirmed and helps to connect the dots at the leading edges of modern science, but it's a deep and profound truth that in many ways has been with humanity through our spiritual traditions going back four, five, six thousand years into the past. In fact, my co-author of Living in a Monopoly Universe and life partner in Karen Newell, who's the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, she and I are right now very busy starting a shift network, a nine-week, nine-module session that will cover exactly that topic. It goes back to ancient Egypt and talks about how much ancient Egypt influenced a lot of thought in China, in India, in the Middle East, in Greece. All of our

kind of thoughts and notions of oneness and connectedness really began, at least from our point of view, maybe even earlier, but right now you can track it all very strongly back to ancient egypt and we start to realize that a lot of this that we claim to be such profoundly interesting novel information about the nature of reality has actually been known to spiritual traditions going back for millennia and that's why it's so important for people to realize you don't have to wait for the scientific community to catch up to all this. They are very rapidly, I promise you, over consciousness itself. But the deeper truth is each and every one of us as sentient beings has the power to explore consciousness and contribute to this growth of sentience, growth of transformation of consciousness throughout the cosmos.

I saw you in an interview with the late Larry King. I love Larry, such a beautiful soul. And he was deeply interested in the afterlife. He's really surprised that he was not a believer. It's a tough nut, but it's, you know, skepticism is very important. I learned when I came back from my coma that to truly unravel this deep mystery of consciousness and brain-mind relationship and nature reality, ultimately, I had to be my own toughest skeptic. In fact, there's a saying in Proof of Heaven, we quote Rene Descartes, where he said, if you want to be a true seeker, at least sometime in your life, you have to doubt as far as possible, everything you've ever thought

to be true. And that's exactly what I faced when I came back from my coma journey was having to rectify all this within a scientific framework. I had to go back to square one and question everything from the get-go. And I love Larry's beautiful kind of skepticism and open-mindedness about it. But you got to remember though, that there are many people out there who claim to be skeptics who are not. They're what I call pseudo skeptics. They've made up their mind already. They don't care about empirical data. They could care less about rational argument. They already know that physicalism is true. Damn the torpedoes. They're never going to change their mind. Those are pseudo skeptics. And there are a bunch of them out there in the world. They often write, you know, like the science section of the New York Times might have that kind of thing.

But they're fooling themselves because the leading edges of science fully support this extraordinary revolution in the understanding of consciousness and the primacy of consciousness. It's the reason quantum physics has been so mysterious for the last century is because some of the people investigating quantum physics have no idea about what's going on in consciousness studies and about neuroscience and philosophy of mind into examining the very nature of reality around us. That, of course, is a territory we get into in living in a mindful universe. And that is a territory that is wide open for growing into this higher knowledge. So he didn't necessarily believe. So how much does

thoughts and belief system actually influence what he's going to experience in the consciousness? And what I'll do is I'll ask you what he asked you about his friend, Billy Graham. Where did Billy Graham go? He was a preacher. He believed in God. So is his afterlife, because of his beliefs, going to be a different experience? I think the important ingredient is being open-minded. That's where being curious, being skeptical is very helpful.

And Larry was absolutely that. So from my point of view, Larry, and God knows he heard plenty from us and he's heard from others about these kinds of spiritual experiences. So he had plenty of information to help him when he made that transition and was liberated into this much higher form of consciousness. My own feeling is that Larry is in a very good place now that he really ran with the ball. I know for a while there, he was even thinking about having his body and brain frozen. Oh, yeah, we got one of those in the mountains here. And I know he had entertained that with Dr. Oz and all that. But

the good news is, at the end of the day, Larry realized that was a waste of time. He wasn't going to do that. And I hope that some of what I shared with him, what we, what Karen and I shared with him in our interviews there, helped him to come to that conclusion that he really had nothing to fear. And that once he was then liberated from his body at the time of physical death of the body, that's when he could truly expand and come into this because he'd been forewarned and advised about it. Now, I think there are some people whose beliefs can shut them down and kind of put them in a purgatory for a while. So if you have an absolute lack of any kind of openness to this, you potentially can get stuck.

But the other thing to remember is your religious beliefs are not even going to dictate the nature of where you go and what you experience. Now, often what we come back with, you know, for people who have an NDE, they will often frame their experience with their religious backing. But for example, me, I grew up in a Methodist church in North Carolina, very conventional views. And there were some kind of concepts and realities I encountered in my NDE that were never part of that Methodist upbringing, like becoming one with God, that experience of my higher soul and primordial mind aspect, becoming one with the God force throughout all of eternity and throughout all of infinite

dimensional space, and then bringing that back as a concept, it was very difficult to explain. You certainly didn't get that from our religious training. Likewise, the notion of reincarnation. It was shown to me so clearly that there's no way to deny. In fact, that's what makes our current society have so much trouble with this, is we think that the default position is birth to death and nothing more physical incarnation and reincarnation opens up so much more about how all this can truly work and it fits better with the experiences people have all the loving relationships the reuniting with loved ones and deathbed visions after death communications every bit of that also lends itself to that much bigger world where our souls come back again and again to really get this right. That was not part of my religious beliefs,

but from my experience, it was absolutely an undeniable truth. So yes, our religious beliefs before an experience like this can kind of flavor the way we interpret it and report it, but often you'll find that the content of the experience is not dictated by religious presuppositions. And in fact, there's a great commonality of what people experience there. There's a beautiful book by Christopher Copp, C-O-P-P-E-S. He's Dutch, but the book has been translated into English. It's on my reading list on evanalexander.com, but it's about the different lessons of religions. And what he does is he takes the major religious faiths and shows how the lessons of NDEs in many ways consolidate, refine, and crystallize those deep meditative beliefs from all the great faiths into a common kind of knowing that involves

love, compassion, kindness, acceptance, mercy, gratitude, forgiveness, all of these profound qualities of NDEs that show you that the religions of our modern world do not conflict with each other. They do in their superficial dogma, but at the deeper meditative levels of practice, especially of prayer and of communing with the forces of infinite love, that God force at the core of the universe, are much more unifying. And in fact, I think that's one of the biggest lessons that needs to come out of the modern study of NDEs and consciousness in a scientific sense, is a unification of religions to show us that actually they're in agreement about the nature of the soul and the reality of

it over eternity. And that also about the binding force, about how we're all in this together, really sharing the dream of the God force of the God mind. And it's all in a process of progression. So this is not about a reincarnation where it's just your goal is to get off the wheel of suffering, but more about reincarnation where it builds towards a goal of basically the evolution and transformation of all of consciousness throughout the universe. And I believe this is going on through multiple civilizations of widely disparate levels of advancement all through the cosmos, but that each and every planet and contribution to this is at a given level of this progression, but we're all working towards this goal of the evolution of

consciousness itself. Listening to your talk when I subscribed to your website and you talked about the sense of separation is false. Right now, our world needs to hear that. But all perspective, because Shanna and I through our podcast see that unity more than we do the separation. So that's what I'm focusing on. But some people don't understand that you say things like there's no sense of separation and that everything in the physical realm is just a projection. And then their mind just goes, what in the heck are you guys talking about? Well, that's why it's important to kind of go within because you can start once you've got these kind of signposts that kind of indicate a way of thought and a worldview that can make sense. Then going within, you start discovering more and more that the evidence for that, and a lot of your personal information that contributes to your personal soul aspects of

that group journey and evolution of consciousness start to become clear. But it's not like we think our way to this. In our society, education, rational discussion, logical thought, these are all functions of the linguistic brain. And yet much of this is beyond the linguistic brain and yet readily accessible to us by going within. And that's why meditation is so absolutely essential to come into this grander sense of self. We're having to retrain ourselves because we haven't been taught generation after generation to have that self-trust that it is within someone wants an answer they're like going to the depths of deep google to you know find that

answer and hopefully they find you when they have it right here yeah it's all right right inside in our very conscious awareness that very source of existence And that's where we are to look. And again, the first step is you're not necessarily going to think your way logically with that little running stream of thoughts in your head. In fact, the best way to get into a lot of this knowledge is to go into meditation and put that little voice into timeout. You know, the impish teenager that it is, because there's an aspect of you, your awareness that is far grander than that little voice. And that is what we are growing this relationship with over time. That, for me, has been the process in the last 12 years since my coma.

It has really been just developing a much richer relationship with that kind of primordial mind and sense of self that is actually part of the universal self that we all share. And again, the power of love and kindness and forgiveness. And you're right, what you said a few minutes ago, Shana, about our world right now is in dire need of this, because we tend to take our lead in various cultures and societies from certain thought leaders. And for the last few centuries, the scientific mind has been one that in general, our culture has turned to. And that's where it's kind of led us down the wrong pathway. In fact, I would say it was a divorce, probably sometime during the scientific revolution, certainly arguably in the probably in the 1800s and early 1900s, a divorce between our human spiritual nature and our intellectual,

scientific, technological capabilities. And that was all due to the reign of materialist science. Now, materialist science has done a lot of good. You know, look at our modern pharmaceuticals, look at a lot of the medical advances, transportation advances, things like that from technology, and they're all wonderful. And yet look at climate change, look at a million species threatened with extinction. Look at the plastic in the Eastern Pacific, twice the size of Texas from plastic pollution. You know, we are killing this planet. Homo sapiens? Wise? Are you kidding me? Well, we actually do have wisdom, but our materialist science, by being unbridled from human spirit,

has allowed for corporate greed and militaristic avarice to really kind of threaten this world. And that's what we're facing today. In fact, I am very optimistic about the COVID pandemic. I look at it as I do. I've spent a lot of my life working in addiction and alcoholism work as part of medical and healthcare. And I had my own issues and stopped drinking in 1991. Congratulations. Me too. 10 years sober. Fantastic. But in that world, we often talk about a gift of desperation. You know, having a bottom that is low enough that it forces us to kind of reconsider our soul journey and maybe come to a higher recognition of our soul purpose and grow out of the alcoholism or addiction that is in many ways a disease of the ego and the ego mind. The whole notion of higher power in many ways is just acknowledging that we all have access to forces in our mind that enable us to rise above that ego and do much better work for ourselves and much deeper understanding. But this is really about a tremendous wrong turn that was fostered by that

false sense of separation that came out of materialist science, reductive materialism, trying to break everything down into parts and then pretend that by assembling those parts back together, understanding the laws that govern their relationships, you explain all of emerging reality. That gives you the kind of bottom-up causation that misleads a lot of materialist scientists even today into thinking that the brain creates consciousness out of all these neurons. But in fact, top-down causality is a much better way to look at it all. Top-down causality is operative in quantum physics, where you have kind of master organizational systems that govern how everything is unfolding. And much

of that top down is from a mental layer. And that's where the whole scientific discussion gets very interesting, because you start talking about mind over matter in a very real sense. But again, probably the deepest sin of that divorce of materialist science and technology from our human spirit was leading to that false sense of, oh, brain creates consciousness. When you die, that's the end of it. There's nothing to this concept of soul, that it's all an illusion of all those a hundred billion neurons and their 10,000 connections each giving you a thing we call consciousness. And in fact, the other way of looking at it is the truth, that consciousness is fundamental and the brain is merely a filter.

And that's what gives our souls so much more power. But the power resides in acknowledging the oneness, that we're all in this together, that it's all about love, compassion, kindness, acceptance, and mercy. This isn't something new. The founding fathers of quantum physics knew this many years ago, but they were afraid because if they came out, they would have been burned on the stake. Exactly. Well, you are exactly right. And it's astonishing, but that's the deep truth of quantum physics is when you get right down and scratch the surface of this material world and investigate how it works, what you find is none of it exists independently of your observing mind. That's the astonishing profound truth. We go into a lot of detail about that argument in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe. And we often do it in our

coursework, like we'll be doing in the Shift Network course. I will just say that you both, sense of soul, you absolutely hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what this is all about, is each and every one of us coming to realize that our concept of soul is absolutely real. But there's never any such thing as one soul. You know, that's one hand clapping. We're all in this together, sharing that dream of the one mind. And we are really here to manifest that love and compassion and kindness for all fellow

beings. We are not separate. To hurt another is to hurt ourselves. So it's a beautiful lesson emerging from the science of consciousness. And you all are doing a great job spreading it around this world. We're the students and our guests are the teachers. And we just feel honored to have people here like you to bring our consciousness and our learning up even higher.

So thank you. We are all truly in this together. And every soul brings a meaningful and important part to the puzzle. As a doctor, how would you explain the pineal gland, the third eye? The pineal gland is not, from my point of view, is not a key player in understanding all this. I know Rene Descartes said it was the seat of the soul and he had his own reasons for believing that. In modern thought, people are interested in dimethyltryptamine DMT production by the pineal. From my point of view, the pineal is not such an important part of it. There really

is no kind of physical structure in the brain that's the kind of ultimate arbiter of consciousness. Consciousness is just beyond the brain. It is something you cannot reduce any part of the brain to explaining consciousness. The DMT story, I'm participating with research groups in the UK around that. You know, DMT, for all it's cracked up to be, just like many other psychedelic substances, it's important in understanding some of this. It gives us a glimpse through the keyhole, but it is not like the full-bore, penthouse suite, panoramic view that you get from the NDE of that realm. The psychedelic drugs gives a teeny little window into it,

but they are absolutely not a ticket into a deeper understanding. That's where I urge people to go with binaural beats, sacred acoustics, meditation. That's a far more powerful way to truly get in touch with those realms. Talk to us real fast about the acoustic music. Within two years of coma, I'd read about 150 books, trying to make sense of all this.

And I came to the realization I had to go within. I had to explore mind and consciousness and meditate. And somebody introduced me to the concept of binaural beats. And I'd not heard of them before. But that was absolutely essential to my journey from that point forward. Binaural beats were discovered by a Prussian physicist in the mid-1800s, found that a pure tone in one ear, a slightly different frequency in the other ear, and something strange happens in the brain. It generates a wavering

sensation that's equal to the arithmetic difference between the two input signals. And the reason all this works so powerfully, we believe, and we explain it all in Living in a Mindful Universe, is because, you know, every sound you've ever heard, and that includes chants, anthems, hymns that might have influenced transcendental experiences, are processed in the neocortex, in the acoustic cortex of the temporal lobe, in circuits that have basically been refined and evolved in the last few million years in primates and homo sapiens. Very, very different, the sound of sacred acoustics and other binaural beats. They're actually being processed by a circuit way down in the lower brainstem, a very ancient part of the brain in terms of the circuitry of consciousness. And I believe

that's one reason they are so powerful, is they cause this oscillation in your lower brain stem, which resembles the oscillation used, for example, in hypnosis, where you might use a visual target and eye movements, EMDR, you know, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing that is used, for example, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder is likewise a left-right oscillation in the midbrain. And so we're talking here, sacred acoustics causes this oscillation to occur way down in your lower brainstem. And I believe it then modulates the overall kind of ascending reticular activating formation, its influence on the thalamic cortical loops,

which are neocortex communication to deep thalamic structures. But all of it is modulated by these ancient systems. And that's why I believe sacred acoustics has such a profound ability to alter consciousness and to liberate us from the shackles of the physical brain. Getting the neocortex out of the way is the name of the game. And we know that scientifically, for example, in the studies that we mentioned in Living a Mindful Universe of psychedelic drugs like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, that actually decrease brain activity. You know, to people who have taken those substances, they would say, oh, my brain must be lighting up like a Christmas tree because they believe the brain creates consciousness.

But when you study it scientifically, functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, their brains go dark. There's no part of the brain that increases in activity to explain those phenomenal experiences. To me, based on my experience with meningoencephalitis taking down my entire neocortex, I knew what that meant to get the neocortex out of the way. But that's exactly what those scientific studies of psychedelic drugs are showing us, is it's taking the brain down and offline that enables your conscious awareness to expand into those kind of experiences. The same thing happened to me, but in a much bigger form, because my entire neocortex was effectively taken offline. But that's why I love how the sacred acoustic sounds enable me to duplicate that, get back to that in a very strong form. And you guys have a lot of this information on what website for that?

If you go to sacredacoustics.com, you can learn a tremendous amount. And I would also encourage people who are interested to follow our series of webinars, unitedinhopeandhealing.com, because we talk a lot about a lot of those same concepts. Likewise, on ebanalexander.com, there's your free 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness.

You can click on that banner and you's your free 33 day journey into the heart of consciousness you can click on that banner and you get a free 33 day email drip campaign that'll introduce you to all the main concepts of wow living in a mindful universe it's it's a companion workbook we decided to give it out for free so a lot of people could participate in this more than 9 000 people around the world have taken that course a 33 day journey into the heart of consciousness that you can find on evanalexander.com. And they all leave their comments. They help each other. They leave their experiences and it has a translate button.

So people from all over the world are participating. Oh, that's awesome. Get all of your people to get on board 33 day journey into the heart of consciousness that you find right there on the welcome page. What a beautiful gift. Well, that's part of it. We like to give away as much as we possibly can to help people get up to speed on this. And that's really the name of the game is to share it, get it out there in a big way. So those would be your go-to resources, sacredacoustics.com. There's a free 20-minute

download. Listen through headphones because those sounds are far more powerful through headphones. Look at the training videos on sacred acoustics dot com. Karen has put together some beautiful, very short, I think about an hour and a half in total, but each one's about eight to 10 minutes with each one with a little nugget of information to help you get more and more power out of exploring consciousness. I can't wait. She was the co-author on Living in Mindful Universe. I would suggest we get Karen on here to talk with both of you. I would love that. If you want to, line it up.

Karen is a fount of wisdom, as you will see. The important thing about sacred acoustics is Dr. Anna Yousum, Y-U-S-I-M, who is a psychiatrist in Manhattan. She did a pilot study with Sacred Acoustics with a bundle that is now available at a deeply discounted price. It's the whole mind bundle on Sacred Acoustics. But she wrote up her pilot study in the peer reviewed medical literature. And so in February of 2020, her pilot study came out in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases that showed that over two weeks of listening to Sacred Acoustics in her busy psychiatric practice in New York City, 26% reduction in anxiety and depressive symptoms over two weeks

versus the control group, which only had a 7% reduction. Pandemic and of all the anxiety and depression coming out there, this is very important. And in fact, Dr. Anna Yousum and Karen and I have put together a nine-hour video, a training video for healthcare practitioners, mental health practitioners, for all kinds of therapists. You don't have to be a licensed psychotherapist for this, but Reiki, massage therapists can use this kind of thing. The training course is available at becomingmorewhole.com. It's nine hours of video. It's very high professional content for treating depression and anxiety, especially in this modern era.

I love that. I'm such an empath. I've been really worried about these people getting out of ICU that were on it and, you know, intubated during COVID because ICU psychosis is real. And I didn't have anyone to walk me through my recovery and explain that eight months later, my trauma was storing itself in my soft tissues, causing my joint pain and memory loss and disrupted sleep. And I mean, there's so many side effects, you know, withdrawing off of the medications, the hair loss. I mean, it was a lot. And I, so I really feel for a lot of these people because what happens when you go through ICU and you did have a near death experience, sometimes the physical symptoms that happen when you go

through an awakening look like trauma, but they can be one of the same. Absolutely. So it's like, I want to reach these people and I want to help them and say, this is what you might feel or experience. And he brought up EMDR, the saving grace to my trauma and my recovery. Right. Well, it's all about that oscillation in the lower brainstem. And in some fashion, it seems to liberate our conscious awareness beyond the here and now and sense of self. And now it's time for break that shit down. Leave our listeners with something that's on your heart today? I think the most important thing to remember, every soul matters in this awakening of humanity.

No soul left behind. This is about a tremendous process of growth and transformation that is part of human destiny reaching back thousands of years. We are alive at a very exciting and important time in human history. And each and every one of us plays a role in this evolution. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for taking time to be with us.

Well, my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on. Many of our listeners have asked how they can support Sense of Soul podcast. You can now buy Mandy and I a cup of coffee by going to www.mysenseofsoul.com and go to the coffee fund. You can also take one of our many workshops or classes online. We love to meet our listeners and work with them. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week. If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening.