You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best in paranormal talk radio
in the UK and around the world. If I had to boil down the
two most important books that catapulted near death experiences into public awareness, they would
be first off, Life After Life, written by Raymond Moody in nineteen seventy
five, and then this one in twenty twelve, exploding onto the public stage
was Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven. Both captured the imaginations of millions of people,
and today I have the privilege of introducing you to doctor Eben Alexander.
Welcome to the Afterlife Files, where we investigate near death experiences, shared death
experiences, and how they affect you. Unlike by casts that are just stories.
We'll give you a heads up on what to look for in our conversation,
and then after the interview, stick Around will help you make sense of
those accounts so you can incorporate the insights into your life. I think you'll
find that once having your most profound questions answered, living life in the physical
is filled with more peace and joy. Evan Alexander, MD was an academic
neurosurgeon for over twenty five years, including fifteen years at the Brigand and Women's
Hospital, Children's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. In two thousand
and eight, he experienced a transcendental near death experience during a week long coma
from an index explicable brain infection that completely transformed his worldview. A pioneering scientist
and modern thought leader in the emerging science that acknowledges the primacy of consciousness in
the universe, he is the author of the New York Times number one bestseller
Proof of Heaven, Map of Heaven, and Living in a Mindful Universe.
This fascinating interview is unlike any I have conducted in the Afterlife Files. It's
a curious mixture of head and heart. We find out later in the interview
when he talks about being attacked. Watch how evans first response to questions is
to go to his head and answer from a scientific viewpoint. He's very good
at that, and he should be. He's a trained scientist and has that
worldview. So keep your penhandy. He will give you tons of leads to
interesting and relevant books, articles, and papers. I'm not going to list
them down below. He'll give you a reference at the end of the interview.
Where there are a bunch of hot links and you can just pick them
up from there. Now, here's the interesting part. About seventeen minutes into
the interview, I ask him about the role of heart and love and near
death experiences. The scientist drops, Evan emerges and he talks eloquently about the
primacy of love and its directing force in the universe. It's a moving and
breath taking in its importance. In that description, he uses the word consilience.
Frankly, he stumped me on that one. It means the agreement between
approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities.
Simply put, it's a synthesis of ideas from different disciplines. Lastly, we
assume that you know his story. If not, there are hundreds of interviews
captured and uploaded onto YouTube. Choose your favorite. Here's our interview with doctor
Evan Alexander fifteen years later. I've been really glad to have you here on
the Afterlife Files. Welcome well, Scott. It's great to be with you
again. It's been a while and I've always looked forward to catching up with
you and finding out what's new, and looking forward to our time together today.
Well, I have been so thinking about you lately because it's been this
is kind of an anniversary year. It's been fifteen years since you had your
ND and over the course of time, I know that near deathics experiencers kind
of evolve their understanding of their experience. What's happened to you? Well,
what I can tell you is, you know, being a scientist, I've
tried to always put my journey into a kind of a scientific perspective, and
that's what I've really spent the last fifteen years doing. And the good news
is, as you're quite well aware, there are multiple scientific groups around the
world who are studying the afterlife question and similar issues concerning consciousness. So for
me, I feel like a kid in a candy store. You know,
people often think, oh, well, I guess the scientific community is not
on board with that kind of craziness. But in fact, some of my
biggest support for sharing my stories come from the scientific community, from groups like
Division or Perceptual Studies at University of Virginia or Institute of Noetic Sciences at California,
and of course the European Investigators. There's a lot of support for our
story in Europe and the scientific and Medical network as well as the Galileo Commission.
So I've just I really have been like a kid in a candy store
working with scientists around the world. There's a fantastic revolution in kind of the
fundamental tenets and metaphysics supporting our modern science that are in shift. And that's
what I think is so exciting is how this whole near death experience community in
many ways is kind of a tip of the spear for a revolution in scientific
understanding of the mind brain relationship, the nature of consciousness, and indeed the
very fundamental nature of reality. So it's an exciting time to be alive and
I'm certainly thrilled to be part of this revolution. Amen. Brother. So
it's also been five years since your last book, Living a Mindful Universe.
What have you been thinking about lately? Because I know your brain is always
percolating. Well, you know, I must say I often tell people that
the book Proof of Heaven from my perspective, is a big question mark.
You know, it simply says, yes, these amazing events happened to humans,
but what do they mean? How can we interpret them? And I
would say that the book Living in a mindful Universe, which, as you
point out, came out five al those five years ago. It came out
in twenty seventeen. In fact, that book is more of a proof of
heaven because it goes into the details of really kind of uniting science and spirituality
in a way that Karen Knewll my partner, and I saw saw fit at
that time, but since that time, I would say, my understanding of
some of the relevant issues, and in particular that concerns quantum physics and its
relevance and really putting together the whole package of consciousness from the hard problem consciousness
and neuroscience, through the binding problem in philosophy of mind, all the evidence
for non local consciousness and parapsychology, like to Lepitham of viewing, and then
of course that lion's share of information coming from the world of quantum physics,
which implies to us that the very physical world around us doesn't exist except as
an expression of the mental layer of the universe. It really brings into kind
of importance in a scientific perspective, the power of mind over matter, And
of course it's a healer. I'm fascinated by that as it presents in something
like placebo effect or spontaneous remission, and especially of course miraculous healing and near
death experiences, which I think is the most profound kind of expression of mind
over matter and the power of our free will and kind of our spiritual nature
to guide our unfolding universe. And so all of this is now gained for
kind of the scientific interpretation, given a lot of our modern efforts to understand
these phenomena. And of course these phenomena include not only you know, all
the evidence for the afterlife, but after death communications and near death experiences,
but also the tremendous evidence for kind of eternity of soul, and that privacy
of consciousness has exemplified through all the work showing of you know, reincarnation memories
and children past life memories and children suggestive of reincarnation actually are telling us something
deep and profound about the nature reality, and all of this blends into an
incredible kind of revolution and understanding and living in a mind for unise is probably
still one of the best premers to help people get up to speed on where
all that's headed. But we're already kind of working on what the next levels
of explanation might be and you know what's required in various theoretical models to try
and make sense of all this and explain his privacy of consciousness and viewing the
brain is a filter for that primordial mind. But you know, waiting for
the scientific world to catch up on all this is not something any of us
really have to do. We can all kind of run with it now,
you know, through meditation, centering, prayer, all the various ways of
going within are ways of experimenting with how we can glean information from the universe
and contribute to a much more ideal world. Unfolding is our reality, and
that's where I think that the lessons of the book Living in My Mind for
Universe, as well as a lot of the teaching that we've done in the
last five years since it came out, is really important to help people get
up to speed with understanding where this is all headed. So I remember that
about five years ago the International Association for Near Death Studies did kind of a
switch. I'm not sure it was conscious, but it was. They kind
of moved away from our nd is real to the question of how do they
live with what they know? And you're touching on that here, you know,
it's like, what is this? What does this mean for us as
individuals and for us as a community. Talk more about that, well,
I think it's important to point out, you know, this is not just
my thoughts on it, as you know, an isolated scientist, I'm reflecting
a lot of what the major kind of scientific community, the interested in understanding
of consciousness and mind brain relationship is expanding tremendously, and we have moved well
beyond you know, all these things real or not. That might have been
a discussion ten and fifteen years ago, but I think especially with the advent
of kind of a modern notion of consilience. That's what I was hinting out
a few minutes ago when I talked about how this information and this kind of
science of consciousness is now a consilience synthesis of information coming from neuroscience and the
hard problem consciousness where you realize that the brain cannot in and of itself create
conscious awareness. This is something Wilder pin Field recognized, you know, renowned
Canadian nursers and back in nineteen seventy five, and it's even more true now
because the evidence continues to pile up showing us that consciousness is primary in the
universe. That's where I think the iads kind of took their lead from the
scientific community, because, of course that IAANDS group is fundamentally about the scientific
investigation of near death experiences. And when you realize that near death experiences and
what they're telling us about what happens when we die aligns perfectly with other avenues
of inquiry. For example, Christopher Kerr, who is a Buffalo, New
York hospice worker, wrote a beautiful book, Death Is But a Dream,
and came out I think about three years ago, and in that book he
deals only with hospice and the end of life issues. But what he finds
is that eighty six percent of the patients in his study had very profound events
that lined up perfectly with kind of the life reviews and the things that indie
ors described as occurring in a near death experience. So when you find that
the dying experience lines up perfectly with what you discover in near death experiences,
you start to realize that indiees are truly an indicator of what happens when we
actually die. Even though indie ears by and large come back to this world,
so they didn't actually die, but The fact is when you start building
these lines of inquiry together and realizing how much they align and support each other,
that's where the real power comes into it. And a lot of that
lines of that discussion, I would simply like to mention something I'm sure you're
very aware of and want to make sure that your listeners are, and that
is that contest run by Robert Bigelow back in twenty twenty one where he challenged
the scientific community and said, well, what's the best scientific evidence for survival
of conscious awareness beyond permanent bodily death? And when they put out that challenge,
they receive more of the a thousand inquiries and people who wanted to participate.
Then they made it clear that you had to show at least five years
of rigorous scientific work experience investigating the afterlive question to submit an essay, and
in that context they got two hundred and four essays. They were originally going
to give out three monetary awards. The essays were of such high quality they
ended up giving out twenty nine monetary awards. And I would urge any and
all of your listeners who are not familiar with it to go to Bigelowinstitute Dot
org and right now for free, all twenty nine winning essays are available,
and you can just start with Jeffrey Mischlaw's First Place essay is a beautiful starting
point. He does an excellent job, and again he takes many different lines
of inquiry, and I think that's the important thing is we spent a lot
of time where, you know, scientists were kind of debating, you know,
one or two cases or issues. But it's only when you really look
at the whole big package of all phenomena of non local consciousness, including reincarnation
stories and including all the afterlife information, that you can start to really make
sense of it. It's taken the whole big database of information from many different
lines of inquiry, and I think that's where the scientific community has finally started
to get ahead of this and realize, of course, the afterlife is real.
Of course our souls come back again and again. To get this right.
That much as crystal Clear from erland Er, Haroldson, as well as
the word New Va, dops Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker. They have more
than twenty seven hundred cases they've investigated past life memories and children, of which
seventeen hundred are solved. So all of this adds up to a tremendous amount
of evidence, scientific evidence that these cases are real. Pay attention to them.
There's something very real going on here. Does not defy modern science at
all. In fact, in many ways, of quantum physics demands the reality
of kind of a mental layer of the universe and its primacy over the physical.
And that's why it's taken our kind of materialistically biased of scientific community more
than a century to understand what quantum physics is trying to say to us.
But given that the twenty twenty two Nobel Prize in Physics was given for entanglement,
that is, spooky action at a distance, as proven by three scientific
investigators who have been involved for the last five decades in proving that work,
that's a huge step for the Nobel Committee to admit that, because it's really
a major step towards admitting the primacy of mind and the unification of consciousness throughout
the universe. And that's where I think this russion is becoming very very excited.
Indeed, well, you know, I'm sure glad that you mentioned that
Bigelow award. Our viewers had a chance to listen to doctor Jeffrey Long,
who got the third place award, and he was describing his work on the
show and same thing read Mischlaf read Jeffrey Long's They're fascinating in how many different
lenses they bring to this problem of consciousness. So you get a thumbs up
on that one. Evan for bringing that into the discussion, well good.
And while it's I would simply like to also point out for those who insist
on a very hardcore scientific interpretation, you can find those essays to Pim van
Lobels, a second place winner, is a strong, very strong scientific paper
supporting the reality of the afterlife. So was Bernardo Castrip's excellent Bigelow submission.
He goes at it completely from the viewpoint of modern quantum physics and its interpretation
without invoking any kind of parapsychological issues. And I also would highly recommend Julie
Weischel's paper in the Bigelow submissions because hers is a very scientific assessment of psychic
mediumship in a way that I think when you read it, you realize she's
done a very good job scientifically improving the reality of some psychic meetings. Not
all, of course, but certainly some are very good at what they do.
And that's where I think the Bigelow essays are so important to this world.
Yeah. Amen, on that, I'll go to that church. All
right. Back to your book for a second, Living in a Mindful Universe.
You talk about this concept of the heart of consciousness. Go a little
little bit more into that and how that fits into what we've been talking about.
Well, it fits in beautifully. I can tell you from you know,
having lived through the experience in its aftermath and kind of seen how I
as a former Harvard neurosurgeon as a neuroscientist and tried to explain my experience and
come to a deeper understanding of it. Well, always I was very blessed
because, as you know, back in November twenty eleven, I met my
best half Karen Newell, who turned out to be a beautiful spiritual mentor certainly
understanding deeply about the use of sound for deep trends and inal states of conscious
awareness. And Karen was reminding me back in those early days when I would
be so in my head, is this neurosurgeon talking about the experience that it
was ultimately, ultimately about that binding force of love. And I'd say,
of course, of course, but I tried to tell her, you can't
really bring that love back here, the same love that you know Indie ears
bathe in. But she was right, you can bring it back here,
and I've seen it, you know, through meditation workshops, We've done people
who've never had an inde but coming to a beautiful knowing of that binding force
of love and it's infinite power to heal through personal experience of meditation, of
centering, prayer, going within. So when we use that phrase, you
know, as a subtitle a neus Urgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness,
what really pointing out is that it's truly ultimately all about love. And as
much as the scientific community can harp on kind of the cognitive and intellectual framework
of that mental layer that we've seen to share, ultimately, as any Indie
or will tell you, it's about that binding force of love that ultimately determines
kind of our understanding and our very brocking of the nature of our relationship with
the universe. So it's just pointing out that you cannot ignore love as a
primary factor that guides the evolution of these kind of concepts and of human understanding
of it and where humans go with it is all about that love. And
I often like to say it's the love of the creator for the creation,
because we all become those co creators as we realize this deeper aspect of connection.
And so to me it's a beautiful kind of reminder that as much as
we try and bring this scientific answer of this nature of reality and the mind
brain connection to some kind of mechanistic and demonstrable, hardcore truth of causality,
it ultimately is all about love and never to forget that in this entire journey
of discovery, because ultimately that's the part that we'll most impact and influence and
benefit humankind, is that binding force of love and how all of us are
in this together and we're here to take care of each other and take care
of the least, the last, and the loss. This includes taking care
of refugees and many of the other people that our modern polarized world doesn't necessarily
see the value in helping. But I would say that from the perspective of
this revolution and understanding about the nature consciousness from a scientific perspective, that power
of love cannot be denied and is ultimately what we drive what we see is
the benefits of this revolution. That strikes me that that orientation would be an
important part of spiritual health. Talk a little bit more about how that has
impacted your life and your view of the world. Well, I would say
it's mainly through this rerect cognition that in my experience, you know, love
was obviously very important. It was the thing that brought me back to this
world. At the end of my inde, I saw the six faces that
kind of served as important markers because for one thing, five of them were
physically present in the ICU room in the last twenty four hours I was in
coma, and there are many other family and friends who'd been there earlier in
the week who I didn't remember. And this helped me to know that the
vast majority of my coma journey and the spiritual experience had to happen between days
one in four or days one in five of my seven day coma. And
we explained the timing of all that in the book Proof of Heaven and going
to a little further detail in Living in a Mind for Universe. But that
really that recognition of that binding force of love and how important it was in
my many passages, you know, from the Gateway Valley up into the core
realm, as I described in Proof of Heaven, and it was always about
love. And I came back to this world realizing that, in fact,
just as the Armenian soldier Err was reported to say by Plato twenty four hundred
years ago, you know, when you die, your life flashes before your
eyes, and the only important thing is how much love you were able to
hand out to your fellow beings. And I knew that much very clearly from
my own NDE about the power of love and how it was so healing in
this world, but I didn't realize just how important it was for healing all
the kind of issues that we face that individually in terms of any kind of
personal illness and challenges all the way up to humanity at large, and some
of the challenges we face with stewarding this sub planet through some major challenges,
many of which of our own making, like our addiction to fossil fuels and
warming climate change, those kind of things. But it really is about expanding
our view to this unification, of seeing how we're all in this together.
I mean, from my perspective, that's one of the deepest messages of the
near death experienced community is that we see how our mental space overlaps both those
still living and those who passed over when we're in that kind of never never
land of ndees. So it shows us that that mental space in many ways
is eternal and reflects relationships that go beyond the death of the brain and body,
proving in many ways the eternity of our souls and the ongoing nature of
our soul and how important that is. But it's because of my NDE in
the fifteen years since then of trying to make sense of it, that I've
come to have a much clearer vision of this notion of love and oneness and
taking care of each other as the ultimate driver of what leads to kind of
the world of our dreams unfolding in our reality. But it must involve an
expression of that love for others and the way we live our lives. So
it's not just paying lip service to it, but living the choices and every
breath we take, and every decision and choice we make of how we view
ourselves and view others in our world, and our actions and our thoughts.
That is where invoking this power of love and its healing forces is so important
in any and all of our lives, and I think that's really where the
world stands to benefit the most is realize that that deep lesson of love,
kindness, compassion, mercy and acceptance and when necessary forgiveness bundled, especially with
tremendous gratitude with which I think most inner death experiences certainly feel when they come
back to this world having glimpsed that bigger view of it all, and then
having the opportunity to continue living in this material body, knowing that ultimately that's
not defining of who they are, but this is how we express it is
what we do in living in these bodies, and that means so changing our
lives to care more for others and the higher good. So have in your
meditations, have you been able to go back and touch that loving space again?
Well, yes, that's one of the most beautiful gifts. And of
course I've also been able to witness other people who've never had an MDE similarly
using meditation to get in touch with it. For those in your audience who
might not be aware when I talk about meditation and centering prayer, for me
personally, I use a form of differential frequency brain wave in trainment called Sacred
Acoustics and full disclosure. Sacred Acoustics was co founded by my life partner,
the co author of that book Living in a Mind for Universe, Karen Newell.
But what I've found is that she was a beautiful spiritual resource going all
the way back to our meeting in November twenty eleven, and then she and
what her sound engineer and business partner Kevin Cossey have put together in the form
of Sacred Acoustics, I have simply found to be a very powerful way of
exploring across the veil and getting deep into a meditative state. And I was
attracted to buying Oramal beats back in twenty eleven when I was first researching meditation
because to me it sounded like a very powerful way to launch conscious awareness away
from the here and now and the false sense of self that we normally experienced
in our living in our world. But it's important to point out that that
voice in your head is not your consciousness. That's not the magic I wish
for n de Kartes. Instead of saying I think therefore I am, I
wish he'd said I am aware of thoughts and therefore I am. And it's
that awareness that's the mystery. The thoughts themselves, in many ways, are
little more than a parlor trick. You know. I love how Michael Singer
in his book The Untethered Soul, he says, that voice in your head,
you know, all your running stream of thoughts and consciousness, is nothing
more than an annoying roommate. To say that, again, that's great,
it's nothing for Michael's Singer. I have to credit him fully. But in
his book The Untethered Soul, he says, to look at that voice in
your head as your annoying roommate. And I can't realize early on that the
little ego mind, that little linguistic voice in my head was little more than
a parlor trick. There's a much deeper aspect of wisdom within us. And
it's almost tricky the way our language forces us to say within and go within,
because actually going within the mental space is going out into the universe,
once you realize is modern quantum physics is telling us that the physical universe does
not exist except as an expression of the mental layer of the universe. And
from my perspective, there's a beautiful essay that covers the shift of that thinking.
It was by Richard conn Henry. He was head of physics at Johns
Hopkins, very reputable institution, and he published a one page essay in the
scientific journal Nature in two thousand and five entitled Mental Universe. And he makes
it very clear in that essay from a modern scientific perspective, and this was
seventeen years ago when it was published. He said, the universe is not
physical, but what quantum physics and the modern experiments were showing us is it's
fundamentally mental and spiritual. Enjoy is the last word of his essay. But
he's simply saying we are spiritual beings in a spiritual universe. And it's similar
to what Wen Heisenberg's, you know, one of the founding fathers of quantum
physics. He said that the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will
lead you towards atheism, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting
for you. And that was simply his way of saying that modern science and
consciousness has come to acknowledge the primacy of consciousness and that the brain serves only
as a filter that allows projection of these events from that mental layer of the
universe. But ultimately, we as human beings have access to that mental layer,
and that's where a lot of this newfound power of healing and coming into
wholeness comes from. So yes, it leads right there that if our consciousness
is primus, then healing that naturally could result because we just reframe what the
physical world is. Talk more about that, because you've read and witnessed some
really remarkable healings as a result of NDEs or just shifts and consciousness. Well,
I'll say it's important to understand kind of an expansion of my own story.
You know. I put out my story as it occurred to me as
a neurosurgeon in the book Proof of Having. But luckily there were other physicians
interested in my case, and three of them who were not involved in my
care but fascinated by my recovery, ended up spending the better part of two
years going through more than six hundred pages of my medical records, and they
wrote a medical case report that was published in a peer review journal. It
came out in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases September twenty eighteen by doctor Laurie
Sirbi Kana, Lauren Moore, and Bruce Grayson. But the important thing,
they came to two major conclusions that kind of went far above and beyond what
I dated in the book Proof of Heaven. But one thing, they made
it crystal clear that given the Glasgow coma scale, the CT and MRI scans,
the lab values, et cetera, my brain was in absolutely no condition
to harbor any kind of dream or hallucination, much less the most profound,
detailed, memorable, and transformational set of events I've ever experienced in my life.
So they came through and confirmed and validated and strengthened that argument from Proof
of Heaven that I should have had no experience at all. And then secondly
they made it crystal clear, and this had to do with a challenge from
the peer review editors. They said, wait a minute, somebody spending a
week in coma from GRAM negative bacteria as deep as this guy was and then
having a full recovery is unprecedented in the medical literature. They called the case
absurd, and they said, how do you explain it? They challenged the
three authors of the paper, and the three authors said, well, it's
because he had a near death experience, that this miraculous healing was enabled,
and so the peer of you editors said, okay, they knew of other
similar cases of near death experiences with extraordinary healing that goes beyond any medical explanation,
like Anita more Johnny healing from her stage four lymphoma and deep coma doctor
Mary Neil who had an over thirty minute warm water drowning kayaking in Chile back
in the late nineteen nineties. Anyone in medicine, you hear of those stories
in mind and you realize those people don't survive, and yet they come through
with a complete recovery. That is in the setting of a spiritual journey and
a deep near death experience. And that is what is informing us in the
modern scientific community of the power of mind over matter and that in many ways
we are spiritual beings in a spiritual universe and we do have free will.
In fact, in our book Living to Mind for Universe, we make a
very strong case, a multidisciplinary case for the primacy of consciousness through neuroscience,
philosophy of mind, a pair of psychology, non local consciousness, and quantum
physics, and make that very strong argument of consilience. And this is where
I think that this whole world is waking up to that much bigger truth is
because of the capacity of these kind of arguments to really support this. But
the fact that the peer of viewers of that medical journal agreed, oh well,
now we have an explanation for this miraculous healing. It's because of the
NDE and that shows they're on the right pathway for understanding the power of mind
over matter. I mean, medical science has admitted this for more than six
or seven decades now by using using uh blocking blocking on it, hold on,
pluce Ebo effect plus e bo, et cetera. But placebo effect has
been the gold standard for assessing any new medical treatment in many ways, new
surgical procedures. By doing a sham procede, you can do a placebo controlled
arm And that really it reflects something very deep that many people don't realize.
Uh. That is just the medical professions acknowledgement that our beliefs, thoughts,
and attitudes can actually play a tremendous role in our healing. And that is
kind of the starting point for where we really jump off into spontaneous remission.
For example, if you go to noetic dot org. That institutent Nedic Science's
website. Put in the search term spontaneous remission, you'll find a book they
publish. It's out of print now you can download the whole thing for free
and legally from them. But their Helene wabe at Ions is now updating that
entire database. But the database currently there from the mid nineties had more than
thirty five hundred cases of people who healed advanced cancer, advanced infections, even
congenital deformities healed them through kind of mind over matter and things beyond any medical
intervention. That's the important thing. That we have tremendous power to bring a
lot of healing to ourselves. And as I've said, that has so much
to do with just that primacy of love and acknowledgement of a loving connection that
the universe has with us. And that's what allows us to start to manifest
this kind of well being, wholeness and healing in our own lives. Lovely
yes. And just this week I had a chance to speak with a near
death experiencer who had her eyesight restored to twenty fifteen after her experience, and
I was like, no reason for it other than she went through it and
then woke up and was able to toss their glasses. It was you know,
it just goes on and on about how that can change our lives.
Well, I think it's an important point that any kind of physical, mental,
or emotional wholeness and healing ultimately depends on spiritual wholeness and healing. And
when I use the word spiritual, it doesn't have to be religious at all,
even though people can use religion and centering prayer to get in very deep
spiritual connection. But for me, spirituality just implies one a sense of deep
connection through this kind of mental air of the universe, that we're all in
this together, and the other is a sense of shared meaning and a sense
of shared purpose that I think becomes evident, especially from kind of the bigger
view of this revolution and understanding consciousness and the nature of reality, moving away
from the false sense of separation that is so inherent in materialist scientific thought,
but more towards a quantum informed, uniform and universe where we're truly all connected
in deep and powerful ways, and that our thoughts and choices reflect the importance
that we might place in that sense of connectedness. So it's for all of
us to shift away from that false sense of separation that comes from materialism.
So shifting gears only sort of kind of is. I actually almost called you
about a week ago, just personally to say that now that I've been on
this podcast venue, I have also been I think I think about fifty interviews
plus or minus on different podcasts and radio and television shows around the country,
and I know you've been on hundreds of them, so you're way ahead of
me on this one. But what happened was it about a week ago I
had I told my story and it was just one time too many, And
it's, as you know, it's a very emotional, heartfelt experience to have
a near death or a shared death experience, and you know, I'm kind
of in this spot now where I'm feeling like I need to protect my heart.
Did you ever get to that spot where you like, told it too
many times and you're like, I, I just can't go there one more
time. Well, I don't think I've ever tired of sharing the story,
especially as I've come to realize that it helps people in many ways, and
I often cannot predict how it's going to help a specific person. But I
think I sense a bit of what you're talking about, mainly because you know,
occasionally of people kind of attack you for sharing this kind of thing,
and to me, those attacks seem to be you know, they can take
their toll, and so sometimes you feel like kind of holding your cards a
little closer to your chest. I must agree with that, but I don't
think I've ever tired of sharing my story. And what I find is kind
of my sense of gratitude. You know, I have tremendous gratitude for every
breath because I came back to this world, and you know, I should
have gratitude for every breath before, but I guess I needed this something,
this waking up. But the good news is that gratitude is kind of a
basic fundamental mode of being, has been my natural ambient state ever since coming
back from the NDE, and that gratitude can easily be expanded to a point
where it acknowledges that if my story helps you know one person out there in
a given telling, it doesn't matter if there are others that hear that telling
that might try and attack me or bring me down. It's the benefit of
one the one that benefits that I take away, you know, with gratitude
in my heart as the reason I keep doing this. And so it's really
that gratitude and that notion of the higher good that in many ways I think
helps helps me to kind of live through the day to day challenges that I
think are part of what you're talking about that sometimes you know, these are
deep, emotional, very personal sharings, and you know, our culture at
large arge is not necessarily ready for this awakening. But the good news is
what I've seen in fifteen years is a tremendous kind of increase. Now you
can argue, you know, I have kind of a prejudice view because I
live this stuff all the time. It's what I talk about with people,
believe it or not. This is what Karen and I talk about all times,
you know. But you know it's a deep and passionate interest of mine.
But I also realize how it can help people. How the story,
you know, my story, sharing the wisdom from hundreds of other indie accounts,
which you know, I applaud you're doing that, getting you know,
many of these stories out to the world. As ken Ring pointed out,
you know, thirty plus years ago, the indie ear is not the only
one to benefit from indie accounts. The world at large benefits from these accounts,
and he showed how the world at large can improve as people of discuss
and share and and more and more news stories come out. Because, as
you're aware, the natural tendency in our culture is when this happens to you,
you're very concerned about sharing it, you know, because our culture has
kind of a present of prejudice and an assumption that you're crazy, that this
is not the way the world works. You know, when your die,
you're supposed to come to a complete end, no more awareness at all.
So what the world are all these stories of people staying aware and in fact
having enhanced awareness when they leave the brain and body at the time of bodily
death. Well, guess what, that's just the nature reality. Let's get
used to it. It's actually good news for all of us to realize that
we have a much bigger purpose here than one that can be solved and just
a birth to death incarnation in one physical body. And that's where I think.
You know, religions have had five thousand years plus to try and get
the golden rule, you know, treat others as you would like to be
treated out into our society and to our culture, and in many ways,
the near death experience is the golden rule written into the fabric of the universe.
When you look at life reviews, which are described anywhere from twenty five
to fifty percent of NDE series depending on who's doing the work. But life
reviews are quite common, and one of the most interesting thing about life reviews
is that forty five percent of people who have them feel that like they're in
actual reliving of events, not just remembering, but that you're going back through
it again, which shows you the power of those kind of spiritual realms to
kind of guide our evolution and spirits. And the other important thing is about
seventy five percent of people who have life review describe it as experiencing the events
through the emotional perspective of those around them, So in other words, the
boundaries of self are false. You experience these things kind of as the dream
of the one mind. And those figures I get from a recent article by
Bruce Grayson that was published just in the last few months, so they're very
current figures from someone who knows what he's talking about. Bruce Grayson has studied
indies for more than forty five years. Now I can highly recommend his book
After which is basically his monoir about in the Ease as a skeptical scientific investigator,
and it comes through that, you know, a true open minded skeptic,
it can be amazed by this information. Don't be misled by the people
out there in the media who call themselves skeptics, who actually are nothing of
that. They've already made up their mind. They don't care about the scientific
evidence. They're not about to study it. They just know that based on
modern scientific materialism, that these stories are impossible. Well, modern scientific material
is in many ways was just debunked with the ordering of the twenty twenty two
Nobel Prize in Physics for entanglement. And there are many quantum physics out there
who will deny that, but they just don't know enough about consciousness in the
brain. So you touched on the concept of oneness and this this binding force
of universal love. Expand on that just a little bit, because I think
that's at the center of everything that we do here. Well, I would
say in my work as a neuroscientist understanding the mind brain connection. In the
last fifteen years since my own kind of mind opening experience. That's what has
come to be very clear in the scientific study. Now you can look at
quantum physics, go back one hundred years, and you had people like Max
Planck, We're in Heisenberg, Rowin, Schroedinger, Pustual, Jordan and others
quantum physicists saying we cannot get behind consciousness. It seems to be something fundamental
in the universe. And they were simply saying what came to mind in looking
at the very early experiments in quantum physics. Well, all of that story
evolved tremendously. In fact, we discussed the whole history of that story and
how it's unfolded in Living in a Mind for Universe. So for anybody who
wants to catch up on the real nuts and bolts and details of how quantum
physics over the last century has come to increasingly kind of define the mind brain
connection and inform us about the nature of consciousness and how it's really unified in
the form of one mind, can see how all of this has unfolded.
The story goes through Einstein's objections in nineteen thirty five to entanglement, to spooky
action and a day distance as he called it. It goes to John Bell,
the brilliant Irish physicist elaboration in nineteen sixty four that there was a way
to experimentally assess whether Einstein was right, and there were some form of hidden
variables in these particles that allowed them to know how they were supposed to behave
or whether it was true spooky action at a distance, where in fact,
local realism the concept that all of physics involves particles interacting locally, and realism
is the notion that the world observed out there exists before it's observed. Well,
one of those things has got to be false if ententegrament is true,
and that is where the modern scientific world has gotten is to acknowledge basically the
reality of objective idealists. Idealism which is the oneness of mind and consciousness,
and it views our brains as being filters that reduce that primordia one mind into
the apparent individual cells. But of course when we die, those in the
boundaries of individual selves begin to dissolve. Again is we become one with that
mind, and that gives where we get mental experience with those still alive in
the world, mental experience with those who have already departed the mental world because
one of the most common features of NDEs and this goes back thousands of years
across all cultures. Like if you read Gregory Shushan, who's written about ancient
cultures and near death experiences, you find that of seeing a loved one,
a departed loved one is the most common of finding across all cultures. And
it's because our loved ones still exists, and there's often information gain that goes
far beyond any kind of wishful thinking, et cetera. So those stories have
a tremendous basis in reality. But it's this oneness of mind that's such an
important concept. And in fact, if you read Pim van Lamo's beautiful Bigelow
essay, he won second place, and at the very end of it,
he's making the scientific case for how you explain all this, and he is
exactly going into the one mind hypothesis, what we call the primordial mind hypothesis
in our books Living in a Mind for Universe. And he recommends four sources
for that one mind thinking that he says are the best scientific sources. One
is Larry Dasti's excellent book called One Mind, which I think came out in
twenty eleven. The other is Steve Taylor's more recent book Spiritual Science. His
third source is Bernardo Castrip's paper I think it's Journal of Consciousness Studies in twenty
eighteen. It's called the Universe in Consciousness. And the fourth resource that Pim
vent Level mentions is our book Living in a Mind for Universe. But I
would also certainly recommend his book, A Consciousness Beyond Life, Pim van Lovel's
book, because I think that is one of the best jobs of taking consciousness
as it's currently understood in a modern scientific setting and really elaborating the importance of
quantum physics and the importance of understanding how this is where all the evidence leads.
Let's go there. But it's all for those five of those resources that
I just mentioned are all about the one mind hypothesis and that the brain is
simply a filter. That filter theory has been around for more than a century,
but it kind of went to sleep for a while as the materialists have
their heyday in the twentieth century trying to prove the brain creates consciousness. But
we've now gotten to a point where all the evidence is pointing to the primacy
of mind, that the brain only is a filter which completely opens the door
to the reality not only the afterlife, but of reincarnation. Wonderful. We
are bumping up against a time limit here, so I have two questions left
for you. This next one is pretty easy. If people are interested in
you and what you're having to say, how do they get a hold of
you? How do they find out about Sacred Acoustics give us a commercial?
Absolutely well, definitely. The best way to keep up with me is follow
ebeneb in Alexander dot com. I would especially recommend there's an extensive recommended reading
list there with more than one hundred recommended books, chapters, papers. Many
of the papers links are hot to the actual paper themselves, and it's all
categorized to make it easy to kind of go through that list, So recommended
reading. Also, the faq page very important for people who want to know
more about kind of my history, my belief on certain deep topics. So
don't miss the FAQs and don't miss the blog postings which go into a lot
of detail of a lot of this. Now. In addition, Sacred Acoustics
dot com is a beautiful resource to inform you about differential frequency brain WAVEN trainment.
That's what I use daily, sacred acoustics. I've been meditating an hour
to a day for the last eleven plus years and I wouldn't trade it for
anything. Very powerful and helpful in coming to a deeper understanding of the nature
of reality. And also I would highly recommend a site that this is largely
Karen's brilliance. During the pandemic, we had to cancel a lot of our
meetings with people and a lot of those world experts and consciousness other experiencers,
et cetera, and so we would interview those people and those interemis are all
available at United in Hope and Healing dot com. That's one way to access
it. There are other resources available there too, but I can highly recommend
those free interviews. That whole series will bring anyone and everyone up to speed
on this kind of discussion. Wonderful And for the people listening, what's the
one thing they can do right now to improve their lives? And what would
you recommend going within spending you know, twenty minutes, forty minutes, whatever
time you have a day, even if it's late at night or early in
the morning, when you might be able to brack at the time, but
go within, centering, prayer, meditation. If you need a tool to
help you separate from that little voice in your head, the little ego mind
or monkey mind, I can recommend sacred acoustics. It's worked very well for
me, and I know it's worked for many other people. You can see
the testimonials page on sacred acoustics dot com. There's also a pilot study from
a busy Manhattan psychiatric practice doctor Anna Usam. It came out the peer review
Journal of Nervous Mental Disease February of twenty twenty, supporting the use of sacred
acoustics against anxiety, a very powerful result of twenty six percent reduction in symptoms
over two weeks versus only seven percent reduction in two weeks with a psycho talk
therapy alone and not with the sacred acoustic sounds. So anyway, it's meditation.
Going within is one of the greatest gifts we have for living our lives
in this world, and it's what I highly recommend to people to stay sane
in our modern world and then to bring the world of your dreams into reality.
I love that, and I love you Evan, this has been a
terrific conversation. Thank you for taking the time to be on the Afterlife Files.
Well I love you too, Scott, and thanks for doing what you're
doing. Getting this out to the world is very important to help wake people
up to their own power of healing and wholeness. So thanks for everything you
do, and for those of you that are listening, stick around because there's
a couple of things that Evan said today that I think could use a little
expansion and at least a different lens for me. So stick around and thank
you once again Evan for being on the Afterlife File. Have a good day
you too, Thanks a lot, Bye bye. I warned you that this
interview would vacillate between head and heart, given that there are several insights that
I gained. Just to be clear, these are my viewpoints, but that's
where you watch the Afterlife Files to gain perspective by using more than one lens
with which to view this rich information. First, I'm touched by his definition
of love as the love of the creator for the creation. It explains why
love is the organizing principle of the universe, and what's important is how much
love you are able to hand out to your fellow human beings. Second,
I appreciate his definition of the voice in your head as an annoying roommate.
Isn't that great? We are so much more than that. Third, I
felt Eban was at his best when he stated, and I quote, it's
all about love. We're all in this together. We're here to take care
of each other. Love will drive the benefits of this revolution end quote.
The revolution is how we think of ourselves and the primacy of consciousness. Here's
another great quote. We cannot get behind consciousness. He sounds just like our
interview with Stephen Schwartz. So after you're done watching this, go watch that
one. I think you'll get a great perspective. Number four, he said
that the near death experience is the golden rule written in the universe. He's
referring to the concept that the universe is reactive. What you put out is
what you'll receive. So pay attention to what you're thinking and the energy that
you're emitting, for the universe is going to send that back to you.
It's going to reflect it back to you. Lastly, his comment on the
Life Review, I love this. The boundaries of self are false. He
was quite dramatic about it, didn't you think You may remember from our other
interviews that during a life review, you get to experience your life as first
as yourself as how you experienced it, and then the other meaning also the
other people in the exchange or in the room, So get your perspective and
their perspective, and simultaneously you'll get it from a third perspective, that of
God's perspective or the omniscient perspective. And that's when you learn how your interaction,
how you were living your life affects not only you the other, but
your family, friends, community, and a sally humanity at large. This
is a huge concept. Sit with that a while. I do hope that
videos such as this can give you some insight on what near death and shared
death experiencers discover about the afterlife, the nature of consciousness, and how to
live your life more fully. If you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe and
comment, And if you've not already hit that subscribe button, I'm going to
ask you to do it again. Please do so. You can find the
Afterlife files on all podcasts, streaming apps, Apple, Google, Spotify,
Audible, lot and please play us a visit at neardeathmeditations dot com. I'll
repeat that Neardeathmeditations dot com by now. We'll see you next time, and
thank you for joining us at the Afterlife Files