Ep. 95 - Life Beyond Death with Dr. Eben Alexander

I come to realize that all of physical, mental, emotional health depends first and foremost on spiritual health and by spiritual health what I really mean is just coming to know that this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, this is synchronicity, welcome to episode 95 of synchronicity, my guess this week is Dr. Evan Alexander, you may know Dr. Alexander from his book Proof of Heaven in which it recounts the story and which he recounts the story of going into a coma from gram negative bacterial meningitis, very rare disease but quite often fatal especially when it gets to the brain and went into a coma for seven days and was pretty much about to be written off as another victim of a very rare disease and then emerged from the coma but while he was in the coma he retained full consciousness not as himself as Evan Alexander but as an awareness and he recounts this amazing story of the different kind of areas he explored and beings he met and energies and sounds and sights and it's really an amazing, really, really a great read, I listened to it on Audible, this isn't, I don't even think there's an Audible account for this podcast so I'm not hocking it but go check it out if you're there, it was a very good listen to, he read it himself, he narrated it, incredible book, that's basically the point of that and there's a lot of ideas and concepts that Dr. Alexander has expanded on in the following years and kind of reflected on this experience and it's something we talk about a little bit in this episode but I have referenced it many times on this podcast and interviews, dribs and drabs, pieces here and there but back in 2004, 2003, 2004, I had a transcendental experience that lasted for months, a significant period of time and while I wasn't dead, certainly in any clinical sense, some of the experiences I had really seemed to line up with what Dr. Alexander was talking about and one of these ideas is this concept that consciousness precedes everything else, so it precedes matter whereas the common scientific viewpoint, at least if we're talking about Newtonian physics and bigger things, not in the quantum world which we get into in this episode well as well but the general consensus there is that our brain creates this stuff and our perception of it around it is that is the thing that is creating everything so this idea, especially if you're a listener of this podcast, it's not like a wild idea to say consciousness predates or precedes rather matter but it is a very crazy concept and I had a very interesting experience related to synchronicity, on my birthday I started just randomly, I'd heard the name spoken about quite a bit, I know Michael Philip from Third Eye Drops is a big fan of Corey Allen is too, of Robert Anton Wilson and I had heard his name but never really read anything about him or that he wrote and so I decided to get cosmic trigger on Audible again, I'm into the audiobooks right now, it's a nice way, it's nice on drives and it's nice at the beach, so I was listening to this and this book is fantastic, it's crazy, it's fun, it's so wrong in some ways and it's so right in others but it's a really interesting and entertaining read and one of the things that emerges is this idea of synchronicity again being a validator or this weird spooky kind of coincidence that transcends this idea that the world works in this very ABCD linear way, time is proceeding from point A to point B, that's how we experience it, no doubt but we also know those things can be thrown on their head given the right experience.

So anyway, back to the idea that these events of Dr. Ebonya Alexander's death and things I experience in a transcendent state, other people when they're on psychedelics and meditation it seems to make sense but that is a whole other area, what I really want to talk about is this idea of there being something after our physical body dies and this is a very interesting concept and it's one that I think we should reflect on, as much as we can. Number one, the idea of dying is a terrifying concept for everyone, for the most part right, even if we have some handle on what that means, the notion that everyone you know and everything you know will die, a physical death including yourself, that's not like I said a particularly comforting thought, however, using something like an idea of heaven or an idea of anything and afterlife to soothe that fear is akin to an aversion right, that's not necessarily what we should be doing either.

But Dr. Alexander's story is really interesting because this clinically what he was experiencing can't be written off as a weird function of the brain, he's neocortex was essentially non-functional and it was being attacked so the aspects of our brain that would actually allow him to experience some of the things that you could say, oh well maybe it's DMT being released or some other chemical or serotonin or whatever it could be, that wasn't happening and those receptors weren't picking up those signals as they regularly would and another really interesting thing about this is very few people in the world would be able to fully appreciate exactly what he was experiencing after the fact, when his case you'll hear us talk about it in this episode is one in a million, it's a miracle, this doesn't happen, even his contraction of gram-negative bacterial meningitis is insane, there's no real explanation for it and his full recovery in every possible way is also nuts, as is his direct experience which again if you've listened to this podcast the one thing I recommend, I guess the one piece of wisdom that I would recommend to anyone is trust your own direct experience, so if your direct experience says contradict your own experience I don't know, then you're in some weird fucking place but for those part trust don't believe other people because they say it's so, if there's some intuitive aspect that resonates with you that's great but really trust your direct experience and I think Dr. Alexander's experience really has a lot to offer us, so this book is this book, this podcast episode is great, I know that's just a superlative I can't really do it justice, we get into how words can fall short no matter how eloquently we use them but again how beautiful they can be when used appropriately, it's just a wonderful episode, we get into sound and music, I am going to try to get Dr. Alexander on again when his book is coming out in October because I just think he's a wonderful person to speak to about this and you can hear his enthusiasm and what he wants to communicate from his experience, which if you've had something really meaningful and impact will happen in your life and you feel you can communicate that to other people, you understand why that becomes kind of the driving force of your life and it certainly has, so that's it, not going to hock anything, not going to ask you to do anything, I want to get right to the episode, I know it's been kind of a long intro without further ado, here is Dr. Eben Alexander, thank you again so much for coming on and doing this, I'm very very excited to do this so thank you again, one question where are you based, I'm typically based in the Hudson Valley of New York, I actually saw that you're going to be at the Omega Institute and not to, I live 15 minutes from the Omega Institute, so oh wow, we got to come by, we're going to be doing some pretty heavy-duty work with that sound, sacroecoustic sound at that workshop, so speaking of synchronicity, my first experience at Omega was actually with a sound healer, which I knew nothing about and that launched me into a very, very intense journey with sound and we were speaking a little bit before we started recording here about how sound can be one of the most transformative modalities we have for accessing some of these higher consciousness states and I can confirm that is the case, having done about a five to six hour sound meditation in New York City a couple of times, I have never felt like that, I have taken plenty of psychedelics, plenty of other psychoactive drugs, nothing compares to the endogenous state that was aroused from sound healing, so I think a great place to start would be, I know you're writing this new book or it's finished and it's coming out in October and we're talking about all of these things we could speak about before this, I think let's start with sound, what has been your experience or what's your approach to sound and kind of this intersection with spirituality and consciousness?

Well, it turns out that if for one thing, since you've recently listened to Proof of Heaven, those who are familiar with that book will realize that in my deep spiritual journey that occurred during a seven day coma due to extensive gram negative bacterial meningitis that had disabled my neocortex, that in fact sound or what I remember as sounds in music had a profound effect at basically catalyzing transitions between various levels in that spiritual realm and for example, my coma memories and my near death experience all started in what I call the Earthworms Eye View, it was a very primitive course, unresponsive kind of murky underground realm and it sounds very dark and foreboding and it seemed to go on for a very long time and now important to point out in my NDE, I had no memory whatsoever for Evan Alexander's life before coma, I had no words, I had no language, I had no memories, personal memories of my life, anything about earth or this universe, I really started with an empty slate, and that's a very important point to stress because it allowed for a very profound transcendental journey, the fact that I had no memories of earth and recollections and everything was presented to me freshly, now as I said it all started in that primitive course unresponsive realm, the Earthworms Eye View, but I was rescued and I was rescued by this slowly spinning very clear light that had fine golden and silvery tendrils off of it and it was slowly spinning as it came to me out of the murky depths of that Earthworm Eye View and as it did so I realized it was associated with a perfect musical melody and in fact later on I called it a spinning melody because that's what it was, it was basically the sound and the light were completely one, there was no separating out what it sounds like, what it looks like, they were one kind of entity and as they came towards me it opened like a rift in the fabric of that ugly Earthworm Eye View realm and it led up into this brilliant ultra real valley that I refer to proof of heaven as the Gateway Valley and the Gateway Valley is very much like Plato's World of Forms, it was a world of ideals but it was kind of ideals for the individual soul and I saw many Earthlike features, for one thing the whole landscape was just lush with light, with flowers of blooming and buds on trees and all very dynamic and no signs of any depth or decay, everything was richly alive and blossoming and bursting forth with life and fertility, you know at every turn there were sparkling waterfalls of the crystal blue pools and thousands of beings down below that were dancing, lots of joy and merriment and I was witnessing all of this because I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly way and it was one of millions of butterflies and they were all spiraling and looping in these vast formations and as we would dip down above that valley I could see all of this joy and merriment and this dancing of these beings and there was lots of joy and children playing and dogs jumping and all of that and was all being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of golden light that were leaving sparkling golden trails against this blue black velvety sky and the whole scene was lit from these billowing clouds of color. Now the interesting thing is that those swooping orbs of light and when I came back from coma, you know after a week and then weeks later is my language and words were returning, all my personal memories were returning, all of that coming back and I was trying to write it all down, I called those swooping orbs of light angelic choirs because they had dominated these chants and anthems and hymns that would just thunder through me just this stunning of vibration of oneness and connection all through the sound itself, you know in that realm our ways of knowing are so much richer than they are in this material realm and the material realm, our brain is serving as this filter that greatly, greatly limits the flow of information to this tiny little trickle of an apparent here and now and when you slip to that other side our modes of knowing are so much grander to the point where some of it can involve identity with the entire universe, identification process where you become one with all of it that it makes it impossible to put it into any kind of words but the point I'm trying to make here is that those angelic choirs and the sounds that they were emanating, those beautiful chants and anthems allowed for yet another portal to higher and higher levels so in fact what I witnessed from that beautiful valley was all a four dimensional space time of the material realm collapsing down and there's a whole different layer of causality in that spiritual realm in that gateway valley that I call deep time it's a much more fundamental ordering of events of soul journeys of sentient beings so that you come to realize that passage of earth time is only part of a common illusion we share here but it's not the fundamental nature of flow of our kind of spiritual events and so I saw that even that deep time though collapsing down and the higher spiritual realms collapsing down until that musical portal led me up into what I call the gateway valley I'm sorry let me out of the gateway valley but up into this core realm, this inky blackness is still to overflowing with the power of that unconditional love of the creative source but the point here is that music vibration and of course I'm sure your listeners will realize by now we're not talking about you know the physics of sound waves of airwaves vibrating again membrane in the ear this is much much deeper and it has it's a far more profound and fundamental and transcendental form of vibration and frequency which when you think about it frequency is just a way of matching up time and space it's a way of defining the relationships at space time but in these higher dimensions it serves a similar purpose of kind of tying the things together and when we come back to this world we can remember it as music you know it's a beautiful kind of demonstration of frequency but don't get bogged down with some simplistic materialist idea this is just like sound hitting the ear it's the experience and the way we bring it back and it's also the way we can use it as a tool so improvement heaven sound was absolutely essential to all manner of traversal of those various levels of the spiritual realms and that was kind of my clue when I came back to this world that sound should play a role now of course when you look back over human history for tens of thousands of years human beings have used sound to get into deep transcendental states of awareness yes sound you know in the form of anthems and chance have been used for thousands of years to help in kind of religious and spiritual ceremonies their musical instruments of for example the Dijirudu out of Australia that reportedly has been around for up to 40,000 years and it by by the way is probably the most powerful healing instrument I've ever encountered in terms of a sound you know musical instrument contributing to deep and profound healing the Dijirudu is probably at the tip top of the list one of the purest and most profound modes of directly influencing your spiritual health and all of your physical mental emotional health is through the Dijirudu but there are many other instruments obviously and of course we have chambers sacred chambers like Malta other places that have been used for thousands of years for a deep spiritual transcendence and likewise of course then construction of cathedrals and churches and mosques and other places where music can be used to help get into deep transcendental states so it should come as no surprise that sound is a very important tool that we have to use to access transcendental states and consciousness yes and all of this hit a much higher level about two years after my coma I first encountered the notion of a binaural beats yes you know the whole use of differential sound frequencies that's a phenomenon that was first described by a German physiologist in the mid-1800s his name was Wilhelm Heinrich Dove and he he was the one who first noted it if you put one tone in one ear say a hundred hertz tone a hundred cycles per second and then in the other ear a hundred four hertz as an example that somewhere in your brain you generate a four hertz tone that is the difference between the two input frequencies to the two ears and that all sounds nice and simple and straightforward but I tell you the power that can come when that is properly harnessed is shocking and from my point of view as a neuroscientist I believe what it's doing is actually accessing one of the most primitive aspects of how our brain is linked to consciousness and that's in the lower brainstem in a circuit that arose 200 million years ago in evolutionary neurobiology and we're actually interfering with that circuit in a way that we are able to entrain the dominant brain state and another part of the package is to realize and this is something that we stress in our book living in a mindful universe coming out October 2017 is that the brain does not produce consciousness at all right right right hopefully we all have to get used to that concept believe neuroscientists philosophers of mind are getting very used to that concept because the evidence is very strong the brain does not produce consciousness at all in fact it's better to look at it the other way around the consciousness of what produces the brain and physical universe emerges out of consciousness yes but we can get into that a little bit later but suffice it to say for now what I believe we're doing with these tones and with this differential sound frequency is actually transcending the veil that is getting to the other side of the brain's mechanism of kind of filtering in consciousness in a very limited form and using sound we can traverse that veil just as I did in my coma journey and that's where things started to get very very interesting yes oh my god thank you for that wonderful kind of exposition of this relationship between sound and mystic states and transcendence and consciousness I thought one of the things you mentioned was particularly interesting to me this idea of kind of this internal music or sound and this external vibrations you know physical sound that hits our ears that to me is is fascinating because many of us this anyone is familiar with this just on a mundane regular worldly level if you think of a song that you've heard before you can hear it in your mind that's not actual sound waves being generated but that's the internal kind of spiritual sound another thing that I found fascinating in your book is how you describe this source energy as Om Om and I even specifically in your book you mentioned you know as a Christian this isn't really the cosmology I grew up in but this was my experience in this realm I remember when I was probably about three to five years old it's my earliest memory is waking up from sleep or going to sleep I would see this entire black matrix with white dots of lights infinite dots of lights just too many to possibly count and this very persistent sound of oh but a deep deep it penetrated every aspect of my being and I'm you know a young child I have no framework for this in any type of worldly way I don't know anything really but I it's stuck with me obviously to now and this idea of sound being the generator of our physical universe is also something that to me is a fascinating concept and seems to line up and this goes into your idea of the brain not being the thing that creates consciousness but the other way around I like to think of the brain in two different ways one is kind of as like a radio tuner that you can tune to different frequencies and the other is as an exact tuning fork that we can pitch to certain levels and frequencies to access different things I loved I love love love in your book talking about the brain as a filter because in my experience that is exactly what it does and it's clear to us that we're inputting way more than we can possibly process and a lot of people ask the question when they hear something about the brain being kind of like a tuning fork or a receiver is well why don't we experience all of these things all of the time and I think the very practical reason is we would go insane we can't actually process the world as it is unfiltered because we'd be bumping into things we wouldn't be able to move basically we'd be paralyzed by the amount of input that was coming in so I love this kind of this intersection of how sound also creates the world around us in a very real and tangible way I'd love to hear a little bit more about your upcoming book and some of the theories and ideas that you've kind of discovered in the years since you wrote Proof of Heaven because I think one of the things that really stuck out to me in researching you is that you do believe and I've had this kind of feeling for 15 years or so that we are in the midst of a transitional state spiritually, collectively, physically and we're moving in if not already transitioning into a new paradigm where science and spirit aren't positioned at odds at to each other but really function in sync together to get us to a place where we can kind of understand really why we're here and not just in a reductiveness materialist this is all chaos you know good luck you're stuck here and hope hope it works out so I'd love to hear some of the other ideas that you've been exploring more recently that have kind of either confirmed or validated your experience when you were in a coma for seven days and I'd also like to point out for people who haven't read your book your case is unprecedented the fact that you even contracted gram negative bacterial meningitis is a mystery because that's not you know most people have to have brain surgery or some foreign element introduced for that to come and your recovery is also unprecedented and I know that you speak about this in the book but I for one do not view it as a coincidence or random chance that it happened to someone like you who was able to kind of straddle the line of neuroscience neurosurgery a practical fundamental world of you but also experience some of the most mystical transcendent states that we've been reading about for thousands of years all across the globe so I just think it's such an incredible and obviously cosmic wink type of event that this happened to you well it you know it really is kind of amazing I think all of us are together on this journey and so in that sense I don't really consider my part of it any more than just another piece of the puzzle but it is it's kind of an interesting part of the puzzle I must say and and that's something that we go into in great detail in the book living in a mindful universe coming out in October but it really gets back to a lot of what you were saying about the spirit and science and the reality is a reductive materialism which is our conventional kind of scientific view of the world and that's one that I subscribe to very deeply for the first 54 years of my life before this coma it's one that I came to realize through my coma experience and and it's aftermath over the last nine years is completely false in fact it's shocking to me when you look at all it what we're talking about here is really the mind body discussion you know what's the relationship between brain and mind right and that's a discussion that's been going on for at least twenty four hundred years you know more than a hundred generations of humans have mused over this since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle although you could certainly argue that the eastern spiritual traditions had arrived at a lot of this truth of you know hundreds of years before that so it's been going on for a good three thousand years and you'd think after that much time we'd be making significant progress well we are about to make very major progress but in fact shockingly what what's happened is over the last 400 years you've had the scientific revolution yes and you got to remember that when that started back though when the likes of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton Francis Bacon Giordano Bruno and other brilliant observers of the natural world we're trying to understand the laws that govern the natural universe if they stray too far into the realm of consciousness and mind they were likely to get burned up date yeah as in Bruno was for his you know his beliefs that distant stars were just like the Sun and might even have planets and he got the church burned him for that so it's I think that that was kind of built into the DNA over a long time is don't don't start using over consciousness or mind at all just stick to the natural world and let that be that as if we were separate from that natural world and that kind of thinking continued into the 20th century and then what happened to change the game was a beginning in the early 20th century when Albert Einstein wrote his four papers of his Annas Moravoli his miraculous year one of those papers that led to his Nobel Prize in physics was on the photo electron effect and that was a that and also Max Planck's original observations about what was called the ultraviolet catastrophe and things like that led to quantum physics so by the 1920s you had Erwin Schrödiger develop his wave equation that described what was going on at an atomic and subatomic level in terms of light and its interaction with with a matter and what they started discovering in very profound form is that the mind of the observer was absolutely essential you could not envision any kind of a reality independent of the mind of the observer now of course this flew in the face of what the naturalists in science and those who are soon to you know trumpet reductive materialism as the main way that the world works it was shocking to them and they didn't know how to make sense of it and in fact science even in the last century and trying to understand quantum physics continues to try and cling to that materialist notion yeah world out there made a material and that we are part of that world and we just follow natural laws but that is not the way it really works and this is what quantum physics is trying to force on us through elegant experiments and that whole story is something we go into in some detail in our book living in a mindful universe and I don't know how deeply you want to get into it but it's a fascinating story that goes through the kind of wrestling match between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein in the 1920s and 40s trying to make sense of all this and I can tell your listening audience to this day the scientific community has not yet arrived at any consensus and what I would say is the main reason for that is they they keep rejecting the obvious the obvious which is something that was stated many a time by the founding fathers like Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Sir James, Jeans and others is that consciousness is fundamental you cannot have any reality without the mind being there to generate it and so to look at us as separate from the universe was false and this of course this idea of oneness and being one with the universe is very important that comes out of Eastern mystical tradition yes but I would say that one of the reasons why those spiritual traditions of oneness were not able to really get the job done was people kept buying into what Karen and I refer to our book as the supreme illusion the supreme illusion is the fact that we sit here thinking that we exist and we look out and and witness this world around us of physical objects and of things all of it and the thing that you miss is the extremely clever trick of human brain and mind yes of to convince you that all that stuff is out there because what you're actually witnessing is only an internal construct within mind yes and it's all within mind and that includes your brain and your body yes body here in the physical world out there but every bit of it is a construct within mind itself and it's astonishing when you start to realize the power of recognizing that supreme illusion for what it really is now the world of quantum physics has gone on to prove to us in no uncertain terms that consciousness is the thing that exists and generates all that is out there and the way that it got more interesting with with Schrodinger's wave equation that led to all kinds of practical ways to develop quantum physics and basically a third of our economy you know all computers GPS systems every bit of micro electronics is based in quantum physics and it all works perfectly well but the thing is when you get down to the roots of those experiments that's where you start hitting the deep mystery yes and there's an adage among physicists that came out of one of a renowned MIT says this is and that statement is shut up and calculate and what it means is don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain don't pay attention to the underlying fabric of the experiments that keep proving over and over again that mind creates all of matter and it's because it leads to such deep mystery and it's something they don't want to face but the reality is you can start making sense of all that when you realize the consciousness is fundamental the consciousness exists and this is the same consciousness I encountered on my journey of that God that intranly loving power that as you you reminded the audience I came back and when I came back to this world and I was trying to put it all together and remember that when I first woke up in that ICU bed I didn't even recognize my mother my sisters my sons at the bedside I had no idea who these beings were I had no earthly language all I knew was where I had been and I had very rich and beautiful memories of that spiritual journey described and proof of heaven and those memories have never left me they're perfectly intact yes and that's in concert distinction to about 36 hours of the whole 36 hours after I woke up from coma and they took out the breathing tube and all that I had a I was in and out of a paranoid delusional psychotic nightmare and it was a little more real than a normal nightmare but it had nothing in terms of reality to compare to that deep spiritual journey in coma and that all occurred at the time when my doctors kept assuring me my knee of cortex was so devastated I could not have come up with any of that right I could not have any kind of hallucination dream drug effect none of that was possible given the damage to my knee of cortex right and that was an extremely crucial part of understanding at all but when I came back to this world it was trying to make sense of it my language returned very quickly personal memories over a few weeks all my scientific knowledge came back over about eight weeks or so and I remembered that sound of all that rich deep very profound that was what I identified with the entire core of oneness of the entire universe and to me especially when I was first coming back and my brain was still very rattled from this experience the word God was a puny little human word with a lot of back with and it didn't remotely do justice to explaining the power majesty and all of that deity so I just I called it all all because that was the sound yes that I brought back from that realm and when people asked me what's the origin of that sound I'd say well basically it's the kind of resonance that you would expect in all of infinite and intimate and all the eternity now those involved in music physics would say what kind of resonance can you get in something that's eternal and infinite the sound of all that's exactly what you get and and so of course that has become a base of a lot of the work that I do with sacred acoustics and the meditative tones that they put out and anyone who's interested in learning more about that visit sacredacoustics.com and there are a lot of free downloads and other information there to kind of help you get started the important thing there is just listen with headphones because it's just like this channels to the two ears even though the sacred acoustic sounds can work quite effectively through speakers as we often do in our workshops right but getting back to the the main theme here that was you know that whole mystery of quantum physics is one that is now finally leading us into some group territory and a lot of that came if you want to just know that some of the milestones of the thinking of in 1935 Einstein was having these debates with Bohr about how to interpret quantum physics and he wrote a paper that's referred to as the EPR paper Einstein but Austin Rosen are the authors where they pointed out some issues concerning the completeness of quantum physics and basically said they thought it was an incomplete theory because they thought somehow the variables must be packed in these particles so that entangled particles that are separated by great distances can somehow know how to behave and and that was Einstein's way of preserving what's called local realism right right is the idea that there is a local reality that nothing is influential at a distance you cannot have what Einstein called spooky action at a different rate right that here to be necessary to explain the entanglement phenomenon between subatomic particles and so Einstein put that philosophical paper out in the in the 1930s and it was just a curiosity for a few decades until the mid 1960s in 1964 John Bell a renowned Irish physicist came up with a way to look at the EPR paper and came up with what's called as bells inequality and Bell's theorem that was actually a way to start addressing these things experimentally to investigate them deeper and so that's what's happened since the 1960s is physicists have gone into deeper and deeper experiments utilizing various aspects of bells inequality to examine this phenomena of entanglement and spooky action and distance and every single experiment keeps to confirm that spooky action and distance is the way the world was yes yes I was wrong hidden variables and those experiment experiments have got to be extremely sophisticated and they keep telling us mind is fundamental consciousness is fundamental it is what is creating the universe and I would say that that is the biggest part of the awakening that's coming now and that's why it's not just all of that talk of oneness and connectedness and deep meditative states from Eastern and somewhat Western spiritual traditions brought to us quantum physics and the farthest reaches of modern science and physics and cosmology are what are helping to turn this of this finer final major turn which is getting back to oneness getting back to an idea that we are all part of one universe any idea of separation is false and leads to great confusion in fact reductive materialism by its very tenets and possibilities of separating things out its processes of you know splitting the universe down into its smallest particles and then seeing where their interactions go and expecting that to explain all of reality that's completely backwards and that's where I think the new view that is much more of a top-down approach and one that we can each individually approach through meditation through going within and proving to ourselves that we are one with the universe and that is part of transcending that veil that we were talking about and sound is an incredibly powerful way to do that but this is about a merger of science and spirituality I would say neither one can actually move forward without the other oh and so it's really consolidating these ideas and coming up with a far more sophisticated notion of the way this universe works and it has tremendous gifts to all of us as human beings because first and foremost it implies the absolute essential existence of the afterlife and not only that of reincarnation yes they're all crucial parts of understanding the way this universe works and every bit of it is tied to this deeper understanding consciousness as a fundamental driver of all that occurs in this universe and each and every one of us can come to prove that for ourselves yes yes yes so much amazing stuff there thank you for that and I think one of the key things you're touching on at the end here is that experientially going through these things are what crystallizes conceptual ideas into a faith or belief and that's one of those things that no one is going to tell you no matter what that what you experience when you were in a coma didn't happen it doesn't matter and especially you I mean we're we're lucky enough to prove empirically that your neocortex wasn't able to even create some of these things so someone did want to reduce it to a chemical or an imbalance or some you know electrical signal going wrong that's eliminated and the other thing one of the other things I mean you're going into quantum physics I love this so you mentioned max plank right the plank length which is used in quantum physics is one one thousandth of an inch right so hell of a lot smaller yes but that's the level where you start going into the quantum world is that correct well the plank length is far far far smaller than say the diameter the proton gotcha I mean the plank is getting right down to infinite fundamentals of the construct of all space and time so let me ask you this because you you would actually be able to answer my question which I've wondered about for a very long time in the physical brain what's the distance between the synapses it's well it's on the order of of nanometers you'd have to talk about tens to hundreds of nanometers it's a very small distance i mean that of course you're starting to touch on the magic of the connection between my brain has everything to do with those uh of very tight confinement of ionic channels and membrane decicles and things like that because as people who who are familiar with quantum physics will realize there's the heisenberg uncertainty principle yes which has to do with the fact that you cannot simultaneously know the exact position and momentum of a subatomic particle that's right and that principle comes into tremendous play when we're talking about the dynamics of the brain and how it's related to consciousness and it all has to do with those very tiny ion channels and things where you're actually getting a very tight confinement in spatial position that leads to tremendous uncertainty yes yes that's where you start getting the fact that mine can generate all kinds of different mental states that will only be one mental state they're not superposed like physical states but it has to do with that very tight confinement of neurotransmitter released and ion channels in neurons yes yes i bring it up because it seems like in our brain this physical organ we have to kind of parse through consciousness or the world around us is functioning on this in this quantum world that works so much different than Newtonian physics that we move around with here it's just it's it's very interesting to me because we have all of these examples of the veil being pierced whether it's something like looking at the mechanisms of quantum mechanics or quantum physics or it's looking at um you know the impact on psyche and matter which is one of my favorite kind of roads to pursue is i'm a huge fan of Carl Jung and one of his uh his translator his main translator Marie-Louis von Franz uh wrote a wonderful one of the densest books i've ever read took me a good three years to get through it um called psyche and matter and this explores the relationship between our internal consciousness and external reality and the conclusion that's basically arrived at is totally what you're saying that these things aren't separate that we are not living in the material world and there's this outside things and there's this spirit we are we are kind of processing what's going on through our consciousness but the consciousness is also creating what's around us and when you keep saying and using the term piercing the veil this is why my podcast is called synchronicity because synchronicity which Jung referred to as a causal patterns of orderedness which thanks young for the really easy term for us to get behind what he's really saying is is these are instances where this is piercing the veil we can rule them as coincidences whether it's a precognitive thing whether it's a dream whether it's your thinking of a butterfly and then a butterfly suddenly appears in front of your face these are little kind of knocks on the door for our for our brains and our minds that think we live in a physical reality in time only moves linearly in one direction these are little kind of knocks for us to open the door and say hey maybe things work a little bit differently than we've been thinking they work and I love this idea of you talking about matter and spirit my favorite people in the world are bridge builders people who are able to bridge concepts and seemingly disparate areas whether that's east and west whether that's matter and spirit whether that's religion in science and showing that these things are not different fundamentally that they actually are the same thing and what I also love about what you pointed about about the whole that whole exposition you went through is that this fundamentally points to our interconnectedness this is something that the Dalai Lama jokingly tongue-in-cheek says that if modern science comes to any conclusions that disprove any aspect of Buddhism will change it and he says it tongue-in-cheek because what's interesting is in the western world we typically look out into the world not the Greeks didn't do this but you know they partially did Aristotle especially they look out in the world make observations about what's going on and a lot of the eastern traditions they went internally right they they explored inner space to come to the laws of the universe to think that these are diametrically opposed methods or ideas is just a falsity as you've been pointing out they're the same exact thing so I would absolutely love to get into the more kind of you know and the other thing we're not talking about with at least physical sound is that the mathematics that underlies all of this stuff is is amazing it's incredible how these frequencies drill down to numbers another idea that Marie Louise von Franz has which I absolutely subscribed to is that number is kind of a primordial archetype right we have these archetypes that these mythological ones that we can identify with but number is something that our conscious brain can also grok in a way that really shapes the world around us so I'm interested to see it is has there been a connection between the sound explorations and the modality of sound and number or math have you have you discovered anything there absolutely I would say you cannot possibly talk about this sound without referring deeply to mathematics now this again is a point that we make very strongly in living in a mindful universe is this discussion of the mathematical kind of description of the entire physical universe and the fact that it is such a tightly wound system and especially when you combine that mathematical formulation of the physical universe with the fine tuning of the 26th physical constants as well as the cosmological constant of anyone who comes away from that analysis thinking that we've got a cold chaotic mechanistic purpose and without a very profound sense of meaning to our very existence is completely missing the boat and it has to do with this notion of oneness and in fact that the creative force of this universe is us we are one with the creative I would say that the self-awareness of the universe and that's one of the most profound kind of realization is that the universe is self-aware but there's the interesting thing is of course it is simply the self-awareness expressed through sentient beings throughout the cosmos they are one and the same right but part of really recognizing the power of this notion is realizing that the boundaries of self are false that there is one mind and we are all you know to even use the words part of our is misleading but I have to use that because that's our language we are all part of one mind and the boundaries of self are what allow for this to be soul school they it's kind of apparent of perciliation or separation at a very superficial level that makes us all individual players but we're not really individual at all and what did I think crime examples to kind of make this point would be say the life of you you know in near-death experiences which are out there by the tens of millions at least the reported ones are out there just all over this world and 30 to 50 percent of near-death experiences involve some form of life review now in the life of you when you talk to people who have them the interest there to major lessons that come out of life reviews just in terms of concept one of them is that our notion of time is wrong the memories you know the experiencing of things in a life review are absolutely complete you go through everything in your life review all the goods and bands of any residual lessons still to be learned every bit of it and it happens like that finger it's it can be instant doesn't matter but it's complete and that is because that deep time is not slave to earth time it works the other way around now the other interesting thing is not only is our flow of time in this realm a very much part of the illusion the Maya but also the sense of self because in life reviews what happens is you start experiencing the impact of our life choices it's even thoughts on others and we experience it from their point of view we become them yes feel the impact now that is just another way of showing that this is really just all the dream of that one mind and this is a very crucial concept to get uh and it is based deeply in the origins of quantum physics i would say that part of my realization of that lesson started early after my coma when i was trying to make sense of all this and i read uh Jill Bolty Taylor's book my stroke of insight the interesting thing about her book and story and she gives a great TED talk is that she had a vascular malformation in Wernicke's area in the main speech area where you construct your view of the world be deafening you know as as Renee Descartes said to define as to limit well all those limitations are set up in our objects and relationships and our linguistic portrayal of them yes she had that area in her brain destroyed with a hemorrhage and as it was destroyed she gives a beautiful description of how she became she was sitting in a chair and became one with the chair the rug the desk the room the trees outside the window she became one with all of it and that was also associated with a feeling of pure love and wonder yes it was a perfect demonstration of how our linguistic brain in our ego is right there in the way to try and perpetuate this full sense of separation yes we really are all one we're part of one mind and it's not just human beings and it's not limited to life on earth we are part of this one mind with all living creatures including plants animals all of it here on earth but also sentience throughout the universe this is really a much bigger deal than i ever could have imagined and that this is why this awakening is happening that yes we spent three thousand years kind of circling the drain trying to figure this stuff out and finally we're hitting a point where the deepest spiritual truths and the deepest scientific truths and this certainly involves the leading edges of cosmology and physics and realizing how our notions of time are completely off i mean that's a yeah and Einstein recognized he said as president future cleverly raw illusion yes so he knew it well towards the end of his life but we're now beginning to realize the deep truth of all that it's almost like they're simply an eternal now and it we have this ongoing projections both a future and past that instruments are knowing of the now and our growth of information and understanding but the past present future river of time is part of the illusion part of the Maya and this is all part of the deeper understanding we go into this and living in a mindful universe also discuss this pretty heavily to try and make more sense of it but the good news is that we can we don't have to wait for the major scientific community to come to this realization they will right because over the issue of consciousness and the mind body discussion there's no alternative but to come to this kind of synthesis pure materialism in terms of the mind body question is dead it died long ago but unfortunately there are still perpetrators who believe that and try to perpetuate the false notion that the physical world is all that exists because they don't understand enough about consciousness but the more people get into this mind body question the more they realize that the production model that is that the physical brain produces all of consciousness and that comes from the scientific view of physicalism or scientific determinism is false it's absolutely dead in the water all over the relationship of mind and brain and this world is coming to realize very rapidly this revolution is happening now oh yes not in the future oh without a doubt and I think one of the the an interesting thing about this is how people or ideas or institutions will do the tried and true grasping and aversion and if something is uncomfortable you either cling to the thing that makes sense for you or you push away the thing that is making not sense to you and this seems like a cultural phenomenon that we obviously individually can go through but culturally and collectively as well and what you're saying is just it's accurate I mean I think whether you get this through a download through an NDE through a wisdom tradition through whatever it is it clearly starts to unfold many of these concepts you're talking about simultaneously and it does throw the idea of time functioning only in one way it just throws it on its head and that's not how it works and I love this idea of what you're describing of this eternal now being what is but us having this ability to move through the modality of time allows us to kind of unfold the truth of that situation so it's not like this I mean because a lot of people what we've been discussing you know there's some ethereal and esoteric components to it but from a practical standpoint knowing that time is akin to an illusion knowing that our physical reality is much more like a dream than what we like to imagine it is what are the practical implications in your mind of what these things are what do we do individually as a society as a culture wonder I mean hearing that the fundamental nature of the universe and everything we know is unconditional love I agree I've experienced those things too but from a practical standpoint where do you think we go as individuals and as people who know and really just grok what you're saying and the conclusions that we've come to what do we do as individuals and as people going forward well first of all I would point out that the answer is a lot I within us all yes that's been known for a very very long time but that is really the key going within when you realize the brain is not producer consciousness but going within is actually a way of going out into the universe and aligning with the creative process of the universe with that infinite power of love now of course the first and most proximate gift from every bit of this is help healing becoming more whole and I would say as a neurosurgeon as a healer I've come to realize that all of physical mental emotional health defend depends first and foremost on spiritual health and by spiritual health what I really mean is just coming to know that connectedness that we are part of the universe not and again that part of is really the wrong word we are the universe and it we are the creators of the destiny of that universe each and every one of us serves that and going within consciousness is the best way to do that and that's why the sacred acoustic stones can be very powerful important to point out that the voice in your head and your thoughts are not who you are not at all in fact as a neurosurgeon I can tell you the voice in your head is a little more than a parlor trick I love the way Michael Singer puts it in his book The Untethered Soul the voice in your head is an annoying roommate and this is something you can and so in other words you're not going to think your way to this the best way is to experience it going within and letting that little voice in your head take a little time out because the magic whether you're talking you know the deep the two deepest mysteries I would say in modern science one is called the hard problem of consciousness that was defined in the mid-1990s by David Chalmers and it basically is the impossibility of trying to connect the dots to explain how the physical brain could give rise to consciousness because nobody has ever made even the first step from that pathway and it's a very profound realization now the other leading edge issue in modern science is the measurement paradox in quantum physics and that of course is right at the core of all of the extreme kind of mystery and kind of confusion about interpreting quantum physics the measurement paradox but both of those the hard problem and the measurement paradox are really part of the answer because both of them are telling us that consciousness is fundamental in the universe and creates all of the rest that comes out of it and when you flip it like that and realize that the material realm is all produced out of consciousness then everything starts to make much more sense so I think that's a crucial thing and then of course when you realize that you realize that going within consciousness has so much power and and the observer is the part of consciousness that those two scientific uh uh impasses uh run into is the observer the awareness yes uh and so what you do in meditation is learn to develop that observer self and I would say that as you do that uh you readily define uh a connection to your higher soul your higher soul is is really not only part but it is identical with that infinitely creative source what we might call god yes uh that higher soul the higher soul is how we experience it if we want to come in at this as you know a quote individual yeah but the reality is we're all building that connection so god becomes a relationship yes uh and you know in our world uh in our especially in our western culture if you start talking about becoming one with god uh something like trying up your medication or something like that and it's a one way to look at it because in fact um you know there's a very deep sense of of that uh observer and creative source being one with all of this universe and that is something that we can enhance and develop uh through meditation through going within transcending the veil which is uh you know whatever means you have whether it's centering prayer meditation transcendental meditation sacred acoustic sound entrainment uh what have you there many different ways of going within uh but it's it's basically the um kind of approximate goal there is just to kind of recognize the little voice in our head those thoughts that rational mind logical thinking uh as what it is a little more than a parlor trek it's what we use to communicate with other humans but we don't have to be limited by that as an individual soul exploring all of this yes uh so I think that's a very crucial thing to point out is developing that observer self and that is what is the key to then gaining a tremendous creativity insight guidance connection with souls of departed loved ones who can often serve as beautiful guides to help us navigate our lives uh connecting with the souls higher souls of others uh say people we might be having conflicts with or uh having uh some kind of relationship with I often have my higher soul connecting with their higher soul we get things done in that level uh you know so uh and and I believe that so much of what's going on in this world today in terms of the awakening um that's coming to this world has to do with uh those souls of departed loved ones who are playing a tremendous role helping to guide every bit of this but the more we connect with that individually the more we open doors I came to realize from my journey that hardships and difficulties in life such as illness and injury are gifts yes ethnic stones that allow our souls to grow it's how we deal with those hardships and challenges uh that that gives us that soul growth and by dealing with them what I'm talking about mainly is recovering that sense of oneness connectedness that notion that all is well that we do not ever have to force some outcome in this universe that all is well that we have to take that higher soul perspective to kind of see how it all works to see the win-win situations uh that are available to us in dealing with other people uh if we have tragedy in our life how to deal with that often this going within connecting with a higher soul seeing the much bigger picture we come to see how those challenges enable us to grow to become much grander uh in in our connection with the universe and this is where I think uh the value of this awakening uh benefits individuals first and foremost and that's why your listeners don't have to wait for the whole world to get a part of this but in the long run the entire world will become the world of our dreams the harmony and peace uh overcoming all this false sense of separation that unfortunately our material is bent in science in the 20th century uh was a horrible sin in terms of uh say the chemist committing their sin in world war one with poison gases the physicist is committing their sin in world war two with the nuclear weapons uh if we ever are stupid enough to have a world war three I'm sure world war four will be fought with sticks and stones exactly but the bottom line is it was uh materialist science unbridled from human spirit and that's why this awakening is so important we've horribly damaged our climate um our addiction to fossil fuels is leading us down a deadly pathway where a third the world species are at risk of uh extinction uh and we really must awaken and uh collectively get in touch with our higher soul to better uh steward this planet out of the trouble that we're in likewise all the violence and conflict in this world so much of that has arisen out of the the false sense of materialist separation and and in parcel with that was this misinterpretation of Darwinian evolution you know the notion of survival of the fifth right you know biological science in recent decades has come to realize that in fact the greatest successes in the history of evolution uh are all due to collaboration and cooperation yes members of a species but even between species and of course we see this all the time just in terms of the natural world the interdependence of species but it's all about cooperation collaboration not about conflict and survival of the fittest and defeating you know the enemy because in fact we're all in this together uh and it's really recovering that love and that sense of oneness and purpose where we're here to take care of the least the last the lost and and really to take care of all uh that is in our power which is this entire world uh and uh this is why the awakening is so crucial and why i believe it's happening very very rapidly even now yes and i couldn't agree more and my friend dr bruce damer talks about his theory of cooperative evolution and can prove it in many different modalities and ways and i think that it speaks to the core messages of what you're communicating and this idea of awareness being the building block of which we can begin to understand everything around us including ourselves that's why we see mindfulness meditation having its moment in culture um it's because the mystics and the people who have been doing this for generations and thousands of years know that if you want to gain any insight into anything that's going on you have to have an awareness of it and cultivating that sense of awareness um is the first step so it's it's so clear and that witness consciousness that observer consciousness so many of us tune it out but when you can actually really just cultivate that awareness it's amazing how it feeds every other aspect of your life and one of the other things you mentioned improve of heaven and you're alluding to now is and i thought about this too um again i wasn't in a coma but i had a very intense psychological spiritual experience and i came away from the experiencing thinking oh god words are so useless why the the the the scourge of words upon our society which limits these experiences and things uh is such a problem but then months later i came to feel as you do about words they're beautiful what a wonderful gift we have to express some of these internal states through language so it's this very interesting paradox of having these tools available that somewhat limit us in terms of our viewpoints of the world but still can be used to point in the direction of these fundamental truths so uh dr x sander i i have a feeling if we had the time we could probably talk about this until the end of time so i want to be mindful and respectful of your time in this conversation and wrap it up i asked three quick questions and then one greater question but i i just want to extend my sincere gratitude um for you sharing your story for you coming on this podcast uh it's been an absolute prep pleasure and i'm just incredibly grateful so thank you well thanks not for having me it's been wonderful talking with you and i hope we can do it again sometime great i'm sure we can and i'll point out that i don't know if i mentioned this uh i have a podcast network and i have you know 15 other podcasts and i'm sure when your book comes out if you want to talk about it on any of these every single one of my podcasters would be thrilled to have you on so i want to do anything i can to help support and promote people like you who are really sharing such powerful stuff i mean it's it's truly anything i can do that's that's why i think i'm here as an individual so i'm happy to do that would be great and i'd love to uh participate with others i will tell your listeners that you can learn more by going to evanalexander.com that's e-b-e-n allexander.com uh and in fact that whole website's going to be completely redone by about the 20th of july so uh right now my old website's up but it's quite good but then within a day or so that's going to become a a brand new website that'll be far more informative and useful to people so i would encourage people to visit evanalexander.com also those who want to get into this kind of meditation can visit sacredacoustics.com to learn a lot more.

well i i'm happy to say my birthday is july 20th so i hope the new incarnation of your site of your site birthday. perfect timing thank you so i'm going to ask three seemingly ridiculous questions and then one larger one so what's your favorite color red what's your favorite number 21 what's your favorite animal that one's kind of a challenge puppies puppies are pretty amazing i gotta say yeah yeah we we got a puppy in february and and that puppy's been a whole ton of fun oh god i love it rolling out puppy in our older dog so isn't it amazing when that happens it's just oh god i love it so the last question i'll ask is what's a practical tip that you've learned in your life that's helped you that you could share with people listening just to live you know live from your heart and realize that we're all in this together and it is truly all about love and it brings more and more gifts the more we can just serve as a conduit to channel that love because the greatest way to love ourselves is to let that love flow through us to others and i think that that is probably the one of the easiest and most ready ways to health and happiness and joy is just to see yourself as a conduit for love and share that beautiful love it has infinite power to heal there is not an opposing force of darkness or evil darkness and evil are just the lack of light and love so never will darkness or evil overcome the forces of light and love so we can all make that choice and serve as those vehicles of light and love uh and it uh it just carries gifts uh first and foremost to those who choose to do it but then of course it flows out to this world and the more of us who do that the better place will will have you get it makes me think of this the the famous stonka pictures into betting buddhism of these buddha trees and all of these buddhas flow out from all of these other ones and that's exactly kind of what you're describing there dr. alexander this has been a thrill for me let's connect soon i hope to see you uh when you're in ryan back at omega in the not too distant future thank you so much for doing for doing this thank elizabeth for setting it up and our friend brandon beachham for linking us thank you so much ryan thank you so much great talking with you and we'll talk soon all right bye bye thanks for listening to that episode i hope you enjoyed it dr. alexander such a cool guy uh reminder if you are interested in anything that he is doing he's going to be speaking very shortly at omega institute up by me i'm going to try to make it there so maybe i'll see you in person uh go to evanalexander.com he mentioned that he's revamping his whole website that should have happened by now haven't checked in but if it did that's awesome go check it out proof of heaven his original book is a great place to get started um just just stay on the lookout for him because he's a really interesting guy so that's it if you want to support this podcast it's free right it's offered freely support some of the costs of running it some of the time and energy it takes to do these things you can do that on patreon become a patron get some rewards you can just donate on the website if you want that's also appreciated and if you don't have any money or don't feel that you need to donate at all i totally respect that maybe leave a review on itunes would appreciate that if not just enjoy i know we got a lot of shit to do as it is i'm not trying to force anyone to do stuff but if you feel obliged to do so it is greatly appreciated thank you and i will see you next week oh by the way patrick nimchik super awesome bye bye