You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia pictures and iHeart podcasts.

So you see a movement and a growing interest in the consciousness studies, near death experiences, and even psychedelic research as signs of conversation beginning to shift.

Do you think that so it is happening?

You think?

I think that's the biggest lesson from NDAs and from the science of consciousness, that we have shared meaning and purpose and also a shared connection and come to realize that all that emerges in the physical world is ultimately determined by our willful interaction.

With the universe.

Welcome back to Alive Again.

I'm your host Dan Bush.

Today I'm honored to be joined by someone whose story and work offers a quantum leap into the way many of us think about consciousness in what lies beyond this life.

Doctor Evan Alexander is a renowned academic neurosurgeon who spent over twenty five years teaching and practicing at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world, including Harvard Medical School.

For most of his career, he had a conventional materialist view of the mind and brain until his own near death experience and remarkable recovery challenged everything he once believed about the nature of reality.

His journey from the world of materialist science to a deeper understanding of consciousness has become a beacon for anyone seeking to understand what it truly means to awaken, to heal, and to come fully alive again.

Doctor Alexander's best selling book Proof of Heaven, a neurosurgeon's journey into the Afterlife, became a global phenomenon, offering millions of readers a deeply personal and scientifically informed glimpse into the possibilities beyond death.

He has since authored several more works, including The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe, bridging neuroscience, spirituality, and philosophy in a way few others can.

Today, we'll explore not just doctor Alexander's extraordinary journey, but the transformation it's sparked, a transformation of understanding of purpose, of heart and mind.

We'll talk about the mind's role in shaping reality, the illusion of separation, how profound experiences, whether through trauma, loss, or near death, can transform us, and also about the powerful transformation that can happen when we step beyond our fear and into a larger view of existence.

What drew me to doctor Alexander wasn't just his near death experience, although that's extremely powerful on its own.

It's the fact that he has since become one of the leading voices in a growing movement to reimagine the relationship between consciousness and reality through science, philosophy, and personal experience.

I've been searching for voices that are willing to challenge this sort of materialist view of consciousness, which is the idea that our awareness is nothing more than brain activity.

Doctor Alexander's story and research offer a radically different perspective that consciousness is not produced by the brain, but is in fact universal, something that we all have access to and can tap into.

As someone who's always asking questions about the mysteries of life and death, I was inspired that his message actually resonates so deeply with my own beliefs that our sense of separation is an illusion created by an ego mind, and that beneath it all is something profoundly unifying, something loving.

So while this episode focuses on doctor Alexander's specific experience and viewpoint, I also hope that Alive again will serve as a space to explore many different perspectives.

But doctor Alexander does draw on more than his own experience of his end, and he's at the forefront of this new research that's not dismissive of these ideas.

In talking to him, I was really happy that his experience has led him to an inspiring and hopeful message about the true nature of reality as one that reflects love and compassion.

I mean, our show is all about where human experience brushes up against mystery and how those intersections transform us.

So it is a true privilege to have doctor Alexander with us to share his journey and his insights.

It really is a true privilege to have you, doctor Alexander, on our show.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Well, Dan, it's a real pleasure to be with you today.

I appreciate your getting this out to the world, and I can tell you're very knowledgeable about this and have the right kind of interests.

I mean, this is the kind of interview I love doing.

If you could take us back to the beginning of your near death experience and how did it begin to transform your understanding of not just life and death.

But I'm interested in your shift in yourself and your sense of purpose.

You have described your coma and your near death experience as more real than anything you experienced in waking life, and so I'm extremely curious about how this may have shifted your sense of self and your purpose once you came back, and more importantly, what parts of yourself would you say that you left behind?

Like what I often ask people what did you lose and what did you gain from this experience?

So maybe maybe we can start with that.

All right, well, those are excellent questions.

I think it's important to point out that when all this happened to me back in two thousand and eight, which is when I went to a week long coma due to meningitis, I was basically, you know, a reductive materialist neurosurgeon.

I'd spent fifteen years teaching at Harvard Medical School teaching neurosurgery.

Thought I had some understanding of brain, mind, and consciousness.

Now it's also important to point out that a deep part of the background of my story is that I was adopted.

My birth mother was sixteen years old, unwed, and in fact, I demonstrated what's called failure to thrive as an infant and was hospitalized at age eleven days.

And I think part of that may have been due to my kind of sensing the great discord at home.

I said, my birth mother unmarried, her her father was often unemployed.

You know, he'd had trouble with alcohol, et cetera.

So there were many issues at home.

And so I was born into a home that was somewhat troubled.

And then Social services took me away when I was eleven days old, but my birth mother had to sign the release papers and she didn't do that.

She didn't want to let me go, and so that put me in kind of purgatory for four months in a baby dorm.

I'm just putting that out there.

That's the starting point of my story, and it is important because as much as my adoptive father, who was a globally renowned neurosurgeon, would certainly know about things like memory, he used to reassure me there's no way I could remember anything that happened back when I was that age.

And I know now that he was wrong.

That I had a deep, kind of smoke looking crater memory, and it was so existential.

It had to do with whether or not I even deserved to exist my own birth mother left me behind, and you find that animals left behind often go on a hunger strike, you know, left by their mother, and so that's what was going on.

So early on I had that kind of traumatic event that led to what I believe were some subconscious wounds that were greatly healed through my NDE.

And so when I tell the story, think of it in that context as an adoptee who's trying to come to some kind of sense of his reason for being in the universe.

But suffice it to say that in November tenth, two thousand and eight, when I went into Comba very suddenly in the early hours of that morning, I've had basically towed the line as a materialist or physicalist neuro scientist by believing the brain creates consciousness.

That was the fun bent falsehood that was going to now be exposed in my journey, because my journey could not have happened according to the tenets of modern neuroscience.

It couldn't have happened, and yet it did happen.

And that, of course, to me, has been incredibly powerful incentive to get to a deeper understanding of the nature reality because trying to pretend that my old philosophical system of materialism could explain it didn't work at all, and that has to do with the medical details of the case.

So to kind of briefly go into the important features of my journey, first of all, I'll point out that I was in a state of amnesia.

That's very unusual be completely amnesic.

I had no knowledge of Eben Alexander's life, of humans, of this universe.

It really was an empty slate.

Now, when I first came back to this world and my science knowledge was not yet returned.

It took about two months post coma for a lot of that to come back.

But when I first came back and I tried to tell my doctors about my spiritual experience, which I'll get to in a minute, they would just say, well, your brain was soaking in pus, we can't even believe you're coming back to us.

But you can forget about it, because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks.

So I thought, oh, well, the doctors say that that's what dying brains do.

I was shocked by the ultra reality of the experience.

But I remember even telling my older son eb and fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience in college.

When he came home two days after I got out of the hospital, I told him it was way too real to be real.

That was kind of the lesson I'd gotten for my doctors, that that striking kind of alter reality of it was due to that.

But I had only just begun investigating my own medical records, which would completely defy that thinking.

If the brain and the neocortex played the role in consciousness that we normally think of, then there was no way I could have had such an experience given the devastation to my brain.

And that is all elucidated not just in my medical facts presented in the book Proof of Heaven, but also in a medical case report on my medical records that came out September twenty eighteen in the Journal of Nervous.

And Mental Disease.

And anyway, the important thing is that journal article made it very clear that my brain was way too damaged to allow any kind of enhancement of activity.

If anything, you would expect great diminution in that brain's ability to do anything because the entire neocortex was involved.

And that's why my case is so important to the neuroscience community.

And they take it quite seriously.

Many people who study consciousness pay big attention to this because it completely defies those materialist models, and they basically become impossible of hopeless arguments to defy my experience.

And then, of course you have my recovery.

And that another challenge from the scientific peerview editors of that journal was, how do you explain this case?

It's unprecedented in the medical literature to have somebody that ill from bacterial innenguin cephalie.

I is in coma for a week, with all the medical parameters of my case, the neurologic exams, etc.

How could that all happen and then have this complete recovery?

And the doctors who investigated the case said, it's because he had an NDE.

That's why he had this miraculous recovery.

And so science is now paying attention to spiritual encounters as profound explanations for recovery that has no other explanation.

So given that preamble, I'll now take you briefly through what I went through, starting what I call the earthworm's eye view, a primitive course, kind of unresponsive realm, like being a dirty jello of you know, I remember roots or blood vessels.

I had all kinds of sensory information coming into me, but I never had any body awareness during any part of the journey, and that I think is important.

Luckily, I was rescued from that kind of subtraining existence by a slowly spinning white light that game packaged with a perfect musical melody, and that open up like a rip in the fabric of that ugly earthworm eye view realm that I'd first started in, and led me up into this ultra real, kind of sharp crisp reality that had many earth like features but also many spiritual features.

And for example, there was this lovely meadows surrounded by a forest, sparkling waterfalls into crystal blue pools.

There were thousands of beings dancing in this meadow, lots of joy and merriment, and children playing dogs, jumping, incredible festivities, all being fueled because up above the spiritual elements were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were emanating chants and anthems hymns that would just thunder through my awareness.

I mean, it was a scene of amazing beauty.

In many ways.

I describe it as kind of Plato's world.

Of ideals, kind of a world of perfection that serves as a guidance as a template for our kind of spiritual growth.

And that's kind of the way I sensed it as I entered it.

It also seemed to be very familiar.

And I know thousands of people wrote me after reading Proof of Heaven or hearing my talks and said that somehow my words and my depiction of the story reminded memories in them, very deep and subconscious memories brought to the surface about their own kind of life experiences between lives and past lives, et cetera.

So a lot of people resonated with what I was saying in describing that now in this beautiful gateway valley, I was witnessing it because I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing, and there were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling in vast formations.

Some people make the mistake of thinking, oh, these are symbolic of something.

No butterflies, hummingbirds, owls.

There are many animals that are kind of totems for the spiritual realm and play a big role in our human interpretation of all that.

And this is not something you know, I'm kind of making up now whether they were actually butterflies or flying carpets, I don't know.

It was such a magical, powered altra reality that the words kind of pale in trying to describe it all.

But the best description I could have was that it was like these intelligent butterflies, and that's what we were flying around on.

And the best part was I wasn't alone on that butterfly wing.

There was a beautiful young woman and she had sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, my forehead, broad smile.

She never said a word to me, she never had to.

But her telepathic message to me, delivered as our minds melded together in that beautiful environment, was the message was you were deeply loved and cherished forever.

You have nothing to fear.

You're richly cared for.

And I cannot tell you how comforting that message was at that time.

And I remember sensing all of four dimensional space time, kind of this lower level beneath us, but then the spiritual realm, where there's something operative called deep time.

This is a very important concept.

When you hear people talk about life reviews, they often say that you relive the events and that they're more real than when they were initially lived, and owing that you relive them from the perspective of everybody involved.

So it's a very kind of cosmic consciousness view of what happens during a life review.

And the life review is really kind of the Golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the fabric of the universe.

And that's exactly so.

You're experiencing your life reviews.

You're experiencing these events not just from a singular perspective, but you're experiing them from multiple participant perspectives, right exactly.

In fact, there was an article by Bruce Grayson, a skeptical psychiatrist who studied in these for the last forty five years.

It came out in the Journal of Near Death Studies in the fall of twenty twenty one, and it made it clear that something like three quarters of people believed that reported their life review.

And this was in his reported involved seven hundred life reviews.

There's six ninety eight, seven hundred or so life reviews, right, and the interesting thing is that three quarters of them said it was from the perspective of everybody involved, you know, as I often say, if you heard another, you're hurting yourself.

The golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated, is right there with this incredible kind of commonality of reports.

Now, I couldn't have an Eben Alexander life review because of the amnesia, but I saw life reviews and reincarnation in these very grand visions that happened at the next stage of the journey.

Just as kind of that musical melody had given me a light portal up from the earthworm's I view into the Gateway valley, likewise, a musical portal was about to expand again, and that was one that was due to the angelic choirs above in this Gateway valley, and so all of that deep time, of that whole realm of time listeners, I would say, they're not stuck in Earth time.

That's why some of these experiences are so hard to explain, and yet they make so much more sense when you just acknowledge that those are real effects.

They're not vague memories of events.

It's a reliving.

It's from all perspectives.

It's kind of shows us we're sharing the dream of the one buy, that we're all in that together.

It's interesting because the point of like one of the reasons I set out to do a live again and to create the show, it wasn't for any sort of I wasn't looking for any like, you know, particular spiritual bent, and I wasn't looking for any specific, scientific, deterministic look at near death experiences.

I was simply wanting to hear the perspectives of the people who had gone through them.

And it has kind of developed since then into more generally stories about human fragility and trauma and resilience and forgiveness, and in so doing, I've really leaned into an understanding of the mission of our show, which is to unify right, and that we tend to not get into something a lot of the people were affected by different politics that affected their situation.

We don't get too much into that because I don't I want everybody to understand that there's a shared human condition.

We're all We're all going to die, everyone we know on this planet, everyone that has ever existed, you know, passes on.

And so the point of our show is to is to help people to hear stories that unify us and give people a sense so that they're maybe not as scared.

You know, I think that that's really the beautiful lesson that comes from all this.

And when you consider that this is not about any kind of religious kind of posturing or ideologies, but more just about what happens to people in the modern era.

What do people report, and how does that inform us about what we should expect to happen when our own bodies coming to an end.

And what I will tell you is the evidence for the afterlife is overwhelming.

I should probably finish off the little bits I was going to say about my plea story and then we can get into all that.

So I just wanted to finish by saying that, you know, I ascended to this higher level.

I remember seeing all of the material realm collapsing down, all of that deep time, that spiritual realm with its kind of whole different ordering and causality and apparent connections across the time, all of that collapsing down until I entered what I call the core now.

The core was an infinite, inky blackness.

I often describe it as a dazzling darkness.

It was a complete resolution of all paradox.

You know, we live in a world where everything is in kind of a spectrum of activity.

You have darkness, light, you have good, evil, masculine, feminine, all these different kind of ranges of possibility, and yet in that realm, what happens is everything kind of coalesces into that oneness.

And for me, the core.

Realm was a realm of kind of coming into oneness with that pure source of consciousness, that God force that's at the source of all of our conscious awareness, and recognizing I was never separate from that at all, I could pool myself into thinking I was separate, but that was kind of my ego mind and some of the more human aspects kind of losing track of this deeper connection with kind of cosmic source.

And that also has to do with causality.

We are kind of prime movers in determining the direction that our life will take, and it's unfolding and that's very important.

You know.

In fact, the materialist side that I had worshiped before my coma materialist or physical scientists will scoff at you for even claiming to have free will, because they think all just chemical reactions, electron fluxes in the brain, giving an illusion of awareness, an illusion of willful interaction with the universe.

But that they've got it completely wrong.

Every bit of this is about kind of a soulful, a purposeful reflection, and that indicates where mind over matic can really occur.

And we can get into that a little bit later because I've got much more about it, but just to kind of finish off my journey going into the core, I had two visions on two separate passages because I would cycle through these levels multiple times, and the later one I think is more important.

That's the one I'll discuss.

It was called the Indra's Net vision.

And in that vision, I saw our lives as these interwoven threads in this beautiful, silvery, golden tapestry leading to a golden center.

And what I recognized there was the threads represented in our lifetimes over multiple incarnations, as higher souls that we are, indeed eternal souls that are contributing to this growth of consciousness, this evolution and transformation of the mind of the universe itself, that godmind.

It's growing, it's learning, it's teaching, and that's what we are all part of.

And to see all that.

So not only did I see the life reviews as a course correction, but also the process of reincarnation is one where we move closer to this, and I didn't realize that.

You know, there was a huge scientific basis for reincarnation before my coma.

I only did that homework afterwards.

But for example, at the University of Virginia, they've studied more than twenty five hundred cases of pass like memories and children suggestive reincarnation over the last six and a half decades, and over those twenty five hundred, more than seventeen hundred or what they call solve that is, they actually found the person who lived before.

But they also will point out to you, doctors Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker, who did all that work, that you must harvest those memories before age six or seven because their natural processes in all of us that cover over those memories of past lives.

I guess it's to give a skin in the game.

You know, at this stage of human development, for whatever reason, we need to have a little more skin in the game that were not these eternal souls, but to kind of buy into this physical incarnation of so we don't dismiss or mistreated.

Right risk of doing that.

A lot of what I want to begin to discuss with you after in just a few minutes.

We'll get to it in a bit.

Is is uh, huge questions I have about why why we have We'll get into this in a little bit, but why we have this this maya or why why is there this ego that you call the supreme illusion?

Why is this built into our evolutionary process, or why even in our cultural you know, biases.

And I'm just really interested in like the function of the default network and the function of the ego as as creating the sense of separateness.

And I'm really curious about why would that even exist for us?

You know, what's the function of that?

We can get into that.

But we can get into all that in a few minutes.

Uh, It's those are fascinating and very important questions because that's where the kind of deeper meaning and reasoning behind all this starts to crystallize out.

But I'll just finish my indie here to interrupt.

No, that's quite right.

But at any rate, so that vision was incredible, and also that vision showed me this is not reincarnation in the kind of blind mechanistic get off the wheel of suffering and Buddhism, but much more of a grace filled and progress and transformation filled.

And that's where I think we'll find some answers to your question, is because of where all this allows us to lead our emerging reality, and where human sentience and sentience of other of beings throughout the cosmos is leading towards this progression and a kind of a grace field growth towards oneness with the divine.

So it's not pointless at all.

It's kind of about a shared meaning and purpose.

But at any rate, getting back to my journey, there were many lessons.

I mean, we could talk for hours about so much of what I learned and what was shown in various different ways.

But the important thing to get is that I would cycle through these levels.

As I said, I'd tumbled down from that core level all the way back down to the earth orm my view, and learned that by remembering the musical notes of the melody, I could conjure up that light portal that took me up and then they always welcome by the beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing, and then escorted up through the core into the deeper lessons in that timeless realm of pure oneness.

At any rate, there came a time, as I'd often been told, going into the Core, you're not here to stay, You'll be going back.

And there came a time, after multiple passages, where I tried to conjure up the musical notes of the melody to escort me up out of the earth form my view, and it didn't work.

So to say I was sad at that point would be an understatement.

But also I knew I could trust that I would be taken care of.

And that's one of the most beautiful things that anyone can gain from hearing these stories, is a sense of trust in that loving God force at the core of the universe.

And from that point on, one of the last visions I had in my Nde was of thousands of beings going off around me into the distance, arms up like that, some holding candles, some with hoods, and this murmuring energy coming from them.

The fascinating thing was, even though I was back down in this kind of murky earth for my view where it all started, now they were all this kind of mirth and joy that I sensed in the Gateway Valley and the Core in earlier passages was now present at this lowest realm and I realized.

I called that the power of prayer in my writings when I came back to this world and a few weeks later was trying to record it all.

That's what I sensed as those thousands of beings go around me, because it was kind of guiding me back towards the earthly realm.

And then there were six faces that I saw at the very end of my journey.

They were very important.

They serve as what are called vertical time anchors, because in looking back on it, the five of those faces were only of family and friends present in the ic room the last twenty four to forty eight hours of coma.

So in other words, those faces showed me that the vast majority of the spiritual journey had to happen between days one and four one in five and I explained all that timing and proof of having and especially also in the third book Living in a Mind for Universe or go into some of that, and that's where we really bring the science and spirituality together.

One of those faces is important because she was not physically present.

That was a good friend of mine all the way back to Freshman English nineteen seventy two at UNC Chapel Hill, Susan Rinches.

That's when I'd first met her.

We lost touch.

And then when I was a resident neur surgery in the nineteen eighties, she was a co teacher with my former spouse at a school in Raleigh, North Carolina, and so they got to know Susan again, and at that point they realized that Susan had done channeling work, and she wrote a book called Third Eye Open about her work where she had channeled to people like in coma and other things to help them.

And she came to me because my former spouse and a good friend of her, Sylvia, called Susan and asked her to intervene, and so on nights four and five, she channeled to me.

And so when I was waking up in the ic room and I say, you were there, and you and you, but where was Susan, They said, well, Susan wasn't physically here.

She channeled to you from one hundred and twenty miles away.

And of course to me, I just knew, well, of course that realm is non physical and so distance is no object.

So it made perfect sense that she had channeled to me.

But it was the last of those six faces it's the most important.

It was a ten year old boy, and I didn't recognize them at the time because my amnesia was filled very much.

In effect, it was my son Bond.

That was a Sunday morning.

It was day seven of coma.

That's when the doctors held a conference where they told my family I'd gone from a ten percent chance of survival early in the week but was now down to two percent chance of survival, but with no realistic chance of recovery.

A week in coma with a severe meningitis like that with a through or spinal fluid glue coast level of one where years of mine might be eighty, anybody with bad big turium and andingitis might get to twenty.

Well, none of the consultants had ever heard of that, but my CSF glucose was only one.

They'd run out of sugar to eat and they were eating my brain.

So and of course any neuroscientists today would look at me and say, well you can and that's it, because look how well you're doing.

But that begs the question that misses the point that was made by the three authors who wrote the case report for the Medical journal that I had an NDE and if you don't count that, then you really have no way of understanding how I had this miraculous recovery.

So it's all that's a big important lesson for all of us about the nature of free will and healing and all those kind of things.

But ultimately what happened was in seeing that face of my son but not recognizing him.

He was pleading with me, Daddy's going to be okay.

Daddy, He's gonna be okay.

Is if somehow that would make it so?

And that's how I came back to this world.

I don't understand the mechanics of it all, and it was the most frightening aspect of the whole part of the journey, because you know this, I had thought throughout the NDE, this can continue, it conceis doesn't matter.

But now everything did matter.

I had a big sense of responsibility to this other soul and really had to be there for him.

And so it was soon thereafter that I was fighting the ventilator and trying to come back to this world.

And I still was in and out of a thirty six hour paranoid, delusional, psychotic nightmare as I emerged from coma.

But that was very important because the memories of those events disappeared within weeks, whereas the memories from the deep Comba experience are as strong and resilient and solid today as if they just happened yesterday, completely different from imagination or dreamed events.

That's why we need to take these stories so seriously at any rate.

So I did wake up came back to this world.

Initially, it was a very rough go for my family because in those first minutes an hour or so of waken up, I wasn't even recognizing love into the bedside like my mother, sisters, sons, et cetera.

But those memories came back very rapidly, language, very rapidly, and within a day or so I was getting a whole lot back.

But it did take, as I said, two months to get everything back.

And during that time, you know, I was first of all writing down everything I could remember, after my son advised me to write it all down before I read anyone else's indie account.

That was very smart advice.

Therefore, I had twenty thousand words that I wrote down and I hadn't read indie accounts before.

So that was really my story without any kind of influence from outside or anybody else.

And then of course I was going to the hospital, talking with my doctors, going through my scans, CTSMRIS.

Et cetera.

And it wasn't lining up.

That brain was not just playing tricks because it was dying.

That brain was unable to host any kind of dream or hallucination.

That was quite clear from the documented damage of the Glasgow coma scales, the neurologic exams, as Kilo cardiac reflex, things like that.

It was this was a brain far too gone to be hosting extraordinary, a rich and memorable and transformational spiritual experiences.

And so that's why it's important, is as I tell in the book Proof of Heaven, that incredibly a mind bending point four months after my coma, where I'd been so shocked, you know, I realized if I had scripted this, my adoptive father would have been the soul, would have been the spiritual guide, and yet he was nowhere to be found in And we describe all that in our third book, Living in a Mind for Universe, where I talk about encountering my father's soul two and a half years after my coma in meditation.

And that is a very important point because when I encountered his soul.

He made it clear to me he couldn't be apparent to me, as he put it with his sense of humor, Because if that had been the case, in spite of one in ten million diagnoses of equal imeningitis and an adult in spite of one in a billion recovery, if my adoptive father had been there, if his soul had been there, I would have been a little more tempted to dismiss it all as oh, you see who you want to see on the way out.

The universe kind of doubled the ante and gave me a whole different level of understanding through the identity of that guardian angel that I only discovered four months post coma when I got a picture in the mail from my birth sister who had only met a year earlier, of another birth sister who we had lost.

And I won't say.

More kind of spoiler alert for the book Proof of Heaven, But when I recovered the identity of that guardian angel, it brought me to my knees and I went, oh, seemed way too real to be real, because it really happened, and it's almost says if she's looking at me in that picture saying, do you finally get it?

I guess, Betsy, I'm finally getting it.

And since then, sixteen years of hard work as a scientist, working with fellow experiencers other scientists.

It deeply involves quantum physics and how neurons are basically quantum computers, and a deeper understanding of kind of top down causality to begin making sense of it.

But most importantly, my spiritual journey has shown me that, you know, the hardships and challenges and difficulties in life are gifts, and it's how we respond to those and how we are energized by those hardships and challenges, illness, injury, what have you.

That's what enables our incredible soul growth.

And the soul growth happens with what we do in these bodies, with that temporary dumbing down and not necessarily remembering all the knowledge of a higher soul than involves prior lifetimes, et cetera.

So there's a lot going on here, a lot of moving parts, but it hurts to make a lot more sense as you put this much bigger picture together.

But the bigger picture emerging in the scientific community is absolutely one of a primacy of mind.

That is what is so reassuring that we're all truly in this together and just as Inde have been trying to tell us for thousands of years, you know, we're bound together through forces of love, and love brings us into healing and wholeness.

And that's true for any one of us as individuals, although no one's ever a quote individual.

We're all part of soul groups and none of it ever happens with an individual soul, but it always happens with groups evolving together, and we're all doing that in large measure, you know, with sentience throughout the cosmos, and that includes sentience thence also comes in and out of kind of material bodies, but is ultimately much more than that.

And I think that's the biggest lesson from NDASE and from the science of consciousness, that we have shared meaning and purpose and also a shared connection through our mental space and come to realize that all that emerges in the physical world is ultimately determined by our willful interaction with the universe at a mental level.

And this is why centering, prayer, and meditation are so important.

If you just live in this material world in your little ego mind.

The ego only uses fear and anxieties its main tools.

The ego was absolutely tied up with all addictions and dysfunctions.

And this is about coming to recognize and cultivate our relationship with our higher soul.

That is thank you so much.

That's such an elegant and probably very condensed version of the big story and your transformation and your journey all the way through that.

I have so many questions to ask you about so many parts of it.

If that's okay, we can sort of start to unpack some of it.

Absolutely.

I will say that Bruce Grayson got back to us recently.

We asked him for an interview and he said he would be delighted, but apparently he had suffered a stroke and so he said he was in no condition to do an interview at this point in time, which was heartbreaking.

But another thing is I'm also a Chapel Hill graduate.

Really, oh, I love that.

Excellent, fantastic, Well, I've absolutely some of my finest memories of life were those chapter eight years in Chapel Hill.

I was there from seventy two to seventy six.

Oh wow.

Yeah, And I'd like to just for our listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the idea or the term of I guess it's materialism or materialistic science that's the dominant, the currently dominant view in science that consciousness is purely a product of brain activity, and that it ceases when brain when the brain stops functioning.

But Eben, you and others have offered this new definition of consciousness, and I want to talk about that first.

I want to I want to ask you a little bit about your healing process.

So, when you were cycling through these different realms in your near death experience, and when you were in this other, even more vivid, more real than reality space, would you say that that there was healing happening to you in that space?

Were you being healed or were you in what was it an emotional healing or was it a physical healing?

Secondarily very strong emotional healing.

And I would say it's the same kind of healing that I think is widely available to us when we go to prayer and meditation.

And I'm talking specifically about centering prayer, which is a form of kind of defocused prayer that really just kind of allows one to connect with that God force of healing and the wholeness and love.

It was something that was just flowing through me and also one of the reasons why I continue to meditate and for anyone who needs a tool for meditation, and meditation to me very simply involves acknowledging kind of the higher aspects of soul that we are and putting that little ego voice into timeout.

You know, look how Michael Singer in his book The Untethered Soul, he calls a voice in your head, the annoying roommate.

Roommate that is absolutely on target.

Now your consciousness is your awareness of that voice.

Now, that part is quite magical, and that's an alignment with the universe at large.

And that's what I think is so important to get.

But it's why meditation is so important.

And for anybody who needs a tool, I can recommend one, and that is Sacred Acoustics.

And it's a form of buino orbeat brain waven trainment.

Full disclosure.

Sacred Acoustics as a company, you know, Sacred Acoustics dot Com was co founded by my wife, Karen Newell, who also is a co author of that third book, Living in a mi Own for Universe.

She's a great spiritual mentor who I've been with for about twelve years now, and she has been a tremendous guide to me.

And she also knows a tremendous amount about sound and how it can be used to achieve transcendental states of conscious awareness.

A pilot study by doctor Anna Yusam in the peer viewed scientific literature supporting sacred acoustics for a leaf of anxiety, she found that in her busy Manhattan practice, she had a twenty six percent reduction in anxiety symptoms over two weeks, versus only seven percent in the control group.

Control group got standard psychotherapy for anxiety, but just by listening sagred acoustics tones, twenty six percent reduction over two weeks.

That's a pretty powerful result.

In the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases January of twenty twenty, that anti usum study came out.

But much more is going on than just relief of anxiety.

And that's what happens when you start connecting with that higher soul and putting your ego in the back seat where it belongs, where it's not trying to drive right, and that's where so much healing can come.

But that's exactly the kind of thing I was feeling deep in my coma as I was going through This was healing, coming into wholeness.

It's interesting because a lot of my work, everything, even in the fiction world, is all about sort of how people compensate for what they perceive as a lack of a sense of belonging.

And I believe, I believe truly that, you know, anthropologically, the need to belong is greater, a greater force than the need to survive or to preserve life throughout throughout history and humanity, and a lot of there's there's sort of this.

I believe there was a study done where they, you know, an addiction study, where have you heard of this with the rats or the rats are mice in a cage?

And I'll have to go back when I'm done with this interview to tell the listeners exactly what this was.

But the the rat they give them, you know, the traditional addiction studies, they would give them cocaine or heroin in one dropper, and then the other one was just pure water.

And then and they tended to just over use the cocaine or the heroine until they died.

And then this one person said, this one reach's researcher said, well, that's they're isolated in a cage by themselves, so they choose this sort of morbidity.

He said, why don't we change the environment.

Let's put them in a a in a rat paradise where there's you know, wheels and colors and lots of other animals there, and its social interactions.

In that case, they didn't.

They avoided the cocaine and the heroin laced water and they went for the healthy water, or almost one hundred percent.

And so it points out the idea that you cannot look at addiction and you know, this need, this hunger for dopamine.

You can't look at addiction without also also understanding the need to belong and that unity a beautiful point.

And I think, you know, especially when you look at where consciousness studies are going now, the signs of consciousness of explaining many of these incredible events after death communications, deathbed visions in the hospice, you know, not just near death, but shared death, which share death experiences happen in perfectly healthy people.

They are usually a healthcare worker or a loved one who can be one thousand miles away from somebody who's passing, but in a shared death, their souls come together and the bystander soul can even witness a life review before it comes back to this world.

So the interesting thing in light of your comments about kind of community and society and relationships with others, is you find that ultimately every bit of our progress is about relationships.

It's about how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, how we interact with them, and that is absolutely the material by which our souls make any kind of progression and contribution to the evolution of all consciousness is through these relationships.

They are what matter.

And ultimately you find from the NDE community especially that the tip of the spear is really one of the binding force of love.

So, in other words, as you get closer and closer to the kind of the spiritual core of the universe, you find there's not some battle between good and evil going on there, but that it's pure love that God force.

And this comes out when you look at the incredible variety of how love manifests and near death experiences.

When I say that talking specifically about, for example, Nancy Evans Bush, who's written extensively about negative or hellish indies, Now they may only be about five or six percent of all indies, but I think they're an important category.

It turns out that they also lead the participant towards love, kindness, compassion, and mercy.

So they have the same transformational effect as the positive indies.

We you find, like even in a prison community where you've got basically murderers and rapists and they're serving as hospice for their fellow prisoners, you find the same thing that as they approach death, it's making amends and acknowledging the wrongs they've done to other to other beings, and kind of a sense of commonality and realizing that to hurt another was truly to hurt oneself.

That's the context in which they're growing.

At the very end of their life, they're gleaning these lessons, and the lessons don't let them off the hook for what they've done to others, but by making a men's seeking forgiveness and forgiving oneself is an important part of it.

And I also point out that for our world at large, a forgiveness of the perpetrator is an important step to take.

You don't even have to ever tell the perpetrator you're forgiving them.

But to release your own heart from the travesty of keeping yourself imprisoned with a revenge mode, you know, is just it's it makes no sense.

And so there's a far better way of looking at positive progression, at love, kindness, at making amends and working towards the next lifetime where you can make far better contributions to the overall higher good.

And that's what I think are the main lessons that come out of indiease is we're all in this together.

We're here to use that binding force of love to help our fellow.

You know, souls.

It really is all about manifesting kindness, love, compassion, mercy when necessary, forgiveness and of course never forget gratitude.

And this again is the main argument for centering prayer and meditation, because I would argue that you don't have to have gone through what I went through to come to the same kind of understanding of our deeper nature and our spiritual nature.

You can use prayer.

And meditation, and if you do that on a regular basis, you'll start to realize that we do have these connections with that loving God for us, and that ultimately it gives us tremendous power to come into healing and wholeness in our lives, but that involves serving the higher good and taking care of others.

Ultimately, there's no way that an individual soul, a selfish, greeting, narcissistic, egocentric soul, makes any kind of real progress in this world.

And to me, it's saddening to see souls like that get to the end of their life and have made no progress at all, right because they're doomed in their life review.

Whatever they cannot fix and make amends for, it's going to be repackaged in the next life, so you know, and.

They say, you know, hate is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick, exactly, you know I and you know I also wanted to mention we interviewed you.

Have you heard of David Ditchfield In his story David Ditchfield was He's a British fellow who was dragged underneath the train and horribly injured and had a near death experience.

But in his in thee he had a similar experience to yours, where this you know, resonant sound, the symphonic for lack of a better way to describe it, he heard this symphony and it played over and over and over, and when he came back, he composed without any prior musical training, composed a symphony based on what he had experienced.

That's so it's beautiful.

It's pretty many you can check it out, but it's pretty very beautiful, and it's a beautif full symphony.

I mean, it's just gorgeously just washes.

It's a bath that washes over you.

And he he was able to get an entire orchestra to perform it.

Oh, that's amazing.

I'd like to take to sort of shift towards looking at, you know, getting past the materialistic scientific viewpoints, and how you and your journey towards bringing what you gleaned into the you know, the scientific community afterwards.

And I know that there was probably some tension there, but I also want to talk a little bit about sort of this this definition of consciousness that's starting to that it exists independently of the brain, and that the brain may act more as a filter or a transceiver, as you've said, for a larger non local consciousness, and this everything you've been talking about.

I don't mean to just be reading my notes here, but can you just walk us through your shift and understanding.

I mean, you've done that, but just specifically with any previous dogma that you might have had in the materialistic side of the scientific training that you'd had, and also in what I'm interested in, what ways your medical background has helped or complicated your effort to share this to validate the legitimacy of ndies in the scientific community.

Well, I would say certainly of you know, something that may come as a surprise to some of your viewers is that my greatest support has been from the scientific community in huge measure.

And that's once they, you know, if they take the time to read the case report, start learning more about my illness, they realize why I was so befuddled by all this and why I was so challenged, you know, because just recovering from that kind of illness makes no sense.

It doesn't happen in the medical literature.

But you find many other inde cases where you have a miraculous healing, and to me, these are some of the best examples of kind of mind over my You know, that whole discussion as a healer, as a neurosurgeon, as a physician can start with placebo effect because we've recognized for thousands of years as healers that the belief's thoughts and attitudes of the patient and of the healer and of everybody else involved can play a tremendous role in what happens.

Do you actually get healing or not, And so beliefs are incredibly important.

The whole thing has been an incredible journey of understanding, and it basically led to one hundred and eighty degree flip.

That physicalism or materialism that you mentioned, that's really kind of the conventional science that we were all taught in the twentieth and early twenty first century, and in many ways it devolves into a kind of Newtonian deterministic science.

And this is where I'll point out a quote, one of my favorite quotes from the quantum physics community.

This one came from Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize I think in thirty two could be off on the year, but he won it for his uncertainty principle.

And Heisenberg said, 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.

He knew exactly what was going on.

Many other quantum physicists like Max playing Erwin Schroederger Paswal, Jordan and others have talked about how consciousness had this kind of primary presence in the universe and was not the emergent property of brain that so many kind of physicalists thought it was, but that we had to reach much deeper to understand conscious experience.

And he knew that quantum physics was actually saying that because before that science had this notion of a deterministic universe.

That's what Newton's laws told us.

If you understand the state of the universe at any one time, then you can know where it's headed by under those laws that govern the interactions of all these subatomic particles and then larger assemblies of such particles.

Interesting thing is, when you get right down to that subatomic level, none of it has that kind of predeterministic level at all.

There's you know, Schrodinger's equation is about an evolution through time, but it takes observation to make things crystallize out.

And that's a really shocked quantum physicist was how this act of observation kind of a mental choice of what to look at and how played a gigantic role in what emerged from your findings.

Correct in fact, was so strong that Pascual Jordan said, not only do our observations, you know, report to us about reality, they actually change and create that emerging reality.

And that's exactly what we're finding in the modern era.

And it couldn't be more true than the mind of a matter that we see extending beyond placebo effect, which is showing us how important bleafs are.

But you can get into the realm of spontaneous remission.

For example, if you go to noetics dot organ Institute of Noetics Sciences website, put in spontaneous remission as a search term.

You'll find a book that they published in the mid nineties by Carole Hirschberg and Brendan o'reagan that has more than thirty five hundred cases people with advanced cancer, advanced infection, etc.

Who would basically come to the limits of any medical treatment and then started invoking spiritual type things like emotional engagement, you know, processing negative emotions, fostering positive emotions, taking on a more spiritual approach to life, seeking kind of meaning and purpose in life.

Things like that.

It led people to be able to heal those advanced cancers and infections that had not been fully cured with various medical interventions.

So you know, in other words, free will is alive and well.

And when you start acknowledging the power of prayer and meditation, you start realizing how all this can lead to our benefit.

Now, one resource I'd love to point out year of Audience, and this is a resource that forever dispels the silly notion that this modern idea of privacy of consciousness and fundamental nature of mind and free will and the afterlife is fully supported by modern science and afterlife and even reincarnation.

If you go to Bigelowinstitute dot org, that's the website I'm talking about, you'll find twenty nine essays at Bigelowinstitute dot org that basically from scientists, all of whom had at least five years experience investigating the afterlife question.

And all twenty nine of these essays, coming from many different directions, support the reality of the afterlife and of reincarnation.

So a much bigger scientific view of who we are and what this is all about and the very nature of will and of the spiritual realm, etc.

Comes with light as scientifically supported at Bigelow Institute dot org.

So highly recommended people start reading those essays.

That first place essay by Jeffrey Mischlav incredibly powerful.

But there are many other scientific essays too, Bernardo Castrup's essay, Julian Weischel, Dean Rayden, Jeffrey Long.

I mean a bunch of scientific essays in I don't want to limit it, because all twenty nine essays are extremely good.

They take us.

Beyond the point.

So any materialist or physicalist who tries to tell you, oh that that you know in the ease or nonsense, you know we've proven scientifically that's not true.

Well, they're telling you that they are basically wilfully ignorant.

They haven't even bothered.

To read any of the Bigelow essays, because once they're do, they'll realize that their simplistic dismissal of the spiritual rem in our spiritual nature is very unwarranted by the evidence.

I love how you've put that.

There is so much dogma.

I don't know if it's coming out of fear.

I don't know if it's coming out of some you know, I have to look back at when I was so skeptic, and you know, and I'm really more questioning now.

I don't have the answers, but I'm comfortable in my ability to not have all the answers, but to be in that's the state of questioning and to be open to it.

But I don't know what that dogma comes from and why people cling so much to it.

And I don't know if it's a stigma that is born in culture, perpetuated by the powers that be, or what have you.

But well, it's interesting.

In the twentieth century there was this, you know, heyday of success of materialist science.

But also I will point out, for example, the chemists committed their sin in World War One inventing high explosives, machine guns, and poisonous gases.

The physicists committed their sin in World War two and they created atomic bombs.

I don't know about World War three, but if it's ever fought, world War four will be fault with sticks and stones paraphrase from Einstein.

And it's absolutely true.

There's no way to have any kind of winnable warl world War three.

It's time to get rid of the nukes.

But the bottom line is, yes, our science has been wonderful in progress in medicine and transportation, communication, and yet it's there's an ugly underbelly of that science and our addiction of fossil fuels, and you know, global warming, which absolutely is human calls by our addiction to burning carbon based fuels, and it is time to take responsibility and to come into some level of maturity.

We call ourselves homo sapiens.

Sapiens means wise.

But I would say, given the big picture of where I see science now, with you know, the nuclear weapons and all the modern warfare enabled by science and our addiction of fossil fuels, et cetera, I start questioning just how wise we've been to date.

And I would say that absolutely what we're talking about now is a turn towards wisdom.

It's a turn towards acknowledging the oneness of mind, the binding force of law.

There's a healing force in the universe.

They're all truly in this together, and we need to be much better stewards for the planet.

I mean, as it is, there are thousands of species who are threatened with extinction.

Who can look at one spiece is the culprit?

I mean, it's it's it's born out of I would say, I would offer that it's born out of that dualism and that dualistic thing like it.

So if we are separate from each other and separate for if we have and it's the ego mind that that's causing this situation where we're thinking that we are separate, we're perceiving ourselves to be separate, you know.

And then in a classical sense, if we're born, you know, we're made in the image of our creator.

That means what you know, an old white man or something you know.

So so does that mean that that then the entire world and everything around us becomes you know, something exploitable, and it is, and we don't see ourselves in in each other.

We don't see ourselves.

It allows for things like, you know, environmental disaster, It allows for things like races, It allows for these these horrible sort of thought patterns.

Absolutely, I'd like to talk a little bit about that with you, because we're getting into my big question here of you know, many people describe their brush with death or their profound trauma as a kind of forced awakening, like an invitation to turn inward and do some of the deep inner work.

And you've been talking about, you know, the power of prayer and the power of mindfulness and meditation.

Are those the main key opportunities that you would see for people for awakening this sort of understanding of a larger group consciousness.

I guess well, I think that's a lot of it.

You know, always remember that our true spiritual growth as souls occurs in these bodies in the material realm.

This is where we make the progress.

The life review which occurs mainly in the spiritual realm, and that timeless aspect of the spiritual realm, that's really where you kind of make corrections and try and reshuffle the cards in the most kind of empowering way in the next life.

So, but the living of it is what makes a difference.

So it's not just resorting to prayer and meditation and going within.

That's very good for helping us realize that we're much more than our physical body in our little ego mind.

But it's all about getting the work done.

The getting the work done is manifesting this love, showing love for others and living that life.

And that's what I think is happening.

I think there's a tremendous amount of people.

I love how in a lot of younger audiences, you know, I see a lot of passion.

And in fact, I was just reading an article how in the generation Z is now seeming to turn a little more towards religion and spirituality than like the millennials did, et cetera.

Maybe there's some shift.

And in fact, the article I read, and I think it was Vox, was trying to explain all this, and they weren't looking at the kind of explanations we're talking about, and that is that as the world is discovering, in approaching truth and trying to come to a deeper understanding nature of existence, that were actually hooked together through mind, and that in fact, our existence doesn't end with the death of the physical body.

In fact, our awareness expands tremendously.

I mean, that's basically what indie ears are telling you, when their awareness expands so much that they can witness their entire life bert to death as one continuous, interactive set of events that then make much more sense when viewed from that kind of lofty perspective.

You start realizing that we've kind of fooled ourselves into thinking we're much smaller than we actually are.

Much less important and much less influential and isolated world.

And what I see happening is a grander sense of coming to recognize is the power we have over our lives and over the world at large, especially as we focus on the higher good and on taking care of the least, the last, and the lost.

I know in some political circles that's not necessarily the direction forward, but I would say from this spiritual perspective, there's no doubt that it's all about taking care of the less fortunate society.

And the point you were making earlier is when I often make that the false sense of separation that is inherent in materialist or physicalist thought is really a doom.

You know, that false sense of separation leads us into this kind of nonsensical realm where we think we're always in competition with others, and then it's a zero sum game and if you don't win it all, then you lose it all.

And that kind of thinking, and a lot of that discussion in the twentieth and early twenty first century was also kind of bundled with discussions of Darwinian evolution were misleading.

In the mid twentieth century, a lot of that discussion of Darwinism and neo Darwinism was focusing on survival of the fittest and that you outcompete your enemy, your nemesis, what have you.

And I would say that biologists have come to recognize that by and large, collaboration and cooperation are far more powerful principles in the natural biological kingdom for success and thriving that the sense of competition in beating up the other and you know, zero sum game, et cetera.

And it was those discussions together that were so damaging, you know, the materialism, false sense of separation, darwinning competition, as opposed to coming to acknowledge what all of that research has shown in recent decades, which is that it's all about collaboration and cooperation.

You see species interspecies like for example, of dolphins serving as midwives in the birthing of whales, calves, things like that.

So you've got species helping other species things done.

And in that environment, I look at all these poor animals that are stuck in forest fires and in droughts and floods.

You know that in many ways are human cause with global warming, And say who is the bad guy here?

And it's you know it's us human with our false sense of separation without competition and kind of destroying the environment for profit motive.

I mean, all of that is extremely misguided and incongruent with where I see the world headed, with this notion of primacy of mind and the binding course of love as a force of healing and wholeness and restoration and allowing us to become the souls we came here to be.

So to me, this is a revolution that's gigantic in scale.

It's not just something that's a resolution of a few decades worth of human interaction.

It's thousands of years of human interaction that is now being kind of realigned, reassessed, and I think brought more into a closer alignment with truth and the nature of reality, and that is one that reflects the love and kindness and compassion and that were really here to serve as better stewards for this planet.

So you see a growing interest, You see a movement and a growing interest in sort of the consciousness studies and near death experiences and even psychedelic research as signs of scientific conversation beginning to shift.

I do think so it is happening.

I see it and then you've got to remember that in the background to all of that, which I think is a true revolution.

I remember, it's just an example of Karen and I were at a conference on indies and neuroscience in Belgium in twenty eighteen, and one of the speakers from the Lori's Lab showed a slide of the number of indie e papers in PubMed globally increasing fourfold after twenty twelve twenty thirteen.

But there's a question that the scientific community has turned dramatically more in favor of this, and you find less and less of the materialist person getting online to provide that argument, because really they're not following the data.

And that's the good news is the data really leads in one direction, and that's towards a much more enhanced view of spirituality, of oneness, of that body, force of love, and after death communications, deathbed visions, nd shared death past life memories and children.

All of this gives us a tremendous reason to be optimistic and hopeful about the human condition, the eternity of the soul, and how we're contributing to these evolution of consciousness throughout the cosmos.

I mean to me it's all really good news, and it has to be rejecting that kind of bleak and paltry fiction of materialism that used to be there.

That is, you know, you're a meat robot.

You have no free will, Your existence is burned to death and nothing more.

How fun is that?

Yeah, you're giving me great hope in your passion for this gives me great hope.

And you know who knows?

Maybe you know, who are we to say that you weren't you didn't have this experience specifically so that you could bridge the gap between the sciences and the spirituality, you know, I mean that's part of it.

I certainly have become the messengers.

So it makes sense.

Well, I'm a messenger.

I mean to me, I the You know what, one of the best benefits to me has been by going public with my story.

There are thousands of people around this world who have shared their stories with me, and that is that's a gold mine.

Now, we tried to turn a lot of those stories into a book.

That's what the book Map of Heaven is all about.

That stories that were just showing that this doesn't just happen to some you know, Harvard neurosurgeon who then comes back these claims, But in fact it's happened with millions of people around the world, across cultures, across languages, across absolutely and once you pay attention to it.

And don't you know, the materialist scientists through much of the twentieth century, we're just saying that stuff's nonsense.

We've disproven that scientifically, there's no such thing as a spiritual realm.

They said it with such confidence, and yet they were lying, who were absolutely lying?

So read go to Bigelowinstitute dot org.

Start reading those twenty nine essays.

You realize how much the scientific community is actually affirming and validating the reality of our existence as spiritual beings in a spiritual universe.

Science and spirituality help each other, They strengthen each other.

I don't know how much more time you have.

I just I really wanted to get to my big question, which is sort of trying to unpack or get to the mechanics of and this is probably just me a fascination of mine, but to get the mechanics of you know, where's the genesis of this false sense of separation?

Like is this you know, why do we have this default network in our brain?

And why do we you know, what is the function?

And from your perspective and from what you've experienced, what is the function of ego?

Let me just read these notes real quick.

So it's like, so, from your perspective, why do we have the kind of brain and mental structure that we do.

Why the filtering, why the ego?

Why have we evolved or adapted to have this perception of separateness and beyond our perception?

What is the purpose of this deeply convincing experience that there's separation and individual identity.

I'm wondering where that, how did that evolve and what function did it have for us as a species.

Well, I would say at kind of a primary level that the kind of ego mind and that ego sense of presence and existence is there to support the biological needs of the body.

So, in other words, of kind of the ego mind manages the programming that allows us to take care of ourselves in terms of you know, eating and re producing in those kinds of things.

But I would say that from my perspective, you know, it's really hard to kind of fully explain that way that there seems to be this sense by which, you know, when one gains a much more enlightened kind of spiritual approach to understanding.

It seems to be very rewarding, especially in facing things like death of the of the body and emities.

You know, it turns out that our higher soul kind of awareness is something that's not always so obvious to our ego mind at all.

And that's one of the reasons why in meditation I work so hard to kind of turn off my little ego voice.

I'm turning it over to the universe to kind of show me what I need to know in that grander spiritual sense, and that I think gives us a tremendous advantage in terms of where we're headed, where humanity is headed, where sentience is headed, because it's a much more kind of open ended field of possibility for soul expression and that kind of thing.

But it is kind of mysterious how this program forgetting even works.

You know, it's interesting when you study these children who remember past lives and they can have such vivid kind of phobias and behaviors.

Some of them even have birth marks they were I think it was twenty percent of Ian Stevenson's original series had birth marks that were related to the prior mode of violent unexpected death.

And that's another important thing to say is that seventy percent I think of those cases that were reported by Stevenson and Jim Tucker had a violent death.

So, in other.

Words, it was premature, it was unexpected, it was sudden, and that might explain part of why it's so memorable into a next lifetime, that it was so trumatic that they left with so many things unfinished, that you know, they remembered that those kind of features of an earlier life are still with them in a new lifetime.

And yet by age six or seven, as Tucker and Stevenson have showed, those memories start to disappear.

And why is that that we would bring those memories in as a higher sol early in life that they would still be there, and yet as we mature and become the person that we're going that's going to live this life, those memories of the past life disappear.

And I think again it's a statement more about where humanity is and their understanding.

I think there have been times in human history where we had a much more natural and kind of broad based, spiritual understanding of things, and of course.

Or maybe even an intrinsic knowing maybe that we've you know, there was a lot of intuition, a lot of like there's a statement in the kind of Indie literature, especially when you look back across indigenous cultures, that occasionally in those cultures you don't even find a life review.

And I would say that that circumstance is probably one that arises more in these aboriginal cultures that have much more of a sense of connection with each other and don't have some time goo an ego conflict.

But for example, the societies where women share caring of infants and they basically hand them around all the time, and they basically as a group, these women feel the needs of the infants and take care of them, you know, as a group, and they're much more efficient doing that.

And I think that only happens in a society where you don't have a lot of boundaries of egos trying to protect individual agendas, but you're much more focused on the higher good and the social agenda of the group at large.

So it's funny, it's just sort of like what we desperately need long for this to, you know, to reaffirm the sense of belonging and the sense of interconnectedness, and yet we sit, you know, alone on our devices in social media, struggling for just that, trying to trying to find some outside validation, trying to belong, trying to connect with these people in this in this sort of and in this world of noise and of sort of honestly more disconnected social media.

You've spoken a lot about love being the foundation of reality, and I'm curious, how do you see that truth showing up in you know, in your work today, and so when you more specifically, when you write and speak and connect with people, what would you have to offer anybody who's still living in that sort of materialistic science, the skeptic, the ones who maybe even our feared death or you know, or struggling with grief and loss.

What would you have to say to them?

What?

What's something you can offer to those people who are still in that sort of cynical, skeptical or even fear based mindset.

Well, what I would recommend is take a little vacation from your ego, and by that just very practical and simple tool is to take fifteen or twenty minutes a day just out in nature, you know, kind of walking, meditation, just putting the ego in all of its little fear and anxiety and kind of addiction tools out of your mind and just let yourself bathe in that kind of pure consciousness in the moment, in the breath and breathing, you know.

Adopt a program of meditation where you spend fifteen or twenty minutes a day.

I try to spend an hour to a day when I can meditating.

And if you need a tool to help you quiet that little monkey mind voice of the annoying roommate in your head, I would recommend sacred acoustics form of binaoral beats.

The reason I was attracted to it about two years after my coma, I read an article in Scientific American by Gerald Auster from the early seventies on binaural beats in the brain, and I realized that the anatomy and physiology was there to allow us to basically escape from the kind of slavery of the ego mind in our daily existence in these material bodies.

And it does it by oscillating a circuit in the lower brain stem in what's called the superior olivary nucleus.

And we talk about a lot of this in our book Living in a Mindful Universe, if you want to learn a lot more about the physiology and the anatomy of that kind of meditation.

So take a little time out for yourself in the form of meditation, centering, prayer, going within.

And I think the more people can do that kind of thing to escape the kind of slavery of the ego mind and its demands on us and start realizing that they're much more positive and optimistic ways forward that involve engaging our kind of higher soul and our higher self, but doing it in a way that we can kind of open our minds to the hints and suggestions from the universe about what are the best steps forward to achieve that life that we came here to achieve.

Certainly, if you're facing eternal diagnosis, facing potential death of a loved one, or recent death of a loved.

One, etc.

These kinds of tools can be amazingly powerful.

Because one thing that I heard very often in my early talks about this even before Proof of Heaven came out, because I started giving talks about two years before that book came out and was getting a lot of feedback from people, and people would often come up to me after my talks and say I've never told anybody this before, but and then they'd share a story with me that would change the world.

It was be an after death communication from a loved one who had passed or maybe during their time of passage a past life memory something like that that been a sense and then lined everything up for them.

They're tremendous insights that we can glean, you know, in that kind of unexpected realm of the subconscious and the deep conscious state of meditation, and that's where I think people can start getting a lot of benefit.

But never forget that the actual change we bring to the world is what we do living these lives in these bodies.

So it's not just a game of you know, going into a deep meditative state and gleaning some answers from the universe, but really putting that to work in terms of how we live these lives and the choices we make and where we choose to put our energy in terms of helping the higher good in various forms that we all can do.

So to me, it's a very kind of optimistic and kind of beautiful pathway forward that brings a lot of positive growth and certainly helping other people, never wears out.

It's a positive energy for what it brings back to us.

And really, in many ways, the universe gives back to us whatever we put out to it.

So the more I can serve as a conduit for love, kindness, compassion, occasional forgiveness when necessary, and never forgetting gratitude, the more I can help other souls to optimize their kind of life and growth and contribution to the evolution of consciousness itself, which I think is ultimately what is going on here.

We talked to Aaron Ralston, who's the subject of that film one hundred and twenty seven Hours, who had Conary Canyon and had to cut his own arm off to survive.

And he had so much to say because he had all of these experiences that happened to him in the cave and all this gratitude that came to him and helped him to survive miraculously after six days without water or food or amazing.

It's an amazing story.

And he said this, he said, you cannot hold despair and gratitude in your heart at the same time, right, It's impossible.

And Martha Back also reflects that too.

She talks a lot about that.

But it's but yeah, I guess you know.

Is there anything else that you would like to add to the conversation today before?

The main thing is that no soul left behind.

This is a major revolution and understanding it's going to have a tremendous impact on humanity at large.

We've taken huge steps backwards in the last few years with warfare and with violence and with disregarding the rights of human beings.

It's time to reverse every bit of that and start acknowledging this much deeper lesson that's coming to the fore about the nature of our existence and how we're really all in this together.

And to hurt another is to hurt oneself, and no soul should be left out of this transformation, and we can all contribute to the higher good moving forward, and it's very rewarding for the individual soul.

So I highly recommend to your audience get on board with this, start learning more about these kinds of cases as kind of literature.

People can certainly keep up with what I've done At Ebenlexander dot com.

There's a recommended reading list there, a lot with hot links to the scientific papers involved.

There's also an FAQ page that I think is very important for the kind of public perception of my contributions to all this.

And then also thirty three day Journey.

Right there at Eben Alexander dot com there's a free thirty three day Drip email campaign that will get you right up to speed on every bit of this quickly.

It also contains four Sacred Acoustics meditations that come packaged with that free thirty three day journey.

You don't have to spend a penny.

It's a mint as a workbook to go along with our third book, Living in a Mind for Universe.

But there's a huge community that's formed up around this thirty three day journey from around the world.

More than twelve thousand people have taken the course and they leave comments, and you'll be part of that community just by signing up for it, So get going.

No reason not too.

You'll learn a tremendous amount about yourself and nature, reality and our power of will to kind of determine our future as an unfold.

These are all beautiful gifts for the individual soul.

Well, I'll take this moment to say that I can't thank you enough for coming on the show with us, your work, your books, and your spreading of your message and in the telling of your journey as well as your challenges to looking at it.

You know, hopefully a new paradigm of understanding of us, of ourselves as not separate, as as interconnected and with the foundation of love.

I can't thank you enough for your work and your time, especially with us today.

Well my pleasure, Dan, and thanks so much for what you do to get this out to the world.

It's high time and encourage people to just stay in touch with me through Eben Alexander dot com.

Well, thanks for you to Dan, I appreciate you too.

Thank you so much.

Next time I'm alive again, we meet Alien Lloyd.

Her story highlights persevering in the shadow of generational trauma and a legacy of suicide and her family.

This is the ultimate betrayal.

He sent me over the edge and sent me right down the whole like shoot where I almost became the third kid that off themselves.

I didn't recognize trauma on my own family, my trauma.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelba.

Music by Ben Lovett, Additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.

Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.

Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.

Our studio engineers are Rima El Kali and Nuams Griffin.

Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhardtslovitchka, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez.

Mixing by Ben Love and Alexander Rodriguez.

I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Alive Again is a production of IRT Radio and Psychopia Pictures.

If you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.

Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.

That's a l I v e A g A I N p R O j E C T at gmail dot com.