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Eben Alexander & Karen Newell Interview
RICK: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually Awakening people. We’ve done nearly 600 of them now. And if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, please go to bat gap comm bat gap and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website and there’s also a page of alternative ways if you don’t feel like dealing with PayPal. My guests today are Eben Alexander, MD and Karen Newell. And many of you will have heard of Eben. He was an academic neurosurgeon for over 25 years, who had a profound near death experience resulting in his writing a book called Proof of Heaven, which became a New York Times number one bestseller for something like 40 weeks. And I’ll let him give a bit more of his background himself rather than me just read a bio. His partner Karen Newell is an author and specialist in personal development with a diverse body of work that rests upon the foundation of heart centered consciousness. As an innovator in the emerging field of brainwave and entrainment audio meditation. Karen empowers others in their journeys of self discovery, by demonstrating how to connect to inner guidance, achieve inspiration, improve wellness and develop intuition. She is the co founder of sacred acoustics and co author with Evan, of living in a mindful universe, which I read cover to cover this week, and really enjoyed. So welcome to both of you. Good to have you here.
EBEN: Rick, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having us on.
KAREN: Yes, thank you.
RICK: Welcome. I tried one of those audio entrainment things this week, a couple of days. There’s one I downloaded from your website. And I always take a rest or a nap before I meditate in the afternoon. And so I listened to that during my rest and it was nice, it was restful.
KAREN: Which one did you listen
RICK: on thing and then towards the end? There’s some ocean waves and some bells. And it’s the one that’s easy to download off your website. Yeah,
KAREN: that’s our free down. Yeah, yes, the
RICK: one I did. So we’re gonna we’re gonna talk about that today and a whole lot of other things. Just to give people a heads up what we’re going to talk about, we’ll certainly cover Evans near death experience. Because not every we can presume that everyone listening to this has heard about it, although millions of people have. We’re going to talk about near death experiences in general, we’re going to talk about consciousness, science and medicine. We’re going to talk about the themes of this book Living in a mindful universe. We may talk about reincarnation, suicide, life challenges freewill, death, fear, love. And wherever else the conversation takes us, I, I didn’t take any notes while reading your book, because I note taking would have slowed me down. And I really wanted to read the whole thing. And also had, I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to wing it and just come up with all the important things that we want to talk about. Well, yeah. So where should we start? You want to? I mean, maybe we should start? Well, we can start anywhere you’d like. But maybe it would be good to start with telling about your nd even though half the audience will already have heard about it, but it wouldn’t hurt to refresh their memories.
EBEN: Right? I can give you a short version of that. And of course, nowadays, the story of my indie he comes with some additional kind of backstory, official objective information. Because in fact, you know, I went through my medical records talk with my doctors portrayed my case as best I could and bulletproof heaven. But since then, there was a team of physicians who were not involved in my care who studied my medical records and actually spent about two years and writing up a case report that was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental diseases in September 2018, and that case report does a lot to take my story to the next level because they were amazed. I was that I had such a recovery. That’s the part that any physician who reviews my case objectively is going to be shocked by is the depth and severity of my Mandingo encephalitis involving all eight lobes in my brain. And then having a full recovery, that part is really kind of beyond any kind of Western medical explanation. So most of what I’m going to tell you completely violates what modern neuroscience says is possible, given their understanding of the brain mind connection. And that’s one of the reasons why my story I think, has so much value to the scientific community in trying to make sense of all this, but there are other indies where you have miraculous healing, just like in my case. So for the world at large. That’s a valuable part to study. Briefly, I’d like to share with you what I went through. And of course, I, when all this happened to me at age 54, back in 2008, I thought I had an understanding of brain mind consciousness, I’d spent more than 2025 years as an academic neurosurgeon. But I came to realize I was completely wrong, that our models of physicalism and the brain creating consciousness are completely false. So the journey itself, important point out a typical of Indies mine involve complete amnesia. For my life, I had no memory of Evan Alexander’s life, none of the life events. And in fact, when I came back from the coma on day seven, that I didn’t even recognize my mother, sons, etc. So my brain was really fried by the event. It’s the recovery over two months after that, that is so shocking. So what was it that I knew when I woke up in that ICU bed, all I knew was where I’ve just been this extraordinary journey. I started what I call the earth worm’s eye view, very primitive, course, unresponsive kind of subterranean realm. And that went on for a very long time. And again, it was in a setting where I had no memories of earth or humanity, or a life of Eben Alexander was an empty slate, which I think was very important for some of the lessons I was to learn. Turns out, I was rescued from that Earth form I view by basically a light portal that came packaged with a perfect musical melody, and it opened up into a rich, ultra real gateway Valley
RICK: and hang on a second. So when you say it was an earth worm’s eye view, in a subterranean realm, can you be a bit more descriptive? I mean, what was it just dark and murky? And
EBEN: yeah, it was murky was like being in dirty jello. And I had some, I had no awareness of any kind of body image whatsoever. But I did have awareness of existing. And what I witnessed in that Earth where my view was very kind of a dark realm, I, there were smells, I could feel things, but I had no body at all point in this journey. And that earth or by view, I, you know, for a long time, I thought it was the best consciousness my brain could muster. Well, it was soaking in pus, but I’ve come to realize that that level, it’s much more commonly encountered. But just to kind of briefly kind of complete the summary. That gateway Valley, it was rich with Earthlike features, it was much more real than this world. That’s the thing that so surprising to people is that the ultra reality of these events, they’re much more detailed, vivacious, alive and memorable than most of the events of our life
RICK: gateway Valley, you mean the beautiful place that you went to after coming? earthworm?
EBEN: Exactly the gateway Valley was that’s kind of the realm where are we reunite with salt with our higher soul with souls of departed loved ones go through life reviews, all the stuff that involves kind of ready reference to an earthly existence would be in that gateway Valley region. And yet that is not the ultimate destination. I remember. You know, many things I witnessed there describe a Proof of Heaven, the beautiful, lush kind of greenery around me, the plant life, the 1000s of souls dancing, lots of joy and Merryman. I remember children playing dogs jumping. And that was those souls. I remember labeling in my writings early on when I came back to this world as souls between lives. In terms turns out, I had a beautiful guardian angel and on that butterfly wing that I was riding on through this whole adventure, that guardian angel gave me a telepathic message, very empathic, and emotional, of, of love, of comfort of oneness of belonging, in that, in that particular guardian angel was very important in the story prove what happened. And she realized later, her importance and showing me the reality of the journey, but that that level was only kind of a stepping stone to deeper levels. And I remember seeing all of four dimensional space time collapsing down all of that spiritual realm of what I call deep time and completely higher order, causality, of kind of transformation of consciousness, all of that collapsing down and until I reach what I call the core, this infinite Thank you blackness filled to overflowing with the healing love of that God force at the core of all creation and and in fact, by memory of that core REM was one of all of that incredible rich resonance throughout eternity, and infinity of that awesome sound. That’s what I call that deity when I came back to this world, to me, the word God was too puny, a little human word with a lot of baggage to it didn’t remotely come in to the kind of realm of that incredibly loving sense that that God for us at the core realm. And then what happened is I was with psycho I be taught many things that all of these levels that I would spontaneously fall back down to that earth were my view. And that was a big mystery. But I learned early on that by remembering the musical notes, the melody, I could conjure up that portal that led me up from the earth warm side view into the gateway Valley. And I will always encounter that beautiful guardian angel and the butterfly wing and many other lessons that would occur in that setting and that gateway valley, but then I would ascend through the musical portal of those angelic choirs above in that gateway valley that were emanating chants and anthems and hymns that would just thunder through me and reveal the profound majesty of this incredible loving force of God, and then use that portal yet again, to ascend to the core realm. And I went through those levels multiple times, I was always told entering the core, you’re not here to stay, you will be going back with teaching me things. But there finally came a time when trying to conjure up the musical notes of the melody to usher me out of earthlings LiveView. Didn’t work again. And to say I was sad at that moment will be a vast understatement. But I also knew I could trust in the universe. Because the deep message of that loving guardian angel was always every time I passed through you were deeply loved and cherished forever, you have nothing to fear you are cared for. So anyway, all that’s how it all transpired. At the very end of the journey. There was a phase where I was witness to 1000s of beings going off in circles around me off into the miski distance, many with heads bowed and with their arms up like that, and it’s murmuring energy coming from them. And when I came back to this world, I call that the energy of prayer. Because to me, it was astonishing how that loving forest was so apparent even in these murky realms, through those loving souls and the power of prayer. And then there were six faces that appeared, they provided vertical time anchors, because there were people who were there in the last 24 hours in the ICU room with me. Anyway, that’s kind of a brief version of the story. But there’s, as you can imagine a tremendous amount to it. When I came back to this world, after seven days in that realm, my brain was wrecked, but it came back very rapidly words and language over hours, memory of my loved ones and family relationships over days. And over two months, every bit of it came back. In fact, the memories were more complete. After returning that they had been before coma. That’s another deep mystery that we explore in the book. Interesting.
RICK: So yes, the book he’s referring to, again, is Proof of Heaven, which people can obviously buy if they want to read it. And there was also a nice talk he gave at a Theosophical Society that I listened to the other day that goes into this in a lot of detail for about an hour and a half. So if people want to hear that you can, if you just like, search on YouTube for Eben Alexander, you know, Proof of Heaven Theosophical Society or something, it’ll come right up. But that was a nice unpacking of the story. So there are a couple thoughts that came as you were saying all this. One is sort of a humorous one, which is a boy, if we can have a recording of this and send it back in time, you know, prior to your, your coma, and have you listened to it, you would have thought, Oh, my God, what happened to me? Why did somebody slipping my coffee?
EBEN: Well, the reality is that, that all the data is there. Oh, yeah. To fully support the amazing aspects of it. So it’s not as if I would dismiss this case as a data. Yeah. Yeah. All the surrounding data is so shocking. You just have to pay attention to it. So yeah,
RICK: I mean, I don’t have a problem with it all. But I’m always sort of intrigued by the notion of paradigm shift and how people get locked into a certain worldview and what it might take to pry them out of it and on nothing better than direct personal experience than to pry somebody’s
EBEN: personal experience. That’s something Karen and I really focus on in our workshops because we believe everyone can come to have that kind of personal experience, just support this knowledge of kind of the higher realms and our spiritual nature.
RICK: Yeah. The other thing I found interesting was that you seem to sell Michael repeatedly through these different levels. And, and you were in this coma for about a week. So it could be that, you know, all this was going on for a long time in Earth time, although I think must have seen much longer and your subjective experience. But the psych the cycling is interesting because that’s in a way that’s kind of the way spiritual practice works, you don’t do it 24/7 You, you dip into it and come out and integrate an activity and dip in again and come out. And it’s sort of like, you know, makes the die of the cloth colorfast as if dipping and die and bleaching and sun and dipping into bleaching and sun eventually the color sticks. So it’s something more to be gained by that, I think, than just staying in a certain state.
EBEN: Well, that’s a beautiful point. And I think to me, it’s simply especially discovering that incredible role of what we call music, vibration or frequency being what we remember that helps us to actually navigate those realms. To me, that was a very important discovery that is very much related to a lot of the work we do now with Karen and sacred acoustics and using sound to get into deep transcendental states. Because sound can be a very effective tool to help engineer these journey. Yeah, and also that sound or sounds in those realms are not sounds heard with physical ears, just like we don’t see with the eyes, they are ways of knowing or through identification and much grander. That’s part of the reason they’re these journeys sort of difficult to describe is because our very modes of knowing are so much more out of intense and involved with the universe. Yeah.
RICK: Monitors work on the basis of sound to not only the ones you chant out loud, but even the ones you think mentally because thoughts are actually a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing. And, and so a mantra is a sound, which can take you from grosser level of thinking to subtler and then beyond to the transcendent. But, you know, an external sounds such as the, how do you pronounce that binaural or something, but I normal binaural beats Yeah, can achieve a similar effect. And, obviously, people everyone’s experiences. I mean, you know, you listen to, I don’t know, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or something. And the sound is transports you to another realm. So sounds are very powerful. And all all cultures have recognized this. I remember Mickey Hart was the drummer of The Grateful Dead, wrote a book called drumming on the edge of madness. And it was all about how ancient cultures from around the world have used rhythms and drumming to transport people into altered or higher states of consciousness.
EBEN: All right, very much. Well, there’s no question that music sound vibration can be very important and binaural beats are a very special form of sound that are dealt with mainly down in the lower brainstem. And that’s why I think they can have such a profound role in kind of releasing conscious awareness from the here and now and kind of illusion. So
RICK: another thing I was wondering, as you’re recounting that just now is how much your experience concurs with other nd experiences and with people like Michael Newton, who wrote about the period of that we spend between lives, and we can talk about reincarnation a little bit, but he can he, you know, found through his hypnosis of 1000s of people to a period between lives that we sort of go into this realm where we kind of review our lessons from the previous life and prepare for the next one. So anyway, what do you think about that?
EBEN: Well, I think there’s a tremendous amount to that. I mean, the whole notion of the life review, you know, of kind of going through the the main residual teaching points of one’s life, that’s been part of near death experiences going back at least 2400 years to the time of Plato, when he wrote about Armenian soldier or killed in battle, who woke up on the funeral pyre before they burned his body. And his story to his fellow soldiers was, when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. And what you realize is the only thing of real importance is how much love you were able to share with the world. And so the life review, Karen and I often talk about this in our books and our works. The life review is kind of how the golden rule is written into the fabric of the universe. And I would say these experiences, very broadly have that kind of life review element. And the interesting thing about the life review is you don’t really experience it from your own perspective, as much as from the emotional perspective of those around you affected by your actions and thoughts. And that’s where the life of us starts become a beautiful demonstration of how we’re all in this together. And if we hurt another, we’re really hurting ourselves. And so, indies have a lot to inform this world about how we should treat each other and live these lives. And it really begins with a deeper understanding of that life review.
RICK: Yeah, I’m sure you’re familiar with Danny and Brinkley’s story. And he was a sharpshooter, in Vietnam and, you know, killed people. And he had four near death experiences too, because of lightning strikes. And I think too, because of heart attacks or something. And in each one, he had to experience what the people connected with the persons he had killed experience as a result of his having killed them. So in other words, he experienced the ramifications of his actions from the perspective of everyone whom they impacted.
EBEN: Well, I think that’s a general feature of life reviews, I mean, the more you kind of study these and come to an understanding of them, I mean, it’s at a soul level. So really, you’re, you’re getting it all the ramifications that we normally wouldn’t think to kind of connect, you know, and connecting the dots in this world. But that’s where the life review goes far beyond simply what you could remember, in trying to make amends in your life. But it really goes back into the actual events of your life. Yeah. Which is astonishing.
KAREN: And this is why I often recommend do this as you’re going through your life, realize when you hurt people make the amends now, and you won’t have to go through all of that at the end of your life, because you will already have sort of dealt with it.
RICK: Yeah, I go through that quite a bit myself, especially like, you know, sometimes during meditation or something else. Remember something I did to somebody 50 years ago, and I don’t think Oh, my God, how could I do that? And I’ve even actually reached out to a couple people and apologized for having done those things. Oh,
KAREN: yeah. So you’re doing and it’s interesting, sometimes you have a different perspective many years later. So that’s awesome that they come up in meditation, perfect time for them to come up. And then you realize completely differently how your behavior might have affected that person.
RICK: Yeah. Well, as you know, and as most people listening, probably know, when you know, meditation and practices like that. Definitely unearth deeper stuff that we’ve been carrying around. It’s been, you know, stored. Some scars, they call it in Sanskrit and kind of works it out. And when enough of it has been worked out, then awakening or realization can occur. But it can’t, can’t easily occur for carrying all that baggage unresolved.
KAREN: It’s kind of interesting, because this seems to be a natural process at the end of life that we go through whether we really want to or not, I just finished reading a book by Christopher Kerr, a hospice doctor in Buffalo, called death is but a dream. And he talks about the only word he can really use this dream, but they’re not really dreams, because these people, when they’re at the end of their life, start having experiences that are more real than real, just how near death experiencers describe them. And it seems like the life review begins there because people start revisiting events. Some people are having beautiful experiences, others are reckoning with their past. And one was a cop who realized he was a dirty cop. And he had done all kinds of things good. But he had done all kinds of things bad. And he was really reckoning with all of this and wondering, you know how it was all going to turn out. And it was just before he died, his dreams shifted into other types of dreams of peace and love. And he actually had that transformation right before he passed on. And so it seems to happen automatically in a life review. But also right as we’re getting ready to transition. I find that fascinating. Yeah.
RICK: Did you ever hear what Steve Jobs final words were?
EBEN: Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. I know what he was saying. Wow. Wow. Right. That’s just beautiful. I love that Mona Simpson wrote that op ed in the New York Times about his passing? Yeah, he was sister,
RICK: huh. Ah, so there’s a kind of underlying a couple of underlying assumptions that, you know, based that everything we’re saying is based upon? And, you know, one is that obviously, we’re more than this physical body. And there’s some deeper aspect to our existence that outlives the physical body. And not everybody believes that. I don’t know what percent the percentages are. Dude, do you know what percentage of the general population has that perspective?
EBEN: I think it depends largely on you know, which decade and which survey but I would say probably more than 50% have had a pretty solid indication to an after death communication or deathbed vision, shared death experience, what have you that there’s much more of this world than just the physical? So it’s fairly common in
KAREN: 1984. There was a study 50% of people who had lost a spouse had a connection with them that made them certain that their spouse had survived. Yeah, so that was way back In 1984, so I’m sure it’s gone up.
RICK: But of course I think Stosh materials would say this is just wishful thinking, you know, we just sort of want to hang on to these hopes and dreams. But really, when you’re dead, you’re dead.
KAREN: But when that when you start looking at the evidence, you find that, that this is not wishful thinking. For example, I had an after death dream of my stepfather. It was about a year after he had died and taken his own life. So I was concerned about him. And he showed up in this dream, a different dream, just as that hospice doctor described, so little different than well, actually vastly different than any typical dream. And when I encountered him, we had our, you know, encounter of yesterday, okay, yes, everything is fine. But then he also gave me a piece of information about my mother. And he said that she had been dating a man who had been to our home her home for three, three different occasions. And he thought that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for them to keep seeing each other. And so I spoke to my mother, I didn’t speak to her often, we lived in different cities. And she told me when I gave her this information that in fact, she had been dating a man who had come to the home and picked her up three different times. And he turned out to be an old friend from high school, and they both had lost spouses, and they were trying to see if they might get together. And she had just decided, maybe I shouldn’t see him anymore. And that’s when the message came and validated. So when that kind of thing starts to happen, that’s not wishful thinking, this information that you’re able to really validate. And that’s where those materialists really need to start looking at this evidence, and taking it serious. Yeah.
RICK: And of course, there are 1000s of accounts like that.
KAREN: 1000s when it happens to you, that’s when you
RICK: Yeah, and then, of course, there’s, you know, the research of Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker with, you know, children who remember past lives in detail, and it’s possible to go to the village or whatever and, and corroborate what the kids are saying, which they have no, no way of knowing. Otherwise. It’s just, they’re actually remembering this stuff. And they can go there and they can name people and identify objects, all kinds of things. So yeah, go ahead.
EBEN: I was just gonna say that’s a very important body of research. And people can access a lot of that if you go to uvadops.org at University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies, website and basically to cut to the chase over six decades, they’ve identified more than 2500 cases of past life memories and children. Were a very the best explanation is one of true reincarnation course I originally thought they would just disprove all these cases, but no, what happened was there was too much evidence supporting true reincarnation, I think you cannot possibly discuss consciousness in the current era, you know, as a scientist or philosopher without having a ready kind of knowledge of that data that Ian Stevenson and now Jim Tucker, have uncovered its Astonish, yeah. And in very strong support of the reality of the primacy of consciousness. And what
KAREN: I love is how he started with the sort of Indian type cultures that societies that already sort of believed in reincarnation, where the stories were more common. But I know Jim Tucker, he has spent significant time trying to find stories here in the United States in this culture, and he’s finding them the most famous one that I’m familiar with his sole survivor, about the boy who was having dreams about being in a plane on fire. And turns out he was a World War, he found out through all kinds of critical information that he was in fact, a world war two pilot who died in a plane crash. So this kind of thing, you just can’t continue to deny it. I could rattle off some interesting facts that I’ll just give you one fact this boy had three GI Joes. And he named them Leon, Walter and Billy. Later on his family was able to connect with a man who was still alive who apparently knew this boy when he was the other person validated that three other men who died on that same day were named Walter, Leon and Billy and he even had named them according to their hair color in
EBEN: the GI Joe. Yeah. There’s a lot more to that story. It’s a book called toll survive. Okay. So you will survivor and
KAREN: changing. And Jim Tucker validated that case.
RICK: Yeah, I mean, the kid remember the name of the ship that is planted taken off from and right,
EBEN: yeah, Bay pass the blanket class aircraft carrier. He knew so much. He knew we could fly a Corsair, which was an unusual plane to be flying off that carrier, but that’s the history was actually that. So there’s a lot of facts that line up in that case, but there are other cases too. There are plenty of other cases that Jim Tucker has written about. In the US,
RICK: and I think the reason we’re interested in this, and we’re spending so much time on it, is that, you know, if this is the way life works, and, you know, millions and hundreds of millions of people don’t realize it. That’s a huge blind spot. I mean, it’s a it’s a huge misunderstanding, or what kind of effect does it have on one’s life to either realize or not realize that this is the way life works? I think it’s huge. I mean, if you think that you’re going to just cease to exist when your body dies, or you feel like, okay, my life is a vast continuum. And, you know, I change bodies from time to time, like I change clothes from time to time, those two perspectives would, in my opinion, radically influence the way you feel and the way you live your life.
EBEN: Absolutely. And, and just the deathbed visions, your people witnessing loved ones, and sometimes loads of shared and bystander events where someone else at the bedside might also see the loved one appearing. And it just gives us such a beautiful lesson about how the deeper aspects of this kind of revolution in the science of consciousness is really all about our relationships, and about love and about, you know, helping each other. So there are tremendous lessons there that can inform our kind of materialist, sodded world, and help us come to a richer understanding of a reality that’s much more comforting, and where we really do reincarnate with our loved ones and things like that.
KAREN: But I think you make an interesting point you, you really live your life differently, whether you’re in one or other at those camps. And I know when I first met Evan, and this was before his, it was after his near death experience, but before his book kind of came out, so I didn’t really know his story, but I knew he had had in your death experience, we happen to both be attending a workshop related to using sound to achieve altered states of consciousness. But I asked him just making conversation I’d known others who had near death experiences, I said, What was the big lesson that you learned, I thought I would cut right to the chase. Because these experiences come back usually with these deep, profound spiritual lessons. And he says to me, what I learned is the brain does not create consciousness. And I was very confused by that. And I said, Well, why would anyone think that? And so that shows you the camp I was living in, wherever you thought this was just this huge discovery. And I thought, well, that’s my friend. And so when I think that where did that feeling come from? Where did I learn that, and I don’t believe I learned it. I believe I knew it when I was born. And when I was presented with information, say about the Christian religion, or how what science said, I just knew that certain things were incorrect. And I think a lot of children know these things. And somehow it gets, it gets conditioned out of us as we grow older, many, many, many of us, but it’s really our birthright to understand how our consciousness works. There’s a reason why that ancient Maxim, know yourself is so significant, because if you know yourself as a biological being that will just disintegrate and a few decades, very different from living your life as if you will continue as if you will return. My father was telling me how concerned he was about climate change, because of his children, his grandchildren, and now he has a great grandchild, my grandson, and he so worried. And I said that Dad, you’re going to come back to, you’re going to have to come back and see what we’ve done with this world at some point. And so wouldn’t you want to be concerned about the earth for your own reasons, so that when we come back again, and again, we still have this beautiful place to really learn these lessons of love in life?
RICK: And he said, No, no, I’m gonna open a beach resort in Antarctica.
KAREN: Actually, my dad has a, he has a very skeptical mind that the one thing he’s a military officer, but the one thing that he, he believes is that he believes he has past like memories of living in Scotland, for some, for whatever reason, she’s pretty certain he has this connection to it. And so that feeling is really what convinces people whether they talked about it or not, or not with their friends. Many people walk around knowing this, but they don’t necessarily reside in company that wants to hear about
RICK: Yeah, so several threads here we could pursue. Another one is that you know, we could think of life as having strata. And there’s the grossest, most superficial, most obvious level, and everyone perceives that but then there are subtler levels, which The subtler you go, the fewer people perceive them. And, and so we could sort of understand the spiritual enterprise as being the exploration of all these various strata and the incorporation of them into our ordinary, everyday awareness. And, you know,
KAREN: by just just one model I have we’ve discussed along those lines, it’s really three strata, or st realms, the physical realm, which is that gross realm you spoke of, then there’s the mental realm, and the spiritual realm. So the mental realm, that’s where we are right now. That’s our thoughts, our emotions, everything we can encounter our unconscious, our transcendental state and meditation, but then there’s the spiritual realm. And that’s more elusive, that’s not so easy to get to, except when we’re in those higher transcendental states. So they’re really, it’s really that mental state, mental realm that has all of the capacity to do everything. And that’s us. So I think that know yourself comes in really handy when you realize that your mental space, you spoke about, you know, thoughts being forms, but your mental space is really, according to Evan, what is creating all of our physical reality? And it’s our mental space, that allows us to have an awareness of that spiritual realm. So yeah, this this way of looking at things, this paradigm shift, you’ve been at this a long time, Rick, when’s it gonna really break through to the mainstream? Do you think
RICK: it’s breaking? You know, I mean, if you compare, where things are now to where they were in the 60s, or early 70s, there’s been huge progress. You know, a lot of the things we’re discussing here were very unfamiliar to most people 50 years ago, but, you know, now they’re more or less mainstream. I mean, Evans book was on the bestseller list for 40 weeks, and a lot of books like it have been, and there’s all kinds of things on TV, and I mean, and, and all kinds of great movies that explore these themes. So it’s really seeping into the popular culture, tap, yeah,
KAREN: we’re probably in the midst of it. And just don’t realize, of
EBEN: course, you got to remember, there’s also a background of experiences. So people out there, literally, by the, by the millions, having these experiences and kind of coming back shocked, but you know, often not willing to tell people that was one of the main reasons I wrote Proof of Heaven was I wanted to take the lid off, so that the medical profession for one would take these seriously, but also, other people want to so they share their stories more, because the more we can do that, allow all the people who have these experiences to talk about them, and honor them as experiences that tell us something about humanity at a very deep level. I think that’s what will help the world to change. It’s just that natural background incidents of these extraordinary experiences.
RICK: Yeah. And I think it’s, it’s more than just on the level of talking because I think when people have these subtle experiences or when they you know, meditate or do whatever they do, it kind of enlivens the morphogenetic field, coined to quote Rupert Sheldrake, it it somehow saturates the, the subtle atmosphere with just a little bit more whatever. And, and it is kind of, you know, one way of looking at it as well, let’s use the metaphor of a forest. So every time somebody has one of these experiences, whether through a spiritual practice or an NDA or whatever, I think it it kind of fertilizes the ground of the forest and, and then all the plants are a little bit more nourished, and they can grow a little bit more vibrantly, and, and healthily. So I think that that’s building up and building up and building up. And to switch metaphors. There’s the idea of phase transition, where something in a system will, will build up to a point where there’s a sudden phase transition, and everything changes, like even boiling water, you know, get it to 99 degrees centigrade, not nothing much seems to be happening one more degree, and it boils. So we don’t know how close we may be to a kind of a boiling, so to speak, of the collective consciousness where there’s a radical shift, and not just this really almost imperceptible incremental shift.
EBEN: Well, I would, I would say, I sense that we’re getting very close to that inflection point. And I would say that it involves a history and a destiny that goes back at least 5000 years and in human understanding. And there’s there’s kind of a coalescence going on now and in many ways, as a neuroscientist studying the nature of consciousness and the mind brain relationship. To me the essential All fishing thing is how some of the deepest truths we seem to be coming to in neuroscience and philosophy of mind about the oneness of consciousness. It’s about that binding force of love. It’s so apparent in indies, about all of that is that in many ways, some of the spiritual traditions, both east and west, have known these deep truths forever. But I think what will make it different this time is this alignment with kind of the scientific investigation of consciousness. And science is a method of objective of kind of comparison of information and sharing that I think will trump the past centuries efforts by say, religious leaders and prophets to get us to this realm of truth. But now, with this kind of a study of scientific study of consciousness, we’re coming to kind of agreed upon territory and that’s where the afterlife in reincarnation seriously discussed and studied in scientific and philosophical circles, is where this revolution will now finally truly happen, as opposed to what might have happened over these 5000 years, from various leadership and spiritual traditions.
RICK: Yeah. Did you want to add to that, Karen? Or? No, nevermind, you have to, because I was just gonna say something. But I wanted to give you a chance. Yeah, I think that’s really important and really exciting. And I think that you, I know, you talked about this in your book. But I think that the cooperation or collaboration of science and spirituality will give us something much more profound than either has been able to give us separately.
KAREN: It’s interesting, Evan and I were just speaking about this this morning, how some modern clergy, some modern ministers, kind of doubt the reality of God and the afterlife. That’s how powerful the materialist culture has really been, because they don’t have that support. And so if science can come out and really support that this is real. There’s there should be a renaissance around at all. Not necessarily religion, but this spiritual, but not religious kind of thing that’s taking on more and more.
RICK: Yeah. And it is happening. And you know, there are a number of organizations like the Galileo Foundation and the science and medical network and, you know, Institute of Noetic Sciences and science non duality conference, and all kinds of things that discuss this kind of stuff and popularize these ideas. And then naturally, there’s a whole faction that have their heels dug in, and, and resist this sort of notion, but that’s kind of typical of the history of development of ideas in the world.
EBEN: Well, I would say the kind of in science, in the world of science and philosophy, what it really boils down to is whether someone is basically a Newtonian determinist do things okay, the brain creates all conscious phenomena, and that the brain behaves like a Newtonian system of billiard balls and all that. That’s where they get misled is they’re still living in a model of science that’s been disproven for more than 80 years now, through quantum physics and the emerging kind of world of quantum mechanics, which very clearly opens up fully, not only to allow for the reality of an afterlife and reincarnation, but in many ways to insist on it. Because of what modern quantum physics says about the nature of reality and consciousness for a sentient being, going all the way back, say to John wheelers, participatory anthropic principle, he was the head of physics at Princeton, he talked about how astonishing it was this feature of contextuality, where the mental processes of the investigating scientist actually plays such a deep role in what emerges in the results of the experiments, you cannot deny the kind of prime role of that mental layer of the universe. And that’s where I would say, I love that quote from Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932, for his foundational work as a father of quantum physics. And he said, your first sip from the glass of Natural Sciences will lead you towards atheism. But at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting. And that is absolutely the deep truth of quantum physics. And the people who would resist it so hard in the scientific community keep insisting on explanations of say the measurement paradox in quantum physics by assuming infinite parallel universes and to them that works just fine and it gets rid of having to invoke consciousness. But infinite parallel universes doesn’t seem to be the world we really live in. And so the alternate answer that makes much more sense, is objective idealism. That is the primacy of Consciousness in the Universe. And that sentience beings simply have access to that mental layer of information assimilation and integration. And that’s where it starts to open up to a much fuller vision. Of course, that’s what we talk about in living in a mindful universe, our chapter five, the primordial mind hypothesis, looking at the brain as a filter, or reducing valve, that allows primordial consciousness to manifest. So we’re really all part of that one mind that infinite God force that nd ears have experienced. And in fact that God for us, I would say, is the very source of our conscious awareness. And so really, this is a journey of discovering a much richer kind of relationship with the mind of the universe. So it’s, it’s very rewarding and satisfying as an individual has been through this kind of experience, that the scientific community is actually we’re making progress in kind of a theoretical system that would support it all.
KAREN: And I would just like to add that many of us in the world aren’t really waiting for science to come up with these theories and data, many of us who have had these experiences who have this understanding, we don’t need science, but it’s very important for societies culture to understand this. So institutions and government and civic societies, you know, they make decisions, important decisions about how we’re going to, you know, run our cities, and so on. And just having this understanding, it seems to me would just change everything. So, well, individuals, maybe we don’t need science, so much, many of us, the society in general, truly, truly does need that because we many, well, you know, science is having a bad rap these days, among some, right. So sometimes the anti science crowd is out there, but most of the secular society trust science to tell us and if science can come through there, which I really
EBEN: think they are, I believe ever since, you know, months after my experience, that these kinds of questions are part of the scientific paradigm. I mean, one example of that is all the recent studies in the last eight years using functional MRI, to look at the brain of people under the influence of psilocybin or LSD or DMT, you know, these powerful psychedelic substances and plant medicines. And what you find is, the brain gets less active, it goes dark, it’s not creating those phenomenal, extraordinary experiences, it’s getting out of the way, so they can happen. This is a perfect example of where the scientific community needs a bigger bottle than physicalism. To try and explain, you know, for example, the the influence of such plant medicines and psychedelics on the human psyche. It just makes much more sense to broaden to a bigger vision where you realize it’s not created by the brain at all. But the brain is simply serving as a filter that allows presentation of conscious experience, and you have the ultimate origin of memory. And experience is beyond the physical realm.
RICK: Yeah. There’s so many great things we’re talking about each one of them could take us off for half an hour
KAREN: discussion of this or that, but And you thought two hours was a long enough,
RICK: no, no, never got to gamma. Alright, so one thing as you’re talking a minute ago about this infinite parallel universes thing, and I was reminded of the word parsimonious, which I learned from Bernardo kastrup, I hadn’t really been familiar with the word before. But it just means, you know, the simplest, most elegant explanation of a thing. And it reminded reminds me also of, you know, medieval astronomy, where they thought the earth was the center of everything. And they, they had to really do backflips to understand why the planets moved as they did with taking all these little extra loops. And doing all these strange things. didn’t make sense. But obviously, when you put the sun in the center, ah, the planets just fell into these beautiful elliptical orbits. So it’s kind of funny how, you know, materialists struggling strain to come up with extremely unparsed ammonius on simple inelegant explanations of, of how consciousness relates to the brain, where so much simpler explanation is just that the brain is like a it’s like a transmitter receiver radio, it just a radio intermediates with the electromagnetic field, which is more or less everywhere, and the brain does that with consciousness and boom is such a simple explanation.
EBEN: Right in that’s where I think the science is finally starting there for that. Yeah, the evidence is overwhelming. In fact, the biggest problem of of looking at our culture and society in terms of this debate, and especially, you know, for people out there who think oh, well, scientists, real scientists will tell you in the ether possible because that implies You know, some kind of spirit or consciousness independent of the brain? Well, that’s the fact. That’s actually what the empirical data shows us. And the good news is that the scientific world is coming up with ways to make plenty of sense of all this. And down at
KAREN: the scientific level, the scientific organizations, just
EBEN: radio like Galileo commission.org, as you point out, noetic.org, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, these are beautiful, reputable scientific organizations that have a lot to say about this because they study the evidence, fact, I’ve come to realize that those out there the kind of lay press in scientific community, who claimed to have contrary evidence to all this, of both likely are pseudo skeptics, they’ve already made up their mind. They’re not they’re not willing, they don’t care about empirical data, and about rational argument. They simply have made up their mind that these things are impossible because of the physical this model must be true. And that’s where I think the world is certainly growing beyond that kind of simplistic nonsense of the debunkers and deniers and pseudo skeptical camp.
RICK: Yeah. And you know, my attitude towards those people is not altogether unappreciative, like, you know, I’ve read most of Sam Harris’s books, and I’ve been listening to his podcast for years. And he’s a brilliant guy, I would be totally intimidated to interview probably make mincemeat out of me. But you know, he’s just locked into this way of materialist thinking, despite all of this spiritual exploration and cycling, psychedelic exploration, he’s somehow hung on to that. And
KAREN: when it one thing I read in one of his books was that he and he may have grown since then, I forget which one we have. Oh, waking up waking up. Yeah, he speaks of one very specific Buddhist practice that’s allowable. And all the rest are, you know, not allowable by his mind, who said they’re not allowed. Sam. Found a technique that worked for him, which I maintain, we’re all going to find a slightly different kind of combination of techniques that work the best. He found the technique that worked for him and then claimed that was the tech only technique that the rest of us can use. I thought that
RICK: kind of fundamental. Yeah. Well, go ahead.
EBEN: I was just going to say that I know Sam discusses my case, in his book, he’s discussed it in other places, and he pretty much dismisses it. He tries to say it was simply a DMT experience, as if, you know, he has the evidence of DMT does all of this. But it’s really
KAREN: not to take away from your point that Sam does bring some value to the world even though we’re trying not him for these these things. Yeah, I agree.
EBEN: I think for example, his critique of of my case that Sam did in his podcast pales when you compare it, for example, to Bernardo Castro and the way he treated my case, and he completely eviscerated Sam Harris’s analysis my case tore it apart, based on very factual and modern scientific arguments. So it’s a shame that Sam Harris, you know, claiming to be a neuroscientist, a lot of people pay attention to what he says. And you know, he’s certainly entitled to his opinion, but I think if you read Bernardo Castro, criticism on Barnardos blog, Bernardo Castro calm of Sam Harris, the way he had kind of attacked me, you realize how weak Sam Harris’s position is and how poorly thought I should read
RICK: that. Hill to Sam Harris also did a podcast episode recently. Explaining why he felt freewill does not exist. And it was really detailed materialist, it really was, you know, but as I listened it was all of his arguments were predicated on what I would consider fundamental misunderstandings, for instance, he would say, Well, you can’t choose your parents obviously. So that’s one and I thought of course you do.
KAREN: Yeah, absolutely funny it’s it goes back to the Do you believe in you know, we disintegrate at the end of life? Or do we continue it goes back to that, in a in the scientific world, you can have these other types of assumptions that take you way down the road, like only the physical world is real. You don’t choose your parents. I love that. He said that because we know of course we choose our parents.
EBEN: Yeah, there’s so much more going on when you study this bigger, you know, World of consciousness studies, like the reincarnation work and the serious afterlife, work and all of the work in say from Stan Grof and Mike Newtons of Brian Weiss, about translation transpersonal psychology, you know, the whole realization that to fully explain the events that our psyche is involved in in human life, we have to realize that the soul has been through other facets of existence other lifetimes to contribute to the issues involved in this lifetime. So in other words, you come into this world, kind of pact with the prior history. So it’s not just nature and nurture, as I used to believe, you know, the DNA of nature and the nurture of your upbringing, but that there are other features involved. And I’d say an astonishing feature of all of this is what I call programmed forgetting, that, you know, sitting here in our bodies, and just kind of mental state, we don’t necessarily have ready access to all those memories of past lives, it takes real work to uncover them, just as Jim Tucker, Ian Stevenson would tell you about past life memories in children, you have to harvest them before age five, or six, because after that, their natural processes where they get covered over so you don’t as an adult, generally remember all about between life and past lives that you do when you’re a young child. And and so this program, forgetting I think, is kind of built into the system, just like we don’t remember our dreams for most of us. Even though dreams and sleep are critical, you’ll die in a few weeks if you’re unable to sleep and dream. And yet, you know, we don’t remember the content. And likewise, of the way the system is set up, we’re supposed to live these lives without necessarily having all that ready, access to that information. That’s where meditation, centering prayer, hypnotic regression, all these techniques of kind of uncovering, removing those overlying layers can be so helpful. Yeah.
RICK: Two points. One is that, you know, what we were just saying a minute ago, kind of loops back to what we were saying in the beginning, where having an understanding of the kind of stuff we’re talking about has a huge impact on one’s orientation to life, I think it also has a huge impact on a scientists orientation to how he pursues knowledge. Because, you know, if you’re, if your starting assumptions are erroneous, then, you know, it’s like, it’s like, you’re not aiming the arrow at the target, there’s no way you’re going to hit it. So you’re going to end up, you know, pursuing hypotheses that take you down dead ends, or, and this could open up a whole area of discussion, you’re going to accomplish things and perhaps technologies will arise out of out of your study out of your findings. But those technologies could be extremely mixed blessings, you know, on intentionally could have an extremely destructive influence, which I believe wouldn’t be the case. If, you know, the foundation from which those technologies arose, was a state of enlightened consciousness, we can we can flesh that out in some detail. What we can do it right now, if you want to?
EBEN: Well, I would, I would simply add to that, in terms of the scientific perspective, from my point of view, one of the biggest challenges of quantum physics and of the modern scientific world, understanding the deepest lessons that’s trying to teach us is this refusal by materialist scientists to acknowledge the reality of the mental realm of mind of the kind of realm of consciousness is having its own fundamental existence. Because quantum physics pretty readily starts to resolve and become more understandable, when you realize there’s this top down causal principle from the mental layer of the universe, spiritual mental, right is that it originates in spiritual level, a level of oneness of connection, where we all have kind of similar purpose. And we’re all in this together to help each other, grow and live and learn and transform in these bodies in this material existence. And that’s where I think you’re exactly right, that the assumptions if they’re false, if they’re off target, all that does is lead to a life of misery trying to connect the dots you mean like you are you’re like me before my exact like all of your science that’s still stuck in, in physicalism. And believing the brain is the creator of consciousness? Of course not. And the evidence is all over that with this broader model of primordial mind and consciousness as we discussed in living in a mindful universe, that primordial mind hypothesis, looking at the brain as a filter, and consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. That’s a very facile explanation for the measurement paradox in quantum physics, and helps us move to a whole other level of understanding. So those false assumptions can be very damaging, and they’re especially bad for individuals who had their own experiences showing them the bigger aspects of of the spiritual realm and their involvement with the universe at that level. And yet they come back and try and share tell their story or fit it in with a sign scientific community and find that some of the materialist scientific camp are trying to refute it because it’s impossible. So no, it’s not impossible. This is what most human experiences involve. And the science needs to grow up to explain that and quantum physics takes us a long way towards that growing up. But it’s not that infinite parallel universe explanation as much as for those who want to quantum physics, I would steer you to Carlo Rovelli is relational interpretation, modified by Bernardo kastrup metaphysics. And you’ll start to realize how all of it makes sense, especially if you combine it with our use of filter theory. And living in a mindful universe. You see how all of that can fit together and explain all this much more readily and allow fully for free will,
RICK: for those listening have interviewed Bernardo a couple of times. So you’ll find him in the past interview section, if you want to check him out. Why do you think it is that materialists or physicalists are so entrenched, and so fearful and so defensive? About the kind of perspective we’re discussing here? I mean, what have they got to lose? If they were to shift to this perspective? What Why are they hanging on for dear life?
EBEN: I think from their perspective, they have a lot to lose, especially those who are journalists, who are scientific and academic writers. And they have spent decades writing about all of this, for example, Christophe Cox spending all those decades studying of memory in mouse brains, assuming that, you know, memories are stored in the human brain in the same way. And they spent all this time for this tremendous amount of effort into those scientific studies. And then to find it, it is all for naught can be kind of, you know, a terrible
RICK: will haven’t probably never been great thinkers and scientists who at some point towards the end of their lives, can realize that they’ve been wrong all the way and admitted it. And it was like a relief for them. In a way. I can’t think I’ve heard of examples of that. But I can’t name a name at this point. Oh, well, there are I think,
EBEN: many scientists at the end of their life kind of come to that. I mean, so one story that comes to mind is Roger Ebert, who was the film guy, you know, yeah. Siskel and Ebert. And, in fact, the end of my second book map of heaven, recounts the story of his kind of deathbed vision of saying that this is all a sham, that this physical world is, you know, only a tiny part of the picture and that there’s so much more to our existence.
KAREN: But didn’t Einstein also, when he got near the end of her life after his friend died, and
EBEN: that that, I think, Einstein, we cover that in our book Living in a mind for universe when Einstein was within months of his own death, which happened in April of 1955, one of his nearest and dearest childhood friends, Michele Besso, who had been instrumental in his first job, working in the Swiss patent office is besos. Father, I think had been helpful in that. But the reality is that Einstein, there’s a beautiful quote from him where he says, that time, you know, to those of us who study physics, and I’m paraphrasing here, but he said, Time is simply an illusion, the past and future are a very persistent illusion, but that this friend of his who had passed a little bit before him, he said, That’s of no real concern, because he realized there were deeper aspects of this universe, that time flows. We saw it in the material world as we saw, it was not the be all and end all and he cinched in that quote, you can tell that that Einstein is kind of teasing the idea that he and his friend Michelle Besa will be together again in an afterlife.
KAREN: Well, and also this just reminds me I don’t Are you familiar with the work of Gary Schwartz?
RICK: Yes, I interviewed Mark Pitts. Dick not long ago, who does most interviews these days? Because Gary’s behind the scenes. Yeah.
KAREN: Well, what’s out just bring this up. I don’t know if the scientific validity of all of this for certain, but part of his research is actually reaching out to scientists who have already passed on. Oh, yeah. Get the soul help us. Yeah. In the phrasing, but he’s doing it from the scientists who are on the other side are helping to advise the project.
EBEN: They call the A team. Yeah. But it does make people like Einstein so bomb David bombs. Very, very important player.
RICK: Yeah, we talked about fascinating
KAREN: if that’s the case. That’s pretty fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.
RICK: And with a with a point like that, you know, I mean, my attitude is I, I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but I take everybody with a grain of salt and portions very, you know, so I hear something like that, I think, yeah, maybe? I don’t know. It’s not like I’m just gonna sort of believe it hook line and sinker but it’s an interesting area of expertise. Exactly.
KAREN: I kind of prefaced Yeah, because I don’t necessarily either. But nonetheless, if he’s successful and conduct cement all of this, eventually, I think we’ll all be
EBEN: much the key, the proof is in the pudding. So we’ll see what they come up with. But fascinating premise, there certainly is nothing that we know in modern science and philosophy that prevents the reality of that kind of an information exchange. Yeah, in many ways, it’s kind of reassuring, because there are general ideas in science and philosophy. That information, in many ways is conserved in this universe in very profound ways. And I think that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. That kind of conservation and growth or transformation of information goes far beyond any kind of conservation principles of energy, or mass or any of those things, in terms of explaining the deeper running of the universe.
RICK: Let’s talk about memory for a few minutes. You cover this a bit in living in a mindful universe? To use a computer metaphor, do you I mean, obviously, memory isn’t just stored in the brain, otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to remember past lives because we have a different brain now. Do you think I mean, here’s the computer metaphor. You know, I have stuff stored on my hard drive here. But I also have it backed up to the cloud. And so there’s kind of a and I wouldn’t want to have to access all my data off the cloud all the time, because that would be slow compared to accessing it off the hard drive. So there’s a value to both. Do you think that there’s something like that going on where things are stored in the brain in some way that we don’t understand. But they’re also stored in the cloud, or maybe, maybe some things are stored here. And some things are not because some things aren’t worth storing in the cloud, or whatever. We’ll go ahead.
EBEN: I can tell you looking at it as a neurosurgeon and being aware of all the work over the last century and a half by neurosurgeon to tease out this issue of memory in the brain. And in our book, Living in a mindful universe. We talk a lot about contributions of Dr. Wilder Penfield. He’s one of those renowned and respected neurosurgeons of the 20th century, he was Canadian, spend a tremendous amount of his career electrically stimulating the brain and awake patients. Now I’ve done hundreds of those cases myself. So I know all about the technical details of how it’s done, and what the potentials are. But I certainly defer to his kind of scientific expertise, because he made a career of this. And he wrote a book in 1975, called mysteries of the mind, where he made it very clear that you can not explain the workings of conscious awareness and a memory of just based on the workings of the brain alone. And there are many reasons why that’s true, but and he had been chasing this chimera of memory of assuming it would be in the neocortex. And by the end of his career, 1975 He made it very clear, no memories are not stored in the neocortex at all. It’s crystal clear, and neurosurgeons that if you operate interfere with a medial temporal lobe, the hippocampus especially if there’s bilateral damage, you can greatly impair a person’s ability to convert short term to long term memory. But that’s not the same as identifying storage sites of long term memory. And in fact, neurosurgeons for decades have mused over that issue. Because in spite of a world in a million resections of brain done over the last century, there’s never been a reported case, of demonstrable lapse in in specify that long term memories that occurred with a specific region of brain being removed. And so we’ve come to realize that this very notion that memories is somehow stored the brain is very suspect. There’s no real evidence to support it based on neurosurgical experience, and all else that we know about the brain. And as you point out, the reincarnation cases, make it crystal clear that looking at the brain, its repository doesn’t work because you don’t have a brain intact between those lifetimes. And important to point out for the listeners who may not be aware, but only about 20% of those cases studied by UVA Doc’s involve the same family. So the majority of them would not be any kind of hereditary DNA type, memory transfer either. And especially when you then look at indies writ large and look at life reviews, and look how detailed they are. This goes far beyond anybody’s ability to what they like to remember about
KAREN: their life. The brain is
EBEN: really the receiver and the receiver but in fact, being fully liberated from the brain gives you far greater access to memory. That’s what happens in a life review. You know, people talk about being able to count the mosquitoes in the air around the scene that happened when they were a young child and drown. That’s an example from Bruce Grayson new book after That’s an extraordinary level of detail that you often hear that kind of score. So these are not just vague CPE attended memories. These are extraordinary relive things in a way that show you that the universe has the power by having access to these multiple layers of our experience, to completely relive everything we’ve ever been through in our life. I mean, in many ways, it shows us that our notions of time flow are completely erroneous, because time flow in the earthly realm is set up to allow this stage setting for this drama to unfold. But what you see when you leave the physical body at the time of death and a near death or dying experience, deathbed vision, things like that, is this far more robust kind of access to the events of life, they go far beyond what any individual could remember. And so memory is not stored in the brain. This is one of the biggest nails in the coffin of materialist neuroscience. That’s why don’t hear it broadly discussed in scientific circles, because it really kind of sets you completely adrift from any kind of physicalist rescue, you know, in terms of a potential explanation, when you realize that no, there’s much more going on here to understand to explain all these kinds of phenomena, to
RICK: some people try to argue that well, actually, the memory of how many mosquitoes were hovering around was in your brain. But, you know, it just got finally triggered under this unusual circumstance. But it was there to zoom by trying to argue that kind of thing. I’m sure somebody
EBEN: would try and argue that but the more you kind of work with the brain and realize what’s involved in synaptic transmission in the interaction of these 100 billion neurons, and each one with their 10,000 connections to the rest of the brain. That’s when you start realizing that to presume that some very minutia detail of a memory from early childhood would live in a physical system of synapses, and all that over all these years, with all the kind of vagaries and kind of chance for noise in those physical systems, you start to realize that to try and pin it all on materialist models of synaptic connections between neurons really just doesn’t work to explain memory, in that big sense.
RICK: And of course, what we’re alluding to here is some kind of Akashic Record field or something like that in which everything is stored.
EBEN: Well, I tend to call it the quantum hologram. I love how Edgar Mitchell and Bob Sterrett choose that term and one of their papers on consciousness years ago. And I think that’s a better way of looking at it. It’s an information field of all potential.
KAREN: That’s what I would kind of say, is the spiritual realm. That’s where all that information is, and we can access it when we use that word spiritual. So many people want to go right to God, religion, some kind of deeper meaning, but what if it’s just the information field that, you know, provides the blueprint for
EBEN: this role of conscious awareness and all of memory?
RICK: Yeah. Seems like there would be different aspects of this field because we don’t necessarily have to share everybody else’s memory. So there must be sort of an individual one, then there must be some that overlap, because sometimes we do share. And then there must be some kind of collective, you know, memory, perhaps even in concentric circles, where you have, you know, family memory fields and national memory fields and the whole global memory.
KAREN: The narrative talks about that when he talks about how consensus reality could exist. And that’s where all of us kind of agree on some level that mountains are, are a mountain. Well, I
EBEN: think you’re right, I like to look at it is we’re kind of like drops of falling in the ocean. And yet there’s a certain viscosity to those rocks, so that they tend to kind of stay together. There’s a tinge of information, interrelationship, I’ll say, resonance, yeah, resonance, kind of like constructive interference, or what have you information that allows us to identify with energy signatures in that spiritual realm of close kind of relatives and soulmates, that kind of thing. So we can tend to recognize them in that space through this kind of overlap of energy signature. And yet, there’s that broad kind of spreading out,
KAREN: not even just recognize that being drawn to being drawn
EBEN: to in many ways. Yeah, those principles are very operative in that kind of quantum hologram and that that’s how kind of souls identify in their journey as they relate to certain souls. I mean, to me, one of the kind of a sidelight that it makes the point here is if you look@winbridge.org And that’s a group that scientifically studies psychic mediums, Julie by Szalay, validate to By surely, etc. And you look at their quintuple blinded protocols for assessing mediums, where basically the medium only gets a first thing, you know, Routh, and then somehow the medium was able to track through of their processes, and get to the correct Ralph in the afterlife. But the key ingredient that makes it work is that the center, that’s the person who has lost the loved one, you know, in their prayer or meditation, they invite the loved one to connect the dots for the psyche. And so in other words, it’s simply by putting that will into the universe to connect the dots to help make the realization, and the loved one does that from the other side. And, and to me, that’s what makes it all work. That’s why you can have any psychics that have any kind of ability to do this is because there are real connections going on on the other side. And my point is simply that, that shows you this kind of power of resonance and of familiarity, and how these soul lines can actually direct their kind of understanding and relationships and come to a deeper knowing. So it’s not just a raindrop falling in the ocean and diffusely spreading into all of consciousness and that primordial mind, but actually having some viscosity that preserves relationships between incarnations for the benefit of soul groups that are growing through these multiple incarnations.
RICK: I think one key point that is integral to the teaching of Vedanta and many other schools of thought is that, and we’ve kind of touched on it, but it might be good to get it more clearly is that we we have a subtle body and in addition to our gross body, and it’s kind of like a Russian dolls thing where the, you know, subtle body is contained within the gross body, but it can also become independent of it. And as happens in an out of body experience. And as happens when the gross body dies, it’s like when it goes by it dies is considered in Vedantic model only one of five different sheets. And so now we have four sheets instead of five because the gross body died. So that explanation helps a lot in terms of understanding how the soul which I guess you could call the subtle body migrates from life to life, or retains memories or anything like that. And to my way of thinking, it’s not a really weird, far fetched idea. It just sort of fits in with everything else.
EBEN: I think that makes makes perfect sense. But again, it’s this notion of saying that there’s kind of an essence of our soul that goes through these multiple lifetimes, in a process of growth and transformation, I would add, so from our point of view, this notion of reincarnation is not about trying to get off the wheel of suffering, you know, after multiple incarnations, but that the, the goal is actually growth and transformation, I would say, the big picture view would be that Pierre Teilhard de shardanand, who wrote his book, The phenomenon of man in the mid 20th century, he was a scientist, a paleontologist, he was also a French Jesuit priests and spiritually advanced. And he realized that these, this talk of evolution of Darwinian evolution, as it was discussed in the mid 20th century, actually had a bigger context in which all of consciousness was doing the evolving. And I think that that essentially, is what’s truly going on. And so just like that old saying, in realist, you know, in politics, you know, all politics is local. Well, likewise, all evolution of consciousness of the universe is nothing more than individual sentient beings coming into a deeper understanding of their own purpose for being in relationship with the universe.
KAREN: Did I just want to add that this this evolution we don’t think of as a linear evolution going from, you know, primitive to advanced that a cyclical evolution, or a spiral evolution six, where we go through cycles of evolution, where we do dip down into not so fun, and then maybe more fun and enlightening, but this reminds me of Rick tarnis Because in cosmos and psyche, he does an incredible job of explaining how the rotation of the planets around Earth seems to mark around this. Thanks, Evan. Good to have
RICK: back to her medieval medieval lifetime.
KAREN: When she discovered No, no, no. Weird verbal dyslexia. Thank you. Anyway, so Rick tarnis has marked these cycles that seem to match up with the cycles of the planets around the sun. And so Eben has even come on board that some of this might even some of this astrology might actually have some validity to it. Just because he realizes in science they use Spurrier waves to do transforms, varier transforms,
EBEN: we basically it just takes has to do with understanding those deeper relationships and not just the four year transforms. But
KAREN: but how you use for your transforms to to predict cycles, right? Well,
EBEN: I mean, just accepting that there are cycles, large and small that involve individuals, their lifetimes and evolve societies, ethnic groups, that this very notion of cyclicity is part of the dynamic of growth and increasing understanding and transformation. And yet that cyclicity in many ways is, could be measured by, you know, the movement of planets, and moons and all that kind of thing in orbital cycles. They’re all just harmonic oscillators. So in many ways, you can look at astrology as simply being an admission that these oscillating patterns that manifest in human existence in various levels are oscillations, and you can measure them with any clock. And that includes anything that cycling and orbiting.
KAREN: And we can look at this in our own lives, really, because we all have patterns, patterns in our relationships, patterns, and, you know, the job we hold or something and certain troublesome issues might wit that we think we might have resolved early in life seem to come back to us and perform Yeah, and then we have an opportunity to address it in a different fashion. So if you look at that, from a individual perspective, we can see that easily in our lives. And yet, from a larger perspective, that’s could absolutely be what’s going on. And that speaks to the holographic principle where everything in the hole can be found in the piece, right? So if our individual lives work that way, why wouldn’t all of the evolution of consciousness work in the same sort of cyclical fashion?
RICK: So are you saying, and incidentally, for those this thing got to be? I’m going to be interviewing Rick tarnis Next week? But um, are you saying that with the cyclical thing, I probably I might have completely misunderstood that, you know, rather than sort of progressing through higher and higher stages of evolution over the course of the existence of our soul if we want to use the word soul, that it even cycles. So we go back to being troglodytes and dinosaurs, and tree sloths and stuff, and then work our way up and go through the whole thing again,
KAREN: in theory, yeah. Well, I can I just mentioned that you guys that you go cycles of the Hindu Hindu tradition, speaks of, there’s different interpretations of how many years this cycle is, but the one I’m speaking of is 20, roughly a 24,000 year cycle, which just happens to match up with the astronomical precession of the equinoxes. So that you could cycle does have this moving from a Sperry spiritual, higher realm. And of course, the Greeks talked about that golden age, many cultures talked about this golden age, and that we seem to have lost knowledge. And then you go all the way into the Dark Ages. That’s where it’s in a book called The you ghosts, where two people really go through all of this, but the Dark Ages were really the bottom of that material realm. And now we’re on our way back up to that spiritual, but each time we go through that cycle, in theory, we’re doing a little bit better job there, there’s there, I would assume to be some judgment on how well we’re doing, or you know how well we’re succeeding at whatever goal we set out to learn. And the one we feel that that goal that we’ve set out to learn is all about love. And so many of us think, Oh, we understand, but our society is not really based on love as a as a founding principle. So this lesson is the one revolving.
EBEN: And I would simply add, from my perspective, this is why we often describe it as a spiral. Evolution is because you come back around to similar issues. But there’s a certain amount of growth between rotations so that you’re actually progressing and learning more. But just like that old saying, there’s nothing new under the sun. Likewise, some of the challenges that engender certain growth and understanding can represent themselves at a whole new level of this evolution of all consciousness. And
KAREN: also, there’s some traditions who say, I think it’s the Theosophists and some others who talk about these grand cycles that we go through. And that when we reach that darkest point, or really, when we start to figure out how the material world works, as we’re coming out of it, we usually end up destroying ourselves and that this time around, we have much better chance at making it through without destroying ourselves. And so that’s the cyclical spiral nature that may be going on.
RICK: Yeah, a couple thoughts there. One is I remember some Vedic story where some master was talking to a disciple or something and there was a line of ants walking along the ground and the master pointed to them and said, at once All those ants were Lord Shiva. So in other words, they had gone cycled around another. Now they’re ants. Right, but so I don’t know. But that’s just the story. But um, another thought I have, as you’re saying that is that, you know, there’s what happens to the whole culture, the whole society, and then what happens to individual beings. And maybe it’s that individual being cycled back around have to go through the whole thing again, but maybe there’s a there is a sort of an ascending trajectory that just continues on. And eventually we don’t even get born on earth as a human being anymore, because we’re sort of living in higher realms. But nonetheless, the the cycle of yugas continues, and, and the site various cycles Earth goes through. And a couple of quick points on this. One thing marshy, Mahesh Yogi used to say is that it takes a long time for what he called natural law to sort of descend and descend and ascend, and eventually when it reaches a name, its Nadir, it shoots back up to 100%, in one generation in a short amount of time. So that’s hopeful.
KAREN: Yeah. There are some who say that that golden age is right around the corner, that others say now, it’ll take us a little time to get there.
EBEN: I mean, I must say I, you know, I feel I’m so close to this, maybe I have to take my own vision on it with a big grain of salt. But the reality is, I do believe, in the last decade or two, we’ve made tremendous progress along these lines. And I believe that humanity is truly headed for kind of a golden age of transformation and understanding that will, in many ways, be a complete and wonderful kind of resolution of all the kind of human conflicts and confusion of the last five to seven, eight millennia, I believe we’re headed for a true inflection point that will be just astonishing. And I believe it has to do with the fact that this is all about the scientific study of consciousness and the nature of reality that goes far beyond the simplistic conventional material of science and physical science. Because you cannot explain consciousness, you know, the hard problem of consciousness, and it was defined by David Chalmers, in the mid 90s, is a very deep challenge to materialism. In fact, it’s probably a fatal challenge to materialism, you cannot explain consciousness totally within this physical realm, we really must kind of have a broader vision of it all. And that’s where I think the scientific contribution is going to make this revolution be something truly phenomenal from the viewpoint of human destiny over many, many millennia.
RICK: Yeah, I agree. I think I’ll shift the topic unless Karen wants to add to that, because, you know, I want to make sure we cover everything we might cover. But, but I agree, I mean, I think it’s a very exciting time to be alive. And, you know, there are various scenarios on how it might play out. And if you don’t have the full picture of what’s going on with the kind of the spiritual Renaissance that’s taking place, you could become very pessimistic, and I know people who have, you know, moved to Australia in order to just sort of live out the rest of our lives before everybody on earth dies. But I somehow think that God has a few tricks up his sleeve, and that this sort of spiritual epidemic, which seems to be welling up is the perfect and essential kind of antidote to what ails us, and that it may just save the day in ways that we can’t fully, you know, elaborate yet?
EBEN: Well, I would just share with your thoughts on that. I have a tremendous amount of optimism to about this. And I know that people, especially in our polarized society with a COVID challenge, the economic collapse, the racial disparity in our country that’s kind of in bundle with all that conflict. From my point of view, of when you’re getting close to an inflection point where you have true change. That’s where to the chaos so fundamentalists that had so much invested in the old worldview, rise up and recoil and kind of with outrage, you know, kind of pounding their chests.
KAREN: It’s kind of like a healing crisis. Right, where someone an individual is going through a health challenge, and sometimes the treatment makes you feel a little bit worse before you feel better.
EBEN: It’s kind of like the fever breaking in a bad infection. You know, you have that night where you’re in cold sweats and a hot fever. And then the next day you’re done.
KAREN: Yeah, or that collective gift of desperation. Colombia caravan, I
EBEN: often talk about kind of the parallels would be a doc addiction, and the whole world of addiction and alcoholism, all that there’s this notion of the gift of death. desperation, you know that if you hit a low enough bottom that actually energizes your bouts and your incredible recovery and kind of Ascendance. And in many ways, we’re facing a collective gift of desperation. And that’s what I think COVID And a lot of the economic challenge is related to, is the fact that these fundamentalists of the old era are kind of rising up and recoiling, because it really is time for them to go. They’re using this go to join, transform and resolve. Yeah, and come to resolution, I should say, not go. But we’re all in this together, and they serve a role. You know, this, I would say that the true skeptic server, well, I’m not too sure about the pseudo skeptics, you know, out there, and the kind of lay press and some of the scientific community who don’t really care about the empirical data, or the hypothetical models that support all this, they’ve made up their mind already. So, but to the rest of us into the world at large. I think that there’s a tremendous amount of reason for optimism, that we’re finally really learning this deep and profound lesson that we’re all in this together, we need to take care of each other. It’s all about kindness, compassion, love, forgiveness, gratitude. These are the qualities of our spiritual selves, that help us to grow into the grander beings that we all truly are.
KAREN: And these qualities you’re speaking of, I think of his very feminine qualities, and our world or materialist world is very much filled with masculine quantity, sort of what we can see what all the action, what we can do all the focus on the external world. And the feminine is more about going within the inner world, the more sensitive part of us, and I love how the the women leaders of countries during the COVID crisis, that women you really have these embody these feminine characteristics have done a really beautiful job of taking care of their citizens. And, you know, it’s not men and women necessarily, but those qualities that all of us really need to find balance.
RICK: Yeah, I saw a graphic of, you know, about seven or eight countries that have women leaders, and their COVID statistics in comparison to a bunch of countries comparable countries that have male leaders. You sent an alder in or whatever her name is in New Zealand and other ones that, you know, much better outcome.
KAREN: Absolutely. And when they did their lockdowns, they actually made every effort to be sure and certain that everyone was cared for that they weren’t at risk. And that’s, that’s the world I
EBEN: want to let you know, that’s, that’s, that’s the kind of world where that feminine energy is doing a lot of healthy work, to help transform and grow all of us together. So I think there’s no question when I look back on human history, especially the last few centuries, what I see is, you know, Homo sapiens, sapiens means wise? Well, yeah, we’ve had a lot of beautiful developments in science, about medicine, and communications, and transportation. I mean, science has really benefited us in many ways. And yet, there’s that dark underbelly, for example, our addiction to fossil fuels, climate change, you know, more than 35,000 species threatened with immediate extinction because of our irresponsibility as a species for the planet at large. And I would say a lot of that comes from a false sense of separation, that is inherent in that materialist model of who we are and the nature of reality. Whereas a more quantum informed version, that that acknowledges this oneness of mind and consciousness that we all seem to share, as revealed to Indies and, and that kind of manner of understanding of the nature of reality. That’s where we can really kind of grow with this, to a much deeper level is that kind of understanding that really is all being fostered through the science of consciousness. And yet, individual seekers can come to know that in meditation and centering prayer, just through living their lives, the way they deal with people. That kind of deeper understanding of how we’re really here to care for each other, and take care of all fellow beings. And of course, it’s not just about the consciousness of humans, because that one mind involves animals, plants, that one mind involves all of life forms. And it really is becoming apparent to us that we, if we want to consider ourselves Homo sapiens wise, we really need to do a much better job of serving as stewards to the world and for each other. And that involves tremendously this notion of the oneness of all that we’re in a shared existence.
RICK: Yeah. And that reminds me of that quote from Jesus Whatsoever you do unto the least of these you do on to me. You know, if we’re in that sort of unity consciousness, then we realize that you know, whatever we harm or help, or harming or helping ourselves, because it is ourselves really literally. Right? Yeah, exactly. Okay. Um, speaking of pandemic, and you mentioned this earlier about the importance of science and thinking scientifically, as you know, there’s a lot of confusion around the pandemic, and the vaccines and everything else. And there are people who seem to have significant credentials, saying things that conflict with other people who seem to have significant, impressive credentials. And so, you know, I’ve given this a lot of thought and painted a lot of attention, because it’s like, I don’t care if somebody thinks the earth is flat, or we didn’t land on the moon, those are sort of amusing, wipers, perspectives. But I do care if people are saying things that end up killing hundreds of 1000s of people unnecessarily. So somehow, clarity of thinking, discernment, discrimination, respecting science, and not sort of just going by your own individual perspective, to the exclusion of the shared perspective of the whole scientific community, or seemed like very important things more important than ever, at this moment, the only thoughts about that?
EBEN: I think it’s discernment is certainly a very crucial ingredient to any of our dealings with the world. And that certainly include cludes, the spiritual realm and our encounters there, we need to use discernment. I think, Karen has taught me a lot about that whole process, the vaccine, but in terms of the vaccine, and in terms of modern science, I think people need to remember that science basically has self corrective mechanisms built into it, to help nudge it towards truth, nudge towards the real answer. And you’re right, there are people out there who claim to have certain credentials. The reality is, in our modern era, unfortunately, you have to use your discernment again, because just having those credentials is not necessarily enough. But for me, for example, Dr. Fauci everything he has said about this virus and the vaccine, and everything about it going all the way back to the beginning, has been right on the bark. And there’s never been any kind of reason to doubt it. Now, some people bring up the fact that early in the pandemic, you know, experts were not recommending masks, and then they moved to recommending masks. But a huge part of that was that there were enough math for the medical profession,
KAREN: and there wasn’t enough data. And there wasn’t enough data. Yes, the data comes in,
EBEN: data comes in the science improves the science kind of bends towards the truth. And, you know, in our modern society, it’s really a shame how some people, you know, very publicly doubt the science and challenge of science. And just because somebody is a scientist, that’s enough to kind of put Obama on the chopping block and his views. And
KAREN: also, you’ve also spoken because we’ve discussed this quite a lot, because of all these varying viewpoints, that we’ve also discussed how the science community that occasionally there is disagreement or not, occasionally, there was disagreement, and then what you find is the consensus, what do most of the scientists believe? And it’s
EBEN: because the scientific method has a lot to be said for it. And and so when you see science being followed, in these discussions of the, of the virus in the vaccine, what you find is that over time, month after month, we get closer and closer to what appears to be the actual answer and the actual truth. And Eben
KAREN: has actually read because I’m not a scientist, I don’t know some of the language that’s used in some of these papers that are circulating around. And he, he comes in so handy, because when I’m ever concerned about a scientific claim, I ask Eben, and he is so broadly informed about science that he’s able to tell me Well, here’s where they made their step in logic that I wouldn’t agree with. And once they make that step in logic, then he can’t really follow what the rest of them are saying. And one of the papers that is out there circulating Eben looked at it. And that was one of the cases that that the logic that that scientists was using, Evan didn’t agree with. And so it just comes down to that. And I agree with you, Rick, I think this is terribly damaging, because it does have such an effect on other people. It’s not just a choice we’re making for ourselves. It’s a choice we’re making for our whole community. That’s how viruses work. Everyone seemed to be on board. You know, when polio was killing all of the children and paralyzing them, and I don’t recall any concern back then. Except that people got the shots and polio went away. So So
EBEN: Well, it really is very unfortunate when our political leaders end up sacrificing science on the altar of public opinion. Because science ultimately is our best way of getting to all of these answers. And of course, when I say that I’m not saying materialist science, or physical science, I’m looking at clients at large, the whole process of scientific investigation, which, just as an example, we mentioned a little while ago about the psychedelic plant medicines shutting the brain down. I mean, where’s the scientist go? Who wants to get too deep answers, when all you’re demonstrating is that your brain is going dark under the influence of the substances that create the most phenomenally rich experiences that many people have ever had. So we need to reach beyond materialism and physicalism for our answers, but that doesn’t mean we have to reject science at all. I will consider all of those past life memories and children’s study by the UVA group, in many ways to have been scientifically and philosophically validated and studied.
RICK: Yeah. Remember that book that the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, I love that book. And one thing, one point he makes is that there’s sort of a value to the fact that paradigms don’t just flip with the slightest provocation. In other words, there needs to be a sort of certain stability, and, you know, almost a resistance to change. Because otherwise, we’d have total chaos, where every little bit of information that came, oh, that must be wrong, we wouldn’t have any kind of edifice or foundation upon which to build our structures of knowledge. But, you know, the point he makes is that with enough anomalies, with enough things contradicting the established paradigm, they eventually topple. And, and the reason I’m bringing this up is that this, it’s good to understand how science works and to understand that science can be wrong about things, but it eventually self corrects as time goes on. And I think it’ll self correct with regard to all the sort of more esoteric topics we’ve been discussing today. But with regard to the pandemic, and all, it’s a learning process, you know, I mean, it’s a novel virus, and a lot is being learned as we go along. But to be to just throw out blatant disinformation is it’s dishonest and irresponsible. I mean, I know a few people who say, a vaccine didn’t cure smallpox, it was just coincidental improvement in public hygiene, smallpox, smallpox. A lot of questions I’m getting, I’m starting to do this. Anyway, but it bugs me, you know, because people are dying. And that’s real. And if you talk to people who are working in ICUs, who have to watch them die. You know, I wish everyone could have that experience there, I think it’d be a lot less bullshit flying around.
EBEN: Right. But I think you’re absolutely right about that. And what people need to remember is that kind of self corrective mechanism built into the scientific method. And the scientific community, I mean, scientific community is made of human beings, they have the same frailties, and kind of wishes and wants and desires and foibles is, is any human being. And yet the community at large and the techniques that science uses are something that can help lead us towards truth. And in fact, I’m very frightened by the notion that some people believe that anti science is the answer for something like, you know, the COVID pandemic, we’ve had 560,000 Americans die in a little over a year, a million worldwide. I just heard 3 million worldwide. I mean, it this is
KAREN: a fan you have the naysayers who say those are made up numbers. And well, we know people who’ve died. In
EBEN: fact, when you look at excess deaths, what you find is those numbers are probably an under call of the true ravages of the COVID pandemic, it’s probably been much worse than the official numbers, because of the number of guests. Now some of those, of course would be people who were having a heart attack who didn’t go to the hospital because of COVID and died because of that. But I think even more of those numbers could be explained by the fact that COVID is more extensive and out there than we come to recognize. Yeah.
RICK: Okay, we could go on on this topic. But I’m going to switch it because now the questions are starting to come in because people are emailing them to Irene because the forum wasn’t working. So I’m going to ask you some questions. And they won’t necessarily be in any logical order. So we might jump around a little bit. First question from the net in Sacramento. Do you still have conscious contact with your sister? I’m not sure.
EBEN: Yes, beautiful question. And that’s something we discuss a lot and living in a mindful universe. I use meditation sacred acoustics of binaural Brainwave and binaural beat Brainwave Entrainment, an hour to a day, I’ve been doing that for more than a decade now. So it’s really about going within developing a much richer relationship with all all the denizens of that realm. And that includes, of course, my birth sister, who I’m now very close to, because of ongoing meditation got to know her much better, and many other facets, my father’s soul now engaging after meditation, etc. So, but yes, it and it all depends on my use of meditation to return to the
RICK: so just to highlight a point you just made. So when you do the binaural beats thing, which you say, done a couple hours a day for years now, you very often go into very deep states that kind of approximate your near death experience where your ears, you know, in transcendental realms, and you’re meeting subtle beings and all kinds of stuff like that.
EBEN: Right. Okay. Right, absolutely. And, and that, in fact, I would say it’s my work with Karen, who’s never had an NDA, and also with all of her, her people who use sacred acoustics around the world, and there are many, many of those people. And they’re kind of sharing with us that their experiences. That’s what leads me to know that the meditation is an equally valid pathway to getting to this knowledge as a profound in di now, I’ve not yet experienced the full blown Ultra reality that I sensed in the, in the gateway Valley and in the core realm. But it could be that I have to wait till the next time that my brain is pretty much completely offline for that to happen. But through meditation, I’ve come very close and developed a very rich relationship with my indie.
RICK: Well, let’s hope your brain doesn’t go completely offline anytime soon. Because that wasn’t the picnic. Yeah, one thing, but it was one curiosity I have, which might be you might be able to speak to is, you know, I’ve interviewed Chris bass a couple times, who did some very deep, psychedelic and had some very deep psychedelic experiences. And he was always listening to music during them, like Beethoven or whatever, he had this whole playlist and he would lie there and listen to music. And I don’t know if I quite asked him like, why not just lie there in silence? Maybe even with noise cancelling headphones? Why do you want some kind of music going on? You have a thought to that. That’s,
KAREN: that’s a natural question from a TM teacher. Because it’s interesting, I have people who practice TM and they, they have been told by their teachers that they cannot use sound while they’re practicing their TM. But but the sound actually for me, the binaural beats in particular, offer an opportunity to help quiet the mind a little more quickly than than just standard silent meditation, especially for those who are just starting out. And I think Christopher Bache also used Hemi sync another form of binaural beats and and yeah, but all different kinds of music can help people get into those states that I know you probably want to Yeah,
EBEN: in fact, in his book Dark Knight early dawn, Christopher Bache talks very specifically does a head to head comparison of his work with high dose LSD for spiritual investigation with his use of Hemi sync binaural beat Brainwave Entrainment that, I would say is kind of a more primitive version than than what I would view sacred acoustics. But just that’s just my opinion. And of course, sacred acoustics is a more modern version of all that. But Christopher beige said that you could use the sound and get as far if not farther than you could with a high dose LSD. I mean, he was very respectful of how and when you think about it, that makes sense because, in essence, the the serotonin drugs, like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, things like that are really kind of having an effect through parts of the neocortex. That’s where most of those receptors are. And that’s a very kind of superficial connection of the brain to consciousness. And what I would say is the binaural beats by going after this target way down in the lower brainstem, they’re going to a circuit that arose more than 300 million years ago. And I believe that’s one of the reasons why binaural beat Brainwave Entrainment can take you so so far in separating from our everyday consciousness itself, and that false sense of here and now and help us to escape that so I will be Brainwave Entrainment by going at consciousness at this primitive level in the lower brainstem can be extraordinarily powerful.
KAREN: And I’ll just, you may have intrigued some listeners so anyone who’s curious can go to sacred acoustics comm look for the free download link and we’ll send you a 20 minute recording and also look for the whole mind bundle. This is a collection of recordings We reduced drastically in price at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. And there’s also a free option for those in financial uncertainty, we thought that was incredibly important because these recordings were actually used in a pilot study that showed a 26% reduction in anxiety. And so many people have anxiety just by listening to these recordings, you can sort of help to reduce and, and calm yourself into a calmer state. And that of course, for some people helps to take them into deep states of meditation, but others all they need is that, that, you know, anxiety reduction, and so we accept any one who can’t afford to pay because even if you cannot, you have our gratitude for taking time to quiet the mind simply because we know we are all in this together and each person who who does that contributes to our well being.
RICK: So I’ll be linking to that website and to your other websites, on your page on bat gap calm. Just want to add that I listened to that free download one, last few days in the afternoon and had a nice effect I really enjoyed I’d like to listen to some more.
EBEN: It’d be very relaxing. And we would invite people to really explore sacred acoustics comm. Karen has put a lot of work into some free training videos and other things that help people with all the tools and kind of practical techniques to help them get up to speed on all this. Yeah,
RICK: I know, for a year before I had learned to meditate, I spent a lot and a lot of deep experiences on under the influence of various chemicals. While listening to music. And I in a way I think that contributed to the fact that when I finally did learn to meditate, it was like boom, falling off a log. You had that practice? Yeah. Okay, more questions. Here we go. So this one is from Hang on a second. This one is from Jay, in Victoria, would be British Columbia. Could you please elaborate how a person would choose their parents, I had parents that were abusive. And I was wondering what the point would be to choose abusive parents. Good question.
KAREN: Would you like me to take you take that? Yeah, that’s bad. Ted, very good question. And, you know, a lot of what Michael Newton who who Rick brought up talks about is that we do make choices about how we’re going to live our life that’s upcoming before we incarnate into a body. And so those choices are based on particular lessons, we want to learn particular things we feel we’re lacking. And I’ll just give you one very brief example. There was a this was actually an example from Paul around another life between lives regression is he was regressing a woman who had incredibly low self esteem, and she was unattractive had big nose and was overweight. And in her life between lives, she ran into her deceased uncle, and she didn’t like her uncle, because her uncle teased her all the time. And what she learned was that she wanted her uncle to to treat her that way. Because in her previous lifetime, when she was going through her life review, she was an incredibly beautiful woman who look down on others who weren’t attractive. And she was actually rude to them. And when she realized that what she had done, she wanted to experience that from another perspective
RICK: to see the end of that. Yeah, and
KAREN: some of these issues like why you would have chosen your parents to have that abusive experience. Sometimes we don’t necessarily have those ready answers that Rob Schwartz, who wrote a book called your souls plan does a beautiful job of explaining why we might have made those choices, you
EBEN: got to remember, it’s not our ego that made the choice. It’s our higher soul and kind of soul group that made the choice from a much broader, much broader perspective of seeing multiple lifetimes and of realizing, you know, a kind of a growth a transformative pathway forward. And that’s where people really run into trouble. And that’s where meditation can be so handy, because in meditation, you can put that little voice in your head, your ego mind, annoying roommate is Michael singer calls it, you can put that into timeout, and start exploring your relationship as that kind of neutral observer connected to that primordial mind with a higher sense of purpose and growth. Good.
RICK: Okay, I’m just gonna move right along. Next question from Matthew in Indonesia. Do you think that within the next few decades, the materialists will be able to explain how nd is happened? If there is a biological marker, will that establish causation rather than correlation?
EBEN: Well, I would say materialists are in fact going extinct because I don’t have any answers relevant to to consciousness. Find it biological. No, you’re not going to find some biological molecular trigger. That makes all this happen. Again, you have to look at the giant picture. promissory material, promissory materialism. That’s what Sir John Eccles called it. He was a Nobel Laureate back in the mid 20th century. And he thought it was ridiculous that materialists would promise it someday all the extremely fascinating of spiritual features of human existence, which some day be reduced to, you know, the movement of particles and atoms and molecules in a physicalist model. And I would say that the trend in modern neuroscience, especially over the last few decades has been away from materialism. You know, materialism is kind of the low hanging fruit, you know, what we can measure in the lab and all that. And yet, in explaining it all, just like those fMRI cases, that show that psilocybin makes the brain go dark, not get active anyway, but the entire brain, there’s no region that has increased activity under the influence of psilocybin. So we need bigger explanations, and they’re not going to be from the world of materialism,
RICK: which is not to say that all this research on, you know, the neuro physiological correlates of meditation and higher states and all that is not a valuable thing. I mean, that’s, that’s great. It just doesn’t explain everything about it, it just gives you 60, some indication of what’s going on in the brain, when you have that and who I mean, it’s a little bit with nd ease and OBE is would be a little harder to study that because their heart is harder to predict when those are going to happen than
EBEN: it is. But you could do things like Target, you know, where the where the body is going in and out of by experiment, you can measure photons at the target site, there are many ways to scientifically take this to the next level. Yeah.
RICK: Okay. Here’s one from Felix. I don’t know where Felix is located. But the question is, how do we know? We’re aligned with what we came here to do? And what tips can you give us to stay on track? Or read the signs to stay more aligned? That’s a good question.
KAREN: Yeah. So this is I know, you’re wanting to ask answer quickly.
RICK: I mean, we have about 123456 left, and we don’t have to end exactly at two hours and go a little long, so just do justice to them.
KAREN: Yeah, so I think what you’re asking about is being aligned with your purpose, we all seem to feel as though we came here for a purpose. And people who have aunties come back, sometimes knowing their purpose, sometimes not knowing that, knowing that they have one, so it’s good that you’ve asked. So the way that you would know that you were aligned? Is how’s your life going? Are you happy? Do you have what you wish to have? Are things when you set projects in motion? Or do they? Do they, you know, come about very easily? Or do you have a lot of roadblocks? Do you have resistance to something that continues to come to you over and over again, sometimes what you resist is what you really need to dive into. So there’s lots of ways to cook to kind of understand this, it’s hard to explain it easier to explain if I knew more about this person situation. But one way that that I personally have felt as though I feel I am fulfilling my purpose is that I used to have a lot of anxiety around what is my purpose? What should I be doing? What activities will I do to perform my purpose, what I eventually realized is that I could just generate this feeling within that I was living my purpose. And as I started to generate, I am living my purpose, I’m living my purpose, and just really feeling as if that was the case, the external world around me completely changed. And I found myself in a completely different life that I never could have imagined. And while I was living the purpose, my purpose previous to my life, completely changing, that all of that was necessary to get me to where I am now. Now I definitely feel like I’m in the flow of my purpose. And so just kind of aligning yourself having a personal practice, really going into know yourself is really the biggest key Yes,
EBEN: I would say the value of meditation and centering prayer cannot be overstated in this discussion, it’s important to spend at least some time you know, on a frequent basis kind of going within and kind of being with yourself in that kind of silence and meditative mode. I believe that that’s been tremendously helpful to me in coming to kind of live my life purpose since my end Yeah,
RICK: no, when you have a spiritual practice or and you’re spiritually growing like that, it really lines your ducks up, you know, in a relative sense in terms of all the all the sort of circumstances of your life.
KAREN: Yeah, I often say that if you want to make a change in the outer world, pay attention to your inner world, and that’s when you’ll start to make progress.
RICK: Yeah, I heard Swami Saba pre Ananda talking about this. Just last night he was talking about what They call Swadharma, which means your your dharma, your purpose. They’re that course of action, which is really what you’re cut out to do. And there are so many different variables and stages of life and all kinds of considerations. It’s a little bit hard to work it all out intellectually. But if you kind of get in the flow of God’s will, we could we could put it, you end up serving your purpose quite nicely. And that doesn’t mean I mean, I’ve spent many times many years where I was doing stuff that had no ultimate profundity for me, you know, I was a computer consultant that was crawling around under people’s desks, you know, pulling out wires and stuff, even after I’ve been meditating for decades, and yeah, had earned some money. So okay, it wasn’t something I thought I would be doing all my life and and it wasn’t. Sometimes you just have to be patient and do what needs to be done.
KAREN: It’s more about how you are being rather than how you are doing Yeah, it’s another way to look at it. But of
EBEN: course, ultimately, the beautiful lessons of kind of this kind of discussion and sharing of these profound spiritual experiences like indies, inform all of us how to live our lives, better day to day, it’s not just about what happens when I die. But far more important in this discussion is how do I make my choices and live this life day after day after day, to reflect kind of my, my greater knowledge and wisdom. So it’s not just about meditating and centering prayer, but it’s about living that life that you discover as you come into more alignment with your higher soul,
RICK: Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else should be added unto thee. Alright, okay, here’s a question from Ravi in Sharjah, which I guess is in India. Robbie says I, too, am a neurosurgeon, and can only imagine how your nd must have changed your life. For those of us who are not fortunate to have had your experience, can you help us understand and reconcile these two dimensions? I suppose he means the worldly dimension with the sort of world spiritual dimension,
EBEN: to realize it first and foremost, we are spiritual beings in a spiritual universe. And I think this gets back at what Karen was talking about earlier, which she talked about the three planes of spiritual, mental and physical. And I would simply argue, that bothered kind of physics and study of the physical world, is showing us very clearly that there’s a top down, causality involved. It’s not all bottom up. That’s where some quantum physicists get confused. They think it’s understanding electron corks, protons, atoms, molecules all doing their dance according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and in our case, biology. And that that gives you all the answers. Well, in fact, no, the answers come from a deeper understanding of a top down set of causal principles. This is something that’s perfectly at home in the kind of quantum physics world, this notion of a mental layer of reality. And we’re simply taking that to the next level. So in terms of being a scientist, and trying to understand the modern version of kind of the overlap of the spiritual and the physical, is to remember, it’s all ultimately, kind of that spiritual mental universe giving us top down causal kind of impetus to all the events that we see emerging in the physical world. And, I mean, we get into our, in our book Living in a mindful universe, we talk a lot about how those relationships work. There are, I would especially recommend for the scientific mind, the words from Ed Kelly, irreducible mind, his book, and Trump 2007, beyond physicalism, his book from 2015. And the most recent book that just came out a month or two ago from Ed Kelly and UVA DOPPS group called consciousness unbound. And those three volumes together are very deep scientific, philosophical dive into the modern evidence showing the reality of what we’re speaking of here. And I would highly recommend those with a kind of scientific crowd that wants to
RICK: go deeper. Sounds like I should check out this ad Kelly guy, and not, too. Yeah, you
EBEN: should check out that gal Ed Kelly knows what he’s talking about. He’s the lead editor of those three books, but
KAREN: he likes to be under the radar.
EBEN: But he’s, yeah, he’s under the radar. It’s kind of hard to hard to find Ed, but he is, in many ways. He’s the magician behind the scenes for a lot of this will he maybe
KAREN: he’ll come out from behind that curtain.
EBEN: He might, but I was one of the main endorsers for his newest book consciousness unbound. And I will tell you, that book goes light years towards taking the whole scientific community on this pathway,
RICK: right. Next question from own car. What happens to the individual consciousness when one is under anesthesia? And when one is in deep sleep?
EBEN: Well, that’s a beautiful question. But I would say that it is often in realms that are you know, not this physical route. In fact, Karen can talk about kind of the ancient notions of our souls every night.
KAREN: Yes, some people will say that. And I know people where this actually that you actually remember this happening, where every night when we go to sleep, apparently our energy leaves our body and interacts in the spiritual realm that we don’t always remember. And of course, sometimes that’s where some dream fragments come from, some would say, but we’re doing this every single night. And sometimes people when they have that sleep paralysis that some people theorize that your energy hasn’t come quite back into the body yet after having left it. But yeah, it is a mystery, though with anesthesia.
EBEN: Well, what I would say to that is you got to remember that the the time clock of Earth time is, is a supporting element that supports the fiction of each and every one of our sentient being kind of incarnations and living in this physical world. But it is not an ultimate, ultimate arbiter of the flow of time, from the higher perspective of our consciousness in those realms. And if I would tell you the life review is a perfect example of how time flow when you realize in the life of you, that very major events can be represented to you in such detail, that it rivals even the kind of detail and information content of when you live through it the first time in the material realm in this life, you start to realize that this earth time is not the ultimate arbiter of the existence of consciousness and of its transformation.
KAREN: I will tell you, I just remembered it. There’s a woman called Michelle small, right, W ri ght and she’s written some books. She has a nature conservatory called perelandra, here in Virginia, and she actually has written books that talk about how every night when she goes to sleep, she is in another realm interacting with other people. And when she she never has a sleeping moment. And so, because she always maintains her awareness and one realm or the other fascinating read, very fascinating. And she’s she seems credible. Yeah.
RICK: I have a friend named Harry alto, whom I’ve interviewed on this show three times, and he said he hasn’t slept in about 60 years. Same thing. He probably snores, but he never loses pure awareness.
EBEN: Right? Yep. So that’s most of us don’t remember that entering that realm of Dota. Right. You know, when when our souls in that Dreamland. And likewise, I would say during anesthesia are our kind of soul and conscious awareness is it in a very different aspect? It’s not in four dimensional space time. But it’s certainly out in that realm of more primordial consciousness. And
RICK: of course, some people some
KAREN: of you probably are gonna say the same thing some under anesthesia Do you maintain where
RICK: they see the surgeons from the perspective of the ceiling, or they see a red sticker on the roof of the hospital or something like?
EBEN: Well, certainly that stuff happens in the setting of an indie so and I would say an indie he kind of resets what is possible, just like terminal lucidity. That often happens to a patient who might have been demented for months or years comatose, what have you. But the phenomenon often witnessed in a hospital or in a dying setting is that the soul can come back and reanimate kind of take over that body again, even in spite of the fact that doctors you know, physicalist materialist, doctors would say, There’s no way out
RICK: because the background is the world,
EBEN: you know that the soul comes back in and manifests and has this beautiful kind of access to memory and often at a time when they’re witnessing souls of departed loved ones. So that’s when, like my mother who passed over two years ago, she was deeply unresponsive for four days straight. But at 230 in the morning, on the second of those days, she woke up and was totally convinced her own mother was there in her presence, and she wanted to call all her children get the nurse in here, call my children tell her my mother’s here. And to me when I heard that I knew, Okay, she’s getting very close. That’s an authentic time, that she’s really very close to leaving this world, which he had a very real connection. And I’m not just saying that she thought it was real, it was real. Her mother was actually there. So that’s kind of the the syncline on those experiences to tell us of their reality.
RICK: Another quick question from own car. Why do NDAs happen to only some people?
EBEN: Well, it’s a great question, and I suspect it has to do with memory. And that if you look at the numbers, it’s somewhere between 18 and 20% of People who say for example, have a cardiac arrest and are clinically dead for a period of time, roughly one in five of them will have something that qualifies as a near death experience. And I would say that the other cases are incomplete or kind of a failure of memory to recall it, but also call around
KAREN: the hypnotherapist I mentioned earlier, he has been regressing people who had cardiac arrest, with no memory of anything happening. He’s regressing them back to that moment and finding that they are having that they are able to retrieve some memories. So I think you’re right. And also
EBEN: there is certainly a common story that sometimes people who have an indie II say in mid life will remember the events of an indie when they were a child, where they didn’t remember any of the indie events after that first indie. So in other words, the second indie kind of registers their memory of events that happened it for whatever reason, they didn’t bring back to this world after the first thing.
RICK: I have a weird thing sometimes happens once in a while, I’ll remember some dream I had 40 years ago. I hadn’t remembered it the next morning, but also who had that dream? Yeah, it’s kind of cool.
EBEN: Well, that’s because of the richness of that kind of realm of the one mark of our higher soul. And we have access to all manner of kind of information important to us.
RICK: Okay, here’s one from Matt in Vermont program, forgetting of our real nature as spirit of our eternal being past lives, etc, seems to serve an important purpose, that life lessons are more meaningful when we aren’t aware of the true context of human life. But it seems that the veil of program forgetting is thinning. Is the increase seeing through the veil, an intended new phase of the program. Is the program changing?
EBEN: I would say absolutely, that’s part of this awakening, we’re talking about the veil is thinning globally, board, more people are coming out and sharing these experiences, they’re being put out in the literature, put out videos put out for all the world to kind of embrace, assemble, learn from, and I do believe the veil is very much thinning, you have to kind of wonder how is the system even set up in the first place that we’re not supposed to remember our dreams, or remember, no paths life in between life memories beyond age five, or six. And I believe that the questioner here is hit the nail on the head in many ways that serves a purpose of giving a skin in the game and some buy in to these lives. And in many ways, indies, have kind of short circuited that whole process. Because up until the late 1960s, most cardiac arrest patients went on to die. Since we develop resuscitation techniques in the late 60s, we now millions of people who have been to the other side and come back to share the tale. And that I believe is an intentional part of the awakening that’s happening.
KAREN: And in terms of the veil thinning, the theory of the Yuga cycles would say that’s actually very expected right now, because we’re in the energy age where we start to really identify with ourselves as energy. And of course, that’s what’s happening in science since the electron was discovered back in the 1800s. And so we’re rapidly moving into that energy age, we’re actually right in it, according to the you guys, and that is exactly what should happen is the veil should start to thin.
RICK: So another sense in which I think the veil is thinning, which is actually related to the name of this program, Buddha at the Gas Pump, is that I think maybe a long time ago, a couple 1000 years ago kind of took a Superman like the Buddha to break through the the wasn’t even a veil, it was like a thick curtain that was blocking enlightenment. But these days, it’s thin so much, perhaps because of the efforts of people like the Buddha or perhaps because like you say, the cycles of time the Hugo’s, the veil is quite diaphanous now, and lots of people are having spiritual awakenings. So you may encounter a Buddha at the Gas Pump.
KAREN: Yeah. And the lesson is, what do you do with that information? And they talk about this in the UK is how we end up destroying ourselves because we’re not using that power for good. And so this power to interact with the energy, you know, created the nuclear ball. And and you know, what, what have we done since then we’ve avoided them. And so if we can keep doing that, and, you know, use this power only for good, I would say then, we’ll go
EBEN: a lot through that one of the deepest lessons is through that binding force of love that is so apparent to virtually all near death, experiencers and other spiritual journeyers who’ve been that deep. That power of love is a very important feature. And it’s what I believe we’ve been challenged to learn for 1000s of years and yet humanity has not taken that lesson of, of love and the infinite healing power of love to heart. And that’s why the scientific revolution is so important. Because by bringing science and spirituality back together, we’ll begin to refocus on that kind of prime directive of, of love and kindness and compassion and forgiveness dominating our world
RICK: here. Okay, next question from Nicole in Kansas City, you mentioned dogs jumping in the place you went during your NDA. Did you see any animals you personally knew from your life? I asked this because I said, are pets just as close as human family members?
EBEN: I did not. And I can tell you though, because you had amnesia, I had amnesia, that’s an important piece of you know what, even though it’s an atypical feature, you don’t usually find that nd ease. I’ve come to realize in the months and years since my coma, that the amnesia was very important for some of the deepest lessons that that I gleaned from the experience. But that amnesia prevented me from having such recognition
KAREN: that I will tell you that Paul, around that one of the cases I’m recalling that he regressed, a cardiac arrest patient to a near death experience. This man, this Canadian big hunter type guy, encountered his hunting dog who had died and just put him into, you know, tears. And he’s really
EBEN: funny story because he would, every time his heart would stop. He’s there in the spiritual world, reunited with his beloved pet. And then the doctors were resuscitated. And he come back. And he’s like, No, I don’t want to be here. Yeah, so it’s funny
KAREN: that yes, all all evidence ports, points towards pets
EBEN: being there. It’s one of the biggest myths of 20th century science that animals don’t have a rich spiritual existence. And I think that’s a huge lesson that needs to come from this scientific revolution about the nature of consciousness is we need to treat all animals with that respect. Because they are spiritual beings, too. They share in just one bite experience that we’re in Yeah,
RICK: I saw sweet cartoon the other day, it was like the gates of heaven and St. Peter’s standing there. And then there was a dog and a cat sitting outside the gate. And they’re kind of looking off in the other direction. And St. Peter’s like, you know, come on in. And they said, No, we’re waiting for someone. That’s right. We hope we’ll see. sleeping on the floor here.
KAREN: So it’s this one.
RICK: Okay, here comes another question. This one is, from Ravi from Raj Kumar in Delhi. Please ask Evan about his profound encounter with God or ohm as he puts it, and the wisdom that can be shared from that encounter?
EBEN: Well, I would say what I’ve come to realize is that infinitely loving and healing force of love of God, it doesn’t matter if you want to call it God or brahman or Allah, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit. All those names are misleading, because there’s really a one unifying force of love and connection of kindness, compassion, acceptance, right at the core of this university, I would say is the very source of our conscious awareness. It’s kind of a complete redefining of the nature of God and consciousness that in many ways emerged from my journey. But it showed me that the apparent darkness and evil in this world is really just the lack of the light and love that infinitely healing power of that God force. Any of us can recover, that force of love. And another important corollary to this is there’s not an actual, opposing spiritual force of darkness or evil. Those are just the absence of that light in love. That’s why unconditional love has such infinite power to heal all wounds and to heal this world.
KAREN: And why did you call that deity I call that
EBEN: deity all because that was the sound that was so deeply memorable from that core version of the experience, the core realm as I call it, was dominated by this in for one thing I had the higher dimensional multiverse there, it collapsed down into these eternal, over spheres are the lessons I was to learn. But that was in the midst of this infinite dimensional infinity and eternity, that gave me that resonant sound of all that’s what I call that deity. When I came back to this world, it has nothing to do with any kind of religious predisposition. It just is the the natural groundwork of my of my journey and my realization of the kind of personal linkage of that infinitely loving God force.
RICK: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting to consider that we don’t have dark bulbs that emit dark. We have light bulbs. And if we ever have a dark room, no matter how long it’s been dark, as soon as you turn on a light bulb, you’re adding a second element, so to speak, and the darkness is dispelled.
KAREN: Right, great, beautiful now.
EBEN: That’s what it’s all about. That spiritual realm has an infinite supply of it. Love and Light and any of us can serve to bring that into our own lives and to this world at
RICK: large. Yeah. Okay, this may be the final questions. Another. Okay, this is from another Ravi. But it’s a different Ravi than the previous one rabbit died Lanie. Okay, yes, the first question was asked already. So the second question is, as a physician, how has your understanding of disease changed after nd? Do you still believe in the germ theory as an ideology for infectious disease? What’s your take on the karma theory of disease?
EBEN: Well, I would say there’s much more along the lines with the karma notion. And for in my own life, and looking back on it, for example, there are several things where at the time, I might have thought I was going through a real hardship. For example, in 1991, my family and I came to a decision that I needed to stop drinking alcohol, I never had any trouble at work. But on my nights off, I tended to rely too heavily on a drink. And so I stopped, I look back on the gift of that not being that I stopped drinking alcohol, that the gift was I was born alcoholic in the first place, because that gave me a stage setting and a certain set of hardships that actually enabled me to grow. Likewise, my medic Benito encephalitis in 2008, a weakened coma due to a disease that should have killed me was a tremendous gift. And of course, many people would say, Well, it’s a gift because you came back? Well, yeah, that’s very true. Because when you look at near death experiences with this kind of healing, you realize that miraculous kind of extraordinary unexpected healing is within the realm of human potential, when we have this kind of overlap with our spiritual self. So it’s kind of a deeper knowing of connected with the universe and a sense of purpose. In fact, there’s a book by a friend of mine, Dr. Norman naive in a ETM, called healing from the inside out. He’s a pulmonologist intensivist. So he spent all his time working with extremely sick people nice to use. And his book is a beautiful example of how illness can actually lead your soul into tremendous growth, that really couldn’t be accomplished any other way. So these hardships can be tremendous gifts, when looked at in the proper way. And I’ve come to fully believe that in many ways, our higher souls and soul groups do select the challenges and hardships in life. And in many ways, those are the true kind of mileposts and indicators of a pathway forward. It’s how we deal with those hardships and challenges, are we able to recover a sense of love and purpose to the universe, in the midst of these challenges, and that’s where I believe we can really grow and come to see the hardships as gifts, and in many ways that altered the way I look at kind of disease and illness and injury. And all of that is to look more at kind of the gift nature of these challenges.
RICK: Yeah, and I don’t think everything you just said Would, would contradict germ theory. It’s like, you know, a person can’t
KAREN: turn theory is still valid germ
EBEN: theory is still very valid, but they’re just like, you know, those fMRI, so people on psilocybin, it’s not going to give you all the answers, you need to dig deep. Yeah. And likewise, that’s why I love and use them who we work with. She’s a psychiatrist, who wrote that pilot study looking at Sacred acoustics and relief of anxiety. But she wrote a beautiful book called fulfilled. And it’s about a spiritual approach to psychiatry that I think is incredibly valuable in the current era, to help people kind of come into alignment with who they truly are, with his higher soul notion of self with a very optimistic way of looking at the hardships and challenges in life as opportunities for growth and transformation.
RICK: Yeah, well, the reason I said that is that, you know, these days, there are some people walking around who say things like, you know, oh, I don’t need to wear a mask, I don’t need to social distance. I don’t need to do this so that I just have a strong immune system, I believe in myself, and you know, stuff like that. So, you know, yeah, obviously, strong immune system and not having underlying
KAREN: what about what about not infecting others if you’re an asymptomatic carrier?
RICK: Yeah, there are. Do you ever see that graphic about if everybody walked around naked? This is a little gross, but if everybody walked around naked, and some guy peed on you, you get wet. Now, if you had pants on and he peed on you, you’d get less wet, but if he had pants on, you wouldn’t get wet at all. Example, why not wearing a mask works?
EBEN: Well, the mask issue I would say, you know, we drive on the right side of the road. And we all kind of accept that that keeps us safer than if we just drive on any side of the road. We want to drive on it. I would say mask wearing is like driving on the right side of the road or seatbelt. It’s just good public health. Just do it. It’s not a political Yeah, just check each other. Right.
RICK: And and we don’t say that not being allowed to drive 90 miles an hour on the highway is a restriction on my freedom. You know, it’s, you know, the only car on the highway, then maybe I could do that. But obviously there are other people involved.
EBEN: Exactly. Good point.
RICK: All right. I don’t know if that’s kind of weird note to end on. But we’ve covered a lot of ground.
EBEN: Yeah, we have you’ve done an excellent job.
RICK: You’ve done all the work, I’ve just asked a few questions.
EBEN: Questions, and
KAREN: you’ve kind of steered it in a beautiful direction, it takes a good interviewer to be a good interviewer. We do a lot of these.
EBEN: So we recognize that somebody is, you know, an expert.
KAREN: And I just want to thank you. I’ve heard of your program for many years. And I just want to thank you for doing all of this. And now I’ve learned a little bit more about you. And people like you are critical to helping the world awaken and to move forward and bringing all of the varied voices that you bring to your program is just so inspiring and helpful. So thanks for all that you
RICK: do. We really appreciate. And thank you. I mean, Brady must experience when people say, Oh, thank you so much. You must feel like, Am I really doing anything? I mean, I’m just doing doing what I love. And that’s not even me doing it. And it’s just, you know, so it’s almost inappropriate to accept Thanks.
EBEN: Well, it really is, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I mean, this is authentic, kind of heartfelt way of living life, you know, helping others helping the world to wake up. And to me, it just, you know, goes far beyond what I could ever do as a doctor trying to help individual patients as a neurosurgeon. I feel like I’m able to help more in this particular fashion. Yeah, I’m doing what I I love to do. That’s great. And you seem to be the same.
RICK: Yeah, sometimes I feel like people who have nd ease. It was almost a setup. You know, it’s like, we’re gonna give this guy an NDA. We’re gonna send him back and then he’s gonna be an emissary for you know what he’s gonna learn.
KAREN: A lot of indie authors end up telling, saying and Anita Moorjani being one of them, and Mary Neal, especially, I don’t know if you know, Mary Neal’s case, an orthopedic surgeon, but she was told you’re gonna come back and share this with people and she really didn’t want to. She still doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t.
EBEN: She doesn’t Beautiful. Beautiful. That’s
RICK: great. All right. Well, thank you so much. And thank you. For those to those who’ve been listening or watching sorry, we had a little glitch with our question form. We’ll figure out what, what the problem with that was. And there are many more a few, you know, scheduled. If you look at the upcoming interviews, page will, you’ll see what we’ve got coming up and usually scheduled two or three months in advance and just keep pushing it forward. This is our 12th season now of doing this, and I hope to at least do another 12 I don’t know how he feels.
EBEN: Keeping up you’re doing a great job for people who want to kind of stay in touch with us on a on a reasonable basis beyond Eben Alexander calm and sacred acoustics comm I would suggest our bi weekly webinar that Karen and I have been doing for more than a year now. Interviewing guests and you can access that united in hope and healing calm. Okay.
RICK: Send me a link pretty well, we’ll see. Yeah, because I don’t think I have that on my list of things to link to. So send me a link to that. And I’ll put that on the show notes.
EBEN: Alright, Rick, thanks so much.
RICK: Okay, thank you. And we’ll hopefully we’ll run into each other in person. All right. I love it. Alright, thanks. Bye bye.
