Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump, an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and about spiritually related topics. If you would like to check out past interviews, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the “past interviews” menu, where you’ll see over 660 of them organized in several different ways.
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My guest today is Dr. Maurio Beauregard, PhD. He’s a neuroscientist previously affiliated with the Department of Psychology, University of Arizona and currently resides in Quebec. He has received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Montreal. He also underwent postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston and the Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University.
Dr. Beauregard is the author of more than 100 publications in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. He was the first neuroscientist to use functional neuroimaging to investigate the neural underpinnings of voluntary control in relation to emotion. Because of his research into the neuroscience of consciousness, he was selected in 2000 by the World Media Net to be one of the “100 pioneers of the 21st century.”
In addition, his groundbreaking research on the neurobiology of spiritual experiences, including near-death experiences, has received international media coverage. In 2008, he was invited to participate in a symposium held at the UN. In 2013, he participated in a dialogue with the Dalai Lama in regard to the new science of mind. Dr. Beauregard has appeared on several radio programs in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His research has been featured on the Discovery Channel and in many newspapers and magazines. He’s received a number of distinctions.
Dr. Beauregard authored “The Spiritual Brain” (HarperCollins) and “Brain Wars.” In these books, he demonstrates that mind and consciousness are much more than the activity of nerve cells in our brains, which is in large part what we’re going to talk about today. He also shows that spirituality is a central feature of human beings that cannot be reduced to physical processes. Dr. Beauregard actively contributes to the articulation of the new post-materialist scientific paradigm. Co-author of “The Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science,” which has been signed by several hundred scientists, he is also one of the founders of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Sciences.
Rick: What’s the name of your new book?
Maurio: “Expanding Reality: The Emergence of Postmaterialist Science.”
Rick: There was an experience that you described in your book. I’ll just start reading it. “One evening, I was so desperate that I mentally bellowed at the sky. Apparently, my supplication did not fall on deaf ears.” And this is because you had been very sick for a long time. Then “a Being of Light, radiating immense and unconditional love,” “reassured [you] telepathically that what [you] were experiencing was no disease, but rather a process of transmutation.” He told you you were not alone. You had to hang in there. He told you about certain events that would take place shortly in your life and that your disease would diminish over the coming months. All of those predictions came true. So let’s start with that. What more would you like to tell people about that? And the word “transmutation” is interesting. It’s like you were being squeezed out like a cloth in order to be ready for something that you were supposed to do in life.
Maurio: When I was younger, at primary school, I was very good and skipped a few years. This was fine, but I didn’t want to arrive at the university too young. So I decided to take a year off. I went to work in a humanitarian hospital, working with handicapped children. The hospital was directed by Catholic nuns, and very close to Jerusalem in Israel. I became very sick there. I was 17 years old and contracted an infection. But we didn’t know what exactly. Fortunately, the symptoms vanished after about a week. So I worked there for a number of months. Then I came back to Canada.
A year after that, I started my studies at the University of Montreal in psychology. I was beginning my second semester when one morning, I woke up and I had lots of symptoms in my body. My visual perception was altered. I was not taking any drugs. I didn’t know what was happening. I was very weak. To make a long story short, I’d been forced to quit my studies at the university and I went back to my parents.
My parents were farmers in a region of Quebec that is called the Eastern Townships, close to the Vermont border. I spent almost a year there, lying down in a bed like a patient suffering from terminal cancer or AIDS. I was not able to eat or do anything. I felt like dying. That’s when I decided that many years before that– it was 11 years before that– I had another experience, a mystical experience, on the farm of my parents. During that experience, I had the impression that I downloaded my life mission, my program. I saw clearly that I was eight years old. It was during the summer break, during the vacations in July. I received– or I saw clearly what I had to do in my life, what I would do as an adult. I realized that I would be involved in a scientific movement. The goal was to demonstrate to the general population on the planet Earth that, contrary to what mainstream science was saying at that time, mind, consciousness, and spirit are not located or produced by the brain. They are interacting with the brain.
Rick: You had that cognition when you were eight?
Maurio: Exactly. Very strange.
Rick: That’s pretty good. I mean, had you been thinking about that kind of thing?
Maurio: No.
Rick: You were just like a kid. You were playing baseball or whatever.
Maurio: I was in the woods when it happened. So I told my parents about that. But they didn’t understand anything about it. They couldn’t understand how a child could talk about these things and could know something like that. But anyway, that’s when I decided to become a neuroscientist. I knew I had to become a neuroscientist. So that was the beginning.
But 12 years later, when I felt very sick, I was confused because I knew my life mission, if you will. But I was not in a physical condition anymore to be able to realize that life plan because I was too sick. I couldn’t understand that. I was even thinking about killing myself at one point. So that’s when I asked for help. My parents were religious. They were Roman Catholic. I was an altar boy when I was younger. I was a religious boy at that time. I decided to ask for help. A few days after that, during one night, I had the impression that my soul body, or my spiritual body, if you will, was extracted forcefully from my physical body. At the heart, at the level of the heart, from what people call the heart center or chakra. That’s what happened. Then I saw a beautiful being of light. I thought it seemed to be more masculine. So I thought he was a guide. He showed me things about how you can end up when you decide to kill yourself. What can happen. In what kind of sphere of existence you will end up for a while.
Rick: Not for eternity, instead of a dark place or something, that you would end up for a while?
Maurio: Yeah, grayish. So that was the first part of the experience. Then he told me about what was going on in my body. To not get discouraged, because it was essential, apparently, for my transformation and for the deciphering of my future research program. So I was not sure what was the meaning of all this. But yeah, he talked about a process of transmutation, total transmutation.
Rick: Do you have a better understanding of it now?
Maurio: Oh, yes. That was the turning point of my experience. Overall, I’d been extremely sick. It took seven years for a famous doctor in Montreal to discover what was going on. He identified five different types of viruses that I had contracted in Israel. The severity of the results of the tests was incredible. He told me that he didn’t understand why I was not dead. Because he had seen other patients before like this. I told him about my experience. He was a bit open-minded. His parents were also farmers, so I thought, perhaps this guy will be able to hear. So I told him everything. He said, you know, medicine is limited. It’s based on science. But it’s also an art. We don’t know everything. I was considered to be a miraculous case, apparently.
Rick: I find it so interesting that you had this download when you were eight. Then this being of light was talking to you. I feel like we’re guided, that this physical reality that we live in and perceive is not the only thing. That there’s much more going on, we could say higher levels or subtler levels and many of the goings-on pertain to us. You know, there are beings who are guiding us, inspiring us, who have almost a vested interest in our success in certain areas. We’re here to accomplish something. They’re helping us and nudging us along.
Maurio: But you know, what happened after that is that I became extremely psychic and spiritual, very spiritual. But for whatever reason, I left the church. I was very spiritual, but the tradition didn’t interest me for whatever reason. When I was younger, my parents were hoping that perhaps I would become a priest eventually. When I was very young, six, seven years, I was already an altar boy. It was something of value back then, because we’re talking about the late ’60s, beginning of the ’70s. Religion was still very influential in Quebec. But no, I decided to leave and to follow my own path. That’s how I also received, at about the same time, the grand access of my scientific career, what I would do, the most important questions.
Rick: “Received” meaning kind of psychically cognized.
Maurio: Yes.
Maurio: So I was in my early 20s, but it was tough to go back to university, because my directors, my supervisors, one neurologist and the other a psychiatrist, they were atheists, materialists. They didn’t want me to go back to university, because they thought I was– I had a schizoid type of personality. That’s what they told me.
Rick: They thought you were crazy.
Maurio: Yes. Yes. Bright, but crazy.
Rick: Right. Because you were telling him some of this stuff, right?
Maurio: Yes. I felt I had to, to be honest. But it was not the right move, because it put me on a blacklist. So I needed a miracle to be able to go back. The doctor who examined me at the hospital in Montreal, he wrote a letter for me to try to convince the guys at the university that I was not crazy, and it did work.
That’s when I went back to the university.
Rick: Can you say more about this psychic, spiritual stuff that was going on?
Maurio: A lot of remote viewing and clairvoyance, telepathy with people who were close, my family, especially my sister, but also other people. The impression of being in touch with deceased people that I knew. I turned 60-years-old last summer, and it’s still like that. Never changed.
Rick: Interesting. You never really tried to do this stuff. It just became natural.
Maurio: Yeah, but I discovered that my mother was like that, but she didn’t say it.
Rick: Ah, runs in the family.
Maurio: Like, yeah, but she didn’t know if it was OK or not. She didn’t want to–
Rick: Didn’t want to get burned in the stake.
Maurio: Yes. So OK, but she was a lot like that herself.
Rick: So it’s a fascinating story. I love it. I wish we all had such a clear vision of our purpose in life at a young age. A lot of us bounce around for a while before we find it, if we find it. But you obviously had a mission. I mean, some people, if we were to talk to some people who talk about life between lives and all, they would probably say that you agreed on all this before you even came here.
Maurio: Oh, I’ve been told that.
Rick: Do you have any memory of that?
Maurio: I’ve been told that by the being of light. He said you don’t remember it, but yes, that was part of your plan.
Rick: You probably heard of Michael Newton, and then Rob Schwartz, whom I’ve interviewed. They say that any significant thing that we end up doing in life was pretty much prearranged. Any significant person that we’re involved with, or an accident, or perhaps even your sickness period, all that stuff was foreseen.
Maurio: Exactly.
Rick: Do you feel like the sickness period was an essential purgation of some kind, a purification? Maybe karmically, if not physiologically.
Maurio: Something like that, yes. It was very difficult. My body, there was inflammation everywhere in the body, including my brain. My brain was infected. That’s why my visual perception was altered. It was very severe. That’s why the doctor, the specialist, told me, it’s a miracle that you’re still alive after all those years.
Rick: So we could conclude then, so far, from what you’ve been saying, that there are not only people on Earth, but there are higher beings and higher dimensions who very much feel strongly that humanity needs to change its thinking, that it needs to change the paradigm on which it functions, namely that the world is a material thing and that the brain produces consciousness and all. So why would you say that these beings and also people like yourself, who work on this stuff, feel that this is so important? What kind of difference is it going to make? What would happen to the world if it really changed?
Maurio: It’s a matter of the kind of worldview we entertain. For instance, the people we call the founders of modern science, like Galileo, Galilei, Descartes, Newton, and company, were deeply spiritual and religious as well. But what happened is that in the church, there was a council. The church, the pope, and the cardinals let the emerging scientists know that the church would take care of the non-physical world, the non-material world. It was of interest to theologians, philosophers. The so-called material world would be the object of research of the emerging scientists, the new science, the physicists back then especially. The physicists, they didn’t have the choice. They accepted that. So after a few generations of scientists, the new scientists during the 19th century, they forgot totally about the history of science and they didn’t know that. They were not aware of that, except for a few exceptions, and rare exceptions. So they thought that the founders of modern science were strictly materialists, that they only believed in– back then, they were talking about corpuscles, billiard balls, small billiard balls, and that were composing the universe. That was it. There was nothing else. So that’s how, after a number of generations, during the 19th century, science became synonymous with materialism. It became what has been called the scientific materialist worldview.
According to this worldview, everything is composed in the universe of material principles, corpuscles, particles, whatever, or waves. So this means that when you die, there’s nothing– your personality and your consciousness, they vanish automatically. This also means that you don’t have any free will. You cannot really exert any effect on your brain or on the other physiological systems connected to the nervous system, the immune system, the endocrine system. So you only have an illusion of influencing. But in reality, you’re like a robot, a biological machine, sophisticated, but still. So that’s what I’m trying to say, is that this worldview, which became an ideology, has had a very negative impact on the world, on society. It became really an ideology by the end of the 19th century. During most of the 20th century, this was the central dogma. So if you were a scientist and you dared publicly challenge this, there was a price that you would have to pay, ultimately. This is exactly what happened.
But there were, according to the– I don’t know if you are aware of the work about what we call paradigm, so-called paradigm.
Rick: Thomas Kuhn?
Maurio: Yeah, for instance. So we could say that materialism was like the big or the meta paradigm, which ruled everything. But after a while, there were scientists who were investigating other types of phenomena than physics. So they were not in mathematics, but they were studying what was called back then parapsychology. So maybe extrasensory perception, like telepathy or clairvoyance, remote viewing, precognition also. But some of them were also investigating the possible influence of mind over the material world, over matter. That was an avenue of research which started at the end of the 19th century. In 1974, Dr. Moody, Raymond Moody, the psychiatrist, I met him on a couple of occasions during conferences. He reported what he called a near-death experience. Then after him, we discovered that millions of people have had near-death experiences in the Western world since the 1950s. That’s what the statistics are showing. These sorts of phenomena were considered, if you were looking at them through the lens of the materialist paradigm, they were considered to be anomalies. But a paradigm, it’s the type of lens that you are wearing. If you challenge the materialist paradigm, then it’s possible to accept these phenomena and to integrate them into another theoretical structure, another framework or paradigm. This is exactly what we did. I knew exactly that that was part of my job to do that. So when I was at the University of Arizona, it was also an idea of Gary Schwartz who invited me there. We talked about organizing a symposium of maverick researchers in various fields: black sheep, physics, biology.
Maurio: So there were people like Rupert Sheldrake, the famous British biologist. Dean Radin, one of the best psychologists in the world, or psi researcher, as they say now. People like that in neuroscience. I was taking care of neuroscience, but we had mathematicians and a few philosophers. We spent three days together in Tucson. At the end, I wrote a document that was called the Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science. It was co-written by my colleagues. It’s been signed by hundreds of scientists from around the world. So post-materialist, it’s vague. It doesn’t mean what it is, but what we’re saying is that we need a different paradigm. The old way cannot explain a ton of phenomena related to mind consciousness, spirituality, spiritual experiences. So we need something else. Since it was in 2014, the Manifesto, a few years after that, we created the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Science. Since then, there’s been a growing movement.
When I was younger, when I began my career as a young scientist, I had an encounter with a man, a famous neuroscientist, one of the pioneers of neuroscience, Dr. Herbert Jasper. He was the friend of Dr. Penfield. They created the Montreal Neurological Institute at the end of the 1920s. So he allowed me to talk to him. He was about 93 years old at that moment. He asked me about my plan and why I wanted to talk to him. So I told him about my vision for the future. He was shaking his head and said they will demolish you. You will have a very hard life. It will be very difficult for you. Don’t do that. Play the game. Be smart. If you play the game, you’re bright, you will benefit from the system. You will move upward in the hierarchy, and you will end up at the top of the pyramid. But if you don’t, you’ll be a black sheep. You’ll be seen as a heretic. I was very disappointed with my meeting with this famous researcher. That’s what he had been doing for his entire career, even though he was not a materialist. To protect himself. That’s what people were doing. But I was young, and I was rebellious. I’m still rebellious. So I decided, who cares? I want to shape the system. Even though it may cost me dearly, I don’t care. I’ll do it. I know that’s what I have to do. And I did. I was expelled from the University of Montreal in 2013.
Rick: Really? For not being a materialist?
Maurio: I was working at the medical school. The dean of the school and my direct directors of the departments where I was working were materialists. At first, I was doing the kind of work that they enjoy, working with big pharma, checking the impact of drugs on the brain. This brings a lot of money to the institution. But I didn’t want to do that. I knew I had to do something else, something totally different. I wanted to show that the brain was not the producer of my consciousness spirit. So they thought I was totally crazy and were warning me. Each year, I was asked to go to the office of the big boss at the med school. Sometimes there were a few people. They were looking at me and threatening me because I started to study near-death experiences. I was the first to use a scanner, a brain imaging scanner, to examine what’s happening during spiritual experiences in Carmelite nuns, cloistered nuns, things like that. The media was craving this kind of research all over the world. I was becoming very famous. They didn’t like that because that was not the kind of work they were expecting from me. So they started threatening me. They told me, do you realize that we have the power to greatly influence what will happen to you and your future from a professional point of view? I was not responding. I was not listening. So finally, after several years of confrontation, they decided to let me go. They didn’t renew my contract as a researcher. So that’s what happened.
It’s a funny story because a few days after that, I didn’t know Gary Schwartz. We never met. Gary Schwartz received at about the same time, a sort of intuition, an inner voice telling him to contact me. He knew who I was, even though he didn’t know me personally. After a few days, I received an email from him. He said, I know that it will look very strange. But there’s something compelling me, urging me to contact you and to ask you, is there anything I can do for you? He didn’t know why. So I responded to him immediately. We talked over the phone. Then he said, my goodness, we would be honored to have somebody like you here at the University of Arizona. Because over there, that’s where the first center for the research on consciousness, the first Center of Consciousness Studies, emerged in 1995. So for whatever reason, there were more open-minded scientists than on the East Coast or in Montreal or in Europe in general. So I did a collaboration. That’s how it started. That’s very interesting.
Rick: That’s a great story. You’ve probably heard Max Planck saying that science progresses through a series of funerals. Because these guys get so stuck in their rut. Everybody’s so concerned about their salary and their tenure and all this stuff. Whatever happened to finding out what’s real and investigating what’s true? It’s like that goes out the window.
Maurio: I learned that science is a human institution like other human institutions. So it’s not necessarily about the truth, but it’s about who gets the most money, reputation, fame, glory, rewards, awards. I was an idealist. I was only interested in the truth, really.
Rick: Ironically, you might get all that stuff during your lifetime, the money and the fame and all that stuff. But in 100 years, everyone will have forgotten about you. But they will be remembering the people who are mavericks. Those are the people who end up being honored for changing the way the world works.
Maurio: When they had a revolution in physics, from classical physics to the new physics that they call quantum physics, it took 30 years for quantum physics to establish itself. It didn’t happen like that. It took three decades.
Rick: There’s actually some benefit to that. We mentioned Thomas Kuhn and the structure of scientific revolutions. He describes that paradigms have a certain inertia. That’s good, because a paradigm shouldn’t just be toppled the moment some little question comes along. It takes repeated buffeting by anomalies until eventually the anomalies get so strong that the paradigm has to collapse. Then a new paradigm gets formed. There’s a period of transition between the old and the new that can be kind of chaotic. But it’s OK that things might take a little while to change, because everything would be kind of chaotic if everything changed too easily.
Maurio: Yes, but things are changing. I never thought I would see something like that. Even philosophers who were deeply materialists, philosophers of mind, interested in mind consciousness, neuroscientists, famous neuroscientists, like Christophe Koch, who was working with Francis Crick, very materialist. He changed his mind. Now he’s becoming what we call technically a panpsychist. So he believes that there’s consciousness or mind everywhere in the universe. Now you can see more and more books from philosophers and scientists about the waning of materialism. We are in a transition period. But I cannot tell you what exactly will be the path, the new theory, the big theory. But I think that I know we need at least some– I have some clues about it. Because first of all, we need to recognize the existence of what we call mind. Because mind, for materialist theories, either it does not exist, it’s only an artifact, an illusion, or it does exist, but it doesn’t exert any effect at all. It’s like steam produced by the engine of a train or something like that.
Rick: How can they say that? Because in my mind, I think I want to go and get something to drink. Then my body gets up and I go. So isn’t that an effect of my mind producing– making me do that?
Maurio: Well, if you’re committed to materialism, what you will say is that your impression and your desire, your motivation, et cetera, it’s only electrical and chemical activity in your brain. So they will say it’s one part of your brain involved in executive functions, where the huge prefrontal cortex that we have, sends information to motor structures in the brain, and then that’s how it works. You have the impression, you’re under the illusion that it’s you. But in reality, it’s the brain, regions of the brain affecting other structures, other regions in your brain. That’s it. You don’t need a ghost. That’s what they were telling me when I was younger. We don’t need a ghost in the machine. There’s no ghost in the machine. So they didn’t understand my conception. I was telling them about the so-called psi phenomena. So they had to deny their existence to maintain their materialist worldview. The same thing for near-death experiences. But what about a so-called near-death experience when there’s a cardio arrest of your heart, and at the same time of breathing, which means clinical death? How do you explain that? So they were telling me, oh, pure coincidence. But at a certain point, they don’t have any explanation anymore. They’re trapped. But what I discovered is that me and many others, like Sheldrake and several others, think it’s an ideology. You’re emotionally attached to your ideology. It’s like politics, for instance. If you’re a left-winger, right-winger, you’re communism versus socialism versus capitalism, and so on and so forth. Scientists are human beings. They are very deeply involved in their life, their ideological life is built on a theoretical structure. And you arrive there. I was very young. I was trying to convince a lot of people. I’ve had physical trouble with people, because some of them try to attack me, because it’s a matter of emotion. It becomes very emotional.
Rick: Really? I mean, they try to physically attack you?
Maurio: Yeah. Yeah, because it’s like a religion. It’s your religion.
Rick: Ah, amazing. So you’re there, and you’re young.
Maurio: It reminds me, 15 years ago, I was invited to Paris to the oldest and the most prestigious university, the Sorbonne in Paris. They asked me to talk for about two hours. At the end of the talk, there were a number of very old scientists who were members of the Academy of Science who commented on what you just presented. I was seeing them. Several of them were becoming red, and they were angry. The president of the committee told me, it’s too bad that we’re not a few hundred years ago. I had an idea what he meant.
Rick: Because you’d be burned at the stake or something?
Maurio: Exactly. Yeah. That’s what we should do with you.
Rick: Wow.
Maurio: It was 2007. You see? So that gives you–
Rick: Maybe you were burned at the stake in some past life.
Maurio: I don’t know. But it was like that for a while. I would tell you that since about seven, eight years– and I’ve traveled all over the planet. Things are really changing, 10 years, perhaps. There’s a change in the world. Now, you can go to a very prestigious institution, university, and you can talk about these things, and they won’t attack you anymore, which means that there’s an evolution, a progress. They will listen to you, even though they do not agree. They don’t think that you’re a flake automatically. Things are changing. For the people, the general population, well, damn. They knew. They were open to all these ideas decades ago. They were in advance relative to scientists and social institutions, of course.
Rick: It’s true. I mean, a lot of the movies and books portray these kinds of ideas, Star Wars, the force. That’s interesting. Aside from your experience when you were younger, have you ever had any formal debates with people, materialists? If so, how does it go? What are some of the objections they raise? What are some of your counterarguments?
Maurio: I stopped doing that very rapidly, because sometimes it was turning ugly.
Rick: Too unpleasant.
Maurio: Yes, and I’m not like that. I don’t need to impose my view on other people. I’m not like that. They were using insults, personal insults. They were not addressing the facts, the evidence. So I decided to let go of this. It was not very productive. Now I’m more interested in talking to people or doing interviews with people who are at least a bit open minded with regard to these questions.
Rick: Have you ever talked to Sam Harris or read any of his books?
Maurio: I read one of his books, but no, I didn’t talk to him.
Rick: I’d like to see a conversation between you and him, because he’s this real spiritual guy. He’s been doing spiritual practice for ages. He’s done psychedelics in a very careful way and things. But he also prides himself on being an atheist and arguing against free will and things like that. I couldn’t quite match wits with him, but I’d like to see somebody like you do it.
Maurio: But you were talking about the implications of a post-materialist view. In the future, we will have another term more specific for this. But in the other view, we’re not only physical beings, but we have free will. Our mind can greatly influence what’s going on in the brain and also in the body, everywhere in the body. I was the first to show that in neuroscience with brain imaging in 2001. For a very long time in psychology and in neuroscience, since the mainstream view is that we’re sophisticated animals, but still animals, people thought that we didn’t have any control over our emotional impulses. It was not possible to. So what I decided, I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe in that because I knew that religious people or spiritual people, genuine people can live their lives differently from a moral point of view.
So I decided to do an interesting study. My team and I at the University of Montreal, decided to present erotic film excerpts to young guys aged between 20 and 30. They were students or PhD young professors. We knew that the emotional part of the brain, what is called technically the limbic system, would react greatly. This is exactly what happened. But what was very interesting is that we used another condition. We scanned them during another condition. When we presented to them exactly the same kinds of stimuli, but this time we taught them to become detached observers of the film excerpts and of their own subjective reactions, feelings, and what’s going on in their bodies. All the major activity in the emotional brain, the limbic system, vanished. I became famous because of this study. These guys never practiced any form of mindfulness meditation or other types of meditation. We just taught them how to do that subjectively 30 minutes before the actual experiment. The results were very impressive. So that was my first demonstration that we can exert a great influence over things that are considered to be biologically programmed and genetically programmed.
Then after that, that was the beginning of epigenetics. Epigenetics showed that things that your thoughts, your emotions, your memories, do have an influence over the activity of certain genes. They respond. They turn on or off. That’s what we say. They are activated or not. So in reality, through our mental processes, our intentions, our plans, through will, also volition, we can exert a great influence over what’s happening in the brain and in the body. So that’s one thing. That’s one major implication. We’re not robots like in the materialist worldview.
Rick: I mean, people were doing biofeedback back in the ’70s. There were studies starting way back then on meditation and the neurophysiological correlates of it.
Maurio: Yes. But I reinterpreted these data in view of a different framework, a different theory, a non-materialist theory. But mind can also operate in what we call a non-local fashion. So non-local means it’s borrowed from quantum physics and means not limited to a single point in space, like the brain. It’s not limited also to a single point in time, the present. So mind can access information from the past, but also from the future, as shown by some studies in parapsychology, the study of so-called psi phenomena.
Rick: I’ve interviewed Dean Radin a couple of times, and he talks about those things.
Maurio: Well, yeah, and with these guys, at the Academy, we have published new books, mostly for academic people, but still about these new visions, the new paradigms, what could be the new paradigms in the future. But to come back to what I was saying earlier, we have to recognize that mind does exist. People have to accept in science that it’s not reducible to physical processes. It’s something else, but it does exist. Not only does it exists, but it takes a great influence. The influence is local. For instance, psychophysiological, you interact with your own body, but it’s non-local as well. So you’re interconnected with other people, with pets, with even trees. You can see the world in terms of information, interactions, and communication all the time, like internet, for instance. Of course, there’s so much information. The brain, in the normal state of awareness, plays a role. It acts as a filter. So you’ll focus more on what’s related to your biology. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Do you have pain? Are you feeling some sensations? What’s going on around you in the so-called physical world and so on and so forth? But when you alter somehow, you can alter the electrical and chemical activity of the brain. There are several ways you can– if you do meditation, prayer, sport. You can practice sports. You can go jogging. It will change what’s going on in the brain. You can do sensory deprivation in a flotation tank, for instance. You can take psychedelic substances and so on and so forth. You always change what’s going on in the brain. It’s like if you’re reaching other frequencies, if you will, other programs, other information. That’s how you can have expanded states of awareness, spiritual experiences, psychic phenomena. You have access to information. There’s nothing paranormal in the universe. There’s nothing supernatural. It’s only related to our materialist worldview. It seems paranormal, but in reality, it’s perfectly natural. There’s nothing that is not natural. It all depends on your lens through which you’re looking at the world.
Rick: In your book, you mentioned neuroplasticity and how it was once thought that the brain can’t grow new neurons after a certain age. Now they know that it does, and the brain is changed by just about every experience we have.
Maurio: Oh, yeah, all the time. For about 100 years, at the beginning of neuroscience, it was a central dogma that the brain was a static machine. It couldn’t change. You had to deal with the kind of brain you inherit at birth. But that was not true. But all scientists believe that, because the beliefs are implicated, are involved in science also. It’s not only about facts, evidence. It’s also about how you see the world. There’s a subjective element importantly involved in science, like in any other sphere of human activity.
Rick: Yeah, and all the sort of human shortcomings of stubbornness and greed and jealousy and possessiveness and aggressiveness and all those things, they all are tugging science around this way and that. Really, you can safely say that there are no pure scientists, because everyone is influenced to some degree by their human shortcomings.
Maurio: Exactly. I’m included in that. It’s the same for everybody.
Rick: But it’s a matter of degree.
Maurio: Yeah.
Rick: Towards the beginning of your book, you present several terms– materialist, reductionist. There’s scientism, I think, and maybe one or two others. Are they synonymous, or does each one contain a certain nuance or implication?
Maurio: Yeah, they are different. So when I was talking about the scientific materialist worldview, which became an ideology, there were a number of postulates implicated in this ideology. In reality, they are hypotheses about the nature of the world, reality. They were first proposed by Greek philosophers even before Socrates. But they reappeared during the birth of modern science. They were used by scientists. So materialism is the idea that everything is composed of material particles or components. So that was one of the hypotheses proposed. But at first, it was only a hypothesis. It was not presented as an absolute certainty. The other postulates were mechanism, the idea that the universe works like a huge machine. Newton liked that idea very much.
Reductionism, it’s the idea that you can reduce complex phenomena or complex systems to their most elementary components. So for instance, you take the brain. It’s composed of over 100 billions of nerve cells or neurons. So that’s what we study when we talk of neurobiology. We study the nerve cells. But if you look, you can also see that neurons interact with chemical messengers. So you can try to reduce mental activity to chemical activity. That is what is done in what we call biological psychiatry. That’s why we use drugs to try to interact with the various brain regions and the neurochemicals, the chemical messengers, to influence them. So for instance, if you’re suffering from major depression, one finding that is quite robust is that you need more serotonin, a chemical messenger. The most antidepressant drug will target serotonin, will increase the production and synthesis of serotonin. So that’s an idea. But if you talk to physicists about the brain, they will tell you that the nerve cells, the molecules, are all composed of atoms and subatomic particles. So they will propose quantum models of the brain interacting with mind, for instance.
Another assumption, a postulate that was part of the scientific materialist ideology was determinism. So that was the idea that everything is predetermined, is related or programmed by previous phenomena or components, and that there’s no free will.
But quantum physics showed that all of these assumptions were wrong, were erroneous. It was demonstrated nearly 100 years ago. But in neuroscience, it’s not been integrated yet. It’s not been accepted yet because not many neuroscientists have the time to become interested in quantum physics. It’s quite complex. So there are a number of reasons. But these old assumptions are not valid anymore. So we know that.
Rick: Would it be useful to go through these one by one and say, OK, here’s the assumption. Here’s why it’s not valid. Or do you think you did that enough just now as you were laying them out?
Maurio: Oh, well, yeah, we can do that.
Rick: Like, for instance, materialism. OK, science, physics tells us it’s really hard to find any material if you go deep enough.
Maurio: Yes, you can take the brain, for instance, as a physical material system. But in reality, the brain is interacting. The brain seems to act as an interface with information coming from other levels. You know when you’re in a state of clinical death, how can you perceive, how can you remember, how can you feel emotions? If it’s the brain, if there’s a– when you’re in a clinical death, there’s a shutdown of the blood flow to the brain after 10, 20 seconds maximum. So if you’re measuring the electrical activity of the brain, it will become flat very rapidly. So in principle, according to mainstream neuroscience, in that kind of state, there can be no mental processes. Consciousness cannot be there. It’s supposed to be gone. So that’s why I’m saying that all these assumptions are not valid.
Rick: Right, because so many people have had experiences where they are in a state of clinical death or they’re under deep anesthesia. They’re not only seeing what’s going on in the operating room, they’re seeing what’s going on outside the building or down the hall or something like that, which is later verified.
Maurio: Oh, yeah, exactly. The mainstream view, the old materialist view, is still dominant. But there’s a battle going on. There is more open-mindedness with regard to new views. This is what has changed. So there’s a dialogue. Now the dialogue is possible. Before, it was not.
Rick: Well, rather than going through each of these, because they’re all kind of similar, maybe another angle is, what do you think society would be like if the opposite of materialism, reductionism, and all that, has become the predominant paradigm? What would education be like? What would medicine be like? What would international relations be like? Economics, world hunger,the climate situation. How do you think that the flipping of the paradigm would impact all these important things?
Maurio: Well, this new emerging paradigm has very deep implications at various levels. If you take education, for instance, we have now enough studies showing that if you practice mindfulness as a way to self-regulate your emotions, you will alter the trajectory of the individual. If you start very young at primary school, you would create a different type of adult collectively, if there’s enough people doing it. Right now, it’s already going on. But not everywhere yet. But there are many projects in various countries around the world doing this. So this is a key. Education is a key, because you don’t end up with the same kind of adults if you start doing this. But we have to teach people that they are very powerful.
When I speak about mind, I mean mental functions, intentions, will, memory, emotions, and so on and so forth. Consciousness is a sort of mental function, but it’s like a very big component of it. We can learn how to use mind and consciousness, but we have to be taught about this. Now we can see there are more and more studies in the medical field. We see a lot of studies showing mental influence on genes, epigenetics, psychoneuroimmunology. You can influence what’s going on in your brain, and so on and so forth. So it’s making progress also in medicine. But there’s another current in medicine, and another trend which is very powerful, big pharma, on the other side. What is big pharma? It’s the translation at a medical level of materialism, man as a machine. So you use substances, molecules of various types, and you believe that by using these molecules, you will affect the individual, because he’s a biological machine, a system. But so you can see right now that there’s a sort of battle going on. Many people are not conscious of this, but there’s a battle between the holistic vision, spiritual vision, versus the materialist model at various levels, not only in science, in mainstream science, but it’s the same ideology in economics, in politics.
Rick: In terms of big pharma, we don’t have to be black and white about it. Modern medicine has done wonders, penicillin, antibiotics, and polio vaccine.
Maurio: Of course.
Rick: All those things have saved millions of lives. On the other hand, I don’t know, it seems like the majority of people in the United States are on some kind of antidepressant drugs. It’s a very high percentage. I don’t remember the exact percentage. When you see the ads for these things on television, it’s like 10 seconds of promoting the drug, and then 50 seconds of telling you all the warnings.
Maurio: Side effects. Yeah. It’s the same thing in Canada. Same thing. It’s on TV.
Rick: You wouldn’t need that if it was an ad for meditation or something, I don’t think.
Maurio: No. Now it’s true that materialist science has made great progress and has helped us evolve from a technological point of view. What we’re saying, my colleagues and I, is that it is not complete. There’s more in the universe than only physical processes or biological processes. That’s what we’re saying. We’re not saying that this is not true, that it doesn’t exist. Although it’s a matter of perspective, because some physicists believe that, like you said before, the matter, what we call matter, what is it exactly? There’s a lot of void involved in matter at the microphysical level.
Rick: Yeah. But in practical life, you don’t go stepping in front of buses thinking that there’s nothing there.
Maurio: No, no. That’s right.
Rick: Yeah. The Church used to consider astronomy to be part of its territory, for instance. People got in big trouble for suggesting that the stars might be other suns, might have planets around them. Then the Church had to relinquish some of its territory as science came along. As you were saying earlier, the Church said, OK, we’ll take care of the spiritual stuff, and you guys take care of the material stuff. I mean, by the same token, there might be many aspects of all the different modern sciences and medicine and pharmacology and all that, which will still be useful, but a whole lot of things which can be replaced by technologies of consciousness or mental technologies or emotional technologies or whatever that are non-physical and that will be much more beneficial and not without side effects.
Maurio: So that’s what I think will happen probably in a few decades from now.
Rick: Who knows? Maybe it’ll speed up. But I mean, it kind of needs to speed up, because we’re at a critical point.
Maurio: We have to become smart very rapidly and wise.
Rick: You can even relate what you’re saying to climate change, because the attitude, the short-sightedness of thinking we can do whatever we want and let future generations worry about it or there’s nothing to worry about because I’m making a good salary and I don’t want to think about the possible consequences, all that stuff is, I think, based upon a state of consciousness that doesn’t have really good access to their inner life, inner resources.
Maurio: Obviously. It’s very egocentric to think that way.
Rick: Greedy, egocentric.
Maurio: Yeah.
Rick: Or international relations. I mean, look at what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine right now. It’s such a crude mentality to resort to violence like that to make my country a little bit bigger, whatever. I mean, all this stuff, hopefully, if we all survive as a species, will be seen as such antiquated thinking.
Maurio: Or fake. Yeah, very primitive.
Rick: I think that the materialistic paradigm that you’re trying to overturn will be seen as the foundation of that sort of thinking.
Maurio: Yes.
Rick: And its opposite, whatever we end up calling that, as the foundation of a much more ideal world.
Maurio: Yes. But what we’re thinking about is new in terms of science. But it’s not new in terms of the great spiritual traditions of the world. Some philosophers were talking about these things thousands of years ago. So we’re not inventing. We’re just rediscovering. What we notice is that there’s a sort of commonality between the vision of the world proposed by many ancient spiritual traditions and what we call post-materialist view of the world.
Rick: I think what we might be heading for is something where we have the best of both worlds. Because in some respects, you wouldn’t want to have lived a couple of thousand years ago. You could die of a dental problem or something because the infection would spread. Something that could be taken care of very easily now. Or if you broke a leg. I mean, they had ancient treatments for these things. But they’re very primitive compared to what we have now. So we could end up with a world that has advanced spiritually as much as it now is materially.
Maurio: I believe that.
Rick: That would hopefully make our material endeavors and accomplishments not harmful as they are now. Because right now, it’s like guns in the hands of children. We have these powerful technologies, but we don’t have the emotional and mental and spiritual insight to wield them responsibly.
Maurio: Let’s hope for the best.
Rick: Your book goes into detail, and you present various bits of evidence why the materialist paradigm doesn’t stand. We could call them anomalies. There are so many things which conflict with that worldview. Maybe these are some of the things that are making some of the people you mentioned change their thinking about it. But let’s review some of those things, in whichever order you’d like to bring them up.
Maurio: Well, the first line of evidence, it’s related to our capacity to modulate what’s going on in our brain and in our body. So that’s– because when you think about it, it’s not that obvious. But you can learn to take control through– you can use meditation. You can use deep abdominal breathing. You can– there are various ways, but intention, visual imagery. But you can influence, really. That’s what I’ve shown. That’s one of my biggest findings, through brain imaging, the discovery that we can greatly alter. You change your mind, you change your brain automatically. But it goes both ways. You affect the brain and the body, and it will also alter your mental experience, mental activity.
Rick: Sure. We all experience that all the time. As you bring up a line of evidence, let me play devil’s advocate a little bit and see how you respond. So in that one, what would a materialist, reductionist, mechanistic person say? They would say, that doesn’t prove that the mind exists. That doesn’t prove that consciousness is fundamental. That all can be explained by mechanistic points.
Maurio: Exactly. They will say that you don’t need a ghost in the machine. You don’t need that because it’s only certain brain regions acting upon other brain regions. You don’t need more to be able to explain these phenomena. I recognize that. I admit that. But we can also use a non-materialist perspective to interpret these findings. But I agree with you. That’s right.
Rick: So it doesn’t prove anything, but it’s one piece of evidence among many.
Maurio: Yeah, because for people, we do not believe in free will or power of intention. It’s hard to interpret if you don’t recognize what’s going on mentally in an individual. It’s very closely associated in terms of physiological activity and what you’re entertaining at the mind level. It’s deeply interconnected. To give a few examples, well, there’s a scientific discipline called psychoneuroimmunology studying the relationship between thoughts and emotions and memories and the nervous system and also the immune system, the endocrine system. Now there’s epigenetics also. So there are an increasing number of studies showing that we influence all the time the activities of our genes based on the kind of thoughts we have and the kinds of emotions we experience and the traumas we have and so on and so forth. It’s all interconnected. It’s like if the physical body is a huge information system or highway. Everything is interconnected through chemical messengers and hormones and so on and so forth.
Rick: So somebody the other day told me that the word materialist is kind of a pejorative term. I’m not sure of a better term. But for the sake of convenience, let’s keep using it.
Maurio: Well, now they use a physicalist or physicalism.
Rick: So is that less insulting or something to say a physicalist?
Maurio: It’s accepted.
Rick: So let’s call him a physicalist. So this thing you just explained about epigenetics and the mind and mental processes actually changing the genes, would a physicalist have a rationalization for that?
Maurio: Yes, he would say that thoughts or intentions are neural activity in brain regions. These neurons, this activity is connected to the activity of certain glands, the endocrine system, through the hypothalamus in the brain, which is a brain structure, involved also in the endocrine function. So they will explain that you have electrical phenomena connected to chemical phenomena, messengers. But it’s all based on physical processes of various kinds.
Rick: All right, so it wouldn’t blow their minds any more than I being able to raise my arm or make myself breathe fast or breathe slow. They just have a fancy explanation for how it could change the genes and not have to acknowledge anything, not physically.
Maurio: Yeah, but it’s harder when you talk to them about the second line of evidence, the so-called Cyrus phenomena. For instance, your daughter is away and there’s something negative happening. You feel her, even though she’s 50 miles from your home. Or you can have your dog in the woods and you will feel something. There’s something wrong. Very often, this is true. It’s related to something happening in the physical world, something negative happening. It’s not always negative, but more often than not, it’s negative stuff.
Rick: I’ve interviewed Rupert Sheldrake in his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. I’ve studied that every which way. It’s significant. Or I interviewed this guy named Stephen Post, who was taken on a very scary motorcycle ride, going 140 miles an hour in the rain. He got back to his college dormitory at 2 in the morning. All of a sudden, the payphone on the wall rang, which he never picked up. But he was right there, and it was ringing. So he picked it up, and it was his mother calling from the other side of the country saying, Stephen, are you all right? It’s like it woke her up in the middle of the night. There’s a million examples like this that we can bring up.
Maurio: But the physicalist, they will say, oh, that’s random stuff, like a coincidence.
Rick: They can just say that forever. But there are some pretty significant, I think, studies by Dean Radin and others, which are hard to just brush off. If you’re willing to look at them.
Maurio: Yeah. It’s very hard to explain. But usually, these people like the idea of what has been called promissory materialism. So it’s an idea that appeared about 300 years ago. French philosophers said that, perhaps we don’t have the explanation, the materialist explanation or the physical explanation now. But one way or another, if we have enough time, we’ll find out the physical explanation of the phenomena. So they were saying that 300 years, 400 years ago. Some of them are still saying that. Give us more time, and we’ll find an explanation.
Rick: Yeah, another phenomenon is that they refused to look at the evidence. You’ve probably participated in things with the Galileo Commission, have you, or the Scientific and Medical Network?
Maurio: Yes.
Rick: The Galileo Commission was so named because some of Galileo’s contemporaries, particularly church authorities, refused to look in his telescope because he was telling them something that would conflict with their theology if it were true. So they didn’t want to look at it. That’s the way some of these guys are now. They say to Dean Radin, well, it couldn’t possibly be true, so I’m not going to bother to look at it. So have a nice day.
Maurio: Exactly. But to me, if you’re looking for the truth, you cannot act like that.
Rick: You go where it leads. That’s what we were saying an hour ago, you’re interested in your salary, tenure, and reputation. The truth is not necessarily conducive to those things.
Maurio: Exactly.
Maurio: Finally, the third line of evidence, it’s the near-death experiences, but mostly during cardiac arrest and clinical death. That’s even harder to explain because the brain is not functioning.
Rick: Sure. People like Eben Alexander, who had this marvelous experience when his brain was pus. But then to that, they say, oh, it’s oxygen deprivation, or you just had a vivid dream.
Maurio: You can say that when you’re not dead. But if you’re clinically dead– and in some cases, the people have been clinically dead for several minutes, sometimes 45 minutes, or even an hour– then they don’t know how to explain that. They don’t have an explanation.
Rick: You had a guy in your book where he was found comatose in a field and brought into the hospital. You tell the story.
Maurio: It was at a hospital in the Netherlands. They had to remove his denture to reanimate him. At a certain point, the heart ceased beating and he was not breathing anymore. So he was clinically dead for, in this case, a few minutes. But, he had the impression of leaving his physical body and floating above his physical body in the room. He saw the nurse removing the denture. Finally, after a few minutes, the doctors and the nurses were able to reanimate him. He stayed at the hospital for almost a week. About five days after that, before he was ready to leave, he saw the nurse remove the denture. He asked him– it was a male nurse. He asked the guy to bring back his denture.
Rick: Yeah, he described it. He said, I saw you remove the denture. You put it in such and such a cart and wheeled it off.
Maurio: And the nurse was very surprised to hear that. But there are many, many cases like that.
Rick: What is it Martin Luther King said? He said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Somehow, I feel like we could adapt that quote to say, “The arc of the realization of truth is long, but it bends toward realizing it.” Because there’s a beautiful Sanskrit saying– I forget the actual Sanskrit, but the translation is that, “That which is closest to truth lasts longest.” A similar thing, they also say, “Satyameva Jayate,” which means, “Truth alone is victorious,” or “It wins in the end.” So I have a feeling that the time has come, that we’re in a time when these outmoded ways of thinking just don’t stand a chance. But it’s just going to take them a while to get deconstructed and for something better to take their place.
Maurio: We’re seeing great changes in the world at this time at various levels and various fields. It’s a time of great change. I’m optimistic about that.
Rick: Me too. In all of your visions and psychic glimpses of things, do you see a period of upheaval and chaos as a transition to a better world? Or do you think that we can breeze through without too much of that?
Maurio: I feel that there will be chaos for a while. We’re already in this. There’s a lot of fighting everywhere, politically, economically, the war.
Rick: Militarily, yeah.
Maurio: But at the same time, there are more and more spiritual people, more and more people. There’s more positive people realizing that we need to help each other. If you look only at the television, the news, or internet, you have mainstream news. I mean, you have the impression that everything is going negatively. It’s like hell here. But in reality, that’s not the case. There is so much beauty on Earth, and magnificent things, and people, and activities. So there’s a bias for mainstream science to focus on the negative stuff. But there’s a lot of beautiful things also going on at the same time.
Rick: There’s a saying in the newspaper industry, if it bleeds, it leads.
Maurio: I know.
Rick: So they show us all this. Because this is significant. We do need to know what’s going on in the world, I think. I watch the news, but only for a smaller chunk of my time. The rest of my time is focused on this kind of thing. Do you have any sense of timeline? I mean, do you think this chaotic period is going to drag on for the next century, or a decade? Or what do you think?
Maurio: No, I don’t think it will be a century. But it’s hard to say. I don’t know. I hope it’s not too long. I hope to be still alive, still physically here, to be able to see major change, positive changes.
Rick: I feel that way, too. I’ve got about 13 years on you. But I’ll take good care of myself so we can both be around.
Maurio: Me, too.
Rick: When you were young, you had this download when you were 8. Then you had this vision with the being of light. Have you had any other visitations or downloads like that that have upgraded your knowledge?
Maurio: I’ve had very deep mystical experiences a few times in my life. In such experiences, the small self, the ego, my ego, vanished. But it’s more at the level of being, what was happening. It was a merging with, it seems, the source of everything in the universe, everything that exists, and more. Very impressive. But I’m a mystical type of scientist.
Rick: I can tell.
Maurio: Obviously.
Maurio: But it’s interesting about that. It’s funny because at the last project of the Academy for Postmaterial Science, they produced a collection, a book, an anthology of more than 50 essays of scientists from various fields, well-known scientists. It’s about the most significant spiritual experience in their life. You see, something like that would not have happened 20, 30 years ago. This wouldn’t have been possible. But now, it’s not only old guys and women. It’s even young scientists, younger scientists. They’re doing this now. It seems more natural to them to do that. They don’t feel the need to hide, like I did. Well, I did to a certain extent, but for a while. But things are changing. It’s a sign of time.
Rick: That’s great. Is Ray Hernandez involved in that?
Maurio: No.
Rick: He’s somebody I interviewed some years ago who got in touch recently. He was talking about this whole compendium of books on this topic. I was just wondering. And that organization is still happening, the Academy?
Maurio: Oh, yeah. It’s growing.
Rick: You have conferences and things like that?
Maurio: Well, we had a conference planned. But it was done online because of the sanitary situation last year. But yes, yes, that’s the plan to organize something in Tucson at the University of Arizona.
Rick: I would like to go to that. I’ll check into it. OK, well, is there anything else you’d like to add while we still have you?
Maurio: We covered a lot, I think.
Rick: Yeah, good. So people can get your book. And I’ll have a link to it on your page on BatGap. Do you have a YouTube channel or anything else? Or what else can people do if they want to hear more from you?
Maurio: I’m reorganizing my website. So for now, I don’t have a website in English. But it will come soon. So it’s more my books. And I have lots of interviews on YouTube, I believe. But I’m not– I don’t have a channel.
Rick: You don’t have your own channel. No problem.
Maurio: I’m old fashioned. I’m an old guy now.
Rick: Younger than me.
Maurio: Oh, yeah? Doesn’t show.
Rick: OK. So let me know in the future if you have a new website or anything else that you’d like me to add to your page on BatGap. I’ll add it there. All right. Well, thanks so much, Maurio. I really enjoyed talking with you.
Maurio: Same for me.
Rick: Next week, I’ll be speaking with a woman named Ann Mathie, talking about Kundalini.
Maurio: Oh.
Rick: You know Ann?
Maurio: No. But I’ve had a Kundalini experience. One of my mystical experiences was associated with this phenomenon.
Rick: Yeah.
Maurio: I never practiced. So it came apparently spontaneously. At first, I was thinking that I was going mad or something like that. But it was stressful at first. But I heard an inner voice saying, just relax. Let go. We’re taking care of you. Don’t be afraid.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great. These days, it seems like every week somebody contacts me and says they’ve had some Kundalini experience. In many cases, they’re scared, because they don’t know what it is.
Maurio: Well, yeah.
Rick: There’s help for that kind of thing. There are people who are kind of experts in it and who can help people. All right, so thanks again. I really enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you.
Maurio: Take care. Have a nice weekend.
Rick: You too. Bye-bye.
Maurio: Bye.