Mark Gober Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Summary

Mark Gober examines the materialist belief that the brain produces consciousness and argues that consciousness may be fundamental to reality. The discussion explores scientific anomalies, paradigm shifts, quantum physics, and how a different view of consciousness could affect human society.

Questions This Interview Explores

Could consciousness exist independently of the brain?
What evidence challenges the materialist view of consciousness?
Why do scientific communities resist paradigm-changing ideas?
How might understanding consciousness differently change the way people live and relate to one another?

Key takeaways

Consciousness may be fundamental, with matter emerging from it rather than producing it.
Anomalies that do not fit prevailing theories can point toward major scientific breakthroughs.
Common perception presents matter as solid, even though physics reveals a far less substantial reality.
A worldview of separateness may contribute to fear, conflict, prejudice, and greed.
Paradigm shifts often begin when evidence exposes limits in the accepted model.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people or people who are experts in various topics pertaining to spirituality.

I’ve done hundreds of these programs now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and check under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Mark Gober. I met Mark last October at the Science and Nonduality Conference. I was excited to see the title of the presentation he was going to give: An End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness and the Implications for Everyday Life, which is also the title of his book.

And so I attended his presentation and enjoyed it, talked to him afterward, and we made arrangements to do this interview, which we’re now going to do.

I was thinking about the interview, and I’d like to just read a little something I wrote. I don’t want to pretend that I’m saying this extemporaneously, but it’s something I’d like to read out as a preface to our discussion.

Our understanding of how the world works has a major impact on how we influence it. If we still thought the Earth was the center of the solar system, we wouldn’t have gotten to the Moon, we wouldn’t have satellites, modern communications, and so on. If we still thought the Earth was flat, we wouldn’t be able to navigate the oceans. If we didn’t believe germs existed because we can’t see them, we wouldn’t have modern hygiene and medicine.

In each of these examples, and many more, those entrenched in the existing paradigm resisted the introduction of new knowledge. People were ridiculed, tortured, and killed for espousing it. Church authorities threatened to put Galileo on the rack if he didn’t recant his assertion that the Earth orbited the Sun, and they refused to look through his telescope.

Mark argues in his book, and as we’ll be discussing, and he’s in agreement with many time-honored spiritual traditions, as well as many leading physicists, that consciousness is fundamental to the universe. This view contradicts the predominant materialistic scientific paradigm today.

Since modern science and the technologies it spawns are the predominant influence in our world, if science is wrong about what consciousness is and how it fits into the scheme of things, how has this error impacted our world? And how might the world change if science correctly understands consciousness?

So that’s the bit that I wrote. Now, I just want to read a little quote from Mark’s book, which answers the question I just asked: How might the world change if science correctly understands consciousness? And here it is. This is Mark writing:

“I view the belief that we are finite and separate to be the disease underlying virtually every problem in human society today. Anxiety, depression, interpersonal problems, racial and social prejudices, gender inequality, geopolitical unrest, violence, war, greed, or nearly every problem you can think of, at their core, are symptoms, not the disease. The world’s problems are caused at the most fundamental level by the pervasive underlying assumption that we are all finite, limited, and separate. And that stems from the materialist belief that consciousness comes from the brain.”

So here we go. Thanks, Mark. And hello.

Mark: Hi, Rick. Thanks for having me.

Rick: You’re welcome. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a long time. I read your book back in December because I was eager to read it. And I think we’re both, and hopefully our audience, are really going to enjoy this conversation.

So before we really get into it, just tell us a little bit about your background.

Mark: Sure. My background on the surface doesn’t have much to do with consciousness. I work in the business world. I’m a partner at a firm called Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley, and we advise businesses on their technology, business, and intellectual property strategy. Prior to that, I worked in investment banking with UBS in New York.

Rick: Union Bank of Switzerland—is that what that is, UBS?

Mark: It was originally. That was the name, and then it became UBS. I was there from 2008 to 2010, so it was during the financial crisis. My first day was in July of 2008, and it was right before everything really got bad.

I was actually in the group that was responsible for advising financial institutions, so my clients were banks, insurance companies, and asset managers. I got to see a lot of that world up close and personal.

Prior to investment banking, I was a student at Princeton University. I was a captain of the tennis team there. My focus in college was very much on sports because it was a Division I program, and that kept me very busy.

I ended up studying psychology and focusing on behavioral economics. I wrote my thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning Prospect Theory, which was about how people make decisions under risk. He wrote a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes a lot of what I studied in undergrad.

Rick: Okay. And so you probably weren’t thinking much about the things that you described in your book. How did you shift from your primary focus of finance and so on to writing this book?

Mark: Well, now, in hindsight, I think I’ve had interests in big existential questions for a long time. In college, I almost decided to major in astrophysics because I took a few introductory courses and thought it was fascinating. I wanted to understand our place in this big universe. But because of the tennis commitments, I wasn’t able to do it. So I think the interests were always there.

The topic of consciousness, though, didn’t really enter. It wasn’t a big deal for me until around August of 2016, when I heard a podcast. It was a show called Extreme Health Radio. I wasn’t listening to learn about consciousness per se; I was just learning about health.

I heard a woman on that show who talked about psychic abilities and her ability to communicate with nonphysical entities. These were things that I had just never heard of. At the end of that interview, the woman, whose name is Laura Powers, talked about her own podcast called Healing Powers, where she interviews other people who have had similar experiences.

So I decided to listen to that podcast just because I thought it was cool. On my drive from San Francisco to our office, which is down on the Peninsula, where there can be lots of traffic, I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts in the car. I ended up listening to all of the episodes of that podcast from 2016, all the way back to 2011, over the course of a few weeks.

At that point, after having listened to so many different interviews, I was confronted with a problem because now I had a lot of independent accounts of things that I couldn’t explain at all with my worldview, which was a very conventional, materialistic one. Here I was being presented with evidence that contradicted it.

So I became very curious and started to do research. As I researched more and more, looked at the science, and also worked with people who have these abilities, what they were able to do confirmed what the research was showing. It really rocked me.

It was an extremely disorienting period of a few months in late 2016, where I had to shift my worldview. All I wanted to do at that point was learn as much as I could because I wanted to understand the reality that I’m in.

The way I think about the world is that how we derive meaning is ultimately based on our perception of reality and of who and what we think we are. So that’s all I wanted to do. I spent about a year just researching nonstop outside the office, pretty obsessively, with books all over my apartment in San Francisco.

After telling a few friends about what I was researching, because at first, in the communities that I’m in, these were totally foreign concepts, people would just stare at me when I talked about psychic abilities and life after death.

But as I started to tell people about the research I was doing, and that there was credible stuff out there, I got very positive reactions from people. In fact, some people said that their lives were shifting in a positive direction as a result of our conversations.

I think the combination of that feedback with my intense passion for the material led me to say, “Why don’t I try to put this down on paper?” At first, I said that to myself, and then I said, “No, I’m not going to do that. It’s going to take forever. I have to cite all the sources if I want to do this right. I work in finance; I’m not going to do that.”

Then I actually had dinner with a few friends one night, and they suggested, “Hey, Mark, why don’t you try it?” So I took the Fourth of July weekend in 2017, which was a long weekend, and ended up getting a good chunk of the book done that weekend. That motivated me to finish the draft that month, and now here we are.

What a paradigm shift means

Rick: Here we are. Explain for a minute—I can explain this, but I’m sure you can explain it better—what is the paradigm, and what is a paradigm shift?

Mark: A paradigm is a prevailing way of thinking about things, and a shift is a new way of thinking about that fundamental idea.

What’s interesting to me about this consciousness-related paradigm is that we’re talking about a paradigm that underlies other paradigms. You were alluding to this in your introduction: The way we view reality will inform the way we act toward each other, the way we do science, the way we do medicine, and the way we study things.

So what we’re talking about here in this conversation, and what my book discusses, is a paradigm in terms of how we view reality: What is our basic worldview?

Rick: And there’s a great book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I’m sure you’ve read that, in which he talks about the process of paradigm shift.

Again and again, history shows that there’s always a reluctance by those who are entrenched in the existing paradigm to shift out of it. They have vested interests, and they give anybody who’s proposing a new paradigm a really hard time, generally.

And yet, if a paradigm is going to shift, it does so because there’s more and more evidence challenging and refuting the existing paradigm. It really begins to get shaky, and eventually a shift takes place. Then that becomes the new paradigm. Is that a fair summary of that?

Mark: Yeah, I think that’s what we’ve seen historically. And I wonder if we’re at that point with regard to consciousness and reality.

Rick: One thing I was thinking about in your case is whether there was something about the work you do in the financial world that made you more flexible and open-minded, or if it’s just your nature. I mean, do you just happen to have a more inquisitive mind or something?

Mark: That’s a great question. I think it’s probably both: I’ve tended to always ask questions and just be open to things because I know that I don’t know that much. Therefore, I should be open to new possibilities. My whole life has shown me that, just based on how much I’ve learned, there was a lot that I didn’t know at a certain point in time.

But professionally, it’s interesting you ask that. I work a lot with intellectual property and help companies license their intellectual property and patent assets, acquire them, or work on their business strategy around those assets. A patent, by definition, is a new invention that is novel and non-obvious relative to what’s known as the prior art—what was done at the time. So every single patent is looking at a paradigm and doing something beyond it. I think, in some ways, I’ve been trained to look at paradigm shifts. And because I work with so many inventors and inventive companies, I may be a bit more acclimated to that.

Rick: That’s interesting. The real innovators in science and other fields have always been those who have thought outside the box. They weren’t so constrained by the existing paradigm; they were kind of renegades, in a way. A lot of people look at what Einstein came up with—he was working in a patent office, actually—and think, “Wow, where did he get that?” It was so totally unexpected. But he had the breadth of vision to come up with something radically new.

Mark: That’s a great point. I notice that a lot with inventors we work with. Some of the best inventors look at things from a different perspective. Sometimes they’ll come from outside of the field that they’re working in because they have a different background. They’re using perhaps a cleaner slate to look at an old problem, and they come up with a novel solution that is sometimes so simple that the status quo—those who are entrenched in that belief system—will resist it.

In the patent world, that manifests itself through litigation, where someone gets sued for patent infringement. There’s resistance because there’s an argument over who invented it first and whether it was actually a novel idea. So it is something that I see all the time.

Rick: Yeah. I wonder if the resistance to paradigm change has something to do with human psychology, which you also studied at Princeton for a bit. I wonder if it’s a kind of fear, where one feels that one’s existence is threatened. One derives some sort of security from being in a world that makes sense, and if something begins to shake that world, you feel personally threatened.

Mark: Yeah, I can say that from personal experience. This was a threatening experience for me: to challenge my worldview and realize that what I thought to be true was not correct, or that it was only partially correct.

You reminded me of a quote from an interview that I did recently for my forthcoming podcast. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will be released at some point in 2019. I interviewed Brenda Dunne, who co-ran the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab with Dr. Robert Jahn, who was the former Dean of Engineering. They were studying anomalies of consciousness. Brenda and I were talking about anomalies.

Rick: Define the word “anomaly.”

Mark: Anomaly means something that doesn’t fit the mainstream paradigm. If we think the world works a certain way, an anomaly is a finding that doesn’t fit with that. There’s been a tendency throughout history to just sweep those things under the rug because they’re not convenient to a modern theory.

Scientific Anomalies That Challenge Established Theories

Before I give the example about Brenda, I’ll give a historical example. Around 1900, Lord Kelvin, who was one of the major authorities in science globally, said that basically all of science had been figured out except for two clouds. These were two anomalies in science—small things they couldn’t figure out that didn’t match the conventional theory.

Once those anomalies were solved, those little things, those two clouds, turned into relativity theory and quantum physics, which are two of the most revolutionary theories in all of physics. I think paying attention to anomalies is important.

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, which again was run by the former Dean of Engineering there, is significant to me because I have great respect for that engineering department. They were looking at anomalies of consciousness, which I’m sure we’ll get into.

What was fascinating to me was to hear Brenda Dunne’s recollection of the resistance that she faced, which is similar to what I’ve heard from many scientists. What she told me scientists would say to her in private is:

“Brenda, do you realize that if the things you’re doing are real, then that would mean that everything that I’ve been doing in my career… that’s all wrong?”

Rick: Yeah. Right, dude. Sorry to break the news to you. But yeah. This whole topic, for some reason, just fascinates me. I’ve been interested in it for years.

Another obvious anomaly is the astronomical one, where it was thought that the Earth was the center of the solar system. With that as the prevailing understanding, the movements of the planets made no sense. They would kind of stop and go backward in little loops, and all kinds of things. I don’t know how those were brushed under the rug for as long as they were, but when we finally shifted to the understanding that the Sun is the center, all of a sudden we had these beautiful ellipses, and everything mathematically worked out properly.

Mark: We have something going on in physics where there are incompatibilities, where things don’t fit, just like that. The biggest one that people talk about is relativity theory and quantum physics, which I just mentioned. These are two of the biggest and most important theories for understanding the physical reality that we’re in. And yet they are incompatible when you apply them together.

So physicists and even philosophers are trying to come up with a unified theory that can work with these theories, which seem to work independently. But when you put them together, something is off. Now that I’ve done the research that I’ve done, I am very curious as to whether consciousness is something that needs to enter all of our paradigms.

Rick: Yeah. In the last couple of days, you and I both watched a video by Dr. John Hagelin positing whether consciousness is the unified field and vice versa. One of the things I think he pointed out in that video is that resolution or unification tends to take place at more fundamental levels.

For instance, we have the four fundamental forces: strong, weak, gravity, and electromagnetism. Going more fundamentally, a couple of those—I guess it’s the weak and electromagnetic forces—get unified into one fundamental field or force. Physicists have been striving to go even deeper and unite them all into a grand unified theory, which Einstein devoted most of his life to after his initial breakthroughs.

Mark: Yeah, it’s a big one for physicists, and it still amazes me to think that we don’t have a unified theory to explain existence and the physical reality we’re in. So it’s great to see videos like that, where people are trying to integrate many of the findings of consciousness with mystical traditions to come up with a unified theory of everything.

Rick: Yeah. And as you may know, Max Planck and a bunch of the early physicists were actually students of Vedic wisdom and often quoted from it and so on. There’s a quote from Max Planck that I’ll put up on the screen here. You won’t be able to see it, but the audience can. He said:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Mark: That one really shocks people when I talk to them about this topic. They hear names like Max Planck, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, saying this in 1931. That statement really summarizes the thesis of my book and what many other people are saying: the conventional view known as materialism, which says that the universe is fundamentally made of physical stuff that we call matter, is incorrect.

When I say matter, I mean my table here is made out of atoms of matter—physical stuff. That’s the basis of the universe that formed in this Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. There are lots of atoms of matter everywhere, and then, all of a sudden, because you have a big universe, you have pieces of matter that start to interact with each other. Randomness and chance tell us that will eventually happen. That’s called chemistry.

So we started with matter, then we got chemistry. With enough random chemical reactions in a very large universe, chance says that we’ll end up with a molecule that can replicate itself. That’s like DNA. DNA leads to the evolution of a human species, which develops the brain, and then we develop consciousness.

Matter creates consciousness. Here Max Planck is saying, “No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

That’s the conventional view: matter creates consciousness. Here Max Planck is saying, “No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

Rick: I want to unpack several of the points you just made. But before we do that, since you mentioned randomness, here’s a quote from Fred Hoyle, the astronomer. He said:

“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way from randomness is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

You’ve probably heard that.

Mark: It’s a great one.

Rick: Yeah. I’m biased because I’ve been in the “consciousness is fundamental” paradigm for 50 years or more, but it seems to me that any high school kid these days knows that matter isn’t really material. You learn in high school that that which appears solid is really mostly empty space, and even the little bits that are supposedly material are just vibrating strings if you go even deeper.

So it’s funny that, since that’s such common knowledge to any reasonably educated person, the notion that solid matter actually exists and is the foundation of everything is still so predominant.

Mark: It is, and I think about that often. I wonder why that’s the case, because, like you say, it’s a basic part of our education to learn that atoms are 99.99999 percent empty space.

As we look around our collective rooms right now, or wherever we are, all of that stuff that is allegedly matter is mostly empty. Separately, we know from quantum physics that—it’s known as the observer effect—when you look at something, it behaves differently than when you’re not looking. That’s an oversimplification, but that’s basically what happens.

When you’re not looking at it, matter—or what we’re calling matter—behaves like a wave of probabilities. It’s maybe here, maybe there. It doesn’t have a definite location. So this stuff that we are all seeing, which we consider to be matter because that’s what our eyes show us, is mostly empty, and it’s not even solid unless we’re looking at it.

It takes a few intellectual steps, and I think that might be the difficulty. Our common sense and our perceptual systems—our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, and everything else—show us a world, which we then interpret as being a certain way. We have to almost undo that interpretation. Those extra steps, I think, can be difficult.

Rick: Yeah. And obviously, you have to respect what appears to be matter as matter. You don’t go stepping in front of buses thinking that they’re just going to pass right through you or something, even though there’s actually a finite statistical probability that they might. But you don’t take that chance because the odds are not in your favor.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. We do live in a world that is apparently material, and there are material laws. So it is practical to view things as being solid. The thing is, though, when we’re looking at a picture of reality, we can’t use approximations; we need to look at an exact picture.

Whereas what our eyes show us, we know is just an approximation. Using traditional physics and the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the spectrum of all types of light, we know that visible light is just a tiny, tiny fraction of all kinds of light. That would include things like infrared or X-rays. Those are types of light that we can’t even see with our eyes. So we just have to remember sometimes to stop for a second and say, “Wait, our eyes are just showing us a small sliver of reality.”

Rick: Sure. I mean, every time you use a cell phone, you’re actually employing the electromagnetic field, the same field that enables you to see the cell phone. You’re just accessing or using different frequencies of it.

Mark: Exactly. And we know that they’re there because our phones work. So we know that there are invisible things acting that we use on a day-to-day basis.

✨ Evidence for consciousness beyond the brain

Rick: So, okay, there are a number of threads we want to tie up here and go more deeply into. One is that there’s a whole lot of things in your book that we’re going to get into that attempt to illustrate or demonstrate that there’s something subtler than the material world that we perceive, and that there are all kinds of phenomena that take place by virtue of that something, such as telepathy, remote viewing, dogs that know when their owners are coming home, or all kinds of things like that.

So I guess let’s probe into that a little bit. And there’ll be some little side channels that we’ll go off on as we do that. But the reason that I thought of that question is that when we started talking about electromagnetism, I thought, “Well, what are some of the things the devil’s advocates say to you?” Maybe they say, “Well, maybe it’s the electromagnetic field that we’re somehow accessing as transmitter-receivers, and that would account for telepathy. We don’t have to jump to the conclusion that consciousness is fundamental. It could still be produced by the brain, and yet somehow the brain is able to tune into electromagnetic fields and thereby do these anomalous things.”

Mark: I have heard arguments like that. And for me, what’s most persuasive is the accumulation of these anomalies, these things that don’t make sense under the conventional view—the accumulation of anomalies in independent areas, which all point in the direction of the primacy of consciousness.

So it’s not that one thing on its own convinces me for sure. And I’m not sure this is something that can ever be proven beyond subjectivity, beyond having a personal experience with consciousness, because all that we actually know is subjectivity anyway. But that’s a separate topic.

So that, I would say, is the first answer: it’s not just an individual telepathy study here and there. It’s the convergence of all the different things. But with regard to telepathy and other psychic phenomena, there have been attempts to isolate those sorts of issues.

An example I’m thinking of off the top of my head is studies that were done by the U.S. government. The U.S. government ran a program using psychic spies for over 20 years during the Cold War, which I was shocked to learn in my research. And I was even more shocked that the CIA declassified certain documents that explicitly say that certain things are real in this realm.

But there were studies done with Uri Geller, who is a famous Israeli psychic who was tested by the U.S. government. There are documents from 1973 that I was able to include in my book. They’ve been declassified. In those studies, they put Uri in an electrically shielded room and asked him to perform these psychic tasks, and he was still able to do it, which suggests that something beyond the traditional forces we’re aware of is at play.

Rick: So Uri’s in that room. Electrically shielded, so that means a radio wouldn’t have worked in there?

Mark: I believe so. Yes. So you wouldn’t be able to get information using waves in or out.

Rick: So that would rule out the electromagnetic fields. Okay, good. But obviously, if everything is ultimately consciousness, then the shielding of that room is made of consciousness. So although it could block the electromagnetic field, it couldn’t block itself because it is consciousness.

Mark: Right. And that’s the big question: if there is a psychic ability—telepathy or remote viewing, which is perceiving something that’s far away using your mind—is something being transmitted and received? Is there an energy force that is beyond the forces that we know of? And if we are in this kind of sea of consciousness, then it would make sense that things would be able to flow beyond the traditional forces that we’re measuring.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, I guess all this stuff is sort of subtle. I mean, in some cases, there are random-number generators being influenced by mass events like 9/11 or Princess Diana’s death, and things like that. We’re talking about really infinitesimal variations from the average.

Most people aren’t even thinking about this, and most people aren’t in a position to do the research themselves. So most scientific researchers just have to say, “Well, I guess these guys know what they’re doing.” But if you’re predisposed to disbelieve it, then you can easily sweep it under the rug or ignore it.

And I’ve heard stories of people refusing to look at this kind of research because it has to be bunk. It doesn’t fit their paradigm. Just as the priests and Church authorities refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, I’ve heard stories of people refusing to look at this kind of research.

Yeah, I’ve heard that as well, where certain scientists don’t even want to spend time looking at it. Because according to their worldview, the odds that these things are real are so low that it’s not worth spending time and money on them. That ends up being a self-selecting issue, where you only end up studying things that you think are real, which is kind of antiscientific because, in my mind, science should be the open exploration of new topics.

Mark: Yeah, I’ve heard that as well, where certain scientists don’t even want to spend time looking at it. Because according to their worldview, the odds that these things are real are so low that it’s not worth spending time and money on them. That ends up being a self-selecting issue, where you only end up studying things that you think are real, which is kind of antiscientific because, in my mind, science should be the open exploration of new topics.

But what you said is very much true, and it’s something I’ve had to look at closely. If these things are real, why is it that I had never heard of them until I listened to alternative podcasts? How could it be? And how could it be that so many people I know who are well educated have never heard of these things before?

So I had to really convince myself that there was a dynamic happening where—I don’t know if suppression is the right word—but there is a sweeping under the rug that seems to be happening, where there is a resistance to the paradigm.

When we look at paradigm shifts throughout history, we see similarities, where there’s a reluctance to look in the telescope in the case of Galileo. We have something very similar right now. And it applies even to the world of peer review, where it’s difficult to get a journal paper published in a mainstream journal because editors don’t necessarily want to put that information in there.

And I’ve heard from scientists who say that sometimes their papers are rejected without reason because the findings are impossible, and therefore the journal doesn’t want to publish them. So when I hear stories like that, it kind of makes sense that, at least up until this point, we haven’t heard about some of these ideas in the mainstream.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a lot of politics that represses it. People’s reputations are on the line, their tenure may be on the line, and their grant funding may be on the line. And so they’re cowed into subservience, really.

Mark: That’s exactly what I hear. The scientists who I think are very brave and have decided to study these topics, many of them say that if you mention these topics at all, you can kiss tenure goodbye. And many of them have waited until they got tenure to study these things.

At that point, they’re still not shielded from criticism. A good example of that is Brian Josephson, who was a Nobel Prize winner in physics.

Rick: I met him back in the ’70s.

Mark: So, a brilliant guy from Cambridge, and he has said things like that he thinks telepathy is real. He thinks that quantum physics might help us explain how this could happen. And he has been turned away from a scientific conference.

There was one conference in particular that he mentioned in a paper I cite in my book, where the person running the conference said, paraphrasing, “We understand that you have an interest in the paranormal,” speaking to Josephson, “and this is a scientific conference. We don’t think that those topics should be included.” So he was uninvited from a scientific conference as a Nobel Prize winner in physics.

Rick: Yeah. A similar thing happened to Rupert Sheldrake. He was either uninvited to a TED Talk, or his TED Talk was taken down, or some such thing, because he talked about this kind of stuff.

Mark: Yes, I’ve heard about that. And it seems like the stories happen over and over again. But I’m becoming optimistic. Maybe it’s because I’m just new to the space. But at the same time, there are some developments that seem very favorable.

One is the fact that in 2018, there was an article published by American Psychologist, the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association. So this is mainstream psychology. They accepted a study by Dr. Etzel Cardeña from Lund University in Sweden, who looked at these psychic phenomena: telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, which is sensing the future before it happens, and psychokinesis, which is the mind affecting matter.

He showed that there are statistical effects beyond what randomness would predict, that there’s something going on, and that there’s some anomaly occurring. Those findings were accepted to the degree that this mainstream journal published the article. So that, to me, is a very positive sign.

Rick: Yeah. And of course, there have been tons of published articles on the effects of meditation and all, usually in terms of their physiological effects, which don’t necessarily shatter any paradigms. You’re sitting quietly and your heart rate goes down, or whatever; your skin resistance changes.

But there was one published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution some years ago on studies that the TM group conducted, where they amassed large groups of people in trouble spots. I myself spent three months in Iran. And there were groups in Israel and Southern Africa, where there was a lot of trouble at that point, and in Central America. There was a measurable and statistically significant change in war deaths and other conflict measures.

It took them about two years to work up the nerve to publish that study. And they got a lot of flak after they published it, but it was published.

Mark: Yeah, there are studies here and there that are published in various outlets, and they’re just not talked about often. To me, the fact that this Etzel Cardeña study has not been on the front page of newspapers says a lot. I mean, it’s a major finding: the American Psychological Association publishes an article like this that’s validating the reality of psychic phenomena.

So these are like the little clouds that are popping up all over the place, to use Lord Kelvin’s terminology.

Rick: Yeah. And I think the pattern is repeating itself and will repeat itself through the conclusion that the paradigm will shift, and the pattern being that these anomalies get more and more pesky, more and more insistent as they continue to accumulate. And they kind of peck away at the foundation of the existing paradigm until eventually it topples and gives way to a shift to the new one.

Mark: Yeah, I hope we see it soon. But on one hand, I’m encouraged by things like some of these papers being published, but I personally experienced some things that made me a little less optimistic. I’ll give an example. My publicist was sending my information out to various outlets to try to get the information out about my book to market it, and we reached out to a mainstream scientific journal.

The editor there initially just dismissed it immediately when he heard that remote viewing was involved in this topic. Then I asked my publicist to just send this editor the CIA documents, which say that remote viewing is a real phenomenon. That’s a direct quote from the CIA documents, along with other things like it, including the scientific panel that examined the phenomenon. We also sent him the Etzel Cardeña study from American Psychologist.

His response was—he just dismissed it immediately. He said that the CIA is not a scientific body, and that the American Psychologist article was amusing, and basically said something to the effect of, “Unless my 35 years in scientific journalism have been an exercise in delusion.”

Rick: Which I guess they have been, at least to a certain extent. Well, you probably heard that quote, that science progresses by a series of funerals.

Mark: Right, the idea being that those who are entrenched in the paradigm—

Rick: They die off.

Mark: Or they’re no longer a vocal force.

Rick: Yeah. But I think my observation is that in every way, the pace of change is accelerating. And we’re building up to some kind of crescendo here. Also, the dilemmas—the potential catastrophes facing us—are getting more and more ominous and getting closer. So something’s got to give.

As I read in that quote from your book at the beginning of the interview, this whole issue of consciousness being fundamental, it’s not just some kind of ontological entertainment or something. It’s really impactful and really critical to what’s going on in our world. And that’s why we’re talking about it.

Mark: Yes. And it applies to every single person. That’s the important thing. It sounds kind of intellectual when you talk about consciousness and the brain and neuroscience.

Rick: Yeah, like, who cares?

Mark: But these are fundamental questions about existence, who and what we are, and how we interact with one another. So when we think about many of the problems in the world, which you quoted from me, whether they’re interpersonal, personal, or international, the problems, to me, at their core relate to assumptions about reality.

I think many of those mainstream assumptions are not correct. So it affects all of us.

Rick: Yeah. And like you said, with your friends, when you told them you were researching this area and you started telling them some of the stuff, they said it shifted their perspective. I mean, if you think about it, if you think that you’re basically a meat puppet and that your existence is going to completely cease when your body dies, that’s one perspective.

If you think that you’re an immortal soul and that the body is just like a suit of clothing that you change from time to time, then that’s a radically different perspective. It seems to me it would have a major impact on your mentality, your psychology, your hope, your optimism, and your happiness.

Mark: Yeah, well, I can tell you from personal experience, because I was very much in the conventional way of thinking, which says matter—that is, the material brain—creates consciousness. Therefore, when the brain dies, when the body dies, then there’s no consciousness, no memories, no feelings, and no emotions.

Under that paradigm, at least the way I interpreted it, which I think is a strict interpretation, you cannot find meaning in life; you can only rationalize, because once you’re dead, it’s over. And everyone’s going to be dead because we have these finite bodies. That’s the reality of what we’re taught.

So that’s where I came from. And I think that might help your listeners understand why this was such a big shift for me.

Rick: I saw this cartoon recently. I should have queued it up to show during the interview, but it was called “At the Dung Beetle Bar.” There are a couple of dung beetles sitting at the bar, and the bartender is a dung beetle.

One guy is drinking his drink, and he says, “So is that all there is to it, Murray? Eat, shit, and die?” And Murray says, “Yeah, that’s basically it.”

Mark: Yeah. But that’s kind of where I was. And I didn’t want to fight that because I thought that’s what science was pointing to more and more: the notion that the universe is fully random. It’s egocentric of us to think that we’re more than a body. And I didn’t want to rationalize.

So I thought life had no meaning. And I struggled with that, not necessarily outwardly, but in my day-to-day life. If something would happen to me that seemed ostensibly good or bad, in the back of my mind I said, “Mark, why does it matter? In the end, it doesn’t matter at all. You’re just making it up.”

Identity as Consciousness Beyond the Physical Body

Then, when I learned this other information—which is what you suggested, that our identity is much more than the body, that we’re really a consciousness experiencing the physical world through a body, rather than being a body that has a consciousness—that shift rocked me and took me time to adjust. I’m probably still adjusting.

Then, when I learned this other information—which is what you suggested, that our identity is much more than the body, that we’re really a consciousness experiencing the physical world through a body, rather than being a body that has a consciousness—that shift rocked me and took me time to adjust. I’m probably still adjusting.

Rick: Yeah, I think we’re all still adjusting. And there’s another thing I think that has a ripple effect from the materialistic assumption. What if what you are, what you appear to be, and what you accumulate in your life is all there is to it? Then “he who dies with the most toys wins” might be your predominant attitude.

We live in a very materialistic society, one in which there’s huge wealth inequity, and in which a lot of people are really not living very happy lives because they’re so impoverished. That might be one example of the upside-down thinking that it’s just a material world, and when you die, you’re gone.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, if it were true that material goods would make us happy, then we should see that every billionaire or superstar should be in ecstasy all the time. And we certainly don’t see that.

So there seems to be something happening beyond this notion that materialism is everything there is. And that reminds me of one of the phenomena that I think has had probably the biggest impact on me: the near-death experience. It’s an instance where a person has little or no brain functioning, and yet their consciousness is totally lucid, rational, and logical.

Sometimes the things that they see from outside of their body are reported as being accurate when they come back into their body and are resuscitated. But on this topic, the life review is something that occurs during this period where a person experiences their whole life in a flash. They’re judging and observing themselves, and they’re seeing how they acted toward people.

They’re not judging how big their house was or what kind of car they were driving. They’re judging how they treated the other person. And if they were inflicting pain upon that person, they feel that person’s pain through that person’s eyes.

“They’re not judging how big their house was or what kind of car they were driving. They’re judging how they treated the other person.”

It’s a very powerful thing to think about: that all of our actions—if a life review is something that we all encounter—how we treat other people is what actually matters. There’s a great example of Dannion Brinkley, whom I also interviewed for my podcast. He recently had his fourth near-death experience: once when he was electrocuted, twice during open-heart surgery, and once during brain surgery.

Rick: He got struck by lightning a couple of times, at least once.

Mark: He got struck by lightning when he picked up a phone. And, yeah, that was his first one. But in his case, he had a life review every single time, in addition to going to other realms. And he was a Marine and killed many people in Vietnam.

Rick: He was a sharpshooter in Vietnam.

Mark: So he had to go back during his life review and experience the deaths of the people that he killed, and experience the pain that he inflicted upon them. Not only that, but he experienced the pain of the people who were affected by the person who was killed; that is, he felt the “indirect” effects of his actions.

So the child who lost a parent—he felt that pain, though he didn’t feel it quite as strongly. When we think about the life review, and you talk to people who have had a near-death experience, they come back into their body and are often much less materialistic because they see this broader reality.

To them, all that seems to matter is how they treat people. So Dannion Brinkley is now a hospice volunteer.

Rick: Yeah. I should interview him one of these days. I enjoyed his books. Not only do near-death experiences tend to change how people live their lives, but they also radically change their attitude toward death. They no longer fear it. They’re not suicidal, but they’re no longer— they’re kind of looking forward to death because they’ve seen a glimpse of how beautiful it is on the other side.

Mark: Yes, I hear that very often. I’ve actually heard someone say to me, “I’m not suicidal, Mark, but I really want to go back there because it’s such a pleasurable place to be in these other realms, being freed of the body, so to speak.”

But when we talk about these ideas in the context of the world that we live in and the traditional education system, these are not the things that we are always learning. It is about achievement and the attainment of material goods, in the hopes, I think—perhaps falsely—that we will then become happy and satisfied once we achieve all of those material things.

Rick: And there’s nothing wrong with having a certain amount of them. You need that to be comfortable, and even to engage in spiritual practice. It’s hard to do that if you’re living under a bridge. But it’s not the be-all and end-all.

Mark: That’s a great point. In the same way that the world is not actually physical, but we perceive it to be physical, we are in this realm where we need physical things to survive. So there is nothing wrong with the material world, so to speak.

But I think maybe the emphasis that’s placed on it can be recontextualized if we think about the fact that maybe we’re all going to have a life review, for example. And in that life review, what we are judging our life on is not based on the material goods; it’s about the treatment of others because we are interconnected.

Rick: Yeah. Well, it worked for Ebenezer Scrooge. Here’s a question that came in from Mark in Bogotá, Colombia. Mark asks, “Do you find a relationship between electromagnetic fields and collective consciousness? And what does the accelerating shift of the North Magnetic Pole toward the Eastern Hemisphere mean?” That’s an interesting thing that’s been going on.

Mark: Good question. Yeah, I’ve heard of that. The answer is, I’m not sure. I think it’s something that needs to be explored more fully.

Part of the reason I think we’re not exploring it fully is that these ideas are not mainstream. So many scientists who are studying electromagnetic fields aren’t able to look at them. If we start to integrate the topic of consciousness with these global shifts, what could we find?

It’s a great question, and I think it needs to be explored.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s bring up a point from your book, which many others have discussed, indicating that there is something more fundamental than the electromagnetic field, or any field, taking place here. I believe it’s called complementarity, where you can have particles that are separated by light-years. I don’t know exactly how they test this, but it’s established science that a change in one produces an instantaneous change in the other. There’s no way that the speed of light, or anything else, could get from one to the other.

So that sort of presupposes some kind of omnipresent field that is infinitely correlated, and through which information, if we call it information, can travel instantly. It’s what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

Mark: Yes, spooky action at a distance. Nonlocal connections. In physics, many physicists call it entanglement, or quantum entanglement: the notion that two particles that are physically…

Rick: Maybe it’s entanglement, not complementarity. I might have had the wrong term. Go ahead.

Mark: So, yeah, entanglement is the notion that two particles physically distant from one another, no matter how far apart they are, have an instantaneous correlated effect when you affect one. They’re basically mirroring each other, even though they are far apart.

Einstein called it spooky because he thought that the fastest anything could travel was the speed of light. And here we have an instantaneous connection. Einstein tried to disprove this, and in his attempt to disprove it, he actually further proved that it is a real thing. Now it is accepted science that there are nonlocal connections at the core of reality.

Rick: Yeah. Are you aware of how these are explained? Does anybody have an idea about this, or is it just one of those head-scratchers?

Mark: My understanding is that it’s something scientists are trying to understand, though it’s still a mystery. To me, if we incorporate consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is fundamental, or primary, or, as Erwin Schrödinger said, “In truth, there is only one mind,” that we’re part of the same mind, that might help us start to explain these things.

Rick: I think most of the people watching this are pretty much on board with the stuff we’re saying. But a simple analogy that we could use, and that they might want to use if they’re talking to friends about it, is a radio—or a cell phone, obviously, that’s a good one.

There’s a radio transmitter maybe 60 miles away, and your little radio picks it up. So the human nervous system could be thought of not as a generator of consciousness, but rather as a receiver of consciousness. Want to riff on that a little bit?

Mark: That’s an important topic. And I think when there’s a paradigm shift, the history books are going to write a lot of papers on this topic: Why is it that we thought the brain produces consciousness, given all this evidence that we have?

There are a few reasons to think that the brain produces consciousness. One is that our sensory organs are located near our brain, so it feels like our consciousness is up here. If we put our eyes at our shins or our toes or something, it might feel different. So we should just think about that: We are biased by where our eyes are.

But even more than that, more scientifically, the fact that there are strong correlations between what happens in the brain and what happens to your consciousness is biasing us. So what do I mean by that? Let’s say someone gets in a car accident and has brain damage. They might have corresponding memory loss. We changed the brain; we changed the consciousness.

Another example is if you stimulate a part of the brain. Let’s say you take a little electrode and stimulate the part of the brain responsible for vision, and then you start to have different vision. So, look, we changed the brain, and now we changed the conscious experience. It’s a super-tight correlation.

Now, why can’t we conclude that the brain must be producing consciousness based on that tight correlation? I’ll use an analogy from Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. His book is called Why Materialism Is Baloney.

Rick: He’s been on BatGap twice.

Mark: Okay. He says we should imagine that there’s a fire and firefighters show up. You have a larger fire, and many firefighters show up. So you have a strong correlation between how large the fire is and how many firefighters are appearing. But the firefighters aren’t causing the fire. That illustrates that just because two things are related, we can’t always say that one is causing the other.

And this gets to your point: How else can we explain the fact that our brain is definitely related to our consciousness? It’s somehow related to it. But if it’s not necessarily producing it, what could be the relationship?

The analogy of an antenna, I think, is a helpful one because it places the brain in a processing role, so to speak. The brain is taking in consciousness and almost spitting it out in a new form.

There’s an analogy that I think is maybe the most precise, which is to say that the brain is almost a filtering mechanism of consciousness. It’s like consciousness is the sun shining all the time, and we have clouds, whether it’s our brain, our thoughts, our mind, or our perceptions, actually blocking the rays of the sun.

So the brain is a limiter. When we have experiences like a near-death experience, where the person’s brain is shut off, or meditation, which is a bit more subtle, where there’s a calming of the mind, it’s like a removal of clouds, and more pure consciousness is able to come in.

Rick: Yeah. The second verse of the Yoga Sutras is yoga—or meditation, we could say—is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. So there’s a calming of the mind. And then the next verse is, “Then the seer is established in the Self.”

It’s like if the mind is agitated, then, like water trying to reflect sunlight, the reflection isn’t very clear; it’s all broken up. But if the mind is settled, like settled water, then the reflection can be very brilliant. And that’s what the whole spiritual-practice thing is all about, basically.

Mark: It’s been so fascinating for me to learn that the ancient traditions have been saying this for a long time. Now science is really pointing to these same concepts that we can find in ancient scriptures.

So these topics we’re talking about are not new in any way. Maybe for your audience, that is an obvious thing. But I will say that many people I’ve spoken to are just so shocked that people have been saying this for a long time, that cultures have known about how we think about consciousness as potentially being a fundamental aspect of reality. Now science is finally catching up to it.

Rick: Yeah. You know, one thing that would really shock the culture and change the paradigm pronto is the fact that throughout history, there have been numerous accounts of people levitating. A friend of mine wrote a book accumulating, amassing all these different accounts that come from cultures all over the world.

It’s easy to brush that one away as some kind of imaginative thing. But there have been so many accounts, and even some fairly recently. If someone were to do that—and if it were proven that they weren’t just a good magician or something—it would really blow some minds.

We’d have to ask ourselves: How can they do that? What are the mechanics through which physical laws are apparently being violated or counteracted? Any thoughts on that?

Mark: Many of the studies that I referenced in the book, including the one from American Psychologist, are talking about small statistical effects. In other words, if you weren’t looking at the math, you wouldn’t know that something’s happening. You have to look at the math to see that it’s a deviation beyond what chance would predict.

These more extreme cases, where it’s actually visible, are much more anomalous and much rarer, it seems, in my research and in looking at the U.S. government program.

That’s a good example, where there were a number of people who were really, really good at remote viewing. There’s an example that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter confirmed: A downed Russian bomber was found in an African jungle. It was lost, and the radar systems couldn’t find it. They used remote viewers to locate this bomber using their minds.

But the number of people who can do that seems to be a smaller group. It’s like there’s a distribution of abilities. In sports like basketball, you have Michael Jordan on one end, who’s a superstar, and then you have an average person who can dribble a basketball. The number of Michael Jordans in the world seems to be smaller.

So I think that is one issue: We can’t always find the Michael Jordans. Another issue is that, especially with people who have developed spiritual practices, it tends to be a spontaneous occurrence. It’s not always planned.

Rick: Yes and no. Firstly, I think LeBron James deserves some credit. We’ve been quoting Michael Jordan for a long time. These days, LeBron is king.

Mark: Yeah, we’ll go with LeBron.

Rick: Or Serena Williams, if you want to switch to tennis. But this thing about it not being planned, or having to be a spontaneous event, maybe certain things are, but spiritual practices can be systematic. There are people throughout history who practiced things in a very systematic, regular, repetitive way, and it ultimately yielded some fruit.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. But sometimes the anomalous occurrence, as far as I’ve understood it, is spontaneous. The practice can be done, but the anomalous event doesn’t always occur with it.

So it seems that these things can be difficult to pin down. Even those who are really talented at it, like the LeBron Jameses of remote viewing, aren’t always 100 percent. Maybe it’s the same with the person who does spiritual practices. Maybe it’s not 100 percent, and the skeptic will want to latch on to the few instances where it’s not perfect.

Rick: Yeah. And, of course, spiritual practices are not primarily about having particular flashy experiences or demonstrating some kind of supernatural ability. But those things have been associated with spiritual practice.

I mean, Patanjali’s third chapter of the Yoga Sutras, which has four chapters, is all about siddhis—being able to do these things, actually, intentionally, on demand, more or less. He lists a whole bunch of different things you can do if you’re able to do them and prescribes a formula for doing them.

But anyway, that’s interesting. It’s hard to find contemporary examples.

Mark: It’s hard to find contemporary examples and to find people to do it in a rigorous enough way that the mainstream will accept it or even look at it.

But it is kind of mind-blowing to know that these practices have been around for a long time. People have reported and experienced psychic phenomena, paranormal or anomalous phenomena, and yet we haven’t been able to document them in a way that is at least satisfactory to the mainstream.

Although I would say that there has been significant documentation of a lot of this stuff, it’s just not being looked at.

Rick: Yeah, some would say that the suppression of these kinds of things is not just a cultural or intellectual kind of thing. But it actually has to do with the quality of collective consciousness, that there’s a sort of density to it that keeps these things tamped down. And as that density clears, like the dispelling of clouds, spontaneously, a lot of things that we now consider rarities and anomalies will become more and more commonplace.

Mark: I’ve heard that idea, sort of like as consciousness evolves, as the collective evolves to a new state, then certain things will become more commonplace. And I hope that’s the case. Because if that were true, then I think many of the world’s problems might start to shift.

Rick: I think I’m seeing it in terms of all the people I talk to and who communicate with me. There just seems to be some kind of epidemic of awakening consciousness around the world. People start having Kundalini experiences, and all who didn’t know anything about Kundalini, or these spontaneous awakenings, who weren’t even looking for them at all. So it definitely seems to be something getting enlivened, I think.

Mark: I’m noticing that as well. And I’ve been surprised to know how many people have known about these topics and are experiencing them on a regular basis. And as I’ve kind of gotten into that world more, I’m seeing exactly what you’re seeing, where there are more awakenings, sometimes spontaneous ones. The SAND community—Science and Nonduality—lots of people talk about their experiences there. So I think it’s a growing community globally.

✨ Consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of reality

Rick: Yeah, it’s exciting. There are a lot of things in your book that we could get into, a lot of different topics we can discuss. But one that comes to mind at the moment—I think I’ll preface it with a quote from Einstein, which I’ll put up on the screen here. He said:

“Contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe, which we can dimly perceive, and try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.”

So I like that quote. Do you want to comment on that before I go on?

Mark: The first thing that came to mind is the notion of humility, which has been an important one in my journey: to continue to acknowledge how little I know or could ever know using my intellectual, rational mind. The linear brain, the way we think about things in a linear fashion, is a sliver of reality. Things are happening beyond what our intellect can sometimes comprehend. Or even if they are things that our intellect can comprehend, maybe we don’t know them yet. And keeping that open mind, I think, is really critical. It might be one of the things that are holding us back in other areas—the tendency to think that we know much more than we actually do.

Rick: Yeah. I think that there’s a value to adherence to certain established knowledge. I mean, if we were willing to just brush it aside with any little contradictory notion that came along, there’d be no sort of stability or consistency. So there’s a value to that, but generally, it becomes too calcified, too rigid. And, as we discussed earlier, there’s a value in counterbalancing that with open-mindedness.

I think you can do that. You don’t have to either be, “Anything goes, and I’ll accept any wacky idea that comes along,” or, “I know it all, and I’m not going to change my mind.” You can somehow incorporate both the stability of what is known and the open-mindedness to accept new knowledge.

Mark: It’s a really important point you make. So this materialist paradigm says matter creates consciousness. We start with matter, and we end up with chemistry, biology, brains, neuroscience, and then consciousness. What we’re talking about today is saying consciousness comes first. But still, we have physics and chemistry and biology and neuroscience. I’m not suggesting that those things should be thrown out. I’m just suggesting a recontextualization.

Those other areas work, and we’ve discovered a lot in those disciplines. So that’s important. It’s kind of finding a middle ground in all of this and not taking too extreme a position.

Rick: Yeah, and if scientists at large were really scientific, in general, they would do that. Because it’s definitely unscientific to let personal bias or fear, or worry about tenure, or any of those other things, close your mind. Science is open to anything that could be a hypothesis worthy of testing, if you’re really being scientific about it.

Mark: That’s the scientific approach. It should technically be nondogmatic. If there is a finding, we should explore it and see if it’s real, then see how we might be able to incorporate it, rather than saying everything should fit into this box. And if it doesn’t, then it’s not accepted. That is almost an unscientific approach.

So it’s taking that approach. And again, it kind of goes against some of our instincts to want to cling to the security of what we know, or what our sensory organs are showing us. We have to counteract some of those instincts to just be open and willing to accept things that might challenge us.

Rick: Yeah, well put. So back to that Einstein quote—I won’t read it again. But one of the things that he uses the word “intelligence” there. And when we talk about what consciousness is, let’s talk about that a little bit. And it being the basis of the universe, perhaps the ultimate foundation of the universe, perhaps the essential constituent of the universe, perhaps the entirety of the universe—maybe there’s nothing other than consciousness appearing as a universe—then what does that tell us about the qualities of consciousness?

Mark: When I think about consciousness, the way I define it in the book is our subjective inner experience. And when I say that I am speaking to you, Rick, that “I” is what I mean by consciousness. So it’s not a tangible thing, but it has sentience to it, an awareness as a property. And what I argue in the book is that the awareness I’m experiencing is part of the same stream of consciousness that we’re all connected to, which is essentially the basis of all reality.

So what is consciousness? In the book, I include a footnote when I define consciousness, and I say that even though I try to define it using language, that is perhaps limiting. Because if consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality, existing beyond all space and time, and is actually infinite, then to put language around it is creating a limitation that shouldn’t exist. So by talking about consciousness, we are constricting it and actually not purely being it.

Rick: I think that we could do our best to talk about it, as long as we acknowledge that words will never do justice to it. We can use words like unbounded or universal or blissful, or whatever. But they’re just words. And they all point to something that potentially could be experienced. But we shouldn’t get too hung up on the words.

Mark: That’s how I feel about it, too. We need language in today’s day and age to communicate, and so we do our best, while keeping in mind that something that might be infinite, to put language on it would put an artificial boundary on it.

Rick: Yeah. But that’s true of almost everything, not just consciousness. I mean, try to describe the taste of an orange, or try to describe what being in love is like. Any of those things are just words; they’re concepts. And if the other person has tasted the orange or been in love or something, then there could be some communication, and they really understand what you’re talking about. But if they haven’t, you could talk until you’re blue in the face, and they’re really not going to get anything like what the actual experience will be.

Mark: Right. It’s a proxy. You’re reminding me of the near-death experience, where people come back and say, “Look, I can’t really use words to explain this.” It’s known as ineffability. And that’s part of the disconnect: people who have had these mystical experiences sometimes find it hard to explain them using human language to others who haven’t had the experience, because the language is a proxy, and it’s not the actual thing.

Rick: Yeah. So a minute ago, you said consciousness—you define consciousness as subjective experiences?

Mark: Yeah, our subjective inner experience.

Rick: So let’s say, for the sake of metaphor, that a radio is conscious of what it’s playing. So a radio is playing the Beatles, and the radio might say, “Well, my subjective inner experience is the Beatles.” But that doesn’t define the electromagnetic field. I mean, the electromagnetic field is a much vaster, more significant thing than any particular vibration of it, which could give rise to a particular song through a radio.

Mark: Yeah. To use a term from Rupert Spira, he talks about “modulations” of consciousness. It’s sort of like if we’re in a still body of water, we get little waves that pop up, and those modulations create diversity. So consciousness is the basic underpinning of reality, and all of the things that we experience, whether they’re electromagnetic fields or just a tree that we see, are all just different modulations of the same consciousness.

Rick: Right. And in that video we alluded to earlier, about whether consciousness is the unified field, it was presented that both consciousness and the unified field, which Hagelin was claiming, are one and the same. They arise and appear to give rise to the manifest universe through these modulations, or vibrations, at a very, very fundamental level. They, in turn, become more and more complex through something called sequential spontaneous symmetry breaking, until you have a manifest universe. But the whole thing arises from that foundation.

Mark: That’s how I see it, and the mechanics of how that all happens are still an open scientific question. But I don’t think we’ll get there unless we acknowledge the primacy of consciousness, or at least entertain it.

To me, one of the strongest arguments for this is one that Bernardo Kastrup has made, and a number of other people have as well. We should look at our own experience. Our own experience is always subjective. I can’t prove anything outside of my own experience, nor can anyone. We can infer it.

So if we take that a step further and say, imagine that there’s a material universe with no conscious beings, no awareness, no sentience at all—just a material universe. Could that universe be there in the first place? When we think about it, yeah, it’s possible, but we could never verify that it was there, because it would take a conscious awareness—

Rick: There would be no “we” to verify it.

Mark: There would be no “we” to verify it in any way. Whether it’s seeing or hearing, there’s no way to verify it. So if we want to be truly skeptical, the skeptic would say, “All we know is consciousness.” To say consciousness is fundamental is, ironically, the most skeptical position metaphysically.

Rick: But if the universe arose from consciousness, if consciousness is fundamental to creation, then if modern cosmology is correct, presumably there was a period of billions of years in which there couldn’t have been any sentient beings around to perceive the universe. And yet the universe was able to evolve on its own to the point where such beings began to exist.

Mark: So that line of reasoning would presume that sentience and consciousness need a biological body to exist. And if consciousness is independent of the brain, then we don’t need a brain or a biological organism.

Rick: No, not for consciousness to exist. But perhaps for perception to take place, you need perceptual—you need senses.

Mark: An apparatus?

Rick: Yeah.

Mark: Well, what I mean by consciousness, being able to experience or verify the universe, is any kind of awareness, even if it’s not in the body. So if we look at someone with a near-death experience, their organs are totally turned off.

I’ll give examples of blind individuals, people who have been blind since birth. And there’s a great book called Mindsight. The authors look at 31 cases of this, where the person has been blind since birth, they have a near-death experience, and they experience all the same things that a sighted person has reported throughout the ages, including being able to see. Then they come back into their body and they are unable to see again or have the same impairment.

So it suggests that the way we perceive is not tied to biology, that there is this—as author Kenneth Ring and his colleague referred to it—they call it “transcendental awareness” that exists independently of a functioning body. So if that sort of awareness can exist without biological organisms in the universe, then presumably there could have been an awareness at that period.

Rick: Yeah. One explanation for what those blind people experience is that we not only have a gross body, but we have a subtle body, and the subtle body actually has senses through which things can be experienced. And that would account for disembodied beings, spirits, astral beings, angels, ghosts, all that kind of stuff being able to experience without having any kind of actual biological material. It’s just an astral or subtler level.

Mark: Right, right. But still nonphysical.

Rick: Still nonphysical, yes.

Mark: Yes, less physical, beyond the physicality that we are assuming to be the only reality of materialism. So even an etheric body, or however you describe it, is still a major departure from the conventional wisdom.

Rick: Oh, yeah. Although conventionally, we deal with all kinds of things that are nonphysical.

Mark: That’s the irony of it.

Rick: Yeah. You spoke about randomness earlier on, and I read that Fred Hoyle quote about a 747 being assembled from a junk pile by a tornado. I wonder how conventional science understands how all of this beauty and complexity and detail arose through some process of randomness, from basically hydrogen. How do they explain this?

Mark: Well, I can give you the answer I would have given you a few years ago, and maybe this is aligned with scientists or not. I probably got it from scientists that I was reading, which is that in a huge universe, we know, with the law of large numbers, that certain things will happen based on chance.

When you have enough trials of something, you’re bound to end up with diversity. And one part of that diversity could be the complexity of life. It’s just a chance emergence out of many, many things happening. And we’re seeing a speck where diversity in life evolved.

Rick: So a speck on our planet, or a speck in this whole universe being such a speck, because it’s obviously full of diversity.

Mark: I think it would depend on who you talk to. But I’ve sensed that more and more scientists are open to the notion that there is some form of life, even if it’s not as advanced as human beings, elsewhere in the universe, just based on chance alone.

Rick: Sure, and even on our planet. I mean, when a daffodil grows or something, it’s not just doing that by chance. It’s doing that in a very orderly way, extracting nutrients from the ground and the sunlight, and so on and so forth, and coming out with this beautiful thing.

It’s sort of as if the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t dominate in our world. There are so many things that counteract it.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, now, with my perspective, looking at consciousness as being the fundamental aspect, which is kind of—instead of a bottom-up approach, where we emerge from matter and consciousness comes out—it’s more of a top-down approach. Consciousness is fundamental. Everything is emerging within it.

It’s just much easier to explain this kind of diversity with an underlying awareness or sentience than it is using randomness.

Rick: Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. Muktananda wrote a book called Play of Consciousness. And in the Vedic tradition, they use the word Leela. And they say the whole creation is a play of consciousness.

But the implication is that it’s pure intelligence, pure, unbounded intelligence. It’s not just consciousness, but it has this sort of creative potency that wants to give rise to more and more sophisticated forms through which you can experience itself as a living reality.

Mark: That makes much more sense to me than it used to, I’ll say, and it could explain the diversity that we see all over the planet and all over the universe.

🛤️ Research into psychic phenomena and survival

Rick: Yeah. So let’s go through some of the things in your book. Some of the chapters, I mean, obviously not in tremendous detail. But you outline a number of different areas that you feel buttress the argument for consciousness being fundamental. And I’ve got the table of contents in front of me here, but I’m sure you have them in mind. So let’s go through a few of them.

And people who are listening or watching live, if you want to send in a question, there’s a forum at the bottom of the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com.

Mark: To preface this discussion, my approach, when I started my research, was that I was exposed to anomalies, things that didn’t make sense. So I didn’t start my investigation by looking at the brain versus consciousness. I didn’t start by saying, “I think consciousness is fundamental.”

It started with a number of independent phenomena that I couldn’t make sense of. And as I did more and more research and saw more of these phenomena, studied by people independently in independent areas, it all converged on this idea that consciousness is primary, and that consciousness doesn’t come from the brain.

And that’s the way the book was ultimately structured. It comes back to the idea that we all have a consciousness. Anyone listening to this right now or watching it has a consciousness. It is there. How is it there? Is it from the brain, or is it not from the brain?

The book explores a number of independent phenomena which, if real, could be explained much more easily by saying consciousness is not from the brain, whereas we’d have a really hard time explaining them by saying consciousness is just stuck in our skull.

So that’s the preface for these various phenomena. And I divided it into two major categories, and each has its own chapter. So the first category is psychic phenomena. And the chapters within that are the evidence for remote viewing, perceiving something at a distance; telepathy, which is mind-to-mind communication; precognition, which is knowing or sensing the future before it happens; animals that exhibit these abilities as well; and psychokinesis, which is the ability for the mind to affect matter without any physical contact.

So that’s the kind of wizard-like psychic abilities category. The other category is evidence that consciousness survives after bodily death. And the three chapters there are near-death experiences; communications with the deceased, including planned accounts like mediumship and also spontaneous ones; and children who have memories of a previous life. And that’s from research coming out of the University of Virginia in particular, for over 50 years.

Rick: Yeah. Well, all these things are all kind of matter-of-fact assumptions for me. I’d be interested if anybody listening is skeptical about any of these things and would like to voice their skepticism. I’m sure you could address it.

But one thing that I often thought about, reading your book or listening to various other interviews you did, is that it might be interesting for you to present some of the most intelligent skepticism you’ve encountered.

Has anyone, rather than just brushing you off, actually sat you down and given you a really good argument as to why this data or the other thing might be seen a different way?

Mark: I haven’t heard any arguments that have swayed me on the whole. But I’ve heard arguments that look at specific cases.

So, for the sake of your audience, the reason that I positioned the book the way I did, where I have each of these independent phenomena, is that I reasoned that if any one of these things is real, we have to rethink the paradigm.

So it’s not necessarily the case that every single anomaly ever reported is real, and that the statistics were properly done every time. I cannot personally verify that. But when I look at the large body of evidence, I have a hard time, as a rational human being, saying that every single one is wrong.

So that’s the overarching premise here. And I haven’t heard of anyone who’s been able to shoot down every single one. But within individual cases, I have heard things like, “Well, the statistics were manipulated here.” And, using complex math—the statistics are beyond me—they say, “Well, this was not done properly, and therefore the study is not valid.”

I’ve heard things like, “Well, these are anecdotal cases, and we need controlled scientific studies to be able to verify that something exists.” And to me, that doesn’t really work because everything is experienced subjectively, and we can’t just throw that out.

So the short answer to your question, Rick, is that I haven’t heard anything that has compelled me to throw all of it out.

Rick: No, not all of it. And it’s fair enough to say that some studies are shoddy and some are well done, and some people are phonies and some are genuine, and all that stuff.

I mean, Houdini spent a lot of his life trying to verify psychic phenomena and life-after-death stuff, and he debunked a lot of psychics and so on. But one anomaly—I mean, one sort of phony or weak study—doesn’t trash the whole bunch.

I mean, there are people who take the email scandal over some British climatologist and say, “Well, climate change is bunk because they cherry-picked some guy’s emails, and they appear to be monkeying with data.”

But anyway, like you’re saying, that’s going to happen with pretty much any field of scientific endeavor. There’s going to be a broad range of studies and a broad range of quality in those studies. But you have to sort of take the entirety of it and look at how solid it is.

And I think in the area we’re talking about, there’s a lot of information out there. Now, that’s really hard to ignore unless you have your head in the sand.

Mark: But you make an important point: the bad apples in the barrel are the ones that seem to get the most attention.

If you don’t have a lot of time to research these things, and you see a headline or a Wikipedia article that says all this has been debunked—and maybe some of it has, rightly so, where there have been studies that have been done improperly, or they’re frauds, just like in any other area—those get all the attention.

And then it causes people to put this whole domain in another area, which is, “Oh, that’s all fraudulent.” And it’s perhaps the inability or lack of adjustment to say maybe those are just a few cases, and it’s not that reflective of the whole.

Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of like the whole extraterrestrial thing where, yeah, maybe there were some weather balloons, but boy, there’s a lot of stuff going on that’s really hard to explain.

A question came in from—let’s see if I can pronounce this—Guillerme Koeho from São Paulo, Brazil, South America, who is on today. He said, “I would like to know more about your opinion of free will and choice. More and more neuroscientists, including Sam Harris—he didn’t say that, but I’m adding it—have come to the conclusion that choice and free will are an illusion or unrealistic construction of the brain. Michael Gazzaniga is one of them. What are your thoughts?”

Mark: Well, if we think about what reality is—reality, under the idea we’ve been discussing, is made of consciousness. Consciousness is the basis of existence. Therefore, at the level of pure consciousness, there would be infinite free will. That’s how I would see it, because if consciousness is all there is, and if we’re talking about the sea of consciousness, then that sea has free will.

Now, each of us is a part of that stream. But it starts to get abstract. Does the individual actually exist as we perceive the individual? Is there an individual if we’re all part of the sea? Is it really just the sea that has free will, and we are free-will instruments within that sea?

I guess the way I would summarize it is that I think there is free will in the universe at the basic level of reality. Secondly, I think the concept of free will is a human construct. It’s something that we have created with the limited mind, and we have a particular perspective on what free will is. We’re kind of answering our own limited question, so it might be something that is also just beyond the comprehension of the limited human mind.

Rick: I think one way of looking at it is kind of like what you just said. Consciousness, in its ground state and its fundamental nature, is a field of all possibilities. As it begins to manifest, then it has to do so in particular streams, and the possibilities become more and more limited as it manifests. Birds can’t swim underwater, and humans can’t fly like birds.

Once you get into a particular form or structure, then that structure has its limitations, but it’s still permeated by, and essentially is, that which is a field of all possibilities. So, if you could, as a human being, cultivate the ability to maintain that unboundedness of awareness while functioning within boundaries, then you kind of have the best of both worlds.

Mark: I totally agree with you. That’s how I see it as well. It’s in line with what many mystics have said for a long time, which is aligning with that awareness when we are just being in the world. That’s kind of the optimal state.

Rick: Yeah, good. I suppose another analogy we could use is water, which doesn’t have a form or shape. But if you put it in molds and then freeze it, like popsicles or something like that, then it has a particular shape. It doesn’t have the fluidity of water; it’s rigid, but it’s still water.

Mark: Right. It has a limitation or a restriction, but within the same context.

Rick: Yeah. One implication of what I just said, I think, is that if you get focused into boundaries without having access to unboundedness, then you’re inevitably frustrated because you are that unboundedness.

There are beautiful quotes from Rumi and others about how you are this field of all possibilities. That might be why Thoreau said, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” You’re stuck, and you know you’re more than that. But if you could somehow access that something more and live that fully, while enjoying life as a human being, then there’s tremendous freedom and fulfillment, and a lack of such frustration.

Mark: Yeah, it’s a liberating transition. I can say that because it’s so fresh for me. The materialist perspective is one of limitation inherently, and that applies to one’s own identity as well.

But maybe there is that knowing in the background, that awareness that’s always been there and has been overlooked throughout one’s life, like it was for me. Once one taps into that, it is just an incredibly liberating experience.

Rick: Yeah. And again, concrete, practical applications of this: I often mention the opioid epidemic because I think it’s such a shame that all these people are trying to blot out their consciousness because they’re so unhappy, or whatever it is that motivates them. All these people are dying, but golly, if they could contrast what they’re experiencing, either on opioids or before taking them, with what it’s possible to experience—what, say, Ramana experienced, or Jesus Christ, or one of these great sages—they would be so inspired by that vision of possibilities that they’d never be able to forget it.

So, the birthright of human beings is tremendous, and we’re just not really realizing it as a society.

Mark: With instances like opioids and other drugs, or anything that’s external to bring us happiness, it’s almost like a misattribution of pleasure. We attribute it to a drug. Say it’s an addictive drug: someone takes it, and then they become happy, and we say it was because of the drug.

It’s really a misinterpretation. If we use the analogy of the sun and clouds, maybe what the drug is doing is just removing some of the clouds so that you’re experiencing more of those rays of consciousness. All the drug is doing is unlocking the filter that was already there. We’re saying it’s because of the drug that that happened, but we have that innate capability within us.

Rick: Yeah, they say that of psychedelics—that psychedelics thin the filter, or move some of the filters, so that we’re experiencing a lot of stuff that’s ordinarily outside the realm of our experience.

With downers, with opioids, it seems like the opposite is the case. We’re sort of just trying to make the filter even darker so that we could become unconscious and not have to feel anything.

Mark: Yeah. Or it’s dulling disturbances. If there are disturbances to the rays of consciousness, maybe they’re clouds or something else. But it’s a dulling that allows us to experience more of the pure consciousness, so to speak.

We’re saying that the opioid, or whatever it is we’re taking, is the cause, but it’s actually just an enabler of something that’s already there.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so I’m enjoying talking to you, and I don’t want this to end. But I also don’t have a big, huge list of questions in front of me. So anytime you feel inspired to say anything that we haven’t discussed, just bring it right out, and we’ll do it. Anything at the moment?

Mark: Yeah, we haven’t talked about the research at the University of Virginia. I think it’s important to talk about them because they’re a mainstream, credible, established institution, and they’ve been looking at this for 50 years.

One of the areas of study is near-death experiences and altered states of consciousness, but they’ve spent a lot of time looking at more than 2,500 cases of children who are reporting very distinct memories of a life that is not theirs. In some cases, the children have memories or certain preferences that just don’t make sense based on the life that they have.

Birthmarks and Physical Evidence in Reincarnation Cases

To me, the most compelling cases are the ones where the children have physical deformities, birthmarks, or birth defects that are aligned with how the person died in the previous life, and where the researcher sometimes can find medical or historical records to verify that the person died in that manner.

Here we have the person’s new body as a child sharing physical manifestations.

Rick: Yeah, I had a friend who had a lump on the back of his head, and he claimed to have been Abraham Lincoln in his past life. I was skeptical of him, but, yeah, that’s very interesting. Do you have any idea how that would happen—that physical deformity coming into this next life?

Mark: It is not well understood, but the researchers at UVA tend to think that reincarnation is the best explanation.

If we use Dr. Kastrup’s analogy of reality being like a stream of water, and we are all whirlpools within that stream, then we’re just different modulations of consciousness having individual, localized experiences.

When the person dies, it’s like the whirlpool stops being a whirlpool. The water dissolves into the broader stream. It doesn’t leave the stream; consciousness doesn’t leave the stream. Consciousness continues. It’s simply transitioning into a new form.

This example of apparent reincarnation that we’re seeing with children might be a re-forming of a whirlpool that’s using water from a prior whirlpool, to use an analogy. It’s like information is being transferred from one to the other, and it’s having a manifestation both mentally, in terms of memories and preferences, and physically.

Rick: Yes, some people say that the next life is formed by randomly taking a bucket out of the stream, and then all the karma in that bucket, or whatever, forms this life. But I tend to think that there’s a kind of continuity from life to life, and that the same water, so to speak, that was forming one whirlpool goes on to form the next one. We’re stretching the metaphor here, but there are traditional texts that concur with this—that there’s a kind of record kept, that the soul evolves from life to life, and that it takes advantage of the progress it’s made in previous lives and carries that on into the next.

Mark: Yeah, that notion really makes sense to me now that I’ve looked at this whole area. If we think about our physical existence, we come into the body and we don’t bring anything physical with us. When we leave the body, according to this notion, consciousness continues.

Consciousness leaves the body, but we don’t bring anything with us from the physical world, so to speak. All we carry with us is our consciousness and the ways in which it has evolved.

This notion that we are evolving through an infinite diversity of expression in the universe, and even on a more individualistic level as individual whirlpools that become new whirlpools—it’s like there is this continuity that’s occurring, and there is an evolution. That just seems to make sense to me, based on the way that consciousness is transitioning beyond this life.

Rick: Yeah, it makes sense to me. I’m happy to entertain any contrary opinions, but it just seems to fit.

Mark: It seems to fit, and it’s what many people report when they’ve entered altered states or when people come back from a near-death experience. There is this sense that it is not the end of life, and the life review is part of the learning and evolving process.

People who are highly psychic, whether it’s through mediumship, channeling, or other forms, and many people working through independent areas—hypnosis is another one—come back with this notion of recurring lives in different bodies and evolution. That’s sort of a continuum.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a guy named Michael Newton. You’ve probably heard of him.

Mark: Yes.

Rick: He specialized in hypnotizing people back to the period between lives. He got so much consistency between all of his different subjects that he was able to map out an agreed-upon scenario of what happens when we’re in between lives.

I interviewed a guy who is sort of a protégé of his, or somewhat in the same vein. I forget the guy’s name.

Mark: Was it Robert Schwartz?

Rick: Yeah. Right. Thank you. But in any case, it kind of reinforces what we’re just saying here: there’s a sort of—it’s like you go from one grade to the next, so to speak, as you go through your education. And it’s not like you’re a whole new person when you go from seventh grade to eighth grade. You carry on your knowledge from seventh grade, and then you build upon it in eighth grade, and so on.

Mark: Right. Right. But it’s so counter to mainstream thinking to think that way because it’s much more expansive. And it says that something is at play here that’s beyond our genetics and beyond our environment.

And that’s what basic medicine says: our physical form, and who we are, are informed by our genetics and our environment. And that’s it. Here, there seems to be a third factor. And that’s what the University of Virginia researchers say: there might be a third factor here that’s influencing who we are in this body. And if that’s true, think about it: if our medicine and science and everything else are missing an entire factor.

Rick: Which they are. And what we’re saying doesn’t contradict genetics or the environment. It just says that your karma, so to speak, means you would be born into a circumstance and with certain genetics that would be in alignment with your karma.

Mark: Exactly. We don’t have to throw out the old; it’s just the incorporation of a much more expansive idea.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s an important point. Because if we did have to throw out the old, then there would be a reason for all these people to be threatened by and fight back against such notions. But if it’s more a matter of building upon what we already know, and just expanding it and filling in some missing pieces, then who wouldn’t want that?

Mark: Right, in theory.

Rick: In theory. Yeah. But I’m intrigued by the notion that I read in that paragraph at the very beginning of the interview: that we could actually trace back just about every problem in the world to the fact that we don’t regard consciousness as fundamental. And we might add that we’re not taking advantage of the fact that it’s fundamental by tapping into that resource adequately.

Mark: It’s a very empowering idea because it means that everyone is entitled to this because it’s fundamental to who and what we are. Whereas we live in a world that is much more hierarchical, it makes certain things seem to be more important than others. Here, we’re seeing an empowering notion.

So I think this is why it’s not just an intellectual endeavor. This is something that applies to everyone in their own life, how they carry themselves in the world, and how they think of themselves in relation to others.

I think this notion of separation is one that is so subtle, but it’s just part of the materialist view: “I’m a body that emerged randomly through matter. I have my own brain, my own consciousness. And even though I see you as another human being, you have similar genetics to me because we’re part of the same species. And we inhabit the same universe and planet. Beyond that, we are separate beings.”

I think this notion of separation is one that is so subtle, but it’s just part of the materialist view: “I’m a body that emerged randomly through matter. I have my own brain, my own consciousness. And even though I see you as another human being, you have similar genetics to me because we’re part of the same species. And we inhabit the same universe and planet. Beyond that, we are separate beings.”

Whereas, if we are part of the same consciousness, and our eyes just show us an apparent separation, then the way we treat one another becomes paramount because we’re all the same.

And when we think about things like altruism—and that’s been a hot topic in biology—it’s like, “Wait, how do we explain that we’re good to others if we’re separate and we’re survival of the fittest?” There are some explanations to show that it’s beneficial for genetics to help others in your gene pool. But we could also explain altruism through this notion that we’re connected as part of the same self, and by helping another, you’re actually being selfish because you’re helping yourself through another form.

And that idea alone—I mean, we think about all the problems we have on a daily basis and throughout the world—I think many of them stem from this notion that we are separate from each other.

“If we are part of the same consciousness, and our eyes just show us an apparent separation, then the way we treat one another becomes paramount because we’re all the same.”

Rick: Yeah. And of course, all the great religious traditions say that we’re not. I mean, Jesus said, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” The Upanishads say, “Thou art that,” “All this is that,” “That alone is.” And so there are so many examples of people who actually were having that experience expressing it for us.

But if you don’t have—well, Jesus also used to always say, “If you have ears to hear, then you will hear,” and “pearls before swine,” and all that. But a lot of people just hear these concepts, and they don’t mean anything because they don’t resonate with their experience, I suppose.

Mark: Right. Again, I think it goes back to our perceptual systems. It looks like there’s separation out there, and unless you’ve had a personal mystical experience where you felt the oneness, or unless you’ve really dug into this science, or you’ve had just a personal sense of it, it can be hard to absorb it.

But to me, it’s important enough that I decided to write a book on it. I’m now speaking publicly. These were not things that were on my radar. I had no plans of writing a book or being public in any way. But I felt that it was important enough because, like Rupert Spira says—and I quote him toward the end of my book—he says something to the effect of, “If we look back 250 years from now and see that the human species hadn’t survived, it will likely be because the materialist paradigm has prevailed,” meaning this notion that consciousness comes from the brain.

So that’s a big deal, and that’s worthy, to me, of spending time talking about these topics and writing a book.

Rick: Yeah, I’m placing my money on a paradigm shift.

Mark: I like it.

Rick: So, in addition to really wrapping your head around this intellectually, have you gotten onto some sort of spiritual practice that you are doing consistently?

Mark: I’ve tried different forms of meditation. I think living a very contemplative lifestyle, where I’m kind of pulling back to that sense of being consciousness rather than being the body while living on a daily basis—in addition to doing that kind of thing in a silent time—that’s been the biggest practice for me: that reminder of who and what I think I am now and what reality is, and then acting from that place is very different from what I used to do.

Rick: Yeah. Well, maybe you’re a Jnana yogi. Do you know what that means?

Mark: Yeah. So it’s the intellectual path. I’ve learned about it.

Rick: Right. And you’re certainly a bright guy. Next lifetime, I want to go to Princeton and be captain of the tennis team, or maybe the pickleball team if they have one.

Mark: Maybe then they will. Pickleball is fun, as we talked about.

Rick: Another question came in. Let me ask this one. This is Aaron Morton from Dunedin, New Zealand. I think that’s a girl’s name. Aaron asks, “What about the observer and the observed? Do they have to happen at the same time and can’t exist without the other? What do you think comes first? And how does that affect free will?”

I saw a cartoon the other day that said, “I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I’ll let you know what happens.”

Mark: That’s a great question. Thank you, Aaron, for asking that. That gets to “What is time?” That’s really the fundamental question underlying what you ask. Is time linear in the way that we perceive things? Is causality what we think it is? Does something from the past cause something in the future? And is time linear—past to present to future?

In my book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, and just having thought about this a lot, I think there are reasons to question our perception of linear time. We certainly perceive time to be that way, and it helps us organize things in the universe. Space and time help us organize perceptions and thoughts. That’s really what they are.

But when we look at things like precognition—and I’ll give an example of a study that I cite in the book—it’s been replicated many times. A person is looking at an image on a computer screen, and the image is either an arousing one, like an erotic or violent image, or a very peaceful one.

The body seems to respond to the image seconds before the image is randomly shown by the computer, meaning the person doesn’t know what’s going to come up. And I’ve actually done this test at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. You’re sitting in front of a computer screen, and you’re just hooked up to machines that are measuring either your skin or your eyes or your brain or your heart.

Rick: And the researcher doesn’t know what’s going to come up, and even the computer doesn’t know what’s going to come up. It’s just random.

Mark: It’s random. No one knows because it’s based on a random system. And yet the body seems to have a subtle but highly statistically significant response in a direction that’s consistent with the eventual picture that’s shown.

Meaning that if it’s an arousing picture that comes up, the body responds in that direction before the picture is shown, versus a peaceful picture, like just a mountain, something that wouldn’t stimulate the body. There’s a correlation there.

So, studies like that, combined with many other studies of precognition—precognitive remote viewing is something that happens a lot. And I spoke with Russell Targ a few weeks ago. He’s one of the laser physicists who ran the U.S. remote-viewing program out of Stanford.

Precognitive remote viewing is where people are remote-viewing something far away in space and in time. They’re seeing it before it happens. So all this is to say that our notion of linear time is put into question. If something in a future picture is affecting the past of the body, is time linear?

So I think where I come out is that time is not linear in the way we perceive it. And even when we look at time from just an intellectual perspective, like many mystics have done—Rupert Spira does this all the time—he says, “Well, think about the past. You’re thinking about it right now. The past occurs now.” And the same thing with the future: the future is a thought that occurs now.

So I view time and space—it’s kind of like this ever-present now and here, a simultaneity that’s occurring in a way that’s almost beyond human comprehension. So then we start to—I think humility comes back in. And that’s where I end up with, “Wait, I just can’t understand it. I don’t know.” But it’s not what I perceive it to be in the linear fashion that is just common sense.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, Einstein told us that time is malleable and space curves, and all that. I mean, there’s relativistic time dilation, the twins paradox: one twin goes out near the speed of light and comes back, and when he gets back, his other twin is really old, and he hasn’t aged much.

So time is malleable in that way. But it’s a bit more of a leap to talk about predicting or seeing things that haven’t actually happened yet.

Mark: It’s a hard one. I’ve heard lots of analogies about this, and it’s kind of what you were alluding to on the topic of free will: the future isn’t fully set, but it has highly probable outcomes. Some of those outcomes are just more probable than others. It’s sort of like this distribution of potential. If a future event is very, very likely, then maybe it can be predicted. I don’t know. It’s hard for me, too, but the findings are suggesting—and I’ll quote Dr. Jessica Utts, who was the 2016 president of the American Statistical Association. She was asked by the U.S. Congress and the CIA to examine the evidence for psychic phenomena.

In her report, which was published back in 1995, she says, in a direct quote, “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, psychic functioning has been well established.” In that report, she says that precognition also appears to be real: this notion that the future is able to be known by some people beyond what chance would predict. So I’m seeing it occur over and over again, and scientists who seem to be really smart say there’s an effect. It’s mind-boggling.

Rick: Yeah. I interviewed a guy a few months ago named Ishtar, and he had all kinds of remarkable experiences as a child. At one point, he had this really strong feeling that his mother shouldn’t go anywhere. He was begging her, crying, “Don’t go anywhere. You’ve got to stay home,” and all this stuff. But he and she went out in the car somewhere, and Ishtar looked to his left. A car was inches away from their car, going about 60 miles an hour, and killed his mother instantly. He was okay, but it was this really strong precognition thing. There are lots of stories like that.

Mark: Lots of stories, and sometimes they happen in dreams, known as precognitive dreams. I mentioned a story from Dr. Larry Dossey, who wrote a book called One Mind, around the same idea. He personally had an example of a precognitive dream in which he dreamt something that happened in the hospital where he worked. He’s an M.D., and he dreamt it in vivid detail beforehand. He couldn’t reconcile that with the old worldview, and he ended up shifting away from materialism as a result.

Rick: Yeah. All righty. Well, I hope this interview will help a few people shift away from materialism, if there are any people of that sort listening to this. I don’t know if there are—we have a pretty selective audience here. But anyway, I think the whole topic is as important as you think it is, and it’s really been fun getting to talk about it with you for a couple of hours.

Mark: Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on the show. I think even for your listeners who are familiar with these topics, I’ve found in talking to people that it can be validating sometimes to hear that there’s science to back up what someone has experienced personally.

I’ve heard from people that they’ve felt shy or timid about speaking about these topics openly. But now that there seems to be science backing what they’ve been through, maybe they’ll talk about these topics in areas or social circles where previously they wouldn’t have.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s one of those things that can build momentum until the point where it just shifts—the hundredth-monkey phenomenon, or whatever you want to call it. A lot of times, that kind of stuff happens quite suddenly. There’s a big shift, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. You didn’t see it coming, and then all of a sudden, there it is. There are all sorts of societal shifts like that that come quite suddenly after just percolating for a while. Gay marriage, for instance.

Mark: Yeah, the universe seems to work in a nonlinear fashion. There’s a theory that I referenced in An End to Upside Down Thinking called chaos theory. You have a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia, and because, when you run the math, that butterfly flapping its wings—that minute shift in the air—ends up causing a hurricane on the other side of the planet. That’s how things seem to work: a tiny shift, ostensibly based on our linear mind, actually has a much bigger effect, more than we can compute using our brain.

Rick: Yeah, there’s also a thing in science called a phase transition. There are many examples of it, but even boiling water is one. It can be almost 212 degrees Fahrenheit—maybe 211—and it doesn’t look like much is happening. All of a sudden, it reaches 212, and boom, it starts to boil. There are all kinds of interesting analogies about how certain percentages of people shifting in their consciousness could cause the whole society to shift once a certain critical mass has been reached.

Mark: I’ve heard that theory. I’m very intrigued by it. I hope it happens in our lifetimes. That would be cool to see a shift that way. But who knows? I think, at the very least, on an individual level, this can be extremely liberating.

Rick: Yeah. There is an old Bengali saying: “If no one comes when you call, then go ahead alone.” So it’s extremely liberating and gratifying for the individual, whether or not the rest of society buys into it.

Mark: That’s how I felt about this whole process. I was going to put the book out because it really resonated with me, and I wanted to give others an opportunity to take in that information without having to do the research that I did—to scrounge around, find things, and sift through them. Some people like that, and that’s okay by me. I think it’s a matter of finding truth for ourselves.

Rick: Yeah, well, the book is well referenced. There’s a whole section of notes in the back with references to all kinds of things. Yours is a good kind of synopsis, and if people want to get into the details, you point them in all the various directions.

Mark: Right. I wanted it to be an overview for the general public. I didn’t want it to be too scientific while not being unscientific. So there are hundreds of citations in the back for people who want more detail.

Rick: Yeah, great. All righty. So I’ll be putting up a page on BatGap with a link to your website, a little bio of you, and a link to your book. People can go there. Your website is easy to remember: markgober.com—M-A-R-K G-O-B-E-R. They can go there, or they can bounce off the BatGap page and get to your site. So thanks, Mark. I really appreciate spending time with you.

Mark: Yeah, it was fun. Thanks for having me, Rick, and thanks for all the great work you do. I think these interviews are part of helping the shift, and I know they’ve helped a lot of people. I’ve listened to many of your interviews over this period as well, so I want to thank you.

Rick: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. I’m looking forward to your podcast, by the way. I’ve heard you allude to it several times, and you’ve interviewed a whole bunch of interesting people. It’s going to be very well produced, and I’ll definitely subscribe to it.

Mark: Okay, thank you. I’m excited about it. Later in 2019.

Rick: Good. Okay, so thanks to those who are listening, who have been listening or watching, and we will see you in the next one.

Summary

Questions This Interview Explores

Key takeaways

Transcript

What a paradigm shift means

Scientific Anomalies That Challenge Established Theories

✨ Evidence for consciousness beyond the brain

Identity as Consciousness Beyond the Physical Body

✨ Consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of reality

🛤️ Research into psychic phenomena and survival

Birthmarks and Physical Evidence in Reincarnation Cases

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