Mark Gober is an international speaker and the author of "An End to Upside Down Thinking" which was awarded the best science book of 2019, and its sequel book "An end to upside down Livingโ. He is also the host of the podcast "Where Is My Mind", featuring his interviews with world-leading consciousness researchers.
This is the first half of the conversation. In the second half on episode #133, Mark goes deeper into this fascinating, mind-blowing topic.
๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ฎ๐๐:
* Where does our mind come from?
* The #2 question remaining in all science: the hard problem of consciousness
* Does the brain manufacture consciousness or is it like an antenna that receives it?
* Correlation is not causation
๐ฉ๐ฎ๐น๐๐ฎ๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐:
Website: https://markgober.com/
๐ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ ๐พ๐๐ผ๐๐ฒ:
"Is it that the brain creates consciousness, OR is consciousness beyond the brain, and the brain is like an antenna receiver, tapping into the cloud?"
-Mark Gober
๐๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ต๐ผ๐๐:
I am Agi Keramidas, a knowledge broker and zealous podcaster. I am a firm believer in the power of self-education and personal development in radically improving one's life.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
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0:05
Welcome to the personal development mastery podcast. I'm Agi Keramidas. And my mission is to inspire you to rise up, grow, stand out and take action towards the next level of your life. I interview leaders influencers, entrepreneurs, authors, exceptional people who can and will inspire you to improve your life, Jr for two episodes each week, and make sure you subscribe to the podcast to get the episodes as soon as they are released. In today's show, I am delighted to speak with Mark Gober. Mark, you are an international speaker, the author of an end to upside down thinking which was awarded the best science book of 2019 and its sequel book an end to upside down leaving. You're also the host of the podcast, where is my mind featuring your interviews with world leading consciousness researchers? Mark, welcome to personal development mastery. I'm delighted to speak with you and to discuss the mind blowing conclusions that your research has led you to. Well, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it. And Mark, sir, we go back a little bit first, and you have a background in business and previously investment banking analyst. And at some point you start researching about consciousness. So can you can you take us back first and paint a bit of a picture of who you were before?
1:42
Yeah. Well, I didn't expect to be writing about consciousness talking about it. It wasn't on my radar. I had a very traditional academic background, I went to Princeton, I was a competitive athlete growing up, I ended up being one of the captains of the tennis team at Princeton, wasn't thinking about consciousness. They're very achievement focused. And then I went into investment banking in New York, after college, decided to leave in 2010. I was there during the financial crisis, I was working non stop. It was a pretty tough period, and joined a firm called Sherpa Technology Group first in Boston, and then Silicon Valley. So on the surface, it doesn't look like I would have much to do with the topic of consciousness or metaphysics. But thinking back, I've always had an interest in like, what are we doing here and ask questions like that. What Why am I trying to achieve, I always kind of felt like I was on a treadmill, like I would achieve something that I always wanted, and then it would feel like nothing happened. And I'd be on to the next thing.
2:41
So I've had big questions like that. And actually, when I got to Princeton, my sophomore year, I was thinking about majoring in astrophysics when you had to declare major. But for a lot of reasons, I decided not to do it, I was very busy with tennis, I would have been a late entrant into the major. And at Princeton, they had great deflation, when I was there, meaning they limited the number of a grades that would give. So I was like, do I really want to do astrophysics while I'm doing tennis, and all these other things and being so conscious about grades could dislike? Could it be? Could it actually take away from my life and make it much more stressful? So I decided not to do it. But I mentioned it, because I think the impulse was already there to ask those kinds of questions. Yeah. But it was for me in 2016, when I when I really became interested in these topics. It wasn't something I was looking for consciously. But as I talked about more in my second book, and and upside down living, there was a lot of my life, in addition to having these questions about does anything matter? There were some business deals that didn't go my way, some personal dating, situations that didn't go my way. And it was kind of like a lot of things at once hit. And I was not feeling good about life. And in the back of my mind, I didn't know. I didn't know if there was any meaning to life. And in fact, I think it was more than that. I didn't think there was any meaning to life. I thought we were here randomly. And when you die, there's no, there's no more memory, there's no more ability to be aware. So we're just here trying to enjoy ourselves, I guess, and rationalising meaning. So I was like, I was in a pretty lost place. But it was a place that I think my traditional academic background led me to, because that's what science, at least traditional science would say that the worldview I just described is actually correct, even though it's very bleak. There's no meaning to life. And that's it. So that's where I was coming from. And I was listening to podcasts, usually on the topics of health and business. And there was one in particular, that I remember that, I guess sparked this whole thing, even though this one interview didn't necessarily change my worldviews maybe the first domino, it was a show called extreme health radio, and they interviewed a woman named Laura powers, who talked about her own psychic abilities and she was speaking like a normal person, but saying things that sounded crazy. Like she works with energy and she communicates with nothing. Physical entities and talks about consciousness beyond the body. And it was enough for me to listen to the whole interview, and it was probably over an hour. And at the end of that interview, Laura said, Well, I have my own podcast called healing powers, where I've interviewed many other people who've had these experiences. So I remember at the time, I was in this very last place, but also working, and I lived in San Francisco, and I would drive down to Silicon Valley and lots of traffic. So it was a good time to listen to podcasts. So I just I subscribed to Laura's podcast, and within a few weeks ended up listening to every episode from 2016, back to 2011. And I was like, okay, what's going on here, because all these people are describing a very similar picture of reality. It's not one that I've ever heard of before, in a serious way. And these people are independent. Some of them are scientists, some of them just are normal people, some of them, they have different backgrounds. And they were coming to similar conclusions. So it wasn't like I heard one interview, and it changed my life. It became the compilation of all these different conversations. And I was like, Okay, what is what's going on here? What's, There's more than meets the eye to this universe? And if that's true, then I have to rethink my own life. And so I started to then look at that the scientific evidence for this and looked at the University of Virginia's research, even the US government's Princeton had a lab that I didn't know about, and many people didn't know about that studied a lot of these topics. And so long story short, after about a year of just studying, because I wanted to learn in the beginning, it was no intention of doing like writing and doing podcasting. But I was just so curious, in my own life was changing, that I ended up deciding to write a book. And so in the summer of 2017, even though I was still working at the time, I said, Okay, I'm going to take it was Fourth of July weekend, and I just, it was a long weekend, I sat down with my books and said, I'm going to put this on paper had outline for how I was going to do it, ended up writing a big chunk of the book that long weekend, which then led me to finish it over the next few weekends. And then all of a sudden, I came out in July 2017. I said, I have got this manuscript here. What do I do with it. And so here we are today, a few years later, a second book came out a podcast series called where's my mind where I interviewed many of the people that I wrote about. And I also in the end of 2019, decided I would leave my firm after becoming a partner. So in 2020, just want to end up writing my second book, concurrent with the pandemic, I ended up having a lot of time to meditate and do more research. And that's where I am now.
7:27
Great. So I'm going to go back again a little bit before we go more currently, again, and I wanted to ask, you mentioned the word. Curious that you were curious, and you started research. And I wanted to ask when you first listen to that first podcast that three get you to keep on searching more. And you were listening to all those things that you said, that you had never heard before? Were you sceptical about them? Or were you inspired by them? Were you hopeful that Oh, wow, there is something here that feels like the truth, even though I don't have any proof about it.
8:12
I asked myself that question a lot. And I wish I could go back to that moment, because I didn't realise how significant and what it was that I was just here, this one conversation. But I think in hindsight, it wasn't that I wasn't sceptical or not sceptical, I wasn't even looking at it in those terms. It was more that, that I sensed that she was genuine in what she was describing that she was just describing her experience. And it happened to be an experience that I had never heard of in a serious way I don't think I'd ever heard maybe in science fiction movies, but this was someone who was speaking about her own life. And I do, I think I was also intrigued by her personal story, that she had a somewhat traditional background and got a master's degree in political science or something like that, and worked in higher education. So she was speaking as a person who was well educated. So it was enough for me to say that that baby her experiences are genuine, I had no conception of what the implications would be. Yes. At the time, it was just enough to spark to spark me to say, Well, I'm, I'm interested enough to learn more. And at the time, I was, I didn't even know what I was interested in. Because I was having all these existential questions and my career just wasn't as sure of as I used to be. I didn't know where it was gonna go. The sensation of being on a treadmill was really there. Because if I had Look, this was around the time I was, I had just turned 30 at this point, and looking back at all the things that I had accomplished that I would have wanted to have accomplished maybe 10 years ago, I would have said, Okay, now I should be in a great place because I've gotten all these things done that I maybe thought were possible. And yet I hear I was saying, Well, I don't even know what's next. It's not that great wherever I am. So I think I had the the openness at that point because of my life situation. And So I think it's important to note that at this stage in my career, I was more in a managerial role, whereas much earlier, I was always at the bottom of the barrel doing all the analyst type work. And now at this point, I was delegating a bit more. So I had more free time to be able to explore and more mental capacity to even think about these topics. And think about the implications. That happened a few years before I was so consumed with my profession, where I was always working, always thinking about it, that I didn't even have time really to analyse anything else.
10:33
And suddenly talk then, actually, I wanted to ask you one more thing about this story, which I find very interesting, because I was telling you earlier before we started recording that it, when I read about it, it feels to me like something to go over you. So when was it during that intense period of studying and remember your friends saying that you had like 1000 books in your flat or something like this? What was that a point that you realised that wow, I have really become obsessed with it, it has become a true fashion.
11:15
I think it's a good word obsessed. That's kind of what happened, because it's all I wanted to do. I wanted to understand what Who am I if something is more is going on, which we'll talk about, and what am I doing here? Is there meaning to life? And if there is meaning I need to know about it. Because whatever I used to think is wrong. Was there a point where that clicked? I think it was progressive. And the way I like to describe it, it's sort of like a stock chart. If you look at the s&p 500 decades ago, versus now you see an upward trajectory, but there's downs on the way, on the way up. So for me, I would learn something that would be mind blowing. And then I would go to work, and I think about daily life. And I would, whatever I learned wasn't relevant. All of a sudden, I'd be like, well, that's just how can that be. And then I would learn something new and say, well, there's something here. So there was this back and forth process. But there were maybe little spikes along the way. And there's one in particular that I'm thinking of with relation to Laura's podcast, she interviewed a man named Paul Davids who I ended up interviewing as well. What's interesting about him is that he also went to Princeton, also majored in psychology like me. So when I heard him say that I said, Okay, I can relate to this person, we have very similar backgrounds. In some ways. He also was the producer of the transformers. So it seemed like a somewhat a credible person, and he seemed intelligent when he was talking. He's telling the story about his colleague in Hollywood, who was an atheist, and said, Look, I don't believe in any afterlife. But if I get there, and there is an afterlife, I'm going to drop you a line. That's what he said to Paul. It turns out, Paul ended up having hundreds of mystical experiences after his colleague passed away, the most notable of which, and he wrote a book called an atheist in heaven and did a documentary on this. The most notable one was he was alone, I believe it was in New Mexico at his second home or something. So no one was there, he was reading papers, left the room and came back and found an ink blot covering certain words in the paper that had significance when he analysed what was removed. And he wouldn't he didn't know how the ink could have gotten there. Because it didn't make sense. And he ended up sending the ink to a chemistry lab for like three years paid for his own money. And they couldn't understand the composition of it. He had many other weird experiences. And I remember hearing this and not being able to move, because I had heard a bunch of things that suggested maybe there's reality to it, but the seriousness of what he was saying, of the implication of that I had to really, it was disorienting, see, I'm a bit more adjusted to it. Now, I'm more used to feeling like I don't know anything. Whereas before, when I, when I first learned about this, I said, Wait a second, I have to rethink my whole life. I remember that year, because when I heard these interviews, this was maybe in August, September of 2016, it was Thanksgiving that you're unusually, I would spend that time with family, I would go back to where I grew up. I didn't, I didn't do that. I stayed by myself, I went into Muir Woods, outside of San Francisco and just had to really sit there and think because not only was my own worldview changing, I understood the implication of that. But I had to understand that so many people around me would not even understand or have a way to relating to what I was talking about. Because I was here I was I had a bit more free time to think about these things didn't have a wife or kids. So I could just immerse myself. And I was like, Well, how can I How can I possibly convey this to someone else for them to even begin to understand what I'm thinking of, and this was just a few months into the journey.
14:41
And it it really hasn't ended? So I would say that one interview was a pivotal one because I remember just being so shocked by it. The Another thing I should add now thinking back to the story is that I began having my own experiences that were very strange, that I call them synchronicity. Now, having researched It's a topic Karl yune called it synchronicity where, for example, I would I would learn about something that I'd never heard of before. And then that thing would emerge somewhere else, like, I'd read about it, or it will come up on a podcast interview, or someone would mention it. And this would happen repetitively. And it happened so many times with different things, that I was like running the math in my head, I took statistics, what are the odds that this could be happening? and repeatedly, I would, I would conclude something is really strange here, what is going on in the universe? And then I started to work with some psychics myself, so I did a session with Laura powers, a psychic session she did professionally works with people. And not just her, I worked with a lot of people. And I did all the weird things you could imagine of talking to esoteric people, because I wanted to understand, I said, Okay, this is I will, this will be my leisurely spending, I will spend on these sessions, maybe they're frauds, maybe some of them are legit. And the long story short of it is, there's some legitimacy to at least some of it. And that fact alone is mind blowing. Like, they would tell me things that were happening in my life that there's no way they could have known about from across the country on the phone not seeing me. Really weird stuff. And those sorts of personal experiences are enough to jolt one. And in my journey, what I found is that there's two paths. Generally, there's an intellectual path of understanding it's at that level of like, the logic and the quantum physics and things like that. And then there's the experiential aspect, which could be a near death experience for some people at psychedelics. For some people, it's meditation or synchronicity, where it happens to you, and no matter who you are, you can't deny that it happened to you. And no one can tell you that it didn't happen. Because you know what happened to you. And what I found is that when people have direct experience, it's the most powerful.
16:42
Absolutely. Mark, let's discuss then about your research and your book and thinking about it is about rethinking consciousness, you talk about where does the mind come from? So I will ask you this question in a moment. But before I do that, because we are going to talk we have already have started talking about consciousness, if you were to give him a brief definition of what you mean, when you say consciousness. Can you share that with us?
17:18
Well, before I do that, I want to give some context for this term consciousness. And I didn't start off saying, I'm going to be thinking about consciousness when I heard lower powers. And I heard these other interviews, that wasn't the focal point, it was maybe weeks or months into my research, probably more like months, where I said, Okay, this whole entire issue of is there psychic phenomena? Is there anything after we die? It relates to this topic of consciousness, and it relates to the brain. So the topic of consciousness, what is what does it mean? Interestingly, I studied psychology and undergrad, I wasn't focused on neuroscience, it was more on how we make decisions. And I wrote my thesis on Daniel Kahneman, judgement, decision making and errors in our cognitive process. So consciousness is embedded in all of that, but I actually never even thought about consciousness itself. Because in the traditional academic world, it is so widely assumed that we are conscious. So consciousness, it means that the capacity for being aware the sense of experiencing life, so anyone who's experiencing the listening of this conversation right now, you're listening to it. That is your consciousness that's having that experience. It's difficult thing to even describe because it's abstract, like, I can't touch my consciousness, but I can touch my head, I can touch my leg. But consciousness is our capacity to experience it's our awareness. And the reason that I think it probably didn't come up much in my studies is that it's so widely assumed that consciousness is just a product of stuff happening inside our skull. We have a brain that has immense complexity, there's electrical activity, there's chemical activity, and it produces our capacity to be aware, that's what science would say. And why would science ever say that? Well, because there's tonnes of evidence that when you change the brain, your consciousness, your state of mind, your awareness will change in a corresponding way. So let's say someone gets in a car accident and has damage to the brain, and then has memory loss, we can easily point to the parts of the brain that have been damaged and say, Okay, well, you have memory loss, maybe you have changed in your vision, we can say, look, here, these are the parts of your brain that have been damaged, and now your consciousness, your experience has changed in a corresponding manner. Now, here's the key point. This is the critical, maybe evolved things I've researched in the last few years. This is the one this is the one thing to understand. It's not sufficient. Logically speaking, scientifically, speaking to say that well, because there's such a strong relationship between the brain and our states of consciousness, that therefore must be the case that the brain creates it. I'm going to pass on that this is a big deal. Now I'll give an example to explain why this logic doesn't necessarily follow and it's free. I'm a philosopher named Dr. Bernardo kastrup, who I think is a really clean philosopher in this area of consciousness. He says, You imagine you have a fire, and lots of firefighters show up, you have a larger fire, and there are more firefighters that show up, we can show this very tight correlation between the size of the fire and the number of firefighters that appear at the scene. Now, do we assume that the firefighters caused the fires? Not necessarily most likely? No. So the point is that when you have two things that are related, there can be multiple relationships between them, it could be that one creates the other could be that there's something else going on. And that is that this is the key issue where I think science has gone astray, mainstream society has gone astray. It's like, and I remember this analogy when I first started, it's like you're going on a hike. And if you go one way, you're going to be on one path. But if you just take a different path, to start, you're going to be on a completely different path in your life or in your thinking. And that's where this diversion happens, is it that the brain creates consciousness, that's one path, or is consciousness beyond the brain. And the brain is like a filtering mechanism or like an antenna receiver, tapping into the cloud, like your cell phone tapping into the cloud, or like we say, on my podcast, is the brain actually a blindfold. And it's a processing mechanism for something that's way beyond the body. And we're showing a little sliver of it through our brain. It's like,
21:28
with playing with playdough, you can stick the playdough through a little machine and squeeze it through and it comes out of spaghetti. Or it comes out of some shape. That playdough in this case could be like consciousness, and the brain body mechanism is the the way in which that playdough comes out. It comes out in different ways. So this way, thinking would put someone on a totally different path, it would it's a different path to take on the hike, because well, what is the body? What is the brain what is a human being? What is consciousness in relation to that. And I will say one more thing and pause after that. The broader thesis here is that to go back to the doctor kastrup, the philosopher, he says that all reality is actually just one consciousness that we're a part of, and we're whirlpools, within a stream, an infinite stream of water, we're waters like consciousness. So it's this idea that we are individuals, but we're kind of not individuals. We're separate, but we're not separate. So when I'm experiencing things as a whirlpool of as the whirlpool of Mark, I'm experiencing one aspect of reality, but there's a much bigger stream out there, and my brain and my body are somehow blocking me from that. And that's the general metaphysical framework that has informed all of the work that I've done this idea, rain consciousness, they're related, but actually, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the brain is this antenna, receiver, Hilter and we are we as our individual identities are much more than our bodies. And we're fundamentally interconnected.
23:04
I
23:05
remember it analogy that I had read about, you said the Whirlpool, remember it like waves in the sea. So the waves might think that they are individual from each other, but they're all interconnected to the sea, and they can't exist on their own. But they tend to focus on what they are and not to the whole. So it's similar to the Whirlpool. And great analogy. Yes. You were saying about this, the the causation and the correlation, which many people unfortunately have that really, I don't know if that is intentionally done or not. But there is quite a lot of confusion about whether it's something that you were given that wonderful example, with the firemen and the fire showed, usually they don't cause the fire, but one might look at them and draw that conclusion, either mistakenly or deliberately to mislead others. Yeah. I was very, when I was reading a bit more about these, these topics. I was very surprised to find that this question of about where does consciousness come from is actually the number one remaining question in all of science the into it's called the hard problem of consciousness that we don't know. So I find that very fascinating that it's so high up on the list of scientific problems.
24:40
Yes. Well, and that's an important point because, and for me, as a researcher, and also as a business person, at that point you just raised was one of the reasons I had so much confidence to be able to write a book like this, that it's known as the hard problem of consciousness in science. Even the scientists who say that the brain creates consciousness, they will admit they don't understand how that could happen. So Science Magazine, a very credible outlet. They put out their top 25 questions remaining in all of science. So the number two question the way they phrased it, because the number two and the number one are related, the number two question they ask is, what is the biological basis of consciousness? So that question has an error built within it, because it says, What is the biological basis of consciousness? Meaning that there is a biological basis? It assumes something within the question. And of course, what I would argue is that there is asking the wrong question, they will never be able to find a biological basis of consciousness because there is not. So that's the second the number two question the number one question which is related to this is, what is the universe made of? So I would argue that the universe is made of consciousness, everything is consciousness itself, the world that we experience seems to be material, it seems to be physical, but that is an interpretation of our sensory organs, we feel something that seems solid, and we say, Oh, that's solid matter, we see something, and we interpret it as a solid thing. But when we look at physics, in addition to lots of other science, we can talk about basic physics will tell us that an atom of matter is 99.99999999%, empty space, entirely empty. So this chair I'm sitting on feels solid, but it's mostly empty space. And even further than that, there is something in quantum physics, it's known as the double slit laser experiment. And to give an oversimplified version of what this means is that a particle, which is something that should be solid matter, behaves differently depending on whether or not there is an observer. More specifically, in this experiment, when someone is looking at the study, and there's big questions about what does it mean to observe? Does it mean just shining a light? Or does it mean a consciousness there's debates about that, but observing when you observe it, it behaves, the particle behaves just like a particle, what you would expect, but when you're not observing it, the pattern that appears in this study is that the particle behaves like a wave, meaning it's maybe here, maybe there it's in a state of probability. That's not solid. So there's, it's known as a wave particle duality. That is people that doesn't make any sense. How could it be that this physical world might not be so solid? And what will we think about in terms of consciousness, if everything is just consciousness, like modulations of a See, it's being modulated in different types of waves that we have, we have a body with mechanisms to interpret things to say, well, that must be solid, and there must be something out there. It's sort of like we're in a virtual reality suit, a highly immersive virtual reality suit. And because it's so immersive, we interpret things and see things in a way. And we were so convinced of that interpretation that we assume it's real, and don't take the time or have the time, or, or have the time to look at the science to say, Wait, maybe the way I'm seeing it and experiencing it is not the way it actually is.
27:59
I wanted this is great. And I wanted to ask you, going back to what you were saying that what if the brain does not produce consciousness, but instead it receives it like an antenna. This also has tremendous implications, the way that people live their life, because most people, arguably, I think it's most people that don't have that idea at all, even in a in a spiritual sense, it, they're very, very absorbed, if I can use that word with the word consciousness, their life experience, their awareness is all in here. And there are so many phrases in the language that kind of describe that as well. So my question really is, is there something that one could do to have a different understanding or maybe accept that a little bit more in order to be able to research it?
29:11
Well, as you were asking that question, I think there are two significant implications, or more than that, but to that, I like to focus on the Whirlpool in the stream analogy, because I think this is a starting point for how someone could look at this from a different way. If you imagine that your Whirlpool within a stream of water, if some of the water from my world will get into your Whirlpool, which could happen in an interconnected stream. That would be analogously. Like some of my consciousness getting into your consciousness. That would be like a telepathic or a psychic effect. So one of the predictions of this model of consciousness is that psychic phenomena would be real. They wouldn't be weird anomalies. They wouldn't be paranormal, it would be normal. If we just change what we agree to be normal, if it's all one consciousness or something like that. That's number one. Number two is if you imagine a whirlpool that de localises it stops being a world Pour, the water just flows back into the stream. That would be analogous to like someone who's in a body where their physical body dies, their consciousness actually doesn't die, it transitions into a new state flows back into the broader stream. So these are the two big implications. For me, as I've studied this that wait psychic phenomena would be real. And also there would be something known as the survival of consciousness after bodily death, meaning you don't die. Which is a very radical thing to say. But now for me, I'm almost desensitised to it, because there's so much evidence. And the way I've approached this, from a rational academic perspective, as someone who's in business saying, if I'm going to write a book about this and do podcasts, I have to have a rational, rational way of looking at this. If, if any, there's any evidence for psychic abilities in any evidence for survival of consciousness after bodily death, even one piece of evidence, then the model that the brain creates consciousness cannot explain it. Or we have an extremely difficult time explaining it, because those things should not happen. If consciousness comes from the brain. That would mean your consciousness is just almost like an illusory construction that emerges and pops out of your skull. And it's stuck there. There can't be anything that goes outside of it. Because there's, it's it's not connected to anything. And there could certainly be no consciousness after death, because the mechanism for consciousness is your body and your brain. And when that turns off, it's like a computer shuts off. So there can't be any consciousness anymore. But if they're if we're connected as one stream, what Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel Prize winning physicist said, he said, In truth, there's only one mind. So the quantum physicists understood this, if we're part of one mind. And we are like, as kastrup says, it's like one mind has dissociative identity disorder. We're dissociated into these, these alter egos, whirlpools. And we can explain this stuff very easily of psychic phenomena and survival of bodily death. And that's my first book, actually, it's structured that way in the podcast, to an extent a structure that way, I have chapters on these things. So in the book, there's a chapter a lot on telepathy, mind to mind communication, there's a chapter on the evidence for remote viewing, which is seeing something that's far away with your mind, both in space and time, there's evidence for pre cognition, which is knowing or sensing the future before it happens, which is this idea that consciousness is not only fundamental, but it's also beyond space and time. So it can reach forward, it can reach backward, because time doesn't even exist at this level at this high level. I also look at psychokinesis, which is the mind impacting matter, just sort of like if you change, we change the waves in the pool in the stream, then the the physical manifestations of reality will change in a corresponding way. So the mind is actually impacting reality. That's that. So that's the psychic abilities. And I also looked at this, the evidence for all this stuff with animals, because they're scientists and looked at this. And then I look at near death experiences, which people that have no brain functioning at all, or little brain functioning, like they had cardiac arrest or some kind of major physiological trauma, or they're under General anaesthesia. And yet they have lucid experiences, which we can talk about a bit more, because there's evidence that that's not a hallucination, looked at communications with the deceased. So these are people that claim that they can get information from dead people and then communicate it mediums. There's actually a scientific evidence for that. And then finally, I have a chapter on children who have memories of a previous life. And I'm referring to research done at the University of Virginia, over 2500 cases for decades. And sometimes the children have memories that can be validated by the researchers looking at historical records. And sometimes the children have birthmarks or physical defects that match with medical records of a person that did die in the manner that the child describes crazy stuff. So my overarching point, here he is, wait a second, if any one of those things I said is real. We haven't even talked about all the evidence if there's any evidence for one thing, that's what I want to harp on one thing.
33:57
Brain equals consciousness, can't explain that very well. It's much more. It's much easier to explain if I want to be rational to say, Okay, we got to shift the model of consciousness and we can accommodate for all this stuff. And that's my starting point for anyone who wants to look at this from an intellectual perspective, is to say, Okay, can I deny all the science? And if I can't deny it, then wait, maybe I have to rethink my view of reality.
34:23
Thank you for listening to the first part of this fascinating conversation with Mark Gober. In the next episode, there is the conclusion where Mark goes really deep on this mind blowing topic of consciousness. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and rate it on Apple podcasts. And also share this episode with someone who you think will benefit from it. If you want to find out more about what I do and gain access to exclusive co didn't join my facebook group but from a development master. The link is in the show notes or you can simply type B dot L y slash PDM group. And until next time, stand out don't fit in
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