#327 A deep dive into the mysteries of consciousness, with Mark Gober [re-release]

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

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Please note that while an effort is made to provide an accurate transcription, errors and omissions may be present. No part of this transcription can be referenced or reproduced without permission.

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Agi Keramidas  0:02  
welcome to Personal Development mastery podcast. For this episode and the next one, I'm going to revisit two interviews that I did in the previous years of the podcast. These are two of the most important podcast conversations ahead, and I decided to revisit them because I believe the head deep, useful and pertinent messages inside, I realised that especially if you have discovered the podcast recently, it's not easy to go back and check over 300 episodes. So these two specific conversations I believe that you will benefit from and I wanted to give you the opportunity to discover them, and the value that they contain. 

Agi Keramidas  0:52  
Today, the episode is the first of these two conversations and my guest is Mark Gober, an international speaker and the author of a series of books. The one in particular that I discuss with him is an end to upside down thinking which was awarded the best science book of 2019. Mark interviewed the world leading consciousness researchers, and the conclusions he came up with are mind blowing. This episode will challenge intrigue and inspire you to delve into the depths of consciousness. If you're seeking to understand reality beyond the physical world, in the most scientific way possible, don't miss this conversation. 

Agi Keramidas  1:45  
In today's show, I am delighted to speak with Mark Gober. Mark, you are an international speaker, 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 living. 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.

Mark Gober  2:24  
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to

Agi Keramidas  2:27  
mark so 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?

Mark Gober  2:48  
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 think one of the captains in 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 nonstop. 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. So I 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, 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 grade deflation, when I was there, meaning they limited the number of a grades they 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 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 of my second book, and ended 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 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 world views, maybe the first domino, there 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 works with energy. And she communicates with non 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 had 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, I 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 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 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 son that 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 of 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, which is what I ended 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.

Agi Keramidas  8:25  
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. 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? Or are you hopeful that Oh, wow, there is something here that feels like the truth, even though I don't have any proof about it.

Mark Gober  9:07  
I asked myself that question a lot. And I wish I could go back to that moment because I didn't realise how significant it was that I was just here, this one conversation. But I think in hindsight, it wasn't sceptical or not sceptical, I wasn't even looking at it in those terms. It was more that I sensed that she was genuine in what she was describing that she was just describing her experience. And what happened to be an experience that I had never heard of in a serious way. I don't think I'd ever heard maybe I didn't science fiction movies, but this was someone who was speaking about her 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 expect Chances 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 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 I 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. 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 openness at that point, because of my life situation. And also, I think it's important to note that the stage of 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. So this had 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.

Agi Keramidas  11:21  
And, 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 when I read about it, it feels to me like something to cover. 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? Was there a point that you realise that wow, I've really become obsessed with it, it has become a true fashion.

Mark Gober  11:55  
I think it's a good word obsessed. That's kind of what happened, because that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to understand 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 is 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 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, it'd be like, well, that's just how can that be. And then I will 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 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 he seemed like a somewhat a credible person, and he seemed intelligent. When he was talking. He told 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. And 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 suggests that 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 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 2016. There was Thanksgiving that year, and usually I would spend that time with family, I would go back to where I grew up. I didn't do that. I just 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 of 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. And it it really hasn't ended. I would say that one interview was a pivotal one, because I remember just being so shocked by it. And the other 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 the topic, Carl Jung 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 would come up on an 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, if 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 reverse? 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. 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 one. And in my journey, what I've 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 can be a near death experience for some people at psychedelics. For some people, it's meditation, or a 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.

Agi Keramidas  17:13  
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 about we have already have started talking about consciousness, if you were to give a brief definition of what you mean, when you say consciousness, can you share that with us?

Mark Gober  17:46  
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 larger 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 and 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 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. Because 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 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 change 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. Here's the key points. This is the critical video of all things. I've researched the last few years Sit, 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 it therefore must be the case that the brain creates it. I'm gonna 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 from 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 the 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, in 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 shown a little sliver of it to our brain. It's like playing with playdough, you can stick the playdough through a little machine and squeeze it through, and it comes out as spaghetti. Or it comes out of some shape. The playdough in this case, could be like consciousness, and the Brain Body mechanism is 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 the 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 Dr. 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, or waters like consciousness. So it's this idea that we are individuals, but we're kind of not individuals, or 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, brain consciousness, they're related, but actually, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the brain is this antenna receiver filter. And we are we as our individual identities are much more than our bodies. And we're fundamentally interconnected.

Agi Keramidas  23:25  
I remember an 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. So they see and they can't exist on their own. They tend to focus on what they are and not to the whole. So it's similar to the Wilpon analogy. Yes, you were saying about this 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, so generally, they don't cause the fire, but one might look at them and draw that conclusion, either mistakenly or deliberately to mislead others. When I was reading a bit more about 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. 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.

Mark Gober  24:51  
Yes, well, then that's an important point because and for me as a researcher and also as a business person, that point you just raised was one of the reasons I had so much coffee needs to be able to read 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. And 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 phrase 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 it's asking the wrong question, they will never be able to find a biological basis of consciousness, because there is none. 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 99.9999999%, 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. So more specifically, in this experiment, when someone is looking at the study, and there's been 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, 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 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 sea, 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.

Agi Keramidas  28:03  
This is great. And I wanted to ask you going back to what you were saying, What if the brain does not produce consciousness, but instead it receives it like an antenna? This obviously 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 spiritual sense. It's they're very, very absorbed, if I can use that word with that consciousness, the life experience, that 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 little bit more in order to be able to research it?

Mark Gober  29:03  
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 you're a whirlpool within a stream of water, if some of the water from my world will get into your world, or which could happen in your connected 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 mentioned a whirlpool, that D localises. It stops being a whirlpool the water just flows back into the stream. That would be analogously. Like someone who's in a body, where their physical body dies. Their consciousness actually doesn't die, it transitions into a new state, it 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 there's any evidence for psychic abilities, and 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 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 is one stream, what Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel Prize winning physicist said, he said, in truth, there's only one mind. So the quantum physicist 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 is structured 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, 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'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 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 are key is, wait a second, if any one of those things I said is real. We don't even talk about all the evidence if there's any evidence for one thing, that's what I want to harp on one thing, brain equals consciousness can explain that very well. 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.

Agi Keramidas  34:05  
Thank you for this answer, Mark. And I came to mind while you were saying that was that science really is finally catching up with some elements that a while back, they would consider completely elements of religion because of what you're saying about consciousness, not disappearing, once we die, but going back or dissolving, or in other words, that doesn't die, it is something that religions no matter how much the message has been distorted through the ages, but they have been saying that we are immortal. So we say or we made in the image of creator and so on. So for me it is amazing because I have both scientific background and spiritual or if you wish, curious background, which lifts to the to the other Right. So it's great to see that Chasma, that gap that is starting to be bridged and finally have proof, I think it is only inevitable it's only a matter of time before the proof will be so solid, that no one will be able to ignore that it would be like, ashore versus gravity or something.

Mark Gober  35:24  
Well, I agree with you. And one of the things that shocked me most when I first started on all of this is I couldn't believe how much research there was. On all of this. I mean, peer reviewed scientific papers. The US government has declassified CIA documents, talking about the reality of remote viewing psychic spying, using people's minds to find things that are far away in these documents. And on my podcast, I interviewed Russell Targ, who was one of the leaders of the programme in the 1970s, and 80s, which went into the 90s. And he was there for part of that time, but actually training people to do this. So there's so much evidence for it. And yet, how could it be that the mainstream scientific community doesn't talk about this, and in fact, there's an aversion to it. Because now I've gotten to know many of the scientists who study that these anomalous topics, the paranormal, I'm on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was founded in 1973, by an Apollo 14 astronaut, who had a mystical experience coming back from the moon that he speaks of, he's passed away, but he spoke of frequently and said, well, we need to be studying this stuff scientifically, in an independent institution, because in most places, if you're a scientist who says, hey, I want to study pre cognition, which is how you could know something before it happens. They're gonna say, okay, good luck getting tenure. It's not going to be an easy path for you. So I've had to think really hard. Okay, what's going on? Here? We are at the infancy of learning about these things, I will acknowledge that, like, we might know that there is an effect, but we don't really understand it. However, there's strong evidence for the fact that there is an effect happening. And it's been going on for a while that we've known about this. And I thought I had a good education. And I knew nothing about this. And if I talked to my colleagues about it, they would tell me, I'm crazy. And they have said, Okay, that's crazy stuff doesn't exist. So what's going on here is part of that, I think, is there's a paradigm shift happening. And with paradigm shifts, people have a difficult time changing their thinking, especially if you're a PhD. Imagine you're a well known professor with tenure. And someone comes along and says, Look, you know, this theory, you've been talking about your whole life, you missed the biggest thing ever, which is that actually consciousness is fundamental. And you have to, you have to rethink everything you've done, even though what many scientists have done, there's reality to it, I would just argue it needs to be recontextualized in the context of a consciousness. So I think there is a resistance naturally to this stuff, that in some ways, I'm discouraged about, because in the last few years, maybe there's been a bit more receptivity to this. But in a lot of ways, they're still closed mindedness, even though the evidence seems to accumulate, and it gets more and more airtime. I'll tell a personal story that really helped me understand this resistance. So when my first book came out, and then to upside down thinking, I hired publicist to help me with it, and to help me get the word out. And I was so excited to get this message out to people because I said, Look, I put all the evidence in one place. This is life changing, I changed my whole life, and I can help people so much, and science could change. So let's get it out there. And I really wanted to get this the mainstream scientists, even though I knew that there's been resistance, and I wrote about some of the scientists who will say, look, I won't even look at the evidence, no matter what happens, some of them will say things, they'll say that that they there might be evidence, but I don't want to see it. Imagine that,

Agi Keramidas  38:40  
I'm scientific is that

Mark Gober  38:43  
it's so unscientific, but that's the irony of it. Science has become a religion. In that sense. It's dogmatic. But we reached out to among other places, and mainstream scientific journal to say, look, there's this book, and many scientists have endorsed this book, would you like to feature it in your scientific journal, or at least talk about it? This was a big time editor at a big time scientific journal that everyone knows of. He just said, No, I'm not going to look at it. And I told my publicist, I said, we got to show him some evidence, let's just, let's send him the CIA documents. And let's send him a paper that came out in 2018. It was published in American psychologist, which is the official peer reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association doesn't get any more mainstream. And it compiled all of the statistical evidence for things like telepathy, and remote viewing and pre cognition psychokinesis, those things I mentioned of psychic phenomena. He compiled it's called a meta analysis of taking all this analysis that's been done putting it together in all these areas and saying, look, there's a strong statistical effect where in other areas of science, we accept these things to be real if we get this level of significance, and doesn't mean that it's a very big effect. It's just statistically significant. And I'll give you an example to give your audience a sense of how this works in A study of telepathy mind to mind communication, the classic study, it's known as the gods felt experiment. You have one person in a room, we'll call that person Bob, and you have another person, we'll call her Jane. These are not people that claim to have psychic abilities. They're just normal people. Sometimes they're college sophomores doing studies, Bob sitting in a room, he's put into a relaxed meditative state, because the scientists know that when you're in a more meditative state, you might be more receptive psychically. So but he's just put in a more relaxed state. And Jane is shown an image. And she's asked to try to mentally send the image to Bob from far away. So she's, she doesn't know what's going on. She's trying to mentally send this image. And Bob doesn't know what she's looking at. So after a while, Bob is shown four pictures, he's comes out of his relaxed state, and the experimenter say, Bob, which of the four was Jane sending to you mentally? Bob will say, Oh, I don't I don't know. Pick this one. You would expect that Bob would guessed correctly, one out of four times, if there were no effect should be 25%. One out of four, overtime over many, many trials, it should approach 25%? Because how could Bob get any information from Jane and they're not psychic and psychics not real. So what? Actually what the studies show is that it's closer to 32% of the time that Bob guesses correctly, or the person in Bob's room 32% versus 25%. That's nothing you might say that 7% differential, but statistically speaking, it's massive effect. And it's in a category known as six sigma. There are other studies that meet this too, and psychokinesis in other areas, six sigma means that the odds this is happening due to chance alone, this deviation is more than a billion to one against chance, more than a billion to one. So this is what's known as small but statistically significant. And what Dr. Atul kardinya, in this very well respected journal, what he put together is the statistical evidence for all this stuff. Back to my story. We sent him the editor, this paper, we sent him the CIA documents, which say, I'll give a direct quote, remote viewing, which is the ability to see something far away with your mind. Remote viewing is a real phenomenon. implications are revolutionary. And they show the scientific panel that evaluated these studies, including someone from Caltech, in the declassified document that's now open to the public. So we sent them these two documents. And I said, Okay, surely, this will be enough to get him to engage. And his response was, the CIA is not a scientific body. And he said, something, the effect of the American psychologist paper is laughable. Something like that just didn't take it seriously. And that was the end of the engagement. He didn't want to engage beyond that, and didn't want anything to do with it.

Agi Keramidas  42:38  
I suppose, like anything that not everyone is ready to receive a knowledge at any given time, everyone, when the time is right, they do receive it. And I remember that quote, that I liked very much as well. But truth goes through this three stages, always the first it is ridiculed, isn't it then violently opposed. And third, it's accepted as self evident. So the more I see these things appearing or new knowledge, knowledge does go through these stages, it's very easy to ridicule something that only time will tell whether it was to be ridiculed, or whether it became the truth as as with everything really in history, we can't see the future.

Mark Gober  43:29  
Right. This is how science progresses through paradigm shifts and learning new learning, the old way of thinking needs to be revised. In my professional career, I worked a lot with intellectual property, especially when I moved to Silicon Valley. So things like patents. A patent is something that is both novel and non obvious relative to everything that's been done in the past. So thinking about this idea of paradigm shift, I saw this all the time. If there were a new patented technology that would come out, there will be resistance in the industry to it, by definition, because it's something novel and non obvious, and that the scientists, the mainstream scientists, or the ones that were preceded this invention would say and would say no, this is not how it's done. We do it this way. So there's always this tension in science and there's a human, a human desire for their own belief systems to remain intact. There's an egoistic aspect to it, if one especially has promoted an idea to be resistant to something that would challenge it. And then it also takes a lot of mental energy to chips one's way of thinking. I mean, for me, it took so much energy and so disorienting and disturbing to think that I was so wrong. I mean, I don't know exactly what's right now still, but I knew I know that whatever I taught before was completely wrong. And I think there's even another level to this. That's probably harder to put our finger on. But what we're talking about here is an incredibly empowering idea. It empowers the individual that we are part of this universal consciousness. That means every single person is significant in some way in every person's mind as power. We're in influence in the world, no matter who you are, no matter what your socio economic class is. So there, one could imagine that those in positions of power, who have this kind of knowledge would not want everyone to understand how this works. So it's hard to understand what the if there are social engineering forces as well, in addition to our own resistance to new ideas, that there could be reasons for this information to be suppressed. And I'm receptive to that, because there just seems to be so much evidence in such resistance, and even in the media to ridicule this kind of thing. I'm thinking to Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who is a Cambridge, former Cambridge biochemist who studied a lot of these psychic abilities. his Wikipedia page says that he's like, he's a pseudo scientist, he uses something like that in the first sentence. So if you are an everyday person who doesn't have much time to research, you say, Look, let me look at the psychic thing. I'm just gonna look at Wikipedia. He is a pseudo scientist, you're probably not going to continue. That sort of thing, I think keeps the science down.

Agi Keramidas  45:59  
Yes, and that I won't even go into Wikipedia or Facebook, or all the others. One who really wants to go deeper, probably will go past Wikipedia. But for most people, that would be enough to stigmatise a person and for people to say no, this is not credible, if he's a quack or, or because Wikipedia says so whoever writes that that's, that's a different story. Mark, can I ask you, looking forward, you know, as more and more of this knowledge, send scientific evidence comes around, and people realise it and more people accept it, and there is less and less resistance. So looking ahead in the future, how do you see humanity changed by this realisation?

Mark Gober  46:49  
Thinking of Rupert Spiro, who is a philosopher in this area, he talks about how we look at the world's problems, we can name them very easily, there's so many problems that we can all point to in the world. He says they're all symptoms. They're not the disease, the disease is the misunderstanding of reality, and the misunderstanding of our identity, that we our identity is consciousness beyond the body as an interconnected thing. Our identity is not our body. So that's the biggest thing of all, if we can understand that, if everyone really understood that and lived it, and this is more of my second book, and and upside down living, how do we embody that? That's huge. But it's hard. I mean, because there's so much conditioning, we have to overcome our old our old way of thinking, and we're in a body that makes us believe the world as we see it is what it is. So there's a lot of hurdles to overcome in this process. But I think that's the ultimate thing that we can really, if we can get to, there's a dedication component to this, that it takes so much mental energy and time and commitment to really want to go down this path to fully embody it. And some call it the path to enlightenment there lots of different names for it. And I can say this from my own experience, because I prioritise this left my, my career, that there are challenges to it. But I think if more people committed to these things like personal development and spiritual development, it could improve the world in many ways.

Agi Keramidas  48:13  
Is that a line? Do you think? Where's that? Trying to transcend that idea that consciousness is inside our head? Is there a line where this goes beyond just intellectually understanding it and having to use some kind of, you know, deeper understanding spiritual if you want or something more than the mind itself? Now I

Agi Keramidas  48:42  
bought I bought it here with after our conversation, it's a mistake, but you at least I realised when I did it.

Mark Gober  48:53  
I want to comment on that because our sensory organs are located up by our head. So we hear we see we taste so it feels like our consciousness is up there. Some people have offered a thought experiment, what if our eyes were on our, at our feet? When our ears were down there? What are we where are we experienced consciousness, you're getting to a very important point, which is the embodiment and the experiential aspect of all this. I like the way the yogic tradition breaks this down, they talk about four pathways, which I think can be incorporated into any tradition that you could think of. The first is the pathway of wisdom, it's known as Yana yoga. And in theory, all of these lead us to embodiment and an understanding of all the things we've talked about. So there's the wisdom path, there's the Karma Yoga path, which is selfless service. There's the bhakti yoga path, which is devotion. This could be rituals, chanting prayer, attitude of being gracious in the world. And fourth is generally energy which could be anything from yoga, to meditation, to breathing exercises, to nutrition, anything to focus on the energetic aspects. So, wisdom, selfless service, devotion and energy. They're like different pathways up a mountain. That gets you to the same point of that many enlightened sages have spoken up. They speak very similar things of oneness and an unconditional love. Which, by the way comes up in the near death experience, when you get the brain out of the way people talk about it, people talk about this with a psychedelic DMT that this one mind is an infinitely loving state of being. That's actually our true nature. And we're sort of trying to get back to that and get rid of all these blocks. So then it becomes a path of, of how does one, how does one do all those things to get the knowledge and the wisdom all the way up and to be doing selfless service and to be devotional and to have energetic practices for each person might be different. And as having studied spiritual paths, which is more of my second book is like, what are the commonalities whether it's the religious figures that people talk about, like the Buddha, or Jesus Christ, or we could, Muhammad, there's parallels and all these people that have elevated themselves in consciousness, but also in modern day life, there are people that are going through these awakenings all the time, there's a podcast called Buddha at the Gas Pump, which has been very influential for me, because the host Rick Archer interviews, he's interviewed hundreds of people that have had these awakening experiences everyday people, you're, it's like you're pumping your gas at the gas station, and you see someone there. And that person could be at a very high enlightenment level, but they're just normal people, that people go on these four pathways. But for me, it started with knowledge. It was all wanting to learn, what does the science say? But as I've progressed, in my own journey, I've been thinking about these other pathways, how am I? How am I serving? How am I being devotional? What kinds of energy practices am I doing? And the interesting thing about these pathways is that they're interrelated. That when one learns more about the nature of reality, the conclusions that one will reach is that we are part of this one mind, there's an unconditional love aspect, we're interconnected, and that would naturally want to make us want to be of service more, because we're interconnected. It would also make us naturally more devotional and more gracious, because we're part of this broader intelligence, it would naturally make us want to improve our, our energetic body to be more connected on a physical level to this. So it's like he started on one path, but the others naturally become incorporated with it. So what is the going back to your original question? I think what you're alluding to is like kind of how to how do we, as an individual and collective level get to this point where we're more connected to truth? Because I think truth is something along the lines of what we're discussing. And I think the way we do it is by reorienting our lives. And I start my second book by asking you a question, I say, what is the overall intention of your life? And I asked people to think about that. And the whole book is devoted to answering that question. And I answered for myself, but if we really think hard about what's the intention of our life, where's our compass pointed, and then actually live a life that seems to be in alignment with reality? To me, that is the ultimate solution. Because when we shift our consciousness, Reality Shifts, and if we shift consciousness collectively, how does reality shift? That's a big deal. Man, I want to give one really concrete example that I like to talk about in every interview, if I can, because it's, this is a life changing topic. It's actually episode six of my podcast, we did a whole episode on it. It's called The Life Review. Yes. And the life review is experienced in the near death experience. In short, it's an N D. And then D, which I mentioned is a time when the brain is barely functional or non functional. And yet a person has a lucid experience. So Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia who I interviewed for my podcast, he's been studying these near death experiences for decades. And he's, he says, we're left with this paradox, that at a time when the brain isn't functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever. What is going on, you get the brain out of the way and people are hovering over their bodies. They talk about this unconditional love sense. They see deceased relatives, sometimes sometimes they see Beings of Light. And sometimes they'll see things in the room, that upon being resuscitated or validated as accurate. So they'll be like, I hovered over my body, I saw my own resuscitation, I saw something in the other room. I saw something on the roof or the ledge or something outside, and they come back in and then the doctors and family say wait, no, no, you could that's not possible. What you're describing is accurate. These are very significant. They're known as vertical out of body experiences, meaning the thing they experienced was verified as accurate. You know what that means? It's not a hallucination, by definition. So I give that preface to say that okay, what happens in the end D state, the near death experience is very significant to tell us something about the nature of reality. What are we missing with our brain? What is the blindfold blocking out, and what people often report is a life review also in the state of being out of their body or whatever, where they relive their whole life in a very short amount of time. So something with time is weird, that you could relive your whole life in a short amount of time. But what people say is that not only do they relive the events through their own eyes and feel everything that they experience, but they relive it through the eyes of the people that they impacted as if they were that person. Okay, so this is the idea of interconnectivity, though One Mind, it's like the one mind can switch lenses, it can be multiple whirlpools at once. This is incredibly significant because when people come back and their bodies afterwards, after the life review, they say, Whoa, these materialistic things I cared about. Those are not the things I was seeing in my life review, I didn't see how much money was on my bank account my life view, I saw how I treated the cashier at the grocery store, and how that action positively or negatively impacted every other person in line afterwards. So what people say frequently is the little things are the big things in the life review. And they change their life when they come back. Often, sometimes they change their jobs, they get divorced. I interviewed a man named Danny and Brinkley for my podcast who's had four life reviews, and four near death experiences. He was electrocuted. Struck by Lightning, he had open heart surgery twice brain surgery once and each time he had a life review, where he relived his combat days in Vietnam. So he experienced the deaths of the people that he killed through their eyes got to feel that pain. And for him, it was very difficult to talk about to have to live through that multiple times. He also told me that he experienced the pain of the child that would no longer have a father because he had killed the father, he felt the indirect effects. He said they were not quite as strong, but he felt the indirect effects. So you can see the rippling of our actions. So just hear that fact, for your listeners. And I always I will never know who's going to hear this when it could be next week. It could be years from now someone hears this. But think about the possibility that any that a percentage of what I just said is true. That this is the nature of reality, we're interconnected, we have an amnesia somehow from it. We don't remember it in this state. But that's the nature of reality, that we're interconnected and our actions actually matter that could dramatically shift our lives and also shift the lives of others around us because of the way we started to treat them.

Agi Keramidas  56:52  
Wow, this is mind blowing. And that ripple effects. I never thought of it in such a way. But you're it does make complete sense. And, Mark, wow, this is extremely intriguing conversation could go on for a very long time. I would I would like to start wrapping things up, though. And I'm going to ask you some quickfire questions, just to start concluding. And the one I always start with is what does personal development mean to you? Since this is the personal development mastery podcast?

Mark Gober  57:32  
Yeah. Well, I would like to commend you on on having a personal mastery podcast because I think it's, it's the most important thing we can do. It is the evolution of our being. And that's to me, if we combined the reincarnation research that I mentioned, at the University of Virginia, it's like the recycling of the water and the whirlpool in the stream, you know, you become one Whirlpool, and some of the water gets transferred into another. There's strong evidence for that. And this life review suggests that we're evaluating ourselves, we're seeing how we do in life, no matter what our circumstances are rich or poor, doesn't matter. Race, none of that matters in this day, it's how are we treating each other. So what's personal development, then it's the evolution of our consciousness, some would call that our soul. To me, it's the most important thing we can do. Because from one life to the next, even if there is reincarnation, and we may be physically have some aspects of how we were harmed in the past life shows up in this life. The research suggests that's true, maybe some of our characteristics from a past life transfer. But I'm not going to take my house with me, my car, my bank account, they don't come with me in the next life. What's transferred is the evolution of our consciousness. And that seems to be a theme. In my research. However, the information is obtained through spiritual connections. Everyone says the same thing, that we're here to evolve our consciousness, at least that's part of what we're doing. So personal development, that is the evolution of our soul of our consciousness. What more important thing can we do? That to me is the centrepiece of our whole life is evolving. And it could manifest differently for different people. Although the elements of the evolution are very similar. It always comes back to self love. That usually seems to be the what is, there is a lack of that in whatever thing we're trying to develop in some way. And that could be if we don't love ourselves enough, we then mistreat other people, it can manifest in different ways. But it usually comes back to this concept of love, not romantic love, so to speak. But it's it's this something that's transcendent, the idea that we're interconnected, and we're expressing that in some way, but it also means we're whirlpools within the stream. And I think in the spiritual community, that can be a tendency to be to say that there's only altruism, which is very important, the altruistic aspect, but then there's the individual development aspect. So that can be lost sometimes to say, well, all I'm going to do is focus on everyone else, which is very admirable important, but there's a focus on the self too. And it's sort of like when you're on an aeroplane, they tell you to put your mask on first before your oxygen mask before you can help other people. The personal development will will then enable you to help other people more.

Agi Keramidas  1:00:03  
Thank you. That's a wonderful answer. Let's say you could go back in time and meet your 18 year old self, what one piece of advice would you give him?

Mark Gober  1:00:14  
I was thinking about that this morning, I was thinking about things that have happened in the past. And it's interesting, I have much less regret than I used to. Because everything that's happened has led me to this point. And even the things that I maybe cared about before in terms of accomplishments and more material things that led me to work really hard in school, and professionally. And all those things enabled me to write a book so quickly, and to do the things that I do now. So if I were to go back to my 18 year old self, it's hard because it led me to where I am today. And that enables me to be this vessel. But I would tell myself, I wish I knew what I know now, because there would be much less suffering. There was a lot of suffering that came from having expectations and wanting to have certain achievements, and being focused on that without having any context for it.

Agi Keramidas  1:01:03  
Can I argue with that, that suffering might have been your own evolution of your consciousness? And you had to go through it?

Mark Gober  1:01:11  
Yes, you're completely right. It's It's paradoxical. That suffering enables evolution. Absolutely. Right. And I look at life that way now, because I feel that we are in an evolutionary machine effectively with intelligence. Now, this is an important point that, in the last few years have like more solidified in within myself that not only is the one mind unconditionally loving, because that seems like that's what people always experience. And it kind of makes sense to me. But it's intelligent and infinitely intelligent. And how do I get there? Well, I'm intelligent, you're intelligent, every living species has a degree of intelligence. And we're part of the stream. So that means the stream has intelligence logically follows. But if we look at the complexity of the universe, down to the smallest levels, looking at atoms to the biggest galactic levels, there's infinite complexity. So it would stand to reason that this one mind is of infinite intelligence to be able to embody this complexity of the universe. Yes. So that means everything in our life could be that everything that happens in our life is almost like a mathematical calculation derived for our own evolution. And some would call this karma. It's almost a different way of thinking about it. But the same thing, that what happens in our life is a magnetic attraction of what we need in some way to evolve, whether it's coming from this life or from past life, and we're trying to work stuff out with you know, our consciousness is continuing. So we might be working out things that happened in the past, like two. So I think this there is this element of maybe needing to suffer to balance things out or to learn. And I'm thinking now of Nisargadatta Maharaj, who I think was a great sage died several decades ago. He said, Life is the supreme guru. Meaning that everything that happens in our life is our teacher. And if we look at life that way, even though something happens that causes us to suffer, if we can zoom out for a second and be the helicopter looking down, it's like we're almost in a maze. And we don't see the high level perspective, we just see what's immediately in front of us. If we can take the time to zoom out and say what's good. Maybe there's something ahead in the maze that I don't see, the suffering that's near term is leading me to something later, that's a good thing. So maybe, to re answer your question, the suffering may be needed to happen. But I would have had a different way to, to frame the suffering. To say, Okay, I'm suffering right now. But maybe I need this for a certain reason.

Agi Keramidas  1:03:29  
Yeah. And it is, as you said, it is a paradox. But I love this question, because it I get some very interesting answers. Mark, out of the oldest conversation we've had today, if you were to give to the listener, one actionable item, something they can take away and implement, what would you tell them?

Mark Gober  1:03:51  
Go back to the life review. So just there can be a tendency to not want to think about that that conversation that we just had, because the implications are so immense, you almost want to say, Oh, wait, what have I done in my past or Whoa, everything I do has ramifications in the world. And there's a rippling effect to my actions, and I take personal responsibility. I think that's a big part of our life is to take personal responsibility. And I think one of the issues in society is a tendency to to become a victim and not take responsibility. I will close with this. Ken Wilber, the philosopher, he says. It's not just about waking up, which is this having maybe incredible experiences and meditation, feeling the one mind the unconditional love, that can all be in the bliss, that's part of it. But there's also other areas of development that are somewhat independent. He says, There's waking up, there's cleaning up and there's growing up, this will be the parting message to your audience. Waking up is very important. So maybe that's doing our knowledge and our meditation and our devotion and our selfless service. But there's cleaning up too, which is looking at our own trauma and figuring out maybe what's been repressed and allowing that to be expressed because if we don't clean up It's kind of come back to haunt us in some way, and we're gonna be forced to. But there's also growing up, which is this life review concept of responsibility to accept responsibility for our own actions. And to, to not just want to shut it out and not to be naive to acknowledge that there can be darkness, as well. So there's waking up and cleaning up and growing up and the maturation process. If we think about our lives in that way, how are we waking up? How are we cleaning up? How are we growing up? And just maybe for a minute a day, ask ourselves that question, and then ask the question, what's the overall intention of my life? Yes, I'd come up with an answer for it. I know, I just left a lot of different things. But I will summarise it by by saying this, to ask yourself the question, what is the overall intention of my life? How am I orienting my compass? Because if you ask that question, everything else will flow from it.

Agi Keramidas  1:05:49  
And that way, small people would ask that question, because I bet that if you ask that question to lots of people, most of them would have never even conceived it. To answer it. Sadly, Mark, how can people connect with you and find out more about yourself and what you do?

Mark Gober  1:06:08  
My website, which is my name, Mark gober.com, ma RK Gob er.com. Also my my two books in end to upside down thinking and an end to upside down living? They're available on Amazon. They're in Kindle hardcover on Audible. And my podcast, where is my mind, which is available on Spotify, Apple podcast, all the major players?

Agi Keramidas  1:06:29  
So use that I know we, for me, it was a really intriguing conversation. And we talked about many things. And I'm sure there were like 20 times civil wars that we could talk about. But from your point of view, is there anything that you were hoping that would be discussed today, and we completely missed it?

Mark Gober  1:06:50  
We covered a lot. Thank you. You asked great questions, very well informed questions. And I, I can tell that you've done a lot of thinking about personal development and orienting your compass by based on the questions you've asked. So I think we've covered what I would hope to cover and at the same time, we're in an intelligent universe. And whatever came through in this conversation probably came through for a reason that I don't know, because you ask questions, probably that you might not understand fully. And so I'm just going to hope that your audience listens to this whenever they do, and that they get what they need from it.

Agi Keramidas  1:07:23  
That's really unpicked, very much Mark, I want to say it too, thank you again, for your time and sharing your insights with me today. I want to wish you all the very best with all your plans for the future and helping to bring that knowledge and that scientific proof of what is happening to the world. And the last parting words.

Mark Gober  1:07:47  
I want to thank your audience for listening this far in the conversation because if you have that you've been exposed to a lot of ideas. What's fun for me is that I get to spend all this time learning and then pick out the what I feel to be the most important pieces, and then we can have these conversations. So but I would just encourage your audience, that if you're interested in this, and you feel a poll, not everyone feels the poll, but some people feel really strong poll, I would say go with it. Because what is the nature of reality, if what we're talking about today is even partially true, then there's probably a desire for all of us innately to want to understand ourself, because our self is connected to the nature of reality. So I would just give your I would give encouragement to go for it. And to maybe if you're really busy even to instead of listening to one podcast a week, listen to two podcasts and we think about how you can ratchet it up. And I say from personal experience that is really life enhancing and has helped to reduce suffering. There is still suffering, but I can contextualise it much more. And so life improves. Even though it can be a rocky process upward there can be some downtimes it's an overall upward trajectory.

Agi Keramidas  1:08:55  
I hope you enjoyed listening. If you have please share this episode with someone who you think would benefit from it. And until next time, stand out don't fit in!