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Welcome to the Free Thought Project Podcast.
A hub for free thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty
and the daunting task of government accountability.
Here are your hosts, Jason Bassler and Matt Agarist.
Hello again, Free Thinkers.
Welcome back to the Free Thought Project Podcast.
My name is Jason Bassler.
And joining me is the Free Thought Project Editor-in-Chief Matt Agarist.
Thanks as always for joining us again for another powerful episode.
I've been looking forward to this conversation today for months now
since we had today's guest on the first time and more so recently.
But I do have a feeling today's show will be quite interesting and quite educational.
First off, apologies on missing last week's show.
Guys, it's my fault. I'll take all the blame.
The week prior, we did have an in-depth conversation with Jacob Johnson,
though, from Rise to Liberty podcast.
And that conversation was all about mind control,
MKUltra, how the powers that be weaponized fear.
And I mentioned it because if you're here today
to listen to the conversation about consciousness,
there's a good chance that episode will also resonate with you as well.
So download it and listen to it after this episode.
Also, guys, the holidays are right around the corner.
They'll be here in a blink of an eye.
So we're starting to promote our children's book
that we released last year entitled Little Free Thinkers, Know Your Rights.
It's a wonderful resource to give your kids or family and friends with kids.
It really is a foundation of liberty and education.
Now we wrote the book for kids aged six to 12
and it covers a lot of ground, including due process, probable cause,
free speech and so much more.
So it can be found at littlefreethinkers.com and makes a great gift.
Now Christmas will be here before we know it.
So help support our work and our podcast
while also educating kids about their rights.
And last but not least, I know I say this every show, guys,
because it's important.
Sometimes I scratch my head because we get a decent amount of listens
and downloads for this show.
But we have very low subscriber counts on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify and Podbean.
So do me a favor, guys.
If you listen to our podcast on any of these platforms,
just take a moment to make sure you have hit that subscribe button
on your favorite podcast player of choice.
And while you're there, please also rate and review the show.
Okay, well, let's go ahead and get this interview started.
Our guest today is someone we had on the show back in April of this year.
And it's very rare that we book a guest for a future appearance
just minutes after the previous interview ended.
But that was the case with our guest today.
And we wanted to continue that fascinating conversation.
So we knew we had to have him back.
Our guest today is a former investment banker.
He's an author, a volunteer, which might be my favorite part
and a brilliant consciousness researcher.
His name is Mark Gober,
and we're excited to have him back on the show.
So, Mark, welcome back to the Freethought Project podcast.
And thanks again for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, man.
Well, I'm happy to share that I now have a copy of your first book
and end to Upside Down Thinking,
which I received as a gift for my birthday.
And I actually haven't had a chance to start reading it yet
because I'm trying to finish up a few other books,
but I am excited to dig into it.
And part of why we wanted to have you back on
is to pretty much pick up where we left in our conversation
because I've listened back to that episode a few times now
and there's a question that just keeps gnawing at me
and it might be a great place to start part two of a conversation.
It might also be jumping into the deep end.
I'm not quite sure,
but I felt like I needed to get clarity on this.
So you said in the beginning of our last interview with you
that the mainstream view on consciousness
is that it comes from our brain, which I agree with.
But you also mentioned that your view has evolved
from the mainstream perspective and that your view now
is that we are basically these antenna receivers,
these transmitters and or interface for consciousness,
which certainly aligns more with my experiences and observations.
And I've observed that it often feels like
these preferences arise spontaneously
as if the conscious mind is witnessing observations
rather than generating thoughts.
So yeah, it definitely feels like there are times in life
when it just feels like we're observers in our own preferences, right?
So I don't think we got into real depth about it
when we originally made that point
and maybe this is the million-dollar question,
but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on
where those signals come from.
If we are receivers or an interface for consciousness,
then who or what is transmitting these signals
and where do these spontaneous indicators of signals come from,
especially those that feel kind of reflexive by conscious thought?
It's a great question.
I want to take a few steps back in case your audience is not familiar
with some of these general topics
because there is a field of neuroscience
which examines correlations between the way the brain is behaving
and the type of conscious experience that people have.
So for example, if someone damages a part of the brain
responsible for memory and then has a loss of memory in their consciousness,
we can see that there is this relationship
between what happens in the brain
and what happens in the person's consciousness.
They're called NCC's Neural Correlates of Consciousness.
The problem, however, is that it's not always the case
that because two things are correlated,
that one causes the other.
Just like saying that if we saw firefighters at the scene of a fire,
we might incorrectly conclude that firefighters caused the fire
because they were there, but we know that's not the relationship.
And another important point here is that
no one has ever observed consciousness coming out of a brain
even though that is the mainstream assumption in academia and elsewhere.
It's largely because of these correlations.
And if it's true that the mainstream is correct,
that the brain creates consciousness, think about the implications.
It means that when you die, i.e. when your brain turns off,
that is the end of your conscious experience.
So there would be no afterlife.
And there wouldn't be an ability for consciousness to exist non-locally.
So it wouldn't be able to go out in space and time.
So things like telepathic abilities or remote viewing,
which the U.S. government has done,
and there are declassified documents verifying this
where people are psychically spying,
sending their consciousness out to see something and perceive it
and relaying that information.
Those sorts of things would be impossible
if the brain created consciousness.
And my first book in end-to-upside-down thinking,
and my podcast series, it's an eight-episode series
called Where Is My Mind,
goes through the evidence that consciousness doesn't come from the brain.
And now it's your question, Jason.
Where would it come from?
I would answer it two ways.
First, I'll start off conceptually,
which is that I've become more and more comfortable
falsifying a theory
than I am with coming up with a comprehensive alternative.
And that's an okay thing to do,
because if a claim is put forth by academics or anyone,
the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that it's true.
And I would argue there is a lot of evidence
contradicting the idea that consciousness pops out of our brain,
which no one has ever even observed.
That said, there are ideas I have.
So I just wanted to give that preference
because I don't know exactly how it works.
But I hearken back to what many mystics have said,
or even Max Planck, Nobel Prize winning physicist in 1931.
He said,
I regard consciousness as fundamental.
I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
In other words, the world that we call material,
the world that we live in,
is actually a product of some kind of underlying consciousness.
Versus the material world existed
because of 13.8 billion years,
a big bang 13.8 billion years ago that created the universe.
And after billions of years of evolution
and the solar system popping up,
human beings develop brains
and consciousness popped out of their brain.
That view starts with the material world
and consciousness comes later,
versus what Max Planck and many mystics
and traditions around the world have said,
which is, no, the material world is a product of consciousness.
Now, if we take that perspective,
maybe it's more complex than that,
but maybe directionally it's accurate.
And that's what, again,
my first book goes all into this
and ends upside down thinking.
The perspective entails the idea that
nothing is actually physical,
which sounds weird.
Everything appears to be physical,
and when we touch something,
we interpret it as physical,
but really everything is happening within our consciousness,
and then we have mental gymnastics,
and we reverse engineer this idea that there exists a world
that is outside of our consciousness
and independent of our consciousness,
when in reality our experience is that it's always
experienced within consciousness.
An analogy that I love in this area,
again, it's an analogy,
it might be more simplistic than the truth,
comes from Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher.
He says that all reality could be likened
to an infinite stream of water,
where water is analogous to consciousness,
and each of us as an individual
is like a whirlpool within that stream.
So it's a localization,
an individualization of
the overall stream of consciousness.
So to go back to your question, Jason,
this is a long-winded way of saying it,
that consciousness itself,
the underlying stream,
what Erwin Schrödinger called the one mind,
that is the source of all consciousness
that we are experiencing through the vessels
of individual whirlpools.
And it could be that this stream
and the whirlpools themselves are multi-dimensional,
whereby, let's say there are
whirlpools that exist,
individuated consciousnesses,
that are not in the physical realm,
but they can communicate with our consciousness
through, who knows what, other dimensions,
or maybe that's the way consciousness works,
in which case we could have a creative idea
which comes from a multi-dimensional whirlpool
that's not our own whirlpool,
which ultimately at the highest level
is coming from the overall stream
of consciousness.
So the way Kastrup describes it,
it's almost like this universal consciousness
has dissociative identity disorder,
where there's one mind
and then it dissociates into these individual whirlpools,
and what we are picking up within the whirlpool
could be coming from different parts of the stream
or even different dimensions.
Does that help?
Yeah, it certainly helps.
It kind of opens up a whole new can of worms,
but it certainly helps at least kind of broaden
the spectrum of possibilities,
and I think that's what I'm curious about.
And, you know, I guess I have to read your book
to really get a full grasp of this,
and I'm looking forward to doing that by the way.
I'll certainly give you a feedback,
but it does feel like maybe
some of our leftist hippie friends
over the past few decades
telling us that we are one collective consciousness,
it does feel like that kind of
aligns with what you're sharing here.
since the last time we spoke,
I've actually found myself reflecting
not just on the ideas you present,
but on how you personally navigate them.
And I mean,
you've had to use your own consciousness
to explore and articulate
and challenge the very nature of consciousness itself.
It's like an introspective loop
that seems to fascinate me.
It's almost like your mind is trying to kind of like
peek behind the curtain
while also acknowledging that the curtain exists
and it's limited by your own vantage point, you know,
which kind of brings me to a,
I guess, a personal question
and maybe something that's essential
to kind of understanding consciousness.
I think this goes hand in hand with the last question
and your answer might not
vary too much from it, but
do you ever find yourself just kind of like lying
awake in bed and kind of wondering
where your internal monologue actually comes
from, you know, that voice in your head?
I mean, it sounds, it seems so
familiar, you know, but it's so elusive
at the same time. You know, is it truly
us or is it something that we're being,
you know, it's received?
Is it, you know, information we're just receiving?
It feels like it could be
possibly the root of consciousness itself.
So does that question
ever haunt you? I'd love to hear
your thoughts about that.
Yeah, man, all the time.
Every day I'm wondering what is going on?
Where are these ideas coming from?
Why do I want the things that I want
and dislike the things I dislike and so forth?
I
think there's a paradox here
that's worth mentioning because you mentioned
that many leftist friends
talk about how we are all one
and that there might be some reality to that
when we look at the way
science and philosophy point us.
That might be true
at the highest level of reality,
but there also exists distinction.
So at some level we are all one
but clearly we are not
because there's Mark and Jason and Matt
and I don't have direct access to everything happening
in your minds. Sure.
So that's, I call it the metaparadox
of non-duality, meaning
that it's all oneness with duality
which is, there's not one.
There's multiple. And I think people can get
lost in those distinctions
and then come up with political and other philosophies
based on
an oversimplification
of the metaphysics. And that ties into your question
that you're asking me, Jason, about my own
thoughts. And the way I
think about it now, I'm nine years into
this journey in 2016, that's when I had my
awakening when I first started questioning this
working in Silicon Valley, advising
tech companies, is that
there seems to be
an intelligence
that is guiding the world
and I see it in my own life where
a lot of things are happening that I don't directly cause
or at least I don't see the cause.
I don't see the cause in the way that
one billiard ball hits another billiard ball hits
another one, which is a very materialistic
lens on causality where it's very linear
one physical thing hits the next
hits the next and that's why
things happen. Whereas
now I don't even know why things
happen. There could be non-linear
spiritual causes of things
and the way that my life has now been guided
when I look at it rationally there are things
that keep happening that are just beyond chance
and it feels like I'm being steered
and because of that I'm more surrendered
to what life is bringing including
my own thoughts and ideas.
So when things come in I start asking the question
is this something that I should be following
or looking into more and that can be
on the positive or negative
side. Negative side meaning
is there something I'm ruminating on that's causing
me a lot of pain that I'm
being shown that I need to look at this
to try to resolve it or is
something coming in that might be a new creative insight
or a path that I didn't think about
but it keeps coming in and maybe I should explore
it because it keeps coming in. So I've become
much more curious about my surroundings
and also the way that my thoughts
are evolving. Yeah
and I love the
what you just described it where it's not
is it one thing or is it a million things
we don't we don't really see it like that
if you've ever done DMT it's a million things
right the
the super highway that is
the blast off into DMT realm
into the bardo if you will
is where I like to think
that that consciousness is stored that's
you know this outside of our body and that's what we tap into
and we could just see it when that's taking place
but not to get off into
the psychedelic realm but I just felt
like that was necessary to say that
I mean it all what we're talking about
it connects perfectly to your you know the
receiver filter model of consciousness
and before
like like Jason said we always like to
do a little background and some studying before
we get on the podcast and I was doing
some reading last night about some
some pretty fucking
crazy new scientific evidence that backs this up
and it's a
from the University of Virginia they have this department
called the division of perceptual
studies DOPS
and they look into veridical
perception
and during near death experiences
and what this is
it's not like people when they die they just
you know I saw a lot
and I was just floating you know like this is
it's not like that these people
they're clinically dead
their heart stopped their brain is flat
lined
when they come back in they report back
specific verifiable details
from the rooms like
shit that they couldn't see while they're in their
bed like one of them described
the serial number on one
of the machines that was working on them
and it was behind the machine like there's no possible
way that this person could have seen it another
person described like the scuffs
on the doctor's shoe
and in detail and they're laying in a bed
they could have never possibly seen the scuffs
on the doctor's shoe or the serial number without
from their physical bodies right that means
they they fucking floated around
the room somehow and this
and and observed in what was
going on in that room which is kind
of like a crazy blow
to the the materialist narrative
that you know that everybody dwells in now
and it's like I think
personally it's like it's a huge favor
you know a point in the favor of your thesis
and but
it brings up a really strange question
like fucking shoes
and serial numbers right if consciousness
is this fundamental universal stream
and the brain filter is offline
what I wonder why like
their first instinct is to just float
up to the ceiling and watch the surgery
or or observe the doctor's
shoes or get the serial number off of the machine
why are they like they're hanging
around and to quote Monty Python
when they're not quite dead yet
you know why why observe these
mundane details instead of
jettisoning off into this infinite cosmos
that you know that
I just described before I started this question about
like that I think is out there in this
DMT realm first off so like
my question is is that you know
and then are you familiar with this research
and what do you think is actually
happening in that room if you're not or if you are
great question
I want to start with the University of Virginia
that you mentioned I'm so glad you mentioned them
the Division of Perceptual Studies at the Med School
when I learned about this in 2016
I was just stunned that a mainstream
academic institution was looking at near-death
experiences also research on
children with memories of another life
that they call potentially reincarnation
research research on the afterlife
this is being done at UVA
like stop there for a second
that is unbelievable to me and that's been around
since the 1960s Dr. Ian Stevenson
and I would also refer your audience
if they're interested to my podcast series
where is my mind because I interviewed several of the doctors there
Dr. Bruce Grayson, Jim Tucker, Ed Kelly
very smart guys
who have been looking at this seriously
and
there's something wrong with the model of reality
that starts with matter the materialist
perspective very clearly and the near-death experience
is
it's really informed a lot of my
research
because I wonder if it is teaching us
something about what happens
when the person
when a person actually dies even though they're
resuscitated in a near-death experience
maybe it tells us something about what might happen
in the early stages of death
there's a phenomenon also known
as the shared death experience
which is not talked about as much
where
a bystander, someone who is not dying
co-lives
in the dying process
with the dying person
and reports very similar things
to a traditional near-death experience
so we have a healthy brain
that seems to be going into this other dimension of reality
and is verifying it
I think that's really significant
number one
number two, these veridical out-of-body experiences
in other words
the memory of what the consciousness had
before being resuscitated
is verified as accurate
by people who were not dying
like the doctor or family members
or staff in the hospital
they verify the memory of what their conscious
this person's consciousness experienced
so how does this work
let's say a person is in cardiac arrest
meaning in some cases
clinical death
blood stops flowing to the brain
and upon being resuscitated
the person comes back and says
my consciousness was hovering over my body
I saw and heard things in the room
or even other rooms
and
the doctor and other people say
yeah, you got that right
but how could that be
how could you have perceived this
from a vantage point outside your body
given what your brain is doing
which is that it was barely functional
or completely off
and even with a functional brain
how could you explain perceiving something
from a vantage point outside your body
it's very perplexing to mainstream thinkers
doesn't make any sense
and I've heard some people say
well, you know, there's a little bit of brain activity
that's measured
we can find this spike in brain activity
and therefore we shouldn't consider these near-death experiences
real that it's just a function
it's a hallucination by the brain
number one, if it's a verified memory
it's not a hallucination
it's an accurate perception
that the person had
hallucination would not be verified
in that same way
number two, it's true that there might be
spikes of brain activity that are occurring
but then we'd really have to rethink the brain
if one little spike of brain activity
or just a few could explain the
elaborateness of what happens in a near-death experience
such as perceiving something
from outside the body
that is very difficult to explain with just a little bit of brain activity
but even beyond that
people talk about a whole variety of things
they talk about sometimes encountering
other intelligences
meaning deceased relatives and pets
or even mystical spiritual beings
or a being of light
when I interviewed Dr. Alan Hugano
in my podcast, Where Is My Mind
he talked about in his near-death experience
encountering this being of light
and he said it was a being that I feel like I've known throughout time
he had this immense familiarity with it
that's not an uncommon thing
for people to report
and sometimes they will have flash forwards
where they will see the future
they will remember the past
or like past lives will come up
and often there's a light
that they don't progress into
sometimes people even experience other realms
like Dr. Eben Alexander
former Harvard neurosurgeon
who was also on my podcast
he was in a coma for about a week
with bacterial meningitis
and he talks about
these other realms that he experienced
so to your question Matt
there are a variety of experiences people have
the vast majority of the ones that are reported
are highly positive meaning they're flooded
with unconditional love
there are others where people are in a hellish experience
it was very traumatic for them
and there are other worldly elements
of what some people do describe
where it's not as mundane as just the hospital room
so I wonder in some of these cases
where it's a verified memory and they're looking at
certain details of what's happening in the hospital
it might be just the very early stages
of their consciousness leaving the body
and maybe it hasn't fully untethered
from the body and that's why it's a bit more mundane
but if things weren't to progress
they might end up in a different state
where it's much more mystical
yeah that's that's brilliant man
great great answer there
in regards to
the brain activity that you were talking about
how some people try to use that as evidence
that you know the brain's still making this
that what I read last night
was there was the aware to study
and they you know
they found EEG evidence of high level
brain activity with all these
different waves that are a bunch of Greek letters
that I don't even need to say
and this is like up to an hour
after the person had died
and this this study
used those waves as evidence
you know to be like the smoking gun
for the like the receiver filter model
you know improving that the brain is
capable of conscious like activity
when it's assumed to be completely inactive
and so I think that you know
that's more powerful just want to speak to that point
it suggests consciousness is more resilient
than the materialist model allows if you will
I guess yeah it's definitely
a point of contention and there have been rebuttals
to that argument that I've seen
I'm sure certainly
there could be brain activity measured but the next
step would be to demonstrate that the activity
that they observe is capable
of producing the
wide variety of experiences that people have
in the near-death experience I listed a bunch of
things that people experience and I didn't mention
the life review which is another one that's very
perplexing people sometimes relive
their whole life in a very short amount
of time and they relive it from the perspective
of other people that they impacted during
their life they become those people
so when I interviewed Danian Brinkley for example
in my podcast he had
four near-death experiences four different
times and each time he had a life review
he felt what it was like to be the person
he killed in combat in Vietnam
and he felt the pain of that person he felt
the pain of the children that no longer had a father
and then later in his life
he became a hospice volunteer after being
resuscitated and healing and
he had later near-death experiences and he got
to feel what it was like to be the dying person
in hospice and he felt the love and care
that he gave to that person through the person's
eyes so these are very
complex phenomena that people are describing
and someone would need to show that those
spikes in brain activity
could produce such experiences
that's a big missing
gap here in the literature
where there's a materialistic bias
so it's just the brain that's producing these
experiences and they're not really that mystical
and then again the shared death experience
that I mentioned where somehow a healthy
person who doesn't have any
brain damage at all is
shifting dimensions I guess
and is co-living in the dying process
of a person who is actually dying
and reports it just like a near-death
experience or would
Exactly and this
brings us to like the point of
you know the University of Virginia has been studying
this for years like you said decades even
and it kind of comes
back to the idea of internal sovereignty
you know we look at who tries
to control our consciousnesses
and without a doubt
most people the largest
organization on the planet that tries to control
consciousnesses is the state
and the government's
whole model that we're just like these
fragile meat computers
it is what allows them
to keep us in these constant states of
fear they tell us we're under constant
attack by germs by people by
the word of these insignificant
specs in a dead universe
and we need you know we need them
to save us and
I think that's
it's a form of mind control and
I think it keeps us our
brains in these boxes and
disallows the
us to even think about these ideas
you know
because
I think that we
once we start having these conversations
more often than I think that
that would lead to a whole awakening in humanity
and we would be more people would be studying
this and we could see our true potential unfold
but I guess I can get to
my question how much does this like this
new scientific evidence you know
proving consciousness is incredibly
resilient and not just a product
of our brain
our fragile brains how much
does that demolish the entire like fear based
narrative you know that if
people truly understood this would
they be so quick to obey
the like the medical priesthood
and the technocrats who demand
total control in the name of our
alleged safety
well part of me wants to say that this understanding
would help people not have fear of so
many things including the medical
ideas that were told to be true
and yet there are many smart
people I know who have very similar spiritual
beliefs meaning that they believe
consciousness doesn't come from the brain
and so forth and
they fell for everything in 2020
yeah so
man I think it's layered in terms of
the mind control that this understanding
of metaphysics
and the importance of consciousness is one
of many layers that
needs to be overcome and that's why I've written
seven books rather than just one
which I didn't know I would do at the time when I
wrote an end to upside down thinking I thought oh that's
my book I'm at my firm I'm a partner okay
I'm just going to stay there and then I quickly
realized there are many other paradigms that seem to be
part of this mind control
mentality and I have
a chapter actually in my book an end to upside
down liberty which talks about voluntaryism
all about mind control because it is
really a fear based
phenomenon where if the authority figures can keep
people in a state of fear then
they're much more easily controllable
and one part of that would be
for us to believe that we are
we are live in a random
and meaningless universe and that when you die that's the
end of your consciousness and then people with fear death
extremely but then there are other paradigms
too which we can talk about or not
related to medicine and cosmology
and so many other things
where we're told this
is going to happen and you need to be
aware of it otherwise you're going to die and you should
listen to us because we're the expert class
it's not just consciousness there are other paradigms
too yeah the solution
always rests on their shoulders right there
they're the only ones to ever be able to produce
anything of significant value
as far as solutions go
I've noticed a pattern
randomly enough of course but
speaking of brain activity and technocrats
here when I mentioned
the collective consciousness
aspect of this you rightfully so
mentioned that there are boundaries there
right like obviously your mark
Matt was just speaking I'm Jason
so we do all have our own
I guess lane
to stay in when it comes to our own
thoughts or own collective consciousness
our own consciousness generally
but if I had to take a stab at it
I think that a company
like Palantir might be trying
to work to break down those walls
of privacy and I say
that because I've been focusing a lot
of my work on Palantir right and obviously
they are the enemy to privacy
but Palantir co-founder
Peter Thiel was interviewed
God I guess it was probably a couple
months ago now by a New York Times columnist
and he was asked the question
you know should the human race survive and of course
you know everybody got the laughs about
you know how much Thiel hesitated
you know because it's a pretty straightforward answer
but then he went into this long rambling answer
about transhumanism and he even
mocked you know the modern day trans
people but he ultimately argued
that today's transhumanist
ambitions lack this radical
vision that he thinks is necessary
and then he discussed this idea
of uploading human consciousness
to computers and that
kind of got me thinking about your work
and as consciousness is not something
that's generated by the brain but is you know
fundamental and non-local
so I guess my question is
like if consciousness isn't confined
to the brain what does that say about
the idea of uploading it to a computer
like can a machine ever truly
host something that's not locally generated
and
do you think that transhumanist
vision misses something essential
about you know what consciousness is in the
first place?
It's a deep question that many people are talking about
these days also in the context of AI
like can AI ever become
conscious or will it just be a machine
that has high computational
ability but is never going to have feelings
in philosophy it's known as qualia
love for example
these are very intangible abstract ideas
that are only within consciousness
that's the only way we can fully know
them we can't point to them could that just
pop out of the machine well certainly
the materialist would argue that that's possible
because they believe qualia emerge from
brain activity so if you could just
have a really complex computer that sort
of mimics a brain then these
qualities of consciousness would
pop out of it I don't know
I mean if you ask Federico Fezzin
for example he was one of the
inventors of the microprocessor back at intel
he had a mystical experience
changed his whole life about the nature of consciousness
and how he speaks publicly about this
and he doesn't think that AI will develop
consciousness because consciousness
isn't going to pop out of a computer and it's
pretty significant for someone of his stature
to say that I do wonder however
I mean because we are
biological entities we're not just
computers in the way that AI is currently
we have a capacity
for consciousness and we know that to be true because
we're conscious right now that's actually the only thing we can
verify about life is that right now it feels
like we're having a conscious experience
and if we are biological entities
then could it be that
if a computer learned how to
integrate biological material within
itself could it become a receiver of consciousness
I don't know
that's getting into some real theoretical stuff
but in terms of uploading someone's
consciousness into
some kind of a computer
in order to even conceive of that possibility
we would need to much better understand
how consciousness currently interacts with
biological organisms
and it's not just the brain by the way
because there are instances
that I've written about for example
people who receive
organs from another person
organ transplant recipients
they often will take on
preferences
personality traits and even memories
of the person
that they got the organ from
so we're not even dealing with the brain anymore
there's a good book on this by Paul Piersol called
The Heart's Code and in my books I've talked about
some of the cases that are remarkable
where people literally shift
in crazy ways
I actually met someone recently and he told me
he had a liver transplant and I pulled him aside and said
has anything changed in your life
and he goes how did you know that
people around me they know I'm not the same person
and I don't like this food anymore that I used to like
so it's a very common phenomenon
of wait a second are we uploading consciousness
through biology in a way
and if so
it broadens the aperture to the question
about uploading consciousness I think it's way beyond
just looking at a computer
and the human consciousness and saying somehow
it's just going to go into that computer
right well I mean I guess that kind of opens
up the door too for another question
which maybe we'll
kind of sidestep this one and go into
a different one here
maybe I could kind of combine both of them but you know
plants I mean obviously plants don't have
brains but they still
respond to stimuli they communicate
chemically they even show signs
of memory right so that's an interesting
you know observation but then
and you know I know
we talked behind the scenes about
this question and I know you're not
exactly an expert
on it but I recently came across
some ideas that I'm still kind of wrapping my head around
regarding the work of
Dr. Imoto and more recently
a woman named Veda Austin
about water crystallization
and this idea that water might respond
to intention or emotion
and you know this person
Veda Austin she's done a bunch of research
she's done her own
demonstrations over a course of
time and kind of shown that she's had some
repeated results and she claims
you know that because water
is such a main component of our
bodies that yeah very well
could be also conscious
and having maybe what you were just
referring to some of these
changes and particular preferences
or even the way we act our character
and behavior and stuff like that so
I'm still kind of
trying to wrap my head around if this is
just some type of mysterious
albeit kind of unexplored
phenomenon of life that just happened to surface
around the internet age or
if it is you know some type of
beautifully packaged suede of science you know
I don't know yet but
I know you mentioned you haven't gone super deep in this area
but I would love to hear
your thoughts even if they're not well formulated
like do you see any conceptual overlap
between this type of water research
and the frameworks that you've
explored with your research
Yes I'll start with plants and then
move into water. There
was a researcher named Cleve Baxter
who used to run
lie detection for the CIA
he wrote a book called Primary Perception
which I've cited in my books
where he decided
to test whether there was
some kind of a reaction from plants
if he hurt the plant
and he used his lie detector
technology he hooked it up to the plant
and nothing was happening
when he and he decided at one
point okay I'm going to burn the leaf of this plant
he was actually going to do it
and then the lie detection thing spiked
and that changed his life because he said
what is going on here I need to now
test so many things and in this
book Primary Perception he talks about his own
experiments he even expanded it beyond
plants so I'm hoping I'm remembering
this example correctly where
for example he would have
he would take a person's
cells outside their body and I can't remember
if it was saliva or something else
and have it hooked up to the lie detector
machine to see if it would spike
but he would check whether it would spike
while the person that the cells came from
was having some kind of an arousing event
for example looking pornographic magazine
and sure enough he found that the cells
outside the body would spike
when the guy is looking at the magazine
a bunch of examples like that
in this book now has this been studied
as well as other areas that I've talked about
I would say no and part of that
is due to a lack of funding and a lack
of researchers because so many researchers
in the mainstream they're studying materialistic
ideas consciousness coming from the brain
so this is an area that I hope will
get more research and that leads
into your question about
Water Jason where I think we need a lot
more controlled research and Dr.
Emoto's work and Beta Austin's work it's
really amazing I recommend Alex
X podcast the way forward he's gone
into this notion of water in
a lot of detail he's also looked at the fourth
phase of water Dr. Gerald Pollack
work really fascinating to me
but the idea one of
the main ideas is that
if someone puts an intention into water
and then you freeze it then
the structure of the frozen
water will look different depending on whether
there was a loving or a hateful intention
yes that's just a very high level way of looking at it
and to me that makes sense
conceptually
number one it speaks to a
phenomenon known as psychokinesis
or mind-matter interaction
the idea that the human
mind through intention can affect the physical
world which is completely compatible
with this idea that everything is consciousness
and there are whirlpools in a stream
it's like if you shift what's going on
in one whirlpool then you've shifted the stream
in some way you've shifted the modulations
of the water so it would make sense that the mind
could affect the physical world
I'm actually on the board of an organization
called the Institute of Noetic Sciences
which has been around since
1973 and
50 plus years of peer-reviewed
research on phenomena like this
mind-matter interaction Dr. Dean Raiden
among others Dr. Robert John
who was the Dean of Engineering at Princeton
was studying phenomena like this Roger Nelson
and one example I'll give that I think ties
into the water discussion is studies on
random number generators
so these are machines that spit out
zeros and ones in a random
fashion and when you look at the string
of zeros and ones over time it's about 50%
ones 50% zeros
because it's all random the experimenters
ask people and these are not
people claiming to have any special abilities
often they're just in college they'll say
I want you to try to make the machine
produce more ones than zeros
but you can't touch the machine so do it
with your mind and sure enough
what happens is that the machine produces
more ones than zeros in a
statistically significant manner
it's not a huge effect but it's small
and highly statistically significant and it's been
shown repeatedly so
that is one experiment out of many
suggesting okay there's a
power of human consciousness on the
physical world it's affecting the behavior
of a machine without any physical
contact and if we apply
that to this research on water maybe this is
just a nuance
to that notion of psychokinesis
of putting an intention out it has
a certain quality in ways that we don't understand
and it's affecting
water and I think it's a major
area of research like you said Jason if the body
is made out of so much water
that has huge implications for health
sure yeah and then you
bring vibration and frequency into that and
there's a whole new topic for
a podcast right I think
that the same thing like we back to plants
with the water like they've done studies
where they've yelled at plants played different you know I mean
granted some of those studies
actually turned out no results
but the plants
undoubtedly are exhibit
the traits of consciousness
right they have these the mycelium
that connect all these trees together and they
when the trees need nutrients
the mycelium that aren't even
a part of that tree
will funnel nutrients to that tree
it's pretty pretty fucking crazy Jason and I
were talking about that yesterday about Michael
Poland and Paul Stamets who are like
two pioneers in that realm
and
and so like back to this
the unconscious there like I guess
non-living things being conscious right
we do
joke and always talk about the AI
waking up one day right but
that's like an establishment trap
I think you know that's like if you build a
complex of enough machine consciousness
will just magically emerge
from the silicone right because our brains
are just meat computers
but there is an
entire other school of thought here that's
called pan-psychism and
I want to get your take on this it's
I heard this guy on Rogan one time who
champion says Philip golf and they
argue that the materials
is totally wrong and propose
that consciousness isn't an
emergent property at all
it's a fundamental law of
the universe like basically like gravity
and it's you know like
meaning like all electrons
or in the universe
have some rudimentary
form of experience
in this universe
and you know if they're right
then the whole debate about uploading the mind
that we were talking about earlier is
essentially flawed because
we're not creating consciousness
with a computer we just be organizing
complex matter in some
some new way that allows
that pre-existing fundamental consciousness
to express itself in a more complex form
basically. Yeah there are different definitions
I've heard of pan-psychism but the one that you're referring to
I believe is known as constitutive
pan-psychism wherein
every unit of
matter has its own form of
consciousness and when you put those little
pieces of matter together you end up with big
consciousness. Is that basically
what you were hearing?
Yeah I mean it was just I was
more on a basic level like where you know
consciousness in the universe exists at the
most fundamental level on the electron or
subatomic particle level
and yeah you would
I guess if you put enough of them together
then you could have more of it I guess.
Yeah so that version
of pan-psychism
I wrote about this in an end to upside down living
I think it's still a form
of materialism because it starts
with matter and says that each piece of matter
even little units spawns
consciousness somehow and
that is really distorting
the idea
that we have been talking about today which is
more that consciousness is fundamental itself
and everything that we call material
is derived out of consciousness
there's a distinction there
so it's everything that we call the material
world is some kind of a modulation
of consciousness itself versus
there's material stuff and consciousness pops out of it
even if it's at a small level so that version
of pan-psychism where it's constituent
parts that are all conscious and then you put them together
and then you get big consciousness I
would debate that one.
That's very interesting man I'm glad I asked that question
and got corrected on it.
I don't have necessarily a
follow up for that we are getting a little low
on time here I do have
you know I started
to rack my brain here and I wanted some
out of the box questions for you Mark
I know we covered a lot on the first
podcast definitely listen to that one guys
if this is your first time listening
to Mr. Gover here but I
have a question here
it could be silly it could be
something worth expanding on but
when I was thinking about the evolution
of consciousness
I couldn't help but think about the nature
of language and how it's essentially this
man-made system where we've
assigned meaning to sounds and grunts
and vibrations that we make
with our mouth it's a symbolic
interface right it's not the thing itself
and I feel like that kind of raises
this deeper question about consciousness
is consciousness reliant
on human intelligence or even speech
to express itself I mean
obviously consciousness can exist
without language but it
might feel radically different so I guess
I'm curious like how do you think
about this conundrum you know does language
shape consciousness or just
reflect it and you know what would
consciousness look like if we didn't have
any language at all.
Language is a tool to express
things and it's inherently
an approximation
and this is especially clear when we're
talking about consciousness because
there is no language that adequately
describes what consciousness is
consciousness is a purely subjective thing
it's something that we experience
we don't actually see it
we don't touch it we can't draw it
and any language we use because
of that is inherently an approximation
or limitation
and that gets to another point
which is a little wild and crazy
but in my book an end to upside down
contact I talk about
allegations that non-human
intelligences exist both in the modern
era but also throughout history
and when you look at ancient mythologies
ancient religious or spiritual scriptures
they're talking about things that sound very much
like what people are alleging today
when they encounter a spirit or an alien
or a UFO or something like that
and there's a common theme
when people encounter these entities
there is communication but there's no language
it's completely telepathic.
Interesting. Which seems more efficient
that's my guess
and telepathy
is something that has been studied
I mentioned the institute of noetic sciences
Dr. Dean Raiden and others
there's a study called the Gansfeld experiment
among others have demonstrated
that telepathy is a real effect
that it can be demonstrated
statistically speaking
that a normal person who doesn't even have any training
is able to transmit something
with the mind beyond what chance
would predict so it's not always 100% telepathic
like we hear about on the telepathy tapes
for example the podcast series where
there are telepathic autistic savants
who can read their caretakers minds
Dr. Diane Powell who's also my podcast
where is my mind that's an area of research
where there's extreme telepathy
and then other times it's more subtle
my point in mentioning all that is
that telepathy is a phenomenon
which many mainstream scientists don't even realize
has been demonstrated
and there are peer reviewed papers that aggregate
the evidence for psychic phenomena
like a paper in American psychologist
the official peer reviewed academic journal
of the American Psychological Association
2018 paper by Dr. Etzel Cardina
another example
Dr. Jessica Utz
who was the president of the American
Statistical Association
what she said is using the
standards applied to any other area
of science it has concluded
that psychic functioning has been well established
so
with all that background
to hear that people are encountering
non-human intelligences which we know happens
in near-death experiences in a whole host of other phenomena
and everyone saying it's telepathic
that would suggest that
the way that we communicate
might be a less evolved version
of communication because something is lost
in translation through language
versus an ability to perhaps have a more
pure version of communication with telepathy
and that raises a whole host of questions
if that's true what I just said
why is it that we have
a less efficient form of communication
what does that mean about our origins
were we designed this way
in a nefarious manner
because we want it to be kept in
some kind of a negative state
of imprisonment or control
or is it just built into the way
this realm is constructed
and it's just part of the journey to have
language versus pure telepathy I don't know
that's a
that's an awesome thought man isn't it
and yeah language is so basic
in rudimentary and if you've ever tried to describe
an experience like a DMT experience
or like you said
trying to describe consciousness language
is not even possible
to do such
it doesn't do it justice
and I've been through that a whole bunch of times
trying to describe
my psychedelic experiences one person
I found that does it pretty well is Alex Gray
and he does it with imagery not words
but because he's able to
remember it and I guess bring that back
but then again it might not even be
that's what we're seeing but that's what we see afterwards
you know might be implanting
that visualization in our heads
before we even go there
but yeah that's brilliant man and
I do think that I think that
language because it's so basic and doesn't
get the points across that we're trying to make
I think that
you know these
bodies that we're in may have
the ability to somehow communicate
without it and
it is apparent you know we have
I read some statistic
a long time ago about
how you know like 90%
of human communication has nothing to do with
words and it's all
the subconscious things that we could read
and we could I'm calling it subconscious
but maybe it's just conscious
these conscious things that we can
read and interpret without even
talking to anybody you know you could tell a person's a threat
without them telling you that they want
to hurt you and
it goes way deeper than that you know
but I don't know where I was going with that
but yeah that's just a brilliant point that you made
and I wanted to draw attention to that man
yeah you're pointing that to some
subtle energies that we might be picking up
whether it's telepathically or some other kind of
energy that is beyond that
that mainstream science won't
talk about because it's not physical or maybe
it's not measurable in the way that most people want
there's a phenomenon I've written about
it's called the sense of being stared at
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has looked into this
where people can tell when someone's looking at them
and apparently snipers and people in various industries
know this that there's a subtle
that intention has an effect that people pick up
and it's not
something that is traditionally measured by science
but it speaks to your point Matt
yeah no kidding well I mean there's even
something as simple as just the yawn
right like I yawn next thing I know you're
yawning and everybody in the room is yawning
I mean there's something there's something there
but you know
Mark you know as we've been discussing
your work challenges
the materials view on
consciousness which you know they claim
arises from the brain
your ideas you know you're exploring
consciousness that it's received rather than produced
right but that aligns
with a lot of ancient traditions and spiritual
teachings yeah and
I know you've taken note from both
scientific studies and the metaphysical
frameworks but maybe for listeners
who are new to this intersection
can you maybe speak to where
modern science and the ancient spiritual
teachings kind of converge and where
you see any kind of meaningful overlap
to me there's a lot of convergence
and they are to me different
approaches to trying to get to the
truth often in spiritual
and religious traditions they're referring to
anecdotal reports someone
has a major mystical experience and then comes
back and describes it with words and people
then live by the teaching and they just trust
that it's true and in science
we have a scientific method we have an independent
variable that we vary and then we see what happens
to the study and
even though much of mainstream academia
is not looking at non-local consciousness
or consciousness beyond the brain there are
people like the University of Virginia
the Institute of Noetic Sciences there are people out there
that are studying non-local consciousness
and they're coming to very similar conclusions
that consciousness is beyond the brain there is
a mystical reality and what a lot of
traditions have talked about for many many years
seems to have validity
yeah and and I love
the fact that there's more and more people studying
this stuff man and as Jason said
we're kind of getting to the end here but
I do want to follow up with
another question and I have to say
before that though like this this conversation
which is why we had you on a second time
in less than a year it's just been incredible
man it's it's atypical
our normal conversations this one is beautiful
and you know our normal ones
are we spend like an hour digging into the
darkness of the police state technocracy
and propaganda and we have
to essentially like claw our
way back to a white pill at the end of the show
but this has
just been an amazing conversation man
it's just been a white pill from start to
finish and you've laid out
like this powerful evidence-based case
man that we're we're not just this
meaningless
body of cells that
that in our existence isn't just
random accident a random accident in this
dead universe man the model
you describe where consciousness is fundamental
and we're all interconnected is
it really is it's the ultimate
antidote to the status divide
and conquer system
it's why I
found my way back from being this asshole
atheist so many years ago where I just
didn't there was nothing everything existed
in my head and it was just
a dark and horrible part of my life that
that I found was hopeless man
and now that they're studying it and
people like you out there this this does
renew hope and me and a lot
of other people and
you know this system though that we live under
it requires us to believe that we're
separate finite and
like this in
this constant state of competition right
if truly if people truly
you know deeply understood that
we're all part of the same stream
then the entire propaganda
paradigm of us versus them
that fuels this
fucking entire horrible place that we
brought been brought to that
simply dissolves right
so like this is
the key to literally saving humanity in my
opinion it's
for me saving humanity from itself if you
if you will the million dollar
question is like how do we get there
like we live in a world this practice
look practically designed to keep
our like I said earlier
our receivers locked in our brains and boxes
and on the lowest possible
frequency just distracted
by fear materialism
pornography division you
name it like there's just all that shit
is out there and it's very difficult
to break free from it if you have no idea
that you're even trapped by it but
for the person who is
listening to this right now you know who can feel
this this truth in their core
what is the
the most practical and powerful
way for them to to change the channel
like to quiet that noise
of the technocracy get their ego
out of the way and
and tap into this shared consciousness
more effectively in their daily life
I do think this discussion
today is the ultimate white
pill because we're getting to the
fundamental nature of reality
and at the same time we are clearly
somehow blocked
on an everyday basis from
that ultimate reality it's almost like
there are layers of density
that are in the way
of a truth that some part of us
must have known and that we have
amnesia to which is a crazy
idea the idea that we know things
that we don't have access to in terms
of our own knowledge but maybe through a near-death experience
or through psychedelics or meditation
people then will have a glimpse and then come back
so to me
it's ultimately about trying to get
to the truth about existence
and there's the meta truth which is what we're talking
about today the nature of reality
is consciousness fundamental or not
and then there are these sub truths
about well okay if we exist
within these layers of density is it
sufficient just to know that there is a higher
consciousness that we're a part of
and as we alluded to earlier I don't think it's
sufficient at all because there are a lot of people who believe
that who fall for psyops
so there is a test of discernment
here beyond just metaphysics
and like I said it's why I've continued writing books
because it's been mind blowing to me
like wait they got so many things right
but then how did they miss this how did I miss this
I need to investigate
and it leads people I talk about this
in my book and into the upside down
reset where I critique leftism
and also the world economic forums great
reset where there is this underlying
desire for compassion
which is a great thing we want to help people
but blind compassion could be
a dangerous thing because
you might think something is beneficial to another
and then recommend it what if it's actually
harmful so there needs to be
not blind compassion but compassion with
discernment and discernment is
really the key it's the thing I think about
now how do we know that something
we're told is actually true
or whether it's a wolf in sheep's clothing
or if it's just a mistake
and that has led me to very basic questions
like if someone tells me something is true
in the field of medicine or cosmology
or history or geology
you name it the first question
I asked now is how do you
know that thing is true
can you demonstrate it to me with direct evidence
rather than inference
and what I'm finding over and over again in
discipline after discipline is that the models
of reality we have beyond metaphysics
are based on inference and then we build
houses of cards
without a strong foundation
and mountains of inferences on top of it
where there are things that have not been directly observed
at the microscopic scale
at the macroscopic cosmic scale
and in between we have
no direct observation for the thing that we're told is
true and yet we believe it's true and we're told
it's true by the authorities and we're not allowed to question it
and that's a whole other can of worms
that we're not going to have time for today
but it speaks to this notion of discernment
because Matt to your question how do we transcend
all this stuff and whatever kinds of
negative nefarious agendas
seem to exist within this density
we've got to understand the metaphysics, the ultimate white pill
and then we have to be able to see through deception
within the density that we live in
dude
I don't think there's been a better
answer to a white pill question
on this podcast ever dude
I have goosebumps right now man
that's a very well stated
hey free thinkers this is Matt Agarist
and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind you
of something really important
first off apologies for the interruption
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Mark dude you're such a really
like really good speaker
and these ideas are
complex and very difficult
to get across you know I know I
just stammered a whole bunch of times
trying to talk about them
but you do a great job man
and it was a really a pleasure
it was a beautiful conversation that we had today
thank you so much for coming on man
before we go let's
tell people where they can find, follow and support your work man
well first I want to thank you guys
for having me back on the show
I love the conversation and thank you for all the work that you do
I've learned a lot from you guys as well
so I really appreciate it
we need to have you on a third time
any time you want
I'm happy to chat
my website is my name
markgober.com
I have seven books
out there in paperback
or hard copy some are hardcover
you can get them in hard copy kindle
and audible formats
I narrated all the audibles myself
if that's what you prefer
and also my podcast series which came out in 2019
but it's still relevant on the nature of consciousness
where is my mind
on Apple podcast, Spotify
all the major players
it features clips from
50 people that I interviewed
including researchers and experiencers
and if you decide to listen to it I suggest starting with episode 1
and going chronologically to episode 8
because it is an episode series that builds
hell yeah man
we'll have the links to all this down below
the podcast description
wherever you guys are listening
thanks again man absolute pleasure
thank you mark
thank you
thank you for listening
to the free thought project podcast
and please don't forget to rate
review and subscribe
free minds
free people