Declassified documents from the CIA talking about using psychic spying or national security
known as remote viewing.
Former US President Jimmy Carter verified that psychic spies were used to find a downed
Russian bomber that was lost in an African jungle and the radar systems couldn't find
it so they used psychics.
This is the True Health Report where critical appraisal fuels true freedom.
Hello everyone and welcome to the True Health Report.
I'm your host Dr. Andrew Kaufman.
Today I'm going to be speaking with a guest on a very interesting topic that of consciousness
and in this episode we will challenge the ideas of materialism as it has played out through
science and look at what some very important experimental evidence shows that can clue
us into what's really going on with the mind-body problem.
So today's guest, Mark Gober, is an amazing researcher and author of at least seven books
in the Upside Down series and I first heard of him when he reached out to me to help edit
some chapters on medical science in his book, An End to Upside Down Medicine.
And we have been involved in a chat group for a while and I noticed he's very well informed
on a number of issues so eventually I got around to reading, I believe this was his
first book, An End to Upside Down Thinking in the series and we're going to discuss
his ideas about consciousness today.
Now Mark has a very interesting background with an Ivy League education from Princeton
majoring in psychology and then going into the world of finance and investment banking
before he started to essentially wake up or become aware of some of these scientific
frauds and misperceptions.
So Mark, welcome to the stage.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to finally do this.
I should have reached out sooner once I realized the breadth and depth of your work.
So Mark, how did you go from investment banking, a career that is very desirable in our society
where all the rewards of fast cars, women and money come to going off the beaten path and
risking your reputation to take a position, a truthful position on these topics?
I was not even aware of these topics until 2016.
I think that's reason number one.
I wasn't aware of, let's just say, the...
You mean they didn't teach you this at Princeton?
No, the sad thing is that the more I think about it, the more I realize that I was
stressing over getting good grades on things that I don't think are true anymore.
Unfortunately, by the time I didn't know that and I hit a wall in my life in many
ways, ending in 2016, but maybe I could say a few years before that it started where I realized
that the things I was trying to achieve were not bringing lasting satisfaction or happiness.
And I believed at the time that life was random and meaningless, that when we die,
that is the end of our consciousness.
There is no reality to spiritual phenomena and anyone who believes in a spiritual
reality is basically believing a superstition because they don't want to believe in the
finality of death.
And I wasn't going to do that and I was going to listen to what the science said and the
science was telling us.
There's no higher intelligence.
It's all random and meaningless.
Now, Mark, if I may interrupt for a second, because that's obviously a critical issue
and this is the paradigm that we're living in.
So in that philosophy of materialism, which you're describing where there's no
meaning or purpose and we're meat suits and once we reach the end,
then we cease to exist.
What do you think are the cultural and philosophical consequences of that?
They are huge.
Number one, morality, if we don't believe in any organizing intelligence in this
reality that we inhabit, then if it's all random, then why would you want to
act in a certain way beyond survival of the fittest?
And that's where the Darwinian perspective comes in very strongly,
that it's just survival of the fittest and do whatever you need to succeed.
And there are no metaphysical or spiritual consequences to your actions.
Also, if you believe that when you die, that's the end of everything,
then it creates a fear of death potentially.
That there's a rush to do whatever we can in this lifetime and this death is coming
and that's the end of everything.
That's very different than if there is a continuation of consciousness after the body dies.
So there can be a bit of nihilism depending on how much one thinks about this.
For some people, it's probably subtle in the back of their mind.
For me, it became stronger and stronger as I was going through life, realizing
I'm not sure why any of this stuff matters that I'm stressing over.
What's the point?
Wow, that's really fascinating.
So I think what you're getting at with the first point is the
inception of moral relativism, where in order to justify your advantage over the pack that
you just can make it acceptable from a moral perspective.
And then I think what you're talking about is really a very common psychological phenomenon
that we see that I have a lot of experience with formally practicing psychiatry,
which is an existential crisis.
And this is, in fact, in my current formulation involving natural healing,
one of the central problems that people face in terms of a psychological
dilemma that can affect one's health mentally and physically.
So these are really key issues and some of the major problems with our culture.
And then of course, really the coup de gras that you mentioned, which is almost
exactly what I've said is that ultimately it leads to a nihilistic perspective.
And that may bring about a decadent society, which you didn't take that last step,
but I think it follows logically.
Completely.
And it's very, it's challenging to live that way.
I can tell you from personal experience, because what's the point of anything,
even the hedonism, it's temporary.
And when you die, it's over.
So I was struggling with both the failures and the successes with this worldview.
But knowing that this was my worldview, I wasn't going to change it because I didn't
want to just comfort myself.
I wanted to believe what was true.
And I thought science told us materialism is true.
And maybe that is the reason that many mainstream people embrace their religious
beliefs and practices because it provides refuge from this dark reality of nothingness.
For some people, maybe.
For me, the shift was not that because I was having to overcome what I thought was
true about materialism.
And I was forced kicking and screaming basically to shift my perspective.
So what were the circumstances in your life that brought about this confrontation of ideas?
It was a combination of struggles professionally and personally,
and not knowing how to deal with them in the context of materialism,
of it's all random and meaningless.
And then encountering phenomena that I was not previously aware of.
And this was in 2016 when I was listening to podcasts.
Initially, I was listening to shows like the Tim Ferriss podcast,
where he was talking about using sensory deprivation, float tanks,
various alternative ways of relieving anxiety.
He spoke about psychedelics, had many guests on like that.
And that led me to look at alternative health.
There was a show, it's still on the air, called Extreme Health Radio.
And I was listening to a bunch of episodes there.
And one day I was just listening to the next one that was up from months before.
And it was a woman named Laura Powers who spoke about psychic abilities that she uses
with her clients to help heal them.
And she talked about interdimensional beings, angels.
And what was interesting to me was that the hosts of the show,
who I had heard on many other episodes, were taking her seriously.
And I thought that they had at least some level of discernment.
And the fact that they were listening to her and not kicking her off the show
suggested to me maybe there's something I'm missing here.
There was a lot of cognitive dissonance.
Well, now most people would simply turn to a different podcast
when that dissonance comes into play.
So, and also I imagine that probably earlier in your life,
you heard something about psychics before, right?
But something was different at this point in your life.
And, you know, do you think it was like a developmental crisis
that you were going through as you maybe realized your professional pursuits
were not going to bring you the satisfaction in your life that you wanted?
That could have been part of it for sure.
I might have been ripe at that point.
But something captivated me about that episode enough to just be intrigued
enough to say, I'm going to listen to Laura's own podcast
because she mentioned it on the show.
And that's when I started to get really interested
because Laura has pretty short episodes and interviews many other people in the spiritual realm.
Some of whom have just had personal experiences that are not
scientifically validated, let's say, and others who are more scientific.
And after hearing case after case, I started to wonder what was going on
because these were people from different parts of the world,
sometimes different backgrounds, and they were describing a picture of reality
that was not the one that I believed to be true.
And I couldn't reason that they were all colluding with each other.
And I wondered if they had a similar kind of delusion perhaps.
I didn't think they were lying.
And that led me to then start to read books and scientific papers and come across,
for example, the University of Virginia has a division of perceptual studies,
which looks at near-death experiences and many other phenomena.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which studies psychic abilities,
energy healing, lucid dreaming, which I'm now on the board of.
And Princeton University had a lab for nearly 30 years run by the former dean of engineering.
And some of that was while I was an undergrad at Princeton.
I didn't know it existed.
And they studied these sorts of phenomena, psychic abilities.
I was just blown away that these things existed.
One more, declassified documents from the CIA talking about using psychic spying
for national security known as remote viewing.
I had no idea this stuff existed.
And then I had to question things.
So now you're basically pointing out here that you were confronted
after doing some research that is pervasive in the academic world and government agencies.
And this is not just some fringe gypsy with a stand at the carnival.
Yeah, that's what captivated me because I had heard about those more anecdotal cases.
And certainly there can be frauds in this area.
But that doesn't mean that an entire field is wrong.
Right.
And I believe if it's not still in existence that Duke had a department of occult studies
or something to that effect as well, because there were occasional psychiatric patients
that came from distances to basically try to find the professors there to communicate
things that they were perceiving that we said they were psychotic, of course.
But now I wonder if perhaps there was something different going on.
Yeah, the researcher was named Ryan, R-H-I-N-E, I believe,
and he was studying psychic phenomena as well.
And I just couldn't believe that these things existed, and I thought I was well educated.
I'd never even heard about them.
Well, there's a lot of knowledge out there.
But Mark, I want to ask you because you mentioned when you first saw the interview
with the woman you mentioned, Laura, I think, that you applied some validity testing.
Where did you develop those skills or that practice of being able to use your discernment
when evaluating these kind of things?
Because this is something I think my audience often relies on me to do,
and I want to teach them how to hone those skills.
It's a great question.
I think a lot of it I probably do on a subconscious level,
and maybe it was through academic training and then being in the professional world of having,
especially in the realm of strategy consulting in Silicon Valley,
I worked with companies that had patented technologies that were significant and valuable,
which meant that I had to go into a new technology area,
perhaps that I knew nothing about, learn about the technology,
learn about the industry, and see what the strategic landscape was like.
So I was used to having to discern new situations all the time,
and therefore when I came across something that was new to me,
I was probably applying many of those skills.
Which on the fly, what would those be?
One is consistency.
Is the person speaking in a way that doesn't contradict him or herself?
Internal validity.
Yeah, that's probably something I'm looking for.
There's also probably an element of something energetic,
where I get a sense of whether I feel like the person is genuine or not,
and that's very difficult to put my finger on.
Well, no, I mean, I think you're describing intuition.
And so you're combining a logical rational analysis with your intuition.
I think that summarizes this whole discussion,
really, because you're relying on consciousness,
rather than whatever your brain circuitry can do to compute an answer.
Right.
And then combining it, like you say, with the logical aspects.
So when someone's making a series of claims,
I try to fit those into a worldview and figure what kind of worldview
could accommodate all of these things that the person's saying,
given that I believe the person is genuine.
And then I have to reconfigure my existing worldview
if it contradicted that worldview.
And it becomes like a puzzle where I have to maybe take certain pieces out
and try to put new ones in,
and that's the calculus happening in my mind.
Well, now that is a crucial point, Mark,
because many authors, I think, that pursue a narrow area of research
and they uncover a different truth than the mainstream narrative,
they often then don't take a bigger view and see how it fits into context.
And then they bring in other areas of knowledge
that have the same falsehoods, right?
And I mean, even you were guilty of this early on in your writing,
right?
And you graciously confessed to me because we all have to learn.
I mean, the same thing with Tom Cowan.
When I first met him, I had bought a couple of his older titles.
And one of them, he said, don't read that, everything's wrong.
Yeah, fortunately, I agree with the general themes of all of my books,
even if there are parts or details that I don't agree with anymore.
And in many of those cases, if not all, I just took a mainstream belief for granted
as being true and applied it to whatever I was doing.
And I hadn't explored.
So for example, I referenced germ theory briefly in an end to upside down thinking.
And as you know, and as your audience is probably aware,
that's something many of us are questioning.
And that's just one example out of a few.
I also talk about general relativity.
And in my book, an end to the upside down cosmos, I question that too.
Well, I think this is a normal part of the growth of our knowledge over time,
because of course, I have made the same exact mistakes where I talked about vitamins,
or I talked about genetics as being completely valid.
When now that I've had time to investigate them, I think that's not really the true story.
So we all have to develop.
And so folks out there, try the practice of putting it in context and relating it
to other themes and ideas and subject matter.
But forgive yourself for making mistakes as you go on.
The important thing is to learn from those mistakes.
And once you uncover them to not repeat them, that's how we really make progress
in this pursuit of the truth.
One thing I would add there, I've had to do this myself,
is to appreciate the things in a person that I can learn from,
where I think they are onto something important,
and not let the falsehoods they believe cloud the areas that they're good at.
It can be easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes.
Well, they said this one thing that I don't agree with.
Therefore, everything they say is false.
I think we need to take each claim on a claim-by-claim basis.
Yeah, that's right.
And to do that successfully, I think you have to monitor your emotional reaction,
because there could say something that could trigger you,
because you have a strong opinion about it,
but that doesn't mean that the main idea that they're presenting is invalid.
And you could lose out on important knowledge by doing that.
So thanks for that point.
And similarly, it's possible to dislike someone and agree with something that they say.
Wow, it's the way people act today.
It's almost like they don't think that's actually possible.
But really, it's the only possibility because what is the probability
that two individuals would agree on everything?
I'm sure that we don't.
We probably have a good overlap,
but I think their, of course, are going to be individual differences.
So we almost have to have relationships with people and not agree on certain things.
And there might be things we disagree on,
not just the two of us, but any two people,
because they haven't done the same level of research.
And one person just believes the mainstream
and is not aware of other science or lack of science, for example.
Right.
And that's the exact problem that I faced with all the people
who wanted to engage in debates about germ theory or virology is
that I had spent all this time studying it and learning about it
and developed a pretty good depth of knowledge.
And many of the other folks just had the assumptions of what they were taught
and didn't read even one paper to try and examine the issue.
Yeah.
So, Mark, where did this lead you discovering all the academic institutions?
How did you go about doing this research?
And what are some of the main early discoveries that you made?
The research I was doing starting in the summer of 2016
was just purely out of personal interest,
because I understood the implications of what I was encountering.
If there was any validity to even a fraction of what I encountered,
then I needed to rethink the basic metaphysics
about the nature of reality.
Is life really random and meaningless?
Or maybe is there something more?
That was my driving force behind wanting to research.
So you decided to start small.
Yeah, exactly.
I knew this was huge and I was obsessed, basically.
My friends remember the stacks of books that I was developing.
I was accumulating just any book that seemed interesting on Amazon.
I was buying it.
I find out about a new scientist by that.
And I basically spent all of my waking hours outside of my day job
learning about this stuff for roughly a year.
And I started to socialize this to some friends
and they were largely interested actually.
There were some that were pretty skeptical,
but I remember having lunches with some friends
and they would text me a few days later and say,
hey, what you talked about some of those studies,
that's pretty mind blowing.
And I decided in the summer of 2017,
I wanted to summarize the findings into a book.
And that became an end to upside down thinking published in 2018.
But the way that I structured that book,
it's around whether or not the brain creates consciousness.
And that's not where I started per se.
I was starting with various phenomena
that did not match the materialist paradigm of reality
that I used to believe.
And I realized that all those phenomena,
while they might sound like they're different,
for example, a near-death experience
or the work done at the University of Virginia
where there are young children
who remember a life that's not their own,
or telepathic allegations,
or precognition,
knowing or sensing the future before it happens,
these are seemingly distinct phenomena,
but they all relate to a central question
around what is the relationship
between the brain and consciousness.
And I realized that framework would be something that,
because of the extent of the science that is out there
that I didn't know about previously,
I would be able to put into a book
and feel like I could continue in my career.
And one of the other reasons I felt that way
was that I wasn't claiming every example in the book
was 100% fact.
And maybe some of the studies would be falsified later
or there would be a methodological problem.
My argument was, if there's one phenomenon
that I described in this book
that materialism cannot explain,
that by definition means that materialism
needs revision or is completely wrong.
And I think there are many phenomena described in that book
that challenge materialism.
So it sounds like you really embarked on this
as part of your own spiritual journey
and not with the intent to create a book
and do interviews or anything like that.
That just, and you also opened yourself up
to see what's the evidence out there
and what are the experiences people have
rather than formulating a hypothesis
or theory or glomming on to someone else's teachings.
I had no idea I would write books.
I mean, I was squarely in my career in Silicon Valley.
I became a partner at my firm in 2018.
I'd spent about 10 years there before leaving.
I mean, I was in a good spot and I was so pulled
in this other direction because my priorities shifted.
And even the subsequent books, like you said, Andy,
this is about my spiritual journey.
The books are a byproduct of my own evolution
where I then want to share with people what I've encountered
and that's had a big impact on my own life.
So this whole journey that I've been on
of now speaking publicly, it was not on my radar.
I never expected it.
Well, we're definitely glad that you took this path
because not too many people are capable
of putting things together the way you have
and I think it's a really important contribution.
Thank you.
Can you tell us about some of the experiments
or information that you told some of your friends
that they were interested in
or maybe less skeptical about than you expected?
Well, one place I like to start with all phenomena
that are challenging to mainstream perspectives
is where people can agree on things,
where the mainstream agrees with even the alternative.
And I'll give two examples of that.
One is in the realm of what's known as quantum mechanics,
which there are those who question why those phenomena occur,
but there are observations that many people have seen repeatedly.
For example, the notion of entanglement,
where there are particles that are distant from one another
and when one is affected,
the other one seems to be affected simultaneously,
which suggests that there's a hidden interconnectivity going on.
And I would recommend to your audience Dr. Steven A. Young
who's a theoretical physics PhD.
He has a great video on his YouTube channel
questioning whether this is actually quantum or something else.
But there are these phenomena like entanglement
that have been measured.
And so when I went in from that angle,
people would say, oh yeah, there is this quantum world
that's weird that scientists don't really understand.
Okay, you're talking about phenomena that are weird in physics
and maybe that would relate to other phenomena out there.
And Dr. Dean Raiden wrote a book called Entangled Minds,
which seeks to make this connection as well,
that there are strange phenomena in physics,
maybe there's some relation to consciousness.
And people tend to exhale a little bit
when they hear that because it sounds sophisticated.
And the other area where I like to start
is to talk about what's known as the hard problem of consciousness.
This is a well-known issue in philosophical circles
and field of neuroscience,
which if I were to simplify it, probably oversimplifying it,
is that our consciousness, which is the part of us
basically that is experiencing,
it's difficult to define if not impossible
because we can't point to it, we can't feel it,
we can't touch it, but we have experience.
We have experience.
We can't use our normal senses, however, to access it.
But that exists undeniably
because we are all conscious at this very moment.
And we know we have a brain, we can see that,
and we know the brain is connected to consciousness
in a correlated manner.
In other words, when certain parts of the brain are affected,
a person has a shift in their consciousness.
So damage a part of the brain,
typically regarded as being responsible for memory,
then the person might have a corresponding shift in memory.
So there are these correlations between the brain and consciousness.
Yeah, go ahead.
You can just think about when someone gets knocked out with a punch,
that basically causes a mechanical stress
on a certain area of the brain,
and then consciousness is temporarily gone.
Exactly.
And these are known as NCC's Neural Correlates of Consciousness.
They're very well known.
And scientists will acknowledge, however,
that the hard problem of consciousness,
which is that consciousness is not something physical,
and the brain is physical.
How could it be that something non-physical,
like consciousness emerges out of a brain,
even though we have these correlations?
Correlation does not always imply causation, in other words.
Just because two things are related
doesn't mean that one is the cause of the other.
Right.
Now, this is the so-called emergent properties, right?
Right.
So is consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain,
which many materialist scientists,
many people in academia would say,
consciousness pops out of the brain
due to chemical and electrical activity,
but there is still a hard problem
is that it's not understood how that could occur.
And no one has ever observed consciousness
popping out of a brain.
And the implications of this are massive
because if you believe consciousness comes from the brain,
what happens when the brain shuts off,
i.e. when you die?
That's the end of your consciousness.
I think there's another implication
with respect to the so-called
artificial intelligence technology.
We have these groups of the CEOs of big AI firms, right,
who say that AI will become conscious
and destroy the world just like in the Terminator.
But for an order for that to be possible,
consciousness would have to just emerge
from the circuitry, from those chips,
and which is not really the way it works, is it?
I don't think there's evidence for that.
I don't think we've established
that consciousness comes out of the brain.
And to the contrary, there's a lot of evidence
suggesting that the brain has some other role.
Maybe it's a filtering mechanism,
an antenna receiver, an interface,
and maybe the whole body itself
acts in that manner.
There are cases of people who receive organs
from another person,
so organ transplant recipients,
who take on personality traits,
dietary preferences, for example,
of the person that they got the organ from.
And that's not a brain.
Musical abilities, romantic preferences.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's a very interesting area of research.
And these are the types of quote-unquote anomalies
that interest me.
The analogy I use in a later book
and then to the upside down cosmos is,
if there's a law that says that all swans are white,
and we go around the world
and find a million white swans,
and one day we find a single black swan,
the law said all swans are white.
Therefore, the law is incorrect
because it's not true that all swans are white.
There was a black swan we found.
So there's a single anomaly
that means the model needs to change,
whether it's these organ cases
or many other cases too.
Yeah, logic is so useful in these matters.
With respect to the definition of consciousness,
what about going back to the idea of Descartes,
Cogito, Irgosum, I think, therefore I am?
Because the philosophy before the modern era
and people like Daniel Dennett of the materialist school,
there was this issue of the mind-body duality
where there is a separate consciousness.
And that obvious phrase is quite famous
for delineating that theory.
Well, if we think about a thought,
which many of us are not trained to do,
if you could just sit there and watch a thought,
there is a part of you that is aware of the thought.
So it's the consciousness that is absorbing the thought
rather than the thought creating your existence,
if that makes sense.
You are the observer of the thoughts.
That is the I am to me,
the awareness that is able to perceive anything,
whether it's a thought or something
that we see with our eyes and so forth.
That's interesting, although I wonder,
could one reason that in order to determine
that you're observing a thought requires a meta-thought?
Perhaps after the fact, we could have the thought
that there was the awareness that observed the thought.
But in the moment, it is an awareness observing a thought.
Very interesting.
And of course, there's also the relationship
to this consciousness experience and language,
because for example, there are humans
who have never been exposed to language,
but when we have thoughts,
we often formulate them using language,
or certainly we express them that way
in order to express them.
But what you're talking about is something
that is pre-linguistic.
Exactly, something more primordial.
It is a pure awareness state
that we typically don't even acknowledge is there,
because that is the canvas on which experience occurs.
Now, one of the experiments you mentioned
really struck me as interesting,
especially given all the narrative about AI
and technology,
but it is the random number generator experiment.
Can you describe that and what the results were?
Yes, these are experiments that have been done
at Princeton and many other labs
where these are machines, random number generators
that generate ones and zeros in a random fashion.
So if one were to observe how many ones
and how many zeros came out of the machine
after a certain period of time,
it would approach 50% ones and 50% zeros,
because the machine is generating the numbers randomly.
What the experimenters have asked people to do
is to try to use their mind
to alter the behavior of the machine without touching it.
So they would say Andy or some college sophomore,
for example, come in here
and I want you to try to make the machine
produce more ones and zeros with your mind,
see if you can do it.
And what the researchers find
is that there is a slight deviation
beyond the 50-50 chance
at a highly statistically significant level.
Interestingly, the researchers have found
that there is a common pattern and performance
where the person will be able to shift the machine
to make it produce more ones and zeros.
And then as they see that they have a good performance,
they will start to overthink
and their performance goes down.
And the researcher says
you need to just relax and be in flow
and then they do better.
That's experiment type number one.
There's another type.
It's called the Global Consciousness Project
where these machines, the random number generators,
are set up all over the world in different locations
and many of us are not even aware
that they're running right now.
And the researchers examine what happens
to the behavior of the ones and zeros in these machines
when there is a major global event.
The hypothesis being, if there's some event
that causes a similar emotional
and strong response for many individuals,
that they will unknowingly affect something
in our reality such that the machines behave differently.
And the researchers find that, for example,
with 9-11, Princess Diana's death,
other events that cause an arousing emotion
in much of the population,
the machines behave non-randomly.
So the implication here that many have drawn
is that the human mind is capable
of altering a physical system,
meaning what's physical can be affected
by something apparently non-physical like consciousness.
And if we regard consciousness
to play some fundamental role in reality,
some would even say that what we call matter
is just some kind of a manifestation of consciousness.
It's actually not a big leap
to then wonder whether reality
that we see is somewhat malleable.
Wow. So essentially what you're saying
is that just by using our consciousness,
we can influence the physical world.
From these experiments, is it known
what the, is there like a dose-response relationship,
like the degree of the emotional expression
or the number of people
that are sharing the emotional expression?
Does that have an influence on the magnitude
of the change in the output?
Well, you're making me think of something
known as the Maharishi effect.
And there's a book on this called
An Antidote to Violence,
which has about 20 peer-reviewed papers
on the phenomenon of people getting together,
meditating with a pure intention, basically,
and altering levels of violence
in certain places in the world, for example.
Right. Now, this was done by the,
one of the big meditation schools
in Washington, D.C.,
Transcendental Meditation.
Maharishi was involved in that, too.
He was.
Yeah. So that's related.
So if there's a,
I don't know what the critical mass is.
I'm sure there are people who've looked into this.
If you have more people,
maybe there's a stronger effect.
But this is where large groups
of people came to meditate together
and did they have like an intention,
a piece or something like that?
And then they monitored the effect on the crime rate
during and after the meditation, correct?
Exactly. And we could say,
I mean, again, these are correlations.
They're observing crime rates
and other metrics they want to look at in the world.
And they're looking at what happened
after the people meditated.
And getting to the causal relationship,
I mean, it's certainly a reasonable hypothesis
to say that perhaps the group meditating
is what resulted in the shift,
but it is a correlation.
Yes. But you can actually design
a controlled study like this
where you can get at causation,
depending on your design.
I'm sure they, like you mentioned,
they've repeated it many times,
but they did not, I'm guessing,
have a proper control.
I would have to go back to those studies,
but that's the book.
Because you could antidote to violence.
That's a good one.
Right. Okay. Very interesting.
So I think this actually provides
a lot of hope for people,
especially people in the truth space,
because it means that at least collectively,
we could have some influence on the dark agendas
that we face in the world currently.
That is the implication
that if we shift our individual consciousness,
and if enough of us do that,
then there might be tangible effects in the world.
Very fascinating.
And I wonder, does this relate
to any religious or spiritual practice
that currently is in existence?
Obviously, it must relate to meditation,
but are there other practices
that can have this kind of an influence?
I do wonder.
Things like prayer, for example,
which is a form of intention,
stating something or believing something strongly.
One might wonder what the strength is
of various practices.
If an individual practices it,
are there differences in the strength
of how much it can affect the world?
I think these are areas
that need a lot more research.
And one of the common themes I found,
not just in this area of consciousness,
but everything that's outside the mainstream,
is there's much less funding
for the nuances relative
to the mainstream narrative.
And one of the reasons I wanted to write the book,
back published in 2018,
is I said, if people knew about this,
then they would start funding this research
so we could get to the nuances
and understand exactly what's going on,
whereas people are funding materialism primarily.
And I talked to some of the scientists
about the process of getting
their work in peer-reviewed journals.
And often, the journal will reject the paper
because the subject matter
is not aligned with their beliefs.
Right.
Not because the study was done poorly.
Yeah, well, I've definitely criticized
the scientific publication
in the peer-review process quite extensively.
And I would definitely encourage all of you folks out there
to put it on ResearchGate
because we need to definitely be able
to see these manuscripts
and to help with the scientific journal Gatekeepers.
You're reminding me of another series of experiments
where people's consciousness
has an influence on water,
like the Masura Moto experiments,
which people can certainly look into.
And when I had an opportunity
to show a documentary on that subject to my kids
who were around preteen, teen age,
at the time, they were really blown away
seeing some of that.
And so we did a little experiment
after watching it.
I suggested that they just focus
on hope and gratitude to the water in their body.
And they had a very perceptible reaction,
like an emotional reaction.
Like they were smiling, giggling.
Like it's almost like the effect
you might expect from cocaine.
And this was their consciousness
affecting their own physical body.
So what have you learned about how,
because this is kind of where you started, right?
What's the evidence of how consciousness
can actually affect our physical health
that you've uncovered?
This is something that I address
in an end-to-upside-down medicine,
as well, because mainstream medicine
often does not acknowledge
the possibility that consciousness
could affect the body in this way.
They're typically looking at physical mechanisms,
whether it's a germ or a toxin.
And those are the reasons people get sick
versus something more metaphysical.
An example that comes to mind
is a famous one, Anita Morjani.
She had a near-death experience
while she was in a coma.
She had tumors all over her body.
And during the near-death experience,
she had many shifts in her consciousness.
She encountered her deceased father.
She realized things about her own thinking
that she was too judgmental about herself and her life.
And she came back into her body
and the tumors disappeared
without any known medical intervention
that was responsible for it.
And the doctors couldn't believe what happened.
It seems as if there was some kind of resolution
in her consciousness,
something that she shifted
that resulted in saving up her own life.
And now she speaks all over the world.
This is a form of a spontaneous remission
that mainstream medicine cannot really account for.
Well, I think that's why they use that term,
because they don't want to acknowledge
that it could be something
that actually brought it about
rather than just spontaneity.
Right.
Did she do anything intentional
to bring about that outcome?
Not that I'm aware of.
I think what happened in the near-death experience
was beyond her control in many ways.
And the shifts she had in her consciousness
just stuck so strongly
because of the near-death experience reality.
This happens to many people
who have this encounter, the phenomenon.
It is so clear to them
what the nature of reality is
and how different it is
from the materialistic world that we live in.
That they have no choice but to adopt it.
And many of them will change their professions afterwards.
They will leave their marriages.
Their priorities have shifted so much
that the old world that they were in
no longer appeals to them.
Right.
I've been actually encountered in my career
several doctors who had,
maybe not a near-death experience
like all Bruce Grayson subjects,
or maybe they didn't actually lose consciousness
necessarily, but they had a serious illness
or accident where they came close to dying.
And then everything changed for them.
And they, including their career,
and they went into medicine,
which I think is probably more common
because people may think that
they got better because of the medical treatment
and they want to provide that to people.
I think there are a lot of misconceptions
in the near-death experience space,
generally speaking.
Because the popular narrative is,
well, yeah, of course people have weird visions
when their brain's about to die.
But no one has been able to validate,
for example, there's a common theme out there
that, well, we've measured a spike in brain activity
after a person's died.
Therefore, that spike is capable of producing
all the things people talk about
in a near-death experience,
including hovering over their body
and perceiving things accurately sometimes
that they can then validate with the doctor
or people in the room,
from a vantage point outside their body,
among many other things.
So if one wanted to say that the near-death experience
is a product of the brain,
we'd have to understand how the brain
is actually producing this very complex
realer-than-real experience.
Right.
And so a couple of things there.
One is we don't have the ability
to know what the brain's doing
when it's alive or dead or what it's doing.
And even the best analytical techniques we have,
like perhaps you might consider EEG,
don't tell us really the full story.
We can only correlate that with a few conditions.
And how do you correlate when someone's brain is not working?
You can't ask them.
It's kind of a problem.
But if we look at the information that people have
regarding some of the near-death experiences,
like when they're able to see things
from the perspective of outside their body
or in a different location,
that is then validated by witness accounts,
that kind of trumps anything else
because no one is claiming the brain can do that.
Right.
What is the physiological mechanism for someone's consciousness,
even leaving the room that they're in sometimes
and seeing things from that vantage point?
And then it's called a vertical out-of-body experience
because it's a verified memory.
The doctor or family members,
when the person's resuscitated,
those people who are not in a near-death state
can verify what the person perceived
in their consciousness from that vantage point.
Therefore, it's non-hallucinatory consciousness.
That's right because a hallucination
would not be something in reality.
But it relates directly to remote viewing.
Exactly.
Remote viewing is this alleged ability
for someone's mind to perceive things
that are far away in space and or time.
And this is what I referred to earlier,
the US government's declassified documents say,
this is a direct quote,
remote viewing is a real phenomenon.
Implications are revolutionary.
Right.
And it's even more than that
because they set up a special center
at Stanford University to partner between the CIA
and some of the academic researchers there
to study and implement this phenomenon.
It's actually been used in real missions.
Yes.
And when I interviewed Russell Tarr,
who was one of the leaders of the program,
he's a laser physicist in the 1970s,
he told me that they spent over $20 million
on this, the US government, from all sorts of agencies.
And former US president Jimmy Carter
verified that psychic spies were used
to find a downed Russian bomber
that was lost in an African jungle.
And the radar systems couldn't find it,
so they used psychics.
That's right.
And this isn't even the only time the CIA
has gone this route
because if we look at the Monroe Institute,
for example, it's based on CIA research.
So, Mark, I realize that we can only touch
on the surface of this topic.
And there's a lot of other places we could go
if we had more time,
which is why everyone should definitely read Mark's books
because then you will get more of a full experience.
But I want to kind of wrap up here
by asking you, what are the main conclusions
that you've come to about the nature of our reality
and our consciousness from all the in-depth research
and information you've been exposed to?
I've been more and more biased toward falsifying
an existing model versus coming up
with a comprehensive alternative.
So it leaves me in a place of saying,
I don't know exactly what's true.
But I can say with regard to the existing
mainstream model of materialism,
number one, it's based on a fundamental leap of faith,
which is ironic because most materialists are anti-faith.
The whole model presupposes that there exists a world
independent and outside of all conscious experience,
like there was a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago
and after billions of years of evolution,
you end up with organisms like humans
that have a brain and consciousness just pops out magically.
No one has ever verified a Big Bang or life before consciousness
because in order for one to do that,
you need to have a consciousness to experience that world
that was predating consciousness and that's not possible.
So they're talking about an inference
that is at the core of their entire belief system.
So it's essentially a form of circular reasoning.
That's another way to put it.
Or a house of cards is another way.
So what do you think is,
what can you say about what the reality actually is?
I like to give an analogy from Dr. Bernardo Castro.
He wrote a book called Why Materialism is Baloney,
among others.
So he's a philosopher.
And great title.
Yeah, catchy.
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 a whirlpool
within that stream.
So we have this sense of being individuals.
I have my own mind, Andy.
You have your own mind and so forth.
And yet at some level of reality,
we're fundamentally interconnected.
And this model would posit that consciousness
is the fundamental substrate of all reality,
not just our individual consciousness per se,
but the overall stream.
And Castro makes an argument
that this is the most philosophically
parsimonious metaphysics, basically.
Because we all know
that we experience consciousness right now.
It's actually the only thing we can verify.
The past is not directly verifiable.
It's always a memory or a vision that we have
in the present moment
that we infer is from the past.
But we know consciousness exists in the present moment.
We don't know with any certainty
that there exists any material world
outside of consciousness,
which is what materialism says,
because you had a material world first,
and then consciousness came later.
So what Castro says
is that if we just want to go in terms of
how can we explain reality
using the fewest number of assumptions,
which is Occam's razor,
we can do that by saying consciousness is fundamental.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's the correct model.
And this is known as philosophical idealism.
Idealism meaning consciousness is fundamental.
But to me, it's an anchoring framework
to use to say,
maybe there are realms of consciousness
beyond our own individual whirlpool.
And maybe it's on a multi-dimensional level
beyond what we can even comprehend.
And that what we are perceiving
is some kind of limited frequency
or bandwidth
that we are living in,
and there exist many, many others.
For example, in the near-death state
when the brain is largely
or if not entirely out of the way,
then these other worlds become available.
Or the realm of psychedelics or meditation.
People experience these broader realities
that are typically filtered out.
And it makes me believe,
I will say believe
because I don't know with certainty.
If you ask me,
Mark, what's the nature of reality
you have to answer right now?
I would say some reality
in which there is an underlying consciousness
that is highly intelligent
and all of us,
including the world around us,
represent the product
of that higher consciousness.
So I think the biggest question for me
that flows from that synopsis would be,
you know,
is it possible that there's only consciousness?
I would argue it's the only thing we can verify.
Even things that we touch
or feel or smell or taste,
every one of those experiences
is always within consciousness.
And then we do mental gymnastics
to infer a physical world
that those are derived from.
Even if we get down to the world of particle physics,
I mean,
a mainstream scientist will say
that 99.99999% of an atom is in space.
I was just thinking that.
Yeah.
But then if you ask people
like Dr. Stephen A. Young
and some others,
they would say,
well, the part that isn't empty space
they're inferred to be subatomic particles,
but those are also inferences
that might just be more energetic in nature,
like going back to the elements,
earth, air, fire, water, ether.
And maybe nothing is actually solid,
but just we are interpreting it as solid.
Right.
And you could even also question
is there even empty space
or is it all just a construct of our consciousness?
Exactly.
Right.
Because we know,
well, perhaps we don't know that,
but, you know,
it could be the other way around,
right, that the material world
arises from consciousness,
but it's actually not a physical thing.
It's, you know,
I mean, simulation theory, right?
This is kind of this.
Right.
Well, I'm thinking of a quote,
Max Plunk,
the Nobel Prize-winning physicist in 1931.
He said,
I regard consciousness as fundamental.
I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
But to your point, Andy,
this notion that matter is actually
a separate entity might be a false notion.
That matter is just some kind
of modulation of consciousness
that we perceive as something different,
but it's all this underlying stream.
Now, this, of course,
is going on belief or faith,
or perhaps there's some information
from some of the research.
After we, our consciousness passes
from this world,
because, you know,
clearly if our consciousness is primary,
it doesn't die with the physical body,
necessarily.
So do you think,
or is there any evidence that there'll be a point
when we will have direct knowledge
of the nature of our existence?
I hope so.
People certainly come back
from the near-death experience
feeling like they know a lot
about the way reality works.
And they often say it's ineffable,
meaning that there are no words
to describe the nature of their experience,
which makes it difficult
to know what was going on.
Anytime they use language,
it's always going to distort what they saw.
Another point here
is that the near-death experience
is a near-death experience.
The person has been resuscitated,
and some will critique it and say,
well, Mark, you can't make inferences
about whether this is what happens
when people actually die
because those people didn't die.
A potential counter argument to that
is a phenomenon known as the shared
death experience,
where there is a person who is not dying,
a perfectly normal, healthy person,
who somehow co-lives in the dying process
with someone who is dying and does die,
and they describe it, the healthy person,
describes it just like a near-death
experiencer would describe it.
And to me, that suggests
that perhaps the near-death experience
does tell us about the early stages
of what happens to our consciousness
after a physical death.
Right, and there are probably
two other types of evidence
that can contribute to that,
one being people who receive
communications from others who are deceased.
Now, that is a little bit harder
to validate scientifically,
but certainly I've heard you talk about it.
And the other would be research from hypnosis
and perhaps from early childhood memories
about past life experiences.
Right, the question is,
what is the source of this information?
It's quote-unquote anomalous information
that we can't explain through normal means,
but do we know that it came from another individual?
Is it simply some form of psychic information
that's being received?
One counter to the point I just made
is something I reference in the book
and end to upside-down thinking
of neuroscientific studies
on people who claim they're having
a psychic engagement,
meaning something that's telepathic
versus tuning into another energy
like a mediumship,
and different parts of the brain
seem to be lit up.
And the psychic will describe
the phenomenon differently.
They will say it's actually a different process
when I'm tuning into one versus the other.
Very, very interesting.
And have you looked into a lot of the data
or the information about
past lives and what people have uncovered
through hypnosis, for example?
Yeah, hypnosis, I think, is probably not as...
The evidence from hypnosis to me
is not as strong as the evidence
from young children
who have these memories of another life
because we don't know what's
confabulation with hypnosis.
I mean, sometimes it's very compelling
where the person will describe things
in elaborate detail.
And even Dr. Ian Stevenson
at the University of Virginia
in one of his books,
he was very skeptical of hypnosis.
But he said there were some cases
that could not be dismissed
and that were significant.
He was much more biased
toward the young children
and he and his colleagues
have accumulated over 2500 of these cases
where the children have memories,
preferences, fears
that don't make any sense
in the context of their own life
where the researchers can actually,
in some cases,
find historical records
validating what the child said.
And to me, the strangest
and perhaps most compelling cases
are when the child has a physical defect
and or birthmark
that corresponds to the way
the person died
in the alleged previous life
where the researcher sometimes
can find a medical record
validating that, yes,
there was a person who died
in this manner
and it does correlate
to the physical defect
and or birthmark in the child.
Yeah, in some of the hypnosis research
that also it's been validated
with a historical record
and very similar findings to
that one that I'm thinking of
went to hypnotherapy
because of pain issue
and said that the pain was related
to how we died
in a previous life and battle
and was able to describe
where they were stationed
like the rank,
the name of the regimen and such
and then it corresponded
with the historical record perfectly.
So there are ways
to validate some of this research
and I'm sure that there are errors
in all of it
but it's just really fascinating
to talk about this
from a scientific perspective
because we certainly have
you've been able to show
that many of the assumptions
that we have
about the nature of reality
and consciousness
and our existence
have been completely disproven
through a very
some well done research
and a lot of other research
of varying quality
but enough of a body of evidence
to completely tear down materialism
and then that leaves us in a position
to continue
our pursuit of the mysteries
and realize that
I think you made a compelling case
that consciousness is fundamental.
Thank you
and I would also say
that there is not a compelling case
for the alternative
for materialism
it relies on a fundamental leap of faith
on something that is by definition
unverifiable
unexperienceable
a world outside consciousness
that created consciousness
big problem
well mark thank you so much
for taking the time
to enlighten us on these topics
what is the best way
for people to purchase your books
and find out more
about your amazing research
my website is a good place to start
it's my name mark gober.com
m a r k g o b e r dot com
all seven of my books
are available on amazon
in hard copy kindle
and audible formats
I narrated the audible for all of them
and I also have a podcast series
called where is my mind
it's an eight episode series
on apple podcast
Spotify all the major players
but it goes through many of the topics
that we discussed today
I interviewed near-death experience
survivors researchers
and just psychic phenomena
and it's a it's a quick way
to to binge this information
and I would recommend to your audience
starting at episode one
and going sequentially
to episode eight
where is my mind
well, I think, you know
I'm getting on a plane tomorrow
and my plan is to go back and forth
between your podcasts
and your books
so hopefully everyone out there
will take advantage of all of these
you know free and low cost resources
to learn about these critical issues
mark I hope to have you back again
to perhaps discuss
another one of your books
and until then
please take care of yourself
thank you so much for having me
Andy and I appreciate all the work
that you've done
I've learned a ton from you
in my journey
so thank you again
all right everybody
we'll see you next time
even if you're doing your best
to live clean
you're still being exposed
from off-gassing furniture
and plastics in your food
to synthetic fibers
personal care products
and even medical imaging procedures
especially fat soluble chemicals
these toxins don't respond
to your average detox
they settle deep in your tissues
and you need the right tools
to clear them out
that's why I created
the ultimate detox protocol
a free 30-day roadmap
that teaches you
a serious nature-based detox
using pine
targeted nutrition
and a focused daily plan
you'll choose the cleansing diet
that fits your needs
support your elimination pathways
and take action against
the toxin load
that's been holding you back
many people
who've done this protocol
have reported major improvements
in energy, focus, digestion
and even long-standing symptoms
they thought they'd have to live with forever
unfortunately
I can't share the full scope
of results people have experienced
using this protocol
not on this platform
if I did
the video would surely
be taken down
but trust me
it is incredibly
powerful
download it for free
at the link in the show notes
your health
is your responsibility
and this is the best
place to start
thanks for listening
and I'll see you
in the next True Health Report