Guest: Mark Gober - Exploring Consciousness, Time & Hidden Realms of Reality

People should not be afraid of their governments.

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It's too pervasive, and we still have tools to spread the message. Music. 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 agrist as always guys we appreciate you joining us today and listening to the show lots of big things happening and to, We wanted to share a couple of things because I believe it's important that our listeners are aware of just how challenging it is to do this work full time

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Our guest today is Mark Gober. Mark is an author of several books. He's a speaker, a podcast host of the show entitled Where Is My Mind? He's also a Princeton University graduate and has a background in finance. And we wanted to have him on the show because he's a fascinating thinker.

His work explores unconventional topics, often blurring the lines between science, philosophy, spirituality, and he's actively challenging conventional beliefs, exploring alternative perspectives on society and the universe. So hopefully I did you some justice there, Mark. I know your work is extensive, but thank you for joining us and welcome to the Freethought Project podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, man. Well, you know, as I was mentioning briefly there off air, you know, there are several subjects that I really did want to dig into today relating to your work because you have a unique and interesting perspective that seems to deviate away from the mainstream discourse and in many ways charts new territory. And as you know, this podcast is called the Free Thought Project podcast.

So, you know, we're always happy to explore counterintuitive ideas and topics and concepts and ideas that people just really aren't talking about. And I mentioned in the intro there, you have a number of books touching on various theories that are outside the norm of conventional thought. And, you know, we could certainly get into concepts that relate to liberty and volunteerism, two subjects that our audience tends to hear about a lot.

But your knowledge expands beyond those two topics and hoping we can explore topics about consciousness that, you know, your book and upside down thinking touches on and maybe the UFO alien spirits conversation that you wrote about as well. That all definitely sounds very fascinating. And as I said, you know, not really something we've we spoke about much on this show. Perhaps we'll get into the Big Bang and cosmological models and alternative perspectives of the universe.

And all that stuff sounds, you know, super intriguing to me. I should say as just like a little footnote here, these topics do extend, you know, well beyond my area of expertise. So I'll probably be more of a listener than anything else today. But hopefully, you know, we have some good questions. I think I have some good questions here to keep it interesting. And with a little luck, maybe we can help our audience begin to think outside of the box on some of these topics.

So the first question I wanted to ask, which kind of seems like a no brainer in the sense It would be a good place to start because it's kind of the opposite of normal thought is a topic that people just don't really acknowledge or explore. But what led you to write a book that explores consciousness and question the materialist view of reality?

Well, Jason, thank you for that introduction. Let me walk you through my background because I never expected to be writing about any of the topics that you mentioned. It was really not on my radar. I have mainstream background, worked in investment banking in New York during the financial crisis after I graduated from Princeton. And then I worked in Silicon Valley. I became a partner at a firm that advised technology-focused companies on their intellectual property and their business strategy.

And while I was out in Silicon Valley, this was 2016, so almost 10 years now, I was at a place in my life where I felt like I was hitting a wall, almost like being on a treadmill. I was trying to achieve the next thing in front of me, which I had been doing for so many years, and maybe I would achieve it or maybe I wouldn't. But regardless, I ended up kind of back at the same place. I didn't feel like I was progressing very much.

And at the time, I didn't have a sense of meaning or purpose in life. And what I mean by that is that I believed the mainstream scientific view, which is that we live in a fundamentally random and meaningless universe. In other words, we can try to create meaning in our own lives, but that's just something that we create in our minds. It's not actually something that's embedded within the fabric of reality itself.

So I was very much opposed to spiritual or religious concepts because I thought they were superstitions and that science had moved us away from that. So in 2016, I was in that place of kind of feeling lost in life, even though on the surface, it looked like I was doing pretty well. And also having this metaphysical worldview of a random and meaningless universe, which also, by the way, implies that when the physical body dies, that's the end of our consciousness.

That's the end of our awareness. So when you die, that's lights out. That's the end. There's no afterlife. All that stuff is crazy talk. That's where I was. And I started listening to podcasts initially in 2016, and then started to read scientific papers and books and realized there was a whole body of evidence that challenged my worldview.

It's known as the materialist worldview, which is that basically everything comes from the physical world, including our consciousness, which just pops out of our brain.

And I was coming across evidence that contradicted it. And that has led me on a journey, not only to explore consciousness, but voluntarism and many other things. But everything I've written about actually does tie back to this question of consciousness, because it's ultimately the... Without consciousness, we can't even ask these questions. So consciousness is an important part of the nature of reality, and it's not well understood by science.

Yeah, that's for sure. And boy, I don't think it's a topic that really many people delve into unless they're doing some type of psychedelic drug or something along those lines, you know, and really trying to expand their consciousness. And then they start to kind of think about it and question it and understand it a little bit more.

But, you know, I guess a good follow-up question here is because I think you alluded to that, you know, consciousness isn't really a product of the brain and as your work suggests you know like. If it's not a product of the brain, what does that mean for how we live our life and death? And how does it change our understanding of what happens after we die? And I mean, it kind of challenges the concept of existence itself.

And I was just talking to a friend about this recently. It sometimes feels like the fact that we only have so much time on this earth is what kind of makes it special and meaningful and creates this sense of urgency to live. But yeah, let's get back into that. If consciousness isn't a product of the brain, that will likely change the way we view our existence entirely, right?

Yeah, for sure. And so where I land now is that consciousness, which I would define as our sense of experiencing life, it's a very difficult thing to define because we can't point to it, we can't touch it, but we all have consciousness right now at this moment. So the conventional view, as you alluded to, is that consciousness comes from the brain. It emerges from chemical and electrical interactions inside of our skull, and then consciousness just pops out. That's the mainstream view.

Whereas now I think maybe our brain and our body more broadly act sort of like antenna receivers, transmitters, an interface for consciousness. And I want to just, this sounds pretty crazy to your audience. It definitely did to me when I first started on this journey. I want to take it back to something that all scientists agree on, which is that there is a hard problem of consciousness. This is basically the idea that consciousness is something not physical. We can't touch it.

Whereas our body and our brain, our brain is something physical. So how is it that something non-physical like consciousness just pops out of something that's physical? No one really understands that. But the reason that most scientists believe that consciousness comes out of the brain is because they can find correlations between what happens in the brain and the type of conscious experience someone has.

So to put that in plain language, imagine someone gets in a car accident and damages the part of the brain responsible for vision. And then the person has a corresponding shift in the way they see. They can't see as well. So we can look and point to the exact part of the brain that was affected and say, look, here we go. Your eyesight changed as a result of this. The brain creates consciousness. Now, why is that insufficient to say the brain creates consciousness?

Because correlation does not necessarily imply causation. in the same way that if you saw a fire and firefighters were there, you might incorrectly conclude that firefighters cause the fire because the firefighters are there with the fire. But obviously we know the firefighters are there to put out the fire. So the general idea is that when two things are correlated, there might be other ways to explain that relationship beyond the mainstream version.

So if you think about a television set, you're watching TV and then you take a hammer and smash the antenna that was receiving the signal, the signal wasn't damaged. But the apparatus, i.e. the antenna that was responsible for processing the signal, that was damaged. So the television show on your screen, it appears to be very scratchy because you damaged the antenna, not because you damaged the signal.

So if you think about the brain in that sense, maybe the brain is picking something up from outside the body. And like you were saying, Jason, this has massive implications for how we think about the nature of reality and what it even means to be a human being. But yeah, that's, that's, that's incredibly interesting. And I've been listening to a bunch of podcasts that have been talking about this and they're not only talking about consciousness.

They're also talking about thoughts, right? Like our memories and everything that we know, our knowledge is not, does not reside in the brain.

And some of these scientists are backing that up by stating, like by showing that there's nowhere that this information is stored, that this is like in this greater cloud right like this uh this this this higher consciousness and so what i mean like you just said like this changes our implications for everything right it's if if it's the foundation of all that then what does our understanding of self even become right and the this objective world that we live in like are we on the verge

of of basically like rewriting the operating system for human reality. I mean, where do you think that this consciousness streams from?

And I want to get into that further. Everything that I've read and taken in, it's also leading me to this exact same premise that you have written about in your book. So yeah, where do you think that this consciousness is coming from?

The way I like to think about this issue and really all of the topics that I've tackled is if we are exposed to a model that the mainstream tells us is correct, they've put forth a positive claim and it's therefore the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that it's true. And what I find interesting is to find the holes in those beliefs that we're told. And that is an exercise on its own, basically falsifying a model. The next step would be to try to find the model that could replace it.

A new comprehensive model that can explain phenomena. I tend to be much more comfortable with falsifying one model than I am saying definitively what the replacement alternative is. But I have spent a lot of time with one general idea, which I'll elaborate on here.

And this goes back to my first book and into upside down thinking and my podcast series called Where Is My Mind, which is to consider consciousness not as something that pops out of the brain, but rather as the basis of all reality or something like that. So there's a broader consciousness that we're all a part of, it exists beyond space and time. And to use an analogy from a philosopher named Bernardo Kastrup, it's like we're whirlpools in an infinite stream of consciousness.

So there's this sense of being an individual Mark and Matt and Jason and so forth within individual whirlpools. And that's true at one level that we're all separate, but on another level, we're interconnected as part of something else. As Erwin Schrodinger said, who was a Nobel prize-winning physicist. In truth, there is only one mind. And that's an analogy I've liked to use a lot, that there's one broader consciousness, one broader mind, and we are pieces of that within the stream.

Bernardo Kastrup describes it like dissociative identity disorder at the level of the one mind. So it's almost like we are little dissociations of a broader consciousness. And that's the general framework that I like to hold. But again, I would caveat it by saying reality is probably way more complex than we could even conceive of. Yeah, I agree. And it's funny that you mentioned Schrodinger. Jason said psychedelics earlier, like this is what gets people into that type of thinking, right?

I remember 11 years ago, oh shit, this is way more than 11 years ago, but 16 years ago, I was reading In Search of Schrodinger's Cat because I was super into quantum mechanics and quantum physics. And I basically, I couldn't understand it and I couldn't wrap my head around it. So I, at the same time, I had gotten a recent invitation to an ayahuasca experience. And I went into that experience thinking that I would come out understanding quantum physics, right?

And I would, I would know like, cause I could see it, you know, I'd be able to see this quantum realm that I lived in.

And basically I was this hardcore atheist, you know, and there was there is no life there's no life after death there's no connection we're all just these meat sacks on this planet just evolving and changing and living and dying and that's it you know and then i came out of that after like one of the most profound experiences i've ever had in my life and i was incredibly spiritual and.

Didn't get what I wanted out of it, which was an understanding of quantum physics, but I gained so much more than that, right? And I don't think I'm alone in that. And that's what I wanted to ask you, like, since you came into this from a different way, have you ever even thought of like trying, or have you tried psychedelics to maybe understand this a little bit deeper?

Yeah, my journey is unconventional in a lot of ways, because it has been more intellectual of reading the science of these phenomena and coming from very credible places like the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies at the med school or the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which has been around for over 50 years. And I'm actually a board member now where Princeton University had a lab run by the former Dean of Engineering.

And the US government has been doing psychic spying and has declassified documents explaining this and admitting that it's real. So those were some of the really compelling things for me. But then I also worked with some people who claim to have special abilities like psychic phenomena and things like that.

And sure enough, sometimes they were able to do things that I couldn't explain, which definitely helped me to just validate some of what I was researching. But in terms of the realm of psychedelics, I have very limited experience, only like two very mild experiences, one with cacao, which didn't really do that much. And another was a heart opening substance. So I didn't ever feel what you described, Matt, or feel the things that I've read about so much.

But what I do hear very often from people who have explored the psychedelic realm much more is they'll say, Mark, what you're describing in your books is real because I lived it myself.

And I do find that to be, as a researcher, compelling because we can do all the science we want, but when people have direct experiences over and over again, whether it's in the realm of psychedelics or also near-death experiences, which I've written about a lot, or through meditation or breathing or all sorts of transcendent experiences, there's a very similar picture of reality that people describe. And as a researcher, that's just something I can't ignore.

Yeah, exactly, man. Exactly. And it all kind of seems to lend itself to, yeah, there's something bigger out there, right? I mean, we're talking about psychic phenomenons and near-death experiences. I'd probably throw remote viewing in there as well. And even, yeah, the inner exploration, which Matt was kind of talking about. I remember hearing like Terrence McKenna doing these hero doses of like, what is it, Matt, like five grams of mushrooms or something crazy like that, or eight grams.

I can't even remember, but that you just transcend to a different place. And that's very much aligned with what I've also heard. And we've had other guests on the show who've kind of corroborated. This was with DMT. You know, a lot of people have these similar experiences, I guess, on DMT, where they're seeing these like tiny dwarf elves kind of things. I mean, I'm sure Matt could get into that a little bit more than I can, but yeah, it all kind of points to something much bigger here.

And, you know, you talked, you talked about the possibility of, you know, consciousness surviving physical death, which kind of opens up the door to another question here, which I'm sure, you know, maybe some of our audience who's listening to this right now would want me to ask this question, which is like, are you in support of the concept of reincarnation? And like, how does that theory fit into the conversation? This is complex because on some level, I don't think time is linear.

And linear time means that there's something called the past that goes to the present, which goes to the future. And I think we perceive things to be that way, or at least we interpret reality to be that way. But if we actually go deep into our experience, we cannot validate the past or the future. The past is always a memory that we have in the present moment, no matter how compelling that memory is. And so the same as the future. The future is a thought we have in the present

moment. It's always now. And I've heard many people who have been into these altered states of consciousness describe something similar, that there's an ever-present now moment, but in some regard, there's also a past and future. So if we put the time stuff aside for a second, I think there is evidence that there could be quote-unquote past lives. And there's really strong research at the University of Virginia. Again, their Division of Perceptual Studies, they've been around since the 1960s.

Dr. Ian Stevenson initially founded it, but now there's Dr. Jim Tucker. Dr. Ed Kelly, Dr. Bruce Grayson, some really great scientists. But UVA has studied over 2,500 cases of young children who have memories of a life that is not their own. And these are kids maybe three, four, five years old with very specific memories. And it's not like they're all claiming they were Cleopatra in a past life, often obscure people.

And the researchers in some of the cases can find historical or medical records validating what the children say. And to me, the strongest cases are the ones where children have birthmarks or physical defects in their body in the present time that correspond to their alleged death in the previous life. And the researchers can find a person that did die in that manner.

So for example, there might be gunshot wounds that correspond to birthmarks, or there's one that I include in my book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, a young girl who claims she was killed in a past life in a very gruesome manner. She was tied up in ropes and her leg had indentations. Her legs had these very strange indentations naturally as if they had been tied up in ropes. So those cases are really hard to explain from just a materialist lens, like something seems to be happening.

And I also want to bring this back another level just to the afterlife more broadly, because the research on near-death experiences, I think is critical to mention. The mainstream press will often poo-poo this stuff as just, you know, people have elaborate experiences when they're close to death because their brain produces chemicals or they have oxygen deprivation or things like that. They try to tie it to something physical, but there are examples that don't

match that. So for instance, when people have a near-death experience, and for your audience's benefit, this is not just someone thinking, oh, I might die. This is like cardiac arrest. Right. Sam Parni calls them actual death experiences. Yeah. I mean, and many of these people, I mean, our resuscitation technology has gotten much better. So people are coming back and we get to hear their stories. But a lot of people in the past, we have fewer cases.

I mean, they have been reported throughout history, but we didn't have the same technology. Now we've got more and more cases with resuscitation, including in children, and the reports are very similar. Often there's an out-of-body experience, meaning their consciousness somehow, while they're clinically dead or close to it, is hovering over their body, sometimes even outside the room they're in.

And when they're resuscitated, they come back and tell the doctor or family members, hey, I saw this or I heard this from a vantage point outside my body. This is significant because the memory can then be timestamped and the doctor can say, wow, we know what your body was doing then, and it should not have been capable of producing a memory that clear, let alone one from outside the body, let alone one that can be verified. So that means it's not a hallucination if it's a verified memory.

And that is very difficult to explain with any kind of brain activity. And the implication here before I pause is it might be the case that our consciousness can exist without the body. And in some ways, the body actually limits our consciousness. And when we have a near-death experience or a psychedelic account or something times in meditation, basically the broader reality becomes exposed.

So the brain might be in some ways like a blindfold that gets in the way. And when that blindfold is lifted, we can see or perceive beyond our individual whirlpool, so to speak. Yeah, man, that's, that's, that's, that's fascinating. The, I wanted to get into near death experiences a little bit and, and talk about that.

We, so I remember we reported on it, on the free thought project several years ago when this actually, this, this study had come out that it shows that when people are actually dying, you know, like they, they do end up dying. They, they studied like a whole host of hospice, people on hospice and, and monitor their brain activity. And, and this, they essentially go into like this, this dream state, right.

And which means maybe their consciousness is uploading or finally leaving or whatever, you know, and I had this experience once on mushrooms where I had this revelation about this entire thing where, you know, like what happens to our conscious when we die and our consciousness when we die.

And being that there you know time is complete perception right like there's we we perceive it differently like you can go on a dmt experience and experience decades right within a matter of seconds and and so i had this revelation that i like man maybe that is like the that life is eternal and in that regard when people are dying maybe that the time stops and they can live in that moment for the rest of their lives. And that's this afterlife that can exist.

And then when their consciousness goes up into whatever this fundamental fabric of the universe, that's the afterlife, right? And you had just mentioned that, which was mind-blowing. I didn't realize these children had the same injuries as people they claim to have memories of from the past. My question was, what I was getting to is that, what do you think happens when we do die?

Does this consciousness keep going and it like is this are these people that can have memories of previous lives actually are tapping into that consciousness or do you think that the consciousness can keep thinking as as we were as ourself or or do we lose all like reality of self and and not even, understand that we had lived this life before like a factory reset yeah,

Right. Yeah, it's a really hard thing to verify. But what I can do is try to point to some anecdotes that are repeatedly discussed. So if we go back to these cases of young children who have alleged previous life memories studied at UVA, there's a subset of those 2,500 plus cases. And there's a paper written on this by Dr. Jim Tucker from UVA and one of his colleagues on intermission memories reported by the children.

Intermission meaning these children not only remember a previous life, but they also talk about a time in between lives. So after the previous life, but before the current life where they existed as an individuated consciousness and even chose their parents. So that would suggest that maybe there is some continuation of the individual, but then you do make a good point about like some of these psychedelic accounts where there is the sense of oneness and the self goes away.

So it's hard to know what's going on in that intermediate realm. I also would point to what's known as the shared death experience, which is people talk about near-death experiences, but shared death experiences are starting to get more traction because these are instances where a healthy person who is not dying experiences the dying process with a person who is dying.

So let's say there's a person dying and a family member, for example, who might not even be there in person or a bystander by the bedside, co-lives in the dying process and they experience exactly what's reported in a near-death experience state, which suggests that maybe the near-death experience, even though in those cases, the person's resuscitated and doesn't come back, maybe that is a window into what happens as the person is moving toward the dying process.

But regardless, what I think seems to be the case is that there is some kind of an amnesia, a lack of memory of what's come before us because the three of us are sitting here. I don't have memories of any of this stuff. I don't know if you guys do. Most adults don't, but. Many young children, for some reason, they might have more of an access to this broader stream of consciousness. But as they get older, it seems that the memories fade, or they become clouded.

So I don't fully understand how all that works. I wonder if it's the pineal gland just getting more and more calcified. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Yeah. I was going to say that same thing. I was going to ask about, I mean, because clearly the state decriminalized psychedelics because it made people challenge authority, right?

And they were actually, if we want to go into government research, how the CIA was using LSD to experiment on people and try to get them to do different things. We had the one operation where they were using prostitutes to drug Johns, and then they were just watching what happened. And then they got a lot more in depth with it. And like with NK Ultra and even the Manson family, right, they were dosing these people to see if they could get them to commit murder on that side.

And I'm wondering if the powers that be, if you will, know about this inherent consciousness that you just mentioned about this child, that they have less of a filter than we do. And we look at the way that so many different, not different, but so many children in so many different countries all go through this, rigid indoctrination process when they turn five and they go into these government schools where it kind of fucking cuts off their damn stream of consciousness to that area.

And I'm wondering if the, if, I mean, this is completely hypothetical and I'm not speculative, speculative, right? If there, if you've, if you've ever heard anything like that, like it may just to get in the conspiracy realm for a second, like if, if government knows that we do have this amazing ability to tap into this consciousness and they deliberately send us through these indoctrination programs to terminate that consciousness as a child.

So we don't, so we don't become like better than like these working class slaves that they keep us, you know, Yeah, I do tend to think that there is a concerted effort to keep us away from this truth. And it probably does start at a young age for a lot of modern society.

I mean, if what we're talking about today is true, that there's a part of us that transcends our body, that psychic abilities are real, like some of the whirlpool, water from one whirlpool getting into another whirlpool, that's not paranormal. That's just, if we have a different metaphysics where consciousness is fundamental, psychic abilities, remote viewing, all that stuff is real. But if we're not taught that from a young age, we're not taught to harness it.

So there's probably, aside from all the chemicals you referenced, which probably hurt things too, we're not encouraged to expand these abilities. But in spite of that, what's been really interesting for me to learn is that even adults with no formal training are able to exhibit subtle psychic effects.

And I'll give one example. This comes in a category of what's known as six sigma results, meaning that the odds statistically that this occurs due to chance alone is more than a billion to one against chance, meaning that there's some real effect here. And the study is known as the Gonsfeld experiment, where you have two people who are in different rooms.

One person is Bob and another person is Jane. So Bob is put into a relaxed state and Jane is in another room and she's asked to try to psychically send an image that she's looking at to Bob in the other room. So she doesn't tell him what she's looking at. She's not communicating with him in any normal way. She's asked to try to use her mind to get this image into Bob's mind somehow. And again, these are people not claiming to have any special abilities.

So then after a while, Bob is shown four images by the experimenters. And they say, Bob, which of the four was Jane trying to mentally send to you from the other room? And if there were no effect at all psychically, we would expect that the person in Bob's room would guess correctly about one out of four times, 25% of the time. It should be roughly that if there were just totally random.

But in fact, the experimenters find that the person in Bob's room guesses correctly closer to 30 or 32% of the time, which sounds like a small deviation from the 25%, but statistically speaking, it's massive. And this suggests that all humans have at least slight psychic abilities, not 100% like we're walking around knowing every thought from another person all the time, but it's slight.

It's like, well, sometimes we get a text from someone and we were just thinking about that person and we think, well, maybe that was chance. Maybe it's some of the water from one whirlpool getting into another whirlpool. I don't know exactly. But there are many of these sorts of studies that have been done over many decades.

And now there are peer-reviewed journals like the American Psychologist, which is the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association, publishing a paper in 2018 compiling the statistical evidence for these phenomena published by Dr. Edsel Cardenia. So I just want to give some weight to this, that there is real scientific evidence that's been done in controlled settings. And they're showing that all human beings have these subtle abilities.

And to your point, Matt, we're not taught about this. So one might wonder what would a society look like if as children, we're all taught that we are more than the body. And what does that mean about how our education should be versus how it is now? Great point. Yeah, that's certainly worth considering. And I know over the years when that happens to me with friends, And as you just mentioned, you know, we might think something similar at the same time.

I was just about to call you. You called me something like that. I always just chalked it up to ESP, you know, the extrasensory perception and just kind of chuckling. But that's certainly fascinating. I think it could be something a little deeper than that, Mark. And, you know. The friend of the Free Thought Project and former guest, Alex Zek, actually just listed you as one of the top five people who need to be on the Joe Rogan show in a tweet this morning.

And now after, what, 20, 30 minutes of talking to you, I could definitely see why. This is definitely fascinating stuff. I love this type of thinking. I love asking these types of questions. It feels like we're trying to get somewhere. We're trying to get to the heart of something bigger. With that said, though, I know we were just touching on maybe some of the politics involving some of this stuff.

And I do want to move on after this, maybe into more of like paranormal realm, or maybe even talked about the UFOs and stuff like that with your book and to upside down contact.

But first, I know when I reached out to you about this podcast and things that you'd like to discuss, you mentioned that your journey to voluntarism relates to your work on consciousness. And that seemed really stimulating to me. So do you mind walking us through that and kind of connecting the dots for us? I can't quite see how they connect, but definitely compelled to hear what you have to say about it.

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. It's one of the reasons I decided to write my book, An End to Upside Down Liberty, which is the third out of seven in the series. So the first two, An End to Upside Down Thinking and An End to Upside Down Living, cover a lot of what we've discussed so far about the nature of consciousness, the scientific evidence, and the implications. And then 2020 hit, and I saw what was happening. I saw the deception.

And for the first time in my life, I became interested in politics, because previously, I really didn't have political opinions. And I started to, I learned about Murray Rothbard and people in that vein and realized, wow, their voluntarism is the way to go. It makes the most sense. And I don't need to go into that because your audience is very familiar, but my first, my book, it ends upside down Liberty.

Basically the first half or so goes into the political theory and the economic theory, the Austrian school of economics, but at the end I tie it to consciousness. And basically what I tried to do, and I hadn't seen this done elsewhere, which is why I thought I needed to write a book about it, is to. Validate the non-aggression principle with natural law.

So the non-aggression principle is key to libertarian thinking, voluntarism, which basically says that no one should initiate aggression against another person's body or the physical property that they own. And if anyone does initiate aggression, then there's a right to self-defense. And aggression could be physical violence, fraud, theft, coercion, and so forth. Very simple principle. And that I think makes sense to a lot of people, which is why they get drawn to voluntarism.

And they see that the state inherently violates that because it's a political monopoly that basically gets to determine its own morality and impose that as if it's being benevolent, but it's really just acting as a coercive or extortive agent. But what's the tie to the metaphysics? So to me, the non-aggression principle is built into the fabric of reality itself.

So let me take a few steps back. We talked about near-death experiences before, and I think the evidence I provided, which is just the tip of the iceberg, suggests that there are phenomena happening that cannot be explained by brain activity, whether it's the shared death experience, the person at the bedside or the bystander who has a perfectly healthy brain, who's co-living in the dying process, which feels just like a near-death experience

with someone else, or the person who has a near-death experience and is resuscitated and is reporting things that cannot be explained by brain activity. All of that to me suggests that there's something in these altered states of consciousness, like the near-death experience that we should take as hints about the nature of reality, not just hallucination.

So with that preface, there's a phenomenon known as the life review, which is reported in 20 to 30 percent of near-death experiences, depending on the estimates you look at. And these are instances where the person, again, is clinically dead or close to it, and they relive their whole life in a very short amount of time. But it's not only that they relive their life from their own perspective. They actually become the people that they affected and they feel what it was like to be that person.

So I'll give you an extreme example for my podcast series, Where Is My Mind? I interviewed a number of survivors of near-death experiences, including Daniel Brinkley, who told me about four different near-death experiences he's had in his life. He was struck by lightning, he had open-heart surgery twice, and brain surgery. And each time in this near-death experience state, he had an elaborate experience, but he also had a life review.

And for him, this was very traumatic because he had to recall what it was like to be in Vietnam in combat and to be the people that he killed in combat. So he felt what it was like to be the people he killed through their eyes. And he also felt the indirect effects, meaning he felt what it was like to be children who no longer had a father because he had killed the father in combat. Although he said he didn't feel that quite as strongly.

And he had to relive that four times because he told me that each time he had a life review in the near-death experience, which he didn't know he was going to have, by the way, he didn't know he would die multiple times and be resuscitated, but he started at the beginning of his life in each life review. So he actually had a hard time talking about this painful stuff, but it changed his life so much.

That when he was resuscitated, he became a hospice volunteer because he said, wow, I've seen something about the nature of reality. This world is much more about caring for people. So I'm going to become a hospice volunteer. And in his later life reviews, which he didn't know he was going to have, he became the person who was dying in the hospice and he felt what it was like to be comforted by himself. And so he saw the good things and felt it through the other person's eyes.

All of this is a preface for what Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia said in his book After, which came out, I believe 2018 or something like that. He says, looking at all these near-death experiences and the life review phenomena, the golden rule is built into the fabric of reality itself and its natural law. It's beyond actual morality. And the golden rule is basically that we should treat people the way that we would like to be treated because we're all interconnected.

That's what people come back from the near-death experience life review saying. He said, Bruce, Dr. Bruce Grayson says, this is natural law. That's what I'm finding scientifically. Whoa. So if natural law means that we should treat people a certain way because it's actually in alignment with the nature of reality, the golden rule is basically describing the non-aggression principle. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. That's, that's profound, man, that people come back with the golden rule from near death experiences. That's, that's pretty amazing. And it makes sense as to why the CIA and the government and the Department of Education, they run all these programs to try to sever us from that feeling, right? I mean, that's basically what your book, An In and Upside Down Liberty, tackles this, right?

Or tackles, right? Is this what you just explained, how consciousness and liberty are basically synonymous, and that's the natural state of things. So, like, if we were a truly conscious-based society, what would that look like in your view? Like, how would it differ from this centralized fear-based technocracy that we're growing right now?

I think it would be very different. I mean, the way that we do government around the world, it's known as statism, this political monopoly that we've all come to accept, or most of societies come to accept as a benevolent force. What I describe in the book is that not only is it problematic from a political theory perspective and also from the perspective of economics, but it's actually not in alignment with the nature of reality. So the state is incompatible with basic spiritual principles.

That's the claim, which is a pretty big statement. That means we've structured society in an upside down manner. So the way I actually look at this is not just whether or not we should move away from statism toward voluntarism, which means the absence of the state. And that means a society without rulers, but not a society without rules. The rules would be determined by private property owners. So that's sort of one axis, statism on one end, which is what we have now versus voluntarism,

a very free society. That's one axis. The other axis to me is basically our state of consciousness in terms of the broader metaphysics that's accepted. And on one end of the spectrum is what's known as scientific materialism. It's what I used to believe. Matt, it sounds like you were there too. All of life is random and meaningless. When you die, that's the end. There's no morality built into the fabric of reality. That's all bogus stuff. That's materialism versus a more spiritual perspective.

Some would call it non-duality, the idea that there's an underlying oneness or whatever word you want to use, the more spiritual version where consciousness is transcending the body and the brain. So I see it as we need to move toward voluntarism and toward this new perspective of reality where consciousness plays a primary role. And it's actually not a new perspective. Look at all the ancient cultures. They talked about very similar things.

So it's a metaphysical shift in thinking and perception and also a shift in the way we actually structure. We've been trying to champion the idea for over a decade now, and I think this aligns with what you just said, Mark, that we're not seeking a revolution within society to just change tyrants for new tyrants or oppressive systems or whatever.

You know, what we need is evolution and we need to evolve to a higher consciousness. And I guess that kind of aligns too with what I was hoping to get into. I know we're getting pretty low on time here, so maybe I'll see if I could combine two different questions here into one. But, you know, just a quick plug here, you know, in the beginning of February, we had an interesting guest on by the name of Ashton Forbes, who is more or less an expert on the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

And he's got some pretty interesting ideas and theories regarding what happened to that plane. Was it UFOs, UAPs, government with secret advanced tech, or possibly even some futuristic free energy prototype or something like that. It was definitely a fascinating interview. And I highly suggest any of our followers who haven't listened to it already, definitely check that out. But it seems like your work goes even further past that.

And I know I mentioned in the beginning of the show that we usually don't touch on this topic too much, like the paranormal UFO alien kind of stuff. But you know, you're certainly welcome to share these theories, because we'd like to hear about this kind of stuff. But in an upside down contact, you discussed, you know, the topic UFOs and aliens and spirits even interacting with human civilization.

And so yeah, two questions, I guess a good place to start would be like, asking for evidence or experiences that you found, or encountered that, you know, stand out to you as being the most credible.

And then if you don't mind, like if there is some type of, you know, interdimensional being or higher power, something that's else that's out there in the universe, could it be part of a larger interconnected system that maybe even, you know, they could be gods of the simulation that we currently live in if we do want to consider it a simulation? Like, you know, people like Elon Musk and others have kind of half-heartedly suggested, but like, yeah, what, what can you tell us about those things?

So this book, An End to Upside-Down Contact, it's the fourth one in the series.

It came right after the Liberty book. And it ties to our earlier discussion about basically how have we been manipulated to not understand these basic facts about the nature of reality and ourselves. So I became interested in the forces, so to speak. Are there really dark and light forces, good and evil? Does that really exist beyond just thought? Are there actual energies?

So this book, An End to Upside-Down Contact, explores the evidence that there are non-human intelligences that are affecting our world. And it's an incredibly complex area. I don't feel like I understand it. When I researched it, I didn't feel like I found anyone who really understands this topic. And I divide it into two segments. One is contact phenomena involving crafts, meaning UFOs.

And then the other one, which I don't hear enough talked about, which is contact phenomena in the realm of consciousness. So for example, someone does DMT and they encounter machine elves. You mentioned that earlier. That's a common theme. There's an entity or entities that are commonly reported. That's interesting. Or what about near-death experiences? I haven't mentioned this yet, but another phenomenon, when people are in this altered state, they will encounter higher intelligences.

Sometimes it's a being of light, sometimes it's a religious figure or deceased relatives, but there are other intelligences that they are interacting with. Another phenomenon that really blew my mind, it's known as alien abduction, which I know sounds crazy, but the reason I was inclined to look at it is that the former head of psychiatry at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize winner, John Mack, MD, studied this phenomenon late in his career and evaluated it like a psychiatrist that he was.

And he concluded that based on his knowledge of psychiatry and having evaluated many patients over the years, that these people really experienced something. And then I saw in the literature on DMT, which stands for dimethyltryptamine, it's a psychedelic compound that causes people to go into these other realms. There was a study done by Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico. He wrote a book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and there's a documentary featuring

Joe Rogan on this as well. But in his book, Dr. Strassman talks about what happened to some of his subjects who were given DMT intravenously, they were experiencing things that are akin to alien abduction, like being operated on and actually very unpleasant things happened to them. And Rick Strassman stopped the study eventually because he was like, I don't know if I can be subjecting my subjects to these beings. I don't really know what's going on.

Ethically, it's a problem. And he said, I'm not familiar with the alien abduction phenomenon, but it's something I realized that I have to look into. So John Mack, the former head of psychiatry at Harvard who studied abductions, actually endorsed Rick Strassman's book because he was seeing this phenomenon outside of the DMT realm. Very similar types of beings and encounters that people were having, whether in their consciousness or in their body, we don't know.

But that's a very interesting correlation. John Mack's research and Rick Strassman's DMT research converging. Wow. Yeah, dude, that's wild. I actually had a similar experience under DMT.

I had smoked a lot of it and i was laying down in the grass and the sky opened up and a fucking massive alien the size of the entire sky like a lizard glow-in-the-dark lizard alien came down and was like examining me and it wasn't it wasn't like any other dm i had done dmt multiple times before this and never once did i experience this and but it was like this lizard was fucking examining me and looking at me and and you know then he just went back up into the sky and i

was like holy fucking shit that was weird and profound and like just crazy all at one time so i went and i got on the internet and i had to google you know i was like do people share dmt experiences anybody ever looked at or seen like giant fucking aliens or aliens come out of the sky or lizards or any of this shit. And sure enough, man, I got on like a forum and there were hundreds of people that have all seen this and experienced the exact same thing.

And like I said, I, my mind wasn't tainted going into this. I had no idea that you're going to fucking see this shit. So it wasn't like I had a seed planted that made my consciousness project this.

This was something that came in without any with a complete objective view of this experience which is super fucking interesting that yeah that i didn't i'm familiar with the spirit molecule i didn't realize that they ended that test because people were all experiencing that and it was kind of fucking crazy for them.

Yeah, he makes important points here, which is that I found this with the participants in Rick Strassman studies too, that apparently they were not aware of, at least some of them were not aware of the alien abduction phenomenon and yet they still encountered it. And this is what was compelling to me when I researched is that these phenomena have been reported throughout history where people have extraordinary experiences and there are similarities across cultures.

And even in the near-death experience date, Gregory Shushan has written a book on cross-cultural near-death experiences and the similarities there even in indigenous cultures.

And children who have near-death experiences describe very similar things, even though they don't have the same kind of cultural priming. So all of this is to suggest that there might be an actual reality to these other realms. And maybe they're different realms. Like maybe the DMT realm is different than the near-death experience one. And it's a multidimensional place that we exist in.

I mean, all of it, however, to me suggests there are intelligences that are around and probably have been for a very long time. They're not within our ordinary perception and they might be affecting people in ways that we don't often appreciate. I mean, it really opens the door to asking yourself, like, why do these substances exist? Like, why are they here on this planet? What purpose they serve? And like, how do they tap into parts of our consciousness?

I mean, is this kind of like finding an Easter egg in a video game where like, you know, this crazy simulation we live in? It's like, hey, like you just found this secret component of life and you get to expand your consciousness. Like, what's your theory on that? And what's your take on this whole simulation theory as well, Mark? Hmm. I'm really not sure what to make of basically the history of these psychedelic compounds.

It may be, I know there are many researchers who've talked about this, like Brian Morescu, where it could be that some of the ancient accounts that people have had that are sort of religious experiences have been tied to the use of psychedelics and or near-death experiences. This is a common theme that near-death experiences might have primed many of the current religious beliefs. And so that might make us wonder why a lot of this stuff has been suppressed.

Although these substances can also be used for harm, as you mentioned, Matt, like MKUltra, and there's definitely abuse that can be possible. I feel like all technology, there's a good side and an abusive side. So I do wonder if there's a suppression, but I also worry a little bit about it. And that's why I've been hesitant to explore this stuff myself, because these realms and these sorts of beings might be way more advanced than we can even appreciate.

And I talk about this in my book on contact, like John Mack from Harvard said, the alien beings appear to be consummate shape shifters. That was a theme. They could actually change their form because they're more advanced. There's also something known as a screen memory. And Mike Cleland has written many books on this. I'll give the classic example. Is a person sees an owl on the side of the road and goes up to the owl. All of a sudden, it's multiple hours later.

There's missing time. And the person says, what happened? I don't know what happened. So they go to see a hypnotherapist to try to recover these memories. The missing time, that's the term. And the hypnotherapist will bring the person to a relaxed state and say, hey, I want you to go up to that owl and describe it to me. And the person will say, wait a second, that's not an owl. It's a gray alien. This happens repeatedly. So the question becomes, is there a manipulation in our consciousness?

That's what I'm getting to, where we don't even know what we're perceiving or when we encounter these beings, we're not in the same control unless we're really trained, like maybe some shamans are. And that leads to all kinds of questions, Jason, about like, what is the nature of this reality? Are there intelligences that have informed it? I mean, the notion of a simulation, I think it's a tricky subject because there are so many definitions for simulation.

If we adopt this idea generally that maybe we're part of an underlying consciousness, the one mind, we could argue that the one consciousness is the simulator and we are parts of it. So we're the simulatee, but also part of us is the simulator if we wanted to use that kind of language. But if there are these multiple dimensions as there appear to be, it could be that there are layers of reality. Then there's a Toltec shaman named Joel Schaefer who's been speaking out publicly

more recently. The Toltec tradition comes, it's similar to what Carlos Castaneda talked about in his books, but the idea is that there are multiple realms that can be traversed not only through psychedelics, but through dreams. And what Joel has said is that some of these realms he's experienced are realer than this one. It doesn't make this one unreal, but there are other dimensions of reality that we're just not ordinarily perceiving.

And that to me really makes the question of a simulation even more complex because we're talking about a layered reality.

Great points, man. And yeah, boy that's a can of worms to get into high it almost makes me feel like we i wish we had another hour to to really flush a lot of this stuff out and i will say though if there is some type of alien overlord mechanical elves or something like they certainly made you pretty sharp man so i appreciate you kind of navigating us through all this information again that you know we just don't really get to talk about a lot because there's not a lot of people

discussing it or talking about it or researching it. And it's certainly not trending on social media. So I don't think you're going to be at the top of the algorithms anytime soon. But it does seem so important. And it's definitely fascinating. And I do believe we have a few minutes left here.

So Matt generally serves up the last question, which, you know, after a heavy conversation like this, although, you know, we weren't talking about war and dead and theft and violence and all that stuff, which some of our podcasts get into, but we try to always end on a positive note, on a white pill, if you will. So Matt, I'll hand it over to you. Hey, Freethinkers, 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, but if you're still here, that means you're resonating with what we're doing, and we need your help to keep it alive. Independent platforms like ours don't survive on corporate sponsorships or mainstream media funding.

We survive because of you if you're finding value in these unfiltered conversations and real solutions the best way to support us is by liking subscribing and sharing this podcast with your friends and fellow free thinkers it's a small act but it's a powerful one it helps us break through the censorship and algorithms designed to silence voices like ours,

This isn't just about supporting a podcast. It's about standing for freedom, exposing corruption, and building a movement that inspires real change. And if you want to go beyond liking and sharing, we'd love for you to become a member of the Freethought Project. Just head over to thefreethoughtproject.com and click on the TFTP membership link at the top of the page. As a member, you'll be directly supporting our mission and helping us to stay independent.

Your support is what keeps this platform alive and fighting. So thank you for being part of this journey, for sharing these ideas, and for standing with us. Like Jason just said, dude, this podcast flew by. We could have gone on for hours, man. I genuinely believe that conscious isn't just a philosophical curiosity or scientific mystery, man. I think it's by regaining that, it's the key to saving humanity from this destructive path we're on.

You know if if we can reconnect with something deeper something universal and shared we can start to fucking heal not just individually but like collectively across the planet and maybe the rest of the universe right there's still so much work to be done you know which is why i'm so glad to have met you and and know that you're going to continue doing that man you know your your research your voice and like your courage to challenge courage to challenge this the status scroller.

I think they're helping to open the eyes and shift these perspectives, dude. It's. It's very good that you're keeping that up, man. This kind of work is essential, you know, maybe now more than ever. Yeah. Right. And I think I also think that psychedelics are playing a part in that and helping to open these blocked conscious holes up in people's heads and let them see again. And anyway, so I can ramble about psychedelics and consciousness forever.

So to leave our listeners with something hopeful, even though I believe that this, like Jason said, this whole conversation has been hopeful. It's been a great one. What gives you a white pill right now? How do you see maybe consciousness playing a role in waking people up and guiding us to this better future that we talked about earlier? The white pill is that we're having this conversation and we're able to.

That indicates to me that there's some part of reality that is allowing us to access the truth if we want to try to seek it out. But we're born into a system that clearly keeps us away from it. I mean, for me, it was 30 years. I thought I was well-educated and now I'm realizing I have to unlearn all the stuff that I was taught. But so I can understand why it's difficult for many people who are brought into that indoctrination system, which the state is a big part of.

But there is hope because we have control over our consciousness. We can decide where we orient our attention and reprioritize things. And I do feel like there's a ton of momentum right now to talk about these subjects. There is a new podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, which reached the top of the charts ahead of Joe Rogan recently, featuring autistic savants who are able to read their caretakers' minds. This is something I wrote about in my book, and end upside down thinking.

And I interviewed Diane Powell, who's one of the doctors on that show, but that, you know, my book first book came out in 2018 and my podcast with Dr. Powell came out in 2019, but now here we are in 2025 and everyone's talking about it. So there's a big shift and that gives me a lot of reason for optimism. That podcast that Rogan mentioned, man, that's some crazy shit. He's been talking about that. I've been meaning to go check that out, man. And.

Yeah. And I hope people can get on the right path from listening to this podcast. And I think they will, dude. I think that you just opened my mind a little bit more and I know that we're smarter now for listening to this and talking with you, man.

But before we let you go, can you let folks know how they can support you and find your work online? Sure. And I just want to thank you guys for all the work you do and for having me on. I really, really appreciate it. My website is my name, markgober.com, M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E-R.com. That has all my basic info. I have seven books. They're all available on Amazon in hard copy Kindle and audible formats.

And I narrate all the audibles myself. Also my podcast series that I mentioned, it was released in 2019, but it's still very relevant. It's on near-death experiences, telepathy, remote viewing, all that stuff, the nature of consciousness. Where is my mind? It's on Spotify, Apple podcast, all the major players, and it's only eight episodes. So it's a bingeable show in just several hours. Hell yeah, man. That's awesome. I'm definitely going to go check that out.

Thank you for coming on, Mark. It was a pleasure, dude. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, guys. Thank you for listening to the Free Thought Project Podcast. Music.