UC 23: Harvard Neurosurgeon Explains Why Consciousness Is NOT Created By The Brain - Dr Eben Alexander

He had a strong belief in God and power of prayer, but, like so many of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I always knew science was the pathway to truth, and as much as I might have wanted to believe what I heard in that Methodist church growing up in North Carolina Science was going to guide my way to any kind of understanding of the nature of reality.

And the conventional training I had at both Duke and then when I worked at Harvard medical school teaching neurosurgery for 15 years, was basically the notion of materialism or physicalism. And that's basically the metaphysical position that all of that exists is the physical world. And therefore, if we can fully understand everything that governs the interactions of the particles that make up that world. Then we can understand all of causality and all of the nature of our unfolding reality.

In fact, that materialist science that I worshipped before my coma, and I do not use that term lightly would scoff at you for claiming to have free will. Because that science claimed that it was all just chemical reactions, electron fluxes, and the substance of the brain. It gave us an illusion of free will, an illusion of conscious awareness. But that ultimately it was all predetermined by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. And that was the hard core position.

But that's really where you went if you believed that conventional scientific... Training, which basically said our existence is birth to death and nothing more. When our physical brain and body die, that's the end of conscious awareness. My journey back in 2008 showed me that just the opposite is true. We are conscious in spite of our brain. And that's really where I think all of this gets a lot more exciting. And the proof to me was very solid.

In the form of the severe case of Bacterial Meningoencephalitis. You couldn't have come up with a better laboratory prep to try and mimic human death than what I went through. This kind of severe meningitis is a perfect model for human death because it selectively destroys the neocortex and then the brainstem. The pieces of the brain that are most responsible, according to modern neuroscience, for our detailed human conscious awareness. And yet...

The medical details of my case made it crystal clear that brain was in no shape to harbor any kind of dream or hallucination. And that's something that I discuss in the book Proof of Heaven, but that point is greatly amplified by the medical case report written by three doctors not involved in my care that came out in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases in September of 2018.

Dr. Surbhi Khanna, Lauren Moore, and Bruce Grayson were fascinated by my recovery, and that's why they wrote this case report. And in fact, when they were challenged by the peer review editors of that journal, how do you explain this? This is unprecedented in the medical literature. Have somebody this ill from, a week in deep coma from gram negative bacterial meningoencephalitis with all the lab parameters, Glasgow Coma Scales, 6 or 7, and anything below 9 is deep coma.

And all the lab values, that's what haunted me, was when I was reviewing my own medical records. and remembering everything that I went through, that brain was in no position to construct any such elaborate hallucination or dream. That's why the scientific community takes my story so incredibly seriously. And that's why some people who try to take me down with ad hominem attacks cling desperately to their hope that this, their claim that this was a medically induced coma.

They are denying the facts of the case that are absolutely a beautiful gift to humanity. And that is, no, this extraordinary experience happened but wasn't caused by my brain at all. The fact of the matter was I was so close to death and so far gone from this world that I could experience this extraordinary spiritual journey that I had. And that's really, to me, the magic of it all.

And I can dive briefly into what all that involved, and then we can talk about some of the details and why it's important to the scientific community and all that kind of thing.

I had a really an empty slate. And in looking back on it, I've come to realize that every near death experience is tailored for the individual who has it. That's ultimately the reason these things occur. But there are NDEs that are so remarkable that it's of great interest to to this world at large. In fact, I think all NDEs can be very instructive to this world at large because they paint a beautiful picture.

That we're all in this together and that the binding force of love is absolutely there connecting us with each other and with the universe at large. So my beliefs before coma were really strongly that of that materialist scientist that brain creates consciousness, and then of course fearing that when the brain and body die awareness comes to an end. The opposite is what I experienced, and it all started in what I call the earthworm's eye view.

A very primitive course, unresponsive realm, it was like being in dirty jello. Seemed to go on for a very long time, even though I'm sure I didn't have a memory of moment to moment, eternity would seem like a reasonable length of time that I experienced all that, but I was rescued, luckily, by this slowly spinning white light. They came towards me and it opened up like a rip in the fabric of that ugly earthworm eye view, as I call that initial stage.

And it led me up through this light portal into this brilliant, ultra real gateway valley. And that's the part that's so hard to explain to people. It was much more real than this world. Much more detailed, much more memorable, much more meaningful. Much more transformational. This was an extraordinarily rich environment in which I found myself. It makes this world look very murky and dreamlike by comparison. Now that Gateway Valley, it had a lot of earth like features.

I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There are millions of other butterflies. Looping and spiraling in these vast formations, and down below in this verdant, fertile meadow, there were thousands of beings dancing lots of joy and merriment. I remember children playing, dogs jumping, incredible festivities, and it was all being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would just thunder through my awareness.

And the best thing about the whole scene I'm describing to you is I wasn't alone. There was a beautiful woman sitting beside me on this butterfly wing and she looked at me with a look of pure love. Sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, high forehead, broad smile. She was dressed in the same kind of simple garb of all the beings dancing down below, but it was very colorful. Really, colors beyond the rainbow.

And when I say this world is ultra real, do understand this is the realm where people would have life reviews, where your life would flash before your eyes and you would relive the events, not just remembering. And also those events in a life review are commonly described as being from the perspective of others around us who were impacted by our actions and even our thoughts. In other words, your life review is a beautiful example of how we're all in this together.

And if you hurt another, you're hurting yourself. If you hand out a lot of pain and suffering... In the life review, you have to be on the receiving end of that to see what it felt like. And the life review is there to serve as a course correction, because another major part of the scientific evidence for the reality of this broader concept of mind we're talking about is the scientific evidence for reincarnation.

And the University of Virginia, which is about 12 miles from where I'm sitting right now, For the last six decades, they've studied more than 2, 700 cases of past life memories in children indicative of reincarnation, of which 1, 700 of the cases were solved. That is, they found the person who was described by the child. So this much bigger vision of consciousness is one that is here in the scientific community and certainly in my very neighborhood.

Now, I was discovering this for my own on this extraordinary journey. And this beautiful message that came to me from this lovely spiritual guide, the guardian angel on the butterfly wing. was you are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You are richly cared for. And I cannot tell you how reassuring and validating that was in that moment. And it was around that time that I witnessed the soft summer breeze that blew through.

And that breeze essentially changed everything because given my complete amnesia and complete lack of knowledge or of any kind of history of connection with human thought that summer breeze was my first awareness of that infinitely loving God force. And I came back from this incredible journey realizing that it doesn't matter if you want to call that deity God or Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, whatever the words are.

The truth of the matter is more than 90% of near death experiencers from all different faith traditions and, many who were previously agnostic or atheistic. More than 90 percent of near death experiencers through thousands of years come back believing in an infinitely powerful, loving force at the core of the universe. So the reality of that presence defies the fact that we can't necessarily nail it down with a proper label.

That's why it's so important to have your own practice of centering prayer, going within, meditation, what have you, to develop your own personal relationship with that loving force. Now for me on this journey, it turns out that those angelic choirs provided yet another portal to a higher and higher level. And what I remember is that all of four dimensional space time, the kind of lowest material realm, collapsed down.

And then this entire spiritual region, this gateway valley as I called it, that same realm where you can experience birth, death, everything in between, You have left time. You are no longer just remembering events that occurred in a lifetime, in Earth time. You're reliving those events. That's the power of that realm. But given my amnesia, I was not to have an Eben Alexander life review. I had life reviews presented to me in two very powerful fashions in the next stages of this journey.

Because with these angelic choirs providing yet another portal, All of that deep time, as I call it or meta time. That's the causal relationship that occurs in that spiritual realm, which is of complete order of magnitude beyond what we experience here, because you can have all the events of your life simultaneously presented in that deep time.

Very important concept, because this explains a lot about How reincarnation and all that can still honor that our loved ones will absolutely be there when we pass over. To help welcome us into that realm. And people are often concerned when they hear all this evidence for reincarnation. Oh no, what if they've reincarnated before I get there? No. I can tell you from my experience that

just doesn't happen. That's the importance of understanding this different temporal layer in that in that mystical, spiritual realm. But what that led me up into is what I call the core.

And I remember seeing all of, even that spiritual realm collapsing down until what I saw was this complex over sphere that was there for teaching, and to me that over sphere was basically the universe throughout all of eternity, but it showed me the much bigger aspects of the universe that I was trying to understand. And in that core realm, all dualities.

Come into oneness, masculine, feminine, light, dark, good, evil, etc. All the different dualities of this world come together into oneness in that beautiful realm. And I also came to see that the very source of our conscious awareness. is that deity, that God force of pure love.

And it's important to understand that even though you may see apparent conflict and, apparent darkness and evil and all that kind of on the way into this, as you get closer and closer to that spiritual core of what I call the core you're getting to a level where it's pure oneness and love. In other words the apparent darkness and evil isn't even part of the original sourcing equation. This is all part of that one mind and we're sharing the dreams of that one mind in all of this process.

Now, it turns out that in that core realm, I was taught many things. The two visions I did have that showed me both life reviews and reincarnation, even though I couldn't have an Eben Alexander life Review because of my amnesia. One I call the flying fish version. That's as it sounds. The flying fish down in the water. That's our bodies in the material realm. Dumbed down, not knowing all that our higher souls know about the bigger picture. But then when we die, we come back up.

Reunite with higher soul, with souls of departed loved ones. Go through life reviews. Plan next incarnations for further growth. learning and teaching, and then dive back in. The second vision was on a separate passage through the Core Realm, and that was what I call the Indra's Net vision.

That was far grander, showing me life reviews and reincarnation and a profound kind of Indra's Net, this higher dimensional network of web, where basically everything we did had influences that would It would influence out into the universe and you could see how we were all interconnected in this Indra's net vision. And it was that binding force of love that was so important. Now it turns out, again, I would tumble back down into that earthworm eye view.

I cycled through these realms several times. I learned that by remembering the musical notes, the melody, that's how I could conjure up all these light portals. And always many lessons I've spent 15 years since my coma, unpacking those lessons in meditation. I use sacred acoustics, which is a very powerful form of differential frequency brainwave entrainment. And I use that form of meditation basically daily.

And a lot of that effort is not just to recover memories from my NDE, but to develop ongoing relationships with the guides and the force and that incredible love force at the core of that realm. Every bit of that is what I've been doing for the 15 years since with this program of meditation. It turns out, as I said, I would cycle through those levels. Every time I entered into the core realm, I was told, you're not here to stay. You'll be going back.

I'd even come to believe that going back, just going back to that earth worm eye view. And for me, that was no problem, because I'd learned that by remembering the musical notes and the melody in my mind, I could conjure up that light portal. And that would always take me up to the next level. But there came a point where, as they promised me, you're not here to stay, I could no longer conjure up the light portal up into that gateway valley.

To say I was sad at that point would be an understatement. But I also knew that I could trust in the universe, that I would be taken care of. And it was at that point that I saw thousands of beings going off around me, off into the distance, many with heads bowed like that holding arms up, some holding candles. And this murmuring energy was coming back from them.

The surprising thing was I now tumbled back down to this murky kind of earthworm's eye view, that primitive level where everything started. And previously the incredible... Joy and bliss to see I had experienced in the spiritual realms, in the gateway valley and the core realm was not really present in that lowest level in the earthworm's eye view, but now it was.

Because of this murmuring energy of these people around me thousands of them, and when I labeled all that, when I came back to this world and was writing it all up, I said that those were prayers, and that was the power of prayer leading me back to this world. And the final stage of my near death experience were the six faces I saw at the very end of it all. They were very important. Five of them were physically present in the ICU room the last 24 hours I was in coma.

Now, there were many other family and friends who had been there earlier in the week who I had no memory of. And what this helped me to realize is the vast majority of my coma journey had to happen between days one and four or one in five of the seven day coma. And I explained that timing in the book Proof of Heaven and then elaborate more on that in the book Living in a Mindful Universe.

But it was really the last of those faces that I would say is the most important. That was the one that actually compelled me to come back to this world. It was of a ten year old boy. Now, I didn't recognize him at this time, but it was my son, Bond. Great name. It turns out that that he was 10 years old. They'd given him the sugar coated version of the story, Dad's sick. Then he saw Dad on a ventilator, unresponsive, worried about that.

And they hadn't told him the worst news, but it was day 7 of coma. And the doctors held a family conference where they said I'd gone from a 10 percent chance of survival down to 2%. But with no chance of recovery. And they were recommending stopping the antibiotics and taking me off the ventilator. Just letting nature take its course. But turns out Bond overheard all that and now realized it was much worse than he'd been told.

So he came running down the hallway and I was lying there on my ventilator. Eyes taped shut, he pulled open my eyelids. One eye looking over there, one eye over there, neither pupil working. Any of your audience in medicine will know that's a horrible picture. And I promise you, I did not hear him with my ears, I didn't see him with my eyes. But somehow, his pleading with me, Daddy, you're going to be okay, Daddy, you're going to be okay.

Even though I didn't understand the words, but it was that emotional engagement of our connection, that pleading, that somehow I had to be back there for him. Whatever that meant. And it's the toughest thing I've ever done in my entire existence. Crawling out of there. I often use the analogy, it was like crawling out of a gravel pit where every time you reach up, everything collapses in around you. I had to do it. I had to get back for him.

In some way, I was able to come back to this world and, the next thing I knew, I'm fighting the ventilator and they pulled the tube out. I said, thank you. Now, my brain was still very addled by this serious infection. And even though I was coming around, it was still deeply involved. And in fact, over the next 36 hours, after they took out the breathing tube, I was in and out of a paranoid, delusional, psychotic nightmare that I described briefly in the book, Proof of Heaven. But it was wild.

And the interesting thing about it was that those memories as much as they seemed a little more real than a normal nightmare, I knew they were delusional while it was happening. And also those memories faded within about two weeks. Whereas the deep coma memories, the spiritual journey that I describe in the book, that incredible richness, that, those memories are as sharp now as if the whole thing happened yesterday.

Gigantic difference, and there have been papers, scientific papers, written about the resilience and stability of NDE memories that corroborates this. These are not, hallucinations or dreams. These are profound memories that rival real, lived events in terms of their kind of tenacity and their staying power.

People would often come up to me after I gave a talk and share something with me and they'd say, I never told anybody this before, but, and then they'd share an after death communication or a deathbed vision, a near death experience, what have you. Might have happened 50 years ago. But they remember it perfectly because these things transform your lives. They're incredibly rich dives into the nature of reality that's much grander than what we normally assume to be our human condition.

And they're much more indicators of kind of the spiritual nature of the universe and our spiritual nature as beings. And by spiritual, I simply mean interconnected through that mental layer and also with a shared meaning and purpose, because that's ultimately what emerges from near death experiences and from a broad review of this literature. At any rate, over two months, all my memories returned. That was shocking. In fact, in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe,

Karen and I talk about how memories are not even stored in the brain. It's something that neurosurgeons have suspected for a long time that was false. And yet it's such a nail in the coffin of materialist neuroscience that it's not often discussed. And yet, if you go back to Wilder Penfield, the renowned Canadian neurosurgeon who wrote a book in 1975, Mystery of the Mind, he makes it very clear that consciousness is not something that you can simply explain as a result of brain work.

And in fact, through his career, he went through, as a neuroscientist, as a neurosurgeon, working on awake patients with electrodes. I did a lot of those operations myself. But Penfield... Basically concluded that memories were not to be stored anywhere in the neocortex. Now, of course, there was enough materialism still around in 75, that he thought you got to put it somewhere, so I guess it's in the brainstem.

But when you hear all these reincarnation stories in the modern literature, you realize those memories are not being stored in any brain at all. 80 percent of the reincarnation cases are not related. So there's no way to even postulate, a DNA connection or heredity when 80 percent of them are not from the same family.

But in other words, we need a much bigger model to explain consciousness and memory than the simplistic and outmoded model that the physical brain somehow is storing those memories. And so I've spent the 15 years since my coma working with scientists around the world. And this includes if people wanna go check out the groups that I work with. Go to scientific and medical.net or go to galileo commission.org. Those are both scientific groups that I've worked with for a while.

And they are coming up with models of reality that go far beyond the simplistic and. Basically, paltry fiction of materialism that pretends that only the physical world exists and that we don't even have free will. There's obviously much more that we can learn about the human condition from all this, but it really implies that we're all eternal souls and we're all working together on this kind of evolution of consciousness. That's basically where my NDE has taken me and I'd like to...

Address any questions or comments and get deeper into it all with you.

But I quickly, within hours, a day or two, started recovering plenty of memories of those relationships to start putting it all back in context. But, this new Eben Alexander was one who had been through something quite astonishing and completely unexpected based on my prior worldview. I was also very busy trying to tell my doctors about this, what had happened to me, and they would just pat me on the back and say your brain was soaking in pus.

We don't have any idea how you're even coming back to us. You can forget about it because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. Okay, I believe my doctors, I should forget about it, but I wanted to write it all down because it was such a fascinating experience.

And in fact, by the time I got out of the hospital a few weeks later, it was two days before Thanksgiving, Now, I remember my older son, Evan IV, who was majoring in neuroscience in college at the time, and he had been there during part of my coma, so he knew just how ill I was. In fact, he thought they lost me but he had gone back to school after I started waking up took some exams, and then he came home, and he drove overnight to surprise me.

He'd heard that I was staying up all night because I couldn't sleep because I was so energized by the spiritual experience. And he drove overnight. He came home the day before Thanksgiving, gave me a big hug. And he told me much later that it was like when he gave me that hug, like there was a light shining within me that I was far more present than I'd ever been before. And I remember telling him, it was all way too real to be real. That's the way I, that ultra reality.

That's how I put it into words because I always believe in my doctors. Trick of the dying brain, but I had not yet begun to review my medical records. That was weeks and months into the future, and as I did that, I started realizing no this brain was not there creating some wild hallucination or dream because this brain was far too damaged.

It could not have done that and that of course, as I said, is why the scientific community takes my story so seriously, but the the reality that was coming to me is all the memories started coming back. And in fact, the memories of my distant past life or distant early life in this body were more complete than they had been before the coma. I figured that out with conversations with family and friends about certain things that occurred way back in early life.

And realized that those details were clearer in my memory after the coma than they had been before. So it was a beautiful example of how our brain serves as an interface. It's a filter to that primordial consciousness. And it accesses memories and it accesses this kind of

lifeline of our existence. But ultimately the brain is not the creator of that conscious awareness. The universe is conscious, essentially. That's what this is teaching us in a very deep fashion. The very same consciousness that came up with the Big Bang and so many other, aspects of our emerging reality. That is the consciousness we share, that God force is one. At the deepest levels of our journeys, we find that is the source of our conscious awareness and that we all have the same source.

So it's all shared. That's why this notion of the life of you as being the golden rule written into the fabric of the universe is so important. If you hurt others, you're hurting yourself, and the more the deep lesson of NDE's of this oneness and this binding force of love can come to fruition, the more harmonious and prosperous this world will be for all of our fellow sentient beings.

I tell a lot of that story in the book, Proof of Heaven. I was put up for adoption by my 16 year old unwed mother at age 11 days. I was basically taken by social services because of failure to thrive. I went on a hunger strike, which babies that are not wanted by their mothers often will do. And so social services had taken me on and my birth mother could no longer claim me after that Christmas break when they had taken me. But she wasn't willing to sign the papers to give me up.

So I basically got stuck in purgatory in this baby dorm in Greensboro, North Carolina for four months until my birth mother was willing to sign the papers to let me go. And then I couldn't have been luckier. I couldn't have been adopted into a better family. a loving family that honored all my hopes and dreams. I had three sisters in that family. The older one was adopted. The younger two were the biological children of my adopted parents.

But the important thing is I went through most of my life not knowing about anything of the details of that connection. And there was a deep kind of subconscious worry. And I was not conscious of this, but it was operative at a subconscious level. that maybe I wasn't even worthy of love. And I think that affected a lot of my relationships with people and whether or not I could trust the world.

And in so many ways, this whole journey of working towards my NDE and then beyond was part of the sole journey of answering that question of whether or not I was worthy of love in this universe. And what I will tell you in terms of answering your question is that I finally met my birth family a year before my coma. That also that story's all told in proof of Heaven. And that was a beautiful reunion. I felt a huge part of my past had now been locked into place and I now understood so much more.

It started me on a pathway of understanding the answer to that question, whether or not I was loved, but I needed the n D E to fully answer that question, and that's why I dove in deep and in fact that beautiful guardian angel had to be somewhat important in my life. And it turns out that she was, and that had to do with that birth family and a sister that I never knew. I won't go into any more detail than that.

But suffice it to say, it was a mind bender that shocked me to my knees when I did figure it all out. And it also proved to me the reality of my journey in a very strong fashion. I already knew all of this seemed way too real to be real, but then to fit it all into my life in a meaningful and powerful way was extraordinary. And that was the gift.

It's just one of those things you have to experience and then you get it, but otherwise it's really just a concept that's quite foreign.

But it has more to do with kind of their overwhelming power of of reliving these events and getting this much richer, deeper sense of connection with the universe. It's a very beautiful lesson in actually existing to go through these kinds of things. And then come back to this world and have that as a touch point as a, a mile post that you contacted. Bathing in that ocean of consciousness is something that always can serve me well in terms of these journeys.

And I know when I present this to other NDEers, for example that's especially when that heart resonance of understanding comes out and you realize that the communication goes far beyond just our language and our words. There's something much deeper about our connections, especially in sharing these kind of profound spiritual journeys that leads us into some common ground.

than that was what I remember. It was like there was this sort of ongoing essence of joyful cheerfulness. So that's hard to explain, but it was like everything was really vibrant and everyone who was there was really happy and great to see you. And

If there were things that they had done in their life where they had a lot of guilt or shame and they had hurt others they end up able to make amends and to do that in real time with the spiritual ingredients of these encounters. So the dying experience from the hospice world is identical to what happens in near death experiences and shared death experiences.

Shared death are just like near death but they happen to perfectly healthy people. Often people who might be loved ones, say a thousand miles away from a mother who is dying, but when the mother dies and leaves, and her soul leaves her body, it goes through and grabs the soul of the loved one, who might be a thousand miles away, takes that along even to the point of witnessing a full blown life review with the mother's soul, but then the bystander soul comes back to this world.

And those shared death experiences have many of the same ingredients of near death. And yet, as I said, they usually happen in people who are perfectly healthy. So they completely defy those materialist pseudo explanations of, decreased oxygen tension or increased carbon dioxide if somebody's body is dying. But no, you don't need those ingredients for these incredible spiritual journeys.

And anybody who wants to learn more about shared death experiences should read Raymond Moody's book, Glimpses of Eternity. I think it came out in 2011, but that's all about shared death, completely. And then also follow the work of William Peters. If you Google Shared Crossing Project, he's in Santa Barbara. California, and which enables people to learn techniques that might enhance their ability to share the dying experience with a loved one who is terminal.

And he's, William Peters was just a guest with us and he's claiming some very good success with this. He's recently written a book. It's called At Heaven's Door. I highly recommend it. And that will help people get up to speed with shared death experiences, which are an extraordinary kind of extension of near death into explaining our spiritual nature the spiritual nature of the universe at large. Highly recommend people get into learning more about shared death experiences.

Because she also was there training learning how to teach people to use these sounds to get into deep hypnotic or deep states of conscious awareness. And in fact, I was the one who, once I listened to what she and her business partner, Kevin Cossey, he was a sound engineer. They were putting together their own binaural beats. They'd not shared them with anyone else. Once I heard those back in early 2012, I said, you guys really need to get these out to the world.

Now I'm one of their biggest customers and biggest fans. I listen to Sacred Acoustics an hour to a day, and I've been doing that for more than 11 years now. But people can go to sacredacoustics. com to learn a lot more. I highly recommend it as a meditative tool and just cuts the chase from a neuroscientific perspective.

The reason I think sacred acoustics is so powerful is because it uses binaural beat brainwave entrainment to engage a circuit way down the lower brainstem in this ancient circuit by oscillating left and right back and forth quickly with these binaural beat sound waves. I believe that is what allows our conscious awareness to be set free from the illusion of here, now, and sense of self. So I highly recommend it. People can learn a lot more at sacredacoustics. com.

To learn about these meditative tools and the different ways that you can use them. Her site is very good for instructing people about the details of these various programs and how they've been used.

And it's important to note that Dr. Anna Usim, Y U S I M, wrote a peer reviewed scientific study of sacred acoustics binaural beat brainwave entrainment that was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases in, I think it was in February of 2020 and basically they found that in their busy Manhattan psychiatric practice, that simply listening to binaural beats, sacred acoustics gave a 26 percent reduction in anxiety symptoms over two weeks.

And that's compared to only a 7 percent reduction in anxiety symptoms in people who had standard of psychotalk therapy but did not have the tones. So by listening to Sacred Acoustics tones, you had a dramatic improvement in alleviation of anxiety symptoms. This is very early in the pandemic. So Karen, with all her generosity, It was important to get these tones out to the world to relieve anxiety, especially as the economic collapse added on top of the pandemic.

And so she made the whole mind bundle, which was the source material for that scientific paper. showing such a reduction in anxiety. She made that whole mind bundle available for a discounted price of 19. But she also included a free option because she knew there'd be a lot of people because of the pandemic who didn't have the financial wherewithal, but would need something like this powerful tool. And I believe that free option is still available.

Due to Karen and Sacred Acoustics generosity, people can download and use that very same set of acoustic files that were so effective in alleviating anxiety in that scientific study.

Which I believe is the reason the whole universe exists, is for this one mind to grow. It's we're sharing the dream of the one mind in this process of learning and teaching, and unpacking what is possible for sentient beings to accomplish in recognizing their connection with the universe at large. And that's really what I see a lot of this as being this kind of expanded sense of mission, of understanding that we're all in this together, this process of discovery.

And it's really all about a deeper version of know thyself. That inscription over the temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece, Know thyself. And I think that's ultimately what we're all being challenged with. And the interesting thing is you find that your mind is not just related to this three and a half pound gelatinous mass sitting in a warm, dark bath between your ears, but your mind is sharing the mind of the universe.

And this becomes obvious, especially in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, we point out All the different consilience lines of evidence that lead to this notion of primacy of mind. From the hard problem of consciousness in neuroscience, to the binding problem, the apparent unity of consciousness, which is very difficult to explain in the individual if you're postulating that it's all different neuronal populations contributing in network fashion to this bigger version.

Why is consciousness so unified?

It's because it's unified from the get go. We're sharing that one mind. The brain is a filter that allows it in. And then you have in this argument of consilience all the evidence for non local consciousness, like telepathy. Read Guy Lyon Playfair's book on twin telepathy. You realize 35 percent of identical twins have very powerful telepathic experiences.

Of course, they're easy to demonstrate in twins, but they also occur in many other connections we have with people where telepathy is real, remote viewing is real, distance healing, and then you run into all this kind of category of non local consciousness in the form of near death. Shared death experiences, deathbed dreams and visions like in the hospice work, and then of course after death communications would probably happen in more than 50 percent of our modern western population.

In fact, it's the population at large that's going to be driving this revolution. The scientific community is catching up, slowly but surely, but ultimately it's people having these experiences once they realize they don't violate science and scientific principles. But, in fact, are supported by the modern science of quantum informed scientific investigation of consciousness. And really that's where this whole thing explodes.

And, for example, if anyone still thinks that this is, talk of the afterlife and reincarnation is not scientific, I would send you to BigelowInstitute. org. Because that's where you'll find 28 essays that were written in the year 2021. The challenge was from Robert Bigelow, an aerospace engineer in Las Vegas, who said he'd lost his wife, his son had committed suicide. He wanted to know more about, are they really still here in some form? And so he put a question out to the scientific community.

What's the best scientific evidence for continuation of consciousness after permanent bodily death? And you had to demonstrate at least five years research experience in the afterlife question to submit an essay. But in that context, they got 204 essays. They were going to give out 3 monetary prizes, instead they gave out 28. And you can read all 28 of those winning essays at BigelowInstitute.

org And from my perspective, you read even that first place essay by Jeffrey Mishlove and you realize... We're far beyond questioning whether or not these these things are real. We're now into, okay, how do we work this into our larger worldview of understanding? But, the old heyday of materialist pseudo skeptics, saying this is nonsense, science disagrees with this, are gone. Because quantum physics actually demands...

This kind of free will openness of sentience that we share and doesn't allow for that complete determinism that I thought before my coma based on my materialist scientific studies. And once people start reading these essays, and if you're looking especially for the deep and profound scientific essays in that BigelowInstitute.

org group, I would steer you to Bernardo Kastrup, and I would steer you to Pim van Lommel, who won second place, and I would steer you to julie Beichel, Now, many of the other essays are excellent, but these three in particular are the strongest kind of scientific footing, I think, for defining this afterlife question.

But the astonishing thing is how they do not seem capable of understanding this revolution. The revolution is gigantic. Read the Bigelow Institute essays and you'll get it. This is all in process. It's happening. And yet, for example, there was a paper of a month or two ago that was talking about this burst of electrical activity that happens in a brain, right around the time of death.

And everybody made this giant deal of these, I think it was two cases reported and this was on top of an earlier study where in mice that were being euthanized they saw this burst of electrical activity. Bruce Grayson and Pim Van Lommel put out a public response to that misinterpretation by science journalists.

That continue to trumpet materialism as an explanation for NDEs, because in fact, When you review, for example, Pim Van Lommel's own study of hundreds of patients who had cardiac arrest and had near death experiences, you'll find the EEG goes flatline in 15 to 20 seconds. Period. End of story. So nobody expects any kind of EEG activity to be associated with NDEs based on the NDE literature itself.

And Pim Van Lommel and Bruce Grayson made that absolutely crystal clear to some science writers who still don't get it and continue to pretend that brain activity causes this. The exact point from the deep literature on NDE's is that you don't have brain activity in these people. You have flat EEGs in the cases where it's measured. So walk away from that silly nonsense and let's get rid of this stupid materialist assumption that the brain is creating consciousness.

Another place where this is very relevant is a whole series of scientific papers that have come out in the last 11 years. Looking at people under the influence of psychedelic substances like psilocybin, magic mushrooms, DMT, dimethyltryptamine, active principle in ayahuasca, LSD, one of the most potent serotonin 2A psychedelic substances known.

And in all the scientific papers using functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, ways of really looking at detailed neuronal activity in the brain, what you find is people under the influence of things like psilocybin.

The default mode network, which is the network that's normally thought to be the kind of ego network of what happens when you're sitting there doing nothing but just existing and aware of your existence, that network completely dissolves under psilocybin and same thing with LSD and DMT. And so what we find is the brain activity is not going to explain those incredible, phenomenal experiences under those psychedelic substances.

So why would we demand that the brain somehow explain these other activities that occur when people die and when their soul is in the process of leaving their body? The bottom line is these are not created by the brain. You've got to give up on materialism or physicalism because it's inadequate. To answer these questions we need bigger models like idealism, which is where we go in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, the primacy of the mental over the physical.

And in fact, if you really listen to all the words we're saying in this talk about NDE's and that loving God force and how all of this is really around the one mind and how we're connected through that mental layer. You'll realize that it's not just simple idealism, but we're really pushing for what might be called in a philosophical discussion, evolutionary panentheism. That's a better philosophical description of where we're headed.

But ultimately it's all just saying that the physical universe is emergent from the realm of the mental. And that we have much more power over that than we might think. And for me as a healer, as a doctor, where that then leads is into placebo effect, which is an acknowledgement of our six or seven decades that our thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes can influence our healing. And then you get into spontaneous remission.

And then finally you get into the category of miraculous healing in the setting of near death experiences that begin to show us this power of understanding our spiritual nature and its ability to influence our emerging reality has tremendous power to bring us into wholeness. That is healing. So any kind of physical, mental, emotional healing, ultimately, will be spiritual healing, fundamentally. And that spiritual doesn't need any kind of religious ingredient at all.

Even though religions can help people get into deep spiritual states, but sometimes religious ideologies work against spirituality. Because ultimately, spirituality is teaching us we're all in this together. We're bound through the forces of love. The best way to free ourselves and others is with kindness, mercy, acceptance, love, when necessary, forgiveness.

But get rid of this sick and toxic false sense of separation that comes out of materialism and let's move on with the scientific revolution that proves the oneness of our consciousness and how we're all truly in this together.

And they're categorized. And I try to update that on something of a frequent basis. But I think evanalexander. com is an excellent starting point. The books, Proof of Heaven, Map of Heaven. And especially important is Living in a Mindful Universe. That's the real proof of heaven. That's the one that unites science and spirituality. That was co written with my partner, Karen Newell, who's also the co founder of Sacred Acoustics.

And we talk in there not only about the scientific revolution, but a lot of personal recommendations about meditation and about doing this journey yourself, so a lot of personal guidance is in Living in a Mindful Universe. Also highly recommended, sacredacoustics. com. That's Karen's website. She has on their page, I want to dot dot, and all the many things you might want to do with meditation are there.

And she has specific pathways of the different sacred acoustics audio files that might be useful, but you don't have to pay a penny. You can just either download that free 20 minute OM file, or you could download that whole mind bundle. Like I said earlier, it's a very discounted price now at 19, but she still has for those who are financially challenged as the pandemic leaves us behind, she still has that free option available for that whole mind bundle. So people can jump in full speed ahead.

The other website I'd recommend is inner sanctum center. com. That's I N E R. SanctumCenter.

com and that has a number of different possibilities that Karen and I have come up with that's really through Karen's wisdom to have that website there and especially I would recommend the interviews we did during the pandemic about a year and a half's worth of interviews every two weeks that we did with thought leaders around the world in consciousness studies, many of the scientific endorsers of our book we interviewed, other experiencers we

interviewed, and there's also a monthly session, Zoom session that we hold with a lot of people who like to follow us that's available through innersanctumcenter. com. We have a tremendous time on that monthly broadcast. I love it with people who are deeply into this line of work and they join us every month for that. And there's also a mental health practitioner course available at intersanctumcenter. com. That's a course that Karen and I taught with Dr. Anna Usom.

A very valuable practical course on bringing this into a mental health practice. So there are all these different options. And then of course the other ones that I mentioned the scientificandmedical. net and the galileocommission. org, especially important scientific resources.

When you face up to things like death or loss of a loved one to realize that we're eternal souls, which is essentially what this deeper scientific message is trying to tell us I think can be very comforting very reassuring and very affirming of what people seem to sense at a deeper level about our connection. No soul left behind. And it's all about that binding force of love.