Alex Ferrari 0:00
We have these little mini deaths of like shedding the old version of us.

Dr. Eben Alexander 0:04
This is about facing up to all the issues of life. That includes people who might be difficult. NDEs have the power to heal the world because our world is very sick. When you think how addicted our society is to materialism and to the the physical, this is what you find in near-death experiences. It's their transformational effects that are so shocking. The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will lead you towards atheism, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.

Alex Ferrari 0:29
Concept of that there is no past life, there is no future life, that all lives are happening simultaneously because there is no time on the other side.

Dr. Eben Alexander 0:41
Now here's what happens...

Alex Ferrari 0:53
I'd like to welcome back to the show returning champion, Dr. Eben Alexander. How you doing, Dr. Eben?

Dr. Eben Alexander 0:58
Well, Alex, it's great to be with you again today. I look forward to catching up.

Alex Ferrari 1:02
Yeah, absolutely, my friend. Absolutely. Well, you and I are both going to be keynote speakers at the IANDS Conference this year, and I'm looking forward to to being there and meeting you in person. So I was asking you about it before, and you just saying it's just a wonderful group of people, and I'm really looking forward to to meeting them all,

Dr. Eben Alexander 1:20
Well, it is a fantastic group, and it's a blend of you know a large number of experiencers. So these people have had the kind of personal experience that shows when we live in a much grander universe than the bleak and paltry fiction of materialism. But also, you've got the scientific researchers, and that's a very critical component of that group because you know these researchers have to be especially kind of skeptical and careful in their work, otherwise they get shot out of the sky by all the materialists and atheists who are trying to to prove materialism, which has pretty much already been rejected by science anyway. So we need a much bigger model of reality, and that's something that comes to the right to the front in that ions meeting, which would be in Bellevue, Washington. I guess it's the weekend before Labor Day weekend.

Alex Ferrari 2:10
Correct, correct, correct. So I'm I'm looking for I'm very looking forward to that and meeting you in person, my friend.

Dr. Eben Alexander 2:15
Well, that will be fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Alex Ferrari 2:18
Obviously, have a very well documented near death experience, and we're going to get into we on the other episode that we talked about, we went through it all, but we'll kind of go over the the highlights of your NDE there. But my first question to you is: Has anything is your understanding of what happened to you in that near-death experience changed since last time we spoke?

Dr. Eben Alexander 2:40
All that's happened is that, mainly with my work with other scientists involved in consciousness studies from all different directions, it's become clear and clear that the empirical data and the rational argument all points to a form of what I would call evolutionary panentheism is kind of the best philosophical model to really explain what's going on in pan-entheism is just the notion that there's that kind of God mind distributed into into all sentient beings, and there the brain is serving as a transceiver or a filter that allows a little eddy current. It dissociates an eddy current of that primordial mind that we use, but you can demonstrate that that little eddy current is not our private mental contents only, and that can be shown, for example, in identical twins. Guilion Playfair's book on on twin telepathy estimates that 35% of identical twins have a lot of mental overlap. That is, they have a kind of a telepathic connection and can be aware of things going on with the other twin, even at a distance. So we need to get used to the concept that this one mind is something that we're all sharing, and the the word evolutionary in there means that we do have free will. I would say that quantum indeterminacy is right at the heart of our free will, and that has a lot to do with kind of the neuroscience of neurons and how their neurons, you know, the brain cells that are involved in cognition, memory, thinking, all those things are basically quantum computers. They're dealing with quantum objects, ions, and neurotransmitters that do not behave by the rules of the big world, the macro world, but really are quantum particles, and that-that's the beginning of a deeper scientific understanding of this kind of top-down causality, the apparent unity of mind throughout this system, and yet the the separation that our minds seem to have-that's also part of the part of the package-and I think all of it's important in understanding that this is really an evolution of all consciousness that occurs through sentient beings coming to a deeper understanding of their own relationship with each other and with the universe at large. And this, of course, is where meditation and centering prayer become so useful because people can start witnessing their own kind of personal experiences that show them this grander universe. I use sacred acoustics, a form of binorbeep brainwave entrainment, for meditation an hour to a day. In fact, I just finished a short session a while ago, I always like to meditate before these kinds of discussions, just to kind of help me be more grounded in that primordial mind. But I would say that the scientific community is slowly waking up to this, and and it has to do with resolving some deep mysteries of quantum physics that have been with us for more than 100 years, so all of it is part of this package of awakening and increased understanding. But the good news is we're moving away from that bleak and paltry fiction of materialism that pretends that we're just meat robots with no free will because it's all chemical reactions and stuff in the brain following the rules of physics, chemistry, biology, but we realize that that is is not the case. That there's a much deeper sense of reality we acknowledge as mental or spiritual realm, and that's where I think we've made some real progress.

Alex Ferrari 6:12
Now, can you go over and kind of give us a a Reader's Digest version of your near death experience because it's pretty profound with the disease that happened in your brain and clinic, all the clinical proof of what happened to you is pretty remarkable. So, can you so quickly tell me how you died? No, quickly go over your NDE.

Dr. Eben Alexander 6:34
Yeah, I'll just hit the high point, so that'll leave time for some other discussion. I think the important thing to point out is that I had severe bacterial meningoencephalitis. That's the most important ingredient. Was this severe disease that afflicted the entire outer surface of my brain? That's the part that makes us human. Neuroscience would would postulate that all of the details of conscious awareness, everything we see, hear, you know, executive function in frontal lobes, projecting the future, recall of memories to inform kind of this evolving system of what's going to happen next. Sense of smell, of body orientation, every bit of that dissolve or depends on that outer layer, the neocortex, and meningitis is a perfect model for human death because it selectively destroys all of that calculator of the neocortex. In my case, was very severe. It's supported by a medical record review in the peer-reviewed medical literature, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September 2018. There's a report by Dr. Serby Khanna, Lauren Moore, and Bruce Greyson on my medical records, and they make it very clear that that brain was in no shape to be harboring any kind of dream or hallucination. That was the conclusion I had within a few months of my NDE as I studied my medical records and realized it was so shocking because how did I have this robust, profound, ultra real experience when all those parts of my brain that neuroscience says are necessary to make that happen were inactivated by the meningitis? And not only that, but in the backstory to that case report, you find that the peer-reviewed scientific editors challenged the the authors of that case report and said, "How do you explain this unprecedented, apparently miraculous recovery? They said it's because he had a near-death experience. They knew of similar cases of profound illness with a shocking, unexpected medical recovery that occurred in the setting of a deep NDE. So, with that background, another important feature to point out about my NDE that's a very atypical feature. I've never heard this as severely in anybody else's NDE, but it was necessary component of my NDE, and in terms of my buying into it and believing in the reality of it, and that was amnesia. I had no memories of Eben Alexander's life, no knowledge of Earth, humans, this universe. It was an empty slate, and only in the months and years after my coma did I realize why that was so important to actually convince me that the whole thing really happened. It just didn't happen in the material realm. So, in that setting and that backdrop, very quickly we'll go through the elements. It started in Earthworm's eye view, primitive course, unresponsive starting point, like being in dirty jello, kind of very murky. Luckily, that didn't last forever. I was rescued by a slowly spinning white light associated with a perfect musical melody, music ended up being a terribly important theme in my journey because it's basically how I could navigate these spiritual realms, these memories of musical cadence and rhythm and and melody and things like that. Now, in that first ascent. Through this spinning melody of light, of musical light, I ended up in the Gateway Valley. It's a realm of extreme richness and ultra reality. This is where we reunite with souls of departed loved ones, go through life reviews, plan next incarnations, dive back in. It had many Earth-like features, but in many ways, it was like Plato's world of ideals, but for the individual soul. So that's how come life reviews are so relevant there, because we would relive the events of our lives when, when possible, make amends, try and do it better in in our life review, so that we don't have to repeat all the issues facing us in this life and the next life, you find that a lot of the hardships and difficulties are there to serve as engines of growth, and it's best to work our way through them in this lifetime, and then have a whole new set of progressive, you know, improvement on our understanding of our relationship with the universe in the next lifetime, and not have to come back and repeat.

Dr. Eben Alexander 11:00
I mean, there's some people, for example, a hardcore narcissist sociopath who might make no progress at all in this life, and have to repeat everything in the next life, and they'd have to do it from kind of a different perspective, since the cards that were dealt in this lifetime didn't seem to work to help them move in that direction. Anyway, so in this Gateway Valley, I had no body awareness. I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were 1000s of beings down below dancing. I in the writings weeks later, I call them souls between lives. And I remember in all that festivity and joyous celebration, there were children playing, dogs jumping, incredible festivities, all being driven because up above were these swooping orbs, angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would thunder through my awareness. And the best part about it all was I wasn't alone on that butterfly wing. People who've heard my story before, or have read Proof of Heaven, or heard any of these 1000s of podcasts out there that I've given on this topic, will realize that you know I was in for this incredible journey, and and that led to the next stage. And the next stage was actually witnessing of a collapse of four dimensional space time, and also a collapse of that rich spiritual realm. And note very importantly that that spiritual realm is not locked into into Earth time. Like, and and there I would I would point out that Earth time is not part of our underlying reality, but Earth time is part of how the universe enables us to kind of experience things in a way that we can make sense of. Now, between lives in a NDE and a life review, and this has also been shown to happen in the hospice palliative care literature. So it's not just the NDE literature, but in palliative care terminal care, you find a lot of examples of people reuniting with souls of departed loved ones and beginning elements of a life review, even as they're there in that hospice setting, so very important thing to recognize. At any rate, I saw all of that collapsing down, and the angelic choirs that had been emanating these chants and anthems and hymns that were just thundering through my awareness and reminding me of the beautiful kind of spiritual home nature of this journey, well, all of that led to another collapse. And witnessing all that spiritual realm of eternal souls collapsing down, I entered what I call the core. The core was an infinite inky blackness filled to overflowing with that divine love of that God force. In fact, in the core realm is where I recognize that my very conscious awareness, as I believe it is for us all, is directly sourced in that God force. So we're never separate from it. We may fool ourselves into thinking that in this world, but as especially as we leave the body at the time of bodily death, that's where we come into direct contact with that infinite loving force at the core of the universe, and we realize that any judgment that is sensed in these life reviews doesn't come from that higher force, but that higher God force is simply this beautiful golden light of love, unconditional love, and against that light, any kind of our misdoings on our behalf, being greedy or selfish, handing out pain or suffering to other people, it looks especially bad in that light, and that's where that sense of quote judgment comes from. It's not coming from a higher being; it's really more from our higher soul and soul group in witnessing the way we behaved in this lifetime, and especially when you when you learn that scientific studies of life reviews reveal that about three quarters of life reviews stress that the review is from the perspective of many of the participants. That's why we often say the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated is written into the very fabric of the universe because of the structure of those life. Views and how, if you've hurt others, you feel that pain that you dished out by becoming them in the life review. And anyway, there's there's more we can say about all that later in discussion if you like.

Dr. Eben Alexander 15:11
At any rate, in this core realm where I had a complete resolution of all dualities, you know, in our world we have masculine, feminine, dark light, good, evil, etc. All these different specter of possibilities that are compressed into pure oneness and unconditional love in that spiritual realm, and that's what all of us go through between lives. And then, of course, there's the the process of program forgetting. Anyway, so just to shorten this, that's the kind of essence of my story, but I would cycle through these levels multiple times, always falling from that core realm, that sanctum sanctorum of the divine, all the way back down to that primitive starting place. But by remembering the musical notes of the melody, I could conjure up that light portal, go back up into the beautiful Gateway Valley, and the most important thing about all this that I haven't mentioned yet to this group is the that I wasn't alone on the butterfly wing. There was a beautiful young woman, sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, high forehead, broad smile. She never said a word to me. She never had to. But every time I passed through that gateway valley, she was there beside me on the butterfly wing, a constant spiritual companion, and her message to me delivered telepathically. She never had to say a word at all, and this message was given every time I passed through that level with her. Very reassuring. And the message, as I wrote it in words weeks later, you are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You are richly cared for, and I cannot tell you how reassuring that was in the moment. And it helped to remind me that this was a spiritual home that I remembered from past soul journeys. And I think that's one of the reasons why the book Proof of Heaven did so well. Is it struck a chord with 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s, of people that they reminded them of part of their journey that they'd been through that wasn't even available in their memory anymore, and so it reminded them of this deep kind of connection we all share-that loving force that greets us when we leave the physical body. So the last things I saw in my journey, one was being surrounded by 1000s of beings going off in the distance, and this occurred back down to that earthworm, my view realm, that where it all started in the first place. And this was when I finally came to realize, as I was told every time I entered the core, "You're not here to stay. You'll be going back. We'll teach you many things. And but now I tried to conjure up the musical notes of the melody that had allowed that light portal to lead me up into the Gateway Valley in the core, and it no longer worked. To say I was sad would be an understatement, but to I also knew I could trust that I would be taken care of. I've been reassured many a time in this near-death experience by both my guardian angel and by that infinitely loving God force at the core of the universe, that I would be taking care of. So I knew I could trust in that, and that's what ended up leading me back towards this world. The last thing I saw, six faces. They would bubble up out of the muck in that earth where my views say a few words that I couldn't understand because my amnesia was still very powerful, and then I then they drop back into the muck. Now I remember those faces as vividly and crisply today as if the whole thing happened yesterday morning, and yet I'm almost 18 years out from this NDE that happened back in 2008 when I was 54 years old. So tremendous amount of growth and understanding those 18 years, and I've used meditation to get to a deeper hold on it. But the essence of my exit point was those were faces of people physically present the last 24 to 48 hours of coma, meaning that the vast majority of the spiritual experience had to happen between days one and four or one in five, and we explain all the timings of that based on those faces and who they were and how they appeared to me in the books.

Dr. Eben Alexander 19:08
Not only proof of heaven, but also in much more follow-up detail in the book Living in a Mindful Universe, which came out in 2017. And that one I co-wrote with Karen Newell, with who is my wife and has been a partner in this work since 2011. At any rate, it was the last of those faces that really got my attention. And that final face was a 10-year-old boy, and I didn't see him with my eyes and hear him with my ears. I promise, I was far too gone from this world, and that is all well documented in those in that case report and my medical records, but it was my son Bond. Now I didn't recognize him at the time because of my amnesia, but all through this journey, because of my amnesia and that kind of presumed anonymity and no sense of responsibility to other souls, I thought that this whole thing can continue or it can. It doesn't matter, but now all of a sudden, in witnessing him, and and what I witnessed was him being at the bedside of my ICU bed. I'm on the ventilator. It's day seven of coma. The doctors have just held a conference for the family where they said I've gone from 10% to 2% chance of survival, no chance of recovery, and that's where Bond knew he had not been told the the real news here, and this was much worse than he had been told. So he came running down the hallway, pulled open my eyelids. One eye looking over there. One eye over there need the pupil working. Anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture of brainstem damage because this meningitis was really trying to take me out, and he was pleading with me, "Dad, you're going to be okay, Daddy. You're going to be okay. As if somehow that would make it so, and that's what I sensed was his pleading nature. I didn't understand the words, but there was another soul out there that needed me, and that's what drew me back to this world. And I started fighting the ventilator. They pulled out the breathing tube. That's when I said thank you, and but I was still in for about a 36 hour paranoid delusional ICU psychosis that was just beginning. So the interesting thing is those kind of psychotic nightmare dreams. I knew they were delusional as they were happening, and and all of the rich spiritual stuff that seemed way too real to be real. Those memories are as sharp today as if the whole thing happened yesterday. Whereas the memories of that 36 hour post coma ICU psychosis they vanished within a few weeks. So I'm glad I wrote everything down. It was very important to have those memories recorded within two months, I was back to normal, and all memories had returned even more complete than they had been before. That's something we discuss in that third book, *Living in a Mindful Universe* where we point out that memories are not even stored in the brain. It's one of the last nails in the coffin of materialist neuroscience, but neurosurgeons have suspected that for more than a century because we've never had a brain operation where brain resection resulted in any loss of long-term memories, so it does, and that includes cases of hemispherectomy in children, severe epileptic cases where you actually have to remove half the brain to relieve their epilepsy, and they don't have any loss of long-term memories either. So, in other words, there's a lot to be learned here that defies our assumptions of the conventional materialist neuroscience that lead us to a much richer understanding of the brain, mind, and the nature of consciousness.

Alex Ferrari 22:34
And and for people that don't know your background, you were a neuroscient, a neurosurgeon, surgeon, neurosurgeon from Harvard. You you graduated from

Dr. Eben Alexander 22:45
Harvard Medical School 15 years as an associate professor. So

Alex Ferrari 22:49
So you're not so you're not a woo woo guy when this happened to you. If anything, you didn't believe any of this.

Dr. Eben Alexander 22:54
No, I was I was a neuroscientific materialist. You know, in other words, I wanted to believe in spiritual stuff. My father was a renowned adoptive father. I need to point out was a renowned neurosurgeon, and he has strong belief in God. He was very scientific, and he had no question in his mind about the power of prayer and the reality of God. He had lived it through most of his life. Now, me growing up in the 60s and 70s, I always knew science was a pathway to truth. But like so many of us, I made the mistake of thinking Newtonian deterministic science was a pathway to truth, and it's not. Quantum physics is the much bigger pathway to truth, and quantum physics opens the door to a much richer understanding of the primacy of consciousness and the nature of reality in ways that make far more sense than the simplistic and false materialist view of brain creates consciousness. You know, we're looking more at the brain as a filter that allows this primordial unified consciousness to come into our awareness. So I just didn't realize there's a beautiful quote from Werner Heisenberg. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics. I think it was 1932. I could be off in the year there, but about that era. But he said, "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will lead you towards atheism, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you. He knew the implications of quantum physics were gigantic because what they told us about the nature of our conscious kind of spiritual reality and the physical world that we can measure around us, including our brains and bodies and and all of that. So it's just an extraordinary kind of awakening that comes with a deeper understanding of quantum physics, and there are a lot of quantum physicists who don't get the connection because they aren't aware enough about the issues in consciousness and in neuroscience that help us to realize that there's much more to this world than just the physical that's necessary to explain human experience.

Alex Ferrari 24:57
Is reality a simulation, or is. Or is it consciousness itself? Since we're talking about quantum physics,

Dr. Eben Alexander 25:03
Well, reality is consciousness itself. In fact, I would say no human being has ever experienced anything other than the inside of their own consciousness. Now there are clues there that that help us to extrapolate and kind of gather, you know, that other souls are out there; that they're also conscious, willful beings, etc. But the thing we discover is that free will is a tremendous principle operative here, and that is revealed especially through quantum indeterminacy. The fact that Werner's Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is active and alive at the neuronal level, and in fact, that decisions of fire, no fire by neurons, are not locally derived in a kind of a cartoon neuron Newtonian sense, but they're more of a top-down field effect of the quantum field influencing this much larger system. So it's not a simulation. This is the thing that's real: is is consciousness and our conscious awareness of things. And there are many ways that, in ways to look at it, such that you realize that the apparent kind of space and volume and energy and time of the world is something that, in many ways, is projected onto the physical world and depends more on our mental function. I know of the the great quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who was involved in the Manhattan Project. He taught. He was a head of physics at Princeton for many years, and he was definitely not woo. In fact, surprisingly, as much as he came up with the what's called the participatory anthropic principle, guiding deep physics, in other words, the anthropic word means in there that you don't have any of this emerging without the human mind participating, and that was a very important statement by Wheeler. He had this deep evidence of the mental as being something so special, and yet for some reason he attacked J.B. Rhine, who headed up the Rhine Center in Durham, North Carolina, associated with Duke in early days, and that was a very reputable center of parapsychological investigation. And yet John Wheeler had this thing of against parapsychology; he knew that the American Parapsychological Association was trying to join the AAAS, one of the biggest you know group formations of scientific thinkers on earth, and he wanted to prevent that because he didn't want this quote woo woo nonsense. But there he is, being the guy who understands physics enough to realize that you had to have an anthropic principle because you couldn't deny the role of the mind and the the human mind and his his view in this whole process. So at any rate, they you know quantum physicists have struggled with this, tried to make sense of it. We finally got to the point in 2022 when the Nobel Prize committee finally had the the guts and the the evidence to give out a prize for quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a complete refutation of the notions of local realism. That's what Einstein was trying to defend. You know that all physics is local, and realism is the notion that an objective physical world exists out there independently of the observing mind, and entanglement says that either both parts or at least one part of local realism are not true, and so that's where it gets much more exciting because that basically says that the four-dimensional space-time and its understanding of causality that's been the theater of operations for scientific investigation for centuries is no longer an adequate description. Again, there's something more required, and the more is the field of consciousness, that entanglement field, and that's what enables all the rich features of like life reviews, a reliving of events, not just a remembering, and from the perspective of multiple involved sentient minds, that's what's so powerful about life reviews to force on us a much richer ontology about the nature of reality. But it also shows us that the universe cares how we act and think and treat each other and ourselves.

Dr. Eben Alexander 30:41
That's why the life review is an opportunity to reflect on how things went in certain activities, and then to try and make amends so that in your next lifetime you don't have to worry about it. When I say next lifetime, people need to know what I'm referring to is the scientific evidence for reincarnation. Reincarnation and life reviews were crystal clear to me in the living tapestry vision I often describe in the core realm. I'd never considered reincarnation to be part of human reality before my coma. After my coma, I knew it was a deep part of it, but I didn't know how to explain it. I didn't realize that only 60 miles north of where I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, at the time, at the University of Virginia, ever since the late 1960s, they had studied more than 2,500 cases of past life reviews in children claiming past life memories, and more than 1,700 of those cases, the scientists from UVA had actually solved. That is, they found the person who lived before. So when I talk about reincarnation and life reviews, I'm talking about a scientifically validated reality that most of us don't remember because there's a process I call programmed forgetting, which means that by age six or seven, those memories from past lives and between lives are starting to fade, and that gives us buy into this life and buying into this identity, and also allows us to treat this life seriously, but you know there's no reason you can't treat it seriously when you realize that reincarnation is part of the package too. That we come back again and again in a process of refinement of growing towards that oneness with the divine over multiple lifetimes. So it's just a much bigger universe than I would have thought of before, and this is how to start connecting the dots and making sense of it, especially solving century and longer old mysteries like quantum physics, and coming to an understanding that starts to make sense through this evolutionary panentheism.

Alex Ferrari 32:39
I've heard this concept a lot, and it always makes my brain hurt. And I have some explanations of how to to present it as an idea, but I'd love to hear your your take on it. The concept of that there is no past life, there is no future life, that all lives are happening simultaneously because there is no time on the other side. To me, that's a for our linear time, you know, framework of this reality, that's very difficult for us to swallow. Very difficult for us to even comprehend. You have to kind of get into the quantum field or into the higher level of consciousness to understand the soul. There is no time on the other side, how would you explain? How would you explain this to somebody?

Dr. Eben Alexander 33:24
I'll explain it very simply, and that is, when we're alive in these bodies, we're sharing in a consensus reality that involves a sense of the passage of time, and what I would argue is that that is a way for us to try to make sense of our lives. Now, here's what happens, you know, when we when we're freed up from the shackles of our brain and body. And what I'm going to describe here are statistics from about 700 life reviews in the University of Virginia database, and these were reported by Dr. Bruce Greyson. He's a very skeptical psychiatrist who studied these things for more than 45 years, and he he wrote a paper in the Journal of Near Death Studies. It came out in the fall of 2021, and in that paper, he dissects out the statistics on these almost 700 life reviews for more than 1000 NDE cases in their database. Very importantly, 37% of of the life reviews in his report involve their entire life. Nothing was omitted. Every single event. Okay. Now you might wonder how does that happen during a 10 minute cardiac arrest? Well, the way it really happens and is not just kind of make believe, is that that realm is in a an eternal realm. So that when you're in that realm, birth, death, everything in between is simultaneously presented to you. All of the kind of interconnections and kind of causal relationships and reasons for things become much clearer when you have. That incredibly rich-it's called the spatialization of time, where you can actually examine across time as if you're looking across spatial dimensions. And in fact, in those reports, you find that people often find past life memories coming in too, and even potentials for future life. So, and that-that should give you a flavor of what's going on here. But it gets even more interesting because about half these people, 47% said that the events were relived as if still ongoing, not just remembered. That I cannot stress enough-that's what's really happening. So, in other words, it's natural for us to be in a timeless situation where birth to death and everything in between, and even past lives and potential for future lives, can be simultaneously presented to us. That's our natural state when our mental function is no longer limited and constrained by this tiny little brain and body system, which it's used to, but has now been liberated to this much higher level, and it is completely outside of Earth time. It's no longer constrained by that at all. So in that sense, you're starting to get this hint of an eternal now. But interestingly enough, it's an expanded now that can involve all these different events. But it also shows us that there are different temporal scales, and that I think is the important thing to get. Some of the best scientific work I've seen done on this is by Bernard Carr. He is a very renowned and respected British physicist. In fact, he was Stephen Hawking's last postdoc, so he was trained by one of the best. I think Stephen Hawking was a brilliant physicist, and Bernard Carr has done a lot of work in multi-dimensional analysis of the of this situation, where he uses not only higher spatial dimensions but higher temporal dimensions to also explain all these kind of spiritual phenomena. So they can be worked into a scientific system, and that's the work of people like Bernard Carr, but I want to get to what I think is the most important feature that was reported by Bruce Grayson in that report back in 2021, and that is that three quarters of people stress that the life review was from multiple perspectives. That is, if you're panning out pain and suffering to others, greedy, selfish to others in the life review, you become the others, so you see what that felt like. In other words, be careful who you mistreat, because in your life review, mistreating anybody comes back at you. It's a beautiful example of the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the very fabric of the universe.

Dr. Eben Alexander 37:42
So, to me, those these facts about scientific study of life reviews shows us something really deep and profound about the universe, where we have to blow our little materialist fiction just completely out of here because it's useless. We need a much bigger view of how we are spiritual beings in a spiritual universe because that's essentially what replacing the world idealism with panentheism is doing is showing that unification of that of that spiritual mental force, and that's where the whole physical universe emerges from. And this is why our beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes are so important. They actually guide the unfolding of reality.

Alex Ferrari 38:23
Now, Eben, I want to ask you something. This is something. This is a theory of mine in the near-death experience realm, and I'd love to hear what you think of it. There is a book that was written by one of the greatest authors in English literature, and that story that everyone watching and listening to this show knows the story because it has been made into multiple movies, multiple. It's been that's it's one of those stories that's been told a million times, and that story is the Christmas Carol, and I my theory is the Christmas Carol is a near death experience. It is a beautiful, beautifully archet. It's just right, and now you're thinking about it, right?

Dr. Eben Alexander 39:04
It is absolutely it

Alex Ferrari 39:05
I mean, before you see what you see, this Ebenezer Scrooge, he's horrible to people. This, all that. He needs. Then he has a he has a call from Marley, who shows him if he doesn't change his ways.

Dr. Eben Alexander 39:19
Right.

Alex Ferrari 39:19
This is the response to it, and then he literally dies, goes to see his past, has life reviews of his past, his present, and also shows him a life review, life not review, but of what the future potentials are. Be if he doesn't change, then he comes back a renewed person. Am I completely?

Dr. Eben Alexander 39:39
You're right on target. That's completely. In fact, I've I've heard this discussion in other quarters, other times, because people have recognized that you know he has a Ebenezer Scrooge goes through life reviews in a very profound and powerful fashion, and he ends up being much better. In fact. This brings up another important point, and that is, you know, the general estimate is that most of these experiences are positive, probably 90, 93% something like that, of NDEs, which is especially shocking when you think how addicted our society is to materialism and to the the physical, and yet 90% of us are willing to let it all go and move beautifully in that spiritual realm at the time of bodily death. Well, you know, I think that tells us something very big about the power of that journey and how it can make us better souls. It helps to make us better versions of who we came here to be, and that's where even the negative life reviews, and that's exactly what you're talking about in the Christmas Carol, because he had a very negative life review because of the way he had been, and it ends up making him a very positively impacted person, much more loving. And this is the story of NDEs. This is what you find in near-death experiences. It's their transformational effects that are so shocking-that's what got Bruce Greyson, the skeptical psychiatrist, so interested. He realized that the natural, organic effect, the benefit of an NDE, did far better to help heal patients than anything he could do as a psychiatrist, and that got his attention. And that that observation is borne out today. NDEs can be very healing, not only for the individual who has them. NDEs have the power to heal the world because our world is very sick from a dysfunctional kind of narcissistic, sociopathic focus on the self. This kind of egocentric behavior, rampant narcissism is a disease, and that's an ego disease. This is all about realizing we're not simply our little ego. I love how Michael Singer, in his book *The Untethered Soul* he calls that voice in your head your annoying roommate. Yeah, that voice in your head is not your soul. It's not your consciousness. It's a primitive program, but there is part of you that can rise much higher than the ego self, and that's what meditation is all about. That's what NDEs are all about, and and this is where I think we bring value to the world. And this is where SacredAcoustics.com, which is the company that my wife Karen Newell co-founded with Kevin Cossey back in 2012 or so, differential frequency brainwave entrainment is a very powerful way for people to get into deep transcendental states of conscious awareness and start to set their ego voice aside as they develop and cultivate the relationships of their higher soul with that primordial cosmic God mind through meditation and centering prayer. It's basically getting into a hypnagogic state, so kind of between awake and asleep, but doing some lucid dreaming there. But lucid dreaming that's not guided by an ego voice, but more by your higher soul and more open to the wisdom of the universe. This is where meditation can be so handy, and this is something we discuss in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, and also something that people can discover on a free online course at evanalexander.com. And that free course is a companion workbook that goes with Living in Mindful Universe. Again, totally free. It's called 33 Day Journey into the Heart of Consciousness. So if people go to evanalexander.com, you'll find that 33-day journey. Sign up with a first name and an email address. You're often running each day for 30 days a new message from us from the course. But more than 14,000 people have taken that course to date. They all leave their own comments, help each other, reflections, observations.

Dr. Eben Alexander 43:42
So it's become this giant community of you know 14,000 plus people who are there to help each other in the spiritual awakening. Plus, it that 33 day journey on evanalexander.com comes with four free sacred acoustics audio files to help you get started in differential frequency brainwave entrainment meditation, so you know lack of financial resources should be no restriction because this is totally free. This 33 day journey, and people can really start picking up on the scientific revolution and on a personal meditative revolution to help them get personal experience along these lines.

Alex Ferrari 44:24
Eben, have you seen the film The Odyssey yet?

Dr. Eben Alexander 44:27
I have.

Alex Ferrari 44:28
I I literally just watched it again. I haven't been to the movie again in in a long time, but I actually made a trip out and saw it again, yes, literally yesterday. And I find it really interesting the power of that film and what it's done to this to the zeitgeist of humanity right now, and it's pretty. I mean, obviously the filmmaker, and I won't get into the the filmmaking geeky stuff, but I'm asking you the question because that story is such a. I mean, it's obviously been around for 3000 years. It is it is timeless. There's so much in it. I love what Christopher Nolan did with Zeus's Law, which is very much is like the golden rule. It is, and if you don't do the Golden Rule, the entire civilization kind of crumbles, which is what is.

Dr. Eben Alexander 45:16
It's a little more of a threat than the Golden Rule, but nonetheless, it's saying the same thing. You know, be careful how you treat others, you know. And and the way we often put it, especially given this life review scientific evidence, is you know to hurt another is to hurt yourself. So don't hurt others. It's it's really that simple. I love how you point out Zeus's rule. You know, where basically they're saying you don't know if that might be a god. Well, I would say that the golden rule from life reviews, in many ways, is kind of a similar, maybe a slightly more friendly wording of that, showing the divine that's in all of us. So don't hurt, you know, the sacred divine fellow being that you're living with and that's out there in this world that you're interacting with, let's all get along and take care of each other. We find in life abuse and NDEs and Zeus's rule that we'd rather not hurt others,

Alex Ferrari 46:09
Right! Because there's the delusion that we're all separate and and we're all one. So you're hurting somebody else. You're actually hurting yourself. But what the the question I have for you regards the Odyssey and why I brought it up is, I realized in that story, which I read in high school and like most people have and things like that. But the way it was structured, that Odysseus has multiple deaths, many deaths throughout his journey, and that is exactly what happens to us. I mean, obviously, not everyone has a near-death experience, which is a massive resetting of most of the times resetting of our our lives. But we have these little mini deaths of like shedding the old version of us and moving forward. From your experience in your studies and in your experience of near-death experiences, What is the what is your take on that in our own life journeys that there are these multiple little deaths? Because obviously you're not the same person you were before your near death experience. Obviously you're not the same person you were in high school, or when you were in at an elementary school, or even when you were in your 20s or 30s. Every time there's always these little mini deaths, and even our biology is dying every day and being reborn every day with our cells and our organs being replaced and our skins and so forth. So it seems like a common theme in this reality. What is your take on this?

Dr. Eben Alexander 47:33
Well, I think we're all evolving. We're all contributing to the evolution of consciousness itself. I mean, to me, I refer to the mid 20th century book by Pierre Tillard de Chardin. That book is called "The Phenomenon of Man, and to me, it really was an eye opener. He was a French Jesuit priest, so he had some spiritual training. He was a paleontologist, so he he was a scientist who was used to working with billion-year timescales, and he realized that in that big discussion of Darwinian evolution back in the mid 20th century, yes, there was evolution going on, but he saw it as a far grander evolution-that it was really the evolution of all consciousness throughout the cosmos, and that we were all participating in that. And I believe his vision is very much on target, and so you're pointing out these kind of the situation in the Odyssey and Odysseus and what he went through just reminds me that one of the biggest lessons I learned from my NDE was to embrace the hardships. Hardships are gifts; they energize our growth. Now there's there are a lot of positive things that can that improve our lives too. But don't think that all the apparently darker negative things are bad. To me, the worst thing at all would be if you won the lottery the day you're born and you're you know just sitting there sipping champagne on your yacht your whole life, you've gone nowhere. You've done nothing. That's a loser situation. This is about facing up to all the issues of life. That includes people who might be difficult. In fact, my NDE showed me that before my coma, those who I might have seen as difficult or challenging to prevent me from getting what I wanted in life. After my coma, I saw many ways were near and dear soulmates. I love that kind of related phrase from Confucius. I'm paraphrasing here, but the ancient Chinese sage said, "When you encounter something objectionable in another, look inside yourself. And to me, it kind of reminds me that we're really sharing the dream of the one mind. These life reviews are a demonstration that we're we're here to kind of interact with each other and help in the learning and teaching and growth of consciousness itself-a deeper understanding. And so that's where the hardships are something I accept much more readily as as gifts. And not so much look at them as a negative, and I think that's a very important part of the lessons that come from NDEs. And I often use the phrase "all is well, and that phrase is that basically, when you can say that truthfully, you realize you've got a enough of a kind of a separation and a helicopter view of all this to realize it's all working in your favor. You know that the apparent negatives are really there to energize your positive growth. There are ways to put a spin on this to be very optimistic about it all, and that's what I think has been a gift of my NDE. So to me, it's especially important to kind of take everything that life gives us and realize that we're growing. And once you realize that the materialist model of well, it's birth to death and nothing more. When your brain and body die, that's end of your conscious awareness. Once you realize that that's tricksterism. It's not based in experience. It's based on weak, inadequate hypothetical models that are no longer applicable. That's where we start to expand our our view, and I know scientists have tried to do this many a time over the history of this human civilization. For example, Wilder Penfield, a renowned neurosurgeon who would study the the stimulating brain in awake patients more than just about anybody else.

Dr. Eben Alexander 51:23
Back in the 50s and 60s, he wrote a book in 1975, called *The Mystery of the Mind* He made it very clear that as a neuroscientist, he was very grateful to know that mind and kind of spiritual occurrences in human beings demanded far more than just the simple little brain and body to explain, and that he could gain great hope in in knowing from all of his scientific work that spirit and mind were something rising above all of the brain and body and and and that environment and the stuff that neuroscience studies, and he was relieved by all that. But sadly, people, you know, the scientific community didn't necessarily pay attention to his book. I would say our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, it came out in 2017, is a modern echo to Wilder Penfield's book, but it goes much further. It takes my NDE and then a lot of other information about knowledge in quantum physics, in neuroscience, and the hard problem of consciousness, philosophy of mind and the binding problem, the apparent unity of consciousness and individual, and of course, quantum physics is right at the core of it. And people are just beginning to understand that relationship, but it's all this top-down entanglement field effect that allows for things like those life reviews to be a reliving of events from multiple perspectives. That's the kind of deep science and philosophical position I'm talking about here.

Alex Ferrari 52:49
Now, I wanted to dive into psychedelics because that's another emerging field in science that they're using psychedelics, a ketamine, DMT, either synthetic psychedelics or you know peyote or stuff that the ancients have been using forever. I'm curious to to your your take on it. Is like something like ketamine opening the same door or a similar door that your like your coma did because it does simulate a ego death when you take some of these things.

Dr. Eben Alexander 53:24
Well, it not only simulates, but according to neuroimaging, it causes an ego death. That was one of the fascinating papers. I mean, to get right to the chase here, I'm I'm glad you brought this up. I think psychedelics are very relevant. Now, I want to go on record, make it clear as a bell that I believe that people who rely solely on meditation will make a lot more richer, deeper personal progress spiritually than people who are depending heavily on psychedelics. Now, that's not to say that psychedelic experience cannot greatly open one's mind to the possibilities, but the thing I do not believe is is so true is that repeated use of psychedelics gives you some enhanced spiritual insight. For one thing, yes, I agree with the point you just made. It's giving us a window of look into the very same spiritual territory. So psychedelics can uncover some interesting and powerful personal spiritual connection to the universe kinds of observations, but important to point out that in this field of study, especially using functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, which are very great techniques for looking at every neuron in the brain for getting a very good look at what's going on with the nerve cells in the brain and the neural node networks. What you find, surprisingly enough, and this first came out in a paper 2012 by Robin Carhart-Harris, Imperial College London. They looked at psilocybin and found. That patients, people under the influence of psilocybin, that their default mode network, which is thought to be the ego, the visualization of the ego network by these imaging techniques, it dissolves under the influence of psilocybin. In fact, in that first paper, they had used a visual analog scale to assess the depth and transcendental nature of a spiritual experience, and the deeper and more powerfully experience, the more the default mode network disappeared, and and everything else. In fact, you found no neuronal population where the activity was increasing. And anybody who's ever taken psilocybin, LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, those things would think their brains lighting up like a Christmas tree, but it's not because the brain is not doing what they're witnessing. That's occurring more at kind of a spiritual level. Now, another and those papers have been replicated multiple times since then. Other laboratories around the world all showing the same thing that these serotonin two A type psychedelics cause a decrease in activity in the brain. The brain is really, truly getting out of the way. It's not doing what you're witnessing there. Now, the other important point I'd like to make about about psychedelics: there was a set of pilot studies done by Roland Griffiths. He was at Johns Hopkins University. He did a lot of this pioneering work. He's one of those people responsible for getting psychedelics legal again for research purposes, and I'm grateful to him for that. He passed from this world a few years ago, but this pilot, these pilot studies were very important. He basically was treating a group of alcoholics, addicts, etc. and he was also treating terminal cancer patients with a debilitating fear of death. Those are both big ego issues. Ego, fear of death. Ego is always involved in addictions. What what leads us to such kind of self harming behaviors? Because the ego would rather see itself survive than its host survived, so sometimes psychologists would even do a ritual sacrifice of the ego to rescue people from addiction. But in Roland Griffith's studies, one dose of psilocybin, and a year later, 80% of patients in both the addiction and in the fear of death categories, 80% still had a great beneficial relief from their addiction or their fear of death, even after just that one dose a year earlier. My point is that it's just serving as a catalyst. You don't have to keep taking that substance, and in fact, I think that meditation would offer a superior overall result over time. Now, the one other thing I will confess to is when I came went public with my story about my near death experience. Sam Harris, who is you know a podcaster who claims to have knowledge of neuroscience and training in neuroscience, and I think he probably has some very good training there, but he attacked me. He said basically my story sounded just like a DMT trip, and he dismissed it.

Dr. Eben Alexander 58:09
And I think that's that's really wrong for materialists to dismiss, you know, these extraordinary spiritual journeys by saying, "Oh, just a DMT dump. Next question is very diminishing of the reality and the spiritual power and the transformative power that these experiences have, not just for me who's been through it, but for other people who learn of that story. But he accused me of having a DMT trip, so there was only one way to answer that, and that was I participated in a dose Escalation study with five methoxy DMT. That's the most powerful psychedelic substance out there. It was an absolutely mind-bending experience. You talk about leaving this universe. I was witness to incredible kind of connections of space, time, mass, energy that I won't go into, but ultimately my conclusion in terms of comparing it to my NDE is it's like looking at the same territory, but with a psychedelic substance. You're restricted to a tiny little keyhole, and it's very dark on the other side. You can barely make anything out. That's compared to my organic, spontaneous near-death experience panoramic view from the penthouse suite of that spiritual realm. So, in other words, and I think meditation gets you a lot closer to that quality and level of experience than than the psychedelics. Also, point out that scientific study of people under the influence of these psychedelics and deep meditators who are experienced meditators shows the same dissolution of the default mode network in their brains when analyzed using these very advanced scientific techniques. So meditation, the psychedelics-they're all just trying to help you to suppress and damp down your ego. Voice and start to acknowledge and recognize your higher soul and its interconnection with that cosmic mind, and that's what we can do so effectively through meditation. And people can go to sacredacoustics.com to learn a lot more about that form of meditation. Get some free downloads. There's a pilot study that proved its utility against anxiety. If you'd like to discuss that at all, that was done and published back in 2020 in February by Dr. Anna Yusum. But it showed a 26 percent reduction in anxiety over two weeks versus only 7% reduction in the control group that got standard talk psychotherapy, so binaural beat brainwave entrainment, especially sacred acoustics in their whole mind bundle, has been proven in that pilot study to be a very effective treatment of anxiety. And I promise you, there's a lot more going on there than just relief of anxiety, especially for people who are bereaved or have a terminal diagnosis or similar kind of mortal mortal challenges to their being.

Alex Ferrari 1:01:04
Eben, would you agree that taking psychedelics? I've never I've never partaken in that or any sort of drugs in this lifetime, at least. But what I find and what I've heard and what I find in my own research is that not everyone is ready mentally or psychologically to take a psychedelic because it it it shatters your your framework of reality and it can be it can be dangerous it can be dangerous in a sense that they just can't handle it and I had a guru on the show years ago when I asked them about psychedelics, and he's a master-I mean, master guru from India-and he and he said something so beautiful. He's like, "Well, taking psychedelics is like taking a sledgehammer to the wall to see on the other side of the wall. When you meditate, you install a window, and it's very one's very rough, very brutal, very destructive, potentially, and another one is more controlled, more clear. Everything's a little bit better.

Dr. Eben Alexander 1:02:14
It's more natural, more organic,

Alex Ferrari 1:02:16
More natural, right? Do you agree with that? And and what is your take on that?

Dr. Eben Alexander 1:02:20
I think that's a very beautiful statement, and that that says a lot. And you know, as you pointed out, if people have some mental or spiritual instability, psychedelics can really tip you over, and that and that they they can be very counterproductive, and that's why I would I would use great caution in that kind of circumstance. And for some people, they might be a necessary catalyst to help them kind of see a richer version of themselves that they can then develop more fully through meditation. But ultimately, I think the psychedelics. I'm so glad they're back in the sphere of discussion, because of the scientific evidence they can give us about the nature of consciousness, and also help us in this elaboration that the brain is not ultimately creating consciousness. That's a myth. That's a materialist myth that is untrue, and especially when you recognize that extensive literature on past life memories and children and reincarnation, you realize we need a much bigger model to even begin to discuss, you know, the nature of reality and the brain mind connection and the nature of spiritual experience and all that stuff. But meditation, I found, is a tremendous way to kind of become more at one with yourself, with your higher soul, and with that cosmic mind, and start living that life. That when you do have your life review, you will just sail through it with pure accolades and move on to all the issues of the next life.

Alex Ferrari 1:03:52
Beautifully said, Eben. What is one thing you want people to believe above all else? From not only this conversation, but from your work in in life.

Dr. Eben Alexander 1:04:03
Well, probably just I would say it's the big message from the near death experience community, and this is something that's been known or sung about or poems written about for for 1000s of years. Love, love, compassion, kindness have a tremendous role in healing this world and taking us back into wholeness, empathy, connection, taking care of the least, the last, the lost, denying the ego's you know rages about all this, and simply admitting that we're human beings. We're here to help each other and support each other, and this also applies to the world at large. We're here to acknowledge the spiritual nature of animals too, and that's a that's a huge part of this kind of awakening is realizing that there's nothing big and special about humans spiritually that separates them from animals, except maybe to say that we have. Linguistic brain, a a little rational, logical engine in there that can start questioning everything, and you know our our world has become dominated by left thinking, left hemisphere kind of logical, rational reasoning, as if that's the only way to approach life. But I love how in her book, my stroke of insight. Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a hemorrhage in Wernicke's area, that's in the speech area of the left temporal lobe, and it was very precise hemorrhage. But by getting rid of her kind of linguistic structuring of observations of the world at large, she was more right brain dominant, which meant open to the wholeness and healing and oneness and love that connected everything, and in meditation you can do that. You can help to kind of put that kind of ego voice and that left brainy thing into timeout, not to let the right brain dominate, but to let your higher soul dominate, and that's a whole different thing. And I, you know, when I found that these studies were showing that the psychedelics revealed the neocortex basically going dark, that no part of it was participating in these extraordinary visions, I knew exactly what they were talking about because I knew what it felt like to have meningitis take out your entire neocortex, not just Wernicke's area, but everything, and it's a far more profound sense of oneness, love, and connection with the universe at large, and that's what all of us go through when we're, you know, when our lease is up and we're kind of leave the physical body and brain once and for all. We're liberated to that much higher level, and that's something we can all start to anticipate and and predict and and and mimic and duplicate through meditative experience. This is why regular daily meditation to me is absolutely critical in kind of living this life and learning more about who we are, where this is all headed, and helping the world the most.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:58
Eben, where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world?

Dr. Eben Alexander 1:07:02
Well, ebenalexander.com. That's e-b-en alexander.com is a great resource. I highly recommend a recommended reading list. That's there. It has a lot of hot links to scientific papers. It's categorized and very useful to help people get into the deep aspects of all this. Also, an FAQ page, especially important if people are trying to sort out what has been said in the literature about me. And there's one article in particular that was a takedown piece, and the good news is that's been heavily refuted, and most people, I think, are not no longer paying attention to it because it was basically just an obvious hatchet job, and this is really about taking people to a much higher level of understanding. So ebenalexander.com. There are also links to many interviews and podcasts in there. In addition, I would go recommend innersanctumcenter.com. I n n e r sanctumcenter.com website. Karen Newell, my wife and I put together. It was really her brilliance, but part of that website intersanctumcenter.com is 50 plus interviews we did during the COVID pandemic with thought leaders around the world on consciousness and other experiencers. It is very illuminating. All that's available for free at intersanctumcenter.com. In addition, there's a mental health practitioner course we did with Dr. Anna Yusim on InterSanctumCenter.com. That one does come with a professional fee, but it's an excellent course on basically spiritual psychiatry. And Karen and and I were joined by a real expert, and that is Anna Yusim, psychiatrist in New York City. She's the one who wrote that pilot study in January of 2020 in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases about the whole mind bundle from Sacred Acoustics and how it gave a 26% reduction in anxiety over over two weeks of listening. So those are really the main resources I would recommend. SacredAcoustics.com is a beautiful resource for meditative wisdom. At any rate, but also tremendous tools, a great app that works on phones to help bring all this with you wherever you go. So I think those are good resources, and of course, Living in a Mind for Universe, our third book, goes beyond proof of heaven and map of heaven. In fact, we just had lunch a few days ago with somebody who read all three in order recently, and said that was a far more powerful experience than doing them piecemeal. Anyway, the books are quite valuable, and of course, that 33 day journey@ebenalexander.com.

Alex Ferrari 1:09:38
Eben, it has been a pleasure having you back on the show, my friend. I look forward to seeing you at the Ions Conference this year, and thank you for everything you're doing to help awaken the planet, my friend. So I appreciate.

Dr. Eben Alexander 1:09:49
All right, Alex, thanks for having me on. Great talking with you as always, and I look forward to seeing you at IANDS in Bellevue, Washington.