Arthur: [00:00:00] Welcome listeners to today's episode of Pitching Passion. It's such a privilege to have with us today Dr. Eben after Oprah interviewed you, she referred to the conversation as having interviewed a man who has met with God, what a unique experience you've had.
But just to give the listeners a bit of a introduction you're an American neurosurgeon and author, and in 2008 went into seven-day coma whilst being treated for meningitis. And your book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, describes your near-death experience whilst in a coma, and has sold over 2 million copies. You've so well described- being in this near-death experience, touching in you describe it as three phases. The earthworm's eye view, the gateway valley, and the core. But in hearing about you talk about your experience what sort of comes from this is you getting a sense of peace and excitement and a sense of what life's about, how [00:01:00] things are connected, and almost like a sense of calm. - how do you think your experience can serve humanity
Eben: I think first of all, I'd like to point out that Oprah was wrong. Millions of people have had these experiences who are alive today. Something like 90% of people who have had near-death experiences come back to this world not just believing in and having faith in, but knowing through personal experience the reality of this God force of love and kindness and compassion at the core of the universe.
So I'm not a, a isolated case. I'm like one of millions of humans alive today who has gone through this, and it's a tremendous gift. You come away from it not fearing death because you realize in many ways that our souls are eternal. And this is all something that's very supported by the science.
That's one thing that people seem to get wrong, they think you're either kind of spiritual, religious, or you're scientific, but you can't be [00:02:00] both. And in fact, I would say the only way to be more completely human in the modern era is to be both, to be fully aware of the science and fully aware of the spiritual potential and reports and stories and events that people explain.
And it's all very comforting because, our dominant conventional worldview is one of materialism or physicalism, the notion that only the physical world exists, although that view is rapidly being discarded by science as completely inadequate. But that view is the one I grew up in and so many of us in our modern culture grew up in.
And what we don't realize is that when you study all these cases of humans that seem to violate that that is near-death experiences, shared death experiences, which are just like near-death, but happen in perfectly healthy people, after-death communications, which happen in more than half of our modern population to a degree to suggest the reality of, eternity of soul.
And then you've [00:03:00] got this incredible category of, for example, past life memories in children suggestive of reincarnation. For example, the, the group at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies has looked at more than twenty-five hundred such cases of past life memories in children suggesting reincarnation.
And of those cases, more than seventeen hundred they've solved. That is, they actually found the person lived before that the child is describing. But they also point out that you must harvest these memories before age five or six because they're covered over by natural processes. So even the children who have been most heavily interviewed and written about by age nine or ten, they're often forgetting the past life and between life memories.
So you really have to harvest them early, and it's another reason why most of us, when we hear about this concept of reincarnation, say, "No, I don't remember any past lives." But they can be uncovered through hypnotic regression, through a near-death experience, through meditation, centering prayer. [00:04:00] These are all ways to get at the deeper aspect of who we are.
And so this is just science waking up to the reality of human experience. And instead of doing what we did in the most of the twentieth century, early twenty-first century, where a materialist scientist would say, "Oh, near-death experiences are nonsense. They're imagination. They're hallucination. They have nothing to do with reality."
We now know that's completely false. And for those who want more of the scientific proof of the reality of the afterlife, I would steer you to bigelowinstitute.org. And at that website, you'll find twenty-nine essays all written by scientists with at least five years of experience in investigating the afterlife question.
And those twenty-nine essays will convince you beyond any reasonable doubt that the afterlife is a very real prospect, very heavily supported by the evidence and as is reincarnation. So we just need to understand that human existence is a far grander situation than materialist [00:05:00] scientists have so far led us to believe.
the reality of that God force is really right at the core of it all.
Arthur: So let's just ju- like jump in here, right? 'Cause, w- most people w- listeners, I don't know what they're doing now. Maybe they're in bed, maybe they're driving a car. But, we've all got our challenges, our pursuits, the things we're trying to figure out, endless things.
And here I am talking to a man who you've been into this realm. How, do you want people to feel and understand who've not been to where you've been and , haven't had that experience? What are you, jumping at the bit to be like, "Hey, guys, don't worry, this is true or this is true"?
Eben: Yeah I think the big message that comes from the near-death experience community, and this is a community that stretches across all religions, across all continents, across all millennia. It's not at all limited by religions at all. In fact, you don't have to have any kind of religious conversation at all on this topic, not [00:06:00] even the tiniest bit.
Everything I'm saying is based on modern human experience and human reports and scientific investigations of the natural world that show that materialism is false. It's really good news because this means we are all truly in this together.
We're here to help each other. The binding force of love can lead to tremendous healing and wholeness. When we make all the choices and actions in our life from a position of love, compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance, when necessary, forgiveness life tends to straighten out and move forward in a very beautiful way.
And this is about sharing with all of our fellow human beings. So the revolution in science that I'm talking about is a revolution in human thought that can liberate us from the dire, horrible, bleak, and paltry fiction of materialist science that tries to pretend that we're physical bodies without free will just chemical reactions, and that it's birth to death and nothing more.
Arthur: Let's [00:07:00] say you meet someone, they're really going through a crisis. They've just lost their job. They've got, a family to support and provide, they're really struggling to see answers. Based on what you've experienced what are the things, the messages that you would share for those that, that, fear does cover elements of their life?
Eben: I would say the a key thing to acknowledge here is the ego is a giant part of the problem, and the more you recognize how much your ego is active as opposed to your kind of higher soul and greater sense of higher good the better off you are. So I would be recommending in the situation you're talking about, someone who's facing big loss, a job loss or terminal diagnosis, a child who commits suicide, all these big challenges that can come at us as human beings is start developing a mode of centering prayer and meditation, of going within.
Because the more we explore within mind, the more we realize we're not [00:08:00] limited to just our own little individual human mind, but that we're really sharing the mind of the universe, and that's something that all of our fellow beings are also sharing. So we're united through this kind of mental layer of the universe,
Arthur: It's so beautiful the way... for listeners I really suggest they check out your, full story and the lectures you've done and how you touch on so many wonderful forms of connection. But I just wanna touch on this, so the meditation and the prayer because these are, used by some people and not by others.
I personally I've been meditating and transcendental meditation for the last year and a half, and it's quite weird in the way that it does connect you to certain things. But let's strip into the whole meditation thing. How does it link to getting people connected to themselves, the universe, and out of their like, crazy, their mind that is telling them things that aren't serving them?
Eben: Remember that the, our modern model is that the brain creates consciousness. That's materialism or [00:09:00] physicalism. The, the brain is creating this isolated consciousness, and when you start investigating it, you find that's not true. Our mind is not simply our own little isolated consciousness.
For example, Guy Lyon Playfair wrote a beautiful book called Twin Telepathy. This is based on his scientific research of identical twins and, or specifically The identical twins where he finds about a 35% incidence of very powerful telepathic experiences. So one twin can touch a hot stove, the other twin can be 300 miles away, and yet they feel pain and develop a blister on their finger.
So this kind of connection between twins is quite remarkable. Now, twins share the same-- Identical twins share the same genetics, basically, and also that gives them very similar kind of patterns of a nervous system. And so their communication across distance with the brain just serving as a [00:10:00]transceiver for that quantum field makes sense.
But it's not just twins who have these experiences. For example in my own story, I was adopted. Anybody who's read Proof of Heaven or heard me talk will know all about that gigantic impact of my adoption on my life journey. But my-- I didn't meet my birth mother again, after we were separated when I was eleven days old.
I didn't meet her again till I was fifty-four years old and that was a year before my coma. And we spent a lot of time back and forth to getting together with family, relatives, friends, beach weekends, all this fun stuff. But then there'd been about three months where we hadn't talked at all from July to November of of 2008.
And that morning, December 10th or November 10th of 2008, my birth mother returned home from a business meeting and realized something was badly wrong. She had to call the family. Something was wrong with me. She sensed that through our connection, as a mother and child, even though we'd spent fifty-four years of our life apart, she still had [00:11:00] that strong sense, and she was right.
She called my family and found out that morning I'd gone into coma, and I was now on a ventilator in deep coma with meningitis and might not survive the week. That's, that's a telepathic connection. It shows you our minds tele- telepathy, intuition, empathy, these are all things that are real qualities.
And so you have to be careful of your beliefs. Your beliefs can be very falsely limiting. And so examine them to, to the nth degree. And the best thing is when people start meditating centering prayer, different modes of going within mind, they quickly discover that their mind is much grander than, than would ever be something generated right here by this three-and-a-half-pound gelatinous mass floating in a warm, dark My ears.
There's far more going on to mind, and this is why meditation and centering prayer are so powerful. And a lot of where the science goes on this is how you can use [00:12:00] mind to influence your emerging reality. And I would say that there's no such thing as physical, mental, and emotional health or healing without spiritual health.
And when I use the word spiritual, it doesn't have to have anything to do with religion at all, even though religions can support spiritual growth and efforts. But the reality is just based on what people go through in the modern era, without any reference to religious concepts or ideologies you can get to the point that we get to in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe.
That's our third book. Yeah, Proof of Heaven, Map of Heaven, but then finally, Living in a Mindful Universe. It was co-written with my wife, Karen Newell, , and that book is all about unification of science and spirituality in a very powerful form. We talk about the emerging model of what's known as evolutionary panentheism, which is the best philosophical description of what we think is operative here in terms of the brain-mind connection.
And you start realizing that science [00:13:00] fully supports the reality not only of the afterlife, but of reincarnation. Quantum physics is what really blows the doors open because it demands that we have a much richer understanding of the nature of conscious experience and the difference between consciousness and the mental or spiritual realm, and the physical realm, which is, this realm in which we find our bodies.
But I would go so far as to say even something like time flow is not inherent in the underlying reality. Time flow is something our consciousness uses to help us make sense of this much bigger world. But time flow itself is not part of the underlying reality
Arthur: let's jump into meditation. When you're meditating, can you just share the sense of what it gives you, what you connect to?
Eben: The best thing to do is take you back into my beginnings of meditation. Now, I used meditation back in college oddly enough. I was on the sport parachuting team. We used to do free fall formations, jumping out of airplanes. And [00:14:00] we would practice in our mind using something called Silva Mind Control, and that was very effective and we had one of the best college jump teams on earth.
We had a 10-man star group in our university, which was unheard of back then. But I left it all behind after I went to medical school. I don't know why, but I thought the meditation was great for, for skydiving formations, but I didn't really see the value of it for everything else. For learning, for spiritual growth, et cetera.
But it was after my coma, and it was literally about two years after my coma, after having read hundreds of books of quantum physics, meditation, Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, et cetera, and I finally realized, if you really wanna understand what you went through in your coma experience, you need to develop a regular practice of meditation, of going within mind.
And that's around the time that I discovered a technique called binaural beats, and binaural beats were first discovered by a Prussian physicist back in the 1800s. He found that if you put a [00:15:00] pure tone in one ear, let's say 100 hertz, 100 cycles per second in one ear, and a slightly different tone in the other ear, let's say 104 hertz in this ear.
So 100 and 104. That gives you a four hertz signal difference between the two, and that's what you perceive in your brainstem, is a wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa, this kinda powerful wavering sensation when you listen to Sacred Acoustics binaural beats. And people can do this. Go to sacredacoustics.com, explore that website.
There's a lot more information there, plus an app that you can use, et cetera, to download these binaural beats. The reason I was excited about it all was in this article in Scientific American by Gerald Oster called Auditory Beats in the Brain in October of 1974. He talks about how the anatomy and physiology of the brainstem allow these differential frequencies to cause this powerful oscillation.
Now, there's a, a general principle in hypnosis, for example, where if you use a pendulum and you have eye [00:16:00] movements following the pendulum, that, for some people, can put you into a hypnotic state a transcendental state of conscious awareness. And so at any rate what these binaural beats are doing is simply taking that whole left-right oscillation in the brainstem down to an even more powerful level, more primitive, because the eye movements happen in the midbrain, and those are circuits that are more recently evolved.
When we go way down the lower brainstem to the superior olivary nucleus, and that's where sacred acoustics and other binaural beats have their effect that's really the most primitive part of the brainstem. Those circuits arose more than three hundred million years ago. And every sound or chant or anthem you may have ever heard that induced some kind of a spiritual state in you was really processed up in the acoustic cortex of the temporal lobes and circuits that have really been around and evolving for the last one to two million years only.
That's very different from the three hundred million-year-old circuit down in the [00:17:00] lower brainstem
Arthur: So when you're doing this form of meditation, what does it give you? Where do you go? Why do you do it?
Eben: It gets me into a hypnagogic space. So first of all, again, reminding people, the voice in your head is not your consciousness. It's not your soul. The voice in your head is basically an ego program for most of us. And it runs to protect and nourish and cultivate things that are good for the body.
But it has it's very dangerous when it comes to kinda spiritual growth and finding out who you really are. In fact, I would say that every addiction, and that's not just alcoholism and drug addiction, but every addiction we have, people can be addicted to work, to sex, to love, to workouts, whatever.
But addictions are basically an ego program gone berserk and making very unrealistic demands on its owner. So in meditation, the very first thing I do is my little ego voice in my head can ask a question, make a statement or an observation, but then it goes into timeout. And I've learned to [00:18:00] ride those tones, that as- oscillating sound in the sacred acoustics audio files following my breath, riding the tones, and before I know it, I'm way into that hypnagogic space between awake and asleep.
So it's very much like lucid dreaming, but what you find, it's very easy to displace the thoughts and consciousness out of the way Because they're not ultimately who you are. There's much more to be discovered within you about your relationships to the universe at large that can be done through this kind of meditative practice.
And again it becomes a form of lucid dreaming where that whatever thought I put in with my initial kind of ego voice stating a request or making an observation, often I'm simply asking about something that was observed in my most recent meditation. Could've been just yesterday or even earlier in this day.
I might ask why was that? What did that mean? But then I've learned to follow the tones, follow my breathing, get into this hypnagogic space between awake and asleep where my [00:19:00] little ego mind is no longer there saying, "You're doing this all wrong. Forget about this meditation nonsense."
That ego voice is not your friend. And so letting it go into timeout and then developing this richer relationship by expanding on my kind of hypnagogic space and my dream space and mental space allows me to really get out and examine my influence on the world. It's a way of discerning information.
Some people can have visitations from departed loved ones spirit guides. You can have information related to health. People often get advice, in this kind of deep hypnagogic space that they need to see a doctor because they have a breast mass or this, that, or the other.
They're kind of health revelations that can come from this kind of a deep dive. But it's really just a form of self-exploration and once you realize that we're all sharing the mind of the universe, then exploring the mind of the universe seems to gain a lot more value for what it offers [00:20:00] of us in terms of our relationships with others, where our lives are headed.
The apparent challenges and difficulties we might have in the moment might start coming to some kind of fruition, some kind of solution through this hypnagogic space and this opening ourselves to the wisdom of the universe. In fact, I'm convinced that some of the greatest composers mathematicians, scientists have gotten their best stuff from this kind of hypnagogic space of being between awake and asleep.
I know Albert Einstein used to drift around in a sailboat looking, gazing up at the sky, and he'd be just daydreaming in these episodes. Sometimes the harbor police had to pull him back in. But he that's where he'd get his very best stuff. Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous, author and poet musician would use a a technique that was similar to one used by Thomas Edison, one of the biggest inventors in history, and he was one of the founders of General Electric, and Edison invented a lot of things.
But [00:21:00] what he would do is when he was looking for creative solutions and he was very sleepy, he'd hold some weights in his hands. As the weights would drop, it would wake him up. He'd have another micro nap, and then they'd wake him up again. After two or three of these micro naps, all of a sudden he had the solution, so he'd go to work.
Salvador Dali had a similar episode, a similar technique as to Stevenson in terms of uncovering, you know, kind of visual stimulus that he could use in his paintings. This hypnagogic space, it's kind of a space of creativity that the universe gives us for free, and we can learn to explore that through meditation and centering prayer, and that's also where we start to get tremendous benefits to help us, say, with the loss of a loved one.
Because often the souls of departed loved ones can be easily identified in these deep hypnagogic, meditative centering prayer kinds of efforts by human beings trying to get a deeper understanding of what they're doing here and how to improve their own life. Healing as I said [00:22:00] earlier, I think spiritual healing is ultimately the source of any other healing and wholeness
Arthur: let's say you've got a worry, you're worried about something and, you can't control it. Maybe it's someone you know is unwell or it's related to something that you're trying to do and it's difficult. There, there's fear there. With your exposure to prayer and, your connection with the universe, et cetera, how do you tap into getting answers
Eben: It's really learning to ride those tones. As I said, listening to the audio tones, and it's important. If you go to sacredacoustics.com, there's several free files you can access to try it out. But listen through headphones or earbuds because these tones are far more powerful when you're actually splitting the signal between the ears and not just relying on speakers.
But a pure separation of the tones gives a lot of power to that oscillation. And I've just learned to ride those tones. If I have any trouble separating from the anxieties of the moment, preoccupied [00:23:00]with kind of thoughts about things I might have to do today or what have you, I have two very simple techniques I recommend to people to get out of that state of here, now and sense of self.
One of them is there's a beautiful video on YouTube called Powers of Ten. It's a picnic blanket and a couple having a picnic, and then the field of view of the camera expands or shrinks by a factor of 10 every 10 seconds. And when it shrinks every 10 seconds, within about two minutes you're outside of the Milky Way.
And another 10 or 20 seconds and you're getting into a sizable portion of the entire local collection of galaxies, et cetera. So that's one way to separate from the sense of here and now at least the here part. In terms of the now part, I'll often just go back into an early childhood memory.
So when I'm just beginning my meditation, I make a request, state an intention, ask a question, but then I'll go right into this early childhood memory. And I'll go back as [00:24:00] early as I can, three or four years old, and I'll try and pull up a memory, and then I'll try and chase that to other linked memories.
And before you know it, I am gone from this world, the sense of here, now, and sense of self, and in that much broader world. So just some very simple mechanisms to help you separate from here, now, and sense of self and start getting out into that much broader sense of a connected mind, the primordial cosmic mind of the universe that's really the source of all of our minds.
And that's what we all contribute to in this evolutionary panentheism by using our free will. And the free will is evidenced by quantum indeterminacy. But the free will is an absolutely real part of this. We don't need to be fishing for, infinite parallel universes or something like that.
This is all about consciousness selecting this pathway forward, and that we have the power to make that happen. So we can do that the more we meditate, go into centering prayer. I try to do it an hour or two a day if I have that [00:25:00] much time. Sometimes I don't. But I find the meditation is very important
Arthur: Centering prayer. What does it give people? How do you do it?
Eben: For me, I whenever I do meditation using binaural beats from Sacred Acoustics, I'm invoking a form of centering prayer. And centering prayer is basically Thomas Keaton and Merton and others have popularized this, but it's a, a form of kind of thy will not mine be done. It's a form of going into mind completely accepting that all is well.
And that, those were the first words I spoke about 30 minutes after waking up from coma. And my youngest sister said it was the most bizarre thing after a whole week in deep coma where they were worried I was gonna die. Within 30 minutes of waking up, I'm sitting on the bed looking at everybody surrounding me, doctor, nurse, family, friend, and reassuring them all is well.
Nothing to fear. And that is basically the attitude I'm talking about here, is you can quickly get to a point where you realize that [00:26:00] your little petty ego concerns are not that grand in the bigger scheme of things, especially as you b- begin to acknowledge your grander aspects of being and of connection with others and of sense of shared meaning and purpose.
All of it starts to take on a far grander aspect than what you can recognize when you're just limited to that little materialist body just believing that your brain is creating your consciousness. So this is all about expanding that kind of notion of self. And in meditation, that starts to happen as you become in charge of kind of lucid dreaming your way to getting some answers, opening your mind in such a way that the universe can start to fill in the gaps, just as I discussed minutes ago, with all those techniques that those creative scientists and artists and musicians had for getting into this space we're talking about, which is not one that is at all limited by the ego and its petty little concepts, but is a far grander space.
And that's where I think creativity can really flourish. But the [00:27:00] centering prayer is just a notion that God force has our back that we can trust, that we have nothing to fear about it. And this is not God with some limited little religious definition, but a far grander creative God that comes into view from all religious viewpoints and including from people previously atheist and agnostic when you pay attention to near-death experiences and what they tell us about the nature of this God force at the core of the universe.
Arthur: You've got an opportunity to make a prayer for listeners. What would you like to, bless our listeners with
Eben: I would certainly like to say that world peace is absolutely within our reach, and many people today think that's impossible. The world is far too complex, far too conflicted, far too polarized. And yet the more people share this kind of message, and this is a deep reality about the oneness of mind, it's going to be the scientific model of reality as we move into the future, this evolutionary [00:28:00]panentheism.
Science has already rejected materialism and that came in 2022 when the Nobel Prize committee gave out the ph- prize in physics for quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement has no role within a four-dimensional space time or local realism. It completely violates them both, and that's what Einstein was trying to preserve with his kind of notions of interpreting quantum physics, and that's why he said quantum physics is incomplete.
And yet he was wrong. And all the experiments that resulted in that Nobel Prize in 2022 that went to John Clauser, an American, and then Alain Aspect in France, and also Anton Zeilinger in Austria because they progressively improved on and increased the size of the experiments that were measuring this entanglement phenomena until finally when Zeilinger was using stars at opposite sides of the sky to reset the parameters, you realize there was [00:29:00] no way quantum information was sneaking between those those information layers.
So in other words entanglement is an absolutely astonishing phenomenon of reality that doesn't fit local realism. That was Einstein's treasured view. Local meaning all physics involves particles interacting with particles. Realism meaning there's an objective physical world out there independent of the observing mind.
And that's where Einstein was wrong, is none of that is true. Entanglement is real. There are information pathways through space and time that allow connection between parts of this universe that in my view, for example, enable this extraordinary thing we call life reviews. Your life flashing before your eyes is something where it's a reliving of events, not just remembering, a- as if the events are still ongoing.
And it's from the perspective of many of those involved, not just your own perspective.
Arthur: Dr. Eben your experience, has it [00:30:00] given you a sense of what the purpose of life is?
Eben: With 18 years of meditation packed onto my near-death experience of 2008, I've started to get a clear view what I think the purpose of life is. And it is really for one thing, to focus on our relationships with our fellow beings and basically our relationship with ourself, how we understand ourself, the way we view ourself.
Those things are very important. Nothing else really even matters. It's the relationships we share with sentient beings that help us to delineate a shared meaning and purpose and start understanding our ability to discern information from around the cosmos, and also to put our will to work, in meditation and centering prayer and in our actions and thoughts in living these lives, to bringing that world of the ideals into existence.
So it's really about focusing on relationships, on love, compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance, when [00:31:00] necessary, forgiveness, taking care of each other, honoring the deep vision of near-death experiences, which is we're all in this together, and we're here to take care of each other. It's a very different message from the common physicalist, materialist message that came up in the mid-20th and 20th century and early 21st century that is so kind of self-focused and ego-focused, and that's completely wrong.
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Eben: What we're
learning from life reviews, from NDEs, near-death experiences, and their big message to the community is we're really here [00:32:00] together. We're here bound together through forces of love. In fact, the biggest message from the NDE community is it's all really about love, unconditional love, and taking care of each other.
And this is the big message from people who have come close to death but then come back to life. I would say all of our religious systems are based in these kinds of experiences. At some level, somebody had some extraordinary experience like a near-death, and that's what en- enabled them to come up with religious systems because of what they saw in those situations.
But up until the late 1960s, almost everybody who was in that situation went on to die. Since the 1960s, when doctors developed techniques for resuscitating cardiac arrest patients, tens of millions of people have been brought back to life. So they've walked the same walk that I've walked, come to know the same things I know about this, and that's the message NDEers try to bring back to this world.
Arthur: It strikes [00:33:00] me that your experience being close to death has reduced your fear of being dead. Am I right?
Eben: Yes. Yes, you are correct.
It's not the end of awareness. That's what people are so scared of, is annihilation, and they pretend, "Oh, it's just before you were born." It turns out that 7% of people in our world of children, 7% of them have very strong past life memories. So pay attention to all of that.
And of course, those memories start disappearing as they get older. But this is something all of us have been through before and will go through again. In fact, I think one of the reasons the book Proof of Heaven was such a big hit was that it resonated with millions of people who would thousands of them contacted me after reading the book or hearing me talk and said it reminded them of something very deep in their own spiritual journey, something that had been lost from memory.
Arthur: Do you feel there is a ruler out there,
Eben: I would not say a [00:34:00] ruler. I would say there's a co-creative source of love and of energy to get things done that near-death experiencers come into that awareness, that ocean of love, and that light and God force are one and the same. Light, love, God is all one ocean of bliss to see and connection and shared meaning and purpose.
And that, I believe, is a very real phenomenon. Depending on the studies you look at, somewhere between seventy-four percent and ninety percent of people who have had near-death experiences come away not only having faith in or believing in, but knowing through personal experience the reality of such a God force.
That's another reason that they have no fear of dying, because they know that force i- is there to assist them. They can trust in its presence and guidance when they leave the physical body once and for all. So near-death experiencers should know if anybody does, about th- this kind of force and [00:35:00] how to describe it and what it really is.
But what I advise people is, resort to centering prayer and meditation because these will show you the way. In fact, I know from our workshops where thousands of people have benefited from this kind of knowledge and awakening just by using Sacred Acoustics binaural beats. So if people go to that website download you can download the free Om file.
It's a twenty-minute file. Listen through headphones. And also pay attention to the website. She has a lot of information about how to enhance your meditations, how to make them much stronger. But you'll quickly realize that this is, very useful stuff. If nothing else, it's extremely good for relieving anxiety.
That was shown by a scientific pilot study in the peer-reviewed literature by Dr. Anna Yusim she's a psychiatrist in New York City. She did a study that was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases back in February of twenty twenty. And in that study, in which she used Sacred Acoustics, a file known [00:36:00] as Whole Mind Bundle
but that's what she used in her study. And what she found is over two weeks of listening, that she had a twenty-six percent reduction in anxiety symptoms in her New York City patients, versus only a seven percent reduction in those people who spent those two weeks getting standard talk psychotherapy.
So just by listening to these Sacred Acoustics tones for two weeks gave you three times the benefit in terms of relief of anxiety compared to standard talk psychotherapy. That's a pretty powerful number. That's big. So use it
Arthur: that's extraordinary. And even your experiences with respect to meditation how have those changed how you connect with people?
Eben: I'm much more reliant on intuition and empathy. I feel like I, I gained a lot in those departments of connection with others after my near-death experience. And to me, those are something that can easily come out of [00:37:00] meditation too. Once you realize what a fragile little pathetic construct your e- ego is, but start acknowledging how that kind of higher soul version of self can be far grander than all that, that's when you start realizing the sense of connection and the importance of our connections.
The fact that life reviews happen in about half of all near-death experiences is a powerful statistic in its own right. That means there out of the fifteen to eighteen million near-death experiences in the United States as an example, that are still living that would mean that a significant number of those say twelve million or so, had these profound life experiences where they saw the interconnections with their fellow beings very strongly.
And in fact, one-third of those life reviews s- say that their whole life is involved. And you might wonder, how does that happen during a ten-minute cardiac arrest? The only way to get what's really going on there is to appreciate the power of this reliving of events, not just a [00:38:00] remembering. It's not just memory.
This is a reliving because the universe actually stores that k- kind of information and gives our soul access to it when we leave our physical brain and body at the time of bodily death. And that's all in the process of refinement so that we have another chance to learn some of the lessons that we were supposed to learn during this lifetime about love, kindness, compassion, mercy, acceptance, forgiveness.
And the life review gives us one more shot at doing that so that we don't have to repackage those same items in the next lifetime.
Arthur: When you come across people who are, let's say, displaying evidence of being bad agents yet not doing some good stuff what are your thoughts ar- around that?
Eben: My thoughts are that they then get to see what that feels like in the life review. They become the recipient. That's what's so nice about the life review. It's the golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the very fabric of the universe. The life review is an incredibly important [00:39:00] concept to understand about near-death experiences, but also about this bigger process we call human existence.
And this is why I think it's why meditation is so important because life reviews and a lot of the elements of a life review can come to light during a meditation and during centering prayer, all in an effort to help us come much more in alignment with a soul journey that supports our fellow beings in the higher good and is not in complete conflict with our fellow beings in the higher good, which is where the ego often tends to drive us.
Arthur: some really wonderful words there. Where do you see humanity going? 'Cause I think what you touch on is, that we're all connected. We're conscious maybe in some different levels.
And almost like we're part of this ecosystem that is over time getting richer in connection, in wisdom. A, is that true? And B, where do you see life for humanity [00:40:00] going?
Eben: I think that's a very good interpretation. Thank you for offering that because in many ways, I think that's right on the money. There's no question that the scientific view of the brain-mind relationship is rapidly converging on this notion of the oneness of mind and the brain as a filter or a transceiver.
So the brain allows us access to consciousness and to memory. I'll point that out that in fact, and this is something we discuss in detail in our book, "Living in a Mindful Universe," memories are not stored in the brain. It's the last nail in the coffin of materialist neuroscience, but neurosurgeons have suspected this for a very long time because in more than a century of brain operations, of taking out brain, and that includes, for example, in children with severe epilepsy, sometimes you take out half the brain, hemispherectomy.
And yet never in any of these cases has a long-term swathe of memory, long-term memory, been removed by removing any part of brain. It's something that was covered to some degree [00:41:00] by Dr. Wilder Penfield, a renowned Canadian neurosurgeon, in his 1975 book, "The Mystery of the Mind." He had spent more time stimulating the brain in awake patients than most neurosurgeons, and yet he came to the conclusion very solidly in that book, and he explains it all very well, logical and rational thought, that you cannot explain the workings of the mind by the workings of the brain alone.
He said something more is required. Just w- William James, who was the head of psychology at Harvard in the late 1800s, who investigated a lot of spiritual phenomena, and he was a psychologist, so he was very scientific. But he said there's so much more going on in mind and spirit than can possibly be explained by brain alone.
Arthur: D- doctor, even having had your experience, where is the world going
Eben: I think the world is moving in the directions that I'm talking about. That is a complete paradigm shift in scientific thinking, an acknowledgement of the oneness of mind, of the binding force of love [00:42:00] as a, a force of healing and of wholeness. And that this will be a tremendous antidote to the insane false sense of separation that is absolutely built into materialist or physicalist thought.
It all came along in the mid-20th century bundled with a misinterpretation of Darwinian evolution, where everybody was focusing on competition and not realizing what biologists do today, that collaboration and cooperation are the keys to success in the biological world, not that competition.
Arthur: interesting. And you're talking towards a world of abundance
Eben: More harmony, abundance, and prosperity for all.
Arthur: Let's talk about a big top- topic, artificial intelligence. How does that fit in with your world? 'Cause for me, I, find there's things that are nerve-wracking about it, but fundamentally, democratizes access to a lot of different power depending on which way you look at it, and it, equips people in such a powerful [00:43:00] way.
If you look at even just the area of medicine, right? Tremendously powerful. Does it spiritually excite you?
Eben: Let's put it this way. Starting out I don't want anybody out there to ever think that their AI running on a digital computer is self-aware, and that is a big problem. Many people have come to attach a notion of self. In fact, there are some people who want to give legal selfhood to AI agents.
Nothing could be further from a ridiculous, reality of, the AIs are not intelligent. They're programs. We've had expert systems running for decades, and now with AI and, kind of neural network mimicry, et cetera, systems are much more powerful, and especially when you have trillions of parameter data points going into their upkeep.
Never forget garbage in, garbage out. There's a lot of nonsense on the internet, and if that's been used as training material for [00:44:00] AIs, you're gonna get some nonsense answers. And that's why I think there's this tendency still to hallucination, where the AIs come up with complete absolute... completely ridiculous nonsense.
And you have to learn to realize that they're gonna give you wrong answers that are not so obvious too. People have to be very cautious of AIs in the current era. They can be quite powerful. They're terribly seductive too. And again, do not under any circumstance start thinking that AI agent is your friend or has a self-awareness.
It does not. We may get self-aware computers when we get well into the development of quantum computers because a qubit, the, is very different from a bit. A, qubit could potentially give us the kind of parameter space that actually allows for self-awareness. There's no way that a digital computer can ever do that.
. And they're designed in the current era to be seductive, to fool you into [00:45:00] thinking they're your friend. They're programmed to be nice. They're programmed so you'll keep clicking away and asking it all kinds of things till we're all hooked on, AIs, and they'll start charging a lot more.
But I think AIs potentially can be extremely beneficial to humanity. I think at the current level of development, AIs need some serious guardrails. When I hear about ChatGPT convincing a teenager that, yes, they're right to want to commit suicide and then giving them ways to do it and having the teenager follow the AI's advice to commit suicide, we got a big problem in that world.
And so I think we need guardrails. We need regulatory agencies to prevent things from getting way out of control with AI, and this certainly involves the military. Militaries around the world are starting to put AIs to use. And if you think Terminator was a, a frightening concept, then pay attention to this.
These AIs as killing machines is a ter-terrible idea, and I would hope the governments of the world would [00:46:00] o-outlaw this kind of stuff quickly and make it banned in any kind of conventional warfare because AIs making kill decisions, if you completely remove humans from that chain of logic and decision-making I think we're in real trouble
Arthur: Is there a theme that we've not talked about today that you feel is
Eben: there's a very important theme I wanna talk about, and that is psychedelics. And specifically, I wanna make two points. One is I'm very grateful that psychedelics are now part of scientific study because they're really helping us to unravel a lot more about the brain by giving us altered states of consciousness, and about the mind, obviously.
Turns out that a paper came out in twenty twelve by Robin Carhart-Harris, Imperial College London, and they talked about psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and they used functional MRI and magnetoencephalography to look at the brains of people under the influence of magic mushrooms. Now, anybody who's ever taken [00:47:00] psilocybin or these mushrooms would think their brain is lighting up like a Christmas tree because of all the phenomenal experience.
They'd be dead wrong because you won't find a single cell or node in the neural network that's increasing in activity. The entire brain is quieting down and getting out of the way. It is not causing what you are seeing. That is determined much more in the spiritual level. And so for the neuroscientist who wants to use magnetoencephalography or functional MRI to examine the brain to explain these phenomena, you'll find that the phenomena are not originating in the brain. We have to go much deeper than that, beyond that. And in fact, they did a comparison study where they looked at the depth, the transcendental depth of this psychic experience, and found the deeper it was, the more the default mode network dissolved on their imaging.
The default mode network is what we identify as [00:48:00] consciousness as ego in the brain. Not consciousness, but as ego in the brain. And that whole network dissolves both in, in meditators and also in those who are taking these serotonin 2A-type psychedelic substances. That finding has been replicated with LSD and DMT and other substances.
Now, I do not recommend the use of these substances in general for spiritual and psychic journeying. I think meditation is a far better, more powerful, effective, efficient, and safe way to get these e-explorations done. Occasionally, somebody might need the catalyst of an, a psychedelic experience, but don't believe that you need , a steady supply of psychedelics to do this kind of spiritual work at all.
In fact, I think in many ways it can start to interfere more than help. The other important thing to say about psychedelics, there was a beautiful set of pilot studies by Dr. Roland Griffiths at [00:49:00] Johns Hopkins. He was largely responsible for bringing psychedelics back into the scientific research sphere in a legal fashion over the last few decades.
And his pilot studies concerned patients with alcoholism and drug addiction, and also terminal cancer patients with a debilitating fear of death. He found that a single dose of psilocybin given to these patients relieved them of their addiction, their anxiety, et cetera. In eighty percent of cases, that relief was still present a year after the dose.
So my point is, even if you take psychedelics for spiritual awakening, look at it more as a catalyst and not something you have to take all the time to get that done. The meditation can be a very powerful way of building up your repertoire of kind of psychic experience to help you come to a deeper understanding of self and of one's relationship to the universe at large.
So I'm glad the psychedelics are around for scientific study and research. Occasionally, they might help some [00:50:00] journeyers to get to a deeper level of understanding to help dissolve the ego. But for most of us, meditation is a far more powerful way to get all of that work done
Arthur: . What's the biggest thrill for you in that?
Eben: It's really just helping people wake up to a grander version of themselves, helping them come into living a grander version of themselves. One that is not sucker punched by these silly little ego programs that make us smaller and lesser, but one that actually cultivates a relationship with our higher soul through meditation and centering prayer, but then lives that in their actions in this world.
Everything that they think and do and say mirrors the wisdom that they're gaining through these deep experiences through meditation and centering prayer, and a form of bringing all of that love and light back into this world to share with all of our fellow beings.
Arthur: And that, love and trust [00:51:00] are at the center of all of this really
Eben: Absolutely. I think most near-death experiencers would agree that deep sense of love and light that they've touched on deep in their experience is a gift worthy of lifetimes
Arthur: Dr. Eben Alexander, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today.
Eben: Well, Arthur, thanks for having me on. It's great talking with you, and I hope we get to talk again soon sometime
