➡ The CIA once used psychic spies, known as remote viewing, for national security purposes, as confirmed by former US President Jimmy Carter. In a podcast episode of the True Health Report, host Dr. Andrew Kaufman and guest Mark Gober discuss the concept of consciousness and challenge the ideas of materialism. Gober, a former investment banker turned author, shares his journey from believing in a random, meaningless life to exploring the existence of a higher intelligence and spiritual phenomena. The discussion also touches on the cultural and philosophical consequences of a materialistic worldview, including moral relativism and existential crisis.
➡ The speaker discusses his journey of exploring and understanding psychic phenomena and other related fields. He was surprised to find that these subjects were studied in reputable institutions and even used by government agencies. He also talks about the importance of critical thinking and intuition in evaluating new information, and the need to constantly update one’s worldview based on new findings. Lastly, he emphasizes the importance of not dismissing someone’s entire viewpoint because of a few disagreements, and the possibility of learning from someone even if you don’t like them.
➡ Mark embarked on a personal journey of research out of curiosity, which led him to question the nature of reality and consciousness. He spent a year studying various phenomena that didn’t fit the materialist view of reality, such as near-death experiences and precognition. His findings, which challenge the idea that the brain creates consciousness, were compiled into a book. Mark believes that if even one phenomenon he describes can’t be explained by materialism, then the theory needs revising or is entirely incorrect.
➡ The text discusses the intriguing concept of consciousness and its potential influence on physical reality. It explores the idea of organ recipients adopting traits of their donors, the mind-body duality, and the awareness of thoughts. It also delves into experiments involving random number generators, suggesting that human consciousness might be able to alter their outputs. The text further discusses the potential of collective meditation to influence real-world events, suggesting that consciousness could have tangible effects on our reality.
➡ The text discusses the influence of consciousness on physical health and the limitations of mainstream medicine in acknowledging this. It highlights the story of Anita Moorjani, who experienced a spontaneous remission of tumors after a near-death experience, suggesting a shift in her consciousness. The text also explores near-death experiences and the phenomenon of remote viewing, where the mind perceives distant events. Finally, it criticizes the materialistic model of reality, arguing it’s based on unverifiable assumptions about the existence of a world independent of consciousness.
➡ The text discusses the idea that consciousness, not materialism, is the fundamental basis of reality. It uses the analogy of a stream of water, where water represents consciousness and each individual is a whirlpool within that stream. The text also explores the concept of philosophical idealism, suggesting that our individual consciousness is part of a larger, interconnected reality. It further delves into near-death experiences, shared death experiences, and past life memories as potential evidence of consciousness existing beyond our physical bodies.
➡ The text discusses the scientific exploration of consciousness and reality, challenging the traditional materialistic view. It highlights the importance of research in this field and introduces Mark Gober, an author who has written extensively on these topics. His books and podcast series, “Where is My Mind?”, are recommended for those interested in learning more. The text concludes with an introduction to a detox protocol for improving health.

Declassified documents from the CIA talking about using psychic spying or national security known as remote viewing. Former US President Jimmy Carter verified that psychic spies were used to find a downed Russian bomber that was lost in an African jungle. And the radar systems couldn’t find it, so they used psychics. This is the True Health Report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the True Health Report. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Today I’m going to be speaking with a guest on a very interesting topic, that of consciousness. And in this episode, we will challenge the ideas of materialism as it has played out through science and look at what some very important experimental evidence shows that can clue us into what’s really going on with the mind body problem.

So today’s guest, Mark Gober, is an amazing researcher and author of at least seven books in the Upside down series. And I first heard of him when he reached out to me to help edit some chapters on medical science in his book An End to Upside Down Medicine. And we have been involved in a chat group for a while and I noticed he’s very well informed on a number of issues. So eventually I got around to reading. I believe this was his first book, An End to Upside Down Thinking in the series. And we’re going to discuss his ideas about consciousness today.

Now, Mark has a very interesting background with an Ivy League education from Princeton, majoring in psychology, and then going into the world of finance and investment banking before he started to essentially wake up or become aware of some of these scientific frauds and misperceptions. So, Mark, welcome to the stage. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to finally do this. I should have reached out sooner once I realized the breadth and depth of your work. So, Mark, how did you go from investment banking, a career that is very desirable in our society, where all the rewards of fast cars, women, and money come to going off the beaten path and risking your reputation to take a position, a truthful position, on these topics.

I was not even aware of these topics until 2016. I think that’s reason number one. I wasn’t aware of. Let’s just say the. The. You mean they didn’t teach you this at Princeton? No. The sad thing is that the more I think about it, the more I realized that I was stressing over getting good grades on things that I don’t think are true anymore, unfortunately. But at the time, I didn’t know that. And I, I hit a wall in my life in many ways, ending in 2016. But maybe I could say a few years before that it started where I realized that the things I was trying to achieve were not bringing lasting satisfaction or happiness.

And I believed at the time that life was random and meaningless, that when we die, that is the end of our consciousness. There is no reality to spiritual phenomena. And anyone who believes in a spiritual reality is basically believing a superstition because they don’t want to believe in the finality of death. And I wasn’t going to do that. And I was going to listen to what the science said. And the science was telling us there’s no higher intelligence. It’s all random and meaningless now. Now, Mark, if I may interrupt for a second because, you know, that’s obviously a critical issue, and this is the paradigm that we’re living in.

So in that philosophy, right, of materialism, which you describing, right, where there’s. There’s no meaning or purpose and, you know, we’re meat suits, and once we reach the end, then we. We cease to exist. What do you think are the cultural and philosophical consequences of that? They are huge. Number one, morality. If we don’t believe in any organizing intelligence in this reality that we inhabit, then. And if it’s all random, then why would you want to act in a certain way beyond survival of the fittest? And that’s where the Darwinian perspective comes in very strongly, that it’s just survival of the fittest and do whatever you need to succeed and there are no metaphysical or spiritual consequences to your actions.

Also, if you believe that when you die that’s the end of everything, then it creates a fear of death, potentially, that there’s a rush to do whatever we can in this lifetime and this death is coming and that’s the end of everything. That’s very different than if there is a continuation of consciousness after the body dies. So there can be a bit of nihilism, depending on how much one thinks about this. For some people, it’s probably subtle in the back of their mind. For me, it became stronger and stronger as I was going through life realizing I’m not sure why any of this stuff matters that I’m stressing over.

What’s the point? Wow, that’s really fascinating. So I think what you’re getting at with the first point is the inception of moral relativism, where in order to justify your advantage over the pack, that you just can make it acceptable from a moral perspective. And then I think what you’re talking about is really a very common psychological phenomenon that we see, you know, that I have a lot of experience with formerly practicing psychiatry, which is an existential crisis. And this is, in fact, in my current formulation, involving natural healing, one of the central problems that people face in terms of a psychological dilemma that can affect one’s health, mentally and physically.

So these are really key issues and some of the major problems with our culture. And then, of course, really the coup de grace that you mentioned, which is almost exactly what I’ve said, is that ultimately it leads to a nihilistic perspective, and that may bring about a decadent society, which you didn’t take that last step, but I think it follows logically, completely. And it’s very. It’s challenging to live that way, I can tell you from personal experience, because what’s the point of anything? Even the hedonism, it’s temporary, and when you die, it’s over. So I was struggling with both the failures and the successes with this worldview.

But knowing that this was my worldview, I wasn’t going to change it, because I didn’t. I didn’t want to just comfort myself. I wanted to believe what was true. And I thought science told us materialism is true. And maybe that is the reason that many mainstream people embrace their religious beliefs and practices, because it provides refuge from this, you know, dark reality of nothingness. For some people, maybe. For me, the shift was not that, because I was having to overcome what I thought was true about materialism, and I was forced, kicking and screaming, basically, to shift my perspective.

So what. So what was it? What were the circumstances in your life that brought about this confrontation of ideas? It was a combination of struggles, professionally and personally, and not knowing how to deal with them in the context of materialism, of it’s all random and meaningless, and then encountering phenomena that I was not previously aware of. And this was in 2016, when I was listening to podcasts. Initially, I was listening to shows like the Tim Ferriss podcast, where he was talking about using sensory deprivation, float tanks, various alternative ways of relieving anxiety. He spoke about psychedelics, had many guests on like that.

And that led me to look at alternative health. There was a show, it’s still on the air, called Extreme Health Radio, and I was listening to a bunch of episodes there. And one day I was just listening to the next one that was up from months before. And it was a woman named Laura Powers, who spoke about psychic abilities that she uses with her clients to help heal them. And she talked about interdimensional beings, angels. And what was interesting to me was that the hosts of the show, who I had heard on many other episodes, were taking her seriously.

And I thought that they had at least some level of discernment. And the fact that they were listening to her and not kicking her off the show suggested to me is maybe there’s something I’m missing here. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance. Well, now most people would simply turn to a different podcast when that dissonance comes into play. So. And also I imagine that probably earlier in your life you heard something about psychics before, right? But something was different at this point in your life. And you know, do you think it was like a developmental crisis that you were going through as you maybe realized your professional pursuits were not going to bring you the satisfaction in your life that you wanted? That could have been part of it for sure.

I might have been ripe at that point. But something captivated me about that episode enough to just be intrigued enough to say, I’m going to listen to Laura’s own podcast, because she mentioned it on the show. And that’s when I started to get really interested, because Laura has pretty short episodes and interviews many other people in the spiritual realm, some of whom have just had personal experiences that are not scientifically validated, let’s say, and others who are more scientific. And after hearing case after case, I started to wonder what was going on, because these were people from different parts of the world, sometimes different backgrounds, and they were describing a picture of reality that was not the one that I believed to be true.

And I couldn’t reason that they were all colluding with each other. And I wondered if they had a similar kind of delusion. Perhaps I didn’t think they were lying. And that led me to then start to read books and scientific papers and come across. For example, the University of Virginia has a Division of Perceptual Studies, which looks at near death experiences and many other phenomena. The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which studies psychic abilities, energy healing, lucid dreaming, which I’m now on the board of. And Princeton University had a Lab for nearly 30 years run by the former Dean of Engineering.

And some of that was while I was an undergrad at Princeton. I didn’t know it existed. And they studied these sorts of phenomena, psychic abilities. I was just blown away that these things existed. One more declassified documents from the CIA talking about using psychic spying or national security known as remote viewing. I had no idea this stuff existed. And then I had to question things. So now you’re basically pointing out here, right, that you were confronted after doing some research that is pervasive in the academic world and government agencies. And this is not just some fringe, you know, gypsy with a stand at the carnival.

Yeah, that. That’s what captivated me because I had heard about those, like, more anecdotal cases, and certainly there can be frauds in this area, but that doesn’t mean that an entire field is wrong. Right. And I believe if it’s not still in existence, that Duke had a department of Occult Studies or something to that effect as well, because there were occasional psychiatric patients that came from distances to basically try to find the professors there to communicate things that they were perceiving, you know, that we. We said they were psychotic, of course. But now, you know, I wonder if perhaps there was something different going on.

Yeah, there’s. The researcher was named Ryan R H I N E, I believe, and he was studying psychic phenomena as well. And I just couldn’t believe that these things existed. And I thought I was well educated. I never even heard about them. Well, there’s. There’s a lot of knowledge out there. Yeah. But, Mark, I want to ask you, because you mentioned, when you first saw the interview with the woman you mentioned, Laura, I think that you applied some validity testing. Where did you develop those skills or that practice of, you know, being able to use your discernment when evaluating these kind of things? Because this is something I think my audience often relies on me to do, and I want to teach them how to hone those skills.

It’s a great question. I think a lot of it I probably do on a subconscious level, and maybe it was through academic training and then being in the professional world of having, especially in the realm of strategy consulting in Silicon Valley, I worked with companies that had patented technologies that were significant and valuable, which meant that I had to go into a new technology area perhaps that I knew nothing about, learn about the technology, learn about the industry, and see what the strategic landscape was like. So I was used to having to discern new situations all the time.

And therefore, when I came across something that was new to me, I was probably applying many of those skills, which, on the fly. What would those be? One is consistency, is the person speaking in a way that doesn’t contradict him or herself. Internal, valid validity. Internal validity, yeah. That’s probably something I’m looking for. There’s also probably an element of something energetic where I get a sense of whether I feel like the person is genuine or not. And that’s very difficult to put my finger on. Well, no, I mean, I think you’re Describing intuition. Right. And so you’re combining a logical, rational analysis with your intuition.

I think that’s. That. That kind of summarizes this whole discussion, really. Right. Because you’re relying on consciousness rather than, you know, whatever your brain circuitry can do to compute an answer. Right. And then combining it, like you say, with the logical aspects. So when. When someone’s making a series of claims, I try to fit those into a worldview and figure, well, what. What kind of worldview could accommodate all of these things that the person’s saying, given that I believe the person is genuine? And then I have to reconfigure my existing worldview, if it contradicted that worldview, and it becomes like a puzzle where I have to maybe take certain pieces out and try to put new ones in.

And that’s the calculus happening in my mind. Well, now, that is a crucial point, Mark, because many authors, I think, that pursue an area, a narrow area of research, and they uncover a different truth than the mainstream narrative. They often then don’t take a bigger view and see how it fits into context, and then they bring in other areas of knowledge that have the same falsehoods. Right. And, I mean, even you were guilty of this early on in your writing. Right. And you graciously confessed to me, because we all have to learn. I mean, the same thing with Tom Cowan.

When I first met him, I had bought a couple of his older titles, and one of them, he said, don’t read that Everything’s wrong. Yeah, fortunately, I. I agree with the general themes of all of my books, even if there are parts or details that I don’t agree with anymore. And in many of those cases, if not all, I just took a mainstream belief for granted as being true and applied it to whatever I was doing and I hadn’t explored. So, for example, I referenced germ theory briefly in An End to Upside Down Thinking. And as you know, and as your audience is probably aware, that’s something many of us are questioning.

And that’s just one example out of a few. I also talk about general relativity, and in my book, An End to the Upside Down Cosmos. I question that too. Well, this. I think this is a normal part of the growth of our knowledge over time. Because, of course, I’ve made the same exact mistakes where I talked about vitamins or I talked about genetics as being completely valid when. Now that I’ve had time to investigate them, I think that’s not really the true story. So, you know, we all have to develop. And so folks out there you know, try the practice of putting it in context and relating it to other themes and ideas and subject matter, but, you know, forgive yourself for making mistakes as you go on.

The important thing is to learn from those mistakes and once you uncover them, to, you know, not. Not repeat them, that’s how we really make progress in this pursuit of. Of the truth. Yeah. One thing I would add there, I’ve had to do this myself, is to appreciate the things in a person that I can learn from where I think they are onto something important and not let the falsehoods they believe cloud the areas that they’re good at. It can be easy to throw the baby out with a bathwater sometimes. Well, they said this one thing that I don’t agree with, therefore everything they say is false.

I think we need to take each claim on a claim by claim basis. Yeah, that’s right. And to do that successfully, I think you have to monitor your emotional reaction because, you know, there could say something that could trigger you because you have a strong opinion about it, but that doesn’t mean that the main idea that they’re presenting is invalid and you could lose out on important knowledge by doing that. So thanks for that point. And similarly, it’s possible to dislike someone and agree with something that they say. Wow. You know, it’s the way people act today.

It’s almost like they don’t think that’s actually possible, but really it’s the only possibility because what is the probability that two individuals would agree on everything? Right. You know, I’m sure that we don’t. We. We probably have a good overlap, but I think there, there of course are going to be individual differences. Right. So we almost have to have relationships with people and not agree on certain things. And there might be things we disagree on, not just the two of us, but any two people, because they haven’t done the same level of research. And one person just believes the mainstream and is not aware of other science or lack of science, for example.

Right. And that’s the exact problem that I faced with all the people who wanted to engage in debates about germ theory or virology is that I had spent all this time studying it and learning about it and developed a pretty good depth of knowledge. And many of the other folks just had the assumptions of what they were taught and didn’t read even one paper to try to try and examine the issue. Yeah. So, Mark, where. Where did this lead you? Discovering all the, you know, academic institutions? How did you go about doing this research? And what are some of the main, you know, early discoveries that you made.

The research I was doing starting in the summer of 2016 was just purely out of personal interest because I understood the implications of what I was encountering. If there was any validity to even a fraction of what I encountered, then I needed to rethink the basic metaphysics about the nature of reality. Is life really random and meaningless? Or maybe is there something more that was my driving force behind wanting to research? So you decided to start small. Yeah, exactly. I knew this was huge and I was obsessed. Basically. My friends remember the stacks of books that I was developed.

I was, um, accumulating just any book that seemed interesting on Amazon. I was buying it. I find out about a new scientist, buy that. And I basically spent all of my waking hours outside of my day job learning about this stuff for roughly a year. And I started to socialize this to some friends and they were largely interested. Actually, there were some that were pretty skeptical. But I remember having lunches with some friends and they would text me a few days later and say, hey, what? You talked about some of those studies, that’s pretty mind blowing.

And I decided in the summer of 2017, I wanted to summarize the findings into a book. And that became an End to Upside down thinking, published in 2018. But the way that I structured that book, it’s around whether or not the brain creates consciousness. And that’s not where I started, per se. I was starting with various phenomena that did not match the materialist paradigm of reality that I used to believe. And I realized that all those phenomena, while they might sound like they’re different, for example, a near death experience or the work done at the University of Virginia, where there are young children who remember a life that’s not their own, or telepathic allegations or precognition, Knowing or sensing the future before it happens.

These are seemingly distinct phenomena, but they all relate to a central question around what is the relationship between the brain and consciousness? And I realized that framework would be something that, because of the extent of the science that is out there, that I didn’t know about previously, I would be able to put into a book and feel like I could continue in my career. And one of the other reasons I felt that way was that I wasn’t claiming every example in the book was 100% fact. And maybe some of the studies would be falsified later or there would be a methodological problem.

My argument was, if there’s one phenomenon that I describe in this book that materialism cannot explain, that by definition means that materialism needs revision or is completely wrong. And I think there are many phenomena described in that book. The challenge, materialism. So it sounds like you really embarked on this as part of your own spiritual journey and not with the intent to create a book and, you know, do interviews or anything like that that just. And you also opened yourself up to see, you know, what’s the evidence out there? What are the experiences people have rather than formulating a hypothesis or a theory or glomming on to someone else’s teachings.

I had no idea I would write books. I mean, I was squarely in my career in Silicon Valley. I became a partner at my firm in 2018. I had spent about 10 years there before leaving. I mean, I was in a good spot, and I was so pulled in this other direction because my priorities shifted. And even the subsequent books, like you said, Andy, this is about my spiritual journey. The books are a byproduct of my own evolution, where I then want to share with people what I’ve encountered, and that’s had a big impact on my own life.

So this whole journey that I’ve been on of now, speaking publicly, it was not on my radar. I never expected it. Well, we’re definitely glad that you took this path because, you know, not too many people are capable of putting things together the way you have, and I think it’s a really important contribution. Thank you. Can you tell us about some of the experiments or information that you told some of your friends that they were interested in or maybe less skeptical about than you expected? Well, one place I like to start with all phenomena that are challenging to mainstream perspectives is where people can agree on things, where the mainstream agrees with even the alternative.

And I’ll give two examples of that. One is in the realm of what’s known as quantum mechanics, which there are those who question why those phenomena occur. But there are observations that many people have seen repeatedly. For example, the notion of entanglement, where there are particles that are distant from one another, and when one is affected, the other one seems to be affected simultaneously, which suggests that there’s a hidden interconnectivity going on. And I would recommend to your audience Dr. Stephen A. Young, who’s a theoretical physics PhD. He has a great video on his YouTube channel questioning whether this is actually quantum or something else.

But there are these phenomena, like entanglement, that have been measured. And so when I went in from that angle, people would say, oh, yeah, there is this quantum world that’s weird, that scientists don’t really Understand, okay, you’re talking about phenomena that are weird in physics and maybe that would relate to other phenomena out there. And Dr. Dean Radin wrote a book called Entangled Minds, which seeks to make this connection as well, that there are strange phenomena in physics, maybe there’s some relation to consciousness, and people tend to exhale a little bit when they hear that because it sounds sophisticated.

And the other area where I like to start is to talk about what’s known as the hard problem of consciousness. This is a well known issue in philosophical circles and field of neuroscience, which if I were to simplify it, probably oversimplifying it, is that our consciousness, which is the part of us basically that is experiencing, it’s difficult to define, if not impossible, because we can’t point to it, we can’t feel it, we can’t touch it, but we have experience. We have experience. We can’t use our normal senses, however, to access it. But that exists undeniably because we are all conscious at this very moment.

And we know we have a brain, we can see that, and we know the brain is connected to consciousness in a correlated manner. In other words, when certain parts of the brain are affected, a person has a shift in their consciousness. So damage a part of the brain typically regarded as being responsible for memory, then the person might have a corresponding shift in memory. So there are these correlations between the brain. Yeah, go ahead. You can just think about when someone gets knocked out with a punch. Right. That basically causes a mechanical stress on a certain area of the brain and then consciousness.

Right. Is temporarily gone. Exactly. And these are known as nccs, Neural Correlates of Consciousness. They’re very well known. And scientists will acknowledge, however, that the hard problem of consciousness, which is that consciousness is not something physical and the brain is physical, how could it be that something non physical like consciousness emerges out of a brain? Even though we have these correlations, correlation does not always imply causation. In other words, just because two things are related doesn’t mean that one is the cause of the other. Right. Now this is the so called like emergent properties, right? Right.

So is, is consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain, which many materialist scientists, many people in academia would say consciousness pops out of the brain due to chemical and electrical activity. But there is still a hard problem, is that it’s not understood how that could occur. And no one has ever observed consciousness popping out of a brain. And the implications of this are massive. Because if you believe consciousness comes from the brain, what happens when the brain Shuts off, I. E. When you die, that’s the end of your consciousness. Right. I think the, there’s another implication with respect to the so called artificial intelligence technology.

We have these groups of the CEOs of big AI firms, right, who say that AI will become conscious and destroy the world. Right. Just like in the Terminator. But for, in order for that to be possible, right. Consciousness would have to just emerge from the circuitry, you know, from the, from those chips and. Which is not really the way it works, is it? I don’t think there’s evidence for that. I don’t think we’ve established that consciousness comes out of the brain. And to the contrary, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that the brain has some other role.

Maybe it’s a filtering mechanism, an antenna receiver, an interface. And maybe the whole body itself acts in that manner. There are cases of people who receive organs from another person. So organ transplant recipients who take on personality traits, dietary preferences, for example, of the person that they got the organ from. And that’s not a musical abilities. Romantic preferences. Yeah, exactly. That’s a very interesting area of research. And these are the types of quote unquote anomalies that interest me. The analogy I use in a later book and into the upside down cosmos is if there’s a law that says that all swans are white and we go around the world and find a million white swans and one day we find a single black swan, the law said all swans are white, therefore the law is incorrect because it’s not true that all swans are white.

There was a black swan we found, so there’s a single anomaly that means the model needs to change, whether it’s these organizations, cases or many other cases too. Yeah, logic is, is so useful in these matters. You know, with respect to the definition of consciousness, what about going back to the idea of, of Descartes, cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am, because the, the philosophy right before the modern era, and you know, people like Daniel Dennett of the materialist school, there was this issue of the mind body duality, right, where there is a separate consciousness.

And that obvious phrase is quite famous for delineating that theory. Well, if we think about a thought, which many of us are not trained to do, if you could just sit there and watch a thought, there is a part of you that is aware of the thought. So it’s the consciousness that is absorbing the thought rather than the thought creating your existence, if that makes sense. You, you are the observer of the thoughts that, that Is the I am, to me, the awareness that is able to perceive anything, whether it’s a thought or something that we see with our eyes and so forth.

That’s interesting. Although I wonder, could one reason that in order to determine that you’re observing a thought requires a meta thought? Perhaps after the fact, we can have the thought that there was the awareness that observed the thought. But in the moment, it is an awareness, observing a thought. Very interesting. And of course, you know, there’s also the relationship to this consciousness, experience and language. Right. Because, for example, there are humans who have never been exposed to language. But when we, you know, have thoughts, we often formulate them using language, or certainly we express them that way in order to express them.

But what you’re talking about is something that is, you know, pre linguistic. Exactly. Something more primordial. It is a pure awareness state that we typically don’t even acknowledge is there because that is the canvas on which experience occurs. Now, one of the experiments you mentioned really struck me as interesting, especially given, you know, all the narrative about AI and technology. But it is the random number generator experiment. Can you describe that and what the results were? Yes, these are experiments that have been done at Princeton and many other labs where these are machines, random number generators that generate ones and zeros in a random fashion.

So if one were to observe how many ones and how many zeros came out of the machine after a certain period of time, it would approach 50% ones and 50% zeros, because the machine is generating the numbers randomly. What the experimenters have asked people to do is to try to use their mind to alter the behavior of the machine without touching it. So they would say, andy or some college sophomore, for example, come in here, and I want you to try to make the machine produce more ones and zeros with your mind. See if you can do it.

And what the researchers find is that there is a slight deviation beyond the 5050 chance at a highly statistically significant level. Interestingly, the researchers have found that there is a common pattern in performance where the person will be able to shift the machine to make it produce more ones than zeros. And then as they see that they have a good performance, they will start to overthink and their performance goes down. And the researcher says, you need to just relax and be in flow. And then they do better. That’s experiment type number one. There’s another type. It’s called the Global Consciousness project, where these machines, the random number generators, are set up all over the world in different locations.

And many of us are not even aware that they’re running right now. And the researchers examine what happens to the behavior of the ones and zeros in these machines when there is a major global event. The hypothesis being if there’s some event that causes a similar emotional and strong response for many individuals, that they will unknowingly affect something in our reality such that the machines behave differently. And the researchers find that, for example, with 9, 11, Princess Diana’s death, other events that cause an arousing emotion in much of the population, the machines behave non randomly. So the implication here that many have drawn is that the human mind is capable of altering a physical system.

Meaning what’s physical can be affected by something apparently non physical, like consciousness. And if we regard consciousness to play some fundamental role in reality, some would even say that what we call matter is just some kind of a manifestation of consciousness. It’s actually not a big leap to then wonder whether reality that we see is somewhat malleable. Wow. So essentially what you’re saying is that just by using our consciousness we can influence the physical world from these experiments. Is it known, you know, what the, is there like a dose response relationship, like the degree of the emotional expression or the number of people that are sharing the emotional expression, does that have an influence on the magnitude of the change in the output? Well, you’re making me think of something known as the Maharishi effect.

And there’s a book on this called an antidote to Violence, which has about 20 peer reviewed papers on the phenomenon of people getting together, meditating with a pure intention, basically, and altering levels of violence in certain places in the world. For example, right now this was done by one of the big meditation schools in Washington D.C. transcendental meditation. And Maharishi was involved in that too. He was, yeah. So that’s related. So that if there’s a. I don’t know what the critical mass is. I’m sure there are people who’ve looked into this. If, if you have more people, maybe there’s a stronger effect.

But this is where large groups of people came to meditate together. And did they have like an intention of peace or something like that? And then they monitored the effect on the crime rate. Right. During and after the meditation, Correct? Exactly. And we could say, I mean, again, these are correlations. They’re observing crime rates and other metrics they want to look at in the world. And they’re looking at what happened after the people meditated and getting to the causal relationship. I mean, it’s certainly a reasonable hypothesis to say that perhaps the group meditating is what resulted in the shift.

But it is a correlation. Yes, but you know, you can actually design a controlled study like this where you can get at causation, you know, depending on your design. I’m sure they, you know, like you mentioned, they’ve repeated it many times, but they did not guessing have a proper control. I would have to go back to those studies, but that’s the book. An antidote to violence is a good one. Right? Okay, very interesting. You know, so I think this actually provides a lot of hope for people, especially people in the truth space, because it means that at least collectively, we could have some influence on the dark agendas that we face in the world currently.

That is the implication that if we shift our individual consciousness and if enough of us do that, then there might be tangible effects in the world. Very fascinating. And you know, I wonder, does this relate to any religious or spiritual practice that, you know, currently is in existence? Obviously it must relate to meditation. But are there other practices that can have this kind of an influence? I do wonder things like prayer, for example, which is a form of intention, stating something or believing something strongly. One might wonder how. What the strength is of various practices if an individual practices it.

Are there differences in the strength of how much it can affect the world? I think these are areas that need a lot more research. And one of the common themes I found not just in this area of consciousness, but everything that’s outside the mainstream, is there’s much less funding for the nuances relative to the mainstream narrative. And one of the reasons I wanted to write the book back, published in 2018, is I said if people knew about this, then they would start funding this research so we could get to the nuances and understand exactly what’s going on.

Whereas people are funding materialism primarily. And I talked to some of the scientists about the process of getting their work in peer reviewed journals. And often the journal will reject the paper because the subject matter is not aligned with their beliefs. Right. Not because the study was done poorly. Yeah. Well, I’ve definitely criticized the scientific publication and the peer review process quite extensively. And you know, I. I would definitely encourage all of you folks out there to put it on Research Gate because we need to definitely be able to see these manuscripts. And you know, to hell with the scientific journal gatekeepers.

You know, you’re reminding me of another series of experiments where people’s consciousness has an influence on water, like the Masura Emoto experiments, which people can certainly look into. And when I had a opportunity to show a documentary on that subject to my kids who were, you know, like around preteen teen age at the time. They were, you know, they were really kind of blown away seeing some of that. And so we did a little experiment. After watching it, I suggested that they, you know, just focus on hope and gratitude to the water in their body. And they had a very, you know, perceptible reaction, like an emotional reaction.

Like they were smiling, giggling, like it’s almost like, you know, the effect you might expect from cocaine. And this was, you know, their consciousness affecting their own physical body. So what have you learned about how, you know, because this is kind of where you started. Right. What are, what are the, what’s the evidence of how consciousness can actually affect our physical health that you’ve uncovered? This is something that I address in an end to upside down medicine as well. Because mainstream medicine often does not acknowledge the possibility that consciousness could affect the body in this way.

They’re typically looking at physical mechanisms, whether it’s a germ or a toxin. And those are the reasons people get sick versus something more metaphysical. An example that comes to mind is a famous one. Anita Moorjani. She had a near death experience while she was in a coma. She had tumors all over her body. And during the near death experience, she had many shifts in her consciousness. She encountered her deceased father. She realized things about her own thinking that she was too judgmental over about herself and her life. And she came back into her body and the tumors disappeared without any known medical intervention that was responsible for it.

And the doctors couldn’t believe what happened. It seems as if there was some kind of resolution in her consciousness, something that she shifted that resulted in saving of her life, of her own life. And now she speaks all over the world. This is a form of a spontaneous remission that mainstream medicine cannot really account for. Well, I think that’s why they use that term because they don’t want to acknowledge that it could be something that actually brought it about rather than just spontaneity. Right. Did, did she do anything intentional to bring about that outcome? Not that I’m aware of.

I think what happened in the near death experience was beyond her control in many ways. And the shift she. That she had in her consciousness just stuck so strongly because of the near death experience reality. This happens to many people who have this encounter, the phenomenon. It is so clear to them what the nature of reality is and how different it is from the materialistic world that we live in that they have no choice but to adopt it. And many of them will change their professions afterwards. They will leave their marriages. Their priorities have shifted so much that the old world that they were in no longer appeals to them.

Right. I’ve actually encountered in my career several doctors who had, you know, maybe not a near death experience like all of Bruce Grayson subjects, or maybe they didn’t actually, you know, lose consciousness necessarily, but they had a serious illness or accident, right. Where they, they came close to dying and then everything changed for them and they, including their career and they went into medicine. Right. Which I think is probably more common because people may think that they got better because of the medical treatment and they want to prevent, provide that to people. I think there are a lot of misconceptions in the near death experience space, generally speaking, because the popular narrative is, well, yeah, of course people have weird visions when their brain’s about to die, but no one has been able to validate.

For example, there’s a common theme out there that, well, we’ve measured a spike in brain activity after a person’s died. Therefore, that spike is capable of producing all the things people talk about in a near death experience, including hovering over their body and perceiving things accurately, sometimes that they can then validate with the doctor or people in the room from a vantage point outside their body, among many other things. So if one wanted to say that the near death experience is a product of the brain, we’d have to understand how the brain is actually producing this very complex, realer than real experience.

Right. And you know, so a couple of things there. One is we don’t have the ability to know what the brain’s doing when it’s alive or dead, or what it’s doing. And even the, you know, the best analytical techniques we have, like perhaps you might consider eeg, you know, don’t tell us really the full story. You know, we, we can only correlate that with a few conditions. And, you know, how do you correlate when someone’s brain is not working? You can’t ask them. You know, there’s a, it’s kind of a problem. But if we look at the information that people have regarding some of the near death experiences, like when they’re able to, you know, see things from the perspective of outside their body or in a different location that is then, you know, validated by witness accounts, you know, that kind of trumps anything else because no one is claiming the brain can do that.

Right. What is the physiological mechanism for someone’s consciousness even leaving the room that they’re in? Sometimes. And seeing things from that vantage point. And then it’s called a veridical out of body experience because it’s a verified memory. The doctor family members, when the person’s resuscitated, those people who are not in a near death state can verify what the person perceived in their consciousness from that vantage point. Therefore it’s non hallucinatory consciousness. That’s right. Because a hallucination would not be something in reality. Right. But relates directly to remote viewing. Exactly. Remote viewing is this alleged ability for someone’s mind to perceive things that are far away in space and or time.

And this is what I referred to earlier. The US government’s declassified documents say this is direct quote, remote viewing is a real phenomenon. Implications are revolutionary. Right. And you know, it’s even more than that because they set up a special center at Stanford University to you know, partner between the CIA and some of the academic researchers there to, you know, study and, and, and implement this phenomenon. It’s actually been used in real missions. Yes. And when I interviewed Russell Targ, who was one of the leaders of the program, he’s a laser physicist in the 1970s, he told me that they spent over $20 million on this.

The US government from all sorts of agencies and former US President Jimmy Carter verified that psychic spies were used to find a downed Russian bomber that was lost in an African jungle and the radar systems couldn’t find it. So they used psychics. That’s right. And this isn’t even the only time the CIA has gone, you know, this route. Because if we look at the, the Monroe Institute, for example, it’s based on CIA research. Exactly. So Mark, I realize that we can only touch on the surface of this topic and there’s a lot of other places we could go if we had more time.

Which is why everyone should definitely read Mark’s books because then you will get more of a full experience. But I want to kind of wrap up here by asking you, you know, what are the main conclusions that you’ve come to about the nature of our reality and our consciousness from all of the in depth research and information you’ve been exposed to? I’ve been more and more biased toward falsifying an existing model versus coming up with a comprehensive alternative. So it leaves me in a place of saying I don’t know exactly what’s true. But I can say with regard to the existing mainstream model of materialism, number one, it’s based on a fundamental leap of faith.

Which is ironic because most materialists are anti faith. The Whole model presupposes that there exists a world independent and outside of all conscious experience. Like there was a big bang 13.8 billion years ago. And after billions of years of evolution, you end up with organisms like humans that have a brain and consciousness just pops out magically. No one has ever verified a Big Bang or life before consciousness, because in order for one to do that, you need to have a consciousness to experience that world that was predating consciousness, and that’s not possible. So they’re talking about an inference that is at the core of their entire belief system.

So it’s essentially a form of circular reasoning. That’s another way to put it. Or a house of cards is another way. So what do you think is. What can you say about what the reality actually is? I like to give an analogy from Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. He wrote a book called why Materialism is Baloney, among others. So he’s a philosopher. Great title. Yeah, catchy. He says that all reality could be likened to an infinite stream of water, where water is analogous to consciousness, and each of us as an individual, is a whirlpool within that stream. So we have this sense of being individuals.

I have my own mind, Andy, you have your own mind, and so forth. And yet, at some level of reality, we’re fundamentally interconnected. And this model would posit that consciousness is the fundamental substrate of all reality, not just our individual consciousness per se, but the overall stream. And Kastrup makes an argument that this is the most philosophically parsimonious metaphysics, basically because we all know that we experience consciousness right now. It’s actually the only thing we can verify. The past is not directly verifiable. It’s always a memory or a vision that we have in the present moment that we infer is from the past.

But we know consciousness exists in the present moment. We don’t know with any certainty that there exists any material world outside of consciousness, which is what materialism says, because you had a material world first, and then consciousness came later. So what Kastrup says is that if we just want to go in terms of how can we explain reality using the fewest number of assumptions, which is Occam’s razor, we can do that by saying consciousness is fundamental. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the correct model. And this is known as philosophical idealism. Idealism, meaning consciousness, is fundamental, but to me, it’s an anchoring framework to use to say maybe there are realms of consciousness beyond our own individual whirlpool, and maybe it’s on a multidimensional level beyond what we can even comprehend.

And that what we are perceiving is some kind of limited frequency or bandwidth that we are living in. And there exist many, many others. For example, in the near death state, when the brain is largely or if not entirely out of the way, then these other worlds become available or the realm of psychedelics or meditation. People experience these broader realities that are typically filtered out. And it makes me believe. I will say believe because I don’t know with certainty. If you ask me, Mark, what is the, what’s the nature of reality? You have to answer right now.

I would say some reality in which there is an underlying consciousness that is highly intelligent and all of us, including the world around us, represent the product of that higher consciousness. So I think the, the biggest question for me that flows from that synopsis would be, you know, is it possible that there’s only consciousness? I would argue it’s the only thing we can verify. Even things that we touch or feel or smell or taste, every one of those experiences is always within consciousness. And then we do mental gymnastics to infer a physical world that those are derived from.

Even if we get down to the world of particle physics, I mean, a mainstream scientist will say that 99.99999999% of an atom’s energy. I was just thinking that. Yeah, but then if you ask people like Dr. Stephen A. Young and some others, they would say, well, the part that isn’t empty space is infer. They’re inferred to be subatomic particles. But those are also inferences that might just be more energetic in nature. Like going back to the elements, Earth, air, fire, water, ether, and maybe nothing is actually solid, but just we are interpreting it as solid. Right.

And you could even also question, is there even empty space or is it all just a construct of our consciousness? Exactly right. Because we know. Well, perhaps we don’t know that, but you know, it, it could be the other way around. Right? That the material world arises from consciousness, but it’s actually not a physical thing. It’s, you know, I mean, simulation theory. Right. Is, is kind of this. Right. Well, I’m thinking of a quote, Max Planck, the Nobel prize winning physicist in 1931, he said, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.

But to your point, Andy, this notion that matter is actually a separate entity might be a false notion that matter is just some kind of modulation of consciousness that we perceive as something different. But it’s all this underlying stream do you now? This of course is going on belief or faith, or perhaps there’s some information from some of the research after we, our consciousness passes from this world. Because you know, clearly if our consciousness is primary, it doesn’t die with the physical body necessarily. So do you think or is there any evidence that there’ll be a point when we will have direct knowledge of the nature of, of our existence? I hope so.

People certainly come back from the near death experience feeling like they know a lot about the way reality works. And they often say it’s ineffable, meaning that there are no words to describe the nature of their experience, which makes it difficult to know what was going on. Anytime they use language, it’s always going to distort what they saw. Another point here is that the near death experience is a near death experience. The person has been resuscitated and some will critique it and say, well, Mark, you can’t make inferences about whether this is what happens when people actually die, because those people didn’t die.

A potential counterargument to that is a phenomenon known as the shared death experience, where there is a person who is not dying, a perfectly normal healthy person who somehow co lives in the dying process with someone who is dying and does die. And they describe it, the healthy person describes it just like a near death experiencer would describe it. And to me that suggests that perhaps the near death experience does tell us about the early stages of what happens to our consciousness after physical death. Right. And there are probably two other types of evidence that can contribute to that.

One being people who receive communications from others who are deceased. Now that is a little bit harder to validate scientifically, but certainly I’ve heard you talk about it. And the other would be research from hypnosis and perhaps from early childhood memories about past life experiences. Right. The question is, what is the source of this information? It’s quote unquote anomalous information that we can’t explain through normal means. But do we know that it came from another individual? Is it simply some form of psychic information that’s being received? One counter to the point I just made is something I reference in the book and into upside down thinking of neuroscientific studies on people who claim they’re having a psychic engagement, meaning something that’s telepathic versus tuning into another energy like a mediumship.

And different parts of the brain seem to be lit up and the psychic will describe the phenomena differently. They will say it’s actually a different process. When I’m tuning into one versus the other. Very, very interesting. And have you looked into a lot of the data or the information about past lives and what people have uncovered through like hypnosis, for example? Yeah, hypnosis I think is probably not as the evidence from hypnosis to me is not as strong as the evidence from young children who have these memories of another life. Because we don’t know what’s confabulation with hypnosis.

I mean, sometimes it’s very compelling where the person will describe things in elaborate detail. And even Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia in one of his books, he was very skeptical of hypnosis, but he said there were some cases that could not be dismissed and that were significant. He was much more biased toward the young children. And he and his colleagues have accumulated over 2,500 of these cases where the children have memories, preferences, fears that don’t make any sense in the context of their own life, where the researchers can actually in some cases find historical records validating what the child said.

And to me, the strangest and perhaps most compelling cases are when the child has a physical defect and or birthmark that corresponds to the way the person died in the alleged previous life. Where the researcher sometimes can find a medical record validating that yes, there was a person who died in this manner and it does correlate to the physical defect and or birthmark in the child. Yeah. In some of the hypnosis research that also it’s been validated with a historical record and very similar findings to that one that I’m thinking of. Went to hypnotherapy because of pain issue and said that the pain was related to how he died in a previous life in battle and was able to describe where they were stationed, like the rank, the name of the regimen and such.

And then it corresponded with the historical record perfectly. So there are ways to validate some of this research and I’m sure that there are errors in all of it. But you know, it’s just really fascinating to talk about this from a scientific perspective because we’ve certainly have. You’ve been able to show that many of the assumptions that we have about the nature of reality and consciousness and our existence have been completely disproven through a very, you know, some well done research and a lot of other research of, you know, varying quality, but enough of a body of evidence to completely tear down materialism.

And then that leaves us in a position to, you know, continue our pursuit of the mysteries and, you know, realize that you know, I think you made a compelling case that consciousness is fundamental. Thank you. And I would also say that there is not a compelling case for the alternative for materialism. It relies on a fundamental leap of faith on something that is by definition unverifiable, unexperienceable, a world outside consciousness. That created consciousness. Big problem. Well Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to enlighten us on these topics. What is the best way for people to purchase your books and find out more about your amazing research? My website is a good place to start.

It’s my name markgober.com M A R K G O B E R.com all seven of my books are available on Amazon in hard copy, Kindle and Audible formats. I narrated the Audible for all of them and I also have a podcast series called where is My Mind? It’s an eight episode series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the major players, but it goes through many of the topics that we discussed today. I interviewed near death experience survivors, researchers and just psychic phenomena. And it’s a quick way to binge this information and I would recommend to your audience starting at episode one and going sequentially to episode eight.

Where is my mind? Well, I think I’m getting on a plane tomorrow and my plan is to go back and forth between your podcasts and your books. So hopefully everyone out there will take advantage of all of these free and low cost resources to learn about these critical issues. Mark, I hope to have you back again to perhaps discuss another one of your books. And until then, please take care of yourself. Thank you so much for having me Andy, and I appreciate all the work that you’ve done. I’ve learned a ton from you in my journey, so thank you again.

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See more of Andrew Kaufman, M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman, M.D. channel.