Mark Gober - Evidence of Superpowers and Fundamental Consciousness

I consider this to be a perfect episode of Slo Mo, thanks to who is now one of my favorite guests ever, Mark Gober.

Mark Gober is an international speaker and author of the award-winning book "An End to Upside Down Thinking" (2018) and its sequel "An End to Upside Down Living" (2020). He is also the host of the podcast "Where Is My Mind?" and serves on the Board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment (SoWE).

Have you ever been thinking of somebody you haven't spoke to in a while, only to get a text from them shortly after? Are you an anomaly among your friends because you believe in psychics, mediums, and superpowers?

Well, take a listen to this episode, and stand your ground knowing there is plenty of research backing the existence of so called 'paranormal' phenomena. Mark Gober is a brilliant writer, speaker, and researcher who dug up all the legitimate studies that have been done on these topics. Among the many revelations to emerge from this episode, I felt the most calm knowing there are strong scientific reasons to believe that my son Ali is just fine.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How knowing the difference between consciousness and the physical was key to helping me better process Ali's passing
• The other meaning of being a "materialist"
• The Primordial Soup of Matter
• The #2 question in all of science: how does the brain create consciousness? Or does it it all?
• How the brain is actually filtering or impeding consciousness rather than generating it
• The scientific experiments that have essentially demonstrated the existence of psychic phenomena and survival beyond bodily death, with some even backed by declassified CIA documents
• That we may very well be different lenses of One Mind, and how one man's four near death experiences embodied that idea
• How we are nothing more than whirlpools in a stream that localize, then eventually blend back in (See my interview with Dan Siegel for more mindblowing insight on that idea)
• The most important call to action you'll ever receive: knowing that consciousness is fundamental, that we are all connected, and that death triggers a Life Review, how will that change how you treat others?

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Connect with Mark Gober at

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Website: mogawdat.com

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Transcript

Mo Gawdat : 0:02

..I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gawdat. This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends, sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way. This is your invitation to slow down with us. Welcome to Slo Mo. My guest today is one that I've waited a very long time to have on the podcast, Michael Gober. Mark's work has affected me personally. He is an international speaker and the author of the award-winning book "An End To Upside Down Thinking". The book talks about where consciousness actually resides and in my experience of loss of my child, to understand that consciousness is not a physical part of us was really, really important and really reassuring for me. It's coincidentally when Mark started to work on his book, he did that exactly around the same time when I lost Ali. So I lost Ali on July 2, 2017. Mark, he sat down to write it on July 4, 2017. So an interesting coincidence - very grateful that he did. He's also the host of a very interesting podcast, "Where Is My Mind?", and he serves on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment. Mark, I'm very grateful that you join me today. It's sort of like a groupie, and you know, I'm a big fan, and you're sitting there. So I'm gonna bombard you with questions, because it's a very dear topic to my mind.

Mark Gober : 1:44

Well, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for having me.

Mo Gawdat : 1:46

So I'm probably the only person in the word that says "a dear topic to my mind", not just a dear topic to my heart. I think a dear topic to my mind is both of them because I don't believe that the mind is just in the brain and that's going to be one of the questions. I want to start with where you started, Mark, before you wrote "An End To Upside Down Thinking", you said that you came from a school of thought of materialism, what you now call "physicality" or something like that? Can you talk to me about that?

Mark Gober : 2:14

Yes. So this is a term in science and philosophy known as scientific materialism, sometimes called physicalism to distinguish from... some people confuse the term materialism with -

Mo Gawdat : 2:24

Being materialistic. Yeah, yeah,

Mark Gober : 2:26

- being materialistic. So they're the same thing. And I actually had never heard these terms when I went to undergrad at Princeton; I wasn't thinking about materialism. But now in hindsight, I realized that this worldview actually is the underpinning of how I thought about life without realizing it, and some call it a metaparadigm. It's the paradigm that underlies all paradigms of reality. So this is a good place to start, because it's the fundamental place. So materialism or physicalism, asserts, basically, that the universe is made of physical stuff called matter. So everything can be reduced to matter. And if we take the universe back to its beginning days - the Big Bang - roughly 13.8 billion years ago, it fills the universe with physical stuff that we call matter. And in this big universe, you have these units of matter randomly interacting with each other in what's known as a primordial soup of matter. So those interactions are called chemistry. And through random chemical reactions in this large universe, we're bound through chance to end up with a molecule that can replicate itself. So that would be like DNA. And then through DNA, we get the development of a biological organism, like a human being, which develops a brain and from the brain comes consciousness. And consciousness is our awareness, our subjective inner experience. It is that which experiences "right now". So, what looks through my eyes? That's consciousness.

Mo Gawdat : 3:47

Yeah, it's that idea of being aware. Right?

Mark Gober : 3:50

Yes, it's the experience of being aware. And it's difficult to even talk about - I'm glad you mentioned that - because it's not something we can touch. It's not physical.

Mo Gawdat : 3:58

Exactly, right? So you can touch your ear, but you can't touch your mind, sort of. Right?

Mark Gober : 4:03

Exactly. So this is one of the big questions in all science. Science Magazine has called it the number two question in all of science. How is it that consciousness comes from a brain, which is the materialist assumption that the brain, i.e. matter, creates consciousness? And that's what I ultimately challenge in my books and my podcasts.

Mo Gawdat : 4:22

And so your view is that it's the other way around - that it is not the brain that generates consciousness, but that consciousness comes first. And then everything physical happens.

Mark Gober : 4:33

And that's the genesis of my title, "An End To Upside Down Thinking." It's not that matter creates consciousness, but it's the reverse - that consciousness is fundamental, as Max Planck, the Nobel Prize winning physicist said in 1931:

Mo Gawdat : 4:45

Yes...

Mark Gober : 4:46

"I regard consciousness as fundamental;

Mo Gawdat : 4:48

Exactly! Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Gober : 4:48

I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."

Mo Gawdat : 4:51

I apologize for those who are not very much into physics. But this is really exactly what quantum physics says. It's that matter doesn't exist until conscious being observes it somehow, sort of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, right?

Mark Gober : 5:07

Yeah. So there's uncertainty around the nature of matter, which is that we can't find its location or its momentum at the same time. That's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So we can't pin down what matter is. And there's an experiment known as the double-slit laser experiment, where the introduction of an observer into the system changes the behavior of a particle. And so there are big questions about whether it's the consciousness of the observer, it's known as collapsing the wave function, where a particle behaves like a wave, meaning it's not even a particle, it doesn't have a definite location...

Mo Gawdat : 5:37

Yeah, it's just a probability. Yeah.

Mark Gober : 5:38

...probability until an observer comes in and collapses it into a particle. So this challenges the notion of solid matter and a solid universe, really, and many physicists have said, "Well, maybe consciousness is playing a role here." And I think that's what the early quantum physicists were saying.

Mo Gawdat : 5:53

So this puzzles me... like, actually it puzzles me at so many levels. So level one is, we know anyone who studied quantum physics, that there is an impact of life, if you want, of consciousness observing something on the behavior of that physical thing. Yet somehow physics - and most of science actually -almost completely ignores consciousness. I mean, in one of your talks I loved the way you described it, you said: we factor consciousness as zero in most of the innovation and technology and science that we study. How can that be?

Mark Gober : 6:25

I think it's because it's so problematic.

Mo Gawdat : 6:30

It's like easier to live without it.

Mark Gober : 6:32

It's kind of a smart move to put it aside because for the reason we discussed, it's not physical, and yet it emerges from something apparently physical, - a body - and how does that occur, and scientists haven't been able to figure it out beyond correlation. In other words, we know that the brain's activity is related to the type of conscious experience we have. If someone gets in a car accident and has brain damage, maybe memory loss, we can look at what happens to different neurons in the brain and how they are related to the new consciousness the person has. The problem, however, is that just because two things are related to each other doesn't mean that there is a causal relationship. And I'll give an analogy from philosopher Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, who says: if you have a large fire, lots of firefighters show up; you have a larger fire, more firefighters show up. But we don't say that the firefighters caused the fire.

Mo Gawdat : 7:20

Exactly. Right? In which case, the analogy you're saying here is that because there is consciousness associated with brain activity, that doesn't mean that brain activity is generating the consciousness, it's just correlated that they happen together. But what would be your explanation, then? What is the brain doing? Why is it playing such a pivotal role in our awareness?

Mark Gober : 7:40

That's a key question because we know the brain is doing something, and if it's not creating it, as I'm claiming, then what is it doing? And I think there's a large body of evidence suggesting that the brain is actually limiting or reducing or filtering consciousness.

Mo Gawdat : 7:52

Seriously? Okay, that's an interesting point of view. Yeah. What do you mean by that?

Mark Gober : 7:56

So, we could view the brain as actually getting in the way .

Mo Gawdat : 8:00

Seriously?! Okay, listen to this guys! The brain is not giving you awareness, it's just standing in your way. Okay?

Mark Gober : 8:08

It's like the processing mechanism that is... I use the antenna analogy which isn't precise. If you damage the antenna, the signal is still there. So if you're watching television and you smash your antenna with a hammer, all of a sudden your TV show is appearing scratchy on the screen, but the signal hasn't been damaged itself. All that's been damaged is the apparatus for processing the signal.

Mo Gawdat : 8:31

Oh, that's so interesting. So our brain... but is it our brain? Or, because brain is that thing contained in our skull. Is it our brain that's connecting us to our consciousness? Is it something else? Could it be more than our brain? You know, sometimes you get those feelings or you text me and I expected you to; I've just been thinking about you, or something like that. Are those happening in the brain? And again - I would even be more in interested to understand - and why is the brain limiting it?

Mark Gober : 9:02

Yeah. Why... you raise a good point that maybe the brain isn't the entire story in terms of our physical biology, but because of the correlations that we see in neuroscience, which are very well known, the question then arises: how is the brain limiting consciousness, even if it's playing a partial role in our conscious experience? And there are a number of independent examples where we see enriched consciousness associated with less brain functioning. We could summarize that by saying, basically, "less brain, more consciousness". One example is near-death experience. And this is a case where a person is in extreme physiological trauma, they have either no brain functioning or barely any brain functioning, and yet they report having clearer than usual thinking or more logical than usual.

Mo Gawdat : 9:44

Interesting.

Mark Gober : 9:44

So less brain, more consciousness. That's one. Another is savant syndrome.

Mo Gawdat : 9:49

Oh, yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Where if you damage part of the brain you become a genius at something like, Rain Man or so.

Mark Gober : 9:56

Yes. And that could be acquired through an accident or some people are born that way, where their brain could be examined, and there are deficiencies relative to a normal brain, and yet the person has extraordinary abilities.

Mo Gawdat : 10:05

So basically, the less we use our brain, the more aware we become. Or at least the less we use the filtering functions of our brain, the more aware we become. What you remind me of, I don't know if you've seen the TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, who was an incredible - I mean, if you guys haven't seen it, you should - it's, she's a neuroscientist, and she gets a stroke that actually sort of stops parts of her left brain functionality. And she starts to get a very, very different experience of reality through the remaining parts of her brain without the left brain filtering things out.

Mark Gober : 10:40

Yeah, that's a great example.

Mo Gawdat : 10:41

Yeah, it's really interesting. So in that case, what you're saying is the brain is not generating awareness. It's just receiving awareness... of what? So where does the awareness actually happen?

Mark Gober : 10:52

Under this idea that consciousness is fundamental, it exists beyond space and time and is the basis of all reality. So this gets into, I think, ideas that are probably beyond what our human mind is able to even comprehend: that consciousness simply exists without cause, and that is the source of all reality, including awareness. It's like the primordial awareness that simply exists. And to use Dr. Bernardo Kastrup's analogy, each of us is like a whirlpool within this stream of infinite consciousness; we're localizations of the infinite.

Mo Gawdat : 11:23

So I have my own consciousness that could be slightly separate or off-sync with yours, but we're both part of what the buddhists call it, universal consciousness or something like that? Is that how it works? So you can have your own little conscious experience and I would have a different one, but we are both part of a bigger conscious experience.

Mark Gober : 11:43

I think that's the general idea to the extent we can even understand it, that we are sort of different lenses of an infinite consciousness having experiences through the mechanics and machinery of a brain-body system.

Mo Gawdat : 11:56

That has tons of implications, right? Because then - and I say that hoping that you will say yes - that basically means that my son doesn't really die. My son's body, physical form - part of that "materialism" if you want - his physical form decays, but his real essence, his real awareness can continue without eyes and ears, right? Is that what you're saying?

Mark Gober : 12:22

That's one of the key implications of this model. If you imagine a whirlpool in a stream, if a whirlpool stops being a whirlpool, if the water just delocalizes, it flows back into the stream. It changes form, but it doesn't leave the stream.

Mo Gawdat : 12:35

That's such a beautiful way of saying it. It flows back into the stream. What is the stream?

Mark Gober : 12:40

This is the stream of the infinite consciousness of which we are a part. And when the consciousness which is localized in a body temporarily, when it leaves the body, it simply transitions into a new state. And the near-death experience is another great example of this. I think the strongest cases are ones in which a person reports a memory, sometimes from outside their body, that others verify as accurate, and it occurs at the time when the brain is either off or should not have - doesn't have - the mechanics necessary to produce consciousness, according to mainstream neuroscientists. So there we have an active consciousness independent of an active body.

Mo Gawdat : 13:18

But that's also in the consciousness of others, in other whirlpools. I had an experience like that. As a matter of fact, I don't know if I shared this publicly, but, so I believe Ali died at 4:11am even though the doctors basically said he died later. But three of his friends in three different places around the world, at that time reported that they saw Ali or dreamt of Ali saying goodbye. So basically, hugging them and saying, I love you and goodbye. And that... religions would call it spirit, but you're saying that his consciousness sort of flows back into the stream and affects the consciousness of the ones that he's close to?

Mark Gober : 13:58

It certainly suggests, this model suggests, that that's possible. And the story you mentioned, I've heard many cases like that. These are known as veridical cases, where what is reported by others is verified - is accurate. And the information could not have been obtained through normal means. So somehow when consciousness is liberated from the body, perhaps, it's able to do things that we can't normally do, or we don't have normal access to.

Mo Gawdat : 14:22

So if the brain is limiting our consciousness by being liberated from the body, you get the maximum capability of your consciousness without that limit, that physical limit, right?

Mark Gober : 14:32

That's the implication. And you're reminding me of another set of cases of people who have been blind since birth, they have a near-death experience when their brain is cut out of the system, and these people report being able to see and they have clear vision when their brain isn't functional. Then they come back into their body and they can see again. So this is to your point that actually our sensory abilities are enhanced when we aren't restricted by the brain-body system.

Mo Gawdat : 14:57

So Mark, tell me. The near death experience was one of those experiences. I mean, you and I offline - so that people don't think I'm crazy - I can share with you lots of those, but including things like psychic experiences, like telepathy, stuff like that. So you in your book, you mentioned those as evidence of the idea of upside down thinking - the reality that consciousness is primary, and these are evidences of that. Can you take us through a few of those?

Mark Gober : 15:22

Sure. So to give your audience a sense of how I thought about this general problem: to start, as we discussed, there's no known mechanism for how the brain could create consciousness. All we know is that there's correlation; we see instances where there are reductions in brain functioning associated with enriched consciousness. And there are a number of what people would call anomalies. And I categorize them into two buckets. One is psychic phenomena, and the other is survival of bodily death. And I have chapters in my book and in my podcasts, I go through one by one, which I'll mention, and the key point is that if any one of these is real, the materialist or physicalist model has a very difficult time -

Mo Gawdat : 16:00

Can not explain it....

Mark Gober : 16:00

- Can't explain it. Whereas we can explain it easily if consciousness is fundamental beyond space and time. So I will just list those out so you have a sense of what I looked at because I'd looked at a really broad range of phenomena. Within psychic phenomena, one category is known as remote viewing, which is the ability to perceive at a distance, which the US government has looked into and validated; telepathy, which is mind-to-mind communication; pre-cognition, which is knowing or sensing the future before it happens.

Mo Gawdat : 16:26

Okay.

Mark Gober : 16:26

I also look at evidence that animals have these abilities - the work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake; psychokinesis, which is the mind's ability to mold or affect matter, even if it's in a slight way.

Mo Gawdat : 16:36

Oh! That's my lifetime dream. It's like bending the spoon, like The Matrix.

Mark Gober : 16:41

Well, some people claim to have been able to do that, but there are also smaller statistical effects. So that's psychic phenomena. The second category is survival of bodily death, which is near-death experience, is one example. Another is mediumship and after-death communications. And the third is children who have memories of a life that is not theirs, seemingly a past life, and this is over 2500 cases studied at the University of Virginia.

Mo Gawdat : 17:05

This is so many. I want to cover a few of those. So are you saying that things like telepathy, psychic abilities - remote viewing specifically, things like pre-cognition, you called it psychokinesis, which is to affect matter... Are you saying there are facts recorded about those? This is not just folk conversations and urban legends?

Mark Gober : 17:26

This is one of the things that shocked me when I started my research because I had heard of none of this. I didn't even know that people were studying this scientifically. And in my research, I found things like declassified CIA documents, which say very explicitly - included in my book, the actual document - remote viewing is a real phenomenon, the ability to perceive something far away, and the US government was using it for national security. On my podcast, I interviewed Russell Targ, who ran the program in the 70s. So that's one area, but there are peer-reviewed papers that actually look at this and look at the statistical effects. And one of my favorites to mention is one that was published in 2018 by American Psychologist, which is the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association, and it looks at the statistics of these various psychic phenomena, and the paper made it through the scrutiny to the editorial board there. I also like to reference what Dr. Dean Radin calls Six Sigma results, which is the idea that the results are so strong that they are a billion-to-one odds against chance.

Mo Gawdat : 18:28

Yeah, so it cannot be random. It had to be consistent, had to be following an actual scientific fact, sort of, even if we don't understand it.

Mark Gober : 18:35

Right. That's what the studies are showing. And this led Dr. Jessica Utts, who in 2016 was the president of the American Statistical Association... What she told Congress and the CIA is: using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.

Mo Gawdat : 18:53

Wow! So basically, I'm stupid. I'm not using my brain at all, because I don't do those things.

Mark Gober : 18:58

Well, in many cases -

Mo Gawdat : 18:59

Say it! Say "Yes, you're stupid!" (Laughs)

Mark Gober : 19:00

Look, I think that the effects are subtle. If we were all 100% telepathic all the time, we'd be reading each other's thoughts nonstop, and that doesn't happen. Whereas we see effects that are beyond chance. And I'll just give one example of one of these Six Sigma result studies. It's known as the Ganzfeld experiment, which has been done over many decades, many experimenters, where you have two people in different rooms. We'll call one person Bob. He's just sitting in a room, put into a kind of a relaxed state. Jane is in another room far away. And Jane is shown a picture or some kind of image by the experimenters. And the experimenters ask Jane, who doesn't claim to have any psychic abilities, to try to mentally send to Bob what she's looking at. Okay, so she does that for a while. And then Bob is shown four pictures. And the experimenters say, "Jane was sending you one of these four. Which one was it?" So the person in Bob's room, if there were no effect at all, should guess correctly one out of four times; 25%.

Mo Gawdat : 19:54

Correct. Yeah.

Mark Gober : 19:56

But the person in Bob's room guesses correctly closer to 32% of the time. Which is statistically very significant.

Mo Gawdat : 20:02

Very significant, of course, especially if the number of experiments is not that high.

Mark Gober : 20:04

And if you do this over and over again, and it's approaching that number, rather than 25% -

Mo Gawdat : 20:11

- exactly, then it's very accurate.

Mark Gober : 20:13

How do we explain it?

Mo Gawdat : 20:14

Yeah.

Mark Gober : 20:14

A subtle, telepathic effect. And if we go back to the whirlpool analogy, it's like some of the water from my whirlpool gets into your whirlpool sometimes. Because consciousness isn't localized to the brain. It's in this fluid, interconnected stream. And sometimes we see these effects where we think of someone, then we get a text from that person, and it's been a long time. Maybe those are the 32 versus 25%.

Mo Gawdat : 20:35

So how has the scientific community received your work? In a way you're basically saying that we haven't even started to understand reality yet?

Mark Gober : 20:45

Yeah. This is suggesting that we need to kind of start from square one. Although we've learned a lot from materialism. We've learned a lot from physics and biology, but it has to be recontextualized. Because of that, the scientific community has been very resistant to these ideas for years. And this has led... I'll give an example. Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, has said things like: that he thinks telepathy is real and he thinks that quantum physics might help us understand it. He's taken an interest in psychokinesis. And I actually interviewed him for my podcast. We talked about all this. He was uninvited from a scientific conference because of his interest in what people call "the paranormal". And what I don't love about the term "paranormal" is that it's charged; it assumes that we know what normal is.

Mo Gawdat : 21:28

Exactly! Yeah, I mean, reality is, we just convince ourselves but we have no clue. If all of this is happening around us, and we're not monitoring it, then probably is the normal, we just are not monitoring it, right?

Mark Gober : 21:40

Right. And our perceptual systems are inherently limited. And we know from the work of Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine, that actually evolution - biological evolution - has conditioned us not to see reality as it is. Because we don't need to - we are more evolutionary fit to see an approximation of reality. So we have machinery that is not equipped to evaluate what's actually going on. We only see a tiny sliver of light on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Mo Gawdat : 22:04

Yeah. It's almost like when you give the example of an antenna that can receive radio waves - I cannot receive radio waves as a human, just because I don't have the equipment to receive it. Right? And so there could be a lot of that that is real and we're just unable to see where it is. Right?

Mark Gober : 22:20

Exactly.

Mo Gawdat : 22:21

Can I go into a topic that is dear to me? I love my son dearly. And I know he's somewhere. I know his essence is somewhere. You're saying mediums - or mediumship, you call it. Right? The ability to communicate with the deceased or the dead. You're saying there is scientific evidence of that or there is at least fact collection of that?

Mark Gober : 22:41

Yes. So when I talk to the scientists who have looked at this for a while, many of them say the strongest evidence is anecdotal from 1800s, early 1900s. There are some cases that, for example, William James, the Harvard psychologist looked at where they put people under real scrutiny and they were able to get facts that people couldn't explain. So Mrs. Piper is one of the famous examples. But more recently for people that like to see the controlled studies, which our scientific community wants, the Windbridge Research Center scientifically studies mediums. And I was shocked to learn this even exists. They use five levels of blinding. So the medium, the person claiming to be able to communicate with the deceased, is speaking over the phone to the researcher - not even to the person whose relative passed away. So the researcher gives the first name of the deceased person to the medium. And the researcher asks a series of standardized questions. And what these studies show - these are preliminary, they've only done a few of them that have been peer-reviewed - but they show that the medium is able to give information about the dead person, just from the first name over the phone, in a way beyond chance, statistically. So they're able to get information that cannot be explained through normal means.

Mo Gawdat : 23:52

And so what does that mean? I'm going to dive deep here, this is a topic that's dear to me. My son is here in the physical world of space and time. He is going through the arrow of time and then he leaves us. Now, that consciousness of his, that essence of his, is viewed by spirituality in different ways, right? Some people will say he's going to come back in another life. Some people will say he's going to wait until heaven and hell happens. And some people who will say, you know, he's just going to go back to the stream. Most of those explanations, and you could have another explanation, but most of those explanations, basically mean he's not sitting around doing nothing. He's either busy being born again or busy running around in heaven are busy being burnt in hell, or whatever that is, in the absence of time. How can he be there? So is the medium talking to him? Or is the medium talking to his consciousness when he was here, or... what's going on?

Mark Gober : 24:49

What many of the mediums claim is that they are actually accessing the consciousness of the person that passed away.

Mo Gawdat : 24:56

Sort of the database.

Mark Gober : 24:57

Somehow, they're tapping into this database, into the stream, but they're localizing it on a particular part of the stream of consciousness: the consciousness associated with this person. And actually, studies have been done on mediums' brains to show that what the part of the brain used in mediumship is actually different than the part of the brain used in normal psychic activities, like telepathy. So there's something distinct happening where they seem to be accessing something beyond just psychic stuff, meaning that it could likely be the consciousness of someone who used to be in a body.

Mo Gawdat : 25:27

That topic is worth a whole podcast. I think this is what you're doing on your podcast. I want to move to the next book. I apologize, I didn't read it. When was "An End to Upside Down Living" released?

Mark Gober : 25:39

It was released on Kindle in April of 2020; and hardcover and Audible in June.

Mo Gawdat : 25:44

Okay, I'm not too late, I shouldn't blame myself. So tell me about that. Because of course, when I read "An End to Upside Down Thinking", listened to some of your talks on the web, basically, in my mind, it almost redefines your whole life, the choices you make to live. And is that what you cover in the next book?

Mark Gober : 26:00

Exactly, yeah. The second book, "An End to Upside Down Living", is if we accept the science of the first book, if we accept this paradigm that consciousness is fundamental, how would we then live differently? Because for me, life changed dramatically.

Mo Gawdat : 26:12

So I promise I will read it, but give us a teaser.

Mark Gober : 26:14

Well, the ultimate question that I look at in that book is, what is the overall intention of our life? How do we align our compass? How do we orient our life? Because everything we do, all of our priorities and values, start with that compass. So what the book does is it looks at, first, what is the nature of reality? And it looks at what are inferences we can draw if consciousness is fundamental? And then how would we think about living, or approaches to living? And then from there, how can we build a compass? And from that compass, we can then have basically a structure for how to think about all of our priorities.

Mo Gawdat : 26:46

And so give me some of the changes. So I know that you left your job as a successful businessman - is that the result of you realizing that life was not about what you were rushing for?

Mark Gober : 26:57

Well, all of my priorities shifted. And I talk about my personal story a bit more in the second book, where I kind of got to a point of extreme nihilism. If you buy into this materialistic view that consciousness comes from the brain, then when you die that's over. There's nothing.

Mo Gawdat : 27:12

Yeah.

Mark Gober : 27:13

And if you take that out even further, then I don't think it's possible to find intrinsic meaning in life. You can try to manufacture meaning and create it for yourself. But ultimately, that meaning is gone when the person dies. And so I internalized that and wanted to be intellectually honest with my worldview. And that made it difficult because even if I succeeded in certain things, then I wouldn't understand why it mattered. And furthermore, when I failed in certain things, and there were a number of instances in my life where things didn't go as well as I wanted, and that started to hit home really hard with the backdrop of thinking life had no meaning.

Mo Gawdat : 27:46

So what is life's meaning, then?

Mark Gober : 27:49

Well, I think we can... we can get glimpses from a lot of these phenomena that we talked about, and I think the near-death experience is a really important one. What's often reported, and I discuss this more in the second book, is a life review... where a person - again, this is a person in a state where they have little or no brain functioning - they relive their whole life in flash.

Mo Gawdat : 28:09

I know. I wrote about that in my book. But yes, and it is exactly what happens - you have a complete life review.

Mark Gober : 28:15

Right. And so this is suggesting the interconnectedness of all things. But more than just reliving the events, what I find in my research is that people say they sometimes relive the events through the eyes of the person they impacted.

Mo Gawdat : 28:27

Ahhh!

Mark Gober : 28:28

So I'll give you an example. Dannion Brinkley, who I interviewed for my podcast, he's someone who has had four near death experiences.

Mo Gawdat : 28:34

Four! This guy needs to be a little more careful with his life, seriously!

Mark Gober : 28:39

You don't hear that often. But not everyone who has a near-death experience always reports or remembers a life review. For him, he remembered it all four times. And each time it started at the beginning of his life. So he got to see the incremental improvements each time he had a life review. But for him, it was particularly dramatic because he fought in Vietnam. He told me, he's like "Mark, I was a big guy. I was vicious in combat." And in his life review, he relived the deaths of the people that he killed, through their eyes.

Mo Gawdat : 29:06

Ouch!

Mark Gober : 29:07

And then he had to feel the pain of the child who no longer had a father. So he felt the indirect effects of his actions.

Mo Gawdat : 29:14

That's so profound! So we basically rework it from their feeling.

Mark Gober : 29:21

Yes. And if we are all interconnected as part of this one consciousness, which the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger called, he said, "In truth, there is only one mind." So I like to call this stream of consciousness, the one mind. Something seems to happen when we are liberated from the confines of the body, like in a near-death experience, and we can view reality through different lenses. So apparently, in the near-death experience, people view reality through multiple lenses, not just their own localized one.

Mo Gawdat : 29:48

The entire consciousness that they affected.

Mark Gober : 29:51

They feel it all. They see the impacts. So when people come back from that experience, in contrast to a hallucination - which some people make the claim that these are just hallucinations - their lives change dramatically. So Dannion Brinkley became a hospice volunteer.

Mo Gawdat : 30:04

What do you think happens after that? If you didn't come back?

Mark Gober : 30:08

That's the big question. Because the near-death experience, they come back, they see a tunnel and they're told, or sometimes voluntarily, to come back in their body. We really don't know. It's a huge mystery, but it seems that there are other dimensions.

Mo Gawdat : 30:19

That, my friend, is your third book. This is your assignment given to you right now. And if you do what you've done with the first two, on this third one, I think you would be solving a big mystery. Mark, I would go on, I would honestly go on, someone told me I should limit those podcasts to less than 40 minutes. So my fanatic following you was not misplaced. You're incredible. I'm really, really grateful for your time.

Mark Gober : 30:46

Well, thank you so much for having me. And the last note I would leave you and your audience on is if we take the implications of the life review and this notion of being interconnected - some would say quantum entanglement is a part of this, maybe - that we are interconnected as part of the same stream, how would that impact how we treat every person in the world?

Mo Gawdat : 31:03

Yes.

Mark Gober : 31:03

So this is where it gets... to me, these are the huge implications. And this is the ultimate solution to the world's problems.

Mo Gawdat : 31:10

So you know what that means. In the times we're going through with COVID-19 and the lockdowns, everywhere in the world, everyone is so concerned with their own little piece of the pie, if you want. Like, this is my own life, how do I protect it? And we ignore the fact that there are so many out there that are suffering so much as a result of what's going on. And I think the real question is: if we're all one, if we're all experiencing the same... "game", if you want, how would our behavior change? How would we start to engage in life in a way that is not just individually focused on me, but really focused on all of us? I think that would be an interesting change for all of us to consider.

Mark Gober : 31:51

Exactly, yeah. And that's had a profound impact on my life.

Mo Gawdat : 31:54

So if you guys - and I think you should - want to follow Mark's work, please go to markgober.com. I think you definitely want to look at his podcast, "Where Is My Mind?" And yeah, I think you're probably feeling as grateful as I am for Mark's presence with us today. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Gober : 32:11

Well thank you for having me.

Mo Gawdat : 32:15

And for all of you who joined us, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to follow me on social media. Search for Mo Gawdat, Slo Mo, Solve For Happy, or One Billion Happy. I know you've got a lot going on. But remember, there is always time to slow down. Until next time, stay happy. Transcribed by https://otter.ai