NDEs and the Emerging Science of Consciousness

gordon curran and i'm welcoming welcoming you to the professional lecture series which we hold almost monthly during the academic year at the bowen center um i'm a professional volunteer that gets speakers for these meetings and and all ideas are welcome um i'm going to turn it over to carrie collier or dr carrie collier who is our director of the bowen center for some comments thank you welcome everyone and i just want to welcome dr evan alexander this evening and ann curran for connecting him with the bowen center we have a new website thebowencenter.org and if you go there you will see that we have a faith leadership conference tomorrow and then we have other conferences but i want to just put a shout out for our spring conference which is called unlocking the mystery of the family emotional system and so i it's great i can see some people out there that i haven't seen in a while and and i also see some new people and i took a look at the registration list and this is just um this list is so wide and varied and i'm just really excited to um to have everyone here tonight and to be here myself so thank you go right ahead ann um i'd like to introduce dr alexander but i'm trying to find out how to get back to my comments um i had them a minute ago how do i get back to my um windows without losing the zoom um i don't know what your screen looks like you can just minimize the zoom or perhaps you uh click on there it is there it is i couldn't find it it just wouldn't show up yeah all right dr murray bowen developed a theory of family systems emotional functioning which includes eight concepts in an effort to describe how the family as a unit can be understood as a science of the human he based his ideas in the natural sciences showing how all living organisms function similarly he also considered a ninth concept which he initially called spiritual phenomena but found that would get confused with religion and philosophy so called it supernatural phenomena to describe human behavior outside the laws of nature he never had time to develop this concept a year ago i read proof of heaven a neurosurgeon's journey into the afterlife which was written in 2012 by dr evan alexander neurologist and neurosurgeon i was intrigued by the detail and information about his illness and journey in tacoma into deep coma revealing information he did not know about his life prior to this occasion he was hospitalized while having a grand mile seizure and was later diagnosed with e coli gram-negative bacterial meningitis and remained in coma for six days returning on the seventh he experienced an odyssey in another realm entirely with no memory during those coma days of another life before he experienced a complete shutdown of his neocortex it was inoperative in essence absent he had no consciousness dr alexander graduated from the university of north carolina at chapel hill in 1976 with a masters in chemistry and obtained his medical degree at duke university medical school in 1980 he completed residency training at duke massachusetts massachusetts general hospital and harvard with a focus on neuroendocrinology he then completed a fellowship in cerebral vascular neurosurgery in newcastle upon time in the uk he was on the faculty of harvard medical school for 15 years as associate professor of surgery specializing in neurosurgery in 2006 dr alexander and his wife and two sons moved to lynchburg to be closer to family and he committed commuted to charlottesville to work at the focused ultrasound surgery foundation he was instrumental in helping to develop magnetic resonance image guided neurosurgical procedures he wrote both papers and book chapters and spoke worldwide during this time it was in 2008 that he experienced his nde near-death experience while in deep coma the incredible outcome is that dr alexander recouped completely over the weeks to come and return to his responsibilities as a surgeon for a couple of years before moving to charlottesville in 2012. he no longer sees patients as he found it difficult to be fully present with them while also pursuing his new direction as a pioneering scientist and modern thought leader dr alexander was named again to the prestigious watkins mind body spirit list 2020 which also includes the dalai lama pope francis eckertol and desmond tutu he has done hundreds of media interviews on all the major networks and international radio digital and podcast interviews as well his books are sold in more than 40 countries and many many languages at the beginning of chapter 2 of his last book dr alexander quotes nick herbert physicist in saying quote science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness end quote this has become dr alexander's focus as he explores the role that consciousness plays in wellness and recovery and a way to understand more fully mind-body awareness practices and function for a fuller life and death experience let us welcome dr alexander who will present on ndes and consciousness thank you and thank you very much anne that nice introduction um i'd like to move uh through this and kind of share with you an extraordinary kind of life transformation in many ways a reversal from my life before due not only to my near-death experience it happened in 2008 but also largely to the 12 years uh almost 13 years now since that time that i've spent working with other scientists around the world studying the fundamental nature of consciousness and so it really has led me into some exciting new territory and and that's really what i'd like to share uh i i was not very familiar with uh the bowen center before but i've enjoyed what i've read about it and certainly see a significant amount of overlap in our thinking so um i think we can help each other along in this whole process now starting out uh important to point out i've grown up uh in a neurosurgical family my father was very scientific he was the chairman of a neurosurgical training program but he was also very religious he believed had a profound belief in god and the power of prayer and i would say it figured in a lot in his work as a neurosurgeon growing up like many in the 60s and 70s i knew that science is the pathway to truth and i promise you i'm more of a scientist now than i've ever been but i've also come to realize that that kind of mechanistic view of the material world that i thought before my coma was the be-all and end-all of understanding of human events i've come to realize was very much an error and it has to do with the relationship between brain and mind the nature of consciousness and that's where we want to go with this uh now my own personal experience uh involved as you heard of bacterial e coli meningoencephalitis it involved all eight lobes of my brain so there really was no place left no neocortex certainly that could be participating in any kind of conscious experience and yet what i experienced in my coma was by far the most ultra-real meaningful powerful profound memorable uh set of activities in my uh entire existence so how did that happen when my brain was so in such a documented fashion was so damaged that it really could not have mustered a dream or hallucination or anything those who've read proof of heaven will realize i shared some of the medical details in that book especially uh in an appendix and to me proof of heaven the book is really a big question mark it admits these experiences that millions have described over thousands of years and basically says yes they're real but how do we explain them and my focus as a scientist is how to understand it from a scientific perspective but i i'll tell you up front that ultimately what i've found is that we are basically spiritual beings in a spiritual universe and to deny uh you know kind of our spiritual nature in many ways completely denies the most fundamental aspects of human experience now there is a medical case report on my medical records that came out long after the book proof of heaven it was written by three physicians who were not involved in my care uh but they were fascinated by my recovery because there's no question my case for any physician is an extreme challenge uh how in the world i could recover from that illness basically over two months back to normal in fact in many ways i was better than i had been before and that part is very hard to understand but it has a tremendous amount to do with our kind of spiritual essence and the role that that can play in healing and that's where i really want to go with this as we move along um so the journey of i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on my nde itself the book proof of heaven tells that story fully but the important things for this discussion um have to do with uh the the the various spiritual features that i encountered i'll get get to that in just a second i wanted to finish by saying that case the medical case report on my medical records by dr serbikana and and others uh appears in the journal of nervous and mental diseases in september of 2018. and anyone can access that medical case report if you go to evan alexander.com that's my website go to the blog postings for september 2018 and you'll find a blog that's devoted entirely to that uh case report on my medical records uh really astonishing they went a lot further than i did and documented the amount of damage to my brain and kind of their surprise that i could recover from this and in fact when the medical peer reviewers challenged the authors and said well this case really doesn't line up they the word they used was they said it's absurd that someone this ill would end up having a full recovery uh and the way that uh the authors um satisfied them was they said it's because he had the near-death experience that's what allowed this phenomenal profound unexpected and what some people might call a miraculous recovery i don't really like the word miracle because i think there's a lot more to it than that and a lot more ways that our our will can have an influence in this um now uh it's important to point out that in my journey i was amnesic i had no memory of evan alexander's life and that is a very unusual feature for a near-death experience even though most of the qualities of my nde were right on the kind of mark of an absolutely classic in the e if you use what's known as the the grayson scale uh the grayson scale has 16 elements maximum value of 32 is the max score uh and my score was 29 out of 32 so it's extremely powerful as a transcendental near-death experience but the only reason i really lost points and didn't get a perfect score was my amnesia now when i first came back to this world none of my neurosurgical knowledge was there but over weeks and months as that knowledge came back and as i was kind of revisiting my memories because the one thing i never lost was my memories of what happened in the experience but it was a big mystery to me how those memories all came back initially i explained it all by saying well i knew from what the doctors told me about the damage to my neocortex and given the general idea in neuroscience that the neocortex is involved in memory long-term memory storage even though there's been some doubt about that in recent decades oh that was my default explanation for that early complete loss of memories but then imagine my surprise when those memories came back completely over about two months and we'll get into that in a little while about memories because in our book living in a mindful universe we actually go into detail about how memories are not even stored in the brain and as a neuroscientist trained in uh you know formal neuroscience i can tell you that was a big statement to go that far to to realize that memories are not stored in the brain at all but that became very clear to me from my experience and also as you'll hear from a lot of the scientific work i've done with other scientists around consciousness since that time now in many ways my case was a perfect model for human death and so that's why these events what i did know when i woke up on day seven of that coma was where i just been this extraordinary journey and again that whole story is there in proof of heaven but briefly it started in what i call the earthworm's eye view very primitive coarse unresponsive realm it was like being in dirty jello of a strong memory of roots or blood vessels all around me and then that seemed to go for ages i had no memory of anything else i had no words or language uh people when i would talk about this early on after my experience would ask me was that earthworm eye view some kind of hell or purgatory well i think hell would be at least a little bit interactive and and this was none of that even though i had no language and no words i could still wonder you know what where how uh and there was never a flicker of a response from the world around me uh luckily it did not last forever i was rescued by a slowly spinning white light that came as a kind of a perfect musical melody and it opened up like a wormhole or a portal up into this rich ultra real gateway valley and that gateway valley had a lot of of earth-like features i was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing at no point in this journey did i have any body awareness there was never a sense of a body a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing there were millions of other butterflies all looping and spiraling in vast uh formations uh and then below us in this gorgeous meadow gorgeous beyond description were thousands of people dancing uh and when i came back to this world weeks later in writing it all up i said there were souls between lives that was my impression of of who these beings were but there was a lot of joy and festivity as i said this valley was absolutely gorgeous there was no sign of any death or decay of plant life buds blossoms on trees opening up in rich dynamic a very tactile fashion and it was just an absolutely gorgeous scene it was being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs pure spiritual beings leaving sparkling trails against a blue black velvety sky and those orbs were emanating chants and anthems and hymns that would just thunder through my awareness and when i wrote it all up weeks later i called them angelic choirs because to me that's really the best description for what was going on there what was fueling all those festivities and i remember this kind of soft summer breeze that blew through and it was my i called it in my writings a divine uh wind or the breath of god that was my first knowing of the god force of pure love and healing and wholeness uh and and what makes that a true spiritual home is the extreme comfort that's what so many near-death experiences have come in touch with it's that god force of pure love that is not judgmental but very kind of comforting soothing reassuring uh it's it's uh nurturing in just a beautiful way uh and that breath of god that was my first awareness of that and then i realized that all the lower material realms down below this layer of spiritual reality um the completely different ordering of time uh was all part of that world with that divine uh loving force going all through it and i remember the uh the choirs above of those uh chants and hymns that were coming down they turned into yet another portal so another major theme of my journey was the fact that what i remembered as music now of course none of these sounds were being heard by ears none of what i was seeing was being seen by eyes um and um [Music] people have a misunderstanding of indies they think that a near-death experience is very kind of murky and dreamlike this is dreamlike the material world we live in is the dream because in fact that reality is much more real uh it's kind of astonishing and people have done scientific studies of the quality of memories from ndes and are quite astonished they uh rival any other memories we ever have from real or imagined life events uh as being very strong and stable memories over decades so it's it's really it's not a hallucination or dream these are profound spiritual journeys that have a tremendous amount of import to all of us especially when you realize as i did i'd never read the nde literature before but after my own uh case my son who was majoring in neuroscience at the time and and came home from college and uh he had been there when i was deep in coma so he was just astonished that i was making this recovery he came home two days after i got out of the hospital and i remember he gave me a big hug and he told me later it was like he could see this light shining within me as if i was far more present than i'd ever been before and i remember what i told him that morning it was the day before thanksgiving 2008 and i said my experience was way too real to be real i was still shocked by the uh the ultra reality of the entire experience i mean to me that was evidence of something really extraordinary even though my doctors tried to talk me out of it of course they said the dying brain can play all kinds of tricks when i was trying to explain it to him uh so they told me it had to be a vast hallucination now my knowledge of neuroscience had not yet come back very little of it was back it took two months for all that to come back but in the coming weeks as that knowledge came back it collided with my the strength of those memories of what had happened deep in coma especially as i learned more and more about my medical records and talking it over with my doctors that the scan showed all eight lobes in my brain were affected neurologic exams showed my neocortex to be in horrible trouble uh even in the first few hours my brain stem was badly damaged according to that neurologic exam uh the lab values were horrific if you read that case report you'll see what i mean i mean this uh cerebrospinal fluid glucose level which in in most people is going to be 60 to 80 uh in somebody with a bad case of meningitis it might go as low as 20. my csf glucose was one this was a terrific case of bacterial meningoencephalitis that absolutely should have killed me and that's why having such an extraordinary experience and then being able to muster this complete recovery over two months certainly should garner attention and it got my attention uh tremendously so now what i'd like to do is share more of of of that the the gateway valley it turns out was only kind of a halfway point because those angelic choirs provided yet another portal and that was to what i call the core that was as far as i went on this journey was the core realm but it was pretty far and and to get there i had to witness all of four-dimensional space-time in this material universe collapsing down and then all of that spiritual realm the gateway valley that i'd uh just encountered and saw all of that shrink down and collapse and then that was what left me to the core and in the core all of that collapse of the material and spiritual worlds was presented to me as this complex oversphere as part of the teaching and that was uh you know in the core realm of some of the deepest lessons occurred and that includes uh certainly my visions that uh saw life reviews all reincarnation it turns out that life review is a very important concept uh in this discussion the life review is something that goes back in near-death experiences at least to the time of plato who wrote about the armenian soldier er who was killed in battle um 2 400 years ago and uh out on the battlefield dead for days and when they finally put him up on a funeral pyre he came back to life and what he told his fellow soldiers is when you die your life flashes before your eyes because he had a full life review and he said the only thing that matters in that process is how much love you have managed to bring to the world this from an armenian soldier killed in battle 2 400 years ago and that could be uh the same story told by an iraqi war veteran today uh you know of having this extraordinary vision going through life review through the most crucial aspects of your life and the important thing to understand about the life review is it's not really from your own personal perspective uh most people describe a life review as being one where they're aware of the emotional uh kind of impact that their actions and even their thoughts had on others around them uh and this is kind of extraordinary but it shows us how the boundaries of self in many ways are a fiction uh that are there to support this beautiful journey of life where we're interacting with our fellow beings but we we generally think that our mind and our mental contents are separate uh from other people but in the in the modern world of consciousness studies that is not so true uh in fact you can demonstrate telepathy telepathy is uh probably easiest to demonstrate in identical twins uh there's a beautiful book by uh guilion playfair called twin telepathy i can highly recommend he estimates that 35 of identical twins have strong telepathic experiences they can be so strong that one twin might burn their touch a hot stove and the other twin a thousand miles away might develop a blister and feel pain that's a very strong connection so telepathy is one example of how our minds kind of overlap likewise remote viewing remote viewing is a field of uh it's some sometimes referred to as the psychic spy program the stargate program in the us other countries had intelligence programs with remote viewers it's been statistically demonstrated to be a real effect uh by none less than jessica utts the head of the american statistical association back in 2015 who gave a talk uh to more than six 000 statisticians and scientists at that meeting where she discussed how remote viewing was had been proven beyond any kind of reasonable doubt and yet most of her scientific colleagues wouldn't believe in it and when she would challenge them they'd say well they didn't even waste their time studying the scientific literature on it she said well that doesn't sound very scientific um but it turns out that that when asked what they would prefer more data or a personal experience they all wanted a personal experience so that is really uh that reflects a lot of where karen and i karen is my partner karen newell she's my life partner and also the co-author of my third book living in a mindful universe and that's really where we go with all this it's personal experience and it's really through meditation uh because i have i realized within a year and a half two years in my coma that the only way to understand any of this uh that i'd been through uh deep in coma was to explore consciousness through meditation so that's what i started doing i found out early on about binaural beats um which is uh a form of of sound where you put in a one tone to one ear a slightly different tone to the other ear and uh this is a process that was first discovered by a prussian physicist in the mid 19th century but what what has been discovered in the 20th century was that process of the binaural beats that kind of wavering sensation that comes from that process of slightly different frequencies to the two ears can lead to profound changes in conscious awareness and for example robert monroe who is well known for investigating out-of-body experiences found that binaural beats could greatly enhance that process likewise some of the scientists involved in remote viewing found that that binaural brainwave entrainment could greatly enhance the ability to remote view and so that's really what karen and i were pursuing and i was specifically pursuing meditation with binaural beats because to me it sounded like a very powerful tool for allowing us to kind of separate our conscious awareness from the normal processes of consciousness when we're in the body i'll talk a little bit more about that as we move through this uh but for now i want to get back to kind of the center of the challenge of my of my journey of realizing that when my brain was uh so effectively offline with such documented medical evidence how was it i was having such an ultra-real spiritual experience and those who've read proof of heaven will realize what a gigantic challenge that was to me what i can tell you is since then i've had to go through a kind of a fundamental process of questioning everything i ever thought i knew about the nature of reality and i really had to go back to square one and start over and realize this is all about the brain mind connection but very importantly also realizing that in many ways this world around us this physical world is only one realm of many that we have access to uh as sentient beings and of course most of us are used to the dream space we have that every night uh to interact with the dream space and i think there's a tremendous amount of overlap of that space with what i experienced in my nde likewise i would say there is a tremendous amount of overlap with what is uh uncovered in psychedelic um you know plant medicine type experiences so i think uh but i i i also believe from my own personal kind of comparison of such experiences with my near-death experience that the psychedelic drugs really only give you a tiny glimpse through a keyhole they do not give you the much bigger kind of penthouse panoramic vision that you get through a near-death experience but far better than the psychedelics is what i think we can accomplish through meditation with powerful tools like sacred acoustics and i know for example that christopher bates bach in his book dark knight early dawn did a direct comparison of binaural beat brainwave entrainment for spiritual journeying with his own personal process of high-dose lsd for spiritual journeying and in his book in dark knight early dawn he goes so far as to say you can make at least as much progress with the with the brainwave entrainment and the sounds as you can with the lsd and i think that's an important point from my viewpoint uh the psychedelic drugs are really only having mainly a minimal effect on your mainly on your neocortex that's where most of those serotonin receptors are that the uh those lsd dmts psilocybin magic mushrooms and other similar psychedelic substances have uh have an impact uh and in contra distinction when you're using binaural brainwave entrainment you're actually using sounds that are influencing the lower brain stem circuits that arose more than 300 million years ago and i believe that's one of the reasons why in our workshops uh and in our experience of people who use sacred acoustics and stay in touch with karen about the experiences they have uh that we're finding kind of extraordinary ability of people to reunite with their higher soul kind of traverse that veiling function of the brain and really get into some healing soul work i'll point out in the same context that uh another current use of of such psychedelic psychedelic substances are several medical studies showing using psilocybin magic mushrooms in patients who have a severe fear of death cancer patients also psilocybin has been used for extreme addictions uh like nicotine addiction opioid addiction alcoholism things like that and it turns out that one dose of psilocybin in the proper therapeutic setting can be very powerful for months and even years in alleviating that fear of death or in helping people address those strong addiction issues now as many of you are aware there's this whole concept uh in addiction work and alcoholism of 12-step programs of turning it over to a higher power so that we're not leaving it up to the ego mind to kind of guide our life the ego certainly gets us into a lot of trouble uh and that was one of the beautiful lessons of my journey is realizing that you know the ego voice the little voice in my head that was completely eradicated during my journey it's very liberating to do that and of course in my meditation the first thing i try to do uh is put that little ego voice into timeout i love it how michael singer in this book the untethered soul he calls that little voice of the voice in our head our running stream of thoughts the annoying roommate uh and that's a beautiful way to look at it an important way to look at it that is not who we are so in deep meditation um you know i acknowledge that right up front that little linguistic voice in my head that ego i can kind of honor it for doing what it does but then i put it into time out because in fact the deep mystery of consciousness is not that little voice the little voice is little more than a parlor trick and it's a neurosurgeon who's operated on a lot of patients using what are called awake craniotomies for example if they had a tumor or vascular lesion near their speech areas we would operate on them awake and we do that because the brain feels no pain you anesthetize a scalp you can do this opening oh and then a sedated patient and then you can lighten them up and they can participate uh and so i realized as a neurosurgeon that little voice in the head is a tiny part of the brain it's certainly not who we are uh although many of us treat it that way uh and in meditation i i put that little voice into timeout because it's the awareness of existence that is the deep mystery of consciousness and in fact in meditation we can start developing of that awareness we have uh and that connection with that higher soul that's a far more profound and uh deeply interconnected part of the universe than our little ego mind is uh and that's where i think we can start to make tremendous progress in healing so in many ways a lot of this becomes uh something of an issue of semantics and definitions you know of god of consciousness and certainly i will admit that there are a lot of unconscious processes that also play a role in all this uh in this discussion of consciousness uh and yet they're really all part of the of the same package and we have ways of addressing and accessing all of it and this is really in many ways my kind of understanding that's come out of all this especially in realizing the brain does not create consciousness uh but i i've come to a favor of you that i know other scientists in conscience of studies are paying a lot more attention to and that's really the brain as a filter uh as a transceiver and of course that's not a new idea that's an idea that william james had back in the early 20th century as the professor of psychology at harvard studying a lot of very profound spiritual experiences and uh he he uh knew that fcs schiller had discussed this uh notion of the brain as a filter and that consciousness might be more primordial and uh he he was very much in favor of that there were other people already berg saw in france uh aldous huxley in the u.s of in later decades all talking about the brain as a filter or a transceiver but not not as the originator of consciousness and what i've come to realize is not only is it not the originator of consciousness it's not even the repository for memory for long-term memory storage and that's where all this gets very interesting and that's where you really have to start talking uh about these other realms and uh you know where is that information stored i mean i think the uh the best and uh the best answer i would give for that right now is what i'd call the quantum hologram which is really the the uh kind of theater of all potential for all events that could could happen in our lives and and that's where our free will is active because we select a certain pathway uh that allows some of those events to truly manifest and others not um but uh i would say that this whole um this whole uh uh world view shift that i've had to go through uh has really involved uh uh what i call a uh consilience consilience is the notion that if we look at a deep problem from widely different uh and disparate uh perspectives that we get better information about understanding it and and here what we're talking about is studying consciousness that is phenomenal awareness what all of us are used to is is just this uh existing and living and experiencing life um and it turns out that this conciliance involves many different fields it involves neuroscience and what is called the hard problem of consciousness that of course i think most of you are probably familiar with uh that was something that was defined in those terms by of david chalmers the australian philosopher in his 1996 book the conscious mind uh and of course the the hard problem of consciousness had been brewing for decades uh and many scientists had con contributed to this uh extremely deep mystery uh in trying to relate the workings of the brain with what happens in in human phenomenal experience and having great difficulty with it the hard problem is actually an impossible problem for materialist science there is no way to move from the physical world and the material brain into fully explaining consciousness without understanding there's much more at play and that in fact you really uh do best by seeing consciousness as a primordial constituent of the universe that predates and exists outside of things like the big bang our whole observable universe is something that exists within that consciousness that primordial mind so neuroscience is is one field philosophy of mind is another especially for example the binding problem this whole issue of the apparent uniformity of consciousness in any individual you know everything that i smell and touch and see and hear and all of my executive function and all of my memories all of that is coming together into one unified consciousness so how is that how in the world could a physical system like the brain unify consciousness in in such a a way well it's a big challenge and and the best answer to that uh actually ends up being that the consciousness is primordial it's already unified in fact the more interesting question is how is it parsilated out into our individual senses of consciousness and i would say that that occurs mainly through a process of dissociation now uh in addition to neuroscience the hard problem to philosophy mind the binding problem you also have all of the evidence in parapsychology for non-local consciousness and that starts with what i mentioned a few minutes ago with telepathy remote viewing you have the whole category of of near-death experiences of shared death experiences uh for example there's a book on near-death experiences called the self does not die that came out a few years ago and that is a beautiful book with more than a hundred cases of vertical perceptions in ndes that really have no explanation uh in western medicine so uh you know ndes shared death experiences another category of the kind of from the parapsychological world that contribute to this conciliance of information around neuroscience and philosophy of mind trying to tease out uh how the brain and mind and phenomenal human experience all of these things are interrelated and then there's the uh one of the biggest uh kind of fields of study in non-local consciousness um is all the evidence for example out of university of virginia there are other places that study this but at uva dops.org uh you can learn a lot more if you you're not already aware of this uh but the group uh the division of perceptual studies there have studied past life memories in children indicative of reincarnation uh for 60 years now and profound more than 2500 cases of past life memories and children uh where the best explanation is actually of reincarnation and that's after deep kind of scientific study to validate the facts of the case etc but reincarnation from my point of view and i think from the viewpoint of many of those scientists has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt so we really have to entertain a much bigger theater of operations in considering what we're trying to explain in terms of human experience and relationship of brain and mind the the other thing in in terms of the consilience is quantum physics itself because uh uh those who study quantum physics uh when you review the history of it you realize uh people like wolfgang paulie uh erwin schrodinger eugene wigner john von neumann pasquale jordan and others all were so shocked by the experiments of quantum physics because of what they said about consciousness and so what all these founding fathers said was you cannot get behind consciousness it does not seem to be something generated by the physical brain but if you look at the physics of the very world around us and the most proven field in the history of science is quantum physics and yet at its base at the base of these experiments is a very profound mystery about how all that can work i think it was david baume who's one of the first people addressing this as a quantum physicist and specifically the issue they're talking about is the measurement paradox that is that the uh choices the free will choices of the observing scientists play a tremendous role in what ends up resulting from those experiments uh and in fact john wheeler at princeton was so shocked by all this he was one of the leaders in quantum physics uh he came up with what he called the participatory anthropic principle uh and basically that principle was noting with great uh kind of shock and amazement the role of mind and free will in uh kind of causing uh certain determinations of output that really in many ways prove that consciousness is not being created by the physical brain at all and in the last few decades increasingly refined experiments in quantum physics uh have gone uh uh all the way to the point where as we argue in our book living in a mindful universe the best conclusion from these experiments and from uh trying to understand quantum physics in the modern era is that consciousness is fundamental in the universe uh that mind over matter is the way all of this works uh and you know when you get right down to it in in medicine we've known this for decades what is our gold standard for looking at any new treatment placebo effect a placebo-controlled trial uh and that can even be done in some uh procedures for example a paper uh a few uh three or four years ago from england uh where they were looking at uh uh coronary artery catheterizations and stenting uh and they did a did a sham procedure to compare and they found that in fact the placebo effect the patient's belief was as powerful as the placing of the stent uh so you know placebo effect in a patient's belief thoughts and attitudes we've admitted for decades in medicine are very of capable of healing and of leading to wholeness and health and for those who think this is just about taking a a sugar pill and curing a headache i would encourage you to go to noetic.org that's the institute of noetic sciences website and put in the search term spontaneous remission you will find a book there that they publish in the mid-90s it's now out of print but you can download the entire book for free and legally from their site uh and they're now i've just heard recently in discussions with the ions group they are now updating that whole database of so they've got 25 years more of data to add to it but even at that time in the mid 90s they had uncovered 3500 cases of people with advanced cancers of infections of some with congenital deformities others with advanced degenerative diseases that were able to heal themselves beyond any effect of western medicine through their power of belief and if you go through that data set you'll i think you'll be as impressed as i was uh with the incredible um incredible work they've done in showing the power of people's beliefs and ability to heal so it really kind of opens the door wide to seeing the full-blown power placebo effect and of our will to influence the unfolding reality now in many ways in this discussion of brain mind and consciousness it's not like we're talking about anything so new for example wilder penfield one of the most renowned neurosurgeons in the 20th century wrote a book in 1975 summarizing his career and much of his career had involved stimulating uh brains uh weight await patients as i mentioned a little while ago doing weight craniotomies i've done many of those he focused his career on that and uh was a very good scientific investigator and in fact in 1975 in his book the mystery of the mind uh he makes it very clear the brain does not produce consciousness he was fully aware of of too many cases in his patients of events that he witnessed all of his attempts to map memory and map the brain electrically uh he'd come to realize that memories were not stored certainly not in the neocortex although at the end of his life he thought they might be stored in the brain stem because he didn't realize at that time that you really had to leave physicalism or materialism or the physical universe behind in terms of fully explaining consciousness and this is not just talking about you know the the supernatural and the the spiritual uh if you consider consciousness part of the natural world we're really just talking about the natural world and various different realms that we have access to that's that's the way i'd rather put it but i love it the way pinfield uh he he makes it crystal clear in that book that the mind cannot uh be fully explained by the brain at all and he said this gave him great hope as a neuroscientist uh because of the spiritual nature of of humanity and for him that was a tremendous uh relief it turns out that uh you know placebo effect is is in many ways just the tip of the iceberg because then you run into other spiritual healing especially in some near-death experiences just as i mentioned earlier that's how those physicians who wrote up my case report got that all into a publication was by pointing out that the nde was what allowed me to have this profound recovery so this is really just kind of getting us into that territory of mind over matter and just how far can we go with that uh it's um it's very empowering uh to the individual and to the world at large the more we can realize this and of course what most near-death experiencers will tell you is that in these realms that we visit this kind of ultimate realm of ultimate reality of on on these journeys uh in looking back on our life and going through this life reviews every bit of that um is realizing that we're spiritual beings and that is where i think the meditation uh and centering prayer uh from my perspective what i've seen in our workshops has been uh very valuable in seeing where people can go with this and i think the whole world at large in many ways just as we talk about in addiction uh uh medicine you talk about uh gift of desperation well in many ways we're all facing a collective gift of desperation today and it's not just the coveted pandemic and the economic collapse uh and a lot of the the mental challenge that that is presented to us uh but in many ways i think you can look back on our society and and what's happened in the last few centuries with the rise of materialist science and its lead the problem with that materials perspective and the notion of brain creates consciousness uh was this false notion of separation that we're all separate from each other and that's kind of the hallmark of reductive material of science uh and yet i would say that this new emergent uh kind of view of consciousness with consciousness is fundamental uh that takes this conciliance from neuroscience philosophy of mind quantum physics parapsychology psychology every bit of it and tries to build up this bigger model of the primacy of consciousness and kind of the will of that one mind and each and every one of us is a facet i like to talk of the one mind is like the big diamond with all these facets and each and every one of us a sentient being is a facet on the diamond but we're all participating we're kind of using that one mind that one consciousness that's revealed to us very fully in a near-death experience when we become one with that god force of pure love when we go through those life reviews and realize that the boundaries of self in many ways are artificial or set up to support the drama of living these lives together and of learning the lessons we're here to learn but ultimately coming to realize that it's the we're dreaming the dream of the one mind and this is all something that i think our society will benefit from this uh this awakening of humanity to this deep truth and worldview change i know one of the ways that um that karen and i have tried to take this message to the world in a profound fashion and this might be something of interest especially those of you who are actively involved uh in treating and mental health uh for people around you we developed a course with dr anna yusum dr yusum is a psychiatrist in manhattan in fact she is did a pilot study with binaural beats with sacred acoustics and that pilot study was published in february of this year of 2020 in the journal of nervous and mental diseases and in that pilot study what she found was that 26 of her her patients had a reduction in of anxiety and depression and depressive symptoms over two weeks time using sacred acoustics binaural beat brainwave entrainment uh just uh in the listening without much in the way of a therapeutic setup around it they found great relief and benefit just from the the kind of peace and the kind of traversing of the veil and connection uh with higher soul that these tones uh enabled them and so with dr yousum karen and i have recorded a video course that is available it's a nine hours total content it's called spirituality in mental health and it can be accessed by anyone interested at the website becomingmorehole.com that's one word becomingmorehole.com uh and by way of comparison in doctor you some study as i said 26 reduction uh in those who listen to these tones over two weeks whereas the control group only had a seven percent benefit and if you read her paper you'll see a tremendous amount of additional kind of quality of remarks she makes about the experiences of her patients and all this is especially important not only is the coveted pandemic and the economic collapse causing a tremendous amount of mental health issues but that's all on the heels of a really severe crisis in this world i'm sure those of you involved in a mental health provision realize that we had an epidemic of suicide and opioids are wiping people out in fact for the first time in a hundred years our actuarial survival curves were suppressed and by 2015 or so uh this actually won a nobel prize in economics for angus deaton and his wife and case was their reporting on this tremendous kind of epidemic of suicide and opioid death that we had in this country suicides increased by something like 26 from 1999 to 2015. uh the opioid crisis in 2017 claimed 72 000 lives uh and of course since the covet pandemic a lot of this has just worsened uh so we really are in in a kind of a crisis uh mode at this time but i fully believe just like in that the world of addiction studies where you talk about that you know hitting the bottom uh having a gift of desperation i truly believe that we are in the process of a collective gift of desperation at this time and i'm very optimistic about where we can go with it that optimism comes from my knowing of where the scientific revolution in the nature of consciousness is going religious systems have been around for 5 000 years or more to try and teach us of some of these deep lessons of living together of morals and ethics so that we can have a very high functioning society and yet the track record with religious systems has been somewhat mixed uh and in some cases it's even led to more problem than solution especially with some of the conflicts of superficial dogma uh religious wars and and violence between religious sex uh that kind of thing uh i believe that one of the ultimate results of this revolution in the neuroscience of consciousness and our understanding of the brain mind relationship will be a complete revolution in our kind of human society in terms of how we treat each other and deal with each other as more and more people come to realize from near-death experiences that life review is very much like having the golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated written into the very fabric of the universe it's a very profound lesson uh in love and the more people realize well this is part of the human condition uh and that also that it involves coming back to this world again and again this is what that work from uva uh uva dops.org is so important the work of ian stevenson and jim tucker on reincarnation because it really kind of ups the game here we must realize we're responsible for our choices and of course the work at uva is not just interesting you know from a scientific worldview perspective but in fact many in this world beginning with carl jung uh and then charles tart brian weiss michael newton stan groff and others uh have developed the world of transpersonal psychology over the last few decades and this is really just an expression that to fully understand our lives as human beings we have to realize that we are souls that we've been here before uh and that in many ways prior lifetimes were what set the stage for the events of this lifetime uh and the more we can kind of address that use hypnotic regression use meditation start recovering past life memory start making a richer sense of all of this for ourselves for our own existence that's where we can truly grow meditation as i've said a very profound way to get in there whatever your technique of meditation is whatever it takes to quiet that little ego voice and kind of rise beyond the ego because the ego even though it certainly serves a certain purpose of you know in our function uh it does not serve a purpose that helps us in trying to become more whole in a spiritual sense and i've come to realize that all of our physical mental emotional health ultimately results from our spiritual health and that spiritual has to do with our connectedness with others that we're all part of this one mind that we're all in this together that ultimately our soul does the best to bring love compassion kindness mercy and acceptance not only for self and i will say it's very important to do that for self because in many ways my near death journey showed me that the vast majority of the world's problems today are that we don't even love ourselves enough and that is the as the divine sacred beings that we are and this is not just about humans uh animals have a very rich spiritual life that was something that was made clear to me on my journey and certainly in many of the stories i've heard from other journeyers in the 12 years since my comments become very clear we're all spiritual beings sharing a spiritual existence and a lot of the kind of sickness and disease in our society that results from that false sense of separation that emerges naturally from that materialist uh uh prejudice that we're just physical bodies and that there's nothing more to our life and birth to death that's very misleading and so i would say that this awakening that is coming to humanity now um is one that offers tremendous promise for growth and coming into wholeness for all of us uh to to bring to this world um you know a far more harmonious uh more prosperous uh and more resonant uh world where we're all in this together we're here to help each other um gratitude forgiveness when necessary but every bit of this involves these deep soul lessons that ultimately uh originate in near-death experiences but in the modern emerging science of consciousness as much as it supports these kinds of stories and events and the more that the medical community nurses and doctors can open up to welcoming these stories from patients who've have such extraordinary experiences because they are very common uh questionnaires and and polls indicate that probably somewhere around five percent of people in america and in other countries the number go anywhere from four percent to 15 percent of the population have had near-death experiences so they are not uncommon uh and yet they are just the tip of the iceberg and showing us uh something much deeper about our spiritual nature about our connectedness with others and how that truly at the very base level of this universe one of the deepest truths is the love the kindness the compassion that we encounter there and that that is really the ground of our being and that is what we need to bring back to this world in large measure dr alexander yes this is time if i can stop you to begin discussion and to ask people to use their raised hand function and i will call on the people for you um and then i'll ask individuals to unmute self excellent i think this is a perfect time i was actually just going to invite uh the q a session so i was at a natural kind of endpoint for my uh little address for the evening okay um i am really doing this because i would like to have an equal representation of bowen theory bowen thinkers here as well so i'm going to um invite bowen theory thinkers who want to get in here to please do so uh so that we can have um a um a broad view here so let me okay here i see um harold lockett if you'll unmute yourself and you can ask dr alexander your question yeah thank you thank you dr alexander for your very uh stimulating presentation tonight yeah um as you were talking i i made quite a few notes uh but one of the uh just for the sake of brevity i just want to ask one one double prone question and it's about prayer prayer uh before surgery a lot of people think you know that there's some very positive effects uh with with prayer before surgery uh is administered and also along with that what what did what what what was what do you think about your family who prayed for you while you were going through your experience and what all that meant to you and and and to uh what what did that mean for you as well well thank you what i'd like to do is start with your second question my family and that whole event um prayer was a beautiful part of the experience people who've read proof of heaven will realize i describe towards the end of it all when when i find that i can no longer access those higher spiritual realms and now i've been kind of relegated and left in these lower murky realms but they were now blessed with this incredible uh uh loving feeling and that was a vision to me of thousands of beings going off into the distance and i could see them with their heads down some were holding candles some with hoods off into the darkness but this murmuring energy that they were putting out and it was words i couldn't understand but it was booing me up in this incredibly blissful state that mimic perfectly the uh joy and bliss i had felt in the uh in those higher spiritual realms in the gateway valley and especially in the core uh and so he the to me the miracle was witnessing this beautiful comforting spiritual hominess and welcoming of all that prayer energy coming up from them that's what i called it was the energy of prayer so to me it was very obvious from inside my coma just how powerful uh that message was and how comforting and how it gets in uh so that's one part of the the answer the other is yes um i'm a firm believer in prayer for me centering prayer uh which is of course a kind of a thy will be done uh form not a supplicant uh requesting form but for me it's really uh my prayer ever since my coma has been one more of more of trusting the universe and especially with this acknowledgement of our multiple incarnations and kind of this higher soul form uh it's important uh to acknowledge that that prayer uh i think has tremendous power and i think if you read dr harold koenig's book on on prayer or dr larry dossey's book on healing words you won't doubt the uh incredible uh efficacy and power proven with prayer in certain settings of course it's hard to study scientifically but the reality is i think prayer does play a tremendous role in healing and i think praying before surgery certainly in fact i often find i'm contacted by people whose family loved one is in coma sometimes deep coma maybe even brain dead and i always encourage them to pray uh even if the loved one has left the physical world the prayers can get through to their soul and so i think prayer is a very important form of communication and probably the biggest difference in my prayer before versus after my coma is as i said i have so much trust in the universe that my prayers now are really just thy will not mine be done which is a trusting that the universe will take care of the highest and best goods that god force will deliver the highest and best good to all involved and that my soul will accept uh whatever that outcome is but i've been very pleasantly surprised over the last 12 years how often that kind of form of prayer works for the better in terms of my loved ones and in terms of other people that i pray for thank you thank you very much thank you thank you for your question okay dr alexander i see kathleen cauley has her hand up okay go right ahead kathleen and mute yourself kathleen thank you very much um so many things i'd like to to say but i would say you know in bowen theory that um dr bowen believed it was a that it was a fact that people believed but that what they believed was not factual and so it has opened a whole realm of interest in the intersection of science religion the supernatural and bowen theory over the years we've had these wisdom of the ages meetings in the field and there's an effort now to to move toward that once again but um so that would be the first thing the second thing i want to say i've been very involved with animals my life dogs uh guide dogs specifically for the blind and interested in the bond the the family of the blind person and the dog and i've had these animals in my home worked with them in public at hospice and in church but primarily in my clinical practice and having the dog just present in the room and active in what bowen theory might talk about the triangles in a family uh dogs would play an active uh they'd be part of the patterns of a family where they are interactive and they are on the family diagram for instance when they arrive and when they leave and what is the function of these dogs in the system so i was interested in what you had to say about animals having a rich spiritual life without going into detail that has been my experience particularly at hospice just watching the animal move if i can regulate myself in a way that lets the dog do the work uh could you say a little bit more about that well yes thanks for your observations and work with the with the uh um the assistance dogs and uh i mean i just um i i firmly believe from my own experience i know that we have two dogs and i had dogs growing up and uh relating to them is very easy of course you you have a friend in them they understand you in very deep ways i've seen uh animals behave in extraordinary fashion for example when when my biological uh aunt lost her husband about two years ago and they had a little dog that yapping napped in the afternoon no matter who came to the door no matter when um a little sassy uh and yet um when after he had passed and when they brought the funeral home brought his urn of ashes to the front door sassy knew it was him i mean she had she didn't yap at all she knew and and she was acting i know the way dale described it uh you know the dog the dog knew and i'm certainly aware of cases like in certain hospice settings where they use cats just for that purpose some of the the cats will know who the next soul will be to pass over and so i think animals have a very rich spiritual awareness i know when we lost one of our beloved dogs about five years ago the other dog knew it even though there was no way they should have known it but they came running into the house after that the other dog had passed and they went running over to where that dog normally slept and they wouldn't leave that spot for hours and just kind of in the sad mope uh you know they knew what was going on so um i think that animals can have a very rich kind of relationship i know one of my uh colleagues uh dr alan hamilton uh who's another neurosurgeon he's done a lot of work with uh horses for healing uh you know as therapy animals after a stroke or things like that so i think there's a tremendous amount of evidence that animals can have a rich spiritual kind of essence and presence and existence and it overlaps with ours so the more we can kind of honor that and use it the better of course it has tremendous implications for our say our farming and our food procurement practices because i would say right now they completely violate any kind of sensible humane uh vision of how we should be treating other animals and i i think that is from my point of view a major part of our society that needs addressing uh it's that whole industry the way animals are handled thank you very much i'll let others have a chance here thank you kathleen there's ron bacon is next mr bacon do you want to there you are kind of in the shadows here we go uh i was hi i'm interested in your use when you're talking about the soul uh in bowen family theory we talk about differentiating a self uh the solid self core self uh the real self are ways of trying to get at what that is do you see those as synonymous or do you mean something different when you say soul well for me soul is really kind of that essence of a personality that would come through you know a lifetime or through multiple lifetimes it preserves a certain strand of kind of kind of karmic uh debt or of knowledge or of transformation in a process of evolution important to point out that uh in in this kind of way of looking at reincarnation it's not like a buddhist system of kind of a blind mechanistic wheel of suffering that you're trying to get off of in fact one of the visions i had uh in my journey given that i had no memories of evan alexander's life so i could not have an evan alexander life review but i saw life reviews in in very profound fashion and and one of those visions that occurred in the core room was it's a vision that i refer to as the indra's net vision because it reminds me of that kind of teaching and concept from the ancient eastern spiritual traditions but it showed this tapestry of all these interwoven threads and i could see kind of the individual soul life of each of those threads uh you know kind of in and out of of incarnations but it all led to this glorious golden center uh it was uh of in many ways i would say the best way to understand that is uh to look back at pierre taylor de chardin's book in the mid 20th century the phenomenon of maine and in that book he takes concepts of evolution at that time of course the kind of darwinian evolution but he took them much further uh and and basically said all this universe exists for the evolution of consciousness itself and that's what i believe is going on we're all contributing to that so the evil the reason the universe exists is for consciousness to evolve and that is nothing more just like that old saying all politics is local that's nothing more than individual sentient beings are going through this process of growth and transformation which is really just learning their relationship with the universe know thyself that's kind of the prime directive and so i would say that my view of the soul is of that one kind of traceable element that contains experience memory of experience can include memories of past lives everything we experience both in this material world and in our dream space and in our unconscious lives every bit of that adds to this kind of soul consciousness but in many ways it also uh been at its deepest level overlaps with that primordial mind with that uh god force that uh so many near-death experiences have been comforted by uh and i believe all of us can access that in prayer and meditation i know people who've had profound kind of kundalini awakenings and spiritual awakenings uh in deep meditation and certainly many of those never had a near-death experience so i think just as conscious sentient beings we all have the power to access uh uh this and kind of that soul level i'm not sure if i'm really answering your question because i i i'm sorry i don't really know the definitions of the various soul types uh in the bowen system uh but what i do know is is kind of what i look at is that that soul line and then how it basically is a dance between the kind of ego mind and our kind of consciousness in this material realm as well as that aspect of higher soul that we can connect with uh you know through meditation etc by going within and realizing that ego is a little more than a parlor trick and then start connecting uh with a soul that's much more connected to the higher good for all yeah i think you know dr bowen i'm not aware of him using the word soul often if ever i'm just not uh so i'm not sure you know it's it's certainly a you know it's uh there's a lot of different uh interpretations out there that's all you know absolutely that's a very other point and i'll tell you another another thing about my whole process in the last many years of assimilating this is i've come to realize the linguistic brain you know as rene descartes said to define is to limit and so for me i'm much more of a sp lumper than a splitter and and that's why i tend to even conflate mind and consciousness and my use of the words are are pretty much synonymous but i think soul is for me a pretty important concept of maintaining a kind of a line of experience and memory that leads to potential growth uh for a sentient being so and you know the the whole spiritual aspect with uh in work with addictions that somebody who is going to have sobriety versus abstinence is going to have some experience with something greater than the obsession that they've been having for the drug and that um that's something that each person has to discover whether they do that through an organized religion whether they do that through nature whether in some way but to have an experience with god yes he said absolutely yeah well i think that's very true and of course that gets back to um you know what i mentioned during the talk about um the use of of psilocybin in the treatment of fear of death and the treatment of very severe addictions uh and just one dose can have a tremendous effect in the proper therapeutic setting from my point of view it's not really the psilocybin that's doing it as much as the opening of the veil to kind of higher soul to um which i believe is what we we get exposed to in those kind of experiences even though the psychedelic experience is not the best way to do it i think meditation is a far more powerful way to connect with that god force and with that kind of higher self that actually has the ability to heal that's what all this placebo effect and the spontaneous remission that i've been talking about is an example you know by the thousands that are out there in the literature of beliefs and attitudes and thoughts playing a tremendous role in our physical mental and emotional health uh essentially but i think you're right in essence it's getting in touch with that god force to me that's what that primordial mind is and the more powerfully we can kind of uh nurture our connection and relationship with that force uh the more effective we are at growing as a soul and bringing that kind of love and healing and wholeness uh into this world for self and for others so i think that's again it's some of this is about linguistics definition of god consciousness but in many ways this kind of simplified system allows it all to flow pretty readily dr alexander there are two more questions see if we can fit them in in the last 10 minutes thank you for your patience gail thompson thank you mr bacon thanks ron hi dr alexander thank you for sharing your messages particularly as a man of science to come out i really benefited from reading your book aloud to my father as he was dying and i'm curious why you think we forget our oneness and our soulness and become entrapped in ego and material existence why do we get all of that why don't we know what we're here for i think we need to remember the ego does serve a purpose you know especially in uh the dance of predator and prey uh there's uh something about this kind of self-awareness and it's a self-awareness that's also focused on the material world around us and those are the parts where our ego is really not helping us uh in growing um and yet uh in a lot of ways you know we have skin in the game by the emotional buy-in uh that is if we had all the knowledge of our higher soul fully living these lives knowing that we were eternal spiritual beings we wouldn't necessarily be behaving the way in how we treat ourself and others uh so there there i think there's um a benefit certainly to uh kind of rising above the ego in the meditation prayers i'm saying because that allows us to have that kind of higher vision of self in relation to other selves and realize that we're really all in this together so there's a tremendous value in this kind of awakening um and yet you know in some ways you're also asking why do we have that program for getting why is it you know jim tucker and ian stevenson the doctor doctors who study these children in their past life memories say that beyond age five or six it gets very difficult those memories get covered over it's a natural process of forgetting so i believe most of us as young children have these kind of memories that tie us to the spiritual realm tie us for example to a family who might have passed over already like grandparents uh uh and things like that um [Music] so we we have those kind of connections early on but then for whatever reason we we kind of lose all that and then we kind of buy into this life and and uh i think the emotional engagement is very important uh it's not to be denied and yet in many ways in meditation i find that i'm often kind of rising above that i embrace the emotional engagement because that helps to teach me of certain things about this life and about myself and about my relationship with the universe so in many ways it's it's a process of growth and transformation that involves both the buying into this kind of material life but also that spiritual essence that we can glean through spontaneous epiphanies through ndes through a kind of dream work and through meditative work i think ends up playing a very important role in helping us to grow uh to the higher souls that we came here to be odd rules of the game why do we have to forget why does it why is it set up this way why do we have to learn through this means well i i i'm not sure why but i've certainly come to realize that the hardships and difficulties in life in many ways map the pathway forward these are milestones of our soul growth in fact you can really say that our free will only manifests when we can rise above the ego the ego you could argue uh just has a kind of a mechanistic automatonic response to certain things and and that's especially darkness and challenge whereas as we unite with higher soul and start to have this bigger vision of self and purpose for existence to basically learn about our relationship with the universe it allows us to grow into kind of a much higher form that benefits from those hardships and challenges grows from them uses them to energize our transformation as a soul i mean for me that was a very important recognition of my experience was the value and the importance of the hardships in life illness injury these are all gifts in many ways and the more we can come to see our lives as unfolding in that fashion i think the better we can do with growing to be the souls we came here to be thank you i think we can get in one more it's a gentleman who i'm not sure if you'll just state your name it says iphone sir oh it's maybe uh vincent randy hi yes hi thank you i'm very good um can you say a bit more about the term dissociation that you used to talk about this uh question that was just asked right you know so in this this kind of worldview we're developing uh one sees primordial consciousness that primordial mind out of which everything originates and then sees our physical body and brain and the brain is serving as a filter uh you know to reduce that consciousness down to this more limited form that we see is kind of a personal uh conscious awareness um [Music] and uh sorry i lost my train of thought but the your question was about the the term dissociation relationship to this process and so then the question is well how do the how does this primordial mind uh differentiate out into these uh uh kind of apparently individual cells now i again will refer to that life review uh because the most common description of life review in ndes and these are out there uh literally by the by the millions uh is that you experience it from the perspective of of others around you who are affected by your own thoughts and actions uh so in other words the life review is a perfect example of how we are not truly ourselves our boundaries of self are apparent when we're in these bodies living these lives but at a deeper level uh we're we're much more kind of the one mind living this now you might ask well how is it that uh you know in the past life memories in children uh that they they seem to have kind of a soul line so in other words it does seem to be uh that there's a certain viscosities to the soul so even if in this between life uh realm you're having this blurring of the boundaries of self and you're realizing how much this is a drama that involves all of us kind of interacting um but i i like to use the words it's like sharing the dream of the one mind but this is a dream of progression and advance but then the question is how do we have those separations of soul and that is something that recently has come up in in some discussions that i partake in especially around quantum physics and the work of bernardo castro uh and i would highly encourage anyone interested to check out bernardocastropwiththek.com to learn more about that but he he and john climo proposed this about 20 years ago that the the way this whole mechanism works is that consciousness can naturally dissociate into these individual branches that each and every one of us perceive as our own individual consciousness now of course you know in mental health you can also have um you know multiple personality disorder in someone and that's postulated to be a differentiation of of their consciousness into separate modules and it's interesting when you study people in those cases specifically using something like functional mri uh you find that the the brain in the patient starts to behave like the mind that is currently occupying and and that changes of associative into another associative uh or a disassociative version of self leads to a whole different fmri so it's it's interesting how the brain seems to respond to these kind of changes in mentation even to the point of showing uh different dissociated forms of consciousness uh in a given patient but i think that that whole principle of dissociation uh is something that is also operative at this larger scale that allows for us to have this uh semblance of our own mind and yet if you check carefully with things like remote viewing um i'm sorry things like telepathy uh or like say the ganzfeld used in the the dream studies at uh back in the uh late 20th century uh where you actually uh can show that this dissociation um is something that um can happen uh naturally uh in those pathological situations but also occurs naturally um in differentiating of that primordial mind between you and me and other sentient beings who claim to have their own kind of mental processes so it's that dissociation in several different forms that we're talking about there but i believe that would explain the dissociation of mind into the apparent of separate sentient beings that we all seem to assume is there but again when you look more deeply you realize that there's more overlap and kind of a crossover of those mental experiences than than we normally believe to be the case thank you dr alexander i think ann curran has are are you are you is your hand up for closing anne or do you actually have a question because we're out of time i know we're out of time okay great um but i did have my hand up for a thought or a question and i i can do both go for it one is i remember from your first book how touch was a part of your family's decision to to be with you while you were in coma in other words 24 hours a day one family or another family would hold your hand now you weren't conscious of that but it happened and people do respond to touch emotionally or intrinsically it just happens so that was one question and it was also related to a question about energy force and how does that work in this and maybe well just emotional energy uh consciousness energy uh spiritual energy human energy because we we as human beings and and animals as as kathleen cawley mentioned um they sense something in each other that's an energy force that's what i'm talking about absolutely and you may not have time to get into that but that's kind of where my questions were coming from um and of course i was intrigued by this story you gave in that book about your birth sister who had died and you never knew her never knew about her at that time because you did your family research on your birth family post experience with nde um so that that's what triggered me to be interested in your writing because that was beyond knowledge in any context that any that you knew right well that that's a very important point of course that's what got my attention that's kind of the way the book proof of heaven comes to an end was by realizing that uh uh identity of that beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing it was a very profound experience um and you're exactly right you mentioned earlier about touch now i have no personal memory right of that touch but of course they told me about it and i firmly believe that it was a an important part of my staying anchored to this world and coming back to this world uh my family i remember it was the first night i was in coma uh my son had driven five hours down from from uh college my youngest sister had driven up four hours from the south uh they converged at about 11 30 that night and when my younger sister phyllis first got to the room uh and and she actually the nurse had just stepped out and she saw me in there on a ventilator alone and that's when she made a big deal with the nurses and said can one of us be here holding his hand all the time and the nurses were excellent they did their very best to allow a family member there and i'm i'm convinced in my mind that that that touch had a tremendous role to play in kind of keeping me anchored to this world and you had mentioned about energy uh you know the psychic energy the kind of human energy i think this is absolutely a form of energetic exchange um that occurs between us in in prayer and in the healing touch and uh all of that there's a tremendous amount of of kind of an energy exchange and and it's not the word that i often use i mean for me um you know as a scientist in many ways it's more about information uh there are certain laws of energy conservation that uh become problematic especially when you're discussing models of brain mind and consciousness and for me it's much more facile to be discussing passes passages of information than necessarily energy but really again that's just semantics uh it's uh truly about a deep kind of resonant energy i think this is why we can have so much overlap and knowledge of kind of the spiritual energy of animals for example it's it's an information kind of overlay and a resonance of of information where we end up kind of fully uh kind of knowing their spiritual energy and they know ours through this kind of overlap and and constructive interference of information thank you so much ultimately that's what it is thank you and thank you all very much for having me let me give a couple of quick announcements one is march 19th there is an ethics meeting for professionals who wish to get ceus to accommodate their ethics responsibilities in april 9 and 10 we have the spring conference the title of that is unlocking the mystery of family emotional history so that should be quite interesting and preceding that on april the 5th which is a monday night so please just know that um this group will meet again or this the professional lecture series will meet again and um highlight libby copeland who has written a book called the lost family and it's about dna testing and how that's altered people's uh families in fact and concept of family so please come to that that would be quite interesting if you have any other questions you're welcome to leave them here or contact the family center and they can give you my email address if necessary thank you so much for the evening and thank you so much dr alexander for spending this time with us it was rich well thank you all at the bowen center it's been my pleasure and uh would love to hear from any of you reach out to me at evanalexander.com you can learn more about the meditation at sacredacoustics.com uh and for any of the mental health practitioners as i said uh becomingmorehole.com is all the information to that course that we did with dr anna yousum thank you all very much for having me it's been a real pleasure to be here thank you good evening

Channel: Bowen Center

Views: 19,798

Rating: 4.8013544 out of 5

Keywords: bowen center, bowen theory, family systems, family therapy, georgetown family center

Id: GHzAfj-62Uc

Length: 95min 23sec (5723 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021