JJ: Welcome, everybody, to today’s show. I am so excited to bring you Dr. Eben Alexander. “Proof of Heaven” has been a book that I’ve probably purchased for 20 or 30 different people since it came out. And it’s sort of the scientific proof in my eyes of something that I’ve already known or believed, based on other teachings that you guys know that I’ve dealt with, either with teachings of Abraham or watching different reruns of Oprah with people who have had NDEs. But just understanding sort of on a different level, on a scientific level. So, Dr. Alexander, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me and my audience today. It’s such an honor to have you on my show.

Dr. Alexander: Well, JJ, thanks so much having me. It’s a real joy to be here with you today.

JJ: Now, I know that the latest book, “Living in a Mindful Universe,” I’ve been listening to this. I have it, but because of travel and some death in the family and just sort of chaos on my end for the last month, I’ve been listening to the audiobook. And I’m not completely finished with it. I’m on about Chapter 11 or 12, I think. And I have to say, what’s really fascinating is, obviously, you’re a neurosurgeon. And I want to go back. We’re going to deal with Mindful Universe, but I want to go back because there’s still so many people that haven’t read “Proof of Heaven.” And I really think it’s such a beautiful story. In fact, I had seen your interview on Super Soul Sunday. And again, sometimes when somebody knows something, and maybe you can speak to this too, there’s a resonance. And when I heard your story, I’m like, “Yep. Yep. Yep.” And then I believed it, I loved it, I recommended the book before I had read it. And then one of the therapists that I had been working with, doing some EMDR, she said, “Did you read the book?” I said, “I didn’t. I saw the show.” And she said, “Oh, no, you need to read the book.” Because, of course, you don’t unveil on the show the ending. And then, of course, the beautiful way you described your experience, you couldn’t really get that when you were on Super Soul Sunday.

So, I really appreciate and I want to make sure people understand your journey sort of on a linear level of “Here’s what happened to me,” but I want to take it a step deeper than I think maybe you’ve talked about before. I haven’t watched all of your interviews, but before today’s show, last week, we interviewed Karen Newell, and Karen is also the co-author of “Living in a Mindful Universe.” So, we talked a lot about you on her episode, and we talked about astrology. And part of that spiritual part of me… I use astrology like a science. I use astrology to explain energy patterns of how maybe you look at the world, how you interpret information, how you may see things. And again, we’re going to go over your story, but when I heard your story, I thought to myself, “That is the perfect law of attraction story.” And I’ll explain to you quickly why I said that.

Here you are, you’re a neurosurgeon, and we’ll go through your story about what it is that you so yearned for but simultaneously resisted because of the left brain, linear, trusting in science and repetitive information that could be proven over and over again, that you had to manifest the exact disease, the exact circumstances that you would prove yourself wrong. You were asking for something, you got it in the exact way you had to get it, that it was undisputable to answer your deepest core questions. And I’m like, “This is the perfect law of attraction conversation right here,” that we yearn for things, we have questions, and then we attract the perfect situation to prove ourselves right or wrong. Now, fortunately and unfortunately, there might be some pain and discomfort that comes along with it, but… So, let’s go back to the beginning of what life was like before, and if you had to sort of give it a “Here’s who I was in the world. I was this kind of person, doing this kind of thing, believing this kind of thing.”

Dr. Alexander: Yeah. Well, basically, I was very much influenced by my adoptive father who was a globally renowned neurosurgeon. And it turns out, though, that his own father had been a general surgeon in Eastern Tennessee back in the early 1900s, and his own father had taken him to a Presbyterian church every Sunday of his life. My father was a combat surgeon in the Second World War in the Pacific Theater, and he actually survived almost two years overseas, I really think because of his strong belief and a loving personal God and in the power of prayer. And so, when he came back to the United States, he headed up a neurosurgical training program. So, he was very scientific. Absolutely, he was deeply into cosmology and physics. He taught me so much, not just about neurosurgery and neuroscience, but about science in general. But for him, there was always plenty of room for this infinitely loving personal God and power of prayer in his scientific work. He never saw a conflict.

Now, I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and like many of that generation, I came to realize early on that science is the pathway to truth. And I promise you, I’m far more of a scientist now than I’ve ever been. But what I came to realize is some of the assumptions on which materialist science (that’s our conventional kind of media-popular version of science for our culture today)… it’s strongly materialistic or physicalistic. It believes that the physical world is all that exists, and therefore, if you explain everything about causality in that physical world, you can explain everything. And it turns out that the one thing you cannot explain is consciousness itself, which is a really profound mystery from the viewpoint of physicalism. In fact, there’s something called the hard problem of consciousness, which is probably the deepest mystery ever promoted to human thought. And it basically points out that you cannot simply extrapolate that the workings of the brain give rise to the workings of mind.

And so, I had come to believe that physicalist model. And it’s a religious belief really. Our modern scientism is a religious faith that is very little supported. And when you get into the realm of consciousness and all men are of human experience, you start running into tremendous problems with that “materialist brain creates consciousness” model. And really, that’s what my journey has shown me very clearly. And you’re right in so many ways. As I often say in my talks, near death experiences, in spite of the fact that they have tremendous commonalities that are completely independent of your prior beliefs, religious beliefs, things like that, you can be shown things in an NDE that completely topple all the religious beliefs you may have ever adopted in your life. But they modify it in such a way that you come to see the reality of our spiritual existence, and that we’re spiritual beings, and that the calls of forces in the universe are primarily in that kind of mental and spiritual realm.

And that’s what this awakening has really been all about for me, because before my coma, I fully bought into that neuroscientific party line of the physical being all that exists, the brain creates consciousness, and therefore, when we die and our brain and bodies disintegrate, that’s the end of our existence. And I now know that’s completely false. And in fact, the evidence is all around us. When you ignore the problems with the hypothetical model of materialism, because those problems are gigantic… And just look at human experience and what we’re trying to explain, and not just our everyday, mundane consciousness, which is a deep enough mystery in its own right, but also all the examples of non-local consciousness: telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis. All the examples and scientifically proven studies that we actually have tremendous influence and access to information far from where our physical body and brain happen to be at the moment.

And so, consciousness is a far bigger thing to understand than the simplistic little version that I thought I was aiming for as a neurosurgeon back before my coma. And that’s where really I think I found so much kind of joy in realizing where the scientific world was on this. I had no idea how many hundreds of scientists around the world get this at a very deep level, the messages that I’m portraying in “Proof of Heaven.” I mean, Karen and I hear it all the time from doctors, from nurses, from engineers, from physicists, from chemists, biologists, scientific minds who are so grateful for this message, because it really admits something that they suspected is true all along, but now we put it in perspective and we start to address it.

But from my point of view, the book “Proof of Heaven” is more of a question mark than anything. It says, “Yes, these are very real experiences, and yes, they imply things about this universe that are far grander than what we appreciate just in our moment-to-moment lives here about the very nature of our existence, and yet we really are just beginning to uncover some of those deep mysteries.” But the good news is, for those who have always thought that maybe there’s something real to the soul and to the notion of spirituality and the spiritual universe, that the modern science of consciousness fully supports you in that. And in fact, the modern science of consciousness fully refutes the simplistic nonsense of kind of naked materialist science that tries to pretend that when you die, that’s the end of your existence.

JJ: Did you ever ask your father to explain his belief?

Dr. Alexander: Well, to him, it all made perfect sense. He didn’t need some new version of how to explain four-dimensional space-time and other observations of quantum physics to know the reality of prayer and the power of prayer. I mean, he was an operating neurosurgeon, so he would operate on people’s brains. And he fully bought into the power of prayer. I knew that it helped in many cases to help him in getting the healing for his patients that he sought. But he also realized that not getting the necessary physical healing that one wants, say, in dealing with a malignant brain tumor or an aneurysm or subarachnoid hemorrhage or something like that, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the people involved, that there’s something badly wrong about the way they’ve lived their lives. Because another part of the equation that I’ve come to realize is very important is the reality of reincarnation.

And the scientific study out of University of Virginia, the vision and perception studies, Ian Stevenson, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing through the work of Jim Tucker today, these are scientists hard at work. They’ve uncovered more than 2700 cases of past life memories in children around the world, where the best explanation for the data was actually of reincarnation. So, I think one would be an extreme fool to simply throw that data out, say, “Well, it can’t be because it doesn’t fit our theoretical models.” Because they’ve uncovered incredible cases along the way. So, in other words, I’m saying that we’re much bigger than just one body, one incarnation, and the only way to understand our lives is to look at multiple incarnations that I would say always are involving reshufflings of various soul members of the soul group that we’re here to learn and teach these lessons with. So, it’s really just a much bigger understanding of the nature of consciousness and of what human beings and what sentient life is all about, that is not at all restricted by the falsehoods of simplistic materialist or physicalist thinking.

JJ: What do you think now, looking back when you had patients tell you they’ve had an NDE? I mean, because you had multiple patients, right, that told you they had NDEs and you dismissed them? Why do you think, now looking back, why did you do that then versus considering other data or looking for or researching more into it?

Dr. Alexander: Well, like many modern intellectual folks, I was kind of seduced by what science has done, and beauties and glories of scientific achievement. And I knew the techniques that enabled us to get there, and they involved setting up experiments in four-dimensional space-time and assessing results. And so far, I was really not aware of the tremendous amount of evidence that the brain is not the creator of consciousness at all. It turns out that evidence from a scientific viewpoint is widely available to those who choose to look. And in fact, this kind of thinking in neurosurgery goes back at least to the year 1975. That’s when Dr. Wilder Penfield wrote his extraordinary memoir about his career, stimulating the brain and awake patients, especially in treating epilepsy and things like that. But in his book, “The Mystery of the Mind” published in 1975, he makes it clear as can be, repeatedly stating over and over again that you cannot explain the workings of mind through the workings of the physical brain. And he makes it very clear that you need something else, that there is something about the spiritual, something about consciousness that rises above the simplistic nature of the brain and the physical body that’s very real and that you can demonstrate scientifically. I mean, the scientific method can be used to demonstrate all of this.

So, it’s something we go into in “Living in a Mindful Universe” about modern psychedelic drug studies which completely defy that materialist model that brain creates consciousness. Because in repeated studies done around the world on people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, like psilocybin, LSD, dimethyltryptamine, the active principal in ayahuasca, and other such substances, that the brain seems to go offline. Use functional MRI or magnetoencephalography, and the most profound experiences that people have under the influence of those drugs show the brain going dark. No region gets more active. And yet they have phenomenal, logical experiences that are so shocking and novel, they can change their lives. There’s tremendous work going on now looking at psilocybin in particular to treat fear of death in cancer patients, to treat very severe cases of alcoholism and addiction, especially the tough ones like opiates and nicotine addiction, and finding that one dose of psilocybin can be very effective for 6 to 12 months. I mean, it’s astronomically important what’s going on here.

And I would say that these are examples of what I would call spiritual healing, our way of connecting with higher soul and kind of seeing our life mission in a different and more complete version that allows us to grow and teach and really follow the will of our higher soul. I mean, you can have all kinds of debates and this discussion about the nature of free will, and you can make lots of arguments, as materialist scientists try to do, that there’s no such thing as free will. What they believe, of course, is that if it’s all just chemical reactions in the brain giving an illusion of consciousness, then consciousness is nothing more than this confusing epi-phenomenon of those chemical reactions and electron fluxes in the brain, of things all following the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. So, where would you possibly inject free will? Well, free will comes in very powerfully when you realize that we live in a mental universe and that mind influences matter.

In “Living in a Mindful Universe,” we go into great detail about mind over matter in this universe, as it’s proven to us. And one of the strongest examples, of course, is in modern medicine, we have six decades of experience of looking at placebo effect. That is just the fact that if you give somebody a sugar pill and tell them it can make them better, that in about 30% of cases, depending on what you’re dealing with, that’s enough. And it’s not just about headache and hip pain, but if you go, for example, to the Institute of Noetic Sciences website and put in a local search there for spontaneous regression, you’ll find a book on more than 3500 cases of spontaneous healing of advanced tumors, of terrific infections, of congenital deformities, degenerative diseases, etc., healed because a patient believed that they were doing something that could make them better. So, belief and faith are incredibly powerful. And when you look with an open mind at the evidence for prayer and healing, you can find that there is a substantial amount of belief there, especially given the honor of placebo effect that we give it in medicine, where any new drug or a lot of surgical procedures need to go through comparison with a placebo-controlled arm to even show that they’re valid, because we realize how powerful a patient’s belief is that belief and faith can make them better.

Medicine has admitted for decades that this is a “mind over matter” universe, so the fact that quantum physicists are finally stepping up to the plate, as witness, a one-page editorial that Richard Conn Henry, the head of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins, wrote in 2005 in the scientific journal Nature. His one-page editorial was entitled “The Mental Universe,” and it talked about how in modern quantum physics, they were rapidly converging on a realization that the main causal principles in our universe are, top-down, causal principles that involve the mental aspects of it all. So, no surprise that mental works and placebo works. In fact, I would say the whole future of healing in medicine, in gigantic ways, depends on how we learn to really more fully modulate and control those kinds of forces of mental influence on our emerging future.

JJ: It’s all of the details, and looking at your astrological chart, for those of you who are curious, Dr. Alexander is a Sagittarius. Shouldn’t be a surprise whatsoever. Sagittarians are true seekers, and you’ve got it all over the place. So, your soul, your personality is Sagittarius. You’ve got your Mercury, which is how you communicate, in Sagittarius. You’ve got your Venus, how you deal with love, in Sagittarius. It’s all about true seeking, true seeking, true seeking. I have a lot of Sag in me too. And I’m not. I’m a Pisces. But I’m a Sag moon, a Sag rising, a Sag soul. So, it’s always that wanting to learn, wanting to learn, wanting to learn. There’s never an end. At the same time, it balances out also being available and open to sort of the esoteric and the unexplainable and spiritual principles, because Sagittarians aren’t hardcore in the… It has to be, like I said, a Taurus or an earth sign that’s very much about the box being repeated over and over again.

And then you’re Aquarius. So, how you deal with emotion is Aquarius. Aquarius is the 11th of the signs out of 12, and they all kind of snowball and grow and evolve onto each other. And Aquarians are all about thinking and thoughts and ideas, and about really moving our culture ahead. And what I see and what I’m hearing, because it’s been interesting reading both of your books. I know you have one that’s in between this, but reading these two books, and really I’ve been promoting Proof of Heaven for a long time and handing it to anyone who has someone die. I went to a funeral at my family. It was my great-aunt. And at the time, another one of my family members who had lost a child was looking down in the ground at the burial site, and all I wanted to say was “He’s not there.”

Dr. Alexander: Right.

JJ: I’m like “He’s not in there.” If you really understood it, or having a trip to a cemetery in Palm Springs to see some famous people who are buried there. And I didn’t get out of the car because I’m like, “They’re not there.”

Dr. Alexander: Right. They’re not here.

JJ: If you understood it, you could still have a relationship with them right now in this time-space continuum, because you could go into a frequency to connect with them and to receive them.

Dr. Alexander: Right.

JJ: But so many people have this, like, linear “Oh, they’re gone.” I’m like, “No, no, no. They’re not gone.” We all have seen… Hopefully, most of us have seen. My first time, when I was maybe 13 or 14, it was at my church back in Pennsylvania, and I walked in to see the priest who had passed away, who had transitioned. And I remember taking one quick look at his body and said, “He’s not in there.” But most of us don’t realize that we’re also still here. So, for me, one of the main spiritual principles, and I guess as much science as I need to be convinced, is the work of Abraham and law of attraction, and using frequency and vibration. And I was waiting in your book at Chapter 9 or 10, when you did the Tesla quote about frequency and vibration. I was like, “Okay, there we go.” Because that’s super clear to me. That’s all I needed was to understand that on a radio dial, you can’t hear what’s playing on 102.7 if you’re on 98.3.

Dr. Alexander: Right.

JJ: So, in terms of information, and I’ve seen it in my life over and over again, where two people are having the same conversation, receiving completely different messages, because of our belief systems, because of our emotional set point, because of where we’re resonating and what we’re picking up, and both experiences being valid but being received and interpreted completely different. So, for me, I take a step back and I look at your journey and think, okay, it’s not just your curiosity, and of course, it’s not just your personal journey of answering the question, “Why did this happen to me?” or “Is there really a god?” or “Am I really a part of something bigger?” which I think was your bottom line question that you created the very specific answer.

But I’m glad you mentioned all the other physicians and medicine practitioners who are coming to you and saying things because it gives me some hope, because I’m not a huge Western medicine…I’m not saying supporter. If I’m in a car accident, take me to the hospital. But generally speaking, I might go to a physician for the diagnosis, but I’m going to handle the prognosis and I’m going to handle the treatment on my own, whether it be through Chinese medicine, through emotional ways, through hypnosis, through EMDR, through diet, through exercise. But I now really see your mission. And tell me if you agree with this. If you don’t, that’s totally fine. But I see your mission is really being that bridge, because you have that credibility in the scientific community, and if anyone had approached you at that time to say any of this, you would have laughed in their face potentially and be like, “Yeah, that’s not provable.” And now, not that you’re completely over here, because you still have the data, you’re still interested in the proof, in the studies, in the way that we are proving some of these concepts over and over again, but now I almost see you as… you’re the bridge.

You’re the bridge to pushing science forward into incorporating what is inevitably going to help all of us heal things is to recognize that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, recognizing the power of consciousness and mind and our emotions and brain, and how, even though, like in a placebo effect… I mean, I deal with people and even myself in terms of healing, and people think, “Oh, it’s all about my diet.” And while I do live a clean life and promote clean dieting, at the same time, if you have someone who’s eating perfectly clean, whatever that means to you, yet live in toxic emotion of regret and anger and pain, that doesn’t mean you’re healthy.

Dr. Alexander: No, not at all.

JJ: Right? And that you’re going to still experience issues and pains because that toxic emotion is going to be more of a factor in your decline than, let’s say, bad food.

Dr. Alexander: Right. I think everything comes into play. And that’s why I’ve come to realize, as a doctor, as a neurosurgeon, that in the really big, broad sense, all healing, whether you’re talking about physical, mental, emotional health, is all ultimately dependent on spiritual health. And when I use that word “spiritual,” I don’t just mean something religious, although many people can use religion to get into deep spiritual states of connection with the universe. But when I use the word “spiritual,” as we often use it in the book “Living in a Mindful Universe” to make these kinds of points, we’re really talking about two major concepts. One is the notion of connection: that we’re all connected through mind. And whether you look at it through quantum physics and the most recent experiments to try and understand what quantum physics is really telling us about the nature of the universe, or you look at it through the neuroscience of consciousness and philosophy of mind, and there you run head-on into what’s known as the hard problem of consciousness. I mentioned a little while ago the tremendous range of explanatory gaps that show you cannot simply connect the dots of activity in the brain and fully extrapolate a phenomenal experience. You cannot fully explain mind based on all the workings of brain.

And so, all of these things are really leading in the same direction, whether it’s from the quantum physics or the neuroscience. And that is really showing the primacy of consciousness in the universe. In other words, the brain is not creating consciousness de novo out of the physical constituents of a three-and-a-half-pound gelatinous mass sitting in a warm, dark bath inside my skull. But in fact, mind is creating all of this emergent reality, and that includes the image of my brain and body as kind of the external appearance of what my consciousness looks like from the inside. So, I can study that brain all I want, but in essence, what the modern neuroscience of consciousness shows us is that you do not get to a point where you can fully explain the workings of that mind. And that’s especially true when it comes to non-local consciousness, the examples I gave a few minutes ago of precognition, of telepathy, of psychokinesis, of people influencing objects from afar, of distant healing. There are people around this world who have gained a tremendous amount of experience in healing other people from a distance. Things like that, and having influence. And of course, any of us can pray for loved ones at a distance and often can have quite an influence on that kind of outcome.

So, all of this notion of information access and also influencing the information state of affairs with our emerging reality at a distance is all stuff that’s being studied scientifically. And of course, we go into a lot of that in “Living in a Mindful Universe” to really try and connect all of those dots. There are certainly other scientific books that get at this. So, for those interested in the modern medical science, look at NDEs. I would recommend John C. Hagan III’s book, “The Science of Near Death Experiences.” And that came out about two years ago. It’s a very good book on that topic. It goes far away towards the scientific statement about the spiritual nature of things, because if you keep trying to force it all into a materialist mindset, it makes no sense and you can’t explain any of them. You really need that bigger theater of operations. That’s why I think that book is important. There’s another book, “The Self Does Not Die,” which is more than 100 cases of [33:07] perception from the NDE literature.

And you read these kind of books and you realize the scientific study of all of this is very far advanced, and it’s only through willful ignorance that one can really just project it all. But I was willfully ignorant before in my coma. And if it had been portrayed to me in a way it’s portrayed in “Living in a Mindful Universe,” I would have gotten it because the science is now lining up perfectly. But you do have to look at it. You have to pay some attention to it. And that’s where I think the modern scientific world is really stepping up to the plate. People often ask me, “What do your skeptical medical colleagues think about all this?” Well, truth be told, most of my colleagues realize, “Oh my gosh. Now we’re actually going to make some progress on this.” And that’s where it’s really headed now. And that’s important progress because the kind of false message of scientific materialism, which is this sense of separation that we’re all falsely believed to be separate from each other and in this kind of battle of competition where an improper interpretation of Darwinian evolution leads us to believe that only competition rules the way this world works, whereas most biologists today would tell you that’s not true at all, that in biology you find that cooperation and collaboration, both between members of the species and between species, is what leads to true success in the biological world.

So, we’ve completely misinterpreted things, and that notion of spirituality, in the way I use that word, is one of the connectedness of mind that we’re all basically sharing the dreams of the one mind. So, that’s one important concept. But the other is that there is meaning and purpose to our existence. That’s, from my point of view, a hallmark of the word “spirituality,” that there really is some purpose to this, that it’s not some chaotic accident that can be explained through chaos theory and what have you, with no appeal towards any kind of grace or growth towards a goal like love and connection. And that’s where I believe this world is changing rapidly, because the science actually supports that we need to look at all this as sharing one mind and having purpose and developing towards loving each other and showing kindness and forgiveness. That’s why this awakening that’s coming from NDEs and from modern consciousness studies is so crucial to this world today, because the modern politics of division and polarization have fooled us into believing that that scientific materialism is true and we’re all objects in this wild competitive fight to succeed against all odds. And that’s not the way it really works.

I think most near death experiencers would tell you we’re really bound together through love. Our existence here has a purpose. We’re here to love and care for each other. And we need to learn that lesson writ big because our world is getting into a deep and dark hole with a lot of the self-centeredness, the economic polarization, and this notion of taking care of number one and not realizing that to best take care of number one, you love number one. And you can best love yourself, number one, by loving others. And so, it really is a reshuffling of our understanding of lessons that go back thousands of years and yet are more imperative to learn now than they’ve ever been in human history.

JJ: Well, I think the expansion of our species and our understanding of things has gone through the transformation of trying something… We have a problem, and then we fix the problem, and then there’s always another problem coming from that problem, right? So now there’s this combination. Like I look at the food situation, like with genetic modification. The genetic modification was to help feed more people and to save the crops. We didn’t realize it was going to hurt us and to kill us and to create sensitivities and allergies to so many foods that could threaten our lives on a regular basis. And so now we’re looking at “Okay, well, how do we do this in a better way?” So, it’s that expansion. It’s the evolution and the expansion we couldn’t have gotten otherwise.

And I see you as someone who… Because back to sort of the frequency and vibration, I think “Living in a Mindful Universe” is perfectly enough science for me. And I’ll tell you why. Because I see a lot of scientific…people who their belief system is in science. And this is as assessment or a feeling, not necessarily a judgment. But I see it as a lack of trust: a lack of trust in the universe, a lack of trust in Creator, a lack of trust in sort of life in general. And so, I have to prove something. I have to know so that I can feel safe. And to me, there’s always going to be those people who it doesn’t matter how much proof you have. They aren’t going to believe it. They’re not going to want to. Because we’re all on our own journeys. We’re all evolving and growing at our own paces. But you bridge the gap of the ones that are kind of on the edge to help facilitate the physicians, because so many people listen to their doctors without asking or checking in with their own intuition. They just take pills. They just wait to die. They’re not proactive about their health or about their life in other ways. And so, I see it as, again, to me, it’s the bridge. It’s the bridge of that edge of…

Because too much more scientific… Like I bought a book I was telling Karen on the other day when we spoke. I have a friend, dear friend, love him to death, mathematician, very math-based, but has a heart of anyone who you would think would have some kind of deep spiritual belief. But he’s rejected his spiritual upbringing or his religious upbringing and basically says, “No, I don’t really believe in that.” Yet you feel him in someone who’s extremely loving and someone who feels like you should believe in something because you’re just that kind of person. And I bought a book. I bought Bruce Lipton’s book, “Biology of Belief,” because I thought, “I’m going to read this book so I can prove to him that biology of belief is true. And then I thought, “Why?” I don’t need to. Currently in his journey, if he’s not open to it, he’s not going to hear it anyway.

And I think your message, your experience, and I want to talk about your NDE next, if you don’t mind going through parts of it, the highlights of it, because I really want to get everyone who’s listening and watching this to buy both of these books. But I want you to read them in the order of this one first, “Proof of Heaven,” because I want you to understand the story so that you’re more interested in the science that explains what had happened and why. So, with “Biology of Belief,” I didn’t read it because I just thought, “You know what? He’s on his own journey. And when he’s ready, he will listen to it.” And for me, you represent… Again, I think your higher calling was to have this experience to bridge that gap between the people who were lack of trust or the ones who… Because you still have… I read in the book about your colleague who had with the radio, and the radio going off, and then he wrote the paper, and you said, “Oh, I’m so happy you’re at the paper.” And then, however long later, you saw him again, and he said, “No, that was wrong.” Because he was unwilling to go against his community or to be vulnerable to something he couldn’t explain. And to me, that’s a lack of trust.

Dr. Alexander: Yeah. That was a very good point. And I think what it also boils down to is you got, I say, most people who basically want to get to some truth. They want to understand, “How can I make sense of living my life in a way that really makes sense with this universe? How do I better define my relationship with the universe and my ability to facilitate change in this universe?” So, I would say most people are very open-minded about that. And it’s key to remember that especially some of those with a big bully pulpit who have built a reputation on a certain interpretation of modern science and the brain, especially if they’ve been on a platform saying things like near death experiences don’t fit the model and, therefore, are impossible just based on principle. But they’re unwilling to study the literature. They’re unwilling to read it.

Now, I fall into that category. I didn’t read NDE literature before my coma because I thought it was all nonsense. I thought it was hallucinations of the dying brain. Who cares what happens? But when I came back from my own experience, you could bet I wanted to read everything I could get my hands on about NDE. And it was my oldest son who was majoring in neuroscience in college at the time who advised me, “Don’t read a thing until you’ve written down everything you can remember about your own experience.” That was the best advice I’ve ever gotten. So, I had a database of 20,000 words that I wrote down before I read anything about anybody else’s experience. And only then did I dive deeply into it.

And just to cut to the chase, this whole discussion is about relationship between brain and mind, when you realize that the vast majority of what you’ve experienced is really something that’s been constructed by your mind, is a model of a world out there. And people just assume too much about the world around us, existing out there independently of us. And that’s the biggest mistake that quantum physics points out especially. No, we have a deep and rich, intimate relationship with this universe. Our choices and our decisions and our actions matter tremendously. Pay attention to what you think and how you treat others because you’re going to reap every bit of what you sow. That’s where the life review that occurs in about 25% of near death experiences is so important.

And life reviews have been around for thousands of years. They’re not some new age concept. You can go back to the writings of Plato back 2400 years ago, writing about Armenian soldier Er killed in battle, was laid on a funeral pyre after a few days dead on the battlefield, but he came back to life, and boy, did he have a story to tell. But his story is like so many others today where that life review shows that you experience that not as yourself, but as those who were influenced by your actions and even your thoughts. So, it’s a way of showing that we’re sharing the dream of the one mind, because in the life review, you feel the emotional impact that your actions and thoughts have on people around you. So, if you’ve been busy handing out pain and suffering to others, you have to feel that in the life review. It’s, of course, correction mechanism. In fact, I think that our very notions of hell likely have come from life reviews where people had not been necessarily very nice in their life and they didn’t like feeling what their actions on others felt like when they witnessed it during their life reviews. So, they made some amends and came back to this world with a kinder and gentler plan for interacting with others.

So, I think there’s a tremendous amount of lessons that can come from this when we realize that all of this is compatible with the modern science that is evolving around us and the notion of understanding brain, mind, and consciousness. But the first thing you reject, if you’re a truly open-minded skeptic about that relationship between brain and mind when you know all of these possibilities, the one most ridiculous position is that of pure materialism: that somehow you’re expecting the visible workings of the brain to explain every bit of phenomenal experience. That’s the part that you throw out as hopelessly lost. And that’s where I think the modern science is rising by leaps and bounds to help awaken this world to a far deeper, more profound and comforting truth about our connectedness with this universe that’s really most consistent with the highest realms of our higher soul.

JJ: I wanted to go over your NDE, but I don’t think we can do it in the amount of time we have left. I really want people to read “Proof of Heaven.” NDE was near death experience, in case I haven’t said that and you haven’t caught that within this show. I’m sure it’s in the beginning of the audio, in the bio. Let’s talk about life now and your biggest life changes. Obviously, what you’re studying has shifted, what you were studying before versus what you’re studying now. I feel like your passion is probably similar. Maybe you have more passion now because you’ve been awakened. And before, you were a little less conscious, if you will, about these other aspects of life. And now you’re super conscious, highly conscious. But let’s talk about the day-to-day aspects or what you think your purpose is on life or your mission or your practices or your habits. What’s changed since your NDE?

Dr. Alexander: I would say one thing that is probably the clearest is just kind of the way I see this world as I look out on it and see all these sentient beings living their lives and doing their best to try and learn and teach, but doing it in this kind of ignorance, a program forgetting of we come into these lives, as those people who study past life memories in children would tell you, you have to ask the children the questions before age five or six, because after that, those memories get covered over. And it’s very normal in children for them to have alive, very vivid memories of past existence. In fact, I recently saw a very interesting paper that looked at transgender people. This was work that had come out of University of Virginia, Jim Tucker and others, but showed a very high kind of level. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but very high level of people who were transgender going to an opposite sex from what they were born from, having past life memories of that opposite sex. So, they had actually lived life experience of that opposite sex, and now in this lifetime, for whatever reason, were feeling like they would be more natural in that other sex. Maybe because of some of the experiences they had during that other lifetime or what have you. But I thought it was fascinating that Jim Tucker was able to discern this kind of pattern in people who selected a transgender lifestyle.

But it really kind of follows the pattern of all of transpersonal psychology, death psychology in the various notions of “The only way to explain a lot of the dealings in my life right now is to acknowledge that I’ve lived previous lifetimes, and that, if you will, there’s kind of a karmic death. There are residual lessons still to be learned in some of those previous lifetimes where I might not have properly made amends for victimizing someone else. I might have to come back because of the lifetime where I am the victim for that particular perpetration. All these kind of things make it more obvious. But if you follow the work of Stan Broff and Brian Weiss and Michael Newton and others, very brave clinical investigators who recognized that the models we have did not work. They needed bigger models to explain things. And those bigger models include multiple lifetimes.

And this was presented to me in my near death experience in several different ways, even though I did not have a life review for Eben Alexander because of my amnesia. That’s an important quality of my own near death experience. It’s unusual. Most people don’t have that. But it became very clear to me in the months and years after my coma why I had to have that kind of amnesia setting. And it has to do with that beautiful revelation at the end of “Proof of Heaven” about the identity of that guardian angel on the butterfly wing, and also revelations that I make in “Living in a Mindful Universe” about encountering my father in meditation. Because probably another big change to my life is I meditate an hour or two a day. I’ve come to realize there’s tremendous power from going within and exploring consciousness. And once you realize that your brain is not the producer of consciousness, so your mind is not just some little closeted version of self-awareness that’s locked away independent from the rest of the universe. But in fact, going into your mind when you realize the brain is more of a filter for primordial consciousness is a way of traversing that filter and getting out into those spiritual realms.

So, going within is actually a way to go out into the universe, develop that relationship with higher soul and with that god force, with that creative force of pure love at the core of all creation that’s been a guiding force for many spiritual journeyers, prophets, mystics over thousands of years. I would say it’s the basis of all of our religions, our journeys to that very same spiritual space. And yet each and every one of us can do this on our own as a sentient being. More power to you if you can get to this through religion. I would say the only values religions bring to this are the power for great spirituality when they maintain a sense of connection, of love and kindness and compassion for all fellow beings. As soon as a religion starts to strip away and pretend it’s the only source of wisdom and they’re better than the other religions, and they’ll even hurt or kill others who don’t believe like they do, obviously, that religion has gone way off the rails and has nothing to do with the original teachings of the prophets of compassion, of love, and of mercy.

And these are concepts that, whether you’re looking at Buddha or Christ, Mohamed, what have you, they all have these messages of pure love and connection between us all. And the more any modern religion can foster all that and also on going within, on meditation and prayer for connecting with that loving force and bringing it back to this world, that’s the kind of change that I’ve seen in my life that’s been so valuable, that has helped me truly get in touch with who I am, where this is all going, and how I can make far better sense of my life is through this daily practice of meditation. And for that, of course, as I’m sure Karen handed to you, I use Sacred Acoustics, differential frequency, brain entrainment, which is extremely powerful. The main reason, to cut to the chase, is that the sounds that influence your lower brainstem, a circuit that arose more than 300 million years ago, as opposed to most sounds that we hear… And of course, people have used sounds for thousands of years to get into transcendental states of conscious awareness. But most of that sound is processed in the neocortex and the temporal lobes and the acoustic cortex. And that’s why I believe Sacred Acoustics is so powerful at liberating conscious awareness. They’re using in differential frequency brain entrainment. They get at consciousness at this very primitive and ancient level.

JJ: We created a little pathway for my community to get it. So, it’s jjflizanes.com/sacredaudio to get that first free 20-minute download. So, are you doing one or two hours of this audio training? Is that your meditation? Or is any part of it silent, or any of part of it, any other kind of…?

Dr. Alexander: Well, a lot of it is silent because, in fact, you’ll find all the sacred acoustics, or most of them, I should say, come with a fully verbally guided version, and then the very same tones, everything is the same except no words. The reason is the words pull you back into your linguistic brain, into the here and now. And so, ultimately, all of these things are going to be used, moving you away from words. The words are there to help people get into the concepts of a given meditation. If you go on the Sacred Acoustics website, you’ll find there are many offerings they have. It’s a tremendous repertoire of possibilities. Karen also has a beautiful page on sacredacoustics.com. “I want to…” and then whatever you want to do. Whether you’re into healing, or you want to get into astral projection, or you want to encounter souls of departed loved ones, or you want guidance in your current life, you want to enrich your relationship with your higher soul. All these are possibilities, and there are various different sacred acoustics pathways to them. But they all involve a start with verbal guidance and then graduating onto nonverbal where you can really go deep.

And in fact, in the next week or two, the Sacred Acoustics app will be totally redesigned and up to speed. There’s a current app there, but that one is going to be completely replaced within a few weeks by the Sacred Acoustics app. That will give people a lot more flexibility in listening to the tones from various periods of time. We have other concepts of how that kind of guidance from within can be utilized within the app. But I think Sacred Acoustics is a very powerful go-to site if you want to get into some deep tools for transcendental states of conscious awareness and really take control of your life by manifesting the free will of your higher soul. That’s what this kind of program really involves.

JJ: We’re going to be promoting it and talking about it. I used it twice yesterday, and so I’m looking forward to doing more experimentation with it and checking out more of the offerings.

Dr. Alexander: Good.

JJ: And I think you’ve said it multiple times throughout this interview, but if you had to say your mission now, is it in bringing connectedness and to taking anyone out there… Where you were before was you were in a healing modality of helping people in one specific lane of western medicine, of neurosurgery. Now you’re expanded beyond that, what’s the bottom line message to you? Do you feel at peace, let’s say? Is your experience and where you are right now… is that you’re passionate, you have peace? If you were to transition tomorrow, is that a peaceful thought for you?

Dr. Alexander: Yeah.

JJ: Or do you have a mission beyond like “Oh, I need to make sure I get this out as far as I can”? Is there any yearning in there of accomplishment?

Dr. Alexander: I must say, I’ve certainly come to have a much bigger vision of why I’m living this life. Now, that also means that all of those 54 years before my coma were very important years. I wasn’t on a wrong pathway. I was on absolutely the right pathway, but that pathway has shifted somewhat. And I would say essentially what I see is a realistic prospect. I believe that all animals realize that we exist to enjoy life. We should enjoy this existence that is such a gift to us. And I believe that that’s very much what my, if you want to call it, a mission, has become: to share enjoyment of life with all fellow beings, to realize that all is well, that we are here to learn and teach and to grow, and that inevitably this involves a recognition that we are one with this entire universe. There’s no part of it that is separate from us. And thus, any apparent enemies or any apparent sentient beings out there that are not aligned with my life just means I’m not visionary enough to yet see the beauty of our collaborative effort.

So, this is really about expanding the vision of seeing all of us as in this together. We’re here to take care of the least, the last, and the lost. This is all about kindness and compassion and love. And the best way to manifest love of the universe yourself is to share and serve as a conduit of that love with all fellow beings. The more I can share that message, show how much healing, true wholeness comes from this kind of mindset and from taking this practice of meditation and living a life where we’re really trying to help others as much as we can, to bring peace and harmony to this world, I mean, that’s basically what I see now is a reason for taking that next breath, and then the one after that, and after that. I don’t need some much bigger purpose than that. But it really is about trying to bring some peace, harmony, and love to this world.

JJ: Is there a bigger purpose? I mean, really, isn’t everything we do in search of peace or joy or connection or love or safety? I mean, isn’t having a job so you can pay your bills, so you can have a house, so you think you can feel good? I mean, really, to me, the bottom line is we all want to feel good. And whatever we do, we’re searching for a way to do that, whether it’s through safety or connection or receiving love or accolation from others, being seen, being heard. It all boils down to that. So, I don’t think there is a bigger mission. I could keep you here all day if you’d let me. I haven’t even asked you the other questions. I mean, actually, we circled to questions and we did kind of answer them. The scientific evidence for reincarnation, and as a physician, how do you see the future of healing? And I didn’t even ask those questions, but we…

Dr. Alexander: Right. You didn’t have to. It’s natural.

JJ: But there are more. And maybe if you’re willing, we can do another show with Karen.

Dr. Alexander: Well, I’d love to do another show. I think you’re right. I think there’s plenty of territory we haven’t touched on.

JJ: We haven’t scratched the surface yet.

Dr. Alexander: So, let’s plan on doing it again sometime.

JJ: I would love to. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate. I know I’m pretty clear about my mission on this planet, and it’s similar, but I’m the one without the scientific information, I’m the one who’s to connect with people like you who can help me move that needle a little bit further to try to incorporate some of those people who are just on the edge, but JJ doesn’t provide enough yet of what this really means. So, they’re like, “I believe you. I resonate with you. I get it, but I still need a little bit more to really fully trust and really fully embrace what you’re talking about.”

Dr. Alexander: That’s where the meditation comes in handy. I mean, we all have the answers lying within us. We have to go in and find them. And the last thing I would like to leave your viewers with is also there’s a free 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness available at ebenalexander.com. It’s an email course that people can participate in. We’ve had more than 7000 people from all over the world participating. It has a Translate button, so people from all languages have contributed to this effort. But it’s 33 of the main concepts out of “Living in a Mindful Universe.” But they’re available at ebenalexander.com. Your 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness, absolutely free. And that also includes some Sacred Acoustics offerings. So, highly recommended to all of your viewers. Please participate. It doesn’t cost you a penny. And it will certainly help you get on up to speed with a lot of what we’re trying to do to change this world.

JJ: Karen and I, we put together a link for the community for the 20 minutes. So, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll also, so that’s another way to just streamline it, give that one link, and then they can get both of those things distributed to them that way. Because they’re going to want anything that they can do to help enhance their experience.

Dr. Alexander: Excellent. Well, I look forward to meeting them on the 33-day journey. They can message us as they go through all that.

JJ: And we may be meeting at Multiversity in October, I think. I have to check your date.

Dr. Alexander: Yeah, I hope so.

JJ: Because I’m doing my own event in October, but if the dates work out, I will be there.

Dr. Alexander: Excellent. We’d love to meet you in person.

JJ: Yes, that would be great. But before that, we’ll get you both back on the show and dive a little deeper into some of these concepts after I’ve gone through a couple of the meditations on a more regular basis so we can get even a little bit deeper into this work.

Dr. Alexander: Good. I love that. All right. Well, that will be fun. Something to look forward to. And I appreciate the invitation.

JJ: And thank you so much for coming on. And everyone, please, buy it now. “Proof of Heaven.” Don’t wait. Buy “Living in a Mindful Universe.” Read this one first, only because it’s amazing, the story, and it really puts you in the mindset to start to understand and want to dive deeper into the explanation of how this is possible and the powers that you don’t even know that you have to change your own life right now. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for watching. Dr. Alexander, thank you so much for being here, and I can’t wait to connect again.

Dr. Alexander: Thank you. Bye-bye!