Consciousness creates all material reality. Biological processes do not create consciousness. This conceptual breakthrough turns traditional scientific thinking upside down.
In An End to Upside Down Thinking, Mark Gober traces his journey – he explores compelling scientific evidence from a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from psychic phenomena to near-death experiences, to quantum physics and beyond.
With cutting-edge thinkers like two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Ervin Laszlo, Pixar founder and two-time Academy Award winner Loren Carpenter, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Dr. Dean Radin, University of Virginia professor Dr. Ed Kelly, and New York Times bestselling author Larry Dossey, MD supporting this thesis, this book will rock the scientific community and mainstream generalists interested in understanding the true nature of reality. Today’s disarray around the globe can be linked, at its core, to a fundamental misunderstanding of our reality.
This book aims to shift our collective outlook, reshaping our view of human potential and how we treat one another. The book’s implications encourage much-needed revisions in science, technology, and medicine. General readers will find comfort in the implied worldview, which will impact their happiness and everyday decisions related to business, health, and politics.
Here’s the full transcript for this episode:
Steven: Welcome to The Human Origin Project, where we explore The Science of You. To keep up to date, go to our iTunes channel and subscribe and please leave a review if you enjoyed today’s show.
This week I’m really excited to introduce my guest, Mark Gober. He’s the author of the book An End to Upside Down Thinking; Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness and the Implications for Everyday Life. Mark worked on Wall Street and is now a partner in a technology-based investment firm in Silicon Valley.
He graduated with a degree in Psychology which focused on behavioural economics and wrote his thesis on Daniel Kahneman Nobel Prize-winning Prospect Theory. This is probably why I enjoyed this interview so much. Thinking Fast and Slow is one of my favourite books and completely changed my view of the world.
Mark takes us through the evidence of psychic phenomena from the highest levels of academic research. But what really strikes me is the way he communicates it for conventionally minded people. Where does this advancing knowledge of consciousness leave us in society today?
We explore these questions. But if you ever get the chance to see Mark in person, I highly recommend it because the way his eyes light up when he talks about these concepts, you can see he’s genuinely curious and he wants to know. That’s why I found this interview to be so intriguing.
If you are interested in understanding consciousness outside the brain grab a copy of his book which we will link to in the show notes. I hope you enjoy it. Here’s my interview with Mark Gober. Hey, Mark, thanks for joining me here.
Mark: Thanks so much for having me.
Steven: [0:01:42] Yeah, no problem, man. I just listened to you do a really fascinating talk on consciousness and how we are really breaking into a really deeper understanding. Some of the things that I think a lot of people are noticing in the scientific community, particularly, is that we can explain consciousness.
We are going to go through that today. We’ll talk about your book. Before we start, can you tell me a little bit about your first memory and how it shaped maybe your life and maybe how you got here today?
Mark: [0:02:15] Well, the first thing that came to mind is when I must have been around eight. I was playing a lot of different sports but I decided to take tennis more seriously than others because one of the guys that I used to practice with started playing tournaments. I said I’m going to play tournaments too.
I remember that and that led me, that really shifted my life because tennis became one of my big focuses and then I ended up playing college, and I was captain of the team in college. So it was a huge part of my life for my early years and that decision was a critical one.
Steven: [0:02:49] Yeah, that really is big and it really shaped your college education. Your youth is based around sports. Tell us a little bit about your background. Obviously, you were a college sportsman.
Mark: [0:03:02] Yeah, a college tennis player. I went to school at Princeton and then after that, I worked in investment banking in New York starting in 2008. I was there during the crisis, 2008 to 2010. For the last nine years or so I’ve been at a firm called Sherpa Technology Group and we advise businesses on technology strategy and things like that. I’m a partner there based in Silicon Valley.
Steven: [0:03:24] Wow. You’ve actually just authored a new book and it’s really outside the realms of the banking world, isn’t it? What was your journey into that? What was the first moment where you began to see these realms of the science of consciousness really?
Mark: [0:03:46] It was unexpected and it started with a podcast initially. That podcast didn’t change my life but in hindsight, it was like the first domino. I was listening to a show called Extreme Health Radio and I heard a woman on the show. Her name is Laura Powers and she is psychic and she communicates with nonphysical entities.
I’d never heard anyone talk about these things before. At the end of that episode, Laura talked about her own podcast called Healing Powers. So I decided to listen to that. Again, my life hadn’t shifted or anything. I was just curious and then I got really interested when I listened to all of her episodes dating back in 2011.
I listened to all of them and I wondered why I was hearing so many things about reality that I’d never heard of before. So the short story is I then decided to research extensively, spent a year researching and then decided to write the book that’s now been published.
Steven: [0:04:34] When you looked at that material because the idea of your reading the future or being psychic, as such, seems very unscientific. Your book is based on scientific literature. And so how did you find the scope of publications and information out there when you were kind of doing your research?
Mark: [0:04:59] That’s a great question. I wonder how exactly I followed the breadcrumbs. At first, I didn’t know about in scientific research. I was hearing kind of anecdotal accounts, individuals who were saying things. And then I think I probably heard of a few people mention on the podcast and then that led me to read books.
I think the first few that I read were by Dean Radin who’s at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and he’s one of the most credible guys in this area. And then once I started to do that there were a lot more than I found and so it spiralled from there. What I learned was that there’s an entire body of research in this area that I just didn’t know about before.
That’s what shocked me is that wait, there’s all this stuff. I just had never heard of it before. Most of the people that I know in my life, they’ve never heard of it either and that’s what I think intrigued me.
Steven: [0:05:42] Yeah, it really is a disconnect, isn’t it? I think this happens in a lot of scientific fields, interesting and profound research gets, it happens and it doesn’t reach kind of the wavelength of attention to make any kind of impact.
The stuff that you’ve gone into is really, and it’s amazing in your book how you’ve kind of brought that to light, let’s go through a little bit of that. There are some interesting studies. They really crack your mind open. What do you think was the first study, the scientific study that you felt there was something in this?
Mark: [0:06:21] the First study, that’s a really good question. It was probably some of the studies on telepathy, mind to mind communication, where people who are separated in two different rooms one is basically sending a telepathic message or trying to of the image that he or she is seeing.
The other person’s in the other room, he doesn’t know what that other person’s looking at. Afterwards, the person who is supposedly receiving the message is asked to choose one of four pictures and one of those four is the one that was being mentally transmitted.
And of course, this person doesn’t know which one it was. We would expect if it were just a chance thing that that person would guess correctly one out of four times or 25% if it was just chance. But that person in the room ends up guessing right about 32% of the time.
When you combine the statistics it’s like the odds that’s happening just by chance is more than a billion to one. It’s called a six-sigma result. You can win a Nobel Prize for five sigmas, the Higgs Boson Particle which won the Nobel Prize in physics. That was one of the biggest big breakthroughs. That was a five-sigma result. I mean, that’s mind-blowing.
Steven: [0:07:30] Yeah, it really is mind-blowing. I’d seen some studies on this stuff. I hadn’t seen the specific ones that you talk about where there’s image showing. As a numbers guy because you work with numbers every day because we are talking about 25% or 32%, so the person in the other room will pick the picture that the person that they are telepathically connected to 7% or 7 to 8% more than what statistically should happen. What do those numbers mean to you? Was there a number thing going on there?
Mark: [0:08:08] Yeah, that’s a good question. Maybe this is my background in psychology where I did look at statistics a lot and this is how we evaluated studies. Is it statistically significant that what’s happening in the studies beyond what chance would predict with the null hypothesis?
So I was seeing this and said, oh, my goodness, they did this many studies and when you combine all the data it’s approaching 32, it’s not approaching 25. That makes it super powerful. That’s a great point. I think my background probably made me perk up.
Whereas someone else, if you hadn’t been as familiar with it, you are like, well, 7% don’t matter. But in science, the size of the effect doesn’t matter. It’s the strength and this is a really strong effect. Like I said it’s six sigma but there are a number of areas that are six sigma. In Dean Radin’s new book, Real Magic, he just lays all of them out. It’s amazing that you have this kind of statistical evidence in multiple areas.
Steven: [0:08:58] It really is quite. I remember I saw there was the study on the binary number generators and they are still running those today, right? What’s that called?
Mark: [0:09:11] The global consciousness project. I think there are some offshoots of it as well. But these are machines that are set up all over the world and they are generating numbers all day. Sometimes they behave non randomly when there’s a big global event.
Steven: [0:09:25] I’m just trying to think back to the time when I came across that study. I read a book probably about 10 years ago that went into this kind of stuff, very kind of, like scientific. I was fascinated by it but I had no real-world application to it.
It’s interesting how I received your information and you presenting these studies, and it all made so much more sense because I had a context about it and was starting to understand for instance how the body and consciousness can potentially transmit and quantum physics has really kind of become more mainstream.
So we’ve seen, like that real shift to understand that this stuff is happening. When you were describing it, I really have to kind of describe this for the people listening is that you can see how it affects you, how fascinated you are by it and that’s the kind of reaction everyone should have when we understand that the minds can connect like this, right?
Mark: [0:10:29] Yeah. It’s interesting being at this conference, The Conscious Live Expo where people are very familiar with these topics. Some people in the audience, it was like, obviously, this is right. But for me, it’s still pretty new. I wrote my book in 2017, it came out in 2018 and I learned about this stuff in 2016 so it still blows me away.
And I think for a lot of people in the traditional education system, you haven’t heard of these studies, necessarily, the fact that the mind can have a mental influence, a physical influence on a process, like how is that possible with the conventional view?
But you mentioned context and we haven’t discussed that yet so I just quickly want to give it. Basically, what I argue in the book is that there’s an assumption that the brain creates our consciousness. What I was shocked to learn is that there’s a big question about how that could ever happen.
Science Magazine has said it’s the number two question in all of science. It’s called the hard problem. And what I’m arguing and many others are arguing this too, is we are asking the wrong question. The brain is not producing it and that’s why we haven’t figured out how the brain does it.
The reverse is what I’m arguing is true that consciousness is primary and the physical world, including the brain, are all within consciousness. If that’s true, then we can explain things like telepathy and mental influence, like psychokinesis, all these things make sense in that context.
Steven: [0:11:47] Yeah, it’s something that, I mean, you are a scientist and in the health profession and the health-science realm, people get stuck in their fields, and they really try and break down things to the tiniest pieces and maybe the answers will be there, and we’ve just been breaking things down.
I really think in the 20th century, we kind of went through a process of understanding each system and medicine is very like this. We understand the heart and the digestive system, the brain. We don’t treat them as a whole but really, we are finding that everything comes together.
When we don’t look at it through that kind of multidisciplinary context, these kinds of things don’t make sense. And that’s the beauty of all of this data we have coming up today. We are going to come back to that. The consciousness is really interesting and especially you draw a nice pyramid on that.
We’ll talk about this really links to Vedic philosophy too which is pretty much basically what where they say consciousness as is at the bottom of it. Let’s talk about psychic phenomena. We’ve talked about that telepathy but there are other types too so precognition is something
Mark: [0:13:03] Yes, we talk about telepathy, the mental influence is known as psychokinesis. Precognition is the ability to know or sense the future before it happens. There are some extreme cases of this of like people dreaming the lottery numbers before they happen.
Like there was a guy in Virginia recently who won the lottery and he bought multiple tickets because he dreamt the numbers. There have been cases like this where people have vivid dreams and then it happens. But it’s how do you test that? It’s hard but they are more extreme and more like jaw-dropping.
The studies that I think are the most interesting because we can look at them from the mainstream scientific lens, are ones where you are sitting and looking at a computer screen, I’ve done these before. You don’t know what picture is going to be shown and no one knows because the computer is randomly picking.
Some of the pictures are like neutral. It’s a mountain or a river, something very neutral that would not stimulate the body. Others are arousing pictures, a violent image, an erotic image, something that we know at a subconscious level would cause the body to like spike: the skin, the heart, the eyes, the brain.
The one I did was measuring pupil dilation at a very subtle level. We know that when these pictures are shown afterwards the body response. What the researchers are looking at is what happens before the picture is even shown. That’s the question.
Who would even think to test that, first of all? And what they find is that seconds before the picture is shown the body reacts in a direction consistent with the eventual picture, subtlety, highly statistically significant again. The body is like subconsciously knowing the future before anyone knows it. The researcher doesn’t know. The person in the chair doesn’t know because the computer is randomly picking it.
Steven: [0:14:40] It really blows my mind. And when you see the studies you see that spike of the graph it’s right there and like something is happening before any kind of physical contact is. It’s just absolutely mind-blowing in terms of that’s hard evidence.
You can’t really go past it. Those kinds of studies should be groundbreaking. How do you define this in terms of how it has resonated through the scientific community?
Mark: [0:15:11] Well, it’s good you mentioned around precognition because Dr Daryl Nydam from Cornell University made a big splash about this. He got an article published in a mainstream scientific journal because he was a mainstream psychologist and he has a knack for being able to do that.
When that article came out, there was a New York Times article that anyone can look up about Daryl Nydam studies. There’s mass, resistance to it of like we need to stop this ludicrous stuff. People don’t want it to be true, necessarily, some people, because it would require a rethinking of reality like if time doesn’t move in the direction we think so there’s resistance to it.
I think you are right though that the evidence is really strong. It’s cool we are talking about precognition. Dr Gillian [0:15:59], who’s one of the preeminent researchers in the world, was in the room for my talk. She’s a friend of mine. She’s actually one of the endorsers of my book.
But she’s done some incredible meta-analyses where you put all these studies together and she’s showing effects. And the fact that those are not on the front page of journals everywhere I don’t understand it. I think there are a lot of reasons that there’s resistance, but it does challenge the mainstream.
Throughout history, we’ve seen examples of this. Germ theory is a good example, were used to be ridiculous to say that a microscopic thing that we can’t see can make us sick or kill us and then with the advent of the microscope we came to it.
I think we are dealing with something else, like what do you mean, the body is responding before something? I think it’s just we have a limited understanding, and there’s a resistance to it.
Steven: [0:16:43] Yeah, that’s actually a great analogy too especially with germ theory. In the ‘80s we didn’t know that any bacteria could live inside the human gut. The Human Microbiome Project in 2008 showed that there are trillions and trillions, there are more bacteria than we are humans cells. That has shifted the medical community but it really hasn’t not in a way where medical students are taught, we are basically trading a bacterial kind of sponge.
Those kinds of paradigm shifts, I think, are difficult for people to come across. The one you are dealing with is quite difficult because it makes me feel uncomfortable, to be honest. When I think about psychics and I think about maybe someone reading my mind or something it is kind of an uncomfortable feeling because I mean, we are mainstream college-trained people.
It does throw me into that zone and feeling uncomfortable. But the reality is, too there’s a lot of other areas of science that are explaining very well how this can happen. In quantum physics we are talking about Nassim Haramein for instance, talks about the United physics model where there is a field that connects matter, and the matter is just a result of the field.
This is obviously a very deep topic but when you think about if we can’t explain questions from the brain that explains if we are plugging into something, what kind of research have you seen in that area that explains consciousness as this wider field?
Mark: [0:18:27] In some ways, all the research collectively points in that direction but it’s a re-contextualization of the brain. We know the brain’s involved in consciousness. We know that from neuroscience. There’s a whole field on this. The question is what is the brain doing?
Can we conclude that just because the brain is related to consciousness that the brain’s producing or causing it? We know from statistics, correlation is not the same thing as causation. You can have two things that are related to each other, and one’s not always causing the other.
Like fires and firefighters, there’s a very strong correlation between the presence of a fire and firefighters but the firefighters aren’t causing it. It’s the opposite. So if we think of the brain as being like an antenna receiver or as a filtering mechanism then we might be able to explain these phenomena.
And then it’s kind of like what you said, the brain and the body are almost tapping into something and accessing and processing something that is not localized to the body.
Steven: [0:19:18] And there are lots of documented cases of, for instance, children being born with their memories of other places and other lives. You wrote about that in your book, too.
Mark: [0:19:27] Yeah, I have a chapter on that. It’s another example where consciousness seems to be existing beyond the body. The University of Virginia has run studies for over 50 years, over 2500 cases of children with past life memories and these are kids between two and five years old, most of the time.
Distinct things, the distinct memories, preferences, aversions, sometimes the kids have birthmarks and physical deformities. The strongest cases in all cases are ones where the researchers can find historical records and medical records that match up with what the kids are saying.
Where they have no reasonable way of understanding how the kids could have gotten this knowledge unless we say consciousness isn’t stuck in us and perhaps even reincarnation would explain it.
Steven: [0:20:12] Yeah, I mean, it really boggles the mind, doesn’t it? There was a case where there was an experience during pregnancy that influenced—what was it?
Mark: [0:20:25] Yeah, in some cases, the children have birthmarks and physical deformities where the alleged previous life has nothing to do with the family like that person was maybe on a different continent or different city, something like that, where there was no connection.
One of the cases that I share in the book is the little girl whose leg has constriction rings around it like as if she had been tied up in ropes. And she’s talking about a previous life where she was tortured and died in that manner.
In fact, there was a person that died in an exact manner that the little girl described and the mother of that girl had seen that person being carried away after he had died because it was a gruesome death while she was pregnant with her eventual daughter.
It’s called a maternal impression. There are cases where when the mother sees something that’s traumatic during a certain part of pregnancy, the fetus then takes on some of those characteristics. In some cases that could explain these deformities or birthmarks but in other cases you can’t even explain it because the mother didn’t see something.
Steven: [0:21:28] They are relating to things that are in another like some kids. There’s a lot of documented and I think there are programs in China as well where they actually take these kids and they try and learn from them in talented kinds of programs or whatever because they seem to have gifts.
It’s kind of like when they choose the next border they check if this kid has a level of knowledge. There’s an ancient practice there that seems to understand that some people are born with some kind of more knowledge which goes back to that, that same question if the brain is the source of consciousness, how can that possibly happen?
Have you thought about it? If we think about it in a pure matter-based world how could that arise? You know, could there be some scrambling kind of—
Mark: [0:22:21] I don’t know. But I’ve heard people who are stuck in kind of a materialist perspective that it’s all material. The answer is something like, look, there’s so much that we don’t know about the brain, about the body and about the universe. Why should we just jump to the conclusion that has to do with consciousness?
I don’t think it’s a very strong argument. It’s like, well, we are going to figure it out at some point even though we don’t know what it is but it’s not that consciousness thing. To me it’s a much easier answer to say, look we got it wrong with consciousness.
We have to shift our perspective on it and then all of a sudden we can easily explain it and we can explain so many mystical traditions that have been around for a really long time. It’s now aligning with the science.
Steven: [0:23:01] They all speak very similar concepts. All across the world, you see these same teachings. They talk of the afterlife and we now have documented, for instance, there are some cases in your book about near-death experience so what people experience during that.
Mark: [0:23:25] It’s really important and I spend a whole chapter on it in the book because I think it’s so important. These are instances where a person is nearing death because of some kind of physiological trauma, brain injury, cardiac arrest.
Instances where we wouldn’t expect the person to have a lucid consciousness based on our current model the brain because the brain is damaged severely or sometimes it’s completely off because there’s no blood flowing. People describe a very similar chain of events.
This has been reported since Plato’s Dialogues, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. But in the last few decades, our resuscitation technology has gotten much better. So we are bringing people back from the dead or what’s close to dead, and they are reporting this in huge numbers. There’s a book in 1975 by Raymond Moody Life After Life that was like the first one that put this on the map and now there are millions of cases.
People talk about being enveloped by a warm light. They talk about positive emotions. They talk about unconditional love. Sometimes they see beings, like beings of light or mystical beings or deceased relatives. They talk about a life review where they experience their whole life in a very short flash.
So they are reliving events as if they are there but they relive the events through the eyes of the people that they actually affected. So if they were mean to someone they are going to feel that in the life review. In some cases, they feel the indirect effects.
There’s a man named Dannion Brinkley who’s had four near-death experiences. He’s really famous for what his experience is because every time he had a life review in addition to going to other realms that he was shown the future and some pretty crazy stuff which he didn’t know was the future at the time.
In each of these near-death experiences, he starts his life at the beginning, relives all the events. He was a marine so he relived the deaths that he caused as a marine and he felt the pain of those people that he killed but not only that, he felt the pain of the children who would not have a father anymore.
This is all again pointing to the idea that consciousness is in this primary role and that we are interconnected. And somehow in this alternative, I don’t know dimension or state of consciousness, it’s like we are one big consciousness that can switch lenses in that state.
Steven: [0:25:30] Yeah, the near-death experience is a little bit hard to quantify, isn’t it? There are some studies that show they experience sounds and stuff as it’s happening which you can kind of measure that, can’t you? There have also been studies of mediums where you use methods of like five levels of blinding to make sure so they have discussions with the—explain that.
Mark: [0:26:02] Yes. A medium is someone who alleges to be able to communicate with dead people and these have been reported forever. You hear of cases where there are frauds. Maybe some are frauds but the question is can anyone do it because if anyone can do it we have to rethink the paradigm.
The Windbridge Research Center has run a bunch of studies and they have to peer-reviewed journal papers which suggest that mediums can, in fact, do this. As you said, they use five levels of blinding. They call it quintuple blinding. The medium is on the phone with the researcher and the researcher gives the first name of someone’s deceased relative or a close person.
The researcher isn’t even related to the dead person, gives the first name and then asks very specific questions. And what she finds Dr Julie [0:26:42 Byshaw] is that the mediums are able to give non-chance information about the dead person just by knowing the first name.
Steven: [0:26:52] And she’s published two peer-reviewed papers on that, hasn’t she?
Mark: [0:26:54] Yeah, two peer-reviewed journal papers.
Steven: [0:26:56] It’s unbelievable.
Mark: [0:26:57] And she’s using the rigour that applied to other areas of science. She studied pharmacology immunology. She’s a scientist and she had her own personal experience that led her to see a medium herself because her mother committed suicide and some very remarkable things happened.
She was given information that was clearly about her mother. But this was the weirder part that probably pushed her over the edge which is that the medium started talking about a boy who had died in a car crash or something like that and she was like, I went to an all-girls school, I don’t know who this person is.
Years later, she started dating someone and she mentioned this mediumship experience from a few years ago. And the then boyfriend was like, oh my God, that’s my friend from high school. So it was like a precognitive mediumship reading. So she was like, all right. Now she could have been the pharmaceutical world but now she studies mediums.
Steven: [0:27:52] I’m blown away by that. It’s funny how people take their pause. I’m meeting a lot of people now that have got their conventional training and they are jumping into different areas of specialty because one, they find it so interesting, but two they just want to understand it.
You are definitely one of those people. But the thing is too that when you come across something like this you are looking for that modern-day kind of validation, that scientific. There is a level that we do need to understand, isn’t there?
I’m trained in health so for me, I need to see the studies and stuff. But when it comes to you like that, like a punch in the face. Was it Dr Jessica Utts that—yeah so explain that.
Mark: [0:28:39] We haven’t talked about remote viewing so I’ll just give a preface. Remote viewing is another preface. The way I structure the book is that I look at a number of these independent phenomena and I have a chapter on each one. My reasoning is if any of these things are real we have to flip the paradigm because we can’t explain it well, if at all if we say the brain produces consciousness.
I think the evidence is very strong in every area. One is remote viewing. And that’s the ability to perceive something or see it when you are not there physically. So imagine sitting in a room going into a trance and like drawing something out that’s on another continent that you’ve never seen before.
The US government ran a program for more than 20 years where they use the psychic spies, remote viewers. Fortunately, in my research, I was able to go to the CIA’s website and download declassified documents which say, direct quote, remote viewing is a real phenomenon. I would like, stop the book there, almost.
Steven: [0:29:30] Facts, done.
Mark: [0:29:32] I shared those in the presentation today. It’s pretty jaw-dropping to see. They even showed the science panel that reviewed it. They said the implications are revolutionary and that the evidence is too impressive to dismiss as mere coincidence.
That’s one piece of evidence. Back to Dr Jessica Utts, she was brought in by the CIA and Congress to evaluate the evidence for psychic phenomena back in 1995. What she says in her publicly available report is that using the standards applied to any other area of science, psychic functioning has been well established. This woman in 2016 was the President of the American Statistics Association and she’s looking at the math and saying there’s something here.
Even more than that, in 2018 there was a paper published by American psychologist, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychological Association effectively saying the same thing, looking at the accumulated evidence of all this controversial psychic stuff and saying that there’s a real statistical effect if we use the same methodologies that we use elsewhere.
Steven: [0:30:33] There’s no higher level of authority that you are going to get. There’s no one that’s going to be more critical of the data than someone like Jessica Utts did.
Mark: [0:30:43] Yeah. Again, it’s kind of like punches in the stomach.
Steven: [0:30:47] It is, yeah.
Mark: [0:30:48] That’s almost how I feel because it’s still a pretty new paradigm shift. If I’m being an irrational person how do I just reject that other than saying I don’t want it to be true and that’s not being scientific. In other areas of science, we accept these things. The statistics for these psychic phenomena are multiple times stronger than the statistics that we have which say that aspirin prevents heart attacks.
Steven: [0:31:14] Yeah, there’s a number of stats, for instance, and antidepressants, all the statistics are pretty concerning. There was actually one case, the CIA where they found someone in the African jungle.
Mark: [0:31:27] Yeah, one of the coolest cases.
Steven: [0:31:28] Is that recorded?
Mark: [0:31:31] Former US President, Jimmy Carter confirmed that this happened. That’s pretty credible. He’s gone on record saying it. There was a downed Russian bomber who was lost in an African jungle and what’s interesting about this case is that no one knew where this bomber was.
It had like secret code books on it so people wanted to find it. The traditional radar systems didn’t work very well back then so they used remote viewers. And they used remote viewers to successfully locate the plane.
Steven: [0:31:58] It really makes you think about they have to be using this quite a lot, surely because it’s so useful because you can you basically do anything. But if the CIA is using it as you say, you can pretty much bank at it’s real. This is actually something that I was thinking about when I heard you talking is how do you feel that this starts to apply or how do you use this in day to day life? Or where do you think this potentially takes us?
Mark: [0:32:30] I think the psychic stuff is interesting but I think there can be a tendency to like over-glamorize it. I’m actually not as interested in it beyond the fact that it helps explain consciousness. The more interesting stuff to me is implications of this broader framework of who and what are we.
Are we bodies that have consciousnesses meaning when we die, our consciousness is over? In that case, I used to be that way. I used to think that was the case and I couldn’t find meaning in life because I’m like well, I’m going to be dead and so that’s it, that’s the end.
Whereas if we are consciousnesses experiencing the world through a body, if our identity is this awareness that anyone listening right now, you’ve got a consciousness, you are aware, what is that? That’s your identity and your body is actually just an experience.
Think about it, the body could be seen as perception and that your eyes see it, and it’s a sensation instead of sensations. But that which is experiencing the body is the identity, the consciousness so it’s a total flip. That to me is where it gets really interesting.
What I think the science points towards, is that not only is our identity, our consciousness but we are all connected as part of the same underlying consciousness. To quote Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he said, in truth, there is only one mind and that’s where I think this is heading. I’m interested in that.
Steven: [0:33:54] You could talk for hours on end. I’m very similar to that. When I first kind of came into view this kind of stuff in the scientific manner it really led me to the idea of, it really reshapes your view of the world. You actually put it together nicely.
If we build a kind of our materialistic view of the world with matters at the bottom, then you go to, like chemistry which eventually get biological organisms, then the brain and then consciousness is sitting at the top. That’s what mainstream, a biological textbook would say consciousness is. But when you shift that, it completely changes, doesn’t it? Like what would that pyramid look like?
Mark: [0:34:35] Yeah, the pyramid that I use, and this is adapted from Dr Dean Radin, consciousness is at the top of the pyramid. If you say matter creates consciousness, it all comes from material stuff, fundamentally.
But what if consciousness is at the bottom and that matter, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, are all within consciousness? It flips everything because then our identity is sort of like it’s that which experiences and observes the world.
That identity, that consciousness we all have, is the basis of reality. It’s a very empowering picture, for every single person. It doesn’t matter who you are. You can be a king or anyone. It’s the same stream of consciousness that you are a part of.
Steven: [0:35:17] This is just your matter of body like don’t worry about that. It’s the conscious just connecting to the body and it’s finite and whatever it is that potentially that we move onto or whether it continues, those questions really, it’s coming into a scientific lens now.
We are finding this in so many different areas as well, that triangle that you are talking about where the consciousness is at the bottom. In Vedic philosophy, they have very deep principles that basically talk about physics. At the bottom is consciousness.
They say that there is this field and this is what Nasim Haramein talks about. There is basically a resonance field out there that matter is being projected out of. There’s a lot of evidence and there’s a lot of ancient cultures that kind of talk about that stuff as well. The fact that we are sitting here and talking about this in a way that’s a reality I’m still struggling to get my mind around it.
Mark: [0:36:20] Me too. I do mention that in the book as well, that mystical tradition, whether it’s the Eastern philosophies or the Western traditions like Kabbalah, and Judaism, Sufism and Islam, narcissism and Christianity there seems to be a core truth.
And I quote Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in my book he wrote, I am that, the sage in India. He talks about very explicitly how consciousness is primary and I quote him along those lines. These people have been saying it forever. It’s not new.
In a way that when I learned of that part of it because I said this in my talk, it’s sort of like backing into mysticism, I didn’t start as like thinking I have a mystical way of thinking about the world but it all points in that direction.
So the fact that so many people have been saying this independently in a different culture, and now science is pointing towards it like makes sense. Maybe there’s a reason they were saying it and that’s what our science is suggesting.
Steven: [0:37:19] Yeah, the implications are just so far and wide, isn’t it? Especially with The Human Origin Project we really aim to build out these dialogues. There are just so many around the world and they said the same kind of things.
This is one thing to that we often misinterpret they speak in very scientific ways but we just misinterpret it. If we saw a talking Mandarin, didn’t understand it and they were talking about quantum physics and we said that they don’t know what they are talking about because it’s not our language the same kind of patterns are being shown in ancient cultures.
They talked about this stuff in a very deep way with a level of understanding, I think that we are just kind of stepping into, which is kind of scary in a way but exciting as well that we are kind of awakening into a new kind of reality.
Mark: [0:38:17] I think it might open us up to reread ancient scriptures in different ways and the things that people who have reached states of enlightenment or awakening, to look more closely what they are saying and to try to glean something from it and I find that personally very interesting.
Steven: [0:38:32] Absolutely. So we’ll finish off this. It’s funny, our conversation is very much broad but we normally in the show by saying where do you see yourself in five years and where would you like to see yourself in terms of your life but also maybe your consciousness too?
Mark: [0:38:54] Well, I have a quick answer to both of those. I have no idea. I don’t even know what I want it to be. At this point, I’m just kind of letting things happen one day at a time.
I do remember this from studying psychology in college because I studied behavioural economics and how people make mistakes in decision-making. In particular, I wrote my thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory. He wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, heuristics and biases.
Steven: [0:39:16] One of my favourite books.
Mark: [0:39:18] That’s the stuff I studied and it’s all about how there are errors in human judgment like biases that we have. One thing I remember it’s called affective forecasting errors, affective with an A. The idea that we are awful at predicting what we want or we don’t want.
Like the thing that we think will like we end up liking it weighed less in the future when we actually get it. The same thing with things that we don’t like, we end up disliking way less. For me right now to say the things that I want or don’t want I’m very hesitant to do it because I don’t know and if you’d asked me this five years ago my answer would have been wrong.
Steven: [0:39:51] Absolutely. I think that’s one of the best answers you could probably have to that question because of this. It’s interesting, though. I can see you bring a real scientific lens to this whole topic. I can definitely see you are going to write more books, for one.
But I hope it takes you on a path that really kind of—I can see you love it, right. And it’s really enriched your life. I hope it takes you on a path that you look back and just say well, I cannot believe.
Mark: [0:40:26] Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.
Steven: [0:40:29] No problem, man. It’s been our pleasure. Tell us where everyone can find you.
Mark: [0:36:20] My website is my name www.MarkGober.com. It has more information on me and my book An End to Upside Down Thinking. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many other bookstores. I also have a podcast that will be coming out sometime in 2019, hopefully, around May.
I’ve interviewed many of the people that I talk about in my book. I know for me, podcasts were really influential. It’s one thing to read someone’s book but another to hear the person. You’ll hear my interview with Russell Tarde who ran the US government program in remote viewing.
When he talks about his conviction there’s no question about whether ESP exists you end up in a conundrum of like these people are saying these things, do I have a way to disprove what they are saying or do I need to shift my worldview? And that’s really what happened to me.
Steven: [0:41:20] It’s unbelievable. We are really excited for the podcast but also for your work. We’d love to have you again, Mark, thanks very much for joining us and yeah, we look really look forward. Thank you for writing this book too. It’s absolutely brilliant.
Mark: [0:41:34] Thank you so much. It’s been fun.
Steven: [0:41:37] Thank you for listening to today’s show. For more information, you can read the full transcript, articles and discussion on our website humanoriginproject.com. You can visit us on social media at Human Origin Project on Facebook and The Human Origin Project on Instagram.
Follow us on Twitter or join the forum boards and the email list to keep up to date with all the new information. And if you enjoyed today’s show please subscribe on iTunes and leave a review because it helps others to find this information and helps us to bring you the topics you want to discuss and hear about. Until next week, I hope your life is filled with happiness, healthiness and harmony.
