engaged the public in reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective we invite those of you who are listening on minnesota public radio to visit us in person all forums are free and open to the public and information on upcoming forums can be found online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim hart anderson i'm a senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker to a packed house here at westminster sanctuary even the choir loft is filled and we're expecting great things from the choir later in the presentation dr evan alexander has been an academic neurosurgeon for over twenty five years including fifteen years on the medical staff at brigham and women's hospital boston children's hospital and the harvard medical school a graduate of duke university's school of medicine he has authored or co authored over one hundred fifty chapters and papers in peer reviewed journals and made over two hundred presentations at conferences and medical centers around the world he's the author of the bestselling book proof of heaven the neurosurgeon's journey in the afterlife which recounts his near death out of body experience while in a coma from a form of e coli meningitis after decades as an academic and practicing  neurosurgeon he is now committed to pursuing the meaning of human consciousness and reconciling his spiritual experience with contemporary physics and cosmology ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster town hall forum thank you all it's a real joy and privilege to be in this beautiful church and to be back in minneapolis i actually spent the summer of one nine hundred seventy eight working at the u n a neurophysiology lab and i had a wonderful time that summer came to really love minneapolis but of course i realize that those of you here twelve months out of the year see something a little different from what i saw in those three summer months and i'm getting a glimpse of that today well what i'd like to do is really focus a bit on consciousness and the nature of consciousness and what my journey says about that and why it has tremendous implications for how we understand the nature of our very existence and of all reality  i think to tell the story properly i would like to see a show of hands how many have not read the book proof of happened you won't be graded on this i promise ok good well i really will not have time to recount that journey detail because that's all available in the book but i will hit on someone high points that journey and where they intersect with a deeper understanding of the nature of our existence now important to understand  realizing who i was before i was brought up in a scientific family my father was a tremendous influence on my life he was very religious see growing up in eastern tennessee he knew that when he operated on a patient that patient did well it was mainly god's work and not his own i grew up in the sixty's and seventy's fully embracing science is the arbiter of truth i'll tell you today i'm more of a scientist than i've ever been but i also realize that the science that i worshiped before my coma that happened five years ago and i use that word intentionally because materialist science that says it's all just the whirling of electrons protons corks neutrons atoms molecules the cells of the brain and all the rest of physical reality that material science is a faith based religion that actually has very little to support it even the materialis a headlong rush to tell you now that there is no material to the material world by breaking strings of energy and i are dimensional space time that best i always love in this reference that beautiful quote from  jeanne's spoken in the one nine hundred forty s when he was wrestling with the deep mysteries of quantum mechanics he said that the universe begins to look much more like a great thought than a great machine and of course i'm sure he had some idea of who was doing the thinking and that's what this is really all about is coming to a deeper sense of that now the me before coma as much as i wanted to believe in god in an afterlife and the power of prayer and all those things and decades spent in ne surgery i found myself wondering how does consciousness survive the death of the brain and body and that to me was a big mystery that luckily i gained some tremendous insight into five years ago right now because it was five years ago this week that i actually came out of a seven day coma now i think it's important to point out in terms of elucidating how little we actually know about consciousness because i've never really questioned it before and some of my critics out there will say well alexander's not even a neuroscientist he's just a neurosurgeon ok well in fact there right there is not much we have to know about consciousness in neurosurgery and we certainly don't have to get deeply into the mechanism of consciousness but that is what is called the hard problem of consciousness and i'll get back to that in a few minutes it's important to point out though that for example we use general anesthesia we've been doing that for more than one hundred  fifty years and yet there is no one on earth who can offer you the first sentence as to how general anesthesia seems to temporarily abate consciousness i hope that gives you an idea how little we actually understand about the phenomenon of consciousness  important to point out here realization that i came to after my coma remember that all of experience everything you've ever experienced in your existence since before you were born is a model o reality it is a model based on the flickering of ten billion neurons in your brain in a three pound gelatinous mass floating in a warm dark back this is all just signals coming in in time in space we put it together and we say you know there's that reality out there but that's why quantum mechanics presents us with such a deep and vexing mystery about the nature of that reality because quantum mechanics drove the founding fathers very brilliant into mysticism they cuz it demanded they come to a much deeper understanding of what consciousness and the the mind in the observer truly is and of course that was something i never really questioned very much before my coma but my comb experience showed me very clearly that i had better get to some deeper answers about that and in fact i came to realize that everything i ever thought i could know about the nature of existence and reality had to be tossed out i had to start over to square one to begin to get to this now it turns out five years ago that worldview appears scientific materialism thinking brain creates consciousness the only way we can know anything is through our physical senses that's local consciousness  and thinking that it's all birth to death and nothing more those three erroneous thoughts were in my mind my coma showed me very clearly how they are false and started leading me towards understanding a deeper truth now what happened is i woke up at four thirty in the morning nov tenth two thousand and eight with severe back pain and soon realized i had a very bad headache of course anyone in medicine hearing of sudden onset severe back pain severe headache would think meningitis well the doctor was already out i was gone my brain was being overrun by an extremely rare aggressive primitive and absolutely should have killed me bacterial meningitis and in fact it was soon thereafter that i slipped into a coma white plus under pressure and my that doctor later told me that when she saw that she knew i was dead in fact by going into a hospital with a diagnosis of gram negative bacteria meningitis going into coma within a few hours i was already down below a ten percent chance of survival and that only got worse during the week i was put on three very powerful antibiotics in fact by the end of the week they had more than triple the dose of one of those antibiotics maximum triple beyond the maximum dose recommended trying to turn this around and i was down to a two percent chance of survival and that's why the doctors at the very end of that week on the sunday morning day seven recommended that it was time to stop the antibiotics and just let nature take its course and of course it was soon thereafter that i started coming back to this world important to point out my brain was so absolutely savaged by that illness that when i came back i had absolutely no memory whatsoever of my life before coma no words or language all the words came back within hours no memory of my childhood although that came back with a hope my sister's one of whom is sitting here in the audience fellas i'm very grateful to all my family for being there and all that they did that loving connection to bring me back  memories of that childhood came back with their help over the next few weeks memories of my knowing a brain mind consciousness after twenty years experience in neurosurgery took up to eight weeks to return and in fact all i knew when i came back to this world was this brilliant incredible alter real spiritual journey i had been on deep in coma now the me before would have told you that with such an illness a given that that kind of severe bacterial meningitis is a perfect model for human death in fact it's so perfect that almost nobody ever comes back to tell the tale and that's why my story is garnered significant attention in the medical and scientific communities because in fact using the thinking of that conventional neuroscience given the destruction that was apparent to my doctors who neurologic exams and scans and lab values i should have had no experience at all at best maybe that first phase that i describe in the book the earthworms i view that's where the whole experience started for me it was a very primitive course of glee existence very unresponsive and luckily it didn't last forever even though it seemed to at the time and i was rescued by a spinning white light perfect pure white light with fine white and gold filament that opened up like a rip in the fabric around me into a lovely gateway valley a perfect altar real valley lush with life and i was moving up through it because i was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing with millions of other butterflies lots of souls dancing below us joy and mirth and beside me on the butterfly wing a beautiful girl and of course she later provided the key as those who have read the book will realize the key that helped me to understand the reality of the journey but that was four months after i came out of the coma deep in the middle of coma her message to me was most assuring and just to recall it now does give me shivers because of the beauty and the joy and the all encompassing love that was part of it and she never said a word this beautiful girl in the butterfly wing with sparkling blue eyes and high cheekbones high forehead wide smile but her thought came straight into my awareness and these i share with all of you because they are important for all of us this is the central message you are deeply loved and cherished for ever there is nothing you can do wrong in that realm in the strict sense we have the choice of free will that god gives us through that intense love god has for each and every one of us personally and that's why it's such a gift because god has to feel our pain even more than we do when we use that free will to forget our connection to the divine and to each other and of course there are a lot of other things we can do that involve learning lessons here potentially pain and suffering to others that we may have to learn residual lessons in the life review after we leave this world but the message from her was very clear unconditional love infinite love that creator and in fact in that beautiful realm that was greatly amplified because the joy and mirth in all of these souls down below was fueled without saying but as i put it all in writing weeks later i said that those hooping orbs of light above were n g l s choirs and in fact the beauty of that realm was only the beginning because those angelic choirs just as that spending melody that white light that had ushered me from the earth were my view into that lovely gateway realm music sound vibration this is a huge part of the work that i do now in trying to take the lessons from my journey and from cultures going back thousands of years about music and sound and also the scientific aspects that i discussed towards the end of the book about using various audioboo patterns to synchronize the hemispheres and basically to do the biggest mystery of my journey that is the may before coma the scientists thinking brain creates consciousness would have told you the next step beyond the earth or my view because i think the earth or my view was the best consciousness my brain could muster while it was soaking in well in fact that's why it was such a deep mystery that instead of nothingness the next step from that or from my view was one of opening into this white light in this brilliant ultra real realm of pure conceptual love and of them emotional power in that gateway realm with the unconditional love and the beauty and joy down below me with all of those spiritual beings and the swooping orbs of angelic choirs above and of course get again not just the melody of that white light that ushered me in but also the music of the end gel acquires above offered a traversal into higher and higher spiritual realms as i describe in the book ascending and seeing every bit of this room collapsing down even the spiritual realm in what i call deep time a higher calls out collapsing down and going out into the core infinite blackness but filled to overflowing with the divine love of an infinite being of compassion and mercy and of course when i came back i was still so absolutely odd and shocked by the power of that beautiful being that deity at the core of all in that core and that for me the word god was too puny a word it was a little human word and it had a little bit of baggage and therefore i referred to that infinitely loving being as all that was the sound that i heard in that round and of course it was only years after that that i started hearing that two other people all mean something very similar but i knew nothing of that at that time and to me the word all had no baggage and that's why i attach to that being but of course as i started writing all my experience up and trying to explain it i realized that to discuss it with other humans i was referring to what some might call god others might call others would call brahma vi jovo way i don't care what the words are the words get the way they make it look like it's an intellectual discussion you know some high school or college debate it's not that world is absolutely real and that is something that is coming to this world in no uncertain terms as this world awakens even now which i think is happening for a very big reason now it turns out the reason that i was so shocked by all this is i said the ne x modern neuroscience would tell you that the rich details of any kind of conscious awareness and experience depends on at least part of that media cortex the outer surface of the brain the human part of the brain being intact and that's why severe bacterial meningitis was such a perfect model for human death and in fact those who read the book realize i put together nine hypotheses there were actually others that i entertained with colleagues in trying to explain this experience as a brain based mechanism i was completely blown away by the power of that old a reality as are so many others who have near death experiences and it's something that of course we cannot really put into words and that's part of the trouble of coming back and talking about a realm with butterflies and beautiful flowers and the beautiful girl and souls dancing in angelic choirs is people are tempted to think we have that's a trick of the dying brain well guess what i think a better way to look at it is it's much more like plato's world of forms it's an ideal world it's much more real than this one it's the world in which this material universe is based and it's a realm with which all of our souls are very familiar because we've all been there and we all go back there and that is a crucial part of this understanding now it turns out that initially when i came back my doctors would tell me well you can forget about it you know your brain was way to secure neocortex was far too damaged that was all some trick of the dying brain it didn't really happen but i knew something had happened as i said by all of my knowing of brain mind consciousness had been deleted that only returned over about eight weeks afterwards in the meantime my doctor kind of given me this clue it had to be a brain based trick and so in fact that's how i treated it even though i found it to be astonishing as i told my older son evan the fourth who came home the day before thanksgiving five years ago and that was  two days after i got out of the hospital he could tell there's been a tremendous change he had seen me in the hospital for four days and nights he got there that first night right before fellas arrive and saw that corpse being ventilated twelve times a minute by the machine he knew i was already gone and so he was especially shocked of course he had heard that i was coming back to this world and he came home from school that day before thanksgiving and he was amazed he looked at me i was thirteen pounds lighter had an i and getting home antibiotics but he could tell there's been a tremendous transformation i was much more present than i'd ever been and you could tell the passion i had to try and record all this and understand it and of course i wanted to read everything i could about near death experiences and he gave me the best advice i've ever received he said don't read anything about near death experiences physics or cosmology until you've written down everything so i spent the next six weeks or so writing twenty thousand words of everything i could remember from deep in coma the whole story was there in those first days when i came back every bit of it was there and in fact the evidence was there that it happened between days one in five of seven day coma and that was a tremendous part of understanding i think to try and pull this together i do want to point out that what i went through after that time was trying to come to a deeper understanding of consciousness important to define here consciousness is not the voice in our head i would have thought that before my coma you know the little voice that we hear in our head that's actually  linguistic brain it's tightly tied up with ego and with self and in fact there is far deeper wisdom within our consciousness and the little voice in the head is not even the decision maker oddly enough i talk about that briefly in my book and referring to the experiments have been jamin live but where you can actually record electrically over the surface of the scalp record brain activity and demonstrate that that little voice in the head is informed of the decision but it's not the decision maker because a decision is made earlier than that little voice is aware of it an important implication of all this for some people they often ask why are animals conscious well actually animals can be extremely conscious i would say even more so than humans sometimes because the little voice in our head actually gets in the way of deeper consciousness that's why i do so much work now with meditation centering prayer the work with sacred acoustics as i've said in developing sound of files that help people get into deep transcendental conscious states which i am convinced are freeing us up into non local consciousness the true consciousness a better way to look at it is the observer it's the observer that sees that voice and that is the real mystery i would say the voice in our head is little more than a fancy parlor trick as a neurosurgeon i knew the parts of the brain devoted to that are very small and minimal in fact the observer aspect is the far richer part of this and that's something that i get much more in tune with in the meditations now it's important to point out that this it's not like this is a simple issue the mind body debate you know trying to look at what is mental versus what is physical phenomena of the mind in the brain that discussions been going on for more than twenty six hundred years you'd think we'd be getting close to some kind of an answer well i think we are getting closer to an understanding but i also realize from my journey that human brain min d will never understand everything and in fact the hard problem of consciousness which basically says that no neuroscientist on earth can give you the first senates to explain how the physical brain might give rise to consciousness is probably one of the most renowned neurosurgeons of the twentieth century and he probably still holds the record with having stimulated the brain electrical stimulation of way of the brain in awake patients more than any other neurosurgeon the did it tens of thousands of times and one thing that he was absolutely convinced of the mind is not in the brain never once in all of those stimulations was there a free will type of event every single one no matter what the effect of that electrical stimulation the patient felt like a puppet on a string they knew and the point that pinfield took from this is it was very clear as it's clear to me the mind is not created by the brain and the implication tremendous the implication is that when the when our awareness is freed up from the physical brain and body say at the time of bodily death it actually comes to a much higher level of awareness reuniting with the souls of the loved ones and with the divine going through that life of you it's a tremendous shift in my understanding of brain mind consciousness and the very nature of all existence and as i said not only the hard problem but the hard problem of consciousness with the enigma of quantum mechanics is a very very deep mystery that demands that materialism basically says that pure materialism in science is far too simplistic and cannot possibly explain soul spirit consciousness absolutely real at the core of all that exists and that is a tremendous shift in my thinking in for a lot of others but i tell you a lot of the scientific community medical schools nursing schools asking me to come speak this is an awakening that the scientific community is very much open to people often ask what are your scientific colleagues that you critics think of this well i had a lot of help from very open minded skeptics open minded critics and trying to get deeply into this mystery and understand the revelations of my journey and that's to be distinguished from the few voices out there that are so hooked into scientific materialism that they can't possibly let go of their thinking and they insist that my adventure must have been some hallucination or dream well important to point out that for weeks after my coma i was my own worst critic i was the one thinking it had to have an explanation in the brain i was the one going to my colleagues and to my doctors and others going through those medical records and trying to explain it is occurring in my brain and it was really through their insistence that i started realizing it was too real to be real as i had told the fourth day before thanksgiving because it really happened but it really happened in a realm that's far more real than this one at the eternal home of our spiritual souls and i think very much that my message is one that transcends some of the confusion they can come from that either or thinking says you're either spiritual or your scientific and also that says that there are fundamental differences between the religions in that one religion might be better than the others well in fact that kind of thinking is very misleading and confusing it's a dogmatic  basically dysfunctional human thinking trying to kind of limit things out and compartmentalize it and that's where so much of the confusion comes in so it's very much by ascending above and beyond those false definitions and boundaries that we can get much closer to truth and in fact i came to realize that pure materialist science is a dead end it will succumb to those deep mysteries at the impasse of the hard problem of consciousness and the enigma quantum mechanics of some of you may be familiar with the idea of the god of the gaps that's a general idea in kind of the skeptical and scientific community that god fills in the gaps or what we don't know of course in this era of publish or perish or as i used to say at harvard published an parish it turns out that the god of the gaps is an idea where publishing perish and then finally somebody has a theory of everything and of course are clamoring to get to the front of the line to give you the theory of everything one thing my journey showed me very clearly human brain in mind will never have a theory of everything don't be a fool don't go that route and embarrass yourself and what i would put out there is what do you think god of the gaps looks like if there is truly an infinitely powerful god at the core of all existence i would tell you that looks a whole lot like the hard problem consciousness that deep is mystery known to all of modern human thinking and that should be a clue to us as to what's really going on here now to know these truths you don't have to die that's why i'm a big fan of deep meditation centering prayer and once again remind you the work of sacred acoustics those who are interested in those kind of sound meditations i work very closely with them to develop these and you can go to sacred acoustics dot com to learn more about all that about brain trainmen through sounds it turns out that as i often say we're conscious in spite of our brain and the brain actually i believe serves as a veil and i would say in fact that that media cortex is a big part of the veil to me the very clear proof of that in my experience had to do with that transition in the earth where my view seeing that beautiful melody that white spending a light that came towards me and opened up into an all too real rich vibrant verdant valley far beyond earthly description and i was deeply mystified by that transition from what i saw as the best consciousness my brain could muster soaking in pus is very primitive unresponsive realm up into the brilliance of that valley and i would say that in fact that's what led me into the audio manipulations of brain and trainmen i was thinking if i could occupy my neocortex electrically using sound as is portrayed in the work of sacred acoustics that maybe i could duplicate that and that's why deep meditation centering prayer for me is a very clear avenue to get right back into those rounds and in much deeper knowing of those guides of that eternal infinite spiritual god at the core of it all for those out you out there or neuroses to say wait a minute you're saying that some kind of damage to the neocortex can lead to enhanced function well i would point out terminal lucidity i give an example of that my book and this is something often seen when a demented elderly patient is in the process of leaving their physical body once and for all they have moments of lucidity where their thinking is clearer than it's been in years and they often have that at times when they're seeing the souls of departed loved ones there to see them that's an example of thinning of the veil of the brain and allowing us to see the true richness of our existence the other example i give out there for the clinical nurse scientist having their doubts are the phenomena of acquired savant syndrome and of course after brain injury and in autism things like that people going to have very advanced superhuman abilities of memory of calculation i had one patient who had it been hit in the head with a baseball and came to me afterwards and realized that he he asked me if i had a map i showed it to him and then he looked at it for two seconds and went on to draw all the entire map just from memory and he said doc i couldn't do that before can you explain that to me no i really couldn't but i'm getting closer to it now i think to close i would like to finish with a quote from one of my favorites and those who've read the book realize i quote albert einstein a lot but this quote is actually from nikola tesla  brilliant brilliant scientist who i think is somewhat under rated by our scientific historians and tesla said that when science begins to investigate non physical phenomena and i would paraphrase that would include consciousness soul and spirit phenomena in the first decade science will uncover more than in all of its previous history and i believe we're getting into that decade even as we speak thank you very much for coming thank you eben alexander you're listening to the westminster town hall forum broadcast from westminster presbyterian church on nicollet mall in downtown minneapolis i'm tim howard anderson senior minister of westminster presbyterian church and moderator of the forum our speaker is neurosurgeon and author dr eben alexander while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i'd like to invite the radio audience to join us here at westminster church for our winter spring season which begins on tuesday evening february eleventh when sue monk kidd the author of the secret life of bees will be our guest speaker visit our website westminster forum dot org in the weeks ahead for information on our upcoming season and now dr alexander if you would return to the pulpit i'm tempted to call on the choir for a little bit of music but they're shaking their head so if if you return to the pulpit i will present the questions from our audience in your book you repeatedly for if use the phrase is up there and down here can you describe for us something of the geography of consciousness ok why that's a very good point it turns out it's all right here and in fact that part of the understanding as i said this trying to comprehend my journey and how to put it together in proper perspective a huge part of that understanding is realizing that the material world as i pointed out the materialists are in a headlong rush to tell you there's no material to it in fact they're also in a headlong rush to tell you that past and future are not at all what they appear to be they are really constructs of consciousness and they're fairly symmetrical at that  i think to to understand what i've had to wrestle with i think near death and shared death experiences shared death or where of souls are there when when others make the transition when they leave their physical body and i know there are some in this audience today who have had a shared experience where your soul goes right out there and of course that's in a perfectly normal physiological setting so it kind of blows all those little trivial non answers that science has about bright light in the tunnel and all out the window when you start hearing about shared death experiences but all of this reality that we see is not what it appears and that i think is the important thing to understand heaven is right here god is within us all in fact the divine spark in our consciousness they keeps us from being what in consciousness discussions is called a philosophical zombie that is something that looks and acts and quacks just like a human but has no inner awareness is that divine spark is that god within us all and so the short answer your question is that geography involves everything being right here in the mind is of hologram that's very very i would say very much the same hologram as the universe you describe in your book that millions of people have had near that death experiences i wonder if we might try a little test in our audience here how many of you have had or know of someone who have had phrase a near death community in terms of what you experience and what others experience in their near death experiences well i think the important thing to understand is we're trying to use earthly language to describe something that is very much not of this world as i said that gateway will even though it had earth trappings with a beautiful girl in the butterflies and flowers and waterfalls and angelic choirs was far beyond my ability to actually put into words and that's why when when i g talk like this to fellow near death experience or is the communication far transcends the words themselves in fact i would i would say that a lot of our communication here today probably transcends the words themselves because of the reminding  souls of something they know deep down and that's why i advise all to pursue that through their own meditation in centering prayer because you can read the books and watch d v d s and go to the presentations till the cows come home if you don't go there yourself some of these deeper truths and of course much of it cannot be brought back into pure linguistic form becomes apparent so that you did you experience regret at leaving that higher form of consciousness i think of beauty of my journey one thing that i point out in many of the presentations there's an atypical feature of my near death experience in that i was amnesic i did not remember anything about evan alexander's life in fact words language every bit of that completely wiped out which in some ways makes mine the exception that proves the rule and it took me actually more than a year to get deeply into why and how that might have happened and it has to do with the fact that to to get the full power of the reality of the journey i had to be amnesic for my life before and and i think those who have read the book will understand where that's coming from but it had to do with the advent of the of the beautiful girl on the butterfly wing and that gave it some very atypical features but in fact what i came to realize especially when i started reading not only the near death literature but the after life literature going back thousands of years and of course the writings of religious mystics and prophets going back thousands of years from all fa is the similarities far outweigh the differences and of course the skeptics can bang their head into the trees about the differences between these tales without realizing that there is a far deeper reality underlying them and that's the part to know coming out about the nature of that music can you describe it could you comment to maybe or anybody bring a kazoo well in fact i'm working on bringing that music back i can tell you cannot bring it back fully to this round and i'm not a musician which makes it a little more difficult but i am working with people who are very good at that soskin more who works in london on something called dead symphony and also working with alexander to new who is of very  close friend in new york city who's as interested in ancient musical instruments and tuning in of course he does a lot of the work also with sacred acoustics sacred acoustics kevin costly and kara newell are actually deeply involved in how sound has been used it ancient sites of worship and of transcendental types of conscious journeys and so music is a crucial part of it but i cannot hum those tunes i'm working on bringing it back but it has everything to do with the work that i do with sacred acoustics so you can learn more about that by checking them out number of lutherans in the crowd today asking questions about hell  would be at least a little bit interactive and that earth where my view is was nothing of the sort i i came to realize of course the best way to look at that earth or my view is it was the best consciousness my brain could muster soaking in past but it was very clear to me from my journey and from that all powerful all loving deity beyond words beyond description that love is something that is impossible to put into words if we can kind of slightly glimpse it it's one of those beautiful values of a near death experience but again you can all come to know this through deep meditation centering prayer exactly the same all loving god but coming back it was clear to me that there was no eternal hell because that god would not create an eternal damnation you know souls that would be doomed to an eternal damnation but of course it also points out that the eternity of our souls has everything to do with our being here to learn lessons the lessons involve nothing more complex than loving ourselves which is far more difficult than i realized before loving ourselves is actually the core problem with so much of the wrongs of this world that we don't even love ourself enough for reaching outside and trying to deserve in worthy of that love that at some basic level as i pointed out in my book with my adoption history being put up for adoption that i wrestle with that for so much of my life and that that that love loving ourselves loving our neighbors loving our enemies it's all about that love compassion forgiveness and of course the life review if we have any residual lessons to learn from this incarnation of that has to do with not loving appropriately and handing out pain or suffering to others the life of you is where we get the final glimpse of that because we have to live through the pain and suffering we meted out to others we have to feel it on their behalf in a realm where it's far sharper and crisper than they ever had to feel it in this incarnation so there's no need for an internal your experience sounds a lot like the results of albert and larry's drug testing years ago at harvard any thoughts on the use of psychedelic drugs to awaken consciousness well people would often approach me and this is something i mentioned in the appendix of my book in the different neurological hypotheses about how this might happen in my brain many people have come up to me and said well obviously this is what happens when you release d m t di a transmitter in our brain that actually has a strong loosen engine and it's been put out there is one of the major theories to explain near death experiences now in my case of course d m t doesn't cut it because my knee a cortex which is where would work was greatly in activated so d m t could play no role i went to a conference in madison wisconsin a year and a half ago that was a conference on the bioethics of deaf first day was on near death experiences surprising to me the second day was on psychedelic drugs appearances and i think there are some parallels i think there are lessons that can be learned from those drugs but my my strong advice to most people out there and especially the young getting into this is meditation is a far cleaner way of getting to these truths i think the splash that happens with some of the psychedelic drugs is so extreme that it's very hard to come back with the message because it gets so corrupted by the tremendous splash in the neurochemistry induced by those psychedelic drugs one of our listeners in the audience says just after i read your book i was contacted by a good friend who because of infection was in an induced coma for twenty one days his experience was quite the opposite of yours one horrific nightmare after another can you shed some light on that are all comas the same ok that's a very good question i think there are a few major points to make about that one is those who study near death experiences will realize that about two or three percent of near death experiences are what are called hellish indies now surprisingly enough of the vast majority and in our culture that is kind of hooked into this materialist mindset the vast majority of near death experiences in our culture are of souls that rocket right up into those beautiful realms and are very willing to let go of their physical kind of ego and you know this this incarnation of those hellish indeed ease in my view are incomplete if i'd gone to the earthworms i view and then come back to this world i would have had a hellish indeed and that is that is my interpretation is that that they are are simply incomplete in the vast majority is as i would like to assure each and every one of you the message is very sincere and very powerful you are deeply loved and it's simply by knowing that the infinite power of light and love in the universe of god beyond all description loves each and every one of our souls so dearly as to welcome us into those higher ro without any you know further problems so in fact i think you know the drug induced coma can be a very different thing although people can have very profound indy's even a drug induced coma was your experience time dependent if you coma had lasted only one day instead of seven would you do you think you would have experienced something different that's a very good question too if you would ask me when i came out of coma in those first two days how long he was there i would have said months years i don't know i mean any concept of time gets completely lost very important to point out as i said earlier that material science is coming to a point where there will be telling you that past and future are not what they appear to be this has to do with getting into the really deep mysteries of quantum mechanics and of relativity and of trying to bring them together and come to a deeper understanding and coming to realize that there is no arrow of time in the world of pure of physics it can flow either way very easily and i think what was clear to me is that time flow in that higher realm in that spiritual realm of the gateway and the core is completely independent of time here we live in this kind of molas river of time and we feel like we just float along without any control but it's important to understand when people discuss those life reviews and go through those moments of their life of good and bad where they still have residual lessons to learn that those are not some vague sepia tented memory they're sharp pris clearer than when they were lived in this material realm that is an important clue that time flow in that higher around and it also explains so much about near death experiences for example the terminal lucidity case that i present in my book with a very good friend who is the head of the neurosurgery neuroscience department who was there with his own father who passed over and was welcomed by the soul of his mother that would be the grandmother of my friend who had departed sixty five years earlier i promise you she was not watching the clock waiting for him that's an important thing to get calls out and deep time totally different from this this is the stage on which the drama is to unfold it's very cleverly constructed and it's here for a reason we're supposed to have faith in that eternity of souls in that afterlife realm in that heaven in that dwelling place of the divine and not know it is clearly is the moon rising in the sky every night that's for a reason this is soul school why wasn't this more obvious to before the coma the rest of us are unlikely ever to have a coma in this sort of end the well that that's that's exactly why in the book i try and take it well beyond my own personal journey and much more what it points out about consciousness the nature of consciousness the enigma of quantum mechanics and the hard problem that basically points out that giant white elephant in the room of conventional neuro science that would put out ok the brain creates consciousness and we can only know what we know  limited physical senses well in fact i solve very clearly that those are absolutely false and to the scientist in the crowd who want to pursue it more deeply especially about non local consciousness how we can know things far away from us in space and that is listed at the end of my book and that's a site that educates the public about frontier science about how spirituality and science strengthen each other and the physics of consciousness it also attorney a dot org is a beautiful place for millions to share their own story to tell your own spiritually transformative experience not just near death experiences but far beyond that and this is really about an awakening of science and really of this whole world that i would say is clear in reviewing the destiny of humanity over the last six thousand years that we're at a point that was very predictable have you or any of your colleagues change their practice of letting nature take its course because of your experience well i would say that i have come to see healing in a completely new way to much more in light view that sees each and every one of us as physical mental and and spiritual and divine beings that our consciousness is all one that learning the lessons here has to do with seeing the hardships in life and that of course includes disease and injury that these are gifts there are opportunities for growth and that is what our soul is doing here is learning from those hardships and the old saying god never gives us more than we can handle i believe at some level is true and i promise you that for the depths and darkness of the valley that you may walk through is matched by the brilliant light and love that comes from the lessons that are learned there you described how some of the scientists of the skeptical reaction you got from and critical reaction from scientists what do you kind of reaction to get from clergy to your call i would say i feel that i'm very much embrace to by clergy again my message is very clear that infinitely loving god that god loves christians jews muslims hindus buddhists skeptics atheists bloggers that god loves all that god loves all life and that's what we're all here to do and anything that each is separatism in divisiveness and conflict is wrong it's twisted it's dysfunctional human control over other humans am i would say souls know this and this is part of the global conscious awakening that is coming to this world now it's going to be unprecedented change and i'm very optimistic about where it's going