 I'm so bored of living. I wake up every morning in the same bed, I get dressed, and I eat the same breakfast and then take the same commute to work. I'm 28 years old and I'm terrified. This is all there is. That's a clip from the Amazon series Undone about this woman who has this after-death experience. I actually like it. I think it's kind of interesting. Of course it doesn't really follow near-death experience science, but then why would we expect it to? I mean we have all these really good accounts like the one from Dr. Evan Alexander, the Harvard neurosurgeon, but of course we have to attack those people, take down those people, smear those people, and then substitute an entertaining and well done account of what afterlife experiences are. Well, no big. The afterlife is a big tent. There's room for all. But if you want something closer to the truth, listen to people like Dr. Evan Alexander. Getting back to your original question about the attacks on me, I will also say it's a very good thing that three physicians not involved in my care and of course one of them was Dr. Bruce Grayson who spent more than 45 years studying NDE's, but they wrote up a case report on my medical records and that came out in September of 2018 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases. And that case report went a very long way towards painting the picture I tried to paint in Proof of Heaven. They actually go much further than I did. They had a lot more time to look at my medical records. Three of them did it independently, objectively, and I think they were even more shocked than I was that when my brain was so demonstrably offline, given my neurologic exams, given the lab values, given the CT and MRI scans showing all eight lobes of my brain affected, that I could have had the most robust, profound experience of my life in that setting. And in fact, when the peer reviewers at Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease asked them, how do you explain this case, they said it's because he had an NDE. There really shouldn't have been any controversy. There was this manufactured controversy. I just wanted to kind of put an exclamation point on that because there are still these lingering doubts which there will be because the effectiveness of smearing somebody, of taking somebody down culturally, is very well understood. You will carry that forever. It just never comes clean because they're really, really good at that. I just pull up short when we start talking about doing and we have to do and we've got to reduce that plastic thing in the ocean. Of course we do, but we just have to be. We have to be with each other. I would say you're absolutely right on the beam. And, you know, early on in all these discussions after my NDE is I was trying to come to a deeper understanding of it all, trying to explain to people, trying to come up with a shift in worldview that made sense. I remember Karen pointed out to me very brilliantly that really all we are here to do is to be the love that we are. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Acarrison. Today we welcome Dr. Eben Alexander to Skeptico and I can say back to Skeptico, but it's really been so long not that he hasn't been a frequent topic of conversation on the show, but it's been so long since we had him back on that I almost have to reintroduce him. So Dr. Alexander, welcome and thanks so much for coming. Well, Alex, thanks so much for having me back on. I remember having a really good time the last time we talked and of course a lot has happened since then. So it's great to be back with you again. Yeah, you know, what I always remember about that time is I remember 2012 when you're really, it's hard to share with people how groundbreaking your book Proof of Heaven was, but what I remember was being on an airplane and walking from the front to the back and how many back covers of Proof of Heaven I saw as I was walking through the aisles. And of course I was, you know, really into near-death experience, science, and saying this is important science and we need to understand this and bam, there it was. The cultural shift that we all wanted and we're all waiting for was, I felt like it was happening right before my eyes and I felt like it was happening after that as I talked to people. You know, what was it like for you to experience that, to experience one that huge success, which was well deserved because it's such a fantastic book, Proof of Heaven, but then the cultural shift that came along with that, what was that like? Well, it was absolutely extraordinary and in many ways, of course, I have to kind of reflect a bit on my own kind of tangling with that whole world in terms of understanding it, but the reality is to me it seems like the culture has made a tremendous kind of upshift over the last decade or two concerning Indies and Nature of Consciousness, you know, afterlife stories, even reincarnation I think is being much more seriously considered by many. I know I was presenting at a scientific meeting in Belgium about a year and a half ago when one of the investigators from Lees in Belgium showed a slide showing the number of paper, scientific papers on Indies and that in the year 2012 and 2013 there was this giant kind of upsurge. They attributed it to Proof of Heaven, but I think there's much more going on in the cultural landscape. Of course, it was very gratifying to be part of that and I can tell you that really in the 12 years since my coma, the thing that to me has been most gratifying has been working with scientists around the world and realizing that there's a tremendous kind of impetus in the scientific community. Now that may not be the New York Times science section version of science or scientific American version of science, but some scientists who were deeply involved in the science of consciousness are really in many ways banding together and that's where I think a tremendous amount of progress is being made and I feel like a kid in a candy store because, you know, I went through this experience. It absolutely rocked my world. It turned my world view 180 degrees. I mean, I promise you an NDE is not what you expect if you're a materialist scientist and to have this profound expansion of consciousness and then later in the months after my coma, going through medical records, talking over with my doctors, realizing that all the medical evidence was there that I should have had no ability to even have a dream or hallucination given the damage to my neocortex and yet I had the most robust, profound, detailed, memorable, important, impactful experience of my entire life when my brain was documented to be offline, that neocortex was absolutely damaged beyond function according to my medical records. My brainstem was damaged. So it's really been an extraordinary journey to be part of that. Although I will confess early on, you know, I knew I was going public with a story that was very much antithetical to a lot of my career. There was at least some concern that, you know, my career could suffer from it all, although I knew, you know, this happened and the other similar stories have happened to other people, so we need to understand it more. It's, you know, it was a bit of up and down though because there were a lot of attacks and things like that. And so anyway, I think the bottom line is the world is shifting dramatically. I think I've had a little bit to do with that, but more importantly is just that scientists around the world are now taking this much more seriously and we're starting to develop a worldview of kind of an encompassing system, a hypothetical system that can enable it that goes beyond materialist thought. And that's, I think, been a stumbling block for science for a long time is trying to come up with a kind of a theoretical framework that would support all this. And I think certainly a lot of what we cover in our third book, Living in a Mindful Universe, goes that direction in helping to take the world to the next level. Yeah, and I really did enjoy this book, Living in a Mindful Universe. And I thought it was a good, in a lot of ways, follow on. It's, again, has some great personal accounts. We were just talking for a second before we started the interview that I love the story where you and Karen meet around us. I've always had a special affinity towards Neem Karoli Baba, although I've never met him or experienced him in person, but I thought his teachings. And Ram Dass is obviously the one who brought us that. And he's an interesting character, too. Two Harvard guys kind of chatting. I'm sure you had a good conversation. But then Karen takes it to the next level in the book, and this is in Living in a Mindful Universe, where she talks about this heartfelt meeting and this encounter of expanded consciousness, which I thought, you know, in a way this book, Living in a Mindful Universe, is allowed to exist because of proof of heaven, because of the space that you created, because of the dialogue that is possible. But I want to fill that back in because I don't want to get a little bit, I don't want to get too far into inside baseball. And you did a wonderful job of explaining kind of the rough sketch of the big picture. This guy, Eben Alexander III, right? Dr. Eben Alexander III. Part of the reason for the book is it tells this almost epic story of kind of like a hero's journey kind of story of challenges and difficulties and life experiences that I thought connected with so many people, certainly connected with me on a deep level, on a parent level. And again, in the second book, Living in a Mindful Universe, you have so much to say about how that journey has evolved and how the family dynamic journey has evolved. So as much as you care to, do you want to share any of that aspect of this? Because I don't think it's talked about a lot. I love talking about the science. I don't love talking about near-death experience, science and culture and all that stuff. But what about that part of it? Well, certainly those who've read Proof of Heaven will realize the kind of interesting dynamic in my life of being adopted. And I was put up for adoption when I was 11 days old. I was very fortunate. I was adopted into a beautiful and loving family. And I went through my life very much blessed by that adoptive family. But like most adoptees, I was wondering about my heritage, my origin story. And so I would write letters to the children's home, you know, back when I was in my teens and twenties, seeking information about my birth mother. I sensed my birth mother was out there but had no notion about family or anything. And it was really in 2000 that I actually got a response back from them. I gave up looking for a long time through most of my years and just kind of forgot about that adoption story. Because I figured it wasn't really important. My life was going well so you can forget about it even though it's old. Let me just interject because I picked this up from the second book and this is so powerful. So, so powerful and you're so open and honest about this. Your dad said, Eben, forget about it. You couldn't possibly remember anything and besides it doesn't matter. And this is from, again, the parent adoption thing. Eben, we love you. We've given you everything. I gave you my name. You got it, buddy. You got everything. But that doesn't mean that's how you felt, you know what I mean? Well, you know, the interesting reality is intellectually I knew he had given me all of that. My adoptive family couldn't have been better. They honored all my hopes and dreams. All that was beautiful. But the thing that my dad did not realize and that it took me a long time to realize was being left behind by your mother at age 11 days. What happened was I stopped eating. I went on a hunger strike. I was hospitalized for failure to thrive. And that's what a lot of infants left behind will do that. And it's from my point of view, it's because they basically do not feel they have a reason to live. If their mother has left them behind, they have a serious challenge at a deep emotional level about whether or not they're worthy of love. And that is something we discussed a little bit in that book, Living in a Mindful Universe. But that was a lot of what I wrestled with. And of course, I was very loved by my adoptive family. But that doesn't change the fact that I still had memory of events that happened when I was 11 days old that were so shocking. It caused me to try to off myself, you know, with that hunger strike, failure to thrive. And if you will tell the story, I thought it was again, I don't want to just dwell on this, but it's super important. I think to the larger picture is your adoptive parents, your parents, I'll just say that, then are able to conceive and have a child which they didn't think was possible. And then what happens to you? Again, the knowledge that we carry as, you know, preverbal, amazing. It is amazing. And we do carry it. In fact, it's one of the biggest kind of problems with our modern society. We believe that everything, the only things important and the only things that are real are linguistically described narratives. And so of course, we miss a tremendous amount of what's kind of going on in our lives. But to me, that adoption story was a fundamental part of my whole journey because in many ways I could see kind of the shadow side, the echoes of my not feeling worthy of love through a lot of my life before coma. And it had to do with it affected my relationships in many ways, but it was really a huge part of the journey. And of course, in those earliest days, I was having trouble even visualizing as an issue in my life, even though it was a very important one in my early life. But this entire journey, including my NDE, and then of course, including the 12 years plus of resolution beyond that point, has been a tremendous lesson in how all aspects of our lives, the good, the bad, the challenges, the hurdles, these are beautiful gifts. And that was something that I kind of sensed after my NDE was apparent to me that some of the biggest kind of hardships of my life had actually been the catalysts or the kind of milepost that marked my greatest progress as I grew into things and kind of grew into a deeper knowing of myself. And that's really been the best part of the journey. It's this extraordinary richness of having that, for one thing, a very expanded view of self relative to the universe through an NDE and deep kind of spiritual sense of a certain role in life and a certain responsibility and an acknowledgement that our choices absolutely matter at every level. But then to have this kind of resolution of that whole adoption issue and the worthiness of love and that kind of feeling of being less than for much of my life. And so it really has been an extraordinary gift, but it could not have come without the hardships. It could not have come without those difficulties. And for that, I'm just grateful. And that's why what I try and share with people is to embrace those challenges, the hurdles in life, illness, injury, because in so many ways they can be the basically the engines of growth to help our souls come into the higher soul that we came here to be. And I love being awakened to that. And that's been a huge part of the kind of expansion of my idea of self and a relationship to the universe that resulted from my NDE. But I must confess a tremendous amount of my growth has also been due to meeting, you know, thousands of other experiencers and working with a scientific community worldwide that realizes consciousness is fundamental in the universe. So I was gifted tremendously by this, you know, some people would look at a weak encoma due to a severe gram negative bacterial meningoencephalitis is something of a, you know, bad luck. Well, no, in my case, it was an extraordinary gift to show me ways of healing, of understanding of our kind of alignment of our purpose with the universe that I think can be useful to all beings. And that's why I love sharing the story and expanding on it because the science is fully there supporting this primacy of consciousness. And what that does is returns a very powerful notion of free will, you know, free will is pretty much on the chopping block with materialist neuroscience. Because basically they're pretending that all those ion channels are still behaving like Newtonian billiard balls and with, you know, a perfectly determined course of action. But no, the deepest message of quantum physics is really one of free will it opens the door to free will of sentience of the mental layer of the universe. And that's where our healing can come in full force. You know, I mean, the medical community has admitted to mind over matter for more than six decades by honoring placebo effect as their gold standard for assessing any new medical treatment or modality. And a placebo effect is nothing more than admission that our beliefs, attitudes and thoughts can have a tremendous influence on our health. And I would say that this revolution in understanding of consciousness greatly expands that notion of our free will and ability to become more whole, more of the soul we came here to be. Awesome. And I do want to circle back on something because you mentioned hardship and what you had to go through. And also, you know, you're a humble guy in terms of talking about your influence here. But as we talked about at the beginning, and I can't emphasize it enough, you were that swing. You were that upswing in the chart that the guy had, you know, you were selected for whatever reason to be, we have to understand it for whatever reason. But you were also the guy who faced really unbelievable hardship when we look about when we look at it. But I think it's such an important lesson. I think it's a lesson in and we might not totally agree with this, but we can agree with the data, maybe not the interpretation of the data. But what you experience from a cultural takedown standpoint, a takedown of Dr. Evan Alexander, which was really so absurd on some level, so over the top that anyone should have been able to spot it. But let me recap because we've talked about a lot on this show. So you come out with this book. Again, folks, you know, the way that I always like to relate this to people is like, when I tell people that the quote unquote prominent atheist, Sam Harris, who's also a neuroscientist, said that, what did he exactly say? It's alarmingly unscientific, this guy's book. And then he went on to say, this guy doesn't know neuroscience. And when I relate to that story to people, people always have this quizzical look and they go, but I thought you said he was a Harvard neurosurgeon as if, you know, he was in the Harvard Medical School teaching students neuroscience and neurosurgery. And I go, yeah. And I'm like, well, then why would it doesn't even, it doesn't even raise to the level of where it would kind of even be reasonable or, you know, another prominent guy and he's passed now. But Oliver Sacks, Oliver Sacks, who was loved by the psychology community and all that, he felt a need to come out. Esquire magazine, which we covered, you know, on the show extensively came out with a cover story, Evan Alexander, you know, and when you really break it down, they're caught just with bold face lies. We broke it down. Lies, misrepresentations. The physician who was your primary care physician in the hospital has to write a response and say, I have been misrepresented. I'm deeply concerned about what Esquire magazine has written. It's not at all my opinion about Dr. Alexander or about what he's written. This is a cultural takedown. It's in my opinion, it's not accidental. It's not organic. It's not some guys sitting around and going, well, gee, you know, I have a different scholarly opinion on that based on my analysis. What do you think about that? Are you willing to even explore the possibility that there was some, some design behind that takedown? Well, I would say that, you know, we, everybody has a certain addiction to their beliefs. And this is true for all people, and that includes scientists and philosophers. You know, we like to think we understand things. And so people kind of are attracted to a set of beliefs that they develop over time. And in our culture, unfortunately, scientific materialism has held sway for, you know, many generations now. And that I would say has led to a tremendous amount of damage. But when I look at, for example, the critiques that Sam Harris and Oliver Sacks came at me with, mainly it was because they didn't, they hadn't really read my book for one thing. They basically were, but no, they, they read your book. No, they, I talked to Sam Harris. They read your book. That's why, and you don't have to go there. But I think we kind of do our community a disservice if we don't address this head on. So if you're saying you believe differently, if you believe Sam Harris is an honest player who just is, you know, just doing his best and just couldn't understand it and all that. I mean, fine, but I don't see it that way. I see it as spirituality is an assault on scientific materialism. And there are certain people that have a vested interest in seeing that not prevail. And that they just like in everything else in life, they are going to exercise whatever extent of control they have to see that that doesn't happen. So you don't have to agree with that. But to me, that seems self out. I would say in many ways, you're exactly right. And for example, if you compare Sam Harris's attack on me where he was basically trying to say that this, if this experience happened at all, it looked like a DMT experience. He went that far to try and say, this is nothing more than that. It's a biochemical thing we can forget about it. And then if you simultaneously go and read Bernardo Castro's blog postings at the same time responding to Sam Harris. Castro comes at it with a far more kind of intelligent open minded and I would say realistic way of interpreting my experience where he is fully open to the reality of that experience. And I would say, first of all, I think you're making a good point in many ways that there is kind of this crown swell of kind of angst and recoil and in some members of the scientific community and also in those who claim to be science, science journalists, that's a bias, it's a prejudice and it is goes into attack mode as soon as you mention anything about heaven or God or an afterlife, they go ballistic. And yet, you know, the 300 plus scientists now associated with Galileo commission.org, for example, and I'm one of the scientific advisers for that group. We'll actually argue that these experiences help us and in that I would say not only afterlife NDE deathbed vision experiences but also the tremendous scientific literature on reincarnation. And there's a lot of it out there but the biggest body I know of is the UVA group University of Virginia division of perceptual studies, more than six decades of work. And what you realize is that a lot of scientists currently studying consciousness completely go with the reality of these experiences, because they're not forbidden by science at all. In fact, in many ways, when you look at quantum physics and how it's evolved over the last few decades. Not only is kind of the spiritual realm a realm of unified mental function and of kind of shared purpose. Not only is that allowed by the findings of scientific experiments and modern modern paradigms. It's actually demanded. I mean the alternative, for example, and interpreting the measurement paradox and quantum physics is the many worlds interpretation in infinite parallel universes. And I think that most of us can agree that doesn't appear to be the world we live in. And that's where I would say that science will actually benefit from appreciating, you know, this bigger database about the afterlife and about reincarnation about what it tells us about consciousness about the relationship of ontology with epistemology. And how we can come to a deeper understanding of ourselves. So it's really a very important shift to move us to the next level. And I think one specific example of how I see science is growing into this would be the recent set of scientific papers over the last nine years or so, using fMRI functional magneto, you know, magnetic resonance imaging scans, as well as magneto and cephalography and other techniques of looking at the brain. And with when you study people under the influence of certain serotonin to a type plant medicines like psilocybin, magic mushrooms, DMT, active principle in ayahuasca, LSD. There are papers out there from London from South America that show that the brains of people under the influence of these substances goes dark. There's no part of the brain that increases in activity. In fact, the whole brain gets out of the way. And from a scientific perspective, that doesn't mean we have to stop. It just means we have to realize that within the materialist paradigm and trying to look at phenomenal experiences, the result of chemical reactions and electron fluxes have to realize, no, there are higher ordering principles involved that give us our phenomenal experience. And they're not simply the result of atoms and molecules following the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. And so it really helps for science to expand its worldview beyond materialism. I don't think that science well-practiced is limited to materialism, except for the fact, of course, that people like to measure things and most measurements kind of occur in the material world. But I think that a scientific mind, for example, when I look at the work coming out of UVA, DOPS, and especially of those three landmark books from Ed Kelly, you know, irreducible mind beyond physicalism and now consciousness unbound. They're a beautiful example of how science can go far beyond materialism in trying to explain the nature of reality, as in fact it must, because there's more to this universe than the physical world. And, you know, getting back to your original question about the attacks on me, I will also say it's a very good thing that three physicians not involved in my care. And of course, one of them was Dr. Bruce Grayson who spent more than 45 years studying NDE, but they wrote up a case report on my medical records. And that came out in September of 2018 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases. And that case report went a very long way towards painting the picture I tried to paint in Proof of Heaven. They actually go much further than I did. They had a lot more time to look at my medical records. Three of them did it independently, objectively. And I think they were even more shocked than I was that my brain, you know, that when my brain was so demonstrably offline, given my neurologic exams, given the lab values, given the CT and MRI scans showing all eight lobes in my brain affected, that I could have had the most robust, profound experience of my life, you know, in that setting. And in fact, when the peer reviewers at Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease asked them, how do you explain this case? Because just like when I reviewed my records, I was like, these are the records of someone who is bound to die, not someone who is going to end up having a full recovery. So it was a deep mystery to me, likewise to these three doctors who reviewed my case. And so when they were challenged, how do you explain this horrific medical circumstance resulting in a full recovery? They said it's because he had an NDE. That was enough to satisfy the peer reviewers of a scientific medical journal. Oh, now we have an explanation. And it's because they knew of other cases, like Anita Morjani, who wrote the book, Dying to Be Me, and had an advanced stage for lymphoma, that she was within hours of death by any doctor's reckoning. And yet she had a profound NDE came back to this world almost 20 years ago was when she did all this. And it was because of her NDE, she came back. Likewise, Dr. Mary C. Neal, the orthopedic surgeon, she wrote a book called Heaven and Back, a warm water drowning in Chile, kayaking back in 1999. She was underwater more than 30 minutes, her legs broken under a boulder. She was brought to the surface dead, resuscitated, ended up making a full recovery. She had a profound NDE. So it's it's simply taking our lesson from placebo effect at acknowledgement of beliefs, thoughts and attitudes, playing a tremendous role in our health, and realizing, well, in these deeper kind of spiritual journeys of NDE's, you have extraordinary options for returning health to a soul on a journey. But it involves waking up to that much bigger role that we play, the much bigger soul that we are a soul that has been here many lives before will be here many lives to come and participates in this evolution of all of consciousness. And that's where I think so much of the current revolution in science about primacy of consciousness and this deep debate about free will and whether it really exists and how can it manifest is so important if for nothing else to heal ourselves to come into wholeness. That's what this is really all about this awakening. You know, I want to just return. I want to make sure people got that little story that you did there. There really shouldn't have been any controversy. It was really cut and dried, but it was this manufactured controversy. But the story behind it, and you just said that now it's been medically reviewed. And you know, I just had Dr. Bruce Grayson on the show recently. And of course, he's written this terrific book after and you are mentioned throughout that. But I love the story that he tells about kind of the personal part again of you have this experience and you get some pretty sage advice from your son who says, Dad, don't read anything. You're going to be tempted to kind of go there. Don't just get your account down. And that turns out to be really good advice. And you do that, then you get in the car and you drive and you guys meet with Dr. Grayson. And so that's kind of an important meeting. And then later on, he says what you just recounts that just a couple of years ago, they finally published this, but he had investigated it prior to saying, okay, let me examine this case from a medical standpoint. And they had three independent people and I just love this little snippet, which I was trying to lead to. And then Grayson goes, well, then I kind of pow wowed with my colleagues to see where there were any discrepancies. Because to me, it was clear cut. And he said that there were no discrepancies. Everybody came back and said, this is why am I even examining this? This is a slam dunk. Of course, this is a non-functioning brain. This person should have died. And if they didn't die, which 99% they would have died, there's no way they would ever recover. Again, to me, that all points to a manufactured kind, but I'm going to get into that. You already handled that. I just wanted to kind of put an exclamation point on that because there are still these lingering doubts, which there will be because the effectiveness of smearing somebody, of taking somebody down culturally is very well understood. These guys do a great job. You will carry that forever. It just never comes clean because they're really, really good at that. But back to your other point, let me kind of wrap that into a question. It's kind of a related question. And again, we might not see it the same way, but I just interviewed this wonderful guy, Dr. Steve Taylor. And he's written this book and I hope I can get the name right. Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science, exactly. Why science needs spirituality fill in the blank. And I love the guy, but he's got it completely backwards. It's not that science needs spirituality. Science is doing everything it freaking can to keep spirituality out of the picture, to keep him out of their game. Their game is up when they let spirituality in. So you can talk, as you are, about the advancements and maybe we can ground up, you know, from the ground up, from the bottom up, you know, change the tide. And we certainly have to. So we have to try, right? So what you're talking about is certainly true. But I do kind of call into question whether or not we should consider the alternative is that science is actively trying to keep spirituality out of the equation. Because it's not good for business. It's not good for science as we know it's business. Well, those are interesting points. I've read Steve Taylor's book. I thought it was actually quite good. And, you know, as I was mentioning a few minutes ago, talking about the psychedelics and looking at the brain and the brain goes dark. That's why I'm saying science does need to expand beyond material. The materialist thinking of brain creates consciousness is clearly false. And so that's where that's, for me, an example of how science can be more open-minded and grow into a bigger picture to try and get to the truth. I mean, ultimately, we all would like to know the capital T truth, you know, the true nuts and bolts of how the universe works. And, you know, I'd say especially given all the study of NDE's and all the evidence accumulating and saying the hospice literature about the power of deathbed visions, the reality, the transformative abilities that they bring. And then you've got this tremendous body of evidence on reincarnation. Not just from groups like UVA adopts where they have more than 2,500 cases of past life memories and children suggest of a reincarnation. But you have this whole world of transpersonal psychology beginning with the work of Carl Jung and Charles Tartan and moving on to Stan Groff and Michael Newton, Brian Weiss and others where they realize that to deal with the issues faced by their patients, you know, with very psychological psychiatric issues that by doing a hypnotic regression and uncovering memories of past lives, you start to explain and understand why certain challenges are there in this lifetime. And not only that, you gain the tools to start to heal them. So this is not just some kind of idle, you know, armchair philosophy question of, you know, afterlife and reincarnation. Are they real or not? You know, just to tell us what happens when we die. It's a much bigger question of how do we live the lives we have here and now day to day? How do we make choices? How do we see ourselves in relationship to others and to the universe? And I would argue that this kind of expanded vision of study of consciousness allows us to greatly expand our own kind of self vision of our relationship with the universe and really how to act, how to be, how to think of ourselves so that when we come to the end of life of a physical body, we don't get that extreme shock of having your body die and all of a sudden realize you're more conscious than you've ever been before. And damn, did I waste that life following a falsehood that was promoted by the material of scientific community just because their theoretical models were inadequate and they couldn't figure out what the empirical data was telling them doesn't mean we have to just kind of give up and pretend total ignorance and follow this materialist mindset down into the abyss. No, this is about and as I said earlier with placebo effect and healing, it's such an extraordinary capacity to kind of improve ourselves and gain health and wholeness. Why in the world would we keep pursuing a very limited, disproven worldview like materialism? I mean, essentially, it should have been banned from the world 80 years ago with the advent of quantum physics. You know, materialism really has died. It's just that a lot of materials have not read the memo yet, but it's an absolute fact when you study the data and if human beings want to understand human experience, they need to realize this science of consciousness is about trying to get to a deeper understanding of some of the toughest, most challenging experiences humans have ever had, and yet they reveal some very profound and refreshing and liberating truths about our true nature. And that's where I think this is a very important thing to do to share this discussion, get it out there. I'm glad you do exactly what you do because I think you are playing a central role in helping to catalyze tremendous awakening of this planet, which I would say is absolutely necessary if we're going to survive. I mean, with all the addiction of fossil fuels, plastic pollution, we're in deep trouble from materialist thinking in a false sense of separation. We need to take responsibility for our choices. Well, let's, you know, you touch on something that's super important. And those are very kind birds and I appreciate it. But you touched on, you know, where a lot of your energy in mission has gone in recent years, and that is the tools of healing, the tools of becoming whole, the tools of, you know, because one of the things we know from this near death experience and we've explored on this show. It doesn't mean that the journey is over and it doesn't mean that the challenges aren't over. And it doesn't mean that you're still not going to face stuff. And in some ways it does make it worse, right. It makes some of our relationships worse because not everyone went through the experience with us. So they might not see it the same way. And the world hasn't gone through the experience. So I want you to talk about healing and you and Karen, your partner have done some, you know, specific work, some specific products that might help that. But the other aspect of that that you just touched on earlier that I find super powerful, free, easy, low risk is just these accounts, these accounts, these heartfelt soul felt near death experience accounts can be incredibly healing. They've been healing for me, but they've been healing to so many people that I've talked to. So can you speak to that for a minute? Well, you make a beautiful point there. And, you know, Ken Ring, who is one of the founding members of the International Association of Near Death Studies back in the mid 1970s. A few decades ago, he wrote a paper about how influential just knowing about NDE, studying NDE, reading some of the stories or hearing them presented from an NDE or can have a very profound positive transformative effect on people who get that knowledge. And Karen and I realized early on in our collaboration beginning a decade or so ago, that you really have to meet people where they are. And don't expect people to, you know, come to me to hear my story, but I've got to share with them what they are ready to hear in a way that can help them to grow to the next level. And that's always going to be through personal experience. So, and it's not just about sharing the stories, but, but encouraging people to develop a practice of going within. As you realize that the modern scientific model of consciousness is really one of one mind that we're really sharing one mind. I like to say it's like the facets on a diamond. The diamond is the one mind. Each one of us is a facet. So we're, we have slightly different perspectives of what is going on with the one mind, but we're all contributing to the knowing of the one mind. And personal experience is a way of gleaning that and especially like in our book Living in a Mind for Universe as we argue for objective idealism. You know, the primacy of consciousness and we talk about the brain is a filter. So it filters in this primordial mind. But that's when you realize that going within mind is actually a way to go out into the universe. That's why meditation centering prayer can be incredibly powerful gifts. And so sacred acoustics is Karen's company, as you point out. And in fact, I played a kind of a seminal role in getting she and her business partner, Kevin Costi, to join together back in 2011 to start breathing. Bringing these differential frequency brainwave entrainment tones out to people because I was astonished at the power that they gave me. And that included power to go back into my NDE and develop a much richer relationship. So this was not just about recovering information about my NDE as much as developing an ongoing relationship with a various kind of entities and denizens and that infinitely loving God force at the core of all. That was all part of my meditative practice. And yet I also realized Karen had never had an NDE. And yet she had a profound sense of the infinitely healing power of that loving force at the core from her own meditative experiences. And so when I encouraged her and Kevin to put together this company sacred acoustics and people can learn a lot more at sacredacoustics.com, it was really to help share those tools. And just to help your listeners understand why they're different, I would point out that every sound you've ever heard, including a chant or anthem or hymn that might have influenced a transition into a transcendental mode of consciousness or a spiritual awareness. All those sounds are processed up in the neocortex and the acoustic cortex in circuits that really have been finalized in the last few million years in Homo sapiens and in higher primates. The sounds of differential frequency brainwave entrainment, what are loosely called binaural beats. It's a phenomenon that was first discovered in the 1800s by Prussian physicists. Binaural beats were used in the late 20th century to enhance out of body experiences, remote viewing, things like that, enhanced trends and didn't allow local consciousness. And that's what piqued my interest. And I believe, and this is something we go into more detail in our book Living in a Mindful Universe to explain, but I believe the mechanism is because those differential frequency sounds, slightly different tones to the two ears are actually intersecting in the lower brainstem. And that is a circuit that arose more than 300 million years ago. There's a general principle in evolutionary biology that if you want to more fully understand a function and an anatomic structure related to function, you really want to look back through the evolution of that anatomy going back millions of years if you can. And when we do, we find that these differential frequency of sounds are processed in the lower brainstem and the superior olivary nucleus complex. And that gives them an opportunity to have a tremendous modulatory role on ascending signals that we believe govern kind of the modulation of consciousness in the neocortex. That's the human part of consciousness. All the details of conscious awareness come from the neocortex, but it's basically being driven from way down at this lowest level I'm talking about. And that's where we believe sacred acoustics and similar binaural beat brainwave entrainment can have such a powerful effect at liberating people from this kind of here and now and bodily sense of self and being locked into a material world. It's what allows our consciousness to really roam free just as it will be set free when our physical brain and body die at the end of our physical life. And so to have a kind of a leg up on this kind of exploring consciousness beyond the veil of the brain is a tremendous benefit. And it's something that we see over and over in our workshops. And I see it in a lot of the feedback Karen gets on her sacred acoustics website. She's got tens of thousands of people all around the world using that technology for deep meditative experiences. And it can bring extraordinary healing. And I mean, we did participate with a psychiatrist in New York on a pilot study that appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases in February 2020. It's by Dr. Anna Yousam. It was looking at sacred acoustics tones as a modality for alleviating anxiety and depression symptoms. And in fact, this this study that Dr. Yousam performed showed a 26 percent reduction in anxiety symptoms over two weeks. Listening to the tones combined with talk therapy. Whereas with talk therapy alone, it was only a 7 percent reduction. So that's a pretty dramatic effect. And when you read the qualitative reports in her study, you find even more kind of interesting evidence of kind of the transcendental nature of these experiences and how people have benefited from this kind of meditative practice, even though it can be very simple. And I think that that is where there's extraordinary power. The only other point I'd like to make kind of along those same lines is there's also a big literature coming up lately in addiction medicine, treating some of the worst addictions and also treating fear of death and cancer patients using psilocybin magic mushrooms. The interesting thing is you only need one or two doses of the mushrooms. So it's not as if you need psilocybin in your system on a regular daily basis to accomplish these extraordinary goals of getting rid of fear of death and defeating addiction. What you need is the proper therapeutic setting. What I would argue is that is just another example of traversing the veil, getting in closer touch with your higher soul with that primordial mind in ways that in the ears have done, you know, for millennia. That coming in touch with that oneness has a tremendous power to heal us in this life. And likewise, I would say that those kind of psilocybin experiments with fear of death and with addictions is just showing us the power of our higher soul and free will to do this. You're using the psilocybin as a catalyst. I would argue that you can easily use binaural beat brainwave entrainment to get at least as far if not further. So it's a very important modality to help us in healing, coming into better mental health, coming into more alignment. And I believe ultimately much more radical healing like you would find on the Institute of Noetic Sciences website. If you put in the search term of spontaneous remission and uncover that book they published in 1995 with 3500 cases of curing of cancer infections, other things beyond any expectation of medical intervention. And I believe that that is the way of the future. Our healing, our medical arts are going to change dramatically over the next few decades because of the true power of our mind over matter to heal and bring us more into wholeness. Yeah. And the great thing about the binaural beats is safe. I mean, you're just listening to something easy and expensive. I mean, it kind of hits all the things there. The one thing and I can't remember if it was from reading it in your guys book or someplace else. But I thought the hypothesis for why it might work is interesting that if you have two different frequencies playing in two different two different ears and you're getting at that primordial brain and it's trying to resolve it. At some point it just goes, oh, to heck with it and kind of gets out of the way kind of thing to put it in simple terms. Do you have any quick thoughts on that? I would say essentially what you're doing is you're kind of giving it another task. You're taking all that circuitry and the brain that involves, you know, ignition circuits in the lower brain stem 40 times per second firing these now signals to coordinate the phlegmic cortical loops. That whole engine of consciousness and of course the ultimate details of consciousness depend entirely on the neocortex. You know, everything we see in the occipital lobes, everything we hear in the acoustic cortex, our planning, bodily position, all these things in parietal and frontal lobes. Every bit of that is this machine that we're kind of used to being in. And what these binaural beats do, I believe is at a very deep level, they kind of disconnect your conscious awareness from all that machinery. And that is why they were useful for things like remote viewing out of body experiences as shown in the late 20th century. And I believe that's exactly what's going on here. And I've learned to ride those tones beautifully. It's a very powerful technique. And I mean, what you're trying to do essentially is take the little voice in your head, you know, so many of us identify with a little running stream of thoughts in our head. Well, never forget, I love how Michael Singer calls that stream of thoughts in our head the annoying roommate, because it's that, you know, it's a parlor trick. That is not your consciousness. That is not the deep and profound mystery of consciousness. That profound mystery is the awareness. And it's because in many ways the universe is self aware. And we, that's called the mental layer of the universe and it's universal. It's been there since before the Big Bang. And that is what we can tap into. And that's what we do by basically kind of monotonizing this machinery that normally keeps us in the here and now and sense of self. And that allows our conscious awareness to really go places. And that's where we start to realize much of our connection with the rest of the universe, the information we can glean and also a much richer sense of kind of free will and our ability to influence our evolving reality. So you can easily argue if you're stuck in your ego mind all the time, of course you don't have free will. You're an automaton. But by engaging your basically primordial mind by engaging the mind of the universe that we all share, you start to reach a point where you're actually able to manifest a free will that can have tremendous influence on your life. And on the evolving kind of human awareness and consciousness and kind of the mission of humanity will change dramatically as we realize this unification. I mean, I mentioned a little while ago the damage done to this world by the false sense of separation that comes from materialist thinking. You know, it's right there at the heart of reductive materialism, break it all down into the parts, understand how those parts interact, and then you can understand the whole world. Well, that assumes that, you know, electrons, protons, quarks, all these things dancing around following the laws of physics give us the events of human lives. Well, no, that's not true because there is a set of top down causal principles that are far more important in determining the events that unfold around us. And that top down causality is something that comes from that mental layer of the universe. And for those interested in the quantum physics aspect of that, I would steer you to the writings of George F. R. Ellis, the South African mathematician, who's written extensively about top down causality in quantum systems. But I believe that is really kind of the heart of where you go with objective idealism, filter theory, and then kind of that notion of top down causality and how it manifests in this world. And there's a tremendous amount of potential for that kind of a worldview to expand. This is something that we call the primordial mind hypothesis. We talk about it in chapter five of living in mind for universe, but a lot of my thinking on it has advanced since that book came out. So I believe it probably is time to write another book. Great. Well, I want to talk about that in just a minute. I want to know what's coming up for you, but I can't leave that last part without touching on a couple of things. One, I have a ton of respect and love Michael Singer. I think he's, I think he's wonderful. And I love the yogic approach and your explanation for the binaural beats, potentially, hypothetically, how the, how they might be working on a more neurophysical level kind of thing. I thought it was so awesome and it connects with me because I'm a longtime kind of yoga practitioner. Michael Singer has that background and on some of the other people, but early on in, you know, the asana kind of thing. I had a really good teacher and it was the same kind of thing. Like, okay, now move your left toe here while you do your hip and see the energy this length is a bunch of instructions for what purpose to finally your mind goes, oh, to heck with it. I can't keep track of all these physical things that are going on and boom, that's when that little shift opens up. And so I thought the way that you connected that is hypothetically is super, super interesting. And I think people that have gone there in that kind of, in any kind of different modality where they've gotten that heck, you can get there by driving. Don't do this, but you know, by driving a daydream, you kind of get to some of that same effect. So that's fantastic. But let me ask you this because you just, you teed it up. What is in the future for Dr. Evan Alexander? Where are you going? I'm sure there's more books. I'm sure there's you're connecting with so many people and you're bringing us this kind of reporting from the frontier because you are connected with so many folks. I'm sure you're going to continue to do that. But what are your plans for the future? Well, I can tell you in the near term, Karen and I are very busy. We're participating in a certain competition that I'm sure many of your listeners are probably aware of. The Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies in Las Vegas is organizing basically an essay competition to, for the best essay, supporting the scientific evidence that there is an afterlife. I find that absolutely fascinating. I think the evidence is really there. It's strong enough now that anybody who pursues the evidence will come to the conclusion that the afterlife is more likely than not. And so we're very excited about that competition. It kind of dovetails into a lot of our other kind of projects moving forward. But I believe that I can confess that since living in a Mind for Universe came out in 2017, I've really come to kind of a deeper understanding in my own mind that I believe in looking at how brain and mind connect in the brain in a way that would support this filter theory and notion of primordial consciousness and all. And that's where I really want to go next. And this involves collaboration with scientists around the world. I do a lot of work, as I mentioned earlier, with Galileocommission.org, with some of the other investigators there. And I really think that that is a major next step because one of the tremendous hurdles to the scientific community getting on board with all this has just been that kind of missing link of connection at the brain and mind level. What all is going on and what most people get trapped into is they keep following the material side and the brain side and thinking that is going to lead us there where you actually have to take the lead of phenomenal experience and of consciousness itself. And I believe when we come at it from that direction and that includes this much bigger kind of expression of consciousness of afterlife reincarnation, all of it writ large and present through your models. But that's what I really would like to do in the next few years is come up with a much better explanation of kind of the hypothetical possibilities for the scientific community to relieve us of the shackles of materialism. And that's where I hope I would go next. I'm not sure exactly. I'm sure this Bigelow project will lead us into a lot of interesting kind of territory. But from my point of view, the real gift to the world and the one that absolutely will help this help humanity to grow into this awakening would be a better kind of nuts and bolts explanation of from a neuroscientist about what is going on with this kind of idea of primordial mind of objective idealism or analytic idealism. How is it really working and how can we all interact with that kind of mental layer of the universe to really bring the dreams of our higher soul into fruition. That's essentially what this is about is coming into humankind's potential, which I think the beliefs of our modern society are incredibly falsely restricting as to what is possible for humans to accomplish. And I think the more we investigate, you know, a deep meditation centering prayer, the different modalities of kind of getting into deep conscious awareness and the information systems of the universe and then being able to use that in terms of our free will of manifesting the world of our dreams. That is where this whole world can change dramatically. I mean, from my point of view, this shift of understanding is irreversible. And I know, in fact, I recently rewatched your interview with with Bruce Grayson and I also had seen the one with Steve Taylor, not too long ago. And I believe that the world needs this. I mean, we are in deep trouble. The materialist model, very self-centered, egocentric, you know, kind of completely out of balance economic and social systems, judicial systems. All of it is a reflection of the false sense of separation that comes out of materialist thought. And so in so many ways, we will do a far better job and truly become homo sapiens. Sapiens means wise. Well, when I look around at a fossil fuel addicted world, it's with 35,000 species on the verge of extinction. A plastic guy or twice the size of Texas floating in the eastern Pacific Ocean from all the discarded plastic bags. I don't see a very wise species in charge. And I think that we owe it to this planet, to the blessing of our very existence to rise to the occasion to come out of this absolute madness of materialist thought that has led us into such a dark abyss. It is time to awaken to the true potential of humanity and truly become homo sapiens for the first time. So I am going to do everything I can to help this world wake up to this far deeper truth and the importance of our responsibility to ourselves, to each other, to future generations. And of course, when you review that reincarnation literature, you can start getting a little bit selfish about that because our own some aspect of this awareness is going to be living in another body in the future. And we need to do a good job of making sure this planet is not completely wrecked for future generations. You are an incredibly powerful spokesman for this message. And I'm so with you and I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing. I do pull up a little bit on the last part of what you're saying. And I want to just I was going to let you go in that I want to kind of squeeze one more question in there and that's it. And you totally get this. But like from a spiritual standpoint, the doing stuff kind of takes a backseat, you know, which is essentially the most important part of your message is about love, compassion, being there about the light is infinitely more powerful than the dark. You know, and I focused plenty on the dark because I don't want to ignore the dark. But I don't for a minute, really concern myself at that level. I'm, you know, I love the quote from Amma the Hugging Saint, you know, which is works tirelessly to try and do everything to help the world. And she's in India digging with the, you know, untouchables, digging women latrines at 18 hours a day and just how does she have that energy? And then her devotees go, gee, but you said, you know, we're not about this world. Why you put all your energies into it? And she goes, world, what world? You know, she is in the biblical sense in this world, but not of that world of this world. And I don't see a conflict at all with what you're saying, but it is a subtle kind of shift. I mean, the compassion that we have to have, and I think you're totally down with this for everyone, for all the people who are the not maybe doing the best thing or don't seem to be acting in the interest of the whole. They're not separate either, you know, what any thoughts on that as we wrap it up? Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I think essentially just to try and boil it down. You know, the deep truth that near death experiencers come back with the blessing in their lives is a real realization that love binds us all together. It binds all souls to the universe at large. We can trust in a very loving universe at the core of our existence. That's the deep lesson of Indies. And of course, the important thing that I would stress is it's not so much crucial to, you know, the lessons they give us about what happens when we die. Of course, that's helpful, but far more important is how Indies would express that their journey show them how to live this life day to day. Every choice, how they view their relationship with themselves, with the universe, with other beings. This is where we can really kind of improve and expand our human experience. And it's by the work we do here in this world. That's why it's so crucial to realize and that's why reincarnation is absolutely essential. If you miss the piece of reincarnation, you're absolutely missing the growth that occurs over time, the progress of souls. And reincarnation is a story that helps us get to a much deeper truth. But it also points out that the true work of soul growth occurs here in these bodies, even temporarily dumbed down and believing that this is the only existence there is. Our higher soul knows differently from that, but we kind of buy into that and as long as we don't get too sucked into the ego side of it, we can start appreciating this benefit of helping others and being there for others. And Alex, I think the biggest shift, certainly a major shift will be how we treat our fellow human beings. But another absolutely essential piece of this is realizing, you know, Homo sapiens doesn't have, you know, a primary claim to spiritual life and the spiritual nature of the universe. The entire animal world, plant kingdom, every bit of it is part of the spiritual universe within consciousness, within this one mind of infinitely bound together through love. And that's why we have a tremendous amount of kind of growth and transformation that society needs to go through to fully awaken and assimilate these kind of deep and profound truths. But they're really about how we live in this world. I think that's a fantastic point, particularly in the broader understanding of consciousness. And I want you to go into that in a minute, you know, we know that whales are conscious, dolphins are conscious. So, you know, you go down the list and then why would we draw some arbitrary line and think it's all, it's all part of the soup. But if I can, I want to kind of make sure I make the point so you can address it. We started with Ram Dass and name curly Baba. And I love this story about name curly Baba that maybe gets more to my point. And he's talking about, you know, all these Westerners who are coming to see him. This is Ram Dass is guru. That's a kind of an outdated term. But he is the guy who really kind of leads him on this spiritually transformative experience because he's really kind of in the way that we're all messed up. He's really kind of has a lot of issues, you know, in his life and name curly Baba is transformative. And he's the first one to say that completely transformative. But name curly Baba says you Westerners are all about doing making doing. He goes, those guys up in the caves, those gurus, those sadhus up in the cave that are sitting there. They're keeping the planet spinning. And I'm sure he's talking about that metaphorically. But the point is, I just pull up short when we start talking about doing and we have to do and we got to reduce that plastic thing in the in the ocean. Of course we do, but we just have to be, we have to be with each other. We have to smile at that woman who's wearing a mask driving alone in her car and doesn't understand the science of how that's a complete sham. But we can't hate on it. We just have to have love and compassion. And the more that we can face the people that we don't necessarily agree with with that love and compassion, you know, that's the healing too. So I threw a lot out there. I would say you're absolutely right on the beam. And, you know, early on in all these discussions after my NDE is I was trying to come to a deeper understanding of it all trying to explain to people trying to come up with a shift in worldview that made sense. I remember Karen pointed out to me very brilliantly that really all we are here to do is to be the love that we are. And when I fully absorb the depth of what she was telling me, it was not an act of loving or, you know, all of that kind of machination of, well, how do I love myself? How do I love others? But becoming that love. And that is something I was very used to from my core experience deep in my NDE and that sanctum sanctum of the divine becoming one with that infinitely healing force of love that God for us is something that is totally indescribable. And yet it's exactly what what Karen was urging me to remember about my experience and the importance of unpacking that experience for this world is that we all are truly bound together through love. And that is what one of the deepest lessons from the tip of the spear of NDE is there the tip of the spear in changing this world around consciousness. But that is the profound lesson that NDE is agree upon is that we are fundamentally essence of pure love. And that is something that I think comes out tremendously from the NDE community and also from this larger community of the science of consciousness studies. It's really all about being that love. But in doing so in becoming that, that's how we can change this world. It may come out through all of those things and let's hope that it does, but it certainly comes out in the work that you're doing, which is just terrific. You know, I mean, I can't stress it enough. I don't know why you were chosen, but thank God you're chosen. You were the right guy for the job. Let me tell you, and it's fantastic. The thing is, having been where I've been in this NDE and trying to make sense of it, I realized that an NDE and Harvard and all that stuff doesn't mean squat. It doesn't mean a thing. I've met people from all different walks of life who have had profound NDE's that they shared with me that helped me tremendously in my own understanding. So these events are out there by the millions to help change humanity and help wake us up. I think the only importance of my story in our current cultural kind of paralysis in some sense has been that by being a neuroscientist, my brain was so savaged by the infection that when I woke up on day seven of coma and that ICU bed, I did not even recognize my mother, my sisters, my son standing at the bedside. All I knew was where I had just been. My brain was wrecked, but that's the kind of beauty of the message because it then all came back. And that's kind of an extraordinary story. But what it does is it helps me to understand kind of the depths of my own journey. I mean, if I'd been a truck driver and had this experience, my doctors, as my doctors told me when I woke up not knowing any neuroscience, having none of that knowledge, they said the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks so you can forget about it. We have no idea how you're coming back to us. Your brain was soaking in pus. Nobody thought you'd even live through it. But you can forget about that experience you're trying to tell us about. And so I did. You know, that's where we get back to that story you shared of my son coming home two days after I got out of the hospital. And by then I bought what my doctors told me. The dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. So I told him it was way too real to be real. And that's when he advised me we'll write it all down before you read anything about somebody else's NDE because you need a pure version of your story. Best advice I've ever gotten. But that was absolutely critical. But then as my knowledge came back I realized this is impossible. This cannot happen. And that of course is where that case report is so important because they thought the same thing. This kind of patient did not wake up and yet I did. And not only that I had this profound experience. And of course that's what they explained scientifically as the explanation for why I had the recovery. And I think that's beautiful. It shows us that the scientific world is certainly making progress and opening up to truth. I mean that's what we're all after here. We want to understand the truth. And we should not let our the limitations of our theoretical models of our inability to assimilate and integrate empirical data. We shouldn't let those weaknesses get in the way of trying to get at the deep truth of all of this. And that involves a very open mind and it also involves a responsibility to study the data. And I would also say encourage people go within the answers truly lie within us all meditation centering prayer whatever your means of quieting that little voice of the annoying roommate. You know on a regular basis I meditate an hour to a day with sacred acoustics and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's a tremendous gift and all of us can come into much greater healing with this kind of kind of going within. Well fantastic. And it's been just terrific having you on. Thank you so generous with your time and sharing all this terrific stuff. Thanks for having me on and thank you for what you're doing because I promise you a lot of what I interpret as an improvement in the world's kind of understanding of all this in the last decade. A lot of that is due to your work. So keep it up. Thanks again to Dr. Evan Alexander for joining me today on skeptico and thanks again for all that he does. It ain't easy doing what he does. So the one question I'd have to tip from this episode relates back to something we talked about early on in the conversation and that is Dr. Alexander's near death experience seems to be tied to his family dynamics in a very powerful way. And I wonder what y'all think about the role of near death experiences in our personal spiritual journey. I know that's some next level stuff but I'd really like to go there. I want to go there so I want you to go there with me and share any thoughts you might have. Drag me down on the skeptical forum or anywhere else you would like. Until next time take care and bye for now.