 Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. As you all know by now, we cover a lot of different topics on Skeptico. But it seems like we always return to the question of consciousness and what's up with that little voice inside your head. And why does it seem to always be conspiring to make you unhappy? Well, that's exactly the question that today's guest, Sean Webb, has sought to answer. As a young, smart, successful rising star, Sean had achieved everything that should have made him happy. So when he faced the fact that he wasn't, he decided to find out why. This eventually led to Zen meditation, a deep dive into neuroscience, and a spiritual breakthrough that rapidly transformed him from a gun collecting money driven materialist to a consciousness expert and a spiritual seeker who believes he may have cracked the code to happiness. Sounds good, right? Well, hold on a minute, because while preparing for this interview and in true Skeptico inquiry to perpetuate doubt fashion, I also found some points of disagreement between Sean and I with regard to consciousness. So what you're about to hear is an interview with a guy who's done some truly amazing research and personal transformation work with regard to consciousness and spirituality. But what you might also hear is a good old fashioned kind of friendly debate among seekers on the path. This is going to be fun. You really find people that are this intelligent and at the same time open, willing to hash things out. Sean, it's really exciting to have you here on Skeptico and thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Alex. It's a real pleasure. I've heard your voice a number of times and from past episodes that I've heard that are all been interesting and just like, wow, Alex reached out. I got to go. Fantastic. Well, you are the author of the red book and the blue book, as you like to call it. Mind hacking, happiness, volume one, mind hacking, happiness, volume two, increasing happiness in finding non dual enlightenment. So if the titles and the graphics look light and funny, wait until you get to that subtitle fighting non dual enlightenment. Yeah, I wish I could have thought of something a little more creative for the titles of these books. But unfortunately, these two books started out as one book. And I just kind of had the goal of saying, hey, let's just lay it all out there. Soup to nuts from a seeker who starts at, you know, step one of wanting to understand their mind. Well, let's talk about all of the stuff that their mind does that blocks them from discovering the deeper truth within so that they can then understand it. Mess with that process, break that process and then get around that process to be able to, you know, find their deeper truth within. And so the red book winds up being the first half of this huge book that was here's how your mind works and here's how to get it out of your way. And then the second side was, okay, here's the stuff that you may be seeking beyond your mind. And so that's kind of how that whole horrible naming convention came to be. No, I don't think it's horrible at all and you're pounding on your key thing there. And that's awesome and packed with neuroscience. What they're going to find is study after study where you're citing research that backs up what you say in this discovery of self self discovery of self of that little voice inside your head and how maybe that's not all there is to you. So, you know, give us the basics. Yeah, well, you know, the the idea behind this is to, you know, create an experience of for the reader where they can understand and see their mind. And they can understand the processes that come together to create all of their negative emotions that create that little voice in their head that sows doubt and creates havoc within them sometimes. And then to point out, which is automatic for their subconscious level within their mind, but to point out that if you can look at something and see something, then by default, you are not that thing. And so if I can show you how your mind works to where you can see it within your head, it's not like I have to convince you of this. I say, hey, look at that, you look over there and you see it. And then you're like, oh yeah, I never saw that before. This is one of those things where I say, okay, here's how your mind works. Watch it, become it. And then you look at it and you say, yeah, that's exactly how my mind works. Well, if you can see that, then you realize at a subconscious level and then also at a conscious level, you're not that thing. If you are looking at something just like a tooth can't bite itself, a fingertip can't touch itself, an eyeball can't see itself without some distance in a mirror, an olfactory nerve in your nose can't smell itself. If there's a perceiver and a perceived, then there's some distance between the two. And so, okay, then the question becomes, well, okay, wow, I thought I was this mess of my mind before. I thought I was these emotions that are creating havoc in my life, but I'm not. So first of all, can I change this process if I'm not that? And the answer is yes. And then the second question is, all right, well, if I'm not that, who and what am I as the observer? Who am I in this seat of the executor that's being handed all this stuff from my mind, granted, enough to convince you that you are your mind sometimes. But in truth, who and what am I underneath all of that noise that's going on? And let's organize that noise and get it out of the way so that we can really move forward and do some real deep discovery. Awesome. And, you know, you put it in such great simple terms, although as we know, you know, it's not at all simple, but it is a paradigm shift. It is the essence of spirituality, that realization that you are the observer, at least the kind of spirituality that you and I kind of seem to be most interested in. Let's play a little game here. Play along with me. I like to play this game. I call it skeptical jeopardy. And let's jump into kind of all those things that we agree with, which are hugely profound and paradigm-shaking. And then let's hash out these couple of things that we don't. If you will, let me pick the first one since you just talked about mind hacking and your title of your books and the title of your website, Mind Hacking Happiness. You know, I thought this model that you have is kind of really fun and interesting. And I'm showing the graphic up on the screen. And I thought you might explain what people are seeing and for people who are just listening, what they can't see, but what you're going to explain. Sure. Well, you know, it's very easy to understand your own mind and how it works once you take a look at it. And this is one of those situations where just like, like if you've gone through a marketing class, you've, I'm sure, seen this before. But one of the first things you learn in marketing is it's sometimes the things that you don't see that get pointed out to you that make a huge difference. There's an arrow in the FedEx logo between the capital E and the lower letter X. And if you've never seen that before, you're like, holy cow, how could I have missed that perfect arrow between the capital letter E and the lower case X? But then after you see that little arrow in that logo, you will never not see it again. Right. And so that's the type of thing that we're talking about when we're talking about the ability to take a look at your mind and see how your mind works and gives you a different perspective of how your mind works. And it allows you to take a little bit of a distance between you and your mind's reactions. And so what we're talking about here is being able to see your emotional output as it's being processed and then create a space for you where your negative emotional reactions like fear, anger, worry, regret, doubt, sadness, etc. are all optional for you over time. And we're talking about using the adult learning model where we start with an incompetent, an unconscious incompetence. We're just like, we don't even know what we don't know. And then we move through a conscious incompetence where, okay, well, now at least we know what we don't know, we know what we need to learn. We move into a conscious competence, which is, okay, I kind of get this. I kind of understand how to work my mind, but I got to really think about it. And then after a while, because of plasticity, it works into an unconscious competence where you are, you know, lights out, shunting anger out the door before it even comes to fruition. Your greatest sadness is maybe the only ones that ever come through, like if you lose a very close loved one, that type of thing. But, you know, when your favorite show on Netflix gets canceled, it no longer ruins your day, that type of thing. And all of these things you'll realize over time become blockers of your happiness because our natural state is kind of a one where we're in a pretty good well-being. You know, if everything's cool, and this is a function of homeostasis, if everything's cool, everything's cool is basically how that rule works within your body. It rules every cell within your existence in that if everything is status quo, everything is as expected, then there's nothing we really need to do and just kind of chill out and do our regular normal everyday operations. But if something is not good, then we need to take action. And that's true for an individual cell all the way up through all of the trillions of cells in our body that come to create our human existence. And so when you figure that out and you start to work it, then you can basically, first of all, be separated by your body's reactions to things, your emotional reactions to things, because, you know, emotions are a function of your nervous system, right? So, at the point that you're separated from that a little bit, you get a little bit of freedom, you get a little bit of space to be able to say, OK, these things are simply what my mind is giving me. They're simply what my body is giving me, but I don't necessarily have to buy into them. And then at that point, you gain a great amount of liberation to say, you know what, I'm going to bypass that whole frustration thing with whatever Trump said today or whatever it is that it is on your social media feed that has thrown you into a tizzy. Or the fact that someone said something at work, or the fact that, you know, maybe a project that you're working on has gone in the wrong direction for a little while or whatever it is. And all of a sudden, you're back on track on focus and what you need to do, because there's also a physiological limitation of, you know, when you're having a negative emotional reaction or you're in turmoil, your prefrontal cortex actually shuts down. I don't know if a lot of people know that or not, but one of the first things that we do, because our brain is that organ of survival, is it starts to shunt power away from non-critical systems. And it, you know, as of 150 years ago, when we had a fear response, let's say, of a bear or a snake or something that could threaten our lives, we didn't need to think our way out of that situation, right? We just needed to get energy to our legs, we could run a little faster, jump a little farther across the crevice or whatever it is to try to get distance between us and the threat. Well, in today's world where we have, you know, cubicles and we have problems that we have to think through and things like that, that kind of situation is horrible for us because when our thinking brain is shut down, we're stuck in the muck even longer than we normally would be. And so being able to shunt that process or being able to take control of that process and shut it down a little quicker allows you to think and get your mind onto something else that is more productive and more profitable for you. You know, one thing you said there that I think is really interesting in people who have gone down this non-dual path, which we might get into and describe, but in spirituality in general might pick up on a really important thing you said. And it bridges the gap, I think, between this idea of happiness, which many people just accept is, oh, you know, things are good, things, I'm getting what I want. And what you're saying, I think is really important and in some something different that people who have been down the spiritual path realizing you're talking about just creating some space, man, just being able to get a little bit more distance and freedom from that oppressive, yeah, little voice in our head that is driving us nuts. So let's start with the space, which a lot of people will be able to identify with. A lot of people don't realize that you can actually get some space from your human mind and the reactions of your human mind. We often try to think about, let's get some space, let's go on vacation, let's get away from this place, let's go to the mountains, let's go to the beach, let's go to the whatever to create some physical space between you where you don't have to actually think about things that are troubling you or that are challenging you, etc. But without having to move a muscle, without having to go even one inch, you can create some space between the reactions of your mind and your observational self by understanding the process of your mind being able to see that process on a moment to moment basis. And then that creates some space between you and the mind to say, hey, if I can look at this, I'm not that thing again. And this can be dramatic. I mean, there was a lady who was really literally the poster child for addiction, alcohol addiction, specifically in the United States where she had drank herself to one drink within the grasp of death. She wound up in a two week coma in a traumatic brain injury ward of a neuroscience hospital in Houston and woke up weeks later in stone cold sober, had to relearn how to tie her shoes, had to relearn to walk without stumbling, without a drink in her system at all because she had done that much brain damage by alcohol consumption. Well, she got out of the hospital, drove home, her husband was unpacking the bags in the driveway, and she was inside pouring herself a glass of wine to take the edge off. So she came to me with this story after she'd read the book, she goes, I know addiction, you know, I know how much it grips you, I know how much your mind is an uncontrollable thing. Well, she read this red book, the mind hacking habit is volume one, and took control of her mind, and then was able to cure her addiction by herself without the AA meetings and things like that. And the way she did it was she started to go within, she started to look at her mind's reactions, she started to look at that little nagging voice that said, hey, let's go have a drink or hey, let's not deal with this stress right now. And let's let this boil up until it's Friday and I really need to go to the bar and have a, you know, go on a bender. She was able to handle at least the way she explained it, she was able to handle her moment to moment stresses at Tuesday afternoon at four o'clock, at Tuesday afternoon at four o'clock where it didn't boil up until Friday and she needed to go out and have a drink, that type of thing. And so she stopped drinking, but then she also later sat down with a glass of wine and a journal. And she said, okay, I'm going to mindfully take this drink and I'm going to record the psychological effect, I'm going to record the physical effect, I'm going to record my thoughts during the whole thing. And took that drink that AA said she can never take again and decided, I'm done, I'm done with this whole alcohol thing. I really don't really enjoy the whole laundry list of things that I just listed out on this piece of paper. This really isn't going to be something that's part of my life anymore. And so that's, you know, that's her, that's 100% hers, not like, you know, my book cures addiction. She took the ability to take her mind under control to do an analysis of what her mind was doing. And then she did something amazing with that. But that's how powerful this can be in that when you have those things that are, you know, creating havoc for you in your life where you're having just one bad relationship after another or one bad job choice after another or one bad addiction choice after another or whatever it is, there's something inside your mind at a subconscious level that is causing that to occur, right? And you can't stop it from coming up and that's the problem. And so if you can take charge of that process and understand how your process, your consciousness works down to the multiple levels of consciousness below your waking awareness, and you can start taking charge of those, or you can start altering the variables that create your entire emotional landscape period, you can take charge of the output of your mind and change your life dramatically. And, you know, I'm working with a couple of Navy SEALs that has said, you know, this is the best mind training book on the planet. We've already been through the best mind training that we've that, you know, the United States government has available for us up in Virginia. And, you know, I wish I would have found this book to address my PTSD much sooner than I had because these guys are getting in there and saying, okay, no more PTSD, and then it's gone. And, you know, they don't have an issue with it anymore. Creating that space between what your mind wants to give you and who you are and realizing who you are that is different from your mind. Game changer, game changer. So when we're talking about that space, it's incredibly important for you to have that. Yeah, those are some great, great stories. And that's off to you. And so great that you're able to produce something that was there for people when they needed it in that way. And this is yoga, man. This is standard yoga stuff. You just go read it. And, you know, it's kind of interesting to me just to follow on to that point. We've maybe hammered it enough, but I don't think we can hammer it enough because, you know, we look at our culture and what is the, what is the most severe punishment we can give someone when they're in prison? Solitary confinement. Yeah. And you got to be there by yourself with that voice inside your head. Oh my gosh, let me out of this. Now, just take a step back and say, let's go look in India. Those guys are singing a cave for seven years with no contact. They're going, this is complete bliss because they have that complete separation. They're tapping into something else that we can talk about the larger consciousness. But the whole paradigm is quite sick that we have in our culture where we've accepted that that little yammering voice in your head. Oh my gosh, you do not want to be alone with that. So like you say, you want to go down to the bar or you just want to go yak with your friends or you want to spend all your time on social media. But the last thing you want to do is be confronted by the voice inside your head. It's really kind of a strange situation. Yeah. And so you can learn to turn that thing off or at least change its tune. It can be like if you had eternity, you know, I tell this to a lot of people. I was like, look, if you were, if you had eternity, you would eventually break up with yourself. Like if you had to spend eternity with any one person, you'd certainly break up with them long before eternity got there. But I mean, if you had eternity to spend with anyone, even yourself, you'd break up with yourself at some point. It's called suicide. Right. I'm done with this whole process. But if you can understand that process, like, you know, there's this self within us, this spiritual self or this capital S level self that a lot of people, you know, once we start to put words to this stuff, we start walking straight off the path of truth. We all know that. So let's just put that right out there. But, you know, you have this capital level self that is your core being that is your existence beyond your mind, etc. But then you have to understand your mind self and you have to be able to identify that because it likes to trick you into thinking that you're that self. And your mind self is this laundry list of stuff. And again, the brain is your organ of survival. So the limbic system within your brain constantly scans all of your environment for threats. And it says, okay, is this a threat? Is this idea threat? Is this person a threat? Is this headline a threat? Is this, you know, baseball flying in my head a threat? Or is it going to miss me? That type of thing. Then a second question must be asked. Is this a threat to what? And then that's when your mind has to say from a physiological survival perspective, oh, I got to have a laundry list of stuff in my mind that says, this is myself and this is not myself. Like, if I see a leaf cutter and I have to understand whether or not I have Lee used to find out whether or not that leaf cutter and has a threat to me. And if it's not a threat to me, then I don't have to expend energy in my closed system. And if it is a threat, then I need to move away or do whatever is necessary to defend itself. And so that whole mind's self thing, which includes your body, you know, your body gets hardwired into that definition. It starts to pile on like Jim Cohn in Virginia, UVA proved that people around us become a portion of our sense of self. So that one simple system of defensive self within us can then also expand to things around us like our tribe or like our possessions or like our job or like our ideas of right and wrong. Our, you know, pro-choice, pro-life position or politics or whatever it is. Like Sam Harris proved that politics gets written onto our sense of self and our nervous system acts the same exact way when someone attacks our politics on a news feed on our Facebook page, exactly like a bear walking out of the woods in front of us, right? There is a same physiological reaction. Tiffany Burnett White proved that brand connection and other ideas of identity can get written onto this self. And once you start to see all of your mind's reactions as a kind of a reaction, a self-defense reaction to something on your self list, one, you can start to take the proactive step of starting to remove things from your self map to say, okay, well, this is no longer going to bother me anymore. I'm not going to put any energy into defending this thing. And then you can also, again, create that little bit of a space within your mind to say, oh, the reason I'm having a reaction is because I have an attachment, a mental attachment to X. And all of a sudden now there are two magic things that happens. One, there's a space that gets created within you for your observation and the reaction. But then also there's a hard-wiring, really cool thing that Matt Lieberman found at UCLA in 2007, and they did a ton of copycat studies to prove this out. When you put a cognitive understanding to your emotional process, it shuts off your emotional process. So your limbic system sends a message forward to the brain and it says, okay, this might be a coil on the ground, it might be a hose, it might be a snake. And at the point you look down and your mind understands, oh, well, that's a hose. All of a sudden the message gets sent back to your limbic system to say, okay, we got the message, we understand, not a threat. And the emotion stops being sent to the forebrain for analysis. Well, when you can put an understanding of the process of how your mind has created an emotional reaction in the first place by understanding this equation of emotion thing that I outlined in the red book and all this other stuff and you get to play with the variables on that, things like that. When you understand that, there's a magic button in your brain that shuts off the emotion being sent forward. Now, this is cool because this is a resolution of the emotional pain that you're experiencing. All these things get in our way of discovering deeper spirituality and things like that that we talk about in the blue book. But on a day-to-day basis, you can shut off your pain and suffering by simply understanding it. And then the message from your right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex and your medial prefrontal cortex sends a message back says, okay, shut it off, we get it, we understand it. No more message needs to be sent. And that's exactly how the entire nervous system works in masks because it doesn't want to waste energy sending a message over and over and over again. It's been resolved weeks ago or months ago or whatever it is. As soon as it gets the message back, it shuts off. Well, if you're in that space of understanding your emotional reactions to things, even your micro reactions to things on a daily basis, those things get shut off, your mind is much quieter. That creates a plasticity that you can start to understand and feel your deeper existence within. Great. Except you've now kind of meandered into some of these minor points of difference that could be pretty major points of difference. So we have to kind of dive into a bunch of topics and we're going to have some fun. I hope people understand that I pronom to you. You are a true seeker on the path and awesome, awesome stuff. So, you know, we're going to hash out stuff that's kind of interesting to me and my little world. And for people who are really down this path, these things do have a difference, you know? Well, to what extent is your brain what we're really trying to operate on here? Or to what extent is this consciousness something more fundamental that we don't understand? What is the end game in terms of control? Do we want to control? How much are we in want to be in the control game? So I've laid out a board that kind of touches on a lot of these topics. And in the true spirit of jeopardy, I'm going to let you pick and we'll just kind of see where some of this stuff goes. Wow. Okay. Let's go. Let's find out what's behind neuroscience. Fair enough. What's behind neuroscience? Oh, a shameless plug for Alex's book. Why science is wrong about almost everything. And I'm kidding, but I'm not because when I wrote that book, the premise was if you get consciousness wrong, then you can't get anything right. And science has fundamentally misunderstood consciousness. And you have a ton of great neuroscience, but it's all built on this fundamental misunderstanding of what consciousness is. And it's it's hung up in the correlation versus causation problem. They are hung up on the idea that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. Mind equals brain. You can be nothing more. Right. And that is always going to be a limiting factor. You know, Sam Harris is an income poop. So he might have had a good study published about one or other of his pet things about religion and neuroscience, but he's fundamentally misunderstands the nature of consciousness. So jump in there. Yeah, I agree. And I think maybe the audience will be surprised that I agree with a lot of what you just said. You know, I do present a lot of science in the books, which really was more of a tool to say this isn't just a theory that I came up with out of the blue and you need to believe this and yada, yada, yada. It was here's all the empirical evidence that suggests that what I'm about to tell you is correct. And so I agree with you that at the fundamental level there is a horrible misunderstanding of what consciousness is and how critical and how much of a building block it is for the whole thing for all of our existence, not just, you know, this moving meat suit that we have that we seem to have control of for 80 to 100 years if everything goes well. But, you know, the consciousness of absolutely everything. And I talk about this a little bit in the blue book in that, you know, I believe consciousness is fundamental. The evidence that we have of that is, you know, the dive into quantum mechanics. And again, you know, anytime a lot of folks say the word quantum mechanics, they don't understand what the heck's going on with that. You should probably run for the hills as quick as possible. But the reality, the simple reality of the situation of the science is that there is a component of quantum mechanics called consciousness that we don't yet understand. And yet that is fundamental. There are like 17 major interpretations of quantum mechanics. Not one of them leaves out consciousness as a fundamental component. Without consciousness, the whole model doesn't work, right? You do a nice job of breaking down that history. And we talked about it on this show, but you've added some good points to it. It's almost like you can follow the path of these great physicists. And they're going down this path and then they just hit a point and they go, oh my gosh, I can't really get any further without acknowledging consciousness. And then independently, they're all kind of coming to the same thing. And it's funny that we just want to kind of sidestep that and go, no, that didn't really happen. We can pretend. Right. The Copenhagen interpretation is, hey, shut up and compute, right? You know, and it doesn't even really leave consciousness by the wayside. It just says, yeah, but we really don't need it for the math. And we really don't need it for the things that create, you know, almost two thirds of our economy now is based on, you know, the quantum mechanic calculations. It's the single most accurate predicting engine on the planet. It's never made a prediction that's incorrect, et cetera. And that's their place and they're fine with it. And I'm fine with it too. Go make the awesome technology. Let me interject something there because you're a supercomputer guy, super technical engineering guy. And I say that all the time, but I want to just have you reinforce that when you say, hey, two thirds of our economy is based on quantum mechanics. And people go, no, I don't get that. How is that? So maybe let's talk about, if you're just assigning a chip, you know, why you care about quantum mechanics. Maybe let's take a little sidestep there. Well, sure. I mean, quantum mechanics in general is just the science of how the smallest bits of Newtonian physics works underneath. It's like the underlying rule set of all of the tiniest bits of Newtonian physics. And we live in a Newtonian physics world. We live in a very physical world of atoms and electrons and, you know, waves and things moving and et cetera. And so this quantum mechanics is simply a way of understanding and being able to predict how those things are going to react in different situations, inclusive of, you know, randomness and uncertainty and things like that that occur that you have to take into consideration. I mean, even when you have the like, I used to be an engineer for a supercomputing company. And so on these chips, you have a certain level of expectation that they're going to do things correct most of the time. But then there's also going to be mistakes. There's going to be errors. There's going to be uncertainty that is calculated into that chip that you put into multiple chips into the computer system. And so you have to be able to put the right amount of double checks or checksums into this process to create a kind of a more robust system of computing to say, okay, based on my quantum mechanics projections and calculations, now I understand exactly how to program for these chips so that I can understand that these chips haven't given me an erroneous output so that we can do the computing job to a very high confidence level that we're expecting. And let me jump in there and correct me if I'm wrong, but even getting more down to basics where people can understand it. How do I go from a computer that's as big as a room to a computer that fits in my hand and I call it an iPhone? Well, I keep running those little lines that carry electrons that are ones and zeros and I keep moving those little wires closer and closer together. But then I find out that at some point if I get those lines too close together, those little electrical lines, these electrons seem to jump back and forth just like those quantum physicists said they would and everything goes haywire, right? Yes. So I realize this is like one of the problems I have. That is quantum physics. It's like I can't design a chip without knowing that there is that jumping around of stuff, that entanglement of stuff that is kind of right out of those equations. So it does in a way that a lot of people don't understand. The theory rolls right into the mathematical equations, rolls right into the engineering that people are sitting there on their bench saying, okay, how can we make this thing work? Yes. Agreed. I couldn't put it any better. Okay. Okay. Tell you what, let's have you pick another category. We might have covered some of these, but we'll still see where it goes. Sure. Well, you sent me an email the other day about Rogan Shermer and you saw that video that I had put up. What did you have in mind there? Oh, you just walked right into that one, didn't you? So you did a very nice video. If people go to your YouTube channel, you'll find kind of all these videos that you've done. Some are very instructional, almost. They're supportive of the book in a way that says, okay, if you read the book, you know, here's a little lecture on that and that's great stuff. And then you also do just some kind of commentary stuff. And one of the things you like to do is talk about the Joe Rogan experience. You like the Joe Rogan experience. I have mixed feelings about Joe Rogan. But at any rate, I stumbled across this video where you're talking about Rogan and my friend of me, Michael Shermer, who is just a super interesting guy, complete. I don't want to say he's in it because I always say stuff like that and then people really get all bent out of shape and I'm like attacking people or stuff like that. But it's just that, I mean, here's what I said to Shermer when he was on Skeptico that is, you know, just kind of harsh, but true. Let's see if you can hear this. Okay. They had over 100 peer reviewed papers that they included in their book. By now, there's over 200 peer reviewed papers. I don't see any of that in your book. I think it's important to make it, well, look, I don't have to cite everybody that's ever written on the subject. But you don't cite any of them. You don't cite... You don't cite... Oh, yes, I do. You don't cite... ...Penvon Lommel, Sam Parnia, who else? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You misrepresented both of them, but you at least cited them. But at any rate... So, I like to give some people a hard time and Michael Shermer is one of them. This is his conversation they're having about near-death experience science. Something I've looked into a lot, not because I've had a near-death experience. The reason I looked into it is because it really fundamentally gets to one of these questions that you touched on in talking about your books. But I think we need to hash out further. And that is, does consciousness extend beyond bodily death? And if it does, what does that tell us about the nature of consciousness and the brain? Because if consciousness is happening at a time when our neurological models suggest that consciousness can't occur in the brain, right? Right. Let's talk about near-death experience science. And whether or not it suggests that consciousness extends beyond bodily death. And what that might mean for this brain science that is really impressive and that you've cited so often. Okay. So, to cut to the chase, I have two feet, one in each boat, on our experience of consciousness, is certainly connected to the brain and our ability to experience what our brain gives us. But then also, I am a fan of consciousness is a non-local phenomena. So, and to sum up my personal belief, I understand consciousness is fundamental. And as a portion of the quantum foam of the universe, it creates absolutely everything, lest it doesn't exist. So, basically, the quantum field has to be there operating in its mystic operation, or 3D space cannot exist in those places as quantum mechanics creates all of the physical universe in its infinitude, right? And so, as a functional component of the quantum mechanics magic, consciousness is fundamental. Now, our experience, our personal experience of consciousness I think is dependent on the brain being there to a certain extent in this human form. Now, do we continue on? I believe we do. Okay, I do believe that there is a non-local component of consciousness that allows us to continue forward. And so, and that's what the science in the blue book, Volume 2, points out that, you know, there was this, and I don't know if you're a fan of OrcoR or not. I know you've had, you know, some discussions about it. Yeah, so the OrcoR theory is that, you know, consciousness is a portion, is partially caused by these microtubules in our neurons, and the neuron wall is made up of microtubules. The synapses are made of microtubules. It's like, you know, your brain wouldn't be able to be there and function without these microtubules. Well, they interacted, the theory was they interacted with quantum vibrations. And so, for the longest time there was this argument that said, well, the quantum field can't interact with, you know, physical matter, first of all, and then second of all, it's not going to interact with these microtubules, even though they are the right shape in the warm and wet environment of the brain. Well, in Sikuba, Japan, they proved that that was incorrect. They did prove that by taking neurons, brain matter, and measuring it, that those do interact with quantum field vibrations. And specifically, they do so in the gamma spectrum. And the gamma spectrum is important because the gamma waves in the brain, they used to classify them as brain noise. They misunderstood them for the longest time, and now just recently they start to understand they're the most important brain waves that we have because they're the highly integrative brain waves that take a lot of information from a lot of different sources and put the big picture together for us, et cetera. They're also highly correlative to our altruism and higher virtues, unconditional love. They're measured highest in the monks of Tibet who sit around meditating on our pain and suffering all day because they supposedly don't have any, et cetera. These are some of the most important brain waves that we have. And it just so happens that these microtubules in our brains are vibrating with the quantum vibration of the universe, which could be, you know, first of all, dialed into a frequency of love from a scientific perspective, which is kind of crazy that science is leading us towards, you know, first of all, this field is unitive. It's absolutely one with everything. It's part of the whole fabric of the universe and it's made of love. Well, you know, where we heard that message before, right? So the question becomes a semantic one where, you know, where's the delineation of your awareness that gets quarantined away from the rest of this consciousness? How much of the consciousness that we have is being picked up as kind of a carrier wave or a specific wave that we're then interpreting through our physical body and having experiences associated with consciousness that wouldn't be there if the whole thing wasn't conscious, right? So that's kind of where I sit. You know, first of all, I don't know. I'm not sure, right? None of us are sure. As soon as we start to put words to this stuff, we start walking off the path of truth because we try to put concepts, concepts to these things that are potentially beyond our ability to understand them. But at the same time, it's like, well, you know, the model kind of fits together like this in that we can certainly have individual experiences of consciousness. And I believe that there are multiple levels of consciousness within us and I think the science, you know, supports that, of course, in that when you look at the science of split brain patients, you have multiple consciousnesses in there that are arguing about something. Like if you take a knife and you cut the corpus callosum and you ask somebody who has a left brain and a right brain that can no longer talk to each other anymore, you ask them what they want to be when they grow up. One side writes out race car driver with one hand and the other side writes out doctor, there are two consciousness levels in there. Well, there are multiple consciousness levels in there. I mean, there are consciousness levels that, you know, beat our heart and run our immune system and, you know, react on a cellular level even. And they're all kind of separated with these lines of demarcation that help them only take the amount of information that they can handle, and that's where our waking awareness is also. Like if we were handed the responsibility to beat our heart, to run our nervous system, to run our digestive system, to run our immune system, to do all the things that are required to have us survive from today and tomorrow, we die, right? There will be too much information for us to process. And so those things need to be separated at multiple levels of consciousness down within our body. Well, there's nothing that says that we aren't limited to what we can handle up here in our waking awareness and that we aren't connected out into universal consciousness, because I think, you know, obviously the wiring's there and we've proven that it's there and that our neurons actually do interact with this magical quantum field. Let's say, can I stop right there and jump in? Because I want to make sure we don't go too far. I love everything you said. People are really into this. They can go to school on everything you said. I want to make sure we kind of cover the basis. So you're talking about the work of Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Penrose, right? Yes. So Hameroff is at the University of Arizona. He's been on the show once or twice. I can't remember. You've been invited to speak at the Consciousness Conference in Tucson, which is quite an honor, a distinction, and you've had conversations with Hameroff about this. So what's important about Hameroff and the microtubule thing and the link to quantum science is that here's a guy, as I understand it, who's tried to bridge that gap that you're just describing. So you have these really stuck-in-the-mud neuroscience types that say, no, no, no, it's all brain, brain, brain. Consciousness is an illusion. It's the intellectual position they take. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an epiphenomenon of the brain. And he's come along and said, wait a minute, you like quantum physics, don't you? What if I could show you how quantum physics seems to be predisposed to connect with this thing that you're really uncomfortable with called consciousness? And then he says here are these microtubules and look, don't they fit? And then there's further studies. And then you start talking about the levels. We're back into a form of materialism. But then you brought us back in a way of how that maybe can solve both problems. The problem of the larger consciousness, the universal consciousness and the experience that we have and we seem to be able to study inside our physical body. I'm going to return you to the near-death experience science though, just for a minute, because I hope people don't understand what I meant about this kind of friendly, deep-dive debate. I mean, if you're following us this far, then you're in the soup and you probably like this stuff. If not, you've turned off already because it's just too weird. Before we totally leave Schumer and NDE, let's talk about the elephant in the room also that is counter-intuitive that, you know, 35% of us or more have these like near-death experiences or these unitive experiences as William James would classify them. These enlightenment experiences, these miniature awakenings, I kind of put them all under the same umbrella. And so the materialist position on why we have opposable thumbs is that the monkeys who accidentally grew opposable thumbs were able to grab the bananas easier and so thus became a functioning digit on our evolution and the monkeys that had those thumbs and mated went on to create new monkeys, etc. that ultimately became us with opposable thumbs, etc. And so their whole model of existence as it develops is one based on an evolution that is survival of the fittest, right? Natural selection. But in this other space of NDE's or awakenings experiences or whatever it is typically those things happen after procreation age and of course they happen at near-death or at the end of life because a lot of people have near-death experiences and then go on and die and then other folks have these near-death experiences and come back and tell of stories that are extremely meaningful for those folks and that are life-changing and that are extremely beneficial and we've had a number of studies like you know even just like Kevin's studies from the 60's and 70's 90 some odd percent of those people who experienced the chemical that we kind of want to theorize as being dumped into the body naturally during these experiences that we have of consciousness expanding in our own heads 90 some percent of those folks like 34 percent of those folks on that study said it was the most meaningful experience of their entire life another third of those folks said it was definitely in the top 5 of the most meaningful experiences of their entire life and then the other folks said yeah you know it was amazing just so people know this is Rick Strasman University of New Mexico the first guy who was given permission to use this controlled substance DMT and a lot of the spirit molecule Joe Rogan did the movie for it a lot of people have reported on it and it's a good movie and it's a good work and they not only see those things but they also see shamanic beings you know the purple jaguar that's also human they also see ET over there and ET says hey I've been waiting for you glad you're here so there's all that kind of stuff so that's all good and I'm with you on all that the reason I wanted to circle back in near-death experience and it kind of gets my point earlier of I don't have any special interest in near-death experience to me it's just the cleanest way to get at this key thing because one of the things you left out of the near-death experience that I would kind of remind folks of is that number one the reason that near-death experience has been studied as much as it has scientifically with peer-reviewed papers in hospital work in cardiac arrest wards because they after they you know Raymond Moody was the first guy the first researcher to stumble across the near-death experience back in 1975 and he was really turned on to it by Elizabeth Kudler Ross who's kind of famous in the hospice and just grieving community and stuff like that but as she was doing that work with the dying she ran across the near-death experience and she said we can't we can't handle this we can't people aren't ready for this so she just dishes it off to Raymond Moody in 1975 and he goes out and does the whole thing and says okay you know here's what's going on I understand it but then the research from then really shifted in a way that a lot of people don't appreciate and understand in that the real scientists took over the medical scientists and they said okay how are we going to get to the bottom of this because clearly what these people are reporting blows away the neurological model it blows it away because now people are not just talking about having this unitive experience that you're talking about they're talking about being above their body and looking down and seeing and hearing things at a time when their brain is not capable of conscious experience that is the claim that is the claim correct so now we're going to go into the science because you're going to see the claim is accepted by every near-death experience scientist who's ever looked at it and they've withstood all the shurma-esque silly kind of objection skeptical objections that were really handled within the first days of telling you that a lot of people I'm not just telling it to you Sean but a lot of people don't realize it this is now moving ahead 1970s, 1980s, 1990s where they finally get and they say okay now how are we really going to hone in on this because we have these reports of people who drowned that report a near-death experience we have people who jumped off the golden gate bridge you had a near-death experience clearly they don't have the same physiological things going on in their body as shurma reports in that interview that you liked so much he goes hey but yeah we can see that happening with these guys we put them in the centrifuge and they have that and my point he brought that up to me my point shurma is exactly exactly that's your problem you have no way in the neurological model that is existing to explain how such a different physiological states of the brain could produce the same experience but more importantly if you really drill into the near-death experience again back to the science what they then do is they say okay let's go to the cardiac arrest ward because we now know pretty well what happens to a person's brain after they have a cardiac arrest we know that the blood flow hold on we know that the blood flow to the brain stops and we know from 40 or 50 years of EEG study that once the blood flow stops the EEG activity happens so that is the starting point for this research that we're going to dive into so let me stop and let you say something because you have an objection that I'm going to slap down but go ahead I love this back and forth alright so there's two thoughts on that one is in each boat again the first thought is to close the statement the other thought that I had we're going forwards in that you're correct that these are amazing and they're physiologically similar reactions that everybody is having this isn't like an anomalous type of reaction that people are having when we talk about subjective data in science period subjective data is just that it's stuff you want to throw out but at a certain point when you collect a certain amount of subjective data from a large enough number of samples and that becomes scientific my question is if we're having these experiences these unitive experiences these consciousness expansion experiences what is the natural selection function and how could it have been created in a fashion that natural selection then fosters that to occur so then you know which the answer is it can't because you're having these unitive experiences these awakening experiences past the point of procreation so you're not passing those genes down so these things must be fundamental in nature but the other side of that to jump to your recent point of the brain can't have conscious experience in these instances of heart attack and things like that I take exception to and here's why we don't understand the brain well enough to be able to make that statement in my belief now there's been studies that have simulated heart attacks in mice where they've had the brain scanners on the mice and the brains go nuts after the oxygen deprivation sets in and the blood flow stops going to the brain and then the brain that's not quite true Sean what you're referring to is a study done at the University of Michigan largely misunderstood it's like so many studies I've reported on that the neuroscience and materialistic atheistic science props up these little studies that are done that somehow they can create some kind of connection to near-death experience one that study doesn't reference near-death experience at all but the important thing about that study is that what they show is really supportive of the existing model we have with one exception so the mice die the mice are killed as part of the experiment they're tracking their EEG the EEG goes flat that's what we'd expect after some prolonged period of time there's this burst of activity in the mice this does not correlate well with what the experience with the near-death experience is and in a minute I might play you a clip but one major problem you have is the continuity of experience people say is I was stabbed in the chest all of a sudden I was outside of my body I was still alive they hooked me up in the ambulance I got to the hospital and then I died and I left and I went to this place and then I came back and then I saw him resuscitating me there is a continuation of experience that doesn't fit the little mouse model but the other thing about the little mouse model is the little mouse model and what you just said what you hear all the time from the US kind of NDE skeptic kind of thing is that hey I don't accept that the brain really is incapable of producing a conscious experience let alone remember like you just said and we both agree the most profound conscious experience in your life I don't accept that the brain is incapable of doing that in this state hold on no no no I'm not saying what you do I'm saying if that's your position then throw the red book and the blue book throw them in the trash because you're then saying neuroscience is full of crap they don't really know we can't really measure what the brain is doing it doesn't mean anything because there's these times when the brain can just completely be beyond our ability to measure it and it's still functioning so this is not an explanation that gets timber let me hold you on one second because I'm going to throw some throw an expert at you because that's the only way sometimes to get to the bottom of this this is one of my favorite guys Dr. Jeff Long has written two really important books radiation oncologist you know so he works with death and dying all the time as part of his practice full-time doctor who like so many of these near death experienced researchers just stumbled across this and it just stuck in the back of his mind because I gotta get on with my practice I gotta become a doctor I don't earn a living but when I get a chance this is strange this isn't supposed to happen so you know I had him on the show and let me play you a clip when you're under general anesthesia it should be impossible to have a lucid organized remembrance at that time in fact under anesthesia you're typically so far under with general anesthesia they often have to breathe for you and you're literally brain shut down to the level of the brainstem and at that point in time some people have a cardiac arrest their heart stops and of course that's very well documented they monitor people very carefully that are having general anesthesia so I have dozens and dozens of near death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia and at this time it should be if you will doubly impossible to have a conscious remembrance and yet they do have near death experiences at this time and their typical near death experiences they have the same elements and appear to have them in the same order as near death experiences occurring under all other okay so let me jump in there that's making a huge assumption that time recording in the brain is occurring at a natural pace that is also going on during our regular everyday waking awareness now one of the things that you need to point out is the possibility that time dilation can occur and a lot of these experiences and this is this goes back to my only thing about Evan Alexander story that I don't like in that if we're talking let's to remind people what we're talking about Evan Alexander wrote that awesome book Neuroscience or neurosurgeons proof of afterlife proof of heaven and I love every part of that story that Evan Alexander tells because it's telling of a kind of a non-standard conscious experience that he has that is very representative of a lot of experiences that other people have in different circumstances he seemed to have it during a very dramatic you know physical near death situation where his body almost quit a bacterial meningitis I believe right and so he had this experience but the problem there is that he assumes that he had this experience at the time that his brain was shut down now I'm not contesting that his brain had you know flat lined or you know at least shut down to a large degree but what I am saying is there is a possibility that in the couple of minutes or two or three seconds or however long it takes for the brain to wake up and it is in non-standard consciousness a certain level of time dilation can occur where you can experience a long time of experience a lot of a number of things in that very short amount of time and the only reason I say that is because I had a waking experience as well which has started this whole thing which brought about you know my understanding of emotions that I put in these two books that were now turning into artificial emotional intelligence yadda yadda yadda in an afternoon of meditation that I can only assume was a five methyl oxy dimethyl tryptamine dump in my own brain to allow my brain into this non-standard consciousness I had thousands of years of experience from my personal perspective in that one afternoon I thought I was dead I thought I had gone often to the middle of the universe to become one with God to be God to be the whole consciousness soup of the entire universe I learned all the cool secrets about the universe the black holes how multidimensions work all the whole thing that you can't fit back into your human brain when you come back you understand absolutely everything and I was able to bring back a small piece of it which we're now creating into world-changing science about emotions and artificial emotional intelligence and stuff like that so I mean there is intelligence out there in wherever it is you know let's call it the quantum field or you know some type of data set in consciousness or whatever it is there's stuff that you can access out there that is beyond human understanding at this point right but I had that experience of thousands of years of experiences of living multiple lifetimes through multiple bodies through all these weird things that I can take a lifetime of storytelling to try to tell you and still not cover it all that happened within one afternoon of a meditation that I had started that triggered this experience so there was some time dilation there for me to assume that other brains can't have that same type of experience I believe does not serve as well and so at the point where you have somebody who says the brain was dead like Evan Alexander says my brain was dead or my brain my EEG was flatlined or whatever it was I was incapable of having this conscious experience everything that he experienced could have been experienced in two or three minutes upon his brain re-initiating and being in that altered conscious state that then filled with that super neural activity that he would then separate out afterwards because the thing that I'd like to point out with every one of these experiences these non-near-death experiences is that if you can recall it later it's in your hippocampus which means your hippocampus was running Hold on see this is the point and you hammered on Evan Alexander pretty good so let me defend him a little bit I love him, that's the only thing to understand I love his story and I love him and I love him coming out and telling this stuff I just think that him saying that it couldn't have been a dimethyl tryptamine dump Hold on because you switched on me there but first of all again let me re-emphasize I love you man I love the work that you're doing and I love the way that you're breaking this stuff down and I think your books are just I hope people don't lose that and they won't because the story you talk about someone who is at the verge of death from alcoholism and then gets some insight into what's going on in terms of that self, that voice inside their head and the way you break that down is just awesome so we're having a fun little discussion here because I'm about inquiry to perpetuate doubt because that's what skeptico means doubt is among the most spiritual things that you can do and not be settled on anything and you agree and you say hey none of us know any of this If you want to sum it up you can say if you want to read the books go read the books it'll better your everyday life but now let's go off the deep end into these cool conversations and I love this back and forth and I don't even think it's deep end because we're keep coming back to these points of convergence of the stuff that's really important I mean your mind is in dental spiritually enlightening experience we could spend a lot of time we could spend hours on that because it's fundamental to if there is a larger spirituality if there is a larger extended consciousness which all the evidence points to then you tapped into it in a way that's super important and there's a ton of questions about that how did you tap into that why did you tap into that why weren't you able to bring it back completely why do we keep hearing that over and over how is that different from people who tapped into it from DMT experiences is that different than ND experiences from ET contact experiences which we can't leave off the table but let us return to Evan the one thing that you got I think you got wrong that I want to correct because it just plays into this guy has been so maligned it's just so stupid because there is this atheistic materialistic science you're a biological robot a flank within science that is just going to just attack anyone like Evan Alexander who comes out because he has his credentials he's a Harvard neuroscientist he's a Harvard neurosurgeon both a brain doctor so the one part when you say hey if he had a memory he should know that it's in the hippocampus you know this and that Sean do you think he doesn't fucking know that well of course he knows that so the point that he's trying to make that you missed and so many other people missed is he saying that's why this is interesting because I'm a Harvard neuroscientist and neurosurgeon and I understand that it's not supposed to work that way so the fact that it did work that way and the fact that it does work that way for these thousands of cases of near-death experience that's what's interesting and important so what's interesting important is understanding that anomaly understanding where it works that it shouldn't and I'm going to go on for a minute here because I want to talk about this other topic that you touched on which is central if you get into this and that is the timing because you talked about time dilation so this is what I played for Shermer and if you go and look at the near-death experience science again it's science they get it they understand that that's one of the fundamental questions that have to be answered is the timing of it here's Dr. Penny Sartory this is right out of your book which it is you make the point that hey people when oops let me re-re-introduce that because here's a clip from again my interview with Shermer who's funny, entertaining but completely off the rails in the book about death and heaven you know try to in a very feeble way site near-death experience science and didn't ignore all the important near-death experience science so he could make his point so I tried to correct that in our interview and pointed out the work of resuscitation expert PhD and person who ran this experiment Dr. Penny Sartory so again indulge me play this you make the point that hey people when they're resuscitated they claim to have seen things that they shouldn't be able to see well they've seen it on TV they make it up here's a researcher who asked that question with the control group I had then patients who'd been successfully resuscitated but they didn't have any experience or they didn't have the outer body component and I asked them if they could describe what they thought that we had done to them and they were like what do you mean I don't I was dead I don't remember anything right exactly that's right and they were saying why are you asking me this I have no idea what you did to me at all and the majority of them couldn't even guess they couldn't make a guess as to what we done and then a few of them then did make a guess and it was based on TV hospital dramas that they've been watching and what I found is that there were errors and misconceptions in what they thought we had done to them and so some of them thought that they had been DC shocked with the paddles and they hadn't those people had just had the resuscitation the CPR and drugs administered such as adrenaline or noradrenaline and then some of them made educated guesses but the place where they thought that we put the paddles onto their body was completely erroneous it was wrong it was incorrect data data you know this is great stuff yeah so it just you know it just goes to show that the people who did report the near death experience described their experience with accuracy whereas the control group weren't weren't accurate and most of them couldn't even hazard a guess so let me just frame this up and then I'm going to let you answer but here's why I think this is important I get the time dilation thing right but if we're going to do any kind of science if we're going to keep the red book and the blue book intact and say there's reason to trust some of the studies in there then we have to hold to the way things work in this time space little slice of consciousness that we live in so here's a person who's done that who said in our time space reality you die and then are resuscitated that's what everyone in the hospital agrees happened they agree you flat lined and they agree we resuscitated you so the fact that she can go and that's completely valid for her to go and then say in that time space continuum what data can we gather and the fact that the data falls the way that it is is not friendly to your explanation with the exception that it makes the assumption that when our brains are in a non-standard conscious space that could be interacting of some type of quantum action that the quantum reality which is that time doesn't really play the same in our conscious awareness space right when you're talking about quantum mechanics you're talking about being able to throw out the basic scientific foundation of cause and effect they've proven that you can have backward in time causation and effect in reverse those in quantum experience in quantum experiments excuse me and so when you're in that non-standard consciousness space where you could be interacting via the microtubules out into the quantum foam via the two-way communication channel that may exist that we now have physical scientific evidence that is supportive of that potential now you're talking about being in a space where time doesn't operate the same as it does for us in our regular waking awareness well how many angels do you think fit on the head of that pen I mean because if we're gonna go there and if we're gonna talk about science that we have there's no established science that would suggest that right so when you got pushed you brought up the Michigan study in the rats which is really kind of a poor example but now you're just completely jumping the shark a little bit in terms of saying you have all this good science in your books that is neuroscience that is established all the rest of this stuff is complete conjecture so I would move to the other well it's conjecture side and say what is what is being reported well it's conjecture to the point that that you don't have a first person representation or first person experience which I have a first person experience of having an experience on an afternoon through a meditation where I experience thousands of years of stories and and it's not like you know this was just an invention of my brain I was able to bring back something that we're now using to create some new science that we hadn't had previously as a human race right so whatever it is the subconscious creation process that Einstein talked about where you know we don't really create a solution to a problem we think about the problem and then all of a sudden the answer comes to us from within our bodies from another level of consciousness within us we come up with that solution well you know David Eagleman will tell you we've been working on that at multiple levels of our subconscious for days before it pops up into our waking awareness that oh here's the solution to that problem right when you're talking about an experience that can happen within an individual where time dilation occurs under normal operation of a human mind you'd say that would be impossible well you're not talking about the normal operation of a human mind when you're talking about an NDE or an enlightenment experience or a consciousness experience you're talking about the brain operating in a different mode that we are unfamiliar with and have absolutely no scientific foundation for you I mean the folks up at Johns Hopkins right now are trying to figure out the best way to formulate a an experiment where they can induce an enlightenment experience that they can catch in an fMRI right that we haven't even gone that's the whole thing why do you switch back to wanting to catch it in an fMRI what I'm suggesting is that what I think every near-death experience researcher who I'm aware of has come to the conclusion that consciousness extends beyond bodily death in a way that we completely don't understand trying to jam it back into the materialist model trying to say oh we're going to see it on an fMRI we're going to see it in an EEG we exist in both we exist in both we don't understand we don't understand the level of complexity you know we switch back from saying that but how else do you find the details if you don't try to induce an enlightenment experience in an fMRI so that you can look at the physical science of what's happening in the brain because guess what whatever experience that I have right now is completely dependent on me having a brain you cut the brain out I'm not going to have an experience here in my body of consciousness or anything further than the point that your scalpel has cut through right? This is exactly the debate that we're having what NDE suggests is that what you said right there is fundamentally incorrect because as Jeff Long explained to you as Dr. Sam Parnia who's one of the leading experts in the world on resuscitation and we'll tell you these people are dead that we're studying they are dead clinically dead brain dead brain stem dead brain dead every way you want to talk about it and yet they're having a conscious experience that contradicts what you're saying in a way that we can't resolve I'm okay with leaving it unresolved you seem to want to be really wed to the idea of jamming it back into yeah but it somehow has to fit into our biology in some way because my brain is right here and my body is right here maybe it's much more complex only from a perspective of an individual human life right because when you're talking about consciousness and mass yeah I completely believe non-local consciousness exists and there's going to be an alex that exists beyond your body when your body quits and there's going to be a portion of my consciousness that exists beyond the portion that you know when my body quits I get that and I agree with that but what we're talking about here is the ability to create an amazing human life from what we understand about consciousness and so we have to understand the complexity that comes into it when we entertain this meat suit and we put this into the equation right because we're not just this consciousness this you know I mean we're in this non-dual space it's amazing you're nothing but the consciousness of the universe there is no me there is no you you are me in simply a different form you're just in another extension of me and I would love you to the same level that I love myself without an issue but the problem comes in when we have to start you know having jobs and making money and dealing with emotions and understanding the delineations between our conscious awareness and our subconscious awareness and the things that our subconscious awareness throws up into our mind that creates turmoil for us and takes us away from that unit of consciousness etc so I'm talking about when specifically I'm talking about the conscious experience being dependent upon the brain I'm talking about just for our human body right I'm not talking about the whole thing I'm talking about just the thing that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis and when you can understand that better that allows you to reach out farther into that non-local conscious awareness and become one with the universe and be in that space of equanimity at all of your life right when you're having to deal with this you're starting to to bring into complexity the body itself that has a number of things that are counter-intuitive and really kind of confusing on our understanding of our existence and it creates a lot of noise for us to have to deal with and when we can reduce that noise that's when we find that place of complete peace and equanimity and liberation that all of us are supposed to be finding and so that's what I'm talking about the conscious awareness being dependent upon the brain well that's our human body that's our human body's conscious awareness that's the delineation that I'm making a lot of the times when you're talking about consciousness you lose yourself in where the line of demarcation is like the materialist sciences are the lost folks who say consciousness stops at the body and when the body's done the brain dies that's bullshit we all know it's bullshit science is leading us down the path to prove that it's bullshit right but you have to have the conversation in those terms when you're talking about dealing with the human body that we are dealt and the life that we have to live individually here and yeah are there things that we don't understand out in the universe that could help us explain you know ESP is scientifically proven to a statistical significance yeah I mean you've got those things that are you know now we've got the way to start to prove those things can you start talking about past lives well you know when you're starting to take time out of the equation the time doesn't really exist and that all matter and existence can be you know happening at the same exact moment are you really seeing a past life or are you actually seeing a moment that's going on right now through your connection out into the quantum foam that you know you're just seeing a connection to another life that seemingly would have been at another time that it's actually happening in this present moment right these are all questions that we need to ask but at the same time when you're having a conversation about the reality of existence and the consciousness of the quantum quantum mechanics and the quantum foam you know you have to you have to zoom that down to talk about one or two things because you can't talk about the whole thing because as soon as you say word one you're off the path of truth talking about you know whatever your conception your personal perception of that is and then as soon as you mix in this meat suit here you're flawed well we're all flawed and I understand the dilemma and the need to go it's like you're going from shut up and calculate to shut up and liberate shut up and don't worry about some of the little anomalies that pop up and just you know liberate yourself in a way that millions and millions have done before and left the cookie crumbs there in terms of how you can do it too so I'll tell you what that was I hope for at least some people out there an interesting exchange you've been super generous with your time let's kind of wrap it up with the big the biggie down here the question of God and you know one of the things I like to kind of contemplate with guests is when we talk about this extended consciousness this larger consciousness this unity consciousness is there a hierarchy to it and then the question I'd have for you because you tell a dramatic story and maybe you can retell that story now you tell the story in your books and I don't remember which one but you can clarify having this experience this profound transformational experience and being told let go and the voice has to tell you more than once because you don't want to let go who told you that that's a really good question and in front of me I'm seeing God the two questions is there a consciousness hierarchy and as a quick you know as a person who wants to keep one foot in the boat of potential of things that could be and the other foot in the boat of well here's what I know or here's what I'm able to see or observe from that foot in the boat of what I can see within the human mind and what we all can see when we learn how to look at it is that there are multiple levels of consciousness even within our human mind and like I give a good example in the first book of taking a picture of an elephant and imagining an elephant in your mind and then trying to paint that elephant pink with purple polka dots and you see that in your mind but you didn't actually do that you communicated the intention and then poof and elephant appears and then I tell you to paint that elephant pink with purple polka dots and then all of a sudden you see that as well well you didn't actually do that you passed down that intention to other functions within your brain or within your mind that are other levels of conscious awareness that then say okay well here's what an elephant looks like here's the color pink and here's what polka dots look like and here's what purple polka dots look like and they put all that stuff together and then shove it back up into your conscious awareness for you to be able to then see the elephant pink with purple polka dots so there are multiple levels of of consciousness that are working for you and by the way if you get those under control your life becomes amazing but they're working for you right and so from that evidence right there within our own human bodies we have the answer to the question is consciousness is there a consciousness hierarchy I do believe that there are lines of demarcation where consciousness works on certain portions of the universe at the level that they're meant to or that they fall into and so there's a level of consciousness where like at the human cellular level we have these cells that have different functions and it's within their conscious awareness that they sense the outside they have a cell structure they have a line of demarcation they have a function within the cell they understand what's going on outside the cells so they have a perception they make an intelligent decision on what to do based on what's going on outside the cell and then they have an internal reaction that is part of their conscious awareness that they take action and then that has a pro-life function from their perspective and so that is evidence right there that there is some type of consciousness hierarchy that those cells or our organs or our brain or whatever it is has a level of consciousness that it works within and then it can and does have interaction with other levels of consciousness but only to a couple of levels up or down let's make sure we're talking about the rate here the same thing here because usually when I talk about that I'm talking about after we had a discussion about near-death experience science and we say okay there is this extended realm which you've accessed and we'll talk about that in a minute again because that was kind of the second question and then we start looking at all these experiencers who access this extended consciousness realm and what they report consistently is that there is a hierarchy of consciousness that we would associate with God and if you look at the near-death experience that's what they say directly and I always say this and people will hear it for the 10th time that's okay Dr. Jeff Long who I referenced earlier that was his surprise finding in his latest book not a religious guide he just said hey this is the data this is the data that I encountered is people over and over again say God, God, God, God and they say it in ways of like I saw Jesus but then they say it in ways of I saw this light being of infinite love or they say I saw this other being all these kind of things so it's not bound by religion or anything like that there's a hierarchy there's God we're over and over again and what you just said about the level of consciousness inside of us we don't know if that's a hierarchy we don't know if that's a system and a lot of people who when they start talking about the extended consciousness realm stuff that I just did they want to fall into the blob of consciousness well I wouldn't really say that one there's a moral imperative we don't know if anything's good or bad if there really is evil we don't want to make those kind of value judgments there is consciousness it's larger if that's the way it goes I'm just saying day to day to day to follow the data wherever it leads the data we're getting back says hierarchy of consciousness really what it says is God so go with that right but you know at the same time if you have an example within your own existence within your own human existence first of all it would be pompous to say that we are the culmination of consciousness and that consciousness stops with us and there's nothing above our own consciousness and I don't think that the evidence that we have uncovered as our simplistic human existences we think we're a lot more intelligent than we actually are I think that looking at the model that we exist within and not saying that would be extrapolated out to how that's how the whole universe works well that would be kind of silly to say so I do believe that there are hierarchies in consciousness what those are we can't tell right we can only understand our perceptions and our experiences through the limited understanding that our meat suit can process and so we can get an inkling of understanding that there are hierarchies of consciousness but we to delineate what those are that's for world religion to say and for thousands of years of human argument and discussion to try to come together and put together of divas and multiple gods and all this other stuff those are inventions of the human mind I feel but you know are they based in experience of human consciousness sure so could they have a basis in some type of reality maybe you know who knows well then who told you to let go Sean that's the good question isn't it tell the story early on in my meditation just to make a long story short and I expand on this in the blue book into a lot more than I will hear but basically you know I got to this point in my life where I was like look you know I have all these things that humanity and society says are supposed to make me happy you know I have this professional success I have financial success I have a romantic success I have all these things lined up I own this house in this upper middle class suburban neighborhood in Atlanta and you know nothing you know future so bright I gotta wear shades life still kind of sucks for some reason I wasn't happy and there was something missing so I started to dive into world religions because I thought well maybe it's my spiritual life that you know I thought I had a good relationship with God maybe I don't and so I started to dive into world religions and started to do an anthology of comparative religions and I started to understand a little bit more about how the world sees God and then I ran into this book on Zen Buddhism introduction to Zen Buddhism by DT Suzuki and I learned about this thing called meditation and then I learned that they meditate with the focus of finding this thing called Satori which is the immediate understanding of everything in the universe and I was like okay what's that all about and so I started meditating for some time and there was this afternoon where I was meditating where I knew that the focus was to cease conscious thought and I didn't I didn't do a whole lot of Zen I like it didn't go to a Zen group I didn't go to you know these meetings I didn't have you know a master that I was learning from I just read these books and I knew that the focus was shut the mind down so I took my own mind and I turn it back in on itself and I said okay we're gonna cease conscious thought and so for a good 20 minutes I tried to stop my mind from thinking and it wasn't working and because every now and then I'd be like am I thinking anything it's like crap that's a thought you know or an image would fly through or a sound outside would make me think of something like a dog barking whatever in an image of dog or whatever coming in my head and those all those things are thoughts and you have to come to a point where there is absolutely nothing going on in your mind and my looking back on that now is you know you got to change the patterns in your brain to stop what it's doing to get it to do what it can do next and so I forcibly tried to get my mind to stop thinking and it took maybe 20 minutes and then at the point of complete solitude of absolute silence stillness within the mind that's when this energy started building within me it's like I I really didn't understand what was going on and just kind of felt this like holy crap like where did that come from type of energy and again I tell the story in the book but ultimately it built into this vortex and I started to be sucked into it and I was like holding on because I thought I was dying it's like oh my god am I having a heart attack you know what's going on you know I just moved my mom down from north and you take care of her and you know all these worldly attachments were then like I can't let go but my mind was going again so this process had started but I was having those thoughts so that was interesting to me but then during the point that this was building up and I was having to hold on for dear life that I thought I can't have a heart attack now it's like I got too much shit to do you know I wonder if I can get to my phone call 911 or whatever it was there was this huge voice that said within my existence but it wasn't me it said let go and I didn't know where it came from I didn't know who it was I don't know whether it was another level of my subconscious that was telling me you know leading me in the right direction to say hey this is a natural process let's go ahead and go through this you've been asking for answers here they are don't fucking fuck this up now right and and I said absolutely not and I am not letting go there's no friggin way and so then it came through again like from the booming voice of the universe it seemed like it was saying let go and I was like a little more convincing but I think I might not I think I might not buy into that hole you know I'm not really sure if I'm ready to die yet and then a third time it was like you know almost you're like your best friend forever you know that voice that you've just forgotten that you even knew in this whole lifetime that has come from wherever it came before you were even human came up and like you know hands on your shoulders whispers in your ear from the back just saying hey let go you know and in that voice it was like oh oh oh yeah I know you you will not lead me astray so if I'm dying okay let's go let's if it's time if I got something else to do you know I know to trust this voice that just whispered in my ear let's go and then so that's when from my perception again again I believe that I had this experience because my brain was allowing me to have it and it was imprinted in my hippocampus which I can then recall later all that stuff that I argued earlier it felt like my whole existence dematerialized atomized into this vortex of energy and then I was off onto this amazing multiple lifetimes of experience that I I just try to outline in the book because if I tried to tell all the stories it would take me multiple lifetimes but basically I went through the whole you know seeing the life seeing my life from different perspective my whole life again was being replayed but I was able to see it from the emotional perspectives of other people who were around me during the time and so I got to see into their existences and I got to see all the pain that I'd caused for other folks and I got to see all the unintentional pain and all the intentional pain and all the mistakes that I'd made and all the stuff that I was supposed to learn from and yadda yadda yadda and I went through that whole process and then I went into a tour of forgiveness of understanding you know from a quote unquote God's perspective how all of the worst sins and the world could be immediately forgiven and you know all of this other stuff that I'd went through and yadda yadda and I had this amazing consciousness expansion experience where I became I went through these experiences then I became the experiences then I went through being you know following this tour guide and then I became the tour guide and became the consciousness of the universe became the creative energy of all of existence got down below the plank length to where everything goes infinite got to take a tour of you know how all of the universe works the atoms of the universe how it comes together the quantum energy and how it magically creates all of Newtonian physics and the multiple dimensions that come together that then clash with their waves to create particles and you know you got to see chemical reactions occur with the release of heat energy and light energy and all this cool stuff and then you got to see the whole process of life and how two individual cells come together to create a human body and multiple bodies of you know insects and all living things you know all this really really really cool stuff and I thought I was dead and I thought I was oh this is what you learn when you die this is what you learn when you're on your way to heaven and then you wind up in this space of perfect bliss in the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing to do but be the universe which was just amazing and it was infinite and it was knowledgeable, all wise, all loving and everything that happened as humans could judge it good or bad happened and was beautiful and it simply was as it was and it was our judgments of things that then put anything on top of that happening and at the point that I was returning there's a big surprise and I was like oh I have to go back and be a human again okay cool I get to be a human baby this all over again whatever and I thought I was really coming back to be I was like well that solves the reincarnation question and I thought I was coming back to be another human baby and then when I started zooming back in I started to see oh well shit that's my house well there's me on my bed laying there bawling and came back into my body existence and I started losing a lot of the stuff a lot of the understanding that I had gained in that whole experience and I said wait a second and then that voice came back and basically communicated what yeah human mind can't hold all this and I said okay so here's what I want to do I want to go through the pain and suffering thing if I'm going to go back and I'm going to be this Sean character again I want to be able to to communicate some of the benefit of the stuff that I had figured out here so I want to go through pain and suffering on understand how the human mind works and then it was there was like a little joke there is that you weren't the first and I got this thing was like wow you know this the realization I was like wow you know what you're right the Buddha and all these other folks asked for the same stuff and was able to bring it back and try to explain it so that's what I grabbed on to and when I grabbed onto that I grabbed onto it like you know my bare life basically just try to to hold on to this information and not let it go and that's what I brought back into my conscious awareness and it took me a number of years to figure it out because it was actually a lot more than I could try to put all together into this really cool system to explain how the human mind works and all that other stuff and to ultimately create artificial emotions for simulated personalities and things like that none of that was figured out so it took me a good decade to be able to sort all of that stuff out that I had brought back but I was able to grab some of the data and pack it back into my mind into a fashion that we could then you know try to put into some form of book or some form of education to say here's how your bullshit works here's how you here's all the limiting things that are creating havoc for your life here's how all this stuff works and here's how to diffuse it and let's get on from being humanity 2.0 to humanity 3.0 because humanity 1.0 is you know let's survive let's you know figure out how to domesticate animals let's figure out you know and then humanity 2.0 is okay well we figured out the whole food chain thing and now we can go into offices and have cubicles and yada yada yada and make all of this artificial bullshit important to us let's go from humanity 2.0 to humanity 3.0 where we're no longer vexed by the emotional turmoil that is causing us to lob bombs at each other because we have disagreements about financial systems or political systems or religious beliefs or whatever it is let's get beyond that what is that answer and so that's why I clawed on to that data so vehemently and so desperately to say we really need this as a human race and how do I figure that out how do I put it into some books and put it out so that people can use it so that when when I die this can live on a little bit very very very very cool so the books that you're going to want to check out I have them up on the screen but if you need to be reminded mind hacking happiness volume one mind hacking happiness volume two Sean if folks go to your website and we will link to it here on the show but what will they find and what other ways are there to connect with this material the books I have to say I've read the second book I just kind of did look inside the first book great stuff very very readable very well written entertaining and packed packed with a lot of science stuff that people will like so but to tell about the other forms of people getting to know your stuff yeah if you want to check out the stuff that we're trying to create for continuing education because a lot of people are like holy crap this stuff changed my life how do I maximize it right so we're starting to create some videos for the YouTube folks who love to to click on various videos and stuff like that we're creating programs so that you can actually take some exercises and do some work that will help you develop some of the things that we talk about in the books right now we just launched a two seals in a walrus podcast the seals that came forward to say this is the best mind training that they've ever experienced we're now doing a podcast to talk about consciousness expansion and how to proactively use this stuff to better your human life hear your meat suit life before we pass out of this confusing pain and suffering into perfection and bliss yada yada yada we gotta do this round first we gotta do this duty here on this planet so we're doing a podcast called two seals in a walrus there it's raw it's raw it uses adult language and we talk about adult themes and things like that but we do have a lot of fun in poking fun at and poking fun at how people think about things and you know how to maybe step beyond that to create a better existence for yourself stuff like that so you know if you just check in with the website every now and then you'll see the stuff that we're working on great well it's been absolutely fantastic having you on I so commend the work that you're doing and I really do appreciate the openness and just kind of allowing me to hash some of this stuff out with you no it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure I mean you know none of us really have the answers to this stuff and we can only get close with our limited human minds and what not and I think having these discussions to maybe prod people in the right direction is an amazing service and I love you for putting this stuff out I love you too man alright John you take care and we'll be sure to connect down the road for sure for sure thanks Alex thanks again to Sean Webb for joining me today on skeptical the one question I guess I'd have to tee up from this interview is the one that I kind of hammered on Sean pretty hard about but one that does trouble me as well and that's that does mine equal brain I mean we've gone over that so many times on this show and tried to show all this evidence that clearly you are not your brain but once we get over to that side we're faced with a pretty strange dilemma too I mean what is the relationship between the brain and the mind and how do we explain all the stuff that may be going on with these microtubules that we talked about and all that other stuff what are some of the more complex parts of that mind equals brain question so if you'd like to answer that and if you'd like to hear my answer to it probably the best place to go is the skeptical form you can definitely get an answer from me there if you're interested in discussing that you can also email me or find me another way but skeptical form I'm over there pretty regularly and you can communicate with me about this stuff if you like also of course be sure to check out the skeptical website and there you'll find all our previous shows over 400 of them at this point all available for free for download you just get the B3 and you can do whatever you like from there on out and of course as you know from listening to this show we cover a lot of topics that I think you'll be interested in and we have some new really exciting shows coming up that I can't wait to bring to all of you so once again thanks for listening do your best to share the show with anyone you think who needs to hear it and not with anyone who doesn't and until next time take care and bye for now