 On this episode of Scepticode, a show about changing someone's mind. What are you doing? Changing someone's mind. You got me 20 seconds. Really? No, trust me. You got me 20 seconds. You trust me. Okay. You trust me. You got me 20 seconds. Trust me. Okay. Trust me. You got me 20 seconds. And how it almost never works. Much like me before I had this crisis, you could not engage me in a conversation on this stuff. And you can't force people to be interested in things they're not interested in. I find myself frustrated sometimes that I get confronted with these extremely limited, frankly, lazy explanations about materialism from other scientists. And, you know, I just try to think back to myself. And, you know, I could present them a huge reading list. But are they really going to go read it? That first clip was from Arrival 2016. And the second one was from today's guest, Dr. Mona Sabani. Who I think you're really going to like as much as I do. Because she presents such an honest and open account of just how hard it is to change our own mind. Let alone change someone else's. Stick around. It's a good one. I think you'll like it. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Careson. Today we welcome Dr. Mona Sabani to Skeptico to talk about her excellent new book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, a Neuroscientist Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe. By the way, Dr. Mona does the audible version of this too, which I listen to. And I always love that when the author does the narration because you just can't help but get different points of emphasis. So kudos to you for doing that. And it was a great listen. Really, really enjoyed the book. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Sabani. First of all, super smart, super duper smart, pre-med UCSD right down the road from PhD Neuroscience USC, MacArthur Foundation Postdoc Fellowship. In case you don't know, they don't just hand those out every day. She got that Vanderbilt University following up on her research from I don't understand her dissertation. We won't really be talking a lot about it, but I throw it out there because it might be interesting to some people looking at like neuro correlates and serial killers and law and what that might mean in nature versus nurture and all that good stuff. Neuroscientist, you know, who was already at that point doing this kind of crossover integrated stuff. So the question that should be in your mind if you listen to skeptical, if you know this, why does she go throw it all away with this with this book because she's down this track. She's going in the direction. Everyone wants her to go. And then she writes this book with let me read to you the description of the book. This is from her very excellent website. And here is the description on the book with this book. I tell the story of my transformation from a diehard scientific materialist to an open-minded spiritual seeker and the excruciating identity crisis that ensued. It's a book about my search for both scientific and personal proof in quotes that there is more to the cosmos and unseen dimension to life that the mysteries of human experience go far beyond what the present scientific paradigm can comprehend. It leaves open the possibility of a participatory meaningful universe. Awesome, awesome stuff. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Sabani. It's great to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So tell us more about, you know, and there's so many places we could start. You know, you kind of hint at some things like this existential crisis kind of thing, which the book documents in a way in terms of just what it's like to be hardcore materialist scientist doing everything you're supposed to do and then doing that. Tell people maybe just in a nutshell of that whole experience. It's interesting how these things happen to us, I guess. But yeah, I was, I was, I did all the things I was supposed to do and had a job that I, that I liked. And I thought it was pretty good. We need some scientists doing interesting research. But for whatever reason, I wasn't very happy. And like, I started, it was after your PhD, when you're working at your PhD, very focused, you know, you're, you're tired, you're so busy. You don't have a lot of time to think about the meaning of life and you, you're purpose driven. And then once that's over, I think in like, after doing a lot of reflection, I think that the dip in meaning started happening after that. And so I, you know, I tried to just focus on the work and what I was doing. But after a while, I would, I would wake up and kind of just keep kept thinking, found myself thinking, what is the point of this? Like what, like, is this it? Like we just, we, and even though I liked my work, I still found myself thinking that, and that was troublesome to me because I thought for a long time, you know, you find the thing you're supposed to do, you're going to enjoy it, you find a good job, and it's all going to be great. And then it kind of wasn't. And but the funny thing is I wasn't super aware of that. I was sort of aware, but I was in denial. So it's, it's weird. But then what happened was I, the way that all of this other stuff came into my life and it all kind of converged, you know, at one point in time was that, so I'm Persian, my cultural heritage is Persian, my parents are from Iran. And we have in our culture, a practice of divination and we use coffee grounds. I mean, you can use anything you can use tarot, but my grandmother used to use, when she was alive, which use coffee grounds and it's like this thicker kind of coffee. It's often called Armenian, Turkish or Greek coffee. You drink it, you leave the grounds in the cup, flip it over, it dries and there's pictures emerge. And if you're lucky to have a reader, they can look at it into it things. And so my grandmother was apparently legendary. I never got a reading because she passed away before I was of coffee drinking age with her and my, but my mother learned the skills and in my, this was always going on in the background of our, you know, family parties and just all the time in our house and I never registered. It just was just there, you know, never really thought about it until grad school and I started going home on the weekend to spend time with my parents. My mom would make coffee for me and we'd have it together and then she would just flip it over and start reading. And I remember thinking, okay, you know, and it's my mom. I'm not like, I wasn't hostile towards her. So I was like, okay, I'll just listen and whatever. And over time I realized that the things that she said would come true. And then I started taking notes, you know, because I'm a good scientist. So I was like, well, let me just take notes. Maybe I'm remembering it incorrectly or maybe I'm making a self fulfilling prophecy. So I started taking notes and I did this for over 10 years and tracked it really carefully. And her check now it is a scientist because Mona, right? You take notes. We get that. You took notes for 10 years. Add your recording stuff down. I mean, that's, that's pretty. Yeah, I still have them. I still do it actually. I still write everything she says down. So let me just, let me just interject something else because this is how the book starts. Like, and, but what I want to jump ahead and let people know is it's so fantastic really about the book is that you're kind of leading us on this journey. And I want to talk about how where that's coming from to because I got to wonder if part of it for me part of because I have two girls and two boys and two of my girls are in college. So they're, they're closer in age to you than they are to me. Let's put it in that way. And I thought this is so, this is so cool. I would love my girls to read this because it's such a next generation scientific, very scientific woman and the perspective that you're bringing and really the bravery to, to, to talk like this, to talk like this, which is what the book is about to say, yeah, I, I, I did have this existential crisis that we all have, you know, okay, I had it. And then I leaned on this thing that you're going to think is like, sounds kind of wacky. And you even say when you are also because you're this other world, like you say, you know, you're, you know, your parents are from Iran. You're, but you're in this LA melting pot in your Chelsea Handler LA girl. And you're very much that we can tell by reading the book, but you're like integrating all this stuff in an attempt to resolve it from a scientific perspective because you're a very legit neuroscientist. And I think that's such a cool part of this story. So I want you to pick up on the coffee grind reading, but I mean, and that's why I was kind of teasing you a little bit about the 10 years of notes. I mean, do you dive into this thing with just a ferocity of this scientist that you are, and you're immediately kind of hitting stuff that goes, Hey, this doesn't fly with what I've been taught and I'm not going to let go. Right. Yeah. And that's what you can do. It's all I could do. And I think for a while I ignored it, right? So it was like, Oh, these readings, she's able to, you know, know things about the future. And even she's even better at just the current situation, like she could tell you about things going on in your life, the current situation with like incredible detail. And I couldn't explain it with science. They don't give you any framework to explain that. You know, it goes against our concepts of time and how it moves forward. So I remember initially at the beginning of grad school, I was kind of thinking about like, oh, how would this possibly work? I remember reading quantum physics papers and stuff, but then grad school took off and I didn't have time for that anymore. So I, you know, I just did the best I could and lived in cognitive dissonance and kept them separate. And it's, it's, I took them seriously. Like if she said, you know, like I say in the book, she warned me about losing money. I would be careful with my money and I would check my bills because she was usually right. I couldn't really explain it, but, but it worked. I kind of, I mean, it was just a part of life and not a big deal, just a part of everything. And then I had two big emotional events happen that were related to the coffee. And then that was, these were around the time of when I was kind of, you know, not feeling great about or waking up thinking, what was the meaning of all this? And that was the tipping point for all this. So the first one was she kept seeing something in the cup that was for five, six weeks in advance. And my mom's always, you know, she actually, not that she avoids bad news from the cup, but she'll, she'll, you know, breeze over it quickly and just say, don't worry about it too much. I'm not always right, you know, whatever. But this one she got very serious and she was like, you know, I wasn't going to tell you. She's like, but it keeps coming up. So I feel like I just need to warn you that you may be getting some bad news. And, and then she wouldn't tell me what it was. And it was, it was frustrating. And then I lived like in terror for five weeks. Like what's going to, what's going to happen? What am I going to find out? And then I found out that one of our professors at USC, that had helped me on one of my dissertation experiments was killed by one of the students in our program. And it was devastating, obviously devastating. But what creeped me out was that she had seen that. And I think the difference was that it was, it was a death, right? It was a life or death thing. Whereas all the things before that were, you know, like you might lose money, you might, I don't know, you have a project at work or something. This one was death. And so for me, it really shook me. And I couldn't understand how the information about someone's death that could be available beforehand and what that meant. You know, and I kept thinking was, is there such things fate or destiny? I had never thought about that before. But I was like, but if the information was available ahead of time, is it possible that it was meant to be? I don't know. Like I had all these kinds of thoughts, but I didn't have time again. I was busy. I didn't have time to think about it. And I was in grief for a while. And so I didn't do anything. And then, and then a couple of years later, she saw this relationship coming into my life and look like it was going to be positive and good. And it was, it was fine. It just, but it ended. And so I was like, Mom, you were wrong. Like it wasn't positive. I mean, now I can see why it was positive in the long run. But, and so that, that one though, and I always, I think of it now as like, um, I had like a stool, like in the legs were just being knocked out. And that was the last leg of the stool. That was it. I was like, done. I was emotionally, um, like I just fell into a depression. Like I felt despair for the first time. I had no hope or optimism for the future. And I was just like, I just didn't want to exist anymore because I was like, I just don't understand why we have to do this. And so it was dark like that for a long time. And then then I finally was like, um, what is it about these readings? Um, you know, I wanted to look at that part of my story and see, okay. Okay. Um, what does it mean? And is there any truth in this or did I make this, you know, did I create meaning with this neuroscience, right? What they taught us about how we create meaning out of everything in our brains. Did I do this to myself? Um, and so then I started this, um, this, you know, journey with, initially started with my friends as a fun just for ourselves. They were like, we know this really good psychic. She'll turn you away if she can't read your energy. Like if you want to try someone, try someone else will take you. So we started doing that. Um, we would go together. We'd switch notes to see if it was true or not. Cause I never actually had readings from anyone else. It was just my mom. Um, so we did that for a while and we realized, you know, this is like me as a scientist, and I remember they would say things that would be from my past for my childhood, um, with specific, you know, um, uh, like seven variables correct from this, you know, obscure thing for my childhood. And I'd be sitting there like, man, like this is, this is hard to brush off. And I know we're supposed to like, even as a scientist, I was trying to be skeptical cause I don't know these people. I'm paying them. So it's different. It's different relationship than with my mom. And I'm like, but I just don't see how that could be guesswork. Like it's not vague, you know, people always, oh my God, I've spent so much time hearing all the criticisms. And it's like your readings obviously are not the best forum for to prove something scientifically, but so it was just for fun. It was just for us. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, because as you take us on the journey in the book, you know, there's a lot to be said for media mystic readings. And then, you know, just let me interject something else because again, you tell the story in an awesome way. And I think it's very relatable. But I want people to know that you then drill, you go as a scientist all the way. So like you find your way to Dr. Julie Byshele's door at the Windbridge Institute. You go, okay, quintipple blind, controlled after death communication by a PhD in pharmacology who knows how to run that. And she comes up with four sigma or whatever result that blows the doors off. So it's, it's, you're constantly bouncing back and forth between like you're saying, hey, can I trust this reading? And oh, by the way, there's this, there's this evidence. And again, as you point out in the book, folks, I want you to understand, you will get a lot out of this book if you're very science minded. It's great. Yeah, yeah. And I, so yeah, it started like that for fun. And then later I did end up digging deep into the, to the scientific literature, which I didn't think existed. Otherwise I would have looked at that first, but I just didn't even think that existed. So there's no way no one has studied this because it's so outside of our purview. Like we don't learn about that. And so I never bothered to look, but so I did that with my, yeah, I did that with my friends for a while. And I was, should I tell me a tells the other story? Yes. Yes. You're just, you're just like so many of the rest of us, you know what I mean? Yeah. Please. So, so we were going to these readings and we're, you know, it was very casual, like not forefront of my mind, but I wasn't listening to anything spiritual at the time. And in the readings, they, they would say things to me, like this is like someone from your soul group, or this is a karmic thing, a pathway thing. And I didn't believe in any of that. First of all, I didn't even know what they were saying half the time. I was like, I would just write it down, but I didn't know what soul group or anything meant. And I would, and then I would just brush it off because I was like, I don't believe in that. So whatever. But I had heard it. And so it kind of had planted a seed in my head. And so I wasn't listening to anything spiritual, but I listened to, I read Chelsea Handler's book, life will be the death of me. And then she had a podcast, like a limited series podcast with a few episodes. Most of it was about the enneagram and personality and therapy and stuff. And then she had, and one episode with Laurel and Jackson, who's a psychic medium. And I remember, and Chelsea was a skeptic. And so I was like, what is this? Laurel and Jackson, why should have a psychic medium on her podcast? But it was like the podcast that changed my life. And so Laurel and Jackson starts telling the spirit, describing that spiritual framework that the intuitives had mentioned. And she's like, oh, we come to earth to learn lessons. We have soul groups and, you know, there's karma and all this stuff. And I just perked up and I was like, oh my God, this sounds familiar. This is what, and so I started writing it down so that I could, you know, look it up or think about it later. But I was like, oh, that's so weird. Do all psychics believe in this framework? And I've never even heard, you know, I've heard of reincarnation, but I didn't know that there was a whole framework behind it. And so she got my attention there. And then she mentioned the Windbridge Institute because she had been certified by them and been tested. They had done EEG studies on her. So I made a note to look them up. And then her and Chelsea discussed the book, Many Lives, Any Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss. And they didn't say what it was about. They just kind of sent it. It was a great book. It's about a psychiatrist case study. And Chelsea tells the story of how she got in a fight with someone like over dinner, a friend who told her to read the book and she was like, I'm never going to read this. And then gets on a plane to fly home that night. And the book is in the pocket of a seat in front of her. And she reads it, lands. And it's like, everyone has to read this book. So of course I was like, all right, I'm going to order this book immediately. And it arrives and I... And then you become one of those people, right? You start distributing this book. Which is great. Which is great. Yeah. The book was interesting because it's a short book. It's, you know, it's a story. He's an atheist, I think. He's a skeptic. He didn't believe in anything paranormal. Psychiatrist trained at Yale and Columbia. And he just stumbles across past life regression in his practice, but finds out that it's very healing. And then through the sessions, he describes the spiritual framework again. He's like, gets messages from these master spirits and they describe the same exact thing. So when I was reading the book, I just remember thinking, this is just the weirdest thing. I've never heard of this. And now I'm like getting it from all angles. And I'm like, and now it's from a psychiatrist who, you know, and I was all about prestige then. So I was like, look at his credentials. And it just got my attention. And I just, I just throw in a couple of little tidbits here too, because later on in the book, like you follow all these threats. Again, it's a great story. It's a very personal story, very open story. You're just very, very brave to be just this open, being kind of the person you're, you are supposed to be, you know, who we're supposed to hear. But as you point out in the book, what's interesting is when you look, Weiss's experience isn't unique. There's been many other hypnotherapists that literally stumble across this. And the way they do it, and you describe this in the book, is they regress people in the way they've been trained to regress people. Like, oh, I have a spirit fear of spiders. Okay, go back to the first time in my life. I was two years old. Okay, I'm not afraid of spiders anymore. So they get, it's always the same story with, you know, it's the same thing with Newton. In Newton's case, the guy who's very well known for the between lives research, but it all fits together. He has a guy who has a shoulder injury and all the doctors in LA are like, dude, it's in your head. Quit coming into our office and he goes and sees him and it's a tough case. And he goes, okay, further back, further back, further back and boom, he's on a field of a battlefield, you know, and he's describing all the things. So as you point out in the book and document, again, because this is a book that is filled with substance and important research, and she's a neuroscientist, and later on we'll talk about maybe all the neural correlates to the spiritual experience and she's got all this research that she cites and more than you'll be able to kind of absorb and you'll have a long reading list when you get done with this. But the point being, just like this small example, she doesn't leave it there. She goes and says, okay, isn't it interesting that these independent hypnotherapists who are just following a pretty well known, well, you know, ordained, I mean, they get paid, the insurance company pays them for it and they stumble into this past life thing. Isn't that interesting? So I'm sorry, pick up your story. Yeah, and I found that really, really fascinating because from a purely, even neuroscience mental health perspective, because I did, I went and read not just all of his books, but Michael Newton, Roger Boulder, some Dolores Cannon, a lot of the past life progression therapists because, and then I tried to read other psychology books too, but of course they just don't even touch it. But yeah, and I just thought it was so odd. I'm like, so if you put somebody in a regressed state and ask them to describe spiritual framework, that's the one they usually describe, enough so that like these practitioners have had thousands of patients, thousands of cases like put all together and they all say similar things so that they can write these books and give you these summaries. Like to me, that's just insane. Still, I still think it's so interesting because as a phenomenon, it's like what, where is this coming from? It's not even a, you know, Western culture. It's not even, I didn't even know what it was. It's not a popular, it's more popular now, I think, but a lot of these practitioners were from the 70s, the 80s, you know, no internet. And so I just really couldn't get over that. And I just kept wondering, like as I say in the book, I just kept thinking about, you know, is it some like, you know, biological thing? But I don't know, like I just kept coming back to maybe it's spiritual. Like it was really hard for me, but I just kept like it just kept coming up in my head. Like, well, maybe, well, maybe, you know, like, I don't know, maybe you should open your mind. But so then that's when I really was like, let me just keep reading. And then I was like, let me reach out to the Windbridge Institute and talk to them because, you know, as you mentioned, Julie Baishala has a PhD and you know, they seem to be doing good research. So I spoke to them. And then the co-founder gave me a huge reading list. And he was like, he's like, I think you need to do some reading. Mark. Yeah, Mark. He was like, I think you need to do some reading in a nice way. But yeah, but he gave me a huge list and then I went off to do. And Mark gave you another little Easter egg too that you explore and we'll explore and when we talk about, he goes, and you're not only is this research repressed, but it's suppressed. And when you go and do a Google search on this, it doesn't come up. Go over to DuckDuckGo and it does come up. Hmm. I use Google Scholar for most to find academic publications and when I went to look up some of the papers that he mentioned, I couldn't find them unless I put the exact like title exact authors. Like I had to have everything exactly right for it to come up. It was really hard to find. And it was anything that was, I'm trying to, I think Society for Psychological Research, like the journal for that or some of the other ones, but they were, yeah, they didn't come up. It took me a while to find them. And I was like, oh my God, he's right. They're not indexed like easily to be easily found. And so that was, I mean, that was annoying. Just frankly, it was just really labor intensive to even find the research and then to be able to read through it and everything. But I did it. And then I became more and more curious. And then I started reaching out to more people. And I've read about Stargate and reached out to Hal Putoff and Edwin May and spoke to them and read all their papers. And then by the end of that, I was like, okay, Psychic Phenomenon is real. It's like, I've read enough. Like there was, there was so much evidence. You know, a big part of this story, and it's so awesome again that you approached this. The phrase you use is science made me feel valuable. And a lot of your story is kind of deconstructing that on that existential level. And also, so you, because you have, like you're saying, you have these things that we all encounter, you know, in various levels, the loss, the grief, you know, and it doesn't have to be somebody in your immediate family. It can be somebody who you just know and have a friendship and a kinship with like you do with your professor and suddenly you're confronted with death. And then it can be a breakup, you know. And like it's so easy to dismiss those things. Oh, you know, especially in our culture, you know. No, it's your heart, you know, and your heart, your heart breaks and it grieves. And I think you do just an awesome and unique job of helping us understand how you have to separate out the head game, the trip that scientific materialism has taken you on that prevents you from connecting with these feelings. And one of the things that I love is this, science made me feel valuable. And that's something really, really hard to give up, especially because you're a woman and you, you thought so hard to be felt valuable in this gray haired men's world, you know. And you're an Iranian woman, all the rest of that stuff. You know, it's like, talk about that because you talk about it eloquently in the book. Yes, yeah. Man, that's the part that was hard. So what was hard was I was reading all this evidence and I just, as I was talking to you, I said, oh, psychic phenomenon is real, but it was not that easy for me in the moment. It was a battle every single day, waking up thinking I've been fooled. That was the thought that kept coming up because you've been fooled, you're stupid, you fell for it. Those were the three thoughts that kept coming up. And I couldn't recognize them as thoughts, right? That were not, that were me, they were me. I'm telling myself that, but I couldn't get that. And because of that, it was just a continuous struggle of back and forth reading something, even having all this personal experience I had that already should have proved it to me, but then, okay, finding scientific papers, but every morning waking up, you've been fooled, you're stupid. You, they're not going to respect you. Your degree is for nothing. Like, you know, those are the things that come up, but I, it took a lot of self-work or whatever. Like a lot of, and they don't teach you anything about psychology and our culture teaches you nothing about taking care of yourself and your emotions or your psychology. So I had to do, go learn all of that along the way. And that's when I started to notice, you know, these thoughts that were, I was like, like, what is preventing me from enjoying the spirituality? Why can't I just, why can't I just accept it? I would look at people who are spiritual with envy. Like, oh God, I'm so like jealous that you can just accept it and take comfort from it. Like, why can't I, and actually I wish I could say that I came to it on my own. I did notice the thoughts, but it was actually this person that I spoke to who he's a, he was a therapist and then he, his psychic ability opened up like midlife. So he abandoned being a therapist to be a psychic, but he's still trained in it. So I was, I knew him through a friend and he told me, I told him, I was like, can you just tell me what my problem is? I don't care. I don't want to psycho. I don't want to come to it on my own. I just tell me what it is. And then, and he told me, and he's like, oh, it's just because, or he's like, well, I'm sure I have a lot of problems, but he pointed out, he said, it was like, you know, your, your thing, your, your, the point of sticking point here is, is that you can't let go of the intellect and the science because it's made you feel valuable for whatever reason. And, and I remember when he told me, I was like, that's not true. And, you know, I had to go off for months and like meditate on that and realize how it was true. Then I could, then I started hearing the thoughts and I was like, oh my God, he's right. But he, you know, he pointed out to me and I thought, oh my goodness, this is so true. Like you want to be accepted too. Like you feel like you said you is, and it's really hard as a woman in science. Like you're always worried about what you're wearing, how much makeup you're wearing, how you sound, but no one is taking you seriously, sexual harassment, left and right. Like it's real as it is in many fields. And all you want is to be taken seriously. And I do feel like along the way you start suppressing parts of yourself, right? Like parts of self-expression. You change the way you dress, the way you speak, the way you do your makeup, the things you talk about, the things you admit to being interested in, all of those things change. So that by, so no wonder by the end of grad school, I was not happy. Take that one step further. And again, it's something unique you bring to this because you have an extra layer of sensitivity to that. But then you start deconstructing this larger question of scientific materialism. You go, gee, this is ridiculous. There's overwhelming evidence from all these different fields. Even when I look at the cutting edge work that's being done in physics and quantum physics, it's all pointing in the same direction. What's going on here? And then you are equipped to look at scientists who you talk to. Let's say that this book then leads you to interviewing many leading thinkers, scientists, and their ideas and thoughts work their way into the book. But you're then trying to understand, and you do understand why they can't do it because they're doing the same game you're doing. That's how I took it. You can see it. We're all scared. Yeah, we're just all scared. And what are they scared of specifically? Because like you say, you feel good about being smart and being this smart scientific woman. And then you find that they're scared about the same thing. And they're also scared about what will their colleagues say in the cafeteria if they find out that they wrote an article or even made a blog post or what will happen to my funding? And can I really do that inside of an environment where we all know what the head of the department thinks? So you're just tuned into that when you talk to these guys. You're like, I get that. I know that deal. Yeah. I think that when I spoke to my scientist colleague, it's when I was going through my second, my identity crisis. And I was like, am I? Who am I? Am I not a scientist anymore? What do other scientists believe in? Are they spiritual? Are they religious? Do they believe in anything paranormal? And yeah, I just spoke to one of my advisors actually. And then a lot of my just colleagues and friends who are now in great, you know, high positions in academia and elsewhere in companies. And all of them were actually, and the truth is, like any scientist and that's what I would say in the book, like, inconfidentially they'll tell you. Like we know the limits of science. So we can't possibly know everything with science. We can't use the scientific method for everything. And also we're limited by time, right? Like we just haven't figured a lot of stuff out yet. And a lot of them were interested in kind of this paranormal phenomenon or like they had read Dean Radin's books or one of them had even bought Dowsing Rods. One of them was like, oh, I went into neuroscience because I was interested in philosophy, and these bigger questions about life. And he's like, I love ghost stories and stuff. So all of them were human. But we had never talked about these things together. So it made me feel so much better, first of all, to establish that. I was like, okay, I'm not alone. Like we're all human, I think, at the end of the day. But yeah, when it comes to taking it public, you know, some of them were like, well, you know, I would never talk about this like at a faculty meeting. There's also a deeper level of denial that I think you get to because you're so open in truly just digging through this stuff personally that comes through in the book. And in a way, I think you kind of let them off the hook a little too easily, Mona, because they kind of give some explanations that just don't stand up to scrutiny and the kind of scrutiny that you do in the book. And you just kind of give them a pass like we do, people. And you got to give people a little bit of a pass. But what you do is you just deconstruct materialism as just untenable versus the evidence. And you do it in the book and you do it over and over again. And I think you could even go one step further because and you rigorously go through this. But if we cannot measure because we don't know what time is and if we cannot measure because we don't know the influence of consciousness and that we know that consciousness is always in play and we know the observer effect and the experimenter effect is always in play, then we don't really have a science that we can hold on to. And we can still say like you do in the book that well, we still have the scientific method and it's still valuable. Yada, yada, true to a certain extent, but we can kind of reorder the whole thing and put everything under engineering, you know, if you can put it on an iPhone and we can use it, that's great. Otherwise, don't go squacking on your, you know, about how you could do this and do that. You can't do shit really. You can just approximate and if that's good enough to make something better. But I don't think they're doing that on a day-to-day basis. And I don't think a lot of them are, yeah, I just don't think that they engage with these questions on a day-to-day basis. Like when I, much like me before I have this crisis, you could not engage me in a conversation on this stuff. Like I would be too busy. I'm too tired. I have too many other things to read and do and think about. And it's like, you try to talk to me about that. I'd be like, I don't have time for this, you know, like I'm not interested in this. So I think if, and you can't force people to be interested in things they're not interested in. So I think when it comes, you know, it takes like a perfect storm of these things to open you up to things. And that's what I try to keep in mind. Because I just always like I wrote the book like that about old me, new me. Because I just, now I find myself in that position of exactly what you were saying. Like I find myself frustrated sometimes that I get confronted with these extremely limited, frankly, lazy explanations about materialism from other scientists. And, you know, I just try to think back to myself and, you know, I could present them a huge reading list, but are they really going to go read it? Like they're not. They're busy. And they're just going to fall back on their lazy arguments and I'm going to go on my way. But, you know, until it comes a day when they need, need it or something happens to them as Jeff Kreipel writes in his excellent book, the flip when something happens and the worldview is flipped and then they'll come calling. Very interesting because, you know, both through Skeptica and I've been at this for a long time, but it took me a long time to realize this. You know, your book is as much an exercise in why people believe weird things as it is anything else. And it's about belief systems and worldviews and how those change. And essentially and importantly, how you can go about being the master of that process as you are because that's what you do. You take on that job. So any thoughts on number one, kind of looking out and it's brutal, but it's true. You know, why do people get stuck in these belief system ruts that don't serve them? And in particular, now we're talking about the scientific materialistic worldviews that don't serve them. Number two, how do you re-engineer that? How do you go through that process? Second one's hard. The first one is, yeah, I think that I think and you know, I don't know if I know enough. This is just my experience. It does come back to our needs as people and I feel like things serve you as long as they fill some need that you have. Like for me, I needed to feel valuable, science filled that need. So for a while that worked for me and then it didn't anymore. And I think that that's for whatever reason, you know, people are born into belief systems or whatever, however they land on their belief systems, it's various paths for different people. It must be fulfilling a need for you. If it wasn't working for you, I think that's when you do hit crisis like I did. And that's when it pushes you to look and to change. Something is not working for you, then you have to do something. But so long as it fulfills needs and you're not pushed to that crisis point, I just think humans don't voluntarily want to transform, right? Like who wants to go through a crisis like that? I don't think I would have, I think I was forced to. So, and how to do it, I mean, you know, I thought a lot about that because as I've gone through it, I've thought about the beginning when I struggled against it and ultimately how did it become easier for me? And it really was just letting go and which sounds easy, but it's not at all easy, but like letting go and surrendering and then continuously asking myself, but what if you're wrong and stay radically curious? Because I think also once I finally was like, okay, you know what? I don't know what the reality is. I don't know what the universe is. All I know is materialism is not it or is not working for me. And it doesn't explain a lot of my experiences and other people's experiences, but I, you know, not ready to commit to another one now, because I'm like, I thought I was so right. Oh man, I thought I was it. I thought I had it and I was so, you know, wrong or it ended up flipping. So now I'm careful and try not to cling and try to stay open-minded and just I think of it like data sets now. I think of all of us as having limited data sets or like an Excel sheet. And I think of it as like, I had an Excel sheet of my worldview and it was locked. And I was like, no more information, please. I am good. I have the correct worldview. And then of course that opened up, added data to it. And now I'm always thinking, I never want to lock the sheet again. I just want to keep adding data. And that's how I think of it when I relate to other people too, that they have different data sets. Like if I'm referring to something that they don't have in their data set, they're just not going to get it. Again, I have to wonder if you're being overly generous there. But because in the book, you kind of do reveal some of the secret sauce. I mean, you become a meditator and you actively do that. You jump into these experiences. You do pass life regression. Oh, yes. You do. And you continue to get, you continue to get readings. You even are open about having an LSD experience, you know, a hallucinogenic experience, which I got to tell you, you know, at this point, so many people have, but very, very few people write about it and say, yep, this happened. And here's how I integrated it in and all the rest of that. So I'm curious about if I can really kind of jump that to the end, is what do you think about kind of this right action, non-dualism? You said Ram Dass is one of your spiritual guideposts. Have you read much of Neem Karoli Baba? And, you know, I mean, and some of all Ram Dass' stories are with Neem Karoli Baba. So are you down the non-dual right action? Yeah, definitely. Okay, so, yeah. And I, so for me, it was a lot of, I mean, and I've wished this for the world. I do wish, I wish, like, I wish our society focused more on self-actualization and like psychology and just like, what do, you know, what do we need to express ourselves to be happy? Because I feel like a lot of that is what led me to this, I don't know, despair point. But yeah, I got curious about consciousness. I got curious about spirituality. And I found that these altered states of consciousness, whether it's hypnotic regression or psychedelics or breath work or meditation, they really help you get out of your everyday head and out of these social constructs, these things, these, I should be doing this, I'm supposed to be this, this is my identity. They get you out of that space. And I actually now think of them too at these points where the spiritual, the paranormal and personal healing all converge. Because in those experiences, you can have all of them, right? Like I can see the future, I can see a past life. I can, you know, heal me in some way if it's a passive regression or whatever. Or with LSD, I had an insight, you know, I asked a question, a personal development question. I think it was what's my biggest problem right now and got a very, very, very clear answer of like a whole, like not just a cognitive, like it was a, I felt that it was like you don't let yourself be you. Like you, you know, you trying to project smartness, you're trying to project who you think everyone thinks you're supposed to be, but you've forgotten like, and I saw like images from my childhood and, you know, like, oh, you forgot this girl, you forgot this person. And so I feel like these, I mean, if I, yeah, one wish is that everybody would embrace these altered states or just go get, yeah, readings. Like I invite scientists in the book to go get a reading. I mean, like what's the big deal? You know, it's like 30 minutes, maybe they'll impress you, maybe they won't, but to touch the mystical and the spiritual, because I just truly think it's very healing and enlightening. And it really just helped open your mind to other experiences. And most of the population believes in this stuff and engages with it in some way. And so it could help put, you know, at least for scientists, like put us on even footing a little more anyway. Okay. The skeptical portion of the interview begins now. So you mentioned Russell Tarrig helped put off SRI stuff. Let me cover that a lot on this show. They're MKUltra guys, right? I mean, that program is under the MKUltra program. Ram Das, when he's at Harvard, he's working in an MKUltra program. MKUltra is not pretty. It's not nice. It's evil. I mean, they also have at the same time programs going on with demonology, you know, hey, can we do, they have, you know, kind of this weaponizing disillusioned of identity disorder, right? Like Whitley Straver, we've interviewed on the show. You know, let's lock up these little nine-year-old kids in Faraday cages and cut the throat of a bunny in front of them and see, do they disassociate? And can we then inhabit, you know, take possession of that? So evil matters. I wrote a book a couple of years ago. Why evil matters? And evil and deception has to be a part of this equation because it seems to be part of this collage that we're painting together. What do you think? I just talked to Bernardo Kastrup last week and, you know, I had to put him on the grill and he was like, I can't dismiss the definite reality that seems to be of the angels and demons. It seems to be real, you know? You don't really, you don't really go there too much. No, no, I don't. I try not to think about that, but I think that the, I mean, I do think the nature of the universe is, is actually one of my psychedelic trips, I experienced the duality of like the universe of like light is dark and dark is light and that. So, I mean, I recognize that. I don't know that much about MKUltra and I haven't dug into it as much as Stargate, but I mean, I do think. Just to make the point, just to make the point again, I won't pound on it. Stargate is a part of MKUltra. Yeah. So, right. Yeah. But what can I ask, what is your exact question? So, a few years ago, I interviewed this woman and it really kind of changed the show a bit. Her name is Annika Lucas and I kind of connected her through the yoga thing because I've been into yoga for a long time and she now runs this amazing program for women who are incarcerated in New York and does yoga with them and stuff like that. Oh, that's lovely. It's lovely. Annika was sold into a Satanic ritual cult in Belgium connected to the Dutro cult that was exposed in the newspapers and had all these high ranking officials. She was sold into a Satanic cult six years old, raped hundreds and hundreds of times. And Satanic, like I asked her that at one point and she goes, yes, that's what they are. So, if we're going to go there with all the rest of this stuff, one of the questions that's on the table is why are people attempting to tap into that energy but more importantly from a kind of scientific perspective, what does the agency of these other realms mean? And because I think it brings into focus some of the other questions that you ask in terms of you ask political questions at the end and questions about our society and then I think that naturally leads to this is us. This is what we did. We did this. And we did this to other countries but we did this to American citizens all under the umbrella of keep us safe, you know? Don't tell us anymore, you know? So I think this stuff matters. Yeah. I was sort of thinking about something similar the other day about, I mean, I don't have an answer. I don't know that anyone does but I think one part of it is control. I mean, humans love power and control but it all goes back to fear because we're afraid of dying and not having control over our environments. We can't protect ourselves. We're vulnerable in a lot of ways and I think that we try to grasp and control for control and power however we can. But, you know, and the way to counter that I mean, to some extent you can't because we are vulnerable. It is our nature. But, you know, in psychology, that's what they talk about child development. It's about making them feel safe and secure so that they don't have to develop these other mechanisms to control their environment or manipulate the people around them or whatever it is. So it's like in a perfect world, maybe if we all grew up, you know, feeling safe and secure and were raised in that way but like do I think that's going to be possible? I'm not that much of an idealist. The other thing I wonder what you think about this because I think what the book points to and we don't quite close the loop but maybe you can do it here is you start with pretty quickly realizing it's all about love. It's all about the light. The light is always shining, you know, just look up and we don't let the light shine through for a ton of reasons and we all get that, you know, but the light is always there. The light is always shining and you kind of end the book on that too but you feel the necessity to go through this long journey. I'm right there with you. I'm on that journey too but maybe the answer is named Karoli Baba. Love everyone and tell the truth. Maybe the answer is it doesn't matter what those motherfuckers do. It doesn't really matter. We don't have to make sense of it. They have to make sense of it. When they die, when they face their soul journey and they have to face experiencing themselves what they did and the impact of that. We don't necessarily have to process all that evil and that's why I think the mistake is made but people want to shy away from evil like we have to fix something. We don't have to fix it. We just have to be the light and that's what I think you say at the beginning and then you say at the end. Great. Yes. I did the practice that. I feel like I'm still transitioning into that. I don't feel like I was that at all before. It holds me. I was very conditioned from our culture and I didn't think about other people in that way and I think I talk about the book. I was very arrogant and condescending and retaliatory and I felt a lot of emotional just upset when somebody didn't agree with me. Had a different opinion than me or whatnot and now I know it's because I felt whatever my value was threatened. Okay, great. That's why I cut materialist so much slack now or everyone really is I really just tried to it's like I really is just letting go because old me would have been like no you have to see and I would have been angry and I've been like you need to understand you need to get caught up you need to read the papers you need to but like I said I don't I just don't think that that works with people knowing human psychology like I just don't think that even works and I think really the better way is to let go surrender and to live and like you said shine your light and when they see you living well and then if you know they're not they might ask themselves what's the difference here and what could I do differently. So I really do think all you can do is live your peace live your truth. Awesome. So Dr. Sabani where are we going with this book proof of spiritual phenomena a neuroscientist discovery of the ineffable mysteries of the universe. You got a great publisher behind you and you're rolling it out how's all that going? What do you hope to accomplish and then what are you going to do next? Gosh you know I'm such a type A I used to plan everything and I'm trying a new thing where I don't do that so I'm kind of just taking it day by day and I mean I started thinking about and like doing research for a second book but I don't know I'm just enjoying this one and I'm still exploring a lot of different altered states and healing modalities so I'm still on that journey and oh oh I guess I can mention this I haven't picked a date yet but I am there's two things one is a collaborator and I are going to the Society for Neuroscience conference and we're having a sat which is like the biggest conference in neuroscience and we have a little satellite event for science and spirituality but it's really for any scientist who's ever experienced anything that they couldn't explain to come join us and so that's one thing and then next year we're going to plan a retreat where I want to you know in the book I invite scientists to come engage the mystical and so we want to organize a retreat where we allow that to happen like a one day we haven't figured out the details yet there might be a one day one in LA and another one in a retreat center but where they can come and we can we can get readings we can present the evidence from the psychic research and like a release a synced format where we can talk about the scientific paradigm and experimental formats like different ones going forward like if you know materialism isn't the whole story so yeah so those are some of the things I'm working on thinking about Excellent that's great stuff great stuff congratulations again on the book it's fantastic really encourage everyone to check it out if you can do the audible it's great it's great lesson so thank you thank you so much for joining me today thank you so much for having me it was a pleasure thanks again to Dr. Sabane for joining me today on Skeptico the one question I tee up from this interview and it kind of relates to some of the recent episodes of Skeptico is what does it take to change your mind and what does it take in your experience to change someone else's mind let me know your thoughts love to hear from you especially if you have that next level level especially if you have that level 3 sensibility in talking about these topics I'd love for you to join me on the Skeptico form or track me down otherwise that's going to do it for today until next time take care and bye for now