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193. World Renowned Neurosurgeon Dies and Returned To Tell About the Experience · Radically Genuine

• Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (00:02.224) Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. For centuries, our scientific and medical establishments have operated under a materialist paradigm. The belief that consciousness is merely a byproduct of brain activity, that physical matter is all that exists and that anything beyond the measurable is simply wishful thinking or even delusion. But this reductionist worldview may be creating profound limitations that ripple through every aspect of the human experience. When we reduce consciousness to mere brain activity and deny the existence of a soul, we strip meaning from existence itself. When we treat mental health as purely biochemical, we miss the deeper spiritual and existential dimensions of human suffering. When our healthcare system focuses solely on fixing broken parts rather than understanding the whole person, we often fail to address root causes of illness and ignore the profound mind-body connection. The materials paradigm provided us some incredible technological advances, but it's also created a crisis of meaning, purpose, connection, and a chronic disease epidemic. We live in an age of unprecedented scientific advancement, yet rates of depression, anxiety, and existential emptiness continue to climb. Perhaps our fundamental assumptions about reality itself need examining. Enter post-material science, a growing movement of researchers who recognize that consciousness may be primary, not secondary, to physical reality. Near-death experiences, in particular, offer compelling evidence that consciousness can exist independently of brain function, challenging our most basic assumptions about life, death, and the nature of existence itself. These experiences consistently point to profound truths about interconnectedness, unconditional love, and life purpose that our current paradigm struggles to explain or integrate. What emerges from this is a potential revolution in how we understand. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (02:22.672) mental health, healing, human potential, and our place in the universe. Joining us today is Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon whose extraordinary personal journey fundamentally changed his understanding of consciousness and the nature of reality. Dr. Alexander spent over two decades as an academic neurosurgeon, including 15 years at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital Boston, and Harvard Medical School. He also served on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Alexander is the author of New York Times bestselling book, Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife. As a man of science who had previously been skeptical of such phenomena, his experience and subsequent research have made him a leading voice in the scientific exploration of consciousness, near-death experiences, and the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality. Dr. Eben Alexander, welcome to the radically genuine podcast. Eben Alexander MD (03:25.23) Roger, it's great to be here. I love what you're doing and it's a pleasure to be invited onto your podcast. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (03:31.812) It's such an honor and before we get to the miraculous point in 2008, I'm really interested to get a sense of who you were prior to that experience. What was your view of consciousness and the possibility of life after death? Eben Alexander MD (03:46.254) think it's very important to point out I was very influenced by my father and this is my adoptive father because my birth mother was 16 years old, unwed, put me up for adoption. that only becomes part of the story much, much later that I was adopted into this wonderful, loving family. My father was a globally renowned neurosurgeon. He'd been a combat surgeon in the Second World War. fact, I still have the little pocket Bible, New Testament and Psalms that he carried with him for two and a half years in the Pacific theater. before he finally came back to this world. I think he was, in many ways, was his very powerful belief in God and power of prayer that got him through all that. Now, he was also very scientific, fully up to speed on modern physics, cosmology. I mean, he was a brilliant scientist, but for him, there was never any conflict whatsoever between his scientific beliefs and his belief in a loving God that was accessible through prayer. Now, like many of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s, like I did, we grew up knowing science is the pathway to truth. And like so many others, I made the gigantic mistake of thinking that a Newtonian deterministic kind of materialist science was the pathway to truth. And yet that is absolutely a false statement. And quantum physics completely upends all of this, but in ways that we have yet to fully understand, but it has a tremendous amount to do with consciousness. Now, like so many of my colleagues trained in science and, you know, I spent those 15 years working as an associate professor at Harvard Medical School teaching neurosurgery, thinking I understood something about brain mind and consciousness. And I was in for a major awakening. And that awakening happened, you know, in November of 2008. November 10th, 430 in the morning, woke up with severe back pain, severe headache, thought a warm bath might help alleviate my discomfort and almost couldn't get it back out of the tub. Struggled back to my bed and baby steps collapsed, writhing in a cold sweat and severe pain. Soon thereafter, my 10-year-old son, my youngest son, Bond, came in the room, realized Dad wasn't off at work. Not only that, he looked horrible. He started rubbing my temples. Eben Alexander MD (06:06.252) And when he did, I felt like he'd driven a white hot railroad spike through my head. I mean, it was a horrific pain. And soon thereafter, I was having grand mal seizures and was gone from this world. Now, there's a myth out there that was perpetuated by an irresponsible writer who was trying to kind of wreck my reputation. And he said it was a medically induced coma. That's false. I went into coma before any sedation. In fact, when I came out of coma on day seven, I was still under very heavy sedation. So this was a meningitis induced coma. And that makes a giant difference to the medical community because the mechanism by which meningitis puts you in coma is by destroying the human part of the brain, the neocortex, the outer surface. That's the major calculator that's responsible for everything, all the details. We see what we hear, our experience of body orientation in space, our memory of past events, executive function for future events, et cetera. Every bit of that demands this six cell layer neocortex be functioning. Now, that's why meningitis is such a perfect model for human death, because it attacks the entire neocortex. And in my case, the medical case report on my medical records, came out in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in September 2018. A case report written by Dr. Sirvi Khanna, Lauren Moore and Bruce Grayson made it very clear my brain was far too damaged. to be hosting a dream or hallucination, much less this profound transformational ultra-detailed reality that I came in touch with. And all at times when I knew from examination, my medical record that my brain was in terrible shape and in no shape whatsoever to host a rich spiritual encounter. And to me, that's a huge part of the story. But that only unraveled in the months and years after my coma. You know, initially all I had was my initial memories and what I experienced, but then making sense of it, especially against my medical records. That's what has demanded a complete shift in my worldview. And that's where many scientists who study consciousness have assisted me in coming to a much richer understanding of it all. Now to get into the NDE itself, and I'll try and keep this somewhat brief. mean, my story is out there all, many, many places on the internet, YouTube, what have you. Eben Alexander MD (08:32.941) Of course, Proof of Heaven is your go-to source for that map of heaven. And our third book, Living in a Mindful Universe, are very helpful books at helping to kind of tell the whole story. But essentially, the important thing to point out about my NDE is an atypical feature, and I've never heard of this to such a degree in anybody else's NDE, was my amnesia. I had no memory of Evan Alexander's life. I had no knowledge of humans, this universe. It really was an empty slate. And it took me many months after coming out of coma to start to understand why I had to take such a deep dive and have that deletion of my prior memories and assumptions. But I think that was all necessary for me to take it seriously, especially given what all unfolded. Now, for me, in this very amnesic state, it started when I call the earthworms eye view a very primitive course, kind of unresponsive realm. It's like being a dirty jello. It sounds very foreboding when I talk about it, but when I was there, given my amnesia, I had no knowledge of any other possibility. So I accepted it. This is the way existence is. You I had no complaints. But I admit, yes, that first stage, which I labeled the earthworms eye view, that very primitive course, unresponsive state. It was kind of a foreboding environment, especially given what happened next. Because what I remember next is this slowly spinning white light. It was kind of a perfect light. It had a kind of appearance like ground glass. It was surrounded by these fine silvery golden tendrils that were slowly spinning around it as this light emerged out of that murky darkness of the earth for my view and came towards me. And I realized it came packaged with a musical melody that was very, very refreshing and invigorating. And that's kind of an important theme for my whole journey was that music, sound, vibration, seemed to be something that enhanced my spiritual journey. Now, do know, of course, this is one of the most irritating mistakes materialists get into as they start complaining about your auditory pathways and your visual systems not working. So how could you see or hear anything? Well, in that realm, you're in a realm of knowledge through identification, where we become huge swathes of the scene, where it's no longer being limited and filtered by our sensory system. Eben Alexander MD (10:58.424) but it's more of a kind of a pure knowing of the events of our soul journey. And that's what I was witnessing as this light opened up like a fabric, like a rip in the fabric of that Earth from my view and led me into an entirely different realm. And this newest realm is one that I call the Gateway Valley. I never had any body awareness during any part of this journey, but I was picking up. was aware, I was a speck of awareness. That's how I often describe it. And it turns out in this particular realm, in that gateway valley, I was observing it all as a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. And there were millions of other butterflies that were looping and spiraling in fast formations. And I'm just giving you the facts of what I remember. There have been times when I challenged that memory and wondered if maybe I was on a magic carpet or something else. It could have been, this is not like riding around on a big bug, but on a beautiful kind of Butterflies are not just symbols of emerging from the Chrysalis and that kind of thing, but butterflies are a huge part of that spiritual realm. They often serve as symbols in our interaction with that realm for this liberation of the spirit, the psyche, and that kind of thing. In this Gateway Valley, as a speck of awareness on this butterfly wing, what I was noticing was the incredible majesty and beauty of this place. I mean, there was a perfect meadow below me surrounded by a dense, rich forest, sparkling waterfalls and the crystal blue pools. it was just absolutely, it seemed like home. It was very comforting. know, the words are not only there to describe something of great beauty, but also something that seems very familiar. And I know that many, many people who wrote to me after hearing my talks or reading Proof of Heaven talked about there was something about my words and language and kind of the liberating flavor of my telling of the story that reminded other people of similar journeys in their own life that they'd forgotten or somehow have been covered over. This is a process I call program forgetting where we're not necessarily meant to retrieve all the information from that realm and bring it into this world in this lifetime. Eben Alexander MD (13:19.874) But in that gateway valley, I remember witnessing all this beauty. There were thousands of souls between lives who were dancing in that meadow down below. Lots of joy, festivities. I remember children were playing and dogs jumping. mean, just this incredible joy and mirth. And it was all being fueled because up above in this brilliant sky that was lit by the color of billowing clouds, there were swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were. emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would just thunder through my awareness with this incredible sense of majesty, but also of joy and a bliss, acceptance and of kind of a reawakening and a welcoming. It's a very familiar place. You know, we get to appreciate the glory of that when we go there. And that's what so many Indie ears report in coming back to this world is how beautiful that room is. In fact, you're often They're often challenged with having to explain why they even chose to come back to this world. But usually there is a choice to come back. And that's what happens towards the end of my story. So anyway, in this beautiful Gateway Valley, the best part about it was I wasn't alone on that butterfly way. There was a beautiful young woman, sparkling blue eyes, high forehead, high cheekbones, broad smile. She was dressed in the same kind of simple yet very colorful garb of all the beings dancing in the meadow down below. And she was there just to accompany me and to reassure me. And she never spoke a word. She never had to. She looked at me with this look of pure love. And her message to me, which was delivered telepathically and with this deep emotional knowing and truth and identification, her message was, are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You can do no wrong. And I cannot tell you how comforting all that was in the moment. But I wish I had explained that last one, You Can Do No Wrong, more fully in the book Proof of Heaven. Because to me, at this point in my journey, in this incredible world of bliss and perfection in that gateway valley, what one naturally acknowledges is the path, the positive pathway forward for the soul is one of love, compassion, kindness, connection, helping others. Eben Alexander MD (15:35.808) So that anything that you've done in your life, and this is where life reviews happen, but anything that's been against others, selfish, greedy, causing pain in others, et cetera, in the life review, you have to feel that on the receiving end. So in other words, you can do no wrong simply means you learn that you can choose to do wrong, but if you do, it gives you a far tougher, more arduous pathway forward as a soul. And this is why NDE's life reviews in many ways, it's just the golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the fabric of the universe. And that was something I was coming to recognize in this beautiful Gateway Valley. So that statement, you can do no wrong, does imply that the universe has a tremendous interest in our kind of moral and ethical integrity. And it matters. know, these things do matter. It's not irrelevant. And in fact, it matters a tremendous amount as people who've had life reviews will admit. Now, I could not have an Eben Alexander life review because of the amnesia. But I'll get to that in a minute about how life reviews were shown to me in a very powerful fashion. So in this beautiful Gateway Valley, that reassuring guardian angel and all this beauty going on down below, it was a world of perfection. I often liken it to Plato's world of ideals, but for the individual soul. And that's why you can have something like a life review that in essence insulates you from, you know, or kind of protects your little soul journey and your remembering of things from the beauty and the infinite love of that realm so that you can go through a life review and get some meaning and purpose out of it. But ultimately, this is all about nudging us more towards love, compassion, kindness, acceptance and taking care of each other. And so this was really just the beginning of that for me, because the angelic choirs provided yet another portal of music and light. And I remember seeing all of what I could sense as four dimensional space time, which is a material world, which was clearly kind of overlaid by this beautiful spiritual realm I was in. But all that four dimensional space time was collapsing down. And also important to point out that in this realm that I'm talking about, the Gateway Valley, place where life reviews happen, Eben Alexander MD (17:59.562) is a place that's completely beyond time. So that is no longer stuck in Earth time at all. That's why people in a near-death experience will often describe birth, death, everything in between as occurring simultaneously. And not only that, they can even envision events of past lives and potentialities of future lives that are all apparent in that realm. And the important thing to stress is that life reviews are an incredibly important demonstration of this kind of moral interest and ethical interest that God for us, so the universe has in our kind of behaviors and actions. And that's why the life review serves as a course correction to allow us to make amends for the things we got wrong and try and kind of correct our pathway in order to make the... make up the lessons that would be involved in the next life. And that's something we do with our soul groups. I do believe that there's something to this notion of kind of a soul agreement. But anyway, so now I'm seeing all of that collapse down, including that deep time or meta time of the spiritual realm, that complete timelessness, all of that collapsing down until I got into what I call the core. And the core was a complete resolution of all dualities. You often hear people in NDE accounts, and when you study them in large numbers, you find there's often a boundary. And they reach that boundary and they find there's a decision to be made as to whether to proceed or not. And it can be an irreversible decision. But in some ways, I feel like I was able to envision beyond that boundary and yet still come back. And that's what I'm describing as the core realm. The core. was an infinite inky darkness, but filled to overflowing with infinite divine love of the Creator for the creation. It's where I actually came to see that my conscious awareness was directly and absolutely sourced in that God mind, not as some kind of ego identification with God, but as a higher soul kind of acknowledgement that none of this exists, including none of our awareness and none of our sense of being without a direct. Eben Alexander MD (20:13.678) a kind of generative energy coming from the God force of creation right at the core of the universe. And this is something that was clear to me in the core realm. And that God force was overwhelming. It was everywhere. And yet it was so beautiful and it was a homecoming. And yet this was in a world, the core is where all the dualities of our world, you we have masculine, feminine, good, evil, dark, light, et cetera, all these different spectra of possibilities. But what you find is in that core, all of that is condensed down into the simple, pure oneness of love. And the interesting thing is at that level, that deeply creative level of the universe, there's not some battle between good and evil. The apparent evil is only something that emerges as you come well away from that central core of creative love out towards these worlds, the spiritual realm. And then, of course, finally into the material realm itself. But deep in this journey in the core realm, was extremely comforting. And there were many lessons in the core. And the core, the first time I entered there, I remember this message that when I wrote it down weeks later, the message was very simple. You're not here to stay. We'll teach you many things. You'll be going back. And so I did have many lessons. And the two I'll mention in particular had to do with the coming to an understanding of the reality of life reviews and of reincarnation. because there was no way to come back from this journey not knowing that you could never get it all done in one physical incarnation. And that's a very important point. And the scientific data supporting reincarnation is very strong. The work at a UVA being a major example where they've studied 2,500 cases of past life, memories and children over the last 65 years. And of those 2,500 cases, something like 1,700 have been solved. That is, they found the person who lived before. So it's very real. Study the literature and you'll come to know exactly how important that is. Excuse me. Eben Alexander MD (22:25.838) Excuse me. So getting back to it all in the core realm, there was a flying fish. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm having trouble with pollen, think. Eben Alexander MD (22:43.598) Sorry. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (22:44.646) Take your time. Yeah, we'll cut this out, so take your time. Eben Alexander MD (22:55.086) And so I won't stress my voice too much. I'll only give you kind of the highest division that I had in that highest vision was what I called Indra's net. And it was a vision in the core. So in this, in this timeless infinite realm where all dualities have been resolved and I saw all these threads and the threads represented individual lives. And our individual lives were interwoven in these beautiful ways that led towards this golden center. In many ways, I came to see that we're all contributing to the evolution of consciousness itself. And that is what is going on. It's like the vision of Pierre Tiller de Chardin in his book, The Phenomenon of Man, written in the mid 20th century. And he recognized that that, yes, there was. evolution occurring, just as they were discussing about Darwinian evolution. But he recognized that it was a much grander evolution of all consciousness. And that's what I think is actually going on. And that was an amazing kind of recognition that demanded much of me when I came back to this world in terms of explanation. Now, it turns out that I would spontaneously tumble back down. from that highest level, from that core realm, into the earth were my view. And that's where I realized very quickly that by remembering the musical notes of the melody, that was sufficient to allow me to conjure up that light portal that led up into the Gateway Valley. And so that happened several times during all this. Eben Alexander MD (24:49.516) And it was in one of those passages through the core that I witnessed this beautiful vision of reincarnation. Important to point out, some people, when they hear that story of reincarnation, they get all worried that a loved one might have reincarnated before they get there, before their time when they pass over. And what I can tell you is that there is so much focus in that realm on love, relationships, on soul growth, that there's absolutely zero chance from my perspective. that anyone would ever find the kind of paradox that their loved one is not available to them when they get there. That's an important point of talking about the timeless nature of that spiritual realm. So that there's no way that you'd ever have a paradox like that where a loved one would be unavailable because they quote already reincarnated. So that timelessness is a very important and practical consideration. So. At any rate, I would go through these multiple levels, many lessons. There's a tremendous amount more to share about the lessons which I've told in so many of these talks and the books, et cetera. But the bottom line is in the interest of time, because I want to get to a discussion with you about all this, is that there did come a point where I could no longer conjure up that light portal that led me out of the Gateway Valley. say I was sad at that time would be a gross understatement, but I also knew I could trust that I would be taken care of. so that's when I saw what happened was I'm in the tumbled back down to the earth for my view. I can no longer conjure up that light portal. But now what I see are thousands of beings going off around me into the distance. Heads bowed, some holding candles, murmuring energy coming from them that was very reassuring and comforting. And so in many ways, it kind of reminded me of the joy and bliss I'd first encountered in those higher levels in the Gateway Valley and the core. But now I was feeling that down in this lowest level in the earth were my view. And when I called that, when I came back to this world and was writing all this up, trying to record my memories. I said that was the power of prayer that I was witnessing and that prayer from all these beings around me was kind of drawing me back. I still didn't know where it was, where we were headed, but Eben Alexander MD (27:16.172) It was leading me in this direction. And then the final thing that I saw, there were six faces that would bubble up out of the muck. excuse me, these faces, it turns out now I know exactly who they were. In fact, within hours of their appearance, I knew exactly who they were. And they were basically loved ones, a friend, and one of my physicians who I knew very well as a neighbor and good friend. and they would all appear to me and they'd say a few words and then disappear. Now when it all happened, I wasn't sure what to make of them, but they served a very important purpose because five of the six phases were people physically present the last 24 hours I was in coma. So in other words, the vast majority of the coma experience had to happen between days one and four or one and five. I go through all the details of the timing. in the book. So Proof of Heaven and especially Living in a Mindful Universe, they talk about the timing of these events. that was what was leading me back to this world was really the sixth phase. And those phases, the ones I mentioned, were very important because they helped me to time the major spiritual journey to have happened deep in the experience, which is very different. from where some materialist counter arguments would place it and just say, well, this all formed in your memory when you woke up. But I know that the vast majority of the spiritual journey happened deep in coma and not just when I was emerging at the very end. And it was that sixth phase that got my attention, as I said, and it was of a 10 year old boy. I did not recognize him at the time. It was my son, Bond. They had protected Bond from the worst news during this week. telling him dad's sick, you know, and then he gets to the hospital and there's dad unresponsive on a ventilator. So they didn't really share the whole truth with him. And on day seven of coma, I'd been on three antibiotics on a ventilator for seven days and was showing no signs of any neurologic improvement with very dire Glasgow Coma Scales, absent oculocardiac reflex. I mean, a lot of really bad indicators. And that's why the doctors held a conference and told my family, Eben Alexander MD (29:35.562) I'd gone from a 10 % chance of survival early in the week down to a 2 % chance of survival, but with no chance of recovery. And that's why they recommended stopping the antibiotics and just letting me go. When Bond heard that, he knew it was much worse than he'd been told. That's when he ran down the hallway, pulled open my eyelids that were taped shut. Said, I'm lying there on my ventilator. One eye is looking over there, one eye over there. Neither pupil's working. Anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture. But soon thereafter, I was fighting the ventilator and trying to come back to this world. They extubated me. Now, when I first came back, my amnesia was still very much in power. And in fact, I didn't even recognize my mother, my sisters, my sons initially when I was waking up. But within an hour or two, everything started coming back of words, personal memories, et cetera. And I started recognizing them. But initially I didn't. So kind of amazing how deep that amnesia was and also how rapidly it started to reverse. And in fact, all my memories, including all personal memories and even more detailed memories of early childhood events, things like that, all assembled up over the next two months. That was astonishing that the memories came back more complete than they had been before my coma. And we discuss that in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe. And very specifically, we discuss how neurosurgeons have come to realize memories are not stored in the brain. Now that's one of the last nails in the coffin of materialist neuroscience. And yet out of a century plus of brain operations, nobody's ever reported a case of a loss of long-term memories associated with any brain resection. Now it is true if you operate on the medial temporal lobes, hippocampus, things like that, you can damage conversion of short-term to long-term memories, but that's not the same as finding where long-term memories are stored. And when you realize that they're not stored anywhere in the brain, but the brain is merely an access tool, a transceiver that allows us to connect to that primordial consciousness, that's a whole different ballgame. And that's what starts to explain reincarnation memories, explains so much about NDEs, after death communications, when we come to realize the soul doesn't die and the soul still has communication with loved ones here in the physical plane, et cetera. so anyway, for me, Eben Alexander MD (31:58.126) That was really the essence of the journey and especially in events over those weeks and month or two or three after waking up from coma challenged me so much that I finally had to accept the reality of the whole thing and then work with other scientists for the last 16 and a half years trying to come up with a better explanation of how it all works. But I think the point is the afterlife and reincarnation are pretty much established beyond any scientific doubt. So now we just have to move forward and see if we can come up with the appropriate models to explain how all this works. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (32:34.502) Fascinating. I have so many questions for you. The first one, because I've examined the literature into NDEs, and there tends to be very similar journeys that are discussed as you discuss, but one of the things that differentiate your journey from others is this fact that you had this amnesia and you weren't granted the ability for a life review. I'm curious to know how you make sense of that because obviously there's some grander purpose to it. Eben Alexander MD (33:02.574) Well, the best way I can make sense of it is to share with you a story that is in the third book, In Living in a Mindful Universe, that has to do with meditation and using meditation to reconnect with my NDE world. And I started doing that about two years post coma. And there was actually a very profound recognition because for me, going through all this, if I had scripted it, First and foremost, my father would have been there, my adoptive father. That's the soul I wanted to see. He passed over four years before my coma, and yet he was nowhere to be found in the entire adventure. so, a little over two years post-coma, I'm starting to use differential frequency brainwave entrainment. SacredAcoustics.com is the place people can learn about that. But this differential frequency brainwave entrainment allows for a very deep state of transcendental awareness. And in one of those journeys where my question on the meditation was, I on the right pathway? And there I'm asking about using sound. I was at Robert Monroe's Institute, TMI, learning differential frequency sound use for meditation. My question was, is this the right pathway? Meditation, sound enhanced meditation, am I doing the right things? That was my question to the universe. And in that setting, Going deep into a meditative space that I was used to because I've been using it a lot lately I ended up encountering my father's soul and it was the first time and it was it was beautiful I describe it all in the book so I won't go into detail here But in the midst of this deep meditation I see this vision of this Parisian cafe emerging out of the midst of this rocky gorge and there my father is with his college roommate My father passed over when he was 91 years old, but when I saw him in this vision, he was, you know, in his late teens, early twenties. He was college age, which is very often part of an ADC, an after-death communication, that our loved ones appear at kind of an idealized age. And I remember he turned and looked at me with his wink, and in that wink came this thought ball of answers telling me, yes, you're on the right pathway. Sound is absolutely the best way to... Eben Alexander MD (35:20.078) to use your brain stem to shake consciousness loose in this fashion. mean, a lot of what he was telling me was stuff I was just beginning to realize could be possible. And then he said, and the reason I could not be apparent to you, he used that word as kind of a double entendre, his sense of humor. He couldn't be apparent to me in the NDE because he made it clear that if it had been my dad coming away from it, even though it was a one in 10 million diagnosis of E. coli meningitis in an adult one in a billion recovery that I would have been more tempted to dismiss it. you see who you want to see on the way out. And so the universe had to provide a whole different, deeper level of challenge to my understanding. And that was to give me a spiritual guide during my near death experience, who was very important to me in life. And yet I never met her in my lifetime. And that's the story that unfolds when you go, you know, check the whole story out as it's told in the books. is that beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing, turns out to be a birth sister from my birth family who I didn't know about, you know, until the year 2000, eight years before my coma. But I only found out about her at a time when I found out when I was looking for my birth mother. in the year 2000. That was on behalf of my older son, Eben IV, who was doing some school project that involved a genealogical exploration. I found out that my birth parents had gotten married. As an adoptee, cannot tell you what a giant shocker that is. Adoptees are often looking for, least back in those years, was looking for a birth mother who had given them up for adoption. to find out my birth parents got married and then had three children. So I had a full family out there. I found all that out during a phone call to a social worker while I was driving my older son, Eben, the fourth to go skiing through a blizzard back in February of 2000 and had to pull off to the side of the road. mean, that was a lot to absorb. And in fact, it sent me into a dark night of the soul. If you read the adoption literature, what you'll find Eben Alexander MD (37:37.78) is if an adult adoptee gets another rejection by the birth mother in adult life, it can really tip them over. And that's exactly what happened in my life. And it gave me this dark night of the soul that lasted for eight years. Seven years into it, I met my birth family, the ones who are still alive. And yet, you know, there was this void in their lives and certainly in my reunion with them as a family. a void in the form of that youngest sister who had passed over 1998, two years before I even found out about her existence. And that's why in looking back on it all, it becomes clear to me why that amnesia and why having a kind of a different spiritual guide than you might expect, one that linked me back to my birth family, and it also helped to resolve one of the deepest issues that had afflicted me my entire life. And that had to do with that adoption abandonment wound. You know, that my birth mother, my birth mother had let me go, left me behind. In fact, I was hospitalized at age 11 days for failure to thrive. And I think that was part of my recognition of that challenge. My birth mother, as I said, she was unwed. Her father was alcoholic, had trouble keeping a job at the time. So there were major, major difficulties going on. And I certainly understand why she put me up for adoption. But that doesn't change the fact that of, know, when I was younger, it was an abandonment wound that to me was very challenging. And at a subconscious level, she'd caused me to question whether or not I even deserve to be alive and deserved love. And that's what this whole thing was about, is going through that kind of wrestling match with my higher soul and my ego to try and finally arrive at a point where I recognized. that I was worthy of love. And that's what this whole journey has been about. But a huge part of it was buying into this incredible journey. And if my father had been there, I'm quite certain I would have just dismissed it all as who you want to see on the way out. It's amazing that I had to go through the struggles I did to figure out about my sister and birth family. And then there's much more to that story too, but we don't have time for every bit of it. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (39:58.14) question about reincarnation and past lives. When you did go on this journey and passed over, was there access to your previous lives and maybe a greater knowing or understanding of how they may have been impacting your current one? Eben Alexander MD (40:14.828) Well, I have a lot of memories past lives that have been generated through through my meditation. I meditate an hour to a day. As I said, I use sacredacoustics.com for buying or beat brainwave entrainment. To me, it's been something that became very clear, although I would not tell you that after right after my NDE. that I could claim any specific past life memories. I had this huge swathe of memories that seemed relevant to me. And a lot of that appeared in the context of that Ender's net vision that I talked about. And yet I think I've seen a lot more in terms of past life material through my meditation. in looking back on it, it's kind of hard for me to identify which elements were there just from the NDE itself. because it's been so heavily kind of embellished by my work with meditation. And in that setting, I have these past life images that come from old sailing ships, comes from times on the prairie, time in caves. I mean, a lot of it going way back. And yet for me as a scientist, the real challenge is how do I take the details of that kind of an experience and then try and do an objective assessment, you know, in the here and now, like you do with. with the typical past life memory work, what those scientists are looking for are the hard details that connect someone to a prior life. And what I've had trouble with as a scientist on my own personal journey is trying to find those solid details that you can hang your hat on and then go do the research to kind of connect the dots to prove that what you you sense in that past life vision. And they seem very real, but they can kind of come into existence. be there for a few seconds and then go away. So, you know, to me, it's a real challenge to try and investigate all the past life stuff. I certainly have developed a kind of a patchwork quilt of what I think are past life events that are relevant to me. But again, it's something that's very hard to talk about without more definitive proof that links, you know, the events of my mind and my perception of personal journey with what I can bring back and then objectively check into. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (42:38.15) Doc, I have some more larger profound kind of questions that I'm seeking answers to. Now, I'm a clinical psychologist. I often work with people who've gone through some profound tragedies, trauma, horrific violence, sexual assaults, prolonged childhood abuse, neglect, parental loss, and so forth. Some of them were deeper and painful events that could occur in this lifetime. And then the question for a lot of them, the ones that they struggle with is, what is the purpose for all of this? And when we dive into these areas of spirituality, including some of this post-material science, one of the larger questions is, why would anyone choose to go through something like this? And then there's the secondary aspect of healing around forgiveness. So, those are two major powerful points that I often find myself in the work that I do. So, the first question is, is how intentional are some of these life challenges that we may have a say in incarnating and maybe that our soul's choice to go through them? And why would that be. And then the second thing is what advice do you, may you give and from some of these profound lessons that you've learned, not only through your own NDE, but you know, also with your journey since then, about how someone may move past some of those events that have happened in their lives. Eben Alexander MD (44:02.594) Well, I think to me, one thing that was quite clear from the overall experience, the NDE and kind of the aftermath and trying to make sense of it all was that hardships in life, many things that had not made sense to me before, you know, often when you look back on them, they make more sense. You kind of realize that you learn something, you grew as a soul and that kind of thing. And I think to me, it's become clear that even some of the greatest hardships and where it's very difficult and challenging to figure out why a soul would ever, you know, kind of select this, why a soul group would ever put one of their members through that piece of the, of the interaction. And yet what I've come to realize is there's that old saying, you know, God never gives us more than we can handle. I don't know that I totally. buy into that as it's stated. what I will say is I've come to be far more open to the recognition that the challenges we face in life, the hardships, ultimately benefit us with the kind of growth and soul transformation that makes it all worthwhile. Now, I don't want to kind of trivialize the hardships that anybody's been through because I know there's a lot of really tough stuff out there for each and all of us. But the other thing I'll remind you of is when you've been through a near death experience, you also realize that all that pain and suffering of physical discomfort, emotional issues, et cetera, in this world and in this body, as soon as we transition into that spiritual realm, that pain and suffering disappears. It dissipates tremendously rapidly. So it serves as a kind of a conditioner and as a you know, something that flavors our interaction with events here. But you get very kind of complete relief of physical, emotional suffering in those realms, in that spiritual realm. And of course, this is what some people even use, like children who are abused often learn to dissociate, you know, and kind of separate their awareness from their kind of bodily awareness. Eben Alexander MD (46:21.33) And it's a defense mechanism. know Joe Monagle, who is a very successful remote viewer in the military's program of remote viewing, actually said that he thinks the best remote viewers come from traumatic childhoods that involve dissociation because they learn to do that. And dissociation is kind of a big concept here, especially when you realize that these modern scientific models of consciousness are one where each and every one of us is kind of a dissociated eddy current. from that primordial mind. But from my perspective, and I think this is also true in looking back on your life, like so in the kind of general rubric of life reviews, but just in reflecting on your life, I think a lot of people come to realize that those hardships and difficulties in many ways gave them a gift. And it's how they adapt to it. It's how they responded to it, how they kind of grow as a soul through that challenge. that to me starts to make the case that no challenge is too great to serve as a transformational tool for an evolving soul. again, I'm not trying to trivialize the hardship that any person has ever lived through because I realize there's been horrific trauma out in our world. And some of it comes from parents. You look at, for example, those schools that a lot of the Native American children were sent to in Canada and some of the US, et cetera. And I mean, there were just horrific hardships that were perpetrated on these children. And you kind of wonder, how does all this happen in this world? How can there be a loving God associated with all that? And yet I believe ultimately that we're meant to have the resilience and to have the ability to grow through these challenges and hardships. Excuse me. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (48:20.326) So I'm going to venture down the concept of free will. Do you believe our free will? And my first question is regarding life and death. Do you believe that there's some predetermined enter and exit point? Like that's already predetermined. Eben Alexander MD (48:27.15) I'm sorry, what? okay. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (48:40.676) And then as far as like aspects of free will in itself, know, quantum science is kind of inform us that we have maybe this profound ability to, you know, create that we are active creators in this existence, the observer effect and other things. And there's a lot of work that's being done in our own abilities to be able to create in consciousness. So to the degree that free will exists, what's your understanding of that? Eben Alexander MD (49:10.306) Well, as I mentioned a while ago, I do believe there's something to this notion of soul agreements. And what that looks like is that soul groups, and ultimately, of course, even using the word group is kind of misleading because it's done by kind of a higher kind of consolidation of soul, this kind of planning on who's going to do what, what challenges to face, et cetera. But I believe there's something to that. So in other words, I believe that some of the challenges that we face in life. in some ways are pre-selected, but also that is something that evolves as you go. And that's where any kind of appeal to, you know, predetermination of when someone might die, for example. I do not think that's so written in stone. think those things are malleable as you go. so that this whole thing is an open ended demonstration of free will, of souls and of soul groups, but all in a way that presents different possibilities. that allow for mutual learning and teaching because ultimately that's what we're all here to do. And so to me, I think that's that's a very important part of it and that there is absolutely a free will. I mean, to me, you got to remember that materialist science in its most rigorous form would try and would scoff at you for claiming to have free will. And there's a huge kind of group of materialist kind of atheist minds. that think that it's chemical reactions, electron fluxes in the brain. They give it an illusion of free will and conscious awareness, but that ultimately it's all predetermined, just like the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. But it turns out that's only true in a kind of a Newtonian deterministic setting. So once you get the quantum indeterminism thrown into the mix, you start understanding that free will is wide open. You know, the future is not predetermined. And I think the only way to really understand that is to have a deeper understanding of the primacy of consciousness and how all of this is really the physical universe, our events occurring in a conscious mind. And it turns out that, you know, we're each participating in that conscious mind and in this physical universe. But ultimately, we're all contributing. I often use the analogy. It's like that primordial mind, that God mind is a giant diamond and we're each facets on that diamond. Eben Alexander MD (51:40.684) So we offer different perspectives for the one mind and for its mental phenomenal experience. then ultimately we're all interconnected in that process. But it does not take free will out of the picture at all. And I think that ultimately what we end up revealing is kind of the free will of that primordial mind. And it is in a process of self discovery. It's not as if, you some people say, you come back from an NDE and you understand everything at some level and you figured it all out. Well, even the primordial mind, I think, is going through this process of iteration, of allowing this thing to evolve of all these interactive parts of these eddy currents of sentient beings throughout the cosmos participating in the evolution of consciousness. And that's really kind of the way I see it all evolving. That makes much more sense to me. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (52:33.596) I do want to get your sense on religion and how this might have affected your understanding of religions and if you're a religious man yourself and if you follow any specific religion. Eben Alexander MD (52:48.386) Well, you my father took me to a Methodist church every day growing up. And I remember getting in this big discussion with my confirmation teacher in sixth grade because I had read a lot about George Gamow and his reaction to Big Bang cosmology. And so I was trying to educate my Sunday school teacher about, you know, Genesis is not the real story. It's all about the Big Bang. You know, so that's the kind of thing I I was, I was into, was trying to come to an understanding of the world. And yeah, I was open to what was being taught in church and all. And yet I was so seduced by science and again, the material of science. And I'd like to inject one quote here that I think is very relevant. It's a quote from Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the uncertainty principle. I think he won it in 1932, but he said the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will lead you towards atheism. at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for And what he meant by that is that quantum physics completely changes the equation, all that Newtonian determinism. And also that determinism was reflected in Einstein's relativity theories because they involve these block ideas of time that also involve predeterminism. And yet this quantum physics really opens the door, this indeterminacy of quantum physics, and it's playing out right at the level of neurons. know, most neuroscientists will tell you that that neurons are right there at the heart of our phenomenal conscious experience and awareness. And they're quantum computers. mean, John C. Echols wrote a beautiful book on how the self controls its brain. And he was demonstrating that any of those complaints from materialist scientists that pretended that you were violating conservation of energy laws at the neuronal level, because Echols showed that the fire and no fire decision was well within Heisenberg's uncertainty limit so that kind of top down causal principles could easily participate in that fire, no fire of neurons, which is right at the heart of, you know, our phenomenal conscious experience, according to modern neuroscience. Now, from my perspective, you have to go multiple levels deeper than that, because I think that the life review, especially as it's described by so many, a third of people who describe life reviews in big series. Eben Alexander MD (55:15.296) A third of them say their entire life is involved. And how can you involve your entire life in a life review and a 10 minute cardiac arrest? Well, you can if that realm is completely timeless. If you're in eternity, when your kind of mental position is in that spiritual realm and it completely allows for that. The other thing, of course, as we've said, is that people in life reviews and large studies, three quarters of them say that it's from the perspective of everybody involved. So in other words, if you've been handing out pain and suffering to others, you have to feel that in the life review because you become them and feel what it felt like to be dishing that out. and that's why when people ask me about Hitler's life review or, know, pull pot or something like that. Well, you know, when you've participated in something that killed 53 million people like world war II, that's going to involve one hell of a life review, literally, because we do have to kind of feel what we've handed to other people. It's not, you know, these life reviews are, they're reported in at least half of NDE's. And, you know, I think we need to take it seriously. But to me as a scientist, what the life review is really telling us is we need a much deeper dive in terms of trying to explain here now in this material universe, because the fact that you can go through your entire life in a review form. in very detailed and it's like a reliving and that can happen in a, in a 10 minute cardiac arrest. That means we need to pay much more attention to what the they're telling us. And instead of the old days where material scientists would say, that's all a hallucination to dream. You know, forget about it. The dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. Well, no, there's something bigger going on here. And that's why I think understanding the importance of life reviews and what they tell us about the nature of reality is very crucial. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (57:11.098) You alluded to this earlier, the further you move away from the source of all things to God or love, the core in which you were referring to, there's a more experience of kind of darkness and potentially like spiritual battles. Do you believe there is an entity of spiritual battles of light versus dark? Does evil exist in this way outside of our material world? Eben Alexander MD (57:35.746) Well, I think that at very superficial levels, that is, as you get out towards this material realm and the very most superficial aspects of that spiritual world, I think that there's plenty of apparent kind of darkness and evil. So I'm not questioning the reality of people who experience various kind of dark forces. You know, in meditation and in the E in dreams, what have you, in psychedelic experiences. I think that there are some some darker entities. But to me, for example, my reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead is one where they use dream work to get ready for death. But they also acknowledge that the basically those kind of demons that you might see at those early phases, like what I. might have seen in my Earth or my view, in many ways they're just slightly altered perspectives of self that also assist in this kind of process of just as the life review does, who kind of self-reflection, there's a way that I think some of those apparent demons, know, or evil spirits in many ways are there to kind of help nudge us in the right direction. So don't necessarily see them as countering forces. I mean, and this discussion for me reminds me very much of often discussions of near-death experiences in general, and especially the hellish or negative NDEs, which are maybe five to 6%. They're not that common. They're certainly less reported than benevolent NDEs. I mean, people are more scared to talk about them even than a regular NDE. And yet what you find is even in those hellish Indies, people, even if they discover what they label as Satan, the devil, they end up coming back with very same positive transformational effects. They come back and realize that it's important to love others and to treat others well. and I think that's an important thing to get that ultimately the goal of all this is nudging us towards kind of a love of the creation. Eben Alexander MD (59:54.926) creator for the creation towards a more harmonious loving existence with each other and really acknowledging that we're all simply versions of that primordial mind. So we're sharing the dream of the one mind in many ways. And that is one that ultimately is leading us more towards oneness, harmony, harmony and togetherness. Now, religions have had thousands of years to teach the golden rule, know, the golden rule. You don't even need religion to get it. But near death experiences and the literature on near death experiences are rich with those kinds of stories of of love and compassion and kindness. That is a deep lesson they learn. And that includes even if they have a hellish NDE, sometimes even more strongly, they come back knowing the power and importance of love in their lives. So. I think all of this is kind of gently nudging sentient life and civilizations towards a more loving, acceptable, kind and less ego focused, less narcissistic kind of existence. And I believe that, in fact, when you look at the world at large, you know, as much as we're all alarmed now, there's some terrible things going on for sure in terms of political polarization, violence, the conflict, warfare. And yet. if you compare this to say the mid 20th or early 20th century, we've gotten a whole, whole, whole lot better. I mean, battlefield deaths. I mean, in world war II, you had bombing rates at night where you had a hundred thousand people dead the next day. And now we've got these horrific, battles going on in the middle East and in Ukraine. and they're tragic and horrible. And I hate it. You know, when 80, a hundred people are killed. in these raids, but it's not like World War II and some of the darkest days in the mid-20th century as we're trying to move away from some of our worst warring instincts. And the same is true, for example, for violent crime in cities and things like that. There's been a decrease over time. And I think ultimately this effect of life reviews and of nudging all of humanity more towards loving oneness and kindness is ultimately having an effect. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:02:20.282) I appreciate your time. And I certainly hope you have a little bit more time to explore a couple other issues that are really meaningful to me. And one of them is the, you know, profound mental health crisis that is really prevalent in Western societies. There seems to be a real loss of meaning, more fear and anxiety, people identifying themselves with depression, and then turning to psychiatric drugs or other external means to try to kind of numb or detach from that experience. And what I'm probably most known for is being very outspoken about two things, the labeling of them as illness, as if there's some material medical condition and it's separating us from the role that emotions play as powerful energy, as informing us that, you know, there's things in our lives that we have to face and overcome. I kind of see that as very dark and very evil to disconnect people from that and just label it with a condition. As well as the continued normalization of this as a disease and pushing more and more people to pharmaceuticals. I want to just kind of get your sense on maybe how you conceptualize and think about the trials, tribulations and challenges that, you know, we'll go through and what we end up labeling as mental illness. Eben Alexander MD (01:03:41.4) Well, I think for one thing, I often say that some of the worst aspects of our current world are a direct result of a false sense of separation that's inherent in materialist thinking. So you think about the materialist science, know, reductive materialism. You break something down into all its little parts, break it down into electrons, protons, quarks, know, photons, et cetera. and then you understand the physical laws that govern those things and you can understand how all of reality emerges. That's kind of the conventional approach and it really doesn't work. And it's that false sense of separation that I think gets us so much into trouble. And especially when you combine that with a misinterpretation of Darwinian evolution that focused too much on competition and not collaboration and cooperation. between members of a species and also between various species. I just saw a YouTube video this morning of an elephant that was lifting a gazelle out of a raging river. I saw it a few days ago of dolphins serving as midwives for whale birthing. You have this incredible, beautiful sense of animal and the animal kingdom in the natural world of basically sentient beings helping other sentient beings. even when we don't necessarily expect it. And the reality is that is, to me, a huge part of the benefit that I see coming in the form of this revolution in thinking about the brain mind relationship and the nature of consciousness and the nature of the spiritual. And so ultimately, I feel that as we begin to focus much more on relationships with each other, what we're here to share and do together. which is what you find, for example, in the near-death experience literature, an incredible focus on love and kindness, on the emotions of our connections with others, on the fact that unconditional love is really the best answer at any time. It's what we reflect out, what we project out to the world at large is what the universe thing gives us back. So the more we can move away from that false sense of materialistic separation and more into Eben Alexander MD (01:06:04.406) and acknowledgement of the one mind and how we're all sharing that one mind. We're all in this together. We're here to help each other and start focusing more on relationships. I think you'll find that a lot of that kind of dysfunction and kind of trauma in our world today will slowly start to dissipate because we'll help people by bringing them back into a much more natural mode of operation, which acknowledges the importance of loving and caring for others. to me, you know, working my, spending my life as a doctor, as a physician, I know the benefit that come to me as a person from helping others. If they're in deep trouble, you know, the more I can do to help them, the better. That's why I loved having a very advanced neurosurgical training so I could take people with very advanced diseases like malignant brain tumors and aneurysms, things like that, and try and restore them to a very wholesome and healing life. But ultimately, I think that for each and every one of us coming into this wholeness involves a kind of a shift that views our ability to serve as helpers, to be here to help others and to seek out those in need and to try and help the least, the last and the lost. And then ultimately getting away from this egocentric narcissistic self-focus can be very healing. I there's something very therapeutic. about helping other beings, not just human beings, but our animal friends, et cetera. And the more we can do to make other lives better, I think it ultimately makes our lives better too. And I agree with you in many ways, I've especially kind of recoiled against, I remember when I was training as a medical student back in the 70s, 80s, that kind of thing. and thinking that some of those psychiatric drugs, the SNRIs, SSRIs, et cetera, I saw them as having great benefit, but over time I also realized there were side effects, and then I started realizing people were being put on them, and then these arguments from the pharmaceutical company about, if that's not working, we've got this that you can add to it, this and that, but ultimately to me it seemed kind of foolish because I think they were kind of missing the target. Eben Alexander MD (01:08:25.0) And I'm much more of a fan of meditation. I believe we have the ability to bring healing and wholeness to ourselves in very powerful ways. And remember also that the ego is right there at the source of so many addictions, know, addictions, not just alcoholism and drug addiction, but addictions to work, addiction to exercise, addiction to sex, addiction to love. I we can be addicted to a lot of things. And that in most cases is that ego mind. trying to convince us through the tools of fear and anxiety that these are things we need. And that's why I think meditation, centering prayer, which for me is kind of the same thing, these are all ways of getting into mind, into that realm of the mental. And that's where we have far more influence. so for me, when I meditate, that little ego voice of Eban Alexander, is right there at the entry saying, I want to know this or that, or makes a certain observation. But then when I start writing those sacred acoustics tones, that ego voice just goes into timeout. And that's a very important step in meditation is to take the voice in your head. love how Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, he calls the voice in your head, your annoying roommate. And that's a very good way to put it, because what I would suggest is each and every one of us as a higher soul. has access to far richer kind of ingredients coming into growth and coming into wholeness. But they involve an acknowledgement of the oneness of mind and that we're all really here to serve and help each other. And the more we can kind of shift that focus and move away from the kind of egocentrism and narcissism that's right at the heart of drug and alcohol and other addictions, I think we start to move in a very healthy and wholesome and healing territory. So from my perspective, meditation, centering prayer, and for anybody out there who needs a tool of what I use is sacred acoustics, form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment. can go to sacredacoustics.com to learn more. And I'll also put out there that there is a peer reviewed pilot study of sacred acoustics tones in the treatment of anxiety. It was published by Dr. Anna Youssouma. She's a Manhattan psychiatrist. Eben Alexander MD (01:10:46.05) And she found in her study of sacred acoustics that over a two week listening period she had a 26 percent reduction of anxiety symptoms in her patient population versus only a seven percent reduction in the control group that got standard talk therapy for anxiety over those two weeks. So to get a 26 percent reduction just by listening to sacred acoustics tones through headphones, that's pretty amazing. And what I will tell you is given my kind of understanding of how Sager acoustics works. Basically by going down to the lower brainstem to a circuit that arose more than 300 million years ago and by oscillating left right oscillation in that low brainstem circuit, you're doing something even more powerful but similar to what you do in EMDR. Eye movement desensitization reprocessing which involves oscillations in the midbrain to move the eyes left and right. Well here we're going to an even more primitive level. using sounds to oscillate the lower brain stem. And that's where I think this real power is coming from. But I've learned to use differential frequency brainwave entrainment as a very effective tool in recovering memories of my NDE and cultivating relationships with the various guides and kind of the wisdom, the God force of the NDE, et cetera. I mean, to me, meditation is a very powerful tool to help people kind of align with their higher soul and kind of move beyond the impediments of the ego and ego-mind. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:12:17.828) So the messages that you're sharing have been shared by other people that I've had on this podcast. I've been reading about this. The Course of Miracles is a good example. Have you read The Course of Miracles? Eben Alexander MD (01:12:29.738) I've not, but I've had so many people reach out to me about course miracles. I have an idea of what all is involved in that. And yes, I would love to read it one of these days, but, it sounds like it's very aligned with, with a lot of this kind of discussion. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:12:43.962) Yeah, I'm three years into it. That's the extent of the richness around it. And one of the most important, if not the most important message is that, you know, the one sin that is described is the illusion of separation. And one of the things that you're sharing here is that when we become connected and attached to the ego mind to serve ourselves, to serve our own needs, our own desires, that's a root cause of a lot of suffering. And when Eben Alexander MD (01:12:46.286) Uh-huh. Eben Alexander MD (01:13:13.688) Right. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:13:13.946) you go into meditation, you're facilitating that process of separating from that ego mind and you're connecting to source consciousness, you're connecting to God, you're opening yourself up to the oneness of all things, which if your experience is similar to mine, then there is an access there to a knowledge or a wisdom that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to attain when we're just thinking ourselves or we're in our own minds and our own heads. And that attachment to that ego self is also attachment to our bodies and the time-limited nature of this Eben Alexander MD (01:13:42.935) Right. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:13:51.484) existence. So we worry and we fear about sickness and illness and money and our who we are in this world and the safety and health of those around us and you know what we're going to do tomorrow and where are we in the standing of our community all those things everything that's that's creating this energy in us that we we understand it or label it to be anxiety when you're able to disconnect from that you're getting to a place of peace. that you otherwise cannot experience. Eben Alexander MD (01:14:22.958) Absolutely. Well, that's, that's beautifully put. And to me, uh, I mean, as Karen will tell you, you know, um, by the way, she's the co-founder of sacred acoustics. is my wife and co-author of the book, living to mind for universe. Uh, but she realizes how much I thrive, uh, with my meditative experience. But of course it's not just meditating, but that does give you a tremendous sense of peace. Uh, and also helps to clarify kind of goals and kind of aspirations, but it really makes life just so much more kind of pleasant and harmonious and just seems to flow. And I'm sure that meditation over time has also kind of changed my normal waking consciousness to where I'm much more kind of accepting and comfortable with being in the moment. And a lot of that has come through this kind of very rich interplay with meditation and kind of a very playful enjoyment of engaging with my higher soul and with, you know, everything that I can glean from these these kind of adventures. And I often just open it up in a meditation. just the the intro is very simple. It's just what do I need to know now? You know, that generic, that wide open and the universe has the intelligence that it can fill in that blank. And so I've learned not to try and follow the breadcrumbs of my linguistic brain and rational logical argument, but to actually use the meditation to blank all of that process and allow my mind to much more freely engage and cultivate a relationship with those spiritual realms. And I've found that especially over time, it works very effectively. And to me, I cannot imagine my life today without meditation. mean, there's just no way. For one thing, it would be very kind of discomforting, but it also would be far more lacking in kind of fulfillment and understanding and wholesomeness. And of course, that fear of death is also deeply tied to that little ego mind because the ego will do anything to avoid its own elimination. But in fact, I'm sure you're aware as being in psychology, often you have to do a ritual sacrifice of the ego. Eben Alexander MD (01:16:45.57) to liberate the person into this kind higher awareness where they're no longer enslaved by the ego itself. So it's just a different way of seeing our conscious awareness, who we are, what our role is in this world. But the more we kind of open up and don't just follow that annoying roommate's voice wherever it may lead us, but actually start engaging with that higher soul and with that God for us. That's where I start, all of us start coming into healing. And the value of this should become especially apparent when you recognize that near death experiences are often associated with what we would have to label as miraculous healing or very unexpected levels of healing. My case is just like that. You know, the as was made clear by the doctors who wrote the case report by medical record. But something not stated in that report was a challenge from the peer review editors. who said to them, how do you explain this unprecedented recovery? And they said it's because he had a near death experience and they want a near death experience in the title of the paper so it would be searchable. And they knew that was important. The NDE, the spiritual journey was crucial in my healing. And that was something the scientific peer review editors at the journal said, OK, now we have a reason. And they were willing to publish based on that. They had an explanation. It's not what many scientists would prefer for an explanation, but it certainly is one that most of us would agree makes some sense. And, you know, I think that's very important. Anita Morjani, who's a stage four advanced lymphoma, disappeared after very spiritual NDE. Dr. Mary C. Neal, who wrote the book To Heaven and Back, she's an orthopedic surgeon who had an over 30 minute warm water drowning. kayaking in Chile in the late 1990s and was brought to the surface dead, you know, which is what you'd expect after more than 30 minutes in a warm water drowning. And yet they resuscitated her and she ended up making a complete recovery. Well, she also had a very deep, rich Christian spiritual NDE. So these NDE's are just an example of how when we have the opportunity to have this deep, rich kind of spiritual engagement with the universe at large. Eben Alexander MD (01:19:08.126) It can enable a tremendous amount of healing and wholeness kind of just in the pursuit of our goals for existence. And so it really kind of allows us to have far greater power in coming into wholeness in our lives. And that's that's where I would say the real importance of this kind of spiritual, meditative, prayerful awareness is so important in the modern world, because, know, People think science can do this, science can do that, medications can do this and that. But what they've lost sight of is the fact that we all as sentient beings have a tremendous amount of power in coming into the being we came here to be. But it involves a serious engagement that moves beyond the petty little manipulations of the ego mind and identifying much more fully with that higher soul mind that we all truly have as the essence of our kind of awareness. and we simply have to wake up to that. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:20:08.848) Final question, I could probably talk to you for hours, but I certainly want to be respectful of your time. I've had so many healthcare professionals come onto this podcast and what we're often analyzing is the broken nature of the allopathic medical system and the chronic disease epidemic that plagues Western societies, the United States in particular. And... what continues to be brought into the conversation from those who have witnessed what we call medical miracles or spontaneous remission is more of a connection to nature and surrender to God. And so, I'm interested in, given everything that you've experienced and learned, maybe what would be your kind of takeaway message here for people if we were going to try to understand root cause of disease, try to improve the quality of life and living not just in the United States but across the planet, and try to remake our healthcare system, what would you emphasize? Eben Alexander MD (01:21:16.802) Well, absolutely emphasizing spirituality and prayer would be a big part of the initial package. I want to mention one book in answering your question, and then I'm going to go into more of an answer. But I want to mention the book because it's a pretty pure attack on exactly what you're talking about, the broken medical system and all of that. It's by a friend and colleague. His name is Dr. Norman Naeem, N-A-E-E-M. and his book is called Healing from the Inside Out. And I highly recommend it. He's an intensivist from Toronto. And he writes very beautifully about the major problems with our modern world and with healing in the modern world, especially as we've moved away from any kind of spiritual approaches. Now, his very kind of hard knocks approach comes from his years in the ICU. mean, he's not messing with people who are a little sick. He's been with extremely sick people. But in his book, he makes it clear that your very kind of meaning and purpose in life and your satisfaction life, every bit of it depends on coming to a deeper understanding of why you're even here. And that is ultimately tied in with the diseases and challenges that we face in life. And his book is a very eloquent exploration of that in the modern setting. And then getting back to your question, I would simply say that we need, I think, meditation, centering prayer, these are all things in medicine I think many of us have come to realize over the last few decades can play a far more significant and important and impactful role in leading to wholeness and healing. And I think that would be a big part of both nursing and medical training programs. is more of an emphasis on meditation and centering prayer and how these things can influence someone's well-being. know, from my perspective, nurses have been kind of ahead. They were ahead of me, I'll say. I often say they're ahead of many of us doctors. And I know that I had nursing staff who were trying to teach me some of these deep lessons about spirituality because what they would see at the time of death. Eben Alexander MD (01:23:43.342) And, you know, at the time of death, sometimes or very often I was not there for my patients when they died. You know, I was busy trying to heal those I could heal. But the reality is the dying process itself can bring a tremendous amount of healing and kind of energy to a soul group that is not to be dismissed. So even the dying process is something that I think can be such a gift. I know that I had Hundreds of people come up to me in the early days of giving my talks about my experience, know, beginning two years before the book Proof of Heaven came out. And these people come up to me after my talk and they say, I've never told anybody before this before, but and then they'd share a story with me that could change the entire world. And those stories, I think. And they were often of an after death communication or something that happened right at around the time of death. Sometimes there are shared death experience, shared death happen in perfectly healthy, normal people, often a relative, sometimes a healthcare worker. But the departing soul will take along this other soul, the bystander soul, even to the point of witnessing a full blown life review before the bystander soul comes back to this world. So there's a lot of incredible energy around death itself. that I think is not very well used by our society. But the more we come to embrace death, the more we come to honor it, celebrate life, you know, a complete shift in how we look at this dying process and the loss of a physical body, but one that acknowledges this emerging reality of eternity of soul and of the importance of soul groups and of the binding force of love and bringing us all together. These are all very healing and kind of wholesome concepts to bring into our existence. And the more that they can be brought into our general lifestyle, our very kind of day to day existence, the more we can start to alleviate that false sense of separation and all of the toxicity of the ego narcissism that we have in our modern world and start helping people to get into much greater alignment with the life they truly came here to lead. So from my perspective, opening up to this greater kind of wisdom and possibility. Eben Alexander MD (01:26:04.351) for identity of the self beyond the ego and much more with the interconnected higher soul is one that leads ultimately to harmony and healing and wholeness. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:26:15.94) Well said. To conclude, where can people find more about your work? One of the things you mentioned here, which I'm going to certainly take a look at today to enhance my meditation, is sacredacoustics.com. But where else can people be directed to your work? Eben Alexander MD (01:26:31.214) Well, I'd start with ebbenalexander.com. That's E-B-E-N, alexander.com. And especially the recommended reading list there. are papers with scientific papers with hot links right to the paper and they're organized in categories. So it's a pretty useful recommended reading list that will really help people get up to speed on this stuff. Also at ebbenalexander.com, your 33 day journey in the heart of consciousness. When you first get to my welcome page, that 33 day journey will kind of bubble up. looks something like this. 33 day journey. And you put in your email address and a first name and you're off and running 33 days of emails on hot topics from the book, Living in a Mindful Universe. In fact, this is a workbook that goes with it, but it's free. It's available to everybody. So you can freely share that. Also the FAQ page at evanalexander.com is important to many people, especially those who want to see kind of me in bigger context of the modern media empire and media world. There's a lot of information there, a lot of links. So all of that at EvanAlexander.com. The other place to go is Innersanctumcenter.com. That's I-N-N-E-R-sanctumcenter.com. That's a website Karen and I developed. It's mainly Karen's brilliance behind it. There's several things available there. One is a mental health practitioner course. that we did with Dr. Anna Youssef that's available, but it does have a cost. But there's also a free set of interviews, more than 50 interviews we did during the pandemic with thought leaders around the world and other experiencers, all available for free at IntersanctumCenter.com. There's some other things going on there too. But between Evan Alexander and IntersanctumCenter and SacredAcoustics.com, I think you've got plenty to work with there and of course in the books, there's the Proof of Heaven is now out in a 10th anniversary edition that has 32 additional pages beyond the original book, including six pages in a new forward that's very important in bringing all this together into the current era. And then of course, Living in a Mindful Universe, the book that I wrote with Karen is our third book and that's by far the most powerful to date in terms of connecting the science and spirituality together. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:28:50.428) Great, thank you. I can't tell you how grateful I am for your time and your willingness to speak to my audience. Dr. Eben Alexander, I want to thank you for a radically genuine conversation. Eben Alexander MD (01:29:00.418) Well, Roger, thank you so much for having me on. It's been a real joy talking with you and thanks for doing what you do to get all this out to the world. So thank you so much. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D,ABPP (01:29:08.496) Thank you.