Near-Death Experiences Explained by 3 Doctors: Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Anna Yusim & Dr. Mitch Abrams

Eben Alexander

And so there really is nothing for people to fear about death and dying. And that’s what I think is such an important deep lesson from near-death experiences in this entire literature.

Mitch Abrams 

I realized that the system was purely focused on my body and there was very little attention to my mind, to my spirit.

Anna Yusim 

There is more to life than the physical reality that we are taught about and that the brain and the mind is one part of reality, but that there is perhaps a transcendent soul that Eben and Mitch are talking about.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lorne Brown. For centuries, science has been extraordinarily successful at helping us understand the natural world, but some of life’s deepest questions still remain unanswered. For example, what is consciousness? Is it simply produced by the brain? Or could consciousness be more fundamental with the brain acting less like a generator and more like a receiver or filter? Today’s conversation explores a growing paradigm shift, not one that rejects science, but one that asks whether our current scientific model is complete. Our featured guest is Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who once firmly believed consciousness was nothing more than the product of brain activity. That belief though was shattered after a rare case of bacterial meningitis that left him in a week-long coma. During that time, he experienced what he describes as a profound near-death experience that completely transformed his understanding of consciousness and reality, which I hope he’s going to share with us today.

His bestselling book, Proof of Heaven, introduced millions of readers to that remarkable journey. In his follow-up book, The Map of Heaven, he expanded the discussion by exploring evidence from the near-death experiences from scientific research and spiritual traditions. And more recently in his latest book, Living in a Mindful Universe, co-authored with Karen Newell, he asked an even more practical question. How can we begin exploring these expanded states of consciousness without needing a near-death experience ourselves? Joining Dr. Eben Alexander today are two returning guests to the Coherence Code Podcast. Dr. Mitch Abrams is a radiologist whose work explores coherence, consciousness, and the energetic nature of reality, reminding us that much of modern medicine already depends on measuring invisible signals rather than directly observing matter. Also returning, Dr. Anna Yusim. She’s a board-certified psychiatrist, researcher, and author of the book Fulfilled. Her work bridges spirituality, purpose, and evidence-based mental health, helping patients integrate science with meaning, intuition, and inner transformation.

Together today, my intention is that we’ll explore whether consciousness extends beyond the brain, what the current evidence suggests, and perhaps most importantly, what practical lessons each of us can apply today to live with greater awareness, healing purpose, and connection. Doctors Eben, Mitch, and Anna, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. 

Eben Alexander

Great to be here, Lorne. Thanks for having us.

Anna Yusim

Thank you

Mitch Abrams 

Thank you. Great to be here.

Lorne Brown 

So Eben, I want to start with your story because I think it’s been over 20 years ago. If a patient had described a near-death experience to you, what would the old Eben have it said? And what assumptions about consciousness were you absolutely convinced back then? I want to know before the time, because a lot of our listeners may not know of your story, so I kind of want you to set us up for what we’re going to talk about today by sharing your story.

Eben Alexander 

Okay. Well, my near-death experience happened in November of 2008. And so before that time, I’d spent 54 years of my life honing a very kind of conventional scientific worldview, and that’s one that would be based in physicalism or materialism, the notion that only the physical world exists. That’s what we measure with all of our scientific tools. And this notion that I was a living example of what John Eccles called promissory materialism. That is the notion that if we keep studying the physics of the brain, sooner or later we’ll uncover how consciousness works. And I now know that’s completely false, that materialism is not the right answer at all, that there’s much more needed for this universe for us to explain it. And we’re just mirroring what others have gone through on this journey. For example, William James, head of psychology at Harvard back in the late 1800s, knew there was something more necessary to explain consciousness than just the brain.

Likewise, Wilder Penfield, renowned neurosurgeon from Canada writing 1975 Mystery of the Mind, having stimulated the brain in awake patients, he knew there was something more. And that’s basically what I was bound to discover through this severe case of meningitis. But patients, families, nurses, they would share these stories with me and I would say, “Well, maybe, maybe.” I wasn’t ruling things out, but I was certainly having trouble explaining how consciousness could survive the death of the brain and body. And that’s why I think my week-long coma due to meningitis was such an incredible gift because it completely disabled my entire neocortex was involved. CT and MRI scans showed that. And yet I had the most profound, rich, spiritually transformative, detailed experience of my life all at a time when my brain was very demonstrably offline. So to me, it’s a wake-up call, and there are millions of people who’ve had these experiences, and we should be done with the days of materialist scientists saying, “Well, they don’t fit our materialist model, so forget about them.” And instead look at empirical data is maybe leading us towards a deeper understanding of truth and the nature of reality.

Lorne Brown 

And what you’re suggesting then from your experience then is a massive paradigm shift. And so how do we help people come along on this journey? What consensus or evidence do you have from your journey? What was your experience? And is everybody’s experience unique or are you guys all tapping into the same thing, which I think we’re going to be calling consciousness?

Eben Alexander 

Well, I think the experiences, for one thing, I’ll point out that they are always for one purpose only, and that is to help in the kind of transformational soul growth of the person who has them. And so they’re each unique in that sense. And yet when you study them in large numbers, as the group at University of Virginia, Bruce Greyson being a skeptical psychiatrist who studied near-death experiences for more than 45 years, and you start realizing that there are a lot of similarities and things that suggest it’s a common realm. In fact, it’s kind of surprising given all the very different kind of medical situations that could get somebody near-death, that there’s such a commonality of experience that happens there. To me, that’s kind of astonishing. And then of course, when you study them in richer detail, you start to find out some astonishing facts that I think should be very relevant to our understanding of the nature of reality.

And very specifically, I’m talking there about life reviews, which occur in about half of all near-death experiences, depending on which series. But they’re fascinating. And especially when you realize, as Bruce Greyson pointed out in an article in journal of Near-Death Studies in 2021, that a third of people have their entire life involved in a life review. And you might wonder, how can that happen during a 10-minute cardiac arrest? And it’s only by acknowledging the deep rich nature of these journeys that we’re truly in a timeless realm, that in many ways, time flow in this earthly realm is part of our kind of conscious illusion of being a self and a here and now. And yet ultimately, these journeys show that we’re much grander than that and that we’re all interconnected. I think the most important other fact to mention about life reviews is that in Bruce’s study, 76% said that they were reviewed from the perspective of multiple people involved.

And that’s why I would say the life review is like the golden rule written into the fabric of the universe. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Because in the life review, how we’ve treated others is reflected back on us, and we get to see what that feels like. So ultimately, they’re teaching us to take care of each other, that we’re all here in this together, and then it’s all about that binding force of love that’s so obvious to near-death experiencers to try and bring that back to this world.

Lorne Brown 

I want to unpack a little bit more what you experienced and what the consensus is on the NDEs. And then I’m going to bring Mitch and Anna in a bit more because I need some more medical doctors’ assessment on this as well. And people are looking for, I need more of the evidence. So that’s why we got the team here today. I guess the question will be first, people have death anxiety, and you said there’s a life review, so be kind to other people while you’re here. And there may be people that have not been, but there may be people that are, but then they think they’re not kind enough and now they’re afraid of dying. So in the experience, in the NDEs, yours and others, is it a beautiful experience? Is there punishment? Do people have a reason to fear this transition out of the body?

Eben alexander:

Well, I would say not only in my experience, but in the thousands of experiences I’ve studied in the literature and on the various websites that support them, it becomes clear that love and light, a spiritual home, the sense of comfort is a rich part of these experiences. And that’s also true in the hospice literature, palliative care literature. And so there really is nothing for people to fear about death and dying. And that’s what I think is such an important deep lesson from near-death experiences in this entire literature. Just to review NDEs, if you go to, for example, iands.org, the International Association for Near-Death Studies or other sites like NDERF, the nderf.org website, you’ll find thousands and thousands of cases. And what you end up finding is the vast majority of these are comforting. And even in that, say, five to 8% of the cases that are not so comforting, that ones that we might call hellish or distressing NDEs, you find they still have very positive effects.

People still come back knowing this kind of richness of the reality of their soul. I think it’s pretty clear that in most NDEs, there’s not some judgment from outside, from some higher power. In other words, the Old Testament God that we may have read about is not necessarily so represented in modern NDE studies, but it’s much more of a judgment of higher self witnessing so that in that light and love, if during a life review, we’ve been handing out pain and suffering to others, have been greedy and selfish. It looks especially bad in that beautiful light and love, and yet it’s not a judgment from outside. It’s where we reach our own kind of conclusions about our behavior and recognize that selfishness and greediness really do not align so well with the love and light that’s so apparent to us in our existence in these deep dives, in the spirituality, into life reviews.

And so it’s nothing to be feared at all. In fact, I view it as a tremendous adventure. Another part of the equation though that is to me extremely encouraging and empowering is knowledge of all the many cases of past life memories and children suggestive of reincarnation. And so in other words, the eternity of soul and the interactions of our souls is something that is so clear that we also come to recognize that our souls come back. Even though we have what I call programmed forgetting, that is by age six or seven, even most of those children who have been most heavily written about in terms of past life memories suggesting reincarnation don’t remember the events anymore. They’re covered over naturally, and that’s why I call it programmed forgetting. It’s something that we’re not meant to have all of that knowledge going through these lives. And I think that this kind of bigger conversation is one that allows us to become much more than just our ego selves and much more than just a little physical body living birth to death, but truly eternal souls that interact with each other and that bring gifts to our fellow beings and to the world at large that we can bring in through this kind of knowledge and deeper understanding through processing into ease and talking about them and sharing these stories.

Lorne Brown 

I’ll bring in Dr. Mitch and Anna into the conversation. Mitch, when you first heard Eben’s story, I know from being a radiologist, you’ve been looking at the invisible, at least invisible to the eye. But when you heard his story, why didn’t you dismiss it, being a medical doctor trained in the material world?

Mitch Abrams 

By the time I heard of Eben’s story, I’ve already had gone through much of my experience as a patient. And I was starting my journey into mindfulness meditation into this different perspective because I realized that there was something deeper that our Western medical model just does not engage with. And so –

Lorne Brown 

We can share with the audience because you said patient, you’re a doctor, but patient. Was yours a near-death experience or just a big wake-up call? 

Mitch Abrams 

No, mine was more of a wake-up call. I had open heart surgery for a condition called the hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy. So it was a planned scheduled surgery. But during my recovery, I realized that the system was purely focused on my body. And there was very little attention to my mind, to my spirit. And even as a patient, I had a hard time even recognizing within myself what is it that was missing? I recognized something was missing in this paradigm of healing, but it took time for me to begin to recognize that there was something missing. And part of that was a background of burnout from. I mean, I was just beginning with my first year of independent practice, but by the time I started practicing, I had already started to experience symptoms of burnout. And this was also coupled with the fact that shortly after returning to work, I was appointed the chief of our department.

So the way that we study and define health and wellness was extremely narrow in scope, but also the system itself was so outdated systemically that I felt the degree of compassion fatigue amongst nurses and healthcare providers that I just realized myself there’s something fundamentally missing in our medical model. And so needless to say, when I started traveling to India and started to recognize that there was an entire discipline of science that we’re just not exposed to, and as I began to engage and have these deep inner experiences, when I heard Dr. Alexander’s story, it just resonated to the core. I mean, it was to the point where there was certain truth in his experience that it was helping me make sense of my own inner experience. It was putting words to what I was experiencing. And it was deeply so grateful when I started to see others having experiences that would help me make sense of my own.

Lorne Brown

Thank you. And Anna, when I told my wife I’m having an interview on near-death experiences, she said, “You’re going to really hurt the credibility of your podcast.” And so now I want to ask you this question. How does psychiatry distinguish profound spiritual experiences from maybe psychosis or just hallucination?

Anna Yusim

It’s such a great question. And I also want to echo the words of Eben and Mitch in that in my own experience, I too have had a lot of doubt and was trained in the conservative traditional medical model. I went to Stanford and Yale, and now I’m a professor at Yale. And I then had experiences and was also exposed to the science, like both Mitch and Eben, on the fact that there is more to life than the physical reality that we are taught about and that the brain and the mind is one part of reality, but that there is perhaps a transcendent soul that Eben and Mitch are talking about. And this has become a very near and dear part of my own life and of my own studies. And at Yale, we have created a program for spirituality, mental health in the brain to study precisely the questions that Eben and Mitch have brought up.

And you’re asking about NDEs versus psychosis. Great question. And I think the key really is to evaluate the credibility of the individuals who are giving the claims. And in the research studies that Eben has described, as I understand it, the repeat reports of very similar near-death experiences with light and a tunnel and individuals from your past and the life review, the fact that there is such consistency among the reports together with the people showing cognitive competence. These are not people who are psychotic. They’re not on medication, they don’t have psychiatric diagnoses, they have an experience, and then they return back to their life oftentimes, especially if they’re lucky. So that shows that most likely this is not psychotic experiences, and this is something that perhaps people are enabled to get a glimpse of the outside world or of their so-called transcendent souls. 

Lorne Brown

Thank you. And you had your own experience because we heard from Dr. Mitch how he had a wake-up call, that heart surgery, even had the meningitis. For you, how do you go from somebody trained as a psychiatrist to writing a book called Fulfilled where you’re integrating spirituality with science? So did you have an event that shifted your thinking and paradigm?

Anna Yusim 

I did not have a health event. I had actually a concentration of interesting experiences that took me outside of the paradigm I had been taught in. For instance, at one point in my life, I was going through my own dark night of the soul, having to do with love and work, et cetera, which I can go into here, but I go into in my book. But what I can basically say is that the upshot of that experience was that I started searching. And in searching, I started going to different spiritual lectures. And on the way back from one of the lectures, I felt pulled into this ice cream shop. So I’m sitting eating my ice cream after a lecture, and a psychic with a child comes up to me and says, “I’m a psychic and I have a message for you. Can I give you a message?” And this woman I’d never seen before proceeds to sit down across from me and start to tell me things about my life that she could have absolutely no way of knowing.

I was like, “What just happened here?” These were things that were not in my diary, certainly not on Facebook. They were maybe even on the tip of my consciousness. I don’t even know if I’d articulated some of the things that she was telling me, which I experienced as deep truth. So what that led me to think is here we’re taught in medical school that all minds are separate and distinct, but somehow or another, this woman got into my mind, maybe even into my soul, and pulled something out. What in the world happened? And then the deeper question underneath was that, that’s so interesting. It felt not like I was discovering something, it felt like I was remembering something. It was actually like, oh yeah, that’s how the world works. That’s how our mind works. So what I’ve been taught in medical school is only a little bit of the reality.

There’s actually something vaster. And that led me to study kabbalah, to go to ashrams in India, similar to some of the experiences that Mitch described to study with shaman in South Africa, South America, and learn Buddhism in Thailand to really understand what is the role of the soul in healing? And what is this thing that we call soul that in all of my training at Stanford, Yale, NYU, soul was never mentioned once. And my favorite definition of soul through all that was actually given to me by a Mexican shaman, Fernando Broca, who described the soul as being comprised of two parts. One part being our interconnectedness with everybody and everything. And the second part being our uniqueness as human beings. So our souls encapsulate these two parts, that which connects us and that which distinguishes us. And so that became, for me, the way that I started to think about healing and my work with patients forever after.

Lorne Brown 

I think people want to know then, what’s it like on the other side? We have the world, and some people may be perceiving this as a very dark world right now, so it bring comfort to know that there’s something beyond this life. So the question kind of goes, do we continue on? And why are we here? What is going on on the world as in why are we here? What is our purpose? Because we’re going to lead into at some point practical tips and ideas for people to take away from today. But I think first we have to understand then what have we learned from each of your experiences, even from your near-death experience, and from the research, from the consensus that you are collecting? What is the message that we are getting of what’s going on on the other side or what other realities exist beyond the material paradigm?

Eben Alexander 

Well, I would simply point out that in my own particular case, I think it’s important to understand the background of my life, and that is that I was adopted. My birth mother was 16 years old and unwed when I was 11 days old, failure to thrive. I was taken by social services. She thought she could get me back before Christmas, but it didn’t work out that way. And so I got stuck in a baby dorm for four months before she finally signed the papers to let me be given up. So my first four months were in a baby dorm. And I know my adoptive father, who was a globally renowned neurosurgeon, had told me I couldn’t possibly remember things that happened to me that early in life. And yet I did. I knew there was this kind of smoking crater. And in many ways, I think there was a subconscious doubt as to whether or not I was even worthy of love that dominated much of my life.

All that came into tremendous healing with the near-death experience itself. So this was not just some isolated, oh my gosh, moment, but it actually came in a setting of resolving some lifelong kind of questions I’d had about my own worthiness of living in this universe. And that was a great discovery from my NDE. Of course, anybody who’s read my book or heard me talk about this before realized that that adoption story was also extremely important in my NDE because the guardian angel who kind of guided me through a lot of this turned out to be a figure that was very important to me from my birth family history. So all of this is just a way of saying that I think these are just a mode of self-discovery. And I would say the reason for existence is to know thyself much more richly, and especially as we come to realize that thyself involves the mind of the universe, that we’re sharing this cosmic mind and not just having our individual mind.

Then it becomes a far more exciting and potentially rewarding journey. So to expand the notion of what this involves and how it’s really looking at ourselves and our relationships. I know there’s a big movement in science today to move away from the objects like electrons, quarks, et cetera, but look at the relationships as the more fundamental kind of processes that make up existence. And likewise for us as human beings, there’s no such thing as one soul. That would be like the sound of one hand clapping. But all the souls are working together in this process of evolution, of knowing ourselves, knowing the nature of this universe, our reasons for being together. It’s a great process of discovery. And the little limited version that our ego musters, if we’re kind of swamped in materialism, believing we’re just physical bodies and nothing more, is just the tiniest little shadow of what all is available to us when we come to accept this grander mission of growth and understanding and kind of self-discovery.

Lorne Brown

I’d like you to tell us a little bit more about this interconnectedness. I’m thinking of this. The questions I get is, so how do we know it doesn’t just end when I end? When I go and I get buried, how do you know I continue on? I’m pretty sure you documented cases where young children could remember past lives where there’s no way they would know this and it was quite detailed. And when they would go look up, they would find that this person actually existed. So can you share the best of evidence we have that would make you think there’s more to this life than the finite, say, a hundred years that you get on this planet?

Eben Alexander 

Well, I think again, strictly focusing on the scientific investigation of phenomena suggesting reincarnation is real is a very important place to focus. And that data has been gathered rigorously by serious scientific investigators for at least 65 years now, and includes especially that group at University of Virginia, the Division of Perceptual Studies. And people can go to their website to get a lot of papers and books, et cetera. It’s uvadops.org, and that’s just Division of Perceptual Studies. But they’ve studied more than 2,500 cases of past life, memories and children over the last six and a half decades. And of those 2,500 cases studied, more than 1,700 they’ve actually solved. That is they actually found the person who lived before. This is not just the occasional, oh my gosh, story. This is a very rigorously collected, strong data set that when you read Ian Stevenson’s writing, he was the one who was in charge of this for a long time.

And more recently, Jim Tucker has headed up, although now he’s moved on too. But they’re amazing stories. In fact, one that was vetted by Dr. Jim Tucker that I can highly recommend, it’s a story from the United States is contained in a book called Soul Survivor, S-O-U-L, Survivor. It’s about a World War II fighter pilot who was killed in the battle of Iwo Jima back in March 1945, but then was reincarnated as a young lad in Louisiana in April of 1998, so 53 years later. And it’s an astonishing story that’s so full of rich details of connection that I can’t even begin to list them all, but just amazing stories. I mean, one thing of note is just when the sister of the fighter pilot, who is now in her late 80s, talked to this young lad who claimed to be her brother born 53 years after his death, she was convinced she was talking with her brother and he said things that were said in a way that only he would know about her, et cetera.

So these stories can get very deep and very rich and very kind of amazing. And once you realize that our souls come back again and again, and this is not just like people thought for a while that these past life memories might be just a vague kind of piece of information from the vault of information about human lives, but these children have such engagement. They have fears, they have phobias, they have nightmares. They’re really driven by the events often dictated by the mode of death of their previous life. So these are not just kind of idle collections of somebody else’s lived experience. These kids lived through it. And that’s what to me is such strong evidence that our souls come back again and again. And I look at it as a process of progressive refinement, that it’s all about coming closer to that kind of God consciousness that near-death experiences recognize as part of their experience.

They come back not only believing in, but knowing in a powerful loving force that is right there at the universe and has their back. So these are all just kind of examples of the scientific study of these phenomena. And once you dive deep into that, you realize there’s no going back, that the evidence leads in one direction. And we’ve wasted plenty of time with materialist scientists in the 20th and early 21st century saying that these things violate principles or realities of modern physics and science, but they don’t. They don’t violate it at all. In fact, quantum physics opens very widely to the primacy of consciousness. That’s what the founding fathers of quantum physics were screaming at us a century ago. So I think it’s just time to allow ourselves to wake up to personal experience, begin meditation, centering prayer, different ways of engaging, but the scientific evidence is there.

Anybody who needs more, go to bigelowinstitute.org and you’ll find 29 essays written by scientists five years ago that proves the reality of the afterlife. So the evidence is all around us of the reality of these kind of systems and potentials for human experience, and it’s just up to us to start exploring them and understanding better how they overlap with our lives.

Lorne Brown

I heard you say, and I’ve actually heard all three of you say something of the sense that materialism, so I’m thinking of conventional medicine, materialism isn’t necessarily wrong. I’m hearing it’s incomplete. I was wondering if you guys could unpack that because now we have a chance. Some of your colleagues are probably listening. Some of them may have had glimpses to what you’re experiencing, these experiences. Where does conventional medicine need a bit of a shift then since it’s incomplete, but not wrong? So can you share what your vision is of healing in medicine? And I’ll just kind of go around the room here. I’ll start with Mitch because I know this has been part of your thing based on your experience as a patient, really wanted to change that paradigm.

Mitch Abrams 

As a radiologist, I find it’s fascinating that we can put people into a machine called an MRI and slice the brain like a loaf of bread without a scalpel blade because ultimately we are energetic beings. If you think about the fact that we’re able to extract information from the light of individuals in this concept of this idea that we are actually all beings of light, mind, body, spirit, we talk about this now in medicine or we call it the biopsychosocial model. This is helping us understand that materialism, as you said, Lorne, it’s incomplete. And we’re now shifting into this next chapter in medicine, this next chapter in science. It’s helping us understand this deeper level of reality that our minds that we can actually tap into. And the science is becoming very clear that we each have this ability to tap into this information, to tap into this light, and this has profound healing effects.

And I think it’s not just about patient care, but even amongst our healthcare practitioners, those who are dealing with the emotional trauma and the stress, the burnout, the compassion fatigue. The fact that we are not engaged in this deeper level of understanding our reality is preventing the system to allow to create something that is healing, not just for patients, but also for the healthcare staff. And I think part of what’s driving our burnout epidemic is the fact that we treat ourselves as just these biological physical beings, and it’s a very industrialized model of care. It’s an industrialized model of healing, and it’s just not sustainable. And so as we begin to shift into this broader perspective of dualism and appreciation of this deep interconnectedness, it opens up a whole new world for healing. And I think a big part of this conversation now begins to help people, this appreciation of interconnectedness.

As part of the way that I help in our education programs, a big part of it is helping people learn how to see. And I like to focus on the heart as the very first chapter in this conversation, because when we begin to appreciate the fact that our hearts can synchronize with each other when we have a deep sense of connection or compassion, love for each other, our biorhythms synchronize, our heart rate variability can synchronize with each other, and we begin to then understand a deeper appreciation for our connection to each other. And as we continue down this road, we can begin to understand that just like the trillions of cells in our body, we together on a global ecosystem, that we are also a global community, an entity. And that I believe when you, again, bringing it back to this biopsychosocial model, this understanding that the sense of connection is paramount to healing.

Feeling connected to others, to something greater than yourself is something that is really important when it comes to healing for thriving. And as we better understand that deep sense of interconnectedness, it begins to better explain why the biopsychosocial model is so important and it will help us create more compassionate models of healing.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you. And you reminded me when you said you start to focus on the heart. I don’t know if you remember in the book, but you recommended the book Stalking: The Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov for me to read. And I remember he talked about the physics of science. When you start to focus on the heart, he actually showed what happens inside the heart, some frequencies change, and then how it affected the brain and then the whole physiology. I don’t know, you read it a long time ago. I just finished it a week ago, but I still don’t exactly get what he talks about, but I figured you would.

Mitch Abrams 

Yeah, it’s amazing. Again, the fact that we are more than just these physical puppets, the fact that you can place your attention on your heart, bring awareness to gratitude or love, and the heart rate variability, the patterns of our heart rhythms will shift in towards a very specific frequency of 0.1 hertz. And the moment that happens, it becomes this signal that not only is sent to the brain, but to the entire body. And through entrainment, our biology begins to resonate at that particular frequency, which is interesting because the very first magnetic field line, that resonant frequency around this planet, if you think of it like a guitar string, you pluck it and it will resonate at 0.1 hertz. So the fact that love and what Eben was sharing about love, I think is so true to our core and true to our identity of who we are individually and collectively as part of this planet.

Lorne Brown 

I want to continue on this conversation about the medical paradigm because I think we want to work on that level where it’s going to take it to the population, to the people. So Anna, on the same question, what are you seeing in the paradigm shift and what are you hoping to see change in your profession? 

Anna Yusim

Yeah, definitely. So within my profession of psychiatry, the dominant paradigm focuses on two primary modalities, psychotherapy for the mind and psychopharmacology for the brain. You could think of it a little bit differently, but that’s how I contextualize it. What’s missing in this paradigm is the body and the spirit. So to be clear, the current paradigm is for many people quite effective and quite potent. It helps people get out of depression, prevent suicide, reduce anxiety, reduce OCD, improve their lives. And there is a significant number of people between one-third and two-thirds of people on antidepressants, for instance, or one-third of people who do a combination of therapy and medication who are still unhealed or do not get to the point in their life where they feel really, really good about all aspects of their life. And so our paradigm is limited and lacking. And so what I mentioned is missing is the body and the spirit.

And so what does that mean? I think this is exactly what we’ve been talking about. There is a ton of research showing that introducing spiritual beliefs and practices into mental wellbeing actually improves quality of life and reduces many different kinds of mental symptoms and mental illness, anxiety, depression, et cetera. For individuals with cancer, for instance, no matter how severe the cancer, having a spiritual practice and spiritual beliefs improves quality of life. And it’s been shown over and over and over. So that’s the spiritual part. But the body and a lot of somatic aspects are also lacking from much of psychiatry. The mind and the brain are well treated, but the bodies is often ignored. We know number one, that exercise is as powerful as any antidepressant, even more powerful oftentimes because there’s often no side effects. And in addition to exercise representing the body, nutrition, when I went to medical school, we had two nutrition classes in all of the time that I studied.

And nutrition is what we put into our body day after day. And there’s so much right now known about metabolic psychiatry, for instance, how the ultra processed foods that we eat, the sugar that we eat, our diets, et cetera, have a huge impact on our mental health and wellbeing. So diet, exercise, other things, connection to nature, healthy sexuality and pleasure, all of these things often ignored by traditional medicine. So what I’m hoping to do, and what I often do in my practice is to bring in the spirit and the mind, sorry, the spirit and the body into our brain-mind paradigm to create a mind, body, spirit, brain paradigm overall.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for that. And you remind me of some of Lisa Miller’s research on what she showed around that. Even you mentioned this earlier in our talk today, and I’ve heard you talk about it’s not that it’s wrong or broken, it’s incomplete. Can you elaborate also just on what you’re seeing as a physician and hoping to see a shift on how we do our care and understand the mind, body, spirit?

Eben Alexander 

Well, I think I love the points that Mitch and Anna have made about the oneness of mind. That to me is a very powerful concept in the emerging understanding of the mind-brain relationship from a scientific perspective is what we’re really uncovering is that we’re sharing one mind and that kind of God mind that we’re sharing is something that the brain serves as a dissociation mechanism to dissociate a little eddy current of that God mind. But when our brain and body die during, say, a near-death experience or a death experience, it’s actually a liberation of that awareness to a much higher level. And this is where this whole notion of is the brain a producer of consciousness and pure materialism would insist on that. So obviously that aspect of materialism is false because we’re finding much more unified consciousness. We find things like telepathy. For example, Guy Lyon Playfair wrote a beautiful book on twin telepathy where he stated it’s something like 35% of identical twins are powerful telepathic experiences.

And of course, it’s not just twins who can do this. Identical twins have, given their identical genome and a very similar nervous system, they have a resonance that can allow for this kind of connection across a distance, a telepathic connection. But anyone who’s had a romantic partner that they’re very invested in, things like that, we share our mental connection with many people that we’re close to. I know the day I went to coma, my birth mother, who I just met about a year before my coma, and then hadn’t been in touch with for about three months, but she knew something was badly wrong November 10th, 2008. She said, “I’ve got to call him. Something’s wrong with him.” And she then found out, yes, I’d gone in the hospital that morning deep in coma with meningitis. And so her hunch, her connection to me as a mother, even though we’d spent 54 years of our life apart, was still very strong.

So telepathy, this kind of unified mind is a major concept. And then when it gets to healing and mind over matter, because to me as a physician, one of the most dramatic and valuable ways for us to interact with mind over matter as individuals is in our own health and healing. And doctors have used placebo effect. Placebo effect has been known for thousands of years, but it’s been used for the last 60 or 70 years in double-blind placebo-controlled trials. And when people look at it the proper way, they realize that placebo is not just fooling somebody with a sugar pill, but it’s acknowledging the power mind has over matter to bring us into wholeness and healing. And then you can move beyond placebo effect to spontaneous remissions. Say, for example, go to noetic.org, the Institute of Noetic Sciences website, put in spontaneous remission. As a search term, you’ll find a book that they published back in the mid – 90s with more than 3,500 cases of people who were able to follow their intuition, release suppressed emotions, increase positive emotions, enhance social support, deepen spiritual connections, and having a strong reason for living.

Those are all kind of spiritual things that were found to lead to spontaneous remission of diseases beyond any Western medical intervention. And then of course, you have the next category of spontaneous healing in near-death experiences like my case. There’s a medical case report on my medical records in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, September 2018. It makes it clear that my brain was too damaged to have any kind of dream or hallucination, much less the incredible spiritual experience I went through. And not only that, but how did I come back from it? My recovery was really quite unprecedented given the medical details and parameters of that case. And when challenged, the authors of the report were challenged by the peer reviewed scientific editors of the journal, how do you explain this recovery? And they said it’s because he had a near-death experience. And that was sufficient for the scientific review board to say, okay, well, we have a reason, let’s publish it.

So the reason was a deep spiritual journey, but they knew of other cases of Anita Moorjani who had an advanced lymphoma that disappeared after her strong NDE, or Dr. Mary C. Neal, who had an over 30-minute warm water drowning while kayaking in Chile in the late 1990s, pulled to the surface dead, but then ended up making a full recovery. These were all associated with rich spiritual experiences. And I believe that that is what played a tremendous role in my being able to come back to this world. It wasn’t Eben Alexander’s little ego doing anything, but it was kind of my higher soul being open to this kind of wisdom and understanding and to go through a journey like that. So it’s really just about rising up to the grander souls that we can be coming to a richer sense of understanding our own abilities, not only to know things about this world, but also to influence the outcome.

Lorne Brown 

When you talked about these radical remissions, is that Dr. Kelly Turner’s work that you’re referring to?

Eben Alexander 

Yes, Kelly Turner, she actually took a thousand plus cases that were cancer cases from that Noetic Sciences database. I mentioned the 3,500 spontaneous remission cases. And by the way, that book is being redone now with new data by Helané Wahbeh at IONS.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah at IONS. And we’ve had Helané on our podcast too. She’s great. In Kelly’s book, I’ve made notes of it here, something I wanted to bring up. But when she talked about things that brought these remissions, few of them, if any, were actual medical treatments. She listed purpose, connection, love, following intuition, releasing emotional trauma, deepening spiritual connection, a lot of the stuff that Anna was talking about earlier in her book. So quite interesting. And when you talk about the placebo in Chinese medicine and my training is clinical hypnotherapist, when I go there, my goal is to engage the innate healing. And so from a Western perspective, they’ve called that placebo almost as a negative.Because I don’t see myself as the healer. I’m the facilitator and your body’s going to do the healing, so wouldn’t I want to turn on the innate healing aspect of your body?

Eben Alexander 

Absolutely.

Lorne Brown 

It’s just your intention or perception going into it. And it’s amazing. We’ve given it a negative connotation. I understand if you’re going to do research, you want to see if a pill works, if you’re going to pay for it with assurance. I totally understand. We want to know it works. However, there’s a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bath water where we’ve tried to take away the relationship and connection that we know is so healing, a quick tangent, and then we’re going to go into what can people do? But there was a study that I just got to read recently out of Harvard on an acupuncture study, and they looked at outcomes. And when the patient felt the practitioner cared and there was a relationship, and they did measurements with, I don’t know, fMRIs, and they’re looking at minute facial changes so they could see that they were mirroring each other unconsciously.

When they were linked up, they got better outcomes. So regardless of the treatment, if the patient and the practitioner developed that rapport and there was a relationship of, “I’m safe with you and you care about me,” the outcomes changed. So people are looking for the evidence, there’s more evidence showing that there’s something invisible happening. And I’ve heard many stories where somebody can follow the exact same treatment to physicians and get different results. So what’s the missing piece if they’re doing the same treatments? It’s where are you at in your spiritual evolution and how are you showing up for that patient as well? You guys all talked about love and light and connectedness. I was thinking even in that idea you talked about, and I wanted to get clarified, one of the messages I heard is treat others as you would like to be treated. Is that how you said it?

Eben Alexander 

Absolutely. What I’ve heard all my life is the golden rule. Treat others as you would like to be treated. And to me, life reviews as described in these scientific studies of life reviews and near-death experiences are saying exactly that, that we re-experience in the life review events of our lives. In a third of cases, every part of our life is revisited. But also it’s a revisitation, not as a remembering, but as if the events are still ongoing. And not only that, from the perspective of multiple people involved. In other words, life reviews are telling us we’re sharing the dream of the one mind all in the process of coming to a deeper understanding through learning and teaching about the nature of reality with each other. And this is where we end up discovering more about ourselves and why we’re here and what this is all about.

Lorne Brown 

It makes me think when you had this experience, we have this idea of linear time here, which I’m hearing from so many people is more of an illusion that outside of this Newtonian world, everything’s already happening. There is no time. And so it makes me think that I’m treat others like you want to be treated because it sounds like if you’re rich now, you’re also going to be poor. You’re a man, you’re a woman. It sounds like you’re probably going to get to experience it all. So now’s your chance to just be kind and treat others as you’d like to be treated because you will have the opportunity to know what it’s like.

Eben Alexander 

Well, I would say the life reviews just give us that final opportunity to learn the lessons we’re sitting here to learn. And if we still fall into materialist, egotistical, narcissistic traps, we’ll have to repackage those same kinds of challenges in another lifetime. Better to get it done this go around with a successful living of those events. And especially as Karen often reminds me, why not have a daily review? Why wait for a life review? Just make amends at every moment of the day. Treat people with love, respect, kindness, mercy, acceptance at every turn, and you don’t have to save up all that baggage for a life review. To me, that makes perfect sense. Just do it now. Treat people the way you’d like to be treated and short circuit this whole thing towards the deeper lessons and understanding.

Lorne Brown 

And I want to get into the healing part. And Anna, for you, Eben reminded me of something. He talked about being adopted and they were saying you can’t remember this stuff, but he already knew that there’s this idea, it’s not exact his words, but not belonging or not lovable. And in my practice, when I work with people’s stories and I distill it down, most people are running the same kind of program, not lovable, not belonging, not enough, shame, guilt, regardless of their story. And so do you think belief influences biology? I’m talking unconscious or conscious because you’re a psychiatrist and you’ve written a book, I think, on this topic a bit with Fulfilled. But does belief influence our biology? And what we’re calling consciousness itself can get tapping into that or tuning into that, can it influence healing?

Anna Yusim 

Absolutely. And I think Eben’s story is indicative of how powerful the first few months of one’s life are in shaping who we are, because this is the most primitive time that’s completely nonverbal. It determines how safe we feel, how loved we feel in this world. And if you were in a space away from your parents where tons of babies are being taken care of, probably to the best of the ability of the caretakers, but certainly not as well as loving parents could take care of you, that’s going to have profound impact. And it’s going to be hard even to get to the degree that that impacts the rest of your life. And so I think that Eben’s experiences have been so powerful in opening him to that and changing his life accordingly. And not everybody’s so lucky to get such deep insight into some of their deeply held unconscious core beliefs that could be holding him back in life in certain ways.

And I think, as you said, Lorne, you’re exactly right, that we are a function of our beliefs. And if we’re not aware of our beliefs, especially those that are unconscious, they begin to rule us and we can call it fate or destiny. So being able to see those patterns in our life that may come up again and again, much to our chagrin and dismay despite our best efforts to change it, this is what Sigmund Freud called the repetition compulsions, or in Kabbalah we can call our tikun. Being able to recognize precisely those patterns I think is part of our purpose in life. And once we’re able to recognize them, we make the unconscious conscious, and only then do we have freedom over that part of our life.

Lorne Brown

Thank you for that. The love and light, I need clarification around this because I think when we hear love, we’ll think of Hollywood and romantic love. So much in the NDEs, they talk about love and light. Can I get more of a definition or experiential of what this love is, feels like, or what your sense is? I’m assuming it’s not quite lustful and Hollywood, I’m assuming, but I’d like to hear your experience even, please.

Eben Alexander 

Well, it’s really like an ocean of love and it’s something. The words almost sound trivial, and yet the experience of it is life-changing. That’s why people come back from near-death experiences and never fear death again. They have a new kind of purpose for being. And it’s all because they bathe in that ocean of light and love. And I would say the two things are the same, that God force is light and love, and it’s all there at once. And it’s that bathing in it, kind of soaking in it, absorbing it that also reminds you you’ve been there before. I think that was one thing that was clear to me with the book Proof of Heaven was thousands and thousands of people reached out to me basically because it reminded them of something in their own deep personal experience that they’d even forgotten about, and now they were remembering.

And that’s an important part of getting the kind of power of this ocean of light and love we’re talking about, is when you’re back in it, it brings back such incredible memories. It’s bliss, it’s ecstasy, it’s just a kind of a perfection of being. It’s very comforting. And yet I also sense that that was not an eternal realm, but one that is there to serve as kind of a station to help us with life reviews and planning next incarnations and diving back in and doing it again. Because in fact, this world is where we get the real soul work done from my perspective. And that’s an important thing to understand about this notion of Heaven, that yes, there’s this God force, a pure beauty, light and love that’s not judgmental, but given that light and love and that environment where our life reviews would happen, the things that we’ve done that are greedy and selfish or kind of fall away from that highest potential look especially bad.

So that’s where that light and love is so important. And it also shares with us that reality that in life reviews, you’re remembering relationships. Nothing else matters. You’re not remembering any kind of material successes and things like that. It’s always about the interaction with other souls and the mutual learning and teaching that we share in this process of what I would call evolutionary panentheism. I think that’s kind of the best philosophical definition for the system that I think is at work here. But it really is based wholly in that notion of love and light and compassion and mercy and forgiveness and kindness and taking care of each other. And in many ways, the magic about that love that separates it from the lust of this world would be that it’s an unconditional love. I often kind of use the phrase of the creator for the creation, but say that with the knowledge that we’re co-creating that our emerging reality with that God force so that God is not the ultimate creator of emerging reality.

We contribute to that. That’s why our thoughts, our attitudes, our beliefs are very important because they kind of build up the structure of what we’re able to offer to this world in terms of an understanding, in terms of a wisdom, in terms of a seeing of these relationships and in a way that brings new meaning and purpose to our existence.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you. And as we wrap up, I think the most important question is practical steps. And so I don’t think people want to have a near-death experience to start living today. In my process, I have a process I call notice, accept, choose again. And in short, it’s a bottom-up approach of reducing the noise. So you have all this static like a radio and you can’t hear your own intuition and you’re not in that flow and receptivity. And when we lower the noise, the static will become present. Resistance drops, we can tune into it. I’d like to hear each of your processes that you share so people don’t have to have that near-death experience or wait for the life review at the end and go, “Ah, damn, I got to come back because I got to do it differently. What can they do now differently?” So when they’re at the life review, they’re like, “Ah, I feel like I did it well. I’m good.” Dr. Mitch, can we start with you? And please share if you have books or programs in this process of sharing what you’re recommending for next steps, what people can do today before waiting to die.

Mitch Abrams 

Thanks, Lorne. Well, for me, I find having a regular routine practice is so important in life. And one, having gratitude. So starting the day with a moment of gratitude. And for me, it’s more than just thinking about the things that I have and what I’m grateful for, but it’s really tuning inwards to the inner experience of that energy, of that gratitude, and that I find creates a certain intention for the day ahead. And I would also say that I’m a true believer in the heart. So the heart is so much more than a pump. And when we begin to take time to tune into the heart, tune into that energy, and cultivate that inner experience of love, of that deep connection. I mean, ultimately, we’re all beings of light, and I have this belief system that we are all each reflections of each other’s light.

And so through that perspective, when I tune into my inner light, I’m able then to better recognize the light in others. Even those who may be inappropriate or may be challenging, I can now tune inwards and recognize that there’s a lesson for me to undergo and to at least experience that deep sense of compassion. And in that inner peace, there’s a deep sense of. Healing of certain emotions or challenges that I may be experiencing. And so by experiencing inner self and inner peacefulness, I’m able to experience the connections that I have for others. And I would also mention that part of the work that we’re doing is we’ve created this platform called this Global Heart Sync where people and organizations can sign up, they’ll receive the resources to dive into their heart. And through this hub, it’s a not-for-profit platform where not only do they learn about their heart, they have opportunities to connect as a community, to practice this heart coherence, but it’s also in recognition of our shared humanity.

And it’s a unique platform in that it’s a gamified approach. So essentially as people get access to the use of free biofeedback tools so that people can actually measure their own heart rhythms in real time as they practice these techniques, but they’re also earning points. And these points create the opportunity to create collective milestones that will help us unlock sponsorships, that will allow us to deliver more mental health and resilience programs for communities in need. So we’re creating a platform that helps people connect their own self-care with social impact. It helps people recognize that self-care is a form of social activism. And again, it’s this broadening of our compassion for each other and witnessing this emerging global heartbeat, reframing our identity individually and collectively through this understanding of our oneness.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you, Mitch. And it reminds me what you shared is it’s an inside job, it’s inner work. So the practical tips I’m imagining we’re going to hear is it starts inside and when your being this changes, then your actions change. So right action follows that right thinking or right being. So rather than going out and trying to change the outside world, we’re not saying not to do that, but first clean up your own house and then go out into the outside world. Anna, you talked about remembering, and that again, in my notice except choose again, a colleague, I said it’s a do be, do activity, meaning a little bit of doing to get you into being. And then from that being you do more doing, but right action follows right thinking. And he says, “It’s not a doing what you’re offering, it’s an undoing.” And I was like, “Oh yeah.” And to me, you used the word remembering.

So I think it’s aligned to that. I’d love to hear more about what you’re suggesting for people to do practical steps. And again, where can they find you and more about your book as well would be great.

Anna Yusim 

Sure. Yeah. So I think undoing is a great way to look at it. And the way that I would conceptualize it from that framework is that oftentimes we are a product of so many influences that are not really aligned with our own soul. And those are the influences of our society, our community, our worldview, oftentimes, the polarization in our political system, et cetera. And the key is to distinguish who you really are at the soul core level from all of the other expectations, voices, and masks that can create your identity. And that distinction is key. Being able to know who you really are and then to act in accordance I think is paramount and important to being able to live a truly fulfilled life in a life that is aligned with purpose, with love, with unconditional ways that we want to relate to the people closest to us.

Now, the second part of that is that we have, in trying to understand all of the different forms of our identity, there are many so-called voices in our mind. There is the voice of our mind or reason. There is the voice of our heart or our emotion. And this is a little different from the heart that Mitch is talking about. Sometimes our emotion, I think that in my framework, the part that Mitch is talking about is the soul or the intuition. And because the mind can scream, our emotions can be overpowering. Our heart could be equally emotional and override so much of what we know, but there’s a still quiet voice underneath both of them if we can temporarily quiet both the heart and the mind that can truly guide us to who we really are at the core. And that is our deep intuitive voice.

And that’s underneath all the masks, all of the forms of identity that may be inauthentic and truly aligned with our soul. And then the third thing with respect to what can we do, I want to actually point, I’m sure Eben will be speaking about this, but there’s amazing tools out there similar to what Eben and Karen have created with sacred acoustics that enable people through binaural beats, through other meditations to reach higher consciousness, to be able to experience that part of themselves in real time. And in my practice, I did a study with this important technology that Eben and Karen created a few years ago, showing that that technology has a huge impact on anxiety levels within my patients. And it works synergistically together with treatment as usual in psychiatric care. And we looked at two forms of anxiety, state anxiety versus trait anxiety. State anxiety is more situational anxiety.

Trait anxiety is just who you are at your baseline as your personality. And the powerful meditations of sacred acoustics actually had an impact on the anxiety that’s much more difficult to impact, which is trait anxiety. So very powerful tools out there. So to find the tools and to use them. And then your final question, as to where people can find me, I have a private practice in six states, and you can go to my website, www.annayusim.com. We also have a Center for Spirituality, Mental Health in the Brain that we are creating at Yale. It’s currently a program. We’ll be moving hopefully to a center and an institute soon. And we have regular events there. So if anyone’s interested to join the Listserv, please let me know. We’d love to invite you to our events.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you, Anna, for that. And the binaural beats, quite interesting on my acupuncture table, it’s a sound table, so it gives off vibration frequency and the sounds are binaural beats. So I’m glad to hear there’s some research behind that. And when you’re talking about state change versus trait change, often when people come and they have that treatment, they feel differently. And I will say that’s a state change. Just like I can give you a motivational talk and have a mindset change. You’ll feel good for a couple of hours. That’s kind of the elastic band effect. You feel good, but then boom, you’re back to normal. And when you’re looking for a trait change, that’s the neuroplasticity where if you do something repetitively over time, then it stays. It doesn’t bounce back like an elastic band. So I will share that everything that I think our speakers are sharing, we’re going to go to Eben next.

It’s not a one and done thing. It’s kind of small things done daily lead to massive results. And I think there’s an expression, the longer you do it, the easier it becomes. The easier it becomes, the longer you’ll do it. Even what are some takeaways, practical steps from your experience and the books you’ve written in the teaching that people are listening can start to implement into their daily lives?

Eben Alexander 

After my coma, took about two months to have everything come back to normal, including return of all my memories and everything. And then I dove into books. I was reading books about quantum physics, spiritual traditions, other spiritual journeys. Read about 150 books over almost two years, and then realized that I absolutely had to explore my own consciousness. I had to develop a form of meditation. I had used meditation back in college. It was for very different purposes. Back then I was jumping on the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill parachute team. We were doing free fall formations, and we found that using Silva Mind Control before the jumps, we could do a much better job with our free falls. And then I let it go after college for I don’t know what reason, but now it was time to get back into meditation. Remember reading an article in Scientific American from I think October of 74.

It was by Gerald Oster called Auditory Beats in the Brain. And that’s what really woke me up to the potential power for binaural beats to serve as a form of brainwave entrainment to help people get into deep transcendental states. And so I started working with binaural beats, and that’s how I met Karen Newell. And Karen and I have worked together since about November of 2011, something like that. And the reality is of she and her business partner and sound engineer, Kevin Cossey, they’re the ones who came up with these tones. And the tones are very, very useful to me. I’ve been using sacred acoustics tones for meditation an hour or two a day for the last 12, 13 years, so very powerful. And for me, the way I see them working is basically causing an oscillation down in the lower brainstem through slightly different frequencies into the two ears.

And that’s what gives you that kind of wavering sensation. And that’s a true oscillation in the lower brainstem. And just like with EMDR, with a pendulum for hypnotic induction, oscillations back and forth in the brainstem can be very powerful. And that’s what I found to be the effect of sacred acoustics when I would listen to these tones. And for me, it’s always been to put that little voice in my head, Eben Alexander’s little ego mind, that goes into timeout. And I think there, I hope what I’m getting at is more what Anna has talked about, that kind of higher soul. And I think that that’s what I feel evolving with this process of using sacred acoustics is my ego self goes into timeout. I can make a request, state a question, but then I’ve learned to ride those sacred acoustics tones and get into very deep states, basically like hypnagogic states between awake and asleep.

And where that little voice in the head, I love how Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, calls a voice in your head, your annoying roommate. And to me, that’s the little Eben Alexander ego voice that goes into timeout. But I think what I’m then able to develop is a much richer sense of higher soul that’s interconnected with other souls and that has to do with life reviews and has to do with learning the lessons of these lifetimes, et cetera. So for me, the meditation is absolutely essential. In fact, I know that many people resort, for example, to psychedelic substances to try and get into deep states of spiritual awareness. From my perspective, meditation and centering prayer are more effective. I’m not saying that the psychedelics can’t in some circumstances be a good catalyst, but I certainly don’t believe one needs to take a substance like that on any repetitive basis.

I know Roland Griffiths showed that in his work in pilot studies where he showed things like alcoholism and addiction and fear of death in cancer patients was completely alleviated by one dose of psilocybin. And even a year later, 80% of the patients still benefited from that one dose. So in that sense, the psychedelics potentially can contribute as a catalyst. But from my perspective, meditation, sacred acoustics, binaural beats, brainwave entrainment are very powerful ways to take charge of your life and start developing that relationship with the higher soul with a sense of connectedness with the world at large. And the places people can learn more about all this, go to ebenalexander.com, E-B-E-N-Alexander.com. It’s my website. The FAQ page is of interest to many. There also is a recommended reading list that has hot links to scientific papers and books, and that recommended reading list is also categorized.

I think many people find that a valuable resource. There are many interviews and conferences that are listed on their podcast, et cetera. So a lot of information available, but don’t miss the 33-day journey that’s right there on the welcome page to ebenalexander.com. And that is a 33-day email drip campaign that’ll introduce you to major concepts from the book, Living in a Mindful Universe over 33 days. And more than 14,000 people have taken that course to date, and they leave their own comments and experiences and help each other all in a big community forming on those 33 days. So people can join right now for free. They also get four free Sacred Acoustics sound files for that 33-day journey. So a lot of benefits there. And finally, I would mention sacredacoustics.com and also the website, innersanctumcenter.com, I-N-N-E-R sanctumcenter.com. There are more than 50 interviews that we did during the pandemic with thought leaders around the world consciousness available for free at innersanctumcenter.com

And also a wonderful course on spiritual psychiatry that we did with Dr. Anna Yusim. So Anna and Karen Newell and I did this course available at innersanctumcenter.com. That one does have a professional fee associated with it, but it’s a very high-end introduction from a therapeutic perspective to a lot of these concepts and practices and the actual use of the sacred acoustics tones, et cetera. So these are all ways that people can get on board right now, start joining this kind of scientific revolution, but it’s also a revolution for all of humanity to move away from the false sense of separation that is so inherent in materialist thought and move towards this kind of evolutionary panentheism and the unified God mind that we all share that is part of that emerging picture of reality that the scientific investigation of all these phenomena is beginning to support more and more.

Lorne Brown

Thank you all. And I want to circle back to something you shared, Eben. And all those links, by the way, they’ll be in the show notes on my Lornebrown.com website. We list all the podcasts and all these links will be there as well. You talked about psychedelics. I just wanted to bring this up. I wanted to clarify or emphasize what I think you heard. Interesting enough, I don’t know where we’re at, 160, 180 episodes, mostly teachers of consciousness. They all have said pretty much what you’ve said around psychedelics. They all say they are catalysts. They can be used once, twice, three times, but they’re not meant to be a crutch that you use all the time to tap into this. They all say they’re great to let you know there’s more to this life than what you think to give you an open eye here or opening your eyes, but it’s the inner work that is necessary that you have to develop a practice.

And so that’s interesting because I know in the West we are guilty of if we find something good, we change the dosage and we take something good and make it not so good. So I just want to clarify, that’s what I heard. You didn’t say don’t do psychedelics. You’re just saying psychedelics are not the inner work. They’re just catalysts, but you do still need this personal practice.

Eben Alexander 

Right. I think just in my experience with thousands of people taking our workshops and things like that, I think that the meditation is a far more powerful, effective, reliable way to get some deep spiritual kind of wisdom and growth. I’m not denying that a psychedelic experience can’t contribute for some people who might need that kind of shake to shake them loose from believing in materialist thought is all there is. And the other thing I’d like to mention, if I can take a minute, and that is it’s a good thing the psychedelics are now back in the research sphere because for example, there’ve been a number of papers since 2012 that have shown that people under the influence of magic mushrooms, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, others, serotonin two-way type psychedelics, that in fact, anybody who’s ever taken such a substance would think their brain is lighting up like a Christmas tree on functional MRI of magnetoencephalography.

But in fact, the opposite is happening. You won’t find a single neuron or neuronal node that’s increasing in activity. In fact, this is the subject of Dan Brown’s latest fictional work, Secret of Secrets, is all the science that we mentioned in our book, Living in Mindful Universe, about the fact that the brain is not creating consciousness. This is as clear as a bell. And the psychedelics show us very clearly that the brain is going dark. The default mode network, which is kind of associated with the ego, dissolves under the influence of those substances. But I’ll also point out that default mode network also very reliably dissolves in experienced meditators as they’re meditating. So it’s a beautiful way to get ego dissolution. And our ego kind of represents the self and soul that we are, but it’s not the same thing. And that higher soul has tremendous power for growth and understanding and contribution.

And this is what we’re trying to cultivate through meditation and centering prayer is that notion of a higher soul and its connectedness with that God force and the universe at large and with all of our fellow beings through the binding force of love, compassion, kindness, mercy, and acceptance.

Lorne Brown 

And on that note, I think I’ll say thank you to all three. So Dr. Mitch Abrams, Dr. Anna Yusim, Dr. Eben Alexander, I appreciate your time. I appreciate all the work and studies that you have done. I appreciate your own personal experiences that you had to go through so we don’t have to go through it. And then from it, have the easier process of the tools that you’re sharing in your websites, in your books, in your program. So I like to say thank you for being here today. I really enjoyed and appreciate our conversation. You’re obviously doing your work near the end here. I was sitting here and I was just starting to feel that low level bliss. And I was like, “Oh, those guys have some good wifi.” I’m not talking your internet wifi. I mean whatever you guys are doing. I was just sitting there going, “I think I know what they’re talking about when you’re bathing in that stuff.

I just had a nice little, for no reason at all, just that awareness of low level. So thank you guys for being who you are.

Mitch Abrams 

Thank you

Eben Alexander 

Thanks, Lorne.

Anna Yusim 

Thank you, Lorne.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show, and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.