Near Death Experiences

0:00Welcome to our Paranormal Afterlife. This is an our Paranormal Afterlife remastered episode and I'm your host Simon Bound. I've recently gone back and listened to some of the older episodes and I was reminded just how much valuable relevant insight they still offer. So I'm going to be re-releasing one episode each week now with updated and remastered audio for a much better listening experience. Dr. Eben Alexandries, my guest this week, is the author of the books, The Map of Heaven, Seeking Heaven and Living in Mindful Universe. He's also the author of the best seller, Proof of Heaven. Dr. Eben Alexandros spent over 25 years as an academic neurosurgeon. In November 2008, he was driven into a coma by a rare and mysterious bacterial meningiotein cephalitis of unknown cause.

1:01He spent a week in coma on a ventilator. On the seventh day, he started to awaken. Memories of his life have been completely deleted inside the coma, yet he awoke with memories of an amazing near-death experience. Dr. Eben Alexandre, thank you very much for coming on to my podcast and giving us your time. It's fascinating what happened to you in your near-death experience. I was wondering if you could tell us how that all started. Yes, Simon, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be on with you. Yes, as I discussed in my books, some mainly Proof of Heaven and also Living in a Mindful Universe. Those are the two main books about my journey and my understanding of it. Really, to cut to the chase, it all started in November of 2008 when I was 54 years old and I spent more than 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. Thought I had a pretty good idea about brain, mind and consciousness work.

2:05Then I deepened the coma and everything that I discovered in that journey showed me that all that I believed before was wrong. I had to completely rework my worldview. But essentially, in November 2008, I woke up early one morning with severe back pains and realized I had a severe headache. Of course, anybody out there in your audience with any medical trainingers about severe back pain, severe headache, would be thinking about meningitis. But I was already gone from this world. My brain was being overrun by an extremely aggressive and primitive bacterial infection, but by all right, should have killed me. That's what has sent me on such an incredible journey. My doctor's new, from my neurologic exams, when I first got into the emergency room, that Monday morning, that I was deathly ill from this meningitis. I was deep in coma long before they put me on any sedating medications at all, even though there's some confusion out in the lay press about sedation in my case.

3:09The impact there was one very disparaging article that tried to pretend that I made everything up that I wasn't that sick at all. But in fact, there's a recent medical review by medical records, a case reported in the medical literature that I think will be clear to anybody with any medical training. This was a horrific case of bacterial meningitis. Medical report is available on evanalyxander.com. My blog page, if you look back in September of 2018, I wrote a blog that addressed that medical report, case report on my medical records, and that fully supports the story of how sick I was as presiding improved. Heaven, in fact, the doctors who wrote that medical report, who were not involved in my care, but were fascinated with the medical aspects of my case, came away trying to explain how this recovery happened.

4:11They actually had trouble getting it published because the medical journals didn't leave that this medical record had ever resolved, and somebody actually surviving and recovering. To them, it was just an absurd case that didn't make any sense, so they didn't accept it. The bottom line is in the jury, what happened to me should not have been able to happen according to our modern neuroscience. That has to do with the evidence from neurologic exam, and from CT and MRI scans, that all eight lobe in my brain were affected. I was very deep in coma the entire week I was ill with this meningitis. I had the extraordinary spiritual experience that I described in the book, Proof of Heaven in Great detail, but essentially started an impremative course on responsive realm that I call the Earthworm's I View that I think in retrospect was the best consciousness that my physical brain could muster when it was that devastated with this bacterial infection.

5:13But then I was rescued from that by a slowly spinning white light that came packaged with perfect musical melody. That's what ushered me up into this ultra-real valley, the gateway valleys I called it, I had many Earth-like teachers, but in many ways it was far more spectacular, vibrant, and alive than anything I'd ever experienced in this body, in this physical incarnation. That was a part that so shocking is I would think that with the progressive meningitis like this, that dismantled my neocortex and even my brainstem was badly damaged on day one of this meningitis, why would I have such an expansion of conscious awareness, which is exactly what I did have. In fact, that journey as I described in that Earthworm I View, I was accompanied by a beautiful girl on the butterfly walking. Therefore, those who read Proof of Heaven will realize that for a long time after my coma was discovering the identity of that beautiful girl on the butterfly wing that helped

6:13me to realize that this was a very real journey that seemed way too real to be real because it was real, but it didn't happen anywhere in our foreto-mentioned space-con. I would then ascend up to higher and higher levels beyond that Earthworm I View and beyond the gateway valley, yet again sound, music, vibration, providing the portal to higher levels just as that original portal from the Earthworm I View into the gateway valley involved a transition that depended very much on music. Likewise, the higher level ascendance was going from this gateway valley and all the beautiful scenery there, but through this portal that was offered up by the scooping orbs of angelic wires up above that fueled all the incredible mysticism and power of that journey, that music of those angelic wires and the anthems, chance and hymns, is what ushered me into higher

7:18and higher levels all the way out to what I call a core, which was infinite, inky-blackness that filled overflowing for the divine love of that creative force. Of course, millions and millions of other near-death experiences who encountered that power of infinite unconditional love, it's very healing and it leads one to know that death in the physical body is not the end of existence at all, and that's why near-death experiences are so reassuring and affirming and comforting. And probably the biggest message for this world is that there is nothing to fear about death that we're all in this together, that our consciousness is not generated by the brain at all, but in fact our consciousness is what generates all of emerging reality, and that's what we witness. But this material world is really projected out of the realm of that consciousness, and that's one of the deepest lessons of all this. It's a much richer, more profound understanding of the nature of existence, relationship

8:23of brain and mind, and the very facts around our awareness of existence. But it's completely different from what I would have believed before with the primacy of the physical body, and this kind of misguided idea that the brain is somehow producing consciousness out of purely physical matter. Because my journey showed me very clearly that the opposite is true, and in the 10-year sent my coma, I've aligned with scientists working around the world on these issues of consciousness, and there are more than 100 of us who have participated, for example, in the Galileo Commission report that any of your listeners can find a Galileo Commission dot org, and that is a scientific statement that helps to push forward the agenda that or many of my scientific colleagues are pursuing now, which is one of helping this world to understand that we are all connected from consciousness to that power of mind, that we're all in this together, that things like the afterlife and reincarnation are absolutely

9:27real and not only consist with our modern science and especially quantum physics, but in many ways demanded by that modern sound. So as we flesh out a much richer understanding of what near death experiences and other aspects of non-local consciousness who are trying to tell us, they're really trying to steer us in a direction where we realize that our very fundamental notions about reality from a materialist scientific perspective are wrong and misleading, and it's high time we got it right. So that's why this scientific revolution and this awakening in consciousness is so important to this world at large. There's one thing about your NDE is that your perception was much better, much higher than when in your normal waking state, and which kind of suggests that when consciousness is coming through the physical brain, it's like it's getting dumbed down because the brain can't process it properly. Well, absolutely. In fact, it's kind of shocking when you think about it, just how narrow that bandwidth is

10:31of our moment to moment kind of existence, thinking that we're living in these bodies in a here and a now and have a certain sense itself. And one thing that I've certainly learned through meditation over the last nine years or so, and I try to meditate an hour or two a day and say, for the acoustics, those are interesting ones who learn more about that powerful technique, during the Earth of sacred acoustics.com, but you're exactly right. That's what really comes to the poor is a realization that our normal waking consciousness in these bodies is a tiny little paltry fiction compared to what is available to us when we open our minds. And in a near death experience, the mind is broadly open to a much richer and more integrated reality that is much more like a home for our soul and its growth. So our little ego and our linguistic brain, especially with, kind of, the illusions presented

11:31to us by our modern scientific culture. And that is a science that is materialism, which is not the science of the 21st century. The science from the 21st century, in terms of consciousness, is a much bigger science that fully embraces the reality of consciousness as fundamental. And that's where I think this new emerging science is so infinitely more powerful than describing our world, because our materialist science was absolutely hopelessly lost and even trying to explain any mechanism of consciousness arising from the physical brain. It's something called the hard problem of consciousness, which was put forward by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher in the mid 1990s in his book The Conscious Mind. But the hard problem had been brewing for decades and had been very well defined by many philosophers of mind to really show that the materialist model is hopelessly lost.

12:36In fact, some of the materialist camp will try and tell you that we don't have consciousness. Nobody's conscious. That it's all just illusion. They are so absolutely befuddled by the phenomenon of consciousness itself. And yet that's where I think the science is opening up to a far richer and more profound understanding that will leave the simplistic nonsense of 20th century materialist science of way back in the dust where it belongs. Since you've had the NDE, have you had any of the after effects that other nadeth experiences talk about whether it's they say, you know, they can't wear a watch because they just don't work? I did have a lot of those problems, but that was before I'd even read enough about the near-death experience literature to realize how calm and those findings were. But in the first months after my coma, I had to go through free watches before I finally found one that worked. In fact, that particular watch is one that is physically kind of broken. The stem doesn't work.

13:36It's no longer waterproof as it used to be, but oddly enough, it keeps perfect time, month to month. It doesn't lose or gain a second. So that watch is the most reliable I've ever found, but it was the only one that would work for me in the first two months after coma. Likewise, I would walk down the street at night and the street lights would blink out. And I just believed it was all due to degraded infrastructure. You know, when my Apple computer would crash much more often than it had before. But my coma just saw well, it's from Apple outsourcing the China. What have you? I had some, always had some excuse or explanation that didn't really acknowledge, wow, these are astonishing events. And then I found, as I read more and more of the indie literature, that they're very common among other people. Of course, I started talking and meeting many other people who had had similar effects. Interestingly enough, though, a lot of that, especially like the street lights blinking out and computer crashes and stuff like that seemed to improve over two or three years,

14:41I would say by about three years after my coma, I really didn't recognize those same kind of after effects occurring as much. But I certainly felt much more intuitive. And I think that was kind of a long standing gift of my of my coma. And the fact that I also, I had to be so deathly ill from this that when I came back to this world on day seven of coma, after that extraordinary spiritual journey that I describe improved and happened. I came back to this world, I didn't even recognize my loved ones at the bedside, like my mother, my sisters, my sons, my former spouse standing at the bedside. I had no idea who these beings were. All I knew was where I'd just been. And the next week or two, a lot of my childhood memories came back, certainly all my language came back within days. And it took about two months, but really all of my other knowledge came back over about two months. But it was an extraordinary demonstration of the fact that not only is our conscious experience, not generated here in the physical realm in our brain, but also our memories are not

15:46stored in our brains. And that is something that we discuss in my third book, in Living in a Mind for Universe, it was co-authored with my life partner, Heron Nuel. We discuss that in great detail. How modern scientific evidence does not seem to show that memory exists in the brain at all. And yet that is such an absolute nail in the coffin of scientific materialism that we don't talk about at very often. But we'll be talking about it a whole lot more as we move in the future. Now the other thing that's important to point out of course is my coma journey showed me very clearly that reincarnation must be a big part of the package. And that was shown in many, many different ways. Harvard was that to make any sense of this infinitely loving, powerful, and all-knowing deity, his God-force that I encountered, especially in the setting of the suffering of innocence like children and animals. Really if you only have one incarnation, some of those horrific cases of a life snuffed

16:47out at an early age through no fault of their own, leaves it wide open how an infinitely loving and powerful God could allow for that to happen. So it was clear to me from my coma that reincarnation helped to explain a lot of things. Now the other thing of course is I didn't realize that for example the vision of perceptual studies, a group of scientists at the University of Virginia for the last six decades, have studied paths like memories in children where the best explanation was found to be of actual reincarnation in more than 2700 cases. It's really an astonishing database. So it's certainly something you cannot just ignore if you want to understand anything about consciousness and memory in the nature of brain and mind. And the fact that they have more than 2700 cases of path life memories in children where reincarnation is considered as explanation to me tells us we really stop looking for memory in the brain at all.

17:48Neurosurgeons have come to realize through their own private conversations that we resect brain in people and we've done that more than a million times in the last century. There's never been an exact ample where there was a big swath of long term memories that were lost by a resection of any part of the brain. So it becomes obvious that the brain is not the repository for memories. And we discussed that in our book, as I said earlier, but it's something that a lot of other scientists are coming to realize and certainly neurosurgeons have suspected for a very long period of time. And that's why it's such an important point to stress because it destroys the simplistic and nonsensical and false view that the brain is the site of creation and consciousness and of repository of memory. Neither one of those things is at all true. The brain is simply a filter, a reducing valve that allows primordial consciousness to manifest here in the physical realm.

18:49And so as we enlarge our scientific, and this is something we do in much detail in living in a mindful universe where we talk about the role of quantum physics, especially the measurement paradox or contextuality in quantum physics. And now important that is in pointing out to us that consciousness is not created by a physical matter at all, but is something that free exists physical matter. And in many ways is responsible for the generation of our emerging reality that we witness as human beings. But it's not something that's just dependent on the rules of a physical world and the electrons and protons and horts and atoms and molecules following the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, because in fact consciousness is more fundamental than that. And therefore the events of our lives have a lot to do with the choices we make as individual sentient beings. The materialist science that I worship before my coma would try and convince you that

19:53human beings don't even have free will. And that consciousness thing is a complete illusion, epiphenomenalism, you know, than just an epiphenominant of chemical reactions and electron fluxes in the brain. But I've come to realize that just the opposite is the case. We do have free will. And those free will choices make a tremendous difference in our soul's journey. And you find that in the near death literature more than 25% of near death experiences going back thousands of years across all cultures, all belief systems, more than 25% of those have involved a life review. The life review is where you witness the main events of your life, the goods and the bads and the lessons that are still there to be learned and taught still exist. But the life view is the way of witnessing that when you hurt others, you're really hurting yourself. But with the life review, many people have described it to me as a witnessing of experiencing

20:53thing from the point of view of those affected by our not only our thoughts, but in actions, and our thoughts. And we feel that on their behalf in that life review, we don't feel it as we would feel it, you know, from our self point of view. And that's an important thing to stress because I would like to say that all of this universe exists for sentient beings to live these legs, learn and teach the lessons we're here to learn and teach. But all of that involves sharing this one mind. Our sense itself is the illusion and the sense of the physical world around us is part of the illusion. It's not as it appears. And the deepest lesson of quantum physics is to try and teach us that there is no objected physical reality out there independent of the observing mind. And that's the part that's been very, very difficult for the material of scientific community to swallow. But it's the reason that they've had so much difficulty understanding what quantum physics has been trying to tell them for more than 80 years.

21:56The consciousness is fundamental in the universe. Our brain is a filter for that consciousness. When our body and brain die, we actually liberate conscious awareness and our soul is liberated to that higher level, to re-u-not with a higher soul and with the souls of our loved ones. So we can go through that life review and come up with the arrangement for the next incarnation. Because all of this is a process of reprimand and becoming closer to that divinity of oneness of that created source, but through progressive incarnations in these physical body. One of the things about your need of experience, the interest is that while you went through it all, you didn't know who you are. You had no memory of yourself at all. Well, that's true. That's an atypical feature. For example, if you use the grace and scale, Dr. Bruce Grayson at UVA came up with a 32-point scale that measures how deep and profound and phenomenally important and impressive these

23:04near-death experiences are. Such a scale, my experience rates, among the top two percent or so of all experiences, but it still has some unusual features. One of them was this amnesia. The fact that during the coma experience itself, I had no memories of earth or this universe or Evan Alexander's life on my religious beliefs. None of my personal memories were there. None of my language was there. None of the scientific knowledge gained from more than 54 years of the scientific lifestyle. Every bit of that was gone. It was a complete empty slate, a tabular rasa. But I think in many ways, as always, point out near-death experiences when you get right down to it and look at them by the many thalams and look at them in detail, what they do is they point out to you a very common realm for our souls. The similarities are striking when you study near-death experiences in grave numbers. But also the differences and the difference points out that the NDE is always tailored

24:09for the individual soul that's littering through it. In my particular case, that soul just so happened to be a 54-year-old white male who had spent his life studying modern science and neuroscience and physics and cosmology and trying to think that was a way of understanding the world. Given my role as a neurosurgeon, I had enough understanding of the brain to be able to go through this profound experience. Coming back with really no memories at all, the memories had to come back to me over a two-month period. That was an astonishing process in itself. Obviously those mecheries were not just coming back from my brain because I had that very sick brain there to try and preserve those memories when I woke up from coma, but they weren't there. They had to come back to me. A really fascinating aspect of it is that as those memories came back, especially through conversations with close, lonely friends and the months after my coma, compared to similar

25:11conversations in the years before my coma, I came to realize it by the two-month time period when all those memories had returned, they were more complete than they had been before my coma. That part is a big shocker, but it just goes to illuminate and illustrate that our memories are not stored in the brain at all. Our brain is an access point for memory and for consciousness, but it is absolutely not the creator of those things at all. They come from outside of Fortamanship and SpaceKimed, and that's what allows us to construct this model of the world, and the model is built in our consciousness. It's of a physical world that has to do with an information structure that we can learn more about, but don't just default to the simplistic and false assumption that it's the physical world that's doing all this storing and presenting of experience, because it's not. That's one thing that we discuss in the tale and living in mind for a universe, and it's where the modern science where all this is heading.

26:13As you said, just a short moment ago, it seems like people have the near-death experience that they need. It's like it's especially constructed for the individual. You feel that what you experienced was in some way constructed for you. It's almost like a bunch of higher beings got together and thought, right, what we're going to do for this guy? Well, it's almost like it's also involved a higher soul. When I say higher soul, I'm talking about the aspect of us. It is kind of our intersection point with that primordial mind, with that God's pours of consciousness. It's where we intersect with each other and with all non-human settings, too. But that higher soul is really involved in all this. The higher soul is what we re-dite with when we die, when we're kind of taking to these higher levels, reunite with souls of our loved ones who have left the physical plane, etc. And all that is done in that beautiful light of that life review and that light of love.

27:17It's all done in a process of planning the next incarnations. It's not just like this is some game that somebody is playing. It's really about growth. It's really about learning. We're all here to teach and learn with each other through this process. So for me, given that scenario, my near-death experience was to give me some lessons about life. And as a very interested and engaged neurosurgeon who had worked with thousands and thousands of patients, many with alterations in their level of consciousness, I was deeply interested in getting a richer kind of notion of brain-mind consciousness in the nature of reality. And that's what I got in a giant dose in this coma experience. But don't think that all the answers come to you and boom, like that, all of a sudden, you know it all. That's not the way it works. An Indie can often be a profound challenge to everything you ever thought you knew. But it also can be a profound demonstration of the way things really are that takes you

28:21in a whole new direction. And especially as I've met more and more scientists, some of whom have had near-death experiences where we can really get into some depth in this kind of conversation, you start to realize how our modern science is just barely getting out of its cradle in terms of understanding the answers to some of these deeper questions. But the good news is these answers in many ways have presented themselves to us for thousands of years in various spiritual traditions. So there are great truths that come out of ancient spiritual traditions, both East and West, that have everything to do with lining up with these scientific truths that are now coming into view. But it's really a question of opening our minds tremendously, calling into question every thing. We can't really assume anything because so many of the assumptions that are built in to our worldview are just plain old faults. And our culture has done nothing but perpetuate a lot of those falsehoods.

29:22And that's where our science and especially quantum physics has run into so much trouble. Because some of those things it seemed to, so obvious to us, is common sense. You know, like the fundamental reality of the material world, in fact, are not so fundamental. And that's where the science bleeds in a whole new direction, but it's very important to understand by going within, we can all get to the answers. That's why meditation, sintering prayer, and for those who need powerful new tools to develop meditative techniques for going within and finding that the entire universe is within our mind is in many ways. So that's the best way to look at it. And going within is the way to uncover this. So I highly recommend people who need a new tool, go to sacredacoustics.com. Karen's website will give you the kind of tools you need to start exploring consciousness and come away with a far greater sense of your relationship to this universe. And that involves first and foremost finding that your material body in the physical world

30:24are not the be all an end all that our culture tries to portray. So during the seven days of coma, you had this experience, but I think you said that the time flow was different in the experience. And it lasted longer than the seven days. Well, if you would ask me in those that first week or so after I came back from coma, you know, as my brain started right itself, you know, and make any sense of anything, how long were you there? I would have said, oh, months, years, it seemed like an extraordinary involved journey. And yet, of course, it had to fit somewhere within seven earth days because that was the time I was in coma. But another thing I came to realize, and again, this is, I mean, we cover into tail and living in my own book universe, time flow is not what we see what we think. And in many ways, our notion of past, present, and future is kind of built in on this side of the veil and is not part of that deeper underlying reality.

31:27So past, present and future do not have that hardcore existence and concrete reality that we would like to believe. I love that quote from Einstein that says exactly that where he is referring to one of his childhood friends, Bessa, who had died. And this one, he was in very advanced years. And Einstein said after his wonderful loving friend had passed and left from this world, he said, those of us who believe in physics, who know about physics, realize that past, present, and future are just cleverly raw illusions in many ways. It's the only thing that really exists is a now. And as we said earlier, our notion of memory and what that really tells us about our souls journey is still very much up the grabs in this kind of deeper understanding. But I come to realize there's something I call deep time, which is a much more primordial ordering of events of the growth of souls. In fact, of the evolution of all consciousness, kind of along the large of Taylor, Dushard

32:27and who wrote that beautiful book, The Phenomenon of Man in the mid-20th century, I think he was really onto something. But evolution is very much happening. But in a far bigger sense, in that punital case of Dunningian evolution, witnessed in the material biological world, there is an evolution of all of consciousness, which is a far bigger thing. And that's occurring in what I call deep time, which is a completely different ordering of time and causality and causal nature of events that occurs from that higher perspective of the spiritual realm. And that I believe is very true. But earth time, we need to acknowledge in many ways, it's just a fiction that supports this drama, this stage setting on which the drama unfolds for the lives of sentient beings. But remember that the events of those unfolding lives have to do with this bigger stage setting of deep time and of the lives we've led before and of our intertwined nature in these

33:29millions of lives and many, many lifetimes. That's the stage on which this drama is really important. It's a much bigger stage than I ever appreciated before. There's something that we've discussed before on this podcast with previous guests as the idea that if time doesn't exist, it means that your soul or whatever it is is experiencing all of your lifetimes in exactly the same moment. People often jump to that. And of course, for a normal human being sitting here with his brain, checking away with our linguistic voice in our head and rational, logical thought, when you hear everything happening at once, you kind of go in panic mode, say, what do you mean everything's happening at once? But I would say from a meditative perspective, from a very deep, kind of mental universe point of view, in many ways, you could say, yes, it all happens at once, but we're trying to make sense of it and to make sense of it, you know, with our very narrow bandwidth, especially when we're living in this incarnation in this world, we have to kind of bring it

34:34down into the bite-sized chunks that we can handle. So in that sense, it's not very useful to say something like everything happening at once. But I think to have a bigger, kind of more mature and open-minded way of looking at it, to say, well, maybe this presentation of time flow that's here with me as a physical being in a physical body is maybe a way that I can kind of split it up into little pieces and make sense of it, but I will acknowledge that there's a possibility that so much more is happening at one time, and that if I can get into the proper meditative state, I can start to appreciate that and live it more fully, which I believe is very true. I think as sentient beings, we can kind of traverse that veil through the meditation and come to realize how all these things can be quote, happening at the same time, unquote, from a different perspective, but actually make some sense of that. So it really, so much of this depends on our language and so many of the limitations

35:37of this discussion are absolutely our language, and the way our language wrecks our ability to truly be a spiritual being, living in infinity and eternity is that multi-lifetime individual is very difficult to put that perspective in our little linguistic brain in its forms of natural thought. But I promise you through meditation and going within, we can learn to kind of address our being and address this universe and learn to learn more about our relationship with the universe in ways that can be very facile and very helpful at helping us to grow into these larger beings that I believe we are. Now, there are some people that are using hypnotic regression with NDE experiences to go back to their experience and kind of relive it in some way. Is that something you consider doing? What is your view of using hypnosis? That's a very good point.

36:38Now I've met many psychic mediums in this line of work. I've come to realize that they're probably are at least 20 in the US that have been evaluated by the winbridge.org group, Julie Byshel, etc. and have been found to have very profound mediumistic capabilities. What those mediums will tell you is every human being has these capabilities. You don't trust ourselves in them. And our culture tries to teach us, oh, that's nonsense. You can't be talking about that. That's ridiculous. That's crazy. Well, in point of fact, communication, after death communications are one of the most profound and solid pieces of proof for the millions and millions of people on this world who know the reality of this. After death communications are much more common than NDE. So they're a very profound form of this realization for people. Psychic mediums, as I've said, are another.

37:40But all they do is confirm that all of us have these capabilities. All of us can communicate with the souls of our departed loved ones. I've done it in meditation. I've encountered that in dreams and in centering prayer. It's something I talked about in detail in living in a mindful universe. So communication with those who have left the physical plane is one of the most readily demonstrable kind of realities of all of this. And yet it's just a part of the puzzle. I would say that hypnotic regression, from my point of view, is a very valid way to get into this territory. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of people like Dr. Stan Groff, Dr. Brian Weiss, Dr. Michael Newton. These have all been very brave and courageous investigators who found that with their patients, people were reporting things like memory, past lives, experiences in hypnotic regression

38:42that could not be explained within this lifetime. And then when they were pursued and much greater detail, they came to realize that was the way to explain it all and make sense of it. Was by seeing ourselves in this much bigger framework where we've had multiple prior lifetimes, they've involved many choices that our soul has made, some of those choices to help the higher goods, some of those choices made out of fear, many of those choices made out of love for self and others. And that's where we are here to learn and to teach is through those choices and realizing that much bigger kind of stage setting for the psychological drama of multiple incarnations is how you then start to make sense of this life form. And so I think hypnotic regression, psychic mediums, meditation going into my mindset and exploring past life memories and things like that. All of those are very valid ways to try and make bigger sense of this and make bigger

39:43sense of our journeys in these physical bodies and acknowledge that they're not just wanting carnation birth to death. You could never get the kind of soul growth that's demanded to us in wanting carnation and they're all it just demands multiple incarnations. And we can make better sense of it if we're more aware of what happened in our past times, how that set the stage for the challenges, difficulties, illness and injury that we were to face in this lifetime and realize that all that is part of our pattern of growth and of learning and understanding. And I think that helps us to have a much bigger picture of who we are and develop that relationship of the universe when we take this much bigger view of ourselves. And that includes past life regressions and meditation, sintering prayer, the many different ways that we can come into acknowledging this grander aspect of ourselves and of our connections with other souls. And they say that before you're born you put together a life plan.

40:45And do you feel that your NDE was part of your plan? I would say that's very much the case. And people would often ask me early on in my, when I give talks and presentations about this. So this is infinitely loving God of your gave you this deadly bacterial meningitis that all doctors agree should have killed you and yet somehow did not. I would say no. I volunteered for it. I was coming to real. Even though the realization took me many months after my poem and a lot of meditative experience in the years since then. I did come to realize that this was part of a higher plan. It had to do with my kind of higher soul notion. Now most of us when we're in the midst of a hardship or difficulty, like a child committing suicide or a spouse who dies of the terminal illness to the age, things with a bunch of young children or what happy, whatever the problem is. It's very difficult in that setting to say, oh yes, I planned all this, my higher soul.

41:46As far as my growth as a soul, no, that's not what comes to our mind. But I can tell you that as we mature, as we grow, as we become a much grander being and have this much more complete view of ourselves, that's what will happen because that is what then starts to make the most sense. But we need to grow into that and realize that we are those far greater beings. When I believe that soul contracts are it, I came back from my journey and after a few months, realized that it was exactly what I needed. One of the things I struggled with and people who have been proven to know this deeply is that I struggled with self work. I was adopted. I was put up her adoption literally when I was 11 days old, I was adopted when I was four months old. And that's a huge part of proof of heaven and living in mind for universe. But to just catch up the chase, that adoption wound and the abandonment by my birth mother

42:51led me to have a life of many decades of doubt as to whether or not I was worthy of love. Now, it's not like I was sitting there in my intellectual mind debating whether or not I was worthy of love. But what happens is when you have such a profound and shattering early life challenge, like your birth mother leaving you behind, which is what my 11 day old self sets, it really makes a giant impact. It left a smoking crater. And as much as my adoptive father, who was a nurse, and then go, I assume, would understand a lot about memory. And he would tell me over and over again, there's no way you remember when you were only weeks a month old, anything that happened to you. And I believed him for all those years, but I came to realize after my coma journey that he was raw, that I did have a very deep and profound memory of being given up by my mother when I was 11 days old. But it was such a giant crater that all I did was measure myself against the universe

43:54for every relationship in my life. And everything I went through was measured against that giant crater being left behind by my mother because I wasn't good enough. And I discussed that in more detail in living in mind for universe because obviously, the 10 years since my coma have been an important kind of turning point in my understanding of that birth wound, you know, that not being worthy of love. But it turns out that all of us have kind of a universal wound of separation. And I would say it's really separation from the divine. It comes when we're born into this world as physical beings. And as Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson, the head of the vision of types of studies at UVA, I've studied all those children in their path, I'd memory you would tell you, if you want to harvest those memories, you need to ask children before age six because after age six, their natural process is that bury those memories. Most of us say, well, no, we don't remember past lives easily like we remember other things

44:56that have happened in our life. And yet we can if we do the work. And children remember them very easily. They remember past lives and between lives. And that's why near death experiences in children will be quite different from near death experiences in results in adults. And that's because the children are much more intimately familiar with those memories. And it's much easier for them to know that they're simply going back to that place of a pure love. Most of us adults, especially in our wickedly materialist culture, have completely lost side of that. So it's much more damaging that birth wound of being separated from the divine. And so we have to do a bit more work, kind of reconnect to the divine. But the good news is, it's right there within us all the time, just waiting for us to reawaken it. We can do that through a prescribed program of meditation, of going within, of study, of trying to change this world for the better, trying to live from principles of love, loving

46:00for self and love for others. And the best way to manifest that love and passion, science and acceptance for self is to love others. And the more our world can bring this deep truth back into reality, it's a lesson that certain religious systems have tried to teach us for thousands of years. And our materialist science is not a horrible job of taking us away from realizing what quantum physics and what the modern neuroscience of consciousness are telling us very clearly. And that is that we're sharing the dream of the one mom. We're all in this together, just like those life reviews that have been around for thousands of years across all cultures. In 25% or more of near to enough experience, we need to realize that when we heard another, we're hurting ourselves. And this is really all about recovering love and compassion, forgiveness, acceptance and mercy for all of our fellow beings beginning with ourselves. And that I think is probably the deepest aspect of my NDE and what I'm trying to bring back

47:05to this world for all of us to learn and share to make this world a better place. Dear, you have an idea why is that some people may die and be resuscitated and they just do not have any death experience? Well, I don't know. I'm not sure. I think it has to do with memory. I think that a gigantic part of all this is memory and what I call program forgetting. This was we said minutes ago, you know, as young children, we can have memories of past lives and between lives. We can remember grandparents who we never knew in their lifetime, but we know them because our spiritual connection to them and yet those memories get covered up. Just like when we come back from the dream world, the dream world is very similar in many ways. Very deep truth can be presented to us in a dream world. I know a good colleague of mine, Dr. Larry Burke, recently wrote a beautiful book about pre-bonnaatory dreams in breast cancer patients.

48:08In this book, he talks about how these 42 women had dreams. Basically, they would see a loved one who had left the physical world or another soul or guide who had come to them at the dream and said, you need to go to the doctor. You need to have a mammogram. I will have you. You need to check. You have a breast math. They, in 41 of those cases, went and checked it out and found that that was indeed the case. Unfortunately, in one case, where the doctor did not pay attention to that pre-bonnaatory dream refused to get the test, that woman, unfortunately, died because her breast cancer was not diagnosed until too late. But the dream space is another example of how we can get information that can help us to live these lives, can help us with healing in our own lives. But there is forgetting. When we come back from a dream, there's this whole built-in process. So unless we work really hard to recover and resuscitate the little pieces of the dream, then and there, we lose it from memory.

49:09Likewise, with those memories from past lives, we lose them unless we work to recover them. That's where I think your quest has been about why is it only 15 or 20% or so of people that have these NDE. I mean, when you get right down to it in our culture with its worship of materialist values, shocking that 15 to 20% of people come back from an NDE and have this profound, wonderful experience of how beautiful our souls are in their relationship with the universe at large, that none of it demands any kind of materialist, this, that, or anything that are happiness, that are joy and bliss, don't depend on anything in the material world. And this is a profoundly important lesson for all of us to get. This comes from within. The more we can learn to harms this happiness through developing this relationship of our higher soul with the primordial mind with the universe at large, the more we can share

50:10love and compassion and mercy and helping with others, help our fellow beings, the more we're truly living the lives we came to this world to live. But that is part of the awakening that's coming to this world now. And the damage done by materialist science, giving us this false notion that we're all separate from each other and that we can behave in any way we want to and it will just matter. It is absolutely wrong. And it leads to just some hell on earth for us to live these lives, believing that material is nonsense. Where, in point of fact, I think where the science and consciousness is headed and all human destiny is headed is to a much richer understanding of our relationship with the universe. And that is that we are one with this power of love that ties us all together and that we're really here to help each other. The other side of materialist science that's been our believing misleading is a complete

51:11misinterpretation of Darwinian evolution in the sense that to pretend that it's just competition and survival of the fittest completely misses what I think most biologists today would tell you is it's success in the biological kingdom is absolutely dependent on cooperation and collaboration, not only between members of a species, but between species. And those are the things that lead to success in the biological kingdom. And that's what we're actually getting rid of with our modern materialist science and all the insanity it's led us to this addiction to pathosophials more than a third of the world species are now threatened with extinction. That is a problem that cannot be overstayed. We are in deep, deep trouble with the environment and a lot of it has to do with this false separation and competing for what are called the limited resources.

52:11Because in fact, we really need to get rid of our fossil fuel addiction, get rid of forretting all these species that have spent literally hundreds of millions of years to evolve and literally in a few decades we're forretting a giant, giant fraction of these things. Something like 45% of the insects are threat, not the species because insects have been through these hot spell forms, spells, schools, spells before. So they're a little more used to it. But because of so much damage with mankind taking over and paving everything, getting rid of all the trees, you know, all the CO2 and the global warming, the insect populations are very threatened. And if they collapse, we are in horrible trouble because all of our agrarian society depends on pollination of insects. And we're in extremely deep trouble. If we're foolish enough to let our materialists want some kind of addictions, and that includes

53:15our addiction to fossil fuel and the polluting and plastics and all that, if we keep pursuing that pathway, we are going to definitely create a world that is not going to be habitable by any of those species. So it's high time that we started to take responsibility for our choices and actions, get off of our fossil fuel addiction and start really being this planet like a cradle and nurturing spot for life that we know it to be. It makes me wonder if there is something in the spirit world that they're just sitting back and letting it happen. It's giving us the free will. Well, I think the spirit world is actually helping us a lot. I've come to realize, especially over the last few years, where, for example, I would have a certain colleague that I thought helped us a lot when they were alive and now they left the physical plane. And so back in the old days, I used to play the same game everybody does. Oh, well, now they've left the physical world.

54:15Oh, that's too bad. But what I come to realize, I think in some cases, they actually helped more from the other side than they were able to help us from this side. So in many ways, I think the spirit world is helping all this to happen. We would never discover all this on our own. We're way too unintelligent and close-minded for that. So I would say that's one of the reasons why going within, I think, is so important because when we go into meditation and again, I cannot be strongly enough in my admonition to people. If you don't meditate yet, it's time to start. It's a fantastic program for health, for strengthening the immune system, getting rid of stress, pulling blood pressure, connecting with souls of departed loved ones with your higher soul, with guides, achieving health, achieving a more, kind of, holistic state and oneness, comes from meditation. And for those who don't have a meditative tool, I would strongly recommend sacredacoustics.com.

55:17If you go there, look at our free videos and start investigating some of the commentaries there, the page of people, testimonials, etc., you'll start seeing where I'm going with this. But going within, when you realize your brain is not creating consciousness, the consciousness, it's what creates all of emergent reality. You start realizing why sintering prayer and deep meditation and going within are actually a way to go out into the universe and gain a far richer relationship with that universe, not only for bleeding information, but for also influencing the unfolding reality of our highest aspirations and dreams. When you were in the experience and you were on this butterfly with this young woman, and she kind of gave you a message telepathically that said, you can do no wrong. What was meant by that? Yeah, I wish I had explained that better and proof of them because the way it was explained, unfortunately, I had not laid the case out well enough for people to understand my mindset

56:20at that point, because it has to do with the fact that I was already realizing from my journey that the only choices to be made in this universe are choices out of law, compassion, kindness for self and others. If we choose otherwise, if we choose out of fear, we're starting to choose out of a separation, a sense of limited resources and competition, oh no, I have to have that, I can't let anybody else get it. We really start to lose sight of what's really going on here. So it's a much bigger lesson for all of us to learn, but it really has to do with exactly that, with realizing that we're a much higher soul than just something that would be one physical body, birth to death and nothing else. That little linguistic voice in our head, the voice of our ego, tries to fool us into that, but that's where the meditation, I believe, is so important and sintering prayer going

57:24within and be an extraordinary gift as we free ourselves of that little linguistic brain, the voice of the ego. And all of its fears and anxieties, those are really the only tools it has. And we can start to see a far more kind of open field of possibilities and win, win for everyone in both as we open our minds to this greater conscious and it's into immorality on mind. And that beautiful guardian angel on the butterfly wing was my messenger. And of course, improving heaven, I explain why she was so important to me and that only when the king the parent months after my coma, but all of us, I believe, have guardian angels. We all have guides that we can access in meditation and in sintering prayer that can help us to kind of rise to our greatest potential and to see who we truly are and to live these lives with a full integrity that we should have as we come to realize the greatness that

58:26lives within us all. And there's one thing that I've always thought is that this idea of reincarnation, life after life to learn lessons and also looking at Michael Newton's work of how the space between lives works where you may have a council of elders and a group, a soul group. It almost seems like it's two, like it's organized by humans. And I've always felt that it should be a lot weirder than that and a lot more depth to it. Well, what I can tell you is that I think it is a lot weirder than that and there's a lot more depth to it, but we can only kind of bring back what we're ready to bring back. You know, we in those realms, I promise you, you can encounter things that are far beyond your level of understanding because there's still so much in my journey, not only from I NDE, but even from my ongoing meditations that is beyond my current level of understanding. And I just have to, you know, I trust I have faith that with more exploration, with more

59:30honest kind of inquiry on my part trying to seek the answers, the universe will do a better and better job of presenting me with those answers. It only looks organized by humans because ultimately human beings are the ones who are telling these stories and sharing these stories. And even though the stories in their most exotic form can be the farthest thing you can imagine from human existence, we're still stuck at the end of the day when we come back to this world of trying to explain it all as one human being to another. So it's going to be in the guise of looking like it was created by human. But in fact, as you explore this more and more, you realize that it's not just by humans all. In fact, it became very clear to me that animals are a very rich part of this spiritual existence. In fact, I came to see that our little linguistic boating, that little rational, logical voice in our head was actually the quality of humans that took us the furthest from having

1:00:31any kind of spiritual wisdom compared to animals and all other sentient beings. Because that little rational voice tries to talk us out of it. And by exploring and going within, we actually come to see all the evidence that supports this sense of connection, ongoing eternity of consciousness and that we're all in this together and that it's all about a process of learning and growth and teaching. But it only has that appearance of being human derived from this linguistic boy side of explaining it to other human beings. But that's again, a huge part of why Karen and I in our book, Living in my Infra-Universed, realize that so much of this goes beyond anything they can ever be put into human language. Therefore, just let people go there and discover for themselves the answers lie within us all. That's why the meditation is such an important step. There's so much of this to learn that we're not just going to learn from reading a book or having explained to us by someone else.

1:01:34Thank you very much for coming onto the podcast. Just being fascinating to hear what you have to say. I've really enjoyed talking to you. All right. Well, Simon, thanks so much. I've loved talking with you too. And hopefully we can talk again sometime. I'd love to do that. I would encourage your listeners to visit. They can learn more about me and communicate with me at Evan. That's eden Alexander.com. And also I would encourage them to take the three-three-day course. You may of course, it's completely free. That's right there at EvanAlexander.com. Just click on your 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness. And that will open your mind a lot, give you four sacred acoustics tools, lots of other things there. So just take that course, you'll learn a lot. And also go to sacredacoustics.com. Karen's website is very, very good. Lots of free instructional videos. There's also a new app for the iPhone, sacred acoustics. Check it out. Very powerful stuff. It includes 62 minutes of free training videos that are also available on our website.

1:02:37But I would encourage people who go after sacred acoustics and come to realize it for the gym that it is, it's best to really get to know it all on her sacredacoustics.com website and acquire products there. Because that way they're available in all different formats. You never have to pay twice. In other words, if you paid on the app, you get it as a download, etc., things like that. So visit us at EvanAlexander.com, sacredacoustics.com. And I look forward to talking with you again sometime. Great. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Bye-bye. And this episode was a conversation with Dr. Evan Alexander. My book titled Verified Nideth Experiences is on Amazon. You can get it on paperback, Kindle, or audiobook. And the audiobook is also available on Spotify. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts Spotify, or via your favourite podcast app to make sure that you don't miss out

1:03:40on any episodes. And thanks for listening.