Dr. Eben Alexander, Speaker and Author of the New York Times best-selling book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife with Karen Newell, co-founder of Sacred Acoustics audio focuses on special binaural beat technology for meditation. Eben and Karen are the co-authors of Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- The real reason we exist is about learning and teaching. There is tremendous scientific literation supporting the concept of reincarnation.
- How specialized binaural beat technology has enabled Karen to reach expanded states of awareness.
- While most people conceive health on a physical, mental, and emotional level, there is an all-important spiritual level that also affects health.
- The hardships and difficulties in life can gift us with tremendous learning. It is the silver lining of growth, learning and teaching together.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS EBEN AND KAREN:
- What is remote viewing?
- Why is the continuity of souls important in addressing grief?
- How are we all connected through the binding force of unconditional love and its unlimited power to heal?
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Listen to the podcast here
Eben Alexander MD And Karen Newell: Specialized Binaural Beat Technology And The Concept Of Reincarnation
My special guests Eben Alexander and Karen Newell are speaking to us from Charlottesville, Virginia. I met Eben at The Open Center in New York City. I even have a picture with him and a signed copy of his bestselling book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. It is going to be my pleasure to also meet Karen. They are associated with Helping Parents Heal, the inspiring nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting bereaved parents by providing support and resources which aid in the healing process.
I was looking forward to interviewing them at the Helping Parents Heal Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, where Eben was going to be the keynote speaker, and Karen was facilitating a workshop that involved sound meditation. Sadly, the conference was canceled due to the pandemic, but the good news is that we are together now.
Eben, a well-known author, and speaker, and Karen, CO-Founder of Sacred Acoustics Audio, which focuses on special binaural beat technology for meditation, are the co-authors of Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness. We three are about to have a fascinating conversation about consciousness, meditation, and the continuity of souls in addressing grief and more. First, please stay tuned while I take a quick minute to show some love to our sponsors. We will be right back.
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Eben and Karen, welcome to the show. Let’s begin our interview with this question. Eben, please tell us about your profound near-death experience that occurred in 2008 and the important insights you gleaned from the research you did after your near-death experience.
Thank you for having us on. It’s great to be here. I will give the cliff notes version of my journey, so we have plenty of time to talk about everything else, but it’s all there in Proof of Heaven. It was a profound ultra real adventure into spiritual realms. The reason that the scientific community and medical community takes my case so seriously is because of all of the scientific evidence in my medical record of the destruction of my neocortex.
What makes my case so important is that the evidence was laid out for us very clearly, that I should have had no experience whatsoever. A brain where all eight lobes of the neocortex are suffering full thickness of swelling from a severe, bacterial, meningoencephalitis is not the setting where you expect any conscious awareness, dream, confabulation, or drug effect, much less the extraordinary version I had.
An important feature of my NDE, even though it had many profound features of measuring 28 to 29 on a 32-point Greyson scale of NDEs, there was one unusual feature that makes a big difference, and that was my amnesia. I had no memory of Eben Alexander’s life. I had no knowledge of Earth or this universe. I went through the entire spiritual experience with an empty slate, with no prejudices and no assumptions. That was a real gift that I determined in the months and years after the coma because it helped explain so much. It came to me in three major phases. It began in what I call the earthworm’s eye view, a primitive course, unresponsive realm, and a very murky and foreboding. Since I had no memory of anything else, I thought this is the way things are. It was not so foreboding to me.
I was rescued from that by a slowly spinning white light that came packaged with a perfect musical melody, and that served as a portal up into a rich ultra real realm that I refer to as the Gateway Valley. I had many Earth-like features. I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There was a beautiful young woman there who served as my guardian angel. There were thousands of beings dancing in the lovely meadow below us. In many ways, it was like Plato’s world of ideals. It was a perfect world. There was no death or decay anywhere, but it was also a world in which we learn and teach.
That’s what happens at the end of life, according to near-death accounts going back thousands of years, the life of you. I witnessed a reunion with this beautiful and loving soul and with these many other souls. That was the stepping stone. That Gateway Valley was not my ultimate destination. All the joy and festivities I witnessed in that arena were being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs emanating chants, anthems, and hymns that would thunder through me and awaken me to the power of that infinitely loving and healing God force at the core of all existence.
That’s what near-death experiences bring back to this world. Bathing that ocean of love of God is something where we come back, and we realize there’s nothing to fear about death and that it’s not an end at all. Our existence as humans goes far beyond a little one incarnation, then eternal heaven, hell, or nothingness.
The angelic choirs provided a portal up to what I call the core. The core was the Sanctum Sanctorum of the divine. It was the oneness of eternity, infinity, and the dwelling place of that infinitely loving God force. It was beyond a boundary that many people do not cross in an NDE, but I was blessed to cross it several times in part of my lessons.
I would come back down to the lowly earthworm eye view realm without any explanation, but I learned that by recovering the musical notes of the melody that allowed me to go back up again and again. We go through all of this in detail, not just in proof of heaven, but especially much of it further interpreted in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, that Karen wrote with me. That’s where we put science and spirituality together because these are very real events, and modern science is getting to a point where it admits the absolute reality of these events, and then we have to start explaining more about how it all works.
Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness
It’s amazing that science is backing all of these up now. When I had my spiritual awakening, it was considered woo-woo. Now, more and more people are getting on the train. Eben, for our readers, can you expound a touch on when you said, “There’s nothing to fear about death,” because a lot of people go through their lives and that’s all they are consumed with is their fear of dying.
The important thing that my journey showed very clearly is the brain does not create consciousness. It does not produce it out of the physical matter of the physical universe, and that’s where the entire scientific community is getting on board. Quantum physics, all the findings of modern neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and every bit of this.
This is what we argue in great detail in Living in a Mindful Universe, which is about an expanding model of understanding the nature of consciousness. When you find that the brain doesn’t create consciousness but serves as a filter to allow primordial consciousness to manifest in this physical realm, then that shows you what to expect when you lead the shackles, the prison of the physical brain and body that your conscious awareness expands tremendously. It doesn’t come to an end.
It’s the exact opposite of the oblivion that most materialists and atheists think is awaiting there at the death of the brain and body. Yet the scientific evidence for the story that we are talking about, the fundamental nature of consciousness, is rocking the entire scientific world to its core. It all has at the tip of the spear near-death experiences.
Karen, you have developed a deep personal knowledge of the spiritual realm and expertise in living a life of daily connection to human consciousness. Please explain your eye-opening personal history that manifested a worldview that is just not coming into focus for so many people.
I would put it this way. All of us were born into a family with a certain set of beliefs, a certain religion or culture, and that’s what our beliefs become. We follow those patterns. When we get older, sometimes we leave that family home, family town, learn more and maybe change our worldviews. I was, as a child, resisting my family’s worldview.
My grandmother, who was a devout evangelical Christian sat me down and my brothers when I was about seven years old and explained to me that if I would believe in Jesus and accepted him into my heart, I would avoid spending an eternity in hell. I thought, “That’s all I have to do? It didn’t make sense to me. What about all the kids around the world who don’t hear about this? What about them? Are they going to spend eternity burning in hell?” She said, “We have missionaries for that. We do the best we can.” I immediately rejected that aspect of this worldview as a child.
I’m with you, Karen.
I rejected it. I didn’t argue outside, but inside I thought, “That can’t be true.” As I went through life, I always questioned authority when they would give us these, “This is how the world works.” It had to make sense to me inside. I feel as though I stayed that open-minded naive child in a way because I didn’t allow other beliefs to form my opinion. I wanted to know firsthand if things were true.
I, fortunately, had a family that wasn’t very authoritarian. My parents were divorced. My mom was a working mother. My brothers and I were stay-at-home kids and raising ourselves. I went to church and things like that, but inside I had this other worldview and I enjoy explaining it through a psychological term called locus of control.
People with an external locus of control believe that they are a victim of circumstance. Whatever is going on around them has the greatest influence on their life. The internal locus of control is a little different. Those people believe that their behaviors and actions have the most influence on what happens in their lives. I was the decidedly extremely internal locus of control.
People with an external locus of control believe that they are a victim of circumstance. Whatever is going on around them has the greatest influence on their life. Click To Tweet
I didn’t believe that anyone had any control over me. I don’t know if that’s because I was born in the ’70s. Women’s lib was such a big thing, but I had a very good understanding of who I was as I went through life and maintained this open mind. My beliefs have been more focused on what the universal truths say that all the spiritual traditions can agree on, and even the secular world can agree on. This is where I find the real meat of truth where all of those paths converge and are saying the same things.
Eben, why is the continuity of souls important in addressing grief?
It’s especially important because for those of us who grew up with this notion of living in these bodies from birth to death, and that was all that was there to our existence can be very confusing because one thing that my journey showed me clearly without exception is that I had to come to know reincarnation. Our souls don’t just have one incarnation, but they come here again and again in a process of refinement.
That has everything to do with the connection between souls and relationships, our loved ones. For example, in the NDE community, you often hear about deathbed visions. People who have visitations from loved ones who have already left the physical world. That’s an indicator to us that the real reason we exist is all about these relationships and learning and teaching.
It cannot happen in one lifetime, so we have to look at a bigger theater of operations. For those who are not familiar with reincarnation as a concept, I will tell you that I didn’t realize until after my coma journey that there’s tremendous scientific literature supporting reincarnation is real. It’s work largely done out of the University of Virginia. If you want to learn more, go to UVADOPS.org. That’s the Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA.
They have done tremendous work for decades as scientists investigating many aspects of non-local consciousness. One of those is past-life memories and children suggestive of reincarnation. They have accumulated more than 2,500 cases of such stories from around the world where the best explanation is one of reincarnation.
When you realize how carefully vetted and analyzed these stories have been, you realize this is a very strong scientific basis on which to make conclusions about our lives. It’s all about love and relationships. It’s all about the things that humans would love to be about. Yet the science fully supports that it is true that we have responsibility for our choices. If we manifest love, kindness, and compassion for ourselves and others in this life, it comes back to us beautifully because of this reciprocal arrangement we have with the knowledge of the universe.
If we manifest love, kindness, and compassion for ourselves and others in this life, it comes back to us beautifully because of this reciprocal arrangement we have with the knowledge of the universe. Click To Tweet
We are telling our readers that if they manifest love and kindness, it’s going to come back to them.
That’s it. That’s the rule.
What do you say to the guy that tripped you on the street you have been loving and kind to your aunt that morning. For people who are doubting Thomases who are reading, if they manifest love and kindness, will that start to change their lives?
It starts to affect everything. Karen and I often talk in our workshops about the internal world and the external world. Some call it the supreme illusion. The supreme illusion is an acknowledgment that it’s always been the internal world. We believe all that external stuff is out there, yet it’s always been a mental model within our mind that we think has a faithful representation of a world out there.
Yet, the deepest mystery of quantum physics and the emerging science of consciousness is that all of it is mental. There are top-down mental calls of forces in this universe that have to do with our mentation. The more we engage with that in a loving and compassionate way of oneness expressing the highest and best good for all involved, the more the universe begins to reflect all of that love and compassion back into our awareness. That internal world is one that we have a lot of control over, but it turns out that what we view as the external world is also largely part of our internal world.
I do want to support what you said about the past life memories of children because I’m not part of a scientific study, but my grandson was. He exited the bathtub and announced to me “I have lived before,” and I found out all about a past life. He claimed that he was a caveman with his twin brother. He said, “A lion ate me. My brother ran away, and then a few days later, the lion went and got my brother.” He said it completely like, “Just a matter of fact.”
That’s not just imaginary noise. That’s a real memory. The whole world of transpersonal psychology points to that. The work of Carl Jung, Stan Grof, Michael Newton, and Brian Weiss, brilliant clinical investigators who realized that past life memories that were uncovered in their patients through hypnotic regression are spontaneous epiphanies, meditation, or prayer had a basis in helping them understand the events of this life. It’s a very practical sense in which we should look for the events of past lives to help us come to solutions and understand the events of this life.
In my situation, having lost my husband the way I did, it was a comfort to find out that it’s not over when it’s over. I hope to be with him again. We are going to come back. This is school and that is home. It changes your whole view of your life. I have an old mother and we joke around all the time, and she is very open now to spirituality. I tell her, “You will be very busy. I will be contacting you over there. We will be back again together.” It’s great.
Karen, your thing is specialized binaural beat technology, which has enabled you to reach expanded states of awareness. Please unpack for us your journey of discovery. I know it’s going to be fascinating, including how binaural beat technology enhances meditation. All of our readers who are meditating out there may be very interested in this. How did you develop your rare skill of discernment, which is the ability to navigate a pathway towards truth, which we need more than ever these days?
There is so much information out there for us to discern what’s true. To start with the beginning of your question, I knew there was more to us than our physical bodies. When I talked about the universal truths, one of those is that we have a soul that’s not part of our physicalness. It’s a spiritual thing. I didn’t think of it as spirit because I had rejected that organized religion, but I could still think of it as a soul and I knew we had a soul.
As I was going through life, I wanted to learn more about that. I was reading lots of things. A lot of spiritual texts will talk about how we all have certain abilities that we can access the other side, we are all intuitive, and we all can bring more of this spiritual part of us into our lives, but I didn’t know how to do that. I started taking courses, course after course. Things like healing touch for animals, reiki, remote viewing, and things like that.
Did your family think you were woo-woo?
Yeah. Everyone thought I was a little crazy, but I would do this on the weekends. I had a regular 9:00 to 5:00 job in the publishing world. That’s what I did from 9:00 to 5:00, but then I would do these other things in the evenings and weekends. What I came to find out is that meditation is a critical foundation for doing any of these other things.
In every course I would take, we would meditate and I didn’t like meditating. I was a busy project manager. Meditating meant I had to sit still and let my mind go blank, and this was very challenging for me. My mind would never go blank. It was constantly rattling off all kinds of tasks, conversations, or things I needed to do, but I knew I needed to learn.
It was the brainwave entrainment technology that was probably the most important thing to help quiet that racing mind. I found that when I first started listening to these types of recordings, at first, I would just fall asleep and not know what went on. As time went by, I was able to have my body be profoundly relaxed as if it was asleep, but my mind was still aware.
That’s what’s known as the hypnagogic state. We are all in that state as we are falling asleep at night. Many of us are familiar with and maybe more so when we are first waking up in the morning, potentially in a different location like a hotel and you are wondering where you are. That’s that hypnogogic state. You might still have access to dream fragments, but you are not fully awake. This is what would be engendered while listening to these types of recordings. That’s when I started to make a lot of progress.
I learned that I had a lot of emotional things that had been suppressed long ago. Issues about the divorce in my house and all of these things that had happened that I didn’t think of as problems, but in fact, they were emotions that I hadn’t fully processed, so they turned into blockages. The first thing I had to do was release those things. As more of it got released, more of that spirit became available to me. As time went on, I was able to have my past life memories. I was able to become quite good at remote viewing. That’s a form of telepathy.
Do you help people with remote viewing in different situations?
I learned how to remote view what the standard of that is. Someone will put a picture of something into an envelope and write a random number on it. All you receive is that number, and then you go into a quiet space and start to write down or draw your impressions. A little while later, the envelope will be revealed and you get the opportunity to see if you are correct.
Over time, I learned I could feel signals in my body indicating that I was more correct. You aren’t always correct when you do these things, but I was validated enough that I began to trust my inner promptings. That’s where discernment comes in. This was a skill that was with me all through life, but it became more enhanced once I developed those meditative skills to get into those expanded states of awareness.
Discernment is about knowing deep within that something is true. The first thing you need to do is go back to that wide-open mind and put aside all of your ingrained beliefs. If you want to discern truth, you have to be prepared that one of your long-held beliefs may not be the truth. An open mind is very important.
Reincarnation: Discernment is about knowing deep within that something is true.
You want to read the information, analyze it cognitively, find the patterns, and all of that, but you also want to feel inside. How does that feel when you receive that information? This can take some time to develop, but each of us can develop these internal signals of knowing if something feels true, and what’s true for one person may not be true for another. That’s where we have to understand that there are probably very few things we could say are fundamentally universal truths.
One of those that I love to bring up is we are all eternal souls. Another one is the idea that we are all made of love. People who go deep within eventually, like near-death experiencers, run into that. You come across a love that’s deep in the core because we all are made of love that Eben speaks of on the other side. Somewhere deep in all of us, we can access that.
That is what I learned through doing a certain form of Sufi heart rhythm meditation and focusing on the heart, releasing all of those hurts and misunderstandings I have had in the past. Some people have much more severe traumatic events that happen in their lives, so it may not be so simple, but mine were more standard traumas that most of us had.
As I got rid of all of that and found love at the core, that’s the magic. That’s where I love to live, in that loving energy. When I learned about the research of HeartMath, an organization that’s been studying the heart for decades in Northern California. They talk about the heart emitting an electromagnetic field that expands and contracts around your body and influences the people around you.
The more positive and loving emotions you hold within, the more you are influencing the people around you in positive ways. I took that information to heart because I didn’t want to be responsible for influencing people with my stuff. I wanted to only influence them with a pure loving type of energy. That’s been my goal to hold that type of love within me as I go throughout my days. It doesn’t mean I don’t get angry or upset, but when that happens, it’s more superficial. Underneath is where the real essence of who we are lies and that’s what I like to bring up more to the surface in a very conscious way.
I can relate to everything you just said because of my own experience. I go through the world trying to be very loving and kind, and if I have a problem, I even quote, “I detach with love.” I try not to get into the drama. This is the chance you both have to tell us all about your book, which is a wonderful book. I read it. It’s called Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness. Could you give us a sample of the information and insights? Our readers will glean when they read it because they are all going to go, click on, and get your book.
I would like to start by saying to anyone out there who thinks that modern neuroscience is on the verge of explaining consciousness, I can tell you that couldn’t be further from the truth. The mystery of consciousness is more profound now than it has ever been in our history, and yet we are also making tremendous strides in understanding it. That’s what the book Living in a Mindful Universe is all about.
The mystery of consciousness is more profound now than it has ever been in our history, and yet we are also making tremendous strides in understanding it. Click To Tweet
We take a multidisciplinary approach to supporting the philosophical position of objective idealism, which is the view that there is a mental layer of the universe that governs everything that unfolds in this world. This is something that is a reasonable concept to advance quantum physicists and people who understand a lot about the philosophy of mind, the binding problem, and the hard problem of consciousness.
We are trying to solve some very deep problems and questions by combining an approach from multiple different points of view, and that’s where it gets very exciting in the book not only does it have a tremendous scientific background. It’s been endorsed by some of the leading scientists of consciousness studies on Earth. Also, especially I’d say because of Karen’s input, has a tremendous amount of useful wisdom for the individual seeker.
That’s where we explain why does this philosophy matter to us in our daily lives? The idea is that we are not a materialist society where only the physical exists, but we are a spiritual society where we reside in a physical world. This is why it matters. The book includes how in each area of our lives, we can bring this information into our knowing, especially when we are dealing with hardships and difficulties. We realize that those are learning opportunities. They are not just things that are happening to us. They are opportunities to grow, learn, be more of whom we came here to be, and interact with our fellow human beings in this loving and kind way. The main message of all spiritual teachers is that we are here to be kind.
The other universal truth I love to speak about is the golden rule. The golden rule is that you love another as you love yourself or treat another as you treat yourself. We also discuss how so many of us don’t know how to love ourselves because we don’t think we are worthy for whatever reason. Those childhood voices, “You are no good.” Maybe peers who made fun of us. Those things stick with us. The more we can determine that we can love ourselves, that’s the ultimate golden rule. As we are generating that love from within, that’s what loving oneself is all about, becoming the love we already are.
Loving oneself is becoming the love we already are. Click To Tweet
As we do that, we are influencing people around us in positive ways, which makes that the ultimate golden rule. Loving yourself is not selfish. Loving yourself in the way that we discuss is becoming that love. That’s what we can all do. Everyone who’s in any type of relationship knows that love is that binding force. Somehow, we are connected through that love, and that’s what motivates us throughout our lives. Bringing that more to the fore can be so useful.
I can relate to that also because when they pulled me out of the car, I got loving and kind to everyone. I tell people all the time, “You are everyone also.” It’s about being loving and kind to yourself. You say no one is alone and we are always connected with our loved ones on both sides of the veil. Please explain how we are all connected through the binding force of that unconditional love and its unlimited power to heal.
I would say that having had a near-death experience and paying a lot of attention to thousands of near-death experience accounts told over thousands of years across all continents, all belief systems, and all religious systems. It becomes very clear that one of the central messages coming back from those deep journeyers is comfort and that makes that our spiritual home of how it is a fundamental part of our very awareness and existence to acknowledge that oneness we have with the universe and with loving God force of the universe.
Yet, essentially, especially when you look at the practical presentation of life reviews that have been reported by millions over thousands of years. Again, across this whole repertoire of human experience, the life review is one where the soul going through it experiences the emotional impact their actions and thoughts had on others around them.
The life review is not from that soul’s perspective, but it’s a gift to that soul, showing them how their actions impacted those around them. That’s why the life review is such a beautiful example of the golden rule being written into the very fabric of the universe. That’s why this concept of unity and the healing power of the binding force of love is crucial for us to get. It is something that emerges from the scientific study of thousands of these experiences.
I would just add one way to learn about love is to experience being loved or being loving. Another way to learn about love is the lack of love. There are so many of us in our culture, the Western culture, at least here in the US, is that addiction and suicide rates are rising. This was going on before the pandemic began. Now, that’s only making it worse. It’s that lack of love.
Eben and I feel that those rising rates are related to the idea that spirit has been stripped out of our secular world, and it’s been done for proper reasons, keeping dogmatic religion out of our government. However, the idea that we are spiritual beings has been stripped out of our culture. People proudly are agnostic or atheist and this is doing a disservice.
When you have that lack is when people start to take their own lives and find other ways like substances, to replace them or displace their feelings onto others. It comes back to that binding force of love. Everyone who has shown that love when they are able to receive it wouldn’t even think of taking their own life and they wouldn’t have that empty hole they are trying to fill with something else. That is another demonstration of how without that binding force of love, people suffer. This is something we hope to bring to all souls on Earth so that no soul is left behind. As you eloquently stated, “We are all connected.” We need to care about our neighbors. We need to care about them.
This is all about what you are doing and what we are doing through the show is to help people to know this and to begin to heal those empty holes within them. At international workshops, you two demonstrated key practices of consciousness exploration, heart awareness, intention, maintaining neutrality, emotional management, and cultivating internal knowing. Can you help us understand some of these concepts?
This is speaking to that inner world. These are things that can’t be measured by science. Our hopes, dreams, intentions, and underlying purpose for why we do what we do. The more that many of us go through life automatically following these inner promptings, but if you can start to understand those inner promptings and understand your hidden underlying motivations, then you can start to realize where you could make adjustments.
This is what we tried to teach people how to do. We often use brainwave entrainment technology, which is designed to bring the brain from an analytical state of mind to a much more relaxed state of mind. That’s when we can start to discern between those racing thoughts and other presence that is within us all. That’s what we try to bring to our in-person and online workshops.
You have spoken to that all-important spiritual level where most people conceive health physically, mentally, and emotionally, but there’s a very important spiritual level. Would you like to speak a little more about that?
Absolutely. It’s important to remember is René Descartes said, “To define is to limit.” We sit there with our language and we cut the world apart into all these different pieces. In many ways, they are artificial cuts. I would say that wellness or wholeness to talk about the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual components is ignoring that there’s one wellness and wholeness. In its deepest sense that originates from the spiritual level. When I say spiritual, for me, the best way to define spiritual is it provides two components. A knowing of the connectedness of all that’s fully supported by the modern neuroscience of consciousness and quantum physics that points to the one mind that we are all sharing.
Wellness or wholeness to talk about the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual components is ignoring that there's one wellness and wholeness. Click To Tweet
The other key aspect is there’s a meaning or purpose to all this. It’s not just some blind, mechanistic, and chaotic wheel with no reason for being. I think our spirituality grows tremendously when we can appreciate the reality of that connectedness and a sense of meaning and purpose. That’s where in many ways our spirituality, our sense of those qualities of connection, meaning, purpose, and knowing of that binding force of love is something that opens this world to healing. It turns out medical science, in many ways, has known this for a long time. For decades, we have used the placebo effect as our gold standard for assessing any new treatment.
The placebo effect is an admission right out of the gate there. Probably at least 30% of the benefit of any medication or treatment is due to the patient’s belief that it can make them better. It goes far beyond a sugar pill for a headache. There’s much more to this concept of healing. If you go to Noetic.org, the Institute of Noetic Sciences website, put in a search term.
Spontaneous remission, you will find a book they put out. It’s out of print now but you can download the whole thing from the website legally and for free. More than 3,500 cases of people with advanced cancers, infections, and what have you where they had healing that went beyond any expectation of the Western medical treatments they’d had.
I would add that Kelly Turner a researcher took that database and she went through and found all of the qualities that the different miraculous healing situations had. What she found was she identified nine factors in her book, Radical Remission, and six of them were related to spiritual connections. That’s like feeling a connection to others and feeling a sense of purpose. It’s all about how you feel. Those were the most important factors, 6 out of 9. The other three were things like dieting and taking charge of your health, but the spiritual connection is key to these people who successfully healed themselves.
Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds
It makes sense to unify these concepts and realize just as medicine is recognized for decades. The mind, our beliefs, and our attitudes play a tremendous role in healing. We can take charge of all that. That’s where the spiritual component comes in.
You need to say much more, but if you’d like to give us a message about the importance of healing on this side of the veil that you’d like to share with our readers, please do. Do either of you want to encourage our readers to get rid of those holes within themselves while they are here and why should they do that this time around?
It’s also important to remember. One of the biggest lessons I have received from my NDE coming back to this world is the hardships and difficulties in life, and as a physician, that certainly includes illness and injury, in many ways we should embrace these as gifts. Your ego is not going to like that at all, but the reality is, as we start to see the hardships and challenges in life, they often can gift us with tremendous lessons in learning.
I would say you are a beautiful example of that. You paid a tremendous amount to have your lesson in being in that car accident where you lost your loving husband, yet look at what you are doing with it. Look at how you are growing out of the adversity of what many people would look at as a very dire circumstance.
Similarly, I am taking the lessons I learned from a should-have-killed-me case of bacterial meningoencephalitis and bringing those lessons back to this world. It’s important for us to realize all the apparent evil and dark side of this world, in many ways, offers us a silver lining of growth, learning, and teaching together.
This is all about the reason we came to this world as souls. To live these lives is to grow, to transform. I would say the reason for the existence of the entire universe is to evolve for consciousness itself to evolve. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote in his beautiful mid-twentieth-century book, The Phenome#non of Man. Evolution is real but it’s much bigger than the Darwinian evolution of biological systems on Earth. It’s about all of consciousness evolving to a much higher form. I believe that’s what we are all participating in, becoming more whole as a world, as a civilization, and as life and sentience throughout the universe.
The Phenomenon of Man (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)
Isn’t that a wonderful thing that we are going for that? Hopefully, we are all going for that. We are part of that. Our readers, you will get to see Eben and Karen many times on our feeds. I’m asking a bit about their tips for finding joy in life, but to see them is to know they found joy in life together. Their love just comes right off my screen here. Would you guys like to tell people any tips that you have besides meeting each other for finding joy in life?
One tip for finding joy is to find acceptance. Find a way to accept what is because when we are constantly resisting something that we don’t like in our lives, whether it’s a partner, a boss, the weather, or a job we have, find a way to accept. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take action to make those changes. Finding a way to be in the present moment and accept everything as it is. It’s a beautiful way to understand that in all moments, we can access that joy. Especially in the present moment, unless you are being rescued by EMTs from your car at that moment.
Most of us, when we get into that now moment, that’s when we are not worried about what’s going to happen the next day or anxious about what happened the day before. Find that presence. Nature is a beautiful way to do that. If you are in a city, find a way to see the stars, or find a way to go to a park. Be with nature and feel the joy that comes from a tree that’s blooming flowers or whatever it is. There’s joy just in this simple act of being and living and that’s what I would recommend.
I would simply add that it’s very important to go within. I meditate for an hour or two a day. You don’t have to do it that long, but 15 or 20 minutes a day to go within, whether it’s centering prayer or meditation. We highly recommend Sacred Acoustics because of the power it has on the lower brainstem to liberate consciousness and profound ways.
By doing that, one can develop real trust in the universe if there is true guidance and love we can use as a resource there. Always remember the power you have through gratitude. To me, the strongest virtue there is gratitude because I believe that it energizes everything else that can be a benefit in our lives and never forget the power of forgiveness.
Forgive ourselves and others. Cut some slack and allow us to live and grow as the divine spiritual beings all interconnected through the binding force of love we are. We can learn, teach together, reach much higher levels of human accomplishments, and have a much kinder and more harmonious world by showing kindness, compassion, empathy, and love to our fellow beings. Never forget loving ourselves. Many of us can’t even do that. That was one of my problems before my coma. Love yourself and realize you are a divine, eternal, and spiritual being that is here to help the world become a better place.
If everyone wants to contact you and they all want to get your book, and they all want to learn more. Could you tell us all about the ways they can connect with you and if you have any offers for our readers, please do.
First of all, if you go to SacredAcoustics.com, there’s a free download available to you by putting in your email address. If you scroll down the homepage a bit, look for the Whole Mind Bundle. These are recordings that were used in a pilot study in a busy Manhattan psychiatric practice. After two weeks of listening to these recordings, people saw a 26% reduction in anxiety compared to 7% of the control group who were in therapy but who weren’t listening to these recordings. These are available now because of the COVID pandemic. They are specially priced at $19, but also, there’s a free option for anyone in economic uncertainty. Pick free and you can download these recordings and start quieting that mind with our gratitude for taking the time to do that.
Another way to get in touch with us is InnerSanctumCenter.com. You will find a free webinar series called United in Hope and Healing. This is something that Eben and I began when all of our events for the year were canceled like everyone else is. We started connecting with our colleagues and friends we normally would have seen at conferences. This includes NDE researchers like Pim van Lommel, experiencers like Anita Moorjani, researchers, mediums, and all kinds of people that we normally would have seen. They are coming on this program to have conversations with us.
Those are all available for free. There’s an archive of them that people can just sign up for a password, and you will have access to all of that. We welcome you to join us there. Also, on EbenAlexander.com, there’s something we call Your 33 Day Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, also free. You can sign up for that. It’s an email program where you will get an email every day for 33 days and some samples of those Sacred Acoustics recordings.
That sounds wonderful. I am so grateful to have had this interview with the two of you. It’s been wonderful. Your enlightened new worldview can surely help so many people and reach every facet of their lives. Thank you from my heart for enriching our lives with your special interview on the show. Here’s a reminder, everyone. Make sure to follow us and like us because we know you do, on social @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. As I like to say, to be continued, many blessings, and bye for now.
Guest’s Links:
- Eben Alexander’s book: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife
- Helping Parents Heal website
- Sacred Acoustics Audio website
- Eben Alexander and Karen Newell’s book: Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness
- Eben Alexander’s website
- UVADOPS website
- Noetic website
- Kelly Turner’s Radical Remission referenced in this episode
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man referenced in this episode
- Whole Mind Bundle product
- United in Hope and Healing Webinar
- Your 33 Day Journey into the Heart of Consciousness Program
