#136 My amazing guest this week is Mark Gober with a conversation around consciousness and spiritually that will make you question the world we live in. Mark is an award-winning author as well as a podcast host and international speaker. Mark’s background is in business as a Partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and previously as an investment banking analyst in New York. But despite being a left-brainer, the universe had different plans for him and guided him towards questioning and researching consciousness and how we understand it.

Does our brain create consciousness or is it the other way around? What have near-death experiences taught us? How much do our intentions for our lives actually affects them? Have your ever wondered if there is a purpose to our lives? Does anything we do matter? These are only some of the mind-blowing and deep questions that we answer on this episode, with the help of Mark. This episode really made me think, and I hope it will spark something for you guys as well.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like: Science, Synchronicities & Intent | Dean Radin

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About Mark: Mark Gober is the author of the award-winning book An End to Upside Down Thinking (2018) and the sequel An End to Upside Down Living (2020). He is also the host of Where Is My Mind? podcast (2019), featuring his interviews with world-leading consciousness researchers Eben Alexander, Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, Russell Targ, Raymond Moody, Jim Tucker, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson, and many others. Mark serves on the Board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment (SoWE), and he is an international speaker.

Mark’s background is in business as a Partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and previously as an investment banking analyst in New York. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, where he wrote his award-winning thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning “Prospect Theory” and was elected a captain of Princeton’s Division I Tennis Team.

►Audio Version:

Key points with time stamp:

• Mark’s work in his own words (3:28)
• How did Mark go from Investment banking to researching consciousness? (3:53)
• Mark’s journey to writing his book (13:14)
• Why An End to Upside Down Thinking? Case (15:26)
• The effects of consciousness research on Mark’s life (17:55)
• To the sceptical: (20:56)
• How accessible and available is the abilities of the consciousness (24:12)
• What surprised Mark about the abilities of our consciousness (26:20)
• Tangible changes in Mark’s life since he began his journey (27:04)
• How powerful are our intentions? (30:31)
• Mark’s hope for his book (37:06)
• Mark’s daily practices (38:25)
• How can we be more comfortable about talking about our spiritual experiences? (41:27)
• The low point in Mark’s life which turned into a blessing (43:37)
• Mark’s morning routine (44:39)
• Mark’s choice of a dinner guest, dead or alive (45:45)
• What Mark leaves us with (46:45)

Mentioned in this episode:

• An End to Upside Down Thinking (2018), Mark Gober’s book
• Laura Powers
• Bernardo Castro
• Professor Donald Hoffman
• The Case Against Reality (2019), Donald Hoffman’s book
• Erwin Schrödinger
• American Psychologist Journal
• Etzel Cardena
• Jessica Utts
• American Statistical Association
• Jimmy Carter
• Where is My Mind? Mark’s podcast
• Russel Targ
• Michael Jordan
• Lebron James
• An End to Upside Down Living (2020) Mark’s second book
• Hans-Peter Durr
• Roger Nelson
• 9/11
• Princess Diana
• Heartmath Institute
• Thomas Campbell
• NASA
• Germ Theory
• Copernican Revolution
• Galileo
• David Hawkins
• Bruce Grayson
• Dannion Brinkley
• Chaos Theory
• Butterfly Effect
• Peter Panagore

Mark’s Website:
www.markgober.com
www.markgober.com/podcast

About me:

My Instagram:
www.instagram.com/guyhlawrence/?hl=en

My website:
www.guylawrence.com.au
www.liveinflow.co

 

TRANSCRIPT

Guy:
0:08
Hey, awesome people. This is guy, how are you? Thank you for tuning into my podcast, where of course I have conversations that go well beyond conventional health, wealth and wisdom to inspire change in our lives. And if you’ve tuned in today for the first time we’ve met Hello, howdy doody. Hope you stick around and if you’re coming back for more, I just want to let you know that I appreciate you tuning in every week. I really do. And I have a great episode for you today. As my awesome guest is Mark Gober. Now, I don’t want to give too much away. But you know this this was right up my alley. What I loved about Mark’s story we do get into it so I’m only going to touch on it. He was an investment banking analysis the New York so as you can imagine, very much Have a left brainer. And after a few things, currencies in his life, which we cover, of course, he started going down the rabbit hole of all about what I do on this podcast, you know what I mean? Like so I really connected with Mark and I just loved this conversation. It was awesome. And he put a book together then in 2018 called An End to Upside Down Thinking, which essentially was a compelling side exploring compelling scientific evidence from a diverse set of disciplines ranging from the psychic phenomena to near death experiences to quantum physics and beyond. So, yeah, I have no doubt you’re gonna enjoy this show today. And I want to give out a review. Review of the week from B. B. Hamill. I’m not sure how to.. I think that’ how you pronounce it That’s how you say it. Five stars Guy Lawrence highly recommended. This is iTunes review. By the way, please keep on coming in. I highly recommend listening to go podcasts and joining his liveinflow community. This totally helped me on my initial journey into meditation and deeper understanding of our connection with all things. If you can also recommend attending his workshops or retreats, a game changer. And thank you very much appreciate that review. They all help as you know. And as I record this, we are we have kicked off our reconnected four week interactive program at the moment, it’s going great guns. I don’t know when we will be running it again. But I’m loving every minute. It’s all awesome. So if you want to find out more about anything that we are up to, including the retreats workshops are a group coaching program, which we do, we are opening up just for a few spaces, and also, any future programs we run. Best thing you can do is come back and subscribe to our newsletter, or my newsletter, which is beyond guylawrence.com.au/ Very easy to find or liveinnflow.co And yeah, awesome. Let’s go over a mark. Enjoy this episode. It’s fantastic.

Guy:
3:03
Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark:
3:05
Thanks for having me.

Guy:
3:07
I have to say, I just want to tell you this as well, when I first stumbled across your work, and heard an investment banker was exploring the work of consciousness, I was like, I have to get this man on and find out what the hell happened while you look into that into that work, so I greatly appreciate you coming on the show, man.

Matt:
3:25
Well, thanks for having me. I’m excited to chat with you.

Guy:
3:28
I do ask everyone saying that if you are on an airplane and you sat next to a complete stranger right now and they asked you what you did for a living, what would you be saying these days?

Mark:
3:38
These days, I would say I research consciousness. But as of a few months ago, I was still in my finance business job and I would have said I advise technology companies.

Guy:
3:49
Oh, wow. So you’ve literally just stepped down recently.

Mark:
3:53
very recently, and it happened in a synchronistic way before COVID hit I didn’t obviously didn’t know all this was connected. But in December of 2019, after I had become a partner spent 10 years at the firm, decided that I needed to do something else that my passions weren’t aligned anymore. So I let my partners know, and agreed to stay on for a bit and worked part time for the first few months of 2020 through the end of March, and actually wrote my book in that period, which was not what I had expected. It just kind of all happened quickly. My second book.

Guy:
4:26
yeah, Wow, congratulations, and synchronistically Funny enough, me telling you about me stepping down from my old company. I can appreciate that must have been a big decision for you to do so.

Mark:
4:40
It was a big one. Yeah, it was a shift in many ways. It was going into the unknown. But it got to a point where I realized that I wasn’t being authentic anymore by staying in my role. And that was doing a disservice not only to me, but to my colleagues and my clients. If I couldn’t do it with 100% passion like I used to And letting go of that role did something for me on an energetic level that I can’t really explain. But it was like a release almost. And when I made the decision in late 2019, to let my partners know, my former partners know, that’s when ideas for the second book started to come in and sort of like maybe it was there in the ether. And by opening up space, all the sudden that became a reality. And then by February, that’s when I actually wrote the book in between two meditation retreats.

Guy:
5:32
Wow, amazing. And I and you know, in with me with working with people as well, and I see it so often. And I think that’s why I appeal and resonate with so many people is that I think we find these times in our lives where we get to this point where we know we need to we need to navigate. You know, we know we’re not living our authentic truth anymore, like just like you said, but it can be so terrifying but so liberating. At the same time, there’s all these emotions mixed into one. And when you know you’re ready, you’re ready. And I think that’s when we need to act and not hold on anymore.

Mark:
6:08
Yeah, well, it was tricky for me. Because when I would talk to people about my decision, the logical question is, well, what are you going to do next? And my answer was, I have no idea. And that was difficult because I’ve always been a planner, my whole life worked in investment banking in New York prior to my previous role, went to Princeton before that kind of traditional background where everything’s planned out. And here I was jumping off a cliff really not knowing what I was going to do, but knowing that I had this other passion because at that point, I had already written my first book and produced a podcast but I didn’t know where it was going to lead and I still don’t know where it’s gonna lead.

Guy:
6:41
Yeah, wow. Well, you’re a brilliant advocate made because yeah, I’m getting the feeling if you can do this and find this work and explore this, then then I think anybody can, especially because we’re so conditioned to be analytical planned and come from that side of mind, you know, and tapping into the consciousness. The creative side, the artistic side more is so liberating at the same time, you know, especially if we already use to, to operate in from the other side.

Mark:
7:08
Yes, it’s an integration of using the logic when it’s needed, but also using the intuition and the instincts. So I’m glad we talked about that topic first. Because just based on my circle of friends and family, I find that a lot of people sometimes are, are doing something, whether it’s work or relationships or some aspect of their life that’s not fully authentic, and I can see it weigh on them. And that’s happened for me throughout my life. So I hope that this discussion might spark something for listeners.

Guy:
7:33
Yeah. And that’s where we need to explore right, and sometimes it’s the last place we go because we are scared of what might avail. But I know from my experience, that’s where the joy has come from. Totally. And there’s certainly Yeah, like you said, an energetic shift that comes with it as well, which is, which is hard to explain. So yeah, amazing. So let’s take us back. What happened I mean, you know, you were an investment bank analysis. From what I understand, and then you started looking into this work, like where was the shift? Where was your moment?

Mark:
8:07
I can draw a line in the sand in late 2016. There’s a before and after. And the before was coming from traditional education business background, which has a worldview where the universe is random. Life doesn’t have any real meaning behind it. We can try to create meaning if we want, but ultimately, when we die, it’s over. It’s lights out, there’s no memories, no thoughts or emotions. And therefore, is there any real meaning to life? And many scientists would say, No, there’s not actual intrinsic meaning in the universe, but you can try to make up meaning on your own. And that mentality was in the back of my mind, always, because I was an achiever tried to thrive and everything I did, but never knew why it meant anything. And yet I’d still get upset if I would lose a tennis match. I was attending a competitive tennis player growing up captain, the Princeton tennis team. I would still be really upset and then I think, wait, Mark, why does it actually matter in the You’re being irrational. And the same thing goes would go for achievements. I’d be really happy about an achievement, maybe a promotion. And then I’d realize wait mark, in the end, it doesn’t matter because life doesn’t mean anything. And yet I would have these highs and lows still and have the cognitive dissonance to say, there’s no meaning to life. And yet I’m having these highs and lows. What’s that all about? And I wasn’t looking to shift that I thought science was pointing more and more in the direction of what I would call nihilism. There’s no meaning in the end. And that’s what I thought the world was. And then I came across podcasts, not intentionally. I was listening to health in business shows in 2016. And heard a woman on a health show talk about using energy and psychic abilities and working with clients and how she had her name is Laura powers. She had traditional jobs and higher education and had a master’s degree sounded like a pretty normal person and yet was changed her life. To become psychic and work with energy, so that one conversation didn’t, it didn’t change my life. But it was enough for me to be interested enough in her podcast called healing powers. So, I would turn that podcast on in the car, I live in San Francisco. Our office was in Silicon Valley so so long drive and traffic. And I would just turn on healing powers and listen to the episodes because I was looking for something new. And it was a few weeks of that of listening to people independently describe their own experiences of things, where there’s much more to reality than meets the eye, that our consciousness might continue on beyond the body, that psychic phenomenon might be real and not paranormal, and that there might be this interconnectivity in the universe that we can’t see with our eyes also. So, ideas like that, where I heard enough people independently described things that I couldn’t just discount it. And then I looked at the science, and it became all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was research, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube read scientific papers. spent a year doing that, originally.

Guy:
11:08
So I was gonna say, Well, what do you think was the allure at the time? Because you were very open to it, you know, sometimes we can just go dismiss it throw away a lot, that’s all shit or whatever, and never looked at it for another 10 years, you know?

Mark:
11:23
Well, I did. I definitely didn’t dismiss it. But I also didn’t take it that seriously. At first. It was sort of just interesting to hear what people were saying and it didn’t click, like it didn’t stick in my mind that there would be implications of what people were saying. But the notion that you that communications with the deceased some people were claiming to be mediums and talking to dead people that wasn’t clicking for me that Wait, if they’re not lying, is there something to this and if they are lying, that’s what are they doing? Are they just, they have a motive. I was just kind of casually listening at first. And when I certain people I heard I guess were were credible enough where it stuck to to the point where I wanted to Read the science. And that’s when the floodgates really open because I didn’t realize that the US government had run a psychic spying program, for instance, for over 20 years spending $25 million, or that they were peer reviewed papers or that the University of Virginia has a lab, the division of perceptual studies where they’ve looked at children with past life memories for the past 50 plus years, very credible scientists doing this sort of thing. And that hooked me because I realized that I would have to shift my worldview completely, if any of this were real, and on a broader scale. This implied that basically the world or most of the world, of course, not all of it, most of the world was living in a zombie state completely oblivious to the actual nature of reality, just like I had been. So that pulled me in, and I haven’t looked back really.

Guy:
12:48
Wow…Did I do ever reach out to? Was it the lady’s… Laura, and on the hook, that she had such a big impact of you at the time?

Mark:
12:57
Yeah, I’ve mentioned her in my recent book. I talked about her, I interviewed her for my podcast. Actually, when I started on this journey, I began to do sessions with psychics. And she was the first one I did a session with. And there were a number of people that were able to come up with information that I couldn’t explain. So that was aligning with the research.

Guy:
13:14
Yeah. Wow. So what so but you took it to the next level and going, I’m gonna, you put up, put a book out. So how did you get to that point?

Mark:
13:25
There was no intention of being public. At first, there was no intention of writing a book. It was all curiosity and passion. And at the time, that that I had this kind of line in the sand moment where there was the before and after, and I realized something, something broader was going on. I wasn’t at the best point in my own life. Personally, there were some things in my professional life, personal life that just weren’t going as well as I was used to. Plus, I had this nihilism in the back of my mind. So, I entered this period of great disorientation. Not only was my life and not the best position, but I was learning about it completely different. view of reality that was kind of going to gonna negate a lot of the problems I was having, personally. And so I was, it was I was really on an upward trajectory at this point. But I was also disoriented because I had to rethink life. And that curiosity, I think, pulled me in, where for months, all I was doing was researching, began to talk to friends about it, we’d have dinners, and I’d say, Hey, I’m looking at this, and I tell them about a certain piece of research or the University of Virginia or whatever. And people would just sit there with their jaw dropped. Wait, I didn’t know that research existed. That’s a really big deal. I need to rethink things in life, if any of That’s true. So I saw the impact it was having on people close to me who are well educated, traditional thinkers. And it was it was those pieces of feedback combined with my passions. That led me in June of 2017. So this was under a year since I started researching. I said, Maybe I should write a book on this. Wait, no, I shouldn’t do that. I work in business. This is Crazy stuff, very controversial science. I’m not going to do that. And then I said, No, I’m going to do it. And I took the Fourth of July holiday weekend in the US to just start writing. And it was a long weekend ended up writing more than half of the book that weekend, finished it over the next few weekends. And I came out of July 2017, with the full manuscript. And so it was like this overnight thing that I didn’t think would happen.

Guy:
15:26
Wow, wow. Um, why the title An End to Upside Down Thinking?

Mark:
15:30
Well, the title came, actually, at the end of the process, I wrote the book first didn’t have a title wasn’t sure exactly what it’s going to be. But the title and end to upside down thinking refers to the view of consciousness that’s held by the majority of the world I would say, especially the academic and educational systems. And the idea of consciousness under that mainstream view, is that consciousness comes from our brain. When I say consciousness, I’m referring to the sense of experiencing life. The sense of I-ness. So, when I say that I am speaking to you that I-ness is his consciousness. It’s not something I can touch, but it is experiencing right now it has this ever-present sense of awareness. Now, what I didn’t realize until I started the research is that science has no idea how this consciousness thing which we all experience could come out of a brain, even though it assumes that the brain is making consciousness. And science assumes that because in the field of neuroscience, there are strong correlations between what happens to the brain and the type of conscious experience we have. So, imagine someone gets in a car accident and has brain damage in the part of the brain responsible for vision. That person might have a change in how they view the world because they can’t see the same way. So, we see change in the brain, changing consciousness and we have really tight correlations, that’s, that’s well known. So scientists say well, the brain creates consciousness. The reason that is a leap we can’t necessarily make in statistics, it’s known as correlation does not imply causation. I’ll give a simplistic example. You have a fire, lots of firefighters come up, you know, to try to put a fire out. You have a larger fire more firefighters show up at the scene. Do we think that the firefighters caused the fire? They didn’t cause the fire there’s a different relationship there. And that’s an analogy from Dr. Bernardo Castro, a philosopher. There’s a potential additional explanation for the correlation between the two things and that’s what I argue in an end to upside down thinking the brains not creating consciousness. It’s the other way around. The consciousness is the fundamental aspect of all reality and the brain actually limits, restricts, filters a much broader consciousness

Guy:
17:55
wow, you know I you saying that I’m there’s two things that often to me one is that I literally had Donald Hoffman on the, professor Donald Hoffman, on the show last week with The Case Against Reality. And he’s breaking down the mathematics and science, the very things that you’re actually seeing right here and the argument that’s coming in. And the second thing that occurred to me then is that for a large part of my life, I didn’t even question or think about it, I just assumed, like there was no real Yeah, awareness around that the fact that there could be something greater going on here. What when you were looking into this work and research net what implications as that made on your life, personally, knowing that it could well be the other way around and sciences lien in their consciousness is not generated by the brain?

Mark:
18:44
Well, if we accept this idea that consciousness is fundamental, and to quote Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, he said, In truth, there is only one mind, one mind of which we are apart. So to go back to the philosopher, Dr. Bernardo Castro, he says, It’s like we’re whirlpools with In a stream of consciousness, meaning we have a sense of being an individual, and we’re sort of blocked, because we’re so localized in a whirlpool from the broader reality, but we’re fundamentally interconnected with everyone and everything. And what my first book and then to upside down thinking looks at is all the science that suggests that that could be true. So looking at the reality of psychic phenomena like telepathy, mind to mind communication, pre cognition, knowing you’re sensing the future before it happens, for example, and also survival of bodily death, meaning that the water doesn’t leave the stream. When it stops being a whirlpool, the water just changes into a new state, it’s transitions into a new form, the water might dissolve into the broader stream. And I look at the science behind that, as well. So near death experiences the science of mediumship children with past life memories. And it leads to it leads me to believe there’s strong evidence for the reality of psychic abilities meaning we all have these innate abilities, even though there’s Sometimes very, very subtle, and we can’t sense them without statistics. Number two, that when our body dies, that’s actually the liberation of consciousness. It’s not the end of consciousness, we’re able to experience a much broader and rich reality that our brain is actually blocking out. Number three, we are fundamentally interconnected. It seems like we’re separate, but we’re all part of the same one mind. And that is, to me the biggest of all implications, because when we look at the world throughout history, but especially today, many if not all, the world’s problems stem from a belief that we’re separate that Yeah, we have similar genetics, because we’re part of the same species. We all live on Earth. But there’s me and you, there’s no connection beyond that. I’m going to take care of me when push comes to shove. And maybe I’ll help people maybe not. Whereas if you think we’re actually interconnected, there is a much greater responsibility to work towards helping others and helping the planet.

Guy:
20:56
Yeah, and those implications are huge, isn’t it, and it’s What I’m fascinated with as well with your research is how, like the sceptic out there would say, Oh yeah, but because the moment is not tangible, the moment we can’t see it, and it’s not physical, it’s very easy to dismiss this as, you know, vague or loose or, you know, or pseudoscience, you know, so what is what is science saying, like, what is showing? How accurate are we talking about? And within the studies, that’s, that’s been turning out, because, look, I’m preaching to the converted here, because I’ve had experiences myself personally, when I felt that interconnectedness and beyond myself, you know, of current reality like it’s, it’s, it’s happened many times and through the work and, you know, so for me, I’m very passionate about it, but I can certainly relate to my old self as well, that would just go now.

Mark:
21:55
Yeah, me too. So that that was the purpose of the first book An End to Upside Down Thinking and also my podcast where’s my mind right interviewed many of the scientists and I’ll give a few highlights of some of the best science. There was a paper published in American psychologists, which is the official peer reviewed journal of the American Psychological Association 2018 mainstream peer reviewed journal and Etzel Cardena, a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, looked at the combined statistics for studies that have been done on psychic phenomena like telepathy, precognition psychokinesis, which is the ability for mind impact matter and remote viewing, which I mentioned earlier, like the CIA in the US government ran a program using psychic spying and probably other governments throughout the world. And actually, the CIA declassified documents that I was able to use because conveniently they came out around the time that I was researching, but they were from decades ago. And they say very explicitly, remote viewing is a real phenomenon. implications are rapidly illusionary, and this is the ability to see something with the mind from far away. And these are the CIA’s documents. So But anyway, Dr. Cardena looked at the combined statistics for all these phenomena because scientists have been looking at this for a long time. It’s usually discredited for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. And the statistics are overwhelmingly positive, in favor of a real effect. So to give a quote from Dr. Jessica Utts, who in 2016 was the president of the American Statistical Association, back in 1995. She said this, she said, using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. Well, she said that to Congress around 1995 in 1995, because of the US government’s program, so this researcher Dr. Cardena in 2018 was looking at all the accumulated statistics again in a peer reviewed journal. That to me was very significant because With all the skepticism in this area, and many journals would reject papers like this, but after going back and forth with with the journal for a long time, they had to accept the science. Yeah, that’s, that’s a big one.

Guy:
24:12
Yeah, that’s huge. And, you know, with only these different phenomena and abilities with people, because I, you know, I assume just like any any skill set, you got people are really good at it. And then people are maybe not so good at it. I mean, do you think this this work is available to anyone if they’re willing to put in the work?

Mark:
24:32
It’s a great question. I think they are available to everyone to an extent. Because we’re connected to the stream of consciousness, our brain is a way to tap into the stream effectively. And that’s where I would say knowledge comes from or any, any information is a tapping in. So what the study shows that we all have the abilities to a statistical degree, meaning people do better than chance would predict when they do psychic tasks. But when we look at something like the US government’s program where they use psychic spies, for example, to identify where a downed Russian bomber was that was lost in an African jungle. And the radar systems at the time couldn’t find it. And they use psychics from the program to find it. And, yeah, Jimmy Carter, former US president confirmed that this happened. And on my podcast, where’s my mind, I interviewed Russell targ, who was the laser physicist who ran the program back in the 70s and 80s. And that’s this was one event where it happened. The people that were doing this the ability to see something on the other side of the planet, where no one knew the answer, they didn’t know where the plane was. So in some studies, they’ll place an object in a certain spot, and the last the psychics try to identify where it is, but in that case, even the researcher knows where it is. someone knows where it is, in this case with a lot with the down bomber, no one knew where it was, because it was lost, and they needed psychics to find it. That was pretty significant one

Guy:
25:56
Wow. Was it… Oh go on.

Mark:
25:59
Yeah, I wanted to answer your question of this kind of range of psychic abilities, these people at the US government’s program are like the Michael Jordans LeBron James is of psychic ability. Some people are just have stronger abilities in certain areas than others. Like someone might be a better musician than another person or any talent sports. Yeah, writing. And that’s how I see it. It’s like a spectrum.

Guy:
26:20
Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I mean, you must have looked at a lot of studies and a lot of different aspects to the different abilities that we have, whether it was anything that really surprised you.

Mark:
26:35
The biggest thing that surprised me is that Princeton University had a lab for almost 30 years run by the former dean of engineering, studying phenomena like this. And I didn’t know about it when I was an undergrad there, because it was so controversial is basically underground, and they shut it down in 2007. dr. john told The New York Times something to the effect of if they don’t believe us, after all the results we’ve produced, they never will

Guy:
27:01
Wow, there you go. I suppose sums it up really doesn’t it? You know, so why why with all this work then? And then you do like how would it impact your personal life since because obviously you’ve just said you’ve, you’ve stepped down. So clearly it’s impacted you, you know, over the last few months, but are there any any different things that you’ve brought in as a practice or changed due to looking and research in this work? Because I think that might be helpful for listeners today. That might be where you were driving back and forth on that car in 2016. going, Oh, this is interesting. Now it’s like, what have you taken out of it and made it tangible in your own life?

Mark:
27:41
Well, my new book is called An End to Upside Down Living, the first book’s an End to Upside Down Thinking and it looks at that very issue of how would we live if we accept the science, all these amazing phenomena? And I start the book by asking your question, which is what is the overall intention of your life? Meaning what is the orientation that you’ve set for almost like a compass for your life that drives all of your priorities, values, decisions, behaviors? And if I had answered that question a few years ago, before all this research happened, I would have said that it’s a it’s an irrelevant question. Because life doesn’t have any meaning. So why is there even a sense in trying to set a compass, or set an intention for how to live? In the end? It’s, it’s random, it doesn’t matter. Whereas now I think that we can build a compass for how we might live that logically follows this worldview. So I say, look, there’s a lot of evidence for this idea that consciousness is fundamental. Scientists. Some of them think that consciousness come from the brain. Many of them think that but it’s called the hard problem of consciousness. They have no idea how it could happen. And Science magazine has said it’s the number two question that remains in all of science. How could a brain produce content And the number one question, by the way is what is the universe made out of? And I would argue the answer is consciousness. And the number two question, I would say, you’ve asked the wrong question. You’re asking how the brain makes consciousness when the brain does not make it at all. Okay, so if we accept this worldview, that science is off base, consciousness is fundamental. And there are sets of inferences we can make about living. And so interconnectedness is a big one. This idea that if we are all part of the one mind, so to speak, then help thinking about service in whatever way that manifests for each of us individually might be different for me might be reading a book for someone else, it might be cooking a meal, I don’t think there’s I don’t think anyone is better or worse, it’s a matter of using our skills. But there is an imperative to consider the collective much more and to think about our daily interactions. So that that is a big shift for me. I was definitely I would consider myself a caring person before and I was I always thought ethically Telling the truth and being an integrity. I just always felt that but now, there’s a, it’s different. It’s I feel like the purpose of life is actually around evolving collectively. And that means improving ourselves on a personal development level, but also helping to improve the status of the planet and other people. So whereas before, I would have said, those are nice ideas now it’s complices in that direction, leave my job, everything is there, because that’s why I think we exist at least partially.

Guy:
30:31
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you just triggered another thought around intention. So from everything you’re researching, how powerful Do you think it is? Because even in taking that into group intention, have you looked at the research around that as well?

Mark:
30:51
Yes, it’s huge. If we think about it conceptually, first, if all reality is consciousness, if there’s actually nothing physical, we just interpret things as Even though atoms are 99.9999999%, empty space, and we think it’s physical at a certain level, it’s our interpretation. It’s almost like an illusion, even though it does exist to a degree, everything’s consciousness, it would stand to reason that if we shift consciousness, physical reality will shift. That would be a prediction of this model. And the study of psychokinesis, which I mentioned earlier, mind impacting “matter”, I put matter in quotation marks there because maybe it’s not even matter. To quote Hans Peter Durr, physicist, he said, matters not made of matter.

Guy:
31:38
Yeah, it’s all energy.

Mark:
31:39
It’s all, right. It’s right. Consciousness and properties of consciousness, like energy, vibration, all that. So it would stand to reason that maybe we can impact the physical reality around us with our consciousness. And going back to Princeton University Studies. They looked at the behavior of computer machines called random numbers. generators. So these are machines that generate zeros and ones in a totally random fashion. You look at the string of zeros and ones over a long period of time, you get close to 50% ones 50% zeros. Bringing intention into this, the researchers sometimes asked people who didn’t necessarily claim to have psychic abilities to try to influence the machine to make it produce more ones than zeros. And what the researchers find over millions of trials doing different types of random number generators is that there’s a small, highly statistically significant effect, meaning the machines produce more ones and zeros vary slightly and statistics are needed to to show that it’s real. That’s also done on a collective level. It’s called the global consciousness project and is headed up by Dr. Roger Nelson, who used to be at Princeton studying the same stuff, where they set up these machines all over the world. And most people don’t even know they’re running. They’re just generating zeros and ones all day long. And the researchers look at what happens to the machines When there’s a big global event that they think might cause people to have an intention or an emotion in the same direction or similar direction, so 911 for example, Princess Diana’s death, things like that. They’ll examine the behavior of the machines. And they find during many of those events that the machines around the world behave non randomly when there’s a collective shift consciousness.

Guy:
33:23
Yeah, there you go. It’s fascinating. The another Heartmath Institute have been looking at a fair bit of that work as well which, which led me to it initially, but it does make me ponder as well about intention and how we, most of us go through the day unconscious, we don’t really think about what we want to get out of a day or the direction of what we’re doing and you know, we can find 510 years of skipped on by and, and life is just pushing us along as opposed to intentionally creating it. And I found by harnessing that intention, more and more, my life shows up For me more and more in time, I know Thomas Campbell, the NASA physicist talks about probability, you’re increasing the probability of something intentionally coming into your life. You know, and it’s really fascinating because group intention really fascinates me because we’ve run now in the last 18 months, five retreats, and we average about, we’ve kept it at about 35 people per retreat. But within three days, we’ve got people that are new to this work have not experienced that before. And we’ve actually been getting to the point on the last day where we can hold group intentions and, and direct in energy via the heart for people in there and it’s, you can’t undo those experiences once you can start to experience something like that and the energy that we can all create, and how powerful we really are. it’s mind blowing. And what I’m seeing as well is that it’s almost like we’re relearning the nervous system. It’s like we teaching the nervous system to to move Energy more easily if you like. And then and then once, once you have this new reference point, you can kind of start to bring that back into your daily life. There’s a memory there with it as well. And it just blows my mind. And I’m like, I don’t know people know about this or not, or at least exploring this. Because it it changes. It breaks down so many beliefs, like unconscious beliefs, you know,

Mark:
35:26
it changes everything. Yeah, you look at the world differently. every interaction becomes different, you start to think about meaning and purpose in new ways. And your question is a great one. Why aren’t more people talking about this? And I’ve wondered that as well. I think we’ve seen this throughout history and science, that it’s difficult for scientists sometimes to accept the new paradigm. Germ Theory is a good example. It’s a relevant one right now, in the middle of a pandemic. The idea that there could be microscopic organisms capable of making people sick was a crazy idea until the advent of the electronic microscope and all of a sudden, it’s obvious that bacteria and viruses exist. But there was a ton of resistance against that. And we’ve seen many examples. And it even goes on now with trying to understand what the current virus situation is that there is a, an orthodoxy of what someone thinks it is. And a new idea comes along, and it’s controversial because it’s new. So this one, this idea, though, in particular, that consciousness is fundamental, and not a product of the brain, I think is even more controversial than any of the others because it’s a recontextualization of what it means to be human. Yeah, it’s not just thinking about well, the Copernican revolution is a good example, with Galileo, when he had all his evidence in the telescope, that Earth is not at the center of the solar system, very controversial. He had clergy, men that didn’t want to look in the telescope to see his evidence. But as big as that was, that was still a shift in how we view ourselves in the context of the universe. It was a shift in the external reality. Whereas this paradigm shift is a shift in how we view ourselves. And our identity. Totally. So that’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept.

Guy:
37:06
Yeah, yeah. And what what’s your hope for your books you’ve written, you’ve written a second one as well. You’re clearly passionate about getting this information out there to people and getting it in the hands. Like, what do you what do you hope for what would be a success or win for you? from him?

Mark:
37:23
I thought about that a lot. The books in the podcast have come about really from passion, and that’s one of my biggest guiding forces in everything I do. I follow the passion and I don’t always know where it’s gonna lead. I would love for people to read the books and listen to the podcast and take whatever resonates with them to help them improve their lives, in whatever ways necessary because for me, these ideas have created such a massive shift and a positive shift. And I see so many problems in the world that stem from a misunderstanding of reality that people’s behavior is rational, and sometimes selfish, but it’s rational. Because of The way they’re looking at life. And that’s based on an incomplete set of facts. And if they just had the set of facts, they might act differently. And I think that would benefit the whole planet. So if I’m thinking about it on a really broad scale, I think the planet could benefit from a shift in consciousness, and we would all benefit individually from that. So I would, I would hope that could happen, but I don’t know. I just put out my passions and see what happens. Really?

Guy:
38:25
Yeah. Beautiful. Just keeps sitting in the unknown with it so often, you know, do you have any practices that you do daily? I’m just curious. No.

Mark:
38:35
Yeah. Well, in my my second book an End to Upside Down Living, I talk about spiritual practices in four categories. And I use the yogic system because I think these categories encompass any tradition really, or no tradition at all, but I’ll use the terminology because it’s ancient terminology. Yana Yoga is knowledge and wisdom. I spent a lot of time in that area cleaning books, still doing that, but that’s a practice towards truth. I’ll call It is wanting to understand truth. And that’s, that’s something I always do. So I consider that a practice to is Karma Yoga, which is selfless service. And I consider the work that I’m doing now with books, podcasts, doing interviews, I view it as a form of service. I’m trying to get the message out, and I never know who it’s going to affect in a positive way. A third bucket is called bhakti yoga, which is devotion. That can be prayer chanting, some would call it love for the divine or love for the broader consciousness. And the way I look at that, personally is more in an abstract way that the work that I’m doing is my desire to help the greater whole which is a form of devotion, at least for me. And number four is Raja Yoga which broadly could could be construed to encompass meditation, Qigong, yoga, anything energetic, and that’s something I picked up as I mentioned earlier, meditation retreats within the last six months or so. meditations become huge for me. And I’ve had all kinds of crazy energy experiences where I went from not being able to sit for 15 minutes to going on to silent meditation retreats. One was six days one was five days within a three week period. And then I went on a stretch of five to 10 hours a day of meditation for several months, and I’m still in that mode.

Guy:
40:19
Wow, wow. And I, you find this because I’m just speaking from my experience, I don’t want to put words in your mouth or anything. But I found once I accepted and started leaning into this work more and more, there was a quickening of the shift of the changes that will happen in my life. And then it was like, okay, I’ve really got to just surrender into this fully. Or I’m going to keep clinging on to different parts. And then the more I lengthen, the quicker it became. And then off it goes. Are you finding that?

Mark:
40:53
Completely, completely, and this goes back to I think setting the compass and setting the intention for our life when it becomes a strongest intention rather than a casual one that may be an hour a day I’ll think about when it becomes your whole life, I found that physical reality in ways that I can understand shifts around me that my life circumstances shift and the people coming into my life shift and anxieties that used to be there are no longer there, for example, it’s kind of starts to melt away because my focus has shifted in a new direction, the things that I’m most passionate about and care about. And I’ve seen that with other people around me.

Guy:
41:27
Yeah. Wow, that one other question. Oh, because I keep relating back to the listeners as well. Just before I move on, is that did you find you were like, a closet, kind of, I don’t know what the term is geek or spiritualist or whatever it is, like looking at this. We’re frightened to talk about and have topics because I was terrified. Honestly, I was having all these shifts and experiences. But the more I accepted and started leaning into my truth, I’m opening up and just trying to be unconditionally me, the more things moved as well. Well, I just get the feeling a lot with, you know, we can listen to podcasts, we can seclude ourselves from it. Did you find that for yourself as well?

Mark:
42:10
Mm hmm. Very similar story for me. And fortunately, I had close friends that I felt comfortable enough to mention the science to when I was first starting. And they gave very positive feedback, and then I became more comfortable. And then I wrote a book that, in a way gave me like a shield. Because it’s so much science, that it’s a defense mechanism against someone who would want to counter me even though I don’t even find myself debating very often. It’s irrational rationalizes this belief system in a way, because I think that belief system is, is just looking at science and philosophy and physics, and it all aligns in this direction. So one of the hopes of both of my books but especially the first one is to give that shield to other people who might feel uncomfortable with the topics but they could say, I looked at this book and he works in business, but the whole book is out. He cited and just check out all this evidence. I can’t shoot it all down, and therefore, it seems rational to have this worldview. Yeah. And I’m hoping that helps people to be less afraid.

Guy:
43:11
Yeah, fair enough. It was definitely the language of science. So that got me intrigued for sure. Like, if you told me do too, you know, when I was hearing, you’re like, I’m from Wales, you know, is to play rugby. Like, you know, I didn’t even know what yoga was, you know, I just thought of some strange thing that they did. And off they go kind of thing. So, so thankfully, it’s out there. And it’s definitely needed, especially for the western mind, which is really important. You know, I got some questions. I ask everyone on the show, and I’m always intrigued. It opens up different conversation. But as they’ve been a low point in your life, that’s later become a blessing.

Mark:
43:49
I will go back to that period in 2016. But it really started for me in 2014 were some things in my life weren’t going as well, and they were beyond my control. Combine that with inherent nihilism I had that where I was not in, I was not in a good place. And who knows, maybe that made me more receptive to learning about topics like this, even though I wasn’t looking. Or it also made me where I was in a life situation where I had the time to explore all those things. Like being single, not married, no kids in a job where I was becoming more senior and had people to help. I had the time to be able to explore all this stuff, even though there were professional and personal setbacks that made me I wasn’t in the best psychological state, and it ended up turning into a blessing in a lot of ways.

Guy:
44:39
Fair enough. What does your morning routine look like?

Mark:
44:42
it’s evolving. It’s evolved over the last few years now and I can’t really explain this I have so much energy flowing through my body from the meditation where the chakras which I read about and never felt all the sudden those are very real, like the third eyes, pounding and all that when I wake up, I feel like I had Sit, meditate. It’s not even a choice. It’s like this energy is sitting me down. So right now, I usually meditate for two hours depending on my schedule and try to just schedule things for later in the morning so I can have that long period of time.

Guy:
45:13
Wow, amazing. The other the other great thing as well is that once you’ve set up to set up a life that allows you to keep exploring more and more, it becomes a beautiful thing, isn’t it that when you’re not just having to get up? And you know, people are spending an hour in the car commute? Well, not with COVID that has been happening, but in general, you know, and I used to find it very frustrating that life was dictating but bit by bit day by day, you get that, you know, if you if you set the intention of that direction. Yeah. You’ve obviously met a lot of people anyway and researched a lot of people but if you could have dinner with anyone tonight, from any timeframe anywhere in the world, who do you think it would be unwise.

Mark:
45:57
I would say Dr. David Hawkins, who I quoted Lot of my books, he passed away, I believe in 2012. And I would consider him an enlightened master, one of many throughout history, but he was a modern day Master, and has a traditional medical background. He was a psychiatrist, former atheist and then had incredible enlightenment experiences. So he was at the depths of loneliness. And then he reached very high states of consciousness. And I’ve spent probably 100 to 200 hours somewhere in that range, maybe two years ago, listening to his old lectures, that my practice was I was just all day listening to his old lectures and listening to him answer questions, reading his books, and I’ve listened to many other masters as well, but I will, I would love to have had the opportunity to sit down with him.

Guy:
46:45
Yeah, amazing, man. I have one of his books on that certainly helped get me through at some stage as well. Yeah, totally. And last question, is there anything you would love our listeners to ponder on after everything we’ve covered today?

Mark:
47:00
We have not talked about the life review phenomenon. And it’s something I always try to touch on in any conversation about consciousness. So the life review is often reported in a near death experience. And a near death experience is an instance where a person has a physiological trauma, like cardiac arrest, for example, their heart stops beating, they’re in the hospital, they are clinically dead. And we know from neuroscience and medicine, that the brain gets to a level where it should not be capable of producing a complex thought or memory. The person’s brain dead, their brain is either completely off at this point, or it’s barely functional. And yet the person has elaborate memories. Sometimes they hover over their body. They talk about seeing deceased loved ones, mystical beings being of light. They talk about being surrounded with unconditional love, although sometimes it can be a scary process too, which is kind of a different category of near death experience, but often they’re very blissful. And some people would say, well, that’s a hallucination but The brain is spitting out chemicals, because you’re getting close to death, and it’s trying to comfort the body. And I would say that that’s not the case based on a lot of science, but one of the most convincing is known as the veridical out of body experience. Veridical means that what the person sees or hears or experiences while out of his or her body is validated as being accurate when they come back into their body after resuscitation. So, if there’s a memory that occurs that’s accurate during the time of no brain function, that can be timestamp to that period. We know there is a functional consciousness with a dysfunctional brain. Okay, so Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia who I interviewed for my podcast, he studied this extensively. He said, we’re left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn’t functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever. And it’s a classic example where you get the brain out of the way and there’s an enriched consciousness because the brains actually Okay, I get that preface. Because if we view the deer death experience, not as a hallucination, because if we’re getting accurate information, but they’re a verified perception, that’s not a hallucination, it’s accurate, then we need to look very closely what happens to people in this realm. Because they come back into their body and they change their lives around. And sometimes they get divorced, they change their jobs. It’s overnight, their priorities shift, because they had a massive experience. Why is that happening? Is there something we can learn from him? And I would say yes that we’re getting insights into this broader realm that we just don’t have access to in the body most of the time, because our brains filtering it out. So the life review is not reported all the time. But it’s reported sometimes. And it’s this has been thousands of years and your death experience has been reported. And people relive their lives in a flash. So all the events in their life no matter how big or small, they say that they re experienced them in wartime is altered somehow and it’s like, you know, in a split second, this is happening. It’s not only from their own personal perspective, though it’s from also the perspective of the people that they impact. I’ll give an example from Dannion Brinkley, who I interviewed for my podcast as well, he’s had four near death experiences in his life. He was struck by lightning, electrocuted, open heart surgery twice brain surgery once. And each time he had a life review that he remembers. And so each time for him, it started at the beginning of his life, and went all the way up to the present moment. So we got to see the progress in his life and how you know, what he was doing before versus now. I mentioned his case because he was in Vietnam in his younger years, and he told me that he was vicious and combat materialistic I didn’t I guess, he wanted to be as vicious as possible, killing people. And so when he went into his life review, he relived the deaths of the people that he killed through their eyes, he became that person. And he also felt the pain of the child that would no longer have a father because he had killed the Father. So he felt the indirect effects This is the clearest

Mark:
51:03
example of interconnectivity that we are one consciousness at some level that we’re not perceiving right now. But at a higher level of reality beyond space and time, we’re all the same. We are literally the same consciousness. And something about liberating the consciousness from the body, in the near-death experience allows people to perceive that. So, when someone like Dannion, Brinkley comes back to life, and talks about this, I mean, he became a hospice volunteer number one. But he talks about just like many other near-death experiences, it’s sort of like getting the answer to the test. And what you end up caring about when you see your life review is how you treated people, the joy you brought, versus the pain. And it’s not always the big things. And one of the big themes is the little things in the life review or the big things that you care about. So it’s treating the cashier well, because if you don’t treat the cashier, well, maybe in the life review, you see how that negative interaction You had caused the cashier to be in a worse mood, which impacted every other customer in the line. And you see the rippling effects of it. And those are the things apparently in the life review where people say, I knew better, I should have done better. So if we were to live with that idea, or even the possibility that that’s true. And if we consider there to be one mind based on all the science that I think is credible, at least some of it is pointing in this direction, then it’s at least possible that this is a real thing. And that probability that nonzero probability is enough for us to rethink every interaction throughout the day, and the rippling effects. So just this conversation that we’re having right now, the fact that you’re willing to have a conversation like this and put it out there to the world, who knows who will hear this at any point in history, and what that will do for that person. And one last thing before we, we close this question, there’s a theory called chaos theory. And the butterfly effect is within that idea that Small changes can have a big effect. And there was a meteorologist who who’s discovered this where he was doing weather predictions and changed one of his numbers by a tiny decimal point. And he realized he got a drastically different outcome because he changed the decimal point. So he would say, Wow, small change in the initial conditions lead to a massively different outcome, I wouldn’t have predicted that. It’s a nonlinear effect. In our brain likes to think in linearity. Like if I throw a ball, I can see that the force from my arm made the ball go a certain distance, it’s very clear how the ball got there. Whereas with a nonlinear effect, we can’t see the ripples. So the butterfly effect is a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in New York, mathematically speaking, that’s the way the math works. So if we think about that, in our own lives, it’s a very empowering idea. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re the president of a nation or a cashier at a store or a business owner or anything in the world. Every single person can have an impact through these ripple effects that we can’t always see. And that’s why another reason I’m so passionate about getting these messages out because all it takes is one person to have a shift, who could then shift someone else in some way, just by being Kinder. And then that who knows what that does to the world. And

Guy:
54:17
It’s huge. That’s, that’s incredible. I, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him, but I recently interviewed Peter Panagore on my podcast, and he’s, he had a near death experience, while ice climbing a wall. And he spoke of everything you just said, everything and, and it sat with me for days because he spoke about in such vivid detail and everything that going on and he had two near death experiences. I was just like, wow, you know, it really makes you think about everything and everything, which is a beautiful thing. And that’s an incredible place to end the show. Everyone ponder on that. That’s absolutely amazing. Where can I send everyone Mark? If they want to find more about your books, your work your podcast?

Mark:
55:07
Where can they go? Well, since we’re on the topic of the life review, there’s a whole episode on my podcast called the life review episode six. It’s called Where’s My Mind? That’s the broader series and that’s available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, all the major podcast players, where is my mind and my website is MarkGober.com and they are kg OPR, calm. My books are An End to Upside Down thinking and An End to Upside Down Living are available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. All the traditional bookstores.

Guy:
55:36
Or some other people just pause this show where they’re listening to this and scroll down, they’ll see the links there anyway, to come across. Mark, thank you so much for everything you’re doing and coming on the show today. That was brilliant mate. I love your passion. I love the fact that you’re just simply walking, walking your talk like it’s, it’s it’s a beautiful thing to see. And I have no doubt the ripple effect will be huge over time. So appreciate it, buddy. Thank you.

Mark:
56:00
Thank you Thank you for your work.

Guy:
56:03
You’re welcome. Fabulous guys hope you enjoy that conversation with myself. If you’re still hearing this, yes you did, which is great. always appreciate you tuning in. And of course tag me on Instagram Stories a quick screenshot of this and whacking on stories helping spread the word sharing these messages with somebody you know a lover that’s curious about this work please do and just continues support us and of course come back to the websites you know where to come liveinflow or my website Guy Lawrence. If you want to find out more what we’re up to in the near future. Alright guys, much love for me. Have a fantastic week. And see you next week. Got some awesome guests.