“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. To understand the true nature of the universe, one must think it terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
— Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943)
Today, November 16, 2018, marks the tenth anniversary of my return from a deep week-long coma due to an aggressive and should-have-killed-me case of E.coli gram-negative bacterial meningo-encephalitis. And what a decade of discovery it has been! As Tesla noted above, ten years with a freshly opened mind of my own has truly led to boundless new understandings. One fascinating aspect of my personal journey, as a neurosurgeon who experienced a profound near-death experience, are the tremendous parallels in my personal revelations with those of the scientific community at large – all related to fascinating developments in the science of consciousness.
Karen and I recently returned from the Beyond the Brain conference in London, where the Galileo Commission Report was publicly revealed. The report summarizes the opinions of over a hundred scientists who study consciousness and demolishes the long-ago disproven notions of deterministic Newtonian thinking. Similar to previous such consensus statements from the scientific community (such as those from Mario Beauregard and Etzel Cardeña), this newest elaboration announces to the world-at-large that consciousness includes remarkable properties that, studied from a scientific perspective, support the reality of a spiritual universe.
The commission’s name comes from similarities between Galileo’s time, and ours. Galileo simply asked a church bishop to look through the telescope and see with his own eyes the moons of Jupiter, but the bishop refused to even look. Even today, so many conventional materialist scientists refuse to even look at the evidence concerning the broader implications of consciousness research. The report, like our book Living in a Mindful Universe, is a powerful rebuttal of the simplistic and false assumptions of materialist scientists, who attempt to debunk and deny the evidence not only for the afterlife, but for reincarnation. Those wanting to learn more about the study of reincarnation should also visit the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.
For most of humanity’s last few thousand years, questions concerning the continuity of consciousness after death of the physical body, or of the afterlife, hinged on the personal experiences of very few people. Usually this involved the occasional saint, prophet, or mystic who reported personal experience in realms beyond the material world. I believe that all of our modern religious systems emerged from such courageous reports of the realm of the unseen, often engendered during physiological stress or “near-death” situations. For the vast majority of us, it boiled down to a question of faith – whether or not we chose to believe those experiences of the relatively rare “others.”
All of that changed half a century ago, when physicians developed techniques to resuscitate, or return to life, tens of millions of people whose hearts had stopped, who had been “clinically dead.” This has populated our world with many souls who have been to “the other side,” and returned to tell the tale that death of the physical body is not the end of conscious awareness, but merely a transition to a different realm, very similar to physical birth.
My most recent blog addressed the remarkable conclusions of a recent medical record review of my coma, most notably the supposition that my miraculous recovery might have been related to my profound near-death experience, itself a refutation of the physicalist/materialist assumption that the brain produces consciousness. Of course, many skeptics claim that, given the fact that near-death experiencers don’t actually die, that none of those stories are truly telling us what happens when we do actually die. Yet the very existence of so many similar stories, irrespective of one’s prior beliefs in an afterlife or religious predispositions in general, is quite shocking and unexpected, that is, if the materialist model of brain-creates-consciousness, were actually true. Why these elaborate journeys, even in those who have been declared dead for days, which often occur when the physical brain is very demonstrably shut down?
The paltry and inadequate explanations from materialist scientists trying to attribute such journeys to pathophysiological challenges such as diminished oxygen levels or increased carbon dioxide fail completely in explaining shared-death experiences. These are identical in content to NDEs and yet occur in physiologically normal bystanders. Loved ones at the bedside of a dying patient (although they could also be hundreds of miles away) witness the soul of the departing loved one, sometimes even to the point of joining them for a full-blown life review, before returning to this realm completely mystified by their inexplicable journey.
Recent books supporting the scientific verification of the reality of such experiences (such as John C. Hagan III’s peer-reviewed book The Science of Near-Death Experiences, or Titus Rivas’s The Self Does Not Die) endorse the world-changing vision shared in our newest book, Living in a Mindful Universe. Thus, the question of an afterlife no longer need be answered merely by faith in other people’s accounts. The preponderance of scientific understanding about the nature of the mind-brain relationship, indeed of the fundamental nature of consciousness itself and the survival of awareness beyond death, already exists!
The Galileo Commission Report refers to many facets of non-local consciousness such as the reality of telepathy, precognition, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, near-death and shared-death experiences, after-death communications, some psychic medium communications with the deceased, past-life memories in children indicative of reincarnation, etc. This opens the door widely to a scientifically-based statement about how best to see our consciousness and our very existence as human beings that extends far beyond physical bodily existence limited to the birth-to-death interval. Important to note is that one of the most important revelations from the NDE community is that we are responsible for our choices, and will reap what we sow in the life review. The fact that the golden rule is thus written into the fabric of the universe should help us all treat others with more kindness and compassion.
The most valuable lesson of the last decade has concerned the growing realization that every soul is crucial in this process, and we are bound together in this mission through the infinitely healing force of unconditional love. This is not a truth that requires unanimous endorsement by the scientific community at large – this is the deep and empowering truth available to all souls open enough to manifest it. The evidence supporting this much grander world view, where placebo effect and extraordinary examples of healing are just the beginning of our capabilities as manifesters of the world of our loftiest dreams, is available to all who care to look. We must simply choose to make it so.
This, combined with personal exploration of consciousness through centering prayer, or meditation, provides a pathway towards gnosis. Personally, I listen daily to the differential-sound enhanced brainwave entrainment produced by Sacred Acoustics to enter expanded states of awareness, but the important step is to have some means of going within, and of developing a richer relationship with that “higher soul” and primordial mind. As Tesla said in the quote opening this article, energy, frequency and vibration are the keys to understanding the universe, and exploration of consciousness using sound is an excellent starting point for a much broader understanding of our true free will in manifesting the world of our dreams.
We are currently planning a 5-day course in fall of 2019 for therapeutic practitioners who wish to incorporate Sacred Acoustics recordings into their practice. We’d love your help by filling out this survey for practitioners.