Upside Down Thinking: Identity In Consciousness With Mark Gober

by | Jan 21, 2020 | Podcasts | 0 comments

GCM 82 | Upside Down Thinking

 

A question that begs exploring and that often goes unasked is, where is your mind? In the busy world we live in today, it is so easy to lose ourselves without minding the present moment—the consciousness that is experiencing now. A consciousness researcher and the author of An End To Upside Down Thinking, Mark Gober, sits down with host, Rodney Flowers, in a conversation about the mind and consciousness. Here, he presents a different way around thinking about consciousness, highlighting how the body is not our identity but only a vehicle for experiencing the physical world. Mark talks about psychic abilities, increasing our awareness, and the ways this affects human potential. Test the extent of what you know as Mark takes you to an unconventional route that may open you up to understanding consciousness with a different light.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Upside Down Thinking: Identity In Consciousness With Mark Gober

How many of you know where your mind comes from? I have Mark Gober with me. He’s a consciousness researcher and the author of An End to Upside Down Thinking. If you’re like me, you’re probably like, “Where does my mind come from? An End to Upside Down Thinking, what is this all about?” I’m glad that you asked because we’re going to get into a very interesting conversation about the mind and consciousness. Mark Gober is probably going to blow you away. In the last few years, he’s followed a new passion on the topic of consciousness and what it means for how we think about life. He’s the host of the podcast Where Is My Mind?. His mission is reshaping our view of human potential and how we treat one another. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Mark Gober. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Thank you, Rodney. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Where is my mind? That’s what I want to know. I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out where is my mind. It’s a very interesting topic. It’s an interesting work that you are doing. Before we dive into all of the juicy details around this, I would like for you to tell me how did you get into researching consciousness? How did you get to this point?

It wasn’t something I ever thought would happen. It wasn’t a planned journey. I work in the financial world and I’m a partner at a firm in Silicon Valley called Sherpa Technology Group. We advise large and small companies on business strategy and technology strategy. Before that, I worked in investment banking in New York. I never would have predicted that I would be speaking about consciousness. That’s still crazy to me that this has all happened. It started in December of 2016. I was listening to podcasts mostly on business and health. There happened to be a woman that came on one of the shows I was listening to. She was speaking about some crazy experiences with consciousness like psychic abilities or the ability to communicate with the deceased and sci-fi stuff. After listening to that interview, out of curiosity, I ended up listening to some others. It spiraled from there when I heard a lot of people independently describing things that I had never heard of in a serious way.

When I heard enough people talk about it and they all sounded like they were at least somewhat serious, they didn’t all sound delusional, I decided to start reading and looking at scientific papers. That’s when I got interested in it. I ended up spending a year doing nothing but researching when I wasn’t in the office doing my day job just because my worldview is shifting so dramatically in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. I decided to write the book, which I wrote in a short amount of time in the summer of 2017 after I had done all that research. After the book was published in October of 2018, I had been working on a podcast to help people on the journey themselves. I knew how difficult it was to research this topic because there are many different sources and they’re spread out. With the book and the podcast, I’m trying to make it easy for people who are interested.

What did you learn? What shift did you experience? What information were you exposed to that set you off on this path to write a book, create a podcast and be a catalyst for this viewpoint that you have about consciousness that we’re going to talk about?

It all boils down to the question that you started with, “Where is my mind?” What do we know about consciousness? When I say consciousness, I’m referring to the thing that is having the experience right now. When I say that I’m speaking to you, that I is what I mean by consciousness. It’s subjective. It’s like, I can touch my table but I can’t touch my mind or my consciousness. This is what I have now learned is it’s the number two question remaining in all of science according to Science Magazine, “How is it that something that’s not touchable like our consciousness, it’s not physical, come out of our body and more specifically our brain, which is physical?” It’s made out of physical stuff called matter. No one has any idea how that happens, which is mind-boggling to me.

What I argue in my book and my podcast after speaking to many scientists about this is that the reason we haven’t solved this question and the reason we don’t know how a brain could make consciousness is that the brain doesn’t make consciousness. The brain is related to the way we experience the world but it does it more in a different way than we’ve been taught. The brain acts as an antenna receiver or I think more specifically, it’s like a filtering mechanism. There’s a bigger reality out there and our brain restricts what we are perceiving.

The analogy that I use in the book is from a philosopher named Dr. Bernardo Castro who says, “Imagine that all of reality is like a stream of water or water represents consciousness. Each of us is in that stream and we’re like a little whirlpool.” I’m a whirlpool. You’re a whirlpool. Each reader is a whirlpool. We’re fundamentally connected in the stream but we have the appearance of being separate because we’re in these individual whirlpools. That’s the framework that my book and my podcast use to look at some of these what you might call paranormal phenomena, but they’re not paranormal if we view consciousness in this way.

Consciousness survives bodily death. Click To Tweet

What is our true consciousness? Where does that come from? You said consciousness doesn’t come from our brain. It’s separate from our brain and it’s much bigger than that. What is our consciousness then?

The way I think about consciousness is it’s the full stream of water in the analogy. Each of us is having a sliver of that overall experience. There’s the microscopic version and then there’s the macroscopic version. Each of us is having a little individuated experience. My personal consciousness is part of the bigger one. I get into a little bit of physics in my book and podcast. There’s a famous physicist named Erwin Schrödinger who won the Nobel Prize decades ago. He said, “In truth, there is only one mind.” That’s the idea here. There’s one stream of consciousness and we’re having part of that experience.

That one stream has died for me. That’s how I look at this. I don’t want to turn this into some religious conversation. I do believe in God. I believe in a Higher Power. Are we in agreement that our consciousness comes from that same power or are you saying that it comes from something different than that?

I would say that all of reality is within that stream. Tying it to religious language, it is the equivalent of what some people mean when they say God. What’s a little bit different about some conceptions of that word and I’ve been shy to use it because it has many connotations. I view the stream as the source of all reality and we are a part of that. There’s no separation. That’s one of the keys of this framework of reality is that we are in the stream, but we’re part of the stream. It’s not like there’s some separate thing. It’s only separate because we’re not perceiving it on a daily basis because we’re an individual whirlpool, but there is the broader stream. This is why I get into a lot of the science in my book. It’s something like a near-death experience where the brain is essentially wiped out of the picture. People start to experience things outside of their individual whirlpool. They experience stuff in the broader stream.

The brain holds us backward and it limits us. Moving this a little forward, your philosophy with this phenomena is that if we can be more conscious, walk in consciousness more, understand how we are part of this one consciousness, you’re saying that we can reach a higher level of success or be unrestricted. I guess that’s the correct way of describing this.

Ultimately, that’s where the implications go. For me, most of the book is based on science. It points in this direction of what are the implications. It points to an interconnected stream, meaning that we’re not as separate as we think we are, which has big implications for how we think about treating each other, but also in terms of our own identity. Our identity is much bigger than we think it is on a day-to-day basis. That can inform how we live our lives, not just with other people, but how we think about our own selves and our potential.

How should we think about ourselves and our potential based on the research that you’ve done? What is your recommendation?

The conventional view is that somehow the brain makes consciousness. Consciousness comes from our bodies. When we die, there’s no consciousness anymore because consciousness came from the brain. If there’s no brain, then there can’t be any consciousness or memories. That ties our identity to our physical body. That point of view, which is the conventionally held view by much or science. What I’m arguing and many others are arguing is that our identity isn’t our body. Our identity is the consciousness that is experiencing this conversation right now. The body is something that our consciousness is experiencing. The body is the vehicle for experiencing the physical world. However, my identity is my consciousness. That’s been one of the biggest shifts for me.

I completely get it. I’m Rodney but I’m not the Rodney that you see. What you see is the house that Rodney lives in. I have a name, a hand, a leg but it’s not who I am. Those are things that I have. I am my consciousness. I am my mind of which you cannot see.

GCM 82 | Upside Down Thinking

An End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

Rodney is the person that consciousness is experiencing, but your identity is not Rodney the person.

I can see how it can take a while to sink in for a lot of people. It’s big because now I understand the title of your book, An End to Upside Down Thinking. Very commonly we think it’s the other way around. You’re flipping this on its head. What evidence did you come across that led you to this conclusion?

To be clear, I didn’t start with the conclusion. It was evidence that led me there and then I had to put all this evidence together. If we go back to the stream and the whirlpool analogy, there are a few predictions from this model. One is if you imagine that some of the water from my whirlpool gets into your whirlpool. That’s like some of my consciousness is getting into your consciousness. That would be like a psychic or telepathic ability. The point is this model of consciousness of the one mind or the one stream predicts that psychic phenomenon should occur.

That was one area of scientific evidence I looked into. The other area is this idea that if a whirlpool stops being a whirlpool, the water flows back into the broader stream. It doesn’t leave the stream. It transitions into a new form. The analogy there is when the physical body stops functioning, consciousness doesn’t die. It simply transitions into a new form. That’s the second category, which is the idea that consciousness survives bodily death. That’s another area I looked at the evidence for. The first area is psychic abilities. The second area is the survival of bodily death. That’s how the book is structured.

This leads me to the idea that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It’s the cause and effect of itself. It can only be transformed. Consciousness and energy are very similar things, yes or no?

I think so. I don’t know for sure. My guess is that what we call energy is a property of consciousness. Anything that we experience in the world is something that is experienced. It’s within the stream. That’s the way I would put it. It’s maybe a rippling of the stream or one of the qualities of it. I think there’s probably a relationship.

Did things change for you after understanding this phenomenon?

It was the scientific evidence that we haven’t talked about yet, which we should now that’s shifted me. I didn’t even know that people were studying these topics. I thought psychic ability is something that you see in a movie. I didn’t know that was something people study in a scientific lab. I joined the board of a scientific institute called the Institute of Noetic Sciences that was founded by an Apollo 14 astronaut, which studies a lot of this stuff in the lab. What’s an example of that? There’s a phenomenon known as telepathy, which is mind-to-mind communication. It’s like some of the water from my whirlpool getting into your whirlpool. People have done studies on this for many decades where you have people in different rooms.

You have one person, we’ll call him Bob, in one room and you have another person, Jane, in another room. Jane has shown a picture and she’s told to try to mentally send a picture to Bob in the other room. These are not people who claim to have psychic abilities. Jane is mentally sending whatever she’s seeing in this room to Bob who’s in the other room. After a while, Bob is shown four pictures by the experimenters and the experimenters say, “Bob, which of the four was Jane trying to send to you?” If there were no effect at all, Bob or the person in Bob’s room over many experiments should guess correctly one out of four times because there should be no effect. However, what the experimenters have found is Bob does better than 25%. He guesses correctly closer to 32% of the time.

Anything that quiets the mind allows access to the broader stream. Click To Tweet

When you look at the statistics on this, it’s massively significant. It’s greater than a billion to one against chance. It’s known as the Six Sigma result, which is a big deal in science. When you have many trials of this and it approaches that 32% number, it means that something beyond chance is happening. This matches with our everyday experience because if we were all 100% telepathic all the time, then we would know each other’s thoughts all the time. Instead, it’s more periodic where maybe you think of someone and then you happen to get a text from that person. You don’t know if it was chance or if it was something psychic going on. Maybe those instances are 7% above 25% that occur sometimes.

Sometimes I feel like it’s because we’re not consciously aware. We’re still evolving as people and maybe this is a major breakthrough. I don’t think we’re aware of who we are in our consciousness, how to use it, how it functions and how we can use it to our benefit. We’re on the cutting edge of the breakthroughs around that. I feel like that number can be better. The reason why it is the way it is, it does demonstrate that we have these types of abilities, but it also demonstrates in my mind that there’s more for us to learn.

These are people who are not trained in these abilities and yet there’s still a small effect. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people that have been trained. It’s probably a small segment of the population. I reference a phenomenon in the book called remote viewing, which is accessing a distant part of the stream. Even though you’re in a whirlpool here, you’re accessing a part of the whirlpool that’s far away. It’s like seeing something with your mind at a distance both in space and time. This is something that the US government has used for psychic spying for more than twenty years. They have used this and they’ve trained people to do better than 32% and you can do this by going into a trance-like state apparently.

On my podcast, I interviewed Russell Targ who ran the US government’s program out of the Stanford Research Institute in the ‘70s and ‘80s and they were able to get results. For example, they were able to find a downed Russian bomber that was lost in an African jungle. At the time, no one could find it because the radar systems weren’t good enough. They used remote viewers to identify the location of this plane where no one knew where it was. Jimmy Carter, the former US President, confirmed that remote viewers were used to find the plane. That’s one example.

What can we do to increase our awareness? I know reading your book is one of those things. What are some of the points from your book maybe that we can put into practice to increase our awareness and use of our consciousness?

It seems like anything that quiets the mind allows access to the broader stream. It allows information to flow in. That’s why meditation and yoga practices that quiet the mind are becoming more popular. Sensory deprivations and other ones that people are talking about going into a flotation tank where you’re not listening to music or you’re not seeing any lights. It allows your brain to be more open. Practices like that are helpful, but also having the awareness of what we talked about that the identity that we have is the consciousness experiencing life, not the body. In my own life, tapping into that shift something in ways that I can’t explain. When we don’t identify with the body and when we view the body as the thing that our consciousness is experiencing, that automatically puts us into a different state of awareness.

It changes everything because if I am a thing that has the consciousness that’s happening bodily experience, there’s so much more that comes with that. You look at death differently. You don’t look at death as, “I’m going to die.” You look at death as something different than that. Do you find that the biggest challenge for people is getting over that hurdle of identity?

I think so. It was hard for me. It’s been a few years of thinking about this every day. It’s not as radical to me but I could imagine if your readers haven’t known this before, it’s a pretty rattling concept that our own identity isn’t what we were taught it is. Some of the research on near-death experiences, which I mentioned and I mentioned it in my podcast and in my book, I have a whole chapter on it. That’s a powerful one because these are instances where a person’s brain is wiped out. This is a person who has a cardiac arrest, for example. Their heart stops beating. There’s no blood flowing to the brain. Neuroscientists would say that in this state, a person shouldn’t be capable of having a conscious experience. Yet a significant number of people come back saying that they had clearer than usual thinking and more logical than usual thinking in this state when the brain wasn’t working.

In the most compelling cases, they are even hovering over their bodies. They’re experiencing things from outside their bodies. It’s called an out-of-body experience. The things that they are seeing and observing are validated. They’re verified as accurate after they come into their bodies. Here we have people seeing things accurately, meaning not a hallucination, at a time when their brain isn’t functioning or it’s barely functional. To give a quote from Bruce Greyson, who’s a professor at the University of Virginia, when I interviewed him, 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.” It’s showing this idea that our body isn’t our identity. It’s that our consciousness, our mind, our real identity can function without a body. That is an earth-shattering concept. For me, it took a while for that to sink in.

GCM 82 | Upside Down Thinking

Upside Down Thinking: Our identity is much bigger than we think. That can inform how we live our lives, not just with other people, but how we think about our own selves and our own potential.

 

I can see that happening. What are the things that changed for you after coming into this newfound awareness?

I mentioned the lack of separation that I now view that we’re all connected as part of the same stream of consciousness. I talk about quantum physics a little bit. This idea of entanglement that at the quantum level there’s an interconnectedness. That has implications for how we live on a day-to-day basis. Going back to the near-death experience where people are in this state when their brain is barely functional or it’s “totally off.” Many people report what’s called a life review where their whole life flashes before them and they relive events that happen to them. What people also report is that they relive those events sometimes through the eyes of each person they’ve affected.

One of the guys that I interviewed for my podcast is named Dannion Brinkely. He’s had four near-death experiences. He was electrocuted. He had open-heart surgery twice and brain surgery. Each time he had a vivid near-death experience where he had a life review. For him, this was a very impactful event more so than others because he fought in Vietnam and had to relive the events that happened there. He had to relive killing people and he relived it through the eyes of the people that he killed in combat. Not only that, he felt the pain of the child who would no longer have a father as a result of what he did in combat. When he came back from the near-death experience, which seems to be this one mind seeing things through different lenses when it’s freed from the brain and the body. That’s what seems to be happening.

He came back and his whole life was changed. He became a hospice volunteer and his priorities were shifted less towards materialistic goals and much more towards how he was treating other people. This is a very common thing when people come back from a near-death experience. If you think about the life review as a possibility that you will see the events of your life and how you treated people and feel the feelings of both the joy and the pain that you caused, that alone could shift every single interaction you have. It at least puts the question in your mind like, “What if that’s a real thing?” The researchers tell me and the people that have had near-death experiences, they have a lot of conviction that this is just part of the living and dying process whether we like it or not.

This is one of those things that it takes a while to sink in. It takes a while to comprehend everything that you’re saying in here. What would you say to someone who hasn’t had that near-death experience? What would you say to someone who’s not getting this and feel that this is not true and it’s unreal?

Maybe I’ll start there. That’s was my position when I started. Eventually, I was exposed to enough evidence that if I want it to be scientific and intellectually honest, I couldn’t say that it was all fraudulent because if I said that, it was just my belief system. I’ll give an example. The 2016 president of the American Statistical Association looked at the evidence for the psychic phenomena. She said this in a report to Congress and the CIA. She said, “If we use the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established.” We had that credibility establishing the reality of these phenomena.

I mentioned the University of Virginia and Princeton University had a lab for nearly 30 years that was run by the former Dean of Engineering. I was an undergrad at Princeton and I had no idea this existed because it was so controversial. There are smart people that have been studying this and they’re coming to a similar conclusion. I’m not trying to force this on people. I’m trying to make it accessible for those who want it because if you’re willing to look at all the evidence, it can be reality shifting. If someone doesn’t want to go there, that’s totally up to them and I can understand why because it can be disorienting.

It’s a game-changer. That’s what it is. It’s a shift in how we see ourselves. I was looking at one of your videos and it’s human revolution. I think that’s what you were talking about. It’s revolutionizing the way we think about ourselves. How does this affect human potential in your mind?

If we go back to some of those psychic phenomena, it sounds totally crazy like remote viewing or seeing something on the other side of the planet with your mind. Even though only some people seem to be able to do that well like the superstars at the US government, they’re like the LeBron James of psychic abilities. Anyone can dribble a basketball and that might be 32% versus 25%. You have these people that are doing much better than 32%. They’re the extreme athletes. Maybe we could all tap into some degree of that. Maybe we’re not all going to be at the level of the LeBron James but how could we use our intuition?

Our consciousness, our mind, our real identity can function without a body. Click To Tweet

How can we tap into the broader stream in ways that we’re not doing now because we weren’t taught about it or it wasn’t part of our mainstream thinking? How can we use intuition in business and relationships? I think having the awareness of all this stuff and maybe learning to quiet the mind a bit more and coming into that awareness of thinking about the consciousness that we’re experiencing right now. What is that? Is that from the body? Is it from outside the body? Questioning those things can shift our perspective in ways that enhance our potential.

Don’t you think that we all use this in some way every day? Is it that we not use it or is it more so that we use it and we’re not conscious of it?

It’s probably both. Everyone is using it to some degree. It’s hard to put our finger on it because this is all subjective. Consciousness isn’t something we can touch and it’s hard to explain it. When we have an idea of something, how do we even know where that idea came from? It pops into our awareness somehow. We have the instinct to do something or not. I agree with you. I think we’re all using it. It’s being aware of the fact that we’re using it. Maybe we could use it even better.

When you talk about consciousness though, everyone has a consciousness. Everyone has a body but then there’s this DNA that makes up the body. That’s where identity is formed. Your DNA is not my DNA. Although we all have a body, what makes the difference is the makeup. People have different levels of consciousness, awareness of consciousness, abilities within their consciousness. How is that distinguished?

That’s an important point. If we view the body as the vehicle for experiencing consciousness, then the way the body is structured, meaning our DNA, is like our biological suit. The nature of that suit is going to inform the way that consciousness has an experience. It’s almost like one of those playdough things where you put the playdough into the little grinder and it comes out as spaghetti on the other side. Let’s say the playdough is the consciousness. The grinder is the way in which consciousness is being processed by the body. The way it comes out on the other side is like what our body is doing. It’s showing us different experiences in different lenses of this one mind. The way our DNA is structured, the way our brain is structured and the way our physiology is set up is like the lens that we are using to experience.

What can we do with our lens? How can we change how we’re processing consciousness to our betterment or to our benefit?

One of the analogies I like is to say that consciousness is like the sky. The clouds are the thoughts and distractions that we have. When we have lots of clouds, we’re blocking pure consciousness. The sky is not pure. When we get the clouds out of the way, we have pure sky. It’s a matter of doing a lot of internal cleansing of what have we not transcended on an individual basis that’s still bugging us and distracting us that’s causing these clouds. If we get the clouds out of the way, we have the pure sky of the stream of consciousness that can flow through us.

Why do you feel like it’s taking so long for us to reach this point in our awareness about consciousness? Do you think it’s been held from us as individuals?

This is something I explore in the book and the podcast a little bit. It’s the question everyone asks, “If what you’re saying is real, Mark, how could it be that we’re at a state where society doesn’t acknowledge this as the mainstream view? How could that be possible?” The first answer is to look back at history and see that this has happened many times. A clear example is the germ theory. The idea that microscopic bacteria and viruses that we can’t see could make us sick. That was considered crazy at one point. With the advent of the electron microscope, all of a sudden we can see that those things exist. Now, it’s common knowledge that bacteria can make us sick. My point is that there had been these shifts in thinking throughout history. They’re usually fought because the establishment’s way of thinking wants to keep its view.

GCM 82 | Upside Down Thinking

Upside Down Thinking: The identity that we have is the consciousness experiencing life, not the body.

 

It’s human nature. Galileo faced this when he had all his evidence in the telescope that the earth is not at the center of the solar system. At that time, there were members of the clergy who didn’t want to look in his telescope to see the evidence. It would have challenged their worldview. That’s one of the dynamics that I see a lot. We have smart people who are brilliant in their individual fields who will not look at the evidence from the US government or the evidence from these studies on 32% versus 25% or the University of Virginia’s research on near-death experiences. They haven’t looked at it or they’ll say, “That’s not possible because the brain produces consciousness even though they don’t know how that could occur.” Because they think the brain produces consciousness, it’s not worth studying these areas. That’s the dynamic that’s going on.

What do you think the brain’s function is within your theory?

It plays an important role clearly in how we experience the world. We know that if you damage the part of the brain responsible for your vision, the person’s vision changes. We can do this over and over again. When you shift the brain, you shift the person’s experience of consciousness. The issue is that it’s known in statistics as correlation does not imply causation. When you have two things that are related to each other, it’s not always the case that one is causing it. This is an analogy from Bernardo Castro who has the whirlpool analogy. If you have a fire, firefighters show up to put out the fire. If you have a larger fire, you have more firefighters that show up. Here you have a strong correlation between the size of the fire and the number of firefighters that appear. That doesn’t mean that the firefighters caused the fire.

That’s what’s happening with the brain and consciousness. We see lots of correlations between what happens in the brain and the way that the person experiences consciousness. We’re taking a leap to say, “Therefore the brain creates consciousness.” What I’m arguing is there are lots of correlations. We know the brain is related to the way we experience the world, but the brain is the restrictive mechanism. It’s almost like a blindfold that is shielding us and giving us a filtered view or a very narrow view of reality so that we can have a targeted experience.

Have you done a study that demonstrates or verifies that those that are highly successful or able to overcome significant health challenges or illnesses within their life understand this philosophy or have a high level of consciousness? Has that been validated?

I don’t know but I’m thinking of one example off the top of my head where that does seem to be the case. I don’t know if this has been studied systematically. A woman named Anita Moorjani who now speaks all over the world. She had a near-death experience. She was dying of cancer. Her doctors thought it was over. In that state of being about to die, she encountered unconditional love. She had this typical near-death experience that people talk about. In that state, she learned things about herself and she met her deceased father, which is a common thing and near-death experience.

She learned that during her life she was too focused on what other people thought and wasn’t expressing her true self. She made a decision to come back into the body and shifted her perspective and her cancer went away. This is what she speaks about all over the world. She had a spontaneous remission. All of her doctors kept looking for the cancer, “Where is it?” It disappeared. Her mindset shifted. She decided to live more authentically after having this knowledge in an altered state in a near-death experience. Her whole life shifted. That’s an extreme case of what could happen if someone shifts their awareness.

Do you feel like the mind in this level of consciousness is able to heal?

It’s one of the areas that I looked at a little bit. The scientific term is called psychokinesis. The way the mind can impact physical matter. The most concrete studies were done at Princeton and they’d been done elsewhere, where they asked people to try to impact the behavior of a computer with their mind. The computer called a random number generator spits out zeros and ones in a totally random fashion. In the end, you get 50% ones and 50% zeros if you look at a long string. People were asked to try to mentally influence the flow of zeros and ones using their mind alone. What the statistics show is that when a person is trying to make it produce more ones and zeros, the machine does. It’s a tiny effect but it’s statistically significant.

Consciousness is like the sky and the clouds are the thoughts and distractions that we have. Click To Tweet

What are the implications for things like health? If the mind can impact a physical computer, our body’s made out of matter also, can our mind impact that? There’s emerging evidence that this is the case. There are some people that claim to have extraordinary mental healing abilities. If we think about the physical world as not really being physical, that’s what I’m saying. We interpret things as physical. I touched this table and it feels solid, but when we look at the science of it, an atom is 99.99999% empty space. We know from quantum physics that stuff isn’t really solid unless it’s being observed. There’s a physicist that I quote in my book. He says, “Matter is not made of matter.” If we think about what that means, then this stream of consciousness is the ultimate reality. Everything is just consciousness and we’re interpreting things as solid. If we shift the mind or if we shift consciousness, wouldn’t that, in theory, shift physical reality including our physical health? This is an area for further exploration. I would say based on the evidence I’ve seen, there seems to be some evidence that our mind can impact our health.

I can’t wait to dive into your book even more and learn more from you. I feel like there’s more that you want to research, there’s more that you want to learn about this. What’s next for you?

I don’t know. I’m still working in my day job in the tech world and that keeps me busy. I joined the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which studies these phenomena like mental healing. It’s called energy healing and a phenomenon like that. I’m involved in the science and directing that too. Who knows where that will lead?

How can people contact you if they wanted to learn more about you or connect with you?

My website is my name, MarkGober.com. My book is on Amazon. It’s called An End to Upside Down Thinking. The podcast, which is where I interview many of the people that I mentioned here and I also mentioned in the book is called, Where Is My Mind?. I found that’s a good starting point for people to hear the voices of some of the people that have had near-death experiences or scientists that have studied these things.

I love the name of your podcast. If someone was to walk up to you and they maybe heard about you, your book, your podcast and they ask the question, “Where is my mind?” What’s your answer to that?

My answer would be at the most basic level of reality, the mind is everywhere and everything. All reality is this stream of consciousness. The universe is mental effectively. We interpret physical and we have an experience that seems to be physical but it is all consciousness and it is all experienced in this stream.

It’s not the brain. I know a lot of people when they hear the term mental, it refers to the brain, the use of the brain, the working of the brain. This is something much bigger and less limited in the brain.

The brain is the processor and the filtering mechanism, but the consciousness itself is well beyond the brain.

GCM 82 | Upside Down Thinking

Upside Down Thinking: The brain is the processor and the filtering mechanism, but the consciousness itself is well beyond the brain.

 

Would you say the mind created the universe?

It’s like that. This gets into a much more complicated topic of time that I talk about a bit in the book, to say that the mind created the universe implies the time goes from past to present to future. Where I come out is that time is not linear in that way. I would say that the universe is a spontaneous emergence within consciousness in a way that’s not comprehensible.

I knew it was going to be an interesting conversation with you. I want to get you back on the show. I already know that. There’s so much to talk about and so much more to clarify. The audience wants more answers from you. For now, what is the game-changer message that you would like to leave with us?

The message is to consider the possibility that our identity is our consciousness. When you’re walking down the street, the thing that is experiencing you’re walking down the street under this idea is the source of reality as part of the stream of consciousness. Thinking about that is a game-changing mentality.

It definitely is a game-changing mentality. Thank you, Mark, for coming on the show. This has been a very useful, thoughtful and insightful conversation. I want to thank you for your work. I hope you continue to do this because this is something that the world needs. It’s something that the world is ready for, maybe not many years ago, but I think that people are now open to these ideas and they’re looking for these ideas. They know that there’s something more and different than what they’ve been taught.

Thank you for saying that and I’ll close with one more scientific fact, which is that scientists acknowledge that 96% of the universe is unknown. It’s called dark matter and dark energy. Only 4% which is known as matter has been identified. In the mainstream perspective, we should expect that there will be major breakthroughs in how we think about the universe and ourselves.

Let us know how we can connect with you once again. I want people to be able to connect with you.

My name is Mark Gober and that’s my website MarkGober.com. You can also find me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and social media.

There you have it. It’s another successful episode. I want you to think about the experience that you’re having. Do you have any bodily experience or conscious experience? I’m going to leave it at that. Think about it. Check out Mark’s website. Mark, thank you for coming on the show. This has been amazing.

Thanks for having me.

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About Mark Gober

GCM 82 | Upside Down ThinkingI am not a scientist or a philosopher. Rather, I am a businessman. I began my career in 2008 in New York as an Investment Banking Analyst with a large, global firm – during the heart of the financial crisis. In 2010, I chose to leave Wall Street to join a technology-focused investment bank and strategy firm, of which I am currently a Partner in Silicon Valley. I have been quoted for my opinions on business and technology matters in Bloomberg Businessweek and elsewhere and have authored internationally published business articles.

After college, I read about the universe for fun. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2016 that I randomly stumbled across podcasts that exposed me to new ideas. The ideas put into question the most basic assumptions about who and what we are as human beings.The more I researched, the more I realized that I needed to rethink everything that I thought I knew.

Even though my professional career has been in business, I have always sought answers to life’s challenging questions. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, I was drawn to astrophysics because I wanted to understand the universe. But because of my commitments as a four-year member (and later Captain) of Princeton’s Division I Tennis Team, I decided that astrophysics would be too demanding. So instead of studying the invisible forces that govern the universe, I studied the invisible forces that secretly drive human behavior. I graduated magna cum laude with a degree in psychology, focusing on behavioral economics and wrote my thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning Prospect Theory.

When I started telling friends about my research, they told me it changed the way they looked at life. Their lives started to improve. After enough people said this to me, I realized it was time to share my research with a broader audience so I could help more people. Through my book, podcast, and keynote speaking, I invite you to join me on my journey. I will share with you the evidence I collect, and you are welcome to draw your own conclusions. For me, merely being exposed to the evidence has led to a completely new mindset and worldview.

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