This podcast episode features Dr. Eben Alexander discussing his near-death experience (NDE) in 2008, when he was in a week-long coma from a deadly E. coli bacterial meningitis infection. 

During his NDE, Alexander described ascending through multiple spiritual realms, including a Gateway Valley with thousands of souls dancing and a core realm filled with divine love, where he encountered a beautiful guardian angel and experienced life reviews. He explained how his scientific background as a neurosurgeon transformed after the experience, leading him to reject materialism and embrace a view that consciousness is primary in the universe rather than being created by the brain. 

Dr Alexander discussed his recovery process, including his return to work within three months and his subsequent career shift from neurosurgery to sharing his experiences about consciousness and spirituality with the world. He also covered his work with binaural beat meditation using Sacred Acoustics, past life memories and reincarnation research at the University of Virginia, and how near-death experiences demonstrate the reality of an eternal soul and universal love. 

Takeaways

• During a coma caused by severe bacterial meningitis, Eben's brain was too damaged for hallucinations — a fact later confirmed in a 2018 medical journal article — making his vivid spiritual experiences scientifically difficult to dismiss.
• He describes ascending through spiritual realms, including a Gateway Valley with dancing souls and a core realm filled with divine love, where he was told he would return to life.
• A key insight from his experience is that memories are not stored in the brain, challenging one of neuroscience's most foundational assumptions.
• Neuroscientific research on psychedelics mirrors NDE findings — brain activity slows rather than increases during these profound states, suggesting consciousness exists beyond neural activity.
• After recovering, Eben read around 150 books on quantum physics and consciousness, ultimately shifting his career from neurosurgery to exploring and sharing insights about the nature of consciousness.
• He found that meditation and binaural beats through Sacred Acoustics helped him reconnect with the spiritual states he experienced during his NDE, and a peer-reviewed study showed significant anxiety reduction from using these practices.
• His NDE introduced him to concepts of life reviews, reincarnation, and soul guides — including a vision of his son Bond as a spiritual guide helping him return to Earth.
• The core message he brought back centres on love, compassion, and gratitude as fundamental forces, which he believes can help people navigate life's most difficult challenges.

Please note: this transcript is unedited.

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Welcome back, everybody, and thank you for joining us for another episode of The Fourth Wave in Therapy. It is my absolute delight today to connect to someone who's been on my list for a long time through a mutual colleague.

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Eben Alexander, MD, was an academic neurosurgeon for over 25 years, including 15 years at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

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In 2008, he experienced a transcendental near-death experience, NDE, during a week-long coma from an inexplicable brain infection that completely transformed his worldview.

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A pioneering scientist and modern thought leader in the emerging science that acknowledges the primary.

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The Primacy of Consciousness in the Universe. He is the author of the New York Times number one bestseller, Proof of Heaven, absolutely recommended, The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe, and of course, all those links are below.

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Dr. Alexander, thank you so much for joining me.

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Well, Peter, thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be with you today.

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Absolute pleasure, and I meant to mention before we actually hit record that, part of my teaching in health psychology at master's level here in Australia is actually, acknowledging NDEs, near-death experiences, just because psychologists do obviously have people that come through their doors and our students, and one of the books I actually bring into the classroom is Proof of Heaven.

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So, I feel like it's a full-circle moment, because they've been hearing for many, many years about your wonderful work.

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But if you don't mind starting at the top.

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Could you tell our listeners, and I'm sure you've told this story many times, what actually happened in 2008?

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Okay, well, I'll try to keep it brief, so we have plenty of time for discussion. But the reality is, you know, at that time, I'd spent 54 years of my life owning a very scientific worldview. Thought I understood something about brain, mind, and consciousness, and I was

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trained as and pretty much believed in, you know, physicalism or materialism, the notion that only the physical world exists, and that therefore the brain must be creating a consciousness somehow. Truth be told, nobody ever, from the materialist scientist campus ever.

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had a clue how consciousness could be related to neural correlates. But anyway.

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That aside, I kind of believed it's called promissory materialism, that if we keep studying materialism, that someday we'll explain everything through materialism.

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But I can now tell you that's absolutely false, and materialism is discarded from a scientific perspective as we kind of move into a more mature human understanding of reality. So for me.

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Another important thing to point out is that I was very influenced by my adoptive father.

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I say adoptive, because my birth mother was 16, unwed, had to give me up for adoption when I was 11 days old, but wouldn't sign the papers to really let me go for 4 months. So I got stuck in a baby dorm for 4 months, and that… I'm not asking for any sympathy, because I was adopted into a wonderful, loving family, but bottom line is, 4 months in an orphanage is not the greatest way to start. I had this kind of smoking crater.

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in my subconscious about whether or not I was even worthy of love. My father was very influential. He was a globally renowned neurosurgeon. He was also a combat surgeon in the Second World War, spent a lot of time in New Guinea, Philippines, Japan, etc.

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But… and I wanted to believe his… have his religious beliefs. He tried to instill that in me, but growing up in the 60s and 70s, you know, the era was very much one of science is it. That's the pathway to truth. And that's what I always accepted as a young child, even though my father was very scientific.

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You know, he was a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon.

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Knew all about Big Bang cosmology and everything, but

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Bottom line is I struggled with it. In fact, through my long career in neurosurgery, I really, really was losing any kind of idea of how consciousness could survive the death of the brain and body. So that's kind of the starting point, where I was November 10th, 2008.

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Early that morning, woke up with severe back pain, soon realized horrible headache. After that, grand ball seizures within about 2 hours, and then deep into coma, right at home. There's a myth out there in the lay press by a very irresponsible, reckless journalist trying to,

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destroy my credibility, who said this was a medication-induced coma.

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And nothing could be further from the truth. Very important to the scientific community is the… are the medical details of the case, and how all of my brain was involved. There weren't… weren't any areas spared, according to a CT and MRI scan. The neurologic exams, lab values.

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I mean, this was a deadly case of E. coli bacterial meningoencephalitis that drove me into coma within 3 hours. And basically, that gave me about a 10% chance of survival. That was the position early in the week.

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By late in the week, my doctors estimated I'd gone down 2% chance of survival. I've been on a ventilator the whole time, on 3 powerful antibiotics, deep in coma, and they were basically,

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Giving up on me. So by 7 days, they held a family conference where they said it was time to let me go.

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And, it was soon after that, a few hours later, that I actually started coming back to the world. And as I did, you know.

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I was living a very different reality compared to what they were seeing, and so I'll take you back now into what was going on in my mind. Now, one very atypical feature of my meningitis

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That I think is important to point out, but I've never heard of this happening to this degree in anybody else, and some people worry about it, but don't worry, because it's very unlikely.

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amnesia, that I had absolutely zero memory of Evan Alexander's life, knowledge of humans, Earth, its universe, I had no language. Everything was gone. It was an empty slate. Now, when I first came back from home in those early weeks, I thought, well, maybe that horrible amnesia, or that

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Deep amnesia, steep amnesia, was,

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Because, memories, you know, I was still defaulting to my materialist thinking that memories are stored in the brain. In fact, in our third book, Living in a Mindful Universe, we talk about how memories are not stored in the brain. This is something neurosurgeons have had to face

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up front and personal for more than a century, because we've never had a brain resection that was associated with any loss of long-term memories. Even with hemispherectomies, half the brain removed, you never lose long-term memory. So, memories are not stored in the brain, and we go into great detail about all the other evidence for that in Living in a Mindful Universe. But anyway, early on, my thinking was, well, maybe that would explain the amnesia, but over about 6 months…

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sorry, over 2 months, I had a complete return of all memories, even more complete than they had been before coma. That was a real shock.

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But it showed me in many, many ways, the brain is not responsible for memory, not ultimately. It's a mechanism that encodes memories, but it's not the place for storage, and that's very important when it comes to near-death experiences, and especially the reincarnation literature, which we can get into later if you want to, but that is where you realize, of course, memories are not stored in the brain.

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So at any rate, in this amnesic state.

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It all started in what I call the Earthworm's Eye View, a very primitive course, kind of subterranean, dirty jello kind of existence, with a pounding, monotonous sound. Seemed to go for a very long time, but the good news is it didn't go forever.

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And there came a slowly spinning white light with a perfect musical melody. Music ends up being a gigantic theme of my story, both music, or the concept of music and sound and frequency and vibration as a spiritual means of adjusting my spiritual levels, but also music in my life in 18 years since coma has been very important in the form of sacred acoustics.

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form of meditation using binaural beats. They cause a very powerful oscillation in the lower brain stem, enabling incredible

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transcendental states of meditation. Anyway, more of that later if you wish. But bottom line is, music was a big thing, and music

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I remember the musical notes of the melody, and that's what enabled me to conjure up this same light portal later on in the journey. But the first time it happened, I was aware of the slowly spinning white light, fine silvery and golden tendrils around it. It came towards me, slowly rotating.

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And it opened up like a rip in the fabric of that ugly earthworm-eye view realm, and led me up into this brilliant, ultra-real Gateway Valley. And this is where I joined with so many other near-death experiences and what they've seen.

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Because, and this is not just near-death experiences, but people in palliative care, terminal care, in the dying process, do the very same things. This is very important. So this is not just what happens to NDE people, but also to anybody who's in the dying process. You know, if it's an illness and a prolonged exit.

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at any rate, in this Gateway Valley, things are much more real than in this world, and that's what so many into ears describe it thusly, and

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I remember it was… it had many earth-like features. This lovely meadow surrounded by a fertile, green forest.

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sparkling waterfalls into crystal blue pools, and there were thousands of souls dancing in the… or beings, humans, dancing in the setting, or souls, would be a better term for it all. But there were children playing, dogs jumping, incredible festivities. It was all being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were emanating chants.

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Anthems, hymns, it would just thunder through my awareness, this incredible

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sense of joy and merriment and celebration. And I was witnessing all of this, not with any kind of body awareness. Never was there even a wisp of a body, but I was a speck of awareness, and I was also in that realm

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I was on a butterfly wing. There were millions of other butterflies, and they were looping and spiraling in these vast formations, an incredibly rich and beautiful, indescribable scene. And the best part about it was I wasn't alone. With me on the butterfly wing was a beautiful young woman.

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Sparkling blue eyes, high forehead, high cheekbone, broad smile, and she never said a word to me. She never had to me. She looked at me with this look of pure love.

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And her message to me, mentally delivered and emotionally, you know, with a mind melt of, you are deeply loved and cherished forever, you have nothing to fear, you're richly cared for.

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And I cannot tell you how valuable that was, how refreshing, how liberating. So anyway, all that's going on in this incredible scene, and then all of that starts to collapse down, too. Now, there are many other things that happen. I don't have time to go into all of it, but the bottom line…

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is I could sense that four-dimensional space-time was collapsing down. And then this much richer realm of the Gateway Valley, where we'd have life reviews, reunite with souls of departed loved ones, plan next incarnation, soul agreements, all those things happen in that realm.

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But I was to go further, and so I remember, but it's also important to point out one reason these are so hard to describe, ineffable, you know, beyond our words,

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is that it's timeless. You are truly… if you… the more you learn about life reviews, and we can talk about that later, too, if you want to, but they are not a remembering, or a dream, or a hallucination. They are a reliving of events from the perspective of many involved, not just yourself.

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So, life reviews are an incredibly big challenge to humanity in understanding the nature of reality, and yet they're extremely common. They happen in about half of NDEs. I couldn't have an Eben Alexander life review because of my amnesia, but I saw life reviews in a very powerful fashion. I'm going to describe that in a second. So what happened…

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is all of that was collapsing down. So I'm, you know, ascending through yet another light portal, is all of that deep time, rich realm that is completely unconnected to Earth time, all of that

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down until I entered what I call the core.

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The core was an infinite, inky blackness, but it was filled to overflowing with this God love of everything that is. And this… that God love, that very same feeling, that's what so many near-death experiencers bathe in during their journey, and that's why they come back, they have no fear of death.

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Now, this is a God that's very kind of universal as the source of our very conscious awareness. Not… it doesn't fit at all into any one religion. This is a far bigger concept that all religions kind of revolve around, but in a very imperfect fashion. So NDEs show us a much cleaner, more perfect understanding of our… of the spiritual nature of these kind of journeys. At any rate.

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So, in this core realm.

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I was told, you're not here to stay, you'll be going back, we'll teach you many things, and one of the last visions I saw there is the only one I really want to mention here, and it was what I call the, used to call the Indra's Net vision, and that's because I mistakenly associated it with a comparison with Hindu cosmology.

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Where every interaction of a sentient being, every observation and conscious kind of decision, every bit of it ripples through the net, and has this incredible influence throughout the universe, so we all are far more important than we'd like to believe.

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At any rate, that's kind of what I was seeing in this beautiful vision that I later came to call the living tapestry, because it, to me, was an absolute demonstration of the reality of reincarnation, because for one thing, you cannot get that kind of soul progression to oneness with the divine in a single human incarnation, so it takes multiple incarnations.

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This is something that's been studied scientifically. University of Virginia has more than 1,700 cases of past life memories in children that they've solved. They actually found the person who lived before. So reincarnation is an absolutely real part of human existence, but most of us don't remember past lives, because as the doctors who've done that work will tell you, you need to harvest those memories before age 6 or 7.

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Because natural processes cover them over. So most of us by age 8 or 9 don't have those memories anymore. But they can come back through hypnotic regression, through meditation, through another NDE. There are many ways that those memories of a past life can come back into our knowing.

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At any rate, I would oscillate through these multiple levels, multiple times, because from that sanctum sanctorum of the divine, in the core realm, I would suddenly find myself way back down in that earthworm eye view. And I went up through it multiple times, by remembering the musical notes and the melody, that's what allowed me to conjure up that light portal.

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There's so much more to the story, but…

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Bottom line is, every time I entered the Corps, they said, you're not here to stay, and that happened. It came after multiple passages through there, many lessons. Then there was finally a time where I tried to

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Remember the music notes of the melody to conjure up the light portal, but it didn't work.

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And to say I was sad at that point would be an understatement, but I also knew I could trust in the universe that I would be taken care of. I had nothing to fear. I've been promised that multiple times. And so that's when I saw thousands of beings going off around me in the distance, heads bowed, some holding candles, and this murmuring energy coming from them. And the surprising thing is, even though I was back down in that kind of earth where my view

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region.

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this murmuring from all these beings around me was very affirming and loving and powerful, and joyous, and kind of spiritual homelike. And it was an amazing thing to witness, and what that was doing was ushering me back to this world. Then the last thing that I saw.

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six phases. It would kind of bubble up out of the book, they'd say a few words and then disappear. My amnesia was still powerful, so I didn't understand the words, but I could get the feeling of what they were kind of trying to tell me, and the most important thing of what they were doing

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was… they served as a vertical time anchor. That's what it's called in that literature, which means that,

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because of the faces I saw, and how I saw them, and when I saw them, it showed me that the vast majority of the spiritual journey had to happen between days 1 and 4, or 1 and 5 of a 7-day coma, not at the end. That is a very important piece of information for trying to interpret and understand all this.

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And it was the last of those faces that was most important. That was a 10-year-old boy. I didn't recognize him when I witnessed his face there, but the thing is, that was my son, Bond, and that's a great name we gave him, I must admit. But Bond,

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they'd been protecting him from the worst news during this week, but that Sunday morning, he overheard that conversation where it was time to let me go, and he knew things were much worse than he'd been told. He came running down the hallway into Major Bay 10,

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Pulled open my eyelids, they'd been taped shut, I'm there on my ventilator, one eye looking over there, one eye over there, neither pupil working. Anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture of somebody whose brain stem is badly damaged. And I promise you, I didn't see him with my eyes or hear them with my ears. I was far too gone from this world.

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But his message to me, Daddy gonna be okay, Daddy gonna be okay, even though I couldn't understand the words, the tone, the…

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imploring for me to help. You know, that's what got my attention. And throughout this entire journey, because of the amnesia, I'd always thought it can continue or cease, doesn't matter, but the best, but the important thing was I had to be there to help him.

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Now, that beautiful girl on the butterfly wing, to me, was an incredibly powerful, part of the entire journey.

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And in fact, it was a deep mystery when I got back to this world. First of all, I'll explain, I was still… had to go in and out of a 36-hour psychotic delusion, ICU psychosis that happened after they extubated me.

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But I knew that was delusions. I knew it wasn't real.

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very, very different, where the memories from Deep Coma, the spiritual memories of that journey, they're as sharp and clear and powerful today as if the whole thing just happened yesterday. Whereas the ICU psychosis memories vanish within a few weeks. So I'm glad I was writing it all down as soon as I got out of the hospital, I was trying to record every bit of this. My older son

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Told me, you know, he was majoring in neuroscience in college at the time, and said.

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you know, he knew that every time you revisit a memory, you change it. So he said, you can't read anybody else's accounts of their experience. You need to read everything about yours before you, you know, investigate others, read others. And that was the best advice I've ever gotten. Wrote 20,000 words in 6 weeks, then dove into that literature, but that's where I hit the mystery of that beautiful guardian angel, because

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She was supposed to be somebody very important to me in my physical lifetime here, and yet I had no idea who she was. That's where my adoption history is very important. I won't say a lot more, but 4 months after my coma, I finally got a picture in the mail, and it was like, oh my god. I put it all together. And I'll mention, just in passing, that a year before my coma, I finally met my birth family.

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So, that's enough said about all that, but that's kind of the nutshell version of the journey.

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Oh, the… even there's so much in there. I found myself leaning in as you were talking. There was something there drawing me in, and, so many places to go. I guess…

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Maybe from the off… just… just to take it from the top.

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What was it, I guess, from the moment of coming back, and obviously the writing in that next couple of months, and then delving into the literature about other people's experiences, what do you think was the most profound shift, given your very traditional medical training, and what you understood, and where you came from?

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Well, I'll say that, early on, you know, first of all, I tried to tell my doctors about it. You know, I was so amazed. In the first few days, I'm saying, God, I gotta share this. And at the time.

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as I explained, it was all so real to me. There was no way to think it was a dream or hallucination.

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But they said, well, your brain was soaking in pus, we can't even understand how you're coming back to us. But you can forget about it, because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. Well, we tend to believe our doctors, so I thought, oh gosh, I guess. But as I told my son, it was way too real to be real.

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I mean, that… it was shocking, the, elements of it. And so, there that is for me to digest, but they're telling me it had to be a hallucination. Well, I start… that's when I started reviewing my medical records, going back to talk to my doctors about all the neurologic exams. Now, all that's available. My case, report is in the medical literature. September 2018 Journal of Near-Death

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I'm sorry, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, September 2018, there's an article on my illness, and in that article.

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Two major points. One is, you read it as a doctor, and you'll realize that brain was in no shape to have a dream or hallucination. There was far too much damage, you know, it was far too close to death. So this was not a dreamer hallucination, just by the damage to the brain.

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And then the second thing is the scientific peer review editors challenged those authors and said, how do you explain this? This is an unprecedented recovery, given his illness. How do you explain it? And they said, it's because he had a near-death experience. And that's when the peer-review scientific editors said, okay, now we've got an explanation, and they published it.

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That is a big message to everybody out there, that the scientific community is paying enough attention to this kind of journey to realize that a deep spiritual dive and a near-death experience can be sufficient to explain an apparently miraculous healing. And that

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is kind of the key point for moving forward with any discussions of healing, wholeness, you know, how we can help heal ourselves, and coming into wholeness in general, so…

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Amazing.

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And talk to me more about this consciousness. You said originally you thought.

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The brain is responsible for all these kind of, you know, elements of our experience, our worldview, yet in that near-death experience, consciousness wasn't necessarily in your brain. You've talked about where your brain is at, physically. What is it that's happening from what you've been through?

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Well, that's the amazing thing, is because of the severity of the illness, there's no way I could have had a dream or hallucination. So that was a big challenge. How did this happen? And ultimately, what you find is it happens through things that happen, because your brain is no longer active.

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Your brain is no longer, you know, linking you to a physical body in the material world and to a notion of here, now, and sense of self, and

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Wow.

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So you're out there in a realm of pure consciousness. Now, for the kind of doubting skeptics out there, I want to point out something very important that I found out, you know, years after my coma that have contributed to this. It has to do with neuroscientific assessment of people under the influence of certain psychedelic substances. Psilocybin, magic mushrooms, DMT, LSD, etc.

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And it turns out, when you do fMRI, functional MRI, or magnetoencephalography on their brains, what you find is not a single neuron anywhere is increasing its activity. In fact, everything's slowing down and getting out of the way.

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So, as a neuroscientist, you'll be very frustrated trying to find where the neurons are that are doing all this, because every one of them is moving out of the way and decreasing their activity. In fact, this giant mystery is right at the heart of Dan Brown's current fictional work, Secret of Secrets. So, I won't say more, but I'll tell you, all the science in his book is science we addressed in a factual book, a scientific book.

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Living in a Mindful Universe back in 2017. Every bit of it matches up to Dan Brown's

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amazement at the fact that the brain seems to turn off. The brain is not doing all this, it's getting out of the way. And when I read those articles, that's when I realized that's how meningitis, taking out my neocortex, could allow for this incredible overrichness of conscious experience, because the brain is not responsible for creating conscious awareness. It's a filtering mechanism, or transceiver.

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that allows primordial consciousness to be dissociated, a little eddy current of that. That's what we use as our consciousness. But ultimately, we're part of that God consciousness of the universe.

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And you did mention, and is this a pathway in? So if we're living in our human bodies here, we're wanting to access some of this, because it sounds like we can, is it those practices? You talked about meditation, you did mention psychedelic, and obviously being, you know, assisted medically, in the right hands.

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Are they the practices? Is that what you came back with and thought, that's how I access it again, or was it trial and error?

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What happened was I came back and I read about 150 books over 2 years, and, you know, quantum physics, because I… quantum physics is absolutely deeply tied into consciousness and everything about reality and the mind-brain relationship. We can talk about that a little more later if you want. But the bottom line is I,

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I was trying to make sense of it all, but I realized, you know, ultimately, if you want to get this, you know, a deep conscious experience so unusual, you've got to explore consciousness. And so, meditation… now, I had actually done a form of meditation when I was in college.

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I was on the parachuting team, made 350 parachute jumps. We were doing formations.

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And we would do silver mind control. So we'd meditate, we'd go through the formation in our minds, and we'd go up and we did a lot better skydives that way. But I, for whatever reason, I didn't take meditation with me on into medical school and beyond. And so now, you know, two years after comb, I realized, man, I gotta get back into meditation. Read a fascinating article in Scientific American from the early 1970s called Auditory Beats in the Brain by Gerald

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Oster. That article talks about the anatomy of the brain and the relevant physiology for how binaural beats are generated. Binaural beats had first been described by Wilhelm Heinrich Dove, a Prussian physicist-meteorologist back in the late 1800s.

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pure tone in one ear, slightly different tone in the other ear, and the arithmetic difference between the two frequencies is what you get in the brain. Somewhere, this wavering sound. So, say 100Hz here, 104Hz here, that would give you a 4Hz signal that's kind of, and that's what is… what you're actually sensing is an oscillation in your lower brain stem. It's not an actual

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sound in the atmosphere, it's actually created in the lower brain stem. And that's when you separate the two signals. So, in other words, better than using speakers is headphones or earbuds. So you're really splitting the two signals, but by manipulating that circuit in the lower brain stem.

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You're basically kind of shaking conscious awareness free from the illusion of here, now, and sense of self.

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And it's a very powerful way of kind of synchronizing the hemispheres, kind of getting them and their information processing out of the way, and letting your consciousness get back into that pure state of, you know, what it sources, which is that conscious… the mind of the universe, that God-mind that we all share.

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So at any rate, I started doing binaural beat brainwave entrainment, and it,

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incredibly powerful. I now… I use Sacred Acoustics. You can go to SacredAcoustics.com, learn a lot more.

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I do it an hour or two a day, have done that for the last 13 years or so. Incredibly rich tool for deep, conscious explorations. I highly recommend it. And a little full disclosure here, Sacred Acoustics is a company that was co-founded by my wife, Karen Newell, and she's also the co-author of the book, Living in a Mindful Universe. She is a brilliant

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sage, kind of a philosopher, understanding of deep meditative states, of sound, meditation, spirituality, etc. And she's been a real godsend in my life for understanding. But sacred acoustics was the key to my returning to my NDE many, many a time, and developing much fuller, richer relationships, not only with that guardian angel on the butterfly wing, whose identity I discovered

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4 months after my coma, but also my adoptive father. Very important to me, but he passed over 4 months before my coma, and

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But I encountered him, and this is all described in the book, Living in a Mindful Universe, about two and a half years post-coma in a deep meditation using these binaural beats. And it was a very powerful experience, and I've developed a much richer relationship with him, too, in the ensuing years. So, fantastic power for meditation, and I can't imagine living life without a regular practice of meditation.

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I'm so glad. We've got all those links below if anyone's listening, out walking, driving, they are all absolutely, listed below. Eben, how on earth

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So, all of this is happening, the coma, the four months that, you know, go by, and then the years that go by. How on earth did you come back and integrate back in? Did you go back into your medical world? Did you take some of this?

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Through the binaural beats and the meditation, did you take that into that world, or did you have a complete change of path here?

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Well, I actually, when I… when I went to Coma, I was working for the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and what they did was coordinate, or what I did was coordinate global research

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on brain applications. Focused ultrasound surgery is a very powerful technology that's just beginning to really emerge in its true power. Excuse me.

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But I was doing that work.

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And my boss was a neurosurgeon. When he got the call about my illness, he knew I was gone, that I'd never be back.

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Well, surprise to him, about two and a half weeks later.

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I called him up and told him I could actually do, a specific job I was… I'd planned for mid-December.

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Which was to take the whole board of directors to see a procedure. And at any rate, that trip was all set up, but he thought I'd never be there to do that trip, and then I called him up and said, Neil, I'm getting better, I think I can.

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And he felt… initially felt like he was talking to a ghost, but bottom line is, I went back to… within 3 months, I was back doing that work, traveling the world.

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Going to centers to help coordinate these research projects. So, yes, I got back into a very active pattern of scientific investigation within the three months of my coma, which was a shock to everybody involved. But it was,

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about, two years later, that I realized… I started giving talks on my experience, and the talks were very popular, and I was getting more and more invitations. And one thing is, you cannot do neurosurgery part-time. You cannot… I didn't like signing my patients out. And the problem was.

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I had to make a decision. You know, one way or the other, either spend your life now with this whole new, kind of, sharing with the world the beauty of this incredible mission of oneness of consciousness and the binding force of love, or go back into the OR,

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and start doing neurosurgery again. I had some partners in Lynchburg, and we…

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entertain that option of just getting back in the OR and doing more work there, but, finally decided, no, it's got to be go out on the world and, you know, change it, help everybody get to this point of understanding, and the scientific community has been incredibly supportive. I work with hundreds of scientists around the world.

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who are…

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dedicated to understanding, you know, consciousness, and it means deep dive, and we've rejected materialism long ago. We know materialism is false. Things like telepathy, you know, remote viewing, these ways of non-local consciousness for information acquisition.

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It's crystal clear, even in those kind of settings, that, you know.

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consciousness is not local to a brain. It's actually something that's more shared through the universe, and we're sharing one mind. So that was ultimately kind of the deep lesson I was to learn and to then share with the world, through shifting my career away from operating on patients.

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To sharing this brilliant kind of emerging reality for the… for the world at large.

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So if someone is listening right now, and maybe they're struggling, maybe…

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life's not going the way that they had anticipated. Maybe they're always up against it.

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What is a message that you would want to share with that listener who really needs a lifeline here, or needs to know, how can I change this?

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Well, I think, to me, again, taking the time, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes a day, to have centering prayer or meditation, and if you've… if you have trouble with that monkey mind, you know, voice in the head not letting you relax and get into deep meditation.

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Sacred acoustics is a very powerful way to turn off that little voice in the head. I love how Michael Singer, in his book, The Untethered Soul, he calls a voice in your head your annoying roommate.

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Yep, that's it. And once you get that clear and realize that's your ego, and the ego voice is very misleading. And the ego is absolutely associated with addictions and all kinds of world problems we have. But ultimately, it's about escaping the tyranny of the ego. And once you start realizing and connecting with your higher soul and with that primordial God mind.

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And once you start doing that on a regular basis, and this is where the meditation or centering prayer is so handy.

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You start to realize you're not that little ego.

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And you're not the slave to that little ego that it would have you be. In fact, the ego, in many kind of psychological situations.

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you find the ego would rather see the host dead than see itself dead. That's why addictions can be so deadly. Trying to honor the ego all the way to the ends, you know, can lead to your demise. But once you realize that you're not your ego, and your ego is just a program that's there, it serves something of a useful purpose, but it also can be horribly damaging, and certainly is not useful for these deep spiritual

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kind of explorations. That's where the meditation and centering prayer comes in very handy, and can give you a relief from all that. And also, if… I think if people just start reading a little bit of the literature on near-death experiences.

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You can go to IANDS.org as a great resource with many thousands of reports, and also much professional analysis of what NDEs tell us about who we are and what this is all about. Ultimately, the message of NDEs is we are all here together, bound through the forces of love. We're here to take care of each other, kindness, compassion, mercy.

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without exclusion are the general rules that NDEers recognize from their experience as the fundamental nature of who we are. And so, once you start becoming more familiar with that literature and realize near-death experiences come back here, and the vast majority of them, for one thing, more than 90% of them.

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not only believe and have faith, but know the reality of a loving God force at the core of the universe. And I'm not… this is not some little independent, you know, individual religious idea or ideology. I'm talking about a much grander sense of that

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Uniting God, Force, and Love. In fact, there's a great book by a friend of mine, Christopher Koppas.

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C-O-P-P-E-S, he's in the Netherlands, a big near-death experience researcher, and he wrote a book called The Essence of Religions. And in that book, he compares Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism with NDEs. And he uses NDEs as the gold standard, because they really are. They show us the apex of understanding of a connection with God.

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everything religions have tried to do for thousands of years come together in the NDE literature. That's why it's so important to kind of see this. And also.

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their lives are changed. They're not afraid of death. They come back here often more spiritual, but less religious. Now, I'm not putting down religions, because religions can be useful.

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But if a religion is exclusive, forget it. It's absolutely lost track. If a religion has moved away from kindness, love, compassion for all fellow beings without exception, then that religion is dead. It is,

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outlived its usefulness completely. So what we're talking about in the NDE kind of advice about spirituality is a much richer, more complete view of the reality of a loving force at the core of the universe that is really the source of our conscious awareness, and that that is something that can help us come into comfort and love and understanding of ourselves and of our fellow beings in a very

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powerful way.

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That can relieve us from all of the, kind of horrific, kind of violence, conflict, you know, what you see going on in the world today, the headlines, etc, is all due to the false sense of separation that's inherent in materialist or physicalist thought.

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And, you know, thinking we're individual human beings with these individual brains, and that we're in competition. A lot of that thinking came in the 20th century with discussions of Darwinian evolution and competition, and as most biologists will tell you today, we've learned that, no, that competition is not the dominant principle. Success in biology is all about

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Come, come, you know, cooperation and collaboration.

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not that focus on the competition, which really, badly informs some of our social and economic, and all that of social systems evolving in the 20th century. So now, we're at a point, no, that materialism is rejected.

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In the year 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was for quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is absolutely something that moves beyond materialism. You cannot have, you know, traditional conventional materialism, physicalism, and have quantum entanglement working. It's information channels that bypass spacetime, as we're, you know, normally thinking of it.

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And, that was really the Nobel Prize Committee saying, it's the end of four-dimensional space-time as the ultimate theater of operations, and also an acceptance that consciousness is something far more powerful and more dominant in this world than the material world. So, we need to start paying more attention to it. Yeah.

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And that's the one thing that strikes me about your story, as well as others that I've read as well, that unconditional love at that source, the joy that you talked about, the imagery I was getting just as you talked through your story, you seem to be a really central tenet that is featured in lots of NDEs, that connection, the lack of separation. If you don't mind me

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changing track just for a moment, and it's because of something you started with, which I'd love to finish on, and it… I… I use the phrase past lives. I think you used something slightly different, but you said you might come back to it, and just talk to us a little bit about

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Where we come from, perhaps our past, how, yeah, how we can access that, but also, what's the relevance to where we've come from in today's, you know, way of living?

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Well, I think, the important thing to get, and, you know, back in the… when I was in training, 70s and 80s, we thought you have nature and nurture. You have DNA, you know, and heredity, and that's nature, and then you've got nurture, your upbringing, the family and your social situation, etc.

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But then, Ian Stevenson, who is head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

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back in the 1960s, started hearing about children who claimed to remember past lives. And so they started investigating these cases. Of course, they thought the child is hallucinating, making things up. Well, to their surprise, they found out that in many of these cases, where the child was reporting living before.

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they could actually do some homework and find that that person actually lived before. And a lot of this work was done in the 60s, 70s, 80s, before the internet, and they had to do a lot of homework, but, you know, it was, and they were very careful to not be misled by fraud or deceit.

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You know, people could even deceive themselves about their own child. But the bottom line is, they found, out of 2,500 cases they've investigated to date, more than 1,700 have been solved.

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That is, they actually found the person who lived before. So, from a scientific perspective, reincarnation is absolutely solid. You can't doubt it. If you are, you're just showing complete ignorance. And the other key to understand, though, is, as Ian Stevenson would tell you, you must harvest those memories before age 6 or 7.

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Because after that, those memories start to disappear. They're covered over by natural processes. So most of us, by age 8 or 9, and even those kids who've been most heavily interviewed and reported, they don't remember those past lives. They're covered over, they're away from their memory. And I think that has something to do with the current level of human development

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And how we need to have some buy-in skin in the game for this incarnation to live this life, and not necessarily have all the information from our higher soul in previous lifetimes interfering with that. So… but I think all of humanity is growing through this process, but reincarnation, is undeniable.

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And to me, that was crystal clear in my journey, and the reason I mentioned the nature and nurture before is that Ian Stevenson

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said that, reincarnation provides what he calls the tertium quid. It was a third way, a third pathway of developing personality. So when we look at our origins of where we came from.

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Yes, you've got heredity in nature. Yes, you've got nurture your environment, your family, all that, but there's also this business of having come from a previous lifetime, or multiple previous lifetimes.

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And we need to take all that into account, and it helps us to identify. I'll give you an example of how this has practical utility.

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when we look at people who have gender dysphoria in the current era, there was one paper that came out about 2 or 3 years ago, I believe, from the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, where they went through their whole database

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And they were looking at gender dysphoria, you know, people who, you know, might be born male, but wonder if they're female. And what they found is something like 85% of those who had gender dysphoria in this lifetime were the opposite physical sex in the prior lifetime.

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only 5% of those without gender dysphoria were opposite sex. So, in other words, it seems that that might be a very powerful kind of clue as to why people might have a gender dysphoria. It's because they've been here before, and they were the other sex before.

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And, you know, to me, it's fascinating, because that kind of thing, when you have that kind of bigger knowledge, it helps you to understand yourself, and kind of understand others, and kind of how we get to where we are. And

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you know, open up to kind of the richness of humanity and all this variety. It's here for a reason. It's here for us to show free will, for us to grow, to learn and teach together.

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And just being aware of these much bigger possibilities that we've been here before, explains so much. I mean, uprushes of genius, things like that, have much more ready explanations when you realize that not every human being is starting from ground zero when they're born, but that actually some have, you know, had advantages in previous lifetimes that help them

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To move forward even better in this lifetime.

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Yeah, so many things come to mind when you talk about that, because we see cases, don't we, of somebody perhaps, you know, living an adult life, but then having a traumatic brain injury of some sort.

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wakes up able to speak fluently in different languages, able to play piano or an instrument at some, you know, concert-level skill, and you kind of think, where did that come from? But it makes me wonder, too, about…

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health conditions that I know, you know, intergenerational trauma has been kind of researched as well, you know, as to decades and decades and centuries ago.

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But what gets carried through, perhaps, in the body at a… maybe at an epigenetic level.

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that really belong somewhere else. I mean, it sounds.

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Well, that's another very good point, that some of this stuff kind of goes with us over time in various ways, and can explain some of the kind of deeper aspects of the challenges we face, the kind of situations we run into.

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So I think that's a very good point. And also, I think, I mean, in a broader discussion of life reviews, of, when you realize that life reviews, in many ways, are the golden rule.

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Treat others as you would like to be treated.

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written into the very fabric of the universe in the form of life reviews. As I said earlier, if you do, like, Bruce Grayson, who's a skeptical MD psychiatrist at UVA who's studied for 45 years these near-death experiences.

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And he wrote a beautiful paper in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in the fall of 2021. In that paper, he discusses several fascinating things about life reviews, which occurred about 50% of all NDEs, depending on the series.

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But about a third of people have their whole life in the review. Nothing's omitted. And you might say, wait a minute, how does that happen during a cardiac arrest? Well, it can happen because truly, in that realm, you're completely free of earth time.

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Now, we don't get that here because we are slave to Earth time here, but when you broaden your mind and start researching NDEs and these reincarnation cases, etc, you realize that we have a very limited understanding of, you know, this kind of materialist view of who we are, and that broader view helps tremendously, so…

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An understanding of,

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you know, NDEs, and after-death communications, deathbed visions, all these things show us that our souls are eternal. The fact that, you know, when we go back into that cosmic consciousness between lives.

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It's not as if it's just a drop dissolving in the ocean, because we have that lineage where previous lives then re-emerge when the soul is reborn into a new body.

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So there's a very strong sense of, kind of, eternity of souls, and that souls work together. I think soul groups often reincarnate together. In fact, one book that I wrote a forward for that hits that topic on the head

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And it concerns a very famous sports figure and a true story of one of these,

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Reincarnation Memories in Children case is a book called The Boy Who Knew Too Much by Kathy Bird. And I won't say anything more, but that… I wrote the foreword for that book, and it put it in context how in the modern scientific world, souls reincarnating together is a perfectly kind of acceptable and reasonable way to look at it.

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So, we're all growing through this, and a deeper understanding of this kind of one mind, but how we all share it. I'd say the philosophical position I'm defending is something called evolutionary panentheism.

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So you don't… you don't waste time on panpsychism. Panpsychism is a pseudo-materialist argument that really doesn't give you anything and takes away a lot. But panentheism is a much more unified look at… panentheism basically means the God mind is in all of us, but evolutionary

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The word evolutionary means we have free will, and the free will is something apparent to us in our current scientific studies through quantum indeterminacy at the neuronal level.

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And that's what's going on. I mean, everything going on in this brain that has to do with consciousness uses quantum particles, uses ions and molecules of synaptic, you know, transmitters. And these are all quantum effects, and they are prone to a quantum field and to that entanglement field.

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And that's why there's more of a top-down causality that has to do with, you know, this cosmic mind working through the brain, through our bodies, through this world, and not the bottom-up causality. That's what materialism, physicalism pretended to be the case.

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You know, that if you understand all the electrons, protons, quarks, atoms, molecules, how they interact.

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and build that up, that that explains reality. It doesn't, because reality is far more complicated, and it's organized from the top down. But it does allow for us to have free will. It's not predeterminism.

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Even though there is an interesting kind of scientific investigation of, of,

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Precognition, which is… shows, basically, precognition is real, and precognition here simply means that in some computer models where you show violent pictures, pleasant pictures, neutral pictures, that we tend to know what picture's gonna show up, even before the random number generator has selected the picture.

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So that's a very fascinating statement in itself, and what I will tell you is I believe that our higher soul and mind is doing more of the selection in that process than simply being aware of a predetermined

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item. Anyway, that's a complicated discussion. I won't go into more detail, but I do not believe that everything is predetermined. Although you can certainly find some evidence for this. Precognition is really knowing things a few seconds in advance, but I've heard of other, you know, people who have had precogs of, you know, days, or even bigger, of big events, like plane crashes, things like that. There's a whole literature

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on that, too.

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But… I think, ultimately, I think that the,

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soul agreements is a good way to look at it, and that what we do is we pick certain kind of milestones that can be there for the soul group to experience. So, for example, in my life, I think some of the planning of our soul group was that I would be put up for adoption when I was an infant.

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Some of the planning was that I'd have to struggle with alcoholism, as did my birth sister.

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She ended up dying from it when she was 38. I ended up stopping drinking when I was, in 1991.

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At the very beginning of my career, I never had trouble drinking at work, but on my nights off call, I leaned way too heavily on that scotch.

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So, and to me, I'm grateful in looking back on it all, I'm grateful I was adopted, because the challenges of that

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gave me growth in many ways that I couldn't have gained any other way. I'm glad I had to struggle with the alcoholism back in, you know, very early in my career, because that allowed me to grow, in tremendous ways. So the hardships and difficulties

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in some ways can be pre-planned, but I think our free will is manifested in how we deal with the challenges, how we…

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Accept them, and use them as tools for growth. And one of the big lessons of my journey is embrace the hardships.

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And that includes difficult people. I came to realize that after my coma, some of those who, before the coma, I might have seen as my enemy or my nemesis, preventing me from getting something I really wanted in life, after my coma, I came to see them as near and dear soulmates, that we're actually

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seem to be butting heads so much because we were trying to teach each other some very powerful and challenging lessons. So, embrace the hardships, and the difficult people. Pray for your, quote, enemies. Nobody's really an enemy, but, you know, it's… we're all in this together.

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And the more we realize we're here for the higher good, and to help each other, and to show love, compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance, when necessary, forgiveness, and never forget gratitude, all these kind of ingredients can help us

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to build up resilience and come into the kind of strength that you naturally gain from a near-death experience. Because a near-death experience is bringing you back far stronger. You know, as Nietzsche said, that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger, and if that were… was ever true, it's true in the case of the near-death experience. Yeah.

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Even, this has been a wonderful conversation. I keep finding myself leaning in, so there's something that's a drawing there. It has been wonderful, and maybe, just to wrap it up, you mentioned music.

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Music was part of the accessing…

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for you, when you were in that NDE state, and you kept reminding yourself of the melody, is music still…

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a portal here, back on Earth, is music. Does it allow for… I mean, a lot of people talk about affinities to different musics, and obviously we have our link below for the Sacred Acoustics. Is that…

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a really important part of the piece here.

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I would say, well, for one thing, you know, for many friends I have who have severe illnesses, I recommend that they not only meditate and use centering prayer, but also listen to music often. Music kind of brings us to life, and your favorite music, you know, can enliven you in tremendous ways, and just

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Spend your day… bathing in music and conversation and the best activities you can do, etc.

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But for me, when I say that, that music was a big theme deep in the journey, you know, by remembering the music and the

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Of course, that music is not limited by the physics of our ears and four-dimensional space-time, etc. It's a much richer form of idealized music. But to me, the fact that sacred acoustics is a form of music.

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is what I'm really talking about when I say music is such a dominant theme for me in this big journey.

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Because sacred acoustics has been so important, using sound, differential frequency sound to the two ears as a powerful tool

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for getting into deep transcendental states of conscious awareness, that's where, for me, music has been so valuable since my coma, is mainly through those binaural beats, and they're a beautiful form of music. If you start listening to them, you'll see what I mean. They can really take you deep, and I know a lot of people, if you just go to SacredAcoustics.com and read some of the testimonials.

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You'll find out tremendous benefits that people have received from using sacred acoustics. And also, I'll mention there's a peer-reviewed study that greatly supports the use of sacred acoustics in the management of anxiety, and there's plenty of anxiety in our modern world. Dr. Anna Yusum, Y-U-S-I-M, published a paper in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, February of

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2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, that showed that listening to Sacred Acoustics tones, and it was specifically a file set called the Whole Mind Bundle.

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But listening to that set, over 2 weeks.

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Gave a 26% reduction in anxiety symptoms, and that's compared to only 7% reduction in people who got standard talk psychotherapy for anxiety.

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And I promise you, a lot more benefit than just relief of anxiety comes with this kind of deep dive into the transcendental realm, where you connect with higher soul and with that God force. There are plenty of tremendous benefits and kind of insights that can come from that, but it's good to have that kind of peer-reviewed pilot study that demonstrates a real efficacy

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I mean, that's pretty powerful. In a busy New York City practice, to get a 26% reduction in anxiety symptoms over 2 weeks, just by listening to some sounds? Wow.

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That's a biggie. Amazing. And I'm glad you mentioned Anna, because she's one of our guests in this season on the podcast, so I've actually interviewed Anna Yusum for, for the fourth wave, so she is here, everyone, if you want to go… Absolutely.

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Her book, Fulfilled, is one of my favorite books, and it addresses spiritual psychiatry in an extremely sophisticated, modern fashion. In fact.

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at InnerSanctumcenter.com, I-N-N-E-R Sanctumcenter.com, we have a lot of other things we offer, like interviews we've done with thought leaders in this field, etc.

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But also in there is a mental health practitioner course that we did with Dr. Anna Yusen. It does come with a professional fee associated, it's not for free, but it's a very powerful course at InnerSanctumcenter.com that will enlighten people tremendously

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About spiritual psychiatry, kind of along these lines of what we're discussing.

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Amazing. We'll make sure that link's below, everyone. Even, this has been just a wonderful conversation, and I'm so glad, having read your book many, many years ago, and I hope there's another book that's in there somewhere that hasn't emerged yet that perhaps, you know, will make its way.

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Have you read Living in a Mile?

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Info universe? No, I have not, but that one's on my…

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Read that one. That's my next one. That's the real proof of heaven. Proof of Heaven, for me, that book is a question mark, but the proof of heaven is in the book of Living in a Mindful Universe. Amazing.

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Karen and I are working on another book, potentially. We've got several great ideas we're pursuing, because we really want to get this out to the world. This world could use some help. Yeah.

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Absolutely.

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Amazing. All right, well, thanks so much, Pete. It's wonderful talking with you, and I'd be happy to talk again sometime.

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Wonderful, thanks so much, everyone, and we welcome you back to another episode of The Fourth Wave in Therapy in the Future. Dr. Eben Alexander, everybody, thank you so much for your time.

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Thank you.

 

Website: https://ebenalexander.com/

Sign up for a FREE online workshop: https://ebenalexander.com/33days/ 

Sign up for a FREE 20-minute sound meditation: https://www.sacredacoustics.com/ 

Socials

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YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@AllIsWellUnlimited/videos 

Eben's Books:

Proof of Heaven:  https://www.amazon.com/Proof-Heaven-Neurosurgeons-Journey-Afterlife/dp/1451695195/ 

The Map of Heaven:  https://www.amazon.com/Map-Heaven-Religion-Ordinary-Afterlife/dp/1476766398/  

Living in a Mindful Universe: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Mindful-Universe-Neurosurgeons-Consciousness/dp/1635650658/

Mentioned books

• The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon Book 6), Dan Brown - https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-secret-of-secrets-9780552178013
• Fulfilled, Anna Yusim - https://bookshop.org/p/books/fulfilled-dr-anna-yusim/22292897?ean=9781455596799&next=t&next=t 
• Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul - https://untetheredsoul.com/ 
• The Essence of Religions, Christopher Coppes - https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1590792459?ref_=mr_referred_us_au_au 
• The Boy Who Knew Too Much, Kathy Bird - https://www.amazon.com.au/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much-ebook/dp/B01MZ9BA07 

Mentioned links

https://www.sacredacoustics.com/