A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome, stellar listeners! Have you ever wondered what lies beyond our physical existence? Today’s episode takes us on an extraordinary journey with Harvard-trained neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, who experienced a profound seven-day near-death experience that completely transformed his understanding of consciousness and reality.

As someone deeply interested in the intersection of science and spirituality, I was captivated by Dr. Eben’s unique perspective. His journey from skeptical neuroscientist to spiritual explorer offers a rare bridge between conventional medicine and profound spiritual truth.

In this transformative conversation, Dr. Eben shares practical wisdom about accessing deeper levels of consciousness through meditation, connecting with universal love, and understanding the true nature of our existence. His insights are particularly valuable for us seeking to balance our demanding professional lives with spiritual growth and personal development.

You’ll discover how to access deeper states of consciousness through meditation, learn about the scientific evidence for non-local consciousness, and understand how spiritual practices can enhance personal and professional success. 

Whether you’re a spiritual seeker, a professional looking to enhance your mental clarity, or simply curious about the nature of consciousness, this episode offers invaluable insights for your journey. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the show!

In This Episode

• [03:32] – Dr. Eben Alexander outlines his shift from a traditional scientific perspective to a newfound understanding of consciousness sparked by his own near-death experience.
• [10:55] – Dr. Eben vividly describes ascending through different realms during his NDE, emphasizing the overwhelming love and compassion at the universe’s core.
• [15:11] – Learn about Sacred Acoustics, a tool Dr. Eben uses for meditation.
• [19:49] – Dr. Eben reveals the scientific support he’s received from colleagues, emphasizing the inadequacies of materialist models of consciousness.
• [22:39] – Practical advice from Dr. Eben on how to connect with the God force daily through centering prayer and meditation.
• [24:56] – Dr. Eben discusses the transformative power of life reviews in NDEs, highlighting their role in spiritual evolution.
• [31:36] – Intriguing stories of Dr. Eben’s connections with spiritual entities and how they guide him.
• [35:20] – Dr. Eben elaborates on how to step into higher spiritual realms through daily practice and inner work.
• [38:39] – Dr. Eben and Orion explore the role of psychedelics in spiritual experiences versus the stability offered by regular meditation.
• [45:24] – Dr. Eben shares advice he would give his younger self about the importance of meditation and trust in love.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hey Eben, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Well, Orion, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on today. I look forward to our conversation.

Yes, me too. This is going to be very, very interesting. I have never spoken to anyone who has gone through a near-death experience before, especially if he’s into neuroscience. Those two parts of the brain are very different, but you bring them both together. But before we dive in, maybe you can share a little bit about yourself and your journey.

Well, I think it’s important to point out who I was before. I had spent 54 years of my life honing a very kind of conventional scientific worldview. I was very influenced by my adoptive father. That’s an important part of my history—my adoption. I was put up for adoption when I was 11 days old, but my birth mother wouldn’t sign the papers to let me go until I was four months old. So, I spent four months in a baby dorm, which set the stage for my later life—a lot of things that came to great resolution with my near-death experience in 2008. 

Until then, I’d spent 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School, and I thought I had some understanding of brain-minding consciousness. But my journey showed me very clearly that my understanding was extremely primitive, as is the understanding of our modern scientific community about the very nature of consciousness itself. That’s why I would say my near-death experience was due to a severe case of bacterial meningitis, which is a perfect model for human death because of the way it attacks the neocortex, the human part of the brain. 

And to me, the revelations from that, especially the evidence from my case, that there was no way my brain could have had a dream or hallucination when I was in this deep coma. This is why the scientific community takes my story so seriously. And I’ve worked with scientists for 16-plus years since my coma to understand the nature of consciousness better, the nature of reality. It involves the investigation of quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, parapsychology, and all the evidence for non-local consciousness. 

These are all things we went into in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, which I wrote with my wife and partner in all this work, Karen Newell, back in 2017. Living in a Mindful Universe goes a long way towards uniting science and spirituality, which has been the ultimate result of going through this experience and then kind of framing it up in a scientific setting.

Wow. Tell me about your experience. What happened there? How long have you been in a coma?

I was in a coma for seven days, and it was all very sudden. It happened at about 4.30 in the morning when I had symptom onset within three hours. I was having grand mal seizures and was already in a deep coma at home. There was kind of a misrepresentation of my story out there that pretended that I was in a medically induced coma. But the scientific world takes it so seriously because of all the facts that this was a meningitis-induced coma, which is very different from medication-induced. 

Meningitis takes away all those parts of your brain that we normally use to construct a conscious view of the world. That’s why, in many ways, that was such a gift to have that severe case of meningitis, but quickly into a coma, gone from this world. My family was very alarmed when they saw me having grand mal seizures. They called the EMTs to come to our house. They couldn’t break the seizures. Now I remember none of that. 

I was already gone from this world. That’s when they took me to the emergency room, where I had worked much as a neurosurgeon over the last two years before that. Dr. Laura Potter realized I might have meningitis, did a lumbar puncture, put the needle in my back, and out came thick white pus under pressure. That’s when she knew I was in deep trouble and estimated I had about a 10% chance of survival to make it through that illness. 

Seven days later, I wasn’t showing any signs of neurologic improvement. I had not really responded to three powerful antibiotics. I’ve been on a ventilator for a week, and I have a very poor neurologic grade. This was all reported in a case report on my medical records in September 2018, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases. The case report written by three doctors not involved in my care but fascinated by my recovery made the point that that brain was way too ill to have a dream or hallucination. 

And then, when challenged by the peer review editors, “How do you explain his miraculous recovery?” Full recovery over two months after this illness is unprecedented in the medical literature. They said it was because he had a near-death experience. That’s what allowed for this absolutely astonishing kind of recovery. They knew of other cases like that of NDEs associated with miraculous healing. 

I think one of the biggest messages to all of us is that this kind of spiritual nature that we share with the universe can allow us to participate in our own healing. But we can get into all that a little later. Back in the middle of my journey, I went through three major phases in this near-death experience. One important thing to point out is that an atypical feature of my NDE was that I had no memory of my life. I had no knowledge of Earth, humanity, language, or Eben Alexander’s personal memories. 

When I first came back from a coma, I explained that amnesia by saying, “Well, it was attacking my neocortex.” A kind of rudimentary explanation would be that if memories are stored in the brain, then that attack would give me amnesia. Interestingly enough, all the memories came back very rapidly and even more complete than they had been before the coma when I was waking up and then going through the recovery phase in the next few weeks. That was a giant mystery to me. 

It showed me that memories are not even stored in the brain because my brain was in no shape to harbor the memories. When I woke up in the ICU room on day seven of the coma, and they pulled out the breathing tube, I still was in amnesia, which was so powerful. I didn’t recognize my mother, sisters, sons, or others at the bedside. But those memories of personal relationships, language, and all came back rapidly over hours and days. 

That’s when I started really hitting the mystery because all I knew was when I woke up in that ICU bed where I’d just been on this incredible journey that seemed to last for months or years of this NDE, where I went through multiple phases. It started in what I call the earthworm’s eye view, a very primitive course of the dark and subterranean realm, but then rose through a portal of light into this brilliant ultra-real gateway valley. That was like Plato’s world of ideals but for the individual soul. There were a lot of earthly things there, but perfection. There was no sign of any death or decay. It was an absolutely beautiful round. 

The spiritual nature that we share with the universe can allow us to participate in our own healing.

This is the realm where we would have, for example, life reviews, where your life would flash before your eyes, and where you would reconnect with the souls of departed loved ones. That’s really what I witnessed in this beautiful gateway valley. People who’ve read the book Proof of Heaven will remember that one of the biggest features of that valley was that I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly weighing millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling in these vast formations.

But I wasn’t alone on that journey. There was a beautiful young woman with sparkly blue eyes, high cheekbones, a high forehead, and a broad smile. She never said a word, but her reality, her knowing, melded with my mind in this perfect kind of coalescence of knowledge. She reassured me that I was deeply loved and cherished forever, “You have nothing to fear. You were richly cared for.”

It was very reassuring, especially as I was just beginning to remember I’d been in that place before that beautiful spiritual realm. It turns out that there’s much more to that story. But what ended up happening was all of this beauty and festivity of what I was witnessing in this gateway valley were thousands of people dancing in this meadow below, children playing, dogs jumping, incredible festivities being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were emanating chants, anthems, hymns that would just thunder through my awareness and just impress me so much with the beautiful kind of binding force of love of this realm, the healing and whole nature of it all. 

Those angelic choirs provided yet another musical portal because the portal that had taken me up from the earth was my view into this brilliant valley, which had been musical. I remembered musical notes. Of course, this is idealized music. It’s not in any form that you would hear with ears or would be limited by the physics of our four-dimensional space-time and production of music, but this incredibly soaring kind of melodies and chants. 

That’s what ushered me up to the next level. I remember seeing all of the material world, our earthly realm, and all that collapsing down, all of the spiritual realm and that kind of idealized form of the Gateway Valley, all of that collapsing down into this complex, what I called an over sphere. That was really the universe throughout all of eternity. So, in that realm, you’re completely outside of Earth time. You’re not restricted by it at all. It’s one of the reasons why these journeys are so difficult to report. 

We don’t really have language that’s very good for discussing these kinds of experiences that involve this great vision, seeing all of your life and past lives and even future potentials at once. You get a much bigger sense of your soul, who you are, and how you relate to the universe. Anyway, in that third level, the core, there was a complete resolution of all dualities. We live in a world where you have dark, light, good, evil, feminine, etc., all these spectra of dualities, but they’re all compressed down into one pure being, pure essence in that core realm. 

That’s where I recognize that our very conscious awareness was directly sourced from God’s force. Since that time in studying NDEs, I’ve found that more than 90% of near-death experiencers, no matter what their cultural background, across thousands of years and continents, come back not only believing but knowing the reality of a God force at the core of the universe. It’s irrelevant if you want to try and label that as God, Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, or the Great Spirit. 

All the many names we try to apply to it deny that we’re referring to one reality and one knowing intelligence. That God force is one of love, compassion, kindness, and mercy. This is where, by coming to sense, that kind of connection to that primordial God force in each and every one of us gives us the tools to really sort of rise above our little ego cells and become more of the higher soul we came here to be. 

We live in a world with spectra of dualities, but they’re all compressed down into one pure in the core realm.

On my journey, I would tumble back down from the lofty sanctum sanctorum of the core into the earth, which was my view. Remembering the musical notes, the melody that had first been associated with that light portal brought me back into the gateway valley again. There was always that very comforting reassurance from my guardian angel on the butterfly wing, that beautiful young woman, that I was loved and cherished and had nothing to fear—more lessons in that realm and then more lessons ascending into the core realm. 

Every time I entered the core, I was told, “You’re not here to stay. You’re going back. We’ll teach you many things.” I didn’t know what that meant. In fact, initially, with these loops through these levels, I thought that just going back to that Earth was my view, which, of course, was no problem because by just remembering the musical notes, I could conjure up that light portal that took me back up into these higher spiritual realms.

But there came a time when I could no longer do that and use the memory of the musical notes to get me back up into the gateway valley. 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’ve been shown that so many times already.

After your NDE, you remembered the musical notes and could step into those realms every time you meditated.

Well, I don’t have a perfect memory of the musical notes from that idealized realm. But I do use something called Sacred Acoustics for meditation. I meditate for an hour a day, and I’ve done that for the last 12-13 years. I’ve used it to return to my NDE. I also highly recommend meditation because exploring consciousness is the way each and every one of us can come to realize we’re much more than just a little physical body, living a little life from birth to death and nothing more as material beings. 

We’re much grander than that. We have a connection with the universe and shared meaning and purpose are far more important than we might envision from that lowly materialist body position. Anybody interested can go to sacredacoustics.com and learn a lot more. It’s a form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment, which to me is a neuroscientist. It’s fascinating. I realized when I first kind of came upon binaural beats about two years post-coma that they might offer a tremendous pathway toward a liberation of conscious awareness and meditation. 

It’s because the sounds of sacred acoustics or any kind of binaural beat form focus on the lower brain stem. That’s very important because every chant, anthem, or hymn you’ve ever heard that might have engendered a transcendental state of conscious awareness is processed in the temporal lobe’s acoustic cortex. These are circuits that have evolved mainly in the last two to three million years in primates and homo sapiens. 

The sounds are very different from those of sacred acoustics. They use a slight difference in the frequency of the two ears to heavily influence an important nucleus in the lower brain stem that evolved more than 300 million years ago. That’s one of the reasons I think sacred acoustics and binaural beat brainwave and training, in general, are so powerful in liberating our conscious awareness away from the sense of here and now and sense of self. 

Our very conscious awareness was directly sourced from God’s force.

So, that kind of sacred acoustics music can be an incredibly powerful catalyst for people to get into deep conscious states. The main thing about meditation is to take that little voice in your head, the little monkey mind voice, the ego voice, and put it into time out. Because if that little monkey mind is still chattering, you’ll never get anywhere useful in meditation. But by silencing that voice and getting yourself into a hypnagogic state, like between awake and asleep, that’s what we’re talking about here. That’s where you open up to the universe at large and can experience that grander consciousness we’re talking about. The scientific model is really one of the brain serving as a transceiver but not the producer of consciousness. The brain gives us access to that primordial mind and that universal consciousness. But it’s not creating it ultimately. That’s why in the E’s, when you’re dying and leaving the body behind, brain and body behind, you witness an expansion of consciousness awareness. It’s not a constriction. It’s the exact opposite of what materialism would predict. Materialism means that the only thing that exists is physical, and the brain must somehow create consciousness. But that is not true. That’s where the modern scientific world is going on this great revolution of understanding.

What changed in you as a person after that experience, and what changed in you since that experience to today?

Well, that is a very good question because the experience itself will absolutely change you because it’s not predictable. It’s a good thing that basically one in five people who have a cardiac arrest will also have profound kind of things that identify a spiritual near-death experience. And often, as we’ve said before, that helps them to come back and heal. But what changed initially with the experience itself was it opened my eyes to the much grander nature of the universe at large and the much grander possibilities for my participation as a soul in that universe. 

Consciousness has been with us for all time. In a sense, the whole universe is conscious and self-aware. Share on X

But then the last 16 years since my coma has been spent working, first of all, as I said, with daily meditation. I would never leave out the process of exploring consciousness. You can’t just read about these things, watch the videos, and figure it out. You need to have a form of centering prayer or deep meditation to start exploring consciousness and witness the power you have of gleaning information from the world at large and influencing the world at large. 

Meditation is a very powerful tool for that. I also work with scientists around the world. Some people think, “Well, what do your scientific colleagues make of this crazy story?” Some of the best support I’ve gotten in this world has been from my fellow scientific colleagues because many realize, “Well, they know that our materialist models, physicalism or materialism, are a conventional scientific view that everything is physical. If you can measure it, like electrons, protons, quarks, all the subatomic particles, then we can figure out everything.” 

The sounds of sacred acoustics or any kind of binaural beat form focus on the lower brain stem.

There’s this notion that there’s a bottom-up causality to emerging events. You figure out the electrons, photons, protons, atoms, molecules, etc., and build up their laws, explaining everything that happens in this universe. But that completely misses what we’re witnessing, a mental model of the universe that occurs in a shared theater of mental operations. It’s a higher level of integration than just the physical world.

This is why the mind can make extraordinary explorations of time and space and integrate this information into a deeper understanding. Our natural way of living is in that mental realm of the universe. Many in 20th-century science made the error of thinking, “Well, wait a minute, this consciousness is something that’s necessary for the world to exist.” But consciousness didn’t happen until humans. That’s not true. 

Consciousness has been with us for the whole time. The whole universe, in a sense, is conscious and self-aware. That’s what humans borrow. That’s what sentient beings borrow: access to that mental field, that kind of unified field. It’s not something we create with our brains, but our brains do give us access to it. Interestingly, it also points to the fact that we have free will to alter that emerging reality. 

Now, conventional materialist scientists would scoff at you if you claimed to have free will because they think it’s all chemical reactions and electron fluxes in the brain of material following the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. Would you inject free will into that picture? It’s because their picture is wrong, that there’s a higher ordering, and that’s the mental layer of the universe. It’s something that’s been there since before the Big Bang. 

It was part of the intelligence that organized the Big Bang. That part of us is connected and expands tremendously when liberated from the shackles of the brain and body at death. That’s why near-death experiences are so important for understanding the bigger picture.

How do you connect to God’s consciousness every day when you’re not meditating?

I can tell you I’ve long had a relationship with prayers that connected even before my coma experience. This was mainly due to the influence of my father. He was an academic neurosurgeon, and my adoptive father and I respected him tremendously. He ran a neurosurgical training program. He’d been a combat surgeon in World War II and spent more than two years in the Pacific theater.

I still have the little pocket Bible he carried overseas for two years during World War II. It’s at my bedside. It contains the Psalms and New Testament, which I use in my meditations. For me, it all comes together. There’s this beautiful sense.

The main thing about meditation is to take that little voice out of your head and put it into time out.

But again, do not restrict it to any one religion. That’s where people can make a big mistake. This one loving God is available to all and is a general concept that emerges all through religions, even ones that are thought to be multi-theistic, have a monotheistic core like Hinduism, where there’s an intelligence at the core of the universe. 

That’s really what NDEs teach us. NDEs, in many ways, universalize this notion of love, kindness, compassion, and mercy as part of the universe’s intelligence without claiming any kind of ideological differences. The biggest problem with modern religions is when they pretend they’re the only important ones; the other people got it wrong instead of acknowledging the simple principles of love, compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance when necessary, forgiveness, and never forgetting gratitude. Those are the key ingredients to a modern spiritual reality and acknowledging that we’re spiritual beings in a spiritual universe.

This can be a very healing kind of recognition. That’s why I highly recommend that people meditate and center their prayers. It’s all the same thing for me, but this is a meaningful way of connecting to God to help us achieve health and healing. We do that best by bringing it into this world for others.

How do you think our prayers affect the field, affect the matrix, that consciousness or collaborate with the consciousness?

I think it’s important to point out that the prayers, from my point of view, are most effective when they align with the highest good for all involved. In other words, it involves getting the ego out of the way. Narcissists and egotistical souls can have a lot of trouble with this. But I think when you come into alignment and realize that helping others and bringing love and compassion into the lives of others is one of the greatest ways to have the universe shower us with love and compassion. 

You need to practice centering prayer or deep meditation to start exploring consciousness and witnessing your power to glean and influence information from the world.

In many ways, the way we treat the world is how the universe will treat us. And very instructive in this discussion is the whole notion of the life review, your life flashing before your eyes, a common theme in near-death experience literature. It occurs in 25 to 50% of all series of NDEs. The most crucial thing to point out about life reviews is that this comes from an academic paper by Dr. Bruce Greyson. He’s a skeptical psychiatrist who has studied NDEs for more than 45 years. 

He wrote a paper in the fall of 2021 in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. He discussed almost 700 life reviews in his big series of NDE cases. Roughly a third of those patients reported a complete life review. It involved everything in their life. That tells you this is timeless because some of these would occur during a 10-minute cardiac arrest. How can you go through your whole life in 10 minutes? Well, you can because, in that realm, it’s timeless. You extend throughout much greater swathes of time in getting the information. But it is also important to point out that in 700 or so cases of life reviews, about three-quarters of people reported that the life review involved everybody involved in the various events. So, in other words, if you were busy handing out pain and suffering to others in the life review, you get on the receiving end of that. But the important thing is that it shows the multi-directionality of our engagement with the universe. 

Wow. You sense it from all directions.

If you hand out a lot of love, compassion, and kindness, that’s what tends to come back to you. If you hand out a lot of pain and suffering to others in the life review, that’s what will come back to you. It gently nudges us towards acknowledging the golden rule, which is to treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the very fabric of the universe when you witness this kind of life review and its importance. 

Another important thing is that about two-thirds of those respondents in the 700 life review cases said that it was more real than the living events of this world. In other words, this is not imagination. It’s not dreams. It’s much more important than that. This is why meditation is critical: it allows all of us to start discovering that much grander connection we have with the universe. This is why Karen and I are such huge proponents of meditation. 

Prayers are most effective when they align with the highest good for all involved.

If anybody here needs a tool to help them silence that little monkey mind voice in their head, sacredacoustics.com is a beautiful resource. And, like I said, I’m a personal user. I’ve used that roughly daily for an hour or two for 12-13 years.

Your wife got married to a very left-brain, very scientific person. A week later, he wakes up completely different. How did that affect your relationship?

Well, my former spouse and I have split up since then. It turns out that about 85% of NDEers end up going through a divorce. 

Okay, wow. You can’t just get there because it’s a different level of consciousness. There is a bigger gap.

It is, and there’s nothing to blame. My former spouse and I still get along wonderfully. We have two sons, and we share their upbringing. We’re still in close communication. But I also met my current life partner, Karen Newell, who is the co-author of the book Living in a Mindful Universe. I met her about 12 years ago. I immediately knew we shared a mission to help bring this world to a higher level.

I think I sensed it before she did. Believe it or not, this is the stuff we talk about at home all the time. It’s our passion. It’s what we love—the higher good, the binding force of love, and the true nature of consciousness and reality. I mean, this is what we are passionately involved in. This is why I love the work I do with Karen and the workshops we hold, both on Zoom and in presence around the world, to help people get into deep transcendental meditative states to discuss this bigger literature of kind of the one mind and how the modern scientific community through quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and through the non-local nature of consciousness through parapsychology, all of that is pointing us in the direction of understanding we’re all connected to this universe through that mental layer. That’s very important because it brings to the fore the power of our free will and ability to influence our emerging reality. That’s especially important when it comes to our health and healing because any physical, mental or emotional health is ultimately dependent on our spiritual health.

Everything can heal. Do you believe everything can heal?

First of all, the things that need healing, challenges and hardships, illness and injury, in many ways, are stepping stones that mark the path forward. It’s how we deal with those hardships. In other words, embrace the hardships, but also know that there are ways that they are here to instruct us into ways that we can influence our lives and the universe at large to help bring it into greater alignment, wholeness, healing, and completion. 

We can direct this more towards how our souls came here to direct it. In many ways, this is the evolution of consciousness itself, which is the reason all of this stuff exists. It is so we can know more about our relationship with the universe. Ultimately, we’re all sharing the mind of the universe. That’s the most important thing. That intelligence is actually evolving. Just like that old saying, all politics is local. 

All evolution of cosmic consciousness is nothing more than individual sentient beings coming to a deeper understanding of their relationship with the universe in terms of shared meaning and purpose and a shared connection through this mental realm.

If you give a lot of love, compassion, and kindness, it tends to come back to you.

Do you connect with angels or guides or ascended masters? How does it work for you?

For me, it’s all about connecting with angels and guides. My guardian angel, who was so obvious to me, and that beautiful adventure during my NDE are to anyone who’s read the book Proof of Heaven. They’ll realize the way that whole story comes together is through an acknowledgment four months after my coma of the identity of that beautiful woman.

I’d never read the near-death literature before. I didn’t care about it. I thought it was all hallucinations. After having my own experience, I had to read everything I could get my hands on. But my older son, Eben IV, was majoring in neuroscience in college at the time. He told me, “Write everything down you can remember from your experience before you read anybody else’s experience.” That was the best advice I’ve ever gotten because I wrote about 20,000 words. That’s kind of my raw database. 

But then, beyond that, kind of awakening reading about all these experiences, I realized that beautiful girl on the butterfly wing who was so prominent in my journey. I knew her so well from having our mind meld experience. And yet, I didn’t know who she was in my life. Because of all these NDE reports, they knew who that person was in their life. As I mentioned before, of course, I had that amnesia during my NDE, which was a necessary step to go deep enough to convince me of the reality of all of it. 

As a practicing neuroscientist, I needed a deep dive, and that’s what I got. And yet it was a mystery to me, “Who was she? How come I knew her so well, yet I don’t know who she was in my life?” That’s why when you read Proof of Heaven, you’ll get a shocking and amazing answer to that, and it has to do with my adoption history. It has to do with a birth sister that I never knew in this life who had passed from this world back in 1998, two years before I even found out about her existence.

The way we treat the world is how the universe will treat us. Share on X

Anyway, there’s a big story to that. Well, it’s because she’s here. I’ve seen her often in meditation and when I talk about her in public presentations. People have taken pictures of me on stage, and they’ll see these big, kind of purple and bright orbs floating around me whenever I get to the part about my guardian angel. So anyway, there’s a lot to that story. 

I went to a park with my husband and son and took a photo. In the photo, there was a huge green orb—only in one photo. It cannot be a speck of dust; it’s just so pronounced.

No, orbs are very real, and I’ve seen them in other settings, too. In fact, my older son and I once invited orbs in while he was playing the piano. Just any kind of joyous childish play can often bring orbs to the situation. Orbs started showing up on the video camera. The orb phenomenon is a real phenomenon. They seem to be spiritual entities. I don’t know much more than that, but they show up in settings where they’re invited, in the sense of love, openness, and a childhood fascination with the universe. That’s what invites the orbs into play.

You said it’s very hard to describe the sensation and probably the sound frequency, the light frequency, whatever you experience there, the pure joy, the love, God’s love, the non-duality, something that cannot be expressed in words because words are very limited. So, how can one step into those rounds? Do you have to meditate every day? Do you have to go to the top of a mountain? What do we have to do about this?

The things that need healing in many ways are stepping stones that mark the path forward.

Meditating daily is a very good practice. Meditation-centering prayer, whatever your form, of becoming one at peace with the universe at large, with that God force; it is especially important to deactivate that little ego mind, the little monkey chatterbox in the head, and that running stream of thoughts. If that’s still going, you need more help because you’re trying to get to that hypnagogic space between awake and asleep, where the will of your ego is no longer trying to dominate what’s going on in your thinking. 

But you open up and trust the universe to show you what you need. Sometimes, my intention for meditation might be as general as what I need to know right now. It’s just that simple, that open. But oftentimes, I have a more direct kind of statement or question going into meditation, and of course, it’s my little ego mind, the voice of my head, making that request, but then it goes into time out.

I’ve learned to ride the tones of sacred acoustics. If you listen to sacred acoustics, you’ll see what I mean. There’s a free 20-minute OM download available at sacredacoustics.com. Likewise, my website has a very good introduction to all this. It’s completely free. It’s called Your 33-Day Journey into the Heart of Consciousness. It’s on the entry page at ebenalexander.com—four sacred acoustics files are included.

Every bit of that’s free. A community of more than 12,000 people has taken that 33-day journey course. I encourage anybody intrigued by this information and who wants to learn more about us to go to ebenalexander.com, and you can explore the website in general. The reading list is useful, as is the FAQ page, etc. But there, you can join that 33-day journey and start learning some of the major concepts in our third book, Living in a Mindful Universe.

Beautiful. What do you think about psychedelics? Because it seems like psychedelics can bring people to this type of realm.

The orb phenomenon is real, which shows up in the sense of love, openness, and a childhood fascination with the universe.

Well, I think psychedelics are very important in one sense. First of all, I want to put it out here. I do not recommend the casual use of psychedelics for any of this kind of spiritual work because, to me, although they do give us a glimpse into that richer world, we’ve encountered people who really get kind of get sucked into the psychedelic world, and I think they completely miss the spiritual side. Now, here are two important points about psychedelics, though.

Luckily, research using functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, and the many other ways we examine the brain has proven that the brain does not cause psychedelic experiences. The brain is actually getting out of the way. The default mode network is disappearing. You won’t find any neuronal cell anywhere in the brain that’s more active on psychedelics than less active. Everything gets less active.

That just shows you that the brain is not creating all that. The brain is getting out of the way. So when I heard that, I knew what it was like when meningitis deactivated my brain and gave me this tremendous expansion of consciousness. Psychedelics don’t do it by activating the brain. The brain is getting out of the way. It proves that the brain is not the ultimate creator of consciousness. 

The second point is that Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins has done some very elegant work with psilocybin, magic mushrooms, where he showed that a single dose of psilocybin in the treatment of severe addictions, alcoholism, opiates, nicotine, which is one of the worst physiologic addictions, or in the treatment of debilitating fear of death in terminal cancer patients, that one dose of psilocybin still gave a very promising benefit to 80% of the patients a year after that dosing. 

In other words, you don’t keep taking the psychedelic. I think the psychedelic serves as a catalyst to open you up to that grander sense of higher soul and self and possibility for meaning and purpose. Meditation is a much better, more steady and powerful way to achieve the same result over time. Although for some people, it might be important as a one-time experience to help kind of open their mind to this possibility, I think it’s very tragic that some people get sucked into using a lot of psychedelics to try and get into this spiritual reality because the spiritual wisdom is something that doesn’t demand the psychedelic at all. We can all come into that kind of greater wisdom through meditation. I’m a very big proponent of meditation and centering prayer.

When we meditate frequently, our ready connection with the mind of the universe becomes much more natural. Share on X

I had some experts about psychedelics on the show, and I agree with what you’re saying about where it needs to be if somebody wants to do it because sometimes addictions cannot be solved. Sometimes, meditation is not enough. People with severe fears or severe traumas got healed with psychedelics. It’s about the container of how you do it.

It’s about the intention and the people you do it with. You don’t do it just to have fun. If you desire to explore it, you’ll do it with the right people, in the right situation, and in a legitimate way. It needs to be legit and true.

Right. One clue is if you find yourself going to the psychedelic week after week after week, you know you’re not following the proper pathway. But if you can build meditation, you’ll find quickly that it’s a very loving and forgiving way to dive deep into that same territory. In fact, I was part of a study to compare.

No, that’s destructive.

The brain is not the ultimate creator of consciousness.

Psychedelic experiences with NDEs. I’d had a very powerful NDE. I actually got involved in a dose escalation study using 5-MeO-DMT and up to 48 milligrams. I know what that showed me. And yes, I believe that that that takes us to the same kind of spiritual realm as an NDE.

That’s very interesting.

I tried to see it all through a tiny keyhole, where you couldn’t really make out anything, compared to the view from the NDE, which is a panoramic penthouse view of the universe. I spent seven days on that trip, which was a pretty astonishing trip. That’s a gigantic thing, quite, but in other words, the psychedelics might be helpful to some people.

You also had seven days of that panoramic view of every nook and cranny of the universe with a one-time dose. 

If you’re using it a lot more than that, I’m not so sure the psychedelic is really giving you the spiritual wisdom you’re seeking. I would highly recommend building in meditation or centering prayer some form of going within, achieving a hypnagogic space where you’re able to put the little voice in your head into time out and allow that much richer connection with the primordial mind, the God mind of the universe. That’s where meditation can really help you move beyond anything you can achieve with just the psychedelics alone.

I agree with you. You gotta do the work. You gotta meditate, connect with yourself, and heal your traumas. And then, if you choose to do the psychedelics, you’re ready. You gotta be ready. You don’t do it if you’re not ready. So absolutely, safety, readiness, consciousness, and container. I agree with everything you said, and daily meditation is the key.

Well, and it’s not really.

You’re getting the vessel strong enough to receive so much light.

Exactly. That’s a very good way of putting it. And also, it’s not really work. What should I say? Do the work. Well, that’s true. But I very much look forward to my meditation every day. I also assure you, and I’m sure this is no news to you, but your mind changes over time. And when you meditate frequently, that ready connection with the mind of the universe and that binding force of love starts to become much more natural in your normal waking state. It starts to become who you are. 

I love how my partner and wife Karen Newell says, “Be the love that you are.” It’s much more simple. We’re not trying to love as an action, but we are all agents of pure love from that spiritual realm. That’s what the ears have been saying for thousands of years. They see that connection of love, the binding force of love and how it brings us all together and brings wholeness and healing to the world. This is why, for example, studies that look at, say, a crime level in a community, if you get up to 3% of the people in that community meditating, in some studies, that seems to be sufficient to really alter in a beneficial way what’s going on in the community. 

So crime statistics will drop dramatically, as will things like that. So meditation can work to bring this love to the world, and it doesn’t require that every single soul be meditating. All of us can do some good to bring that good into the world. But the meditation starts with us. In our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, Karen and I made a big point of giving people practical information about meditation. That’s also what people will get in that 33-day journey. 

More than 90% of near-death experiencers come back knowing the reality of a loving, intelligent God force at the core of the universe. Share on X

That’s a free course with a lot of practical meditation tips and about how to see this kind of bigger picture of the world at large that includes our primordial consciousness, this primordial mind that we’re all part of, and also the eternal nature of our souls and their interactions that govern the emerging reality of this world in a way that far exceeds what would be possible from simply materialist particles colliding and trying to guess their way into a future. This is about something guided in a top-down fashion, not bottom-up.

If you had to go back and give advice to your younger self, the one who did not experience the NDE, what would you tell him?

Trust in love, spend some time in meditation and center yourself in prayer. You will find the answers, which can be very reassuring and affirm the positive nature of our spirit and the world at large. In the current era, there is a lot of conflict, political polarization, misinformation and people shouting at each other. Yet the deeper truth is something we can all come to in meditation and centering prayer.

There is a very peaceful, harmonious way forward that allows us to work together, live together, and love together. We can show that binding force of love and bring it to this world. It’s the greatest gift for the individual. It’s a paradox of egocentrism and narcissism that they’re torturing themselves into this horrible situation where nothing is good enough. 

As opposed to recognizing that when we put the little demands of the ego into time out and start to honor our higher soul, that is an honoring of kind of the mind of the universe and that binding force of love that is so obvious to near-death experiences, that’s why they come back to this world not during death and why more than 90% of near-death experiences come back knowing in the reality of that loving, intelligent God force at the core of the universe.

This is a beautiful, harmonious lesson for all of us. But the good news is that you don’t have to wait for the rest of the world to do this. Anyone can decide to start meditating regularly, centering prayer, going within, acknowledging a deeper connection with the God force at the core of the universe, and starting to bring that love, serving as a conduit to bring that love, kindness and compassion into this world through all of our thoughts and actions.

That was beautifully said. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with the light you are in the world. Thank you for sharing so much love, preaching love, and being loved.

Orion, thank you very much, and thanks for what you do. Getting this out to the world is very helpful, and I appreciate all your efforts, especially your invitation to have me on today. Thank you so much

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

All right. Blessings to you.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓} Practice daily meditation for at least an hour to explore consciousness and connect with the universe.

{✓} Use binaural beat technology (like Sacred Acoustics) to help quiet the “monkey mind” and achieve deeper meditative states. It more effectively targets ancient brain pathways than traditional chants.

{✓} Set simple intentions before meditation, such as asking, “What do I need to know right now?” Then, let go and trust the universe to provide guidance.

{✓} Incorporate gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance, and compassion into daily spiritual practice. These are key ingredients for spiritual growth.

{✓} Align prayers and intentions with the highest good for all involved, moving beyond ego-centric requests to foster universal connection.

{✓} Practice centering prayer or meditation to silence the internal chatter and reach a hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep.

{✓} Focus on being loved rather than doing loving actions. As Karen Newell says, “Be the love that you are.”

{✓} Embrace hardships as stepping stones for growth rather than viewing them as obstacles to overcome.

{✓} Cultivate regular spiritual practices that help deactivate the ego mind to access deeper consciousness.

{✓} Connect with the mental layer of the universe through meditation rather than seeking external solutions or quick fixes.

{✓} Access Dr. Eben Alexander’s free resources. Begin with his 33-day Journey into the Heart of Consciousness at ebenalexander.com.

Links and Resources

Connect with Dr. Eben Alexander

Books

Businesses/Organizations

Case Studies/Articles

People

YouTube Videos

About Dr. Eben Alexander

Eben Alexander, MD, was an academic neurosurgeon for over 25 years, including at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In 2008, he experienced a transformational NDE that completely changed his worldview. A pioneering scientist in the field of consciousness, he is the author of Proof of Heaven, The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe.

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Orion Talmay, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.