Contemplating Liberty and Freedom with Author Mark Gober

Podcast
Written By Sarah Rossiter

Welcome to the Psychic Artist Podcast

Welcome to this episode with Mark Gober. He is an author of three books, the award-winning book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, the sequel An End to Upside Down Living, and now An End to Upside Down Liberty. He also has a podcast called Where Is My Mind, which I highly recommend. Today, we talk about Mark’s third book in which he examines individual liberty and collective freedom in relation to government, asking “How should society be organized?” And in what ways are we eroding our freedoms at this time in history? This provocative interview stems from his investigation and experiences with consciousness, and ideas he expanded on in his previous books. I also share his approach, starting with the metaphysical and spiritual, finding what is aligned and true on a personal level, then moving out to the meta and looking at it in terms of society, family, government, education, and the world around us. 

Listen to the podcast here:

Contemplating Liberty and Freedom with Author Mark Gober

Welcome Mark Gober to The Psychic Artist Podcast. I'm super happy to have you back again. You've just published your third book called An End to Upside Down Liberty. Congratulations. How's it going?

Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for having me back. I think this is going to be a fun conversation.

Yes. I've been listening to your book and I have to say the phrase cognitive dissonance is going strong. It is intense. I think of you as a very enlightened person, but you come at everything from a really critical mind and you're very thoughtful. You do a lot of research. You explain it in layman's terms. I love that about your work in terms of consciousness. And then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, let's not stop there. Let's look at the whole friggin’ world."

Yeah, I know. It's a lot to take in.

I was a little surprised by my own reaction as I was listening, that I still have a lot of programmed thoughts about what we should, and shouldn't talk about in terms of society, government, mind control. All these subjects need to be investigated, it seems.

Yes. I agree. I agree. And I've had to go through that same cognitive dissonance and mental confusion and anguish myself in the process. So by the time I write a book and I'm speaking about it, I'm almost desensitized to how radical some of the ideas are. I always have to remind myself for someone listening for the first time, who's never thought about these things in a certain way, how I used to look at it. It was very difficult for me and took a lot of time before it became just part of my worldview.

Yeah. Well, we have a lot going on in our world right now. As you said, you started to look at these issues with the advent of COVID and this is a pretty unprecedented time especially in our lifetimes. So with these unique circumstances, I think we've all experienced a huge variety of emotions over the last two years. I really admire the way you took it as a cue to go deeper and look into it and see what is there for us to learn here?

Yeah. Well, for me, I never really had an interest in these topics that I just wrote about in An End to Upside Down Liberty. Current events, politics, economics. I was so focused on my individual lane of what I used to do in business. But it took a major world event for me to start looking.

Watch the video of this episode on The Psychic Artist Podcast YouTube channel

Yeah. So I want to get into the book and start at the beginning, but I was just at the end of the book where you were talking about Ken Wilbur, the spiritual philosopher and his description of waking up, and you often say amnesia, remembering who and what we are. I feel like that really resonates for me as a starting point. Sometimes we have a certain idea of the way things are and then we get a shift, and COVID was that shift for me and probably many others. And that's the starting point of looking at things slightly differently in an unexpected way. So you want to start there?

Sure. Well, the idea of waking up really encapsulates my personal journey and journeys of many others, but this whole thing started for me five and a half years ago. In summer of 2016, I was very much a mainstream thinker, worked in investment banking in New York, and then was in Silicon valley advising tech companies where I spent 10 years, had become a partner at the firm. But back in 2016, I was listening to podcasts and then became exposed to ideas that suggested that there's more to life than what we can see with our eyes. And that this life is not the end of our consciousness, for example.

All these paranormal, metaphysical ideas that radically changed my life. And that's where it all started for me, the waking up process to our nature as metaphysical, or you might say spiritual beings that we have...

There's an aspect of us that continues beyond this body and the body is almost like a vessel that carries the consciousness for us to have experiences, and we are in a sense blocked from a lot of knowledge that another part of us has.

So when we're in the body, there is this amnesia that we have. So that's everything I do now in my first two books, in my podcast in particular are the evidence for that. The scientific evidence from psychic phenomena, the reality of those phenomena to quantum physics, to philosophical arguments, for example, all point to this direction that we're interconnected, we're inherently spiritual. And that realization for me, which is continuing and there's a lot for me to learn and still has made me curious to learn more about the nature of reality.

It's bled into these other areas where if it's true that we're spiritual beings, then that's not embedded in our society fully, what else is there within our society that we don't know yet that we could be exposed to? Or what else are we doing that might not be in alignment with the metaphysical ideas?

So this idea of amnesia is just an important one. It's a notion that there is knowledge that we all have to some degree that we have forgotten or we've been blocked from. And that maybe encapsulates my personal quest very well is that I'm trying to get back to those things that maybe we all know, and we simply don't have access to right now.

About Mark Gober

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

Check out my first interview with Mark, Episode 15: Transcendent Consciousness with Author Mark Gober

Yeah. And there's a lot of different ways to access it. So some of us are focusing more on spiritual, energetic health and taking care of ourselves, trying to be healthy, trying to connect with consciousness, doing creative things. But as you say, we are all connected, ultimately. So there's this consciousness that has unique individualization in each of us, but then there's the meta.

I feel like the last time we talked, I was sort of like, "Let's avoid the meta because it's just too big." It's too scary to think about politics and government. And I think that that is another form of amnesia or covering our own eyes and saying like, "I don't want to look at the difficult things, too scary.” So I really admire, again, what you're doing because you're like, "I can see it in my own life. I'm working on myself. Now, let's look at the world around me. Now, let's look at the government and the entire world around me. Let's not just skip over to the universe, but let's actually talk about what's happening right now, right here." I think that's super important.

That's how I've been thinking about it.

Applying these principles of interconnectedness and spiritual principles that have been around for a very long time, which science is now helping to validate, how should we organize and structure society? That's really the question I'm looking at.

And the harder I looked at it and saw things collapsing around us, whether it's the political system or the way in which this health crisis has been managed or censorship in the media. There's so many things in the world that are happening that are not in alignment with those metaphysical principles that I'm seeing everywhere else, and I'm trying to embody for myself.

So ultimately that led me to not only critique the current system, but talk about a system which others have talked about too, that's more in alignment with the nature of reality.

Yeah. It's so difficult to take that first step, I think because I did participate in the belief of the crisis. The first year for me was total crisis mode of like, "Oh, we need to survive this. This is like World War III. We're in danger." So I really took on that fear and I think it took me out. It took me down to a place of intellectual annihilation. Then I had to start again with what I knew to be true. In some way, similar to your process, step by step building back up until you can authentically speak each thing like, "This is true. I want to treat people this way. I want to function this way. I want to make my own decisions about what I believe is right for my body. And where I will live, how I will live." So it's been a very undoing, but it's a beautiful opportunity to rebuild.

Yeah. I see it that way too.

The challenges in life are opportunities. It just depends on the way we look at them. So usually when fear is the primary emotion, that's an indicator that it could be viewed in another way, because fear, like you said, it really brings us down.

And I've noticed that in my own life is that sometimes there can be something going on in the world or in our personal lives. That brings about negative emotions and feelings.

But dwelling in the fear is different than just acknowledging, "Oh, this thing exists and I don't like it, but I'm not going to dwell in the negative emotion around it." And that's the way I've looked at a lot of these topics because some of them are unpleasant in some ways. And also there's an unpleasantness associated with acknowledging where I was wrong in my life, where I just didn't see it. And I have to say, "Okay. You didn't get it, and that's fine." Now, you can look at life differently. There's a natural human tendency to not want to be wrong, I think. And that's a big challenge.

Yes. I think that's a really big one. Another one that came up for me was this feeling of like, "This is the way things are done. You must sacrifice yourself for humanity. We must all be vaccinated, wear masks, behave this way, do this, do that for the good of humanity." I have a developing sense of what's right for me or what should be done. So not to say specifically what people should be doing to protect themselves during this COVID time. But it's more like this general societal belief that is being projected that this is what's done and you must do it. I feel like that's really the power of your book is that you're questioning the very premise of that belief, right?

Yeah.

You're not really engaging with, "Should I be vaccinated? Should I not?" But you're more looking at, "What is the premise when our society suddenly tells everybody that they have to do one thing or they're bad?"

Right. Well, what I'm questioning is who is giving that order and who is so all knowing and all powerful, that that edict is the 100% truth that we should know is truth. When in fact, when we look at anything scientific, we see that what was true 200 years ago, or what was believed to be true has now been developed. So I'm always just questioning certainty. There's a certainty that we're being given in various areas. And today it has to do with medical intervention around a virus. One of the reasons I didn't focus too much on those aspects, the specific things that are being forced today is that I look at these books as having principles that can apply for many, many years. And what's relevant today might not be relevant in 10, 20 years. It might be a different thing.

So it's more this idea of an all knowing authority that I'm challenging. Not that there aren't people who know more about certain things than others, but we have to ask a question and this is what you're getting at, I think the idea of this is the way things are done and that we're conditioned to believe, well, these people know what's best and we're going to listen to them no matter what. Maybe sometimes they're right, but maybe they're not right. And maybe they're intentionally wrong because they have their own agendas. So it's questioning that fundamental assumption.

Yeah. You said the weaponization of crisis. Do you want to talk about that concept?

Yes. Critical concepts. I'm glad you brought it up. The idea there is that those who are in charge, we have to flip the traditional assumption, which is that authority figures, particularly those in government, are public servants. Whether they're politicians or they're unelected officials who are part of the government apparatus in different groups, these are people who are serving us and they have our best interests at heart. They care more about our interests as citizens than their own. So when they make a decision or a suggestion, it's because they care about us. Now, the reverse would be to say, "It's not that. They have their own interests and they will lie to bring about whatever they care about." So one way that can be done is through crisis. There can be a crisis which either exists organically and just came about or a crisis that they create.

And that can be used to create fear. It can be used to create policies that give people fewer freedoms than they used to have and say, "Look, there's this emergency. We have to take away your freedom just for right now. We'll give it back to you eventually." But you could see if someone had malicious intent, someone who's not necessarily a "good person", maybe even psychopathic and lacks empathy. You could use a crisis to gain more power and to take away freedoms from other people.

So I'm not saying that's the case in every situation where there's a crisis, but we have to consider the other side because we're conditioned to say, "Oh, it's just the benign thing that the crisis happened and they're trying to help us." It could be the reverse.

Yeah. And we've seen this pattern in, even recent history from the Vietnam War to September 11th. The wars that our country goes to, this has been like sort of an identity of modern American life that when we go to war, you have to give up your liberties. Things have to happen. This is important. And when people have demonstrated and spoken out and it can take many years, but eventually, hopefully we've returned to a balance where the people's preference is represented.

It's a very complex thing and I've definitely felt a great confusion. It's a super complicated subject. So I wonder, where did you begin?

Well, I don't know if there was... I mean, watching COVID unfold was a big one for me because all of a sudden we saw that governments were having a very big impact on our lives in ways that I hadn't noticed before. We were told which businesses were essential and which ones weren't, when you could leave your home, when we were going to have lockdowns. These were big decisions in our lives and the government was basically saying, "We're going to tell you what risk you can take in your life." That's the summary of what they were doing. You're not going to assess risk for yourself and make decisions on your own accord. We're the experts. We're going to tell you what you're going to do.

And that got me looking at things. In parallel, I saw lots of censorship where doctors would come out and they would challenge the narrative about the pandemic. They would just say something that went counter to what the mainstream was saying. And then all of a sudden they would be booted off of YouTube. They would be banned, censored. They would be called names. This was happening to doctors like medical doctors. So it was happening to lots of people who just had opinions that countered what the mainstream was saying.

That for me activated things I have seen in the past. Number one, my research on consciousness, which is mostly my first two books in my podcast series, there was almost a force that I continued to see. I'll just call it a force that would push back against research, suggesting that we're spiritual beings or that psychic phenomena are real or that consciousness might exist beyond the brain. When we die, our consciousness continues. When scientists come out and say those sorts of things in a mainstream institution, they're often told, "You're not going to be able to get tenure if you keep talking that way." I've gotten to know a lot of these scientists. Or in the media, they get called names, or they get called pseudo scientists on Wikipedia.

So I saw that pattern in consciousness, but I also saw it in my professional life with... I just saw lots of corruption. I saw the media twist things in ways that really negatively impacted people. I saw the court system in... Up and down the power structure, I saw really bad stuff relatively early in my career. So I've been primed maybe to think just when these sorts of things happen, I know that there are power structures. I don't know how it's done, but there are ways to conceal things and to hide the truth. So the alarm bells went off for me. And that led into deeper research.

What comes to mind is Jenny Holzer, the artist, her phrase "Abuse of power comes as no surprise." I've held that as a premise since I was young as well.

Exactly right.

So did you feel like starting with the concept of freedom and liberty was the introduction to the subject that we should really consider what is freedom, that people are giving up a lot of things and not recognizing it?

Yeah. I would say that's central to the book and the way I think about things now, but that concept came much later in my exploration. So just like with my first two books, it's all about consciousness in the brain. Does the brain create consciousness? And the answer I come up with is, "No, the brain doesn't create it. The brain is like a filter or like an antenna or vessels."

But I didn't start there. I started hearing about near death experiences or the evidence of the US government running psychic spying programs for two decades where they spend $25 million. These independent areas which can all be brought back to the idea of consciousness in the brain. The consciousness is well beyond the brain, beyond space and time.

It's very similar with liberty. I was seeing corruption everywhere, whether it's the media censorship, corrupt politicians, policies that were threatening our freedoms, for example, and weaponization of crisis. I was thinking about, there are problems here, but what's ultimately the solution? The solution ties back to rethinking our government structure, such that we can be more free. So that was the process where I got to the point where, okay, it's about liberty. That's really the central thing if we want to get to solutions and that's how the book came about.

Can you talk a little bit about how governments are slowly enslaving people, as you say, through this weaponization of crisis or this imaginary safety that the government provides?

Yeah. Well, that is the-

What's going under the radar that we're missing?

What we're told is we're doing this for your safety. We're doing it for the safety of society for the common good. Whatever these measures are, whether it's you can't go outside your home for these certain hours. You need to have a health passport. These are all erosions of freedom. A fully free society, wouldn't have those requirements. We're told, well, it's for your safety and this could be a weaponization where they say it's for your safety, but really it's just to enslave you.

What we've seen over the last two years, because we're recording this in December of 2021, and it's almost two years into the crisis, we are much less free than we were when this started. If you just look objectively. Forget whether or not it's warranted that we have fewer freedoms. We don't have as many freedoms. Our lives are much more under the control of these policies and in very major ways.

So the question then becomes is that just, is it benign? And it's just a natural happening where, okay, this happens, because you're in a crisis, it's an emergency? Or is there something intentional happening? If we look at governments throughout history, anytime, it's this idea of the common good or it's for your safety, this is how totalitarian regimes have happened in the past. They've come to rise through similar types of sayings.

So Nazi Germany is an example. One of the worst cases of how government could become corrupt. There was a burning of the parliament building called the Reichstag and it was used to galvanize support against communists.

Hello.

We have a guest here. You psychically picked up.

It's nice to see her. She's like, "I want to get in on this conversation." So if you're listening to the podcast and you can't see Mark in the video, he has a beautiful, is it a Flame Point Siamese? Who just climbed onto his chair. She's saying, "Let me talk about this with you." Okay, continue.

I'm visiting family and Sarah psychically, before she even knew that months ago said, "Is there a cat around you?" And I said, "How did you know that Sarah?" But she was psychically picking up that there was a cat who follows me around, so she followed me to the interview.

So anyway, the Nazis in the 1930s, they used the burning of the Reichstag parliament building and they weaponized fear to say, "This group of people, you have to be aware of them." And they were able to gain power that way.

Many historians theorized that the not Nazis actually started the fire. They did it themselves so that they could basically create a reason for taking away people's freedoms and to create fear against this group.

Sure. So this has happened throughout history. We've seen this a lot, haven't we?

We've seen it a lot. But we don't want to think, we think, "Oh, we're in America and this is happening all over the world." Could it be the case that all these governments are weaponizing fear to take away freedoms? Could that really be happening? That's just like, it's too much for our minds to comprehend. Do I know for sure? No, but there are patterns happening right now where it's not getting better, that the same kind of weaponization seems to be happening over and over again.

So I guess the summary here is that the government and the media might tell us something and there's a need to break the conditioning of automatically trusting the authority and saying, "Okay, maybe they're telling the truth. But what's the other side of what might be happening if there's malicious intent?"

Sure. I hear you. And you may be right. And I definitely am a bit of a conspiracy theorist myself in terms of other events that have happened in the last 20 years. But in some ways, this idea of intention versus chaos, our government is so disorganized that I have trouble seeing... That's kind of how the pandemic got so bad was that it's just total disorganization.

So for a long time, I was really fixated on that, "This could have been prevented." But now that it's continuing, I think there's a lot of confusion and a lot of chaos between how to approach the world. I think everybody is looking at, "Well, we want this to end, so we must do this. But oh, that didn't really work. So let's try that."

So I feel like there's some ways that a lot of our issues are just related to an inability for us to connect, come together and make wise choices. Instead, there's just so much chaos and there's a lot of disinformation, but there's also a lot of censorship. So it's a really unfortunate turn of events, but at the same time it's laying bare so many power dynamics and so many structures that may need to be investigated.

Yeah. It's difficult to know what's true when there's so many different opinions out there, for sure.

There's so many different modalities of information getting delivered. That was like the last straw, I think, to have social media, just turn the world upside down and information, the stream of information. It’s not exactly controlled, but there's an effort to control information. Things have just changed so much in the last 50 years.

Yes. And it's creating a lot of division, which could be intentional. I think it feels like it's intentional, but even beyond that, one of the reasons I didn't go... The book is not about proving whether or not COVID is planned or whether it's being used to enslave us for sure. Rather, I'm looking more at the principle of liberty and just saying, "Let's look at that aspect." Is our freedom is being taken away or not? Forget the cause.

And are we okay with that? Is that acceptable?

Right. Is that acceptable for a third-party to just basically tell us where we can be free and where we can't be free. What I ultimately argue is that that's not acceptable from just a common sense standpoint, but also from a spiritual standpoint. This goes against many spiritual principles. And that's where I draw the line with a lot of this stuff, whether it's the media or politicians or anyone who's in charge.

If we don't have a choice about our freedoms, whether at the level of our private businesses or at the level of our own individual lives, that's automatically a problem as I see it because it creates... The possibility then exists, the door is open for a lot of corruption to do horrible things to people. Whether they will or not, I don't know. But the doors open and history tells us it can get really bad.

Yeah. We're looking at a lot. I mean, you mentioned in the book, different ways that some of us are being given more freedoms if we participate in the government direction or less, freedom is taken away, if you don't. So we're facing actually a lot of real life consequences to this sort of social control.

We're seeing it. I mean now especially with passports and medical interventions, it's sort of like you have to do these things if you want to be able to participate in normal society. It's becoming a real division where there's two classes of citizens. Those who have certain privileges and those who have other privileges. And looking at that throughout history that does not end very well. I mean, actually in the book, we don't know if it's going to get to this point, but Dr. Gregory Stanton has laid out the 10 stages of genocide. And the first few are things like creating an us and them, dehumanizing another group of people.

Now, we don't know if it will get to the end of where it's like extermination that has happened in the past, but these are very troubling trends. And the reason for even mentioning something so horrific is that you don't want to get to the point where it's already so bad. Like I mentioned in the book that the Nazis weren't sending people to concentration camps on the first day. The erosions to liberty build up over time. So we have to look at the warning signs and make sure that we nip it in the bud, and that's why it's worth becoming very aware of this.

I know there's a tendency sometimes to say, "How could you make those comparisons because millions of people have died and here it's not even close to that?" And that's true, but what were the elements that led up to those atrocities?

The stakes are quite high.

They're quite high because what's happening is on a global scale. This is happening in nearly every country, especially in the West, where there are major restrictions. And even in Austria, it's becoming mandatory now to get a medical injection for all citizens. And there are lockdowns for some people who've had the medical intervention and those who haven't for example. I don't think we've ever seen anything like this where the entire world is under such a threat of liberty. And that's why I think we have to pay even closer attention when we start moving in those directions.

Yeah, we need to get back to the very basics of how do we talk to each other when we have a difference of opinion? You were talking about censorship. How does a doctor who differs in opinion from a mainstream doctor express that? We thought that we were living in a country where you could express your difference of opinion. But in fact, people are saying it's threatening. It's dangerous.

Yeah. There's a journalist named Glenn Greenwald who did a lot with Edward Snowden. He talks about this idea, and the way he summarizes it is that there's a distinction between principle and ideology. So principle is like I believe in free speech. Ideology is, "I think this doctor is saying the wrong thing on Twitter and should be censored."

But if you believe in the principle of free speech, then those who disagree with you should be allowed to speak. There's this inability in society right now of holding principle in the face of a contradictory ideology. And that's what seems to be happening is, "Oh, you have free speech." As long as you're within this lane, and if you leave that lane, it's not free speech. But that's not free speech. That just means you have an ideology.

So we have essentially now an ideological war, which I guess has shifted in terms of topics, and it's being used really to divide the world, but we see it in America, for sure. And to me, it relates back to this idea of an us versus them, which we've seen governments do in the past where they say this group of people. If we just got rid of them, then things would be better. They're the root of all of our problems.

And even in Nazi Germany, to give an extreme example, they would say that the Jews had typhus. They were diseased. So we're seeing a very similar thing, right? The unvaccinated are the problem. It's similar rhetoric, which is concerning because a playbook has been used in the past and we don't want it to get out of hand.

Yeah. It's being flipped all around too. I mean, I think of truth, the concept of who is in charge of truth? How do we perceive truth? I guess my change in perspective came from seeking my truth from non-traditional avenues. What are your thoughts on truth? I feel like you addressed this a bit in your book.

Yeah. Well, I'm interested in the same thing. I want to know what's real, what's not. I want to understand the nature of reality and for any individual politicians or media companies to say, "This is the truth and we know it for sure, and there's no discussion of anything else," that to me is very unscientific. And that's one of the ironies.

That's a red flag right there.

A red flag. So this idea of trust the science, meaning that if someone who claims to be a scientific authority says, "This is true," then you listen to it and don't question it, which is the opposite of how science works. Science is all about testing hypotheses and asking questions and trying to falsify it. So an example that I mentioned in the book is that at one point you couldn't say the idea that the virus came out of the Wuhan lab. The lab-leak theory as it's called. You couldn't talk about that because that's conspiracy theory.

Now, it's being taken seriously as a real potential for the whole reason this pandemic started. So what was radical and crazy, and you couldn't even say it over a year ago now it's like commonplace. So the truth seems to be evolving or what is allowed as truth seems to be evolving, which then suggests that we shouldn't hold so tightly to whatever we think is true at the moment, because it seems to change.

Yeah. I mean, and the timing is really quick too. So it used to take hundreds of years for a scientific truth to be debunked and changed and brought into the mainstream. Now, it can be a matter of months. The timing has changed dramatically.

Yeah. It's confusing to me that there's an acceptance of this where it's sort of like we forget the hypocrisy or we forget that the science told us this was true and now they say, it's not true. It's like, "Oh, that's okay that they told us the wrong thing." There's no accountability and if there's hypocrisy, the hypocrisy seems to be ignored. So there's an amnesia in that sense too where people... I'm not saying all people, but I'm noticing it frequently. It's like, "Do you not remember what they told us six months ago?"

I mean, very recently the president of the United States said, "If you get these shots, you're not going to get the virus." Now, we know that's not true. We had a lot of very credible people saying it prevents transmission. We know that's not true now. And it's like we've forgotten that, that was the truth at the time. So maybe this is part of mind control, which I talk about in the book when you're presented with information in a certain way. You're able to compartmentalize knowledge, so it doesn't feel as traumatic, but something seems to be going on where there is this amnesia and the information's changing and people are not... There's little accountability.

Yeah. And the sad part is that what gets lost in a lot of these interpersonal relationships is the love that like a lot of people, the reason that we are so fearful of the virus or the situation that may harm our family is out of love. We want to survive. We want to protect our family. It's brought a lot of us to the very base fight or flight survival mode.

So it's really hard to hold on to the virtuous ideals of mutual respect. Or maybe you could talk about some of these basic fundamental ways of treating people that we need to return to. If you're coming from a place of love and someone that you're friends with, doesn't agree with you, how should you respond? It's sort of like we have to remind ourselves again, the basic human rights, I guess, and not just the needs, but the rights or our desire to act virtuously.

Yes. This is a big topic. The simple principle, I say simple and that it's easy to say, but actually putting this into practice individually and collectively is not so easy, but the principle is known as non-aggression, meaning not initiating aggression against anyone's body or their private property. Meaning things that they own, they rightfully own.

It's very simple. You don't initiate physical violence, fraud, coercion, extortion, anything like that. You don't initiate it. But if someone does it to you, there's a right to self-defense. And that's a central principle that I think aligns with spiritual ideas, which I want to go into shortly. But also on a societal level, it would make sense to treat people that way in terms of how we do government. If we examine the way government functions, it violates the non-aggression principle all the time by forcing certain things on people.

But why is this principle so important? Because I've had to think about this a lot, and it's probably gave me the confidence to write a book like this, because it's in some ways radical is that if we look at the near death experience, for example, something I've spent a lot of time studying, these are cases where a person has cardiac arrest or some other kind of trauma to the body where they're clinically dead or they're very close to it. Meaning their brain is not functioning. Or if there's any functioning, it's like a few neurons. Certainly not enough to create a complex memory or a perception. And what some people report is that they hover over their bodies. They come back in after they're resuscitated and they tell people what happened. They tell the doctor how the operation was going. And the doctor says, "That can't be true because I know what was happening. At that time your brain was dead. You shouldn't have been able to know that." And you knew it from a vantage point outside your body.

So all this suggests that our consciousness is not fully linked to our body and certain things happen that are not hallucinations during the near death experience. One of which is known as a life review, where people relive events in their life and they relive it from the perspective of people that they impacted.

So one person I interviewed from my podcast, it's called, Where Is My Mind is a man named Dannion Brinkley who relived his combat days in Vietnam during his life review. He actually had four life reviews because he had four near death experiences at different points in his life. But he relived what it was like to be killed in Vietnam. He relived what it was like to be children who would no longer have a father because he had killed a father in his combat days.

So he felt what it was like to be all the people that he harmed and all the pain that he inflicted upon people. The reverse is that after he came back from his first near death experience, he became a hospice volunteer. So in his later near death experiences and life reviews, he got to experience what it was like to be the dying person in the hospice bed and to see what it was like to be comforted by himself from the other person's vantage point.

So all this is to suggest that the notion of non-aggression would align with these principles that you see in near death experiences, which to quote Dr. Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, who's been studying this for many decades, these near death experiences, he says the life review, and this is based on the cases that of people that he's evaluated as a psychiatrist, "The life review teaches us something beyond morality. It teaches us about natural law. Something so fundamental that's built into the nature of the universe itself."

Mark Gober interviews Dannion Brinkley: The Life Review (in Near-Death Experiences)

So what does that suggest? That we want to treat others in a loving manner ultimately. That's what it comes down to. We wouldn't want to initiate something on them that they didn't agree to. And to me, that's what it comes down to whether it's talking to a family member or it's government imposing policies. If a person didn't explicitly, contractually agree to it with informed consent, that to me is a violation of spiritual principles.

If one person makes a decision that we don't agree with, it's really up to them and they would deal with the consequences. It doesn't mean that we might not try to express our opinion, but it's their responsibility and they would have to deal with the consequences, positive or negative.

Boy, take this one step further to having children and it's a very interesting concept. I've started to think about this too, in terms of controlling children and telling them you have to do this, or you have to go to school. When you start to hold boundaries for those that you're responsible for, but still instill in them the belief and the understanding of sovereignty and the ability to control their environment and the ability to state what do you give permission for? What do you allow, do you not allow? I'm really undoing a lot of the patterns that I was taught, not realizing like, "Well, that is really wrong." Luckily, I have very strong-willed girls in and they call me on it all the time. 

But what you were talking about, I had a couple thoughts. So non-aggression, it made me think a lot about yoga philosophy and like Yama and Niyama, this concept of things to abstain from and right action. Did some of your thoughts on non-aggression come from your spiritual studies?

I would say that when I heard it in a political context, because the term non-aggression toward private property is very much in the... The term that I use in the book is known as voluntaryism that we should engage in. Anything that we do politically or otherwise should be fully voluntary on behalf of participants. And the core principle that volunteers use is non-aggression.

I heard this in a political context. Non-aggression against private property. And I'm looking at this saying, "This is exactly what I've been writing about." Just in the context of the golden rule, as some people call it, the life review, near death experiences, the yoga traditions. It's all the same thing spiritually. When people get to these states of consciousness, they speak about unconditional love and not wanting to violate that basic core principle.

So to me, it was like, "Oh, this is the intersection of politics, economics, and spirituality." If you believe the spiritual aspect, if that you take that as an assumption, there's only one way you can do the economy and the political structure. Everything else that violates not aggression is just simply intolerable.

I love it. That's amazing that you got to that point. It feels like that's really important. It occurred to me while you were speaking that perhaps your next book should be on education and how we conceive of education in the world. I know there's some people out there that you follow that are developing new modalities for thinking about education, but it seems that at the root of the problem, and as you talk about, when you talk about cognitive dissonance and kind of... You introduced the book like, "Okay, guys. We're going to talk about some difficult subjects here because we're all educated." The basis of our identities is very connected to how we are educated to believe what our country stands for, what teachers are, what educational systems should be. I mean, I remember as a child just thinking, "Why am I forced to go to school for 12 years? This is ridiculous. I have more to learn and do, but I'm in prison." I felt that way. And I was in a pretty progressive school.

But I'm curious what your thoughts are on education, because that's contributing to the problem that you're trying to unravel.

Yes. It's not an area that I feel like I've figured out, but I think it needs to be reformed in some way. The context in which I refer to education in the book relates to the concept of mind control of basically programming people with beliefs. It seems to start at an early age in ways that might appear benign on the surface. But if we think about government as an institution, that's more like a predator than a protector, inherently it's a power structure.

If we take that lens for a second, then it could use the education system to indoctrinate people, starting with the youth to believe that a really strong government that violates the non-aggression principle is something that we need in society. And not only is it necessary, but it's virtuous to have that. So to me, that's one of the ways we look at education. There's likely some indoctrination. And maybe it's happening in a way that's very subtle and we have to rethink how we educate.

Yeah. Thinking outside the box and being suspicious of systems of control seems necessary on many fronts these days.

Yeah. There is growing momentum toward homeschooling or alternative systems. I know people that are in that space of saying, "Wait, I don't want my kids to be in the system because I don't agree with what they're going to be learning. I don't agree with the policy, so I want to find an alternative."

Maybe over time, we'll see a growing, maybe a more integrated approach of conventional wisdom, but also spiritual wisdom and a diversity of opinions. I think that's really important too, of being exposed to the way many people have thought about things even if they don't agree with those things, but letting children or anyone who's being educated make their own decisions. But knowing what all sides of the coin are.

Yeah. I think that sounds wonderful. And I realize I've been doing that without realizing it, but yeah, it's sort of an undoing and choosing consciously every step of the way. What do I believe in? How do I want to share this? What is needed for children to grow up and be functional and successful? Or what is success? A lot of these concepts need to be interrogated the same as you're doing for the idea of government and liberty.

Yeah. I think everything does.

It's so connected. And so that brings me to what you talk about at the end of your book, which is perception versus essence. And perhaps you want to get into some of those ideas, but digging into the essence of something rather than how we are taught to perceive it.

Yeah. This analogy comes from Dr. David Hawkins, a spiritual teacher who was also a prominent psychiatrist in New York who had many enlightenment experiences and left his profession. He's written a lot of books that I've read. I've been influenced by many spiritual teachers, but I went through a phase where I was listening to a lot of David Hawkins. He used to talk about this all the time and he passed away almost a decade ago.

There's a distinction between perception and essence. Perception is what we are perceiving, but that might miss the essence of what something is. So you might have a person who on the outside seems very, very nice, and benevolent, and altruistic and philanthropic, but that person's hiding something, hiding a darkness that you might not have perceived. And you could have the opposite. You could have someone who on the surface looks super unprofessional and horrible, but actually when you look at the essence of what that person is doing, it's not so bad.

So Hawkins often talked about the wolf in sheep's clothing. To be aware of the wolf in sheep's clothing. I think it's an incredibly important concept today because there is a tendency to look at perception and not consider essence. Oh, that person on TV seems very trustworthy. But how much do we really know that person? When he or she gets off stage and stops reading from the prompter, do we really know what that person's up to? We have to start asking those questions because it's easy to be deceived.

Yes. And you say that it's often easier to accept comforting ideas. This is human nature. Just like we may desire to help others, but others may desire to trick, or lie, or steal to survive. By nature, we like to classify, categorize and feel comfortable.

Yes. When we think of potential explanations for why something is happening, it's more physiologically comforting to come up with the benign explanation or, "Oh, that person is good, or that person just made a mistake. It wasn't intentional." Thinking about some of the more negative things and thinking about the reality of evil, it's uncomfortable. So there's a greater incentive to dismiss it.

I mentioned that because in the book, I also talk about the phenomenon of psychopaths. It's not a comforting thing to think about because it's a psychological condition. It's very real and these are people who lack empathy. Most of us cannot think that way. These are people that don't understand love for whatever reason. Maybe they're tapping into dark forces. I don't know. But we can't relate to the way a psychopath would think, and they can be charming. They could be a wolf in sheep's clothing. And it's uncomfortable to think, is that person a psychopath?

If we look at maybe the policies that person's been supporting, even though on the surface they seem really good. We have to become detectives is what it comes down to. And spiritually the term is discernment. We have to discern what's actually in our best interest versus not. And sometimes that can require us going to uncomfortable places.

You talk about new ways of looking at the world having a liberated mindset with the goal of having a liberated planet. I think that's really beautiful and important. I hope people will listen to and read your book, because I think it is a radical position at the moment, which seems... Again, we said this about your last two books, pretty silly that we should have to say thinking outside the box is radical in this day and age, but for some reason, this is what's needed is for us to look a little more carefully at everything that's happening around us.

Yeah. I mean, I still can't believe I wrote a book on this topic. I never would've expected it. When I wrote it, which was months ago now, I think it was probably more radical at the time. But as things have-

But now it's bearing true as things have played out.

As things have gotten worse... Yeah, the way things have played out, I notice in my conversations there's more receptivity to it. So there's a timing in everything of when these things happen. I know I'm not in control of that and I just go with the flow. So I went with it. I knew it was an important topic. I knew that this idea of non-aggression towards private property is so fundamental and it aligns with spirituality. I love that aspect of it. So I had to do it.

But from me, personally, and I hope for people who read the book or listen to it, or even listen to this conversation, having the understanding is enough to liberate our mindset in a certain way, because it takes us away from being bound to certain structures. It leads us to question things and that's part of being free, I think.

That's another reason I decided to write the book is that I didn't realize it, but the power structures in society I had bought into in ways that were so subconscious. But realizing, "Wait, I'm not beholden to these structures even though I live within them. I'm a free being. The structures don't control me." There's something spiritually that awakened in me and that allowed me to be more liberated.

That's incredible. And at the end of your book, you talk about this idea of waking up, cleaning up, and growing up. And what you just said reminds me of growing up. It's like taking responsibility for our opinions, our actions, our thoughts, and the society that we live in. Really questioning things and making conscious choices.

Yes. And not going through life in a state of hypnosis, really stepping back and thinking about each decision. Why do I do this? Why do I believe that? And questioning everything, which I probably spend way too much time doing. But I think it's a healthy thing in the end.

Well, someone's gotta do it. You're helping us. So I appreciate it. And it's really wonderful to talk to you and I look forward to more conversations in the future. Thank you, Mark.

Yes. Thank you so much, Sarah. And thanks for all that you're doing as well.

No problem. I just want to mention that you're going to join my next course that starts in January as a guest speaker. It's called Creativity and Consciousness. I got the idea from our first interview together and I just was so inspired by your research into consciousness and realized that I have something to share from this perspective of creativity that I decided to offer this course.

The fact that you're one of the guest speakers has been really meaningful to people that participated in it. They really felt you gave them an ability to connect the dots between the spiritual awakening or the consciousness experience that they might have in art making to talking about it in society and with their family. It's sort of a unique role that you are playing. You're a little bit in the middle of these two extreme parts of our world. So anyways, I look forward to having you in that course, and great to speak with you.

Yes, it'll be fun. And the last one was great. So anyone listening, I would recommend it. We had a good time.

Excellent. Well, take care and I will see you soon.

Thank you.

Check out my Creativity & Consciousness Course 2022 - Expand your creativity and let consciousness propel you to the next level in this 10 week live online video course. Open to anyone who wants to connect to their creative spirit. The course runs 10 Wednesdays, from January 19 - March 23, 2022. 90 min. a week, 9am PST/12pm EST/4pm GMT. Sign up before January 1st for just $666, full price in Jan. is $999. Payments available as low as $111/mo. Learn about guest speakers and register here: https://sarahrossiter.com/trainings

Special Half Off for 1 on 1 Reiki Trainings purchased before Jan. 1 - Special price: $444 (Reg $888), or a 2 month payment schedule of $222. Learn more and schedule here: https://sarahrossiter.com/reiki - Attune to a universal healing energy and learn to heal yourself and others immediately. Learn what Reiki is and how to use it, become grounded and clear, call in angels and guides for protection and guidance, and receive your Reiki Level 1, 2, or 3 Attunement. These trainings support you in doing Reiki for yourself, family, and clients. Coming in 2022, Group Reiki Trainings and monthly practice sessions for all Reiki graduates will also be offered.

Rate & Review Giveaway for December - Enter to win a free copy of my forthcoming book: Channel, Messages from the Divine, and a painting made in Mexico by me. Write & submit a review of this podcast, wherever you listen, then email me at: bookings@thepsychicartistpodcast.com Each month your name will be added to the Giveaway drawing until you win! Prizes may change each month.

Important Links:

Sarah Rossiter is an artist, writer and psychic medium. You can find out more about her work online at: SarahRossiter.com

Mark Gober is an author and international speaker.

Thanks for listening to The Psychic Artist Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share!

Sarah Rossiter https://sarahrossiter.com
Previous

Channeling Life Force Energy with Reiki Master Andrea Kennedy
Next

Reiki 101 - Channeling Peace