Metaphysical Contact with Mark Gober
For today's episode, I speak with author Mark Gober, and he has just recently published a book called An End to Upside Down Contact: UFOs, Aliens, and Spirits—and Why Their Ongoing Interaction with Human Civilization Matters. I invite you to set your intention as you receive this information, to align yourself with love and light, and may whatever is beneficial to you filter through. So buckle up, this is quite an interesting conversation and Mark is a really wonderful teacher.
Metaphysical Contact with Author Mark Gober
Welcome Mark Gober, to The Psychic Artist podcast. I'm excited to discuss your new book today. But before we begin, I feel that it's important to set the energy for today and call in love and light. So I'm just going to ask for protection, calling on our angels and spirit guides of the love and light only, to protect this space and help us to share information that will be supportive to our growth as humans. And also, however that this information comes across, that it causes no harm to those who are listening, that it's purely for the highest and greatest good of all. And asking for a shield of protection around us as we discuss really important and complex matters.
So welcome Mark. Would you like to introduce yourself and your new book?
Mark Gober:
Sure. Thank you Sarah, for inviting me back on your show. It's always fun to talk to you and to your audience. So briefly my background is in business. I started my career in 2008, working in investment banking in New York. So I was there during the height of the financial crisis. And I left in 2010. I joined a Silicon Valley strategy firm, where I spent 10 years and eventually became a partner. But in 2016, I became very interested in more metaphysical topics. I was listening to podcasts and then started reading books and scientific papers. I had a very significant worldview shift that led me to write my first book An End to Upside Down Thinking, which I wrote in 2017. It was published a year later in 2018. And since then, I mean when I wrote the first one, I thought that was it. I was so surprised that I wrote anything. And then the curiosity has continued and that's led to more output.
There was a podcast that I produced with Blue Duck Media that came out in 2019 called Where Is My Mind? where I interviewed many of the scientists that I had written about in my first book. And then I decided to leave my firm right before the COVID pandemic and lockdowns. I didn't know that was going to happen consciously, of course. But I got pulled to continue with my research. So I left my firm and since then have written three more books. And the book that we'll be talking about today is the most recent one called An End to Upside Down Contact. It was published in June of 2022, and it deals with non-human intelligence. So things like UFOs, aliens, and spirits. And a lot of the book focuses on the way in which those beings seem to interact with our civilization and have been doing so for a very long time.
Sarah Rossiter:
Well, I just finished your book. And I have to say, I scheduled the interview with you before reading the book because I love your work and I respect you as a thinker. And I was surprised during the reading of the book. I was like, "Oh darn, this is intense. I don't really want to talk about this." It brings up a lot of (as you mentioned in your introduction and with most of your work) cognitive dissonance. I feel that our conversation today will probably be one without a lot of concrete answers, but with many possibilities. And that's kind of how you seem to approach writing it. You're like, "Here's all this information. I want to put it out there so we can just start talking about it."
Mark Gober:
Yeah. I lay out several fallacies in the introduction of the book. And those are the points where I feel pretty confident. But beyond those general points, it's really hard to know what's real and what's not. I talk about a Venn diagram type approach of looking at lots of different pieces of evidence and trying to find the overlaps. So if there's just one isolated case, it's really hard to validate that. But if you have independent sources talking about a very similar thing over different time periods, that might be something worth looking at.
About Mark Gober
Mark’s book An End to Upside Down Thinking, was awarded the IPPY award for best science book of 2019. He also wrote An End to Upside Down Living (2020), An End to Upside Down Liberty (2021), and An End to Upside Down Contact (2022). He is also the host of the podcast Where Is My Mind?
To give a brief summary of the fallacies, which I think can be counteracted by all this evidence: The first one is one that our consensus mainstream way of thinking of the world would say human beings are the top of the food chain, there's no other intelligent life out there. And to me, that's a fallacy. There is other intelligent life in this dimension and other dimensions potentially. And that leads to the second fallacy, which is even those who believe in non-human intelligence, for instance those who have studied UFOs, they sometimes just focus on the nuts and bolts physical aspects of these sorts of things. Whereas I think there's lots of evidence suggesting that contact is not only physical, but also somehow multidimensional. So there's a realm of consciousness involved.
And then the beings themselves that people encounter, there seems to be a spectrum of what you might call good and evil. And I've heard some perspectives of people who say, "Well, they're only good." And some people say, "They're only evil and out to deceive and enslave." And I think there is a spectrum, there's all of the above really.
And then some people might say, "Well yeah, these beings exist, but it's a pretty recent phenomenon and it's kind of fringe, but it doesn't really affect our society." And I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting this is an ancient phenomenon as well. And it's actually really important to our society, not just something fringe.
Sarah Rossiter:
Well, I can identify with you in my recent awakening to metaphysical and channeling experiences with angels and spirit guides. And I would say this is fairly recent for me in my understanding. And I think we have a similar background in terms of an interest in yogic scriptures and spiritual study that comes from a maybe ancient Vedic or Indian tradition.
What drew me to want to read your book besides the provocative title was that you would be talking about metaphysical contact, and understanding our world in this realm that's not just the physical. So I think there's so many ways to talk about it, and you approach it in several different ways in your book. But it's really interesting how our minds have trouble with these concepts. And also depending on what words we use and what background we come from, what our personal experiences have been. But it seems like we're generally talking about an evolution of consciousness.
And I'm interested in the ascension of humanity. And as a soul, I feel like I've been brought here to work with that. My soul purpose is connected to that in some way as an artist. So I wonder maybe we just start out with what are your thoughts on that in terms of your work?
Mark Gober:
Yeah. Well, I agree with you Sarah.
I think that what's happening on an individual level and on a collective level is that we're trying to advance and move toward what some would call a state of unconditional love. That seems to be the nature of consciousness itself.
Those who have had those kinds of direct experiences, whether it's a very positive near death experience or certain spiritually transformative meditation experiences or certain psychedelics, they describe this higher state of consciousness that we're all a part of. But in our human bodies, we're sort of blocked from it. And we're trying to live in a body while embodying that state of unconditional love.
And one of the analogies that has really helped me think about this is the idea that consciousness is always like the sun that's shining. It's always there shining rays, but there can be blockages to it like there are clouds in the sky that can get in the way. And that's what we're trying to overcome. We're trying to get past those clouds so that we have more of this unobstructed consciousness that we're embodying.
And when we look at the world around us and even metaphysically look at what people have reported, there seems to be varying levels of obstruction of the light, so to speak. And that might manifest as some kind of a darkness.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And you talk about a lot of dark experiences. And my last interview was with Rob Schwartz talking about Your Soul's Plan and this concept of choosing, suffering perhaps for one's lifetime in order to grow. And I think a little bit about that, but I'm curious on your thoughts about darkness, and light, and what we experience as good or evil. How do you want to talk about that?
Mark Gober:
Well when I was starting in 2016, I listened to a lot of interviews on Laura Powers' podcast Healing Powers, and I heard Robert Schwartz speak among many other people. And I think his book Your Soul's Plan, his first book was one of the first that I read when I was on this journey. There were some other ones that were more purely scientific, where they were doing studies in the lab. But his is scientific he would say in a different way. So I've been influenced by those opinions that he's put forward. They're very difficult to validate, this idea that there's a pre-birth planning process before we enter the body. We choose the life that we're going to live. We choose the body, and the family, and the circumstances, even if those circumstances might result in suffering what we would call suffering, or unpleasantness, and what he argues.
And I'll explain how he gets to this point. He argues that that is for our soul growth, even if they're difficult experiences. And it's ultimately to get to a state of self-love. That's where his research leads him. And the way he approached it was to interview the souls of living humans through mediums. So someone very psychic would be able to essentially channel this living person's soul and bring back information about why they planned their life.
Now I believe he came across this hypothesis, and he's not the only person to say this many other people in the spiritual community and also hypnotherapists say this, is that he was doing hypnotherapy. And people were describing in the past life setting this pre-birth or between lives era, where they were planning their life effectively. So that's where the idea came up. But for the purpose of his book I believe, he got the information through mediums, where he was directly interviewing the souls. He would actually speak to the medium. And in his book, he has effectively the transcripts of those conversations.
And what comes out across varying types of life challenges that someone might have that might be illness, suicide. He's gone through basically the worst things you can imagine in someone's life. And each of those things is its own chapter in his various books. And what comes through in his interviews is that the person planned that challenge before birth, because it led to some kind of soul evolution. And that the person has a choice in many of those cases as to how to deal with those challenges. And also maybe to avoid certain levels of suffering. Just thinking back to some of the case studies that I remember reading a while ago, in some of the cases, there was a challenge, and the person didn't learn the lesson in life. And then there was greater suffering later. And it's sort of like until the person learned the lesson, that suffering continued or maybe even got stronger. And that was all for the purpose of soul growth.
So when we talk about something being good or bad, good or evil, light/dark, from the context that he takes, and maybe from the highest level perspective, those things don't exist. And I talk about this a little bit in An End to Upside Down Contact, but also in my second book An End to Upside Down Living.
I have a section titled Non-Judgmentalism, which is a term Dr. David Hawkins used a lot, which is this idea that we can't, from our human lens, judge anything - because we don't know the more cosmic purpose. There could be something that we would think is really, really horrible. But from a cosmic lens, it actually stimulates growth or it leads to something way down the road where we can't trace the causality, but it leads to something really good later.
So you could imagine someone has a traumatic event early in life, but that leads them to become an amazing artist later in life and then influence millions of people. But it was because of that initial trauma that maybe that occurred.
So on one level, there isn't anything to judge because we don't know enough. But on the other level, this is the paradox that I've really been trying to grapple with. To ignore something that will cause suffering seems to be irresponsible. That's the way I look at it, because maybe a person's supposed to go through some kind of suffering. But let's say we're a third party or just society at large. If we notice a big problem, to just ignore it and say, "Well, that's their karma to deal with. They plan it before birth. Let them suffer." I think there's also a responsibility and a duty on the part of the third parties to say, "Well, maybe it is their karma to go through that suffering. But we're going to at least try to help them because that's what we should do if we're trying to embody this more evolved level of consciousness." Even if we ultimately can't help them, we should at least try.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. That seems to connect to the golden rule that you speak about and how people have connected to these emotions in their near death experiences when something unkind was done in a lifetime, and they might review it afterwards and experience the effect of that. So it's a part of our learning process is to feel things from both angles. What did it feel like to be the receiver of this, or the actor, or the witness? And so it's very complex, but it does seem to be a conundrum of sorts of witnessing the world, but being a participant and trying to do our best to embody compassionate and kindness.
Mark Gober:
Right. So it's being surrendered to whatever the outcome is going to be, but not being passive in the process and trying to be actively good. It's a really challenging balance.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And surrender could be translated as non-attachment to the outcome.
Mark Gober:
Yeah.
Sarah Rossiter:
Sometimes we think of surrender as giving up, but it could also just be ... or allowing for the highest and greatest good to be in action. And similar to what I did at the beginning of this interview with calling in protection. And at the end of your book, you talk about, "We have a choice to make." And this is part of the conversation around free will. And I feel like a big effect of reading your book was that I had to reassess, “How do I want to integrate this information? What is the point here for me?”
And I actually checked in with my angels and spirit guides yesterday as I was driving and channeled a message to answer "How the hell am I supposed to integrate this information? What is the importance?" And the message I essentially got was very similar to the end of your book. Which is, well at least for me the message was, to not be distracted by all these names, and ideas of UFOs, and aliens, and stories of suffering, but rather to focus on my purpose and continue to do the work I'm doing. Not to have deaf ears, right? But maybe to filter out what I absorb, what information I allow in so that I can continue to be effective at sharing kindness and just very simple goals.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. I agree. In some ways, the information in the book doesn't matter at all, but in other ways it really does matter. Because I've had to weigh this myself, what's the point of sharing all of this? And there are many spiritual teachers who don't like to go in this direction at all. And they'll say, "Well, it's just a distraction." And I agree that it can be a distraction if there's an attachment to it. And I quote David Hawkins again, he wore warns about the allure of glamorous seductions. And a lot of this stuff is very glamorous, and it could be easy to become enamored by these phenomena. This is really cool. I want to learn more about it just because it's cool. And that's not why I'm interested in it.
To me, I'm interested in understanding the truth of the reality that we exist in. And that means being aware of our surroundings. In the same way that if you live in a town or a city, you want to know which areas are safe, which ones are more dangerous. It's just part of being a responsible human to just know what's going on.
And if we exist within a universe of many different types of species, that some of which we don't see with our eyes ordinarily, we should know about that because it might affect the way in which we navigate our world.
But it doesn't change the overall trajectory of wanting to evolve our individual consciousness and collective consciousness.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. Well, let's get into the heart of it. So the first thing you mentioned that totally blew my mind was in the intro about the former head of Israel's Defense Ministry space directorate, who said that we are in contact with a galactic Federation. Perhaps you want to go into that a bit?
Mark Gober:
Yeah. Well, I'll get into this-
Sarah Rossiter:
That's mind-blowing. But I'm glad you said it. I was like, "What?"
Mark Gober:
Right. And for someone of that caliber to say it, and for NBC News to report on it, why would this person say it? And there are many other claims of this federation. Now when I talk about this, this is not from any direct experience. So I'm saying this based on a lot of research that I've done. This pattern theme seems to come up where people talk about it. I don't really know what it means. I don't know if it's a construct, if to call it a galactic federation is just a human way of conceptualizing whatever this organization is. But the idea is that there is a benevolent group of I guess if you want to call them extraterrestrial beings, non-human intelligences that seems to have an interest in what's happening on this planet.
And I've heard some people claim they're in touch with this federation. Others would say, "Well, just the governments are in touch with them." Other people who are psychically involved, there's a whole spectrum of people that claim to have this type of communication. But one of the themes that I've heard, and I quote from The Farsight Institute on this. This is a remote viewing organization.
So they use psychic abilities to see things at a distance, and also to look at things historically. Because if consciousness is beyond space and time, which is something I've talked about in my past books, in theory, our mind can access something that's far away, both in space and time.
And actually the U.S. government used this phenomenon known as remote viewing for psychic spying, and their declassified CIA documents that validate this as a real thing. So there's an Institute called Farsight, which seeks to use remote viewing to understand the world around us, including historical events. And what they claim is that initially, they started off not looking for anything extraterrestrial when they were remote viewing. But when they viewed these events or other things happening in the world, there were extraterrestrial beings. And they were influencing our society. One of the patterns that has come up in their research of using remote viewing is that there is this galactic federation that exists, and that the federation wants humanity to evolve collectively, but has a philosophy of non-intervention. Meaning that we have the free will to voluntarily engage in things. And it has to be our choice about what we choose to do. And if we choose something that might cause suffering or might not be in our best interest in some way according to the remote viewers, that they will not intervene.
Which is very interesting because I wrote about this in my previous book An End to Upside Down Liberty. It's all about this notion of voluntaryism, which is that our society should be based around voluntary choices that the individual makes. And sometimes they will make choices that are not in their best interest and that's their learning experience and their karma to have to accept that rather than having a governmental body impose those choices for us. This notion of a galactic federation is actually very similar. They want us to do well, but their interventions are going to be limited. Which I thought was a really interesting concept.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. It reminds me of parenting. I think I've said that before. You watch your children make mistakes and that's part of their growth process. So this is such a big conversation. And I'm personally very interested in details and stories, and I know what is our government or military aware of. How is it affecting modern day politics? There's also a lot of subtext here that maybe we could talk about it in terms of energy or dark forces. So how did you decide to focus your conversation in the book? Because you went to these specific stories of abductions, and some descriptions of violation, and torture, and a lot of real-world examples of suffering, and it's very scary.
But somehow it's easier for me to understand in terms as energy, as someone who's more psychic. And I do see dark energies, and entities, and attachments, and there are these amorphous creatures. And somehow it's easier. It did take me a while, like a year or two to accept what I was seeing. To understand that they weren't more powerful than me energetically, that I could look at them and that I am in a body, and I have this ability to call in light and dissolve things. But my understanding is still evolving. But does any of that bring something to mind for you?
Mark Gober:
Yeah. Well, my understanding is definitely still evolving too. But where I am now is that it's sort of like what we talked about earlier, this idea of wanting to be aware of our surroundings and knowing what's out there. Because many people are really good natured. That's what I’ve found. And for good natured people, it's difficult to imagine wanting to violate someone or wanting to deceive intentionally. It's just a totally different mindset. But that can make someone susceptible to manipulation at the same time. And many spiritual teachers talk about this process of discernment, of being able to tell who's a wolf in sheep's clothing.
And actually in my second book, before I knew about a lot of this really dark stuff, I tell a story that I often think about going back to David Hawkins, one of my favorite teachers who he passed away before I became interested in all this. But he talked about his evolutionary journey of elevating his consciousness to different levels. And at one point where he was dissolving his ego, he claims, there was what he calls a knowingness that emerged just out of nowhere. So it was just him. It was just all oneness. He was in that state. And I don't know if it was a voice or something that said, "You have transcended all of your personal karma. All power is yours. Here it is. Take it." And he said that he thought about it and was like, "Wait a second. If I am everything, why do I need to have power over others? I'm going to reject this."
And he calls it the Luciferic temptation. And he claims that he was shown other advanced spiritual beings who had a different or similar, but maybe not identical type of encounter with a dark energy at that stage. Some of them took the bait, and apparently they had this horrible karmic fall where they had to start over again because they were at such a high level for them to take the bait was so damaging because they should know better, but they still did. And there were others who transcended it like him, so he claims. And then they reached another level of consciousness.
And I remember him saying it often when he told this story in his lectures, because many of his lectures are still available. He would say, "It is my karmic duty to tell you about this temptation because at some point you're going to get there. Maybe it's not this lifetime, and these dark forces are going to come and you need to know about it in advance. Because if you don't, there could be big trouble. You might not identify it." And that's sort of symbolic of a lot of what I ended up researching later without knowing it at the time when I first discovered that story. And that these forces, which we could look at as dark in one sense, and in another sense we could look at them as evolutionary. They provide a test for us to try to transcend and get rid of these clouds that are obscuring the rays of consciousness, the light that's already there. And that's how I think about it.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And I think whenever I come back to my own awareness of being a soul in a body - and it's quite helpful that I interviewed Robert Schwartz before reading your book. And I can see for me developmentally in a spiritual sense, how in the last couple months, I've been learning things that one step leads to another and allows me to understand the next door. So I had an experience before talking to him where I passed out and I met with what I assumed to be my council of elders briefly. And then they sent me back as maybe a reassignment or something. But now in reading your book, I was looking at those beings like, "Were they aliens? Was that an abduction?" I don't know. Right? So I asked my guides and they said, "We are alien. Some of us as your guides are alien. If you use that word, that word is disturbing to humans. So you might want to use a word like spirit guide or beings of the light."
So overall, I think my ability to understand what you're talking about and these subjects that can cause confusion to the mind, still stems from this deep inner sense of the soul at the heart.
You mentioned Swami Veda and talking about the heart. And I feel like if you really identify with the soul, if you're spiritually at a place where you can connect and see that you're in a human body doing human things, there's room in that understanding to accept that other beings, maybe they're souls, maybe they're not, are also in other forms. So this sort of multiplicity of forms is what I come to.
Mark Gober:
Yeah, I agree. And we have different labels for these forms. And we experience them through our sensory organs, or whatever it is that our consciousness perceives. Because I guess when you passed out, you were in some other state of consciousness. But it's through a certain lens that we experienced these beings. And then people come back and say, "Well, I saw an alien." Another person says, "No, I saw a spirit guide." Another person says, "It was a being of light." And these are approximations. These are ways of communicating what people have experienced. And there seems to be a spectrum of these types of beings that have different ... just like on our planet, we have a spectrum of humans that have different interests. Some are very benevolent, some are not, some are in between. That probably applies to these other dimensions.
But what complicates it for me is the fact that these beings might be so much more advanced than us. And that is a theme that appears, that they can cloak themselves or mask themselves to appear one way when they are actually something different. And maybe in some cases, it's for a benevolent purpose because let's say it would be too overwhelming to see them let's say, in their real form. So they present themselves as something that we can handle. That would be a benevolent interpretation. And maybe that's true in some cases.
In other cases, maybe it's the opposite. They want to appear benevolent, but they're not. And even Dr. John Mack, who was the former head of psychiatry at Harvard who studied many of these alien abduction cases, in his book, he says that these aliens are consummate shape shifters, meaning that they can shift their form. Or at least the way that we perceive them, they could be one thing. And then all of a sudden, they can look like something else. And that complicates things, because how are we to know what's what?
And I think back again to David Hawkins, before I got into all of this. And he was very wary of communication with these beings, because he says that they're more advanced than us, and we can't possibly know, and there can be tricksters. And I do talk about this in the last chapter, that it's tricky.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yes, I felt even by reading your book I was inviting the conversation with these beings. So I would pause, and stop, and shield myself energetically. And even in our interview today for a while, I could feel a lot of interference. And now I feel more protected as we focus our intention.
Mark Gober:
Yeah.
Sarah Rossiter:
This idea of shape shifting and telepathic communication, you talk about this a bit. I don't know the words you use, but manifesting our reality in a sense. I find the most interesting parts of your books are the parts where you're talking about remote viewing, or psychic skills, or these metaphysical abilities that humans have, but we don't all recognize - or some are more trained in. I find those to be really fascinating. Because somehow, there's liberation there.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. It's an empowering notion that we have abilities that are often untapped. And part of our journey seems to be to unlock them.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And I'm also interested in Swami Veda and what he said about the siddhis and the heart. Can you talk about that?
Mark Gober:
Sure. Well, this was in the context of a phenomenon that's reported in UFO encounters where people claim that they were 'switched off.' Where they might see this craft in the sky, and they don't even think to take out their camera. And this is reported very often where their behavior is very strange as if they've been mind controlled or something happened to alter their consciousness. And I was reading a lot about that. And then the work of Dr. Dean Radin was parallel to this in a different context, because he wasn't looking at UFOs when he was looking at Swami Veda. And Dr. Dean Radin is the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And I know him personally because I'm on the board there. So I'm very familiar with his research. And he's written several books. One of them is called Supernormal where he looks at these what are called cities. These are incredible capabilities that people have and can be developed as we elevate consciousness. So many of the Swamis for example have the ability to bilocate, where they're in two places at once and people see them in those two places. Crazy things, magical things.
And he was doing a study with Swami Veda, a very elevated being. And he asked Swami Veda to alter reality with his mind, to affect the light beam. And this is known as psychokinesis. There have been many studies done on this, including studies at Princeton University where ordinary people are asked to alter a machine with their mind and the machine generates zeroes and ones in a random fashion. And they might say, "Sarah, you might not claim to be a psychic, but I want you to influence this machine with your mind. Try to make it generate more ones than zeros." And what happens is that people claim they can do this, or people can do this based on the statistics, even if they don't realize it. So there's a statistical deviation from chance in everyday people. It's not quite 50/50, even though it's small. When you get to someone like Swami Veda or people like in the U.S. government psychic spying program, they do way better than just that slight statistical improvement. They're able to have a very noticeable impact on the world.
But what's interesting about the case of Swami Veda when he was altering this light beam at the time that he did it, Dean Radin and the people in the room, I believe it was the cameramen. They all sort of switched off. They were in this dazed state. And when they were switched off, it corresponded with the time that Swami Veda was altering the light beam. And afterwards, he asked Swami Veda how he actually do it, how he was able to do this. And he said something to the effect of, "Well, I went inside." And he pointed to his heart. So he was able to alter reality by going inward and tapping into that sense. And I'm trying to describe it. This is something that's not tangible. So it's difficult to describe.
But this is what people often talk about is that when we achieve some kind of an inner state, we're able to alter the physical world in a certain way. And tying this back to potential aliens or other types of beings, it might be that they're in this more advanced state. And for us as humans, not many of us are like Swami Veda. We haven't got to that level. Whereas in these other species, maybe many of them are and they know how to use that ability. And maybe in some cases weaponize it for not good, but maybe in some cases use it for a benevolent means to alter someone's consciousness.
Sarah Rossiter:
I'm familiar with this phenomenon. It makes me think of pictures of the guru. I was connected with an organization where the guru had, her photographs were shared in the bookstore. And I spent several years chanting in ashram. And I having been an artist coming into this organization would see her photographs and receive messages through her eyes in the images. So I think there's a tradition of Indian gurus having their photograph taken. And then the photograph is hung in a temple and people receive initiation or information through the eyes, or the face, or the visage of person. And I think that's the same idea with having deities like Ganesh, or the Buddha having a figure made of them. This idea of transference from imagery or physical sculpture to spiritual communication.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. It's like there's a transmission of a frequency that's embedded in whatever the art is.
Sarah Rossiter:
Just this basic concept of beyond time and space, what we think is physical reality and the limitations thereof is not accurate. And I guess I had about 20 years to get used to that concept through my study of yoga that somehow allows my brain to open the door a bit to this conversation.
Mark Gober:
Yeah.
Sarah Rossiter:
In terms of, yeah, if that's possible with yogis, then it must be possible with alien life forms.
Mark Gober:
Right. Why not?
Sarah Rossiter:
And I also found it very interesting the way you reference different cultures, you know? So when you talk about shamans from Africa, or different cultures around the world, this historical way in which even ancient Egypt or this Greek text, those things have been talked about for many millennia. And maybe we're not quite there yet, but I want to talk about amnesia and how humanity has this sort of I don't remember. We have it on the individual level - we are born and we don't remember where we were two minutes before we were born. And then we have it on the collective - we don't want to talk about the bigger picture, we want to stay focused on our everyday narrative. But I put three questions in there, going back to the variety of cultures having this experience.
Mark Gober:
Well for me, that was one of the more compelling parts of my research. Because I research lots of different things. And the last time we talked, I didn't have a plan for a book. And that wasn't that long ago. These things just all of a sudden, they pop up. Because I get to a point in my research where I can start to create a framework for some of the pieces that I've researched, and I can build a narrative. And one of the powerful parts of this for me was the idea that ancient cultures around the world have described similar things of these encounters with beings, other beings. Sometimes they call them the sky people or the star people. And sometimes they're benevolent and helping them in their culture. And other times, they were malevolent or they were dangerous.
So if you look at the language that they used in some of the ancient texts, it might have a different meaning with the language lens that we have today because we have advanced technologies and we use different words. But if you think back to their times when maybe they didn't have those types of technologies, the descriptions that they use could be tied. We could relate those to modern day encounters of aliens, or UFOs, or interdimensional beings.
One example that many people point to, in addition to tribes all over the world is in the Bible and Ezekiel's vision. He encountered a fiery chariot, and creatures. And people say that that was some kind of an encounter with a UFO and aliens for example. You could read the text that way.
Sarah Rossiter:
In chapter seven, you talk about the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. And maybe you can tell us how that was found, but I just want to read this one quote that your translation of it was, "The rulers through humanity integrate confusion." So this is a text that tells a story of the beginning of humanity. "The rulers through humanity integrate confusion and a life of toil so that their people might be preoccupied with things of the world and not have time to be occupied with the holy spirit." That really stuck out to me, and it relates to what we're talking about. So if you would tell about this scripture, and how it was found.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. I'm glad you highlighted it. It actually made it into my previous book too, because I thought it was so significant. It describes our world today. And this was written second, third, fourth century AD, these scriptures. And they were hidden in a jar in the ground and found in 1945. So this is from centuries after Jesus. These were Gnostic Christians. So the mystical Christianity is what the Nag Hammadi Scriptures are associated with, but they were not found until 1945 by farmers who were looking for manure in the ground and they found this jar of books. And the books were then translated into English in the 1970s.
And what historians say is that the books were a challenge to the traditional Christian teachings. So only the heretical Gnostic scholars were thinking about them, and they had to hide the scriptures because it was too dangerous to have them or something like that. That was the way they could preserve them. And for me, that makes them more interesting. I wanted to really learn about them if they were heretical. What was so dangerous about them?
And there are many texts in the book of scriptures. It's a really thick book. And some of them are stories on the origins of humanity. Others are conversations on more just spiritual topics. And I focused in this book on some of the origin stories, because they deal with other dimensional beings or beings that were non-human that played a very big role in our origins. And what you just described is a quotation that comes after what they call 'the garden.' So presumably the Garden of Eden, which comes up in the Bible as well, of course.
That these beings that were the rulers at the time of humanity, that they ended up basically throwing us into this life of toil and confusion, and for us to be really distracted, which is what we are today as well.
But there are also other aspects of the scriptures that talk about our origins, which just to very briefly summarize the way the story goes is that there is a one consciousness, which is what you and I have talked about before and I've talked about in my books. A single consciousness, but from that consciousness, other beings have branched out. So duality emerged. And there have been rogue beings effectively that were branched out from this oneness and ended up creating this world that we inhabit. And because they're rogue, they somehow lack the same connection to the divine spark. I'm paraphrasing here. Whereas we have that connection, but we are kept in this state of ignorance, where the truth is being hidden from us. And maybe this is the amnesia that you're referring to. Maybe there's something that is being kept from us intentionally that I wonder about. And that's the origin story is that humanity is in this controlled - if you want to call it matrix, that is within the broader oneness. But because we live in a realm of duality, this darker force is trying to suppress our innate power. That's the gist of it.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And I love the phrase The Matrix. And it's my favorite movie. And I remember seeing it when I was younger, and it just opened my mind maybe as wide as any spiritual experience I've had. Just being informed of this potential of being a cog in the machine is so liberating. Just to have that pop in your mind of like, "Things are not what they seem. And could this be?" So it's pretty fantastical, but it's also I think in art, and cinema, and novels, sci-fi, fiction, it's really not that far off from what you're writing about. Have you thought at all about these incredible parallels? I mean, it makes sense to me in terms of how a creator comes up with ideas.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. I thought about it a lot. My whole world was turned upside down six years ago, where everything I thought was true. And my worldview was a strict materialist, physicalist perspective. Which is that we are a random emergence of a universe that had a big bang or something that started the universe. And then random processes created a human being of molecules bumping into each other through chemical reactions. And the human being is just this random emergence. And it eventually will die just like any machine. And that's it. There's no meaning built into any of this. It's just all random meaninglessness.
So that's where I started. And I've come a long way from that, where now I think we're part of a spiritual reality, and there are things like karma, and life after death, and reincarnation. So I've had to rethink all of these things that I used to look at. I enjoyed the movie The Matrix a long time ago, but I didn't think about it as something like a potential documentary rather than fiction. But now I do, I mean, I wonder. Because all we really know is the conscious experience that we have from the time of our earliest memory, whenever that is, to the present moment. And there's a lot we don't remember in between. But if you look at the research from the University of Virginia, where there are 2,500+ cases of children that have these memories of a previous life, and sometimes the researchers can validate what the child said with historical records or medical records. It points to the idea of amnesia, that there are things that we're not accessing that have happened to us, but we're just not conscious of it right now.
So that leaves open tons of possibilities. Is The Matrix a literal analog to what's happening right now where our actual body is in some kind of a pod? Or is it more metaphorical? Like our soul is having a virtual reality experience through this body. That's how I tend to think about it, although who knows? And also the movie Inception comes into play a lot. I don't know if you've seen that where people have dreams, within dreams, within dreams.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yes. I thought of that during reading this book. I was like, the layering of reality is endless.
Mark Gober:
It's endless. Yeah. And in some ways it's empowering and liberating, and that's maybe another reason I felt compelled to do it on a subconscious level of just knowing about this stuff. It takes off layers of maybe this amnesia or makes us more open to trying to understand our origins. But I don't feel like I have a grasp on it at all.
Sarah Rossiter:
Well, that makes me think of this quote that you have in chapter eight from Linda Moulton Howe, where she tells the story. This time, how about you talk about her first and then I'll read the quote about this multi-layered chess game.
Mark Gober:
Yes. Well, I don't know if you noticed this Sarah, but as the book went on I was more willing to go really out there. Because some of these concepts, if I started them at the beginning, they would just seem maybe too fantastic. But once we accept the reality of things like alien abductions and UFO encounters, these other ideas are not as big of stretch. So the idea that there could be other species that are very much involved in what happens to our society, that would've been a big stretch for me a long time ago. Now, okay. That's conceivable. So I give that preface to Linda Moulton Howe's story.
And she used to be a CBS reporter and had a meeting in 1999 she claims with a former DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency agent. And she was introduced by her friend who used to work at the World Bank. And they had this conversation near the harbor in Baltimore, which is not far from where I am right now synchronistically. They were sitting on a bench and they wanted to be near the boats, the DIA agent claimed because the satellites wouldn't be able to hear them as well.
And then he proceeded to tell her this story of how the government knows of competing alien races that are essentially trying to control humanity. And some of them have reptilian origin, and others are insectoid I believe. And some look more humanoid. And this has been going on for many millions of years. That's the gist of the story.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. You talked about greys. I would think, or she did.
Mark Gober:
Yeah, there were greys. I mean, in some of the other stories, they are insectoid beings. Some people call them EBENs, which is an acronym for a biological entity that are associated with these grey beings that have big eyes basically and a small mouth and a small nose that many people report.
So that's what this DIA agent told her. And she's repeated the story a number of times. And it's interesting because if you tie this to some of the abduction reports that come from again, the former head of psychiatry at Harvard, he thought these people were not psychotic, and many other researchers. They describe these various species of beings as well. And there are many other case studies or anecdotes of people encountering these beings. And where she takes it a step further through her encounter is that this has been going on for a long time. And these beings have a very big interest in what happens to our society.
Sarah Rossiter:
She says, "The full scope of the complex multilayered chess game for souls, spirits, and bodies of humans, extraterrestrials, angels, and time travelers might be beyond the human ability to understand." And then she goes on to say, "There's a secret war on earth. One group of other intelligences wants to see humans evolve into oneness with a divine field responsible for all matter. And another intelligence wants to stunt human evolution so it can continue to harvest us genetically for its own self-serving purposes." And that's the confusion of contradictory literature and religions throughout human history, just as an example. So that's a huge idea, which I feel like you touch on in your book several times. But we don't really know what to do now.
Mark Gober:
Right. This idea of competing interests, light, dark. It does come up a lot. It comes up in ancient literature. And the more the world evolves around us with current events, the more it becomes believable to me, especially with manipulation in the media. And I talk about this in my previous book, but there's a lot of what seems to be deception and light versus dark that we could point to in the world. So to think that that could be a reflection of something more metaphysical, that's totally believable to me.
But then at the very end of the book, it gets you so well, what do we do about this? I mean number one for me, and going back to your earlier point at the beginning of the interview of how should we even think about this information? Why does it matter? If there are competing interests for what happens to our planet, if there is an actual secret war going on that we have in amnesia to or we just can't see it with our eyes, then that would be helpful to know about. I think it's just part of the awareness of being in this world to know that that's the context in which we exist.
To me ultimately, the war starts with us individually trying to choose something toward unconditional love, rather than the opposite. And trying to discern who is helpful and who's trying to deceive. So even though there's all this external stuff happening, I think it's on the individual to try to make the positive shifts. And then when many individuals do that, there could potentially be a collective positive shift.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. Again, setting our intention. Okay, here's a whole bunch of evidence and a whole bunch of information, and here are some very complicated narratives, here's what's going on in the world. Here's your reality. We each have a different reality, a different experience, a life plan, soul purpose. But ultimately, maybe the one thing that binds us all is our commitment to kindness, and compassion, and just aligning ourselves with light. Love... Is the word that is used the most.
And I find that to be really uplifting, and that's where I have my most transcendent experiences when I set those parameters. But I don't want to be naive and ignore information and reality. And I've always been the kind of person who wanted to take action. I was very politically active as a young person. And it's a difficult place to be in when you start to see things from multiple angles, how to communicate on a politically specific conversation I guess when you're kind of feeling the universe from another layer.
Mark Gober:
Right. Everything takes on a different lens.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. I wonder how you deal with that.
Mark Gober:
I think about this a lot.
Sarah Rossiter:
I know that you dealt with it pretty well in your last book. You brought up things. You didn't necessarily state your position, but you say, "This could be... There are a lot of bad actors out there." I think you're really interested in pointing our awareness towards methodologies of control or manipulation so that we can be conscious.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. That's been a big one for me. Because the more I research, the more I think that's central to if you want to call it a problem, that's the problem that we have as society is some call it ignorance. And going back to The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, that was the intent of these beings is to keep humanity in a state of ignorance, ignorance meaning not being aware of the truth. And that comes about ... before I was aware of a lot of the more intentional manipulation, I just thought it was that we were an immature species. And I do think that's part of it.
But if there are forces that are inducing immaturity, that's important to know about also. Because that's going to keep us from becoming more mature. And I think we just have to be aware of it because, and this is more my third book of not viewing, and I mentioned political leaders in particular because the books about political structures. We're trained to view politicians as benevolent. And maybe some of them are, but not all of them are. So we can't always take what they say at face value or what they're messaging, what they're telling us about the world is not always in our best interest. That is not something that's traditionally taught in a spiritual teaching. I mean, maybe to the extent of when people talk about discernment, that's there a bit. But we're not taught from many spiritual gurus about how to look at the media, for example. At least that's not something I came across very often.
And that can be a big pitfall because what we know about the world often comes from what the media tells us. But what if the media's not always being honest because they have different interests? They don't necessarily want us to know the full truth. Maybe it's skewed. We need to know that because we might base our actions in life on what these people tell us. And if they don't care about us in the way that we care about us, then we might make a big mistake for our individual development.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. I think that's why I was drawn to studying art, because it's about understanding the medium, the message, the ability to deconstruct society's intentions and look behind the visual. I think when I went to school in the late '80s, early '90s, it was really in New York anyways and in intellectual artistic circles, it was really a big time of political awareness and deconstructing power structures basically. And that really appealed to me in terms of how we understand messages. And always looking behind it, always looking around it. Who's paying for this? What's the intention. What's the goal? And I feel like as an artist, that's one of our superpowers is the ability to feel, see, and know from other angles.
And I just want to mention one part of your book where you talk about channeling. And I forget her name, but it's Helen I think. She talks about the science of channeling and she says that we are all channeling unconsciously all the time. Our thoughts being influenced, even if we don't know that it's happening. And when you have a creative thought, where does it come from? I thought that was a really interesting question and worth a little more investigation.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. Well if there are interdimensional beings out there that we can't see, and if our thoughts are not exclusively from the brain, which is what I spent a lot of my prior work investigating, this idea that consciousness is processed by the brain or received by it, but not produced by it. Then that opens the possibility for unseen influences in our behavior. What if we're picking up a signal that is inducing a certain creative insight, like you do a piece of artwork and you're like, "Where did that come from?" And the impulse came from an external source that you happened to pick up on that. And that could be maybe for a positive purpose, or you could have maybe manipulative beings there. I don't know the answer to it, but I also don't know where an idea comes from. When I get an idea out of nowhere, how did that emerge? Is that just a spontaneous random event from a brain, or is it being influenced by another intelligence?
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And I've through practice in the last few years, it started with channeling divine energy from a yogic perspective of allowing consciousness and very big capital C to flow through me. And then over the years, I've started to understand maybe more individual varieties of consciousness. And now in specific, I channel angel energy through paintings at times. But I can't answer the question of specifically who, what, and where. Sometimes, as I've noticed with other people that are psychic or spiritual guides, they'll say, "Well, I channel a collective. This is a group of beings who are here to support humanity's development," or they might say the beings of light. There's this amorphous quality to it. And at times I have asked for specifics in terms of communicating with my guides. I'm like, "Well, exactly who are you?" And I get some names. And it's a variety. Some come from the Hindu tradition of goddesses like Lakshmi and Saraswati, and then others will come from more I guess it's Christianity that talk about angels like Archangel Michael. It's just really confusing to understand in a historical context how do all these things fit in, but it seems there're many names of consciousness in many forms. And I just try to keep aligning with the positive.
Mark Gober:
Yeah. I think that's the key. Going back to what I said earlier, the teachings of David Hawkins, he says we have to be very discerning in this area trying to tap into like you said Sarah, tapping into the light beings. Because we're dealing with a level of sophistication that is so beyond what we're doing. And the phrase he always used was he was saying, "These beings have been added for eons, and we're much younger than them. And they can manipulate us in so many ways we don't even realize it." So he's just like, "Focus on your spiritual development. Make sure you do that and tap into things that are pointing toward a state of love and compassion."
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah. And we're so lucky to have so many great spiritual teachers to learn from like him, and all of the teachers that I've had. You kind of can drop the specifics of the person and just look at the teachings. And there's so many parallels. And ultimately after the experience of reading your book and questioning a lot of my ideas and influences, I still feel quite strong as a human, as a spirit soul human. I'm like, "We got this. We're strong. We can handle adversity. We can handle manipulation and shapeshifters." And I still feel quite identified with the spiritual text that you quoted that was found-
Mark Gober:
The Nag Hammadi.
Sarah Rossiter:
Yeah and I was wondering how you were going to end the book, and then you did end with that quote of how things are going to go down.
Mark Gober:
Right. In the scripture, if we take it to be something factual, it ends by saying that darkness would be wiped out. That light would ultimately prevail. In spite of our beginnings, where we were manipulated by this rogue being that created this matrix and suppressed our innate spiritual power. In the end, darkness would be wiped out.
Sarah Rossiter:
So I think we should stop there because that's really positive. But I know there's so much more to your book and your project. And I look forward to learning more from you, Mark. Thank you.
Mark Gober:
Thank you again for having me, Sarah. And thank you for being willing to have this conversation.
Sarah Rossiter:
I hope that more people are, for all of our sake, able to - I think it's really important to be willing to expand our consciousness to unknown subjects, right?
Mark Gober:
Yeah.
Sarah Rossiter:
That's a big part of your project.
Mark Gober:
That's a big part of it. And I want to help others who are willing, because I know some people are not willing to do that. I know for me, I've been very willing and continue to be willing. And I know others, if they had that little spark and maybe just open the door a little bit, it could be very transformative. And that's what's behind a lot of the work that I do.
Sarah Rossiter:
Wonderful. Thanks Mark.
Mark Gober:
Thank you again.
My two previous conversations with Mark about his earlier books are:
Episode 15: Transcendent Consciousness with Author Mark Gober
Episode 61: Contemplating Liberty and Freedom with Author Mark Gober
Connect with Mark Gober:
Website: https://markgober.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markgober_author
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markgoberauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkGoberAuthor
Sarah Rossiter is an artist, psychic and teacher.
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