Transcendent Consciousness with Author Mark Gober
Welcome to the Psychic Artist Podcast
For this episode my guest is Mark Gober. Mark is an award-winning author and international speaker. His books An End to Upside Down Thinking and An End to Upside Down Living examine consciousness and psychic phenomena from a scientific perspective, and seek to propose ways we can utilize this awareness to improve our daily lives. He is also the host of Where Is My Mind? podcast, where he interviews world-leading scientists and consciousness researchers.
Listen to the podcast here:
Transcendent Consciousness with Author Mark Gober
My guest today is Mark Gober. He is an author and speaker who examines consciousness and psychic phenomena from a scientific perspective. And he seeks to propose ways that we can use this awareness to improve our lives. He is also the host of Where Is My Mind? podcast. Mark and I have a great conversation about the paradigm shift that he has experienced from thinking life is random to life has meaning. Mark also shares insights from his meditation practice and we talk about my favorite subject, tapping into consciousness to fuel creativity. And at the end, there is a surprise visitor with a message for Mark.
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.
Welcome, Mark. I would love it if you could introduce yourself and just let us know a little bit about what you're up to and what you're thinking about these days.
Sure. Well, thank you for having me, Sarah. My background is in business. And yeah, I've become very interested in the topic of consciousness and I've written two books and done a podcast on that topic, but the story of how I got there is pretty interesting. That's something I never would have expected myself. I went to Princeton as an undergraduate and went into investment banking right after that like a lot of my classmates did. I wasn't thinking about the topics that I now write about then, but I was kind of on a mainstream track. Went into investment banking during the financial crisis of 2008, was there until 2010 and then joined a firm in Boston and then joined their Silicon Valley office. Spent 10 years there. It's called Sherpa Technology Group, advising technology companies on their business strategy and intellectual property.
So within that process, in 2016, I was listening to podcasts. I was not looking for a new worldview at the time, but was listening to business podcasts, health podcasts. And there was one called Extreme Health Radio, which talks about alternative ways of healing, and there was a woman on named Laura Powers being interviewed. And it was just the next one in the queue. I didn't single out that interview. And she started talking about psychic abilities and the fact that she worked with clients using these abilities and all sorts of things that sounded really out there to me, but she spoke in a very serious matter. And when I say serious, I mean she didn't sound like she was joking about it. She didn't sound like she was delusional. She sounded like she was describing her experience.
So that interview didn't change my life at the time, but it was enough where at the end of the interview Laura mentioned her own podcast called Healing Powers. And I said, "That's interesting. Well, I have a long drive every day from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. So I'm just going to... This is a new podcast I can listen to." But I turned on her podcast and long story short, within a few weeks, I listened to every episode from 2016 back to 2011 when it started. And I was extremely disoriented because I realized there were lots of people that were describing this picture of reality that I had not been familiar with myself. That there were other dimensions, there were lots of things happening that we don't see with our eyes, but most importantly, the idea that life has meaning. Because the way I looked at things based on the science that I learned in school and just what I read was that life is random. And we can try to create meaning in our lives, but there's nothing built into the fabric of reality that has meaning.
So that's the way I looked at life. I thought that's just what science was teaching us. The more we learn, the more that's what everything said is that we live in a random, meaningless universe. Even though that sounds bleak, that's just what science says. And here I was learning about people who were having direct experiences. Some of them were scientists too, but mostly people that had direct experiences, that point is something totally different. So I was like, "Okay, I need to rethink things here." And I started to look at the science behind it and that led me down a rabbit hole, which led to my first book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, which I wrote it about a year after first hearing Laura Powers' podcast and then doing my own research. It was published in 2018. Then I did my own podcast in 2019 where I interviewed many of the scientists, including Laura also, but that inspired my work called Where Is My Mind?
And then I published a book in 2020 called An End to Upside Down Living which explores basically the awakening journey, how one lives with this new perspective on life. And the end of 2019, I had decided to leave my firm after becoming a partner. Just felt like it wasn't fully aligned. And that was right before the pandemic. So during the pandemic period, which happened to perfectly coincide with my transition out of my job, I got to spend a lot of time in meditation. I actually went on two meditation retreats, silent retreats right before the pandemic hit. And I also spent a ton of time researching still. I'm always very curious to understand what reality is. I feel like I'm constantly relearning and deconditioning my old ways of thinking.
That is awesome. I love your story.
Thanks.
And how are you feeling now? What was the result of the meditation retreats or this sort of time off from COVID?
Well, it's sometimes hard to tell because I'm seeing things on a day-to-day basis, but when I look back at how I used to think of things maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago or three years ago, I can see the differences over that long period of time. I think being forced to sit still for as long as I have over the past year plus has been very valuable for me because I never did that. I was always so focused on the next achievement. And even when I was in high school, I was so worried about the advanced classes. I was a competitive tennis player. I was one of the captains of the tennis team at Princeton. So my whole life - it was always the next thing I had to do.
Doing.
Right. So I've been forced to just sit and after those meditation retreats, which forced me to sit for the first time, even prior to that, and even after all the research I had done, I still could barely sit for 15 minutes. And then I was being forced for five, six days straight. No gesturing, no talking, no nothing. So now it's much easier for me to sit after being forced to do those long retreats. And for the first maybe let's say year from the time I did those retreats, I was averaging a lot of meditation a day like in the range of five hours a day, not consecutively, but a lot of sitting.
And it got to the point where I didn't really feel like I just wanted to meditate. I felt like I had to meditate. Like this physical energy was coming in that I had never felt before. I'd heard people kind of talk about it, but it's difficult to relate to other people's experiences sometimes because if you haven't had that experience yourself, they're describing a sensation and it's hard to pinpoint it, but that energy started to come in.
So it was almost like this energy, whatever it is, needed to have time to work its way through my system. And so I think that's had a big impact and it's allowed me to be very introspective, which has been helpful. But it's also given me time to synthesize when I research because I'm spending so much time reading and learning about different things. And when I sit in that space, I'm not always silent in my mind. There's stuff happening. So it's almost like part of my research process to sit for that long and to organize my thoughts.
People like Einstein, inventors in the field of science that... You had many quotes like this in your book too or in your podcast, people who are in that field of quantum physics and can say things like it's possible that psychic abilities exist. Einstein, I think more specifically was in his creative process of accessing information that later became science was tapping into a meditative space.
Yeah. It's hard to put language to it, to what you're describing, but so many people have talked about it. The idea is that insights that we all have, ideas, creativity, that is not something that our body's producing. Rather, we are like tapping in like a cell phone tapping into the cloud. And when we get into a meditative space however we do that, for each of us, it might be different, it's like getting a clearer signal. That's one way to think about it. For me in my process, it's not like I sit there... And even before I was meditating, I wrote two books before that and did a podcast series. So there was still creativity and maybe coming in a different way, but now I've been able to observe it a bit more. It's not like a hear a voice, I know some people do, and it's not like I can always pinpoint exactly how the creativity comes in.
But when I look back maybe like where I am today versus a week ago in terms of just how I view a certain topic that I've been researching, I realized that I have a framework for thinking about it that I simply didn't have not long ago. So it can be a gradual process. And I look back, even if I look back at some of my books, let's say parts of my book, wow, the way I organize that, that's interesting. Like something must've been happening where I was tapping into something that allowed me to organize it in that way because maybe I don't know how I thought about or I could've come up with that.
Other people, it might be more striking where it's like a bolt of lightning where all of a sudden they have this amazing insight. For me, it feels more gradual. And it also doesn't feel like it's coming from me in many ways because so much of what I do is research-based. That the insight might be, wow, that I was led to listen to this podcast and I learned an important idea there. So the insight was in the being led to be interested in something or the breadcrumbs that led me to something.
So do you feel like there's a new way that you are operating in the world, say compared to five years ago because of your interest in this subject and your commitment to this study? Do you feel like your way of being has shifted?
Yeah. So I would say immensely.
Your relationship to time.
Well, yeah.
What does that feel like? I also share a similar experience, so I want to hear from you what it feels like. How would you entice somebody into this way of being?
Well, the way I think about it is that people do it on their own time because it requires a worldview shift and a different way of being in the world. And you're reminding me of something a friend said to me, who is a classically trained doctor. A very smart, great guy. When I first got into all the science and I was talking to him about some of the research, probably back in 2017, his response was something like, "Mark, I bet you're right about a lot of this, but my life's pretty good and I don't want to mess with it. And I know if I even scratched the surface of what you're doing, my life would change a lot." And he's right because it's a shift in paradigm, meaning that the fundamental way of looking at the world changes. And even more than that, the fundamental way of looking at our own selves changes and our own identity.
Maybe that's the biggest thing for me that's shifted. My identity used to be associated with the body and Mark Gober, and that's who I am and that's it. And now I view that sense of being a body and this character Mark Gober as that is real too to an extent, but it's within a much longer timeline and a much more multi-dimensional reality. And this is maybe one of the hardest things to wrap our heads around as human beings with brains that see the world in a certain way, the idea that there is a reality that exists. That at some level we know exists and yet we are not accessing it or we've forgotten it and we have an amnesia. That's really trippy idea. But that's kind of the core of this view of reality. There's much more than meets the eye. There's much more than what we perceive.
And like you said with time, what is time? I never had thought about it in a serious way before. It seemed like there were sequence. I could remember things from the past and I can think about the future and there was a present moment, but time is much weirder than that. Even the past is an inference. I remember things from the past. So that's in my mind, but I can't prove that it was exactly the way I'm remembering it. So I think it was there. All I ever know is what's in the moment right now that I'm experiencing. And so like when I'm in a meditative state or just in an everyday state, I feel that more. And then time sometimes slows down or it speeds up. It's just much stranger than it used to be.
I like when I hear from science, ideas about time or quantum physics, how time can bend or time is unique for each individual, I feel like that's a huge area to explore. And what you did in your book and podcast was make connections between these two worlds that have been sort of polemical and said, well, people here say this and people here say this, and it's kind of the same thing in some cases. Not everybody agrees, and in some cases the language is slightly different. But there's so many ways to look at it. Consciousness.
Yes.
I wonder if we could talk about any specifics in terms of meditation? Like what kind of meditation did you do or any particular teachers or teachings that resonated for you, or from the scientific side of it, which people you've found inspirational or supported you in your journey?
I'll start with the scientific side of it because that's where my journey really started. It was trying to understand evidence because I had to convince myself that I wasn't going crazy. First I definitely thought I was. I was influenced by brand names in the beginning because that gave me like a justification if I was talking to people and I could say, "Look, this person from Harvard said this," or "This person who worked at the US government said this."
So the University of Virginia, for example, has a lab, a division of perceptual studies that's been around for decades, and they study phenomenon like the evidence for reincarnation. Children who are usually between the ages of around two and five years old who have memories of a previous life, over 2,500 cases. These are real doctors studying this stuff. And sometimes they find birthmarks or physical defects in the child that aligned with what they describe about this past life. And sometimes the researchers can find a medical record, not always, but in those cases, it's pretty compelling when you see that someone died in this manner and here's a child describing it and has birthmarks or other kinds of physical changes that correspond to how they died in the previous life. Things like that were very impactful.
Dr. Dean Radin's work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where I joined the board of, it's called IONS for short. And they study these phenomenon and have peer-reviewed papers on all those kinds of psychic abilities, remote healing, things like that. Princeton University had a lab run by the former Dean of Engineering, and I actually overlapped with this lab when I was there in undergrad. I didn't know about it because it was sort of underground in the engineering department. It was so controversial they didn't like talking about it, but they've done many, many studies on a lot of this stuff.
So those were my starting points in terms of the science. In terms of the personal development, spiritual growth aspect, when I went on those two silent meditation retreats, they were with a husband and wife. One is named Adyashanti, a pretty well-known spiritual teacher and his wife is Mukti. And so they have different styles, but it kind of a similar philosophy. And it was great to go on retreats with them individually and be in that silence space with them because while the individuals were silent, you had an opportunity to ask questions. So that was the one thing you could do during certain periods when they were giving lectures. That's the only time you could talk, but it was a lot of them just talking about life and their experiences as spiritual teachers. So to be in the space of silence internally and then get to listen to those lectures was really helpful.
They have a similar method which is almost a non-method to meditation, meaning they don't say, "I want you to focus on your breath in this manner or put your thoughts in this direction." They kind of have a surrendered attitude that you sit in the space and just be. And at their retreat, they have a two-page sheet. It's actually the only thing you're allowed to read. You can't have... There's no internet, no books. Just that little meditation sheet. And that's what I've been doing. So when I sit, I just sit in a space of trying to unite my mind with the idea that there is a transcendent consciousness and be in unity with that and be still with that. And when I do it, this energy comes in, this physical stuff that I feel.
Transcendent consciousness is a beautiful term. Yeah, I don't know much about Adyashanti and Mukti, but Mukti is my spiritual name that I got from a lineage that was Kashmir Shaivism based. I'm curious what their lineage is, but it almost sounds a bit more Buddhist, even though I think they're from an Indian background.
I believe Adyashanti, early in his spiritual life was Zen Buddhist, but he now considers himself non-denominational. And at Mukti's retreat, we did Qigong, so there is an influence there. But they're non dual teachers, generally speaking. They don't adhere to any specific tradition.
Have you looked into much like yogic history in relation to your practice or science or... I feel like there's something in these ancient Sanskrit texts that would be interesting to you. Do you have any interest in that?
I definitely do. And I've been drawn to a lot of the teachers of Vedanta, which is the mystical Hinduism. I've definitely been influenced probably by that spiritual tradition, more than anything else, because I think they get to fundamental truths. I mean, all the spiritual traditions say essentially the same thing, but for whatever reason I was drawn in that direction. So, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramana Maharshi. Spent a lot of time with their works and they’re getting to fundamental questions about who are we or what are we, more broadly? And that's Ramana Maharshi's question, Who am I? That's his meditation. You ask yourself, Who am I? Who am I really? And when you start thinking about it and meditate on that more and more, you realize that the essence of what we are is not our body.
Our essence is the thing that experiences our body. It's a reversal in how we think about it. I mean, I haven't gotten to this point personally, but those who have done that for a long time, describe this endless process of self discovery. The most interesting thing to them becomes understanding who they are because there's infinite understanding to be learned there.
Yeah. I don't really have any questions. Its cool. Listening to you has put my mind in a state of non-thinking. I'm just experiencing what you're describing and it's really nice. I wanted to talk a little bit about creativity today, but I'm not sure how to go there. One thing that you posted on Instagram caught my eye, it was talking about someone's research on left brain with the logic and reasoning and right brain with intuition and creativity, maybe you want to start there.
Yeah. Well, in terms of neuroscience. So, my view of the brain, and this is the subject of my first book and my podcast, is that the brain is not producing our consciousness. The consciousness is our sense of experiencing life and traditionally we're taught that the reason we have the ability to experience anything, and we have the capacity to be aware and to have emotions, is we have a complex brain and there's lots of chemical and electrical reactions happening in our skull and that produces the experiences we have. When I argue in many others have argued this as well, is that that's part of the story. The brain is involved in the way we experience the world, but it's not producing it. It's acting almost like a filtering mechanism or like an antenna that's tapping into a signal or like a blindfold. I think that's more of a precise metaphor.
That this broader reality exists and we are unable to perceive all of it because of our brain and our body. The analogy given by the philosopher, Dr. Bernardo Castro is that we are like whirlpools within an infinite stream of consciousness. So we have the sense of being an individual and yet we're interconnected. So we're separate, but we're not separate. So going back to your question about creativity in the brain and left brain, right brain, what neuroscience says today and this is in general terms. That the different hemispheres of the brain have different roles in the way we process consciousness. The left brain is typically associated with logic and reasoning and the right brain is typically associated more with creativity, maybe artistic abilities.
And one of the patterns I've seen in my research is that right brained thinking or right brain focus people tend to be more intuitive or psychic. It's like they're tapping into parts of the stream outside their whirlpool by using that part of their brain, or maybe by quieting other parts of the brain, something like that.
Would you propose that your practice of meditation recently might have slowed down your left brain engagement or just allowed it to pause while you opened up the right brain engagement?
I think it very well could be. Or that it's allowing more balance, because the left brain still feels super active and maybe it just needs to slow down still or...
Or there's more communication between the two.
Or there's more communication. Is that the left brain, that's great, let it go. But the right brain has to be there too and there should be a synthesis or a balance.
With a conversation like, "Hey, I have this thought, I'm going to do this thing." And the right brains like, "Yeah, let's do it in this way. Let's bring in this intuition." And left brain's like, "Yeah, let's do 100 of those." And the right brain's like, "Okay, sure."
Right.
I've noticed that recently with my podcast or just with business, when I'm coming at my work from a more intuitive perspective and really tapped in, it goes a lot faster and there's way more productivity and it's sort of... I just have to catch up with it. I'm getting downloads of information. For example, when I contacted you to do a interview, I went out for a walk and sat under a tree just to kind of be still and I just got this huge download of information about a course that I should teach about creativity and consciousness.
And I had to come back and write it all down. It was like three pages. It's interesting how... And it was nothing I hadn't conceived of with my left brain. It was like the right brain got the inspiration and told the left brain, "Write it in this way." And then my left brain was able to... Or my rational side was able to say, "Oh yeah, well, if you're going to have a section on somatic experiential learning then you should teach this guided awareness that you learned when you were a yoga teacher." It started to connect the dots but the inspiration was kind of beyond my understanding when it came in.
I can relate to that.
Well, maybe I'll get you to be a guest speaker for that course.
Okay. That'd be fun.
What would you want to talk about? I thought that you would want to talk more about intellectual things like how to harness the mind for creativity, but I'm not sure anymore. I'm curious what your instinct would be just off the cuff.
My mind always goes to the most fundamental principles. So when you talk about creativity, I start asking why does creativity matter? Why is it that we care to be creative or not or care about not being creative? And it gets to questions about why we exist at all? What is the purpose of being a human being?
It is essentially the question. When anybody really looks deeply, I learned a process called Vichara a long time ago, and we would practice with other people in the group and you ask a series of four questions and inevitably, every single person would get to the bottom of whatever issue was bothering them that day, the bottom root issue was like, "I'm afraid to die." And then after you get past that, it was, "What's the difference between me and consciousness? Who am I?"
Yeah. You're reminding me of a spiritual teacher that I've read and listened to a lot of. Dr. David Hawkins, who was a psychiatrist. I find him interesting because he was an expert at deconstructing the ego professionally. And then he went through a series of incredible enlightening experiences and wrote all kinds of books but he described exactly what you said. He calls it the "And then what game." So, if someone's worried about something you say, "I'm really worried about my job. Maybe I'm going to get fired." And he says, "And then what? So you got fired, so you don't have a job." And then you, "Okay. Then I'm going to be on the streets and I'm not going to have any money, I'm not going to be able to eat." "And then what?" And you keep doing this and then it's like, "And then I die." And then he goes, "So?"
"And then what?"
Right. And then what? And then why is death such a big deal? That's how he would look at it. And a lot of people that have been in these elevated states, they say, "Well, death is not even a real thing. I mean, death is the termination of the experience within the body, but there is no death. Death is impossible at the level of consciousness." So when the fear of death is eradicated, because we realize death is a false construct. The belief that when your body's done, it's lights out. When you realize that's not true, then a lot of the fears start to go away.
Yeah. I want to talk more about death, but I interrupted your thought before about where you go when this fictional course that you might be a speaker on, where you would go to talk about creativity?
Okay. So, I would return to these fundamental questions. Why does creativity matter? Why does the human being matter? And that would help, I think with... So my perspective on this, and I'll give some science to back it up, is that we exist to evolve our consciousness. That's why we exist in a body. And when we evolve our consciousness individually, we are evolving the collective stream. So, we exist to improve ourselves and we see this in the near death experience research. These are instances where a person has some kind of major trauma. Let's say it's cardiac arrest. Heart stops, speeding, blood stops slowing the brain after a certain amount of time and yet some people, when they're resuscitated after this experience of clinical death, they say, "I had this amazing experience with my consciousness. I was hovering over my body. I was immersed in unconditional love. I encountered these inter-dimensional beings. I encountered deceased loved ones." Like really crazy stuff.
But this has been happening. There are millions of cases and in the last few decades, resuscitation technology has gotten much better, and there are many more of them. And sometimes what people perceive when they're out of their body and then they come back and say what happened, it's reported as being accurate. So, the doctor in the room might say, "Well, how did you know that? That's exactly what happened during the surgery." And "You couldn't have known that because I know you were clinically dead. Your brain could not have processed this." And the reason I mentioned those cases, they're known as veritical cases, meaning they're verified as accurate. It means that the consciousness was not a hallucination. By definition, if they got something right, if they saw something accurately, even though they should have been dead, then it was accurate.
And I make that point because we can learn a lot about the nature of reality based on what happens in these experiences when the brains out of the way, and people are experiencing things. It might be real. And one of the things that comes up often, in, by various estimates, 20 to 25% of the near-death experience reports, people have a life review where they relive their life in a flash. They relive experiences, not only through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of people that they impacted. Sometimes they feel the indirect effects, so if they harmed someone, they might feel how that harm therefore impacted someone else who wasn't even in the direct scene. And they come back to their bodies and they have a whole new priority on life. They realize that what matters is the way in which they treat people, where their actions loving or unloving, and they, sometimes they get divorced, they change their jobs because of this.
So, if we combine this idea that there is a learning aspect to life with the reincarnation research, like what's done at the university of Virginia, there seems to be an engine for evolution. We're here to learn things and to embody these spiritual principles while we're in a body. And the reincarnation cycle allows us to have different experiences in different bodies to learn new things. So, if that's true, then what is creativity? Well, creativity is maybe the embodiment of whatever makes us unique to do what we're here to do, and to be a vessel of whatever these spiritual principles are. And each of us might have different types of creativity as different biological beings. So to me, that's the baseline for, why am I thinking about creativity in the first place? And then I would infer, maybe that then opens up creativity once we understand why it matters in the first place... It's almost like we're puzzle pieces within this cosmic puzzle and each of us is a unique one so, we're able to do unique things and creativity is part of that. So, it's therefore our duty to embody that sense of being a puzzle piece and being creative in the way that's unique to us.
Yeah. It sounds great. I wonder what you feel like your creative output is going to be next.
I've been working on a third book based on all the research I've been doing. It kind of combines metaphysical principles with political and economic theory and a lot of what's happening in the world. We'll see where it goes, but that's where a lot of my research has been focused. I'm always learning new things. I'm open to all kinds of ways of... I never know what's going to happen next. I never thought I would write one book. That's not why I started this process. And when I wrote one and people started asking me, "Are you going to write other books?" I was like, "I'm surprised I wrote one. I have no content for another book. I don't know what you're talking about." And then all of a sudden, a second book came and then I thought that was it. So, I'm seeing that it's almost like a glass that gets filled up with water and then it's emptied out and when it's empty there's room for new stuff to come in and when it's full, I can't even conceive that there could be any more.
That's a long way of saying that I do feel like there is creativity that has been coming through this vessel, but I never would have predicted. I don't know what's going to be next exactly. We'll see with this potential third book. I don't have a plan for a second podcast season, but who knows? Maybe there are things that I can't predict and I think that's an important part of creativity. Is that by definition, it's a new insight. It's something that's not within our mind already. It's like an invention, something that's new and you can't predict what that's going to be.
Yeah. And sometimes you can look back and say, "Oh, well, that made perfect sense." But you would not have come up with the context sometimes from where you are now. Or before you wrote your book, you were in such a different paradigm that it was inconceivable to your mind at that time. But something in you allowed it to happen or was ready for it or welcomed it or signed up and was like, "Oh, all right. I want to do something totally... Flip my whole reality on my head."
Well, what you just said gets to a very important point and it relates to intention. That's one thing I have done very consciously and increasingly over the past five years, is to set an intention for why do I care about anything? How do I view myself in the world and why I'm here as this vessel of uniqueness as each of us is? So each of us has our own... We have our own uniqueness and the intention, the way I direct my compass, which is my second book is all about this, is answering this question. What's the overall intention of my life? That's how I start the book.
And when setting that intention to be a vessel in whatever way we can to perfect ourselves individually so that we can be of service in some way, then maybe it's easier for the creativity to come in however it will manifest because that's the way I set my intention. Is that I don't know exactly how I'm going to manifest, but I'm open to it. And generally what I want to be doing is in the field of perfecting myself so that I can be of service in some way without specifying how any of that will manifest.
Yeah. This reminds me of ego and non-attachment. And when you say perfecting myself, I think a lot of people can relate, we all have this desire to get better at something in life, and that can be in the mainstream society or in a more consciousness arena. But I feel like we should talk about ego and non-attachment and maybe what that process has been like for you or what you discovered in your various realms of investigation. Because I found in art making, so I was an artist for my whole life and then simultaneously in my thirties, I experienced a spiritual awakening through a guru, through initiation, through a path but I had no preconceptions. I had no interest in yoga or I didn't have an interest in religion or Hinduism at the time. I didn't even actually know what Hinduism was. So, that to...
I didn't even actually know what Hinduism was. That to me was my scientific proof of like, "This shit is real," because I had no... I just got hit over the head basically. I walked into an ashram in Oakland, and I thought, "Oh, it says yoga. All right, maybe they have a class here." And then down the hall comes this guru. And I didn't even know what a guru was. I thought maybe she was like a famous lady from India or something because she was wearing red and she had a dot on her head and all these ladies were following her. So I was like, "Oh, she must be important." I thought maybe she was a monk. I didn't know the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism. I was just really oblivious. And she walked right up to me. I skipped all the people in the hallway, put her hands on my face, and looked into my eyes.
And I had a complete, incredible experience. Through her eyes, I saw the universe, I saw what it looked like in outer space. It was just so expansive. And I got a feeling in my heart of complete compassion coming from her that she understood all my pain and suffering. And it simultaneously validated my ego. "Yes, I'm a victim. And my whole life, nobody has understood all the suffering," and freed me on the other hand from that. And then it was a process of many years of undoing that attachment to that particular part of the ego. But through that lineage, and I'd say through studying the Yoga Sutras or yoga teacher training, that tradition, the value of non-attachment is really taught. As you let go of your attachment to the outcome, you're present for what is. And you're not making choices because you want to look good, you're more making choices because you're present and this is service.
And then as an artist and creativity, I transferred those ideas into art-making and I realized the process of art-making was so wrought with ego and identity, and this enormous art history of the identity of the painter. I've learned so much about this. And then coming back to art-making, I couldn't really, with a straight face, just make art without undoing the mind. I had to find a way to sort of put the ego over there, be non-attached to the outcome.
I created a process where I made paintings that I said, "No one's going to see them, and I'll just make them really fast, and I'll come back a month later and I'll cut them up into pieces, and then I'll scan them, and then I'll look at them." It's like trying to undo my attachment to making a great work of art allowed me so much freedom that I could be more present. And I guess I just went on that tangent because I felt like there was something there in what you said about perfecting myself, and then being of service that maybe you wanted to speak to.
The process of perfecting ourselves, I think is in a spiritual sense, which includes the notion of non-attachment. Because if we acknowledge that there is this greater intelligence within the stream of consciousness that we're tapping into, that were whirlpools that have only a tiny bit of that intelligence. And we don't really know what the answers are to anything. And therefore, we can't know what an ideal outcome is. And if that's taken out to the extreme, if we're fully rational about it, it becomes irrational to say that we know what an outcome should be, because we literally do not know what should be best.
And therefore, that opens us up to being a vessel of just doing what feels right and what feels like virtuous to do our best and to try our best, but not knowing what needs to happen. And I think it's part of the spiritual perfection process, if there's a... Not that there's an end state, I think there's always progress, but it's this desire to constantly release ourselves of our attachment, because it's so difficult. There's so much conditioning in our lives of thinking that we are this person, we have so many aspects of our identity, things that we think we want. To relieve ourselves of all those, and to say, "Yes, we can want those things still, but we're not attached to them." It's like layers that continually come off.
Yeah, and it's a back and forth play. Doing and non-doing, like we started talking about at the beginning. With a lot of meditation, at times, I have felt like doing nothing, just being in bliss and checking in. And then other times, like now, it feels like, take all that you've learned, and do a very specific task. Perfect that skill. There's a skillfulness and a one-pointed focus, but there's simultaneously, non-attachment.
A lot of Indian references are coming up today. I'm thinking about the story of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita of being a warrior and being tasked with performing your soul purpose. This is what his divine purpose was, and yet having to kill the people in your extended family, having to move forward on something that you don't fully understand, take a leap of faith and give your all, but it may not be like this idea of virtuousness, and what feels right is a tricky arena. Sometimes, what we think is virtuous is not.
So we do our best. I mean, that's really the best we can do. And it goes to non-attachment. We don't know what's best. I think we learn a lot from the near-death experience and other types of mystical experiences. There seem to be principles that... Like University of Virginia professor, Dr. Bruce Greyson, he calls it natural law. That's what emerges from people who have near-death experiences. They say this, "Well, we don't learn about morality, we're learning about natural law."
That's how visceral it feels, that there is this desire to embody a loving, not even emotion, but a sense of being, because apparently, that is the nature of consciousness itself. When people get in these states, they say like, "Love is not an emotion, it's just the state of consciousness that we're tapping into." To try to embody that as much as possible for ourselves and others seems to be a universal principle from which virtue can follow.
It seems to me that that might be the ultimate goal of these experiential lives that we live over and over again, is to get closer to that: fully embodying a loving experience.
I think so. I mean, that's one way of putting... The evolutionary process is evolving toward a state of what some would call unconditional love and unity. They're one and the same, basically that, what is consciousness itself? Like we were talking about earlier. What I would say, based on the research that I've done, is that consciousness is a non-physical state of unconditional love that is uniting all of the various points of awareness that we experience.
And yet, we are born in these bodies, so this is the place to work. I feel like there's a real purpose, for me anyways, in being in this particular vessel and particular lifetime, that there is a purpose and a opportunity to learn and understand. And I also really liked what you said about our consciousness. "As we exist to evolve our consciousness, so it affects the collective stream." Do you want to go into that a little bit more?
Yeah, I think it's a really key point, that we are all contributing as individual puzzle pieces, but it's part of the overall artwork. And when we... The analogy that's often used is that when we evolve individually, the sea level rises and everyone in the collective is impacted by the individual's movement toward a state of enlightenment or closer to that. And in spiritual circles, people will sometimes talk about the idea that one enlightened guru can have such an impact on so many people, that there's this exponential amount of growth that can come from one person becoming more elevated, that it helps many people in ways that we can see, but also maybe in unseen ways, because reality is so mysterious and multi-dimensional and non-linear.
We don't know what happens when we heal something within ourselves, for instance. We don't know what that's doing, rippling through the field of consciousness. That's why I use that phrase, the perfection of ourself. It comes from David Hawkins as well. He even says that our contribution to the world is the perfection of our own self. For that reason, that when we become more spiritually elevated, we are elevating the collective as well.
It sounds like your third book is taking that concept into this specific lifetime and looking more at world events and politics from this perspective.
Yeah.
And that is an area that I have been avoiding. I would love to know how that's going for you.
I have generally avoided it too, but it's for whatever reason, that's where the creativity has steered me. Questions like... I still am not sure exactly where it's going to go, but questions like, "What's the optimal way of organizing society, given all these spiritual principles? How do we govern ourselves? What are our individual rights? And things like that. Very fundamental questions. "What is the nature of... What is government? What does that even mean if we think about ourselves as an interconnected stream?"
It's important to try to translate these things back into everyday life or this world.
Right.
It's like, going in, coming out. And it's really hard sometimes to be a spiritual person or a meditator and come back into this world just literally like, you might sit in one room by yourself in silence, and then you walk out the door and there's four people there that you've got to interact with, and there's a friction. I feel like perhaps your book or your project right now is to bridge that gap.
Yeah. I definitely think so to an extent. And it also looks at this idea of, what are we here to do? What is the purpose of society? To me, if we're all here to evolve individually, then society should optimize the opportunity for that evolution. And to me, that means a movement toward liberty and away from enslavement. That's the tension, because in a state of enslavement, we're not able to express ourselves to the fullest. That can enable some learning, but it might inhibit the full expression of our individual selves. Those are the kinds of things that I'm questioning and looking at.
Yeah, really big pictures. You're also looking at patterns like, what is enslavement? Obviously, we have a recent history of slavery, and I was just thinking about South Africa yesterday. It's just mind blowing that only 30 years ago, people were living in a state where they were considered unequal because of their race. It's still happening all over the world in various ways. I assume that you're looking at it also from that perspective?
Yes, yeah. And then it's part of human history for sure, unfortunately. And I think part of our evolution is to move beyond that. And also, it occurs on a spectrum. There's a spectrum of freedom versus enslavement. There's the totalitarian version that we all read about in history books, and then there's different degrees of it where people want to do things, but they can't do things. And who makes those decisions? I'm looking at where the line gets drawn and how we even approach that question.
There was something in your podcast in 2019. You talked about someone about a life-changing world event that could shift the way we perceive or think about our current approach. And I think you said to the person, "How about AI?" But when you said that, I thought, COVID came not long after that. Do you have any thoughts on how that might have shifted things for the greater collective?
Well, it certainly has shifted things a lot. And for different people, it's probably shifted in new ways. It's forcing people to confront issues of life and death. And for me, that was something I was thinking about all the time, so it wasn't a big deal. But for other people, it's like, you have to think about it all of a sudden, because that's what we're immersed with. I think it's forced people to think about how they prioritize their life and what matters to them, and maybe that's pushed people in a spiritual direction. I haven't taken a survey there, but I wouldn't be surprised if the people become more interested in those sorts of questions.
And it's also raised issues like the ones we're talking about of, who gets to make what decisions? And who has the rights? And what are the right decisions to make? And who should be listening to whom? And those kinds of questions are becoming very... They're in our faces right now. And maybe in the past, we could have avoided them because they weren't so relevant. But now, the decisions of a small number of people impact the lives of many, many people. Now, those decisions are being scrutinized and everyone's asking questions about politics and even economics. These were things that I wasn't thinking about very much before.
So maybe in my journey, I've been forced and nudged to look at those broader questions of, okay, yeah, the spiritual stuff exists and that's real, and there's lots of scientific evidence, and we can work on our own awakening journeys, but there's an issue of, well, how do we all do this on our planet together? What's the best way to organize that? What is the nature of government itself, not necessarily the leaders within government, but the structure of government that is inherently, it is monopolistic, it has monopolies in certain areas that are granted? And do people willingly grant those monopolies, even in societies that are allegedly free?
I'm really looking at some of the fundamental assumptions that we typically have and don't even ask because we grew up in society and that's the way society works, and everyone follows those rules because that's the way it's been done.
Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of social media and sort of the advent of Instagram or Twitter in countries where there's a lot of oppression, and it gave freedom to people to organize and revolt, but then simultaneously became a real problem in our society. A tool can be used in many different ways, depending on context.
Right. Absolutely. And that's like artificial intelligence. Any technology, there's the good and the bad of it. And one of the areas I've looked at in particular is the realm of censorship, and where people are observing, taking in information about the world, and from only a few sources. If those sources don't allow certain opinions in, that's very dangerous, because then, our consciousness is being shifted in only a certain direction without even the option to look at other stuff.
Yes. And so censorship is not just intentional, it can also just be algorithmic or cultural. It can be sometimes sneaky. It could happen through mass movement of, hundreds of humans are doing this, and therefore, all of their children are exposed to that, or the people around them only see that. I feel like the algorithm can have a form of maybe not censorship, but molding, or it's almost like these bubbles are moving through the world and more emphasis is put on certain things because of the number of hits it gets.
Yeah, completely.
I wanted to just talk about one last thing, past-life, karma, reincarnation. You touched on it a few times. This idea of karma has always alluded me, and I'm starting to learn more about it in my own experience.
What are your thoughts on that? Because I know that you've learned about this idea of natural law, and people having out of body experiences, coming back. I'm just curious how you're framing that for yourself?
I think karma is central to thinking about life, but it's probably at a level of complexity that we are never going to fully understand. I don't think it's as simple as, "Oh, you were nice to this person, and therefore a nice thing happens to you." I think that's an oversimplification of how it works, but it's something probably like that generally, and probably relates to our past lives. Things we did are balanced in some way.
So when I think about orienting my compass of the things that I'm doing in life, I am thinking about karma all time, of is this at least conceptually something that's compatible with positive karma, and incompatible with negative karma? Moving towards positive and away from negative, and being very sensitive to anything that's potentially negative, and saying, "Wait, if I do this or if I say this, is that going to..." I go back to the life review stories of many people that have had near death experiences, and they reexperienced what it was like when they were mean to someone for example.
Or one man I interviewed, Dannion Brinkley, has had four near death experiences, and each time he had a life review, so he's had it four times, and he went back to his combat days in Vietnam where he told me he was vicious in combat, and he had to relive what it was like to be killed through that person's eyes. So that's an extreme example, but it's exemplary of what might happen. Whether we all have life reviews or not, it's unclear to me, but I think the principle exists that there is this interconnectivity, and there is an individual accountability for the things that we do. So everything I do now is with that lens, for sure.
It sounds like you said he saw the person that he killed, he saw the death through that person's eyes, is that right?
Yeah.
What's opening up for me is this possibility that it's not good or bad, that there's less of a judgment involved in these experiences. I guess the original concept of karma I was introduced to was, you did this, and it caused that, and then that's going to come back around to you. It's almost like an accumulation of points, or negative points sometimes. But I feel like sometimes, looking at karma and past lives and death or cruelty like causing someone's death, there's a life lesson there, but it's not necessarily, "Oh, he was bad because he killed that person." I wonder what he thought about that?
You're reminding me of something that actually Dannion said. He said something to the effect of, it's not judgment, just like you said. That it's you're observing the way in which you interacted. And you will feel the pain or the joy that you gave to other people, but the judgment isn't there. And I think you're right, that everything is a learning experience. But given that experiences have charges to them that can feel positive or negative, it's only rational to want to try to gravitate towards the ones that involve less suffering. And it's sort of like the more we do the stuff that involves suffering, or the "bad stuff," even though it's not bad, then we have to keep reexperiencing it. And in some of the traditions, they talk about breaking the wheel, or the cycle of reincarnation. Of getting off this karmic wheel, which we could I guess stay on forever if we want to, but maybe we'd have more pleasure and less suffering if we just got off. Left that track.
Yeah, chose a different way.
Yeah.
That's beautiful. Thanks so much. I feel like we just hit this moment of decisive choice, we're going to choose a better path.
Yeah, definitely.
So, that was a wonderful interview with Mark Gober, and after that we talked a little longer, and a message came through from a visitor:
Just to give some background, after contacting Mark, I got information that there was a cat that wanted a reading, and connected to him, but I got that he didn't have a pet, so I just asked, "Do you have a cat?" And you said you were staying with people that had two cats, and one of them's been following you around. I often do readings for people's animals. My psychic abilities kind of became clear to me by going to horse barns and just being around animals, and doing Reiki on them. And all of a sudden, I was getting tons of information. I would check it with the owner, and they'd say, "Oh yeah, that horse has just gone through a huge detox, and jumped a fence and cut their neck," and I had just gotten that information psychically, and I was very surprised.
So I guess I have a rapport with animals, and so for some of these readings, it's interesting how a person will contact you to do a reading for their animal, and immediately what comes through is the animal is either protecting them, or trying to help them, or is sharing a message with them about something going on in their life. So it ultimately ends up being about the owner. And cats in particular I feel like are pretty special beings, and sometimes they have this sort of angelic energy like they've come to watch over us, and they're pointing us in a direction.
I did a Reiki training recently at an in person location in Maui, and there was a black cat that came around. And each time one person was getting the attunement for Reiki, the cat would jump on her lap. And then the next person would get the attunement, and the cat would jump on that person's lap. So they're kind of like energy wands. They can tell you... Or divining wands. And then I was doing the teaching, the cat would sit under my chair. I had never met this cat before. But it was cool to follow the cat to see where the energy was most intense.
Well it's amazing you picked that up, because you would have had no way to know that I was with a cat.
Yeah, I don't know anything about you.
That's amazing. That was amazing.
But anyways, I thought just for fun, why don't we check in for a few minutes and see what is going on with the cat. You up for it?
Yeah, let's do it.
So calling on my angels and guides, Archangel Michael, Haniel, Zadkiel, Azrael, Metatron, Uriel, Jophiel, Chamuel, Saint Germain, Quan Yin, and Joan of Arc. Angels and guides, please make this a safe space. Increase clairvoyance and psychic ability, and may whatever comes through be for the highest good of all. And I feel like we need a little clearing, because we had a big conversation. So releasing any energy or attachments that are not serving our highest good through a grounding core down into the earth. Releasing anything that doesn't feel like love and light, and then cutting that cord angels, thank you. And giving us a shower of golden white light. And Mark, you have such a bright, beautiful energy. I just wanted to let you know, when I contemplated doing an interview with you, it always just felt happy and joyous.
Oh, cool.
So that was fun. A very distinct energy field. Angels, what can you share with Mark today about the cat, and any message she might have?
So she likes to follow you around and be near you. Specifically meditation is drawing her. She feels very connected to your meditation practice, and one of your teachers. I'm getting Neem Karoli Baba? I don't know if that's meaningful to you, but there is a message from Neem Karoli Baba, or through the cat. It's like she's holding space. She reminds me of a woman who spent a lot of time around him, maybe in the '60s? So sort of taking care of you, sharing that sort of consciousness, that knowledge, and offering you food.
Angels and guides, what else could you share that would be helpful to us in understanding this story? She's like a wise old woman, and she's got a insight for you. And it does have a very Indian feel. I think you should look into this at some point Mark, I feel like a past life in India, or with some Indian lineage or teachers, is relevant. There might be something there for you to find out.
I think you're right.
Does it bring anything up?
I don't know specifically, but you're not the first person to say that.
I felt wonderful in India, by the way. Oh, in India, I felt upside down, just like your title of your book. I went to the ashram in India, flew from US, to Germany, to Mumbai, and four hours drive up into the jungle to Ganeshpuri, and spent a month there. And boy, I remember looking at just the mountains, and I thought I was on the moon. I was like, "I am upside down. I cannot find my grounding or my bearing here. It just turned my consciousness upside down. I think that's an important process to experience in one's life.
But back to the cat. Angels and guides, is there anything else that this beautiful cat has to share with us?
I just get the word Wisdom. Through the ages. Lineage. Connection. Does she have a message for us or for Mark? She says yes, stay with what you're doing, you're on the right path. Your mother will guide you in the right direction. And what mother is this, angels? Is this specific mother or universal mother? Universal mother. So the feminine energy can support you, kind of intuition and creativity in moving forward. Sometimes you have, obviously, an interest and tendency in scientific sort of... what did we say, it was left brain?
Yeah.
Logic. And the right brain is associated more with feminine, if you think yin and yang.
Yeah, definitely.
So if the feminine side of things could inform you like this cat, I think it's a lesson for you to see "How does it feel when she's around you? Does it support you? Give you more access to inspirational things? In what way can that support your project going forward?" To trust that that feminine side, that Shakti, that flow of the universe is inviting you to move forward in this more creative fashion that's less concerned about societal constraints, less concerned about having to prove things, even though you're very good at doing that. And then it's okay to move into the realm of the unproven, and the sort of joyous act of creation without knowing. And I hope that's helpful to you.
Very cool. Very cool and relevant, thank you.
I would love to meet the cat. I see a sort of... I don't know if this is her, sometimes animals present differently energetically, but a sort of light gray, sort of beige-y cat with lines, darker lines moving all down her back.
Yeah, well she's a blue point Siamese, so she has this grayish look, and there are almost lines with her spine, yeah.
Siamese cats, oh my goodness. They're so smart.
Very wise. That word was spot on. And you're right, when I meditate, she has been around. And when I've been in creative mode of researching, she's often guarding, or it seems like she's guarding, so I think you picked up on it.
Yeah, I just get this sort of pinnacle feeling. From your mind or her mind, there's this pointed shape. And when we were talking about Neem Karoli Baba and the woman that brought food to him, I saw a vessel, a ceramic vessel that has a point at the top that I think maybe they use in India to cook food, or carry food or something. But that shape is like a pinnacle of how your mind connects to consciousness, to the universal energy, and I feel like that's just sort of an encouragement to you to, "Yes, go with it."
Well for me energetically, as I mentioned I've been meditating and the energy comes in, for me it's heavily concentrated in the upper chakras, so I feel a lot of pressure in the crown and the third eye especially.
Yeah. Perhaps a meditation or a guided awareness, where you release the crown chakra, and you allow that connection to be continuous from your vessel into the... I don't know, what word would you use instead of God?
Extended realms?
Into the expansive goodness of consciousness and the universe. We have to be specific. It's not just universal energy, because there can be a lot of different energies in the universe. But into the consciousness of your choice. I feel like now I see consciousness coming down like this into a point, and you coming like this into a point. So connecting to that realm through your crown chakra is very powerful, and creativity is a representation of that. And the cat was wanting to share that with you, or to protect that area, or to be like an assistant. Oh, you know how in Hinduism the deities like Ganesh will have a figure under them? They each have a vehicle that helps them along. Or many gurus will have an assistant who spends their whole life with them just serving them, but they get a ton of knowledge, and sometimes are the brilliant teacher, and you mentioned two people that you studied with that have these different ways of being, and I get the cat is your sidekick spiritually.
Yeah. That's so funny.
Awesome. Well sending you and the cat many blessings. Thanks for letting me check in, I appreciate that privilege.
Yeah, thank you Sarah. That was fun.
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Sarah Rossiter is an artist, writer and psychic medium. You can find out more about her work online at: SarahRossiter.com
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