And I want to know from you as a person who's been in both worlds, which world did you come to first? Were you always kind of a science-based thinker and had a spiritual practice or were you a spiritualist who was, took interest in science? How did this go?

I was a convinced atheist.

Okay.

That's how I began.

I became an atheist at the age of five.

My father was the minister.

I had an inside look at the church, and that convinced me that there was no God, there was certainly no benevolent force in the universe.

We shouldn't be afraid to feel anything that we're feeling as long as it's appropriate in the moment and we process it as completely as possible.

good to know um can you tell me if there is um early warning signs that your body really has shifted into that place of that point of no return or is there a point of no return you said there isn't

Yeah, we find again, even in geriatric studies, studies of old people that their brains can improve, their bodies can improve.

And I think the point of no return is when you are unable to arrest your negative thinking.

Rumination is the single biggest enemy of inner peace and the single biggest enemy of your body.

In a study, really well-known study published in 2021, the researchers looked at Alzheimer's patients.

And again, Alzheimer's comes up again and again and again in the book, as does cancer, because these are affected by genetics.

And so they looked at all of the risk factors for Alzheimer's and they measured the buildup of tau and amyloid beta plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

What does that mean?

It's not just one or two exposures to stress and cortisol, right? It's got to be a whole perception change, right?

In my book, I give people 12 what I call gold bricks.

And the analogy I use in The Gene in Your Genes, the new edition, because I completely rewrote the book end-to-end for the 20th anniversary.

There's so much more information now about epigenetics and I've done several clinical trials as well than there was 20 years ago.

So the whole book had to get completely redone.

And one of the analogies I use is I have an image of a scale and the scale on one side has all the things that count against us over time.

Environmental insults, bad news, the toxins and pathogens present in the environment.

I

What is your definition of spiritual intelligence?

It's a very simple, non-academic one.

So the old model of consciousness that most neuroscientists would've talked about, and in fact a few of them who maybe were trained a long time ago might still talk about, is the belief common in various branches of science, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of a conscious brain.

That as brains began to be- get bigger, as they evolved over the last three billion years, they got larger and larger and larger, and eventually threw out this field called consciousness.

And so that is the way consciousness studies have been conducted for many decades.

What the new theories of consciousness have discovered is that, A, there's no experimental evidence showing that consciousness resides in the brain.

There's plenty of experimental evidence showing that consciousness resides in information fields beyond the brain, and the brain functions as a transceiver of information from those fields, and a projector of the information in those fields into the world around us, after which we call it objective reality.

Huh