And some of the stuff that you... brought forward in that book really blew my mind your presentation i just want to say was excellent and made me so eager to talk to you then as i started digging in or what are some of the other topics you've talked about it's just fascinating somebody with your background um digging into topics like these which are considered a bit fringe but you're giving them the treatment they deserve so i wanted to take a minute to ask you about this suite of topics you've written these books about And, you know, just sort of like how someone like yourself with your background ends up putting his focus into these areas.

I never expected to be doing this.

In case you were wondering or in case your audience sees all these books, you might think, well, Mark always dreamed of being an author.

If you knew me about 10 years ago, I was very far from this.

I probably have always had an interest in understanding existence at some deep level.

I remember when I was young, remembering some conversations now in middle school and high school with my friends, looking up at the stars and thinking about, well, who are we? What's going on in the vastness of the cosmos? How do we fit into that? And I remember in physics classes, I was always really intrigued.

By what I learned, I took, at Princeton, I didn't major in physics or astrophysics, although I thought about it at one point.

Wow.

And also with the advent of more tech, I think it's getting harder and harder to ignore that there's a lot out there that hasn't been explained by the mainstream media storytelling.

Yeah, maybe I could start with some frameworks in terms of how I think about this, because I think as members of your audience see these headlines in the news, it's hard to make sense of it.

And I don't know what's going on.

That's the short version.

And I think it's impossible for anyone who's not inside the government to know exactly what is happening.

because the objective reality is that the government has known about this phenomenon for a long time, and that's been disclosed.

For example, Project Blue Book.

So

And I'm just curious as to your thoughts as to what is surrounding what we're on.

Well, your point about rocket footage is really important and intriguing to me because one of the complaints of, let's say, cosmology skeptics, globe skeptics, they'll say the footage is not continuous.

When you see the rocket going up and then it cuts out and you see the footage from the perspective of the rocket, let's see it all continuous footage going into space.

And we don't have that direct evidence.

And some people would say, well, that's okay.

That just has to do with the way the videography goes.

But in the absence of that, there are issues with physics too, in terms of the current narrative.

Mm.

chapter two of my book,

this was something I hadn't seen quite as much in the UFO-related literature because people tend to focus on the craft and the types of beings associated with the craft.

Whereas my previous books were more about the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality.

And I was encountering these examples where people claimed they... came across intelligences that were not human, like in the near-death experience, for example, or in a past life regression, or with psychedelic encounters.

They were encountering non-human intelligences.

So I wanted to make sure that was included in this discussion because maybe it is related to the UFO cases.

And one of the things that actually surprised me in my research, I was aware of studies on DMT, dimethyltryptamine, a psychedelic that is known to take people to this state of one mind where they often come back and say, I felt the oneness.

well,

There's this question of whether the brain produces consciousness, as many of us might think, or consciousness is something that comes from outside the brain.

We see that there's a strong correlation between brain activity and conscious experience.

The problem from the perspective of trying to determine causality is that we can't conclude the brain is creating or causing the conscious experience just because there is this correlation.

And the alternative explanation that many have given is, yes, the brain's related to consciousness, but it's not producing it.

Rather, it's an interface for consciousness.

In the same way that if you're watching television and there's an antenna that's receiving a signal allowing you to watch the TV show, if you take a hammer and smash the antenna, all of a sudden, the TV show on the screen is going to be very scratchy.

It's not going to be a clear picture.

Yeah.

Not as much about the physical cosmos, but the metaphysical that leads to the physical cosmos.

I would say that my experiences have reinforced what I believed through my learnings intellectually, especially with ibogaine, for example.

Being in this place that I call the divine lens, and I was kept there for hours.

In one of my other plant experiences, I was there, and it was this place that was so obvious and familiar, and I couldn't believe that I'd forgotten it because it's always been there.

With ibogaine, I was there for hours watching myself almost in this life review where it was intelligently pulling memories up, things from my life.

And that to me reinforces the notion that this is, where we are is a div- divine place, and there is something about the nature of love that is embedded within the fabric of reality itself.

But, uh, what I'd like to kind of extract out of you in a sort of a more concise way f- for the listener is how important is, is a person's cosmology to the way they engage themselves, the way they engage life, the way they engage other?

Would you consider our brains some sort of biological receiver for the signal of consciousness?

I think it's probably something like that.

And this was a helpful analogy that I'm gonna give when I first started, because I used to think of the brain as the producer of consciousness.

And we would see, there's lots of evidence for this in neuroscience, where there are correlations between what happens in the brain and the type of consciousness someone experiences.

If someone gets in a car accident, damages certain parts of the brain, and they've got memory loss, problems with their vision, and we can point to the parts of the brain that were damaged and say, look, if you affect these parts of the brain, the person's consciousness shifts.

The problem with that in terms of logic is that correlation doesn't always imply causation.

So just because two things are related doesn't mean that one always causes the other.

other realms that we can't take back the exact same thing that we experienced in a physical way, but it can sometimes show physically.