"Accelerating Wisdom" Episode 8: New Frontiers

• Article #8 of 8 in the Accelerating Wisdom Series.
• Guest expert: Dr. Mona Sohani PhD. Dr. Sobhani is an author, cognitive neuroscientist and an expert in the emerging science of “spiritual” phenomena.
• Woo rating: 10/10 (obviously). All Leading Edge content will have a “woo rating” reflecting how far from the current consensus worldview it is. But we will never cover topics without direct practical applications. Especially in this episode.

A core theme throughout this series has been the importance of updating your stale perceptions of the world. Out of the “big 5” personality traits, there is a strong positive correlation between wisdom and openness.1 It’s about keeping an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. Wherever possible, radical ideas need empirical proof and practical applications. Over the last two years, nobody has challenged my own stale preconceptions more than 

Mona Sobhani, PhD, and her book Proof of Spiritual Phenomena.

Mona’s work has helped me understand why deliberately accelerating our wisdom is probably single most important thing we can do.

Where are our maps of reality incomplete?

The 10/10 “woo rating” for this final episode indicates how far it is from our social and scientific consensus. The extreme version of the Western worldview I grew up with is something like: “We exist due to a random accident of physics. We live in a dead box of material things. Reality is indifferent to our actions, so our goal should be to have as much pleasure as possible before we die forever. As we are all entirely separate individuals, it is justifiable to exploit anything in our environment to achieve our goals.”

There is a strong possibility that every single part of that worldview is incomplete.

As a neuroscientist, Dr. Sobhani struggled in the face of mounting evidence that this reductionist view of reality was radically flawed. As we’ve learned throughout this series, nagging cognitive dissonance is a sign of a gap in our model of reality. A crisis of rationality led her to question the materialist premises that were damaging her health as much as they’ve been destroying our entire world. She told her remarkable story and outlined her research conclusions specially for The Leading Edge. (Here’s the Spotify Link and we’re now on Apple Podcasts too).

Using her background as an academic, Dr. Sobhani dove into the research around “psi phenomena” and was utterly shocked at what she found. Her tremendous book Proof of Spiritual Phenomena was so challenging to my settled worldview that reading it made me feel physically queasy at times. Psi research describes interactions between individuals and their environment that seem to transcend the ordinary constraints of spacetime. This would include pre-cognition, telepathy, remote viewing and clairvoyance. It turns out that psi research has been conducted for over a century, by hundreds of scientists, from multiple labs across the entire world, in hundreds of thousands of participants and in many prestigious institutions, such as Princeton, Cornell, Duke, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. Moreover, the evidence for the reality of psi is on par with that of other established psychological phenomena.

In fact, the effect sizes of some psi protocols are much larger than those for the clinically recommended uses of some common medications, such as aspirin for the prevention of heart disease, metformin for type 2 diabetes, statins for cholesterol lowering and antidepressants for depression. One of the most interesting aspects of this research is that your own psi abilities seem to correlate with your belief that they are possible.2

But there’s not much point discussing these topics if they don’t have practical applications either in terms of changing your actions or updating your worldview.

Mona’s own research, and that of her brave community of scientific pioneers, have immense implications for both.

What needs to be added? “Mind as Matter”

The most devastating emerging challenge to our materialistic worldview is that the physical world around us that we take for reality “derives from or is dependent upon consciousness.”3 In practice, this would mean that our reality is more influenced by our thoughts than we think.

With this single move, much of what we dismiss as “woo” becomes both possible and explicable.

One of my favourite movies is The Prestige. The twist ending reflects the conclusion of a magic trick. There’s a single moment where your entire understanding of the movie flips. This moment in our culture comes when we see the role of consciousness in shaping our world. It throws every single episode of this series into an even more critical context.

• Episode 1: Accelerating Wisdom. If “consciousness is primary,” not matter, the evolution of your wisdom and expertise becomes the primary goal of life.
• Episode 2: Revealing Attractors. If the universe is evolving towards greater complexity, it makes sense that this exists as a force of nature, and that aligning your own consciousness with this force is extremely beneficial.
• Episode 3: Embodying Wisdom. If the purpose of our life is the acceleration of wisdom and consciousness, these practices become essential rather than optional.
• Episode 4: Mapping Your Transformation. If consciousness evolves through rebirths and transitions, the midlife shift from being guided by ego to guided by the attractor moves from a shameful crisis to an essential stage of our spiritual maturity.
• Episode 5: Myth's Hidden Wisdom. Myth is pattern recognition applied to the hidden forces that evolve consciousness. We can use myth as an operating manual to guide our own evolutionary progress.
• Episode 6: Love, Parenting and Relationships. If reality is fundamentally conscious, relational and driven by love, then the deepening of our interpersonal relationships becomes central to the evolution of our consciousness.
• Episode 7. Dreams and Synchronicity. Increasing our alignment with the forces of evolution brings meaning, satisfaction and flourishing to you and the world around you. Synchronicity and dreams become more easily explicable as a link between individual “inner” consciousness and the “outside” world.
• Episode 8. New Frontiers. When consciousness becomes primary, a vast number of “woo” topics become not just explicable but essential.

Practical Magic

“Now, our mental inner life is the thing in itself. It’s not a byproduct — it’s what really matters. And if that’s the case, then life is not about collecting shoes or cars or houses or clothes. Life is about collecting insights.

-Bernardo Kastrup

If mind shapes matter then what we think really matters. This is why Mona’s research on psi is so important. It implies that our consciousness isn’t as bounded by either time and space as we might have thought. And that means our thoughts might be able to influence the world in unexpected ways. This is why the unique human capacity for visualization is central to every psychic ability or magical tradition. By concentrating our consciousness we can directly influence reality. At the simplest level, this is relatively uncontroversial; for example mentally healing our body using the placebo effect. Or using our willpower to lift weights and shape our bodies. The other end of the woo spectrum argues that collective belief can create independent entities or move and shape matter itself. The debate then becomes how much.

One of the weirder mystical concepts I’ve encountered over the last year is “elementals.” This is the belief that every single thought or emotion we have is given “form.” The stronger the emotion, the stronger the elemental. Once elementals are created and projected outwards, they eventually return to the subconscious of the person who created them. They can then draw on energy and persist over longer periods of time. Powerful negative thoughts can create mental illness or addictions. Elementals can never be destroyed, only dis-energized by no longer giving them your attention. When people say our thoughts create our reality, presumably this is what they mean. Once again- if everything is “made of mind,” it makes sense that the focused usage of our own consciousness has creative power. We all walk around in a shell of elementals created by our own thoughts.

Are elementals literally true? No idea. Is it obviously helpful either way? Probably. Totally mainstream treatments like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aim to identify and disempower problematic thought patterns almost as if they are elementals.

This concept also provides a strong motivation for trying to keep your thoughts both under your deliberate control and at a “high vibration.” In fact, it would turn something cheesy-sounding like “trying to send other people loving thoughts” into a simple-but-powerful spiritual technology.4 If we make a conscious effort to love everyone we know it might directly benefit us all. And it definitely can’t hurt!

The next implication is that concentration is incredibly powerful. When we concentrate or visualise we are literally creating. Hence we should be very, very, very conscientious that what we visualise or attempt to “manifest” with our minds is harmonious, rather than guided by narrow egoic willpower.

Learning Lessons

Another of the most profoundly unexpected aspects of the last few years I’ve spent digging more deeply into “fringe” topics is the strength of the empirical (yes, empirical) evidence supporting reincarnation.5 Mona cites compelling work by Dr. Ian Stevenson of UVA. He studied 2,700 cases from six continents of children reporting past life memories. Children between the ages of 2-5 are allegedly especially permeable to past life experiences. In sixty five percent of cases the identity of purported past life identity could be verified.6 Creepily, there were also 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos. One woman who remembered a past life where she was killed by three blows from an axe to her back had three separate linear hyperpigmented scar-like birthmarks on her back. Another boy from India recalled a past life where he was killed by a shotgun wound to the chest. He was able to give the name of the person from the past life, and Dr. Stevenson was able to locate the autopsy report of the deceased person. The location of the gunshot wound matched the boy’s birthmark.

Mona’s research found the same theme recurring across scientific studies and spiritual traditions. The idea is that we have souls that incarnate on Earth to learn specific lessons through the events and relationships that make up a lifetime here. The point of learning the lessons is to evolve our souls and advance up through levels of conscious complexity. The entire theme of this series is the importance of rebirths and the acceptance of external intelligence. As it applies fractally at all levels, why would it not also apply across multiple incarnations? And if consciousness is primary and not rigidly bound by either time or space (or just bound to our physical brain), the “soul” somehow surviving the body no longer appears impossible.

Are soul lessons literally true? No idea. Is it helpful either way? For me, yes. The mere possibility that life continues after this incarnation has slowly but profoundly diminished any anxieties I have around my mortality. I also now examine my own life for recurring patterns or incidents, and ponder if I was put in that position in order to learn a particular lesson.7 In our interview, Mona describes how reframing adversity as a potential lesson made her life better immediately. And Mona’s summary of the unified message from all the lessons seems like a good one either way:

“The purpose of life was to fully comprehend compassion, nonviolence, love, non-judgment, non-prejudice, patience, generosity, charity, and hope. We are supposed to become aware that we are all interconnected, that energy connects us all, and that we never really die.”

Wrapping up.

As we arrive at the end of the Accelerating Wisdom Series the conclusions are hopefully pretty clear.

We can be left-brain locked, and that keeps us stuck and disconnected. The right hemisphere is intrinsically more connected with the world, especially the “syntropic or holotropic attractor.” This force guides us towards more integrated and complex consciousness. I genuinely think the mainstream acceptance of “attractors” might be the Copernican moment for Western science.8 Instead of realizing the Earth isn’t the center of the universe, we’re soon going to realise our individual intellects aren’t either. And deliberately pursuing the rebalancing of our hemispheres is the way we can all start to access that guiding intelligence and refreshing life force. The evolution of our consciousness is the goal of our life. And if all is made of consciousness, and there is an optimal path for us, it would need to feel good. The practices and experts in this series are all here to help us all along that joyful path.

Suggested Experiments and Commitments:

If you’re interested in taking the benefits of these concepts beyond the screen and into your own life, here is a recommended short-term experiment and longer-term commitment.

Experiment:

• Practice sending love to others. Simply imagine the person you want to send love to, and then wish them to be happy and healthy with all of your heart. You can do it with public figures or friends and family. I strongly recommend this excellent article from Bodhi “The Most Powerful (and easiest) Spiritual Practice I've found.”

Commitment:

• As Mona argued in our interview: look for soul lessons and patterns in your life. Work towards becoming more open and loving. Treat the external world as conscious, intelligent and ultimately loving.

Thanks again to Dr. Mona Sobhani and all the experts for this project! Join us next time for a remarkable interview that ties the entire series together.

Footnotes + Additional Resources:

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[Transcript available on request].

Footnotes

1 Source.

2 While we’re in a 10/10 woo episode, I’d like to point out that I’ve lost count of the people and sourses discussing how the emergence of psi abilities is linked to the next stage of human evolution.

3 I enjoyed this interview with Bernardo Kastrup and  Daniel Pinchbeck

4 I strongly recommend this excellent article from 

Bodhi “The Most Powerful (and easiest) Spiritual Practice I've found.” Dean Radin has also done some interesting research indicating small positive effect sizes for “distance healing intention”

5 Ian Stevenson’s research was simply mind-blowing. And it’s still being conducted after his death, as recently reported by the Washington Post. And here’s another article on current professor Jim Tucker in UVA magazine.

6 Source: Proof of Spiritual Phenomena.

7 I recently read a meme to the effect that “the universe” only gives you 3 answers:

1. Yes.
2. Not right now.
3. It keeps happening because you're not learning the lesson.

8 Over the course of this series I was fortunate enough to interview the father of attractor theory, Ervin Laszlo and the author of Syntropy, Ulisse Di Corpo.