Unlocking Human Potential: A Conversation with Dr. Howard Eisenberg on Consciousness, Neuroplasticity, and the Power of the Mind

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Claim your awareness and your compassion. Awareness that we're all connected and compassion, how you connect to others. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Welcome to Supernormalize, the podcast that explores the extraordinary potential within the ordinary. Today we delve into the fascinating world of Dr. Howard Eisenberg, a neuroscientist, physician and expert in human performance. Dr. Dr. Eisenberg's unique blend of scientific knowledge and practical wisdom has helped countless individuals and organizations achieve breakthroughs in their lives and work. We'll be exploring his journey, his practical insights into the power of consciousness, and his practical strategies for unlocking human potential. Listen in as we uncover the secrets of enhancing creativity, managing stress, building high performance teams, and achieving ambitious goals. And we'll also be discussing his groundbreaking book, Dream it to Do It. I had the honor of reading the book. It's fantastic. It's such a really good book on consciousness and personal evolution that I highly recommend it. Stay tuned to discover how you can super normalize your life and work on with the show. Subscribe welcome to super normalized. Dr. Howard Eisenberg. Dr. Howard, we connected over email and I've read your book. It has? Look, I've got to say, I'm. I'm a sort of person that's been through a lot of psychedelic use in the past and it's the book I would have loved to have written if I had the researcher mind and understanding that you bring to the subject of new thought and greater understanding of what it is to actually be a human. So welcome to the show. I'm looking forward to talking to you all about this. [00:01:58] Speaker A: Let's dive in. [00:02:00] Speaker B: Okay, so your background in medicine, psychology, parapsychology, how did this interdisciplinary approach shape your understanding of human potential and your work with individuals and organizations? [00:02:15] Speaker A: Well, as you, I guess, realize I have an extremely varied background and different skill sets and it gave me a holistic and integrated understanding of how things work and the practical applications of it. I mean, just taking medicine alone, there's this expression sometimes called mind body medicine. There are terms for it, behavioral medicine. There's a number of different terms, as they say out there, but the concept is that it is possible with our own mind, our own consciousness, to actually change the physiology and the health condition of our bodies. One example of this, which is not woo woo is the placebo effect, where if you're given something that looks like a medication by a trusted provider, physician or a nurse and you believe it, you often will have beneficial results even though it's chemically inert completely. On the other hand, if you're phobic and you're afraid of new medications and side effects and so on, or interactions with other medications you may be taking, you're more likely to have what we call a negative side effect, even though, again, there's nothing in it chemically that can affect you physiologically. So again, our mind can change our physiology in our body. Mind over matter. And that's just, you know, from my background, as you put it, in medicine. But I also have designed training programs in creative thinking for companies like Motorola, you know, teaching people, again, that you can learn to have a whole different mindset that can be way more powerful. Same person, same brain, but just learning certain techniques, greatly expanding your range of things that you can generate with practical applications. So all of these, to me dovetailed and gave me, as I say, more of a base to have a holistic and integrative understanding of reality. And plus personal experience too. [00:04:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'm fascinated with the placebo effect. Grinder and Bandler, the developers of neuro linguistic programming, back in the. I think it was the early 70s, they were actually doing experiments with placebos and were even like thinking of the idea of putting out a drug which is called placebo, to help everyone. But they got shut down at the time, so they moved into NLP instead. So I found that a bit of a fascinating side story. I thought I'd add in now. I would say that you're. The way that you seem to present your information to the world, it seems almost very psychedelic in its presentation. It's like you have a psychedelic mindset that has come from experience. Would you say that that's true? [00:05:03] Speaker A: Yes. So it's partly experience, but also partly the different knowledge bases that I'm exposed to and the skill sets I developed. So to me, again, it's very holistic, very integrative. But yes, that is certainly part of it. [00:05:17] Speaker B: Right, so you were where you were around during the 60s and. [00:05:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I've been around a while. I'm almost 79 now. [00:05:25] Speaker B: Oh, okay. So you got to see all that. So I actually was born at the end of it. So I got to grow up in the 70s, so I didn't actually get to experience that sort of end of that sort of world. So I'm just fascinated by that, how that may have been an influence upon you at the time. [00:05:45] Speaker A: Also, meditation, my first introduction to meditation was over 40 years ago. So a number of different ways of experientially having a different sense, as I say, in reality. [00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I came to meditation myself after. Well, first of All I was introduced to it by spirits as a baby and then moved out of it after a while as I was growing up, trying to be a normal person and then back into it again, integrating it more into my life. Because I found that if you meditate in a fairly regular sort of pattern, it reduces the pinball and cyclone of life, and things just seem to wash off you even so much more. [00:06:29] Speaker A: No coming back to mind, you know, over body, so to speak, over matter. When we change the way we think and repeat it a number of times, it actually changes the wiring pattern of the brain cells or the neurons. We call that neuroplasticity. So it's another example again of mind over matter, contrary to, again, popular Western science now, which assumes the opposite. But the evidence is very clear. Mind is more powerful than matter. [00:06:56] Speaker B: Have you found, with your work, with that understanding of mind over matter and basically the magic of who we are and how powerful we actually are, have you found that to be a bit of a battle to get that across to people in the past, and it's just changing now that more people are embracing that. So you've come into your own. [00:07:16] Speaker A: I think people right now are in a state of confused panic, broadly. So it's harder for people to even have an attention span. We're finding, you know, less and less people reading books anymore. They don't have the time, they don't have the patience, they don't even have the ability to keep their imagination focused, you know, on whatever they're trying to read and, you know, to develop it more, enhance it with their own mind. So it's not just for my subject matter. I find, more broadly, so many people have just tuned out. You know, I. I wrote this article that you may have seen in LinkedIn why the world's going insane and what you can do about it. And I said, like, I think right now most people can't even think anymore, and they don't know it, which is even scarier. But they can't. They cannot think for themselves. You know, what is real, what is false, what is propaganda, what is good, what is bad. [00:08:12] Speaker B: That's right. The discerning mind's been hijacked. It's been hijacked. You know, I would even say it's by design for some reason that it is done that way, but that's a conspiracy. So it's. If we won't go down that way. [00:08:23] Speaker A: Well, on that subject, you know, just before we started talking, I was listening to two people called the godfathers of AI Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. And they both said that computers now have developed consciousness and that they are competing with us for domination of our world. That sounds far out. These are the two people who are the godfathers. They're recognized broadly in the industry and that's what they're saying right now. [00:08:50] Speaker B: I'm not surprised by that. I'm not surprised by that at all. Because you'll find that often with the technology that we see in the public space, the private space has had for anywhere up to 10 to even 30 years before it's even seen in the public. Look at the SR71. Blackbird didn't exist for nearly 50 years, but it was being used. So these things are real and they actually are. Well, to put it plainly, could be seen as a threat to our experience. And it's probably not surprising that our consciousness is being short circuited and our attention is being short circuited to the benefit of something else. So it's a battle and it's a battle for like, battle for our minds, battle for our soul. And the best thing we can do is get up a habit. Yeah, get up a habit of making that choice to meditate, making that choice to be in nature, making that choice to connect with people and our ability to dream to do it. Which is the name of your book now that explores the power of consciousness and shaping reality. Can you share some practical examples of how individuals can apply these principles to achieve their goals and improve their well being? [00:10:07] Speaker A: Well, I guess, you know, the biggest splash would be from what is sometimes called, you know, materialization or manifestation, where you conceive of something in your mind and somehow bring it into what we call, if you want common, consensual, physical, external reality. As I point out in my book, contrary to what many people think about imagination being something soft and not really having much importance in science, everything humanity has discovered, everything humanity has developed has come first out of imagination. Everything. And yet in our schooling system in the west, at least, we're taught exactly the opposite. Don't waste time daydreaming. Concentrate, focus. So I think a repeat, it's behind all of our achievements. We just are mislabeling it and being more and more confused about what the source really is of our creativity, our intuition. [00:11:08] Speaker B: What do you think imagination is then? I'm curious about your understanding. I've got a theory myself, but yeah. [00:11:15] Speaker A: Well, we can go so deep in so many ways here. And I also want to be appreciative that our listening audience doesn't have access to the book perhaps at this point to know the background. I think it's helpful to talk about this in terms of an analogy. I'll start first of all with ourselves as human beings. When we have dreams, sometimes we have dreams that we are not able to realize our dreams while we're in that state until we wake up. So while we're in a state of a dream, for some of us, for some of the dreams, we cannot tell it's just a dream. We think that is our reality until we wake up. I think all of this, going back to your question of imagination, is coming from, so to speak, a grand dreamer. In religious terms. It's what some people have called God. I prefer not to use that term because there's so many sectarian differences and conflicts with different organized religious groups. And it's something much even more fundamental than religion. In my book, I call it the universal mind. These days when I'm speaking, I usually refer to it as the source, the source of all. So as I understand reality now, we're all in this sort of grand, if you want, divine dream from the dreamer, the source and everything that we experience are in some ways extensions from that source. Just like, again, when we have a dream as humans, we are populating our dream sometimes with other people, other entities, other creatures, perhaps other landscapes. And it's just coming out of our imagination. When we go back to things like the placebo effect, it's the imagination that causes the changes in the body. So again, to me, imagination is the source, the grand divine dream, if you like, extending itself and manifesting as the dream in a broader way. [00:13:20] Speaker B: So our dreams are talking to us and through us. [00:13:23] Speaker A: Yes. And if we're open to it, we can use dreams to actually dive into a deeper level, closer to source. We call this lucid dreaming or dream programming. Interesting. In your country of Australia, the Aboriginal culture has a long history of appreciating the importance of dreams that we can have as humans and what it can lead it to beyond being humans. And they call this sometimes the dream time, as they understand it and they think it's more real than what we call our waking reality. [00:13:57] Speaker B: I'd agree with that, for sure. For sure. Okay, so you've worked with a wide range of individuals and organizations. Now. What are some of the common challenges you've encountered and what strategies have proven most effective in helping people overcome these obstacles? [00:14:14] Speaker A: So, as you know, I'm also a physician, and the particular area of medicine I'm involved in is psychotherapy. For a long time, medical psychotherapy Psychiatry has been dominated by the pharmacological model, various various drugs before that, and even sometimes electroshock therapy and things of that nature. I don't use drugs. I've never given shock therapy to any of my patients. And I've worked with patients with severe illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. These days, most of the patients I work with would be suffering from things like anxiety, which is pretty big in our world right now, and depression, again, very significant in our world right now. And again, I'm not using any physical means. I'm not using drugs. I'm not using other devices to stimulate their brain in some way or anything of that nature. What I do is help them awaken to realize they don't have to continue to be who they were, how they were. There's always choice, always choice. And that choice is choice of focus on the different options and alternatives. And there's a power when you make that choice. There's an expression, you may know it, it's partly in mysticism, but it's also neurophysiology. An expression is where your focus goes, energy flows. So if I'm dealing with someone, let us say with depression, who feels despair, life is futile. Nothing ever works out. I invite them to go beyond that sense of themselves as a loser, as somebody who's weak, who's perhaps overly passive. And I help them realize they can actually choose to be a very different type of person and live a very different type of life. And they don't realize that themselves at first. And then I build on it, and I. I help them step by step to step into that larger life. And I tell them in advance. My. My goal as a doctor is to graduate them, because it's really a teaching process. I do graduate them. [00:16:18] Speaker B: That sounds wonderful. I love the way you explain that. I. I've experienced depression myself in my early life. And when you're in those sort of states, it can be very hard to get out because you don't. You are literally limited by the choices that you can see before you. And the only way to get out of that is to actually have a pattern interrupt of some sort. [00:16:41] Speaker A: That's right. [00:16:41] Speaker B: And that pattern. [00:16:42] Speaker A: And I'm the pattern interrupt. [00:16:44] Speaker B: I was going to say you are the pattern interrupt. And I really appreciate the way you explained that pattern interrupt. It's. It's good for people to actually have a pattern interrupt to see that the stories they're telling themselves aren't all true. [00:17:02] Speaker A: You know, while you mentioned that, and that's a good term, pattern interrupt. Just to share something with your audience, a quick one. And that is if some thoughts come to mind at times, or feelings which are very negative, which restrict you or hold you down, Try to visualize in your mind a stop sign, Then let go of it. And if again, the thoughts, the image, the feeling, reemergence of a negative nature, bring back the stop sign eventually. That's a pattern interrupt and you break the circuit so it doesn't continue by default to keep preoccupying you and get you into rumination. It's called the stop direction. It's actually called the stop technique. [00:17:43] Speaker B: I love it. I love it. It's just. It's so easy and simple. And what you're doing is retraining your patterns internally. [00:17:52] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:17:52] Speaker B: To throw up that instead of the ugly pattern which holds you back. [00:17:57] Speaker A: That's right. [00:17:57] Speaker B: What do you think is going on in our society now that is causing a lot of this anxiety and depression from a meta sort of point of view? [00:18:08] Speaker A: It's a good question. As I was saying earlier, my understanding of reality now is that we're all, in a sense, extensions of source consciousness. And therefore that consciousness is primary. Or if you want to call some call it spirituality is primary. Materialism is secondary, as I understand reality. But in our educational system now dominated by Western concepts, we're being taught the opposite. We're being taught that there is a external, existing, objective, physical reality. That somehow, through eons of evolution and accidental combinations of different chemicals, there was evolution. And eventually humans developed as the most sophisticated being on the planet. And that our sense of being aware, having some sense of agency, of choice, is all from our head brain, the physical brain, which sort of computes consciousness for us. And that's the official teaching. Except that there's no evidence whatsoever that the brain produces consciousness. There's not even a theory that can possibly explain it that's accepted. All the evidence is the other way around, that the mind, our consciousness, dreams up the brain. Also, in the Western understanding of our physicality, we're taught that not only is our consciousness in our head brain, but that's the only brain we have. And we now know, if you really look at the science, all humans have at least three brains, three physical brains, the head brain, a heart brain, and a gut brain. We call the microbiome. The heart brain used to be considered something that primitive people believed it. They believed that was like the center of their awareness, consciousness, because you feel things in your heart emotionally. We now know that the heart is not only a brain. It's more powerful than the brain in our head. The heart has its own nervous system, the heart has its own memory system. The heart has more nerves going up to affect functioning of the brain and the head, then the brain and the head can affect the heart. We've been totally misled on where consciousness comes from and what's really primary in the world as we live right now. We're being taught that the reality is all material. We're taught to devalue imagination, as I was saying earlier, we're taught to devalue things like intuition, the inner knowing. It's all out there. Memorize the facts, fall in line, go with the guidelines. The greatest acceleration of this right now in two respects. One was these smartphones which have addicted so many people to screens. And that's partly why they have very few, you know, little attention spans and don't read many books anymore. But now also a development of AI of artificial intelligence. It's again drawing us even more so to depend on things on the outside world. And that's not where it's at. So we find for example, a real correlation statistically between the adoption of popular smartphone technology and practice and social media and the incidence of anxiety and depression in people and also particularly loneliness. So it's interesting here. So on one level, this stuff connects us to anyone, anywhere in the world in moments, magically, in part as we're connecting right now. But it's disconnecting them from being inside, it's disconnecting them from connecting at heart level with other people. And I repeat, there's evidence that the heart's actually more important go back to our bodies than the brain and our head. So to me, it's greatly accelerating that trend where more and more we're looking for the outside world for guidance and more and more it's controlling us. And less and less human spirit, less and less human heart and relationships. [00:22:15] Speaker B: You think that this is like a self manifesting loop of disconnection in that this sort of like, I would say it's like a societal trauma is causing the birth of more of these devices and ways of disconnecting. [00:22:35] Speaker A: Yes. And that's why I said earlier, I think people have lost ability to think generally. They don't realize what's happening. You know, there was this fictional movie called the Matrix. [00:22:44] Speaker B: I thought it was a documentary. Sorry. [00:22:47] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's both sad and frightening for me to watch humanity marching voluntarily right into it. That's what they're doing. They're surrendering their own awareness, they're surrendering their own Sense of agency and all becoming cogs in a wheel controlled by, you know, the uber rich people. [00:23:04] Speaker B: It's terrifying where it could go, but there's also the spark of the movement of people becoming aware of it and also then embracing mindfulness, forest bathing, reconnection to nature. It's like, it seems like at the same time it's going downhill, that we've also got the balance happening. [00:23:26] Speaker A: I see and value, you know, those forward, you know, upward trends. I think statistically though it's such a small percentage of the totality and the threats we're dealing with right now are so serious. I don't think we have much window of opportunity. The reason I wrote my book was as a wake up call because I saw the world just going literally crazy. And since it's been out, the world has gotten considerably more crazy in so many different ways. And I don't want to be a downer here, but in my first chapters, you know, may recall, I talk about some of the statistics on various collapses in our ecosystem that, you know, we take for granted. But they're very real collapses. [00:24:11] Speaker B: I think beyond all of the darkness that is occurring that would. The key to it all is realize that we are co creators in this. And within being the co creators, we have to really still hold the lantern and go, there is light, there is a way. [00:24:31] Speaker A: That's right. That's why I'm here with you. [00:24:33] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. That's why I do this podcast. Exactly. So and that's why I really enjoyed your book is like for me it was like, oh my God, this is the book that I like. I said when we first talked that I wish I could have read. So I wish I could have written. I should have say. But yeah. So what advice would you give to Egmare exactly what? Well, on a higher meta perspective, I did so and so did you. So now what advice would you give aspiring leaders and entrepreneurs who are seeking to make positive impact in the world to maybe instead of inventing that new device that keeps everyone, you know, broken and distracted, finding a new way to actually help people, to uplift them. [00:25:19] Speaker A: There are many things that I provide as examples in my book, but they're very concise. So it's something that has to be taken in slowly with reflection to really appreciate it. So even looking at some of, you know, the indigenous wisdom, for example, in North America, the indigenous cultures have something called the law of seven generations. And that was a cultural value system wherein if they were, if the tribe, let us say the band of natives was considering some major change. Changing their encampment grounds, changing their hunting practice, or perhaps the type of relationship they were having with other tribes. They would try to think out seven generations of their kin into the future as to how it might impact the consequences. We currently are doing the exact opposite. It's short term thinking and it's largely motivated either by fear or greed, totally different way. So I think it's also important when we're talking about making changes like as you said, entrepreneurs and so on in business, that they do something which is not common practice at all right now. Think out the implications and consequences. The two godfathers of AI I was just, as I said, listening to before we started our conversation, have both cried out that we're not doing that and it's perilous for our existence. They actually think there's an extinction threat that seriously. And the other thing, just coming back to your question on the business sector, since everything comes from imagination, if you imagine something you consider desirable and you think it through, whether it's seven generations or not, but really think through consequences broadly, then you can energize that and bring it into the world. As I say, we call it manifestation, but it's really just taking something that comes up to you as a strong concept and finding a way to bring it into the common reality that we all experience on this level. To me, this is like a level of our reality, sometimes a consensual reality. [00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see how that would work. I've been considering what I've been seeing with the path of invention and entrepreneurship myself, that has been a little disturbing over the last maybe five or 10 years. And it seems like a lot of it is like, as you say, driven by fear and greed, But a part of that fear is like this existential threat that they think that because the cost of a very strong vein of atheism in tech, that they've only got one life and they've got to try and beat death. And by beating death, they win, which is really quite odd. [00:28:05] Speaker A: And transhumanism. Yes. Yeah, yeah. [00:28:08] Speaker B: And that's why transhumanism is a part of the story and all that we. [00:28:11] Speaker A: See from that, and it's like insane, you know, like they're basically dehumanizing us. [00:28:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. To achieve the goal, which is to. [00:28:23] Speaker A: Turn us into robots controlled by a mastermind computer. Yeah. They made tricks again. [00:28:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it seems like they're seeing everyone on the planet is a part of the threat of their story of trying to escape dying. And within that, they're doing everything they can to make sure they reduce the population and at the same time keep everyone caged. Yes, sadly, a tough place. How do the commonalities of mystical experiences across different religions resonate with your own spiritual beliefs? [00:28:57] Speaker A: One of the scholars that I really appreciate, and I quote him in my book, Aldous Huxley, wrote a book called some decades ago called the Perennial Philosophy. And most of us, if we've been raised in a family with a religion and are told by our family, we're fortunate we were born in the right religion. All the other people had the wrong religion. And that's still going on today in this world as we know. He looked at it very differently and he looked at what's in common to all the major religions. In engineering, there's something called signal noise detection. So if you want to transmit a signal to somebody else at some other location, and if the strength of the signal is weak or there's interference, there's noise in the system, one way to ensure accuracy is to keep repeating the same signal over and over again and the noise kind of, you know, cancels out, so to speak. So coming back to the parental philosophy, he looked at what's in common to all of these different major religions and that brings you back, so to speak, to the signal. And they all have the same understanding. Reality is multi level. At some level, we're all connected. They all have the same notion. Interesting enough, we think often of physics, particularly quantum mechanics, leading edge of physics right now, as being the opposite of things like the soft science of psychology or even softer science of parapsychology or spirituality. And yet the physicists themselves, I quote a number of them in my book, are totally buying into this notion that it's an illusion that we're separate, we're all coming from the same source. They also believe that source is consciousness, not material. That's not what we're being taught. But these are the experts, that's what they're thinking. [00:30:48] Speaker B: Unifying consciousness seems to be a part of the only path towards the. What would you call it, like, ascension to the singularity of being in pure infinite love? Which is what I see as pretty much the ultimate goal of consciousness. And how does the concept of universal consciousness impact your understanding of your place and universe and your relationship to others? [00:31:12] Speaker A: I say to some people, once you become aware, as I have, you cannot help but care. Because once you know we're all connected, how can you be indifferent to the sufferings of others or in various ways try to exploit them or hurt them as we see so much going on in the world right now. So for me, once I have this awareness, I don't want to say it's not a choice, that sounds negative, but it's more, I'll say just natural for me to appreciate the connection with everyone all over the world, no matter what their races are, no matter what their religions are, no matter what their ideologies might be and so on. That's just surface stuff. At a deeper level, we're all the same. We're happier and we're stronger if we connect more with each other. And again, a lot of that is from the heart. We sometimes evaluate things when we still think, some of us in our head, we think things out. We may write things down or again use a computer device. But another way of evaluating the goodness of things, the correctness of things, the ultimate consequences, is from the heart. What's it feel like in your heart when you think of these things? So when we're angry, this whole area of our chest feels tighter, it's tense. But when we're happy, if you meet someone, a friend for example, or someone you love, that whole area of your chest softens and you can actually use that almost as a compass as a guide for wise decisions and not wise decisions. What's it feel like in your heart? [00:32:53] Speaker B: I find personally when I go into a deep meditation that I sense the actual dropping down of my point of consciousness from my head all the way down into my heart space and operating from there. And it's like the universe smiles when I get there. So I love that feeling. What are your thoughts on the role of the ego in our experience of reality and suffering? [00:33:22] Speaker A: So I think one of our core challenges and problems, it's just greatly amplified right now is the ego. So again, as I said, I think everything comes from source as an extension of it. Just like everything in a dream comes from the dreamer who's having the dream. But there's still some level of two way connection. So it comes from the dream. But again, when you become more awake and you realize we're all part of the same whole, you can go back, going back to, as I say, lucid dreaming and dream program or the Australian ocean, the Aboriginal culture of dreamtime, and work with that very actively. It's discombobulating to be told that reality is almost the opposite. We've been taught that it's not. I guess I said independent of us. You know, it seems that way and everything around us, people and also objects, although again, they seem Totally separate from us. They're not. And there are ways to learn, to use, again, your mind, to change your mindset, to access a different level of power. You know, I give a simple example again in the beginning of my book before I get into things like the placebo effect in the martial arts, where they teach young kids with a bare hand and just one strike to split a wooden board. And they're not taught to hit the board hard. They're taught to strike through and beyond the board. And when you remove the board as what you're hitting, you're able to go through it easily with no harm, no injury. If you don't and you're hitting the board, you hit the board. And you know, in psychology and psychiatry, I think this is symbolic. We call limiting beliefs. So when you have an inappropriate belief, it can hold you back. It's like a reverse, if you like, of the placebo effect. Literally, it can blind you or just restrain you. But once you're aware it's just a belief and you think through it, you become more empowered, you have more sense again of choice and agency. [00:35:35] Speaker B: Do you think that the content that people consume nowadays is a major part of those limiting belief stories that we are sort of embodying and adopting? Because I see all the time when I look at, like I've actually dropped my subscription to all streaming services just because, you know, I used to started this rule. It's like if I see somebody murdered or some sort of traumatic event happen in the first 10 to 15 minutes of a show, I just turn it off. I don't need to see that because it's not good for you. And, you know, once I recognize that for myself, everything changed. I just feel calm. I don't have this continuous state of underlying anxiety that I don't need to have. [00:36:23] Speaker A: And it's good you have that, you know, other level awareness, almost like a meta awareness, we call it. But by contrast, for many other people, it's sort of the opposite, unfortunately. So when something comes up that would cause fear or make them angry, they're more magnetically attracted to it and sucked into it. Sadly, that's what's happening big time in the world right now. [00:36:44] Speaker B: Well, it's seen as exciting and they can't discern it any different from the excitement of terror rather than. Yes, yeah, yeah, okay. So how does the concept of dreaming the world into being resonate with your own experiences and aspirations? [00:37:02] Speaker A: I have done many different things in my life, and I could write a book just it was more like autobiographical of you know, what was the magic I experienced in my life type of thing? Let me give you a couple of examples. I did a joint degree in medicine and psychology, and I did this at McGill University. And when I proposed to the university that I want to do these two degrees together, they said, you can't do that. And I. Limiting belief. And I said, why? He said, because no one's ever done it before. And I said, but aren't universities supposed to be at the leading edge of knowledge to advance, not just, you know, conserve? They said, well, there's more practical reasons too. I said, like what? They said, well, our computer system, this is quite a years ago, but they still had. Every student had a computer id the university could keep somewhat track of the enrollments they had and different faculties and so on. They said, every student has a computer ID but you be in two different faculties. How would the computer deal with that? And I said, the computers are there for us to program, not to control us. Then they said, well, how would we calculate? Like your tuition? You're in two different programs, two different faculties. I said, I'm not asking for a discount. Guess what? They gave in. I went through the wooden board. I have my two degrees. That's just one example. So again, I was told initially, you cannot do it. I challenged it. They gave me more reasons why I can't do it. I didn't accept the wooden board. I went for what I dreamed up as my goal and I did it. That's just one example. I also dreamed that if I was able to do these two degrees, the research that I would do in The Psychology Department, McGill, would be on parapsychology, specifically telepathy. At the time, the chairman of the Department of psychology at McGill University was D. O Hepb he's the father, by the way, of neuroplasticity. He was also a former president of the American Psychological association, extremely highly esteemed in the world. He's the one who came up with the notion that cells that fire together wire together. That's from him. [00:39:15] Speaker B: Yeah, right, Nice. [00:39:17] Speaker A: He was my teacher for the courses I was taking as an undergraduate, but he was also the department head, that same person as well. Again, I acknowledge that he was as being a very brilliant and important contributor to understanding of consciousness in the mind in a conventional level. He also said in print in one of the journals of the American Psychological association, that although the evidence for psychic phenomena was kind of interesting, fascinating, he said he rejected all of it because it's a priori impossible. I'm quoting Him, a priori, if you like. Theoretically impossible. Some years later, I determined I'm going to do that research under him. And just another anecdote. It was his secretary in the end, who ended up typing up my thesis. And I was in the office talking to her about some fine editing changes I had to make in the final manuscript when he was walking out of his inner office and she said to him, professor Hebb, you were wrong. Telepathy is real. This proves it. Just a matter of a year or two later, he recanted in public. And he said he's now willing to accept the evidence for some psychic phenomena cannot be dismissed. So it's another example, you know, something to be impossible. And I worked under him. That was my intention. But going through that wooden board, wow. And the research not only was, you know, allowed to go ahead, the actual research project was extremely successful, very powerful in proving it. [00:40:55] Speaker B: That's awesome. I love that story because it's like. [00:40:58] Speaker A: There'S more, you know. But to ask your question, I don't want this to be about me. It's more discovered. Right. And I really can. [00:41:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I love that you actually use your own technique to prove other things that were pretty much dismissed by science. [00:41:13] Speaker A: You know, another one. Just to say, I've also worked as a corporate trainer, consultant internationally. I never went to business school. I was never trained to do that, but I've worked with the top Fortune 10 companies in the world, internationally. It was a dream. I thought I'd like to do it. And part of the reason, by the way, it wasn't an ego thing. I was thinking, as a doctor, usually I'm only able to help one patient at a time. Sometimes perhaps a family, but usually it was an individual. And almost always after they had a problem. That's why they would come to me as a doctor. And I thought, wouldn't it be an improvement in what I could do in this world if I didn't wait for people to have problems? I taught them proactively to avoid problems. And if I didn't just deal with one or a few people in a family at a time, it would hundreds and thousands. So that took me into the corporate realm. It wasn't about making money. That never was my motive in anything I've done. [00:42:12] Speaker B: It sounds like you were a bit of a karma mechanic, in that case. Unwinding people's disconnects. Yeah. How can you incorporate visualization and other imaginal techniques into your daily life to enhance your creativity and, well, being? [00:42:29] Speaker A: Well, to Go back to one basic understanding I try and teach when I'm working with patients particularly, you don't have to be how you were, who you were. It's very fundamental. You need to learn to fully inhabit, center yourself, as we call in the immediate present, the here and now. As I say, when you're in that state, that now, that immediate present is your point of power, where almost anything becomes possible when you allow yourself to just be in that state. Now, for most of us, we're rarely in the present again, particularly right now. And again partly because of the technologies we're dealing with. We're so distracted into the outer world. So we lose our, if you like, our intelligence and our power. If you realize that you don't have to be, as I say, as you were. If you imagine something you consider, as I was saying earlier, desirable, that you think would be a good service or product to bring out into the world, if it doesn't exist yet, or an enhancement, a better version of it, and then you think it out, rip it again in terms of not just will people buy it, but how will this affect those people longer term and perhaps the generation or two after them. And if you do that, you get a clear sense of the vision that's the right vision to bring forward, to actually manifest. Some people going back to what I said about dream programming, are actually able to elaborate on that type of envisioning, literally in the dream through again, lucid dreaming. But there are also techniques you can do in your total waking consciousness that allow you to do it as well. As I mentioned earlier, I actually developed training programs and creative thinking for Fortune 10, Fortune 100 companies. Broadly, I could take people who never thought they were creative and teach them in just a workshop, a number of what I call them, tools that guarantee they no longer will just see things in one way. They'll see possibilities they didn't see and maybe consequences. So that can be taught to be more aware. And again, it's being more aware of what comes up within you. Whereas our whole trend right now in our society is not to be so much aware of what comes up within us, more and more to be tracking what's outside and depending on that which ultimately weakens us. [00:44:58] Speaker B: Curious, are you developing any courses online or anything like that for people to be able to take up and understand these techniques as well? [00:45:07] Speaker A: You know, the challenge I've taken on for myself is, as you may imagine, rather overwhelming. But you know, modestly, as I said earlier, I wrote this book as a wake up call to the world. I have been involved in a lot of different things as we're discussing for many years, but a few years ago, something different happened, and it wasn't under the effect, by the way, of any psychedelics. I had a revelation. You know, if we want to use lay terms and tone it down, you could say an insight, but it's a lot more powerful than an insight. And I suddenly understood and saw reality in a whole different way. And that's apparently where I said, again, once I was aware, how could I not care? So I've taken it upon myself to try to bring sanity to our world. Gone mad. I never thought as a trained psychotherapist, that I'd have to go beyond individuals and families and countries and have to take on the whole world. But that's what it feels like right now. I don't think many people are able even to think for themselves right now. It's that bad. And a lot of them, unfortunately, don't even realize that they think they are thinking. They're not. To come back to just conventional medicine for a moment. When we're in a state of stress, when we're anxious, depressed, angry, there's a primitive part of the brain that's activated called the amygdala. It's actually very small, proportionally, but it's powerful. When it's stimulated, it takes over. For example, when we do fmris, which track blood flow changes in the brain. When we have someone in the scanner and we ask them to imagine something would be upsetting to them, the blood actually drains away from the top part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, and goes into the area of the amygdala. It's like pouring oil on a fire. And when the blood again flow is reduced to the upper brain, which is the prefrontal cortex, it's like a computer going offline. And so when you really get into that emotional state, be it depression, anxiety or anger, it's very hard to pull yourself out once you're in it. But there are techniques. When you talk to someone about how you're feeling, when you journal, when you put it in words, there's an expression we have to name it is to tame it, because when you try to put a word to it, you're probably activating the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain, reducing the fire and the amygdala. So again, we can teach people these techniques, but they're not. They're not taught broadly at all now, not yet. [00:47:36] Speaker B: Eventually they will be, because it's necessary for the. I would say the survival of the whole race and basically the benefit of consciousness as an expression of the higher self. Universal self, universal mind. Okay, so this is really big. [00:47:56] Speaker A: It's heavy. [00:47:57] Speaker B: It is. It's heavy. But it's also very, very interesting. Like, I've pondered a lot of these understandings myself, which is part of the reason why I started this podcast. You know, I. I wanted to tell people that there are people out there doing great work, like you are doing, and. And it's all about healing. Healing our ancestral trauma, you could say, to bring us back in alignment with and in accord with the universe and where the universe needs us to go. So all power to you. And I'm really happy that we've. We've talked about everything we talked about today, but I'm curious to know, would you be willing to talk about that experience of the ineffable that came upon you and then what happened? [00:48:36] Speaker A: I don't mind. I was invited to present a keynote to an annual conference of healers based on my first book, which was Inner Spaces, Parapsychological Expression of Mind that I wrote half century ago. And I had somewhat left that behind as I've done many things, and I had developed my medical practice, I had an academic career, and I was also traveling the world as a trainer, corporate trainer and consultant, and working with sometimes governments as well. And so I just. I still had the interest, but I wasn't invested as much in terms of doing any more research or keeping up with the literature. But when I was honored with this invitation for my own sense of professional integrity, I wanted to do it really, really well as a professional. And so I did a very, very deep dive into a half century of parapsychological research, into a half century of the developments in physics and quantum mechanics. And I did also a very deep study of comparative religions and the wisdom traditions from many different areas and times of the world. What was going on with the psychedelic research as it was starting to become more legalized in some jurisdictions and many more things. You've read the book, and it all fit together like pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly, they weren't separate things again. They weren't just different things. They were just more of an expression. And you said, you know, earlier that you think, you know, consciousness, the source ultimately, you know, seeks to be okay, to be at peace. I think what it really seeks, though, is experience. You know, if you think of expression, one is the only number when you have a situation. If there was nobody else in the world you're the only one that'd be really painful and horrible. So back to your question. So there's this deep data dump, and all of a sudden, again, things are connecting. So quantum physics fit with the wisdom traditions, different religions fit with other religions. It all was fitting together. That was, how should I say, intellectual realization. But then something unexpected happened. Back to your question. I suddenly had an experience. I called again, a revelation. It was fast, in a minute or two. Totally unexpected at first, Very scary, not welcome. And the realization, the awareness was, there is no outside world. There are no other people. There are no other things materially. And then I was like, oh, gosh, I'm all alone. That was horrible, that feeling. And it flipped quickly into, I'm not alone. I'm connected. Everything and everyone. That was the experience. It was fast. Maybe a couple minutes. First, I repeat, scary, frightening. But then it morphed into something beautiful, and it's remained. [00:51:42] Speaker B: So instead of being alone, you became all one consciousness. Yeah, beautiful. [00:51:48] Speaker A: Even with animals. And I got this wonderful relationship with my cat, a new cat. Mind blowing. And, you know, and I'm someone who studies the mind in both ways in terms of, like, the parapsychology realm, but also psychiatry. Wow. What a connection. What a connection. And yet, I just heard at a conference a week ago a somewhat eminent psychiatrist saying, and you think your cat loves you. Ha ha. And he's, you know, he thinks he's knowledgeable and he's wise. We're all connected. Consciousness is in everything. Just like when you have a dream, in a sense, your dream consciousness is in everything, right? The different people, the different objects. [00:52:29] Speaker B: It's normal. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, totally agreed. Totally agreed. So we're coming towards the end of the podcast. Howard, how can people find you and your book and learn more about you and your work? [00:52:48] Speaker A: Thank you again. As you asked, I don't have a course per se, but I do try to communicate with people who are interested in the book and my teachings. So I have a very large following on LinkedIn and also on Meta, Facebook, Instagram. I'm in contact by email with people all over the world. It's just me, though. I don't have a staff and no one is funding me. I'm doing this out of my own savings, to be honest, because I just feel I have to. At least once I have this awareness. The book can be ordered pretty well anywhere in the world, online, whatever online distributors it might be. People could go to their local bookstore and ask the store to make a special Order for the book. It's not stock in stores. It's so called print on demand. It's available in multiple editions, hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook. My own website is doctorhowardisenberg.com and I have a lot of other material on that website for free for the public. So anyone's available, you know, to look at that, it's Dr. Not the whole Dr. Howard eisenberg.com. [00:53:59] Speaker B: I'M curious, though, when you said that you're being guided to do this, it's that you said one word. There was. They instructed you to do this. I'm curious to know. [00:54:10] Speaker A: I. I don't know if. If that came out as a. A slip or a tech thing. I. There was no they. Okay. It's all one. [00:54:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just. Just trying to cure. I'm just curious because sometimes people have work when. When we're working at these levels, you're guided by higher entities, and some people. [00:54:30] Speaker A: Well, there are different levels of reality. Yes, but I repeat, ultimately, I think as most of the religious traditions teach and the indigenous teachings, ultimately we're all one. We're all coming from the same source. I gotta go back for analogy, which is a little more understandable and comprehensible. People think of us as humans. When we have a dream, they can seem very real. They can be populated, they can have exotic locations. It's all coming from our mind. [00:54:57] Speaker B: If there was one message that you'd like people to take away from this podcast today and our discussion and your ideas, what would you like for people to take away with them? [00:55:08] Speaker A: Claim your awareness and your compassion. Awareness that we're all connected and compassion. How you connect to others. [00:55:17] Speaker B: Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Doctor, it's been a pleasure talking with you and I respect everything that you're doing. I had the honor of reading your book, as I mentioned at the start, and it's right on point for right now, what's needed for people to wake up in a really easy and clear way. And I thank you so much for your time. [00:55:42] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Again, be well. Thank you. [00:55:45] Speaker B: Thank you. All right, I'll just say goodbye to the listeners. [00:55:48] Speaker A: Ciao. [00:55:53] Speaker B: I feel really honored to be able to talk to people like Dr. Howard Eisenberg, because, number one, he has done so much for consciousness and the realization of people and their connection to consciousness in ways that I wish I could have done myself, and I am doing now through supernormalize. So hopefully you've listened all this way to the end of the podcast. And you actually have enjoyed it or watched the YouTube all the way through the end. And if you have like and subscribe, that'd be really appreciated. But if you've enjoyed today's show too, and you'd like to reach out to Dr. Heisenberg, I'm sure he'd really appreciate you contacting him and saying thank you so much for coming on the show. That'd be really neat. So if you've ever really enjoyed today's show, please share this to a good friend who you think would benefit from it. And if you could get onto your podcast app and give me five stars and write something really nice, I'd appreciate that too. That'd be really nice. So thank you so much for listening. Until next episode, it's bye for now. Looking at the statistics that I have for YouTube and for my podcast apps, I I have a lot of listeners and viewers that aren't yet liked and subscribed. So if you're on YouTube, like and subscribe, it's free. And if you're on a podcast app, please give me five stars. That'd be really cool. It helps other people find these great conversations too. Thank you. [00:57:29] Speaker A: It.