#205: Mark Gober: Understanding The Independent Force That Is Our Inner Consciousness

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am feeling just this real sense of awe in this moment at how big the universe is or feels to me in this moment. Just even the concept of time is so mind-bogglingly large that I can think back to last year around the same time at the start of a brand new year and how energized we were around 2020. getting going and all these great goals and aspirations we had and not having any sense that the universe was going to test my sense of humor and test us in so many ways with more change and more uncertainty than I've experienced in probably my entire adult life. And I think a lot of people have experienced very similar things. And it was a glorious year and a painful year and a year of tremendous change and lots of suffering. Of course, I don't diminish that in the least. And yet, But look back, it was a beautiful year, beautiful, unpredictable, sort of majestic year. And I'm just in awe of what's happened in the span of the last 12 months. But even just contemplating time itself is such a mystery because I can just as easily as I can think back on where I was at this moment, many of you right now can think back on where you were at this moment last year. It's just as easy to think back to 10 years earlier. Or 20 years earlier or some early stage in our lives. And that only seems like a second ago. It doesn't seem like that's any longer a journey backward in time than even pre-pandemic was. So it's a mystery. And so many things are mysteries. And I'm at a stage in a phase of my life where I'm much more embracing of the unknown and uncertainty and the mystery. of life than I've ever been before. In fact, I started writing a book about a year ago that's all about uncertainty, which we'll be talking about in the months ahead. I won't really say anything about it right now other than to say that it is a book very much about how we leverage uncertainty for our growth, for the purpose of long-term growth. And I think everything that has happened over the last year, without sounding so ridiculously optimistic that it's Pollyanna-like, I think it's all about our growth. Even if we can't see All of that in this moment. I think everything is intended for our growth individually and as a species and as a universe, whatever that means. It's such a big, big concept. But what's really great is that the take sort of taking that on, taking on the conversation of big concept and big universe and the mysteries of life as we know it and as we are yet to know it, maybe I've got the perfect guest for that conversation today who happens to be an Dear friend. I could say an old friend. We know each other a while now, but certainly a dear friend. And I'll say a little bit about him, and then we're going to just dig into this and see where it leads. It's always fun to just sort of start in a place and follow the breadcrumbs and allow ourselves to be guided and then see where it takes us. So Mark Gober is the author of the award-winning book, An End to Upside-Down Thinking, and the new sequel, An End to Upside-Down Living, and the host of the podcast, Where Is My Mind? He's a former partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and previously worked on Wall Street. There's a lot more to this man's bio, but I'm just going to start by saying, welcome, Mark. It's so great to have you on the show again.

Well, thank you for having me back, Adam.

It's a pleasure. I'd love for you to think of one thing right now, one thing that's not in that short but impressive bio, one thing that you would love for people to know about you at the outset.

I was always a very traditional thinker. In that I was traditionally trained. I went to an elite private school outside of Baltimore, Maryland. Then I went to Princeton. I was a captain of the tennis team there, kind of following the trajectory of someone that's trying to achieve. And then I went into investment banking, worked on Wall Street for a little under 2 years during the financial crisis. So that was a big part of my life, a big part of my foundation, because it was a pretty traumatic time, not only for the world, but also for me to be starting my career in such a stressful environment. Investment banking is stressful to begin with, and then also to be advising companies like banks and insurance companies, that was my duty, to work with the financial institutions. So that was a big part of my life, and I decided to leave and then joined a— at the time, it was a new firm that spun out of the Boston Consulting Group. So the Boston Consulting Group, BCG, is a large consulting firm advising companies all over the world on their business strategy. And so I joined a spin-out of that firm to advise companies focused on their technology and their intellectual property. So I was kind of leaving the traditional path a little bit, but in a lot of ways I wasn't. Still advising companies and thinking about achievement. That was my focus. And so in my bio, you mentioned my books and my podcast, and that's kind of where my life has moved in this other direction, which is thinking about the big questions as you were talking about. In 2016, everything shifted for me and not because I was really looking for it, but I would say it was a combination of life circumstances. I hit a wall in many ways, personal life, professional life, things weren't quite going my way at that time. And I heard some things on podcasts that I wasn't planning to hear that challenged my view of reality, that basically made me go from a person who thought there's no meaning to life, we're in this big random universe, but it's all meaningless. And that's what my educational system and I think societal conditioning had taught me to believe. And I went from believing that to learning about science that suggested there is a spiritual dimension to reality. And my journey over the last now 4 and a half years is to explore the nature of reality with this expanded perspective and then look at my own life. What do I want to be doing? Do I want to just be focused on achieving and doing the next step based on what I've been conditioned to do, or do I want to do something else? And so far, I've chosen to veer in another direction, and I don't know exactly where that's going to go, but that's the short version, Adam.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I'd love to get a sense of sort of what's the difference in a day in the life for you right now? Meaning, what was your life like following that more traditional, conventional, well, let's say a well-worn ...path of achievement that leads to success or work and establishing yourself and credentials and the like that ultimately leads to financial success and the rewards associated with that and the path that you were on there and a day in the life today. And what would be the telltale signs that your life, while still you, is quite different or feels different?

First word that comes to mind is stress. That stress was a huge part of my life before, and it's not absent from my life now. But that's what— when I think about that old track, even going back to the first time there were grades in middle school, stress. What's the next thing I'm going to achieve? I have a tennis tournament this weekend. I've got to perform there. And that never ended. And it was because I was focused on the next thing in front of me. And there was a fear associated with that next thing in front of me, a fear of I guess, failure of not getting the thing that I want to get and knowing that every challenge in front of me had the potential of failure, but it also had the potential of success. And you actually reminded me of something that I studied in undergrad. I was a psychology major focused on judgment and decision-making. And this conversation's reminding me of a concept called loss aversion. The idea in psychology that losses are more painful than gains feel good. It's just a human tendency. And that was very much how I think I lived because I was confronted with win-loss situations and I saw the potential for losses and that lead to lots of stress. But that also implied that I was framing the question as gain-loss on some kind of arbitrary scale, as you were alluding to. So now I look at everything so much differently, which we can get into. I look at life in a more evolutionary fashion and that gains and losses are arbitrary and that even, even in a perceived loss, there is something to gain from it. So there's less stress now.

Yeah. And where does worry fit in? Because, I mean, stress, I think we have a sense of what stress is like and feels like and worry is Part of that. So

worry was definitely associated with the stress that I used to— I think worry comes into play now, but it's neutralized much more quickly when I experience it. And it has to do with this more what I'll call spiritual outlook. I almost don't like to use that word because of the connotations. To me, the science points to a reality which is inherently spiritual, which we can talk maybe about a little bit later. But that perspective, this idea that we are not just our body, that are the essence of what we are. Some would call it consciousness, the part of us that experiences life. Some might call it the soul that is beyond the body and beyond this lifetime. So with an expanded perspective, what might seem worrisome right now can be recontextualized and re-understood with this other worldview.

Yeah. I want to dig into that. I just want to go back to the gain-loss distinction there, because I think a lot of people can really relate to that. We can live our lives in so many ways just trying to Avert mistakes and avert the pain of losing or the pain of screwing up or the pain of any number of other things that lead to judgment, self-judgment or the judgment of others. And how different it would be if we somehow understood that gain and loss are, yes, arbitrary. And is it a zero-sum game? What does that mean to you?

It's a great question. So one of the things that as you were just talking that's related to gain-loss is also the concept of risk and risk aversion. So this goes back to Daniel Kahneman's prospect theory, which he won the Nobel Prize for. And my thesis was on this topic. I was exploring how it actually works and trying to figure it out. The idea is that when a person is faced with a sure thing, like, hey, Adam, I'm going to give you $100, or we're going to flip a coin, and if you win, you get $200, if you lose, you get nothing. Yeah. So you take the gamble, Or you can take the sure thing. Most people take the sure thing. That's how they frame it in their mind. It's called risk aversion. If you flip it around though, and I said, Adam, you're going to give me $100 for sure, or we're going to flip a coin and you're either going to lose $200 or lose nothing. What the researchers find is that when you flip it around, people like to take the gamble rather than to take the sure loss.

Yes.

And that idea won a Nobel Prize because when it's framed as a gain, people like to take the sure gain. When it's framed as a loss, they like to take the gamble rather than take a sure loss. So this concept, I think, informs how we think about gains and losses in any decisions we make in life. We think about what is the risk associated with it. And if we frame it as a potential gain, then we just like to take the sure thing. If we're in the position where we might lose more or we might lose something for sure, well, we'd rather gamble to have the opportunity of not losing anything.

Interesting. Is there a philosophy that you now hold that, as you say, neutralizes the distinction between or creates almost like a oneness because I know we'll get into that, what oneness has to do with any of this. But I was reading at some point in a text some years ago that in divine mind, this was a metaphysical text. And in that context, supply and demand were one and the same. And it feels like in this instance that something that you're addressing is that gain and loss are one and the same in a different Exactly. Am I near to what you're getting at?

Yes. Yes. Especially from this worldview that I now hold is that even in what you would call the loss, there is something to be gained on another level. And even in the quote unquote gain, the gain might be on a different dimension almost. So it's like the question of—

And even in the gain, there's a loss that is possible in the gaining. I mean, any person— so I'll just say you and I had a similar path. At the beginning, doing the things that are traditionally associated with creating a path for success and then even tasting of the fruit for a while of that path. And a lot of people know this, that success isn't all it's cracked up to be, sort of that old cliché. But truth in that is that even in the gain, you lose lots of things. You may lose time that you can't get back. You may lose time with people that you can't recapture. You may lose Respect for yourself, as was the case for me, 15 years into a practice of law, knowing that for the most part each day I was doing work I didn't love and feeling like I'm selling out or even feeling like a fraud in the process. So yeah, my bank account was swelling and my possessions were swelling and I was certainly taking care of my family. But for me, my view of myself was shrinking. So that's a lost—

Yeah.

Like the front and back of the same coin.

I think at a different level of reality, there is no question about whether there is a gain or a loss. I think you're right. It's a construct because no matter how you look at it, you can find something that's a gain or a loss in any situation. And that's, I think, a good way to summarize much of the transformation I've had in my own thinking is that any event that happens can be neutralized by looking at all of the surrounding effects. And one can always find the positives at the highest level. There's always a positive to be found, usually, if not always, with regard to growth in some way.

If everything tends to cause growth, I mean, this is, I think, a good lead-in to some of these big concepts. We're still sort of in the midst of a pandemic. For months and months and months, I'm doing podcasts and speaking to people. And I still feel like we're somewhere between Dover and Calais, like somewhere in the middle of the English Channel and haven't yet reached ashore. And this pandemic is certainly not gone and not going away instantly. Even with the advent of a vaccine, there's still tons and tons of things happening. So with everything that's gone on in the world and all the change that's around, how do we help? What's the conversation about framing this as something that's neutral, that is both a combination of gain and loss, of good and other, for people that are living with it daily? I mean, you've been blessed and I know you've worked hard to create a lot of your blessings. I've been blessed and I'm not taking anything away from the work that's led to this point, And— but for the grace of God, because there are people living in boxes, there are people homeless, there are people who can't put food on their table, there are people who have, you know, experienced loss of family members and friends. And it's just, you know, it's beyond description on some level. And so I'd love it if what we're discussing in some way is something that's really usable for people in how they approach their experience of living each— even in this moment. And beyond, because what else do we have? I mean, my theory is that we've got a feeling. We experience feeling of our lives each moment, and hopefully moments and moments to come, too many to count. But this is the only one we've got. So everything that happened, all my feelings of my life a year ago don't really change what I'm feeling in this moment. And if what I'm feeling is scared or alone or any other of those sort of ways of just taking in the enormity of the world as it is in this moment, well then my life is not— it's not as I would want it to be, but I also would believe it's not as was designed by a great creator for it to be. So how do we speak to people now who are dealing with real harsh realities in their lives that allows them to reframe and experience even the hardship, but not But in a more neutral way, the way you were describing it earlier?

2 things come to mind. First is I want to re-explain what I mean by neutrality. And secondly, I want to introduce the concept of humility, which is that there's so much that we don't know about the universe and what we're doing here and what the purpose of life is that it's difficult to judge and know why things are happening. But we'll get to that second. Neutrality. When I talk about neutrality, I don't mean that in a way where we dismiss feelings that come up, whether they feel good or they feel bad. One of— this is a core tenet of many spiritual traditions or self-help traditions— is to fully experience whatever is coming up. And that might need to happen for reasons that we can't understand. It could be a really negative feeling that needs to be cleared from within us. So when there are things happening in the world that appear to be very dark, those could also be viewed as a form of clearing. And we see that on a personal level throughout an individual's life. In order to progress to a new level of understanding or a new level of anything in life, we typically have to clear out the stuff that's holding us back. Whatever darkness we have within us has to be expressed and has to come out in some way so that we can, can be free of that. And maybe that's what we're seeing on a collective level and an individual level, but on a planetary level, we could be experiencing the surfacing of some of the darkness that's been there so that we can advance to a new phase. So this neutrality basically means that we can look at things and find the positives in something that might be negative. And also, like you were saying, when there's a gain, there is something that's lost with it. So it's a more holistic perspective than just saying, I don't care. I'm passive. I feel pain, but I'm going to ignore it. That's not what I mean. Or, I feel joy. I'm going to ignore it. So that's what I mean by neutrality. On the topic of humility, I want to take a few steps back because in order to really explain this, I need to get into My worldview. So if you don't mind, unless you want to go somewhere else, Adam, I want to take a—

No, I'd love to. Yeah, this is a perfect opportunity.

Okay. So the core question that I explore really in both books, but especially the first book I wrote, An End to Upside-Down Thinking, and my podcast, Where Is My Mind, is about consciousness. What do I mean by consciousness? It's the part of us that experiences. So anyone watching this right now or listening to this, you're having the experience of that. And that's what I mean by consciousness. And it's hard to define because we can't touch consciousness. It's an abstract thing. Like I can touch my table, but I can't touch my consciousness. And yet it's experiencing our life and everything about it. One of the big questions in science, in fact Science Magazine has called it the number 2 question that's remaining in all of science, how could a brain make consciousness? Because we know the brain has a lot to do with our thinking and our mental state. And science assumes that the sense of experiencing comes from chemical and electrical activity happening in our skull. Somehow. And that's exactly the assumption that I question and challenge and say, we've got it upside down. That actually this consciousness that we experience is more basic than even our body or the physical world. That the body is like a vessel and consciousness is experiencing the world through the lens of the body. And to use an analogy that I often reference, it's from a philosopher named Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. He says that we are like whirlpools in an infinite stream. Meaning there's a Mark whirlpool, there's an Adam whirlpool, etc., that seem like individuals. They're localized as its own one thing, but it's within a larger stream. So there's an interconnectivity even though there's individuality. And the way I arrived at this, without going into all the science, is lots of evidence from places like the CIA, the University of Virginia, Princeton University, peer-reviewed papers showing that psychic phenomena where our consciousness can be at a distant location in space and time, for example, that, that sounds insane. But there have been scientific studies to suggest that it's like, you know, someone in one whirlpool can access part of the stream far away. There's science to back that up. And there's also science backing up the idea that when a whirlpool stops being a whirlpool, the water dissolves back into the broader stream. It doesn't leave the stream. Similarly, when the physical body stops being this individual body, when the body dies, the consciousness just transitions into a new state. So there's a lot of this evidence scientifically that consciousness continues even when the body dies. Dies. This is all to say that the worldview I'm discussing is that we're part of an infinite stream of consciousness, even though at this moment we're perceiving a very narrow sliver of it.

It might be like I'm standing out on the deck and I'm looking out at the ocean, for example, and I can see as far as my eyes can allow me to see, maybe to the horizon line, but there's a whole world well beyond what I can see and perceive. That, that's us as a tiny sliver of consciousness. We have a A perspective or a vantage point. But beyond that, we are left in either a state of knowing our ignorance, being aware of what we're unaware of, or unaware that we're unaware.

Yes. So the way that— there are 2 analogies that I like to use to describe exactly what you just said, is that the brain and really the body can be likened to filtering mechanisms or almost like blindfolds, where there is a broader reality that we see a sliver of, and it's because the brain is blocking out the rest. The evidence for this comes from a few places. One is a near-death experience where a person's brain is essentially knocked out. So a person might be in cardiac arrest. They shouldn't be able to have any lucid consciousness. And yet after they're resuscitated, they come back and say, I was immersed in unconditional love. I was in other dimensions. I saw things. And sometimes the things that they saw were accurate, meaning it wasn't a hallucination. So we see an expansion of consciousness even though the brain and the body were shut down. We see this in emerging psychedelics research when parts of the brain have reductions in functioning during the psychedelic trip and there's an expansion of this perception of reality. We see it with savant syndrome. This is a person that might have a certain damage in the brain in certain ways, but like in the movie Rain Man, they have mathematical abilities that are unreal, musical abilities. So you see a heightened consciousness associated with reductions in the brain in certain capacities. So it's like from this Whirlpool that we're in, we are directly perceiving not the entire stream, and there's this process by which I think we become aware that we are just the whirlpool within the broader stream. There's a period, at least for me, where I had no conception that any of this could be possible, and so I didn't even think of being interconnected as part of a stream. I just thought of myself as an individual who, when you die, it's over. There's no paranormal or anything like that. Whereas this other worldview, Raises many questions and makes us become more aware of the unknown, that there is an unknown that we can't even know how big that unknown is. And because of that, this is going back to the original point about humility. We don't know what's going on in the world. We don't know how life really works. To judge and say something is good or bad, even though it might bring up those feelings, we don't actually know. So a common example could be when someone experiences a loss like losing a job, getting sick, death, something like that. Death in the family. Those sorts of events might seem very negative, but from a broader perspective, if you take a helicopter's perspective and you can see 30,000 feet, maybe in 10 years, those apparent losses might have led to growth or even positivity in that person's life many years later. So for that reason, I think we can have the initial negative reaction to something because we're human beings, but then look at it and be introspective and say, well, do I really know this is all bad? Is there something that could come out of this that's ultimately a positive thing?

Exactly. And that goes back to what you were saying earlier about gain and loss. Because again, with the benefit of seeing what else is there— I won't say there to be seen because we can talk about, is there a way for us to actually expand our view? Meaning I can see just as far as my eyes will allow me, but is there a way to supplement that or see beyond the horizon line of my own consciousness There's an element of, if we can't see, then are we left with the choice to have faith or an understanding or some sort of a knowingness inside of us that we just trust that if we could see more, if we actually could see at 30,000 feet, would we then see there is a lot of good that's associated with something we would call bad? And sometimes even a lot of bad with things that we associate with the good. And in that sense, you remove the distinction between good and bad, or they in essence become

Exactly. And then going back to your earlier point about worry and stress, this is why I— one of the reasons why I think I feel much less worried and stressed is because I think there is this analogy I use in my new book, An End to Upside-Down Living, is it's like we're walking through a maze and we can see what's right in front of us, immediately in front of us. We can't see the entire maze. If you had a helicopter's perspective, you could see that whatever you're going through in your little corner of the maze, you could see what's ahead from that perspective. So knowing that that even exists, puts to rest potentially some of the long-term worry. And one other point about this stream of consciousness that relates to the same concept is the idea that the stream itself is intelligent, and not only intelligent, but probably of some kind of intelligence that we can't conceive of, maybe infinitely intelligent. And where do I arrive at that hypothesis? Well, if we get to this idea that consciousness is the basis of everything physical, which I wrote a whole book on, did a podcast on, the evidence suggests that that's true. If we buy that for now, Then we look at how complex the universe is from the microscopic level to the macroscopic level. It's beyond human comprehension. Our brain literally can't understand it. Like the concept of infinity. We know mathematically it's a real thing, but we don't understand what that means. So we get to the point where we say, wait a second, maybe there's this intelligence underlying all of reality, underlying the maze that we are in in this life that we can't possibly understand. And therefore, to get too caught up in a judgment about a circumstance Actually doesn't make any sense because we don't know enough to make that judgment.

I'm going to ask you an interesting question. That kind of sounds funny to say that. Maybe it's not an interesting question. Who knows? We'll see. Do you believe that that stream, that consciousness is a force of benevolence? Is that your worldview?

Great question. I would say yes, at the highest level. And now this gets into another distinction I talk about in In an End to Upside-Down Living. The distinction between the absolute level of reality and the relative level. So the absolute level would be that there is this one consciousness, one stream, and at some level of that stream there is actually no division at all. The appearance of a whirlpool is still a version of separation even though it's within the unity. And we see this with many spiritual teachers who have reached very high states of consciousness. They talk about this oneness. People who have taken DMT describe something similar. So we see on near-death experiences these states of expanded awareness. People talk about this absolute There's an absolute level almost where it's one with everything. There's also a relative level of reality where there is a Mark and an Adam. They coexist. And that's— this is a paradox that we're never going to understand, how those could be true at the same time. But I would argue that they do coexist, that there's a Mark and an Adam, and at the same time, there's no Mark and no Adam. There's just oneness. They both coexist. Now, going back to your question about what's the nature of this stream, it gets into really good and evil. Is that a real thing? thing or not. And I would say at the absolute level, there's no distinction. There is oneness. I would say it's benevolent based on the fact that there are so many of these direct experiences from distinct disciplines that talk about people feeling pure oneness, pure bliss, and they use the term unconditional love. Now, I haven't had an experience like that many people have described, like I said, from psychedelics, near-death experiences, meditation, but I can say I've had glimpses of maybe what they're referring to In meditation within the last year, year and a half. And maybe we can talk about this, but in the last year, I've been meditating a ton. I went on 2 silent meditation retreats right before COVID really hit, not knowing COVID was going to hit. And now I'm still meditating on average 4 to 5 hours a day. And in 2 instances, I've had an experience where a very positive energy, more than usual, because there's usually a positive energy. This was a sensation that is not describable with words. I think love is the closest word that I can use to it, but it was not personal love. But it trended in that direction and it was a complete bliss out. And when it happened, for a very short period of time, it was terrifying because I felt like I was losing my sense of identity in my body.

Right.

Shut it down. But at that point, I understood. I said, now I understand why these people will go into a cave and meditate all the time, because whatever the sensation is, it is better than anything you can get in the physical world. So if that experience I had relates to this oneness that other people have talked about, if we assume that's true, then I'm going to assume there is a benevolence at the highest level. But at the relative level, there's distinction, there's duality, there's a me and a you, there is love and hate. We see that dichotomy all over the place. So I think ultimately there's benevolence and within the relative that we experience, there is dark light and the darkness can be viewed from multiple lenses. Like we've been saying, we can dwell on the dark parts of it, which certainly exist, but we can look from a higher level and see the growth that it's enabling.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different, something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. It's interesting, you may have just answered the question I had earlier about if we are— you said that we're blocking out to some extent, our mind is blocking out more awareness or more access to consciousness than we are, I suppose, capable of handling. So, I mean, it's like a Jack Nicholson thing. You can't handle the truth. Is divine mind or universe set up to only allow us so much viewing time or view of the picture? And can we actually expand our view? I mean, you've alluded to the fact that there are ways to sort of gain access to more. Yeah. Were your thought or experience Well,

I think the— whatever bodily form we have right now enables us to have specific learning experiences and that if we knew more, had more access, maybe we wouldn't have those experiences that we're having. So there's benefit to having the blocks in some way. But even on a more physical level, I think there are probably reasons for having blocks to this energy, having experienced it myself. It's overwhelming. And in my new book, An End to Upside-Down Living, I explore this awakening process that many people have described. And many of these experiences of energy coming in, sometimes it's called Kundalini energy, which is actually electric feeling. There's— it feels painful in a way. And I've had bits of that where I feel almost like sparks of electricity that come in during meditation. Some people get it like a fire hose and they're out of commission for a while. Their nervous system can't tolerate the energy. So I think as we move into these realms of expansion, both from a knowledge perspective to— because that takes a lot also to just handle. Wait a second, there's so much more. I have to change my worldview. So mentally, there's a lot to handle, but physically, there's a lot to handle as we evolve.

Yes. You know what? We skipped past something I think it's worth tracking back to, which is in the first book, which I was so happy that our first interview was about An End to Upside-Down Thinking and felt really fortunate that as you were writing that book and getting ready to publish that book, you and I were doing some work together, which was magnificent. You exposed this— the essence of the dispute, if you will. About whether we view consciousness as something that emanates from the brain, is created in the mind or in the brain physically, versus something where— or where consciousness is an independent thing and we access it, which is what your worldview is. So the former being what's commonly known as materialism. And for people that are wondering, that is the mainstream view. So I'd love for you to just sort of set that up now that we've talked about these other ways of seeing things and experiencing things, that that's not the way the science How does the scientific community, the— we'll call it the mainstream scientific community, views it? And there have been tremendous disputes about this for a very long time that don't seem to have been resolved.

Right.

To this point.

So the view known as materialism, also sometimes called physicalism, as the name suggests, is that everything's about the physical and that consciousness, our sense of being, comes out of physical stuff. And the way the story goes under the materialist view is that roughly 13.8 13.8-ish billion years ago, there was a Big Bang filling the universe with little pieces of matter called atoms. So you have a big universe, lots of atoms flying all over the place, and in a big universe, you're bound to end up with interactions between those atoms, those pieces of matter. We call that chemistry. And when you have lots of random chemical reactions in this big universe, chance tells us that eventually you're going to get a molecule that can replicate itself, like DNA, and that leads to the evolution of a biological species like a human being, And that species has developed a brain, and from the brain consciousness comes out. So we started with matter, and through chemistry and biology and neuroscience, we end up with consciousness at the very end. And what I'm arguing, and many others have argued this as well, is that it's the reverse. That actually we can leave the stuff about the physical and chemistry and biology. We can leave those things. We just put consciousness in a new place. We put consciousness first. Say consciousness is fundamental and everything physical is emerging within this non-physical consciousness. And like you said, there's— there are huge debates about this still. Materialism is the conventional scientific worldview, even though there is a realm of quantum physics which is questioning the materialist worldview. Because as we get down to the smaller and smaller scales of what's something physical— like, I look at my table right here, feels like it's solid, but under a microscope— It is. It's 99.999999% empty space. So you get into the physics of it, and then also some of those psychic phenomena, near-death experiences that say, wait a second, you have a consciousness that seems to be independent of the physical. What's going on here? And when you put all that together, it leads to really question the materialist worldview. Why does that matter beyond the scientific implications? To me, it's huge because of the worldview that's implied. If we're just material, then what happens when the physical body stops functioning? You're dead. It's over. Any meaning that you attributed to your life, it's wiped out once you're dead because you can't think about it anymore. And that's how I used to think. So I cared about the gains and the losses as I perceived them, but I didn't think there was any meaning behind it other than what I wanted to just make up. And I said, why should I make up something? That's just rationalizing. I'm not going to rationalize. I'm going to accept things the way they are, which is that it's a materialist universe. When I die, it's over. There's no supernatural. And therefore my life is meaningless. As bleak as that sounds— Nihilism.

Nihilism. I want to go back to one other thing too, which is that looking at the materialist view— and it's not my goal here to try to make a case for this because I think there's plenty of places people can assess that for themselves, including reading your books, because you do almost like a lawyer set up a bit of a case that you're proving. The first domino— I like to sometimes think of or want to find the first domino in any sort of sequence for logic purposes. Where is the first domino in the materialist or physicalist view? And isn't that the actual issue, that the first domino exists out of thin air, even in a materialist viewpoint? And that's sort of the thing that we could— if we're going to find one place where you're building something in air, meaning there's no actual foundation to it, that that's where you would look?

Yeah. So this materialist worldview that there was a Big Bang, it says that something, i.e., this massive universe, comes out of nothing. And that is not well explained even by the materialist worldview. And I'm sure there are physicists that have tried to back into that. But even from the perspective that I'm talking about, some in the philosophical world, they would call it metaphysical idealism. And all that means is everything's consciousness. We're one stream. As the famous Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, he said, in truth, there is only one mind. And I like to use that term, one mind, that we are whirlpools. We are individuations of the one mind. So So I'll call it the one mind versus materialism. Some would say, well, where does the one mind come from, Mark? Like, you're talking about this dream. Does it have a source? And the answer to that, I would say, is very complicated because the question assumes causality, that you need a first domino, that something causes something else. And in order for that to be true, you need linear time. And what I'm actually arguing with this one mind is that it's beyond space and time. So that means that consciousness just is without any cause. And that usually makes people's heads explode because it's like, that doesn't make any sense. Sure. And it doesn't even make sense to me, but I think the data leads there, even especially with things like precognition. Really quickly, this is one of the phenomena. Some people call it an anomaly because materialism can't explain it. Precognition is knowing or sensing the future before it happens. And there have been people that claim to be psychic and there's all kinds of, you know, you can do tests on that to control for ways of cheating. But I think some of the most compelling studies are ones that show a very small effect, but they're statistically significant. And the study goes like this. You have a person in front of a computer screen, and the computer screen will either show a neutral image, like a mountain or a river or something, or a very disturbing or arousing image. It could be a sexual image, a violent image, one that we know from psychology would cause a subconscious response by the skin, by the pupils dilating, things you're not even thinking about. If you saw a certain image, your body would have a reaction if you measured it. And I remember these from psychology class. But what the scientists have now done is they reverse in time the study. They measure the body before the image comes up on the screen to see if your body somehow senses whether it's going to be peaceful or arousing before it even happens.

Hmm.

Why would you even think to test that? If your consciousness is just in the here and now, that should never happen, especially if the images are randomly generated. You don't know if it's going to be positive or negative. And what do the studies show? They show That the body seems to react in a very small amount in a statistically significant matter seconds before it comes up on the screen. What does that tell you? Does that mean our consciousness is reaching forward in time? Does that mean that we have a backwards causality where a future event is affecting the past? It's mind-blowing stuff, but it lends credence to this idea that time is not what we think it is. Even Einstein, who talked about relativity, where time can speed up or slow down depending on how fast you're going or how much gravity there is. So time is a very weird Even though we seem to perceive sequence. And even to make this even more mind-blowing, to just think about our own experience. We've never experienced the past and we've never experienced the future. We've experienced the thoughts about the past, the memories which occur right now in the present moment. Think about the future, it occurs right now. So when we really get down to our own experience, all we've ever experienced is a now. And that's what I would argue is the case with this one mind, is there's some kind of ever-present now. That we experience from different lenses and through our interpretation, we see linear time, past to present to future.

Which gives us a great measure of certainty in the midst of great uncertainty. I mean, at the same time that everything is so uncertain and so unknown, we also have something so known and so certain as this moment.

Yes.

And how it is that we feel and experience this moment. That is our greatest freedom.

If we can get there.

If we can get there.

If we can get our mind to— and when I look back at my own life, and maybe you can relate to this as well, Adam, just being so busy thinking about achievements and thinking about linear time and being so focused on that timeline and time horizon. And I use this analogy in my book. It's almost like the conditioning was get a good education, get a good job, get married, have kids, take care of your kids, and then you die. And that's the trajectory. And all you have to do is think about Those events. And I don't want to say we should dismiss all of those things, but when we focus more holistically and get ourselves more in the present moment, maybe a lot of the noise can— we can get that out of the way and we can focus more on the signal.

Yeah. Well, that goes back to the first question I think I asked you, Mark, which was, how are you experiencing a day in the life? Or I'll shrink it down to a moment. How are you experiencing the now versus the way you recall experiencing the now under a different worldview?

The now has much more mystery and it's a growing mystery because I'm always researching and I'm now meditating, going inward much more. The more that I don't know has increased and that increases on a daily basis. The recognition that I don't know has increased. And with that, in my own life, there's so much that I don't know, not just on a metaphysical level, but what am I going to do tomorrow? I left my job. We haven't talked about this in this interview yet, but in December of 2019, after 10 years at the firm, Went from associate to partner. I told my partners that I was going to leave. And it wasn't like I was going to another financial firm or another advisory firm. I was leaving because I wanted space and I didn't know what I was going to do next. And I wanted to be able to explore the things that I am more passionate about, like understanding what life's all about and researching the metaphysics and everything. So there was major uncertainty associated with that. But if we look in hindsight, the timing of it turned out to be unbelievable. December 2019, I give notice. That I'm going to leave my job. And I said, I would love to stay on and help and work part-time. And I wasn't just going to leave everything. So I ended up staying on for 3 months. That takes us through the end of March 2020. But leading up to the pre-COVID era in the February and early March timeframe, I had scheduled 3 retreats that I never could have done before because I was always so busy. I went on an Ayurvedic retreat, which was very healthy physically, but also on a mental level. And that set me up very well for 2 silent meditation retreats. which were a week apart. One was 6 days, one was 5 days. And in that meditative period, that's when the book emerged. I actually wrote the book in between the 2 meditation retreats. There was a week where I wrote it, went on the second meditation retreat, got to think about it, revised it, and then the book came out. So think about the mystery there of being back in my shoes in December of 2019, not knowing any of the stuff was coming. I mean, you and I had talked about a potential for a second book, and you probably had more foresight on this than I did because I always thought, well, I don't have a second book in me. And you said you were kind of laying out the timeframe and you're about right on when it came. But I didn't really see that I was going to write a second book. I made the decision to be more authentic. That's really what it was, is that I wasn't being authentic and I needed to make a pivot, to use your term. And when I made that pivot, when I actually spoke to my business partners about it, that's when the ideas for the second book came about. And then I went on meditation retreats, got really into meditation, pandemic happened, all this stuff. So in any given moment, think about how much we don't know in the rest of the maze. And imagine if we did have that helicopter's perspective,

Indeed. Yeah. I was curious when you and I were just before we hit the record button on this, I said, I really was curious about how your partners responded to that. I mean, they'd seen your development. They knew things were changing. They were in support of the first book that you came out with. I think you had developed a really good relationship with them. And I'm sure they wished you well, but I'm just curious as a fly on the wall, what was that like? Because you literally, it's that very uncharacteristic or what's the— it's unusual. When someone has attained that level of accomplishment, has gotten a brass ring of sorts, and to give it— to sort of give it back in some way. How did they respond to that? How's your family responded to it? What's life— I'm really curious what's life like for you because you have done the Robert Frost thing. I mean, I taught this so too long ago to recall, but the 2 years I spent as a middle school English teacher, I remember just The Road Less Traveled was a wonderful poem to share with kids when they were in 7th and 8th grade. And you absolutely took the road less traveled by. So give us, if you could, a little taste of what that's been like.

Well, on the Robert Frost, I would say that I see a totally different maze than Adam Frost might have seen, or that most people would look at as take this path or this path. I just have a totally different vantage point. So for me, and this goes into my decision as well, there almost wasn't even a choice from the way I was looking at the world. It wasn't It wasn't like a weird move because it would have been weirder for me to stay on the path that I was on because it was so— it was out of alignment with my—

You were trying to serve 2 masters in some sense.

Exactly. And that is—

No, you cannot do. No one, none of us can.

I tried. And I think even before 2016, when I first learned about this, I was probably serving 2 masters and just didn't know what the second master was. I was serving the mainstream master and I didn't know there was something else pulling at me. And that probably led to a lot of the personal struggles I had during that period. So when I let my partners know about the first book, this was in 2017. After a year of researching, after those initial podcasts in 2016, I ended up deciding to write a first draft of the book, which came out in 2018. But I remember having a conversation with the partners, letting them know that I had written a book because I didn't even think I would write a book. And all of a sudden it was there because I wrote it quickly and it wasn't on business, technology, intellectual property. It wasn't on those things. And they were very receptive, but it was a difficult thing for me to do because I was kind of leaving that path even though staying with the firm, no plans to do anything else, to say, hey, I have this other interest and I'm writing a book about it. And not only that, it's challenging people like Einstein and some of the great thinkers. I'm going against their assumptions and talking about some what might seem like weird scientific ideas. So they were very receptive to that. And I mention it because it was difficult to sort of come out and tell people that I was writing about this stuff while having a traditional business thing. And I mention this because I don't know where people are on their own journeys, and you might be going through something similar. But I felt much better after I did it that time, for sure. Even though I still felt a little bit of nerves because I was on this 2 masters path very clearly at the time, and I didn't know where either was going to lead, even though I had been on the path to become partner and eventually did become partner, even though I'd written the first book. So I got to this point in December of 2019 where I had to make this decision. It really hit me that I had to make the call. I was hoping that maybe another opportunity would emerge or something more clearly would emerge in the current role that would allow me to just stick with it, but I had to pull the trigger. And it was very difficult. One of the more difficult things that I've probably ever done because I had, I mean, 10 years, basically my entire professional career other than the stint I did in New York, helped basically build the firm. It was a new firm when I joined it. I'd put so much into it. Learned a lot about a very specific topic, the relationship between intellectual property and business. So which is both broad but also a niche. And to spend all that time and say, I'm going to do something else, was hard for me personally. That was probably the hardest part is talking about it with them. They were very receptive. Disappointed that I would be leaving because we had a good relationship and spent a lot of time together. So they were receptive. It was completely amicable. The hardest part was on my side of it. And same with family. I mean, they've been receptive throughout this whole journey. So I've been fortunate in that regard that people around me have been supportive, but not everyone agrees with what I'm doing. Definitely. And I would say this more about friends and some people close to me. They just don't agree with what I'm talking about, or they don't agree with some of the science, or they haven't read some the science and they have a different worldview. I knew that was coming. To write a book and put a line in the sand and say, I'm on this side rather than that side, anytime someone does that, there will be opposition. That goes with the territory.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change It's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits That will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Just the idea that you would sort of have to win everybody over or get their approval is so ironic in the sense that, yes, it's impossible to serve 2 masters, but imagine serving, you know, 2,200 masters or whatever number of people in our lives we might want to have be on board or understand or support or any of those things. I mean, it's just not possible and really depleting on so many levels. Because I think that is something a lot of people can also relate to is the idea that what they want to do or what they're doing even has to somehow be reconciled with what other people think. Or what they want other people to think really, because even that's a made-up story in so many respects. So Mark, I think you're just a great example of what's possible when you are willing to be humble in the way that you have shown. I mean, to me, this is the greatest humility of all is to realize each day what little we do know, but still be craving greater understanding at the same time as We see with every new thing I understand, I discover an infinite number of things I don't. To be able to work our way— track my language here— to allow our lives to unfold without some of those other attachments to—

It's a challenge. And I'm still adjusting to that. We're not even a full year into my being completely out of my job. And it's a new state of being to not know, When I'm used to knowing what's going to be next or knowing when the next paycheck is or where I'm even going to live. I mean, so many things for me are up in the air. I have very few commitments. But I think even tracking back to 2016, when I first became interested in this and looking back at my own life, I've always had questions about things, even though I had a certain worldview, I was very curious. And now that I've seen this other potential, how much exists that I don't know, is that I feel like my devotion is to truth and uncovering truth. And that's what all of my exploration has been in both books and podcasts and whatever I do next, I'm sure, will be related to understanding the truth and living in accordance with that, whatever that means. And the way I start off the second book, An End to Upside-Down Living, I ask the question, what is the overall intention of your life?

Yes.

And the book, the quest of the book is to answer that question, to develop a worldview and then say, based on the way we think the world is, how would we then live? And ultimately, at the end of the book, I describe in a more detailed fashion what that is. But the short version for me is I want to perfect myself to become the purest vessel for whatever this consciousness, intelligence, one mind stream is so that I can be of service in whatever way manifests for me. But that happens through my own perfection. So I am working on myself so then I can be of service in a better way. And that's the compass for me. In this context of not knowing. So whatever happens, I don't know how it's going to manifest for me. And the way it works for me might be different than the way it works for you, Adam, or for any other person. And I don't think any— there is a superior way or an inferior way. For me, maybe it's speaking like we've worked on, writing books, getting out there, getting the message out. For another person, it might be being a caring person in a relationship or being just doing a really good job in work.

Yes.

We don't know what that is for each person.

But it would be great if we were more involved in the process, let's say. And I think that's— if there's anything that feels tragic to me about anyone's— about any life, it's the degree to which we're not actively engaged and involved in the process of— or involved in something that is a bit of a sham of the process. Like we're convinced that it's one thing and we go down that road and live our lives in accordance with something that turns out to not be truthful. Right. And so I so applaud your quest and search for truth for yourself and the way that it informs you, informs the rest of us because you're not just keeping it to yourself. You're not just— and I don't want to put this in a judgment form either, that you're not in a cave cross-legged having this experience exclusively for yourself, but you are in fact sharing it with others, writing books and delivering a great podcast. And that's I think that's— it's definitely— it's a sharing, it's a giving.

That's how I view it, Adam. I appreciate you saying that. That's the reason I'm doing all this. If I just cared about the traditional track, it would have been easy for me to stay in my job. I had made it to partner at a relatively young age. I was very fortunate. I could have just stuck with that, but something hit me when I was researching all this material that this is changing my life. If other people understood this, if they had access to the information, they could understand it as well and it could change their lives in a positive way. There has been this impulse to want to get the information out there, and that's how it's been for me. But you mentioned like the cross-legged in a cave thing, because I've had to think about that. There's been almost a pull to do that, and many in the past have done that. And some would say that metaphysically, by elevating oneself through that process, it's almost like ripples in the pool, in the pond, in the stream that's helping.

Yes.

So there might be something to that. And I've kind of been doing a hybrid where hours a day I am meditating like that, and I I think for whatever reason right now, it feels like I need to do that, maybe not forever. And then I'm doing other stuff on the side. Maybe it's researching, doing interviews, not as much speaking right now because that opportunity is— it's a different world with the pandemic. But I'm always thinking about— there are 4 pathways in yoga. I think it's worth mentioning this. It really has helped me frame out how I think about my daily living. And I think this applies to any spiritual tradition of basically the 4 pathways to this process of personal development, spiritual development, whatever we want to call it. One is called jnana yoga, which is a pathway of knowledge. And I clearly started out on that path, is wanting to understand. There's a path called bhakti yoga, which is devotion. And that's really devotion to this one mind, understanding that we're a whirlpool within the broader stream. It's really an attitude. Some people will do it through prayer or rituals, but to me, it's an attitude. There's the service path of helping others and all these kinds They come together, they mesh together. Their knowledge ends up relating to devotion and relating to wanting to serve. So they're independent but sort of not. And the 4th one is known as Raja Yoga, which is around energy. And that could be meditation or other processes that bring about, I guess, the alignment of the physical body with this other stuff. And the 4 swirl together toward one's personal development, but you can almost segment one's own life based on these 4 pathways of how am I working on these 4 pathways every day? Am I learning something new? Am I doing service or doing something that could lead to service? Do I have this attitude or approach of devotion in some way? And am I doing something energetically? Maybe even it's diet or physical exercise, physical yoga, meditation. It could be lots of different things. So I like to think every day about what I'm doing in those 4 areas.

That's as good a blueprint as I think we'll ever hear about how to architect a day in the life, a great day in the life. I've so enjoyed the conversation as always, Mark. I absolutely love you, buddy. And thank you for being And being on the show again, it's a pleasure.

Thank you so much, Adam. And thank you for giving me the opportunity and for all that you do, because I've gotten to know you over the last few years and the work that you're doing to help other people in your own way. I just really appreciate it. Thank you.

I want to close out our episode with a reminder. This is, again, thinking about the blueprint or the architecture of a day in life. To me, the fact that we're awake and aware in this moment is such a gift. I don't know that we are always feeling in such a state of gratitude for that fact. So I want to call it out in this moment that our ability to be here now in this is so special. It's profound and it's holy even. And that all began with our first— the first breath, the first waking breath, the first conscious moment of the day, conscious awareness, etc. And again, there's no beginning and no end. If we could encompass that idea, take that in for a second, there's no beginning and no end. And it's hard to point to a, like you said, a first domino, but we do go to sleep and we enter into a different realm in our subconscious. And that's a different exploration for a different time. And then we wake up and I think it's metaphoric, it's literal, it's figurative, it's all of that. And so I want to point to that moment. To me, that first waking moment of the day is for me a very profound moment because it's the way that I would create that architecture or do create that architecture that you described earlier. And I want I want to, for all of us, just imagine that waking moment for yourself today. What was that like for you? What did that look like? I know that when I was on a similar path that you described earlier, Mark, my waking moments were lots to do, kids and responsibilities and clients and whatnot. And I would start the day, put my feet on the floor and kind of feel it all in a moment. I'd kind of get this rush of that energy and it felt like anxiety. It produced anxiety for me at that moment in time. And that was many years ago. And I didn't like at all how that felt, just like you, that stress and felt off. And I was curious and wanted to explore it and did ultimately change. And I won't get into the details of all that. I'll just say there was one particular practice at the very start of the day that I began to adopt, which on some level is super— is very simple, but it's for me not simplistic. And that was to consciously cultivate a thought and a feeling At that waking moment. Because again, my theory is that all our lives are a collection of feelings. That's all we ever have. And the resonance of that feeling is what will, I think, be what we experience when we transition to whatever that next phase of our consciousness happens to be. And I, I believe I ascribe to the same philosophy that you do. So I don't think there's any end. I think this is a wonderful, wonderful, uh, backstory to all this. But that moment of waking, I chose instead and choose instead each day to instead of experience that anxiety of all there is to do and all that there is that's missing or wrong or any of those things, I instead start with a thought. And that thought is that I love my life. And I say it out loud, actually. And those 4 simple words, I love my life, is really about what you said earlier, Mark. It's about creating unconditionality, that this idea that we can be unconditional with ourselves, And use the word love. It's our language for that. You know, it's just a word, but we've— we're assigning a meaning to that word. And to me, it's acceptance, it's, it's peace, it's harmony, it's all of those things and so much more wrapped up in it. So to be beginning a new day and consciously cultivating that day from that first, that first seed, that first thought, uh, is so powerful. So I leave us with that. Uh, wake up tomorrow. That's my prayer for all of us. We get to wake Wake up, be a little more conscious tomorrow than today. Be in a state, if possible, of generosity and gratitude for yourself. And if you feel like thinking about it or saying it out loud, those 4 little words are there for you. I love my life, or any other words that might make sense to you in the moment. But this has been a blessing, Marc. Again, I so appreciate you, brother. I hope everybody— you've really enjoyed this conversation. We'd love to get your comments. So adammarkel.com/podcast, leave a comment there. If there's somebody that you know that you think would really benefit from listening, taking part in this, feel free to share this episode. And of course, if you haven't subscribed, we'd love to have you join our community as well. With that, I'll just say ciao for now, everyone.

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