Death and Life's Meaning - with Dr. Leo Galland | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 62

Hello everyone, Dr. David Perlmutter here. Welcome to The Empowered Neurologist. Our guest today is my longtime friend, Dr. Leo Galland. You may know of Dr. Galland. He's written a number of really terrific books. He's written a lot of research papers. Continues a very active practice in New York. But Dr. Gallin has written a book that is certainly quite different from his previous works, and this book is called Already Here. Already Here is a story, a true story, about the death of Dr. Gallin's son Christopher, who died at age 22 and provided Dr. Gallin with direct visual evidence that our souls Do go on. And from the communications he received from Christopher's spirit that dramatically changed Dr. Gallin's life, we're going to hear the narrative today. In life, Christopher was a brain-damaged special needs child who challenged everyone he knew with his unpredictable behavior and uncanny insights. And after his death, he revealed to Dr. Gallin the real purpose of life as a spiritual guide who taught others by confounding their assumptions and their expectations. He began to share with Dr. Gallin a new perspective on everything from the nature of good and evil to the concept of timelessness, God's moment, to the notion that the universe is fundamentally an act of love. Christopher's wisdom was revealed to Dr. Gallin over the course of a year. And it coalesced into 3 themes, which Dr. Gallen calls the gift of the opposite, the gift of the presence, and the gift of timelessness. Dr. Gallen quickly came to realize that these gifts were not just for himself alone. They contain ancient wisdom held sacred in many traditions that Christopher intended him to share with others, hence the book. He wrote this book under Christopher's direction to do just this. Dr. Galland is an international bestselling author and a very respected scholar. He's a global leader in integrative medicine and functional medicine, functional nutrition. He has received the Linus Pauling Award, awarded from the Institute for Functional Medicine for creating basic principles of functional medicine, and the Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. for contributions to healthcare from Marquis Who's Who. He is the author of 5 popular books and several dozen scientific articles, as well as chapters in well-respected textbooks. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Nutrition. Dr. Galland received his education at Harvard University and New York University School of Medicine, and he is listed in Leading Physicians of the World and America's Top Doctors. I'm very much looking forward to hearing this incredible story that Dr. Galland describes in this book. Let's turn to our interview now. Hello, Dr. Galland. How are you, my friend?

It's so good to be talking to you today. I'm great.

I, again, want to— as I mentioned in the introduction, gosh, we've known each other a long, long time, so many years of— from the early days of integrative and functional medicine to here we are now. In the intro, I talked about all your great works, your 5 books, and New York Times bestselling author, etc. But this book, and more importantly, the contents, I think many of us who've known you for a long time would say, who knew? I had no idea about this. So, you know, all of our viewers now are tuned in to what this is all about. So, but I would like you to walk us through the, you know, what type of— why Christopher was so special, unique, and then how the events transpired as he passed and what happened after that.

Well, let me just say to begin with that the reason, the only reason I wrote this book, the foundation for everything, is what happened at the time of Christopher's death and shortly thereafter. Otherwise, I don't think I would have believed what was going on. And he was hiking. He was walking with friends in the Berkshires, probably had a seizure, drowned in two inches of water. We were in New York. Call came into my office. We just had lunch with one of our other sons, actually one of Chris's brothers, and so my wife was. Coming to the office after lunch. The call came in. We were sitting waiting for news because he was being resuscitated in an emergency room. And the feeling— you're just— the air weighs about 1,000 pounds. You are so powerless. This is 150 miles away. And all of a sudden, the room filled with this intense white light. You're seeing it with your mind, not your eyes. Christina, my wife, and I had exactly the same vision. We saw Christopher as a being rising up, beautiful, powerful, free, blissful, as the source of the light. He was there for just a few moments, then he was gone. The phone was ringing. The ER doctor is on the phone. Hey, we can't resuscitate him. Of course, we knew that. We just saw it. Saw something that told us he was free. That was very powerful and amazing. I mean, I've never seen— I've never experienced anything with that energy and triumph and joy that's been that extreme before or since. Then— but that was just the first sign. 3 days later, we buried him in the Berkshires so he would be with the community that he'd been with. And we released 22 balloons at his graveside. The next day, we're driving home. We're coming into Columbus Circle, which had a special significance because it was Christopher Columbus. They shared the same name. And I used to joke with Christopher and call him Cristoforo, and he would laugh at the name that The sound that gave his name. All of a sudden, a yellow balloon drops out of the sky, hovers right in front of our car, and disappears. It doesn't disappear. It kind of hovers and then moves on. We couldn't get to it. I wanted to grab it, but it was out of reach. The thing about this balloon is the balloons that I'd released at the graveside, I had to cut free from a sandbag, so they had very short— Strings. like 12-inch frayed yellow ribbons attached. So did this balloon. This was clearly one of the balloons that we'd released at the graveside, and here it was at Columbus Circle in New York a day later. Now, there were 3 kids in the back seat, and to them it was, yeah, of course Christopher sent that. I mean, what could be more natural? But to my wife and I, it was absolutely mind-boggling. That was the beginning. Once you realize that the soul is immortal, then it begins to change the equation on everything. Now, what was special about Christopher is he was brain damaged at birth. He was 22 years old at the time of his death. He was a handful in more ways than one. Always difficult to control. He was—he could be charming and funny and full of insight, and sometimes brilliant. But he could be impossible and make you just want to scream. And that's the way he lived his life. And and what I realized was what Chris most loved and loved in life was interacting with other people, and he would do anything. To get a reaction from anybody. I mean, that was his way of being. Now, several years later, after this happened, I didn't have any more encounters with Christopher. I kept trying to relive those moments. I wondered what had happened to him, but nothing happened. Several years later, he kind of reentered my consciousness in the way he had before. As a being, as someone other than my memory of the flesh and blood boy that he was. Actually, one of the first encounters happened while I was at the 2nd Functional Medicine Symposium in Palm Springs. I talk about that in the book. Not at the symposium, but in the desert behind the hotel. One night he woke I woke up and his voice was saying, you need to tell my story. And so as I spent about a year trying to decide how I would tell about— talk about Christopher's life and these experiences, I began having these silent dialogues with him. They were very unpredictable. They were— they didn't seem to follow any pattern. They were very random. But he said amazing things to me, and, and the longer they went on, the more and more amazing they got. And so when I sat down to put this together into a book, I saw a pattern, and I realized that Christopher was telling me things that really fit, coalesced into 3 themes, which I called gifts. The first one I call the gift of the opposite. The second is the gift of presence, and the third is the gift of timelessness. Now, presence is the easiest thing to wrap your head around, and there's a lot that's been written about it. It's being fully present now at all times, and Christopher actually lived his life that way. The gift of the opposite is in many ways the most subtle and intriguing And I realized that that was Christopher's way of being. I mean, he was always looking for the opposite, and he was bringing out the opposite in people. But the opposite is really the basic organizing principle of our universe. Everything contains its opposite at all times. And in fact, virtually everything that I wrote about in the book, it contains its opposite. My relationship with Christopher Yeah. Life alone is full of opposites. I mean, I didn't write this book as an expert. I wrote it as a scribe, just trying to communicate messages from a being that I realized was really way more advanced than I was. But in life, this being was dependent on me. He was a brain-damaged, developmentally disabled child. I mean, what could be more opposite than that? And in fact, what I realized after the you know the book had the final copy of the book had gone to press was what I really wanted from this was not for people to necessarily understand Christopher, but to be able to find the Christophers in their own lives. Because we all have people like Christopher in our lives, people who. Are in pain or damaged in some way or just outsiders, people we'd like to ignore, and we can learn so much from them. That, I think, is on a practical level the greatest message of the book. And what Christopher taught me is a path to being able to find other Christophers. Now, the gift of timelessness is absolutely the hardest for me to wrap my head around. I have a whole chapter trying to figure out what does that mean in the context of the universe. Of course, Einstein said past, present, and future are illusions and physicists know they don't exist. Christopher was right up there with Einstein.

Now, you know, there's— it looks as if in looking at the book that there are various passages here. I'm actually going to— there are several I was going to read, but that you're a changed person for this experience, that's for sure.

Yeah, well, you know, I started out— although I've always been very open-minded and a problem solver, and someone who likes to think outside the box, I basically viewed the world in physical terms, biochemical terms. That is, we have our bodies, we have nutrition, we have this physical world, and consciousness comes out of that. That just made sense to me. What I began to realize, as soon as you As soon as you know that there is an immortal soul, that begins to change it. I began to realize the more I tried to understand Christopher's message that actually I probably had it backwards, that consciousness is what's primary and that the universe itself depends upon Human consciousness. That would seem crazy to me, but it actually makes way more sense when I consider—

You know, it's intriguing to me how you came to that discussion with me right at this moment, because here's your quote. I always believed that existence led to consciousness. First came the world, and then we found our place in it. Even the Bible seems to agree. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Adam and Eve came later. So it really is the notion of our perception and awareness, I think, that what you're saying is the genesis of reality of the universe.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly quantum physics has reached that conclusion. The way that I came to it was by Christopher's description of the relationship between heaven and earth. That was in our last conversation. It was after one of the people, one of our friends who had sung at Christopher's funeral, was killed by a speeding taxi cab about 6 years after Christopher died, while I was working on this book. Wow. So I went in. I was really upset and I asked— I said, how do I even make sense of this, Christopher? You helped me understand your death. I don't understand Peter's. It makes no sense. So we went into a long dialogue in which he explained a number of things to me. And what came out of it was kind of mind-boggling, really. The way that he described the relationship The reason that we're here, the relationship between heaven and earth, God and humans, or the divine power and humans, is that the universe— where does it start? God is loving. God is love. Not that God loves. God is not some separate being that loves the universe. That love is God. This is what— this is the force that is creating the universe. It is the force of love. The terms I used were the universe is actually an act of love. The role of matter is that matter allows separation. In order to have love, you need separation. Love exists among beings, between one being and another, so you need separation. Separation and you need otherness. Matter allows that to occur. That's why the universe, as a physical universe, is essential to God. There is no God without that. But the love, that power is so intense, it is so great that it cannot be contained by matter. It's what I saw at the moment of Christopher's death. I mean, it's clearly supernatural. It's astonishing in its intensity. Matter can't contain it.

You described your interactions with Christopher as being visitations. Over what period of time did those occur?

Well, pretty much a year. I would say from the time that I woke up during the night being told, you have to tell my story, um, until even a little bit before that. Even though there was this experience I had flying over the Grand Canyon that started it, and Peter died a year later. And it was after my— that final conversation at the time of Peter's death, Christopher said to me, well, I've told you everything you need to know. That was it. The visitations ended. My homework did not end. It went on for decades.

That reminds me of the section in the book where you talk, you quote from Siddhartha about, you've got your lessons now. It's basically, now you've got to act. Yeah, right. Now you've got to do the homework. That's, I think, what you're referring to. So here we are a long time down the road, and now you've written the book. I don't mean to be rude. What took you so long? Why now?

Well, actually, I wrote the book 25 years ago. What took me so long was to decide to get it published. I really didn't quite know what to do with it. 25 years ago, which is about the time I was meeting you, I mean, I think— in fact, my wife Christina remembers your talk on mitochondria at Aspen. She says, oh, yeah, I remember that talk. I think that's the first time we met.

I remember that talk. Because I made the mistake of getting to Aspen from Florida and lecturing first thing in the morning, but before I lectured, I went and exercised at whatever thousands of feet altitude it was, and I, behind the lectern, during the middle of my lecture, had to put my head down to keep myself from passing out. And then I luckily did— nobody knows that, but that's how close—

Right, we didn't catch that fact.

No, but in those days we were lecturing from carousel slides with 35-millimeter Yes, I remember that. But that said, so there is, I think, in your desire at this point to connect with the reader and to portray an important or series of important messages. And what would that be? What would the messages be?

Okay, well, the first message is that Um, is one of transcendence. That is, our physical bodies don't determine who we are. We are much greater than what we appear to be. We are not contained by our physical bodies. We exist even when there is no body. We can be strong and powerful and full of grace even if our bodies are broken. That the power that drives the universe is the power of love. It is the power of love for the other. And the source of all evil, Christopher explained to me, was hatred of otherness. He described it as a crime against God. And I think those are really important things to understand and feel in your heart.

Hatred of otherness, hatred of the apartedness of that which is not familiar or even myself.

Yes, exactly. I mean, he was really explicit about that.

J.J. Virgin sent an email around asking people what— not as what is your New Year's resolution, but what do you plan to focus on in the year moving ahead. And I, and I was there. I said, you know, um, I want to get away from the me and focus on the we, because so much of what we do, you know, we write our books about our thoughts, but, but truly it's about the connection to all that's around us that really matters the most. And I really think that your message is very, very timely as we look around, um, And see what's going on in the world right now, where people are focused on retracting and focusing on themselves, more egocentric, as opposed to really exploiting that prefrontal cortex and wanting to reconnect.

Right. And the connectedness— it's the connectedness that's important. That is, the connection is the energy of the universe. That is what is driving the universe. It is not each of us's separate beings somehow finding connection. The connection is there. Networked. Yes. For us as individuals, our job is to find our place in it. Where do we fit into this connecting?

I want to ask you, the title, Already Here, what does that mean?

Well, that came about because of my last conversation with Christopher. And it was one that surrounded Peter's death. And at some point— and actually, that's one that happened in my kitchen. I wasn't in any special place. Most of the discussions, you know, we were like in the desert in Palm Springs or walking on the beach on Long Island or someplace. And I was always alone. This one, I was just in the kitchen. And I said, well, Chris, what's it like in heaven? I don't know why I hadn't asked him that in a year, but I hadn't. He said— there was this real joy in this voice that I heard in my head. It's what I always wanted. Everybody is here. Everyone, even you.

Your response, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, was, was Adolf Hitler there?

Right? Yeah, yeah. I said, wow, that's amazing. I mean, everyone's there? What about the evil ones? What about Adolf Hitler? I felt this kind of coldness. It was like this evil wind was blowing. So Christopher explained the origins and nature of evil to me. Then he said, I can't say— oh, so he said, Believe it or not, even they have perfect selves. Their eternal torment is the schism in their souls that no love can heal, because what they have done in their lives is to subvert the purpose of existence. The purpose of our existence is to manifest love. And those people who willfully turn against others and manifest hate, they are subverting the purpose of their existence. And he called them pitiful souls. And then he said, I can't say that that detracts from our joy because it was always that way and it always will be. And that was really depressing to me. And I kind of— because, you know, I'm kind of perfectionistic and I'm always trying to make things better. And I kind of retreated to my study. And Chris tried to comfort me and he said, you know, Leo, you know how you like to tell stories about all the quirky, crazy things I did when I was alive? Well, around here, a lot of us like to talk about you and how you were always trying to get everything right. He said, lighten up, you're already here. That was the origin of the title. It is an amazing concept of the relationship between heaven and earth. That is, heaven is not after earth. This is all happening in one moment, God's moment, the eternal present.

That's a powerful message. I was thinking of my next question, but I was knocked off my feet a little bit there. And that was that you were not alone in the visitation. I mean, I recall at one point that your son Jordan, I think, comforted your wife by saying— talking about Christopher, saying that he was fine. So others, I think, were experiencing the interaction as well.

Oh yeah, Jordan and Christina definitely experienced the interaction. The vision of Christopher's spirit at the moment of his death, that's something that Christina and I had together. We saw it. We saw exactly the same thing. We compared notes. Jordan and 2 of his friends, actually Peter's sons, were present in the car when the balloon dropped down. I mean, that was, that was not like a vision.

And it's right there in the car, right there.

Yeah, right, right. They didn't quite get the string on the balloon right, but I couldn't get them—

It's supposed to be yellow and 12 inches long, as I recall, right?

Right, but the art department preferred this. So I told them, I said, hey, that's not really what it looked like, but—

Take it easy, Mr. Perfectionist. Yeah. What would Christopher say?

Yeah, lighten up.

Lighten up. Well, listen, I again will reiterate, You know, a lot of us would say, "Who knew?" And I didn't know all that this had all transpired, but I'm delighted to know about it now. It's it's nothing but positive and reinforcing, and on many levels, I think for all of us to take a breath, for all of us to appreciate what truly binds us to one another, and I think again, as I mentioned before, you know, the the timeliness of this. Couldn't be better in this world. So, so I appreciate you sharing your time with us today, Dr. Galland. You are the best.

Oh, David, I so love you, and I am so grateful that you're my friend and so grateful that you decided to have me talk about this. And Christopher, I know, is very happy because if there's anything he wanted to do, it was to somehow ping another person and say, hey, notice this, pay attention to that. You may think this way, but it's really that way. And I have loads of examples of that in the book. So thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Sure. Well, we'll talk soon. I'm hoping to get up to New York, and if I do, I'll make sure we can get together.

Absolutely. I'd love it.

Okay. Bye for now. This is a very compelling story. Again, here's the book, Already Here, available everywhere, available on Amazon, telling the story of what Dr. Galland has learned from his deceased son Christopher. Wonderful information in this book. What a wonderful interview it was today. And again, as I mentioned during the interview, I had no idea. I've known Dr. Galland for more than 2 decades and I had no idea of these issues that he has experienced. So I hope you enjoyed today's program. Thank you for joining us. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. Bye for now.