Lorne Brown

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.

Welcome to this episode of the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Today we are honored to have Dr. Andrew Newberg, a world renowned neuroscientist, an expert in the study of the brain’s role in religious and mystical experiences. Dr. Newberg is the director of research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health and a physician at the Jefferson University Hospital with over 250 peer reviewed articles and 14 books. I’m trying to write my second book. He’s got 14 books and he’s pioneered groundbreaking research. I’m exploring the connections between brain function, spirituality, and health. His research includes taking brain scans of people in prayer, meditation, rituals, and trance states, an attempt to better understand the nature of religious and spiritual practices and attitudes. Dr. Andrew Newberg, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Andrew Newberg 

Thanks. Thanks for having me on the program.

Lorne Brown 

I really wanted to have you on here, and my listeners know that I’m looking for that credibility factor because personally

Andrew Newberg 

I’ll see if I can find someone who has it.

Lorne Brown 

You got it. You’re a doctor. You looked inside brains. That’s perfect. I could bring in people that have had experiences but don’t have the science to explain it, and I feel that I’m at the state in my life where I think there’s more to life than the materialistic understanding of it, but I don’t always have the words or understanding. It gets dismissed. It’s awesome that people like you have probably had your own experiences, but you’re studying those that have it so it doesn’t become so poo-pooed, right. That we start to open our minds, and this is why I want to have you on here just so we can start to explore this and hopefully have better health and joy in our lives.

Andrew Newberg 

Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, and I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying. I think one of the things that has been really helpful in my own life and career has been to be able to bring science into this discussion. And to your point, it doesn’t eliminate the experiences that people have. It doesn’t eliminate the spiritual, it doesn’t eliminate consciousness, but it just provides another piece of information that we haven’t had before. And given the fact as a medical doctor, part of what I’ve come to realize is that so many people, as you said, have had these kinds of experiences and they range from, as I know we’ll talk about, from very mild to extremely intense mystical kinds of states, that the idea of trying to bring some understanding of what’s going on within the person, within our biology, within our brain, I think it does give, it helps us to realize that these are important experiences for people that have a profound effect on the person in terms of their overall life, but also have an effect in terms of their health and wellbeing. And whether that’s something about their heart health, their brain health, their fertility health, all of the different aspects of our biology and of our health and wellbeing, I think very much folded up along with our psychological status, our spiritual status, our social status. And so trying to understand that whole relationship I think has added a very important layer of knowledge to this discussion. And that’s something that I hope ultimately continues to be helpful for people.

Lorne Brown

In preparing for our interview, I saw that you have steps to help people have this more enlightened experience that we’ll get into. I thought first we could start to define things so we understand what we are really talking about. Do we have, from the neuroscientists perspective, this idea of enlightenment or nirvana or do you know from the studies you have with the participants, do we know why people want to be enlightened, for example?

Andrew Newberg 

Well, I think ultimately that’s a great question. I think ultimately everyone is trying to get to a better understanding about the world, trying to learn more about themselves, how they connect to the world. And so there are different phrases that people use and people sometimes use enlightenment, awakening, understanding, clarity, whatever it is. But I think that there’s certainly, I think within all of us, a sense of curiosity and a sense of wanting to connect to something greater than the self. That is a key drive for all of this. But I think one of the really interesting things, and a lot of this comes into this, a field that I often refer to as neurotheology. So in this field of neurotheology, I think one of the really critical aspects of it is how we define some of these terms. And so for a lot of people, that sense of enlightenment, that sense of spirituality could be very different across people.

In fact, some of the work that we have done has been to try to just understand how these terms are defined. In fact, I kind of challenge your listeners after the podcast is over, after they’re done listening to it, what they feel is their spirituality, what do they feel? Are their spiritual goals if they achieve something, some kind of awakening or enlightenment? What are they hoping to obtain? Are they trying to find something which is truly spiritual? Are they trying to get a sense of wellbeing? Are they trying to reduce their stress? Is it all of the above? And so that in and of itself, to me is really a pretty fascinating question, which is how do we define so many of these terms, consciousness, mind, brain, spirit, soul. And so those questions in and of themselves are really pretty fascinating and I think very important for us to continue to explore and try to understand because that’s part of the whole process of trying to, well, what do I mean by this? And then how do I go and try to get it?

Lorne Brown 

And I always like to distill things down as simple as possible, that Einstein quote, make it as simple as possible, but not too simple that it loses its value. I really think at the end, people want to be happy. That’s why they want the new car. That’s why they want the relationship, that’s why they want the baby, the healing. It’s been my experience. And then they’ve written about this in all the old texts that the external world will never bring that happiness. It’ll give you temporary pleasure, but it won’t bring happiness. And it seems like once you get to that age of 40 plus, you start to realize you got to go and do your inner work. And at the end of the day, I think for the enlightenment, I’ll talk from my experience and the people I get to talk to and work with if they want that peace, right? They want to feel peace. They want to feel that level of joy. And now it’s like, okay, the relationship didn’t do it. They raised the money. None of this did it. So maybe I will finally go in and go inside.

Andrew Newberg 

Well, and I mean, it is interesting. We’ve done some studies where we’ve taken people down different paths of training and learning meditation. It is interesting how sometimes their goals start out in a very kind of materialistic way. I want to make money, I want to be successful and so forth. But then if they begin to really focus on something which is more spiritual, it really does kind of change the direction, the paths that they’re trying to pursue. And what they’re trying to find is that sense of joy, happiness, they’re trying to find something which is not really material. And as you also alluded to, part of the thing that happens is that it’s something that starts to come more from within as opposed to from without. And that also is, I think, a very important part of that process. Although interestingly, I mean when people start to have these kinds of enlightenment experiences, part of what starts to happen, and I know we’ll talk about this in a little bit, is that people have this sense that it is something that’s coming from outside of them, but not in the material way, but it’s sort of pulling them along.

It’s something that starts to happen to them as opposed to them forcing it to happen or striving for it to happen. And I think that in and of itself is actually a very key characteristic as we have learned by asking people the question about their experiences.

Lorne Brown 

Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. How you’re describing it is that synchronicity starts to happen, and there’s this wording that people say, it’s like these hands come from the heavens and open up these invisible doors I didn’t know existed. And the way you described it, how I’m hearing it, is this sense of them getting to a place of letting go. There’s no resistance. So flow and receptivity can start to happen through them. You talk a lot in some of the papers I’ve read and listen to you in other interviews about surrender as part of this experience, light and experience. And in the process that I use, one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you, and there’s many, is I have this approach that I learned from a workshop, studying my training. It was just kind of that idea, it came through me. It became obvious that all the people were doing this notice, except, choose again and accept as a form of surrender. And I started realizing in my own experiences in the state of true surrender, it was beyond relief I’ve had when you can let go and surrender, and there’s a sense of relief. So I’m no longer fighting, I’m at peace. And then I’ve had that surrender where it’s profound peace. I can’t describe it better than to call it profound peace and even bliss. What the hell was that? Which makes me realize it wasn’t coming from inside, but it’s not like out in the material world how you described it. I have a neuroscientist here. What is happening in my brain when I have this profound piece, what’s happening when I’m able to focus on uncomfortable feelings and rather than fight with them, lean into them and relax into them, and all of a sudden a state of acceptance or some people use the word surrender happens, and all of a sudden I can feel it. There’s a sense of relief. It’s alchemy happening inside me that this is how I describe it. There’s this sense that resistance is dropping and then miracles start to happen, and then later on more synchronicity and other things start to happen in your research and understanding the brain. I use layman terms like that. What have I experienced? What are people experiencing those situations?

Andrew Newberg 

Yeah, so I mean this has been a real focus and one of my favorite topics to talk about. So you’re bringing up some really important points too, and there’s a lot of interweaving of ideas here. Let me take a quick step back and say, okay, so you’ve talked a little bit about this idea of surrender and that sense that that’s a very important part of the experiences that you have. So I’ve done a lot of brain scan studies, which I know we’re going to talk about when we do the brain scan studies, we’re looking at people who are having or have had or trying to have some kind of experience, some kind of spiritual experience. But we realized early on that part of what we also need to do is understand the experience, because if I’m just looking at a brain scan and I don’t know what’s going on inside or what you’re feeling or thinking, then it doesn’t really help me very much.

So we conducted a survey of people’s most intense spiritual experiences. It was an online survey we did over a period of about five or six years. And it really created kind of a treasure trove of data for us because we ask people about themselves, what their traditions, their religious or spiritual traditions are, their age, their medical issues and so forth. And then ultimately we kind of gave them a box and we said, tell us about whether you want to describe it in a paragraph or pages, whatever you’d like, but tell us about your experiences and describe them for us as best as possible. And then we could use that information to try to find out where similarities are, where differences are. And on one hand, everybody’s experience is unique. Everybody has different elements to their experience in some kind of fundamental way, but there are certain core elements of these experiences that seem to be shared by everyone when they have them.

And so one of the main ones, which you’ve already mentioned at length, is this sense of surrender. And part of what we also then try to do is say, well, if people have these different elements of this experience, where does it seem what might be going on in the brain? And how do we think about this in terms of what the brain does? Do we have evidence for it based on our brain scans? And so to take the topic of surrender, it certainly is a universal characteristic. People talk about that. And as you mentioned, there’s some other words, letting go, surrender flow. I mean, I think there’s several different kinds of words that people talk about, but it is that sense that whatever you are striving for, whatever was trying to happen, suddenly it takes you over. You let yourself go, you release yourself into the experience, and then it kind of pulls you along.

So that is part of what makes these a very powerful experience for those people. And of course as we’ll also talk about all of the different elements kind of exist along the continuum. So we’ve all kind of let ourselves go a little bit and then let ourselves go a lot. And that’s kind of the same for a lot of this. But now where does this go? Where does this occur in the brain? Well, when we look at the brain, part of what’s also happening is that there’s lots of different parts of our brain that I think are involved in these experiences. And so what exactly the person’s feeling, how they’re doing, has a lot to do with what’s actually happening in the brain itself when it comes to this feeling of surrender. What I have always postulated and what we have found the evidence for with our brain scans is that our frontal lobe, which is located behind our forehead normally turns on when we are being purposeful about what we’re doing.

If we concentrate on a meditation or a prayer, if we’re trying to solve some problem at work, if we’re arguing in a relationship and we’re trying to solve a problem in a relationship, we’re using our frontal lobes and it helps us with language. It helps us to do purposeful things. It helps us do purposeful movements. So when we actually have studied practices like meditation, we see an initial increase of activity in this frontal lobe. But when people start to have these very powerful experiences where they let their purposefulness go, where they’ve surrendered themselves, we actually see the frontal lobe start to decrease inactivity. And we have seen this in a variety of different spiritual practices where this has happened, and we can look at the brain scan and show that the activity levels in the brain literally decreases. And I think that makes a lot of sense because if it turns on to be purposeful, then when it shuts down, we kind of lose that sense of purposefulness and we feel as if we’re not making it happen, something is happening to us.

But beyond that, again, there’s this whole network of brain structures that are involved. So when the frontal lobes are now being affected by this whole process, they’re connected to other areas of the brain, areas of the brain that have to do with our emotions. And you were saying a sense of blissfulness. Well, the frontal lobes are deeply connected with our limbic areas, the emotional centers, and our brain. And so these areas can become very activated, which can make us feel a very intense feeling of arousal, but also can make us feel a very intense feeling of bliss and calmness and sometimes both. So it’s really fascinating to see how all of these different processes start to occur. But we have found, at least when it comes to that feeling of surrender, that there’s a very profound shift in the activity of the brain and particularly in the frontal lobes. And maybe the last thing to say about this too, for those who have tried to do these different kinds of practices is that their dynamic processes, if you started meditating right now, what your brain is doing in the first five minutes is different than in the second five minutes and then after an hour and then after four hours and after five days. So all of these things start to change the way our brain operates and change the way we feel and think and experience the world around us.

Lorne Brown 

And the structure of your brain, are you seeing it change? And the reason I ask the question is my personality has changed using this practice over the past decade plus evident by things that I know that used to trigger me I still don’t like, but I don’t have a big emotional response to it anymore. Curious, is this part of your research that when you do this work, like you said, is dynamic and just in a 20 minute meditation, the last 10 minutes is different than the first, but over years, are you seeing that the brain can change as well? So you are no longer exactly like you were before because you’ve rewired your brain basically?

Andrew Newberg (

Well, that’s exactly what we’ve seen. And it is, it’s interesting. Some of the data that we have are in the moment. So when the person is doing the meditation practice, what is changing in the brain? And that is important for us to learn about and understand. But we’ve also done longitudinal studies where we take people day one and then have them do some kind of program or practice for a month, many months, whatever, and then we scan them again. And our data as well as data from other researchers around the world have documented that it really does change the way your brain operates. It actually does change the structure of your brain. And so just keeping our focus on the frontal lobes for a moment, what data has shown is that, and I love to use the analogy of a muscle. So if you want to lift weights, what’s going to happen?

If you lift your arm, weigh your muscle, your biceps get physically bigger and they get functionally stronger. They can lift more, they can do more. So what happens with the brain? Well, when you do these kinds of practices, what the data has shown is that long-term meditators, for example, literally have thicker frontal lobes than those people who are non meditators. So just as if you were lifting a weight, your neurons, your brain cells, your connections, they become bigger and stronger. And so the structure of the brain actually changes. And then in my studies where we look at the function of the brain, we have found that the frontal lobe is also functionally more active. And if the frontal lobe is involved in regulating your emotions and helping you to concentrate and helping you with memory, then you’re going to be better with your concentration. You’re going to be better with your memory, you’re going to be better at regulating your emotional responses.

And once again, we see that occurring not only in the brain, but correlating that with what people talk about in terms of their feelings of anxiety, stress, depression, and so forth. So that helps us to understand why these kinds of practices actually have a beneficial effect in terms of our psyche. They help to make people less depressed, less anxious and so forth, but they actually change the overall function and structure of the brain itself. And the last thing to tell you is that in addition to looking at just sort of general brain function and structure, we have done some studies where we have looked beyond that and looked at different neurotransmitters. The chemicals in the brain like dopamine, like serotonin, these are neurotransmitters that probably everyone’s heard of. But for example, the serotonin system, which we know is very in depression, is something that if people have depression, we give them an antidepressant that affects the serotonin system.

It actually kind of makes their brain more sensitive to serotonin. Well, that’s exactly what we found. When people go through these kinds of spiritual practices and programs, that there’s a shift in the serotonin levels of their brain. There’s a shift in the way their brain processes serotonin, and it actually makes their brain more sensitive, just like to the SSRIs as they’re called, the drugs like Prozac and Zoloft, the antidepressants. It has the same kind of physiological effect. And I think that makes a lot of sense and then speaks to the idea that it’s going to actually change the way you are as a person, and not just in the moment, but over the long run.

Lorne Brown

And thanks for sharing that. I want to talk about other ways to stimulate the brain to help you have these experiences because your serotonin made me think of psychedelics and photo biomodulation and other things. So I’m going to park

Andrew Newberg 

That. And they’re all connected. Yes, exactly.

Lorne Brown

So I’ve got to go there. I got a little story for you. I think it was in your TED talk from way back when. I think again, in preparing for this, I’ve done a lot of listening to you, Andrew. I’ve been having a field day taking notes and listening to you.

Andrew Newberg

Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Lorne Brown

 Hours and hours. But it’s on the surrender part. And again, it really tied into this, I call it now the practice notice, accept, accept, notice, accept, choose again. And the accept part is the key part. And I have tools to help people surrender. I’ve had experiences I’ve shared on the podcast before where I was sad and I decided to rather than avoid my sadness, was back in the nineties when I was studying to be a chartered accountant, a CPA. So maybe that’s why I was sad I could do it. I finished it. But I did end up doing that as my career, as you can see. But I remember taking a bath in the middle of the day and just focusing on the sadness. So I got curious. I put on yoni, I had a candle lit incense going, and the sadness became so intense that tears were coming down my eyes.

And then in a moment, I’m in bliss. And I hadn’t experienced this before, and I was like, well, I was trying to feel sad, so I’m like trying to be sad. I couldn’t be sad. Years later, I read the Power of Now and he talks about surrender and you can feel bliss. And I love how the brain, because my brain immediately went to the bathtub. I had the experience without the knowledge, I didn’t know what happened, right? And then I was like, oh, I fully did not fight the sadness to surrender. This reminded me of something you said in one of your talks about infinite doubt. And I wrote it out. So I want to read it, and then I want to ask you a little bit more about this, because

The point I want to make is I find the uncomfortable feelings that everybody wants to avoid, myself included, act as portals to what I call presence. And so you said infinite doubt. It was actually one of the most, I’m quoting Andrew, everybody. It was actually one of the most calming, most blissful kinds of experiences that I’ve ever had. I completely surrendered to this sense of doubt. And suddenly I didn’t need to find the answer to these questions anymore. And it was incredibly comforting. That’s what I experienced and other people experienced. So what do you think happened there when you surrendered to not needing to find the answer and allowed the infinite doubt, and you had this comforting experience that happened suddenly that made me as a neuroscientist, what the hell happened?

Andrew Newberg 

Well, I think you’re picking up on a broader point, which is these kinds of negative elements of these emotions. Sometimes they can be very anxious, deep anxiety, deep depression, fear. It could be trauma, it could be a variety of different things. But one of the common elements, and this becomes really interesting in terms of the physiology of our body and our brain, our brain. We can think and we can have all of our thoughts. That’s usually happening in our brain. We can have our emotions, which are also in that limbic system that we were talking about a few moments ago. But all of this is connected to the body. We have what’s called the autonomic nervous system, which connects the brain to the body typically through the limbic system. And the autonomic nervous system has two main arms. It has what’s called the sympathetic nervous system, which is kind of our arousal side.

And that is what gets activated when we’re in fear, when we are in deep depression, in anxiety and so forth. And then we have our, what’s called the parasympathetic side, which is our calming side, our quiescence side. And they normally kind of balance each other out, but they also each allow the other side to take over in the appropriate circumstances. So for example, if you’re caught in a burning building, that isn’t the time for your calming side to kick in, so to speak. You got to get out of the building. And on the other hand, if you’re trying to go to sleep at night, then you want your calming side to kick in and you don’t want your arousal side to kick in. And of course, we’ve all been in that situation where we have a big test or a meeting or some big event the next day, and it’s hard to sleep at night because our arousal system keeps kicking in.

So what happens is that in these kinds of moments of deep despair, anxiety, stress, whatever the person may be describing, that arousal side is kicking in. And so it’s telling us we got to pay attention to it. We’re worried about it, we’re focusing on it. But if that’s on long enough or for an intense enough period, then that other side kicks in, and that is that blissful side. So that’s exactly what seems to happen in many of these kinds of circumstances. And of course, when that happens, now, not only do you feel that blissfulness throughout your body itself, but then that reconnects back up into the brain and says, Ooh, I feel calm. I can now relax with this thing. Then it then kicks in with your frontal lobe decreasing. When the limbic system is on, your frontal lobes go down and vice versa. So if all of a sudden you become a kind of more limbic system driven with these very calm feelings, then it shuts your frontal lobes down, it makes you feel that feeling of surrender.

You kind of relax, and then you feel this incredible blissfulness, not only again as an emotion, but something that you feel throughout your entire body. And so that is in large part how I think these kinds of experiences wind up happening. Now, interestingly, you can go the other way too. You can get into a very profound deep meditative state where maybe it’s very calm and very slow, and you’re focusing on your breath, and it’s just kind of going on and on and on. And then all of a sudden you have this arousal moment that kicks in and says, oh, I have to think about this. And you have this feeling of enlightenment, awakening, rapture, ecstasy. And so it becomes very interesting. And of course, this actually all ties in my most recent book called Sex. God in the Brain talks about this because what’s also interesting about, well, how did all of this even get into our systems in the first place?

Well, sexuality, sexual orgasm, a sexual arousal and an orgasm involves both arms of the autonomic nervous system. They both ultimately kick in, which is why you get the arousal, but then you get the incredible sense of rush and ecstasy and bliss. And then there’s also a surrender element. I mean, at some point in the act of sex, the biology takes over and you no longer are able to control the whole process. So it’s fascinating actually that there’s so much similarity between the biology of our brain and our sexuality and the biology of our brain and our spirituality. But that’s how a lot of these things start to connect us and try to help us to understand what’s going on in the brain and how that has a very profound effect, both in terms of our biology and our spirituality.

Lorne Brown 

This makes me want to ask what camp you’re in. Is it because our brains are making these alter states and spiritual experiences, or is the brain like a receiver? It’s a filter. So I’m curious what you’re thinking and that would, I’m going to say then there’s more to this world than the physical. There’s a spiritual world we live beyond our body and the stuff that we hear in other texts and other teachers of consciousness. So there’s one where it’s material. This is all chemical, it’s happening from your brain, and then there’s others that the brain is the receiver, the radio receiver. Where are you at? What camp are you in based on your research?

Andrew Newberg 

I hope this isn’t a cop out, but I’m in both camps because actually I think this gets back into the idea of what Neurotheology is about as well, which is that we’re really talking about the spiritual side of ourselves, the biological side of ourselves, and we have to be very careful about how we interpret all of this information. Certainly the brain helps to create part of our experiences when it comes to this because it helps us with the ways we think about the world, the ways we feel about the world, the ways we experience the world. So there’s certainly a part of it that has to do with our brain’s functions that helps us to have the experience. But whether or not it is then purely the brain just creating the entire experience, which is possible, or whether or not we’re connecting to something that’s out there in the world, that’s also equally possible.

In fact, when you actually think it’s sort of asking the question, if I watched a car drive by, does the car exist in the world or does the car exist in my brain? Well, the image of the car and everything that you know about it is purely produced by your brain, but it’s connected to something which arguably is out there in the world that exists. But how do you differentiate that? It’s very challenging to know how to do that. And of course, there’s so many aspects of our world that we don’t see, or we don’t have a direct perception of x-rays and ultraviolet rays and infrared rays that are all going through our eyes, just like the visible rays, but we don’t see them. But if we put on glasses that allow us to see the infrared or the ultraviolet, then we can see it.

So when you get into these kinds of experiences, when you get into the effects of psychedelics and so forth, who’s to say whether or not it is actually just creating the entire experience purely on the basis of the biology of what’s going on? Or is this the brain being able to perceive the world and receive things in the world that we typically are not able to access and now we are able to access because we’ve put our brain into a different kind of state? So the bottom line is that we don’t fully know. People are trying to do studies and try to get to some very interesting paradigm shifting kinds of data and questions. For example, when people look at near death experiences, which is also another piece of all of this that one of the common descriptors is that the person gets outside of their brain and they can see the world, they can see that the nurse had red hair or something like that.

So these are things that theoretically could be verifiable. And if we can verify that, then maybe we can show that our consciousness leaves our body or is capable of leaving our body and leaving our brain. But until we do, we don’t know for sure exactly what is out there and the ways we are perceiving it. And that is kind of the fundamental question that I’ve always had, which is what is the nature of reality? And that’s kind of what drove me down the path of getting to infinite doubt. As you were talking about earlier, what can we know? And that was my angst of, well, I got to find this out. I’ve got to figure this out. Why can’t I figure this out? And then eventually I got to this, well, I’m not sure about everything, and if I’m not sure about anything, then where does that take me? And it took me to a pretty amazing experience that also changed the way I thought about my path and my journey.

Lorne Brown 

Do you want to elaborate on that? How has it changed your path in your journey?

Andrew Newberg 

Well, I think that the first part of my exploration, it all started with my question about what is the nature of reality? I didn’t understand why we had different religions, different political systems. I mean, we’re all looking at the same world. Why don’t we all think the same way? And I said, well, let me start with the brain. Let me try to figure out what’s going on in the brain itself since that’s the part of ourselves that seems to be associated with figuring out the world.

Lorne Brown 

That was a long time ago, and you’re still looking at the news going, why don’t we think that’s so polarized?

Andrew Newberg 

Exactly. I understand it a little bit more now. So I went down this path of science, which I still love, obviously, and still love to do research, but to me, there were some questions about the nature of consciousness, the nature of subjective experience that went beyond what science seemed to be able to help us with. So I started to look at other aspects of this, and I started to look at philosophical theological perspectives and really try to look at that side of things. And as I then finally got into this whole world of neurotheology, again, part of what was going on in my mind was that it became very contemplative. I was really focusing my mind on these kinds of discussions. And what I said was, well, if there’s anything I’m not sure about, I’ll just say, well, I doubt it. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

It doesn’t mean it’s right. I just don’t know. But as I went through this entire, what I call a deconstructing process of the world, I began to put more and more and more things into this realm of doubt. And then finally at some point where I said, I’ve really got to try to figure this out. I had an experience where I just said, there’s nothing I can know and I don’t even know that. And so it became this kind of infinite regress of doubt that had many characteristics that I later found out were described in different kinds of mystical experiences and feelings of surrender, a feeling of oneness, a kind of loss of the sense of self and so forth. So for me, the change that it really brought about, maybe change isn’t quite the right word, but it has become my path, which is a combination of what I call my spiritual and scientific path.

I’m still looking for the philosophical and theological answers to these questions, but I’m also trying to see where science takes us as far as that goes. And at the moment where I’m kind of at your point about, well look at where we are today, part of what I’ve kind of realized is a great appreciation for every person’s individual and unique perspective. And what I mean by that is that first of all, one of the questions that I ask all of my students is if you look at our brain, we’ve got billions of maybe trillions of nerve cells, quadrillions of interconnections between them, electrical activity going across their membrane, sodium and potassium ions crossing back and forth, release of dopamine and serotonin and many other neurotransmitters and blood flow and metabolism and all these things going on in the brain. So where in all of that are your thoughts?

Where in all of that is your consciousness? We don’t know from a scientific perspective certainly. But that being said, if you think about what’s going on in my brain versus your brain versus the people who are listening brain, well, they’re bringing to bear all of their genetics and how much dopamine and serotonin they started with and how much they have now, and what experiences they’ve had and what traumas they’ve had, what great things have happened in their life, what they’ve read, who’s taught them. And so to me, it’s actually not a surprise that if there’s 8 billion people on the planet that there should be 8 billion religions and 8 billion political systems. No two people look at the world exactly the same way and understand the world in exactly the same way. And that’s one of my idealistic hopes for this whole field of neurotheology, which is to say, how does this help us to understand each other? And the idea that maybe we should be a little bit more open and understanding and appreciative of the fact that people came to different conclusions about this world than we did, because we all have our own unique neurons and neural connections and all those things that went into it brought us to where we are today that we all look at the world a little bit from, not a little bit, but a lot of it from our own unique

Lorne Brown

Perspective. It ties into often that I share when I talk to my patients and clients through conscious work, we’ll use that word loosely. Consciousness is this idea that your thoughts create your reality. And what we mean by that is, I’m rephrasing what you said. You see the world through the lens of your subconscious and your lens of your subconscious. Your beliefs and programs are based on the history that you’ve experienced up until this point. But there is a reality, but you create your own sense of reality. And I don’t remember which teacher of consciousness said this, but his metaphor really made sense to me. It brought some comfort too, that there is a reality. It’s white snow, but you have pink glasses on, I have yellow, this person has red, this person has blue. So everybody’s seeing their version of reality. So it looks different, but the reality is white snow, but we all have that. And so tying into what you said earlier, the filter that we have is the brain or maybe consciousness throughout ourselves, hence we get that gut punch sometimes when there’s emotional stuff. It’s not just in me, I don’t think it, I can feel it is we’re having this experience that comes through us. So the lens that we see through is going to be how we’re going to experience it. And as we shift or change our brain, we can see differently. You talked about the infrared lights or certain things we can hear or see, but they’re there. We just can’t filter it through our experience. So there’s an idea that there is a reality happening. And as we evolve as humans and as individuals, we may start to see reality differently as we tap into more of our brain power or whatever this body is all about.

Andrew Newberg 

And I think people also need to understand and appreciate that our brain and whatever the external reality is, are in this kind of reciprocal relationship. And whether that’s with a partner, whether that’s with the world, whether that’s with our job, whatever it is, we do certain things and then that changes the external world in some way. And then we receive that new information and we interpret it in whatever ways we do, and then we put something back out there and it keeps kind of coming back and forth. So a hundred percent that we are creating our reality in that regard, but it’s also because of this interrelationship that we have with that reality. And so when you’re talking about people who are together as partners or trying to deal with their own psychological issues or fertility issues or whatever it is that they’re dealing with, how they both perceive it is going to continue to be dynamic and evolve and change.

And so there’s a lot of power in that because it gives us an opportunity to modify the ways in which we think about our world. There can be concern about that. I mean, part of my challenge was trying to find an answer and it was like, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I find the answer? And then finding out that I didn’t have to find the answer, that really changed my whole perception. While it gave me the ability to continue to strive for it, it put it in a whole different way. It helped me to no longer have that level of angst and trepidation and worry and so forth, because it enabled me to think about the world in a different kind of way and in a way that was much more positive for me.

Lorne Brown 

We said we’d mentioned psychedelics. So I kind of want to give a little background for this. The idea is are there other things that can support us on this? People that are looking for this enlightenment or awakened state, we all come with our bias. So my bias is I like toys or tools to help, but I still think at this stage there’s inner work. There’s work that you have to do, and these things are tools that can support you. They’re like catalysts. But some things like psychedelics, again, this is my bias, I want to hear, can leave a residue and they can support you, but you can become dependent on that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with transcranial photobiomodulation. I interviewed Dr. Sanjay Mana and he talked about using it to help go into an ultra stay using 40 hertz in meditators. I think you talked about a magnetic device I’ll ask you about, I got a flicker vice now for the eyes with binary beats that I’ve been playing with. It’s crazy the experiences I’ve been having on that. The psychedelic trip, the reason I thought of psychedelics, just I’m going to go on a little tangent and then we’ll come back. What can you do and what’s your idea of psychedelics when you talk about serotonin and dopamine? So I don’t know if you know my uncle in your field, he’s retired, but he’s Berkeley, Irving Zucker. He’s helped discover the circadian rhythm in the brain.

And so when I did psychedelics, I had a bad trip. I did a powerful psychedelic, and I read later that 13% of people, I think it was, will have a bad experience. And it was pretty clear. Like they said, you’ll think you’re in hell. You’ll think you’ve met the devil. You think you are the devil and you’re disappointed. Your parents. I didn’t get disappointed, my parents, but I got disappointed. Everybody I knew, my family, my friends, and my parents were interested enough, but I had all of it. And so I called him up two days later, I’m still reeling from it. And I said, uncle, I think I broke my brain. He goes, what’d you do? And I said, well, I took these plant medicines, what was it? And I tell him, he goes, okay, that’s not a plant medicine, that’s a drug. So then I say, well, I took this medicinal, he goes, stop calling them medicinals. They’re drugs. I said, they’re out of my system. I looked at the halflife, why am I still having this experience? And he said, this is where you reminded me. Well, you just had a massive flush of serotonin and other things to your brain. It’s going to take weeks and months for your brain to return to normal. You’re going to be okay. So that’s what made me think of psychedelics. I just wanted to give you some context.

Andrew Newberg 

No, thank you for sharing that.

Lorne Brown 

So now that I’ve given you some context, that was over two years ago,

Andrew Newberg 

I’m glad you’ve recovered.

Lorne Brown 

I’ve recovered. So based on that though, there’s photobiomodulation, transcranial therapy, there’s flickering, there’s psychedelics, there’s something else you mentioned, but I don’t remember, I think it was magnetic waves or something. Are there things that you can do to be a catalyst to help you get unstuck? Do you think there’s a balance or can you make that too much of a crutch or an addiction and lose the benefit from these things? Where are you at in that, especially psychedelics? It has resurgence right now.

Andrew Newberg 

No, I mean you’re bringing up some very, very important points. The short answer is that we have to keep looking at data. We have to be careful about things. From the neurotheology perspective, what I often talk about is it’s really this kind of big jigsaw puzzle in the sense that all of these things that you’re mentioning, whether it’s psychedelics or different ways of stimulating the brain, or even practices like meditation and prayer, these are all ways of stimulating our brain in one way or another. Some are more external or artificial, some are more technological, I guess others are more natural. And some do use, certainly the use of magic mushrooms in ayahuasca and so forth, go back thousands of years for people to develop spiritual experiences. So on one hand, I think there’s all these different ways of trying to get at this system that’s in our brain that gets turned on or turned off and gets these different patterns that lead to very powerful kinds of experiences.

And psychedelics are certainly one way of doing that. Part of what, again, not to give a little bit of a cop out answer, but all of our brains are a little bit different. And there is never a one size fits all. And unfortunately there’s 10, 15% or whatever of people who have bad experiences with psychedelics. There’s 10 or 15. In our survey of spiritual experiences, about four to 5% of people did talk about negative experiences, even naturally occurring ones. So there are times where things go bad, and it would be fascinating to try to do brain scans and try to explore how and why these kinds of experiences start to occur and what’s going on in the brain of somebody who has a negative experience versus a positive experience. But I think that what people, and as you also mentioned, I mean part of what happens is these seems to be, there can be long lasting effects.

In fact, even when people have a naturally occurring mystical experience, they describe it as something that can last literally a lifetime. So it really can kind of rewire the brain in a moment. I think context is always important. And again, I don’t know the exact details of your experience, but obviously if somebody goes to a frat party and tries some magic mushroom, probably they’re not going to have a mystical experience. But if it’s done in a very controlled environment, very intentional with guides and so forth, more likely that it will work, they could still have a bad experience, but it’s more likely

Lorne Brown 

I did the latter where I prepped no alcohol and ate well for months before I had to do questionnaires. The retreat was beautiful. I had great guides. I went for

Andrew Newberg 

Integration. The physiology was just wrong. Yeah,

Lorne Brown 

I did it well. But today when I look at it, I felt like it broke my nervous system. I was, and I had all these tools, which was I got my friends and I worked on it, and I got to really work my craft for myself to benefit my patients. And now today I’m like, all right. I think I accelerated my journey by a couple of decades. I had to fix my nervous system. I was very aware that I got stuck in a sympathetic alarm and I couldn’t turn it off.

Andrew Newberg 

Right. And I think that my general feeling is that to the extent that people can go through approaches that are more conservative, they are less likely to have those kinds of negative effects. So practices like meditation and prayer and so forth are probably a little bit safer and better to try. But at least the research on psychedelics is going, are people who that’s beyond them. And we know that’s the case as well. I mean, if you can sit down and be quiet and calm and meditate and have a great experience, that’s wonderful. But for somebody who’s suffering from PTSD, they can’t turn, no matter what they do meditation wise, they cannot turn off those traumatic memories. And so they may need medication or even something like a psychedelic. So I think that it can be, as with everything, they’re all potentially useful. They’re all potentially appropriate in the right setting.

But I think it’s wrong to say, well, everyone should try these things because I think there’s a lot of people who it doesn’t work well for. And I think part of what I do in my world, and you mentioned in the introduction, I’m in the world of integrative medicine, and so we do try very much to the extent that we can try to tailor approaches for each person. The problem is that we don’t have this data, it’d be great to say we’re going to scan everybody’s brain who goes through the retreat that you went through. And then we’re going to find out that the 10% of people who had the bad experience while their frontal lobes were particularly underactive to begin with or something like that. So then we can scan people and say, okay, well if you’ve got an underactive frontal lobe, then you shouldn’t do psychedelics.

You should try something else. But we don’t have that data right now. So I think we are to a certain extent, limited by saying, what are your goals? What are you hoping to achieve? What are the approaches that are available to you? Which are the ones that are kind of the least intrusive that might work? And so can you try a meditation practice? Can you try something that’s more spiritually oriented and hope that you can get the kind of experience or the effect that you’re looking for? But ultimately, if that doesn’t work and you’ve tried other things, the person’s tried other things, then trying a psychedelic to help them deal with a very problematic situation, that may be the right direction to go. But we also need to do more and more research to try to understand that. So I think that all of these things are possibly useful. Certainly we do know that whether it’s psilocybin, whether it’s meditation, whether it’s a near death experience, whether it’s something else that the person has done, can elicit these kinds of experiences or help people have these kinds of experiences. So that’s all part of the process, but exactly how and when and how to advise people, that is a real challenge. And hopefully we’ll get more and more data to be able to answer those questions more effectively.

Lorne Brown 

It’s like the waiver on your trip. You may meet God or you may meet the devil, or they may be the same person.

Andrew Newberg 

Well, and that in and of itself is kind of an interesting characteristic too, which is that there are many different descriptors that people use. And sometimes people say, I felt God, I felt a force, I felt an energy, I felt electricity. And one of the questions that I have is, are they the same experiences that are interpreted differently or are they fundamentally different experiences? I would think that if you think that you’re incredibly positive and godlike, and then on another experience, you’re incredibly negative and devilish, that’s probably a different experience. But feeling God, feeling a force, feeling love, maybe those are the same experiences, maybe they’re not. And so that’s also part of this larger discussion, which is doing a phenomenological approach of understanding these experiences, but then delving into the biology as well and seeing where the distinctions and the similarities are.

Lorne Brown 

So summarize that part is it’s individualized, like you said, it’s not a one size fits all. And then there’s also, there’s mega dosing and microdosing of psychedelics. And obviously it’s understandable because when I share this, I always say, I’m not against psychedelics. I’m not one of those people for or against. I’m very curious, open-minded, and obviously look at what we’re talking about. And I’ve seen it help so many people. I just know some people are not going to have a good experience. And like you said, we’re learning.

Andrew Newberg 

I think it has to be used carefully. And I mean it should not be used in a blanket way. It should not be used for everyone, but exactly who and where and when. As the research comes about, we may find that there are some very appropriate people who it’s useful for. But it gets back to the earlier question, and I kind of mentioned this too, is that if you have some profound spiritual experience under the influence of psilocybin, does that mean that in our Western based model, that’s an artificial experience and it’s not real. It’s just your brain producing the experience, or did it somehow open your brain up to a world and a reality that we don’t typically see that enabled you to have that kind of experience. So again, even from a reality perspective, it’s not clear what those experiences really mean yet.

Lorne Brown 

And my bias would be regardless of going into a psychedelic experience, have a practice going into it and then have a practice coming out of it because you still need to do your own work. It’s just a catalyst, it’s a support. It’s been my experience. So you got to have that. And I’ve had one person also who has come to me, they heard my story on another podcast, and they were in a really bad place, and I was like, great. I had an idea already. And acupuncture, we worked, and it took me close to six months to a year to get back to normal. It took him a week. So it was good. I know we’re of time here, so I wanted to just share and if you have any comments here, but I said I was going to share this and ask you about it, but I’m going to read what are some of the core elements of an enlightenment experience?

And so you talked about intensity, it’s highly powerful and deeply memorable. Two was clarity. You had this understanding of life, this knowing three, a profound sense of connectedness or oneness with the universe or divine presence. So you kind of dissolve, which I think why so many people in conscious world want people to do their conscious work, because then we would not want to go to war with each other or compete if we feel a sense of oneness or connectedness, surrender, which we’ve talked about feeling letting go or being carried by the experience. And then permanence is number five, causing a lasting change in the individual’s perception and worldview. I think what people want to know is what’s your path towards enlightenment? Because you also had five steps towards enlightenment, and I’m curious if you want to share that. I have them written down here, but do you have them off the top of your head? Would you like me to list them? And then you can comment on any of these.

Andrew Newberg 

You can list them, actually. That’d be good.

Lorne Brown 

See if I paid attention.

Andrew Newberg 

That sounds good. Okay. You’re getting everything right so far.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. Step one, a desire to change. So there’s got to be an intention there, right? Desire to change. Step two was preparing your body and mind. What does that look like, by the way, when you say preparing your, I think of learning to relax the body mind.

Andrew Newberg 

What does that mean for you? Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit of, you’ve already kind of talked about it as well, which is that people need to do their own work. They need to consider a practice or approaches that would be helpful for them. And to some degree, they have to be okay with the fact that they’re now going about this process and not necessarily fight against it, but allow themselves to be open and affected by the process. So they have to have that intention to want to change. They have to be open to the possibility of changing. They need to do some work, some contemplation, whatever it is that helps them to get in touch with who they are and what their goals are. That’s all part of the process as well.

Lorne Brown 

Three was creating a ritual or a practice. Four is surrendering to the experience, and this is my practice, my formula of notice, accept, choose. Again. I feel like I have come across a formula that can really support that surrender to get you out of your thinking brain into your body, into your felt sense. And then step five is reflecting on your experience.

Andrew Newberg

Right? Well, so the ritual part is very important because it is about really finding the approach, the practice, whatever it is that works for you. And again, there are thousands of different ways of doing it and people can even develop their own ways, but it’s finding that approach. And sometimes it could be multiple approaches. It could be, I’m going to do Buddhist meditation and I’m going to do this Christian prayer, or something like that. It could be a variety of things or it could be one thing, but it is finding that particular approach or practice that seems to really become repetitive in something that you keep coming back to and keeps grounding you. Then as you mentioned, and I know we talked about this a lot in the podcast, is that ability to at some point say, I’ve, I’ve got to release myself from this whole process.

I’m going to surrender. I’m going to allow it to just take me where it goes. That’s usually when those moments of enlightenment can happen. And then finally, as you’ve also said, the idea of then rethinking how we think about it again? How do we reflect on it? How do we bring it back into our way of thinking about the world, about our way of thinking about ourselves? So this becomes very important for us because when you talk about enlightenment, there’s sort of two basic aspects of it. One is the moment of enlightenment, which is kind of becoming enlightened, that enlightenment experience. But then the other part of it is being enlightened, which is what you take and the list of characteristics of these experiences that permanently change, that transformation about how you now begin to look at the world and look at the world in a different kind of way and from a new perspective.

So I wish I had a button that people could push to just make those experiences happen. And unfortunately, there’s never a definitive, there’s never a guarantee. But that also, all of that information that we were just talking about, the core elements and the approaches that people seem to take a lot of that came out of our survey because those are what people have told us, and people have said, I had this practice, I did this. I surrendered to the experience, whatever it was that happened to them. That’s how they kind of went down their own path. Now again, for some people, they took a drug and had an incredible experience. For some people it just happened naturally. They were just walking down the street and suddenly saw the world differently. So again, there’s never one size fits all. There’s lots of different ways of happening, but I think the most effective ways and the best ways of doing it typically involve that degree of intentionality and can help people to try to find those paths that really work best for them.

And maybe the last thing to say, which to me was we’ve kind of been hitting around this with the uniqueness of each person’s experience, the uniqueness of each person’s brain, the fact that there isn’t one way of doing it. But what also is interesting is that if I were to do a brain scan of virtually everybody’s brain on the planet, our brains really look pretty much the same. We all have our frontal lobes. We all have our limbic system, we all have our autonomic nervous system. We all have these different areas of the brain, and they all more or less work the same way. So to me, I think one of the most powerful messages of all of this is that we are all capable of having these kinds of experiences. That is something that is available to everyone and it’s available to anyone. It’s a matter of, in some sense, being a little bit fortunate or lucky to hit it the right way. It’s finding the combination of the lock to use that kind of metaphor, and it’s each person striving for it. But part of what I’ve also learned, at least in my own life, is that the striving for sometimes can be just as amazing as, not to be trite, but the journey can be just as amazing as the destination and sometimes maybe even more amazing. And so

Lorne Brown 

I think you’ve hit it there because that’s that saying, I’m enjoying the journey over the destination. And in this conscious circle, the idea is not being attached to form an outcome. Right? Because the destination. Because when you become attached to form an outcome, the idea is you’re putting up resistance. And so in your brain scans, I would wonder, I’m curious about this approach of notice, except choose again. Notice when you believe it, everything happens to you is neutral, and you give it meaning to the lens of your subconscious when you believe we’re not going to go down there because of time. But when you believe in this story, you make it real. There’s your reality. So first you got to notice you’re gone, triggered, you’re at the effect. You have doubts in your case.

Then the accepting is bringing in tools to surrender. What I think happens is resistance drops. And what I would suspect when that relief happens or peace, profound peace is the brain changes and now you’re having these spiritual experiences and the choose again is now that you’re at this place, how do you want to be in this world? Now you have the option. You’re no longer fully at your history. You get to choose in the moment how you’re going to be. And I find that sometimes we need a little doing to get into being. So that’s what my approach is, is some tools, some doing tools to help people get into that state of surrender. And like you said, sometimes people do well with taking a medication to get into that surrender,

Andrew Newberg 

And sometimes they need that.

Lorne Brown 

But be able to do this at work or any time of day where you cannot take medication. It’s nice that you can keep yourself present and not reactive.

Andrew Newberg 

Exactly. Exactly. The last analogy I’ll give you, which if this is helpful for the listeners as well, is that when the frontal lobe is on, it is also kind of keeping everything that we think about in its proper folders, if you will. I think about it, it’s a big filing system and everything’s in its proper folders. But the problem is that if our approach is not working for ourselves, then we have, we’re not keeping our folders in the right spot. When the frontal lobe function drops, as you’re talking about, it’s kind of as if we’ve sort of thrown all the folders up in the air and now they can be restored, and now you start putting them back in. But now you’re putting them in a different way and you have an opportunity at that point to put them in a way that winds up being healthier, that puts it in a way that enables people to see the world from a different perspective. Hopefully it opens them up to a more spiritual, more loving, more compassionate perspective and more compassionate, not just for the people who are out there, but for themselves as well. And I think that it is of vital importance that people look at themselves as compassionately, as they look at other people out in the world. And so having the ability to do that and to be accepting of oneself, be accepting of one’s beliefs and approaches to the world, and being okay with that and being compassionate about that, I think is actually very, very important for people.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you very much. Dr. Andrew Newberg. He has so many books. His latest is Sex, God in the Brain, but he has over 14 books, or he has at least 14. You got to check them out. I’m on your website now looking at them. I have some audiobooks, so I’ve been listening to them. His website is andrewnewberg.com. We’ll put that in the show notes, and he has lots of videos on YouTube and on his website, his books, papers, research, and thank you for reminding us that we all have this brain, so we all have the potential, the ability to have these experiences. You don’t have to spend 40 years on a mountain meditating. There’s ways you can do this.

Andrew Newberg 

Exactly.

Lorne Brown 

Andrew, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it. This was fun for me.

Andrew Newberg 

Thank you.

Lorne Brown

I just wanted to share a couple of podcasts that can tie in or compliment what I did today with Dr. Andrew Newberg. And so check out episode six, Jill Boat Taylor on harnessing the Power of Your Brain, and Lisa Miller’s look for the Lisa Miller one, and I’ll describe what she talks about or why I wanted you, and off camera I asked Andrew a little bit about it. She talks about this spiritual practice where it creates some immunity against anxiety and addiction and adolescence. So that’s a good one. That’s episode 68, the Awakened Brain. The other one is by Steven Porges. He just talks about that state of alarm as well. We talked a little bit about the stress response. Anyways, I just wanted to highlight those three podcasts and obviously go back through them all. If you like this one, many of these podcasts, we keep diving into consciousness and spirituality and doing our best to use signs to demystify it.

Speaker 3 

If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance. They help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance.ca. That’s Acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lorne brown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.