Part Two: Are You Ignoring Your Higher Self? NEUROSCIENTIST on Intuition, Synchronicities & Soul Messages | Dr. Marjorie Woollacott

What if consciousness isn’t just in your brain, but in every cell of the universe? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Marjorie Woollacott—renowned neuroscientist and leading researcher on consciousness and spiritual experience—shares her personal journey of spiritual awakening. She describes a transformative guided meditation where she felt an electric current flow from her head to her heart, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of love unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Dr. Woollacott dives into the science, the mysticism, and the practical wisdom behind spiritual transformation, including: - Why it’s vital to integrate spiritual experiences into daily life and how she finally merged her academic & spiritual paths after keeping them separate for so long - Neural features in the brain that limit access to extrasensory perception, and why some people are born with “their senses wide open” - Why you don’t need a scientific explanation to fully embrace the positive transformation of a spiritual awakening - Practical tips to quiet your mind & deepen meditation, even if you’ve struggled in the past - How connection matters more than ever in challenging global times - Who is more likely to have psi abilities, and how Near Death Experiences can unlock hidden potential - How some people can go beyond space & time if they believe it’s possible - Why placebo works & how to balance self-agency with surrendering to the universe - Her belief that consciousness exists differently in dreams & alternate states, and how collective consciousness can create real-world change - The incredible story of a doctor's out-of-body experience during hypnotic regression in an NDE, and what it teaches us about the mind and soul - Scientific argument for why telekinesis could be possible - Importance of finding purpose, noticing synchronicities, and staying “open” to life’s hidden signals - Power of prayer & Reiki, and why establishing energetic boundaries between healer & patient is essential Whether you’re curious about spiritual awakening, consciousness, extrasensory perception, near death experiences, or the science behind mysticism, this conversation will expand your mind, open your heart, and challenge what you thought was possible. Prepare to explore the frontier where science meets the soul, and discover how your own awareness could be far greater than you ever imagined! Dr Marjorie Woollacott’s Books: Spiritual Awakenings: Scientists and Academics Describe Their Experiences: ⁠https://spiritual-awakenings.net/⁠ https://spiritual-awakenings.net/ The Playful Universe: Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness: ⁠https://marjoriewoollacott.com/books/the-playful-universe-2/⁠ https://marjoriewoollacott.com/books/the-playful-universe-2/ On the Banks of the River Styx: New Perspectives on Terminal Lucidity and Other Near-Death Phenomena: ⁠https://a.co/d/0N8w9ZE⁠ https://a.co/d/0N8w9ZE Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with neuroscientist Dr. Marjorie Wolakot. She's a professor and member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. Her specialty is not only neurophysiology, but the awakening of the scientific mind. In part one of our conversation with Dr. Wolakot, we talked about the mechanisms of spiritual transformation. We talked about how near-death experiences are one of the best ways for us to understand sigh abilities and the nature of consciousness itself. In part two, we're going to get deeper into near-death experiences, as well as touching on telekinesis, telepathy, synchronicity, and energy work.

• 0:47Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to talk about communicating with people remotely, and dark energy, and how to protect yourself.

• 0:54Mayim Bialik?

  Here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Marjorie Wolakot.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Breaking down.

• 1:01Mayim Bialik?

  You also talk about this kind of spectrum of consciousness, where we kind of think about the consciousness that we operate in to do all the things that we do. I think that there are, you know, obviously many levels, but there's kind of two levels that I'd like you to speak to. And one is that of dreams. You know, the consciousness level we have, you know, when we're in a state that is not a typical awake conscious state. And then there's a level above that. Can you talk a little bit about sort of how consciousness can exist differently?

• 1:39Speaker 03

  I think Jung even talked about these various levels of consciousness that included like our unconscious realms, or subconscious, our normal waking conscious, and then maybe, in fact, I think it might have been even James talking about super consciousness as well. And I guess what I would say is that

• 1:57Speaker 03

  When we are in the dream state, obviously, the intellect clearly is somewhat out of the way. My ego is somewhat out of the way and it's almost as if now I can access my more superconscious realms. And I'll give you examples that we know, again, that are well documented, of people actually having that moment when they're in the dream state, they've fallen asleep, where their loved one contacts them who is dying and says, "I'm dying." That happened to my husband. He was falling asleep at night and his father, who had had Alzheimer's and was across the country in Tennessee in a memory facility, said, "My time on this earth is over."

• 2:39Speaker 03

  That's all he heard was this loud, strong male voice. And he said, "Well, I don't think my time on this earth is over." He didn't know what that voice was from. And then he sort of went back to sleep. And the next morning at 5:00 a.m., his sister calls him to say that his father had fallen, hit his head on a table, had hemorrhaged and was dying when that happened. And so there is that dreamlike state where somehow we can communicate with people, especially when it's emotionally charged. And I think people find that that's when telepathy often occurs. Why can't we do it in the laboratory? Because we don't have emotionally charged events in the laboratory and we want to repeat it 20 times. So you don't get the same effect.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  But so, yes, dreams are a different level. We have become more porous, as Bernardo Castro could say, to our connections with other people and across the time-space divide as well.

• 3:36Mayim Bialik?

  What happens in that next level of consciousness? So we have this sort of dream state where, as I reported, when we had Julia Mossbridge on for the first time, I started trying to keep track of dreams, trying to be more aware of dreams. And what I noticed as I started learning to meditate and kind of drop into that space is throughout the day, if I meditated, if I sat in quiet, I would start remembering dreams again that I had had that last night when I would sit in meditation. So let's say I'd wake up in the morning and I'd remember a dream. I'd, you know, I'd think about it. Sometimes I'd write it down, but you know, then it kind of like leaves your brain. But then hours later, I would sit down to meditate and all of a sudden I was

• 4:19Mayim Bialik?

  in a state where that dream kept coming back to me. I realized that's a place that I'm able to go. What is another state of consciousness that we would get to beyond that?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Well, I'm even going to take a step back for you in terms of these various levels because what you may also know from whether it's Bruce Grayson or other people doing near-death experience research is that only like maybe 10 to 20% of people who have cardiac arrest remember their near-death experience. But Sam Parnia, another person doing this research, said, wait a minute, I believe there's an iceberg of memories that are unavailable that for these people. And if you get them into the right state again, like your dreamlike state in meditation, you can find those memories. And

• 5:09Mayim Bialik?

  That's it.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  have now shown that's the case. I have a beautiful paper by with a woman named Stephanie Arnold, her case of having an NDE. She in fact had a precognition that she was going to die during childbirth. She warned the doctors about it. Most of the doctors ignored her. One doctor listened and got an extra crash cart. So there were two crash carts. She did have anaphylactic shock, bled out. They had a terrible time reviving her. They did revive her and she didn't remember any of it. She went to a hypnotherapist afterwards and luckily did it on recording because it was, I think in that time where the hypnotherapist

• 5:51Speaker 03

  was away, so it was on Zoom. She recorded it all. She remembered everything that happened during that cardiac arrest and her NDE. During her hypnotic regression, including going to the plane where her husband was rushing off the plane to get back to her at the hospital and seeing all of that, only through regression therapy, because she was then now back in that state like she was in her NDE, which is where you were when you went back into meditation. So it's that intriguing thing. So how do we get back to that quiet state and then maybe recapture these insights that may come in our dreams? I rarely remember my dreams and it's frustrating. I want to know them.

• 6:34Mayim Bialik?

  You know, we know a bit from electroencephalography, you know, research studies. We know a bit about what are the different brain states, right? We know about alpha waves and theta waves, right? We know about these things. We know some of the neurophysiological correlates that, again, we're just trying to understand it. This is not from a place of let me disprove it. There are legitimate scientists and researchers and professors who are saying, what is it about electrical brain activity that might be leading to different states and different access of consciousness? I want you to talk a little bit about the neural correlates, you know, from an imaging perspective. What are some of the neural correlates of

• 7:15Mayim Bialik?

  spiritual experiences? You mentioned a little bit about the default mode network, which we've talked about here. That's something that's also shut way down in psychedelic experiences and other transcendental experiences. But can you talk a little bit more about what's actually going on in the brain when you are having an experience that is allowing you to access another plane of consciousness?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  So we will take the extreme case of the near death experience where nothing is going on in the brain. And again, I will say, the skeptics will say, oh, but they've done some experiments with the rats and they caused cardiac arrest and there's a little bit of brain activity for a number of minutes afterwards. And that proves that NDEs must have brain activity. Well, again, most of the people like Bruce Grayson say, excuse me. Rats are very different from humans. And even if there's a little bit of brain activity, it doesn't say that was a near-death experience. So there's a certain amount of hand-waving by the skeptics in that case. But so the question is, so if we take the extreme, it's saying that you do not need a brain to have the experience, being active to have the experience.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  You need the brain to come back and express it to other people. So something happened that allowed that experience to come back into a brain. Now, one of the things that I remember in a documentary with Sam Parnia is that an M.D. said, "In an NDE, your reticular activating system, which goes up to your brain, your memory area, basically is shut down as well. So you shouldn't be able to get sensory input coming up to the brain to go into your hippocampus and your memory system." So what I say here as a neuroscientist is that this is a question that I cannot answer. Meaning that if I believe the brain is the source of all of my activities,

• 9:05Speaker 03

  and we know there's a great correlation between what my brain's doing and what I'm talking with you right now if I were in an MRI machine, but it doesn't seem to be necessary. And the neuroscientist in me feels a crunch in my stomach when I say that. But maybe, can I take just one step sideways? And that is to go with terminal lucidity for a moment, because I've done a lot of work with terminal lucidity. Just for listeners that might not know it, that's when you have Alzheimer's disease, you have big holes in your brain. And it's been shown in the scanner that that's the case. In the last minutes to hours of life, you come back from being totally disoriented, confused, not knowing your relatives, your family, and you come back to lucidity.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Your eyes are bright again. You say, "Oh, my goodness, you know, it's so wonderful what you've done for me during this time." And talk to your grandchildren. And then, a few minutes later, you close your eyes and you die within 24 hours. And I'm going, as a neuroscientist, excuse me. I can understand that people have found that again and again and again, but we have documented evidence that their brain is really not functioning. And it's the same with people with stroke. And so there, I don't know what to do. And when the neuroscientists around me say, excuse me, it must be an illusion by every medical doctor that saw that, because it cannot happen. According to my understanding of the brain,

• 10:35Speaker 03

  I have to be still. I don't know what to say. And so it's the same thing with NDEs, and it's the same thing with the deep states of meditation. Well, so here I am, a neuroscientist. I've studied the brain and I say, hey, it's when the brain quiets down that we have the experiences. And we're going, well, okay, the filters are now not filtering anymore. That makes sense. But I still have to get a way that the experience somehow comes into my current awareness. And maybe I'll also just share with you some, a particular presentation that was given at the IANS meeting, International Association of Near Death Studies, which I like theoretically. What they said is Julia Mossbridge and others have shown

• 11:20Speaker 03

  that one can have telekinesis, where you can basically move something inside of a glass jar with your mind. And you can make, for example, something turn around in the glass jar. So my mentality can, it's been proven very carefully in the laboratory, move things. They said, then could you not say that our consciousness, because then we would be saying we're all interconnected with other people, what my consciousness could do is actually change the activity of the, basically the channels and the receptors of various neurons in my brain to open them up. All that takes is just moving a little bit of my membrane aside, one of the channels, and making that happen. And so consciousness could have a way of actually,

• 12:05Speaker 03

  through telekinesis, since we know that's possible, make things happen in the brain without the neurons being normally active. And so there is just one little idea.

• 12:15Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Woollacott, I would say no. Like, that would be my response. No. Just like, that's two letters. No.

• 12:25Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I'm like, I'm with you. I'm on the Dr. Woollacott train. Like, I'm a passenger. Everything's cool. I got my head out the window. Like, I'm in it until I'm trying to move molecules with my brain.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Do you not believe Julia Rossbridge's research?

• 12:45Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we talk a little bit more about that research?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's a lot of research on telekinesis.

• 12:52Mayim Bialik?

  Moving objects?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Moving objects.

• 12:55Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:56Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm gonna even, so I'll even give you a more fascinating one, and you can read about it because it's been documented. Stefan Osoviakie, he was living in Poland during World War II. And he was able to do these things, many, many sort of telekinetic things. But one of the things he did as a teenager in Russia, this was like before the Russian Revolution. He was part of the royalty in Russia. And in the parlor game one evening, he was straitjacketed on the floor as people were around him watching, and he moved pillars, columns, little by little, kabum, kabum, kabum, across the room. And again, you can, Stefan Schwartz has a book where he describes a lot of this.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  And there's another book about Stefan Osoviakie. So that was just one example of what he began to do when he was a teenager. He came into the world with this. And then he, of course, trained with a particular master from India for a while, and he's from Russia. That's just part of the story. But the amazing thing is that there is one example of somebody that did it. Julia Mossbridge, and I imagine if, I'd be happy to do this. Now you're making me intrigued by all the experiments that have been done on this type of research where people can move objects. All I'm saying is that this is a relatively well-established fact. And you know, Julia's book with Imam Samburu talks about this, and it's an American Psychological

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Association book on consciousness. So, saying that, your neuroscience brain can say, "N O, no." And I can say it too, because it doesn't feel like I, I don't do that. I don't have that ability. But since I know it can be done, I'm just, this is where that little crack of curiosity comes in. Well, if that is possible, what could that mean? And could there be an experiment where you could actually test this? I don't know.

• 16:50Mayim Bialik?

  I'm wondering how far we can take, you know, our, our belief system, right? How far can we take our belief that people can do and experience exceptional things? And I think, you know, the work that Julia Mossbridge is doing, even our understanding of the fact that those who are nonverbal can communicate, right? And I'm, I always have to, you know, put a disclaimer, I'm setting aside facilitated communication. There's still too much controversy around that method, but there are many other methods that are not facilitated communication, where, I mean, I have a friend Perry Finkelstein, who I actually recorded a TEDx talk for her.

• 17:31Mayim Bialik?

  She is nonverbal and remembers listening to people talking about her and saying to herself, "I can hear you. I understand what you're saying." And it wasn't until she got older and learned to communicate the way that she can, that she said, "I'm in here." I'm a, she got a master's degree, like, that notion that there are people who are nonverbal, who have a complicated, intricate, intellectual capability, even that, right, was a leap for us. And we come from generations of people being institutionalized, because we did not know what to do with them. We didn't have the ability to see into their mind, right? So I think what you're bringing up is like, this is the next level. What,

• 18:16Mayim Bialik?

  what Dr. Mossbridge is doing, this is the next level. Is there something that we can say, "We don't understand why, but what if?" Right? And a lot of people would say like, "Oh, what kind of God would place this ability in this God?" Like, I don't know. That's actually not the question to ask. Or it's not the question to ask first.

• 18:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Tell us a little bit about non-local consciousness from these NDE experiences, and then I'm going to ask about remote viewing, because it ties into the moving objects with your mind.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  With Bettina Payton, she was lying there on the table and hemorrhaging because various blood vessels now were just leaking blood everywhere. And she leaves her body, she in fact goes to another realm. And in that other realm, I should mention that she looks back and sees this tiny flame. And she says, oh, that was my life. And she realizes it's going to be extinguished. That's what she assumes happens. But then, in this realm of total union ecstasy, light, contentment, she's, hears the voice, in effect, a thunder, she says more than a voice, "You must live." Something is decided at some level of reality. She funnels down into the operating room, and now she sees everything that's happening.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  And interestingly, talking about telekinesis, it's not exactly telekinesis, but it's like it. She starts telling the hospital doctors what to do to get her body going again. How was she communicating? Obviously with her consciousness, but they're trying to get into her wrist, and they can't get the needle into her collapsed blood vessel because she has no blood pressure. And she keeps saying, "Go to the elbow, go to the elbow." And finally, the person who's doing that, a third time, he hears, and he rushes and he goes to the elbow and he gets it in. So she was also directing as she's outside the body, and the body is flat. She says, "It looks white, it looks dead." And then, of course, after it's over, she tells everybody what's happened.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  But so, there is that example that, and in fact, I should mention in this case, that she went on with the doctors to a TV show in Boston after this happened, and they corroborated everything she said. So, it's not, again, like, it's just anecdotal evidence in that sense. She was, it was definitely corroborated. So, there you have one example of an NDE, and of course, there are these other cases where the ND, the person with the NDE goes into a different room or a different place as if they're tele-transporting themselves, and they hear interactions of their loved ones down the hall. So, that's been corroborated too by Bruce Grayson and others. So-

• 20:56Mayim Bialik?

  One important thing about the patent case, she was a physician.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Yes, she was a physician and atheist, a materialist.

• 21:04Mayim Bialik?

  And I'm mentioning that because there seems to be a real dismissal of a lot of these cases as, you know, this is not a verifiable person, this is an unreliable person, this is a mentally ill person, they're having delusions, they're having hallucinations. That's not to say, I mean, I've met many physicians who I think are delusional. But the notion that this was a woman whose career was predicated on veracity, on truth, you know, she's a physician. For her to experience this is astounding because she is also putting her career, her livelihood at risk. And I hate to say that we need more people who are physicians, who are putting their lives at risk to share these things.

• 21:46Mayim Bialik?

  But one of the things that so much NDE research has discovered is that people have been having these experiences, probably for all of the human experience, right? When this could happen, people just didn't know what to do with the information. Like if you, if you bring this up, and Jonathan and I had this with, with the death doula that we spoke to, Martha Jo Atkins. When you say to someone, "Oh, I've always known that dead people come to you when you're dying because my grandmother was..." Like, everybody's got a story like this, right? It, it happens all the time. No one knows how to be trusted once they reveal this information, which you encountered as well, as a neuroscientist, having these kind of experiences.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So, I mean, so getting back to the first point, that really helped. And also, after that happened, she said she knew that she was not this body, that she was consciousness. She said that when she came to the recovery room. So, right then, she knew instantly. But then she went back, of course, after she got well, and also realized, "I have to get back to that state and I don't know how to do it, but maybe meditation will help me." And interestingly, again, she then, in fact, said, wow, how do I find a meditation teacher that can do that? She imagined a white-haired Buddhist priest somewhere, and she tried that with this particular person in Boston, and that didn't work. She then said, I felt like

• 23:11Speaker 03

  I was actually going crazy, but I had to go to this meditation retreat in the Catskill Mountains because something inside of me told me that was the way to find it. And her long story short, that I think may be in the paper I wrote with her, she comes to this retreat, she sees this meditation teacher in the hall as she's beginning to meditate, and the whole experience comes back to her. She floods into the sense of total union, and she's crying because she's finally back in that state. And of course, goes home, and she continues, like me, to meditate the rest of her life, and is totally changed. And one more interesting point, her husband, who also has been an M D, to this day, does not believe what happened

• 23:56Speaker 03

  because he's remained a materialist and he cannot change.

• 23:59Mayim Bialik?

  That's a mixed marriage of the worst variety.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  And, you know, what's interesting is, she says they love each other dearly, and he has built a meditation room on the house for her, he supports her in every way, but they have agreed.

• 24:13Mayim Bialik?

  This is like me and Jonathan. I give him his Reiki room for him to have experiences, and then we come back and we talk about math.

• 24:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Understanding that people can have these unbelievable experiences with non-local consciousness, having the ability to see outside of the room that they're in through their five senses, where their consciousness, I don't know, we don't know how exactly, but is able to travel, that takes us to remote viewing, or the ability to

• 24:43Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, even if you're not an actual trained remote viewer, to know things outside of time and space that you would otherwise know them. Can you talk a little bit about the power of developing intuition or the ability to move around time and space without your physical body?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Obviously, what's interesting is Stefan Schwartz, Dean Raden, and others have obviously looked into this a lot. And of course, some people come by it naturally, and those are some of the people that they used with the remote viewing when they were looking at it with the Stanford Research Institute, CIA money and things like that. And other people, now we are learning, are being trained and they're doing it very well. And I'll just give you an interesting example for me. So I was in New Zealand at a workshop with Dean Raden. We were both speakers at the workshop, two or three days on consciousness. And he did like a mini workshop inside of it where he said, well, let's just see what you can do about, you know, remote viewing.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  And so I'm sitting there and what he says, he's going to have us try is imagine for ourselves, what is the next slide he's going to show on the screen?

• 25:51Mayim Bialik?

  This stuff makes me nuts, but I can't wait to hear what you say.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  So, so I, you know, I'm just one of 25 people in the audience and I say, sure, you know, and so I try to think about what it might be and I get totally wrong. And then after like three or four slides that I haven't been able to do it, I just say, hey, I'm just going to let my hand draw whatever it wants to draw. And of course, right then, the hand drew, I think it was windmills. And there the hand drove the windmills and I'm going, well, that was interesting. When I let go of my intellect, when I let go of my rational thinking and my effort, my hand, how did my hand do it? But it had the antennae out to go into the future or whatever we want to say, inside of that projector and do it. And that happened two or three times.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  And so that showed me that it can be done, but my intellect is so in control. That it won't let me out of my normal time-space reality.

• 26:46Mayim Bialik?

  I'm hung up on that your hand knew to go inside the projector. That's hard.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I think my hand knew how to go beyond time and space, or whether it's time, because it was about to come up, and it was also in, it was hidden.

• 27:01Mayim Bialik?

  Right. If we're talking about an ability to remote view, you don't need to go into the projector. It's in the universe.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, of course, and the universe was talking to that part of my system that then could direct the information to the hand. But clearly, the conscious part of me was not necessary. I didn't have to be aware of it consciously.

• 27:23Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 27:23Jonathan Cohen?

  So if you're able to do that, is time at all what we think it is?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  No, absolutely not. And, you know, I say that, I don't know what that means. I mean, I believe with most of, again, the Federico Fargines, the Bernardo Castros, the Donald Hoffmanns, that in fact, that is like the barrier, in fact, that we have to go through to get into a body, that there's a lot of a kaboom. In fact, Bettina Payton said, after she left her body, she was like in this darkness for a while, and then suddenly there was a big kaboom, and she then went to this other space. And that, I like that. It's like, there's this almost impermeable barrier of my belief in time and space that keeps me from actually interacting beyond time and space normally. But some people, for some people, it's permeable.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  And they're able to do remote viewing spatially and also precognitively.

• 28:19Jonathan Cohen?

  It also makes sense to me that if this is possible, which I believe it is, then it's kind of helpful to like, go explore beyond time and space every now and again, just to see what the options might be. Like, if I have to make a decision, shouldn't I go navigate? Like, it's just another set of data. I ask ChatGPT if I should, you know, the pros and cons of this decision. Shouldn't I quiet my filters? It's like, we learn all about what, how to try to take care of ourselves, to eat healthy, to exercise, to move our bodies. No one really tells us, oh, by the way, you have these filters that are guiding your reality, and there could be an enormous amount of information available to you if you just learn how to tamp those down and go exploring every now and again.

• 29:05Mayim Bialik?

  That is what the Akashic records, which many religious traditions have talked about over the past thousands of years. This is what people refer to when they refer to the Akashic records, that there is a place, a place, I'm putting it in quotes, there's a place where this information was, is, and will be, and it exists, and you do a little dance, and you spin around three times, and you, you know, say, "Bibidi boop," and you are in that space, and you're able to access it. And Elizabeth Krone talked about when she was in her near-death experience, essentially she dropped into that place. She said, "You can cut through time." You're just like, you're just cutting through it, like you see it all.

• 29:47Mayim Bialik?

  And, you know, I said "was, is, and will be" because in the Jewish tradition, one of God's names is an acronym for was, is, and will be. It's this notion that there is something that holds all of space and time at the same time.

• 30:02Jonathan Cohen?

  We don't think of our consciousness as having been placed anywhere. But if we realize that our consciousness can be non-local, not attached to us, then at any given moment, we're actually shining it in a direction that is going to guide what we perceive as real. So if all the information is available in the universe, and of course, some things have not happened, I'm not saying that everything is laid out and that there is no free will, but if there are a series of decisions available with cause and effect, and we are then able to take our attention and place it in a way to get more information, all of a sudden,

• 30:44Jonathan Cohen?

  that may open up people's possibility of what they may learn, the insight they may get. As well, if we follow that same logic, we can ask, "Where is our attention being placed at any given moment?" If you tie it back to, "Am I only focused on murder documentaries and cases? What am I filling my body with?" It may be fascinating, and it may be great, but it may also be limiting.

• 31:11Mayim Bialik?

  That feels hostile, bro. That feels hostile.

• 31:14Jonathan Cohen?

  But what else, right? What else? Where are we placing it? And Mayim and I have actually been doing this exercise of looking at another side of any interaction.

• 31:26Jonathan Cohen?

  And that's just a small assumption. That's just like saying, wait, wait a second. The sponge may be used for something else. But I'm trying to sort of build a ladder from a high level understanding of consciousness to our sort of very mundane interactions of assuming the worst of someone, of getting annoyed at people. How do we train ourselves to be more fluid in terms of where our attentions and assumptions lie?

• 31:54Speaker 03

  I would ask your listeners, if they're intrigued by all that we've talked about, to really ask themselves, what do they want out of their life? And what is their true way that they think they could be fulfilled? Because I think it's because we're not looking there that we get distracted by the things that are in front of us and the people that are around us. And we don't take that step back and say, oh, if I want that, then maybe I have to step back and say, do I need to dedicate more time to quieting my mind, for example? A friend, when he was like 10 or 11 years of age in elementary school, they barely like passed him from grade to grade for a while. But then what happened is his family gave him a Rolex, no, a Timex watch for Christmas.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  And he would put it in front of himself on the desk and he would time how long he could hold his breath. Because that was intriguing more than the teacher. And he found he could hold it longer if he stopped thinking, which is where we're going now. So now he's able to hold his breath for maybe a minute or more without thinking. And suddenly, as he does that, he realizes, I can hear the thoughts of that boy that's two rows over and in front of me. And wow, that's not my thought. That's interesting. And then he could begin to realize he could hear somebody else's thought. And he could hear a lot of thoughts around him. And he said, but they're pretty boring. And then he thought, I wonder if I can put a thought into that boy's mind. And so he actually tries it. He says, you're going to want to scratch your ear, scratch your ear.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  And the guy didn't do anything. And he did it for two or three minutes. And suddenly the guy reached up and scratched his ear. And at that moment, my friend heard a voice and the voice said, do not do that. That is not good. And he said, no, no, no, this is fun. This is great. And the voice said, no, do not do that.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  And he said, even at the age of 10 or 11, he understood that it's not good to try to control other people. And the reason I bring this up is because when people talk about remote viewing and all these other things precognition, they often ask that question, could people use it for nefarious means? And I'm hoping that once one gets the sense of expanded reality and interconnection, you wouldn't want to use it for nefarious means, that you would only do it for the right things because you understand your interconnection with everyone in the world.

• 34:14Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know, I think I'd want lottery numbers. And we talked about this, and we talked about Julia Mossbridge, because she talks about it with finances, that a lot of people use these kinds of skills in different ways to make predictions and decisions about horse races, about games, about financial decisions. And the notion is, and if you ask, you know, a strict materialist, if this is a thing, everyone would be doing it and everyone would be winning the lottery. But the idea is not that everyone can learn to do this. And I mean, you know, I think that's also, it's a little bit like, you know, what you decide is nefarious might for me seem like the smartest thing to do, right?

• 34:58Mayim Bialik?

  If my family's suffering and we need the money, it doesn't feel nefarious to me. So I think that sort of is, you know, some of the questions we have around this. Is there a force in the universe that's also deciding, you know, kind of right from wrong on, on levels that usually we leave to religious conversations and not spiritual ones? Along the lines of sort of like, you know, precognition, what is synchronicity? You know, when people start seeing a number a lot, is it selective attention? Or is there some other language that we can operate in? And how, how do you view synchronicity? What's happening in the universe when there are synchronous events?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yes, and so again, for people that might not know the word completely, again, it's just that when there are two events that happen synchronistically at the same time, but have no causal reason for them happening, that's what they call something that's synchronistic. So they call it a causal without cause. And therefore, it implies that something from the universe is bringing these things together in a interconnected way, maybe due to the sincere desire of one person or another or something else. And so. Just to let people know that as the head of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Sciences, we've published a book on essays related to synchronicity from different scientists and academics with their own synchronicities

• 36:23Speaker 03

  and how they believe this gives them an understanding of how the universe operates. And so, basically, I do believe that, in fact, they happen more often when you are actually, perhaps I would say, like, letting go a little bit and allowing yourself to move sort of spontaneously in the world, rather than having... Open. You're open. You're open, and you're not trying to control every moment of your life to make this happen or that happen. So it takes that opening. And I would also say often it seems like there's a sincere wish from the person in some way or another when I look at some of the examples. So, obviously, it was Jung that coined the term because he believed it was very real

• 37:08Speaker 03

  that there was this interconnection at the universe that allows people or events to come together to help something move forward in your life or a new understanding happen in your life. And I think that an example of one of my own synchronicities was when my meditation teacher, again, when I was spending my sabbatical year with her and we were sitting in an office together and I was about ready to go home to University of Oregon where I was teaching, she said, "So, Marjorie, are you getting married?" And I said, "Well, no. I have no desire to get married because I couldn't do the things I'm doing right now with you, going off for a year on sabbatical, doing research." And she didn't say anything more. And then I get home to Eugene, Oregon, a week or so later, and this man calls me on the phone that says,

• 37:53Speaker 03

  "Well, I'm interested in meditation, and I hear that you have a meditation center in your house, and I got your number, and I'm thinking that I would like to, you know, try this." And I said, "Well..." And he said, "But I'm a little bit skeptical, you know, I'm not sure." And I said, "Look, I'm an ordinary neurophysiology professor at the university. There's nothing unusual about me. Come on and try it." He walks in the front door. A few days later at night for the program, and I sensed that I am going to marry him. Now, I didn't say a thing because I am an appropriate meditation central leader, so I didn't say anything. But then, seven weeks later, he stays after everyone has left, and he says, "March, I have something to confess to you." And I said, "Well, what?" He said, "I'm incredibly attracted to you."

• 38:36Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  And we were married, you know, a year later. So there is an example of these events that came together that I couldn't explain. And I just thought it was very funny that I knew I was going to marry him. It's like, huh, okay. So I think that if you look at the numbers of essays in that book, it's wonderful because they really do give you a sense of all the different ways that people have found them happen. Again, a beautiful one by Joan Walton, who is a professor in the UK, is that she was going camping with her family in their camper, and they had an extra tent because there were two families, one that would be in the trailer and one in the camper. When they were at one particular place where they stopped to have lunch, they had laid out the tent on the ground

• 39:22Speaker 03

  because they had to get into their camper. And while they were having lunch in the camper, some guys stole their tent. They didn't realize it till they looked, and it was gone. And the girl saw some guys out the back window. And they thought, "What are we going to do? We have these two families. We have no way now to actually continue camping." But they went on anyway to the next campsite, and they got there in the evening. And she just happens to ask, almost foolishly, "By any chance, do you have another tent around that might be we could buy or we could borrow or something like that?" And the owner of the campsite says, "You won't believe this, but somebody left us a tent today earlier on." And they said, "You know, if you have somebody that you'd like to give it to, go ahead, whatever.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  We don't need it anymore." And when they saw the tent, it looked almost identical, not completely identical, but it was the same mate. It was old, it had different tears in it, but there it was from the universe. There's a synchronicity, a causal. How can we explain it? And they make my hair stand on end, but I hear those things. I think, again, it's just part of this connection beyond time and space that is available to us. And somehow, we fall into those. I think that they do happen more often after those awakenings. Of course, I think we're probably also more attentive. I think it's probably a both and.

• 40:46Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to circle back to what you said about placing a thought in someone's mind and make it really practical in a positive way. I had a teacher once who also described this capability. And we used to sit in the quad of a school that my office was next to. And she said, if you place your attention on anyone walking, if you quiet yourself, you'll hear what's in their head. And I used to think, well, that's really hard because I have a very active imagination. How do you know what's real? And how do you know what you're making up? But your example of placing a thought and having them scratch is interesting.

• 41:28Jonathan Cohen?

  And you will also notice that when you place your mind on someone else's consciousness and you're in the vicinity, they'll start to move a little bit. If you watch their physical movement or reaction, they can feel, heard, or watched the same way as if you're staring at someone. Eventually, they'll pick up on the fact that you're staring at them across the restaurant and they'll like kind of look over at you.

• 41:57Jonathan Cohen?

  So first, I think it's important, can we communicate with people remotely to either offer condolences or connect with them? You know, some people call it remote healing, where you can send energy. But maybe talk a little bit about this idea of communicating either on a soul level or a non-conscious level with people remotely to maybe offer ideas, not in a nefarious way, or in a like, hey, I know I may have done something to you before we deal with it in the physical realm, let's deal with it in the energetic realm.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Beautiful question. And the answer is yes. And I want to give you again a beautiful example of that that I heard at one of these near-death studies meetings. And that was a woman that said that she had been in an auto accident. And it had been a very severe auto accident, and she actually had a near-death experience. And she said, as she was like out of her body and unconscious, unresponsive anyway, a woman drove by in another car and sent her a prayer, asking for her...

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Whatever well-being and she heard that. And she said, you don't understand how important those things are to those people that are in trouble when you hear that somebody really cared. So there is an example, and I would say that we know that happens, of course, when our loved ones are in danger or are sick, that that does come to us, that somehow we, especially for people that are emotionally connected. Absolutely, yes. And, and I think people have that feeling that when others are praying for your well-being, that it does seem to actually help. There's something about that interconnection and that positivity and that sense of they're

• 43:49Speaker 03

  wanting the best for you that does help. And maybe it's partly that it like helps nourish our own belief system of wanting to stay around and be here and, and get better. This whole issue of, does living longer mean living better? And the people that so much want more longevity do all these funny things and they may not live longer, but part of me wants to say, I believe it's about living better, but also about contributing in some positive way to the world and contributing to our own goals of uplifting ourselves and others in the world. And to me, that's probably what allows us to live longer and, and decide to stay in the world. And if somebody's loved one dies, like I know a husband that you've been with for 50 years, maybe it's okay to let go and go to the other side.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  I don't make judgments about people when they, when their loved one's gone, it's like, I always want to be with them. It's like, okay, if that's what you want, it's okay.

• 44:40Jonathan Cohen?

  We know that people who, um, receive prayer or are part of prayer groups heal faster from medical conditions. So is it that they just know that they're being cared for? Or is there actually some sort of non-physical energy exchange that is helping them expedite the healing process? Uh, I'll just button this part up with. Asking people to try, if you are in a conflict with someone, if you need to introduce an idea to someone, just sit quietly and think about them. Think about putting the idea, not implanting it into their head, but putting it in the space in between you in your mind and saying, are they receptive to this?

• 45:20Jonathan Cohen?

  I think it is important to not have aggressive energetic influence on people. And maybe the way to do that is to put it in the space between you and recognize that you're not trying to control someone. The other thing to be aware of is that when you may feel someone very strongly, and I think people may be able to relate to this, you may feel like, oh my gosh, like all of a sudden I'm thinking about this person and it's kind of like intrusive. It may be that they are sending some sort of emotion, thoughts your way that may not be all that positive. So I wanted to, I was curious your thoughts when you talked about mediumship and the idea of negative energy.

• 46:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you feel like we can be influenced and part of a healthy spiritual practice is kind of sitting and being aware of what may be in our space and creating some sort of boundary around that?

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Definitely. And of course, we know, I've taken Reiki workshops and done practicums and they often talk about, even with Reiki, doing that, that this way of symbolically creating a safety barrier around you as you're doing this. And this raises another interesting point that I think is important to just be aware of, that when we do heal other people, there's that possibility that we could take on that energy that might not be good for us. And in fact, people that do Reiki often do some sort of purification process afterwards so that they keep their body uplifted and pure. And so it's not that you shouldn't do energy healing, but it's just that you should be

• 46:55Speaker 03

  aware that these energies in the universe don't necessarily stay only with one person if you're interacting. I think sometimes we have that feeling when we're in the room with a very negative person, we just don't like that energy and we want to leave. So I get that and I think it's more to be aware of it. Often people have said that... People that are actually spiritual leaders can take off, pick on the energy of those people that they are trying to help and awaken. And again, it's not that you don't do it, but you try to be sure that you clear yourself, whatever that means.

• 47:30Mayim Bialik?

  Where can people find out more about the work that you do? You've written so many books and papers. You know, I focused mainly on Infinite Awareness, The Awakening of a Scientific Mind. But where can people find out more about you?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  So if they go on Amazon, they can certainly find out more of those books that we have published through Galileo Commission and the AAPS as well. So that's one place. And of course, I have a website that's marjorie woolocot.com. And I try to have my various podcasts up there if people want to know a little bit more about what I've been doing and a little bit more about my background. Because in fact, it's probably clear that I still wear two hats. I wear the neuroscientist hat as the rehabilitation neuroscientist. And I do work on stroke and Parkinson's disease and kids with cerebral palsy. And I have a textbook in its sixth edition. But my main emphasis right now is on what we're talking about today. It's like really understanding consciousness.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  And I'm hoping that if I understand it better as a neuroscientist, maybe I can help other people through that sharing and see that we can have both the objective part of our world and our reality, along with that experiential part, working together to really help us feel that interconnection between each other.

• 48:43Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much, Dr. Woollacott. Really a pleasure to speak to you.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's been wonderful to be with you today, both of you.

• 48:52Mayim Bialik?

  There's two things that came to mind that I wanted to share. The first thing is, and this is not me like patting myself on the back. Whenever I pass an accident.

• 49:03Jonathan Cohen?

  You send a good thought.

• 49:03Mayim Bialik?

  I do. And I do this out loud because I wanted my children to hear it. And of course, they think I'm a hippie and they're like, she's nuts. When asked, why do I do that? Or why have I done that? It's not for any of these funky dunky reasons. But I guess it is. And I think that's what struck me from talking to Dr. Woollacott. This perspective with which she views the world means that anything is possible. Anything and everything is possible. And so, that notion of taking a minute when you drive past an accident, this is what I say, I hope everyone's okay. That's all I say.

• 49:47Mayim Bialik?

  Do I believe that that has power and it's moving the molecules and the... No, but according to Dr. Woollacott, maybe yes, right? Anything is possible. And everything is possible. So that allows you to be open. It allows you to be forgiving. It allows you to seek a solution. It allows you to even do something so crazy as to believe in peace, when it looks like there can only be war.

• 50:15Jonathan Cohen?

  It does. It starts to change what we believe is possible. And what I love is the sponge example, because it's so tangible. You and I literally were recording this, that it will be released in a couple of weeks, but we recorded yesterday a conversation about how we are all building limits for ourselves that we live inside and then we wonder why we're cramped. And what does it mean to start to expand those limits? I, again, like her explanation that we do so in a balance, where we're not simply blown open and I'm now connected to everything that always is and that everything will work out.

• 50:56Jonathan Cohen?

  The people who I actually see go too far in that direction really struggle in everyday life. They often have very hard time with finances. They often aren't really able to navigate the physical world. And there's something about balancing our spiritual exploration with a very practical groundedness in having to navigate and make choices. Now, how do we use some of the love, compassion, insight, and even intuitive abilities that we can get from that spiritual expansion to help us navigate the real world without simply neglecting our responsibilities and stop making the decisions and doing the hard work that is required?

• 51:40Mayim Bialik?

  You can talk about people who have special abilities and, oh, they may have,

• 51:45Mayim Bialik?

  you know, different abilities in this way, but it turns into a special ability or a psi phenomenon or an extrasensory perception. But is it also possible that there are people who have access to things that inherently make them not able to manage other aspects of their lives? This is very interesting to me because the idea would be, these are people who are often institutionalized, they're often dismissed, they are often called crazy. You know, think about how many people, I mean, we talked about this with the premonitions bureau, think of how many people are in psychiatric facilities who are saying many things that don't happen, but many things that actually do to a level of specificity?

• 52:30Mayim Bialik?

  That's unbelievable. So I think that that's sort of also the pain point. Are there people, and you'll hear this from healers who say, "I am not supposed to be functioning in this world. I was not designed to be here and to manage the things I'm managing."

• 52:48Jonathan Cohen?

  I totally agree with what you're saying in terms of people believing that they're not meant for this time. But I also hear that as a bit of a cop out because life is challenging, it requires a lot of paperwork, and there's digital overwhelm. And, you know, sometimes just being here is difficult. If you say that you're not meant for this timeline, then you're also fighting the universe, right? Like you were, you came here to experience something, and if you believe in a divine, synchronized, you know, knowledgeable, intelligent cosmology that you are a part of, then you have to believe that you came here for a specific reason and that you have a role to play.

• 53:33Jonathan Cohen?

  So to say that you're, there was a mistake, then you're basically saying the universe has miscalculated and sent me versus that saying is actually, wait a second, it's actually hard to be in this physical body. There are a couple of things that I would say that are super practical that we can do.

• 53:54Jonathan Cohen?

  To use our spirituality to help us navigate the world and you have described the science of, we will cover them more in depth on the Substack page, MindBee Alex Breakdown on Substack, come join us there, it's an amazing, growing community where we dive into practical ways that you can do things as well as release content that is not available anywhere else. But one is that if you are in a difficult situation, how do you hold the possibility of something more and see it from other directions? You talk about how from a neuroscientist perspective, we're actually not falling back and we're trying to avoid falling back into those neural grooves which can have catastrophic thinking or very binary, black and white thinking and we can leave ourselves open to more possibilities

• 54:39Jonathan Cohen?

  and ways to solve problems. Number two is a bit more spiritual and hippie, thinking about how to approach people in your life who you may have unresolved conflicts with or not even an issue, but something that needs to be discussed. Can you approach them in the non-physical world and start to rehearse, open up the possibility of communicating? And we can talk about what that means practically and how to do it. And in conjunction with that, if someone keeps coming into your mind, what does that mean? What might that be calling you to do? And I think similarly, starting to look for synchronicities as a guidepost

• 55:24Jonathan Cohen?

  to help you see that you're on the right track when you're trying to navigate the world.

• 55:29Mayim Bialik?

  Absolutely. I have some practical things that I'd like to add to that as well. So we will see people over at Substack for that. Thanks for being here. Please join us on Substack for more of this conversation and lots of other conversations, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.