← Imagine Heaven Podcast with John Burke
Imagine Heaven Podcast with John Burke
NDEs, Neuroscience, and the Soul with Dr. Lee Warren
01:43:15
Can modern neuroscience point us toward the reality of the soul? In this compelling conversation, neurosurgeon Dr. Lee Warren joins pastor and author John Burke to explore the intersection of near-death experiences, brain science, and faith. From his...
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Hey, I'm John Burke, author of the New York Times best selling book Imagine Heaven and Imagine the God of Heaven. And this is the Imagine Heaven podcast. I'm doing a live series between seasons so if you haven't listened to season one episodes one through ten, I hope you'll go back and check that out. How my research on about 1500 near death experiences and how they relate to to the Bible. But in this live series I'm letting you hear some of my live interviews and this one's going to be a little different. Today I interviewed Dr. Lee Warren. Dr. Warren is a neurosurgeon. He served in the Iraq War, came home with ptsd. Fascinating. The brain surgery he did over there, I read his book. But when he came back, not only did he have PTSD, but he found his 19 year old son murdered. Turned out to be an unsolved crime, just horrific. And as a result, Lee got interested in near death experiences. He is a follower of Jesus, but of course wanted to understand more about where his son was. He interviewed me and then I started reading his books. He's done a ton of study on neuroplasticity and epigenetics. And I started to see all these overlaps with the NDE research I had done and what I found in the Bible. So Lee and I decided to have a conversation, and afterwards we thought, let's just record it and let both our audiences listen in. So this is going to be about NDE research, neuroscience, how it relates to the soul and free will, determinism, neuroplasticity and epigenetics, and how our thoughts shape our brain and even pass down generations, and how that all overlaps with NDEs, with brain research, and with the Bible. And there are many other geeky trails we went down. So I hope you enjoy it. Hey, Lee.
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A
John.
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B
Great to be back with you, my friend.
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C
Great to see you again. This is going to be fun. So this is Dr. Lee Warren. He's a neurosurgeon and a really cool guy. For those in my audience who don't know and. And how did. We're going to have an interesting conversation today. I think maybe we should tell both our audiences kind of how this came about.
- [04:04]
B
I think we should, and I'll say, because this is the first time I've done this. So we're going to play this on both of our podcasts. So for the people that are used to listening to me, we've got John Burke, New York Times bestselling writer, pastor, and just all around amazing human being who may be the world's leading authority on near death experiences. You've been on this show before, John, so I'm really excited to see this dual, dual hosting thing play out. It's going to be great.
- [04:29]
C
And I think that's how this happened. I was on your show and then I read your first book. Was it Nowhere to Hide?
- [04:39]
B
No Place to Hide.
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C
Yeah, no Place to Hide. Fascinating. So Lee was a neurosurgeon in the Iraqi war in Ramada, right?
- [04:50]
B
Balad. Yeah.
- [04:52]
C
Okay. And oh my gosh, like, it blew my mind.
- [04:56]
B
Thank you.
- [04:57]
C
No pun intended. I really didn't mean that. But, you know, it was. I mean, just seeing what you have been through and. And then I read, I think the next book, no, Hope is the First Dose.
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B
Yeah, Hope is the First Dose was the third one. Yeah, I've seen.
- [05:17]
C
Okay, well, I read that and then I just endorsed a new book he has coming out that I Read called the art of self brain surgery. Did I butcher it? Is that right?
- [05:29]
B
The life changing art of self brain surgery. That's right.
- [05:31]
C
And I've been fascinated with epigenetics and neuroscience and the way it relates to the research I've done with near death experiences and how many correlations I started to see. And so we talked about, we were just going to have a conversation between the two of us because I've got curiosities. And then we both just said, well let's just record it and let our listeners listen in and see what happens.
- [05:59]
B
That's right. And for me.
- [06:00]
C
So you're going to see what happens today.
- [06:02]
B
That's right. And I was. So, you know, we've talked before about, you know, we lost a son and having. Having grown up in kind of a traditional medical and neuroscience training, I had this, this training from a materialist neuroscience standpoint, your brain is who you are kind of training. Even though as a Christian I never really believed that intellectually. So I think a lot of us sort of accept things academically and then believe things and don't really think about where they conflict a lot. And. But after our son died, I had a real kind of crisis of needing to know for sure that these things that I believed were true. And then it turned out that an experience I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit with functional brain imaging actually is showed me that the mind and the brain are not the same thing. And seeing it with my own eyes led me to this now 12 year long journey of really digging into what's the difference between our brains and our minds and our souls and all these things. And then that led me to your work, which is this, this amazing truth that after our bodies are gone, we're not gone. And the consistency of those experiences that you've had in interviewing those folks is so I think we found each other in a really beautiful way and it's created a fun friendship.
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C
Yeah. So we've talked about. We're going to probably geek out today. You're going to see my engineering science interest, though I'm no scientist like Lee is. But it's fascinating how neuroscience and near death experience research correlate on so many things practically and even, even quantum mechanics. Right. Of relating to the soul, free will versus determinism, epigenetics, how our thoughts shape our brains and pass down generations. So we're going to go down all those rabbit trails today, hopefully, if we have time. So let's, let's start. Yeah. Why don't well, let's talk about the soul. And I'd like to maybe you, for you to tell a little bit more about how you got here and, and a little more that, that journey, but talk about how neuroscience is really proving the soul, unlike what the typical. And there's still what probably not a vast majority, a lesser majority of scientists and medical doctors who would say that the, our consciousness is purely our brains, our brain makes our consciousness.
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B
That's right.
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C
And yet that's getting overturned. And large numbers of both medical practitioners as well as scientists are, are saying that's not where science is pointing anymore.
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B
That's right. That's right. So there's a, if you looked at science as a religion, of course, you know, science would say we're not a religion. We don't. There's no truth in religion. But if you hold something to be true in spite of evidence, in spite of the inability to prove that it's true, then you have to have faith in it. And if you have to have faith in it, then it's sort of a religion. Right? So science is built on a number of premises that can't be proven scientifically. And so therefore you at some point have to be sort of philosophical. But the holy of holies of the church of science is what we would call materialism or reductionism. And if you're not familiar, what that means is that there's this belief that if you, if you can break something down into the parts from which it's made, then you can understand by reverse engineering how that thing's going to behave, including your brain. So if your brain is made out of neurons, right, cells, then the activity of those cells is what creates you and everything about you. And so there's a, there's a whole group of people that believe. You said free will a while ago, this idea that we make our own choices and we choose what we do and what we believe and what we decide to do pursue in our lives. There's a whole group of scientists that would say, no, no, there's no free will. There's just the activity of neurons. And that's back backs up to evolution and that backs up to the big bang. Everything about you was determined when the first big explosion happened.
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C
Bang happened. Which ironically, ironically comes from Newton and Newtonian mechanics. Right?
- [10:31]
B
Yeah.
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C
And. But Newton was a believer, as I recall.
- [10:34]
B
Newton would have, Newton would roll over in his grave if he knew what had happened. But I mean, his whole idea was, it was to break everything down to understand what God had done in Fact, all of the beginnings of science was all a Christian pursuit of trying to understand what God did. And in fact, it was Maxwell who discovered the laws of electromagnetism and ran the Cavendish lab at Cambridge and had. Over the door of the entryway to the lab, which is an inside joke, is the same lab in which Watson and Crick later discovered the structure of DNA. DNA who were materialists. But over the door of that lab, he inscribed Psalm 111:2, which says, Greater the works of the Lord, they are pondered by all those who delight in him. And so, like the original science guys, the pursuit of it was to determine what God had done and be able to help people be inspired and awed by him, by those things. And so Newton was never a materialist, but he believed that by understanding how we were built, then we could understand the awe and the majesty of what God had done. But the. The scientists perversed that. And still to this day, there's this belief that if you're made up of something, that determines how you're going to be. And so when you ask me, what. What's the soul? Well, the traditional neuroscience people would say, there's not one, there's just brains. Brains all the way down. And all the way down to the smallest atom in your head is what you are. And the problem with that is then that means that when you die, you're done. That's all there is to it.
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C
Unplug, the computer goes blank.
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B
That's right. And so I'll. My personal example was we were standing. My wife and I owned our practice in Alabama.
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A
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Contact T Mobile in Auburn on the campus of Auburn University. And at the time, they have one of the most powerful MRI machines in the world, what they called a 7 Tesla MRI scanner, which most, if you go get your knee scanned, it's 1.5 Tesla is the strength of that magnet. So they. A 7 Tesla magnet way back in 2013, so infinitely more powerful. And what you could do with a 7 Tesla magnet was not just take a picture of the brain, but you could, you could study and look at what the brain was actually doing on the cellular level. Right? You can see what the metabolic activity of the brain was. And so we had just gone back to work after our son died, several weeks after we lost Mitch. And we. Somebody had put this meeting on our schedule. We were supposed to go down to the lab and watch these scans being done of human volunteers and the functional MRI machine. And what was fascinating, John, is they said they took all these questionnaires of the people and they asked them all these questions like, what's the worst moment of your life and what's the best memory you've ever had? And what are all these? So they got all this data on these people and then they would put the lady in the scanner and they would have headphones on her and they would say, okay, Mrs. Johnson, think about the worst moment of your life for a minute. And she would think in response to a command, she would think about the day her son died or the day her husband left or whatever that thing was. And you could see in real time. Her thought triggered brain activity in different areas. Limbic system lit up and the amygdala fired up and all these different parts of the brain that process fear and anxiety and all that stuff. And then her physiology began to change. So that the vital sign machine that she was hooked up to, her heart rate would go up and blood pressure would go up and her respiratory rate would go up and all that stuff. So what we saw then in real time was a thought, a non material event triggered a brain activity that triggered a physiological event. And then they would say, okay, stop thinking about that bad thing, Sally, and now think about the best day of your life. The day your husband proposed, the day you won the Nobel Prize, whatever, whatever, it was the best thing you've ever felt in your life. And she would think about that. And all of a sudden the parts of her brain that had been previously firing stopped firing and other parts of her brain started firing. The parts that were related to emotional regulation and resilience and happiness and all those good things. And then her physiology started to regulate and her blood pressure came down and her heart rate came down. And so we saw again, she decided to think about something and her brain changed and did something different. And for the first time in my life as a scientist who was also a believer, I saw that brain and mind can't be the same thing. Mind was telling brain to do something and brain changed what it had been doing, which means it can't have been deterministic, it can't have been just faded that way by the universe. And because she decided to think that and made a decision to think it, and Lisa said, my wife, who's brilliant, said, that's Philippians 4. You know, it says, if you want to be less anxious, be grateful. Like, change what you're thinking about and your life will get better. And that's exactly what we saw. So for us, that was the beginning of this understanding that mind and brain are not the same thing. So when you say, well, what's a soul? Well, I think the Bible would say used all these different terms, right? Heart, mind, soul, all these different terms that sort of point at different aspects of the same thing. But I think we would define soul as that part of you that lasts beyond the death of your physical body and that part of you that is you. Your personality, your thoughts, your dreams, your wishes, your impulses, your communication with God. That stuff that can't be contained in or explained by the activity of cells in your body.
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C
Yeah. What would you say though? And I have some thoughts coming, but you know, if I were a skeptic and I said, well, I mean, when she heard them say, think of the best day of your life, that that just triggered that part of the brain that got her thinking that, well, it's.
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B
Okay, so there's some interesting research done by a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield.
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C
So who I was thinking of.
- [17:48]
B
So Penfield wrote a book called Mystery of the Mind. And Penfield's the father of epilepsy surgery, and he's the father of a lot of things about neurosurgery. But Penfield was the world's leading expert on what we call awake brain surgery. So he would. You can. You can anesthetize a person's scalp because that. That part you can feel or hurt if you. If you cut somebody's scalp open. But the brain itself doesn't have any. Any neurons that can perceive pain. And so you can operate on somebody while they're awake as long as you numb their skin up and sedate them enough that they don't move around. And so you can talk to people during brain surgery. And so what Penfield would do was trying to figure out where seizures were coming from. He would take an electrical probe and he would stimulate a person's brain until he would figure out, like, what part's making them speak or what parts making them move their right arm. And he would map. He mapped out the whole brain, and what those parts of the brain do. What he figured out after interviewing hundreds of these people that he operated on is that there was a difference in when he would stimulate their brain and make them unable to do something. They could still think about the thing that they wanted to do, and he was making them unable to do it, and so they could have a conversation. Well, when you were blocking me from saying this, I was still saying it to myself.
- [19:06]
A
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- [21:07]
B
And so, yeah, I remember one of.
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C
One of them I remember was, because I've written about this too, is he. He would stimulate something and their right arm would go up and they would say, you're doing that. I didn't do that.
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B
That's right.
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C
You made me do that. And he was confused. Right, because he was a materialist.
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B
That's right.
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C
Like, who's the. Who's the eye that's saying you did that?
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B
That's right.
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C
They shouldn't have a perception beyond what I just made their brain do.
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B
That's right.
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C
And yet they did.
- [21:40]
B
And then he made another, I think, really big insight that. And so you're right. I mean, Penfield was not a. He was a. I think a Lutheran or something by upbringing, but he was not a religious man. He was a materialist, neuroscientist, hardcore. And so he was trying to prove that brain and mind are the same thing with all this research and. Or he assumed that he would prove it. But one thing he realized after studying lots of people with seizures is that the people who have seizures always report that the seizures are functional in some way. I moved when I didn't want to move or I couldn't move when I wanted to move. I smelled something, I felt something. Occasionally it would trigger some component of a memory or something. But what they never did was trigger anything that required abstract thought. So seizures could never make you think about a chess match that you could map out and plot or remember Shakespeare and some insight that you made of a play that he watched. None of that sort of thinking and processing and high level abstract stuff that makes us human are available to be triggered by seizure activity. And so Penfield's conclusion there was. Okay, that means abstract thought is something that is not a function of the human brain. It's beyond it, it's mind, it's soul, mind, whatever you want to call that thing. That's not brain.
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C
Okay, this is, this is a really weird thought. We might not want to go down this rabbit hole. But you know what I just thought about and I've never had this thought. What does that mean then, when, when people are having psychotic episodes where like they think they're Jesus or they think, you know, like things like that?
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B
Well, I think delusion is a different category of thought. That's not abstract thought. That's, that's, that's a misplaced belief of some sort. Right.
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C
But could that happen by the brain misfunction?
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B
And I think brain activity can make you think you're thinking something. In fact, that's one of the things we've talked about with my new book that's coming out is, is that something like 80% of the thoughts that pop into your head are not true. Like, like, like you think something and it sounds like you. Right, it sounds in your own voice. But it's brain generated activity that's looking out to make you aware of a potential threat or to remember something that's happened in the past that that might be dangerous to you or to protect yourself in some way, you're having some thought that's, that's generated by brain activity, but it's never mostly not true or helpful.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So I think that's, I think delusion and psychopathy and those sorts of things are different, I think so.
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C
You know, interestingly, going back to Penfield, another thing that Penfield discovered that relates to my NDE research is, and people have used this to say, we'll see these near death experiences, we already have proven they're in the brain is there was a place that he triggered where the person would say, I'm leaving my body now. And then, you know, he would stop and they'd say, I'm back, I'm coming back. And so, you know, like skeptics like Dr. Michael Shermer would say, well, see, that just proves these near death experiences are just in the brain. However, I think it actually may just be showing us for, you know, for other reasons. I think it may be showing us that the gate, like maybe there is a trigger point of the brain that does release the soul. In other words, the soul and the body are very interconnected. Right. They, they require each other in this, in this life. Our souls live on beyond our bodies, but, but our bodies can deteriorate to such a, in, you know, such a degree. I watched my mom go through eight years of slow decay of Alzheimer's. Just brutal, right?
- [25:36]
B
I'm sorry.
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C
And well, and you know, I mean, I God, God used it, you know, I, I was, I was always asking him why? Why, why? And then I started realizing, you know, I'm. I get to care for her the way she cared for me. Me and my sister both.
- [25:51]
B
Yeah.
- [25:52]
C
And, and, and it was actually a beautiful, a beautiful thing, but it was also hard to see sometimes and it was confusing. Like, okay, well, where is she when, when, you know, she's thinking weird things or then doesn't know who I am? And so I think the soul. I've come to this conclusion that the soul is actually the, the us that is the energy that forms the material of Earth around us to present us to the world. And then we are dependent to function in the world on our brains and our bodies as well.
- [26:35]
B
Yeah.
- [26:35]
C
Or we can, or we can kind of be trapped.
- [26:38]
B
I think that's, that's a, that's a good way to think about it. I think the, the whole energy sort of light, matter, energy conversion into, into light, energy conversion into matter is a quantum physics conversation beyond either one of us, probably. But I think the reality is, if you think about it, if there's a God who exists outside of our material universe, right. There's God that said, let there be light, and he created this, but he's also imminent and works within it. And he says he can communicate with us through the Holy Spirit, with our minds. There has to be a physics mechanism by which he does that, how that communication happens. And I think it's light. There's some actually interesting research that is way past my mathematical skills. But, but I think it's light. I think light is the medium in which God communicates with our minds. And, but then what we're finding out, there's some neuroscience evidence that there might be some light to matter conversion inside the brain, inside the spinal fluid of the brain. Actually that may be the place where that happens. So this, what you're getting at is that if there's a soul that's part of our body, but not our body and we're of a part, we're a mind that communicates and depends on our brain and our brain communicates with our mind. There has to be a mechanism by which that communication occurs. Right. Something converts non material energy into material energy in the form of neurons firing. That happens in the brain somewhere and I think it's probably in the form of light. And that's where quantum physics and theology come together.
- [28:15]
C
Well and interestingly near death experience research as well because you know, and, and for multiple reasons. I mean the God that people experience on the other side is the God of light, who is love. Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but have the light of life. And, and he confirms to people I've interviewed that he's even said things like, you know, I am the light, my light is in you, you know, and, and that is what has an effect on, on the world. If we choose, you know, should we choose. And he said that, you know, Jesus said you are the, he said, I am the light of the world. But then he turns to his Father and said, you are the light of the, the world. Let your, let your good works be seen. You know, don't hide your light, let it be seen so that they'll praise your Father in heaven.
- [29:16]
B
That's right. But back, it's interesting, go ahead.
- [29:20]
C
Oh, I was just going to say back to the Penfield thing. You know, I think he, he, he might have found a trigger that releases the soul. I think possibly gateway drugs are doing the same thing. So people have, you know, many people have said to me, well that sounds a lot like when I took DMT or Ayahuasca or you know, some other kind of gateway drug which I think might be true. However, I think it's dangerous because you're going into, if that is what's happening, your soul is releasing from your body and you're having an experience of a dimensional world that's all around us. The second heaven is kind of what the ancients in the Bible would call it. The first heavens being just the stars we see in the sky. The second or the third being the kingdom of God, where God rules. But the second, Jesus said, is where for now evil rules. That's right, that Satan has rule. And he was even able to offer Jesus in Matthew 4, look at all the kingdoms and the glory of the world, it's mine to give.
- [30:34]
B
Yeah.
- [30:35]
C
So that's why I think, well, that might be true, but you're going uninvited and unprotected. And so I think that's why God does not want us messing with things like that. Gateway drugs or transcendental astral travel, those kinds of things.
- [30:54]
B
There's something to be said about that.
- [30:56]
C
But near death experiences, I think, confirm the soul equally. And I think when I was on your podcast last, I talked about verifiable observations that when people die, clinically die, so no brainwaves, no heartbeat for minutes to hours recorded. In hospitals, they say they leave their body, but many times they're up above in the room observing the resuscitation, observing what's said, what's done, and yet they have no ability to record that.
- [31:30]
A
Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college, Help your community build a new playground or help a child make it to that dream competition with GoFundMe. It's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 190 million people every week. Ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kid's soccer team? Or raise funds for a small business? A creative project or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality and help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else, raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help? Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change today. Start your fundraiser in just minutes@gofundme.com that's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com this is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe. Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college, help your community build a new playground, or help a child make it to that dream competition with GoFundMe. It's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 190 million people every week. Ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kid's soccer team? Or raise funds for a small business, A creative project or event GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality and help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else raise up to five times more. So think right now who could use your help. Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change today. Start your fundraiser in just minutes@gofundme.com that's gofundme.com to start fundraiser gofundme.com this is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe.
- [33:31]
C
In their neural networks. So you know where there's no brain function, so where are these new memories being made? And there have even been studies of the accuracy of their observations showing 92% of their observations are completely accurate. This is 100 cardiac arrest patients who had near death experiences and then made multiple observations. Dr. Jan Holden did this study and you know, you've got 92% of their observations about their resuscitation completely accurate. Another 6% mostly accurate. Only 2% inaccurate. And that was one patient in the study who probably hadn't had a real near death experience. You know, so you have that you have. You know, what I was writing about in Imagine heaven are the 40 commonalities of what people having near death experience say they experienced of the afterlife. 40 commonalities of people all over the world. Thousands of, you know, over close to 1500 I've studied and interviewed. And yet they're not all identical. Each experience is unique. But they experience overlapping realities of what's seen and heard and places and people. And so you go like, okay, how in the world do you get unique experiences all around the world, but the same overlapping commonalities.
- [35:08]
B
Yeah.
- [35:09]
C
Seeing the same places. And that's true. With or without anesthesia.
- [35:14]
B
That's right.
- [35:15]
C
So it doesn't matter. They had the same experience with or without anesthesia. And then one of the big ones too is blind people. People blind from birth have a near death experience and they see and they report seeing all the same commonalities that sighted people. So there are all these reasons. They're even more. But it makes it interesting trying to understand how can people now deny the.
- [35:43]
B
Soul.
- [35:46]
C
With all of the science and all of the empirical evidence that's out there.
- [35:52]
B
That's right. To me, it's mind boggling. And it's the same thing that's happening really. If you look at the arc of what's happening in all of science, it kind of makes sense. If God's ultimate purpose is to reveal himself to man and have people Come to know him over time and all that. You look at, at cosmology since the Big Bang and more and more astrophysicists are saying, hey, there's more to this story than we thought. Right. Evolutionary biology, there's more to the story than we thought. Maybe, maybe humanity could have come from actual 2 individual people maybe 250,000 years ago. Looks like it. Genetically now the stories keep getting like more and more closely.
- [36:32]
C
Was that the whole Y chromosome?
- [36:35]
B
Exactly. The primordial atom and primordial eve and all that stuff is fascinating. So.
- [36:40]
C
And then now exactly out of Africa. That was it.
- [36:44]
B
Exactly. So what I'm saying is to me it feels like if you're confused or worried about science and faith conflicting friend, just wait. Because over time what happens is science bends towards things that scripture laid out as truth. There's places obviously where science and faith will never correlate. The Bible doesn't say what the formula for sodium hydroxide is, doesn't care about that. But if it says this thing is true, this archeological fact is true, they're going to discover it eventually. There's never disproven any of that. If they say, hey, this is what produces human flourishing, you just wait long enough, neuroscience is going to say that turns out to produce human flourishing. So I think what we're discovering on the neuroscience side is, hey, it looks an awful lot like mind and brain are not the same thing. And so if you're honest as a scientist, then your task is not to defend the church of materialism. Your task is to refine your hypotheses until your experiments prove them out. Right. That's what science, the scientific method is. And I think over time more and more people are coming to a place where we say we're not ready yet to say it's God. We're certainly ready to say there's more to the story than we thought.
- [37:58]
C
Yeah, I think, you know, I think we humans, we make mistakes on both sides, right. So scientists, you know, have, have, can have this deterministic, it's got to be this way and become closed minded and they actually become religious just like you said. But believers can, can also be fearful and you know, have a Copernican moment, you know, where it's like we're, you know, a Galileo moment where we're insisting that no, you know, we, the Earth is at the center of the universe. And so I think, you know, I think there's an open handed mystery that we've got to be willing to say, you know, God has not revealed all things to us. Deuteronomy 29. 29. He said, he's revealed enough to us that we can know him and follow him. But the secret things belong to the Lord. That's right, the Mysterion. You know, there are mysteries, and I think that's part of what we're kind of poking around and prodding, which I personally find fascinating. So let's talk a little bit about some of the. So what of the soul or mind and the brain and you know, how it practically prays that plays out.
- [39:23]
B
Why does it matter?
- [39:24]
C
Yeah, because. Yeah, that's really what you're, you know, what you're writing about now and you know, Proverbs 4. 23. You know, I, I told you, I'm writing a book right now on purpose. Imagine your purpose. How to find who we are and why we're here and what we're supposed to do. Because of how many near death experiences, God ends up saying to them, you got to go back. You haven't accomplished your purpose yet.
- [39:49]
B
That's right.
- [39:50]
C
So they all have a purpose. We all have a purpose. Interestingly, he doesn't tell us what it is. So there's a whole, there's a whole mystery.
- [39:59]
B
Figure it out.
- [40:00]
C
Well, but, but I think he does. He does to a degree. You know, it's not just a what, it's also a how and a why and, you know, and all that. But in that I was saying Proverbs 4. 23, I was writing yesterday, guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. And, you know, Jesus equated the thoughts and the heart. Right. He said to the Pharisees, knowing their thoughts, why do you think such evil thoughts in your hearts? You know, so many times the heart and the, and the thoughts are, are equated. You know, Paul says, take captive every thought, make it obedient to Christ. So dive in a little more to your, your story. You know, you went through all kinds of trauma, ptsd, seeing all kinds of horrific things in, in Iraq, came back, you know, and then talk a little bit more about the trauma you went through with Mitch and, and all that.
- [41:02]
B
So I'll tell you my story and I'm gonna just tell you if you're listening and you've been through anything hard or you love somebody who has, then one of the consequences of our current, I would call it sort of therapy, trauma culture that we have is everybody's focused on trauma and therapy right now. And when I say that, I mean to say because of what we've been taught that you are primarily just your brain, and if something. And basically the brain that you got, you got because of genetics, because of family and your family of origin and the things that happened to you as you were growing up that determined how your brain works, how you interpret things, how you respond to things, how you react to things. And there's been this sort of worship of genetics to the point that most of us have been sort of taught, John, that we. We can't really change who we are or how our brains work. And so that has produced this. This idea that we need to figure out what our personality types is, are, and what kinds of trauma we've been through and what our diagnoses are, and we need to put those on our Instagram profiles and our Enneagram score. And everybody needs to be aware of how we are and who we are, and that becomes our identity. And so then what happens is, like with us, our son died, and I'm broken and shattered and doubting my faith and all the things that happened to you after you.
- [42:30]
C
Well, and can I say, I mean, for my audience, he didn't just die. He. He was murdered. Right?
- [42:37]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And. And there's so much mystery around. So Mitch was 19. His. His best friend was 19. They were both found stabbed to death in a home where he was living at the time. And they never figured out exactly what happened. And so was it a murder suicide? Did they. Was there a third party, like the cops? The cops in this small town never really figured it out. And so we were left with this torture tragedy.
- [43:05]
C
Oh, it'd be torture.
- [43:06]
B
It is torture. And you can't blame anybody because you don't know what happened. And you can't demand answers because, I mean, the bodies are out, the crime scene's cleaned. There's not going to be any more answers. There's not. Unless some. Unless somebody out there comes forward someday and says, hey, I killed these two kids on August 20, 2013, then there's never going to be any more knowledge about that event. So we had. It's terrible, but what happened, John, is Lisa and I realized that we were either going to be these bitter, broken people who were demanding answers that were never going to come.
- [43:44]
A
Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college, help your community build a new playground, or help a child make it to that dream competition with GoFundMe. It's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform. Trusted by over 190 million people every week, ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kid's soccer team? Or raise funds for a small business? A creative project or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality and help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else, raise up to five times more. So think right now who could use your help. Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change today. Start your fundraiser in just minutes@gofundme.com that's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com this is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe. Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college, help your community build a new playground or help a child make it to that dream competition with GoFundMe. It's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 190 million people every week. Ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kid's soccer team or raise funds for a small business? A creative project or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality and help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else, raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help. Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change today. Start your fundraiser in just minutes@gofundme.com that's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com this is a commercial message brought to you by gofundme or we were.
- [45:46]
B
Going to have to trust that God's sovereignty could be enough for us and that his promises that he could heal us and that we would be reunited with our son someday were true. And so for me, as this, you know, this hard charging neurosurgeon, we're known as sort of control freaks and I'm in charge of my own destiny and I'm a war veteran and I did all these things and all of a sudden I'm given a situation I can't fix, I can't discover more information about. I can't wrap my scientific brain around understanding how this could have occurred. And so I'm going to be crushed by that and defined by it. And I knew because of my work in my second book, I wrote a lot about malignant brain tumors and people who go through finding out that they're dying and how I learned how to deal with folks like that and what happens to people when they discover that the end of their life is at hand. And what I learned about that is the thing that messes most people up the most is not going through something hard. It's when they lose something that they thought they knew, that something they thought they knew turned out not to be true. And the biggest one all of us have is we think our kids are going to bury us someday. And when that turns out not to be true, it really messes you up. Like. Like. Like you're not supposed to bury your kid. You're just not supposed to. You're not supposed to not get to find out who he married and how he turned out. And you're just not supposed to do that. You're supposed to bury your parents. You're probably going to bury your spouse or she's going to bury you, but you're not supposed to bury your kids. And it's just not right. And so for me, standing in that MRI scanner in Auburn was the first time I said, okay, I thought that you could break your brain in a way that it couldn't recover from. But I'm watching people change their minds, and that's changing their brains, and that means there might be some hope that I can change mine, too. And so the why this matters so much is if it's true that you are the product of your genetic material and the family in which you were raised and the set of circumstances you've encountered and traumas you've been through, if that is what determines how your brain functions. And that's all there is to you. That's. There's no hope in that. There's no ability to truly change. You can go to therapy and you can learn some coping skills and all that, but you can't really change. But what we've learned from 21st century neuroscience is functional imaging. And with some contributions from quantum physics and all of that is we have learned that the brain is not actually fixed. It's not stuck. Your brain constantly is making new cells and making new connections between them and is constantly changing. In fact, every cell in your brain is turned over every few years, so you're never the same person that you were before we started this podcast.
- [48:36]
C
But I think That I think we need. We need to say that again, because I don't. I know that I've. I've read that research. But all of the cells of your body, not just your brain, they die and get replaced.
- [48:53]
B
That's right.
- [48:53]
C
Completely, every 10 years.
- [48:55]
B
That's right. So when you say something like. When you say something like, well, I'm the way I am because of my dad and I just can't change. That's how it is in my family. We're always this way. I would say, okay, if you had a television set on your wall, right? And every night I snuck into your house and I replaced one part of that television set after about however many parts there are that many days, it would still look the same, but it would be a totally different TV set than was there before, because every single part of it had been replaced. Right? And yet it would turn on and it would change channels and do all the things. And that's how you. I want you to think about your brain. Like, if your brain was you, then when a cell died and a new cell popped in, that cell wouldn't be you anymore. Like, you would be a different you, but there's a you inside of you that isn't dependent on your brain.
- [49:47]
C
Well, that's part of what made the soul seems to be the functional energy that forms this material of Earth to present who we are. Near death experiences, though, when they encounter loved ones, they look the same. They look the same. And even if they had lost a physical leg on this earth, their leg is back.
- [50:15]
B
That's right.
- [50:17]
C
And so what is the us then? The us is our soul. And it is somehow taking these cells to form what we present to the world over and over and over. Wouldn't it be fascinating to see a fast motion shedding. Shedding yourself?
- [50:39]
B
Yeah. But that's what happened. And I just want to make one more point before we move on from that. Like, if you feel stuck and you feel like you have been unable to change thus far in your life, I'm just going to tell you, every second of every day, you actually are changing. But the miracle of what we call neuroplasticity is this fact that your brain is not stuck the way it is. It's making new cells and making new connections between them. But what drives how those changes happen is either experience and habit or decisions and choices. And what I mean by that is if you don't choose to change something, your brain will remake those synapses in the way it always has. It will Ingr them and habituate them and automate them and you will continue to be the same person that you've always been.
- [51:25]
A
Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college, help your community build a new playground or help a child make it to that dream competition with GoFundMe. It's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 190 million people every week. Ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kid's soccer team? Or raise funds for a small business? A creative project or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality and help adds up. Fundraisers, you start for someone else, raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help? Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change today. Start your fundraiser in just minutes@gofundme.com that's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com this is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe.
- [52:25]
B
And in terms of how your life turns out, TD Jakes wrote this great book. I can't think of the title of it right now, but it's a great book. And he had this line that says, we're born looking like our parents, but we die looking like our decisions.
- [52:42]
C
Yeah.
- [52:43]
B
And that'll hit you. It'll hit you in the chest. You're born looking like your parents, but you die looking like your decisions. And that's true from a neuroscience standpoint too. If you decide to take charge of what you think about, which is what the Bible says in Second Corinthians 10:5, when it says, take your thoughts captive. If you decide to learn the process of doing that, which I call self brain surgery, because I'm a brain surgeon, you can call it whatever you want. If you decide to take charge of that process, you can direct those changes to help you and not hurt you or keep you the same anymore. That's why it matters. That's why it matters, because you can use your mind to take charge of your brain, which is how it was designed. And your brain will begin to support a new person that you want to become. And that's what Romans 12:2 says about don't conform anymore. Don't let the world and your traumas and your experience and your past and your family keep you stuck the same way. Be transformed by the renewing of the mind. Change what you think about you change what your life turns out to be.
- [53:40]
C
Yeah, and I think that's, that's so powerful. I, I've seen it personally in my own life life, but I've also seen it in near death experience research. So part of what I'm writing on in this new book on purpose, there were several people, Kevin Zadai was one of them, who he was having dental surgery actually, and the anesthesia reacted and he's out of his body. He's up, he's watching the surgery and he's there with Jesus and they're having this longer conversation. But one of the things that Jesus did is he said, I want to show you something, Kevin. And he said, I want to show you your soul. And I'm not sure exactly how he was seeing this, but he said he basically showed him these dark spots is the way Kevin described it on his soul. And when he looks closer, because you can kind of zoom in, he sees all these words that people spoke to him growing up. And Jesus was saying, I need to heal some of these things in your soul because you've believed them and you keep thinking them and they're directing your life. Just like that proverb said. What we think in our hearts then sets the course of our lives. It directs our lives. And he said that exact thing to Kevin. And Kevin sees the words and they're like he had a father who was just like, you're worthless. You know, you're never going to make anything of yourself. Why don't you just go die? You know, he would say things like that. And then other people, of course, who, you know, Satan has a way of piling on and to brought others. And so all these things, what Kevin saw is that they had shaped his soul in the sense of who he saw himself to be, but that's not who he was to God. And so just like you were saying, Jesus told him, I want you to meditate on my truths. Meditate on what the word says and what I say about you. That's true. And get that out of your, you know, basically get all the dark lies out of your soul. Another near death experiencer, Penny Whitbrot, was, was there with the Lord. She was a trauma nurse, critical care nurse and long story, but, but he's. He shows her first a good, a good thing in her life and the effects of it. So he shows her a time when she was in the grocery store. This is in the life review, which is a, you know, kind of common commonality. And he shows her when there was a single mom who was putting groceries back because she didn't have enough money. And Penny had been a single mom, had taken a lot of trauma because of, you know, infidelity with her husband and all that. And so out of compassion, she says, here, I got this. Don't worry about it. And the woman said, no, no, no, no. She said, no, I've been where you are. Just take it. And she did. And then Jesus shows her a fast forward of that woman later working in a food pantry serving others because of that. And another single mom comes in full of shame that she has to ask for food to feed her kids. And this woman now is ministering to her, saying, someone once helped me, and it helped me get out of this, just receive it. And she was ministering to her. So Penny saw the kind of, the ripple effect of the kindness. But then she said, you know, he didn't show me all the sins I was fearful of seeing. And she was a believer. I think, you know, he is like. She said, I'd beat myself up enough, and he had covered those. But what he showed me is one of the most difficult things. She said, he showed me my thoughts. And she worked with this other nurse who she said was really hard to work with, just a difficult person, just kind of cranky, you know, bad attitude, wouldn't take care of her patients right away. You know, the bedpan would be needing changing, and then the bell would be going off. And so Penny would go in and do it for her. And, you know, she never, she said, I never gossiped about her because gossip is, you know, one of my pet peeves. But I was thinking these thoughts, and the Lord shows me those thoughts.
- [58:23]
B
Wow.
- [58:24]
C
And he said, you're thinking all these negative thoughts about her. And then he said, let me show you something. And he shows Penny, this woman's growing up years of the molestation and abuse that her father had done to her for years. And Penny said to me, she said, when he showed me that, I was like, oh, my gosh, this woman's actually killing it. You mean she came from that and yet she so redeemed it, she's going into nursing to do something better for others. And here I am judging her and thinking all these negative thoughts. And Jesus said to her, you know, when you hold these thoughts, thoughts have energy, words have even more energy, actions have even more energy.
- [59:16]
B
That's right.
- [59:17]
C
And he said, when you're holding these Thoughts, these negative thoughts, they hurt you, but they also keep her stuck because she can sense how you feel. You don't like coming to work with her, she can sense it. It keeps her stuck in that rut as well. And what penny real. And it's exactly what neuroplasticity, epigenetics, you know, all that is is telling us.
- [59:42]
B
That's right. That's right. Amazing how it is wild. And, and the fact that goes back to Old Testament when David said he prayed, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you. He thought about the fact that it matters to God what we think about, right? Not just what we say. And we all focus on, especially in the Western world, we focus so much on our deeds, our actions, our words. But your thoughts have the creative power because thoughts turn into things. So if you think about just what happens in your brain like we talked about a while ago, John, if you, if you think about something, it triggers a neuronal event. So the, the non material thought triggers a material electrical event in a neuron, right? And that neuron causes the release of neurotransmitters of chemicals that then stimulate glands like your pituitary gland to release hormones. And those hormones then stimulate organs in your body to change the physiology of your body. And then those physiological changes trigger genetic up and down regulation that triggers epigenetic changes that can affect your offspring. So what happens then is a thought become, right, A thought becomes an electrical event, it becomes a chemical event, that becomes a biological event, that becomes a physiological event, that becomes a genetic event and that becomes history. So that's how thoughts become things.
- [61:07]
C
So thoughts literally become things.
- [61:10]
B
They turn into everything in your life. Everything started with a thought.
- [61:13]
C
And probably people didn't catch what you, the implications of what you just said though is genes. We think our genes. You know, like I've got genes for blue eyes, so I'm not going to have brown eyes. And we think genes work like that all the time. But that's not what neuroscience is discovering as well. Right. Genes can either be turned on or, or left. Turned off.
- [61:38]
B
That's right.
- [61:39]
C
And thoughts and environment have a lot to do with whether those genes are activated or not.
- [61:44]
B
That's right.
- [61:45]
C
And then like you said, those epigenetic changes turning on or off a gene actually encodes in the chromosomes that pass on to the next generation.
- [61:59]
B
That's right. That's right. Yeah. So the story of the Human Genome Project, everybody thought we're going to map the human genome, then we'll know all the genes that explain everything about how humans behave. And what they thought was that there were going to be 150,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 genes that were going to turn out to be what makes humans do human things. But it turns out there's only like 23,000 genes, something in that order, around 20,000. Not nearly enough genes to actually code for everything that makes a whole person. And so what they figured out is it's not the genes, it's how those genes are turned on and turned off and what parts of the genes are alive or active at any given moment to transcribe certain proteins and give you the, are you going to have this tumor? Are you not going to have this tumor? All that stuff depends on how the genes are switched on and off. And the fascinating thing about that, that when we now call that epigenetics, so the things outside of the actual DNA that influence how those genes are, are switched on and switched off, and how they do their job of making proteins and doing this stuff that happens. So what's fascinating is we've learned now that the switching on and off tendencies can be inherited. And so what that means is. What that means is there's this fascinating research that they did about mice. And they exposed these mice to a certain smell. It was actually cherry blossoms that they, for some reason, mice like to smell cherry blossoms. And so they expose these male mice to cherry blossoms. And when they could register that the mouse smelled it, so their nose hairs twitched or whatever, they could tell they smelled the thing, they would shock them. And so they taught these mice to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms. And then what they discovered was in the sperm of those male mice, they had genetic switches that changed their baseline trauma response. And their pups in the first generation, after the shocking event had happened, those pups were born with the same response to the smell of cherry blossoms that their dads had, even though they had never been shocked because of the genetic.
- [64:06]
C
Passing on of the trade, the epigenetic.
- [64:09]
B
Switch that happened in the lifespan of the dad affected down to four generations what kids were scared of when they were born, how much cortisol they had at baseline, how they responded to trauma. And then they figured out that they could change that by exposing the mice over and over and not shocking them, that those genes would regulate back the other way and their offspring would be born with a more normalized trauma response. And that sounds fascinating, but you're.
- [64:34]
C
Well, it's so pertinent to our real lives and it's exactly what God said to Moses in both Exodus 20 and Exodus 34. You know, he gives the Ten Commandments. And then in Exodus 34, you know, he says, I'm the God of kindness and compassion. I love to shower loving kindness on a thousand generations.
- [64:59]
B
Generations. Yeah.
- [65:00]
C
But then he says, but I don't let the guilty go unpunished. In other words, but I'm just. And he said, the sins of the parents pass on to the third and fourth generation. Now, I think sometimes people misunderstand that. They think, well, why is God punishing me from my great granddad's sins? And he very clearly says, in other places, no, the individual is responsible for their own sins, and you can choose and you can break those chains. But he's warning us in that, that, you know, there are laws of nature, but there are also spiritual laws of nature. And he's just basically warning us about what epigenetics and neuroscience is now discovering.
- [65:46]
B
That's right. That's right. Yeah. You're referencing that. Good.
- [65:52]
C
I have. I mean, I have a personal example because my, my. I remember when I got to make this short, but when my daughter was three, I'm playing Barbies with her on the floor. Okay, Love it. But. But I also have a problem that I'm not aware of. So I want to be a great dad, but I'm also a way overachiever. I mean, I always redlined. And so at that time, I'm working on the management team of this large organization. I'm working on two master's degrees, not one. I have a writing project going on, you know, all music like we were talking about. And I'm playing Barbies with her, but really, I'm studying for a test, and my 3 year old looks me in the eye and says, daddy, you're not playing. Right. But when she said that to me, it was like the Holy Spirit knife in my chest. And the Lord said, you're not fooling anybody but yourself.
- [67:09]
B
Wow.
- [67:09]
C
And I knew exactly what he meant. He was saying, you want to be a good father, but you're not going to be unless you change. And so I started processing, like, okay, why do I redline? You know, why do I always take on more and more and more? And I even. I even went to therapy. And then they were like, well, do you feel like if you don't achieve, your mom or dad won't love you? Blah, blah, blah. And I was like, no, it doesn't make sense. And I started praying about it too. Two years later, okay, so here's the. So what I'm doing my grandmother's funeral. I don't even know my granddad's name. This is on my father's side. My dad died. That's how I actually got into this whole near death experience stuff and came to faith, you know, so he had died a long time ago. So I'm talking to my aunt and she's the only one who knew my grandfather. I don't even know my grandfather's name because my dad hated him so much, he had abandoned their family in the Great Depression. He was an alcoholic and just not a nice guy. And so my dad kind of had this mantra that he would always say to me. You're not going to be a bum. You're going to make something of yourself. You're going to know the value of a dollar. And he would say these things over and over again. So I'm sitting there at my grandmother's preparing to do my grandmother's funeral. I asked my aunt, what was granddad like? I don't even know what was his name? And she gets visibly mad and she's this very sweet lady and said he was a bum. And what, what the Holy Spirit showed me in that moment is something I was completely unaware of. That. Yeah, I felt loved and believed in by my dad, but he had a hatred and fear of ever being a bum like his father. And that had somehow passed to me.
- [69:09]
B
Wow.
- [69:10]
C
And so how do you, how do you prove to a father who's dead that you're not a bum, you're loved, unless you're a bum.
- [69:20]
B
Wow. You read.
- [69:21]
C
But it was all subconsciously. I mean, I had, I had no idea until I started asking the Lord over and over. And then he. He showed me. And so.
- [69:31]
B
Wow.
- [69:32]
C
The point being, you know, it's kind of like those things that, that they do, they, they pass down, but we're not always aware of them, but we can, you know, so, and so I had to, I had to actually start pushing against those fearful thoughts. Right?
- [69:47]
B
That's right.
- [69:48]
C
And I had to start learning to like, wow, take a Sabbath, rest with the Lord, feel okay about myself even when I wasn't accomplishing, you know, things like that.
- [69:58]
B
What a perfect, what a perfect example of epigenetics. And, and you referenced it a second ago. There's this, there's two scriptures where this almost, almost word for word, I think it's Ezekiel and Deuteronomy, but I wasn't prepared for that. I love how this conversation is weaving, but the two different Places in the Old Testament where they quote this old proverb that people said at the time where they said, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. And in two different places, the prophet says, no, no, no, don't say that anymore. Jeremiah might be one of them. Don't say that anymore. You're responsible for your decisions and what happens to you. Not your dad's sin, not your mom's sin. You're responsible for your life. And so, and that's what we've learned. And when are we going to take God seriously, by the way, that these things that he says that we think are metaphors are actually real? Like we talked about a while ago with the light. Like, he says, hey, I'm the light. We think it's a metaphor. And it turns out it might be. Actually, he's the light. Right? He's literally the light. But this is true too. Like when he says, I'm warning you that how you live affects your children for generations. I'm not punishing them. I'm warning you. Be careful. Paul says it, be very careful then how you live. And that starts in your head, in the thinking that you choose to do, because if you don't think right, you won't make the decisions that lead to those thoughts becoming the things that you want your kids to feel when you're playing on the floor and your, and your kid to remember at your, at his funeral someday that you're not a bum like that. Like, if you don't get that right in your lifestyle and your lifespan, they're going to have to get it right in theirs. And so as hard as life is, let's do what we can to pass on the best set of switches, epigenetic switches that we can. Right. That's what Paul's saying. Be very careful how you live.
- [71:43]
C
Yeah. Fix your minds on things that are good and noble and Right. And just. Philippians 4. Right. If you're anxious, don't be. Instead, cast your, you know, cast your cares on, on God. Talk to him about. With Thanksgiving. Right, With Thanksgiving. And, and, and I'll tell you, you know, I, I kind of, I poo pooed all that for many, many years because I'm an engineer. I fix things.
- [72:10]
B
Right.
- [72:11]
C
If, if the.
- [72:12]
B
That's right.
- [72:12]
C
If it's, if it's good, that's nice, but it can be better. That was. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of my wiring. Right.
- [72:20]
B
Yeah.
- [72:20]
C
But, and, and, and there's some, you know, I mean, there's truth In a broken world, things, there are things that break and things need to be fixed. But with people and with ourselves, we've got to understand other things that are at work and, and what we think really, we never act really on something that we don't first think about. Right. I think that's what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount, Right? When he said, you know, you have heard in the law of Moses, don't murder. But I say don't even think hateful thoughts against that person or you've sinned in the same way. Well, it's not consequently the same, but what he's saying is you don't ever murder someone until you first hate them.
- [73:09]
B
That's right.
- [73:10]
C
Right. One connects the other. You've heard it say don't commit adultery, but I say don't even lust.
- [73:15]
B
That's right.
- [73:16]
C
Why? Well, because you're, you're probably not just going to accidentally commit adultery. You're going to think about it.
- [73:21]
B
You're going to imagine there's another layer to it too. Like if you, if you're using your mental energy to hate someone, then what are you not doing with your mental energy? You're not interceding for them, you're not asking God to open doors for them, forgive them, heal them, save them. If you're lusting after someone, you're not interceding for their marriage and their children and their generations, you're choosing to treat them like an objective energy on something that's for you. Right. And so I think that's the antithesis of what Christ was about. Like, everything about his life was for somebody else. Like, like how do I aim my life at a place that's going to benefit other people? Yeah. That starts with your thoughts.
- [74:01]
C
All right, let's, let's take a right hand turn. Let's talk about heaven in the afterlife.
- [74:07]
B
Yeah. So I gotta ask you about that. You're the expert.
- [74:13]
C
But, but neuroscience I think is also pointing that way. Right? Talk about, you know, because it's amazing to me that, that people can still fail to believe in an afterlife with all of the things that, that science is discovering and all of the evidence around the globe from near death experiences. But, but some do, but what, what's some of the neuroscience that, that points the other way?
- [74:42]
B
Well, I think this, I think the notion that, that there is a part of us that can't be measured or scanned that's, that's real is a big part of it. Like, so for me, like there's this whole conversation around Free will that we didn't have. We mentioned it while ago, but this, this guy named Benjamin labet was a neuroscientist who was studying whether or not there's really free will. And, and in his studies, he determined that people have about half a second of an advance on neurons preparing to fire before they are aware of a decision that they're about to make. And so, so people are thinking they're going to do something, but before they actually become aware of it, there's detectable activity in their neurons. That's an action potential building up. And people took that work and said, okay, well, there's no free will then, because your neurons are preparing something you haven't even thought about yet. But then he did some more research, and what he figured out was when he asked people questions about what they were deciding to do when they were deciding not to do something instead, there was no detectable brainwave activity. And so that means. So this is really weird. You got to stay with me for a second. But what it means is that when you decide you're going to do something, your brain has to prepare and then execute that thing. And quantum physics, we know, says that some things can happen faster than the speed of light. This thing called quantum entanglement, or spooky action at a distance, as Einstein called Einstein. Yeah, Right. And so the, the, the normal math of quantum mechanics would predict that the decision will collapse into the only possibility that you're going to choose when you make a decision.
- [76:26]
C
No, I know we may have to back up for just a second. If people don't know the double slit experiment and.
- [76:34]
B
You know, I'm going on too much of a tangent.
- [76:37]
C
No, no, no, it's. No, I think it's all good stuff. Let's do it.
- [76:41]
B
Okay, so backing up from that, if you want to talk about double slits, there's a thing in quantum physics that's.
- [76:49]
C
I was just going to say, because this is. This is one of the kind of preemptive experiments of quantum physics that made us realize that there is something having to do with free will and thinking that actually changes outcomes in matter.
- [77:10]
B
That's right. And the observer effect.
- [77:12]
C
Yeah, yeah. It's the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Right, right.
- [77:16]
B
That's right. That's right.
- [77:17]
C
But, you know, the reason I think it's important as well is I've wondered about. Is that the mechanics that God has put into the laws of nature that allows free will and his sovereignty to work together. So that's. It's a big question mark. But Go ahead.
- [77:38]
B
So back in the day when they were trying to figure out, we're going to come back to light, they were trying to figure out what light was. Is light a wave? Is it a particle? What is light? How does light work? They were trying to do all these experiments to sort that out, and they came up with this ingenious idea to put slits in a panel and shine light through it. Now they do it with electrons, and turns out electrons behave like light does. To ask the question, is light a particle? The answer was always, light is a particle that you could measure particles going through as if light was a particle. If you set the experiment up to say, is light a wave? The experiment always proved that light was a wave. You would get this interference pattern and it looked like a light was a wave. So what they figured out was the result of an experiment is determined by the. Is influenced by the person observing the experiment. And so there's. There's an influence of the human mind on the outcome of the experiment. And so what they found out then is that you're never quite certain how something's going to be until you measure it. Right? Yeah.
- [78:48]
C
Which is really. Yeah, it's a. I mean, and it's. And it even applies to. Down to the atom. Right. I mean, our. We used to think our atoms were. You know, we've all learned the picture of the nucleus, you know, the proton and the neutron, and then try to couple electrons in different orbital. But it's actually not like that. It's actually improbability states.
- [79:12]
B
That's right.
- [79:13]
C
So it's not determined until you measure it.
- [79:17]
B
That's right. Which is like, neither are you. So. So when we talk about free will, what does this all have to do. I love what you said. So what. Why is, why is this stuff relevant to me? I'm not a physicist, I'm not a man mathematician. Why do I care about this stuff? Here's why it matters. What matters is Benjamin lebet and all that neuroscience research I said before and quantum physics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and all that stuff about deciding, influencing the outcome of something based on deciding to make an observation in a particular way. Why that matters is that the choices that you make in your life change the reality of how your life plays out, and which is very consistent with Scripture. Right. God be very careful how you live, because it affects everything. And so what neuroscience is figuring out now is that there's all these things that can't be measured but are still true. You can't measure when Somebody decides not to do something because there's a part of your mind that isn't scannable. Like you're not computable, as Robert Marx would say. I just had a world famous artificial intelligence expert on the show, and he says, you're not computable. You're not a computer. There's a part of you that can't be put into an algorithm. And so neuroscience is discovering over time that the mind is far more complex and unmappable than the brain is. And they're not the same thing. And if you're honest and you look at the research from an honest scientific pursuit, you come to the conclusion that there is a story being told here that goes beyond the death of the neurons when we die. And that's where your work comes in. Because people who have died, who, by all the abilities that we. I'm the guy that they call when it's time to determine if somebody's dead or not brain dead. Like, I've got to sign the paper and say, this guy's legally brain dead. You can take him off the ventilator, you can donate his organs. He's gone. When we say that, it's because we've determined that there's no measurable or discernible heart activity, no measurable, detectable brain activity, that the body's not too cold, it can't be faked out in some way, that the carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide level's not too high and all that stuff, we can prove that the human body is dead and done. And yet some of those people come back with all of our tests and all our abilities. So that's where your work is so fascinating to me, John, because you can tell us some stories of people who have been on the other side of that, and they come back with information they couldn't have if they were just brains lying there.
- [81:45]
C
Yeah. And the thing that, you know, both, both science and near death experience research, I think is. Is pointing to the reality of a life beyond. I mean, part of the funny thing to me is how many, you know, how many scientists now are like, oh, yeah, there, there's a multiverse, there are other universes.
- [82:07]
B
Yeah, I'm like string theory and all.
- [82:09]
C
We've always known that there's at least one called heaven.
- [82:14]
B
That's true. That's right.
- [82:15]
C
It's in a dimension beyond ours. But they don't want to go there with heaven. Interestingly, quantum mechanics and general relativity, Einstein's theory of how everything macro big works and the way quantum mechanics works Each work perfectly for the minute and for the huge. But they've never worked together. And that's always been, you know, there's been this, you know, for a century, the unified field theory, trying to find the. But interestingly. Well, two mathematicians, Kaluza and Klein, actually showed that if a, a, I think they called it a tensor in a fifth dimension is in, is put into the equations of quantum mechanics and general relativity, they actually work together. In other words, the reason they don't work together is because they are, they are only unified if there are dimensions beyond our four, you know, three spatial and one time dimension. So science. So it's like, then why is it so difficult to believe that there is really a place that Jesus went to that he said he's preparing for us, that these near death experiencers say they experience as well. And you know what's wild, it's a real place. I mean in, I think it's Imagine the God of Heaven, my second book. You know, here I have a Hindu manufacturing engineer, Santosh, who only knew the Hindu scriptures and he perfectly describes the holy city of God that God takes him to and lets him see the holy city of God, just like John describes it in Revelation 21. I interviewed a kid, he's not a kid now, but he was a kid when he had his near death experience. His name was Brad, blind from birth. He describes coming up to this same city, describes the walls, the gate as an archway with this smooth stone. Yeah, like pearlescent booth. Two commercial airline pilots, Captain Dale Black and then Jim Woodford who was an agnostic. When he died, they all cried out to God and they ended up all following Jesus eventually. But when they first had this experience, they weren't. And yet they're both, these commercial airline pilots. Both, both are reporting flying over this holy city just like Santosh described, just like the apostle John describes in Revelation 21. And here's the thing I like to say is like you've got to, you don't have to believe them, but if you're really going to just push them away, it's worth your time to consider why would a Hindu manufacturing engineer, how would a blind kid. And why would two commercial airline pilots make up a story of seeing the same heavenly city that John did? Different religions or no religion, sight or no sight. And yet it's not just them. I mean it's many, many, many. So we're talking about a real place. And that's what people say. They say commonly near death experiencers, that when they come back to this world, this feels more like the shadow that feels more like the real thing.
- [85:52]
B
More real? Yeah, more real. That's what Paul said in First Corinthians 13. Right? Now I know in part, then I'll know. Now I'm partly known, then I'll be fully known. Like now I'm seeing through a mirror dimly. Then I'll see with real eyes. Like the Bible is telling us stuff that's not metaphors. That's really going to happen and it's going to clarify and we're going to see and experience something far beyond what we do now. That's why I love your work. The other thing about your near death experiences that was captivating to me is how many of those folks, John, had something to lose by telling this story. Like they weren't doing it because they were going to get rich and famous and they were going to be so beloved and all that. A lot of them were like, somebody's going to kill me if I tell this story. Like I'm going to lose my family if I tell this story. I'll lose my job if I tell this story. But I got to tell it anyway because it's so important. Shed some light on that. Like, why do these people make these stories up if they're not true?
- [86:45]
C
Well, that's my point. I mean, why would a Hindu manufacturing engineer who travels the world doing that, why would he come back saying that he saw God on his throne and saw this holy city and he was very confused because he didn't see the Hindu gods, he didn't experience what he expected. You know, another Hindu anesthesiologist that, that I interviewed.
- [87:17]
B
Yeah, first.
- [87:18]
C
First has a hellish experience and, and cries out to, to God for forgiveness and then is brought into the presence of this God of light who is love, you know, like a love you can't even describe in words. And that's, you know, that's common. And he says to him, and he, you know, he gets a life review and he sees how he had, he had become an addict to opioid drugs. He had become abusive verbally to his son. His father was abusive to him. So he sees these things and the Lord says to him, you know, I'm going to send you back. These things are going to need to change, basically, you know, but he didn't, but he, and, and so then he, he later asks this God of brilliant light, lord, who are you? And he said, out of the light steps a man in a white robe with a beard and, and puts out his arms like this. And he says, I'm Jesus, your savior.
- [88:30]
B
Wow.
- [88:33]
C
Why? I mean, this is the chief anesthesiologist of the Bakersfield Heart Hospital.
- [88:39]
B
Yeah. He's got a lot to lose, and he's got to tell the truth. Yeah.
- [88:44]
C
But not only professionally, but religiously, culturally.
- [88:49]
B
Family and cultural attractions. And yet, I mean, that argues for it being true. I mean, and the consistency of all these stories.
- [88:56]
C
Right. And so, you know, in Imagine the God of Heaven, that's. That's what I'm trying to show. 70 people all around the globe that I've interviewed of every religious background, but they're consistent in the God they describe. Here's another fascinating. Just. Just maybe another. One more rabbit trail we could go down having to do with epigenetics. So. So Rajiv, who I was just talking about one of the puzzling things that I've thought about. I'm going to do a whole other podcast on this, but I'll throw it out there now. He talked about how he experienced when he was there on the edge of hell. He experienced hell, but then he experienced. He said, his past lives. He experienced two past lives. One was as an opioid farmer or a poppy farmer in Afghanistan, like in the 1500s or something like that. And. And he was an. He was an addict. That's what he said. So he is experiencing being an addict as a poppy farmer in Afghanistan, which. Which, by the way, is not far from India. Right. They're. Yeah, they're right over a mountain range. And then another. Another past life. And I say past life because I have a theory about it where he is a slave owner in India and he's beating his slaves. Mercifully, he's abusive. And his conclusion was that that is who I've been. And I need to change that. I need to stop it. Because my dad was abusive to me. I've now been abusive to my son. You know, my dad. My dad had drug and alcohol problems. I still have them. And that's. So I'm coming back again and again, working out my past lives. Now, I don't believe that's what it is, because I think that goes against the gospel, which says that Jesus came to set us free from our sins, and we don't have to go try over and over and over again to get it right, not even knowing what we got wrong.
- [91:04]
B
That's right.
- [91:05]
C
But here's the fascinating thing. Thing. I think they are experiencing their epigenetic history, ancestors lives.
- [91:16]
B
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [91:17]
C
And so enough people. And I think it has I think it comes into play even with what we're discovering with, with quantum entanglement, the whole spooky action at a distance and all that. Because on the other side in God's world, what people, what near death experiencers say is you're still yourself, but there is an, a connectedness that the way we communicate is. It's thought to thought, it's feelings, it's every associated feeling. It's like there is no possibility of misunderstanding.
- [91:51]
B
Wow.
- [91:52]
C
And they've even said like this, this one guy, Greg Rickert told me God let him look through this or it was an angel that let him look through the story, this time portal. He said it was like of two dimensional time. And imagine having I talk about that. You know how they talk about time isn't just one dimensional linear and how it, the way they talk about it makes more sense of two dimensional time. Like for every point on our one dimensional timeline, there's another timeline that you can have all the time in the world at each moment. And that's what near death experiencers say. It's like time didn't work the same way. There was time, but you never, you had all the time you ever needed. So anyway, he looks into this and he said, I'm watching an ancient battle in Egypt and I knew it was because I could see the pyramids. And he said, I'm watching this, but then you could zoom in and I could look at one person and it's like I could experience fully what that person was experiencing in this battle. And he said, I knew you are not to go, you can't go there, but you can fully learn from that person. But he was himself. Now that would have a semblance of a kind of knowledge that would make you think, well, did I live that life or is that just knowledge of their life? In other words, it's full knowledge. So all that to say? I just put out an interview with this young woman, Riley, who kind of confirmed this hypothesis for me because she had seen her ancestry, one of her grandmothers was into ancestry and had put pictures and everything seven or eight generations back. So she had seen like six or seven generations back her, her grandfather and grandmother. And she had noticed, you know, oh, she was pretty and she noticed what he looked like, like in her near death experience as, as she's going to heaven and meet, to meet Jesus, who she did with him. She has this experience of being her grandmother, confronting her grandfather about his adultery, about his lust and adultery. And she felt all of the pain of that that that caused their divorce. And she said, I, I would have thought I was. I was her living that, except I knew I was still me. And then I felt it ripple down generation to generation to me. And I saw where that, that pain and that distrust is still in me. And I've got to break it.
- [94:48]
B
Wow. Wow.
- [94:50]
C
So.
- [94:51]
B
Wow.
- [94:52]
C
And I, and I have several other examples that I won't go into. I'm going to do a podcast and let you hear from them. But so, so I don't think, I don't think these experiences that near death experiencers are having that they are interpreting as a past life experience. Is that. Because the other thing is when, well, when God says to people, you, you, you can. Sometimes he gives them a choice. You can go on to heaven or you can go back, you know, and, and he doesn't ever give them the choice of, you can go on to heaven, you can go back to your body or you can try a new body. Yeah, I, I've never, in 1500 people, I've researched. Well, actually once one, one person, it was, it was a very bizarre one anyway. And I, you know, one data point, but I've never heard him say, you know, you can go like incarnate in another. Another body. So I think that my whole point was I think maybe this is God letting people see and experience a couple of the painful epigenetic traits that they still have that they need to break.
- [96:10]
B
To better understand where they, how they formed, the way that they are. That goes back into that idea of what's. The genes. You'll be fully known. Yeah.
- [96:21]
C
The genes that were passing down generation to generation until someone says, no. You know, just like Riley said, I realized God was telling me this because I've got to be the one to break it.
- [96:33]
B
It.
- [96:33]
C
I've got to be aware of that. And, but, but the. So what is. Well, that's true of all of us. Yeah, there's good.
- [96:42]
B
We're the cumulative history of all the family members that preceded us. That's right.
- [96:46]
C
And there's good and there's bad. And you've got to, you've got to be willing to look hard and go, because, you know, there are no perfect people and so there are no perfect families. So that means you got some good and you got some stuff you need to look at and go, lord, show me, show me those traits that I need to say. It stops with me. Those chains don't keep going.
- [97:10]
B
Wow. So.
- [97:12]
C
So for one last thing, because this is really your ministry now. Talk about how practically we can do that. How can we practically start to change our, our thoughts and our brains and therefore our lives?
- [97:30]
B
So. So being a brain surgeon, I kind of couch this in surgery terms because the biggest insight I had, John, was that when we talk about the fact that you can change your brain by changing the things you think about, it's not a metaphor and it's not some kind of self help thing to think about as a tool you can use sometimes because it's actually happening. Like your brain is literally structurally changing every second of every day, and it changes in response to the things that you think about. So that means that when you choose to think one thought and not another thought, you're literally performing surgery on your brain. You're making a structural change in the way that your brain works and the way that the rest of your body works. That's a big insight because it means that you have agency and power over what happens next in your life. So if you're not happy about where you are in your life, you can't go back and change the things that have happened, the circumstances, the traumas, the genetics, none of that. You can't change any of that. That you can change what happens next. You can change the decision that you make to how your brain is going to support you in becoming this person that God is calling you to be. And you can literally structurally change your life in real time. The microtubules in your brain that build the synapses, that build the connections between neurons, they change within seconds of you making a thought change and they begin to lay down the pipes that your neurons are going to grow through to make these new connections. So you literally have, have the same kind of agency that I have when I tell my scrub tech hand me the knife and she puts a scalpel in my hand and I choose to make an incision. That's literally what you're doing. When you make one thought and not another thought, you're changing your brain structurally. So the hope therein is that you don't have to be the same person that you were yesterday. You don't have to suffer in the same way that you did. You don't have to experience the result of the trauma or the sin, or the patterns or the choices or any of those things anymore. Because you can choose to be, be structurally different in the very breath that.
- [99:27]
C
You make that decision made new by the renewing of your mind.
- [99:30]
B
It's literally Romans Ephesians 4:23 and Romans 12:2 and Ephesians 4. In fact, there's a fascinating bit in Ephesians, chapter 4, in verse 17, Paul says, I insist that you no longer live as the Gentiles do. So he's referring to Gentiles as the people that aren't Christians.
- [99:50]
C
Like, don't know God.
- [99:51]
B
Yeah, don't know Jesus. So he's saying, I insist that you no longer live as they do, lost in the futility of their thinking. So he goes on to say all these bad things that they're doing, but he starts with what they're thinking about, and that leads into everything else. And then he finishes that in Ephesians 4. 23, that says, I pray that you will be renewed in the attitudes of your mind. So he starts with, don't be lost in futile thinking. Be renewed in the attitude of your mind. That's the whole game. It's the entire thing out of which the best part of your life can flow if you decide to change what you think about. That's why we talk about brain. I call it thought biopsies. Like, if you know that 80% of your thoughts aren't true, then get in a habit of thinking about what you're thinking about. That metacognition thing. Think about what you're thinking about before you decide to react to it. Because the first thing is 80% of the time, you don't need to react to that thought because it isn't true. So say, wait, that's not a true thought. I'm not an irredeemable loser. Some people do love me. God hasn't given up on me. You can process that and then decide to respond. And over time, because your brain gets better at what you choose to do over time, that will become an automated habit, and you'll begin to renew your mind and live in this renewed mind that Paul talks about. In fact, he says, we can have the mind of Christ. So here's the stunning punchline, right? The stunning punchline is, if what you think about changes the structure of your brain, brain in ways that can help you, and you can have a more efficient and resilient brain. And then you think about Jesus, who never committed a sin with his thoughts, because we know he never committed a sin, which means he also never dwelt on something that was sinful. That means that every thought that Jesus thought improved his brain structurally, and he prepared his brain to support him in the worst moment of his life, which was in the garden, when he had to suffer under the decision he was making to obey God's call to save all of us.
- [101:47]
C
Go to the Cross.
- [101:48]
B
Yeah, he had to. He had to make that decision. And he made it based on a lifetime of self brain surgery of preparing his mind, making the right choices, structurally improving his brain, preparing his neurochemistry to support him in that difficult hour and to come through for all of us. And thank God that he did because he had prepared his brain by thinking the right thoughts for all those years. And we can too.
- [102:12]
C
And you know something I love that you wrote about in the the Art of self brain surgery is this, this whole idea that we can, we can daily put in our minds the things that will start to tell. Well, let me say it this way. One of the things I think people have a hard time with is a self refuting feedback loop. So like let's say you've always heard you're worthless, you're not going to make anything of yourself. And we find that we notice how that's true over and over again. So it reiterates to us that yep, see that's just the way it always is. That's how it always is. And you talk about in your book about the reticular activating system, which is this part of our brain we all actually know. If you go to buy a car and you start to think I like blue Fords, suddenly you see blue Fords everywhere.
- [103:22]
B
That's right.
- [103:24]
C
And that's your reticular activating system. And I can't remember the way you said it. I love the way you said it. But it's like your brain is always trying to automate.
- [103:36]
B
From you to automate something. So your brain, it's getting your consent to automate something on your behalf.
- [103:44]
C
It's always looking for consent.
- [103:46]
B
If you want me to do this, that's right, I'll make it happen. I'll make it a habit if you want me to. And that comes.
- [103:52]
C
So if I start thinking about blue Ford Mustangs, my brain tells me this is important to you. So I'm going to show you and make you aware of every Mustang standing. We've all had that kind of experience.
- [104:07]
B
It's not manifestation. Okay, that's, that's the mistake the metaphysical folks get into in the Eastern people. They think if you think the right thoughts you'll just magically all this stuff will start showing up in your life.
- [104:17]
C
Like the secret you manifest your destiny and all that.
- [104:20]
B
It's not, that's not what it is. It's, it's your brain listening. My friend Daniel Ammon says your brain is always listening. Your brain listens for what you're telling it that you care about, and it tries to show you a world where that is more common woman. And that's what happens. And so if you think about the wrong stuff, you'll start seeing the evidence everywhere that everything is wrong. If you think about the right stuff, you'll start seeing the right stuff.
- [104:44]
C
Yeah. And so I think, you know, as a pastor, one of the things that I've done is people who have had just abusive upbringings and they've heard all these negative things about themselves and they've played into that. And I have them go and take Ephesians chapter one, which is really about who God says we are before. That's right before we were born, right. And put, put it in the personal. You know, he loved me before the. The foundation of the earth, right. He. And. And to begin to meditate on that. And after a while, it actually changes what starts to be brought to mind. I had. I had it happen to me. So I went through a season of, you know, I can't call it trauma. It wasn't trauma. It was micro things and maybe the way I was interpreting them, but one by one by one, and it felt like just attack, quite honestly, from every, every side. And I got. I got depressed. I didn't even know I was depressed, but I was depressed. And. And I started. I started hearing and believing these things. You're a bad leader. God's not working through you anymore. You know, no matter. No matter what you try, it's not going to work. And it was. It was only in, you know, sitting there, interacting with. With some people. And this, this was. This was over years. Now, here's the fascinating thing is, before all this started, I'm reading Isaiah 41, and this verse just jumps off the page at me. I have not rejected you, I have chosen you. You know, do not be discouraged. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I am with you, and I uphold you with my righteous right hand. And I don't have any idea, I had no idea why that jumped off the page at me. But I memorized it and I put it, you know, on my desk and all that. Well, it's what ended up happening. I ended up believing the opposite of that completely because of circumstances and because of things people were telling me, because of feedback I was getting circumstantially and all that. Now I say all that to say I had to put together a mantra because I was in a rut. Like, I was just stuck. And that's when I discovered another. Another neuroscientist Dr. Caroline Leaf, who talks about a lot of, yeah, a lot of the same stuff. And I actually worked her program. I did the same thing. And I, I put a mantra together that here are the things that I believe are true, but here's what God says is true about me. So for instance, like, I'm a horrible leader. And, you know, and then I put out to the side, you know, I, I have not rejected you. I've. I've chosen you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I am with you. And so I had to, I had to go, wait a second, second. I started a church from nothing. It grew to 5,000 people. I'm not a horrible leader. I couldn't have done that. But I was feeling like it was true. Like that's no longer true. So I give that just as an example because I did that over and over every day. Every morning I woke up and I wrote that down and I said it, I spoke it out loud, and I tried to kind of meditate on it and with verses and stuff like that, that, and it didn't feel like anything was happening.
- [108:43]
B
That's right.
- [108:45]
C
But three months later, I was out of that rut and I was starting to feel joy again and I was starting to feel creative and new ideas and not just, you know, completely depressed.
- [108:56]
B
You did self brain surgery.
- [108:59]
C
Well, that's why I was so excited reading your book. I was like, I know this, this works.
- [109:06]
B
That's right. That's right. John, where, where do people go to find out more about you?
- [109:15]
C
Well, they can, they can check out my podcast, Imagine Heaven podcast with John Burke. My two books about near death experience research are Imagine Heaven and Imagine the God of Heaven. And that's, you know, anywhere I have. Imagine heaven.net is our, is our website.
- [109:34]
B
And once you share the same, you have. Well, before we get there, you have you told me you're writing a new book and just give us a little teaser. Imagine. Is it. Imagine your purpose? Is that what you told me?
- [109:46]
C
Unless my publisher arm wrestles me into changing it. You know how that goes.
- [109:53]
B
That's right.
- [109:54]
C
So the Life review is so consistent all around the globe and it gives us incredibly insight, incredible insight into when Jesus or when God sends people back and says you have to go back, you still have a purpose to fulfill. Well, that means we all have a purpose to fulfill. We were created on purpose, for a purpose. And it's not just what we do. You know, we were always like, what do I do? Do I become a brain surgeon? Do I become a pastor? Do I become a rocket scientist? What do I do do? And that matters. But it's not just the what, it's also the how and the why and the who we become in the process. All of that, our purpose is multifaceted. So I'm looking at what the scripture says, but also the clues that these near death experiencers get as they come back to help all of us better live out of whose we are and who we are so that we can accomplish the purpose God put us here for.
- [111:01]
B
Wow. Fascinating. I can't wait to read it and.
- [111:05]
C
Tell tell my listeners more about where they can find you your podcast, your your books.
- [111:12]
B
Yep. So Dr. Lee Warren podcast and my website is just that. Dr. Lee Warren there's no period D R L E E W A R r e n drlee warren.com I have a newsletter on substack that is read in 100 countries. Every week we talk about neuroscience and faith so you can get that through my website. And that's it. The new book is the Life Changing Art of Self Brain Surgery comes out in February and we'll be talking, I'm sure more about that in coming months. But John, this has been an absolute pleasure. I can't thank you enough for your friendship and for the important work that you're doing and for having me on your show and my show at the same time. What a great idea. I know.
- [111:48]
C
Well, it was an experiment. We'll see in the comments how it went. Well, I know that was a little different. And yes, we did geek out. That's what you get with a former engineer and a neuroscientist. But I hope you learned something too. I know I did. And if you want to dive deeper into near death experience research of the 1500 people that I've studied and the commonalities, how it relates to the Bible, you can check out the books I've written, Imagine Heaven or Imagine the God of Heaven or check out the the first few episodes of the Imagine Heaven podcast. And until next time, God's Blessings. And you know, if you would like to start reading my second book, Imagine the God of Heaven for free, just click on the comment pin below and give us your email and we will send you the first three chapters and you can start reading for free. God's Blessings.