Everything is said to be not as it seems. Mark Gober authors An End to Upside Down Thinking and takes us contrary to mainstream assumptions: that the consciousness is not produced by the brain. Moving beyond what our eyes show us, Mark brings the whole conversation on consciousness as he details how it fits into our daily lives and what it says about our existence. He gets to the question of manifestation, asking whether or not our thoughts and intentions influence physical reality. Dive into this interesting take on how we could see the world while finding the connection between the unworldly and the worldly things.
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An End To Upside Down Thinking
Christy Whitman Interviews Mark Gober
I’m with the amazing Mark Gober. How are you?
I’m doing well. Thanks so much for having me.
Let me talk to you a little bit about Mark. He’s an author whose worldview was turned upside down in late 2016 when he was exposed to world-changing science. This science suggested that contrary to mainstream assumptions, consciousness is not produced by the brain. After researching extensively, he wrote, An End to Upside Down Thinking to introduce the general public to these cutting-edge ideas. It’s all in an effort to encourage a much-needed global shift in scientific and existential thinking. Mark’s book has been endorsed by none other than the amazing, Goldie Hawn, my friend, Jack Canfield, and former Harvard neurosurgeon and number one New York Times bestselling author, Eben Alexander, who is a two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Thank you so much for being here.
I’m excited to chat.
How did you come across this? I love the title of your book. I’m going to let you answer the question I’m going to ask you. I always talk about that we need to come from an inside-out approach instead of an outside-in approach to creating things in our life because so many people think that if I go get this thing or if I go get that level of success or have this money or get the guy or the woman, then I’ll be happy. When it’s an inside-out approach, you need to feel the success and then you attract. I want to hear about what An End to Upside Down Thinking is. Share with us.
We’re on the same page. How I arrived at that idea was probably not a typical path. I work in finance, so I’m a partner at a firm in Silicon Valley called Sherpa Technology Group. We advise technology companies on their business strategy and on their innovations. Prior to that, I worked in investment banking with UBS in New York during the financial crisis from 2008 to 2010. Prior to that, I was a student at Princeton University where I was captain of the tennis team. When I tell people my background, they’re typically wondering how it is that I got into the topic of consciousness.
You’re typically like the mainstream people that we want to help understand manifestation. You were that guy. How did you become this guy?
I didn’t understand any of this other world. It started about two years ago. It was late summer 2016, I was listening to podcasts and a woman came on named Laura Powers. She talked about psychic abilities and that she could talk to dead people and communicate with entities that are not physical and work with energy. I was listening to podcasts at that time for entertainment. I live in San Francisco and our office is in San Mateo, which is a long drive. I would listen to podcasts in the car.
First of all, I want to say brilliant because that’s such a great success strategy. Instead of listening to the radio or listening to the news, you’re listening to something that’s going to fill your mind, expand you, and that did help. You have all this time in your hands, using it wisely by listening to podcasts that will elevate your consciousness.
At the time, they were primarily around health and business, so I wasn’t looking for metaphysical podcasts. I was listening to a health podcast that happened to have this woman, Laura Powers, who talked about her abilities. I remember at the end of that podcast she mentioned her own podcast called Healing Powers, where she interviewed other people that had similar abilities or had similar experiences that sounded totally crazy. I said, “That’s interesting. Why don’t I turn that one on in the car because I’m looking for new things to listen to?” Over a few weeks of listening to that podcast, I became interested because I heard many people independently described very similar things about consciousness, about the survival of bodily death, about psychic abilities, those things that didn’t make any sense to me.
At first, it was entertaining. I realized it got to a point where I was like, “How are all these people saying the same thing? Are they all delusional? Is there some conspiracy here?” I’m confused because if this is real, then we have to rethink a lot of science. For me, I would have had to rethink my existence because I was very much from the mainstream perspective on things. The more I researched and as I started to look into the actual science and I saw studies from the US government, from Princeton University, from the University of Virginia and beyond, I got interested. It led me down the research path for about a year where all I did was research because I had to understand these things. It’s for myself. I had no plans of writing a book. I want to understand because my perspective prior to getting into the research was a mainstream one, which says that I am conscious solely because of my brain. I’m aware, your readers are aware, where is that coming from?
I would have said, “It’s coming from stuff that’s happening in my brain.” There’s complex stuff going on up here and that’s what’s causing it. I didn’t realize that there is a big question around that. That has major implications for how we think about life and death for example. If consciousness comes from the brain, then that implies when our brain turns off, when the body’s done, when the body dies, then our consciousness is gone. Does life have meaning under that context? I used to think this way. I would say, “Something good or bad happens today or tomorrow. Does it matter in the end?” Eventually, I will be dead and there will be no memory. There will be no emotion or feeling associated with whatever happened. I thought life had no meaning. I think that is what is implied by the conventional view that consciousness comes from the brain.
Here I was challenging that very assumption. I realized that all of these abilities that I was hearing about like psychic abilities, even energy communicating with the deceased, they all centered around this point. Is consciousness from the brain? Is it centered around the brain? Is it localized to the brain? If the brain isn’t producing it, what if the brain is like an antenna receiver or a filtering mechanism where the consciousness itself exists well-beyond the body, but the body and the brain are picking it up? That is a totally different perspective on who and what we are. We go from being my old perspective, which was we’re a body that has a consciousness, to the inverse, which is we are a consciousness first and foremost. I think this is what you’re talking about, the inside out, that the consciousness that’s experiencing the world through a body. This totally rocked me. It was not an easy transition.
That happened to me years ago. It’s been a process ever since. Even a few months ago, I’ve been healing for years and seeing things holographically. I could see you above you, you have a blue aura above your head. I was watching like, “Cool.” About a few months ago, I started full on channeling. I have a different accent. It’s wild because I keep expanding into what I know to be true of that. What I wrote in Quantum Success, it’s been proven in science and everything is that who we know ourselves to be. Everything that you’ve experienced in your life, your background, you’re the clump of matter that you are right is only 4% of who you are. The 96% is nonphysical that’s flowing through in your body. It’s exactly what we’re talking about. I love this conversation. I’ll always love having these amazing conversations.
I’m with you. Now I am. I wouldn’t have been years ago.
I had Jennifer Hough on the show and she said, “We have this conversation that we’re more metaphysical than we are than we are matter.” She was having a very high-level conversation that she and I would normally get into. I said, “Most people don’t think like that.” Most people don’t have an understanding that was beyond what we can think, see, taste, touch, smell, the problems and the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Most people don’t and don’t have the training or the awareness of the consciousness to understand that there’s so much more beyond that.
We’re very biased by our eyes. We forget how little our eyes show us even from a mainstream perspective in the electromagnetic spectrum of light. Visible light is a tiny fraction. There are all kinds of light like X-rays, infrared that we know exist, but we don’t see them with our eyes. We don’t account for that. In mainstream society, we forget that there’s a lot beyond what the eye shows us.
Let me ask you a question because my big thing is seven essential laws. I talk about the seven universal laws. This whole conversation on consciousness and even Law of Attraction, how does that fit now into your understanding of consciousness and how that plays out in your own life?
My view on consciousness now is this is getting to the upside-down thinking idea. The conventional perspective is that matter creates consciousness. There was a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Through lots of random chemical reactions where matters are interacting, we end up with DNA. DNA leads to a human being which develops a brain and then consciousness comes out. Matter creates consciousness through our brain. The upside-down thinking is no, consciousness is primary. Consciousness doesn’t come from the brain. It comes before matter. That was a very big shift. It gets to the question you’re asking of manifestation. Can our thoughts and intentions influence physical reality? Under the conventional paradigm of the brain and matter create consciousness, it makes no sense at all. I remember when people would talk about this idea, I would immediately discount it because how could the mind have any effect on the physical world? The mind is a byproduct of the brain. It has nothing to do with the world. If consciousness is primary, then everything physical is within consciousness. It almost makes the physical world malleable.
I like to think of the Big Bang instead of a big birthing because consciousness had to create that, consciousness, God, the giver, consciousness, whatever you want to call that, the one infinite intelligence. Call it Sally, it doesn’t matter. It’s that consciousness that is a creator that gave birth to everything that you see, whether it’s money, whether it’s the guy or the woman in your bed or whatever it is. Since you’ve had this big awakening, you’ve done the research, applied it in your own life and you’re a finance guy, how do you then find the connection between unworldly things and worldly things? How are you functioning, being able to balance that?
I definitely have a different perspective on it where my priorities have shifted in a big way. I used to think life was a finite thing and that there was no meaning. Now I think that life is infinite and there is meaning. That affects everything I do, my profession included. This conversation is much more of my world now because that’s where I’m spending a lot of my time thinking. The business world is where I came from. This is what I grew up in. That world does not have as many of these metaphysical elements to it. It’s very cut and dry especially being in New York in investment banking during the financial crisis. I saw a part of society that I think needs this message. That’s one of the reasons I decided to write a book after researching these topics for a year. Originally, it was personal interest but I saw that there was a need for a bridge. That’s how I’m looking at it, where I think we still function in this society and have a career in business. I’m doing it there and we serve clients. It’s helping the world function in certain ways. I also think it’s important to be a bridge because these ideas about reality are ultimately applicable to everybody.
Everything, because we’re universal. Let me ask you this, especially since you were in there during the time where a lot of people were in lack. The country’s mentality, mass consciousness, were in that space of lack. I know my parents’ generation and even their generation before them, lack was very real. They had the Great Depression. They were in the bread lines. There was rationing for the majority of people, not all people but the majority of people. That seeped into mass consciousness. That obviously is still in the thought process, in the DNA of everything. You’ll appreciate this. I’ve been doing this work for a long time and I’m aware of my programming. I was with my family. I have my kids who were eight and nine in the backseat. I was driving. This woman was blocking the way to get into the shopping center. She was creating a block of traffic. I said out loud in pure frustration. I was like, “People are so stupid.” My son, who is nine, he goes, “Mom?” I go, “Sorry.” He goes, “You hurt my feelings.” I go, “How did I hurt your feelings? What does that have to do with you?” He goes, “You said people are stupid. I’m a people so you think I’m stupid?”
It’s like his generation can get that so quick. I was like, “I wasn’t aware that I said that. I’m sorry.” I’m sorry to all people that I said that about and that whole thing of the Law of Attraction. It was like one to suck it all back. Literally the next day, I was talking to my mother and she goes, “People are so stupid.” That’s something I had heard all of my life and didn’t even realize that it was inside of me and it came out at that moment because I don’t remember how many times I’ve said that in my life. It’s that unconscious lack of people are not enough, they are this. They are labels, which comes from that lack of mentality. My work has been helping people move from lack into abundance and realizing the limitations. Coming from that energy where you were and working in New York, especially around that time, how do you bridge that for people now?
To me, it always starts with what are our assumptions about reality? It always begins there because if we view ourselves as being consciousness, experiencing the world through a body, it changes our perspective on everything. It naturally will do that if one internalizes that idea.
Thank you for saying that. There are a lot of people that are in the conversation now that everything is energy and it’s like “Everything is energy.” They have it maybe as a concept, maybe not in your world but in the world I’m like, “Everything is energy.” If you get it mentally as a concept, that’s one thing. Living from that, that’s a different thing. I understand this, I live this, I live the universal laws. What I said the other day about people are being stupid or people are stupid, it’s an energy. It’s energy I gave out and that’s coming back. Thank God my son was subconscious that I could go, “Whoa,” and have that type of awareness so I don’t continue to repeat that. What you’re saying is true. You have to embody it. How do you embody this?
[bctt tweet=”Once you have an opening – a thought change or belief change – your consciousness opens up.” via=”no”]
I think there’s a lot we have to unwind both on a personal level and then on an even epigenetic level, what our ancestors dealt with. Thinking about other lives that are not ours. In my book, I have a chapter on children who have past life memories from the University of Virginia, 50 years’ worth of studies on children, usually between the ages of two and five years old, who spontaneously starts speaking about a life that is not theirs. The details are so accurate that sometimes the researchers can find the person at the child is referring to. Sometimes the children have birthmarks and physical deformities that match how they describe dying in the previous life. It’s very specific stuff. Sometimes their preferences, something is being transferred.
We think about what is influencing our current physical form. It’s our immediate family and the direct energies around us and people we associate with and anything physical. We have to think about epigenetics and our ancestors. We have to think about who knows what else if there are factors that are affecting our memories. There are a lot of forces that are making things difficult. I want to start with that. To me, it’s a constant remembering of what the world is and what we are. When I’m speaking with you, what is it that is speaking to you? Is it the witness of my body and my thoughts or is it my body? Associating with that witness on a constant basis and reminding myself throughout the day that I’m not getting caught into the bodily worldly stuff as much can help.
That’s what honesty is? It’s like the God in me recognizes the God in you or the consciousness in me, the love in me, the energy in me, when I look for it in you, that’s what shows up. That’s what I can see in react and respond to. If I’m coming from me as a woman, in my limitation or in my mind and my mind might be telling me what I should be eating for lunch or what I shouldn’t have said yesterday or why did I do that or all the things that our minds create a monkey situation. We’re not relating at that level.
The question is how does one get to that point yet of even accepting those ideas? I would have turned the TV off a long time ago. At least for where a lot of the community that I came from, how they think about things, what I found is very evidence-based. What I tried to do in my book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, is to provide so much scientific evidence from a diverse set of backgrounds where it gets to the point where it’s impossible to reconcile the old world view that the brain creates consciousness. When you’ve become exposed to all this evidence and the children who have past life memories, which is compelling on its own, that’s one chapter. There are chapters on telepathy, psychokinesis and near-death experiences. When you put it all together over time it unwinds the old conditioning. At least that’s my strategy from an intellectual standpoint. The best way to do it though it seems is when people have direct personal experience through meditation or sometimes through psychedelics or near-death experience. Those are artificial ways of inducing it. It seems like meditation is a more natural way of doing it.
There are people that do Ayahuasca and have those types of journeys and have awareness like that. That’s not something I recommend. It’s more meditation on a daily basis because that’s going direct.
It’s going direct. It’s natural. It’s not forcing it. It can be dangerous when you force it. Near death-experience is typically a very traumatic thing. There are some ones in cardiac arrest. What I find is that when people have mystical experiences through any of these means, that’s when they have a very quick shift. My shift was not overnight. It was much more of an intellectual one where it took time of becoming exposed to the data over and over again and write a book about it and then interviewing people about it. Finally, I got to the point where I couldn’t think about the world in the old way, which didn’t make sense anymore.
Thank you for writing this amazing book. I love the fact that you did so much research on it. I was on a podcast with Lou Diamond. He said, “The woo-woo is the new-new,” because it’s not woo-woo. It’s the way our universe functions. I’ve been working with universal laws for twenty years, teaching about it for over fifteen. I see people’s lives change on a daily basis when they apply it, when they say, “People are so stupid.” They stop themselves and change that because I’ll never say that again in that way because I had an awareness that I never knew that was there before. It’s about every time you have a level of awareness and you have that level of shifting, I always say once you birth a baby, you can’t put the base baby back. Once you have that opening, even if it’s a slight opening, a thought change, the belief change, your consciousness opens up.
That was my experience. It’s like you can’t unhear something. You can’t unsee it. That’s why I said, “I need to write a book about this because this could open up a lot of people.” In the world that we live in, I think the problems we see when we turn on the news are not political problems. They’re not problems about violence per se. The deeper problem is a misunderstanding of reality. It’s the belief that we’re finite beings and that we’re separate from each other. I think what the science is suggesting is that we’re not finite and that we are connected in ways that we don’t see.
I always feel that having a president of the United States is important, but I know that he doesn’t create my reality. I create my own reality. I create my reality by the awareness and consciousness and the direct connection than I have. Anything else that you want to share about the book? It’s called An End to Upside Down Thinking. I highly recommend. I’m going to pick up a copy. Anything else?
My website which is MarkGober.com has more information. My book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many bookstores. If you know of anyone who might be interested in it, I hope that it will help a lot of people.
[bctt tweet=”The deeper problem in the word is a misunderstanding of reality.” via=”no”]
If you’ve got those mainstream thinking people that are very scientific based and think all this conversation is woo-woo might be a great gift for them to help them shift so that they can enter your conversation because I know that community that I have is a very conscious community. They’ve been with me for a long time. They’re probably loving this conversation. I get that question all the time, “How do we speak with people that think that this is woo-woo and that sort of thing?” Scientific proof-based stuff is a great way to do it for people that need to see evidence of it. I appreciate you writing this book from that perspective.
It was one of the ideas I had in mind when I wrote it is that I knew there was a community of people that had had experiences but sometimes maybe felt uncomfortable talking about it with others. I was hoping that this book would be a bridge to say, “This is scientific validation for the things that I’ve been talking about.”
Congratulations on being a bridge builder, Mark.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
You’re welcome. Let us know what you’re taking away from this conversation. I have loved this conversation. It’s so cool to be able to see green and blue light above you. I love it. Let us know what you’re taking away. You can find more information at MarkGober.com. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Christy.
Thanks.
Important Links:
- Mark Gober
- An End to Upside Down Thinking
- Healing Powers
- Quantum Success
- Jennifer Hough – previous episode
- MarkGober.com
- An End to Upside Down Thinking on Amazon
- An End to Upside Down Thinking on Barnes & Noble
About Mark Gober
I am not a scientist or a philosopher. Rather, I am a businessman. I began my career in 2008 in New York as an Investment Banking Analyst with a large, global firm – during the heart of the financial crisis. In 2010, I chose to leave Wall Street to join a technology-focused investment bank and strategy firm, of which I am currently a Partner in Silicon Valley. I have been quoted for my opinions on business and technology matters in Bloomberg Businessweek and elsewhere and have authored internationally published business articles.
Even though my professional career has been in business, I have always sought answers to life’s challenging questions. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, I was drawn to astrophysics because I wanted to understand the universe. But because of my commitments as a four-year member (and later Captain) of Princeton’s Division I Tennis Team, I decided that astrophysics would be too demanding. So instead of studying the invisible forces that govern the universe, I studied the invisible forces that secretly drive human behavior. I graduated magna cum laude with a degree in psychology, focusing on behavioral economics and wrote my thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning Prospect Theory.
After college, I read about the universe for fun. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2016 that I randomly stumbled across podcasts that exposed me to new ideas. The ideas put into question the most basic assumptions about who and what we are as human beings. The more I researched, the more I realized that I needed to rethink everything that I thought I knew.
When I started telling friends about my research, they told me it changed the way they looked at life. Their lives started to improve. After enough people said this to me, I realized it was time to share my research with a broader audience so I could help more people. Through my forthcoming book, podcast, and other content I may provide, I invite you to join me on my journey. I will share with you the evidence I collect, and you are welcome to draw your own conclusions. For me, merely being exposed to the evidence has led to a completely new mindset and worldview.
