Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Mark:
I’m interested in understanding the nature of the reality that we inhabit. The term that I use is spiritual war. We can just turn on the news any day. It’s not all light, even if the highest level of reality is benevolent. If you were a being that cared about power and not love and interconnectivity, you would want to keep people away from the truth and in ignorance. It feels like everything is constantly just getting perpetuated to keep us in a state of fear, anger, and then we can point fingers and throw rocks at it and say, well, that’s the problem. It’s just getting more and more intense as if there were a concerted effort to get people to hate each other.

Guy:
Mark, welcome back to the podcast.

Mark:
Thank you for having me.

Guy:
We were just trying to figure out when you came on last, and I think it’s been about five or six years, and was just saying you’ve been a, an extremely busy man since, uh, the last time we spoke.

Mark:
A lot has happened for sure. I, when we spoke, I think I had just written book number two. And now there are seven books. The the seventh one came out in September of 2024, and now we’re speaking February of 26.

Guy:
What I love about you, mate, and what made me reach out to you. ’cause I just stumbled across, I said, oh, mark, like it popped up on my feed, on a, on a podcast and I dropped into it for a little while and what’s evident, what I love about you, you’re very articulate. You, you kind of, you’re very well researched and you. You break it down in a manner that I think is necessary for today’s modern life, but I always get drawn in and go, shit, that’s a I’ve, I’ve never thought of it like that before. What I’m curious about is why are you so passionate about all these topics, unconsciousness on the books that you’ve been writing, you know, from Liberty to Medicine Cosmos, I wrote them down Contact thinking, everything. There’s a, there’s a, a clear drive and a passion as well behind everything you do.

Mark:
Hmm. I am interested in understanding the nature of the reality that we inhabit. I wanna understand who we are, why we’re here, what this place is, how the world actually works. Because to me, without having a sense of answers to those questions, how can we know what to prioritize in life?

Guy:
Do you think we are waking up as a species in terms of being more open to this and understanding? Because it certainly felt like that on my journey. It’s like, oh, you know, the blinkers are coming off.

Mark:
Mm-hmm. I do think that there is growing awareness to various topics, but even the term waking up is a confusing one because there seem to be many different ways in which someone could be awakening. To a, a, a topic. And that’s why there have been many books I’ve written when I wrote my first book at end to upside down thinking the Awakening, there was the idea that consciousness is not something that just comes out of the brain, which is what modern academia says largely, but rather maybe our brain is tapping into consciousness.

Like an antenna receiver or maybe consciousness is even the fundamental substrate of all reality and everything that we call physical is coming from consciousness. So it’s not that there’s a material world after 13.8 billion years ago, there was a big bang, and then consciousness evolved billions of years later. What if it’s the reverse that consciousness is first and the material world is actually within conscious, within consciousness. So that idea of course, takes a long time to explain, but that’s, that’s just one. Type of paradigm shift. It’s a very important one because we’re talking about the fundamental nature of reality, but there’s a lot of other stuff in there too in terms of how we, like what is earth?

How do we think about our health? How do we think about politics and economics? There are many paradigms that we’re taught. In other words, we’re, we’re taught models of how the world works in different, uh, vectors, basically. And what I’ve come to do is to look at the things that we’ve been told are true. And then ask a ba a simple question, what is the evidence that that thing is true? Show me that it’s true. What are the assumptions underlying these beliefs? And what I find over and over again is that typically we’re dealing with a house of cards where we’re told a model exists, but it’s based on assumption and inference and studies done long ago where they were interpreted a certain way.

And if we, if we reexamine those foundational assumptions. Often we find that the world looks very different, and to me, what more could we wanna do in life? That’s just my orientation, is I wanna understand the truth and I don’t think I know the truth. What I think I’ve spent a lot of time doing in hindsight is falsifying models, and that doesn’t tell me exactly what the truth is, but it narrows down the possibilities. There’s a principle in the Vedic tradition, it’s called Netty Netty, where you reach enlightenment by saying, it’s not this, it’s not that. So it’s more of, okay, well I know that’s not true. So that means the set of possibilities of what truth is. It’s a little bit smaller now and it leads us in a certain direction. Maybe not precision, but it points us in one way rather than another.

Guy:
I love it. It feels like my life mate, where I’ve been, I was stumbling through where this doesn’t feel right, that doesn’t feel right, that can’t be right, and then, but I don’t know what is right. Like somebody showed me, you know? And then you kind of start to start to draw your own conclusions as well. I, I mean, I’m keen to get into a little bit about your journey as well in a moment as well, but to me it feels like. Consciousness is the fundamental thread to all of these questions because even when I started to have experiences that were very real and and visceral and embodied, where I felt like consciousness is not coming from the brain, that it is outside of the cells and the body is housing consciousness. Once I started to have.

Wake up to those feelings or emotions or however you wanna put it, in those realizations. It kind of then fueled every decision I’ve made moving forward, coming from a very different vantage point. Does that make sense?

Mark:
It does, and it’s actually the pattern that I found in all of my books is that even though the first book is focused on consciousness, and the other ones might sound like they’re focused on liberty or medicine, the threat of consciousness is in all the books because we have to ask questions about the nature of reality before we can examine any discipline. Because if we’re thinking about health, for example, while we’re dealing with a physical human body in a world. So we need to understand the nature of reality to understand what the body’s role is in. Within that, then that would have to play into how we think about health, and you could apply that to every discipline.

So I agree with you that this is a foundational thread. The way I think about it now versus probably when we last talked, I would’ve been more enthusiastic on the a consciousness topic. Not that I’m not enthusiastic now, but I would’ve said, if we just understand this, we’re gonna be good. Now I think it’s necessary that we understand consciousness, but it’s insufficient. For us to get to a more harmonious place, we need to understand these other areas. And Ken Wilber, who’s a philosopher in this area, he talks about lines of development. Lines of development. In other words, the awakening process has different vectors that are somewhat related, but they’re relatively independent.

And he summarizes it by saying there’s waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up. You could imagine someone who is highly awakened. Let’s say they had a big experience in meditation, and they say, I felt the oneness. We’re all interconnected. I know consciousness doesn’t come from the brain. There is a divine great. They’re highly awakened in that way, but maybe they haven’t worked through their traumas and maybe they don’t understand how the world works. So they’re more inclined to listen to media outlets and politicians blindly rather than asking questions. For example, maybe they haven’t done that other work. So the point is that. I think there’s a broad spectrum of awakening that’s required for us to really understand the nature of reality, who we are and why we’re here, and consciousness is a big part of that, but it’s not everything.

Guy:
I love it. I love it. And something that we see that’s very common in our industry through running the events and retreats that we do in that is that again, we are going outside of ourselves to seek answers. Like we’re searching for these, these spiritual experiences or to have these experiences and understand ourselves better, but in a way, there’s part of oneself escaping and not wanting to deal with what we’re actually living in here now in the present time. And for me it’s like how do we flip that and bring that wisdom in more and more so we make better choices to allow us to have a better human experience. That’s how I kind of see it.

Mark:
And a lot of this relates to personal responsibility rather than just, let’s say, relying on the experts or relying on something external, as you were saying, that we need to get to a point of being accountable for our actions and really everything in our life starting with us, rather than becoming a victim. And when we start taking that personal accountability, I think life changes dramatically.

Guy:
Where did you, when did, just for the listeners to give a bit of background, what were you doing before all this, and where was your moment of really wanting to explore this, this topic of consciousness and everything else?

Mark:
Well, I’ll take you way back. I had a very conventional background. I grew up outside of Baltimore, Maryland in the States, and I was very driven in terms of academics. Um. I was a competitive tennis player. I was always focused on the things that I wanted to achieve. I was focused on accomplishments and whatever the hardest thing or the most prestigious thing to do, that’s what I wanted to do. That was my orientation, and I didn’t really have a spiritual perspective. I thought, especially as I became more and more educated that spiritual concepts were just superstition and that science was taking us beyond that. So as I got older, I became more like an atheist or an agnostic, and this continued when I went to college, I went to Princeton University and I was one of the captains of the tennis team there.

So I was just continuing this path from high school of trying to do harder and harder things that sounded. Good because I didn’t know what else to do, and that moved into my professional life. I didn’t have a real compass guiding my career because I was so focused just on getting good grades, for example, or whatever I was doing socially or trying to win tennis matches. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and I didn’t have a spiritual compass. So I decided to go into what many of my classmates were doing, which at the time I graduated in 2008, most of my classmates were focused on the most prestigious jobs, which were investment banking and strategy consulting.

At the time, tech wasn’t quite as big as it is now. I remember there were a few people that were looking at Google and Facebook, but that was a little fringy back then. Investment banking, strategy consulting. That was the top of the line. And so I ended up getting a job at UBS, which is a, uh, huge investment bank, and I was in their, their office in New York, in Manhattan. I started my career in the summer of 2008. This was. As the financial crisis was really hitting, and the group I was placed in at UBS, it’s called the Financial Institutions Group, meaning that I was focused on investment banking for clients in the financial sector. Meaning my clients were banks, insurance companies, asset managers, financial technology companies, things like that.

So the companies I. Was responsible for advising. These were the very companies that were having big problems, and my own bank was having big problems. So very stressful time for me and for everyone in New York, but especially for someone who was a perfectionist, wanted to do everything well, and I was just being given work around the clock. I remember going months straight without a day off, and that included weekends. It was not imaginable. I, I, I remember when I first started, if I left the office before 2:00 AM that was a good day. Because I knew I could get a few hours of sleep and be ready to go, so it was just around the clock and I knew I didn’t wanna continue with that. I actually had this interesting predicament because the, the, the analyst program, when you start in investment banking, typically it’s a two year program and then it, you can get promoted to being a third year analyst, but not everyone is offered that. So I was offered to stay for a third year and many people who are offered it take the offer and if they get another job, they’ll just leave.

But I didn’t wanna risk. Taking the offer and not having another job. So I rejected the offer and wanted to force myself to find something new. And so I ended up, I did find something new. I left a little bit before the end of my two years. This was in 2010, and I joined a firm first in Boston and then in Silicon Valley, which was a spin out of one of the large consulting firms called the Boston Consulting Group. Some of the. Uh, prominent partners there formed this other company, and so the company I was joining it was, it felt a little bit like a startup because it was newly formed, but it had the big company culture because the partners came out of the Boston Consulting Group. So I felt like that would be a good transition into something a little bit different.

But really there were a lot of similarities. Um, in this job, I was focused on the technology. Broadly speaking in that I was focused on companies with intellectual property, and that spans many industries, basically anyone who’s innovating that could be in semiconductors, energy, automotive, if you really think about it. Basically every industry has some kind of intellectual property, telecom, so I, I got a lot of experience to many industries and I spent 10 years at this company and became a partner eventually. Uh, I, I learned a lot. I saw corruption in the world, which was helpful for me to see. For example, when you’re dealing with intellectual property, a valuable patent by definition in, in a marketplace is one where companies are using the technology, meaning they’re infringing.

On the patent, but they don’t have a license or permission to do so because then you can extract value from all those companies that are using your technology without permission. Sometimes that means you have to go to court and you can be in multi-year litigation, especially if the technology’s very valuable. So I saw those dynamics at play. Some of my clients were big companies, but others were small companies, and I was particularly drawn to the smaller companies who innovated things, invented stuff that enables. Major technologies to work. For example, imagine a technology that allows us to work, use our cell phones, something in the semiconductor chips.

There’s so many different inventions, and I worked with companies that were doing really important things that had widespread use and sometimes. Big companies were taking the invention and didn’t have a license to do so, and I saw what would happen. Sometimes the big company would just take them to court. They would end up sitting in court for years and years, and the small company doesn’t have an ability to withstand that. And sometimes the big companies would use the media. To make the small company look like a, a quote unquote troll, even though the small company was the actual inventor. So I saw the games that could happen and the way that, that the minds of the masses could become manipulated and the way that could hurt innocent people who did important things. So there’s this part of me, I give this preface because a lot of what I’ve done with my books, I think is a similar mentality.

Guy:
uh, no, I think it’s so valuable because the, the, the first thing that’s coming to my mind is that you are seeing firsthand a system in play from the backend. Me is Mr. Consumer that’s living in a world where we’ve got the educational system, the, you know, economic system, the government, the governance system, the financial system, all that. All we see is what is, what message is portrayed at the end consumer. And when we look at that, to me it feels like all everyone’s saying the right thing. The politicians, they’re all just trying to, it feels like. Present a message of support. We’ve got your best interest at heart, but we, we have no idea what’s going on, on the, on the back end of it unless you’re in the, the trenches seeing it firsthand.

Mark:
Yeah, I saw it firsthand and a lot of what I worked with, and it’s, it is a reason I can’t talk about specifics publicly, is typically there are non-disclosure agreements where I was able to see confidential information from lots of companies. So I can’t talk about exactly what happened, but because of that I, I know what was really going on and the level of corruption that exists, it’s real, and that probably helped me this whole exercise to then challenge paradigms. Elsewhere, number one, because I saw that there is a system in place and it’s not fair. It’s not the way we’re taught in school. So that’s that’s point number one. But point number two is because I was working with innovations and patented technologies. A patent that’s granted by definition in the United States is something that is both novel and non-obvious.

So this is an invention. That’s novel compared to everything else out there. And it’s not obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention. That’s the technical term. So I was always looking at these things that were contradicting the mainstream narrative. Otherwise people would not have gotten patents. So I was very familiar with, while this is what the mainstream says, and this is how someone looked at it and said the mainstream is missing something. So I became accustomed to challenging paradigms through this profession, and that’s what I’ve continued into an area that I’m now much more passionate about, about the nature of reality.

But in terms of how I got from this world of intellectual property, and if you knew me back then, guy, I mean, I was spending my weekends sometimes reading about patent law because I wanted to know this stuff so well. I was really into it. And then I had a. Collapse in many ways. Starting, I could trace it to maybe 2014, 2015, but 2016 I felt like I was at rock bottom. I would now call it a dark Night of the soul. In astrology, people would call it a Saturn return, which is what happens around age 30 when your life gets shaken up. But basically, there were some deals I worked on professionally that didn’t go the way that I wanted. Some things in my personal life and dating that didn’t go the way that I wanted.

And on top of that, I thought life was random and meaningless. And I had just come from the great, what I call the, you know, the great financial crisis of 2008. And then I entered a world of intellectual property where. There, the laws changed while I was in the field, so there was this recession in patent values, so that hurt many of the deals I worked on. So I I, I went from one recession to another recession, and most people didn’t know what was going on in the patent world because it’s much more niche. So I, I was thinking to myself, I’ve worked hard for all these years. What am I actually doing? What do I want? Nothing seems to be working out and we’re all gonna die, and when we die, it’s lights out.

So why does any of this matter? And at the time I was not looking for something new. I remember the first little domino was a friend of mine sent me a Tim Ferriss podcast interview with Mark Andreesen, who’s a famous venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. And I just thought it was so cool back in 2016 that you could listen to such a smart investor talk for hours. So I started listening to podcasts and Tim Ferris was talking about psychedelics. And ways of healing, anxiety and other issues in a way that talk therapy could not do seemingly, and there was a few episodes, but one that stands out, he was talking about sensory deprivation tanks where you get in salt water and there’s so much salt that your body floats, like you’re in the womb.

So I was living in San Francisco. I decided to try that. I, I, I was hesitant on the psychedelics. I didn’t want to go down that route. But I, I remember in one of the first episodes I heard. Martine Polanco was on Tim Ferris talking about Iboga, which is an alkaloid that comes from Iboga, an African root. That apparently helps. Vets with PTSD helps people with addictions. So I remember hearing about that and I was very interested and, and I mention that now because I recently decided to do ibogaine. So I have all sorts of thoughts that it took me 10 years to actually do that in seven books. Uh, but my journey started there of like, well, what’s going on?

Why does psychedelics help people? Are there other ways to have similar experiences without having to ingest a substance? So I was getting into things like meditation and Wim Hof breathing, and I was on this path of exploration. I came across a podcast called Extreme Health Radio, where they were talking about alternative ways of treating disease basically. And that was my first real foray into alternative health. And I thought it was super interesting people curing themselves of cancer, or at least claiming to do that without allopathic medicine, the mainstream world. And one day there was an episode with a woman named Laura Powers on Extreme Health Radio, who wasn’t talking about medicine per se, but she was talking about healing using.

Spiritual energy, and she communicated with angels and interdimensional beings and talked about psychic phenomena. So this was a big shift for me to hear that on a podcast that seemed at least somewhat scientific, because the hosts of the show have talked to so many people and they were taking Laura seriously. So that blew me away. I said, wait a second, what is going on here? And then Lara mentioned her own podcast on that show. It’s called Healing Powers. So I decided to listen to her podcast and it was person after person talking about the science of consciousness they would have after death. Communications, communicating with people that had died, for example, or, um, basically everything in the spiritual realm, the idea that we’re interconnected at some level.

It was person after person, after person, IB, her podcast every episode from 2016, back to 2011. I listened to them all and I was flabbergasted because I couldn’t reason why so many people. Who were from different walks of life, different backgrounds were coming to a similar conclusion about the nature of reality. And it was not the one that I thought was true because I thought we lived in a random and meaningless universe, and that when you die, that’s the end. And if you talked about spiritual things, you were being superstitious. And I was confronted with a very big shift of, wait a second, maybe your whole identity is wrong.

The your thought about your identity mark is wrong, that we are spiritual beings, perhaps. Maybe reincarnation is real. I came across the University of Virginia’s division of perceptual studies, over 2,500 cases of young children that remember a life that is not their own. And sometimes there are historical records validating what the children said, or they have birthmarks or deformities in their body that align with the way that the person died in the previous life. These are just a few tidbits. Um, this is one chapter in my book. And then to upside down, thinking there’s a lot more. So this was blowing me away. I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t have people to talk to. None of my friends were interested in this sort of thing or family. This was way out there and I worked with lots of healers and psychics and people that were doing alternative stuff and they became counselors and the more I researched, I started to read books and and peer reviewed papers, and I.

Came across the University of Virginia. I came across Princeton, which had a lab called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab for nearly 30 years, which I did not know about when I was an undergrad run by the Dean of Engineering, Dr. Robert John, studying psychic phenomena and showing that it’s real. I came across the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which has five decades worth of peer reviewed research. And careful examination of psychic phenomena and things of that nature related to consciousness. And since 2019, I’ve been on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. So I was blown away. I realized there was something real here.

I decided a year later in 2017, I should write a book about this. I wrote the book. I was very lucky to get connected with Bill Gladstone at Waterside Productions. He read my email, which I couldn’t believe, and he. Signed me as, um, I became, he became my literary agent and he said, I really like the book, but the title’s gonna be an end to upside down thinking. So I said, okay, that sounds good. And then that book was published in 2018 and basically goes through different areas of evidence suggesting that consciousness does not come from the brain. And if that is new to your audience, life changing. To go into that, and I’ll just quickly finish up here, 2019. I then produced a podcast with one of my buddies from Baltimore who entered the media industry, and it’s called Where Is My Mind?

It’s an eight episode series. It’s still available on Spotify, apple Podcast, all the major players. It’s a short series that you can binge. You start with episode one, go to episode eight in order, and the episodes are 30 to 45 minutes each, roughly. I interviewed 50 people. Scientists, people who’ve had near death experiences, but also the people who are running the studies, so you get to hear their voices rather than just reading the quotes from my book, and I’ve heard from many people still today, in 2026, people will say that that podcast, wheres my mind, had a big impact on them.

That took me to the end of 2019. And I was a partner at my firm at the time. I had became a partner in 2018, and I was not feeling it anymore. I just really was not as interested in the intellectual property world. I felt like my energy was being pulled where I would have to spend time with clients or with my colleagues, and it was bringing me down versus when I would research, I was creative and expanded. So I decided to leave my firm. I gave notice to my business partners that I was gonna leave. I didn’t know what I was gonna do next, and when I made the decision to leave, the idea for book number two came in because at the time I thought it was just an end to upside down thinking, bill Gladstone at Waterside, he was always asking me.

What the next book was gonna be. He told me I was gonna write lots of books and because he had come up with that title and end to upside down thinking it was very easy to come up with the next few. So he would kudos to Bill for that. The next one, in end to Upside Down Living, I wrote as I was transitioning outta my firm early 2020. And here we are. I’ve written about a number of other topics, like you said, politics, economics, UFOs, medicine, cosmology, and a lot more.

Guy:
Holy shit. Did you see a mid partner in your firm? Did I hear that? So that would’ve been a big deal for you to walk away from all that.

Mark:
It was a huge deal in my early thirties. I had a very secure career path that I had spent 10 years at that firm building up, not, that doesn’t even include the investment banking in New York, and that was my life. So I had to make this decision. What really matters to me. And I had, because of my worldview, I think we are spiritual beings. Having a human existence, basically, I think the source of our existence, meaning we would not exist if not for some spiritual divine source. Some would call that God, whatever it is, we would not exist without it. And therefore, I feel that there can be no purpose to life other than trying to serve our source, because we wouldn’t even be here without that source. And that means my priorities necessarily shifted and I felt like what I was doing in my job. Would, would not be of the same service as doing something else. So I needed to give myself space not knowing what would come. But once I had the space, it seems that things seemed to come into my life and I have to start saying yes to them, and I can see when I’m lit up by something or not.

Guy:
That’s beautiful, man, because I can’t tell you how many, um, people I come across that feel stuck. They feel trapped. And the the, the courage to take that leap, you know, is terrifying. It’s terrifying.

Mark:
I appreciate you saying that, but at the time it, there was some terror of, wait, am I really doing this? But it also did not feel that courageous in many ways. It would’ve felt courageous or more painful to stay in my job because of the way I was looking at life. How could I not? Uh, go toward what I think is aligned with reality. Otherwise, I would just make myself sick physically and mentally. And I agree with you. I think that’s a lot of the world today is people wanting to suppress those feelings to stay with what they’ve been told is the path.

Guy:
Yeah, no, I was in the exact same boat. I sold my company in 2000, end of 2017, 18, to take the leap into what I’m doing now, which is running events and retreats. It felt absolutely crazy at the time, but it, but it, but when you start to, when you have that knowing inside that with, there’s something far greater than this. With us, then everything changes, you know? That’s for sure. One thing that’s coming in, uh, as a question for you, not that I wanna sound like a conspiracy theorist in any way or anything, but do you, do you feel everything is set up to keep us disconnected from source?

I am standing here right now in Lake Topo in a beautiful retreat space, and there’s a vast difference between an intellectual experience and passive listening to a fully embodied lived experience. ’cause that’s what retreats can do. They can help you land, start to truly reconnect to yourself. To others, to nature and to spirit as well. There’s so much in it. That’s why we created Live and Flow, and that’s why we are so passionate about getting this work out there and bringing people together. If you wanna find out more when our next retreat or event is coming up, just check out the link below and now back to the podcast.

Mark:
It’s a great question, and I think this question has been part of the reason I’ve continued to write, because the more I look, the more it feels like there is some thread of intentional deception. There’s innocent deception. For example, let’s say there’s a professor who’s had his or her whole career focused on one way of looking at reality. That person has a psychological incentive. It may be a financial one to say, no, these other ideas, we wanna shoot them down because I wanna say that I was right. I don’t wanna say that I, theories have been wrong from my whole career. So there’s some of that. Psychological incentive and perhaps financial incentive to keep ideas down.

But I think also there’s something spiritual, and the term that I use in my later books is spiritual war. That we live in a world clearly where it’s not all light forces. We know there are dark forces. We can just turn on the news any day. It’s not all light. Even if the ultimate reality, to me, the highest, highest level of reality is benevolent. We live in a world of duality where you see other things, and if you imagine it from that lens. If you, if you were a being that cared about power and not love and interconnectivity, you would want to keep people away from the truth and in ignorance. So it makes a lot of sense just logically speaking that this truth would want to be suppressed by some people.

And we see this happening everywhere where, let’s say on Wikipedia, for example, Dr. Dean Radden for many years, and Rupert Shedrick, the, the term pseudo scientist, things like that will come up. So imagine if you have a, a new person who’s looking at this field and they just go on Wikipedia and the good stuff has been suppressed and it’s all negative. That’s just one example out of many, and you’re making me think of a, a text that I’ve referenced in some of my books. It’s called the Nag Hamadi Scriptures, and these were uncovered in 1945 bound books in jars found in Egypt in the ground, uh, written in Coptic originally and translated in into English in the 1970s. And these are considered to be gnostic Christian texts. So they, they talk about Jesus, for example, but there are many different. Texts within the scriptures and some of the scriptures talk about origin stories, meaning the origin of this world. And there’s a very similar narrative within these scriptures.

And it goes something like this, that basically there there is a oneness. And to me, when I read that, it sounds like, okay, they’re referring to God, whatever we want to call that. And within that oneness, there are beings that spawned off of it. So Individuations off of the oneness, and somewhere along the line there was a rogue being and that rogue being created, the world that we’re in and the the scriptures say things like this, this, I’ll paraphrase the rulers through humanity into a state of confusion and a life of toil so that they would be distracted with things of the world and not have time to be occupied by the Holy Spirit. It speaks of basically spiritual beings who knew that the humans had the divine spark within them, the connection to the ultimate oneness. But the world that we live in is one in which there’s a lot of suppression, where there’s a desire to keep the humans in ignorance, and even in those scriptures, which are, I mean, that that has a darker conspiratorial take.

The ultimate outcome is they say that the light overcomes the darkness. And this is of course just one set of scriptures, but when I read those texts, I said, oh my goodness, I can’t believe these were written so long ago because it actually describes the world that I, I seem to live in very well. Mm-hmm.

Guy:
totally. Totally. Because like it just feels that. Everything is getting perpetuated as we continually throw in rocks at someone and we pointing fingers and we, we, we can blame. And to me, it, it just feels like when we’re in that state of anger, like you, I mean, I know nothing about politics, right? Like I, I’m very focused on how can I create space to help people reconnect to themselves. That’s my journey, my mission. And that feels like that’s my contribution to the greater source intelligence, right? So I’m very focused on that. So a lot of. But when you look at, say, politics or whatever’s going on in the states, or you got the Epstein files that are flying around at the moment and everything, it feels like everything is constantly just getting perpetuated to keep us in a state of fear, anger, and then we can point fingers and throw rocks at it and say, well, that’s the problem. But then nothing ever gets resolved. It’s just a new villain on a different day that will happen further down the road. It’s like we keep kicking the can down the road.

Mark:
it’s well said. I see the same picture where, what a, a lot of what’s happening in the media. In, in terms of politics is getting people to hate each other. And sometimes I, I, I see more hatred these days from people claiming to be compassionate than I’ve ever seen. It’s almost like we’re so compassionate that we’re gonna hate you for not being compassionate enough, and we are justified in our hatred, and it’s just getting more and more intense as if there were a concerted effort to get people to hate each other. So I agree with you. I think there is a dark, a darkness to all this, but the flip side of anything dark is that it exposes truth. So we could call it dark, but it’s also helping us get to the truth and get to what needs to be resolved or perhaps what’s unhealed. Because that’s the other thing I see in a lot of the political discourse is what is triggering an individual to get so upset? What within them is unresolved? What trauma are they not dealing with in their own life where they projected out and something in the world they can focus it on rather than looking at themselves.

Guy:
Yeah, totally. Totally. So once you let’s, I, I keep going on this trajectory, if that’s all right on your timeline, then while we go through the conversation, because you’ve, you’ve gone, you’ve written these two books, then, then COVID happened, right? Uh, I think maybe even our, our conversation was, was due in the lockdown. I can’t quite remember. And COVID was an interesting time for me because I, we had the birth of our first daughter, so it was very. Uh, contained. We just like put a, almost like a barrier around us and just focused on raising a child in, in those precious first few months, you know, which, um, which served me well actually. But I’m interested, was that, was that then a, a, another, a evoke for you to start to lean into going beyond just this thread of consciousness that, that you were speaking of?

Mark:
It really was because at the time when I wrote An End to Upside Down Living, which is a synthesis of philosophy, spiritual philosophy, personal development, based on the idea that consciousness does not come from the brain. So the first book is the, the scientific Evidence. The consciousness does not come from the brain, IE the spiritual is actually real. But the next book is, okay, how do I think about living my life? And I aggregated teachings from. All over the world and tried to create a guide for myself, but also for others of what are the ways of thinking about prioritizing various aspects of life? How do we orient our compass? And to me that felt like the ultimate thing to write about.

Like, okay, what else is there to to think about this? This is it. I feel like I don’t know all the answers, but at least I framed it out. And then 2020 hit and the world went crazy. There were questions medically where people were very divided on medical issues, but also politically, where there were people. Who, let’s say, among the people who might have agreed with my prior writings, they’d have vastly different views on what should be happening in politics. And at the time, I had no views on politics because I never cared about it. I cared about it only to the extent that there was new legislation related to my job previously, but I didn’t know the difference between a Democrat and a Republican in the us.

I was that naive. I just didn’t care. So I was so confused about what was happening. All these people are saying that, that this side is evil or this side is evil. And I thought to myself, well, where do I stand on this stuff? I need to have an opinion on it. So I became very interested in what was going on medically, politically, economically, and that’s what led me to write my third book, an End to Upside Down Liberty, which is, is looking at basically political and economic theory, blending in consciousness. So the big question I asked is how should we structure society and how does that relate to what the nature of reality is? Because if reality is a certain thing, then we should probably structure society politically and economically to align with reality. And I hadn’t seen that done in the literature. I saw elements of the politics in the economics, but I didn’t see consciousness.

Metaphysics blended into it. So in that book, I ultimately propose what I call a metaphysical political philosophy that would be ideal, that would align with natural law as we see in the realm of consciousness. And that was a big deal for me to write the book because as we know now in 2026, politics is a very polarizing area. In 2021, if you and your audience can remember, I mean, tensions were very high, and I knew I was gonna come out with a book that would automatically upset some people, so I was very stressed about it and had to overcome that fear. I think of all the books I’ve written, that was the most stressful because it represented the biggest departure, and in some ways felt like the biggest risk, even though I’ve written about other things that sound crazier later. That was a huge one for me.

Guy:
Wow. What happened when you released it?

Mark:
There were people who were upset with me, which I expected, but then there were people who were happy about it and wanted to talk to me. So it opened up new avenues because previously I wasn’t really known in the political or economic worlds. And so it, it opened up stuff. And then a third thing happened, which is that it was ignored. And I found that with a lot of my work is that the, the, the amount of. Both feedback and consumption of my work is way less than I would’ve expected, or I put so much work in and I would expect more people to perhaps read it or it would be, it would feel more satisfying if more people knew what I actually said.

And it was a pretty slow uptake and it still is today. I mean, people, even though the book’s, the first one came out in 2018, people go back and read them and I tried to write them such that they are timeless. These are general topics that conceptually will matter at any point in time. At least that was my goal, but. When we’re dealing with issues that challenge people’s thought processes so much, it is a big ask to say, Hey, absorb this thing when you’re dealing with your family and kids and your job to rethink your whole life and rethink politics and economics and reality. Not everyone wants to do that.

Guy:
I get it. I mean, it feels like we are intentionally kept stressed and just enough to be surviving and that these, these bigger questions, these bigger topics, uh. A struggle to really lean into, unless you have a dark night of the soul, unless you, your pain gets so great that there’s a, there’s an awakening process and you think, shit, what have I been doing for half of my life? I’ve gotta look at all this now. And, and here it is. And then all of a sudden you’re like, oh my God, there’s other people talking about this. There’s Mark over here. He is, he’s saying these, these things. Just on that topic though, ’cause I really feel the listeners. That tune into my podcast would be really interested in all these things. ’cause it feels like a time on the planet. I’ve had multiple conversations, even different scientists come on. I’ve had the heart moth. Um, founder come on as well. Um, uh, uh, Roland

Mark:
Rolling

Guy:
Yeah. As well. And that amazing, amazing minds and everyone’s speaking about this. Evolution on the planet right now and consciousness is shifting and, and that we’re all part of this, this change, and we are gonna see systems, structures maybe start to collapse, but there’s a constant perpetuation of fear as well. I’m interested to know, like from when you wrote that book on liberty and tackle the, the topic of politics as well. What was like your biggest holy shit moment from all that research you did, you know, if you were to, to look back at that and, and what does even liberty mean to you? Because I, I’m still not clear on that either.

Mark:
The way I’d summary summarize it is as follows, which is the way we do politics all over the world violates basic spiritual principles. That was something I hadn’t thought about. And the, the technical term in politics is known as stateism, which is the belief that there needs to be a compulsory political monopoly that rules people in a certain territory. And we call that government. And there might be different parties running the government in any given time, but the structure, regardless of the party running, it is a compulsory political monopoly, meaning you don’t have a free market. To choose from other political service providers within that territory.

There’s one government no matter who’s running it, whereas in a marketplace, for example, let’s say you wanted to hire a lawyer, you could go out and try to find different lawyers that are providing that service to you. Very important service. And if you found a lawyer that you liked, you would compare it to the other ones, and you would freely choose, voluntarily, choose that one lawyer, and then you’d sign a contract. Together, you’d sit down and say, this is what the price is gonna be. This is how we terminate all the things you do in a typical business deal. We don’t do that with government. We’re, we’re technically the customer, but we’re not really a customer. We don’t have explicit, we have not given explicit consent, mutually agreed upon consent.

The government can do things. We didn’t ask it to. Do. We have this implied consent, a social contract, so to speak. So government is really a service provider. It imp it provides very important services like legal services, roads, you name it, military. These are important things in society, but government has special privileges in a marketplace. You don’t have special privileges. If you do a bad job, you go outta business. In government, if you go out, if you do a bad job, you collect tax revenue and, and the real rub here. Is as follows. Actually, before that, I want to go into a logical contradiction. ’cause your audience, if your, if your audience is new to this, this is jarring stuff and I wouldn’t expect you to just like, accept it.

This took me a long time. But, um, the, the belief most people have is, well, mark, I hear, I hear what you’re saying, but you’re being very unrealistic here because people, human beings by nature are warlike and untrustworthy. So we need to have a structure in place to control the people because we don’t trust people. So their solution to this is we’re gonna look at all the people in society within a certain territory, and we’re gonna take a subset of the people we don’t trust and put them inside of a political monopoly. And somehow, magically, we’ll trust them then. And we’re gonna trust the people that we don’t trust to properly elect those people and the people we don’t trust, to then make sure the elections are done in a free and fair manner. The logic destroys itself. People say, we don’t need government because we don’t trust people. And if you don’t trust people, you would never trust government because it’s run by people. So that’s a big problem, number one. But moving to the spiritual topic, there’s a philosophy in, in a political thinking, it’s called the non-aggression principle, and I haven’t come across someone who disagrees with it.

It’s very simple. Which is that no one should initiate any aggression against your body or the property that you, you own. And your property could be your land, your money, anything physical that you own. No one should initiate any form of aggression against your body or the property you own. And if someone does, you have a right to defend yourself. And aggression could be physical violence, fraud, theft, coercion, anything like that. Very simple principle. Don’t initiate aggression. And if someone does, you have a right to self-defense. This to me is the link. It’s the corollary to spiritual, perhaps natural law. And I’ll now go into the realm of consciousness very briefly with the science of near-death experience. So these are instances where a person has little or no brain functioning, and yet their consciousness is expanded into some other realm and they come back with insights and some of those insights. Might help us get to what natural law is, and that’s the tie to politics. So for example, there might be some people who say that a near death experience is just a hallucination that occurs when the brain is dying.

There are multiple reasons not to believe that. For example, there’s something called a shared death experience where a person who’s healthy co relives in the dying process with the person who’s dying somehow. And it’s reported just like a near death experience, even though the person is healthy. But in near-death experiences where the person is resuscitated and comes back and does have a dying brain, they often report an out-of-body experience, meaning their consciousness was hovering over their body, sometimes went to another room, and sometimes the report they come back with is accurate. So they say, the doctor was resuscitating me in this way, or I heard this conversation in another room. This is important because those observations can be verified by the doctors, by family members. And the the doctors can timestamp when that memory occurred, and we can know what the body was doing at the time.

So when people come back with these memories, they’re called vertical out of body experiences, meaning that the memory is verified as accurate by people who were not having a near death experience. That means we have a non hallucinatory consciousness experienced from a vantage point outside the body at a time when the body was either clinically dead or the brain was barely functional. It should never occur under the current mainstream model. But if consciousness is something beyond the brain and beyond the body, when there’s a near-death experience, it’s almost like the consciousness is liberated. The brain was getting in the way and the near-death experience allowed consciousness to go well beyond.

I give that preface because if the near-death experience is at least sometimes not a hallucination, that means we need to take seriously what people are reporting. It’s not just made up stuff. Potentially. So often people have a life review. They relive their whole life in a flash, a very short amount of time, and they become the people that they affected in their life. I interviewed in my podcast series, where Is My Mind, a man named Danien Brinkley, who’s had four of these experiences and each time he had to relive his life from the beginning of his life, and his first one was very traumatic. He told me because he relived his combat days in Vietnam and he became the people that he killed in combat. He felt what it was like to be them through their eyes. So he felt all their pain. He also felt the pain of children that would no longer have a father because he killed the father in combat. He told me it was less, it was not as strong, but he felt the indirect effects. So when he came back from his near death experience, like many people do, he changed his priorities.

He became much less materialistic, and he decided to become a hospice volunteer, helping people go through the dying process, not knowing he would later in life have near death experiences. The first time he was struck by lightning. He was electrocuted, but then he later had open heart surgery twice and brain surgery once, and had these near death experiences where he had a life review and he had to relive the tough stuff again, the painful stuff. But he also got to relive the new material where he was the person dying in the hospice bed, bed, getting to be comforted by himself. So he got to feel the love and comfort he gave those people. The point here is that something about the golden rule. Which all the cultures around the world talk about this idea that we should treat others well because we’re all interconnected in some way. Treat others as you would like to be treated, assuming you’re not a masochist. That’s, that’s the golden rule, basically. So what many people who study near-death experiences say is that the golden rule is not just a nice idea, but it’s actually something that’s foundational to this reality. It’s somehow embedded in reality as.

Law and Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia, who studies near death experiences makes this comment in his book. His book is called After, where he chronicles near death experiences. He makes this assertion that the near-death experiences are near-death. Experiencers are saying the golden rule is something beyond mere morality. It’s actually a law of nature, a natural law. So if the golden rule is natural law, if we take that as a presupposition. Then how could we structure our society with political organizations that can do things that you did not explicitly consent to, that would violate natural law, that would violate the Golden Rule.

And really the non-aggression principle is just an extension of the golden rule. Now, some people might say, well, mark, no, no, you’re crazy here because now we have democracy and democracy is a good thing. But think about democracy. And this is getting into political theory, uh, and economic theory work. Murray Rothbard, for example, was one of the big inspirations for me. He wrote many books, including one called for a New Liberty, but he makes his point about democracy. It’s, it’s a form of tyranny. It’s one group of people that we call the majority getting to impose its will on other people, the minority. And he makes this joke that if the majority says that the minority, they should kill the minority. That’s a Democratic, the majority said. So under the, the guise of democracy, that would be voluntary suicide on behalf of the minority. They’re just part of the democracy. So you see democracy as a form of tyranny, and this is where a lot of the manipulation has come in. And we were not taught this in school.

Guy:
No, thank you for that detailed explanation. And when you start pulling back the curtain, you’re just like, what the fuck is going on? Like, come on. Is it like, but it, it comes back to, unless we don’t. Unless we start waking up to ourselves, we’re never gonna wake up to these, these bigger systems to or, or what’s a player or start questioning things and even then it can feel daunting and scary and think, well, what’s gonna happen? And it’s very easy to shut back down. Interfere. Before we wrap up the podcast, I’m interested to think, because obviously you’ve tackled other, um, topics as well through your books as well. How do you now navigate the world? Like, how do you make choices? How can people feel empowered by this? ’cause if you spend too long thinking about the way governments run in politics, like it’s, it’s like, oh my God. Like they’re just, you know, oblivious to it. Because there must be good hearted people in these systems that are doing their best. But the, the system itself is, is. Denying us of our sovereignty, our our rights.

Mark:
Right. I, I’m not saying that every person in the political world is evil. I’m saying the structure in which they exist is inherently in violation of spiritual principles, whether the person means well or not. And how do I navigate this? It’s a great question because when I first started down this road, it was so upsetting the evil that I was coming across. I mean, we’ve only scratched the surface. There’s some dark stuff and the way that there’s really light stuff too, and people doing amazing things, there’s really dark stuff. People psychopathic behavior, and a psychopath is a, is a phenomenon known in psychology where a person lacks empathy and thrives on the pain of others.

That’s a real thing, unfortunately, even if it’s a small percentage of society. So I got into that stuff and I had to stop at a certain point where I got, I said, I got the point here. I understand what’s going on. I don’t want to. Bring myself into the darkness and it’s a, there’s a fine line because I’m glad I learned about it. I think it’s important to know it exists, but then not to get sucked in. So we need to have discernment to know how to navigate in the world. And the way I describe it in my books is, especially my book, an End to the Upside Down Reset. I talk a lot about the danger of blind compassion, where something that sounds really nice on the surface is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, in which case you could be a compassionate kind person who supports a cause that is actually hurting people.

So we need to have compassion with discernment, not blind compassion. This is vital ’cause we see a lot of blind compassion in the world today, and this is really the answer to your question is keeping the discernment, knowing just enough. Trying to figure out what that is to be able to navigate and then having compassion in the world. But then also, as I said earlier, Ken Wilber’s framework, thinking about waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up. How am I elevating myself in each of those areas, not just one. What are the things within myself that are still unresolved that I could be better at unresolved traumas or darker parts or emotions that haven’t been released.

I mentioned IGA earlier. I think it’s an incredible tool. It’s not the only modality, but this is a, a plant-based alkaloid that is a divine intelligence that can get inside your psyche. It’s a very intense experience, but help you uproot things that might be difficult to access otherwise. So it’s a matter of finding out where we are in our own journey and, and, and also considering our life circumstances and the things we’re committed to, but figuring out how can we improve in all these areas? Because to me, what else could we be doing? Souls here in this, in this place. There must be something that we’re here to do some broader purpose. And when we orient our consciousness, I think that’s a very powerful exercise. Dr. David Hawkins talked about this, one of my favorite spiritual teachers who I never met in person, ’cause he passed away before I started on this path, but he wrote a book called Letting Go, the Pathway of Surrender, which I recommend to everyone.

That’s one of the best books out there. But he makes this point that all you need to do is have the spiritual intention. That’s the first step of this is what I care about in my life. I want to grow myself spiritually to serve the divine, whatever, however you wanna describe it in your own words. Then what happens is that life will unfold in a way that matches this intention. Maybe not overnight, but reality actually starts to shift. So the first step is how do we orient our compass? And this is my second book and End Upside Down Living. I asked that question of how are we orienting our compass for living and setting an overall intention for life? So that would be my advice is to learn a lot because that will help us fine tune what the intention is, fine tune the compass, but then when we do that, life changes and it can be uncomfortable.

That’s the other part of this where, um, I mean, it’s been disorienting for me each of these paradigm shifts and, and getting in the comfort of saying, well, whatever I thought was true about myself and about the world, maybe I’m gonna have to throw it out and start over again. That is a prerequisite for this journey.

Guy:
What a, what a journey, mate. Like hats off to your mate. It’s amazing what you, what you’re, what you’re doing. You know, I think back to the COVID times, like, and I think of myself in my mid forties at the time of how. The guy in his mid late twenties or early thirties would’ve responded in that and it was very different. And there was a lot of my own spiritual growth that had happened during that time before COVID had happened. And I felt like all the inner work that I’d done had given me the tools to really start to navigate this from a very different perspective and Advant vantage point that was key to my decision making compared to the guy 10 years previously.

So that was a big lesson for me as well in terms of that. So I, I look at that in my life today of always bringing it back inward, like you say on that, that journey to the connection, to the intention, to the divine. And we grow from, from that perspective. And, and it definitely helps us navigate moving forward. ’cause that’s the thread that’s behind everything, which is what you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.

Mark:
And, and, um, you’re reminding me of something that might help your audience. So before I, I went into this Iboga journey, and by the way, there, there are health risks with this substance. So if your audience is interested, there’s a lot to consider. I don’t just mean that everyone should do this stuff, and I don’t think it’s for everyone. I didn’t do psychedelics for a long time, but I did a lot of research on this and I went to a place in Mexico called Beyond. It’s called B-E-O-N-D, which I think does the healing process in an incredible way. It’s not just about the medicine, it’s about all the coaching and the massage and the acupuncture and the medicine is part of that, but a big part of what they do there.

It’s helping you fine tune your intentions for the medicine, because if you think about this medicine as sort of a teacher. We have teachers in life where we sit across from a person or we sit on Zoom and they hear things from us and they can sense our energy and they can give us feedback. That’s very different than when you’re dealing with what I consider to be a divine intelligence that somehow unlocks things in your psyche as a teacher in ways that are unimaginable. I will be integrating that for the rest of my life. So this is a very serious, holy, sacred thing that you are engaging in. So when you set the intentions, you gotta be super clear, and I’m glad I did, but I want to tell you and your audience my intentions because they relate to. To me, I wanted to get the most bang for my buck, and I feel like they encompass everything.

So my four intentions were as follows, show me how to serve God. Show me how to love myself. Show me how to receive and give love. Show me how to be fully authentic and show me any blocks getting in the way. Show me how to serve God. Show me how to love myself. Show me how to receive and give love. Show me how to be fully authentic and show me any blocks getting in the way. And I feel like that is a really solid compass. Anything we’re dealing with in life typically flows back into one of those. And really all four are kind of saying the same thing, but just in different ways.

Guy:
Mate, I’m gonna borrow that. That’s amazing. Seriously, is there anything I wish you wish I had asked you today that we haven’t covered before we wrap up the podcast? I feel like we’ve covered a lot.

Mark:
we covered a lot and I appreciate you having me back on, and I appreciate all the work that you’ve been doing.

Guy:
My, where can people find out more? Where, where can we send them?

Mark:
Yeah, my website is my name, mark gober.com. M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E r.com. I’m also on social media, mark Gober, author, Instagram, Twitter X, Facebook, uh, LinkedIn, telegram, for example. And all my books are on Amazon. There are currently seven. I’m not working on one right now. Who knows if I’ll write again, but you can get them in. Hard copy Kindle and audible formats. I narrated all the audibles myself and I also have a podcast series, which is a great place to start. It’s free Go on Apple Podcast or Spotify, eight episodes. It’s called. Where Is My Mind with Mark Gober and Blue Duck Media? Where is my mind if you listen to it? I recommend starting at episode one and going up through episode eight because there is a progression there.

Guy:
Yeah. Amazing. Well, mate, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Maybe you can come back on in the future and we can drill into one of the topics deeper or something if you’re, if you’re open to it. Uh, I really

Mark:
Anytime you’d like.

Guy:
Yeah. Thanks, legend. That was awesome. Thank you.