Mark Gober | An End To Upside Down Thinking: Why Consciousness Matters to Science & Medicine
We have been taught that the brain creates the mind, but the data suggests the exact opposite. What if our entire understanding of the physical world is fundamentally Upside Down?
Mark Gober (Author of An End to Upside Down Thinking) joins Chance Garton to dismantle the "Materialist Superstition." Using declassified CIA documents on remote viewing, Six-Sigma peer-reviewed PSI research, and veridical NDE cases, we prove that consciousness is the primary substrate of reality. It’s time to flip the script on what it means to be human and recognize the non-local power of the "Upside Down" mind.
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In this episode
Core themes
From Wall Street Materialist To Consciousness Author
Gober opens by stressing how different he used to be: a Princeton graduate and tennis captain who became a New York investment banker through the 2008 financial crisis, then a partner at a Silicon Valley strategy firm, and by his own description a hardcore materialist who assumed science had emptied out the old spiritual claims. He dates the turn to the summer of 2016, when podcasts, books and papers became the first domino, and began writing a year later. Six books in the upside down series followed, plus the podcast Where Is My Mind and a board seat at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
The Evidence Gober Puts In Front Of Skeptics
Asked what he finds most compelling, Gober gives three items. First, the CIA documents declassified from the remote viewing program the US government began in the 1970s, which he says state that remote viewing is a real phenomenon, that the implications are revolutionary and the evidence too impressive to dismiss as coincidence; he notes another document declassified days before this April 2024 conversation. Second, Dr. Jessica Utts, the 2016 president of the American Statistical Association, who wrote in a 1995 report that psychic functioning has been well established. Third, Dean Radin's Real Magic, whose sixth chapter reports six sigma results across telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing and precognition.
Near Death Experiences And Verified Memories
Gober argues the strongest near death cases are veridical out of body ones, where a patient in cardiac arrest reports what they saw or overheard and bystanders confirm it. He cites the book The Self Does Not Die, which collects about a hundred such accounts, Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia, whose line that the mind functions better than ever when the brain is not functioning he calls a total reversal of the materialist paradigm, and Dr. Jan Holden of the University of North Texas, who told him these cases wipe out the physiological explanations. Kenneth Ring's Mindsight, on blind experiencers who report sight, extends the point.
Time, Precognition And Rewriting The Story Of Your Past
The conversation then turns to time. Gober revisits Daryl Bem's precognition studies covered by the New York Times, where subjects who studied only after taking a test did better on it, alongside experiments where the body responds before an image appears on screen. He says the definition of time is circular and the past is only an inference, and he borrows David Hawkins's picture of light through a prism producing a hologram viewed from different angles inside one ever present now. Garton answers with biofield tuning work, including reframing a client's Chinese medicine story about her mother's miscarriages and lost Jing, and Gober adds Byron Katie's four questions.
Suppression, Spiritual War And Compassion With Discernment
Closing the free hour, Gober describes organized resistance to this material: guerrilla skeptics rewriting Wikipedia pages, Rupert Sheldrake's entry branding him pseudoscientific, cofounder Larry Sanger calling the site propaganda, and neuroscientist Mario Beauregard telling the Skeptiko podcast that a Canadian institute head would never let him study the brain spiritually. Gober reads this as social engineering and, drawing on An End to Upside Down Contact, as a spiritual war of dark and light that he argues still serves evolution. Responding to a Rupert Spira passage that we are literally each other, he contends oneness alone is insufficient and calls for compassion with discernment.
Quotes
“I was a hardcore materialist and increasingly so as I got older where I thought, well, just science shows us that those old superstitious spiritual religious beliefs, there's nothing to them.”
“I've learned the body is in your mind rather than the other way around directly from being a biofield tuning practitioner.”
“Therefore, we have a functional and non-hallucinatory consciousness at a time when the brain should not be able to produce anything like that.”
“That five, six, 7% variance from the expected probability becomes exponentially less probable when it's repeated over and over and over again.”
“Is it all from the brain or is the brain receiving consciousness and even memories or is it like a transducer, a filtering mechanism?”
“There is no file cabinet of cells that contains the record of what you did on Tuesday, July 11th, 1972. That just doesn't exist.”
“I think the only thing with certainty any of us can know is that in the present moment, we have the feeling that we're conscious right now.”
“So what I've talked about in other books is the notion of compassion with discernment rather than just one or the other.”
Mark Gober is an author and speaker who researches the intersection of consciousness, near-death experiences, and UFO/contact phenomena, arguing in his book "An End to Upside Down Contact" that such experiences arise from consciousness rather than physical extraterrestrial visitation.
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