Neuroscientist Discusses Proof of Spiritual Phenomena in her Book

Mona Sobhani, author of the book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist's Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe, explains in the beginning of her book the following, "At the beginning of this journey, I would have been the least likely person to tell this story. I was vehemently opposed to religion and spirituality because science was my religion. I lived and breathed the wonders of the human brain as a neuroscientist." She goes on to explain that a series of life events led Sobhani down a path of researching consciousness and now she is someone "who is open to the idea of past lives and karma, believes weird things happen all the time that our scientific framework can't explain, and generally finds herself saying things straight out of ancient spiritual texts, not because I needed comfort, but because that's where the evidence led me."

Sobhani says the following, which is extremely refreshing coming from a scientist, "One thing I hope to never do again is have the audacity to think that we already know all the answers to the mysteries of the Universe. Another reason for putting the story down into writing is to add my name to the long list of scientists, philosophers, and physicists who think it is imperative that we update the scientific paradigm beyond scientific materialism for long overdue innovative breakthroughs in physics, neuroscience, and medicine. One of the first things we learn in statistics is that you can't just throw away outlying data points. Yet modern scientists do that consistently with any data that doesn't fit a scientific materialist framework."

Sobhani goes on to explain that out of curiosity she begins going to intuitives with a group of her friends. They take notes and review their notes afterward to verify if the psychics are frauds. They find the readings to be very accurate. Sobhani explains that on her drive to a friend's house, she is listening to a podcast episode featuring a renowned psychic named Laura Lynne Jackson. Jackson explains the purpose of life in a very simple way; however, it puts all the puzzle pieces together for Sobhani. Jackson says the following, "Our purpose as souls on the Earth is to learn lessons that evolve and advance our souls, and we do this through many different lives (i.e., reincarnation). The thing that ties us all together is love, which she described as a binding light energy. Like all things in nature, there needs to be balance, so karma helps keep that balance. She also described the concept of soul groups, the groups of souls with whom we allegedly tend to continuously reincarnate." Jackson recommends the book, Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss. Sobhani goes on to explain this was her next stop on her journey.

As Sobhani is reading Many Lives, Many Masters she is impressed with Dr. Weiss's scientific background and his professional career. Essentially, this book provides Sobhani with an educated viewpoint of the purpose of life and reincarnation. I actually wrote about this book in my blog post on reincarnation, so you can read about it here: Reincarnation. Sobhani explains that based on the book she learns the following, "We have souls that incarnate on Earth to learn specific lessons through the events and relationships that make up a lifetime here. The point of learning the lessons is to evolve our souls and advance up through levels of spiritual being. The lessons are things like learning to be kind, patient, and loving. Karma is real, and there are karmic debts to be paid that help you advance. The reason there are so many lives is that there are so many karmic debts to be paid and many lessons to learn. Souls change race, sex, religions, and physical health or impairment throughout the different incarnations to learn everything by experience. Before birth, souls choose their parents, circumstances of life, and a plan for the upcoming life. So all the participant souls agree to the relationships. Souls are given a preview of the major events and key people they will encounter in a given lifetime. According to the Masters, the purpose of life was to fully comprehend compassion, nonviolence, love, nonjudgement, nonprejudice, patience, generosity, charity, and hope. We are supposed to become aware that we are all interconnected, that energy connects us all, and that we never really die."

Sobhani goes on to explain that as a scientist, she was still a skeptic...that was until she realized there were many clinical psychology or psychiatry practitioners with similar findings on past life regression. Sobhani says, "There were thousands and thousands of stories of past life regression healing people both emotionally and physically. Some practitioners even began specializing in that special state between lives after a person had died in a past life and where patients could meet with spirit guides (other souls that have signed up to help guide your life and keep you on track for your soul's purpose) and obtain more information about spirituality and human life." Sobhani goes on to say, "Additionally, there have been cases where patients report large amounts of factually correct historical information, and even cases of xenoglossy, where patients will spontaneously begin speaking a foreign language that the personality from the purported past life knows, but that that current person has never learned!"

Sobhani says that once she learned about reincarnation, karma, and soul lessons from researching mediums, past life regression, and children remembering past lives, she finds out that people that have had near death experiences also encounter past lives. She is shocked that this research is out in the world and she was never aware of it. She says, "This wasn't woo-woo; this was evidence." She goes on to say, "I would say that my biggest wonder came from how a nearly identical spiritual narrative about reincarnation, karma, and soul lessons emerged from individuals of all faiths under various circumstances."

Sobhani then decides to research the details of the scientific experiments and studies already completed by other scientists. She says the following about mediumship, "Research into mediumship has come a long way since the infamous seances of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Researchers have leveraged modern scientific methods to evaluate the accuracy of information that mediums report having anomalously received from deceased individuals." Sobhani says that she followed up with one of the founders, Mark Boccuzzi of the Windbridge Research Center that provided an impressive amount of scientific research on mediumship. Sobhani says that she met with Boccuzzi on a zoom call to discuss his research. She finds out the following from Boccuzzi, "It was not only difficult to do the research because there were no mainstream funding sources for parapsychology (or 'psi', as it is now known) research, but they also suffered attacks from religious individuals who did not believe in such things as reincarnation or communicating with spirits that have passed on. The stories of harassment they had to endure in doing this work--work that was their lives' passion--moved me. Descriptions he shared of these psi experiments floored me. He said that there were many published papers and books outlining all the research that had been done that is ignored by mainstream science and that is sometimes physically difficult to locate, as it can be left out of internet indexing." Sobhani provides quite a bit on her research on mediumship and she is shocked to find the accuracy of the mediums. She says the following, "Serendipitously, I found a scientific paper published just that year (2020) reviewing all the multiple previously published studies of mediums perceiving accurate information about deceased individuals. The review found that, together, these studies showed that participants were able to accurately convey information about a deceased individual that they could not possibly have known."

Sobhani says around this time, she also started to read the book, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by Annie Jacobsen. She says this book "confirmed everything Boccuzzi had alluded to with regard to research having been done on unexplained phenomena. This book is a deep dive into the secret research programs implemented by the U.S. government into 'anomalous mental phenomena'." This takes Sobhani down a path into Remote Viewing and a program called Stargate, which was a remote viewing program funded by the government and performed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). "Remote viewing is a perception technique that allows a person to quiet his or her mind and describe mental images with regard to some person or event that is distant in space or time. The Stargate program was funded by the CIA, NASA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army and Air Force Intelligence, and many other government agencies". The US government was interested in this skillset during the 1970s when the US was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. You could call this psychic spying. You can find all this information through google searches because this has all been made public now. Also, the Monroe Institute teaches remote viewing so you can check that out in this link: Monroe Institute Remote Viewing Class.

Sobhani also shares the following information, "Many of the results from experiments conducted on remote viewing at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) were remarkable. Further, an independent review of the evidence was even commissioned by the CIA that included analysis by Jessica Utts, Ph.D., a renowned statistics professor from UC Davis and former president of the American Statistical Association, who found that 'psychic functioning had been well established'. Let me skip ahead to what Sobhani says about another book by Russell Targ called The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities. Targ was one of the researchers for the Stargate program. In the book, he lays out the experiments conducted which prove that remote viewing is a very real thing. Sobhani says the following, "After reading Targ's book, it occurred to me that none of these results were aligned with the current scientific materialist paradigm, but the methods used to get the results were scientifically sound. So either our methods are wrong or the paradigm is wrong". Sobhani goes into a lot of research around parapsychology so please read her book for more on this.

Sobhani moves on to explain that she believes "that there are precedents for some of the observations seen in psi research. Many of these discussions surrounding mechanisms for psi include quantum physics. Experiments from the field of quantum physics have already upended the traditional view of what we consider the physical world". Sobhani deep dives into Quantum Physics for example she mentions the strange finding on entanglement. "The basic idea behind this principle is that two particles are entangled in some way such that when they're separated, even by a great distance up to one hundred kilometers, the particles' states mirror each other instantaneously. So if you shook one particle, the other would also shake at the same exact moment. This breaks the locality assumption, which assumes that all objects are separate, and is known as nonlocality." Many researchers in their study of consciousness use this as an example of how quantum physics is finally starting to catch up with what those "spiritual woo-woo" people already know, that all is interconnected. I can't share everything from the quantum physics chapter to keep this blog post from getting too long but I definitely recommend Sobhani's book to understand how all these different scientific research areas are closing the gap between science and spirituality.

Sobhani then explains that she started to meet with "a variety of current and former scientists, engineers, researchers, physicians, and U.S. government personnel from various sectors and agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the US military, and the three-lettered agencies (CIA, FBI, etc)". She says the following, "Although I can't provide the creepy, unnerving details of everything I learned from my new friends, the important point is that their version of reality was far different from mine." She doesn't get into what she found out from these people because she says that much of it was off the record. In an interview, she said the most shocking thing she learned was that there were other dimensions and galactic beings in these other dimensions. Thus, I have a hunch she was learning about other dimensional galactic beings aka extraterrestrials in these "off record" conversations. She didn't get into this in the book though since this book is directed to the scientific community as well.

Toward the end of the book, Sobhani says the following, "Quantum physics and physics are still incompatible. Everyone is still holding out hope that a grand unifying theory of everything will be discovered one day. In recent times, we've been seeing the re-emergence of the idea of consciousness being the true building block of the Universe because it seems to fit the data from contemporary physics (including quantum field theory) better and may be able to finally bridge the previously insurmountable gaps." Let's skip ahead to where Sobhani discusses quantum fields. She says, "According to the theory, all these quantum fields are contained within the zeropoint field, an all-pervasive energy field that spans all of space. The way these systems or particles interact with the field is that they have inherent specific resonance frequencies and when the specific resonance frequency of the system becomes phase-locked with the zero-point field, an equilibrium state is achieved and the formerly disordered zero-point field becomes more ordered and, thus, has more information." She goes on to explain that when we go into a meditative or hypnosis theta brainwave state, then we access this zero-point field. Essentially, we have access to an intelligence beyond what is in our brain for example past life memories and wisdom about the purpose of life. Sobhani says, "Consider that the entire Universe is made of consciousness. This consciousness, or the zero-point field, could also be chi from Taoism, prana from yoga, or the Akashic Records from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which are the entire universal collection of all thoughts, actions, emotions, and events from the past, present, and future theorized to exist in a nonphysical plane of existence". She then says, "So maybe we can access different frequencies of the field by quieting the mind, which sometimes allows impressions from the field to enter the mind, such as those experienced in anomalous cognition".

This is exactly what Dr. Eben Alexander says. Dr. Alexander was a neurosurgeon that had a near death experience. Before his NDE he was a materialist scientist and after his NDE he became a spiritual teacher focused on consciousness. He now teaches that the brain is a filter, filtering out the energetic universe. If we can quiet our brains, we can tap into the higher knowledge and energy of the universe. This is my theory as well after researching Near Death Experiences, Out-of-Body Experiences, Past Life Regression, and Mediumship. In order to engage in spiritual experiences, we need to learn how to quiet our brains.

Sobhani says the following toward the end of the book, "If one is coming at it from a strictly materialist neuroscience perspective, they would have no reason to believe this theory because they would be staying in their narrow lane of neuroscience. They might believe consciousness comes from the brain, so there would be no need to look outside it. It is only when one pulls in observations and theories from clinical psychology and psychiatry, philosophy, psychics, and spirituality that the previously unexplained evidence from psi research and reincarnation, past life regression and spiritual experiences becomes explainable and they might begin to see how it could maybe be possible".

Sobhani wonders why this isn't discussed more since there is so much evidence. She says that many people trying to bridge science and spirituality are called "pseudoscientists" online and that "Google Scholar does not easily index articles from peer-reviewed journals that investigate exploratory scientific topics, making them difficult to locate. Who decided that? I also read, frankly, many quite aggressive and condescending takedowns of anyone affiliated with ideas outside the dogma of scientific materialism". Sobhani says the following, "Psychologist Imants Baruss and cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge list the commonly used strategies for discrediting exploratory research into unexplained and anomalous phenomena in their book Transcendent Mind, such as calling things 'woo-woo', 'pseudoscience', or 'junk science'. But here's the thing: I read the studies, and they rigorously used the scientific method. There was nothing 'psudo' about them; the topic of study was simply outside the arbitrary boundaries of research deemed acceptable by scientific materialism. So why are we perpetuating this false narrative?"

I have seen the same things Sobhani is referring to. Why are people so afraid of these spiritual topics? Maybe it would change everything people believe in, both for the materialist scientists and the dogmatically religious. It would cause people to question everything they've been told by parents, grandparents, religious leaders, etc, then of course lead to questioning who they really are, and into the ego death process I talk about in blog post You're Not Dying, You're Just Waking Up. Either way, we have to question, how can humanity think we know everything? When we look at how little we do know about energy, consciousness, and the universe, how can we pretend to know it all?

Here is Mona's website and book: https://www.monasobhaniphd.com/book.html