Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist's Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe

by Mona Sobhani

• Shares data and meta-analysis from a large volume of extremely sophisticated experiments that provide proof for the existence of psi phenomena

• Explores evidence of past lives, intuitive knowing, and other spiritual phenomena

• Reveals the author’s own inexplicable experiences as well as her conversations with scientific colleagues, high-level experts, and government officials

Neuroscientist Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., details her transformation from diehard materialist to open-minded spiritual seeker and shares the extensive research she discovered on past lives, karma, and the complex interactions of mind and matter. She reveals her conversations about spirituality, consciousness, and anomalous occurrences with scientific colleagues as well as high-level experts and government officials, as she searched for proof of a meaningful cosmos. She discovered that psi research has been conducted on a grand scale for more than a century--by hundreds of scientists with hundreds of thousands of participants--and that there exists substantial evidence for the reality of psi. She examines meta-analyses of these experiments, such as that of the Ganzfield tests, which showed the odds against chance of 12 billion to 1--throwing our current scientific materialist paradigm into question.

Providing a deep dive into the literature of psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy, and esoteric texts, Sobhani also explores the relationship between psi phenomena, the transcendence of space and time, and spirituality. Culminating with the author’s serious reckoning with one of the foundational principles of neuroscience--scientific materialism-- this illuminating book shows that the mysteries of human experience go far beyond what the present scientific paradigm can comprehend and leaves open the possibility of a participatory, meaningful Universe.

Genres: Spirituality, Science, Nonfiction, Psychology

256 pages, Paperback

Published September 6, 2022

About the author

Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist. A former research scientist a the University of Southern California, she holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. She was also a scholar with the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics and her work has been featured in the New York Times, VOX, and other media outlets. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[T Love · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring, Thought Provoking, Entertaining

The author is a neuroscientist. The author is inquisitive, curious, and persistent. This is all good. That’s how we learn and grow. She did, and so will you. Dr. Sobhani is steeped in science but curious enough to go beyond what defies that which has been proven to find out for herself if that which she questions could truly be real even when there is no proof, as defined by science. I rather liked that. She’s authentic in life and in her writing. She doesn’t hold back. Rather she offers a synopsis of the tremendously vast amount of scientific research she read without making it feel academic or patronizing the reader. Anyone curious about how metaphysics works, whether a skeptic or believer, will appreciate the effort, time, energy, and manner in which she presents what she learned along her journey. Yes, this is her journey. The story is woven through the scientific evidence. I found it delightful, easy to understand, and a quick read that is very honest and factual. She is indeed a Spiritual Scientist and I very much enjoyed watching her grow and learn with the turn of each page. This is not a typical self-help book. This insightful read brings out the curiosity, the wonder, the magic, the WHAT IF’s in life – she lets you know she’s navigating these waters for herself, and suggests the reader do the same. She maintains her integrity in all she does, she is honest and I found her to be quite humorous. That said, I highly recommend this book.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very easy read about a very important topic, namely that of the spiritual reality that we are so lacking in the material, scientific, rational, orange West. I quite liked the informal way that Sobhani writes; it draws you and keeps you hooked. While I appreciate the splendour and colour of complex language (Terrence McKenna I’m looking at you), it’s nice to have a pretty “easy” read, but this shouldn’t detract from the depth that Sobhani explores! A decently decent book; well done!

INTRODUCTION

Essentially, this is the story about how ‘old me’ Sobhani dies a death by a thousand cuts, to be replaced by the ‘new me’ Sobhani, a more empathetic, nuanced, intuitive individual. She doesn’t criticize science/ the left hemisphere as such, just points out its limitations and augments it with a more right hemisphered way of looking at the world.

She started out as a neuroscientist, claiming that “neuroscientists are even more skeptical than typical scientists because we know how the brain works. Our brains are coincidence detectors, storytellers, and filters of reality. The brain does the best job it can by taking
the information that it has and crafting a version of the present moment based on
its past experiences and its predictions about the future. (…) The big takeaway from getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience was that your brain is not to be fully trusted.” But she then asks whether this is always the case…

THE FALL

She said she was indoctrinated into the Science Cult, sacrificing her RH at the alter of scientism. Ultimately, she received some bad news and had her heart broken, which didn’t bode well for her flimsy materialist worldview. Essentially, materialism works until it doesn’t, and then it forces people to look elsewhere for some sort of durable, flexible meaning. Jeremy Lent’s story is very similar.

THE JOURNEY

So she set out on her metaphysical Hero’s Journey to try to reconstruct her life out of the pieces she was left holding. She listened to Chelsea Handler’s podcast and there was one particular episode, with a psychic medium called Laura Lynne Jackson, that struck a chord with her. “Jackson described a model of spirituality that I had never heard before but that closely aligned with the things the intuitives had talked about in my readings that I hadn’t previously understood. The entire story started being pulled together for me. Briefly, it can be summarized like this: 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.”

PAST LIVES RESEARCH

She looked into a book by Dr. Brian Weiss, talking about past life regression, where therapists inquire about past lives in order to figure out why certain fears persist in individuals. While treating a patient with hypnotherapy, she started speaking about a past life in great detail - from 1863 BCE. He was confused. But her fears seemed to disappear! In some sessions, the patient would describe her previous deaths in her past lives, and would begin speaking as one of the Masters (Weiss would come to call them), highly evolved spirits from the space between lives. According to these masters, the purpose of life was to “fully comprehend compassion, nonviolence, love, nonjudgment, non-prejudice, 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.” Same as Jackson above. Dr Weiss was NOT the only ones reporting these findings. This was the first anomalous finding.

“There were thousands and thousands of stories of past life regression healing people both emotionally and physically. (…) All of the practitioners reported that their patients reported the same underlying story about reincarnation and soul lessons, irrespective of whether they believed in reincarnation or had been exposed to such material or beliefs beforehand.”

“If past life regression patients are simply using imagination to construct vivid make-believe situations, rather than past lives being a real thing, then we would expect little to no past life reports outside this context. However, past life reports occur under an array of different contexts, such as in psychedelic therapy, deep experiential psychotherapy (e.g., primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathing), meditation, sensory isolation, bodywork, spontaneous episodes of non-ordinary consciousness (e.g., spiritual emergencies), in children (and even adults) in ordinary waking consciousness, in sleep during lucid dreaming, and of course, like we saw in the case of Dr. Weiss, in conventional psychotherapy sessions with therapists who neither work with past-life therapy nor believe in reincarnation.”

Next she looked at cases of reincarnation, where young children claim to have been reincarnated from people who had recently died. Strangely enough, there’s enough evidence to make a case that reincarnation is a real thing. Dr Ian Stevenson pursued this line of study, looking at such cases; this was validated by an independent study which looked at 123 such cases, which concluded that “the investigations of three independent researchers into reported cases of reincarnation in five cultures in which such cases are reported suggested some children identify themselves with a person about whom they have no normal way of knowing. In these cases, the children apparently exhibit knowledge and behavior appropriate to that person.”

“Outside of the major religions, it has been widespread throughout the cultures of the world. The Gnostics and Cathars believed in the concept, as did many Greek schools of thought, such as the Platonists, Pythagoreans, and the Orphics. Many indigenous cultures still believe in the concept, and of course, reincarnation is a component of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, and many other religions and cultures.”

THE SIMPLE ANSWER TO WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIFE, IS TO LEARN LESSONS TO EVOLVE OUR SOULS. “Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention earlier was that another reason souls incarnate is to experience earthly and bodily pleasures—like eating a delicious slice of pizza or having a nice warm bath—that they can’t experience in soul form.”

PARAPSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH

She then turns to parapsychology, saying that people don't realize just HOW MUCH valid research has been done in this regard, and how many questions have been looked at for hundreds of years by serious scientists and have been repeatedly validated through many different types of research.

Annie Jacobsen’s book ‘Phenomena: the Secret history of the US Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis’ is her first stop: “The book detailed how multiple divisions of the U.S. government, including NASA, the CIA, and the U.S. Army, had been interested and involved in research examining unexplained mental phenomena. Briefly, they worked with extraordinarily gifted psychics to better understand the nature of possible unexplored capabilities of the human mind, including the ability to remotely view other places and other times, as well as the ability to move and affect physical matter with thought alone. The government funded this work for about twenty-five years, and much of the work is still classified.”

Russell Targ’s book ‘The Reality of ESP’ came next, where he talks about remote viewing, which is a perception technique that allows a person to quiet his or her mind and describe mental images with regard to some person or even that is distant in space and time. “Targ systematically lays out the experiments conducted, and the evidence accumulated by the team over the twenty-five years of the program, or at least the amount that is unclassified. Much of it remains classified to this day. Targ described experiments in which they tested remote viewing participants’ abilities to draw randomly selected target locations that were distant in space, meaning not colocated with the participant. All told, the total body of research work contained 26,074 trials from 154 experiments involving 227 different subjects.”

This shit is real! If that isn’t a bombshell to you, then you’ve either always been a gifted telekinete or you haven’t read that properly.

Anomalous Cognition: “Some individuals can correctly select, with higher than chance accuracy, which of five cards will be next presented during an experiment.”

Remote Viewing: “Scientific research, with sound experimental design and methods, has repeatedly shown that some individuals are able to sense a remote target, such as another person’s location. They can give accurate descriptions of a randomly selected, unknown, distant location, and this is not just good guesswork, because the statistical analysis of these findings showed, again, that they were happening at a rate far greater than random chance alone.”

Telepathy: “Some individuals appear to have the ability to correctly select an
image chosen by another person, simply by apparently receiving thoughts from that
person.”

Implicit Anomalous Cognition: “That a person’s decision making in the present can be influenced by information from before or after the decision is made, raising many questions about our models of time, and about the independence of events in the present from events in the future.”

Moving Things with Mind: “The concept of our thoughts affecting our physical environment can be difficult to swallow because this cause and effect is not seen as readily in our daily lives. However, as you will see from the results below, there is evidence to suggest the phenomenon is real, although small effect sizes were reported in the literature.”

Noncontact Healing: “There seems to be some evidence for a valid effect of noncontact healing (although much more good quality research is needed)—so don’t feel bad sending those healing thoughts to others.”

The GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS PROJECT: “Mass consciousness of the planet can influence the output of an Random Number Generator to behave nonrandomly when there is a common point of directed attention and focus. This may be the ultimate discovery resulting from all of the psi findings listed in this chapter. Synchronizing our attention in a positive way has the most potential for the planet, demonstrating that we are more powerful if we come together on the issues we focus on.”

Is this data strong? “The amount of evidence in support of psi is much higher than other common topics of research in neuroscience and psychology. (…) It is as Jessica Utts (1996), former president of the American Statistical Association (ASA), said: “If we use the same standards applied to all other scientific research, then there is no reason why the results of this kind of research are debatable except for the fact that no theoretical explanation exists—but
this has never stopped science before.”

THE PEOPLE WHO ‘KNOW’ and CONSCIOUSNESS

Sobhani said she spoke to many “people who know”, various scientists, engineers, researchers, physicians, and US government personnel from different sectors and agencies. These aren’t rare phenomena, since they’re reported all over the world, across all eras. It’s only in our reductionist society that we’ve stopped believing in these phenomena; to our detriment, and to the detriment of the planet and our communities too.

All these findings are linked to our lack of understanding of consciousness, or the Mind of God within which we’re dwelling and Idealism (the view that mind is primary over matter) is starting to re-emerge as the dominant paradigm. Bernardo Kastrup’s useful metaphor will be of help here: “He suggests imagining that our reality is a stream of water, a stream of consciousness. We can think of ourselves as whirlpools that form within the stream. The whirlpool is its own little separate unit, but it is still made from the same water and connected to the larger stream of water. (…) Materialist science is only looking at the whirlpool.” (McGilchrist said something similar, quoting Schelling. “In Schelling’s view each distinct consciousness arises as a vortex within an endless flow, an eddy in the stream. Compared with other aspects of, or ‘products’ of, Nature, ‘we are simply more advanced whirlpools, more clearly articulated expressions of the absolute.”)

A spiritual or “mystical experience can be described as an experience that stirs a sense of unity or interconnectedness, transcendence of time and space, positive mood, a feeling of sacredness, and ineffability—or at least that’s one definition from the literature that allows an empirical investigation. From the spiritual perspective, I think it can be viewed as stepping back from the mind to see the true nature of consciousness as interconnected with everything else—or, in other words, looking past the whirlpool to see the stream.

So what’s going on in the brain during one of these states?”

Brain lesions to the left hemisphere lead to the experience of this Whole, as Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience shows: “Her poetic narration of feeling nirvana, being one with the Universe, a loss of ego, and boundless compassion can leave you envious.”

Neurostimulation can have the same effect, as Wilder Penfield reported during procedures where he stimulated patients’ temporal cortexes; they ‘saw’ God, left their bodies, and met with the dead.

Meditation is another such practice; meditation deactivates the default mode network, the monkey mind, causing there to be less of a focus of perception on the self, which decreases the contrast between internal and external objects.

And lastly psychedelics affect the DMN too, reducing activity between brain regions, resulting in a reduction of the sense of self.

(LSD Digression: “My type A personality had never been interested in psychedelics before, but I was suddenly very curious. So I took a trip—an acid trip. The day I took LSD was one of the most profoundly magical and beloved days of my life. Oceanic love permeated my being, and truth was revealing itself to me in waves upon waves. With eyes closed, the doors of imagination were flung open, and wild, colorful panoramas folded and toppled into, onto, and through each other, leaving neonstreaked emotions in their wake. Electricity was sparkling up and down my spine and through my arms and legs. The energy was so intense that I had to get up and dance to release it. I felt like I was seeing reality for the very first time. The most profound part, though, was the instantaneous and clear answers that popped into my mind as I internally reflected on self-analysis questions I had prepared beforehand. The short answer? “You forgot to be weird.” The underlying message was crystal clear: You project who you think you’re supposed to be and forgot who you truly are; your true self has been a casualty.”)

“You can dismiss and justify an accurate intuitive reading as lucky guesses or argue that past life regression is the patient making up a fictional story that inexplicably becomes therapeutic or classify all the hundreds of researchers that find evidence of clairvoyance, precognition, and telepathy as frauds or believe that NDEs are residual brain activity (even though that goes against the evidence) or insist that the thousands of cases of children describing past lives with verifiable details are due to pure coincidence or explain away spiritual and mystical experiences as simply neural activity with no meaning, but . . . all of them?

“All the evidence together that spans millennia, continents, countries, cultures, and disciplines strongly suggests that our scientific models of reality need an update.”

[Albus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not a skeptic—I believe in the psychic, spiritual phenomena Sobhani discusses in this book. But this particular book is really not very good. It’s poorly written in an amateur, informal style. It’s also filled with totally irrelevant discussion of the author’s own uninteresting personal journey from scientistic materialist to spiritual believer. No one will be convinced by this book. It does have a good glossary of other books to read, however.

[Richard]

A good introduction to the evidence for psychic phenomenon. Read it for its summary of the various academic studies and books. I read this already convinced that that a "materialist" explanation is too limited--the Universe is undoubtedly way more complicated than we mere humans can comprehend—so I liked this as a short, readable breakdown of some of the key concepts in the rigorous study of a subject that is understudied.

The author's core takeaway is that reality is some kind of teaching experience that we undergo voluntarily in recurring “lifetimes”. We drop ourselves into the material world long enough to learn some lesson that we missed the last time. You have enough free will to learn your lesson if you try, but not enough to prevent karma.

Instead of “psychic”, she prefers the term “intuitive”, which encompasses a broader range of abilities.

Although I get why she writes in the biographical format, I personally find the anecdotes too distracting. I personally would rather read a book that just summarizes the evidence and makes the case. This felt more like a first attempt by somebody who's recently undergone a conversion; wait till her first big idea book to tie it together in a more mature way.

[Linda Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dnf