The Science Behind Consciousness with Dawson Church

In this Episode

• [02:29]Stephan welcomes guest Dawson Church, diving into how our thoughts and emotions can reshape physical reality. They explore an incredible story of a chi master who altered the decay rate of americium using only chi energy.
• [11:59]Dawson reveals the unique mental states that set shamans, qigong masters, and high-performing individuals apart and how they unlock extraordinary abilities.
• [14:06]Dawson uncovers the powerful neurochemical cocktail–dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin–that transforms your mental state and promotes deep well-being.
• [19:31]Dawson shares how tapping into heightened states of consciousness can lead to profound positive changes in your life.
• [28:39]Dawson gets candid about how synchronicity seems to falter for him in certain areas, like investing.
• [36:07]Dawson and Stephan discuss the science behind how simple consciousness exercises reshape your brain’s structure and functionality.
• [46:46]Dawson explains why releasing old patterns is the key to reaching higher states of consciousness.

Jump to Links and Resources

Dawson, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Stephan, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I want to commend you on the book Mind to Matter because I haven’t read all of it, but I’ve read a good chunk of it. I think my wife has read most, if not all of it. She was a fan before I even knew who you were. I don’t believe in coincidences; everything is divinely orchestrated. Well, your PR person reached out to me literally the same day that I mentioned you and the Mind to Matter book on another podcast interview. I knew that was orchestrated from above. 

So it’s great to have you on. One thing, in particular, I want to bring to the listener’s attention and get your additional commentary on is a story that you elaborated on in the book about a chi master who can change the decay rate of americium just by sending his chi energy to it. And that is not something that is supposedly changeable. You can’t change the decay rate with extreme heat, exposing it to the gravitational field or anything. It was modifiable, though, by this guy’s chi energy, which was pretty mind-blowing. I wanted to get your take on that.

Not only that, you can actually speed it up or slow it down. When they said speed it up, he speeded it up. When they said slow down, he slowed it down. It was variable in both directions as he applied qi to the radioactive substance. The four forces of physics are believed to be immutable natural laws. It’s astonishing to read research showing that all four of them are variable under certain circumstances. 

Another wild one was in the first edition of the book. I did not explain the study very well in the paperback version. I rewrote that section to really shine a spotlight on this. It was a study that involved a healer called Bill Bengston. Bill has been well-known for about 30 years in the energy healing field. He lays his hands on either people or, often, experimenting with mice. These mice have cancer—very large tumors. The mice usually die between day 14 and day 19. Mice don’t usually make it past day 21.

He’s well known for being able to lay his hands on these mice, and their tumors just shrink and die. In this randomized, controlled trial, he was the healer and was asked to project remote energy to the mice. They were in a cage in a room in a lab on the university campus. A second cage of mice was in a control cage in a different building on the same campus. 

But what made this experiment so interesting was that the researchers put a device below both cages, which measured the changes in electromagnetism in the environment. And again, that’s supposed to be just something that’s happening, meaning the background electromagnetic field fluctuates slightly and goes up and down, but electromagnetism is a constant. We have all kinds of electrical devices, and they are 110 volts or 220 volts. 

We use these liberally in all kinds of devices in our daily lives. So, it was set up so that Bill was given a signal at random intervals. Suddenly, at 2 AM or 4.37 PM, he’d get a beep. He then sent healing energy, but only to the experimental mice, not to the other mice via distance. And so, as always has happened in his other experiments, the mice in the cage in his experimental group got better. Their tumors disappeared. The mice in the control condition were unchanged. 

But at those random intervals, when he was sending his healing energy to those mice, the electromagnetism in the room changed and fluctuated by up to 22%, not in the control room—so totally random intervals. It was the same background as all the rest of the environment. Other times, only at the times when he was sending energy at random, was there a change in that EM field and it was very substantial. All these studies like this make you think, “Yeah, that’s amazing.”

That is so cool. These glitches in The Matrix give me so much joy, certainty, and comfort. It’s not just from reading about studies and anecdotes but actually experiencing them myself and in my regular daily life. Do you have any amazing glitches in the Matrix-type moments that you want to share?

I think one of the very first ones in my life happened many decades ago. It was on a construction site. I was working as a construction worker with a bunch of other people. There was an accident. The nail from a nail gun went through somebody’s thumb. The nail went into the bowl of the thumb and came out through the middle of the thumbnail. We did energy healing on this person’s thumb. We just held our hands around it. 

Several people there had taken energy healing courses. I was one of them. We just held our hands around the thumb, and it was crazy to see what had happened. The thumb swelled up and turned purple like it would normally do in the course of healing, and then the swelling went away, the purple just went away, it turned red, and the thumbnail closed up. The whole thing took about 20 minutes. So, there are these accounts of miraculous healing. 

I also read some case histories of cancer tumors, and there are quite a few. When I began writing Mind to Matter, I didn’t think cancer would be a big focus, but there are so many interesting cancer stories about people’s tumors literally melting or disappearing, sometimes very, very quickly, when an energy healer was treating them. I also emphasize to people that they shouldn’t think this is magic that’s going to fix everything.

Negative emotion produces radical shifts in the body.

You may still need your prescription and surgery. You may still need allopathic medicine for certain things. But if you’re ignoring energy, if all you’re doing is trotting off to your doctor and getting a pill, you are completely missing the potential of your mind, body, energy fields, the collective field, and the collective unconscious. Who knows what healing energies might be available to us? Whether it’s a cough or cold, if you feel a sniffle, look at your attitude, look at your energy. “Am I holding negative emotion?” Negative emotion produces radical shifts in the body.

If you are hooking people up to, for example, the EEG, and you have them feel any kind of negative emotion, resentment, blame, shame, or guilt, you will see an immediate change. What will happen is you’ll see an expansion of beta waves, the fast waves of anxiety, and you’ll see a contraction of theta and delta waves, our slowest waves, and you’ll see a disappearance of alpha waves.

So here you have this big beta, and people having panic attacks, feeling a lot of negative emotion, you’ll see massive beta. This isn’t happening in five minutes. This happens in a second after they have that negative thought. I’ve been hooked up to an EEG myself many times as well, and I’m just so chill after basically 50 years of meditation. I don’t get upset about many things. The one thing, Stephan that’ll still make my beta spike is if someone says to me, “Think about your email inbox.” I looked the other day, and there were 55,000 unread messages.

I’ve got a solution for that, by the way. One thing about EEGs I find fascinating, and this is such a cool video I found. I don’t know what the things that are shown to me are; it’s the algorithm that the angels are utilizing or subverting or whatever. So I’ll see it featured on the YouTube homepage or something like one of these videos, which was really profound. 

It’s Dr. Daniel Amen, a past guest on this podcast, brain expert, and author of Change Your Brain Change Your Life. He was running an EEG analysis on the psychic of Long Island. She has her own TV show or did; she is a pretty famous celebrity. He was doing an EEG study while she was giving a reading, maybe on him or someone else in the room. It’s really impressive. It’s irrefutable.

When you look at what’s happening in her analysis of her brain activity while she’s doing the reading versus not, it’s very clear that she’s accessing something more than just normal. I don’t know if you’ve seen any kind of analysis like that or if this sparks any studies that come to mind. What do you have to share about that?

Without even knowing her name, what she was doing, or anything about her, I can predict that she had a lot of delta, the slowest wave at the base. She had quite a bit of theta, maybe even more theta than delta. She had a very small beta. There was not a lot of conscious mind processing over there. Her prefrontal cortex was probably very inactive. If we had her inside of an MRI, we would likely see a shutdown of the prefrontal cortex. 

You can’t think of yourself in the infused states. These are being states, not doing states, thinking states, or executive states—very, very small beta and probably enormous gamma. Some of the Tibetan monks that have been studied have up to 25 times the gamma of normal people, just extraordinary amounts of gamma. Gamma is the wave of integration. Gamma is the wave of all parts of the brain working effectively and synchronously together. It’s the wave of compassion. 

Gamma is the wave of all parts of the brain working effectively and synchronously together. It’s the wave of compassion.

People who are really compassionate or altruistic have lots of gamma. It’s the wave of awe, it’s the wave of gratitude, it’s the wave of thanksgiving, and it’s the wave of social emotions. I bet she had lots of gamma and that you probably had a significant bridge of alpha connecting those higher frequencies of gamma and beta with the two lower frequencies of theta and delta. We’ve seen this pattern in tens of thousands of people. It’s called the awakened mind. You find it in South American shamans, qigong masters, and Pentecostal Christian faith healers when they’re doing their faith-healing thing. But you also find it in people in flow. You find it in athletes; you find it in peak performers of various kinds. It’s a very distinctive brainwave. We know it well. We know what it will look like and can predict when people are in that space just by their brainwave signature patterns.

Have you done analysis on your own when you’re practicing meditation, breathwork, or other activities that involve accessing awakened states?

I learned meditation when I was a teenager, and then I’ve been doing it every single day, without fail at this point, for more than 25 years. What happens is that if you meditate effectively, you really get addicted to meditation because it feels so good. It’s like the most pleasurable thing you can do. In my follow-up book, Bliss Brain, I talk about the neurochemicals of meditation, like dopamine, which is the meditation in dopamine. 

Effective meditation, dopamine rises 65% in the brain. That’s pretty much like getting a shot of cocaine or heroin. I mean, that’s just like you feel really good. When your dopamine rises 65%, that triggers a rise in serotonin. Also, people doing loving-kindness meditation and compassion meditation have increased oxytocin—the love hormone, the love drug. 

When you meditate effectively, and you’re feeling in love but not with a particular person, you’re in love with the divine, you’re in love with the universe, and you’re in love with all that is, you feel these immense waves of love just shaking you sometimes. That’s why shakers shake and quakers quake. Some of the Buddhists in meditation, they’re just vibrating. Their bodies are orgasmically moving with that feeling of wonderful connection with all it is, that’s oxytocin, and that triggers beta-endorphin. 

When high levels of oxytocin trigger beta-endorphins, you get a big shot of endorphins. Beta-endorphin is ounce for ounce, three times as potent as synthetic morphine. So here we have this massive rise in endorphins, and you feel fantastic. So you meditate, you feel good. That motivates you to meditate again. Then, you get into a pattern of doing it. I also give people a 30-day meditation challenge. I developed a meditation called EcoMeditation in 2009 because I wanted something evidence-based. 

So, it stacks various evidence-based techniques, one on top of the other five. So when you do EcoMeditation in about five minutes, you feel that shot of serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, anandamide, and beta-endorphin, and you feel fantastic. And I say, just do it 30 days. I ask that you do it every day without fail, 20 minutes a month. 

One lady approached me at a workshop and said, “Dorsey and I took your 30-day challenge. It was great—30 days without fail meditation.” I was so happy for her that I asked, “Well, what day are you on right now?” She said, “I’m on day 147.” That was really fabulous because I knew then that she was addicted to her own dopamine, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin. You get to the point where you just love feeling that good. 

Dopamine rises 65% in the brain in effective meditation.

Your body wants to feel good, and you keep up with the practice. So that’s that awakened mind state. You get there through peak performance and meditation in the morning. You’ll stay in a state of flow mind much of the day, and your whole day will work out much better.

That’s 20 minutes in the morning. Do you work longer than that, or is that your usual time?

Well, initially, I need to get people to where that lady said she was. So EcoMeditation, for the first time they do it, they’ll generally realize there’s a there and want to go back there again. Like any good addict does, they’ll want to get another fix the next day. So after a few days, weeks, months, you are there. We get people there, and then they want to extend the experience. It’s so pleasurable that you’ll want to go beyond 15 to 20 minutes, to 30 minutes, to 40 minutes, to longer. 

The challenge we face after about a year is when we have several programs, like month-long programs with a year-long program called the Short Path to Oneness, which uses all of the traditional Eastern methods to bring you to these states of oneness. But they’re all filtered through the lens of neuroscience. So we have this highly scientific way of quickly bringing you to those states. We find after a year, we then have the challenge of bringing people back down again because they are so addicted. 

Beta-endorphin is ounce for ounce, three times as potent as synthetic morphine.

They always want to go up there, and they’ll be meditating at that point, often two hours a day, and they’ll be having trouble interfacing with their lives, missing their doctor’s appointments and forgetting to pick their kids up from school. And that’s the challenge of meditation.

After a while, it’s so pleasurable. You’re so far out there. So, the last part of the Short Path to Oneness brings them back down into their bodies to integrate those experiences of everyday life.

You still have to change your kid’s diaper, and you still have to show up and take your medications and be there for work, or bad things happen. So initially, that 15- 20 minutes is crucial, but after a while, you extend it. It’s so pleasurable. Then, when you start to hit the upper ranges of what’s called samadhi, the challenge becomes to bring them back down and integrate them and live where you at least look normal enough, where people don’t call 911 when you show up.

Are you doing meditation more than once a day, or is it just once in the morning?

One of the things we train people to do in the Short Path to Oneness is we want them to meditate first thing in the morning. We want them to do a practice before they go to bed. Because if you go to bed in the right frame of mind, your sleep and dream life changes. One thing that we find very common is that people become lucid dreamers. They don’t try and become lucid dreamers. They just become natural lucid dreamers. 

A lucid dreamer is simply someone who knows how to dream, and then they can change their dreams. If you’re in the middle of the movie Jaws and the shark shows up, and it’s about to eat you, and you’re lucid dreaming, you say, “Hmm, I think I’m gonna turn that shark into a hand puppet,” and then you do. You start to shape your dreams, and you start to use your dreams then to move you to elevated states.

So now you’re actually not meditating only during your morning and evening meditation. You’re using most of your 8 hours of sleep to meditate or enter elevated states. My personal little hack I use is I have a printout next to my bed of this cave in Burma, Myanmar, called the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas. There are all these Buddha statues in the cave. I look at that every night before I go to bed and picture myself sleeping in the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas. I get great sleep. 

Usually, I fall asleep quickly, and then I’m in that liminal space most of the night in that altered state. So now you are just getting your morning and evening meditation. You’re also getting your eight hours of sleep in this altered state, with anandamide, serotonin, dopamine, and all these wonderful neurochemicals. You wake up feeling incredibly good. And then, of course, you move to the next pedicle in your morning practice. Morning and evening is good.

Delta is the state of pruning. Your brain is cleaning up all the old stuff that made you unhappy.

If you can use a sleep hack to move yourself in that kind of space, then much of your night is spent in positive mental states. We’re in delta most of the night. Delta is the state of pruning. Your brain is now pruning away, cleaning up all the old stuff that made you unhappy. It’s also during your rapid eye movement sleep, beta sleep. Every hour and a half or so, it is wired together. So you’re pruning unwanted neural pathways in the delta. 

In theta, you are building new neural pathways and those neural pathways again. What’s nicer than to pretend you’re in heaven or pretend you’re in the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas or anything that really moves here or Mother Mary is cradling you in her arms, whatever your imagery is. Now you’re generating all this activity in your brain to prune stuff you don’t want to wire together in theta, those positive images. You’re using your sleep for meditative change in your brain as well. That’s super cool. I think many of us do the opposite of that and get into the cave of 50,000 unread emails as we follow the cloud. I’ve been there and done that, too.

I promised you a solution for your 50,000 unread emails. I learned this from David Allen, who wrote Getting Things Done, the creator of the GTD methodology, and an incredible productivity expert. This process involves creating a folder called DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and dragging your email inbox. It doesn’t matter how many tens of thousands of emails are in there, just the entire thing in that folder. And now you start fresh with zero emails. You’re not deleting anything because it’s in that separate DMZ folder. But at least you give your brain a break from the overwhelm when you go right to your inbox, and you can’t process and deal with all the backlog. It’s just too much. But you can start fresh from today and develop some new habits.

Good. I like that I hit reply to any of them I plan to reply to. That way, they have a little red tag next to them. So I kind of do that now. I don’t feel bad about it. Every once in a while, I do stuff, sit there, like Bill Bengston, holding his hands above the mice, and say to everyone, “Bless you. Thanks for emailing me.”

That’s a nice bonus, even for the spammers. If you want to take it to another level, this is what I do. I have my assistant manage my inbox for me. I entrust her with keys to my kingdom because I get a lot of emails every day. She then puts stuff either in the archives, which is most of the stuff, or an action folder, where I check. I try to stay out of my inbox. She does this every day. I go into my inbox, which has no more than 50 emails.

I try to keep my head out of that and go straight to the action folder to look at the things that are for me to act. She won’t put stuff in there that she’s going to action for me, only the things I’m required to do. There’s a separate second folder that I check, but not quite as often. And that’s the “Read Review” folder—anything where I’m cc’d, but it’s not an essential thing for me to take action on, it’s just for me to stay in the loop on a particular important client or whatever. 

That’s the “Read Review” folder; everything else goes into the archives. I try to stay out of the archives and out of my inbox. Although it is tempting sometimes, that’s a really great way to manage email. I couldn’t imagine going back to managing my own inbox.

Having an assistant screen things for you is really powerful. They can then only send you the ones you really need to pay attention to, not all the others that people think you need to pay attention to, but maybe you don’t.

She also drafts emails, so I don’t have to start from scratch, even if they’re in the action folder. Many times, she drafts an email for me to tweak and then send.

That’s also great because then you have the outline of something. I do a lot of my writing that way. I have a writer who I’ll say, “I want a story about this particular person,” and they’ll write up the story for me. I’ll have the outline over there. I also find AI useful for that, although I found AI to be a very mediocre assistant. I like using GPT-4, and it’s okay for the outline, but it’s very bland.

It’s uninspired, really. I like starting with just tuning into God and getting insights, nudges, and ideas from universal intelligence—not from ChatGPT.

Absolutely. The concept of the psychosphereThen, Ervin László, is so powerful. I discuss it in Mind to Matter. In the ‘50s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talked about the noosphere, the total of all consciousness on Earth—actually, it’s the total consciousness in the universe. And then Ervin László, a famous physicist, talked about these information fields we live in, which we can download and tap into. 

Just the way you got the perfect study or piece of information you needed, or you thought about having me on the show, and then suddenly you get an email about having me on the show in Mind to Matter. Eventually, near the end of the book, I thought, “I’m going to write a little piece here on all the synchronicities that went into writing the chapter on synchronicity.” It’s astounding how many synchronicities there were.

After a while, you will find that your life is this way. You simply expect your life to be this way because it has been for all the recent past. Research shows that meditators have far more synchronicity, clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, and ESP of all kinds in their lives than non-meditators. It scales, too, the more you do—the more synchronous your life becomes. Imagine if we were living in a synchronous universe where all these things happen very naturally. And after a while, if you’ve been doing this, you expect that because that is actually how the universe works. Now, what’s interesting, though, is what happens for those parts of your life where it’s not working because everybody seems to get one or two areas of their lives where the magic doesn’t happen. Those are also full of blessings for us.

What are your areas where the lessons are harder?

I have always found investing a lot of mental effort and work. I’ve created a fair amount of individual stocks over the years, like the last 20 to 30 years. It’s always been a chore. It’s never something I’m like thrilled at doing. So sometimes, I’ll stick a bunch of money in an index fund. Predictably, I’ve been able to call at the right time. But I have one friend who was a top banker in Hong Kong for his whole career, and he showed me his portfolio and got it right about 60% of the time, while the other 40% did not. So that’s one area where I’m not a superstar.

If one has anxiety or uncertainty in a particular area, it does cloud the receiving. If you’re just emotionally charged, neutral about that, completely unattached, then it’s a lot easier to receive clear signals from above.

The more you focus on your intuition, the more you develop it.

Absolutely. Good exercise.

You mentioned how you look at your energy earlier, and I’m curious how you see it or experience it. Do you have clairvoyance? Do you actually see people’s energy fields, like auras? Do you get a claircognizance, knowing that something is affecting your energy, and how does that work for you?

I get intuitive hits. When I’m working with people one-on-one, and I don’t work with many clients, I do have a few people I work with on our Short Path to Oneness program who I mentor, but I get intuitive hits, and I always check them out with a client to see if they’re real or not. But they are almost always remarkably accurate. I’ll just sense something. When I’m with people in person, I also do a fair amount of live presentations and workshops, and I see a little bit of energy around people. 

There are no vivid rainbow colors, but I’ll see a dark shadow of someone’s left shoulder. I’ll think, “Hmm, what’s all that all about?” Then, often, they’ll report something like, “Oh, I have this pain in the back of my left shoulder.” The story comes out later. I’m not one of those visual energy seers like Donna Eden, who sees rainbow colors around people. I sense things. It’s also a skill that we develop. 

The more you focus on your intuition, the more you develop it. And then, with my wife, I’m so grateful to have been married to a wonderful human being for a very long time. When I say things to her, and I’m impatient, or I’m not really listening to her carefully, then I realize my energy is a little bit off. I think I can do better than that as a husband or as a teammate, too. If I’m talking to a member of my team and I’m impatient or I interrupt them or something like that, it’s like, “Okay, Dawson. That’s not the energy you want to be in the world.” 

So, I’ll correct myself. That’s the other part of it. It doesn’t feel good to meet someone who’s not respectful and tuned into my wife. So, I must keep my energy high with my grandchildren, children, and close family members. When I find myself acting a little less than I know I can be, a little less than my finest, I try to catch myself and correct myself.

That’s a great goal to aspire to. Have you ever had an experience on a podcast where you show up for an interview, and the person on the other end of the mic has less than stellar energy? You get a dark cloud-like feeling about that person and just want to excuse yourself from the interview.

No. What happens is that they come into flow. I’m good at training people. In fact, I had two of those podcasts last week where the person was low-energy and was really chugging along and perhaps dealing with some difficult things personally. Their questions were from that perspective. I know I can just work with people and talk to them. Both of those guests were just smiling and laughing and were as happy as could be within about 10 minutes.

If we are around upbeat, cheerful, kind, wise, and compassionate people, our energy is infectious.

Our energy is infectious—I discuss this in Mind to Matter. I also discuss the whole phenomenon of emotional contagion. It works even over Zoom, Riverside, and any kind of teleconferencing system. If we are around upbeat, cheerful, kind, wise, and compassionate people, our energy is infectious. The famous Framingham Heart Study showed that it affects people, not just those around us. 

In the Framingham Heart Study, they looked at people physically in Framingham, Massachusetts, and measured their happiness levels. They found that the people who lived next door to happy people were about 35% happier. The people who lived next door to those neighbors were about half, 15% happier. The person who lived next door to that secondary neighbor who didn’t even know the primary person was about 6% happier. 

We have an effect on those around us. Consciousness changes and is evolving. And we generally seek out people who are like us. By being loving and happy, we are able to shift the world. Ramana Maharshi, the great nondualist teacher in India in the 1920s and 1930s, when World War II broke out, stayed in India and was very much in his same meditative space. One day, someone said to him, “Bhagavan, here the world is in flames. What you’re doing is you’re sitting here on a meditation couch in India. All you’re doing is sitting there in meditation.” 

He said, “How do you know that all I’m doing is sitting here in meditation?” Our energy spreads. The studies on distant healing are so interesting that having the intention of distant healing is really powerful. The Maharishi Effect has been studied extensively now, how groups of people believing in kindness and compassion literally can have an effect on remote locations. Ramana Maharshi said, “If you want to change the world, start with yourself.” Gandhi said much the same thing.

We are wired to experience extraordinary states.

Even though it’s tempting to want to say, “I want to change the corporations, I want to change the government, I want to go change all of these bad people doing bad things? What are you in your innermost heart? What are you doing when nobody sees what you’re doing? We train our practitioners in ethics. If there was a spotlight, if there was a little hovering security camera around you all the time, how would you act? Now act that way.

Because there are no private thoughts, you’re being watched and listened to not just by God but by a big audience in the upper world—angels, loved ones, and so many souls who are rooting for you and following you through your journey. You end up in low-vibration thoughts. They’re watching that all unfold without judgment, but still, they’re watching you thinking about whatever you shouldn’t be thinking about.

Yeah, absolutely. So live your life that way.

Yeah. I learned one exercise you’d enjoy hearing about from Jaye Lasko, an amazing healer. She explained it and had me do it in one of my sessions with her. She said, “Imagine your energy is just below the surface of your skin, okay? It’s filling your body, almost to the surface of your skin. Now, expand out an inch above your skin. Now, expand your energy out even more to fill the room and then again, even more, to fill the neighborhood and then expand your energy even more and fill the city or town that you’re in, and then expand it to fill the state or province and then the country and then the entire planet and then the solar system. You could keep going.” 

I kept going to fill the entire universe with my energy and then reverse it. So now I am going to the solar system or the Milky Way galaxy, then to the solar system, then to the Earth, then to your country, state, city, neighborhood, or room, then back to above your skin an extra inch and underneath your skin. That’s such an amazing exercise. She was able to feel it, too, while I was doing all that expansion and then contraction; she was coming along for the ride.

We are consciousness. Rumi said that you aren’t a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop. Our human consciousness participates in all of consciousness. And what I found, to my astonishment, I had no idea I’d write this in mind to matter. But what is affecting all four fundamental forces of physics is consciousness. Consciousness changes, and the physical universe changes. The fact that you can visually have that picture of expanding to have your consciousness be the universe and then back to this small body.

Stephan, we are immensely privileged to have a body, be here breathing, and be able to become one with consciousness. The other thing that’s happening, which I think is underappreciated and very poorly understood in terms of its impact in both neuroscience and by the average person, is the effect this has on your brain. It is changing your brain substantially. I also did this one randomized controlled trial with some very talented colleagues at Bond University. 

We have people in MRIs doing my five-step EcoMeditation procedure for a month. The control group did mindful breathing. We had them do an MRI scan at the beginning of the month and the end of the month. After only one month, we found significant structural and functional changes in their brain. The part of the brain that handles suffering, regret, and rumination about the past and fear of the future was much quieter.

In the group doing EcoMeditation, the compassion circuit of the brain—the insular, gratitude, love, awe, joy, and compassion—lit up dramatically after just one month. When we enter these elevated states, not only can we go to the edges of the universe in our consciousness and come back again, but it’s changing the physical structure of the material body and brain we inhabit. It’s not just changing it a little bit. It’s changing it dramatically. 

In one of the case histories in Mind to Matter, one person’s brain was measured before and after learning mindfulness. In two months, the emotion regulation circuit in his brain grew by 22.8%. We are changing our brains, and that, in turn, changes our bodies and, in turn, shapes our lives. We have this immense privilege of being able to be one with the universe, have a body, and have that shape our body and that dramatic change in our outer lives as well as our inner perception.

Have you heard of a part of the brain called the “God Box?”

Part of the caudate nucleus?

I don’t know anything other than that—just the name I heard. I don’t remember even when, but it was maybe decades ago. It’s a part of the brain that, when it’s stimulated, like if they use electrodes and the skull is partially removed, by encouraging that part of the brain, they can have a transcendental experience—an experience of the oneness.

And that’s just the flick of a switch stimulating that part of the brain that generates those altered states. In fact, we can do it ourselves. We can do it naturally. A particular doctor had an electrode there, and he could stimulate these just by the flick of a switch.

We are wired to experience God.

The enlightenment network of our brain is that when we’re stressed, it shuts down. When we’re meditating, it lights up.

We are wired to experience extraordinary states. We are wired to be one with all that is. We’re wired for ecstasy. One of the baffling things to me is that people who are wired for ecstasy spend so much of their time suffering, and they have that suffering part of the brain turned up. And what that does is it actually turns down the ecstatic circuits. I will talk about the enlightenment network of our brain. When we’re stressed, it shuts down. When we’re meditating, it lights up.

These two networks function in opposition to each other. We spend so much of our time suffering unnecessarily when, if we could just breathe, step back, be mindful, and disentangle ourselves from our everyday thinking, we would find ourselves ecstatic every day. I’ve been challenging myself for the last three, four, or five months when I’m less than 100% happy during the day; maybe I’m only 96%. I’ll say, “Hmm, why am I down 4%? What excuse do I have for that?” Even if it’s just some old habit. I’ll do some EFT tapping, which is tapping on acupressure points, which releases that old habit, pattern, energy, and boom, I’m back up to 100. Why not live your life at 100? Why not make 100 your default state? You have the machinery in your brain to do that. Why not turn it on and live that way?

That’s great. Are you normally hearing God, the Creator, the oneness in your head, like clairaudience? Are you just walking in step with that oneness and just inner knowing? Do you get messages in the form of images or visions in your third eye? How does that work for you?

You will probably experience many of those phenomena on the spiritual journey. It is a developmental path, and there are milestones along it. We help people track where they are on that journey. There will be times when it becomes visual or auditory. You may download messages and hear heavenly music. Other phenomena you might experience include mean energy flowing through your body, strong iconic symbolism, archetypal symbolism, and archetypes themselves.

All of those are phenomena that occur on the spiritual journey. But what Patanjali says in the yoga sutras is that for the ordinary human being, these are enormous accomplishments. For the meditator and the person on the path, there are obstacles. You’ll find yourself moving through them. Where the mystics end up eventually at the end of the path is whether it’s the Christian tradition, the Sufi tradition, the Hindu or Buddhist tradition, you wind up at a place that they all call something like the silence, the great emptiness, the great fullness. 

The void is one term they use. What you find when you get there is this enormous, infinite presence. It’s simply the present moment. It’s contentless. There’s no intention there. There are no prayers there. There are no beings there. It’s a paradox because it’s infinitely full, empty, spacious, and eternal. If I’m going to write a book, for example, I can’t just go to the void. There’ll be no book at the end of it.

But what I can do then is move from that into practical action. There’s a time to be in the void. There’s a time to enter that space, and then there’s a time to come back, change the diapers, interact with your team members, and do your regular life. It’s fine to go there. But personally, I just go to the void every morning, meditating for a while, and then I step back down to the level of ordinary reality. You might hear those sounds and see visions and have a lot of pyrotechnics on the way. The Vedas call them sittings or powers. Again, heavenly music, channel messages, and all these wonderful altered experiences we have along the way are part of the developmental path, but at a certain point, you move past them, and you simply experience this infinite void.

So you are one with all that is.

Yeah. And you’re also not separate from all that is. There’s no sense of I, there’s no sense of oneness. There’s no sense of I as a separate being from the oneness. There is only this one being. You’re a participant in this one consciousness that there is in the universe.

In some of his meditations, Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about being nobody in no time, in no place or nowhere. And yeah, that’s what you’re talking about here.

It’s not a goal. It’s not like you say, “Okay, I’m going to experience the void. I’m going to train myself to experience the void.” In fact, your training, one of the stages of the Short Path, is very difficult for people, and there are a lot of difficulties. This is a one-year training program we offer, and several really difficult junctions exist. One of those is where you have to give up all of your beliefs, all of your practices, all of your favorite meditations, all of your favorite spiritual tools. 

It’s often scary for people. They say it’s this that keeps me sober; it’s this that keeps me motivated. It’s this that keeps me on track. How can they give it up? And yet, the very thing that got you to say milestone 16 is the obstacle preventing you from getting to milestone 17. The void is not something aspirational. It’s not like Buddhist teachers will say, “Okay, now we’re going to train you to get to the void. It’s achieved by surrender and grace.” 

Surrender is something that you do where you’re simply letting go of that sense of “I.”

Grace is ineffable. Surrender is something that you do where you’re simply letting go of that sense of “I.” But again, letting go of that sense of “I” can disorient people. If you believe I am the top real estate producer in my district in my area, I am a wonderful father. I’m a terrible father. I’m whatever your “I” story is. All those I stories begin to crumble and disappear, and you’re there in the void. That’s why we have mentors to help people guide them through these kinds of shifts in their personalities.

Amazing. I know we’re out of time, so this is quite the cliffhanger to leave people on. Where should we send them to have them learn more? Get your books and study and practice EFT tapping and some other amazing modalities we’ve touched on.

The best place is to go to my website, dawsongift.com, and download the EFT Mini Manual. Flip to the back page of the PDF; it’s EFT on a page, and just try it out for any anxiety you have right now. That’s the meditation we used in that study to show that it’s literally shifting your brain’s function after a month. Check out our practitioners. We have an ENT practitioner to help you through any big challenges. Check out the Short Path to Oneness. We have tons of content there, thousands of pages, thousands of stories of people who’ve used these things, and then they write in and say, “I did this. These are my results.”

Is there any last wisdom nugget you want to leave our listener or viewer with before we close out this episode?

Go and have a blast. You’re here to have fun and thoroughly enjoy yourself. Be at 100, go out, laugh, and fill your life with joy. Why live any less?

That’s great advice. Thank you, Dawson, and thank you, listener. We’ll catch up with you in the next episode. In the meantime, have a fantastic week. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

Important Links

Connect with Dawson Church

Books

Business/Organization

Films

People

Previous Get Yourself Optimized Episodes

YouTube Videos