Dr Dawson Church on Chaos to Creation Confessions: Are you in the 1%?

So today we’re speaking to Dr. Dawson church, who’s an award winning science writer with three best selling books through credit. We’re going to probably talk only about one of them today. But there are three of the books that he’s written are the genie in your genes, which was a book that demonstrated how emotions drive gene expression, versus bliss brain, which is most recent, which demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness. And what we’re going to talk about mostly today is mind to matter how the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. Now, Dawson’s got the best laugh I’ve ever heard. So hopefully, we can get some laughs for him today. Those are welcome to character creation confessions.
 
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I spent a lot of time laughing already, I’m sure love some more.
 
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DEBS: Fantastic. So I’m going to hand it over to you really what, you know, the whole creation process. You’ve written three books, they didn’t just appear out of nowhere. How did these books just turn up?
 
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DAWSON: Well, the first big bestseller I had was the genie in your genes. I’ve written several books before that. But that book, I really was passionate about making a success, because it’s so vital to understand that our thoughts, our consciousness, our beliefs, the things that we think of as being totally intangible, are actually having a completely determinative effect on our gene expression. They are literally turning genes on and off. One study showed that certain mental states are shifting over 100 genes. laughter is as changing the expression of 32 genes. So I wanted to really make that clear to people in that book that I had this insight. And I also had ideas I’d heard at different conferences, so psychology conferences, and biology conferences, and acupuncture and acupressure oriental medicine conferences, and epigenetic conferences. No one was putting all these ideas together. And I thought, you know, there’s a book in this the genie in your genes. And if I don’t write that book, it’s out there in the, in the energy field, somebody else is going to write it now I’ll be really pissed off. If one day, I see the genie in our genes by my friend, Bruce
 
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Lipton. So I’m gonna write the book, I just worked with Bruce on a book called The Biology of Belief. And so I then wanted to take Bruce’s ideas, the next stage and showing how these intangible spec gene expression. And so I had this incredible insight. And I just focused on and wrote the book, and also really focused on promoting the book in the next few years. And I thought Arthur genio genes, that’s my big magnum opus, that I had this I’m so gifted by the universe, I felt so gifted, that I’d had this one incredible insight that emotion spirituality is driving gene expression. And I thought, wow, have I done? Well, that’s my lifetime accomplishment. And then I was, I was talking to my friend, Reed Tracy, who is the publisher of Hay House, about a radio series I was doing. And I become aware, this this whole idea in the New Age movement and the law of attraction, the secret that your thoughts create your reality. And as a researcher, I’ve done a lot of research, especially on traumatic stress.
 
I’ve worked with a lot of veterans with traumatic stress, various volunteer groups I was associated with had done work in Rwanda with with victims of the genocide there, we work in the Congo with female victims of sexual violence. We done a lot of work with Vietnam veterans, and now with a new generations, generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. So that was my field. I’ve been hearing these reports from various various people have these these rapid outcomes, rapid changes, people were were experiencing with energy psychology, energy therapies.
 
And then this whole idea that is talked about in the law of attraction that, you know, our thoughts are able to create our reality. I was I was a sceptic about that. So I did a series of radio shows. And I wanted to see how much truth that was, in terms of physics and chemistry, mathematics, and hard science behind the idea that our thoughts create our reality. So I finished the site, 10 years worth of PTSD research with veterans. And I had to turn my attention to this other phenomenon of mine to matter. And I did these interviews with these distinguished scientists and I began to see all of these ways in which might actually does create matter and brain states create matter. So I dropped my friend retracing when they mentioned it to him off handily, and he said, oh, there’s a book in there, and mind to matter. Let’s go go ahead and see what you’ve got. So I’ve had to put all those ideas together. And I expected when I get to Look at all the links in the chain between a thought and a thing. That scientifically, we’d find there were a few links we could prove, but there’d be a lot of gaps in the chain. And to my astonishment, as I worked on the book and looked at the research, and there are over 400, scientific studies that underpin my book might matter, I found that we could show and prove every single link of the chain between our thoughts and our reality.
 
So I had this Sunday, I had this other book, which became a bestseller. It’s sold over 100,000 copies. It’s been signed now and German and French and Spanish and all kinds of other languages. It’s a real phenomenon. And people are practising these methods that I have in the book, and then seeing how their world started to change around them. When they’re in these these. They’re coherent mental states. And I found in the book that the difference between the person who has an aspiration and an intention and the one who actually manifests their intention is mental and brain coherence. And we literally hook people up to emojis. And I got images like this showing these states in mind, no matter if you look at like my friend jack Canfield wrote the success principles. Brilliant. manifester is the star of the movie, The Secret and what jack intends is just going to happen. He’s just that kind of a guy. And then other people I’ve known have these wonderful intentions, high visions, nothing happens, what’s the difference, and when you hook them up to an eg, the difference is brain coherence. So their brainwaves and we can see we see these images in the book from eg studies, and you’ll see the brainwaves of a jack Canfield. They are in sync, they’re marching in step all their brainwaves are in sync together. If you look at the brainwaves of a person who’s not a good manifester, maybe they have higher visions, but they aren’t accomplishing what they want to their brainwaves are all disordered. And they may be really good at some other parts of their life. They may be superbet, you know, athletics or something. But then when they sit down to actually work on, say, their relationship or their spiritual journey or their creativity, their brainwaves are disordered, and those disorder bright those in those non coherent brainwaves are ineffective.
 
And so these great manifesters who are doing things then are able to have these great results in the outside world. So I wrote the second book Mind to Matter. And I was like lightning struck in the same place a second time first energy is now mine to matter. And then after that, I found I was beginning to experience these extraordinary mental states myself, I was teaching peak states peak performance flow to others, and I began to hit levels of happiness that were just like, unimaginable to me. And I began to look at the science behind that. And I found that it’s chemistry, I found that there are neuro chemicals like anandamide, and serotonin and dopamine and beta endorphins that produce these extraordinary mental states. And that you can actually create these neuro chemicals through certain styles of meditation. And that became bliss brain. So it’s lightning struck for the third time. And I also love living in that state and sharing it. So that’s kind of the trajectory of those three books.
 
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DEBS: What’s next I mean, just like, you know, like, let’s, let’s go for a fourth strike, what’s next for you?
 
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DAWSON: I’m now becoming really interested in a couple of things. One is accelerated states. Because the research that is covered in this brain, mostly is focused on adults, meditation adults. So these are like Tibetan monks have spent 10,000 hours in meditation. Some of them spent over 50,000 hours in meditation, and Franciscan nuns, women who entered a convent, often at an early age, and have spent maybe 10 2030, sometimes 60 years in deep contemplation in these altered states.
 
And by the way, there are two paths into flow. One is athletic performance, or some kind of business or personal performance, like you give a speech of a large audience and you feel absolutely exhilarated afterwards. And you’re in flow during the speech. So that’s one positive flow. Or maybe you’re doing like I do mountain biking and scuba diving. And, like, I remember going scuba diving recently and just becoming lost in the experience of it. That’s one part of the flow.
 
The other content flow is meditation. And these adults are able to get to these flow states extraordinary states really, really quickly after their 10,000 hours of practice. But I’m intrigued by getting there fast. How do we get people there quickly. So in in chapter one in the bliss brain, I have one sub Title One sub head call from 50 years to 50 seconds, because it’s taken me 50 years of personal growth of experimentation of scientific studies, exploration to find the states. And then I teach people in live retreats and virtual retreats in brief workshops, long workshops.
 
And in one of our recent live workshop, actually the last live workshop before the pandemic, we were, were hooking people up to EKGs, before and after a seven day retreat. And using these new methods, I mean, they’re really new neuroscience, we’ve we’ve now mapped the brains of these monks and nuns and these adults. But now that we have a map, a brain map of what that brain state is, we can now guide people to that state in just a few minutes. And so they’re they’re sitting there, they’ve never meditated before, very often, whenever meditated successfully. And within, sometimes on the first day of the retreat, within 20 minutes, they have the brainwaves of a Zen master who spent 40 years doing zen, and we’re seeing this on the eg. So it’s an objective measure of brain function, so that we’re teaching them to do this in over the course of only seven days. And one woman with everybody had astonishing shifts in brain functions. That was seven days.
 
But the most astonishing was one woman, who she closed her eyes on the seventh day hooked up to an EKG. And she was in the state of bliss brain, the awakened consciousness of oneness with the universe. She was there in 47 seconds. So it’s taking me 50 years to figure all this out. I don’t have to take you Deb’s or anyone listening. today. 50 years to figure all this stuff out, I have to go into a monastery of Oregon’s beyond us yet and take a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, I don’t want to have to go that route. I want to take people in seven days to that 52nd experience, where you’re just in, in in surrendered bliss, one with the universe, in that short space of time. So that’s one thing, bring people there quickly and reliably.
 
Science is all about replication. Spirituality is all about going and doing these practices and sticking with them and, and, and persistence. And that’s a really, really valuable thing to do. We need to self discipline, we need what Abraham Maslow calls self transcendence, beyond self actualization on his pyramid in the last two years of his life, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he said, no one was wrong about the pyramid. self actualization is not the top of the pack COVID is self transcendence. And we see that in these monks and nuns, they, they transcend the set their sense of self and their brain regions that construct the sell shutdown, and they sell, transcend. But we want people to be able to get there without 10,000 hours. And now we can do that really quickly.
 
And then the other big thing I’m super focused on is what happens to society when large numbers of people are doing this. And so there’s a section in Bliss brain called the 1%. And, you know, we’ve all heard about 1% in in wealth and how the billionaires are getting richer, poor people are getting poorer, the wealth disparities are increasing in developed countries. And so I took that idea of the 1%. And we found looking back over history by one of us wanted to find out of the population of the given region,
 
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what percentage, what percentage, really cares about self transcendence, about spiritual growth, about self improvement, about a better state than they currently are in. And the number is very small. It’s about 1%. If you go back to the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror in England, and look at the number of people engaged in monastic or overly spiritual pursuits, it was 1% of the population go back to Germany, which was keeping pretty good records at the time, China around 1300 1200, India, these were very developed civilizations that time and they kept records. And the number turns out to be 1%. Go to most countries like Thailand and see what percentage of people become Buddhist monks or nuns 1%. And this number 1% just pops out all throughout history, look at the number of percentage of meditators in in Europe and the US in 19 81%.
 
So this 1% number has been very consistent throughout history. And these are the people who have really been able to enter these ecstatic states of consciousness like St. Catherine of Sierra talking about marrying God and you know, Rumi and Hafiz these ecstatic states or so they’re hitting flow, just like that athlete who is doing that peak performance. They’re hitting flow meditator without that monk, now in an MRI, they’re hitting these flow states. And so those people are really small minority we learn from them, we want to understand their experience. And so how, what is this doing for our society to have a wide set of people pursuing these peak states. And then what’s happening now, today, and what’s happening now is in 1980 1990, began to rise.
 
And the number of people doing that globally, as far as we can tell from various surveys, by 2005, was 4%. It quadrupled between 1980 and 2005, quadruple the number of people who are having pay attention to those peak states.
 
In the last few years, it’s hit 15% of humankind, is now engaged in some kind of spiritual but non religious pursuit to do with a better frame of mind. Increased happiness, increased flow. So people, far more people are hitting these these states. And it’s producing a shift in material well being, or correlates with a shift in material well being in the human species. And we’re worried about the recession, we’re worried about economic upheaval, all that’s real. But if you look at the wealth of the average global citizen in 1980, and compare it with a wealth of the average global citizen today, people on average are three times as wealthy as they were in 1980. And that includes all the crashes and all the recessions, all the financial upheaval, look at lifespan in the last century, human lifespan has doubled. It was really consistent for a long time, but suddenly has doubled.
 
So I’m now looking at all of the research and there get 1000s of studies here of human thriving, things like female literacy, female literacy, like if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, educating girls teaching girls to read is the eighth most important thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. There are many other things we can do, but just need to just read. If girls read, they got to become entrepreneurs, they got to have your children, they go and have more time to take care of those children. There all kinds of reduce carbon offsets as a result of teaching girls to read. So female literacy, global literacy is growing human rights since World War Two. I mean, there are that horrible thing this has been, you know, this, the the Korean War, there’s been, there’s been a civil war in Syria, I mean, that are broken, our minds are captured by the problems we have right now the short term tragedies. But if you look at human rights since World War Two, steadily they’ve been advancing.
 
So there are literally 1000s of measures of human well being. And along with a shifts in consciousness 1% in 19 84%, in 2005 15%, today, there’s been a shift in human wellbeing, material well being as well. And we’re now starting to see our ability to solve problems increase, like we’re all aware of global warming. And climate change is very real. It’s threatening low lying areas, there are catastrophic climate events happening every year as a result of it. But what people don’t realise is there are all kinds of solutions where we’re having, we’re putting in place right now.
 
So I’m focusing in my new research and writing on those solutions. And there again, there are huge numbers of I’ll just mention two right now. One is carbon sequestration, that we literally, this isn’t a dream and idea, a theory we’ve been sucked at carbon out of the air. There are plants in several parts of the world right now giant plants, but it’s sucking in air and removing the carbon and producing carbon bricks, which are used for construction for furniture, all kinds of uses these carbon bricks that they produce. That’s not a future science fiction, fantasy. These are plants that operation right now. And they’re running economically in about $200 a tonne. So we now know the cost of carbon sequestration, we’re doing it. One other project that’s been endorsed by many governments, including the UN, is the idea of planting 1 trillion trees. And these are these are native trees that thrive where they’re planted. So we’re reversing, we’re reversing deforestation. Costa Rica has tripled its amount of rainforest in the last in the last 30 years. And it’s a it’s a model for other countries. And by planting native species, we can increase the number of trees and there are about 2 trillion trees on Earth. If we plant another trillion As those trees mature, they will suck up so much carbon, that it will return the Earth’s atmosphere to pre Industrial Revolution levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Again, do you hear about this is this frontline page news? I mean, there’s all this fabulous stuff going on.
 
So the last chapter of Bliss Brain is a little curtain raiser of looking at 1000 of these studies and picking I just picked 12 rounds, they’re all very positive. And then the the other thing is that we’re becoming much wiser and much smarter. As we meditate. That translates into the real world in long term study are by McKinsey corporations, big consulting firm global consulting firm, they did a 10 year study of peak performance people who are not schlubby as they are people at the peak of their profession. And they found that these people pursue flow states, they get into flow states, they want flow, I know that they’ll write well in flow, they know that they’ll speak well in flow, they know that they’ll have great ideas and flow because in flow, your brain is producing a lot of gamma and gamma, that’s the brainwave, that’s when your brain is firing at 30 times per second and higher.
 
I call it the Einstein way, Einstein said that you to figure out the answer to a complex problem, you have to move to a higher level of consciousness, Napoleon Hill in chapter 15, and thinking grow and grow rich, he says, you cannot solve the problems that are generated by your current level of consciousness at the level of consciousness, you have to ascend to a higher level of consciousness. And so there are always people throughout history, who meditate, who seek to become one with the universe and channel, the universal wisdom and joy and law. That’s why we’re so happy people in the state are incredibly happy. And so gamma is the wave that is the indication to an eg neuroscientist are both happiness and creativity. There’s lots of gamma, these Tibetan monks, when they close their eyes and meditate, their level of gamma goes up 25 fold, not 25% or 250%. That is 25 times the amount of gamma, their happiness they’re in. They’re in bliss.
 
That’s why the book is called Bliss Brain, you are feeling really, really happy. And then when you come back from the mountaintop, when you return to your daily life, like I have a nonprofit that I managed that deaths, advanced therapies to veterans with PTSD is called the veteran stress project. We created over 20,000 veterans in the last 10 years, that’s a really practical thing to do. So you are just losing yourself in this ecstatic state and then coming back to your body into your ordinary life as a as a smiling vegetable. You’re doing you’re doing kick ass stuff in the world, you’re treating veterans, you’re helping people who are suffering suffer less.
 
So what the McKinsey study found was that these people who are in the states and then come back to their bodies, after 10 years study of peak performers. Again, they’re they’re having more gamma, there are those that gamma creativity, happiness, they’re in flow, but then they start to do their regular work. They are five times as productive in their own assessment of themselves five times as productive as they normally would be. That’s echoed by the results of the study by the defence arm of the US government called the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency called DARPA. And in the 1970s, if you watched the movie, men who stare at goats that was experimenting with distant viewing and all kinds of phenomena, those with darker projects, DARPA is really interested in consciousness and the effect of consciousness on the outside world. And they find that when you attain those elevated states of non local awareness that Einstein and Napoleon Hill and many other people talk about, and you then come back to earth and start doing stuff.
 
DARPA was testing people’s ability to solve really complicated problems, not easy problems. Problems like global warming problems like overpopulation problems, like income disparity, all the social ills we have right now weaponized AI, I have a lot of sort of doom and gloom stuff in the back of bliss, right and how we can solve it. And so DARPA study found when you come out of that flow state and you’re back in your executive chair, your ability to solve problems goes up by 490% to solve complicated, difficult conundrums increases by 490%, almost a five fold increase in problem solving ability, echoing the McKinsey study of high performers so now we had 1% of people doing that in 11 119 80. We had 4% in 2005, we have about 15% today, and another look at that curve, look what that curve is going. And these people are becoming five times as productive, have a five fold ability to solve complex problems, like global warming, income disparity, we’re going to start to tackle some of the tough shit in the next 1020 years. And we’re gonna do it. I mean, we’re, the human race is gonna do and look at the trajectory of what we’ve already solved, of course of the last decade in three decades. And we are we are in for an unprecedented period of humans writing.
 
So that’s my, my next few books are about how to get there quickly, without 10,000 hours, how to do it in 50 seconds. 30 seconds or less, how to be that happy state, stay in the happy, safe, and then be productive, and what happens to the world, when you have all these millions of people walking around in this flow state, highly productive, highly adaptive problem solving, and incredibly happy.
 
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DEBS: I’m, like, Oh, my God, I can see the future. The future is fantastic. But now I’m gonna ask you. So we know. Your research has shown your book tells us we know that when we get into flow state, when we meditate and we do we get into flow state and then come back to the real world and do things we are five times more productive, we are five times more able to solve complicated problems. We are happier, we are blissful with surrendered bliss. I just love that idea. Okay, so why tell me tell me that? Maybe I’m just talking to me? Why does meditating feel like it’s just another thing on my to do list?
 
2DAWSON: 6:43
For me, it was the same way that I was 15 years old. And I mean, the spiritual teacher said, close your eyes and studio. There are just two things you have to do. One is close your eyes. Two is still your mind. Level one’s fairly easy. We all close our eyes, you do it every night to go to sleep. Still your mind Are you crazy. I mean, the human mind is not meant to be still think about your ancestors, our ancestors evolving 100,000 years ago, they’re here they’re there they are in the middle of the jungle things are their third predators and threats and the Neanderthals are still around ready to, to grab their resources. And so our minds did not evolve to be still our minds, evolved to be looking for what’s wrong out there all the time. And so when you close your eyes, one thing, there are about 11 million bits of information travelling from your eyes, through your optic nerve to your occipital cortex to the back of your brain. And when you close your eyes, you cut off that flow of information, and you then start to think, and those thoughts aren’t aren’t positive.
 
In Bliss Brain, I summarise the study by Harvard to Harvard psychologists about 250,000 people, and they find that we’re doing negative thinking about 47% of the time, especially when we were relaxing when we’re relaxing. And we have nothing on our minds, our bodies, our brains default school, the default mode network, and it tends to ruminate about the problems of the past, and how those might become issues in our future. Because that’s the way our ancestors survived, you had to think about the tiger that almost ate yesterday, and obsess about every detail of that experience. And the tiger that might eat you tomorrow, that 100,000 years ago, it was that default mode network as the default mode because the brain were uses every spare bit of processing ability not devoted to doing a task, It defaults, that that those resources to that network that thinks about that stuff in the past. That’s what might happen in the future, and studies it and regurgitates it and reviews it endlessly.
 
But that’s obsessive negative thinking we all do it. And it leads to terrible health consequences. What the mind matter of studies shows that that negative thinking leads directly. It is the strongest car literary factor to the build up of beta amyloid plaques in your brain and beta amyloid plaques for Alzheimer’s disease, and you know what have beta amyloid plaques in your brain. And this research study showed brilliant study done about a year ago that the single biggest factor wasn’t lifestyle or diet or exercise or social connections, it was negative thinking and the scale, the more negative thinking people did, the more beta amyloid plaques had in their brain.
 
So thinking is able to shape our bodies, our brains, our futures, and see what it be doing positive thinking that you can’t easily do it. Because our ancestors didn’t survive that way. There was no evolutionary benefit to smelling the roses. And there was an extremely large evolutionary benefit to noticing the tiger in the grass so our brains work this way. Close your eyes, dried meditate, and all you do is default to that negative thinking. So what I did was in around 2008, I designed a meditation called eco meditation. Because I constant my own mind, I said, Okay, what do we do to counteract that mind wandering.
 
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And what I said is, let’s just do physiological things that a master meditator would do. So I looked at the research into master meditators, I looked at the research into mechanical ways of relaxing us, like, for example, one very simple one, what are the seven steps because meditation is to relax your tongue on the floor of your mouth. Because when we’re tense when we’re stressed, but one’s more rigid, and we hold our times rigid, most of the day, when you relax, it’s your turn the floor, even now, it sends a signal through the vagus nerve to every single organ system in your body and says, There’s no Tiger in the room, relax. So that’s one of the seven steps of meditation, I designed this little, little thing. Because I Constable, my own mind, I’ve never been able to do that. And so 50 years of meditation, I’ve got a complete failure. It’s solely my own mind. But I can relax my title before my mouth. And I can breathe six seconds in six seconds out, which puts you at heart coherence. So I designed this little routine, put it on the web, people began to use it, suddenly it exploded in popularity, we had to study it, do research studies then do eg that MRI studies of eco meditation. And if you just do these seven simple things, like one woman called Tony, Tom Wilson, she was one of the early adopters and fee. We’ve got 1000s of people like Tony emailing us in their stories, and Tony wrote, she said, I I’m so burned out on parenting on life. I have high cortisol 99% of the time, I failed every meditation practice I’ve ever tried. And when I sat down Dawson to do your seven steps of eco meditation, my mental talk was, Tony have failed at every other practice, you’ll fail at this to just be able to do these seven mechanical, physiological steps. And when I hit Step three, my heart was filled with bliss. And tears of joy began to roll down my cheeks. And I was that place I’d longed to be for so long. And then she wrote to end with, I’m going to do this every day. And that’s what people are saying because it’s so pleasurable. To have that serotonin. We boost our serotonin by doing this, and I don’t mean to very pleasurable neurochemicals, we both boost our in that divide. And then andamanide has the same chemical structure adopts with the same receptor sites, as THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. In fact, serotonin is has the same chemical structure as magic mushrooms psilocybin. So psilocybin dots with certain react receptor sites, serotonin does as well. But psilocybin comes from a magic mushroom. serotonin comes from a magic meditation, meditation, and you start to feel super high.
 
And so we’re just cranking out all these people like Tony now, who doing one or two times and the bliss states they attain as the all those pleasurable neuro chemicals are unlocked in their brains feel so good, that they then are able to meditate without everyone stealing their mind. So that’s that’s why we say it’s necessary to do effective meditation. For most people, what they’re doing meditation is ineffective. And in this brain, I parse out using neuroscience brain studies, which things are effective and which things are ineffective.
 
And the vast majority of what people do and call a think of as meditation is ineffective, it is not moving the needle, it does not put you into a flow state. It does not produce wiring the brain. But if you do the right stuff, if you do the right mixture of mindfulness and self hypnosis and acupressure and and biofeedback neurofeedback, if you do all those things right correctly, your brain starts to rewire itself within a few days. In one study we did we show that four weeks of this produce anatomical changes in the brain. And that’ll be the change with the suffering part of the brain that he talks about network quietening and the happiness part of the brain and the connection part of the brain and integration part of the brain. That part of the brain lit up in people in this randomised control trial. So you have to do an effective meditation for this to work.
 
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So it’s not just it’s it’s not just about the practice, it’s about the right practice the perfect practice rather than what I do to force myself to sit still in my eyes scrunched up.
 
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works great.
 
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Afterwards, yeah.
 
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Do your seven steps. I’m going to do eco meditation. I’ve decided
 
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good Can you feel the difference right away?
 
DAWSON: It’s a very somatic experience. So as you when you hit serotonin, you’ll feel that when you hit the mean, you’ll feel that rush of, of motivation. When you hit norepinephrine, you’re going to feel alertness, nitric oxide, you’re going to be wide awake. I mean, so there all kinds of neuro chemicals that are happening and they’re at you. I mean, you just feel your body feeling hitting one after the other. It’s like, well, in fact, people are so excited. After doing this. They’re reaching such exciting heights, that the last part of it even meditation is really important, which is coming down to earth. Because people get so spacey I mean, you see these images of you know, Rumi or Hafiz or sintef, one of Seattle’s impressive Assisi lists laying there, totally stone and blissed out. And that’s great for your meditation period. But then you got to drive afterwards. You got to get kids to school, you got to, you know, meet the deadline at work, you got to write your blog, post your balance, your chequebook. All these things need mean you have to integrate. And so the last little two minutes of meditation has come down to look around you what time of day it is, what’s your next appointment, look at the calendar. So you have to ground your spirituality.
 
You know, the old back in the old days, 1100 1300 people went into the monastery went into the desert desert had these elevated states, and they were in their bubble, and it was great. Now we’re bringing those elevated states to the prison. We have people working in prisons and helping prisoners do that, again, working with traumatised female victims of sexual violence for the Congo Civil War. We’re doing this with them we’re doing with those Rwandans we’re doing this with, with war veterans, we’re doing this with people, victims of childhood abuse. So this is very real world stuff. It is not in a monastery socked away, the province the the owed curated by the 1%. This is for everybody. That’s why it’s able to produce a sweeping change in the mental health of the globe.
 
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DEBS: I love it. I’m excited. Now I’m going to change tack a little bit. right at the start, you said I suddenly got this insight that I should write the first book. And I should have got this insight. And I was thinking you made it sound so like it just came to me. But I heard that you put yourself in the path of insight that you put yourself in the situation to put yourself where you would be meat mind you would meet other people. Tell me about your insight path. Because how do you how do you get that insight? How, what’s your bigger picture for getting insights?
 
37:35
DAWSON: Well, I wrote the core of my matter. And it’s the core chapters, I just got them outline in a seven day period. And I because I have a big organisation, a company they run they also have this big nonprofit. And I’m doing tonnes of charitable work and all kinds of other things. I wrote my writing time has really compress I had to sit down and I have to produce you know, like 3050 pages in a day. So it’s not like I’m an ivory tower academic with a with tenure and a steady paycheck and I can just, you know, go go off into their invited eyesight, what I do is so that seven day period that I teach at espelette Institute and a few other places like that these advanced leading edge places that that that where they share these new leading edge ideas, and they’ve been emasculated esslyn and escalon was closed so suddenly I seven free days. And I get I have this deadline for mind to matter.
 
So each Monday I woke up around 4am. And I meditated for two hours. Now at that point, you’re totally one with the universe and I right and made better about letting go of your local reality in local mind and becoming one with non local mind. That’s what all these great mystics do. They become one with non local mind. The great creatives are one with non local mind. That’s where they get their ideas, according to Albert Einstein, Napoleon Hill, and a lot of other people much smarter than me. And so you’re downloading these ideas. I meditate for about two hours, each of those seven days, actually added another week end onto it. So it was actually nine days like nine days. So I got out of bed and it’s important to meditate dabs immediately on waking. You don’t want to do something else like go check your email or look
 
39:33
at feed.
 
39:37
Good after you framed your day meditation, but when you begin, you have to start today by really tuning in. So you tend to do it that way that I was doing it for about two hours every morning and I wasn’t coming back down to earth I was staying at elevated stage. And as I did that, and I then went online and now I get I have to look I have to read for a book like mind matter. I have to Read it understand and explain about 400 scientific studies. And these are very difficult papers to read and understand the average layperson would be unable to comprehend them. So I have to go read them by figure out what’s relevant. And I have to explain something written by a Nobel laureate with an IQ of 200. To the average person, how do I do that?
 
So what I would do after my meditation is I would without coming back to reality, I, in that flow state, I sit down, I start to work. And intuitively, I be guided to places that I would find a bit of information I needed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, that obscure little journal that no one’s ever heard of, and that the nugget of information I needed was there, how they get there, I was just totally guided every day, into where to go next, and how to interpret it, how to explain it to people. That same year I was I was, one, I had to write this chapter in my matter, about the global parts of mind matter how our brains are entrained by and how our bodies evolved in the magnetic field of the Earth, and how those those brainwaves that vary from high waves like like, like gamma to slow waves, like delta and theta, all of those waves are also the same breath, the same waves as the earth like musical the Schumann resonances of the planet.
 
And so I had to write a chapter of this very, very difficult chapter to write about how our internal brain wave states correlate with these planetary fields. And also, these fields are shaped by the solar wind moving past the earth that moves past the earth at about 3000 kilometres an hour. It’s going very, very fast. it distorts the Earth’s field, and it distorts human function as well as Sunbeam. It’s a big subject, I do nothing about it. And then one of those weekends that that that year, I read to speak at a conference, I sat down on a science panel with three other scientists, that it turned out that the guy sitting next to me, was the world’s leading expert on the Schumann resonances, and field line residences and how they correlate with human brainwaves of all the millions of scientists in the world. That conference, I happen to get seated next to the guy who was the world’s top authority on that, he explained it to me on the back of a napkin. So the whole book was sacred as the number of this whole section in mind matter, about all the synchronicities that resulted in mind matter getting written, I mean, we’re in synchrony, synchrony, synchrony that happens. So
 
42:47
DEBS: yeah, I’m writing a book called Hacking Serendipity about putting yourself in the path of, of these opportunities. And that you have to be you have to be there you have to, so I’m going to have to interview for that. We’ll test it. Sorry, carry on.
 
43:03
DAWSON: Yeah. So you do that. So you meditate, you deliberately put yourself there, you give yourself uncluttered space, you can’t easily write a book, or write a significant amount of material. If you give yourself a one hour window. For me, it takes at least a half day window. And I would rather have a full day. Without any interruption side work. I started work at 6am on transportation, I’d work a solid 12 hours usually till 6pm. And then I would get out of my chair, I would shower and eat breakfast at 6pm because the previous 12 hours I had been in such flow. I didn’t care about going to the bathroom, or eating or anything. I mean, I was in such intense flow. You’re the downloading, you weren’t even you you’re you’re like channelling all the history of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein and you know Fibonacci. And you’re in you’re just you’re you’re you’re in touch with a living beating heart of science. And you just feel yourself as an instrument. And you’re writing inspired ideas. You come back the next day or the next week and read the stuff you say, who wrote this. Now the guy with my IQ for sure.
 
So we can be one with great creative fields. And again, these field wide residences, and there are these huge pulses of creative energy that influence the planet. And when you align yourself with those, there is love. There’s wisdom, there’s kindness, there’s compassion, there’s joy, this gratitude. That’s why it’s this brain, you feel good. And you also feel one with nature, one to something larger than yourself and your writing then from that perspective, you’re not writing from your local struggles, your local self, you’re writing from your non local self. Chapter One, chapter seven might matter is all about non local self joining with non local self. The book is not mind over matter. It’s being a channel for the wisdom of the universe into your local reality. That’s why it’s mine. to matters of great mind, the Cosmic Mind, into the local mind of your mind, and then into the matter around you. So it’s aligning yourself with that mind when you enlightened that mind. There, you’d have to find creativity. There is so much creativity flowing through you, it’s hard to find places to put it all you have to sort of gather in your brain. It’s like you’re just, you’re you’re walking around completely inspired all day, every day. It’s an extraordinary mental state. And it’s accessible to anyone now we’re finding that people can enter the state doing enough, and it just starts to permeate your everyday reality.
 
DEBS: But I’m going to try and keep to our time, ish. Okay, so I’ve got a couple of final questions for you. The question that I just have to ask everybody this question, and I just love it’s one of my favourite questions is, when was the last time you did something for the first time? Oh, what
 
46:12
DAWSON: a wonderful question. Well, the brain thrives on novelty. So for example, one of the things you do in meditation is you do noble things do do do do new things. And so you want to deliberately induce novelty, that it was this morning, my wife came and my wife seems a little later than I do just just at four o’clock or five o’clock, usually. And she comes down us Mark says bedroom and I, I’ve been meditating for a while. And I decided to say something to her. I usually say I love you. You’re beautiful. I’m so grateful to be with you. I say things like that. But they we’ve been married a long time. And so you can I run out of new things to say. So this morning, she came down. And I thought of something I never said her before. And his way of expressing appreciation to her. And I said that to her. And she was like startled, surprised. So that was the last time you just seek novelty you seek you know, you’re making a dish you may have before you used your spices in it and you walk a different route, you move on the other side of the road, you walk, you know, on the road, rather than other papers, you just fit, you have that kind of a brain and the brain thrives on novelty. So you want to be deliberately inducing that in your life every day, because it’s one of the triggers for flow.
 
47:30
Okay, that’s fantastic. You’re the first person who said today, six years ago. Anything, I haven’t asked you that you want to tell me?
 
47:48
Oh, yeah. But about 47 straight hours of it. But we actually there’s less time that’s
 
47:58
the thing is the most important thing to me is how do people get in touch with you? And how do they find out about the Eco meditation? There are seven steps because I think that for my audience that like, if we can get 12 hours of writing done in a day, I mean, so you can teach us how to do that, that really, how do we get hold of you? How do we get that that information?
 
48:22
Okay, well, the, the best way to do it is by following the links in either Bliss Brain or Mind to Matter, there are 70 meditation tracks. In Bliss Brain, there are eight different EEG meditation tracks, and you want to use those tracks and use it in sequence using the order in the book. And those are the deepening practices at the end of the book. And then you can get mind matter at mind better calm to get this brain at this brain calm. The publisher actually gave us a whole bunch of books at cost. So we’re giving them away at this brain calm, pay, shipping and handling book itself is free. And then when you do that, you’ll also get links to those eight meditations. So just just try the first one, start with the first one. And you’ll feel yourself start to shift.
 
49:07
Brilliant. And is there anything else? By the way, you want us to get in touch with you. So people want to contact you? What’s the best way?
 
49:14
Well, I love sharing this with businesses. And I’m I’m now doing more and more research on productivity and creativity, especially as relates to business functioning. And so we’ve now begun to collect data on how we can induce flow states. And also I’ve done a few executive flow sessions. These are really interesting, because if you have an executive team together, say for a meeting, either a virtual meeting or a live meeting, and their personality conflicts, and some of them are worried about stuff going on at home, someone has a health problem. They aren’t all fully present. And this research by Gallup show that only about a third of employees, both top and bottom level employees are really engaged at work. The other two thirds are partially engaged or actively disengaged from work. So that Gallup Polls real real shocker that only a third of people are engaged. And so when you have that meeting, you know, it’s not very creative people are stumbling over each other and having little rivalries and conflicts. But I’m now become really interested in the phenomenon of group flow. So it’s great to have individual flow. But we found out if I work with an executive team, that I can work with those people at the start of the meeting, will do a brief induction of flow. Now you’ve got everybody in the room, and flow to gather, and big gather, big creativity, calm, mind, calm heart, all those issues go away. And now what that team accomplishes with that five times productivity and 490% problem solving ability, collectively together. It is awesome. And I’m studying this time, I’m getting research on this. I think it was showing that people’s but it goes through the roof. So that’s one other thing I want to do more on is more nonprofits, more corporations, more organisations, where we actually bring teams into flow together. And then that’s where they start their work. And then they start their project that way, and
 
51:12
DEBS: magic happens. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I’m going to put all your links and in the end of the transcription, so people can get in touch with you in those ways. MindtoMatter.com BlissBrain.com are the two key places to get the books and DawsonChurch.com if you go to
 
51:37
if you go to doors and gifts calm that’s another cool site. DawsonGift.com because we didn’t even touch on this that doing all this stuff. produces in one study, I did a doubling of your level of circulating immune antibodies. So your antibodies that chump up viruses, bacteria, double in a week with the right practices. And there’s a study in a medical journal that shows that and there’s a meditation that sparks immunity at that dose, gift comm site. So there’s a special form of meditation, they’re targets directly on immunity and that’s that’s one thing that’s probably worth worth sharing. So that’s, that’s, that’s probably other than the two books sites, that’s probably the best way to get hold of me is DawsonGift.com.
 
52:23
DEBS: Brilliant. Okay. I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve had. Thank you so much for your time. I’m sure we’re gonna have to do this again. There’s going to be so many different things. My my notebook is full of questions, questions and
 
52:38
DAWSON: answers and I just visualising your book, on serendipity just going easily flowing. This has been a perfectly good lubricant for it. And I just visualise that project being joyful, easy, light and productive for you.
 
52:52
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.