Scientists have the world upside down. Consciousness cannot be reduced to material explanations; rather, matter is reducible to mind and there is a whole host of psychic and spiritual evidence to prove it.

Mark Gober’s first day on Wall Street was in July 2008. The market crashed in September. Overnight, fortunes floundered, companies collapsed, jobs vanished and lives were ruined. Gober was left running a rat race that seemed to have already ended, working ‘in a distressed industry… with distressed clients, at an under-resourced investment bank.’ Slowly, material wealth began to seem hollow, irrelevant, immaterial.

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In 2016, Gober stumbled upon a podcast discussing consciousness and the supernatural. Intrigued, he found himself probing deeper and deeper into the subject over the next year, questioning his latent materialism and slowly adopting a belief that mind is more real than matter. So radical was this paradigm shift that Gober now refers to his life in two periods: before and after the shift. This period of intensive growth and research culminated in a radical career shift and the publication of his first book, An End to Upside Down Thinking (2018).

Assembling studies from multiple countries, decades and disciplines, Gober argues that the scientific method vindicates the existence of ‘wizard-like’ abilities that are difficult to explain within a materialistic paradigm but make perfect sense if consciousness trumps matter. Remote viewing programmes conducted by the US government – confirmed by leaked documents and by President Jimmy Carter himself – suggest that psychics were able to remotely locate distant planes, sites and weapons when more conventional methods failed. Other studies implied that minor levels of telepathy were observable among everyday people and were increased among twins and autistic savants. More recently, Cornell psychologist Dr. Daryl Bem observed that precognition (knowing or sensing something prior to it happening) was 3 per cent higher than it should be based on probability alone. Rupert Sheldrake – formerly a Cambridge biochemist – has argued that similar results are observable in dogs who can sense when their owners decide to return home (at randomised times) long before any sensory stimulus would physically alert them. Experiments conducted at Princeton’s PEAR laboratory as late as 2007 also suggest that some degree of psychokinesis (the ability of the mind to move matter) was observed when random number generators (RNGs) reported non-random results when placed next to living organisms. While Gober admits that individual studies may be flawed or faked, he does not believe it is plausible to dismiss out of hand such a significant number of studies.

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Chronicling the nearly 14 million Americans who claim to have had near-death experiences (NDEs), Gober identifies 15 common features within these accounts, suggesting they might be pointing to an underlying reality accessed when the brain shuts down. While materialists suggest this is merely the result of chemical reactions as the brain deactivates, Gober counters that ‘if the mind is not supposed to have any activity within 30 seconds of the last heartbeat, then whatever is having these experiences must be deeper than the material mind.’ In other words, if the mind is shutting down, one would expect its experiences to dim and shrink rather than light up and expand with intense and prolonged visions as well as complex revelations.

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Complicating the matter even further are the massive studies of reincarnation by Dr Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, which followed 2500 reported cases of children who remember past lives over 50 years. These studies suggest that not only does consciousness outlive the material body but that it goes on to inhabit other bodies in the future.

It seems difficult to reject out of hand the impressive plethora of statistics, articles and testimonies Gober has amassed. One cannot help but wonder if the evidence for consciousness has been tried and found wanting, or if it has been unwanted and so left untried. Either way, the open-minded reader will likely find sufficient intrigue in Gober’s work to merit further exploration for themselves.