New Thinking Allowed is a non-profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring the life and work of the amazing Mexican neuroscientist and paranormal researcher Jacobo Greenberg, who mysteriously disappeared in 1994. My guest is Alex Gomez-Marin, a physicist currently employed by the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain. He is also the director of the Perry Center in Italy. Alex's research proposal, Seeing Without Eyes, received an award in the Linda G. O'Brien Research Competition sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Alex is based in Spain and now I'll switch over to the internet video. Welcome, Alex. What a pleasure to be with you. This

is our third interview.
I'm delighted to see you. Thank you, Jeff. Yes, indeed.
I'm so happy to talk to you again. We'll be discussing a figure who is
very controversial and mostly unknown in terms of the great body of his work, Jacobo
Greenberg, the Mexican neuroscientist. As I recall, he got a
doctoral degree in the United States but did his research
in Mexico, author of 50 books. An amazing pioneer when
you begin to look at his investigations of
shamanism and eyeless sight and extrasensory
perception and his theories regarding the relationship
of the mind and the brain. So I'm delighted that we're going to be
able to share with our English-speaking audience so much that is only
available to the Spanish-speaking world. Indeed. And actually,
I'm on a little mission here, which is to convey the
legacy of Jacobo Greenberg.

First, because I feel some sort of affinity with him. I don't know, that's something personal, but also I think he deserves it. Plus, as you just said, and hopefully we'll discuss it, he seemed to have lived many lives in one life and he mysteriously disappeared when he was 45. And now, 2024 is the 30th anniversary of his disappearing. And so, well, it just feels timely to say to the world that this extraordinary man existed and to tell a bit of what he did and what he wrote and what he found and what he experienced. It's a fascinating life indeed. His career is so varied, I suppose a good starting point is your specialty of neuroscience. Jacobo was, amongst everything, a scientist, but he went into all those directions working with shamans and also he was a theoretician at the same time.

He was doing experiments in the lab, so it's like he has many legs. We could talk about the theory, which I think it's the most important aspect if you would ask him, his Syntergic Theory. But also in the lab, he was doing pioneer experiments in the 70s, maybe the 80s until 94 when he disappeared. And so one thing he was doing, they were doing in the lab, they were studying hemispheric coherence and his lab had the title Human Communication. So they were trying to see what happens in certain meditative states and what happens in the brain and whether there's coherence amongst the hemispheres. But then they were also testing two people and how both brains would align with each other, would influence each other. And then he went further and that was actually the last experiment he did before he disappeared. And he was inspired by the EPR, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen.

experiment, this
thought experiment. So his final experiment was taking
these people that were in interaction, close interaction in the same room,
let's say, like the electrons in physics. Put them aside in far-away
cages and then stimulate with some very simple visual stimulus in
one case, one of the subjects. And then try to detect if this evoked
potential in one subject was transferred to the second subject, and he
called this the transferred potential. And it wasn't telepathy per se,
but it was like neurobiological basis of non-local communication
detected in human brains. And I understand he
performed maybe 50 or 60 experiments of this type
with consistent results. Yes, and of course,
the results need to be replicated, and I think
they have been replicated. I know, for instance, Dean Radin has
published something along those lines. And I know Peter Fenwick
also tried to replicate them, and sometimes he
couldn't, and then he could.

This goes also back, and probably Jacobo didn't know about this. I always wondered what they could read then, what they knew, also because I don't think he was very fluent in English. And there wasn't a lot of research, but actually there's some classic papers from 1965, if I recall correctly. A very brief paper in science about some twins and some recordings. So it was really hard to record then. I mean, the technology we have today would sound like science fiction to them. But they were already into it. They were doing it in the lab. They had these ideas. They were getting positive results. I must admit that you could critique the methodology, and it could have been done better. But he was an absolute pioneer, again, both in terms of the theoretical framing and vision, and also the courage to go in the lab in Mexico in the 80s and just go for that.

And today, even today, it sounds pioneering. So imagine 30, 35 years ago. Long ago, I interviewed Carl Pribram, the neuroscientist who was then at Stanford University and had developed a model of brain functioning. He called it the holographic brain. He had very interesting theories. And I know that he took Greenberg quite seriously. He went to Mexico and visited Greenberg's laboratory. I think he was impressed with what he saw. He only hoped there would be more replications in other labs. Yes, yes. Makes total sense. And Jacobo set up his lab and also an institute that he called INPEC. And this stands for Instituto Nacional para el Estudio de la Consciencia, National Institute for the Study of Consciousness. And yes, well-known people would bring him and then travel to Mexico and discuss with him and be surprised about what was going on.

If only he had had more
years to just develop his experiment and his theory,
which was always in construction. By the way, before he disappeared,
they had planned an experiment to try this transfer potential, not between two
people separated by a few meters in Mexico, but actually one
in India or Tibet, if I recall correctly, and
another one in Mexico to provide some more
evidence about the true non-locality, the irrelevance
of space in doing that. But to your comment
and your question, he was known by other figures
like Carlos Castañeda. And so he was very popular back
then, and then he disappeared. And the sad thing is that
people forgot about him. I would dare to say even
in his homeland, even in Mexico, he has been
forgotten until quite recently. So now we are experiencing
kind of a revival of Greenberg. Well, I know there's a movie, a
documentary, that has been made.

I think it largely focuses on the mystery of his disappearance. That has become somewhat sensationalized in the media because of his prominence in the scientific world, and particularly his interest in parapsychology, and the fact that he apparently disappeared without a trace. I agree. And I watched the movie. I watched the documentary. It's called El Secreto del Dr. Greenberg, The Secret of Dr. Greenberg. I also realized that the film director, whose name is Ida Cuellar, was born in Barcelona, like myself, so I found his contact, and I contacted him. He's a wonderful man, also very knowledgeable about, I could say, all these mysteries, not in a sensationalist way. And so I have a good relationship with Ida. This documentary has kind of two sides, right? One is that, of course, it sells, what it sells, what it presents is the thriller, the mystery of what happened to this man.

And it could have been a scientist. It could have been somebody else, right? But it's really shocking how he vanished. And then there's some clues that he could have some ties to the CIA. Other people said he was maybe killed by his current wife there because she also disappeared but was found somewhere. Other people said he just vanished into hyperspace meditating. So there's a whole kind of culture and cult behind it. Now, the documentary presented that, I would say, pretty well. Now, it had the excuse then to introduce to the world, or at least to the listeners, the science, the fascinating science he was doing. That wasn't the main goal of the documentary. But this has created that I was saying, at least in me, spurred tremendously the curiosity of who's this man, regardless of actually what's a tragic happening, right? Because, well, I then got in contact with his

daughter, Estucia, with
whom I chat sometimes. And it's the disappearing of a father,
you see. Out of the blue, he's gone. And also I know his first wife,
Lisette, and she's absolutely lovely. And so this is a tragic happening. Some people are stuck with it
because they cannot stop speculating about whether he's still alive,
where he would be, and so on. And then my goal is just to
honor his legacy and bring it to the foreground and see if we
can continue working on his theory. So all these aspects,
it's a very complicated constellation, Jeff,
because it's irresistible. It's like there's evidence in the
documentary. And by the way, the film director, Ida, I think it took him
eight or nine years to record it. He was going to Mexico
and then he also found the police officer who
was in charge of the case.

And it was really hard
to find. And he found him. And then he showed him
some more pieces of data. So the documentary
also kind of moved forward in the understanding
of what happened. At the end of the day, we don't
know. And, well, for the good and for the bad, this has opened the
Greenberg Pandora box in Mexico. And I would wish that the
Anglo-American world would know about this man, both kind of
the listeners, your audience, but also the more orthodox
neuroscientists today, given that theories of consciousness is on
the table under dozens of them. So Jacobo's Syntergic Theory deserves
a little spot there. And who knows? I think it has some merit, some
really, really important merits theoretically, because we have
time to discuss it maybe later. It brings in together notions of
space and physics with neuroscience. And, well, I'm a physicist or
neuroscientist, so this is even more

interesting to me that somebody
tried to bridge these worlds like that. Well, I think his theory
is quite significant to the extent that
I understand it. He seemed to be positing that consciousness
itself is outside of space and time, but somehow the brain
is able to interact with this, what you might call,
the non-local domain. Yes, yes. He wasn't a
physicist, and I think he admitted that he wasn't really good
with maths, but he had a... I mean, I've gone so deeply into
his work, reading his books and so on, that I try to imagine. That's
something that's mesmerizing. So I try to imagine how he dealt
with that. So he had this tremendous imagination, which doesn't
mean making things up or fiction. I think he was absolutely creative. And so
despite not knowing the maths, he grasped that there's something very puzzling
about space, about the phenomenology of it.

And he writes pages and
pages in different books about, you know. I'm
looking at the moon here and I get the rays of
the moon, but then if I shift a little bit to the
side, I still get them. So he starts making
these theoretical, philosophical digressions
about. Well, it seems like the space can
contain information at all these different points
about another object. So it has a smell of holographic
theory, a la Prybram, too. And so once he has this in
place, and actually it takes him quite a few years, and
you can see it if you trace the ontogeny, the development
of his theory in his own writing, because it was
really work on the construction. Then he
says, well, on the one hand, we have the organization of space,
which we should not take for granted. So that's the physics part of it.
And on the other hand, of course, we

have the brain, and we have these neuronal fields that the brain creates. And so he puts them together, and he says it is the interaction between space and its organization and this neuronal field that gives rise to, and we could qualify this later because it's complicated, but that gives rise to experience. Basically, and he said it very clearly, all his life was an exploration of the question, where does experience come from? And the way he theoretically framed it is by bringing together these neural fields and this organization of space. And then he called it the lattice. So it's like the space in its purest form that then gets distorted. And so that those distortions are what gives rise to physical things, objects, and so on. And it is this interaction that gives rise to experience. But later on, he added more elements. Maybe if you wish some more mystical elements saying, well,

that's not enough. We need
some sort of observer, capital O. And so that brought
his work, led it into the meditation aspect of
it, of the more mystical. And he drew from Jewish mysticism
and from the local shamans in Mexico. So he drew from all these
traditions, from the best he could about quantum
physics and space, and from what he had learned in
his stay in New York about neuroscience, and blended
all together into his theory. It's very interesting. I am
Jewish myself, so I have some appreciation for the Kabbalah,
the mystical traditions of Judaism. And I understand that Greenberg, before
he even became a neuroscientist, went and spent a year or two living in
Israel and visiting the village of Safed, which is considered the
heart of the Kabbalistic tradition going back
to medieval times. Oh, you're saying this, Jeff, and
it gives me shivers because I read

his some sort of autobiography,
which he wrote kind of halfway through. But at some point, he was
writing books like crazy. I mean, in 20, about 20 years, he wrote
more than 40 books, maybe 50. Plus, plus the laboratory
research, plus all his adventures that
maybe we can discuss later. And in his autobiography, he explains
when he was so young and he went to these kibbutz that that's
where he met his first wife, Lizette. And also there in Israel, he
experienced the first, we could call it, we could say it because sometimes I'm
shy, but with you I shouldn't, of course. This paranormal or weird
phenomena started to happen then. He was super surprised because he had like
this inquisitive, proto-scientist mind. And so there was something
about a watch stopping and then he met some
very interesting people.

So I think that experience in Israel, and plus what he inherited from his family. Interestingly, I think it was his dad or his granddad that came to the US, and he tells the story in the autobiography. He had a really strange, maybe Polish surname. Sorry, I forgot. And the guy at the customs, let's say, couldn't transcribe it. And he said, no, that name, no, okay, just we'll call you Greenberg. So even the surname has this kind of profound anecdotal aspect of his life. And so, yes, it was in a way this trip to Israel that many things started happening to him. And throughout his work, he's always, yes, going back to his tradition. Also, he has other books which are some sort of, I put it this way, galactic autobiographies because he has kind of this Earth's biography. But then in other books, he seems to be writing about his previous lives.

And of course, in some of them, yes, he's
in all these times that have to do with different traditions in India, in Israel,
and in Russia, if I recall correctly. And then he has another sort of biography
or autobiography where he describes his life in another planet and that he's
sent to Earth as a kind of punishment. So his universe was filled with
past and present, different lives, different cultures, and he would
hold it all together in one body. As I recall the story you briefly
alluded to about the watch stopping, if I remember rightly,
it occurred when he was in Israel. He encountered a group of
spiritualists, and they held seances. And in one of these seances, a spirit
entity came through and told him that at a certain hour, like, I don't know, 3am,
that evening, his watch was going to stop. And that, in fact, happened to the second.

Yes, yes. And that was one of the
many more incredible, impossible, I would say, impossible things
that happened to him later. And in a way, he was looking for
them, but those things also came to him. And a great example, I would say the
major example, is his work with Pachita, who was this healer and this old lady dressed
like, you know, a person from the street, a normal Lomanley people,
and she, you know, she would receive countless of people
in her house, mostly at night. And she had this knife, this old
rusty knife, and with it and her own hands, she would do all sorts of
impossible surgery, and not even that. And you could say, of
course, and you probably have interviewed people
who claim to do this or who have even presents
those psychic healing experiences where they
say it's trickery and so on. But there were like
hundreds, if not thousands

of people who came
to see Pachita, and she would materialize. It's hard for me
to even say, but organs and put them back. Total impossibility. And for
some reason, Pachita told Jacobo, you stay here with me, you're
my helper, and you take notes. You just you just report what you see. And then and I've
talked about this with Lizette, his first wife,
and she recalls, can you imagine, Jeff, like you're
in the lab during the day doing your EEG or
whatever, your recordings. You're writing books,
but then at night you go to this place and you
come back home covered in blood and sweat
and all the rest, having presents night after
night, impossible things. And then you write about
it. And actually, Jacobo wrote seven volumes called
Los Chamanes de Mexico. And he told what he saw. It's
like a pretty, pretty impressive.

anthropological work on what was going on with many shamans in Mexico. So there was another kind of side career of his, like this, this reporting of what happened, which, by the way, fit really well into his Syntagic theory. So it was he wasn't trying so much to refute it, but it was self-validation. It's like, OK, this is. He comes back home, couldn't believe what he saw, but he saw it. But at the same time, it had a place under his theory, which was his main occupation to answer that question. Where does experience come from? Now, if I understand correctly, Doña Pachita became his guru, in effect, his teacher, and she seemed to demonstrate over and over again what you might think of as a mastery of time and space, causing objects to apport, to appear out of nowhere or to disappear.

Similarly, with the healings that she performed, and he witnessed this over and over and over again. And he concluded that she had access to a level of reality, the non-physical level of reality. You could call it the reality of quantum potential, I suppose. And he believed that the whole physical universe emerged out of that reality, so that if one could access that level of reality consciously, then one could exhibit control in magical ways over physical phenomena. Totally. And again, Jeff, sometimes I believe this is utter nonsense and impossible, but at the same time, the more things I read and I hear, well, for instance, I relate it in a moment to the UAP phenomenon that I'm really a newcomer in, in terms of just paying attention, let's put it this way, but back to Pachita. So she would do those things with eyes closed. So apparently there was already extraocular vision going on there.

but of course, she was going beyond just extra sensory perception and so on. The real deal there was like, well, doing physical things, materializing things. And back to Hakobos theory. So there is this thing called the lattice, which is like the fundamental kind of structure of space that in these interactions with the neuronal field, which by the way also comes from the lattice, so it's a bit complicated. But anyways, distortions and distortions of the lattice are what manifest what we see as physical reality. So according to Hakobo, Pachita would have a capacity, a neural capacity, if you wish, that she could create distortions and distortions. And then through these interactions, she could materialize objects. Now, he then went back to the lab. And there's one paper, and this was a paper that came out from the Freedom Information Act. And also that's why people say, well, he had ties with the CIA.

That doesn't mean that. That just means that the CIA was interested in this kind of research. But there's a paper from 1983, I think, or 92 on bioenergetics, one journal that doesn't exist anymore. I got the paper, and he even tried to weight something on a scale in a lab, and then just see if he could measure changes in weight according to these distortions and distortions of space time. This hasn't been replicated, and it would be really incredible if this could be shown in a lab. But at the same time, you know, you've recently talked to Carlos Eire, for instance, when he speaks about what the Saints were doing when they were levitating, and these aspects about antigravity or maybe suspension of some laws. And that also has to do with aspirations that the technological industry may have. So again, all of that is in those nights that Jacobo spent with Pachita.

And by the way, Pachita said,
well, he didn't recall what happened, but it was the spirit of
Cuauhtémoc, who was one of the, if I recall correctly,
the great Aztec gods. So she could even say who was coming. And the remarkable thing was
that Jacobo remained skeptical, but continued to go
night after night and just reported what he
saw with his own eyes. So that's remarkable of him. I wouldn't
say he just believed everything he saw, but he kept on going
until those visits stopped. I gather he also
engaged in rituals as well as the use of hallucinogenics
or entheogenics. Well, we tend to tell the
laboratories research and also this more anthropological
work on the books. But in that biography I was
mentioning, I have it right here. I was putting the names. It's
this one, La Conquista del Templo.

And by the way, some of those books. I know now that are going to be published in a main publishing house and hopefully translated to English. So in this biography, he explains he went to New York, and then in New York, he was doing his research. But then he went back, and then he rented a hut somewhere on the outskirts of Mexico, D.C. And there he was spending time with his daughter. But then he could spend also weeks just meeting strange people from the mountains and then exploring their own minds and meditating really, really deeply. So he was a true explorer of consciousness. You see, not only theory and a theory that's not, by the way, it's just some metaphor that comes to mind on Tuesday and on Thursday, I have my own theory. For many years, he's working on that. He has the laboratory work. He does all this field work, and on top of it, he cultivates his own experience.

And so to me, it's an example, even if you don't want to imitate or copy what he was doing, of the elements that the future scientist shall possess, right? Explorer of consciousness, avid reader, great writer, unafraid to be in the presence of impossible things. But yes, those times and those experiences perhaps at some point they were more important to him and to his development than what he could find in the lab. I don't know. I think he was also instrumental in helping to reawaken in Mexico an appreciation of their indigenous culture, which was really very highly evolved. Absolutely. And these seven volumes of The Shamans of Mexico, it's also an homage to what's an intrinsic part of Mexico. And that's also interesting. Different countries have their legacy, their traditions. And to many Mexicans, and I've started to meet more and more of them because I'm also in contact with Jacobo's former students who are now 50 years old.

50-something, they were 20-something. To the local population, their parents, and their grandparents, maybe had contact with these curanderos. And this is fascinating. Of course, if you pretend you're like a 21st-century civilized man, you would say, well, I don't know. But it's natural for them to recall that somebody said or somebody saw that one of these shamans was stopping the rain. Another one could communicate with spirits. Another one was dealing with the sacred plants and so on. It's pretty real. It's as real as it gets. It's just that if we study it from our own abstracted and decontextualized perspective, we might just dismiss it. But yes, I think he did great service to the legacy of his own country. I understand, for example, that he was an observant Jew and that on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur

where Jewish people typically fast the entire day, instead of going into the synagogue and praying with the other Jews. And there was a strong Jewish community in Mexico. He would go up to the pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacan, climb to the top of the pyramid, sit at the apex of the pyramid, and meditate all day long. Yes, and probably he was getting into some really interesting states. He was a free soul, you see, and a seeker. And that's, by the way, why it took some weeks even to realize he had disappeared. So this gives also a sense of how much here and there he was and how free, because he could do that for a few weeks and maybe he wasn't coming to the lab, and the students would say, well, or his family, well, he'll be somewhere doing one of those things. And then he appeared again and no problem. And some of the students told me as well that

on Thursdays, there
was a sign on the door that said, well, on Sundays,
they're not there because they were all together
meditating somewhere else. So can you imagine a
laboratory today where the very students are invited
to just go and explore their inner worlds with
the head of the lab? Well, I suppose being
a co-worker with him, because people say he
had a strong temperament. So perhaps it wasn't easy to be around him. They also say he was often
absorbed looking into other places. So I'm not sure how easy it
would have been to be around him. But he was this magnetic figure
that, yes, that was all over the place. Well, you are, to my
understanding, the director of a division in a neuroscience
laboratory yourself. What would occur if you told
your co-workers and students, we're going to go out into the
country and meditate together today?

Would that be tolerated in your laboratory? Well, it would be tolerated
on weekends because on weekends, you're
allowed to have your hobbies. I guess we have freedom.
I shouldn't complain. We have freedom. But
I think the interesting thing is not only to
do it on a Thursday. Is that what you
experience in this meditation then was fed back
into the laboratory work. For instance, Jacobo had this. In
his theory, he speaks about orbitals, which is inspired by the quantum jumps. You can be at this
orbital level and then you need to have this discrete
leap to another one. So we speak about these
orbitals of consciousness and how you could
go up and down them. Or also, he wrote a book about his
particular technique of meditation. And in it, he emphasizes
awareness of the body and then awareness of all
your thoughts and so on, which sounds pretty topical today. But this is also what
allowed him to realize that this

interaction between the
space and the neuronal field required kind of an observer
that was beyond those. And so there's a continuous
exchange between crazy occurrences, people he
meets, laboratory results. For instance, some of those
shamans he invited into the lab. And he was one of the first people to
have real-deal meditators and shamans and measure their
neural activity and discover that they seem to have
pretty coherent structure that was extraordinary,
as well as their capacities. And then other people did it in other labs. But you see, he was able
to spend days in the jungle and also convince some of those people
to come to the lab and wear the technology. Well, it's often said that there's a
fine line between genius and insanity. And I gather that some of his critics
thought maybe he had crossed that line, that he was behaving in erratic
ways that suggested to some people that he was perhaps
experiencing a bipolar

disorder, or some other
form of mental illness. Have you been able to make
an assessment of that yourself? Not really. I don't blame those
colleagues who would be appalled, perhaps, because if you're doing
classic psychology or classic neurophysiology
in Mexico in the 80s, and here you have a man
who seems to come from 50 years ahead in the future,
just working by your side, and you start hearing that
he's doing all of those things, it's hard to swallow that
that's your colleague. And so I think he experienced the
usual taboos and pressures and so on. Now, I can also imagine, as I was
telling you, that he was a complicated man. He was a complicated man, and he
knew exactly what he wanted to do. So he couldn't care less. He would
do it anyways, one way or another. And yes, that's bordering on genius,
and geniuses are difficult people in a way.

But at the same time, at least the
students that I've met, that he had, have great memories of him. Like
being fascinated by having him around, and they felt really orphaned
when he disappeared. And by the way, he
disappeared, it took some months to really realize
that he had disappeared. And the moment he disappeared,
and that's another sad thing, people from the university just took the
equipment and they dismantled everything, and it's like as if nothing had happened. So it's been kind of in a poor mode for
many years, and now it's coming back. And I think now the University of Mexico,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and other places, they would
start to feel proud of him, whereas maybe 30 or 35
years ago they were ashamed. And so that's another mark
of a pioneer in the house. Many decades go by and
they realize, wow, turns out

that we had a great figure here, and we didn't know. He was a rare person to be able to combine the scientific training and neuroscience with a deep participatory interest in shamanism. People like that are very rare. Maybe in some ways you may come close to filling his footsteps. Well, that would be an honor in any way. But yes, they or we, and I include you, we've experienced something, we've sensed something, and we go after it in a way, whatever it takes. And the journey can be harsh, but it's also fascinating because you find those things along the way and extreme curiosity. So I think, yeah, he lived 45 years until he disappeared. And well, what a life, what a life he lived as an academic, as an explorer, as a father, as a lover. He tells many stories about being easily falling in love. So a very polyethnic character.

And perhaps not everybody,
we couldn't live in a world where everybody
is Jacobo Grinberg, right? But we're lucky to have those people whose
influence still ripples many decades later. And I believe, I'm also working towards it, and I believe that people will
just do archaeology on his work and realize what a gift he donated to
Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world. Because, by the way, I'm not
sure, I'm Spaniard, as you know, and speaking in another language, speaking
in English, thinking in English is great. And yet there's some
things I feel we can only think or properly
experience even in Spanish, because it's the same in
English or in Hebrew and so on. And so this is also a call to
the Latin American community. And I've met people, for instance,
in Buenos Aires and in Mendoza, and they have like master
degrees where they bring shamans.

There's this tradition in all
these Spanish-speaking countries where all these edges of consciousness
we've discussed before are very normal, are still alive, and it's invaluable. Because then we're
talking about what people already know
and experience and feel, and they can help us to do a better
science of those anomalous experiences, which are part of the
fabric of the country. It does seem to me, from my limited
travels, that in the English-speaking world we've been much
more successful in suppressing our
interests in the paranormal, whereas in the Latin countries, the
paranormal is much closer to the surface. Yes, that's my impression too, especially
in Latin America, not so much in Spain. Although, for instance, Jacobo did a
trip to Spain in the beginning of the 90s. This is the rare footage
that we have of him speaking. There's not a lot of him, but there
are two TV programs, Spanish TV.

of incredible programs, and in a
way, they remind me of your work, Jeff, because these were like
open-minded and yet rigorous. They were bringing all these great figures
from the time, and they flew Jacobo, and they record him, and you can
watch the line. It's very impressive, and they're all there
smoking in the TV set. He did a tour in Spain, and another thing
that's synchronistic, at least for me, is that I now speak to people, and
quite more often than not they say, Well, actually, I had dinner with
Jacobo when he was touring in Spain. The other day somebody who you
know, who's a researcher of consciousness, told me that he had also
coincided with Jacobo when he was in New
York in that laboratory. So there are many unexpected
ties among all of us there, and so I also have a sense of community,
you know, this is beautiful to me as well.

To feel that there's a community,
your new thinking allowed is also like a great gateway to
know that there are more people there, and then there are those who are still
not with us, but they are with us in a way, and there's a sense of familiarity,
at least for me, with Jacobo's work, and I feel he accompanies what I'm doing. By the way, all these
investigations on extraocular vision that we've discussed before
in another installment of yours, they came to me by reading
his theory and then realizing that he was also spending time
investigating that phenomenon. So it's a very fruitful tree. It has many, many fruits, and you
can pick the one you prefer and enjoy it. Well, yes, we could pick his interest in
theogens or his interest in shamanism, his interest in space and time, his
theoretical work, or his laboratory work. Of all of those, it seems
to me that it's fair to say

that the laboratory work has progressed since his death, that his key insight seemed to be that we could look at physiological measures and show that they correlate with various forms of paranormal communication. Now there's a wide range of experiments supporting that. It's still controversial, of course, simply because it contradicts the mainstream paradigm, the materialistic paradigm that we've talked about. But I would say the number of independent laboratory replications – I just read one recently about working with stock traders and showing that stock traders who are more aware of their internal physiology are more profitable than those who are not, suggesting that the body is able to pick up signals from the future. This remark is really important. Thanks for making it, Jeff, because it allows me to stress something where Jacobo was also very fine-tuned, because you can say, well, all of this goes beyond the brain, and it does, beyond the brain.

so beyond that you forget you have a brain. Some people say,
no, everything is in the brain and those things
don't exist, and so on. Well, Jacobo took the
best of both worlds because, yes, all of this is
crazily beyond the brain, and at the same time, he
was still one of the very few neuroscientists who took the
pains to go and look in the brain for correlates of those incredible
phenomena, and he found some. So I think there's
also a future path for neuroscience, and there
are recent results coming, as you may know, this recent work by
Maurice Friedman, for instance, and so on, of people who have the
means and the training to look at how the
brain may be inhibiting, for instance, these latent
powers we have, and just – it's beautiful,
breaching both worlds. So what I'm trying to
say is you don't need

to reject the whole
edifice of neuroscience. You could put it to your service and learn
more about what's still a mystery, right? About, yes, what's going
on with space and with time and with perception
when these things happen, but they must happen
also in a physical body, and so we have brains
and we have flesh, and so to put mind
and matter together from this perspective, I
think it's totally exciting. Well, Alex Gomez-Marin,
once again, a fascinating discussion about a
fascinating individual, and I'm hopeful that
our conversation will reawaken interest in the
neuroscience community, and particularly the
English-speaking neuroscience world, to reinvestigate
the findings of Greenberg, especially in light of the findings of many
other people such as Maurice Friedman, whom you've just mentioned
and who I'm hoping to have as a guest soon on New
Thinking Allowed, incidentally.

There's so much research going on in the neuroscience field. It definitely deserves a careful look. It's hard to stay on top of. Well, thank you for again holding this space, this platform, and for allowing me to talk about Jacobo. I'm grateful, and I think Jacobo is happy that through New Thinking Allowed, now many English-speaking people can know that he did such things, and they can try to find some of his English work. There's at least one book, if not two or three, that have been translated, and a few scientific articles, and all the popular media stuff out there, so thank you, Jeff, for making this possible as a vehicle. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, Alex. Thank you, Alex. I hope we have many more conversations. For those of you watching or listening to New Thinking Allowed, thank you for being with us, because you are the reason that we are here.

New Thinking Allowed. I imagine that by now,
many of you already realize that in conjunction
with White Crow Books, we've just launched the New Thinking
Allowed Dialogues book imprint, and our first title is, Is
There Life After Death? New Thinking Allowed
is a non-profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New
Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in
our ability to produce new videos.

The Brain and the Universe: The Jacobo Grinberg Story with Alex Gomez-Marin

Scripts