Where Is My Mind?

Does consciousness reside in the brain (as mainstream science tells us) or could it live completely outside the body? My dad’s experience in hospital a couple of decades ago confirmed what I’d suspected for many years…

I’ve spent years digging into the stories that the mainstream doesn’t want you to hear - the ones that challenge the comfortable narratives pushed by governments, Big Pharma and the scientific establishment. But nothing has shaken my worldview quite like this. What if everything we’ve been told about consciousness - that it’s nothing more than electrical sparks firing in a lump of grey matter between our ears - is wrong? What if the mind, the soul, the essence of who we are, isn’t trapped inside our skulls at all?

I’ve always been interested in consciousness and where it begins and ends. Even as a young teen, I’d bring home books from the library on near-death experiences, astral travel and out of body experiences. When my dad saw what I was reading he told me he’d had out of body experiences when he was a teenager but hadn’t breathed a word about it to anyone for fear of being considered insane. He told me everything he’d experienced - from OBE’s to astral projection to levitation. Until he spoke to me about it, he had no idea what was going on and started to read the books I was reading for answers. He was very relieved to discover he hadn’t gone mad and that he wasn’t alone.

Decades later, he had to have medical procedure, during which his heart was artificially stopped. Not for a few seconds but for several long minutes. The medics panicked as they fought to restart it. Machines flatlined. Voices rose in alarm. And through it all, my dad was aware of everything. He heard the chaos, felt the terror but couldn’t move or speak. He was conscious, panicking internally, while his body lay clinically dead on the table. Eventually, they got his heart going again, and he came through OK but was completely traumatised by what had happened. He told the medics that he’d seen and heard everything and they didn’t believe him until he told them what he’d witnessed. They were flabbergasted.

That experience didn’t just defy medical logic - it shattered the idea that without a beating heart and oxygenated brain, a person simply switches off. nyulangone.org

The official story from neuroscience is clear and uncompromising: consciousness resides in the brain. Damage the brain and you lose parts of your mind. Switch off the brain with anaesthesia and awareness vanishes. No brain activity, no “you”. It’s a neat materialist package, sold as settled science. Textbooks, TED talks and glossy documentaries repeat it like gospel. Yet, as with so many “settled” truths I’ve investigated over the years - from vaccine safety to pandemic policies to the horrors of organ harvesting and the brain death lie - cracks appear when you look closer. And those cracks are widening.

Mainstream researchers point to fMRI scans, EEG readings and studies on brain lesions as proof. Consciousness, they say, emerges from complex neural networks, perhaps in the posterior “hot zone” or through global workspace integration. Theories like Integrated Information Theory or Global Neuronal Workspace get trotted out in journals like Nature. A functioning brain equals awareness; no brain, game over. But here’s what they don’t emphasise: these are correlates, not explanations. They show association, not causation. Why does any physical process produce the vivid, subjective feeling of being alive? This is what philosopher David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness. Materialism hits a wall here and, instead of admitting it, many scientists simply declare the problem solved or illusory.

My dad’s story isn’t unique. Around the world, cardiac arrest survivors report similar lucid awareness during periods when their hearts had stopped and brain function should have flatlined. Some describe floating above their bodies, hearing conversations in the room, even perceiving details later verified by medical staff. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been documented for decades, with thousands of cases in medical literature. Researchers like Dr. Sam Parnia have captured brain wave surges consistent with heightened consciousness during CPR - sometimes up to an hour after clinical death. Yet the response from the establishment? It’s simply dismissed as hallucinations, oxygen deprivation or DMT dumps from a dying pineal gland. Anything but question the dogma that mind equals brain.

Why the resistance? Follow the incentives. A materialist view fits neatly with a mechanistic, pharmaceutical approach to health. If you’re just a brain in a body, then pills, surgeries and interventions are always the answer. Question that and you open the door to ideas that threaten billion-pound industries: that consciousness might be fundamental, non-local, even eternal. That the mind could exist independently, at least for a time, beyond the physical form.

Philosophers have wrestled with this for centuries. René Descartes proposed dualism - mind and body as separate. Idealism suggests consciousness is primary, with matter arising from it. Panpsychism, gaining quiet traction among some thinkers, posits that awareness is a property of all matter, combining in complex systems like brains but not created by them. These aren’t fringe ramblings; they’re serious challenges to physicalism. Yet in academia, they’re often sidelined as “unscientific,” while unproven materialist assumptions are paraded as fact.

Some brave scientists are pushing back. Reports of veridical perception in NDEs – where patients accurately describe events they couldn’t have seen with their physical eyes - are hard to explain away. Studies on terminal lucidity, where dementia patients suddenly become clear-minded just before death, hint at something beyond deteriorating brain tissue. Even quantum theories, like those explored by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, suggest consciousness might involve processes at a subatomic level that transcend classical biology. But mainstream funding and journals favour safe, brain-bound research. Dissenters risk careers.

I’ve heard and read about others with similar stories. Oddly, my Uncle Jim said he’d experienced something similar but I never had the chance to talk to him about it. I remember reading about a woman whose heart stopped during surgery and who later recounted exact dialogues in the operating theatre. And I heard about a man revived after minutes without a pulse who described a profound sense of peace and expanded awareness during flatlining. These aren’t fantasy; they’re consistent patterns ignored by those committed to the “brain produces mind” narrative. If consciousness can persist when the heart isn’t pumping and the brain isn’t perfused, what does that say about our understanding of death itself? Are we declaring people dead too soon? Are we missing opportunities for revival or deeper insights into the human condition?

The implications stretch far beyond medicine. If the mind isn’t confined to the brain, then perhaps it survives bodily death - a notion often dismissed as religious wishful thinking but supported by anecdotal and some experimental data from reincarnation research and mediumship studies. It challenges the transhumanist dream of uploading minds to machines. It questions whether A.I. could ever be truly conscious, no matter how sophisticated the silicon.

As a journalist who’s exposed manipulation in public health for years, I see parallels. Just as we were told “follow the science” on lockdowns, masks and experimental injections - only for contradictions to emerge later - we’re fed a reductionist view of consciousness that serves control. If you’re merely a biological machine, easier to monitor, medicate and manage, you’re easy to manipulate and medicate. Recognise yourself as an eternal spark of awareness, however, and you become ungovernable.

I’m not claiming definitive answers. Science should be about open inquiry but it seems less and less so these days. We need rigorous studies on NDEs, more research during cardiac arrest and an honest exploration of anomalous phenomena without career-ending ridicule.

My father’s experience was a personal wake-up call. It forced me to wonder whether the brain is a receiver or filter for consciousness rather than its generator? What if, like a radio picking up signals, damage to the hardware distorts the broadcast but doesn’t erase the source?

The mainstream narrative on this mindblowing topic feels increasingly brittle. Billions of people throughout history, across many cultures, have reported experiences suggesting mind beyond body - from ancient mystics to modern-day survivors. Dismissing them all as delusion requires more faith than questioning the dogma.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped letting a materialist priesthood dictate the boundaries of reality. My dad, although dead now, survived back then to tell his tale. Thousands more carry similar truths. Their voices deserve to be heard, not pathologised. Consciousness - whatever it truly is - may be far stranger, freer and more powerful than the so-called experts admit. And in uncovering that, we might just rediscover what it really means to be human.

I’ve been investigating, speaking out, writing articles and making documentaries on the wrongdoings in UK hospitals, care homes and hospices for the last six years.

Please watch my documentaries and read my book:

‘A GOOD DEATH?’ (2021) -

https://youtu.be/o5285ASMUgw?is=ptomtKS9FseA9bng

‘PLAYING GOD’ (2024) -

https://youtu.be/AaN1uEbah94?is=haLTzwaDuFHf_BoJ

‘UNSEEN’ (2025) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wOYPObjLpM

‘THE GIFT OF LIFE?’ (2026) - an investigation into organ harvesting and the brain death myth. https://youtu.be/_HuoL8tdVsk?is=6N4IdWsHNW9J894h

‘MURDERED BY THE STATE’ book (2026) - available here: https://bit.ly/murderedbythestate

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https://open.substack.com/pub/jacquideevoy and find me in The Light truth paper - https://thelightpaper.co.uk/assets/issues/Light-70-June-26-Web-Final.pdf?v=1781413882

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