Mind the Shift

Julia Mossbridge is a scientist in the true sense of the word, a curious and open-minded investigator and seeker. She has balanced beautifully on the perceived border between traditional science and the esoteric realms.

She has created two institutes, whereof one bears the intriguing name The Institute for Love and Time (TILT). It is about creating technologies that support wellbeing related to feeling unconditional love.

How can love and time go together?

“Both are powerful and healing to humans”, Julia says.

On a deeper level, she explains, people experience that when the boundaries of time are removed, the conditions of connection are also removed, which opens the door to unconditional love.

The way Julia describes the experience of time is somewhat at odds with the “live in the now” mantra. We can extend the self in time, she says. And by doing that we break down boundaries.

“It gives you a lot more chances to do good for yourself and the world. It doesn’t have to be all at once. We have all this time.”

“Folks say you can’t do anything about the past, and the future is all about potentialities, so you can only do something about it in the now. The reason this is so enticing is that we’re built to experience free will. So that’s how we’re gonna make a lot of money on self-help books”, Julia laughs.

“I think it’s a racket. I think it makes people look for control rather than take responsibility.”

In reality, we are not in control. Everything we experience has already happened. That has even been measured (the thought of doing something sudden arises after we’ve done it).

“To even come close to being in control, we must extend the definition of ‘I’. To really be in control we must extend it indefinitely to include the whole universe and everything that has happened and everything that is going to happen.”

The Iroquios have a word for this extension: the long body.

Julia Mossbridge has done extensive research on precognition, the intuitive knowledge about a future event. She uses a metaphor: An event that triggers precognition is like a stick in the stream of consciousness. The stick creates a wake, which is the slowly fading memory of the event after it has happened. But on the front end it also creates an area where the “arrow of time” is reversed.

“There's backpressure. The stream of consciousness ‘prepares’ itself to go around the stick.” 

Precognition most commonly appears in dreams.

“The conscious mind is like our story of what is happening, but the unconscious mind really has access to all the incoming data from the universe”, Julia says.

She agrees with psychology pioneer William James that the brain is like a filter.

“When your brain is damaged, you're not changing consciousness, you're changing the capacity to receive it.”

She is also in agreement with the theories of cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman, who describes physical reality as an interface, where living beings are “conscious agents”. If we were to look “under the hood” (which may be what enlightenment entails), we would see a completely different reality that doesn’t make sense in the physical world.

Mossbridge also delves into what AI does to us, and with us, and what we can do with AI.

“Human potential is going to explode with AI if we do it right. It can be a partner in our evolution. We are in this together.”

Julia’s bio:

• Affiliate professor in the Dept. of Biophysics and Physics at University of San Diego

• Senior consultant with Tangible IQ

• Co-founder of TILT: The Institute for Love and Time

• Founder of Mossbridge Institute

• Author and co-author of multiple books and scientific articles related to time travel, artificial intelligence and unconditional love

• PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders (Northwestern University)

• MA in Neuroscience (UC San Francisco)

• BA in Neuroscience with highest honors (Oberlin College)

Why are we so afraid to die, I ask afterlife expert, researcher, coach and writer Craig Hogan. “It’s a misunderstanding. People think this life is all there is. But we don’t die. Transition happens seamlessly. There is no pain.” Craig Hogan and his associates try to teach people about this. If we knew we were immortal, we would arguably live our lives differently. We wouldn’t pursue things selfishly. We would realize we are on this journey together with the people around us. There are innumerable reports from people who have been in contact with deceased loved ones. Craig has himself had many experiences in which he has communicated with the other side. There are also many widely known accounts of contacts with the afterlife, such as the ones of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Raymond Moody and J.B. Phillips. Anybody can get in touch with the deceased, says Craig Hogan. You don’t have to go through a medium. But you need to go into a meditative state and empty your mind. Ask a question or make a statement to the deceased person you want to contact. “You will get responses immediately, in one chunk, not in words. It’s telepathic”, says Craig. So what is the afterlife like? “We need consistency, so it’s very much like our earth life. People have bodies. There are houses and streets and different cultures and nationalities. People first use the language they are used to, but after a while they drop language, because they don't need it. It is like earth but without the problems. There is no old age and no ailments.” When we pass, we don’t actually go anywhere, Craig explains. It’s already here. It’s all about a change of focus. It's like changing the frequency on the ‘life radio’. For some there is a ‘second death’. These people don’t understand that they have passed at first. Or they don’t want to leave the earth plane for some reason – they may have unfinished business, or they don’t want to leave the sensual pleasures, or they are afraid they are going to go to hell. “So they stay earthbound for a while. They walk around, ride buses, and go to church. Some become poltergeists.” “Then there is another category of almost demonic influences. These are negative thought forms produced by people or groups of people who want to impede other people’s progress because of the anger and violence that exist on earth.” But eventually, all go to life after this and get to have a respite. There is no hell. “This earth plane is a school. The purpose is to teach us lessons. We are growing in love and compassion”, says Craig. Before we are born our souls and guides get together and plan the circumstances and the kinds of struggles we will have in life. Afterwards we can share our learning with others that are within our higher self. Reincarnation is misunderstood, according to Craig. We stay the individuals we are, but we are part of a higher self which has thousands of people in it. When a new life is planned, the planning group will take pieces from other lifes, so that the new person will learn lessons that were not previously learned. That is where past life regression comes from, Craig explains. Lives are intertwined. You tap into experiences of another life. “So, we don’t come back as some other person.” Humanity once knew about the afterlife but forgot. However, when we regain that knowledge, it will be on a higher level. We have understandings today that humankind has never had, Craig points out. “We are in the most mature state of understanding the life after this life. We are going far beyond the insights we used to have.” Within a few centuries, a new kind of earth will arise, he thinks. “There is no need to feel fear about the end of this life. There is no end.”

The ancient Maya taught that consciousness is primary, and that matter is the manifestation of a thought, if you will, that arose in the all-encompassing primordial consciousness.

This knowledge is at the core of the work of Carl Johan Calleman. He is originally a trained biologist and chemist, but he has dedicated most of his career to studying the wisdom of the Maya and has written eight books on the subject.

There is a hidden meaning behind the mythical plumed serpent, theme of the Kukulcan pyramid in Chichen Itzá, Carl Johan explains:

Consciousness has expressed itself gradually in the universe – it has come in nine waves.

The first wave was what modern science calls the Big Bang.

This worldview means that evolution undoubtedly takes place, but it is purposeful, not random.

“Established science has been fighting this idea of a living universe for a long time”, says Carl Johan.

Why do the structures of the universe on all levels hold together? Because there is an underlying purpose, and because the universe is holographic: an atom is subordinate to a molecule, which is subordinate to a cell, which is subordinate to a whole organism, which is subordinate to a planet, a solar system, a galaxy and so on.

“Otherwise everything would be just floating around in a soup of nothingness.”

Evolution is quantized, as Calleman sees it. It takes quantum leaps, namely in the form of the Mayans’ nine waves, which in turn have peaks and valleys.

This entails that technically advanced civilizations could not have existed before the sixth wave, which was activated in 3,115 BCE.

“Yes, this is what you should expect if you adhere to the idea of a quantized evolution. It should not happen gradually.”

With every new wave, a new state of consciousness becomes downloadable. The human mind changes.

The peaks and valleys correspond to creative and destructive periods in humanity. The rise and the collapse of empires, for instance.

The ninth wave is the final one. And it is already here. Forget the trope around 21 December 2012 – the ninth wave was activated in March of 2011. That year was indeed eventful.

All the earlier waves are still running. Not every human and not every other organism will be fully influenced by the most recent wave. Some remain in a lower vibration. Myriad animals and plants that came into creation with earlier waves are still here.

But the ninth wave makes it possible to reach peak consciousness.

“That’s where we’re meant to go. That’s the highest frequency.”

This ascension, as some call it, will be easier for the younger generations, Carl Johan Calleman thinks.

“They will be able to create  peace and unity, a form of heaven on Earth. But the time period until that happens will be very difficult. Maybe we will see a global dictatorship.”

When Lant Pritchett worked as a development economist (many years at the World Bank), he noted the approach was very place centric. It was about how to develop Senegal, India, Nigeria etc. Mobility was not a big deal. “I realized gradually that the mobility of people across places could be at least as big a way for people to improve their well being as the efforts to improve places”, says Lant Pritchett. “The wage differentials, which are driven by productivity differentials, are so huge that the ability of people to move from low productivity to high productivity places is far and away the largest way to improve human well being.” Lant co-founded the advocacy and action group/think tank LaMP to promote labor mobility. The acronym stands for Labor Mobility Partnerships. The economic development models that were developed some decades ago got one thing completely wrong: productivity didn’t converge. Education, health and even capital per worker converged, but productivity didn’t. “Productivity isn't primarily about knowledge, it's about complex features that we now call institutional, political and social.” The a-ha insight is that the world has people in poor places, not poor people. “It’s simply hard to make a person productive in rural Ethiopia, and there's no magic bullet.” To many people, the term migration brings up images of people moving permanently and acquiring new roots. But if the world could achieve well-organized and orderly temporary labor mobility on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger than today, this could bring tremendous benefits, according to Pritchett. Calculations show that the gains would be at least 20 times the size of the ODA in the world. In the migration discourse the elephant in the room is the fact that the labor force is shrinking rapidly in the rich parts of the world, relative to the aged population. How to deal with this demographic transition if you only talk about permanent migration and refugees? “You can’t. The only way is to open a third question: who are we going to allow to live and work on our sovereign territory, without any expectation they are becoming citizens?” Is the temporary nature of this mobility meant to appease those who worry their national identity is being threatened? In a way, Lant says. “But appease is a stronger word than we need. It's not just a necessary appeasement objective, it’s a legitimate objective to want to preserve a sense of 'spanishness' or 'englishness', even if those are socially constructed and imagined identities.” What about the risk of brain drain in the countries that provide the labor force? “Brain drain gets attention because it rhymes”, Lant says smilingly. “There is not much analytical foundation for the claim. If we used the rhyme cortex vortex, brains moving round in a circular way, we would have a more accurate and interesting picture of what is going on.” Isn’t living where you want as basic a right as free speech or religious freedom? Are we primarily humans or are we primarily citizens? “Ah, there's the rub of it.” “I think the conversation on open borders versus closed borders is silly. Open borders is not politically how the world is going to be organized in the foreseeable future. And there is something unique, valuable and important about maintaining identities.” “But these identities can change over time, and they can be inclusive.”

Mary Reed was a staunchly agnostic healthcare executive in Washington DC when she began venturing uncontrollably into mystical realms in the company of divine masters.

”I went into the body and the being of Jesus on the cross at the moment of crucifixion. As an agnostic, that was wildly out of the blue. But in that experience, which went on for three and a half hours, I got all of this information about humanity and what is happening in our world”, Mary says.

Deeply confused by events like this, she moved to the Himalayas and spent seven years coming to terms with her unexpected abilities.

The first ”voice in her head” (not really a voice) appeared in 2000. Since 2020 Mary also channels lessons from a collective of divine beings called Consensus, which presented itself to her.

Today Mary considers herself a mystic wisdom guide. Despite certain transformative events, arriving at that place has been a gradual process.

”It just keeps coming.”

It takes many years to integrate a spiritually transformative experience, which every NDEer can attest to.

Mary is the author of the award-winning memoir Unwitting Mystic, and the sweeping newest release, Humanity’s Epic Awakening.

In the latter, Mary explains that the awakening we are about to experience (and are already beginning to experience) will entail the end of many deeply rooted human ideas, such as hell.

”What we are waking up to is already here. We are just not aware of it yet. But we will be soon.”

The most central part of her message, she says, is that nothing should be rejected. The old paradigm of good and bad inherently always puts us in conflict.

”We label certain things bad and want them to go away. It’s like wanting one part of us to go away. No bad you see in the world today just happened. It’s being recycled.”

Mary saw this extremely clearly when she had a vision of a block sitting in her stomach. It was the collectively rejected block of pain of all of humanity.

”This pain does not want to be rejected, it wants to be embraced”, Mary says.

”Awakening isn’t intended to be a polite experience, it’s intended to be an honest experience.”

”In the good old days, those of us with solid scientific training understood what we didn't know and we were excited about the knowledge frontiers", says professor Judith Curry.

”Now, ecologists, economists, social scientists and other people who don't really understand climate dynamics are busy reciting alarming talking points rather than showing any understanding of what's really going on.”

Curry is one of the world’s top climate scientists. However, she fell from grace with the mainstream scientific and political community after having dared to openly criticize the biased and manipulative research methods revealed in ”climategate” in 2009.

She was ostracized.

Some years later, she left her tenured position at Georgia Tech to become a full-time consultant in the private sector.

”I saw the writing on the wall”, she says.

She had made attempts to find another academic position, but she was told there was no point. Headhunters said: ”You're a great candidate, but no one’s going to hire you, because if you google Judith Curry, what you get are things like ’climate denier’ and ’serious disinformer’”.

”The whole field has become highly politicized. Everybody thinks they are a climate expert. It has become quasi religious”, she says.

Sadly, even the scientific journals have become politicized.

”If you have something skeptical to say about climate change, don't bother to submit it to Science or Nature.”

Going into the technical details of the climate debate, Curry assesses that the weakest part of the alarmist argument is that warming is dangerous.

”Extreme events have little or nothing to do with the slow, incremental warming that’s going on.”

The 1.5 and 2.0 degree targets are purely political, she says.

”The policy cart has been out there in front of the scientific horse since 1992.”

”When and if we meet the 2 degrees target will largely be determined by natural variability factors.”

Besides, she adds, the baseline for these targets is the 1800s, which was at the tail end of the little ice age.

”Why people think of the pre-industrial climate as some kind of nirvana, I don't know.”

This year, 2023, has seen some spectacular records that the mainstream immediately connects to human emissions. But the fascinating thing is that the suddenness of the temperature spike as well as the slowing of ice growth in the Antarctic are basically evidence that the incremental CO2 levels can’t be to blame for the 2023 events.

Interestingly, Judith Curry more or less coincides in this with one of the alarmists’ most revered scientists, James Hansen.

Many factors are likely at play, such as reduced cloudiness and less aerosols, volcanic activity and ocean current oscillations. Many point at a looming El Niño, but as a matter of fact, this warming phenomenon hadn’t really begun when the temperature spike started.

 ”The CO2 increase is lost in the noise here”, says Curry.

Are the oceans, and also the Antarctic ice sheet, perhaps being warmed from below?

”I pay more attention to this possibility than most people do. There is a lot of volcanic activity. To think that atmospheric CO2 is the driver of what’s happening with the west Antarctic ice sheet is rather a joke.”

Why aren’t more people looking into these things?

”Well, because people really like this narrow framework, that everything is CO2. Every career, money and policy depend on this.”

But she thinks we may have reached ”peak craziness”:

”I wouldn't be surprised if we twenty years from now have a different view of what exactly is going on.”

Atlantis is the ultimate myth of humankind – and it has to be pointed out that ”myth” does not equate to ”made up”. Many truths have been conveyed in mythical form.

Troy was considered a mythological place created in Homer’s mind until Heinrich Schliemann actually dug up the ancient city in western Turkey in 1870.

Historian and independent researcher Michael Le Flem has dug deeper than most into the myth of Atlantis. It is a stretch to say he has managed to dig up the lost world, but the evidence and the indications in his impressive book Visions of Atlantis are both comprehensive and compelling.

Le Flem makes reference to basically every known source (including Plato, of course) and many not so known sources.

Two of them would be controversial to the mainstream. Frederick Oliver and Edgar Cayce, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, respectively, were able to psychically channel enormous amounts of information about Atlantis.

As strange as this sounds, Oliver and Cayce made technical, scientific and geological references they could not possibly have known about in their ordinary state of awareness.

Much of it has since been corroborated by hard evidence, for instance the extinction of megafauna, the cultivation of the Amazon and mastodons roaming on the continental shelves (which were plains 12,000 years ago).

”These things are beyond coincidence”, says Michael.

”The information given by Oliver and Cayce fills in missing pieces from pre-Platonic records.”

Some of what they conveyed about the Atlantean civilization is mind-boggling. They described craft that would be called UAPs today. They talked about devices eerily similar to modern-day smartphones.

Michael is rigorous in his research, but he is also driven by curiosity and open-mindedness, hallmarks of true science.

”Don’t be afraid of the Michael Shermers of this world. They are just annoyed that their little world is being upset”, he says, with reference to one of the leading materialist skeptics.

‼️ Please note that Michael and I plan a part two of this conversation. Due later in the fall. Stay tuned.

For almost half a century, professor Bruce Greyson has researched the interface between life and death. He was a materialistically trained doctor when he first came across near death experiences. He was intrigued, began researching them and thought he would soon come up with a simple physical explanation. The more cases he studied, the farther away from that he came. The research material has increased since the 1960s because of our enhanced capability to resuscitate people with cardiac arrest. ”On the other hand, we have accounts of NDEs from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt that sound exactly like the ones we hear today”, says Bruce Greyson. It is estimated that one in every 20 people in the US and Europe (areas that have been surveyed) have had an NDE or NDE-like experience. Some common features are: • Thinking faster and clearer • An intense feeling of peace and wellbeing • Being in the presence of a loving, living light • Paranormal phenomena: leaving the body, ESP, etc • Reaching another type of existence • Meeting dead loved ones or deities A few NDE’ers have unpleasant experiences. ”That is often people who have a strong need to be in control of their life. It can be terrifying to be out of control. When they surrender, it becomes a pleasant experience”, Greyson says. He thinks it is important to document corroborating evidence, such as NDE’ers’ account for things they have seen or heard in the hospital or outside it while being clinically dead, things they could not possibly have known about if they had not in some way left their physical body. One mindblowing case is a clinically dead man in a hospital in South Africa who experienced that he visited another realm and met the soul of a recently deceased hospital nurse – before any of the nurse’s loved ones knew she had died. The fact which most challenges the notion that the brain produces consciousness is that the brains of NDE’ers are flatlined. There doesn’t seem to be any activity going on. Standard explanations don’t hold, like lack of oxygen or influence by drugs: NDE’ers have better oxygen supply than those who haven’t had the experience, and drugs seem to inhibit the possibility of having an NDE rather than induce it. It is as if the brain has to ”get out of the way” in order to have these experiences. ”People use the metaphor of looking up at the sky during the day. You don’t see any stars, but it’s not that the stars aren’t there, it’s just that they’re blocked by the sun. And that’s the way the brain filters out thoughts for us”, Greyson says. Bruce Greyson has mostly studied NDEs, but lately he has also done research on what he and a colleague have labeled terminal lucidity, when people with dementia or Alzheimer's suddenly become lucid a few hours or days before they pass away. Will the world one day accept that there is more to life and death than what is physically measurable? ”I have spent my career lookin at scientific evidence, and that’s ultimately not what convinces people”, says Bruce Greyson. ”What convinces people is personal experience, usually. So the more we can do to help people having these experiences, by meditation or other spiritual practices, the better.”

What if AI is an expression of what could be described, with a Gnostic term, as archontic intelligence? Is it the latest innovation by a force that has been manipulating humanity for millennia? Per Shapiro used to work for Swedish public service as an investigative radio reporter. He grew increasingly frustrated with the constraints of the mainstream narratives. When his boss demanded that he redo a documentary about the pandemic that challenged the official view on vaccines and other restrictions, because it ”sounded like conspiracy theories”, Per decided to quit. He started his own independent channel. Per speaks passionately about some of the most toxic and manipulative terms in journalism (and elsewhere): conspiracy theories, false balance and guilt by association. Shortly after leaving mainstream media, Per felt compelled to write a book about the way he sees what is happening with society and humankind. The title would translate to The War Against Life. At the very beginning Per quotes captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick: All my means are perfectly rational, it is my goal that is insane. This quote sums up much of our overarching societal structures, in Per’s view. ”Intelligence is something other than wisdom. Intelligence is the ability to solve complex problems, to achieve complex goals. To be wise takes experiencing the world, experiencing yourself as a part of the world”, Per says. He makes an analogy with cancer cells. ”You might say that a cancer cell is more intelligent than a healthy cell, because it achieves its goal more efficiently. But it lacks the experience that it is actually a cell in a body, on which it depends for its life.” ”This is a metaphor for how we live our lives on this planet.” Many say that capitalism is the root of our problems. No, says Per: ”Capitalism is the symptom of a culture which is disconnected from the earth, from nature.” The Swiss mystic, scientist and psychedelics pioneer Albert Hofmann – cited in Per’s book – said that the Western psyche has been struck by a schizoid catastrophe – a mindset of being separate from nature, from life itself. Per’s book is first and foremost inspired by the Gnostic message and worldview. He has had several conversations with mythologist John Lamb Lash (also interviewed on this podcast), who has devoted his life to interpreting the Gnostic message. In Gnostic mythology, the wisdom goddess Sophia is Earth itself. ”It’s important to know that this is not an abstract deity somewhere far away, this is a first hand experience of the only source of power you will ever have”, Per says. ”When we have lost this connection to our true source of power, we can more easily be manipulated to believe in illusions of power from other sources.” One of the most difficult parts to understand in the Gnostic mythology is the archontic influence. Per agrees with John Lamb Lash that it can be described as a mind virus. It can hijack your thoughts and ideas. One sneaky archontic modus operandi is counter mimicry: to artificially simulate real experiences. ”It piggybacks on our god-given faculty of imagination. But it turns it around so it becomes a simulation”, Per says. Transhumanism and AI come to mind. ”We have come to view ourselves with an archontic perspective, as if we are machines that need upgrading.” Per shares a deep concern about AI with his brother, MIT physicist Max Tegmark. Max has talked about this in several podcasts and radio shows. Bizarrely enough, the MIT professor has been fiercely attacked from the mainstream, not only for his AI worries, but also for lauding the work of his own brother, ”a known conspiracy theorist”.

Anoop Kumar has started a health revolution. Through an enterprise that bears precisely that name, he and his associates want us to understand that healing is possible.

In Western culture, we have no idea what health is. Modern medicine is the true complementary medicine. What should be defined as conventional medicine are the methods of healing that have been around for millennia.

Anoop Kumar talks about four engines of health: nutrition, movement, connection and rest. And they work in our physical as well as our mental bodies.

”What does the placebo effect suggest? It suggests that the line between the mind and the body is not concrete”, he says.

Anoop got in touch with the Hindu spiritual school of advaita vedanta already as a child. It is similar to what is often referred to as non-duality. He had a hard time combining those insights with western materialism. But he realized that they are both valid.

After his medical training – he is an ER doctor – Anoop decided to dedicate himself to bridging the perceived gap between east and west, body and mind, spirituality and science.

He does not want to label his philosophy as idealism, advaita, non-dualism or anything else. He has developed an explanatory model he calls the three minds framework.

”Everything is consciousness, and consciousness is everything”, Anoop says.

”That doesn’t mean there's no bodies, no minds, no personalities. It doesn't mean that this is all just a dream and it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that we can’t work with the body or that modern medicine is useless.”

”None of this is true. There are so many misconceptions associated with this.”

One oft-used metaphor to understand how consciousness is fundamental is that consciousness is the ocean, and we and everything else we perceive as separate are the waves, or even the ripples. Different expressions of the ocean, but all water.

”At deeper levels of reality, as we go deeper into that ocean, there is a radiant non-duality. The best word we have for that is consciousness.”

There is a real shift happening in health care right now, according to Anoop. And not just in health care. The bigger picture is that amazing things are happening, but at the same time, darker things also have to surface.

”It's almost like an abscess. We’re getting to that eruption phase.”

Anoop Kumar has published two books; Michelangelo’s Medicine and Is This a Dream?

Already as a child, Alex Sanfiz had a sense that there was something off with this reality. He has continued ever since to question how human experiences are described.

Many thinkers talk about the concept of us living in a simulation, or a simulacrum.

John Lamb Lash is arguably the heaviest authority on the Gnostics, at least the Nag Hammadi Library. The Gnostics were vehemently opposed to the Abrahamic religions. Is that relevant in today’s secular world? Well, yes, because the secular world has inherited more features from traditional religions than we think. The Gnostic message is one of liberation from the shackles of both religious and secular ideas that enslave us under artificial rules and renege our divinity and natural connection with Mother Earth. There is a mainstream also in spirituality. Some things John Lash says are controversial, and some of the Gnostic content, as John interprets it, is outlandish, even by the standards of this channel. But whatever you think of it, it is a fascinating and thought-provoking message. John Lamb Lash has written a number of books, but the pivotal piece of work on the Gnostic worldview is Not in His Image. ”My work is an arrow, and Not in His Image is the head of that arrow”, John says. ”The Gnostics were the first noetic, cognitive psychologists. They still get a bad rap, except from those who have read my book.” The first quarter of the book is about the basic problem in humanity. ”What I found is that the basic core problem that underlies all other problems in our world is an ideology of master race supremacy. It is a subject that goes very deep, into the wounding of civilization and into our very sense of humanity. The battle between good and evil is right here, it is in the human heart, and in our minds.” The idea of an off-planet male god, redemption and a savior – the Gnostics saw all of that as insanity, according to John Lash. ”I want to liberate people from this, to the best of my ability.” In today’s world the tzaddik, the unnatural and detrimental ultra-righteousness, is represented by technocracy, like the transhumanism movement, says John. ”They think they are going to tell you not only how you can live, but how you must live. The goal of this insane ideology that came into our world is to destroy our inherent sense of what it is to be human.” The latter three quarters of Not in His Image is about the solution. The Gnostic myth about how humanity came to be is different from other creation myths. The core of it is that the goddess Sophia – an aeon, not the ultimate source – dreamed up and manifested our planet, including its plant and animal kingdom and anthropos. Thus, Sophia not only created the earth but is the planet. And we are, basically, her. ”To Sophia it's like a dream. To her the earth is like your body is to you in a dream. You are a character in her dream”, John says. But we forgot our origins. Only a few indigenous peoples have always remembered. At one point, a ”mind virus” managed to enter human minds. It originated from inorganic entities that Sophia had also manifested, but by accident: the archons. It was then salvationist religion was introduced. This is the one aspect of the Gnostic worldview that is most difficult to interpret and describe. At first the ”virus” operated through religion, but it has mutated. ”Science was taken out of the realm of the senses and spun into a mind game, which goes nowhere”, John says Before this ”infection” broke through, the indigenous cultures of the world, meaning most humans, knew we were in the presence of a divine force, the earth mother. And so did the Gnostics. They dared to say openly that the newly introduced off-planet male god was a pretender god. Hence, they were brutally persecuted and massacred by Christians in the early centuries of the Common era. The good news in our day and age is that the archontic influence is dying out, according to John Lamb Lash. ”The correction of the insane behavior of humanity is happening today.”

Neuroscientist Mona Sobhani made a profound and brave inner journey. It amounts to a transformation, an awakening.

She used to be a hardcore physicalist. Around 2018, in the midst of a life crisis, she began questioning the tenets of conventional western science. They didn’t hold when it came to explaining many nonphysical human experiences. So, she dove into the literature, did dozens of interviews and wrote a book about everything she learned and experienced on the way.

”I eventually became much more open minded”, she says.

”But I had an ego struggle. It’s hard to let go of this box of beliefs. You just ignore things that don’t match the beliefs. That’s how the human mind is built. My mind was constantly being blown, with each interview I did.”

Mona’s ”Old me” would have dismissed someone’s story about a spiritual experience as imagination or misinterpretation. Her ”New me” will listen with curiosity and compassion.

Everybody experiences the world in a unique way. It comes down to the first-person sentient experience, which is the hard problem of consciousness in science.

”In neuroscience, we don’t have any way of measuring how it is to be you or me. You just have to take people at their word”, Mona says.

”Consciousness is the beginning, the middle and the end. What else is there? You can’t really tell somebody that they didn’t experience something, even though we do that all the time.”

She soon realized that you have to ignore a lot of evidence to make the physicalist paradigm work.

”And that’s not a very good model.”

Mona Sobhani thinks there might be a paradigm shift underway in neuroscience. New papers present theories that say consciousness could be an energy field and that there is an interaction between the field and the brain.

Some physicists today say things that intuitives have said for a long time and that are found in ancient texts.

Mona’s book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, is packed with references to scientists, philosophers, studies and books. It covers every conceivable spiritual field. She has herself acquired personal experience from many of them, like intuitive readings, meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, astrology and tarot.

Psychedelics can broaden your consciousness vastly, she says.

”The boundaries between you and the rest of the world get blurred.”

”It’s such a big problem that neuroscience only focuses on the everyday waking state.”

It is difficult to find incentives for truly novel research in our current system, according to Mona. There is much bias and inertia. Scientists who apply for a grant must follow old research closely.

”You can only move just a little bit further. You must not shock the reviewers. True innovation is not rewarded.”

The media is tainted with a similar bias. And when scientists communicate, it is often ”a disaster”, Mona says.

”They often say ’there is no evidence for that’, but that is misleading. What it really means is that it hasn’t been investigated. But the readers never know that.”

The human species has been around for some 300,000 years. A typical mammal lasts for a million years. We are not typical. 

”You might think we are in the middle of history. But given the grand sweep, we are the ancients, we are at the very beginning of time. We live in the distant past compared to everything that will ever happen”, says William MacAskill, associate professor in philosophy at Oxford university.

MacAskill is the initiator of the Effective Altruism movement, which is about optimizing the good you can do for this world.

In his latest book, What We Owe the Future, he discusses how we should think and act to plan for an extremely long human future.

The book is basically optimistic. MacAskill thinks we have immense opportunities to improve the world significantly. But it dwells on the potential risks and threats that we must deal with.

MacAskill highlights four categories of risks: Extinction (everyone dying), collapse (so much destroyed that civilization doesn’t recover), lock-in (a long future but governed by bad values) and stagnation (which may lead to one of the former).

As for the risk of extinction, he concludes that newer risks that are less under control tend to be the largest, such as pandemics caused by man-made pathogens and catastrophes set off by artificial intelligence. Known risks like nuclear war and direct hits by asteroids have a potential to wipe out humankind, but since we are more aware of them we have some understanding of how to mitigate them or at least prepare for them.

Climate change tops the global agenda today, but although it is a problem we need to address, it is not an existential threat.

Artificial intelligence could lead to intense concentration of power and control. But AI could also have huge benefits. It can speed up science, and it can automate away all monotonous work and give us more time with family and friends and for creativity.

”The scale of the upside is as big as our imagination can take us.”

Humans have invented dangerous technology before and not used it to its full detrimental capacity.

”It is a striking thing about the world how much destruction could be reaped if people wanted to. That is actually a source of concern, because AI systems might not have those human safeguards.”

One prerequisite to achieve a better future is to actively change our values. There has been tremendous moral progress over the last couple of centuries, but we need to expand our sphere of moral concern, according to MacAskill.

”We care about family and friends and perhaps the nation, but I think we should care as much about everyone, and much more than we do about non-human animals. A hundred billion land animals are killed every year for food, and the vast majority of them are kept in horrific suffering.”

William MacAskill thinks some aspects of the course of history are inevitable, such as population growth and technological advancement, but when it comes to moral changes he is not sure.

”We shouldn’t be complacent. Moral collapse can happen again.”

William thinks we are at a crucial juncture in time.

”The stakes are much higher than before, the level of prosperity or doom that we could face.”

William and I have a discussion about the possibility that alien civilizations are monitoring us or have visited Earth. William is not convinced that the recent Pentagon disclosures actually prove alien presence, but he is open to it, and he has some thoughts on what a close encounter would entail.

We also talk briefly about the possibility of a lost human civilization and the cause of the extinction of the megafauna during the Younger Dryas. We have some differing views on that.

My final question is a biggie: Could humankind's next big leap be an inward leap, a raise in consciousness?

”The Self Mastery work was what shifted my life after years of therapy, stress management and a feeling of hopelessness”, Eva Beronius tells me before this interview.

”I changed my internal world from a state of depression, PTSD and panic attacks to joy, peace and excitement about life. And a brain and heart in coherence.”

Today, years later, Eva is herself a transformational teacher and guides others who want to go through this shift.

So, what is Self Mastery? Well, it is not about control. It is rather about letting go of control.

”We think we want to control our thoughts and emotions. To me that is coming from the protector part of our ego mind, which says ’these emotions and thoughts are what is causing me to suffer, so I need to change them’. But we need to embrace them and meet with them”, Eva says.

”When I think of Self Mastery, I think of a skillful artist, like someone who masters the piano. It’s about practicing. It is about being here and being human.”

What are we doing most wrong?

”That we believe the lies we tell ourselves. They come from societal conditioning, upbringing and avoidance of certain emotions. It’s not until you take those inner lies apart you can see the lies from the outside as well.”

(And, by the way, even the concept of right and wrong is a belief.)

Attention is a force, a superpower, Eva explains.

”Think of yourself as the sun, and the rays are your attention. Things appear when you put your attention on them. When you realize that, you can start using that, questioning your bullshit.”

There are several practices one can use to stop believing the programmed lies inside. Eva recommends journaling.

”And you should do it in third person. That makes it easier to see your programming.”

We talk about masculine and feminine energies and the misconceptions that surround those archetypes versus what is actually there.

Eva is just now complementing her healing community with a sister community called fembodiment, which is about embodying our feminine energy.

On sexuality, she says:

”It’s important to understand that it’s there for you. We tend to give it away. We think it’s about performing, something we do for someone else. When you shed that, you start to experience sexual energy as a force. We are living in an orgasmic universe. It’s everywhere. I mean, thermonuclear reaction in the sun, what is that?”

Eva has a very special relationship with the Toltec spiritual tradition in Mexico in general and the ancient site Teotihuacán in particular.

”My first visit to Teotihuacán was like coming home. That was where I had my first awakening, in a sense. It all came out of necessity. I was suffering.”

Teotihuacán was a spiritual university, a place where men and women came to wake up from the dream and realize their divinity.

”When you visit the place today, it’s like it is alive, and it wants to play with you”, Eva says.

She arranges power journeys to the site in October every year.

At the core of the Toltec spiritual tradition is the art of dreaming: to be dreamt or to be the dreamer.

”In the world there is a dream of suffering, a dream rooted in fear. That dream is what is dreaming you if you are not a conscious dreamer. Right now, the majority of people are being dreamt by this dream.”

”When you shed that dream of fear, you don’t need to learn how to love, because love is where you came from. Love is the force that created everything, and it is inside you”, Eva says.

We have all heard about the Roswell incident in 1947. But a series of UFO encounters and sightings at and around two air force bases in Suffolk in Eastern England in December 1980 amounted to something at least as spectacular.

The Rendlesham Forest Incidents (RFI), as the 1980 events are called, were a sensation when they became known to the public in 1983. But in the decades since then, the hugely complicated case has been subject to massive cover-up and denial, according to a new book by Gary Heseltine, Non-Human The Rendlesham Forest UFO Incidents: Forty-Two Years of Denial.

With his background as an interviewing expert with the police force, Gary has managed to dig up an impressive amount of new, mind blowing information; find new witnesses and elicit new information from known witnesses.

”I surprise myself. I really thought I knew the case really well”, Gary says, laughingly.

The area around Rendlesham forest was the scene of a number of mysterious sightings and experiences: Strangely and fast moving intense lights, beams scanning the weapon storage area, at least two landed craft and a handful of testimonies about alien beings.

In the book, Gary Heseltine meticulously dissects the often crucial details. He interviews people who were members of the US military at the two bases at the time. He elicits particularly interesting accounts from a sergeant by the name of Adrian Bustinza, who is an instrumental link between at least two of the nights when non-human activity took place.

Another US service member, James Stewart, gives a mind blowing testimony about entities, strange footprints and a craft that landed and was being shot at. What Stewart experienced, however, turns out to have happened a year before the main events.

Gary concludes that in all, no less than 17 UFO encounters took place over four consecutive nights, plus the one Stewart experienced a year before

The deep research that was to become a book started in 2017, when Gary was appointed the lead researcher in the production of a documentary about the case. He then began looking for things he might have missed during years of private investigations.

But in a way it began already in 2007, when Gary initiated a seven year long collaboration period with the key witness Charles Halt, who at the time of the RFI was the deputy base commander.

Halt is a pivotal figure because of a memorandum he wrote that leaked in 1983. It was probably never meant to reach anybody outside the military or the government. What was in the memo could not be denied once it had got out, but anything else pertaining to the RFI could, and was.

In the memo, Halt reported two nights of UFO activity. He admitted to having seen multiple UFO’s himself. But as Gary Heseltine has shown, there was more to the story.

Gary ended the collaboration in 2014.

”Because I realized he knew more than he was telling me.”

Not only the military is guilty of an incredible amount of cover-up and denial, but also the mainstream media, which has not been willing to seriously question the official story.

There is one person who probably has had more influence than anybody else over alternative views on the textbook narrative of ancient Egyptian technology. Christopher Dunn has written three prominent books on the subject. That is actually a piece of news, because number three hasn’t yet been published. It will be out by the end of this year.

Chris Dunn is an engineer, and thus he has the perspective of the people who actually built the marvels of ancient Egypt. He is very much not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist. Precisely because of that I would not hesitate to call him a leading expert in this field.

The two books he is known for are The Giza Power Plant and Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt. The upcoming book is a sequel to the first one and has the title Giza – The Tesla Connection, with the subtitle Acoustical Science and the Harvesting of Clean Energy.

Those who are skeptical of the idea that the precise artifacts and impressive buildings of ancient Egypt must have been made with the help of high-tech machinery often ask: ”So, why haven’t we found any traces of those machines?”

In fact, most machines that have been used to construct things are lost. Over time they corrode and turn to dust, especially if we are talking about an Egyptian civilization way older than the textbook dynasties. 

”I support the idea of a previous civilization that was met with a cataclysm”, says Chris.

In his new book, he fine tunes his theories about how the Giza pyramids harnessed and transmitted energy. Important parts rest on the work by Nasa physicist Friedemann Freund. The Tesla connection is, among other things, the way the energy was distributed.

Some say the knowledge about how to generate basically free energy has been actively suppressed since the days of Nikola Tesla, perhaps even longer. Chris Dunn is inclined to agree.

”There have been some very bright people out here who feel their ideas have been suppressed”, he says.

”There are vested interests that would prevent new technologies from being introduced, which would make their investments worthless.”

”In my new book, I am closer to describing more fully a better way to harness electricity. I expect it’s going to be 50-60 years before people take it seriously. That’s why I devote the book to future generations.”

”Or it may take a week. It depends who gets involved.”

Links:

Anthony Willoughby has been described as an eccentric, an adventurer, an explorer, an entrepreneur and a team-builder. He has lived his life staying away from restricting social structures.

At school, he was the odd man out.

”Oh, I was completely ostracized”, he says.

Today, he sees that as a privilege, because he didn’t want to be a part of a mainstream he never understood.

Anthony is an eighth generation expatriate. He grew up in Sudan, Egypt and East Africa, experiencing fascinating wildlife and adventures.

Then he was sent to school in England, which completely lacked enthusiasm for life.

His luckiest moment at school was when his house master said ”let’s talk about your future”.

”’Anthony’, he said, ’let’s make one thing absolutely clear: you are far, far too stupid to go to university’. I remember the sense of freedom.”

Education has not changed in hundreds of years, and it is basically designed to train people to work in factories or go to the trenches, according to Anthony.

”The brain is damaged by it. It completely removes creativity.”

So he began a life of travel and human encounters.

He was based in Japan for 30 years. From there he made adventurous excursions to Yemen, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and East Africa.

”It was when I met with the Maasai in Kenya I saw people who had substance without arrogance. I thought: why aren't we taught presence, why aren't we taught identity, why aren't we taught who we are?”

In Papua New Guinea, Anthony learned the importance of knowing one’s territory. That was the beginning of the two consultancies he is now running: Territory Mapping and Nomadic School of Business.

”Nomads have this glorious sense of being able to welcome people on their territory. They have absolute confidence. They know who they are.”

He began asking business people ”what are you hunting, what are you protecting and what are you growing?” and had them draw their own territory maps.

”You can build teams in a company quite easily. But the purpose and the identity is what is missing”, he says.

He and his associates are now working in exactly the same way with billionaire families in America as with homeless people in Wales.

Anthony laughingly says that he in some ways loved Covid, and he loves the recently launched artificial intelligence robot Chat GPT.

”People thought structure, stability and certainty existed, but they’re delusions! They’re delusions that people build their lives on. But they’re meaningless if you don’t know who you are.”

”And suddenly the arrogance of knowledge does not exist. The only thing that matters is wisdom. We’re going right back to the basics.”

As many followers of this podcast know, its host worked as a news journalist for more than two decades. In the summer of 2020, I left my job at the biggest newspaper in Sweden. That same summer, Ariana Pekary quit her job at one of the biggest news desks in America, MSNBC, without having any other media job waiting for her. That was a bold and unconventional step in a world of tough competition.

Not only that: On her blog, Ariana posted a resignation letter, which went viral. These are some of the words she wrote:

Behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.

“We are a cancer and there is no cure,” a successful and insightful TV veteran said to me.

As it is, this cancer stokes national division, even in the middle of a civil rights crisis. This cancer risks human lives, even in the middle of a pandemic. This cancer risks our democracy, even in the middle of a presidential election.

There is a better way to do this. I’m not so cynical to think that we are absolutely doomed (though we are on that path). I know we can find a cure.

”So much of the polarization in (the American) society is amplified due to the financial incentives of the news media”, Ariana says.

”It seeps into every newsroom, no matter how earnest the journalists are. And then it seeps into everybody’s living room.”

”It’s a cancer because it’s such an enormous problem that infects everyone. It’s incredibly damaging, and it’s only getting worse. That's why I felt I needed to say that in a public space.”

Before she came to MSNBC, Ariana worked at public radio. She describes the difference as huge. At public radio, the numbers of listeners or viewers are not broken down on a day-to-day basis, as they are at commercial desks.

”This allows the journalists there to have real live editorial debates”, she says.

For example, she was able to do an extensive documentary series about homeless children. She spent the bulk of a year interviewing families and people who worked with these vulnerable people.

”At MSNBC, they might consider that type of topic, but it would always be the first thing they would kill when something else came along. It is a big difference.”

One particular American media dilemma is political partisanship. It exists elsewhere, too, but it is especially prominent in the US. It is a real problem which seems to be difficult to solve.

I ask Ariana what she thinks about another cause of skewed news reporting, the negativity bias. I personally think it is one of the biggest media problems, because it permeates all kinds of journalism, and the focus on misery that is its result poisons people ’s minds.

Ariana agrees that the guiding star of the news media, ”if it bleeds, it leads”, is sad. But she is not convinced that it is a major issue that has to be dealt with.

”It’s a complicated problem. You're going to report on something when it’s broken. If things are working okay, you won’t.”

The media landscape is changing fast. There are ever more outlets for information, some reliable, some less so. Ariana thinks this is already changing the way we perceive news, and what it is.

”We need to exercise more humility, realize we don’t know everything, and that means accepting someone who’ll combat you with a different opinion, which can be very difficult.

My hope is that we can start to raise an awareness that things aren't necessarily black or white.”

Ariana’s ”dream” news media would break the us versus them perspective, the tribalism.

”Even if we have different opinions, we have a lot in common. There’s  a common denominator among all of us.”

David ”Diamond” Mauriello and Leah Shaper moved to southern Colorado to create an alternative way of living and to ”extract themselves from the system”. They perceived the majority society as increasingly unsound.

Today, they are self-sufficient on healthy foods and energy, and they have made sure that they will be able to thrive even if a massive geomagnetic storm takes out the power and communication grids. That risk is not minimal. Significant changes are underway in Earth’s magnetic field.

Diamond and Leah have a background in Academia and science, and they have delved deeply into the historic patterns and behavior of our planet and the celestial body that most influences it, the sun. The most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, the famed Carrington event, knocked out the little electrical infrastructure that was in place at the time. Today, as you know, society is completely dependent on such.

According to Leah and Diamond – and many others who have looked into the historic data – it is a matter of when, not if, a major magnetic disruption with devastating consequences for modern society will occur.

Another sun-related feature that is already here is a prolonged period of weak solar activity, something called the Modern Grand Solar Minimum. It will lead to significantly colder weather within a few years, especially in certain regions. ”The one thing everybody should come away with if they listen to this, is that there will be a large earthquake, there will be a VEI 7 volcanic eruption, and there will be a comet that hits earth. The question isn't if, it's when. And wouldn't you like a little peace of mind, to be prepared instead of scared?”, says Diamond.

I myself have a slightly different approach to the prospect of a coming catastrophe. I am more of a take-life-as-it-unfolds person. Which makes for an interesting exchange of thoughts on that matter.

To sum up, here are some of the many topics we cover in this lively conversation:

• Toxic foods

• False and true risks

• Prepping for disaster

• Censorship

• Hypocrisy in science

• The climate discussion

• The Grand solar minimum

• The geomagnetic reversal

• Optimism vs pessimism

• Hope of a brighter future on the other side of chaos

• What we can learn from cataclysms in history

• Earlier civilizations

Enjoy!

On February 19th, 2016, Jessica Corneille went to sleep and had a lucid dream. The next morning, she woke up and opened her eyes …

”… and I was flooded with this immense sense of well-being and connection with everything and everyone in the universe, a deep sense of oneness. It was a deeply lived experience, it was almost cellular and vibrational.”

It was not something acquired, Jessica explains.

”It was rather as though a veil had been lifted and I could see what had been there all the time.”

”I was returning to a child-like state. Everything was amplified. Even just from a five senses standpoint it was as if everything was new, and paradoxically, it felt as if I was remembering old knowledge.”

This transformational state stayed intense for several months. Eventually it waned, but it is still with her today.

”Six years down the line, I am still thinking about it all the time”, she says.

The spontaneous spiritual awakening made Jessica feel compelled to leave a promising career in the art world and instead follow an urge to understand more of what these experiences are and convey that knowledge to people.

”I knew I needed to do something with this experience, some kind of selfless service to humanity.”

Her new path led her to become a research psychologist. Her mission is to challenge the default pathologization of awakening experiences.

”If we could understand these experiences better scientifically, we could make a case for them not to always be considered psychopathology or mental health disorder within the mainstream psychological systems, which they are presently, unfortunately”, she says.

Before her profound experience, Jessica was an atheist and had no connection to anything spiritual or religious. But the awakening brought with it a strong sense ”that everything will be well after my death”.

”There was a loss of fear. I will return to Source.”

Many spiritual awakenings occur when the person is in some kind of trauma or crisis, like temporary clinical death, but Jessica experienced an ego death in a situation where she was happy. She had just moved to a city she loved and begun a job she loved.

According to Jessica Corneille’s research, 91 percent of those who have had a spontaneous spiritual awakening experience positive effects already in the short term, and 98 percent experience that they are positive in the long term. The experience is transformative. There is a loss of fear and anxiety.

”These experiences are powerful. Overall, they are described as stronger than all other measured altered states of consciousness, like those induced by drugs or by other means”, Jessica says.

She thinks there is hope for a better scientific understanding of spiritual experiences, which entails a possible bridging of science and spirituality.

”Look at the new research on psychedelics and on contemplative practices. And there is quite a lot of funding put into trying to understand the nature of consciousness.”

”I think we are going through a paradigm shift.”

This is my second conversation with the amazing Angelo Dilullo. We talk about the deepest stuff imaginable, but it feels almost laidback.

Angelo and his book Awake–It’s Your Turn are the ideal goto for those of you who feel there is more to life than meets the eye but are uncomfortable with religion and the general spiritual lingo. You don’t need religion to wake up from the illusion of time, self and separation. In his book, Angelo deliberately avoids spiritual language. But there are numerous references to spiritual traditions and practices, especially from the East. It’s unavoidable.

Angelo had his own awakening at the age of 24. He has much in common with guides like Eckart Tolle and Rupert Spira, but he is still very much one of a kind. For one thing, he still works full time as a physician.

Waking up is not about a journey, it’s about realizing what has been present all the time. It’s a state of being–the natural state of being. But the mind, which is conditioned to experience time and separation, wants to see it as a journey to make sense of it.

True realization isn’t possible to explain in words. But Angelo’s superpower is his ability to point out paths that can nudge you in the right direction.

In this second talk, I wanted to go a bit deeper into Angelo’s world view; the purpose of us being here, what awakening would entail for the collective and what he thinks of science, such as quantum physics.

We had a 75 minute window, and, unsurprisingly, I didn’t get to ask half of the questions I wanted to. But some of them led us in unexpected directions. It was an amazing conversation, and in part almost a bit trippy. Here are some of Angelo’s takes on things we talked about:

On stress

”In deeper stages of realization, your reactions to what would typically be called stressful situations actually drop away. It doesn't mean you don’t relate to the outside world, there’s just no unnecessary reactions.”

On time

”We don't really experience the past and we don't experience the future, and yet somehow we ignore that truth. We spend most of our time living and believing in this inner world of past and future.”

On thoughts as just reflections

”Once you're in synchronicity, you experience that everything just arises out of nothing. Things spontaneously appear, disappear and move, just as they need to, and you feel the whole environment as one.”

On quantum physics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle

”There is no particular way that things are. But the mind doesn’t like that. The mind always looks for a model.”

On movies like The Matrix, The Truman Show and Revolver

”This is the collective hypnosis of mind identification. The self-imposed and group think imposed and societally imposed delusions of separation. The forces of delusion are very, very powerful.”

On awakening as ”cracking the code” and ”outsmarting God”

”There is nothing wrong with living in a story, there's nothing wrong with doing it the hard way. But I will tell you–and Buddhism is all about this–that if you live in a world of stories, if you’re totally mind identified, you can perpetuate a massive amount of harm, even violence. And we see people do this.”

On reincarnation

”I think a lot of that is based on a historical paradigm. Hinduism, Buddhism, and also New Age ideas. That doesn’t totally vibe with me. With that said, I can’t  deny the existence of other life times, energetically, because I have experienced it. It's just obvious. But when we see it the way the mind makes sense of it, we see it the wrong way. All events are happening simultaneously.”

A new whistleblower law in the US, following last year’s historic disclosures by the Pentagon, could trigger an avalanche of truths about extraterrestrial activity.

Brien Foerster is probably known to a large chunk of this podcast’s audience. Not only has he appeared as a guest in an earlier episode (#78), but he has been referred to in numerous other episodes and vlogs.

Brien’s ongoing exploration of ancient megalithic wonders, and his attempts to understand how and when human civilization began, inspire thousands of curious human beings in general and a growing number of independent researchers in particular.

This interview was made in Cusco, Peru, where I participated in one of the fascinating tours that Brien and his Peruvian associates arrange to some of South America’s most spectacular sites (he also does tours in other parts of the world).

When you see things with your own eyes, there is so much that doesn’t fit with the standard narrative.

Western academia claims that all you see here was built by the Inca. Not only the interesting yet rather crude structures that are made of smallish, rough limestone pieces held together with clay mortar, but also the walls that consist of exquisitely tightly fit granite blocks weighing a hundred tons apiece, blocks that seem to have been transported from quarries dozens of kilometers away in mountainous terrain.

Wait. They didn’t have machines, they didn’t know how to make steel, they didn’t even have the wheel.

Not only did they construct all of it, say the textbooks, they did it under the rule of merely twelve kings, whereof one is said to have been the big builder.

Again, wait.

As Brien says:

”They say that the whole of Machu Picchu was built in 25 years. Well, the cathedral in Cusco took a hundred years to build, and that’s just one large building.”

When the Spaniards arrived at the impressive megalithic structures at Sacsayhuamán they were dumbfounded. They had never seen anything like it in Europe.

”They asked the local Inca people: ’Did you build this?’ ’No’, they said. ’This was here when we got here.’ So even the Inca were telling the Spanish this was not their work, but academics are still saying the Inca did all of this.”

In this second Mind the Shift conversation with futurist and trend analyst Bronwyn Williams, we zoom in on population, Africa, money and what it is to be a human.

(Unfortunately, we had a bit of bad luck with the audiovisual tech during our call, apologies for that.)

Bronwyn communicates intelligently and with a high level of energy, which makes her flow of thoughts and information dense. You are well advised to listen more than once to what she has to say.

When people talk about the future, we are often distracted by shiny new things and concepts. There are so many signals. Asking three basic questions can help us slow down and focus, says Bronwyn: What? So what? What now?

”When we question the signals consciously, we can stop being so reactive to this constant stimulus and make conscious choices, which makes us more future fit.”

The future is a paradoxical fantasy: it is a place we can never arrive at, but at the same time we are always arriving at it.

”The present is all that matters, but the actions we take are moving us in a certain direction”, says Bronwyn.

”Change is a constant in the universe. You are going to go extinct unless you adapt to changes.”

Bronwyn Williams has strong opinions about the still very common doom and gloom narrative around population growth:

”Who are those surplus people? It’s a rather nasty utilitarian, almost eugenicist, angle to say there's too many people. We have to call that behavior out.”

”What they are saying is that there are too many of some other sort of people they don’t like. It’s nationalistic, almost fascist. There is plenty of space.”

”Who do we think are going to solve the problems of the future? Those of us that are already here? Not likely, right? Every new person who is born is a sort of lottery ticket”, she says.

Even Africa is actually still sparsely populated, not least compared to Western Europe.

Will Africa enjoy a demographic dividend, like Asia did? Possibly. But there is a chance that Africa will end up with a large youthful population that is unable to work, in other words unable to take advantage of the demographic shift.

One main reason for this predicament is the unfairness of the global economy, according to Bronwyn Williams.

Asia came of age at the tail end of industrialization, whereas Africa is coming of age in the digitized era, when it is extremely difficult to amass capital.

”Africa is playing a game with rules within which it cannot win”, says Bronwyn.

So, the rules need to change. Africa needs to focus more on possibilities within the continent.

Is crypto currency a way out? Not really, Bronwyn thinks.

”Money is just an illusion. It is the symptom but not the cause of the problem. The problem is that we have power imbalances.”

Bronwyn Williams thinks we are in a way reaching the limits of democracy:

”Democracy tends towards the mediocre, it tends towards the lowest common denominator. That’s why we see the rise of left and right populism.”

”The future is about finding a balance between total decentralization and anarchy on the one hand and a totally surveilled and top-down society on the other. Neither of those are long-run sustainable on their own.”

”We need checks and balances on all forms of power, also on the international level. It needs to be a ground-up movement rather than a top-down movement.”

In the early 1990s, Dr Robert Schoch was able to confirm John Anthony West’s theory that the Great Sphinx must be much older than the fourth Egyptian dynasty, judging from the visible water weathering (there was more, but this was the crucial ”smoking gun”). The huge sculpture must have been there during the wet African period, which ended long before the dynastic Egyptians.

”I am a classic academic in many respects. When I first went to Egypt in 1990, it was not to prove that civilization goes back further than we are told. I was convinced it would be my only trip to Egypt”, says Schoch.

But that trip was to be followed by many more. It changed his career and life.

Re-dating the Sphinx to a much earlier period than in textbook history gave Robert Schoch a global reputation. At first, he was fiercely attacked by archaeologists and Egyptologists. Today, the notion that the Sphinx may be 12,000 years old is a bit more widely accepted. The discovery of the megalithic site Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which the mainstream has dated to at least 10,000 BCE, was a game changer.

”It confirmed everything I had said about there being a civilization much earlier than what we are told”, says Robert Schoch.

To talk about a ”civilization before civilization” is still far from uncontroversial, however.

As late as in August of this year, there was a bit of a buzz around a study that was interpreted in a way that made Schoch’s / West’s dating of the Sphinx look impossible, but it turned out to be over- and misinterpretations.

Schoch is convinced that the Sphinx, Göbekli Tepe, probably the base elements of the Giza pyramids and many other megalithic structures worldwide were originally constructed by a civilization that was wiped out by cataclysmic events at the end of the last ice age, events that reshaped the face of the earth. The geological period in question is called the Younger Dryas and lasted from ca 10,900 BCE to ca 9,700 BCE.

Many other researchers also adhere to the Younger Dryas cataclysm theory, but when it comes to the cause of the cataclysm, Robert Schoch still walks a different path. According to Schoch, the available evidence does not primarily point to impacts by comets or asteroids, but to huge solar outbursts.

The sun is more unstable than we think. We know of several dramatic solar events during the last few millennia, like the Charlemagne event in 774-775 CE and the Carrington event in 1859. But these would appear like a walk in the park compared to what happened at the end of the last ice age.

The solar outbursts some 12,000-13,000 years ago melted the ice sheets and even melted stone. They caused huge wildfires, floods, catastrophic climate change and lethal radiation. A solar induced dark age ensued, which lasted six thousand years.

Survivors sought shelter underground for centuries or even millennia. Ancient city-wide tunnel and cave systems can be found in many locations around the world, for example in Cappadocia in Turkey.

There is also biological evidence, like the mass extinction of megafauna at precisely this point in time. This mysterious disappearance makes sense when accounting for large solar outbursts, including high levels of dangerous radiation.

And there is cultural evidence, in the form of strange petroglyphs and other depictions all over the world that look like plasma formations in the sky. 

”The truth is that we have incredible hubris. Natural events can devastate us”, says Schoch.

”All the astrophysical evidence is leading up to another really devastating solar event. We’d better learn from what happened.”

Over the last half century, probably nobody has had a more significant influence on alternative theories about humanity’s deep history than Erich von Däniken.

Today, there are a number of researchers, independent as well as tenured, who question the textbook narrative. But von Däniken has a very particular angle to it that many still hesitate to adopt, namely that extraterrestrial intelligence has had a crucial role in our evolution.

When Chariots of the Gods was published over 50 years ago, Erich von Däniken was crushed by the mainstream.

”Because in that spirit of time, of course, extraterrestrials were nonsense”, he says.

But large parts of the public have had a different view on the astonishing claims von Däniken makes. Over the decades, his now 45 books have sold 70 million copies, and many books have been made into films.

Stories about mighty ”gods” with different traits who in different ways have altered the course of humans are legion in hundreds of cultures all over the world. Many of these, if not most, refer to extraterrestrial beings visiting earth, according to Erich von Däniken.

”We are definitely a product of evolution. But all of our family members, like the gorillas and the chimpanzees, are still in the trees. Only we, from the same family tree, came further. Anthropologists say it was evolutionary luck. I say: In addition to evolution there was artificial mutation, and now we are a mixture between humans and extraterrestrials”, he says.

”We are copies of the ’gods’. This is all described in the holy texts, including the Bible.”

”And this is nothing new to us. We have tampered with evolution ourselves, for instance by grafting apple trees.”

The Mayan texts are a fascinating historic source.

”The starting point for a calendar is very important to every culture. The start of the very exact Mayan calendar is August 11th, 3114 BCE . What happened then? What was so important? In the Chilam Balam book it says this was the day the gods from the Milky Way descended ”

There are also numerous accounts of events that seem suspiciously much like encounters with flying machines and even journeys up above the earth plane, for example in texts like the book of Ezekiel and the book of Enoch.

Many ancient texts in the Hindu tradition also describe flying machines.

”And there is not one word about the development of technology”, says Erich.

He points out that every civilization needs raw materials, and there is no evidence that the deposits were depleted before modern humans began extracting them.

Erich von Däniken was raised as a Catholic (and he still believes in God), but already as a young man he had doubts about some of the biblical explanations. He began reading translated versions of the Sumerian cuneiform texts and other ancient texts.

He found astonishing similarities in the stories all over the world: So-called gods have come down from the heavens/the sky/the firmament. There has been interaction. Humans have asked the ''gods'' where they have come from. The latter have always pointed to the sky. And they all have said they shall return.

”Actually, the ETs are here already. Or rather, they never left us. Some are monitoring us.”

Slowly but steadily the spirit of time changes. Today there are a few academics, like anthropologists and space engineers, who dare to write about the possibility of extraterrestrial influence.

Tony Nader is a globally recognized Vedic Scholar, and as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s successor, he is head of the international Transcendental Meditation centers in over 100 countries.

But Nader is also a medical doctor and has a PhD in neuroscience, trained at Harvard and MIT. As you will notice in this episode, he includes thorough science when outlining his view on life and consciousness.

In fact, Nader’s book One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness, published last year, is the perfect crossover between science and spirituality.

It is counterintuitive for many people to see matter as something that arises from consciousness, rather than the other way around. But consciousness is primary, Tony explains.

”It has been shown through history, and more recent knowledge has demonstrated, that our senses only give us certain aspects of what reality is.”

We perceive time and space as fixed, but the special and the general theory of relativity have shown that they are not.

The smallest particles are not particles but fluctuations in a field.

”There is this theory of the unified field. The field interacts with itself. It creates waves, which adjust and move with each other. They create structures. The structures appear as objects. The more complex the structures are, the more complex objects they appear to form.”

”So what we perceive with our senses is real, but it is only one aspect of the true nature of things”, Tony says.

Everything is completely interconnected.

”This is not wishful esoteric thinking any more, this is science.”

Descartes introduced dualism by dividing the physical and the non-physical. But if we want a monistic view, an all-encompassing view, should we start in matter or in consciousness? Physicalists start in the former, obviously: Everything is physical, and consciousness mysteriously arises from matter.

Already in the Vedic tradition, consciousness is primary. Today, the same view is held by for example the philosophical orientation called idealism (see ep 83, Bernardo Kastrup).

But if consciousness is primary, how does it appear as matter? Why a big bang and physical manifestation?

”Consciousness wants to know itself in all possible ways. But when it is merely imagining all potentialities, it is knowing all this from its own unbounded perspective. It doesn't know what it is like to experience from those limited perspectives”, Tony says.

Hence the manifestation into a universe of myriad aspects of the absolute consciousness: Entities at every possible level of consciousness.

Time and space are concepts that allow for separation. If a thousand people are to sit down, you either put them one after another a thousand times in one chair, or you produce a thousand chairs they can sit in at the same time.

From the maximum level of perceived separation, the journey goes back towards the absolute consciousness again. This is what Tony calls the synthesis path. From a human perspective, this is transcendence.

”All of this creation is just knowledge. It is to know from different perspectives. That is the force of life. That is what it is all about.”

So, an absolute consciousness, an unbounded ocean of consciousness, is that what some call God?

”You can call it God, but this concept is defined differently in different belief systems.”

To practice transcendental meditation is to go back to the ultimate self, reestablish wholeness, grow in consciousness.

Groups of people practicing TM have actually been shown to diminish the levels of crime and violence in large areas.

”The research is accurate and published in peer reviewed journals. We can change the collective awareness.”

After having written two books about investing, value investor Vitaliy Katsenelson thought, like Freddie Mercury once, there must be more to life than this, and wrote a book about life.

Vitaliy had written tons of articles about investing and always included personal and philosophical parts, and he learned that it was those parts that many of his readers appreciated the most.

His new book is entitled Soul in the Game. He uses the word soul in a non-spiritual way.

”I don’t know where it comes from, but when I see people who have this passion for certain things, I know they have soul in the game, and then they have a lot more meaning in life”, Vitaliy says.

He thinks writing has made him more philosophical.

”I get up at 4.30 or 5 o’clock every day and write for two hours. So I have two hours of focused thinking. When you do this for a long period of time, you kind of rewire your brain. You become more mindful.”

Vitaliy Katsenelson grew up in Soviet Russia and moved to the US when he was 18 years old, around the time of the Soviet collapse: from a life in the hub of anti-capitalism to a successful career as a value investor.

Has this background in a communist dictatorship been a help or a hindrance when exploring the landscape of capitalism?

”I came from Murmansk with very little light to Colorado which has an insane number of sunny days a year. With capitalism it’s a similar contrast. I appreciate sunlight much more than somebody who was born in Colorado, and I probably appreciate capitalism much more than people who are born into capitalism.”

We have a lengthy exchange about what is happening in Russia today and with the invasion of Ukraine.

”I used to be proud to say I was from Russia when people asked. Now I am embarrassed.”

”The Soviet Union was more scarred by World War II than any other country. I grew up learning to hate Nazis. What Russia is doing now to the Ukrainian people is basically the same thing Nazi Germany did”, Vitaliy says.

It is a sad fact that Russians have never experienced mature democracy.

”Most Russians are brainwashed. My father said something I think is really true: Russians fall in love with their leaders. And doing this, they end up giving them unlimited power”, Vitaliy says.

Two things in life have a special importance to Vitaliy (apart from his family): stoic philosophy and classical music.

”The Stoics give you this roadmap to life. How to minimize suffering and get the most meaning out of life.”

Vitaliy highlights three Stoics: Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

”Epictetus has this one quote that got me hooked. It sounds so trivial and simple, but it clicked with me: ’Some things are up to us, some things aren’t’. That’s it. It's the cutting of control.”

”Up to us is basically how we behave. How we react to things. And also our values. Everything else is not up to us. I can choose to get upset by things that are not up to me, like getting stuck in traffic. Then I will end up having a miserable life.”

It is not that there should not be any pain in life at all. Vitaliy completely agrees with what many spiritual teachers say: pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Vitaliy listens to classical music when he writes. It makes him more creative, he says. He gravitates towards the Russian composers, ”because their pain clicks with me”, but his favorites constantly change.

”If you understand how difficult it was for many of these composers to write this music, you understand your struggles aren’t unique to you. I write and so I can relate to the creative process. And as an investor as well. Investing is also a very creative endeavor.”

In modern society, we learn to live in the day world and to shun the underworld. To get out of pain as fast as possible. But the pain we avoid will inevitably come back to haunt us, in some form.

”The dark places in life are not enjoyable. The goal is not to spend our life in those places. But we are too quick to pull the ripcord”, says Jungian and archetypal psychologist Joanna LaPrade, author of a new book entitled Forged in Darkness. The Many Paths of Personal Transformation

She promotes self-awareness as opposed to the ”mechanical” modern self-help model.

”An approach to self-awareness is so much richer: what is unique to you, how can you manage it? Thus you can pull on your resources, your nature, what inspires and strengthens you.”

Carl Jung advanced the concept of psychological archetypes. He found them in ancient  traditions and in Greek and other mythologies. The striking commonality between archetypes in different traditions all over the world laid the ground for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

In her book, Joanna LaPrade explores different ways of journeying into the underworld to manage inner pain. She does it through the heroes and gods in Greek mythology who make precisely that journey (not all of them do).

Heroism does not only come in the form of strength and willpower (Hercules), as we usually see it in the West. A hero’s journey can also be about listening and showing weakness (Aeneas), or using feelings, learning from mistakes and letting go (Orpheus) or to be clever and eloquent and ask questions (Odysseus). Investigating one’s depths can also entail ecstasy, release and to embrace nature and body (Dionysus).

LaPrade discovered Jung in her early twenties in a very ”Jungian” manner via synchronistic events and a numinous dream that pointed out to her that her path was to help people cross thresholds in life.

She is also deeply influenced by the Jungian writer and mythology professor Joseph Campbell, whose notable book The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a distilling of hero mythology.

”The hero is that part of us that is able to recognize when old life is worn out and needs tending. It is the courage and the bravery that it takes to leave the comfort of the old in us and set out on some kind of journey in ourselves and in our world, where we cross a threshold and become more than we used to be”, says Joanna.

She points out that in her work as a therapist, she has yet to meet anyone who talks about having become more than they thought they were without first having visited places of suffering.

Inner pain and suffering can express itself in the body in the form of illness or injury. The Western world is influenced by the cartesian idea of a separation between mind and matter.

”But we make a really big mistake when we separate soma and psyche”, Joanna says.

And we also make a mistake not to realize that those ailments may want to tell us something.

”Working with cancer patients, I would say most of them have said ’cancer was the greatest teacher of my life’.”

Toward the end of our conversation, we engage in an interesting and deep exchange about the possibility of living in the present moment and whether or not one can actually free oneself from suffering, as many spiritual teachers say. Jung versus Buddha, in a way.

Do we reach any conclusions? Listen and find out.

Have you noticed that things mysteriously disappear and reappear? That broken items inexplicably get repaired? Perhaps even that deceased people or pets suddenly reappear as very much alive?

Don’t think you are losing your mind or suddenly suffer from amnesia. You are most likely experiencing what Cynthia Sue Larson calls reality shifts.

This is a phenomenon closely related to synchronicities as well as what is often referred to as the Mandela effect, a kind of timeline jumps, where some people’s memories of universal events or things deviate from what seems to be the consensus memory.

Cynthia first began to observe weird reality shifts in the 90s. Having a science degree, she began connecting the dots employing quantum physics, but she combined science with the spiritual insights that she also acquired during the same period.

”Consciousness interacts with quantum reality. Somehow we are entangled through space and time”, she says.

Time is a weird thing. It can slow down or speed up. We all experience it differently in different situations and contexts.

”Sometimes it is as if a change has happened in the past and a different decision was made. We can start learning from experiences that we haven't even had yet.”

(This both pleasant and deep conversation made me realize I really must learn more about basic quantum physics. I have a feeling those references won’t go away any time soon on this podcast…)

Cynthia likes to see life as a waking dream. It is real on a superficial level, but the baseline reality lies beneath the physical reality. She thinks we ought to live as if we are in a lucid dream, where we know we are dreaming but can change how it plays out.

”This is a participatory universe, as the physicist John Archibald Wheeler said. If we ask the universe a question, we get an answer.”

Cynthia Sue Larson makes several references to quantum physicists and other scientists, like Carlo Rovelli and what he has said about zero entropy, which may be a scientific way of describing God. From that place all can be seen. In our busy lives, characterized by entropy, it is very hard to see the whole picture.

”We draw the energy required for these shifts from zero entropy”, Cynthia says, ”that non-linear experience, being in that lucid dream where we have access to everything, where we feel connected with everyone.”

According to tests, some people are more prone than others to experience reality shifts, namely those who score high on intuition, empathy and emotions.

Cynthia Sue Larson has written several books about these fascinating phenomena, she runs a website where people can share their experiences of shifts and jumps in space and time, and she is the first president of the International Mandela Effect Conference.

We all dream. Even the most hard-nosed materialist does. When a dream is powerful and seems to carry meaning it shakes you, whether you are spiritually oriented or not.

What is complementary and alternative medicine and treatments (CAM)? The definitions vary in different parts of the world.

”But at least here in Denmark, the definition is not based on evidence, on whether it works or not, but on the formal status of what is being done”, says Jesper Odde Madsen, who is a guest on the podcast for the second time.

Jesper is a Danish science journalist and communication consultant with a focus on complementary and alternative medicine. He has an affiliation with the Galileo Commission, whose aim it is to expand science and free it from its underlying materialist assumptions.

To what extent different kinds of CAM are accepted, or tolerated, also varies widely. Yoga and massage are popular. Homeopathy is a no-go zone in most of the West, whereas it is considered more or less normal in India.

Conducting research on CAM is an uphill battle. Jesper Madsen talks of four main obstacles.

”There is no money in it. You can't get a patent by treating people with reflexology or acupuncture. You won’t make a career of studying these methods. There are no international organizations to back this up. And communication between the stakeholders is random or at least limited.”

There is also a methodological dilemma when it comes to conducting CAM studies: The holy grail of western medical research is to employ RCT, randomized control trials, to show whether a treatment works or not.

”But here is a secret: When you want to study something, you should choose the trial method that's suitable for the thing you want to investigate. This truth has been kept away.”

”All governments listen to mainstream doctors. And mainstream doctors say: we must have RCT. Amen.”

Alternative practitioners have a holistic approach. Before they apply their treatment, they learn things about every individual patient. And afterwards they talk to the patient and give advice.

”The point is that most alternative treatments consist of several parts, and only one of them is the technical fix, like needles in your arm”, says Jesper.

”There is nothing wrong with RCT but you have to start with the research question and analyze the issue before you make the choice of which investigation design to use.”

If you make the method in itself a criterion of quality, then it is a question of belief, according to Jesper Madsen.

”And that is exactly what I have heard medical doctors say about alternative treatments: that they are beliefs, almost religious.”

Is the placebo effect in essence an alternative treatment that the mainstream is using without knowing it?

”Yes. I am happy about the growing interest in studying the placebo. Even many doctors say today that this is more than just noise. There is a link between the psyche and the physical body. It would be great if we could take this seriously. But it will be difficult to make money on it.”

Why are journalists reluctant to cover CAM in a neutral way? Are they also afraid of being ridiculed?

”I have been asking myself this question for years. Journalists tend to go to the usual mainstream sources. They tend to have a belief in authorities. I think this has been shown during the pandemic.”

How to break the materialist paradigm, take down the ”wall”?

”It is not a question of evidence. We have the evidence. It is a question of reaching a critical mass of people and events. Maybe even that some researchers die and the younger ones think differently.”

Philosophy is life. It is always present in life. In a way, every human being is a philosopher. But we also have collective thinking and collective experiences, and that's what a professional philosopher deals with.

Philosophy professor Jonna Bornemark works at the Center for Studies in Practical Knowledge at Södertörn university in Stockholm. Many Swedes have come to appreciate her everyday approach to philosophy. She often appears in the media.

A couple of years ago she released a book about judgment that was much discussed, and her latest book, about pregnancy, was on the shelves a few days before this conversation.

Jonna Bornemark argues that the room for judgment has shrunk in modern professional life. And the room for action.

”To follow a manual is not to act”, she says.

In every profession there is a space for collective judgment. Professional knowledge can be developed within this space, according to Bornemark.

We sometimes talk about judgment as a personal characteristic.

”I think  that is unfortunate. Instead, it is a kind of knowledge. We can be differently skilled at it.”

Jonna Bornemark hesitates to liken judgment with intuition. And she does not like the concept of ’following one’s gut feeling’.

”To follow only one source of knowledge, your feeling, is not judgment. We should follow as many sources of knowledge as possible.”

Often we have to act fast, and sometimes we just have a sense that we must act in a certain way.

”That may seem like acting on gut feeling, but when you look at it closer, it is much more.”

”To have judgment is to be intimately in touch with the newness of every situation. To be able to always act without knowing everything.”

Not-knowingness fills Jonna Bornemark with a euphoric feeling.

”It means we can always explore more. To some it may trigger anxiety because you are not in control. To me it is mainly positive.”

The constantly moving horizons of uncertainty and of not knowing are the lifeblood of science, but the scientific and educational systems are bad at acknowledging this, Bornemark thinks.

Sometimes we need to use our judgment to deal with conflicting forces. Jonna Bornemark has coined the term ”pactivity” for situations where we are passive and active at the same time. She first felt the need for such a concept when she tried to understand the experience of giving birth.

”The labor pain was not mine. It belonged to life itself. I experienced it like some kind of monster going through me. But I had to not object to it, that would have been dangerous. I had to continue its movement in order to give birth. So I wasn't purely active and I wasn't purely passive. I was pactive.”

When does life begin?

”It is a continuum. To draw a line, to give it a timestamp, is just a human desire. The logic of life is the logic of a continuum. That is why we need to look at the question of abortion anew.”

The fetus probably doesn't have the sense of ’I’. Even a newborn displays a sense of oneness. When does the sense of a separate self begin? Is it conditioned? Is it possible to maintain the sense of oneness throughout life? Those are questions we raise during this conversation.

Bornemark doesn’t like the reductionist materialism that is so prevalent in society.

”It is a poor worldview. And not true. But I like matter.”

”One way of responding to reductionist materialism could be to only emphasize the spiritual side, but my response is to work with the concept of matter, to re-understand what matter is: living, self-forming – and also including the spiritual side.”

Bernardo Kastrup began as an accomplished computer engineer and AI developer. Today he is one of the most influential thinkers in the intersection between spirituality and science.

This episode is probably the most philosophically dense and intense so far. Kastrup covers so much ground it is impossible to do it justice in this brief description. Just dive in and listen. And stop once in a while to reflect.

Having said that, here are some highlights:

• On metaphysical idealism, which entails that the world is essentially mental:

”Just like your thoughts are mental, the physical world at large is made of mental processes, which present themselves on a screen of perception.”

”Everything is in consciousness. But that doesn't mean that everything is conscious.”

• On how human-like an intelligent artificial neural network can become:

”We have no reason whatsoever to believe that a silicon computer can ever have a private conscious inner life in the way that you and I have.”

• On the immense problems with materialism:

”You can not pull the qualities out of the quantities. You have to have only one thing. The quantities are descriptions of the qualities, not the generator of the qualities. Mass, spin, charge, momentum, amplitude etc are descriptions of mental processes.”

”Materialists are trying to pull the territory out of the map.”

• The whirlpool metaphor for human life (we are ”whirlpools” in an all-encompassing stream of water):

”We are localized aspects of consciousness within the greater ’mind-at-large’. A whirlpool is undoubtedly a thing of its own, but it is also obvious that it does not consist of anything other than water. This is why I can't read your thoughts and I don't know what's happening on the other side of the world right now despite that everything is in one universal mind.”

• The dashboard metaphor for the world:

”We are like pilots flying only by reading the instruments on the dashboard. And that is sufficient to fly safely. The dashboard is excellent at conveying accurate information about the world. But it isn't the world.”

”The pilot never makes the mistake of thinking that the dashboard is the world. But we make that mistake. We say the physical is the world, not a representation thereof. And that is incredibly naive.”

”So, what is the nature of the thing being measured? I think it's obvious: transpersonal mentation. Mental activity is the only thing we know. Everything else is a theory. An abstraction.”

”The brain doesn't have a standalone existence. It is a representation on the dashboard.  Your brain firing up neurons is what your thoughts look like when observed from the outside.”

• On why idealism gives meaning to life by postulating a continuation of consciousness beyond the physical death:

”Nothing is banal, nothing is temporary. Your experiences are not for nothing. They have contributed to the fabric of nature.”

”The intuition that we are rooted in nature is what is reflected in the golden thread that runs through thousands of years of mystical traditions.”

• On evolution:

”The evidence for natural selection is overwhelming. But the question is: is it the only mechanism necessary for evolution? To say that the genetic mutations are random is a statement of faith. The mutations might have a preferential direction. And a recent study shows that that is exactly what happens in nature. Nature is not shooting blindly.”

Life was a winding road for happiness specialist Monique Rhodes before she found her calling. In her late teens she was so depressed she tried to take her own life. Then she traveled the world. For thirteen years, all she owned would fit in a bag. She lived in slums and castles, she criss-crossed India on a motorbike. She was also an accomplished singer-songwriter.

While in India, Monique understood by accident that she was a good meditation teacher. She began to develop a mindfulness meditation program that is now used at thirty universities and colleges around the world, the 10 Minute Mind. She has since developed other programs, like the Happiness Baseline. She runs a daily bite-sized podcast, In Your Right Mind. And she has worked with a number of well-known spiritual teachers and leaders, like Eckhart Tolle.

”Learning how to deal with your thoughts and emotions is difficult for young people. I asked myself, sitting in a hospital bed, why is it that some people are happy and that others, like me, are struggling so much? Is it something I can change? That's where all the adventures came from. And it completely transformed my life”, Monique says.

”Today I work with thousands of students around the world, teaching the things I wish we were taught when we were younger.”

So, what is the secret? Basically learning how to bring back the scattered mind to the present moment as often and as long as possible.

”Build a relationship with your mind, learn how to work with it. It’s problematic to dance away into the past and into the future. Those are places that don’t exist. The only moment that is real is now.”

”We live in our thoughts without connecting to our heart. We don’t know how to manage our minds.”

Monique reads a lot, she says.

”We have a propensity to not hold our focus for very long on specific things. Reading is a good antidote to that.”

The core of Monique Rhodes’ message is this: Happiness is a habit.

When we experience something we judge that and react to it based not on the present moment but on something in the past. It may remind us, subconsciously or consciously, of something that happened to us before, positive or negative.

”This is how we relate all the time.”

Meditation slows down that automated process.

”You begin to learn to be more in the present moment. Every moment we have a choice as to how to react.”

Many people think meditation is not only woo-woo but also difficult. It’s not. This is what meditation is, according to Monique Rhodes:

”Get your mind into the present moment. Your mind will go off, you bring it back. Your practice is in the bringing back. Every time you bring the mind back, you build a muscle.”

Monique Rhodes describes herself as habitually courageous, habitually positive, habitually grateful and someone who habitually sees the goodness in people.

”Because I have built a series of habits around this.”

At the same time it is important not to just sit in a glorious feeling of wellbeing all the time. The risk is that a kind of arrogance seeps in, as Monique puts it.

”We have a tendency not to see the light that exists in the negative things that arise and to fear the shadow side when positive things happen. But if you allow it all to just be, you can stay in a pretty happy place most of your life.”

A few weeks into 2022, the Covid policies are shifting dramatically in many countries. Restrictions are being rolled back. This conversation with Nils Littorin is a bit like a posterior assessment of what worked and didn’t work during this huge health policy experiment.

For a human being life on earth begins when she takes her first breath. There are reasons why ancient traditions always emphasize the importance of breathing and posture.

”If breathing were only a matter of getting oxygen, then the best way would be to breathe in and out as quickly as possible”, says Paul J Scanlan, author of the book The Body Heat Fiasco.

Or to pick it up through gills, receptors or some other kind of bodily process, one might add.

We all know that quick breathing is bad. We feel better when we breathe calmly and deeply. But western medical science doesn't understand why. So why else do we breathe then?

In his book, independent researcher Paul Scanlan compellingly (and partly funnily) explains how breathing heats our bodies.

”Warming air is a defining feature of being alive”, Paul says.

The mechanism is amazingly straight-forward: squeezing air in the respiratory system. That a gas heats up when compressed is basic physics. For instance, a diesel engine doesn't have spark plugs. Instead, the piston squeezes the fuel mixture to ignition.

It is strange, when you think about it, how vague our knowledge about body heat generation is. And yet, we wouldn’t be able to live on this planet if our body temperature weren’t somehow kept at around 36.9 degrees Celsius.

According to the standard view, in warm-blooded animals like mammals and birds body heat is generated by a chemical burning, primarily within a fatty tissue called BAT. Thus, the reason why the air we exhale has body temperature is because it has been heated by the body.

According to Scanlan there are numerous gaps in the century-old standard model.

One example: Pigs and birds are warmblooded, but they don't have BAT.

Another example: If chemical reactions generated body heat, a chick in an egg close to hatching would be able to heat its own body, but it can’t, it is wholly dependent on its parents to keep warm (thus being ”coldblooded” until the moment it comes out of the egg and can breathe).

And when it comes to heating inhaled air, it actually works the other way around, says Paul:

”The warm body is assumed to warm 7.5 liters of air from, say, 2 degrees Celsius to 36.9 degrees Celsius every minute. If you had a tube through which the same amount of air flowed, known physics would say the tube needs to be pretty hot for the air to heat up that much by somehow just touching the sides of the tube. How hot? Let’s just say it has to be hotter than 36.9 degrees. But there is nothing between the nostrils and the lungs that is hotter than that!”

Some of the more compelling pieces of evidence in Scanlan’s book are about humans who are able to endure extreme cold. A case in point is ”the iceman”, Wim Hof.

”Hof does special things with his breathing. He can compress the air very well. But to get to that point he focuses on his alignment and meditation. The classic for meditation and yoga is concentrating on breathing.”

Paul Scanlan’s model doesn’t dismiss that some heat is generated by way of chemical processes, which is relevant in some contexts.

He has presented a couple of papers about his controversial findings and also had one published in a peer-reviewed journal. He has received polite response from the mainstream, but nothing more than that.

Actually, the golden thread in The Body Heat Fiasco, as well as in the two or three books Scanlan plans to write, is not breathing so much as tension. Or rather tensional integrity, for which breathing plays a pivotal part. His next book will explain how our vision works (he has been able to eliminate his own dependence on glasses). And after that he will take on cancer.

Researchers who dare to go outside the box and investigate phenomena that the mainstream dismisses because they are inexplicable are labeled ”pseudoscientists”. Those who question elements of the accepted scientific view are labeled ”conspiracy theorists”.

”And journalists who dare to contact one of those researchers and do an interview are contaminated with the same labels”, says Danish journalist and communicator Jesper Madsen.

”No wonder many journalists hesitate to write or broadcast anything that is not in line with official science”, he concludes.

When he was young, Madsen wanted to become an engineer. But during military service he changed course and decided he wanted to work in the humanities. Eventually he became a journalist.

Since childhood Jesper had had a fascination for mysteries and the mystical aspects of life.

A seven-week sojourn in San Francisco in 1996 turned out to be crucial. He met people with fascinating insights into the esoteric realm. He made his first contact with IONS, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, with which Jesper is now affiliated (the first Danish community group).

He saw the need for a paradigm shift. But when he returned to Denmark with tons of notes, he found it difficult to know what to do with it. The mindset in Danish media was not very open to this kind of knowledge.

Soon thereafter, Jesper Madsen found himself in a meeting about alternative medicine. He realized that this was connected to what he had learned. So, during the last 20 years, he has specialized in complementary and alternative medicine.

It is well documented that many of the alternative medical treatments work, but if the standard double-blind trial is not employed, the results are ignored.

”To rely on only one investigative method is a matter of belief. They say that alternative medicine is based on belief, but this is also a belief. If you don't recognize the thinking behind the method you want to study, you won't understand why it works”, says Jesper and gives the salient example of homeopathy, which is vehemently rejected by the mainstream.

The placebo effect is well documented by standard science. In some cases it is very strong. It is mostly described as some kind of undesirable noise in studies, but what it actually shows is that our ability to heal ourselves (and make ourselves sick) is much larger than we have been led to believe.

All along, Jesper Madsen has had a profound interest in ”frontier science”, as he puts it.

”Now I feel somehow I want to go back to the basic, big questions”, he says.

His latest endeavor is an engagement with the Galileo Commission, an offshoot from The Scientific and Medical Network, which aims to encourage investigations beyond the materialist worldview. Jesper is involved in the creation of a network of open minded journalists.

”I put my faith in English speaking countries like the US and the UK, because here in Denmark today I don't think more than two or three journalists, aside from myself, are open to this.”

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Independent researchers are putting together a puzzle that is beginning to reveal a vastly different history than the one we are told in school. Especially concerning how far back in time civilization actually goes.

One of those independent researchers is Brien Foerster.

His fascination with the history of human civilization and culture began when he grew up in western Canada. He later moved to Hawaii and eventually to Peru, where he now lives. His quest for the origins of civilization has taken him to a hundred countries, and he organizes tours to megalithic sites in the former Inca lands, Egypt, Turkey and other places.

”I have followed my passion”, he says.

Brien has written 37 books about megalithic sites and hidden history, and he is an avid youtuber.

He is convinced, like many other maverick researchers, that the advanced megalithic structures around the world were not built by the cultures mainstream scientists say did it, but by much earlier and technologically much more advanced civilizations that perished.

In official history, it was the dynastic Egyptians who built the great pyramids and the Inca who built the most impressive walls and other structures in Peru and Bolivia where gigantic blocks of hard stone were put in place with exquisite precision.

But even the mainstream acknowledges that neither the Inca nor the dynastic Egyptians knew how to use steel, and much less diamond reinforced drills or saw blades. They only utilized bronze tools, and you cannot cut granite with bronze.

”The evidence is staring you in the face”, Brien Foerster says.

There is also growing evidence that a series of cataclysms occurred roughly 12,000 to 13,000 years ago which – in the view of Foerster and others – wiped out the civilizations of the megalithic builders.

One compelling circumstance is that at least 200 cultures around the world are talking about the destruction of their world by a flood of some kind.

Brien Foerster’s foremost contribution to the understanding of our origins is probably his research on the mysterious elongated skulls in Paracas, Peru.

The mainstream researchers say they are merely the result of head binding and other forms of cranial deformation. But that doesn't make sense when you study the oldest of them, which seem natural: their cranial volume is 25 percent larger than in a normal homo sapiens skull, a suture line is lacking, the eye sockets are larger and the foramen magnum, the hole connecting the skull with the neck, is placed two centimeters further back, presumably to balance the larger skulls.

Several of the skulls have been DNA analyzed, and it turns out they are related to other elongated skulls that have been found in the area of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea

This challenges the standard story of how America was populated.

”The enigma is that they suddenly appear, and then they disappear.”

Brien Foerster has probably investigated this enigma more profoundly than anybody else. Will he ever find the answer to who the people with the elongated skulls were?

”I haven't given up on it yet.”

Foerster is facing increasing limitations around his research in Peru and Bolivia, but Egypt is slowly opening up more.

In ten years time, a lot more eyes will be looking at the signs of a hidden ancient human history, Brien thinks.

The online revolution has worked wonders to connect people, but we need to meet in the physical to really exchange energy and love and to find our inner power.

That was one of the insights Brady Gunn brought with him when he began standing in a park in Australia every Sunday between 10 and 11 am to simply silently manifest his truth and freedom.

”We’re all one, we're all drops in the same ocean”, Brady says.