Mind the Shift

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.