Mind the Shift

”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.