Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done about 660 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu where you’ll see that all previous ones organized in several different ways. It’s actually easier to navigate than the YouTube channel in terms of organization. If you’d like to be notified of future ones and especially the live stream, but also when we post new ones, subscribe to the channel and click that little bell that pops out when you hit the subscribe button. And also there’s an upcoming interviews page on Batgap which has these little icons in the right-hand column. If you click one of those you can add a notification to your calendar program, whatever it is, about future live interviews so you can watch them live if you want to. Okay, my guest today is Dr. Anneloes-Smitsman. She is a futurist, evolutionary systems scientist, coach, healer, and award-winning best-selling author. She is the founder and CEO of EarthWise Center, which she’ll explain. Her programs, practices, and strategies are sought after around the world for actualizing our future human potential and catalyzing the next steps in human consciousness and systemic design for thrivability. She was awarded the Visioneers Lifetime Achievement Award in May 2022 and was crowned overall African winner in the category Human Development of the 2022 Africa’s Most Respected CEOs Awards. She is the co-author of the award-winning Future Humans Trilogy with Dr. Jean Houston and a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle. Here’s a quote that I pulled off her website. I thought I’d read it. “In each of us already exists the future potentials of the emerging new era, the next step of human consciousness and the evolution of our species. I am here to help you access and actualize this potential in yourself, your relationships, and the systems and cultures you form part of, to co-create and become the worlds and futures where we can thrive and blossom together.” So welcome, Anneloes.
Anneloes: Thank you so much. Great to be with you.
Rick: You’re welcome. Anneloes is in Mauritius, which is a small island way out in the ocean east of Madagascar. And I guess, is it in some way considered part of Africa because that’s why you got this African Achievement Award?
Anneloes: Right. It’s part of the African region and Indian Ocean region, yes.
Rick: Right. Okay. I was looking at pictures of it on the internet yesterday and it really seems like a kind of a Shangri-La, a delightful place to live. I’ve always been interested in the future and futurism and stuff like that. I’ve read books about prophecies that ancient cultures, you know, wrote down and many of which have come true. And I’ve felt since the 70s that the world is going to undergo some very big changes and that we’re probably getting close to that. I think a lot of people have felt like that. I mean, remember all the fuss that came around, was it 2012 when there was supposed to be this huge change? And so I think a lot of people with a spiritual orientation and even people in other fields feel that the pace of change is extremely fast now and, you know, accelerating and we don’t know what the world’s going to be like in 10, 20, 30 years. And many people feel it’s going to be kind of a hellscape with environmental catastrophe and political strife and all kinds of things. But others feel like, okay, it’s going to get rough and it’s already rough but we’re going to get through this and it’s going to be really nice on the other side. So that’s a brief summation of my sense of, you know, where things are and where they’re going. How does that jive with your vision?
Anneloes: Well, yes, I mean it describes, I like to call about it in terms of two futures. So there’s a future past which is the result in many ways of, you know, some really catastrophic actions that we’ve taken as a humanity that is destroying the conditions for planetary well-being and health. And so this is kind of the future past that’s now manifesting as a, and we we call that the sustainability crisis. And then the other hand, there is also the potential for an emerging new future, an emerging new era. And you could say that that future really is one that I think that many of the CEOs and prophets and wisdom keepers of all kinds of cultures of our human family have been talking about for a very long time, that there is the opportunity in the midst of so many changes and catalytic changes, that’s also in the collapse and tipping point conditions, because there is this, you know, structuring decoupling of earlier belief systems, earlier worldviews, it provides an opening, it provides a portal to truly as a collective give birth to a higher possibility of what it means to be human on this planet. So that’s also always the one that gives me hope that despite all the challenges that we are faced with, and that we need to be very, very aware of, but that you can still get up in the day and say, you know what, this is giving me even more reason to help co-create a world that works to help co-create a world in which all of us can thrive together. And that is truly manifesting also a higher possibility of who we as a humanity can be.
Rick: In your book, The Quest of Rose, which is the first book in the trilogy, the main character Rose, you know, got COVID and she nearly died, but then she survived and she came out of it. And it sort of tells a story in the book about how that near death for her was a shifting point after which all kinds of possibilities opened up for her. And I think it was supposed to symbolize what might be happening to society on a larger scale. And in fact, you can elaborate on this, but as I recall in the book, you and Jean Houston, who wrote it with you, cited examples, or maybe this was in an interview I heard you give, of how there were really difficult times in the past in various cultures, like plagues and things like that. And then after that, there was this huge blossoming of culture and science and arts and all that. Do you feel like, you know, this pandemic we’ve been through is something along those lines and that we might be already coming into a blossoming period?
Anneloes: Not sure yet in a blossoming. I think we are really the pre-Renaissance. So it’s like a new emerging Renaissance, but we are just prior to those Renaissance conditions. And that’s indeed, we talked about this in the book and also in the interview is that we could see in the previous Renaissance as well, just prior to that. And we could, you know, a lot of disease, a lot of crisis experiences. But then again, because probably because of those catalytic conditions that had also started to catalyze an enormous amount of creativity, you know, a way to re-envision what it means to be part of this human family. The previous Renaissance, of course, was more oriented around Europe and it had a huge shadow and that’s colonialism that often we forget about. So it may have been really very positive and transformative for people within Europe, but not so elsewhere in the world. And this is why we like to call about this. And that’s not just us, but, you know, many movements are talking about a new regenerative Renaissance and regenerative in the sense that it’s giving birth again to, you know, the sense of our humanity that is not about yet one culture or, you know, society dominating over others, but truly coming into this co-creation, collaboration, that’s also part of the maturation of our species. So indeed, coming back to, you know, Rose as the main character, indeed, of our book, she is in the story, she’s a woman in her mid-twenties and she is hospitalized with severe COVID symptoms. And this is really at the beginning of the crisis. When I myself was actually stuck in the Netherlands and unable to return home to my children, I was stuck in for seven months because all the flights were canceled. So that also as a kind of background and backdrop, and Jean and I were, you know, every day on the phone and to release, living our own personal version of this crisis. And myself also going through the COVID conditions myself. And so Rose in that story, when she gets this inkling of, “Oh, I am dying. My old reality, my old world is dying.” And she’s had premonitions and dreams of always coming at this crossroads, a feeling that the road in which she was, was coming to a sudden stop. And I think that’s again, symbolic, what we’re feeling now. A lot of people are feeling that their lives don’t make sense, their work, the way they’ve been, you know, going to work for other people. They feel like, what’s the point of that? So it’s this experience that many people are having that the old roads are not taking us to the future that is calling us. So in the story, then when Rose realizes that her old life is dying, she says to the cosmos, to the universe, “Look, I’m so young. Really, this can’t be it. Help me find the ways to renew myself and to heal myself.” And then she slips beyond the veils, her heart stops for a few minutes, and she goes through near-death experience. And as that happens, she then discovers really the power of conscious choice. And what she discovers in that moment is that every choice that we make is a coordinate of consciousness. So every choice that you make, imagine that we are in this universe of consciousness, this incredible body of consciousness. Every choice point that we are making is a coordinate in that body and therefore starts to activate different possibilities. So she then discovers how her future human choice is really the choice now to start activating like an imaginal cell. Who she can be from this new cycle of time, this new emerging era. And what she discovers that the potentials of consciousness in that conscious future human choice of the emerging new era helps us to kind of enter into where we are now from a very, very different perspective. So rather than feeling that we are in the midst of the crisis, everything breaking down, coming to this stop, we start to see that instead, because we’re coming in from a higher order of possibility, we start to see how to now work and really get creative with everything that’s no longer working in the world, but not from a place of rejection, but rather to get creative and innovative with it. And that is really the catalyst then also for this renaissance period.
Rick: Just about an hour ago, I was washing the dishes and listening to a TV show called 60 Minutes. And there was a segment on how teen suicides went way up, or attempted suicides and actual suicides during the pandemic. And that now that the pandemic is tapering off, unfortunately, this trend of teen suicides is not tapering off. And they were saying how the mental health care systems are overwhelmed and it takes months to get an appointment and all this stuff. So you hear something like that and you feel like, well, the youth who are really the hope of the future sound like they’re pretty depressed and discouraged. From your perspective and all the people you talk to and all the feedback you must have gotten from your books, do you feel that there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t making the news who have the opposite of suicidal tendencies? In other words, they’re optimistic and they’re thinking creatively and in new ways. And there’s a real wave of such people that are rising up.
Anneloes: Yes. But as you’re saying, they’re not making the news, many of them. And that is really unfortunate. So I am a mother of two sons, 12 and 14 years old. And indeed what they’re bombarded with is all of the crisis news and too little of the creative and innovative capacities. And also too little reminders that look as a humanity, we have faced very, very difficult times. It’s not the first time that we are in the midst of a crisis. What I think is new now is that the way that we can also communicate, be conscious about it. And of course, we’ve never ourselves as a species been destroying the planetary conditions for us to live here. I mean, that is just untold and unheard of. But I think that the teenagers and youth, also the children, what we need to share with them is not that, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, we’re burdening you with this almost unlivable planet so that they’re feeling, well, okay, great. What are we going to do about this now? And it’s all falling on our shoulders and it’s all going to waste. So that’s the kind of sentiment that many are having. But rather to saying this is an unprecedented time for the very first time ever, we can actually be in conversation about this for the very first time ever. We can learn about what’s happening here, Mauritius, you are in the United States. And we have more power as people than we may realize. We have also the power to create new, different economic and political systems, to create new constitutions, to really let our voices be heard. So I feel that, and I’ve done a lot of work in curriculum development, for example. And there, I started with that on the narrative of sustainable development. And that doesn’t really inspire a lot of youth. But if you’re talking about thrive education, you know, regenerative education, transformative education, and actually asking youth, what future do you want? What future lives in you? I remember when I was here in Mauritius doing this process of dialogues with youth all over the island and ask them, what future is alive in you? When you close your eyes at night, you know, what future calls you forward? What motivates you to get up in the morning and to develop yourself? Many, many of these young people told me, nobody’s ever asked me that. Nobody’s ever asked me. They’ve always only just told me, do this so you succeed, do that so you get a job, and all the shoulds, all the musts. So it’s really important we are engaging the creativity of young people. And, you know, whenever you engage a person’s creativity, you engage life inside that person. When you engage life inside the person, there’s future. That to me is what future is. And the depth of creativity is the depth of future.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a very good point. There’s a kind of a competition in a way, because in a sense, we need routine work, and we need systematic, repetitive things in order to produce stuff, in order to accomplish a lot of things. We can’t reinvent the wheel every day. But on the other hand, that routine kind of kills the genius in people, you know, it dampens their creativity. So, you know, somehow we have to find a balance where there can, you know, if we have to do things somewhat repetitively, we can and yet, at the same time, be awakening our inner creativity and not have the two clash with one another.
Anneloes: Yes, and even more so, bring your consciousness into the routine. So for example, I have a washing machine, dishwasher machine, but I choose not to use it. I’m renting a place and it’s part of the rental. So here’s the washing machine. So when I’m doing the dishes, which is terribly repetitive, right, I make a little ritual out of that. For example, as I’m, you know, scrubbing the plates, I can add the intention that I’m purifying certain aspects of my life, you know, I can say I’m washing away all the worries and the sorrows and the heaviness. So it’s like I can project my life onto the dishes. And then as I’m doing the act of cleaning the dishes, I’m cleaning an aspect of my life. So you can get creative with that. Or sometimes I can, by just working with the movement of repetition, your body is, you know, an automatic part of doing, say, for example, the dishes or something else. That you can also use it as a meditative moment, actually, to let your mind just zoom out and space out. So what’s really important is intentionality. So wherever you bring your intentionality, that’s again, you’re engaging consciousness, you’re activating consciousness inside you. And that means you are activating life, life potential inside you. And that way, rather than becoming the repetition and the repetition just going habitual, you’re working now consciously with structures in a way that actually helps you to develop yourself, helps you to develop your concentration. And for a long time, I was trained as a pianist. And when you want to, you know, to learn the piano, it’s incredibly repetitive, and you have to do your scaling here. And as far as you go. But what I noticed is if I am not aware of what I’m doing, so if I’m going into repetition, doing a scale, just to, you know, to make it go past, my muscles are actually not learning anything in that moment. But if I’m putting my consciousness, my awareness, my mind fully into it, and I’m doing the same scale and saying I’m doing it five times, but I hold the intention that I’m doing every five times, it’s slightly different, just a slight difference in touch, intonation, and where I put the accents. Now my whole body mind is engaged, and then I’m learning. And then you actually need far less time on the repetitive movements than if we are, you know, just falling asleep with it and not existing in those moments in a conscious way.
Rick: That’s great. Sounds like mindfulness, a real practical application of mindfulness. Yeah, and obviously, you know, so many people are not mindful, you see these things on TV of people walking into trees while they’re looking at their phone. And there’s so much coming at us these days in the world, bombarded, you know, with information. And I kind of enjoy it. I mean, I’m a bit of an information junkie myself. I’m just always sort of, you know, taking things in. But I also meditate a few hours a day. And somehow I strike a balance between, you know. Oh, did you want to come in on that? I have another question if you don’t.
Anneloes: No, it’s okay. You continue. Yeah.
Rick: Well, I was wondering, when you went around Mauritius and interviewed all these kids about what gets them out of bed in the morning, and they were like surprised that anyone was asking them that, what did you find that, you know, what kind of answers did they give?
Anneloes: Some were very sad. Some were, for example, saying, in the future that I want, mom and dad are not fighting at night, or dad is not coming home drunk. I am safe. I mean, these were children that came from very difficult households. And actually, and then I work with them to draw them out, to make little drawings and paintings, which for some of them was even so difficult to talk about that. So all of them were actually, in these kids, somehow talking about a future in which it was safe to be a child. It was safe to play. There was less violence. Nature was green again. The island was clean. The turtles were not dying because they were not swallowing the plastic. But most of all, you know, people were not arguing and people were not fighting. And so that, when I did those dialogues with the kids, that’s when I realized, whoa, they have internalized the violence probably much more than we realize it, because they were not even talking about the violence of, or not watching a TV game or something with violence, not talking about, it’s safe for me to be a kid. I can play outside and, you know, and be safe. I can be a child. Yeah. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. As you ponder the future, and you’ve been doing that for a long time now. Do you have some kind of a timeline? And do you have like multiple scenarios that could play out? Like, do you know Dwayne Elgin is?
Anneloes: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Rick: Yeah. I’ve interviewed him a couple of times. And in the most recent one, we talked about his new book, “Choosing Earth.” And there was a little video that we played in which he outlined three different scenarios that he envisioned. One would be that everything’s going to collapse and just become totally chaotic and stay that way for a long time. Another was that everything’s going to collapse. And then there’ll be some kind of Chinese style, artificial intelligence controlled society all over the world. And then the third one was that everything’s going to collapse. All three of them involve collapse. Everything’s going to collapse. But then there’s this spiritual undercurrent that’s going along, that’s going to, you know, lift everything up again and we’ll end up in a much more enlightened world. So, you know, if you were to draw timelines like that, would you concur with Dwayne’s or do you have your own vision of the possibilities?
Anneloes: Well, there are alignments on some aspects. So, let’s first talk about the planetary conditions, of course. So, the timeline is what you’re seeing. And this has been a process, again, long in the making that we’re seeing manifest. So, with regards to the climate and biodiversity crisis, and I’m now sharing this more also from a system science perspective, there is a delay in the system. There’s a catching up of the system in a not in a good way. What we’re seeing now is that especially this year, we really have entered the stepping point time. So, you’re seeing escalation events. For example, the more ice that’s also melting around the poles and elsewhere, you have less reflection capacity of the planet. So, you’re seeing that, you know, the warming is getting worse. The climate extremes are getting worse. We’re having one of the worst droughts and heat waves in Europe, for example, in the United States as well. So, we’re seeing more of those extremes that are, I mean, really, really bringing it home to people now that this is serious. You know, the climate crisis is a reality, and it’s a huge, huge wake up call. However, I would like to, you know, put there, emphasize as well, we do not yet know how Mother Earth is going to balance herself. It’s like she’s running a huge fever. Very small changes in temperatures can have major effects in all of her ecosystems. And of course, her lungs, her planetary organs, the oceans is in a very, very bad state, with at least 80% some marine scientists are saying is that, you know, there’s now the risk of the ocean becoming what we call a net emitter, so that all of that methane at the bottom of the ocean, once that starts to… So, that’s not a good news story. And so, that’s what I think Dwayne Elgin is also talking about, these collapse scenarios. That’s not pessimistic thinking, it’s about, you know, we need to get realistic about ecosystemic changes have been set in motions as a result of human action. So, fossil fuel based industry, and of course, also the… Because it’s not an emission story only, the biodiversity damaged more than 60% of our species that have gone extinct in the last 50 years, as a result of human action. So, all of that is really bringing home that we need to radically shift the ways that we are growing and developing our societies. And everybody is impacted. There isn’t a place on this planet that is not impacted. This is where I want to, again, emphasize the however, one is we don’t know how Mother Earth is going to balance herself. And she has… I have faith in the planet of having an incredible regenerative healing capacity as well, but we need to work with her to make it possible for her. The problem is that some of those changes are happening so quick that, like, for example, many of the crops, they just can’t adjust so quickly to the climatic changes, which is putting pressures on our food security, etc. So, that’s the balancing aspect. How is Mother Earth going to balance herself? How is she going to heal herself? What’s happening? But now, the next aspect is, look, our human consciousness is part of the planetary consciousness. So, what is that doing to the human psyche as well? And this is, again, where I think it’s really important that as a humanity, we become really aware and conscious. And rather than taking it into a depression and going on a suicide mission, the way I see this trajectory of our evolutionary development… Now, let’s just take a really, really big perspective here. If we’re looking at the evolution of species, and this is not just for the human species, we can see the same pattern for other species. If a species grows in complexity, so it can grow in complexity because it becomes more diverse or becomes greater in size, you know, greater impact. But so, as a humanity, in the beginning of 1800, we were only with one billion people. Look now where we are. We are with heading towards 9 billion people. So, huge…
Rick: I think we’re already at 8. I heard that.
Anneloes: We are already at 8. Well, there you go.
Rick: I heard that.
Anneloes: It’s incredible. So, we’re adding 7 billion people in such a short period of time on this planet, in addition to the ways that we are living and we are growing. So, what’s important to put, to emphasize here is if a species, when it grows so much more complex, doesn’t take its next step in evolutionary development, and evolutionary development means that that species, rather than killing each other for resources, rather than competing each other for resources, learns to collaborate for resources. And Elizabeth Serturi is an amazing evolutionary biologist. Yes, she’s written a lot about that. So, if we don’t take that step, what we see with species is that there is a different pattern that activates, and that’s the pattern of self-destruction. So, we could say that in some ways, if we’re looking at all the violence, all the divisions, the shootings, that it might well be that this self-destruct pattern has already started to activate. So, it’s like we are now seeing all these different scenarios playing out. So, we have some human beings fully trapped into this self-destruct pattern. So, that’s the trajectory. So, they’re kind of on that collapse trajectory, self-destruction, still wanting to ride out that domination. But yet, we have also a growing number of people who are saying, no, no, no, that is not my identity. That is not my humanity. And they are deciding, they are part of that maturation, they’re deciding on purpose, intentionally, and also systemically now to collaborate and to co-create and to coordinate resources and truly working on different economic systems, different ecological systems, different political systems, social systems. And what I’ve seen in that part of the narrative is that group of people is growing stronger, and it’s starting to coordinate, and it’s becoming coherent in amazing ways. I mean, I’ve been part of these experiments of these new systems for the last two decades. But what I’m seeing the last two years, in the way that this is picking up and the way that we can talk about it in the mainstream, even my own PhD research, which was at a very conventional university in the Netherlands, Maastricht University, what I could talk about and research into the heart of systems change would have been unheard of even a decade ago. So that trajectory to me is not a trajectory of, well, we’re trying to still keep our head above the water despite the collapse. No, it’s actually a new pattern. It’s emerging new pattern and it’s emerging new narrative. And I see that trajectory, not so much of okay, we have either really bad collapse, kind of middleway collapse. And then maybe, you know, it’s still coming out. No, I’m seeing that scenario of this emerging new pattern of the maturation of our species. I’m seeing that activating from the future and reaching us into the now. So it’s like it’s doing this. So we have to collapse scenarios in different degrees. That’s that past future again, some really, really bad, some perhaps, you know, still manageable. And then we could say, perhaps fairly livable. But as this, these are these future scenarios of who we are choosing to become what people actually experiencing in their hearts, in their dreams of something else that’s calling them forth. And that is not just, you know, a nice spiritual vision, wonderful values, but with no grounding. I’m talking about real pioneering work that’s happening. And that’s what I’m seeing is that that’s picking up and that’s touching base on that collapse scenario. And my own intuitive sense about this is let’s take that middle weight of middle scenario of collapse. When this pathway from the future into now of the next step of our maturation, when that becomes coherent, now this starts to serve as an attractor, and it can actually lift that whole collapse scenario up and form the critical bridge that we need to create in order not to go extinct as a species.
Rick: That’s really good. It’s very encouraging, actually. Like when you first started talking, you said, well, how is Mother Earth going to rebalance herself? And my first thought was, well, she just has to get rid of us, because we’re the ones who are throwing it out of balance, you know? But it would be nice if we could cooperate with Mother Earth, Mother Nature, and stick around. [Laughter] And yeah, stop. Because it’s kind of, I think, rare to have such a beautiful, habitable planet. I mean, we haven’t found any other ones yet, although I’m sure they’re out there. But they’re not just, like, you know, really common. [Laughter] And it would be a shame if we, as Buckminster Fuller used to call it, “spaceship Earth.”
Anneloes: Yes, exactly.
Rick: And obviously, I mean–
Anneloes: She hasn’t given up on us.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. But it’s a fascinating thing that you just explained, because obviously we can see the destructive thing happening, like you said, the heat waves. Like right now, the whole western United States is over 100 degrees, which is up around 40 degrees centigrade. And, you know, fires and such droughts that the reservoirs are practically empty, and all this stuff. And we’re thinking, “Whoa, what’s going to happen?” And, you know, like Pakistan, totally flooded. About a third of the country is flooded, and one in seven people in the country is homeless right now. And that’s out of millions of people. So, I mean, we can go on and on with examples like that. So, you look at that, and you think, “Oh, we’re screwed. This is really dire. And how is it possibly going to turn around?” And people like Greta Thunberg have been–and Al Gore before her–have been warning us about tipping points. And now we’re reaching greater and greater rapidity. But I’ve always had this optimistic thing going on, which is that there’s this much subtler, but actually much more powerful, awakening taking place all over the world. Awakening of consciousness. And you just really explained very nicely how it’s not just a sort of a beautiful subjective experience, but it’s manifesting as practical steps that people are taking to turn things around. So, it’s hopeful.
Anneloes: Yes. And remember, when you have all these climate extremes–let’s talk about heat right now. Heat in a system that is not coherent becomes destructive. Yes, that’s so great because it’s a lot of added energy, and the energy now is not embodied in a system, so it starts to go haywire. However, heat in a system that is coherent can actually help lift that consciousness.
Rick: Can you give us an example of such a system?
Anneloes: Well, take your own body, for example. So, say that a yogi, one who has practiced really working with that inner fire, doesn’t collapse in a fever, but takes that heat now to go into an enlightened state of consciousness. So, this yogi would have practiced that a very, very long time. We have hardly, in my opinion, begun to work with all of that trapped heat. We have not gotten really creative. So, instead, we are trying to control the situation. We have to now control, to manage it, to fight. So, first it was the war on COVID, then it’s the war on climate change. No, that’s not going to help us. We need to find ways, actually, of how can we really now work with all of that fire in alchemy? It’s the resource you need for transformation.
Rick: So, when you say work with trapped heat, we were just talking about the heat waves in Europe and the United States, and India had a really bad one earlier this year. Are you literally talking about that heat, kind of harnessing it somehow, or are you speaking more metaphorically?
Anneloes: Both. So, both are the technologies in which we can be developing and working with all of that heat, rather than trying to find it. What are ways to work? So, I think that we are at the forefront, talking about the Renaissance again, of whole new technologies also, whole new developments that we have hardly began to imagine, and that there needs to be also market support for. But at the same time, it’s also about our consciousness. We have not really, as a humanity, tapped truly the powers of our consciousness. Now, I’ve always had a lot of respect for the Australian Aborigines. I lived for eight years in Australia, and the conditions that they were able to live in, even in desert conditions, were astonishing. I know that’s a far call. I’m not saying that everyone now has to become a yogi in order to work with climate change. But when you’re impacted by that heat, if you don’t know how to harness it and work with it, heat can otherwise also, in our own mental health conditions, lead to more violence, more depression, more agitation, sleeplessness. So, it’s also, we as a humanity have to adapt to these changing conditions in rapid ways, and just taking it out, being angry with the state of the world, being angry and upset that the old norms are gone, that’s not going to help us. So, to me, it’s also about saying a call of learn to adapt where you can, and mitigate also, of course, the conditions where you can. But again, get creative with this. And I really don’t think that we have tapped fully into the power of our collective consciousness, and what a collective, coherent humanity, how that’s related also, and might be interacting with the planetary consciousness. And these might be some of the new consciousness technologies. I know HeartMath and the global coherence research, they were doing fascinating research on this as well, to see what can happen in these pockets of coherence. So, just putting that out there, and some other ways to get creative, just thinking about, we are not separate from the planet.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah. You just mentioned HeartMath. I want to make sure people heard that word. Yes. Yeah. On the one hand, I mean, there are certain temperatures above which people cannot live, and they’re, you know, 125 degrees or so, and cities which are reaching those temperatures now, and, you know, the only way you can live is to have air conditioning, but then that creates more greenhouse gases, puts more strain on the electrical grid. But, and we can go into all those pessimistic reflections, but there are actually some really cool inventions coming up. That’s it. There’s this, like, I just read this article about this 17-year-old kid that’s developed an electric engine that doesn’t require all the really rare metals like lithium, which are environmentally damaging to mind, and could be, you know, manufactured much more cheaply, and it’s efficient. I mean, 17-year-old kid. And there are other things like that, where people are just coming up with these really interesting inventions. And so, that’s perhaps an example of a rise in consciousness that’s taking place that’s ripping, and it’s not that this kid is a meditator or, you know, interested in consciousness, but, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. And so, if world consciousness is somehow rising, then people are going to pop up here and there, having all these great ideas, and being able to put them into action.
Anneloes: That’s it. And there, that’s what I mentioned about coherence. Now, imagine this kid learning about another child somewhere else, or teenage, and somewhere else. And now, that becomes a coherent pattern of collaboration, of sharing, of helping each other to develop these new technologies, getting all that creativity together. And that’s what I mean. So, there is also an incredible opportunity. I mean, the way I like to work with it sometimes is, it’s almost like taking a long, long perspective. Imagine we are at the end of this century. Who have we become as a result of this process? From the people who are left behind, then, here in the care for our planet, how are they telling the story about this time right now? So, putting ourselves as a future ancestor.
Rick: How would you, okay, do that. Put yourself there. How would you tell the story?
Anneloes: Yes. All of us, let’s do that now. All of you who are listening as well, just really like you to imagine yourself now, after the big shift, after the big change, after the emerging new era, after this, also the collapse of so many different systems. So, imagine right now, we’ve made it through. We’ve made it through. We may not be anymore with 9 billion people. There’ll be far less of us. Yes. Well, imagine now what we have learned, who we have become as people. And now imagine for a moment that we’ve come to finally, finally appreciate our planet for who she truly is. And remember that we can’t do it without her. We are part of her being. We are part of her consciousness. Now, imagine that we’re able to see and hear and experience and feel each other in ways that technology was alienating us from. Imagine now that we have really learned to live with nature, to design our houses, our cities, which, you know, drinkable water, the rivers have become drinkable water, that the air itself is fully honored everywhere. So, imagine now that we’ve truly become like a living cell in this beautiful planetary consciousness. We as a species have actually become planetary conscious and the collective consciousness is able to become conscious of itself in the human experience. We are also honoring and grieving the collapse and the death of so much. But we are seeing now, you know, at the end of the century, we’ve seen life return in places where we never thought it was possible. We’ve seen the oceans been healing themselves. We’ve realized as long as we’ve been creating the conditions for life to renew itself, it does. It does. We see nature popping up in places where we never imagined it’s possible. We’ve seen whole fields of life come back alive. And we realize now that the power of life really should have been at the center of everything that we’ve always been doing. We’ve really become a new species, different species.
Rick: That’s beautiful. And you know, there’s some nice examples of nature coming back very quickly when it’s given the chance. For instance, in Yellowstone National Park, at one point, all the wolves were killed because it was thought that all wolves are bad. And it really messed up the ecosystem. And then at a certain point, they realized, well, wolves belong here. So, they started reintroducing wolves. And it resulted in this flourishing of the ecosystems and the streams and the other kinds of animals and everything, like a lot of things that had been going downhill revived fairly quickly. I don’t know. That’s just one example. I’m sure there are many others. And as you were speaking, I was thinking, well, people might be listening to that and thinking, well, that sounds nice, but it’s so pie in the sky. It’s very idealistic. But then I thought, well, it’s good to have a vision like that. I mean, you might think you’re being realistic by thinking that we’re going to be living in a dystopian world 50 or 80 years from now. But actually, if we envision a more heavenly world, we’ll probably stand a better chance of creating it.
Anneloes: Yes. I mean, look at all of the inventions that we have. Somebody thought about that and said, well, why not? Why not?
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Anneloes: Yes, absolutely. Because you see, this collapse scenario, you can’t change that by just agreeing with it.
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: By just going down into, in fact, it actually will make things much worse because if people just believe in, well, it’s a dumb deal, there’s nothing much that we can do about it. That’s not true.
Rick: Right. You become cynical and defeatist and give up.
Anneloes: Yes. And also what I often like to remind people of, I know globally, they’re still talking about let’s cap it at 1.5 degrees. But we know, of course, with the science that we’re already having far, far more. And that even with delays in the system, two degrees warming is practically guaranteed. But however, every action is required now to make sure we’re not escalating to three or four degrees. Everything that we’re doing, everything that we’re doing today will make a difference between, if we’re taking those worst collapse scenarios, are we going to have to adapt to life on planet Earth here, that worst scenario, or that middle one, or a little bit higher one? So it’s really important to remember that, that all the emissions that we’re putting out every single day by the way that we live and by the way that we produce, by the way that we consume, is adding to one of those scenarios. So right now we have to prevent at all costs that we are escalating towards three or four degrees warming. That is in our power to stop. That is in our power. And it’s our responsibility to stop that. It’s actually now, thankfully, countries are recognizing, some of them, that it’s a constitutional responsibility to stop that at all costs. We owe that to the future generations, as well as our ancestors. Look at what so many of our ancestors have given for us to have this opportunity of being human. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, I guess what comes to my mind is that, unfortunately, a lot of people won’t change unless they’re forced to. And then they also, or unless they’re offered some alternative that’s so much better than what they have. So for instance, we talk about phasing out coal in the United States and then people, the politicians start screaming about the coal miners losing their jobs. And so then nothing happens. But if the coal miners could be offered a much better job, that paid better and that didn’t require being underground all day, like maybe building wind turbines or solar panels or something like that, then, OK, that sounds better. I won’t get black lung disease and I’m earning twice as much money. But unfortunately, again, it still seems that very often people have to have their town burned down or get flooded out before they really take it seriously. And a lot in the US, at least, I don’t know about Europe, but in the US, a lot of politicians still deny that climate change is a problem or that it’s caused by sunspots, maybe, or that we can’t do anything about it.
Anneloes: Let’s blame it on something else. Surely humans have nothing to do with that. So we can keep business as usual. Yeah, there’s people, you can see websites where they’re arguing that it’s not caused by humans. Yeah. And you can also see websites that argue that the earth is flat. So,
Anneloes: yes, exactly. And often when you bring down a narrative, it’s quite easy to debunk a lot of those stories. You know, they want to say, OK, there’s no warming in the atmosphere. And I have to ask them, where are you measuring? High up or below?
Rick: Yeah, it wasn’t too long ago. One time, there was just a few years ago, there was a snowstorm in Washington, D.C. and one of the congressmen came in with a snowball and said, look, global warming, what a joke. Here’s a snowball.
Anneloes: And that’s where, I mean, climate scientists got, thankfully, a bit smart about the narrative. But the first symptom of climate change is not global warming, but climate extremes. Yes. So you have extreme cold periods as well as extreme heat. So anybody was saying, well, you see, you know, global warming, so there’s no climate change. No. The fact that you have a snowball at a very old time is actually a sign that, you know, of climate change. But yes, going back, of course, also to your earlier point, how, what is it about human behavior that unless we are forced to change, very often we don’t. And then I come back again also to the maturation of our species and good leadership. I think there’s a lot of very bad leadership. And that is, we really need very, you know, future forward thinking, transformative evolutionary leadership right now. But also for people, people become very lazy, if I may say so, you know, it’s like they, we’ve had this kind of lazy attitude towards democracy. Oh, I’m going to, if even vote, vote for somebody, and then that’s their responsibility to take care of. So we’ve externalized so many things that this person will fix that, that person will fix that, that technology will do that. Well, maybe there’s a deeper wisdom in what comes crashing down right now. Perhaps all this externalization, all this subcontracting out has made us poorer inside as people. And right now, as we are realizing that the way that we’ve externalized all of that and outsourced all of that isn’t working, it’s making us sluggish for the change. It’s making us lethargic. It is putting us to sleep like a frog that’s being warped very, very slowly, and it won’t jump. Yeah. So another way to look at that is that life is saying, wake up, reclaim your power. Remember, again, your powers as human beings, you can make the change, but it’s, it’s about starting from within systems change begins within. So yeah, deeper wisdom in here. And yeah, that’s where I put my trust.
Rick: Yeah. And I guess, you know, you could, you could view the climate catastrophes that are happening as wake up calls. Kind of like the, you know, the Old Testament where, you know, the Pharaoh wouldn’t listen and, and so, okay, now have frogs and okay, now have locusts. Okay, now, you know, all these kids are gonna die until he finally said, all right, all right, I got it. But, but I don’t know, it’s like, well, hearkening back to what you were saying earlier about Mother Earth, and how she’s going to rebalance. You know, it’s all this stuff that’s happening, to me is, it’s wake up calls all the dire circumstances. And, you know, people are seeing it on the news, even if it’s not impacting them directly. And I don’t know, it seems like it’s, maybe you know better than I, but it seems like it’s getting through to people and laws are changing and policies are changing. Like in California, for instance, they said, okay, after 2035, no more internal combustion engine cars can be sold here. And, and now 17 other states are saying the same, you know, considering the same thing. And so, you know, slowly but surely. And, you know, in case people are wondering, what does this conversation have to do with spiritual development? Because that’s what this show is about. Yes, I think it’s kind of implicit in what we’re saying, but maybe we should make it more explicit. But I really feel like the, you know, spiritual development of humanity is inextricably linked with the environment, this society at large, everything that’s happening is a symptom of our collective consciousness. And, you know, we need to do things on all levels to solve problems. But if we don’t raise our collective consciousness by having enough of us raise our individual consciousness, no matter what we try to do on more manifest levels, we won’t be successful.
Anneloes: Yes. And another thing is that the way to raise consciousness, it’s not just about sitting in meditation and go, Oh, no, nothing is affecting me. Right. That can really take you into a trip, right? Raising consciousness can also mean, begin with your own household. What appliances are you using? What are your emissions? What’s the ecological footprint of your own life? Yeah. What are you what are you doing for the planet? How are you greeting the birds? How are you making life possible in your own little garden? How are you if you’re living, say, for example, in an apartment, could you at least put some plants there? Yeah. How are you bringing nature back into your life? What are you doing also for nature? Where are you putting your vote? How are you voting with your money, with your wallet? You know, what are you supporting? What questions are you asking in areas where there is human rights violation, nature right violations? How are you raising your voice? How are you being an advocate for the change? So I think this is really also the time and this is also I think a lot of women at the forefront of this is about you want to raise consciousness, put it into action, be the change that we wish to see. This is no longer just a time about seeking some form of enlightenment out and away from the planet. It’s about embodiment. Really embody your soul potential, what it means to be that spirit in physical form. And to me, spirituality is also about really understanding that the fundamental unity of life, that life is interdependent. And that means that we’re all in it. We’re all of this going through this change together. And we need everyone on board to help create a livable future. We’ve been manifesting in many ways, unconsciously, a lot of patterns that perhaps many people on their own didn’t want or never thought that would even be possible. But we are with so many. And then the cumulative effects, but I really feel that it’s about bringing the spirituality back here into your heart, into your hands, into your feet, walk the path, be the path, be the change, be the systems that make life possible.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, it’s what you said about people just sort of meditating and going off into their own little dream bubble of bliss and ignoring the world. Obviously, that is a syndrome in many cases. But I don’t think it really represents the full blossoming of spirituality that some of the greatest spiritual leaders have exemplified and recommended. I mean, you see people like Mahatma Gandhi or Sri Aurobindo or, I don’t know, Jesus, who were very concerned about what was happening to people and whether they were being fed and whether they had their rights and things like that. They weren’t content to just marinate in their inner bliss. And personally, I think that enlightenment, whatever word we want to use, is a holistic development that doesn’t just involve a nice subjective experience, but that is fully integrated with an enriching of all of the manifest or expressed values of life. So, really, one big… Well, you talk about becoming a future human. To me, a future human is somebody who is fully developed in, you could say, 100% material, married that with what some of the groundbreaking insights from a new paradigm in science and consciousness and what that research is showing is that matter itself is a form of consciousness.
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: So, that the old divide between, okay, we have matter and we have spirit, that’s falling away. There’s a whole new understanding of matter. And this is, I think that when we really dive into that, really understanding that matter itself is a particular state of consciousness, then we go deeper into the cosmological architecture, informational architecture. And there we find the ways now to truly create economic, political, social systems that by design are transformative, that are coded for the evolutionary process. To me, that is the future that I wake up for. Which I’ve always felt and sensed in such precision and detail is really possible. When I think of the end of this century, that is what I’m experiencing. And that is not fake. It’s really, as I said, it’s really precise and detailed. For example, I’ve been applying that in seeds constitution. So, as a whole constitution with algorithms, with digital currencies, with hundreds and hundreds of people around the world, it’s a global platform for creating new regenerative economic and financial systems. And when you’re working on that, from that vision, from that future human potential, it is amazing the detail in which when you’re working with living systems, it actually shows itself of what to emphasize, what feedback loop to create, what algorithm to create, and to make visible. But for a long time, people thought, oh, that’s spirituality out there. So, to me, it’s about finding this spirit in matter, in the very heart of matter. When you find that there, that whole duality, that whole division falls away. I mean, you really are then operating from a completely different paradigm and a different possibility. That’s what I feel we are at the forefront of. And that is what’s being accelerated, because we have to. If we don’t take that step, where are we at? And then nature will say, look, humanity, interesting experiment, but guess what? You’re not graduating.
Rick: Yeah, nice try. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I have an ongoing debate with a group of friends who, some of them are on my side, some of them are on the side of consciousness is just produced by the brain, and you don’t survive physical death, and there’s no such thing as reincarnation, and all kinds of things like that. And I’m seeing it from the flip side, is that, like you just said, matter is consciousness, kind of accreted or precipitated into apparent physical form. And I think that the fact that this materialist paradigm has been so predominant could be blamed. We could attribute to that all the mess that the world is in, because if we see the world as dumb stuff, what does it matter what you do to dumb stuff? It’s dumb, it doesn’t know. But if we see everything is imbued with consciousness, with intelligence, with life, then whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me. In other words, you just become acutely sensitive to the aliveness of every little thing, and you would no more harm it than you would slice your own hand or something.
Anneloes: Yes, and in addition to that, and this is what I find really exciting for human development, when you become aware of this consciousness as a field, and how your own consciousness is part of that, and how consciousness is fundamental, what happens is now that instead of operating from your own little human intelligence system, you learn to actually extend your human capacities with the fields of consciousness around you and living systems. So now what you have available to your capacity is so much more.
Rick: Yeah, I used to be in the TM movement, you know, and we used to have these campaigns where we would go to a place, like I spent three months in Iran, just before the revolution, and we were attempting to sort of enliven the field of consciousness in that area, or in various other places people went, so that there didn’t have to be outright warfare, that somehow transitions could be, you know, lubricated and more smooth. And there was a lot of research on it, and they did find that the presence or absence of these groups had a measurable impact on various social indicators, and war deaths, and all kinds of things like that. So the idea of consciousness as a field is very exciting. I was thinking of that earlier when you were speaking, and you know, Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field ideas, and how very often good ideas come popping up simultaneously in various people who had no communication with one another, because that idea was lively in the field and ready to pop.
Anneloes: That’s right. And again here, this is what all of us were listening here, participating in this conversation. You are part of the maturation of the field dynamics that make new innovations, new technologies, new ways that, you know, life-centered ways possible.
Rick: It’s so important, this field idea. We should emphasize it, because if consciousness were not a field, and if, you know, we only communicate by, you know, sending emails, or watching the news, and stuff like that, everything is just so fragmented and disconnected. But if consciousness is a field, then again, it’s like rising tide lifts all boats. There’s a field that permeates the whole world that is rising, and it’s going to lift everyone. I mean, if a boat insists upon keeping itself anchored to the bottom, the boat may capsize, because the water’s going to go up. Yes, exactly. But if they’re willing to rise, the whole world could be uplifted in a way that we don’t anticipate, or most people don’t.
Anneloes: And that’s another thing. I mean, my research has been for a long time on living systems. That’s also my PhD research. But I found fascinating is that when there is damage or harm in a living system, at the same time, there’s an imaginal influx of consciousness that comes forth within the system that is essential for its capacity to renew and to evolve, which is again, about understanding the field dynamics. So also, again, if we are capturing that imaginal capacity of life itself, that’s influx. I mean, look at your, say that you’re injured a part of your skin on your hands. Your body is actively sending all this intelligence forward here to heal and repair itself. So there’s a lot of damage to the planet. But what we are not seeing, because it’s invisible to so many, is how life in its living systems, ecosystems, is regrouping, reorganizing itself, and how there is an influx of imaginal capacity at that time, hence also the Renaissance, and increased dreams, visions, inspirations. That is part of life’s response to renew itself and to heal itself from the harm. If we capture that now, we capture that influx of imaginal consciousness, imaginal capacity, we capture that. And we put that into these new designs, into these new structures, into these new systems, into these ways that we’re creating the new narratives and new movements. There are amazing things that are possible. However, if we don’t capture it, and we let it be hijacked, this imaginal potency, by those who are preaching to the divisions, the violence, going back into warfare, then we have missed just an incredible, incredible opportunity. So…
Rick: Yeah, that’s a really good… It’s more than a metaphor, because it’s literal, the way the planet tries to heal itself.
Anneloes: Yes.
Rick: And it’s fascinating. And if we think of the planet as being like a body, and what a body does when there’s an injury or an infection or something like that, maybe we can elaborate on this a little bit more.
Anneloes: Yes.
Rick: I mean, you know, obviously, you have white blood cells coming, and they’re… What do they do? They kind of try to, you know, gobble up the… They clean up. Exactly. They take away all the dead cells. So on a global scale, maybe we have something that behaves as white blood cells. And then there are other things which bring in nourishment. And I don’t know. Take a specific example, let’s say. So the invasion of Ukraine. What are we supposed to do? I mean, should we just say, “All right, we’re not going to fight. Let Putin take Ukraine.” Or do you think it’s right to, you know, send arms to Ukraine so they can try to defend their territory? Or should everybody just sort of go around and come to Ukraine and chant OM all day? Or, you know, what would you suggest, like, with a concrete example like that?
Anneloes: Well, first of all, look at the immune response of humanity when Ukraine was invaded, and how it was different from other other invasion stories before. Many people felt it as if it happened to them.
Rick: Right.
Anneloes: In standing with solidarity. I mean, look also how Europe opened its arms to all of the refugees. Yes. So there, the immune response reaction towards Ukraine getting invaded by Putin, and people feeling it, even in the United States, as if it’s happening now to them, shows me that there’s already the emerging again of this collective awakening, of this collective consciousness as a humanity. Something has shifted in this. And I think it’s absolutely important that we stand in solidarity with Ukraine, in order to stop these patterns of invasion and domination and aggression that Putin is now not only playing out, but taking opportunity. And he’s not going to stop. He’s not going to stop in Ukraine. I mean,
Rick: Right. I mean, if he could get away with that, he might try Finland or something or whatever.
Anneloes: Oh, and don’t forget, don’t forget, Russia’s influence in Africa, where we are feeling in here.
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: So, you know, the war is shifting in many different ways as well. So the way that we keep democracy alive also is by taking responsibility for it every single day. Again, we can’t just expect, oh, because we signed it in our constitutions, or again, we’re coming back to we voted for somebody. No, it’s our responsibility to keep this alive. What makes democracies vulnerable to people like Putin is because these are open societies. And therefore, we have a different immune response, a different defense system, so to say. And we are having to learn now what is our immune response, learning response to what somebody like Putin, who has no respect for human life whatsoever, is willing to lie. He just wants to achieve his goal. He wants to just have another, you know, Soviet Union.
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: If we don’t stop those patterns, and we don’t stop that, then these archetypes of domination are terrorizing people. So it’s really important. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. There’s that saying, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. Even Raman Maharshi liked that phrase. And, you know, sometimes it takes military opposition to confront an aggressor.
Anneloes: Yeah. Yes.
Rick: I mean, Gandhi was actually saying, oh, you know, we shouldn’t like fight Hitler, try passive, you know, try satyagraha, passive nonviolence. And it just wouldn’t have worked in that case. Sometimes you just have to, you know.
Anneloes: Sometimes you have to match it. Exactly. But then we need, of course, also have very clear agreements that say that we have to match it, have to stop the aggression, how to make sure that the people who are in charge of stopping that aggression are not staying and becoming the next aggressors.
Rick: Good point. And that’s always the risk, because that means that even democracies may choose moments of being more authoritative in order to stop that domination. But if they’re not conscious themselves at that moment of the power, the increased power that they’re using, they may become the next dominator. And that’s the big risk in crisis management.
Rick: Yeah. I have a question here. Maybe just pop this in and then I have some other thoughts to pursue. This is a question that came in from Tiffany Adair in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I love the idea of imagining life after the big shift happens. She capitalized the word shift. But I can’t help but think about how much people need to change to get there from lifestyles to old cultural values, traditions, politics, et cetera. What do you suggest when we encounter someone who is opposed to this shift for any reason, such as being afraid of change, greed, lower consciousness, et cetera?
Anneloes: Oh, that’s a very good question. I always like to start with where there’s a little opening and find that opening in a person and build a bridge from that. Because if you go confrontational and if you go, well, it’s trying to convince the other person, all you get is resistance. So for example, ask them as a future ancestor of a world that’s not yet born, which world do you want to be a part of? Which world, if you were to tell the story later in your life, or even if this was the last day of your life, how would you want people to tell the story about what you and your life have done? And now imagine that every little change that you’re making could inspire someone else and that could inspire someone else. I could tell you a practical example here. This is in one of the classes I was giving on ecological literacy for the students in Mauritius. And one of the girls was saying, well, look at us, what if our island here disappears? And we haven’t even done so much to give rise to all of these emissions. We’re not even responsible, that’s what she’s saying, for the climate crisis. But our island may be disappearing and it may become unlivable for here. And it’s all just so unfair. And what can I do on this small little island to make any change? And as we started to work on our school projects and ecological literacy and taking actions to save the water and the ocean and help with the pollution, and we created campaigns where we cleaned up many of the plastic bags all around and we started to put all of those plastic bags into art for awareness. Now I started to document their story and tell their story. And that story actually then went to Syria. And Syria was just starting to emerge in their own civil war at the beginning. And one of the students in Syria, she was a student of mine as well. And we started to now link to the stories. And suddenly the children in Mauritius and them taking action for the planet and learning to work together and creating teams and feeling that at least there was something they were doing about it. Even if they felt they were not responsible for the disasters, they were doing something about it. That now started to inspire the children who are going to school in Syria in extreme conditions. And as the children in Mauritius were learning about the children in Syria, they went, whoa, it can be so much work. Thankfully, we’re not in a civil war. And so all of those stories started to amplify each other’s. And this is, you know, if when somebody’s telling, well, I’m very pessimistic, we have to change so much. And you know, I don’t believe in any of this. The world is full with stories of people just taking a little action because they believe in it, because they believe that that’s what’s in the heart, what they need to do that then starts to catalyze the change process of someone else and someone else and someone else. And before you know it, we’re creating a social tipping point for the good changes rather than the destruction.
Rick: That’s nice. It reminds me of a story from the Indian tradition where the seagull laid its eggs on the sand. And after a while, a wave came and washed the eggs out into the ocean. And the seagull said, give back my eggs, you know, and the ocean ignored it. And so the seagull said, okay, I’m going to make you dry if you don’t give back my eggs. So it started taking water beak in its beak and, you know, taking it out of the ocean, dumping it on the sand, taking it out like that over and over again. And it just persisted day and night. It had such determination. I’m going to, it believed that it could do this. And obviously it wasn’t going to succeed, but the king of the birds, whoever that might have been, Garuda or something, became aware of this little seagull and what it was doing. And it was so inspired by its dedication that it came and, you know, being the king of the birds, it had the ability to suck up the whole ocean if it wanted to. And the ocean, seeing the king of the birds comes in, okay, okay, I’m giving back the eggs. And so it gave back the eggs. But I mean, the principle there is, I think that if we have the sincerity and the determination, there are higher powers in this universe, or perhaps a ultimate higher power, which responds when we, you know, there’s that saying, God helps those who help themselves. So when we put forth the dedicated effort, some much greater force can come to our assistance and accomplish things that we alone might not have been able to.
Anneloes: I agree with you. Yeah. And that’s a beautiful story. I love that. And also, of course, that, you know, to me, ultimately, it always comes back to who are you going to be in these difficulties? What humanity are you giving birth to? So take the actions because you believe in that, you know, you believe in the goodness because that’s how you’re keeping love and wisdom alive in you. And even if you do that consistently in the most difficult circumstances, to me, that’s heroic in itself, you know, just keeping that love alive consistently. Because as we do that, and then generate that, and then give that and share that with those people around us, we have no idea how much strength that can give and how important that can be. We should never underestimate the value of that.
Rick: Yeah. Jesus said, “If your faith is as much as a grain of mustard seed, you can move mountains.”
Anneloes: That’s it. The mountains of cynicism. Then we can move the mountains of cynicism.
Rick: Yeah. Another thing that came to mind as you were speaking earlier was the disinformation that flies around the world these days. And I was reminded of it because a lot of it comes out of Russia. I mean, they have whole buildings full of people just pumping out propaganda and disinformation and fake news and all kinds of stuff. And somehow, we’ll see what you want to say about this, but I think one thing is that people really have to develop strong bullshit detectors, you know, strong discriminative ability in this day and age. And there’s another thing that’s coming along these days, which is called deep fakes, where they can make videos of somebody like, I don’t know, Tom Cruise or Barack Obama or somebody else that looks exactly like them. And you think it’s them, but it’s not them. It’s just something that looks like them actually saying whatever they want them to say. So with the way that technology is evolving, the world is going to become even more confusing than it already is with this kind of thing going on. Any thoughts on that?
Anneloes: Yeah, this is a very important point that you’re raising. And I think, and it’s interesting, again, because we talked about before, when you externalize all of your powers and you give it away, you become poorer inside. Yeah. And the dangers of that in the time in which we’re living now. So here is the beauty again, coming back to consciousness. When you really connect with life and information around you from that fundamental level of consciousness, you can sense if something is congruent or not. So you may not have the technology at that time to be able to recognize this is a deep fake, this is going on, what’s going there. But at a deeper level of reality, you can sense whether the information, what is the intention behind the information, what is the impact of this information? Is this information being sent into humanity in order to bring us together and to bring up the values of the human heart that are going to make us stronger together? Or is that sent to divide us, to break us apart, so that we start infighting and feeding that very pattern of the self-destruction that we talked about? So this is to me, but as the sermon comes in, it’s really now using the power of your consciousness linked with the wisdom of the sermon. So using the power of consciousness, the ability to ask questions, the wisdom of the sermon, and then to really take responsibility for what information, what dynamics do I choose to participate in, feed in, broadcast, share, invest in? And really taking that home is that is my primary responsibility as a human being, rather than just putting the blame on, “Oh, well, it’s all on the fake news and it’s all of this, and then we can’t know anymore what is…” No, we have a bullshit detector inside us. (laughs)
Rick: Or we have a potential one anyway.
Anneloes: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that’s the power of your own wisdom and your power of your own consciousness, where you can actually sense and use that discernment and ask the right questions and not just believe everything that’s coming at you.
Rick: Yeah, very important. I mean, there was a whole phenomenon when the pandemic hit, where a phenomenon that people called conspirituality, where spiritual people in large numbers just got kind of brainwashed by a lot of the misinformation that was flying about, and shifted in their beliefs and orientations in very strange ways. But I also want to just mention there’s some interesting principles in physics in terms of superfluidity and superconductivity, where these incredibly coherent, perfectly coherent systems, usually it’s at very low temperatures. There’s something called the Meissner effect in this regard, where they become impervious to incoherence coming from the outside. They’re able to maintain perfect coherence despite the onslaught of incoherent influences. And so there’s some kind of analogy there for human consciousness becoming so coherent that you’re not influenced by the incoherence around you. It kind of reminds me of that Rudyard Kipling poem where you don’t lose your head while everyone around you is losing theirs.
Anneloes: Yes, exactly. So it comes back again also to, you’re talking about the power of spirituality before, right? Our training as human beings. I think this is another aspect of spirituality in action, wisdom in action, consciousness in action. And yes.
Rick: Let’s see, here’s another question. Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Anneloes: Yes, yeah, continue. Well, one thing as well is where do you exist? I want to ask people, is your level of existence only in terms of information that is coming to you, or can you bring where you exist at a more fundamental level of reality itself? I think that’s really important because otherwise you’re going to get swapped in story after story after story, but where are we fundamentally?
Rick: Yeah. Here’s a question that came in from Rita. I usually tune in for more overtly spiritual conversations, but now I am coming from a place of fear and worry over possible dark days ahead in America. And I want to tell you, this is a welcome conversation. Thank you. Just a comment, but it’s a nice one.
Anneloes: That’s nice. That is nice. Yes.
Rick: Yeah, I think there is a silver lining. And you know, Tiffany’s question earlier about what can you do about people who are opposed to this shift and so on. Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a funny story. I like to play this sport called pickleball, right? I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s the fastest growing sport in America. And recently there’ve been a couple of articles with titles like, “Can Pickleball Save America?” And the reason is that when I play, I’m there with people who have completely different political orientations than I do. And we’re friends, we’re having fun, we’re playing pickleball. And that was what these articles were talking about. It’s bringing together some very odd bedfellows, so to speak, unlikely groupings of people. And there are other things like that where there are organizations which get Republicans and Democrats in the same room and get them to have conversations and befriend one another and so on and find common ground. And I think there’s probably a lot more common ground among human beings than we often think in this time of great polarization. And perhaps we need to make a more concerted effort to find it.
Anneloes: That’s it, what you just said, because a lot of the polarization to me that is manipulated. That is not natural. There are people who are benefiting by that polarization. I mean, let’s take a bit of a back perspective out. I mean, it’s amazing that people would even identify themselves as, “I’m a Republican or a Democrat.” And that identity, which is, let’s take a historical perspective. It’s really young, right? So honestly, are you going to let that get away? And if you together having to fight a bushfire or in a major flood, you’re going to say, “Well, there’s a Republican on the other side of the river and no, we won’t save them.” Or there’s a Democrat over there saying, “Well, help, help, help.” Well, no, we’ll ask them first, “What party are you voting for?” Really? It’s unthinkable. So that’s also important, I think, to go back to basic people and really look at indeed what unite us and that we need each other right now.
Anneloes: Yeah, that’s a good example. A lot of times when there is some kind of a natural disaster, like a huge snowstorm or a flood or something like that, you see people’s hearts expand and you see just people driving like hundreds of miles with their boat to rescue people in the flood. And they’re not checking their voter registration card to see what party.
Anneloes: That’s all of that falls away. So yeah, that’s why sometimes I feel how you can work creatively in a transformative way with crisis moments is just imagine ourselves all right now in such a big flood as if it’s happening now. And then you’re not looking like you sent somebody’s voter’s registration. How would you behave in the middle of a crisis when lives have to be saved? Well, we’re in that time right now, even if it hasn’t kind of hit home. And who are you going to be in that? How are you going to reach out to people around you? And what are you going to do also to not just human life, but the plant families, the insects, the bees that need our help. Are you going to show up for each other? You need it right now. There’s so much goodness that you can do. So please people, if you think about all the goodness that we can do, all the care that we can give, why focus on the, well, if they’re not going to change, then why should I? It’s just not helpful.
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: Yeah.
Rick: This is a point we can discuss a little bit more because I know that in Europe, there’s been huge waves of immigrants. And in the US, there’s a constant flow of hundreds of thousands of people from Central and South America coming up to the US Mexico border. And it’s a big political issue about what to do with them. And with climate change, I mean, if sea level rises a few feet, there could be a number, there could be hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities that are going to have to move. And at the same time, there could be droughts and famines and all kinds of things going on. And so a lot of people predict that there will be great social upheaval with mass migrations of people. And so that could, you know, we can envision a very contentious world if all that begins to happen. On the other hand, we were just mentioning the point where in natural disasters, sometimes people just become great humanitarians and their hearts open up. So you wonder like, how’s this going to play out?
Anneloes: Well, that’s it. And one thing as well, I think if we are over imagining and overplaying this in our head, we have to be careful as well. Right. So that’s why to me, if you take as a mantra for your own life, what action can I take today that helps to create a more livable world, even the small actions, the little things that you can do, do that consistently, you know, practice calmness in the middle of the storm. If you feel triggered, if you feel annoyed, if you feel like you really want to put someone else in that place, or you want to convince them, you know, whatever, whatever your trigger points are, work with that, because when you work with that every day, then when we are really in the midst of those crisis, you may find that you’re not person, then that actually is really calm, that suddenly rises up and, and just can become that incredible arm for others, when you may even surprise yourself, but you prepare for that today, you prepare for that today in the way in your attitude, the way that you develop it, also your how you work with challenges. And look at what undermines it. One of the first I would, I would almost say it’s emotional poison. What really undermines this is blame. When we start to blame to put it out there, that it’s someone else’s responsibility, we start to feel really sorry for ourselves. Where does that take you? It locks you in, it makes it impossible for you to really take proactive actions. So keep your inner consciousness really free, really clear. We are in the tipping point times now, and everyone is needed here. We don’t know how we are, how we are going to work through this, but we’re, we’re going to work through this. We have to. Yeah, there’s too much that depends on us right now. And yes,
Rick: in 1974, I was on a boat ride on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and a bunch of people. And we were all talking about this thing that you and I were talking about today, this phase transition that’s going to happen in society. And, you know, that was like 50 years ago, but we were talking about it. And people, you know, people were kind of worrying, because it sounded like, ooh, it could get rough. And they said, you know, they asked Maharishi, well, how can we survive this? And he said, hold on to the self.
Anneloes: That’s it.
Rick: You know, hold on. And he meant capital S self, you know, the sort of cosmic self.
Anneloes: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Rick: Yeah. So let’s see now, where should we go from here? Do you have thoughts in the back of your mind of things that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t considered yet? Or what?
Anneloes: Let me ask you some questions. Yeah. So what you’re seeing in the United States, and, you know, people from who are not living in the United States, like myself, and where it looks like there’s really an untold level of polarization that’s been happening in your own country, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: And, and almost a call to renew your democracies in a way that many may not even, you know, have thought of all of those years ago. What does it mean, the American spirit, American heart, American values, there was long this American dream that was tied to this economic dream of everyone can have the big house, the big car, the, you know, the big fridges and ice, ice machines, right? Making lots of ice cubes. That’s what I remember. And I also when I came to the States, but there’s something else in the pioneering, pioneering spirit of Americans. So when you were to close your eyes, or you would tell, you know, the future generations about what it truly means the heart of what it means to be an American, and to be an American in times of great change, what are the values that really stand out for you?
Rick: Well, that’s an interesting question. You know, first of all, people came over here from Europe, and it was a continent that was just incredibly rich with natural resources. And basically, wave after wave, we killed or isolated the people who were already living here, and, and started to cash in on all these great resources. And, and then we began to tell ourselves, we’re so wonderful, we’re so successful, you know, we’re, you know, look at us, aren’t we? Aren’t we great. But I think, you know, if we tried to do this in a desert, like the way Israel has managed to do, it might not have gone so well. So there’s, there’s that. But you know, then again, maybe people who are willing to cross an ocean and to an unknown land have a certain pioneering spirit that is conducive to, you know, inventiveness and entrepreneurial nature and all that. And so, you know, maybe there was that sort of breed of, of person that became known as American. Where am I going with this? So, well, it was first thing we were gifted with a very great natural resource, you know, to begin with. And I think that the attempt at forming the government we have formed, was brilliant, and has been challenged and has, and we’ve been very hypocritical about it. I mean, all men are created equal. And yet a lot of the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution owned slaves. So there’s been a lot of hypocrisy, but, and, you know, it’s, I’m not really a political commentator, but so I should cut this short. But these days, things are very polarized, as you say, used to be that, you know, not that long ago, when some bill would come up in Congress, and there would be, you know, majority of Republicans and Democrats voting for it. These days, it’s 50/50, or just, you know, no vote, Republicans will vote or Democrat will vote for a bill that the other party has proposed. So we’re very divided, very polarized. People talk about, you know, alternative facts, as if there were such a thing that they ascribe to as compared to what the other people think. So whatever we’re going through, we haven’t finished going through it. And there’s going to have to be a reckoning or a healing or a unification somehow. And I’m not sure exactly what’s going to accomplish it. And a lot of people are predicting another civil war, but it will be much more grassroots and much more intermixed. It won’t be so territorial, if it happens. There are more guns in this country than there are people. And, you know, even though there are hundreds of gun deaths, just about every day, you know, the only response to these massacres we have is thoughts and prayers, and you can’t accomplish anything to change the laws around gun ownership. So, well, you can tell I’m getting off on a rant here, soapbox. But did that help at all in terms of the question you asked me?
Anneloes: Well, it raises, yeah, it raises several questions. It’s actually very interesting. The first thing that comes to mind as I’m listening to you is really to, and I like to ask the American people, what’s the root of this division? If you were to go all the way back in time, where did that begin? That would be the first question. What’s really the root? What’s the weed of all of that? And the second question is what has made it so difficult for a third party, a third middle ground, an alternative, a third way to be able to emerge? Why has that not been able to really take off? So what has made it so majoritarian? I mean, I know you’ve inherited an English system, which unfortunately is seeing the same in the United Kingdom, right? All of those majoritarian systems, they’re set up dualistically rather than through coalitions. But what is it within the American people where they somehow have bought in to say, well, that is simply part of political life. And what do we need? What needs to happen for people to start to imagine a very different kind of politics that isn’t hijacked by two parties, constantly giving themselves a standing by making the other person wrong. A lot of politics is not about that game, but the politics of the future is truly about working together on the issues that require our collaboration.
Rick: Yeah. Well, regarding the roots of the division, I’m not sure, but it must be something in the collective consciousness. There must be some deep schism or division in the collective consciousness, and it probably will only be mended by some kind of regeneration of consciousness at a deep level. That’s my conjecture. And regarding the two-party system, it is set up that way. And there have been other parties which have eventually ceased to exist. There were parties called the Whigs, and I don’t know, there were other parties. And there is something called rank choice voting where it would allow for multiple parties, and then everything would get filtered out, and we’d end up with something more interesting, I think, than what we currently have. And as it is now, there have been third-party candidates like Ralph Nader and others, but they didn’t really get anywhere. It’s very often a symbolic thing where someone will run on the vegetarian party or something like that. But I think perhaps there could… It’s hard to change anything, you see, because people like their power, and they don’t want a more eclectic mix-up of multiple parties. And so the guys that were… And then we have the problem of corporations funding the politicians. Just in terms of the pharmaceutical industry alone, there are three lobbyists in Washington for every politician. And so it’s very difficult to pass legislation on drug policies, drug prices and stuff. And that’s just one industry. Then we have fossil fuels and everything else under the sun. American politics is awash in money. And the Supreme Court passed something about it, I don’t know, back during the Obama administration called Citizens United. And it was a thing where corporations were now to be regarded as people, and they had the right to give any amount of money to politicians, even anonymously. There are ways of setting that up. So the system’s really screwed up. And something’s got to give, something’s got to change. And I don’t know what’s going to force it to. We’re just going to have to…
Anneloes: I hear two things that come to my mind, again, listening. One is, imagine, this is a thought experiment, imagine that every child at school in the United States gets asked to envision a different political system, a different society in which there are not Democrats and Republicans. There are wonderful Americans, but also the older refugees, immigrants. And so there are planetary citizens living in the United States, who are also part of other countries. So imagine that all the children at school are actually getting this as a project at school to start to imagine this. And how that in the back of their minds later, when it’s their time to either create jobs or take on positions, there’s something about those early exercises that they’ve done that says, why are we putting up with a broken system? Let’s create a better world, like Bachman’s To Fuller Set. Let’s really put our energy there. So imagine that being a school project that starts that seeding, planting that seed really by design intentionally. And that’s one. And then the other thing that’s just an observation is that any system that is inhibited from transforming and evolving itself will start to do so through collapse and death, because you can’t stop nature. You can’t stop life in that way. So if life is being trapped in structures that can’t evolve, then eventually it just creates the very conditions for the collapse. So if the United States is not going through this experiment to renew and evolve itself and evolve even its constitutional palace in that sense, its own political system, then you’re setting yourself up actually for more of those collapse scenarios. So if for all of those people out there who are thinking, oh, well, this collapse is just happening because again, of someone else or the companies. No, you’re part of that. And you are also an imaginal cell within a society seeking to renew and evolve itself. And imaginal cells have given very, very specific potencies by life itself so that they can be imaginal cells, but just like within the butterfly, the imaginal cells of the butterfly, if in the caterpillar body, the imaginal cells of the butterfly don’t link up in time, they can’t form the butterfly body. And then that beautiful little creature dies.
Rick: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. I think life is fun and I’d like to live till I’m over 100 if I can just to see what happens. [Laughter]
Rick: Because it’s fascinating to watch it all unfold. And obviously, so many great civilizations have collapsed throughout history. And when they were in their prime, they probably couldn’t imagine that they would ever collapse. They would think, yeah, we’re here forever. And so who knows what’s going to happen in the United States? I don’t know. I can only speculate. But again, I keep coming back to the fact, I mean, the very presence of this show that I’m doing and other shows like it, there are so many people around the world who are waking up spiritually and in many other ways. And I don’t think, even if we had the technology in the 1950s, I don’t think I could have done a show like this because the collective consciousness was just not ripe for it. And of course, now we do have the technology, which in itself is a symptom of something beautiful happening. It’s like this nervous system has formed all over the world that lets information propagate in ways it never could before. So I know your guess is probably not as good as mine, but better than mine, as to how things are going to unfold, because this has been your specialty. But ultimately, I’m optimistic, but I think that we could go through some rough times before we get to the brighter future.
Anneloes: Yes, I meet you in that.
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: Yes, and I love it.
Rick: Because there’s so many things that exist that couldn’t exist in a more enlightened world. And so how are those things going to transform or be dismantled or something?
Anneloes: Yes. Well, we’re also creating right now the very conditions for our own next step in evolution, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Anneloes: This is the compost. But we also need to compost some of our belief systems and patterns and behaviors that are just dysfunctional and be very aware of systems that were simply designed for collapse and never designed to make to last. So allow to die, allow to let go, allow to release.
Rick: Yeah, one thing I saw in one of your videos was this, it was animated. There was a kind of a discussion of how the economic system is based upon the principle of continuing growth.
Anneloes: Yes.
Rick: Despite, and you had this upward moving line, despite the fact that we just don’t have the resources to grow in the way we, I mean, what did you say? It would take about five planets or something for everybody to have kind of lifestyle that Americans have?
Anneloes: Yeah, well, for Americans, I think about 12.
Rick: Yeah. And so maybe you could, I mean, what would be an alternative system that wouldn’t be unrealistically dependent upon an infinite supply of natural resources and so on?
Anneloes: Well, first of all, you have to work with renewables, but I think the big problem is in the way that we have visualized and envisioned progress and growth. So somehow economists have thought that growth just means more, more, more, more. And then that came the story of, oh, we don’t want you just more in a progressive line, we want exponential growth. So we’ve made this line, we’ve just really said that’s, oh, that’s progress. That’s what we have to sell to our board members. And that means success, right? But the only pattern in nature where you see the exponential growth curve is in bacteria and viruses. I mean, don’t we know that one now from the COVID crisis? Yeah. So we’ve been behaving like a virus on this planet. And from a systemic point of view, if you’re taking this growth curve, always the one that follows after that is exponential collapse. However, living systems don’t grow that way. So for a living system, for a forest, for an ecosystem, like a waterway or even the ocean itself, the way that living systems grow is that there are moments of expansion. And when the system expands, it doesn’t just expand through monocrops, it expands to diversify. And the diversity now gives rise to new collaborations, new co-creations, new innovations. And then there are moments just like autumn, when the leaves are falling, when the system contracts. And that contraction, in that contraction, what happens is that all of those earlier experiments are being composted, the information is not lost. The information then returns to that field of life that is unified. And in that moment of integration, of returning back to the center, into kind of the deep space of consciousness, that’s where the impulse of the renewal comes from. That’s where the transformative capacity comes from. That’s your wintertime that’s necessary for your spring. Our economic and political systems, because they, by design, we set them up that they only have to do this expansion. We think that that is progress. By design, we have not allowed time for the integration, for the contraction, because we think contraction is bad. If we start by re-imagining this in different ways, it’s amazing how we can actually stimulate and enhance our transformative capacities. When I was going through this process with corporations and helping them to see these patterns, I’ll give you an example. People in some of those businesses, they were not even allowed a 15-minute break because they thought that they couldn’t be productive. However, when by design, we explained to the management and said, “No, if you allow people to rest, to integrate, to go within, their productivity, rather than being less because you’ve imagined it on a curve, actually becomes more qualitatively. It’s not about producing producing.” By so doing, you are investing in the transformative capacity of your organization. You create a better culture. You create a more better balance. These are the beginning conditions of thriveability. I really do believe it can start as simple as it comes back to narrative. Really start to question, “How have we created and designed these systems? For what purpose? What if we actually can change that?” Because if we keep telling ourselves, “Well, that’s just the way it is, and it’s so hard, and we can’t change that.” No. Nothing grows in that way. Growth is always a process of externalization and coming into being, expansion, and then it needs to contract. The contraction doesn’t mean that there is a problem there. No. Allow it to contract. Like we’re seeing now, we’re hitting the planetary boundaries that are forcing us now to contract. If we’re thinking, “Oh, the contracting, it’s going to give us problems.” No, no, no. We haven’t gone through that experiment of the full contraction, allowing the contraction, allowing the contraction so that it can integrate, that it can then renew, so that we then, through that process of dying to our old ways, a new impulse can be born. Then we start to see the solutions. Just like after a very good night’s rest. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and go, “Ah, I can see it now. Last night I was so stressed. I just kept focusing on it, and I couldn’t let it go. It just got worse and worse.” We got deeper and deeper, digging ourselves into the problem. I mean, like go at night, we allow our consciousness to return to the universal field.
Rick: That’s nice. There are companies in the US where they have meditation rooms and massage rooms and ping pong rooms, and you can bring your dogs to work and all kinds of stuff like that. Tammy Simon, who runs Sounds True, the book publishing company, they have a fantastic work environment. Everybody has their dogs, and it’s just this really family-like atmosphere. Anyway, you were talking about things collapse, and then all the potentialities or the information that were in the systems kind of marinate or in the collapsed state and then can
Anneloes: They integrate at a deeper field.
Rick: Integrate it, and then they can kind of reemerge and reconfigure.
Anneloes: Yes.
Rick: So, I don’t know if I’ve asked you yet, maybe I have, for some kind of timeline. Do you see like some kind of collapse by 2030 or something that’s going to be really significant and then a reemergence by 2040? What’s your sense of
Anneloes: Maybe we need to
Rick: Go ahead.
Anneloes: Yeah. Okay. Good question. I even think that we need to change the narrative around that collapse as well. Because there are things that are collapsing because by design they’ve been set up for this curve. So, that system is incapable of doing the contraction. If it can’t do the contraction, if it can’t do the renewal, if it can’t go through its own autumn and its own winter, if it can’t do that, then it will collapse. But those are very rigid, artificial systems that were not designed with life. So, the collapse story belongs to that scenario. However, for those systems and organizations and cultures that are recognizing that we’ve done this for a long time and now we need to learn to have the journey of living within our planetary and social boundaries and thresholds. And that is not a story of collapse. It’s a story of integration. We have diversified as a humanity. We’ve been spread out over all of those continents. And now we’re going to make our journey back home. We’re going to get to know, who are we in all of these countries? Who are we among all of these different cultures and languages? So, that this story, it’s not a story of death. It is a story of integration in a way that we’ve never consciously done before. To me, in terms of timelines, we have already started that. To me, the onset of the COVID crisis, when we had to cocoon, whether we liked it or not, we had to cocoon. To me, that was really the, I mark that point as that, I found that so interesting, the virus kind of put us to a stop. And that was the beginning of having to make this journey. And we just, we are just at the beginning of that being called back to the center, being called back to integrate, being called back to contract for birth, not to contract as punishment, not to contract as some kind of fear scenario. But just like for a woman to give birth, the uterus has to contract. If the uterus doesn’t contract, the baby’s not coming out. So, the baby of our humanity is in the womb right now. We’re not out yet. We can start to feel it, but we need to make that journey and need to help people to understand those stages, so that they understand what’s going on. So, you don’t have to be afraid of it, how to work with the process, and then allowing out of that integration. And to me, just intuitively, my sense is that that kind of birth point, maybe in a couple of decades. Yes.
Rick: So, in other words, the really better time might really, you’re guessing, of course, might come in a couple of decades. But between now and then, there’s going to be a lot of collapsing and reshuffling. And yeah, I think that’s roughly what Dwayne Eldrin was saying too, and in his best case scenario, maybe around 2040, 2050, something like that. Even now, I mean, you can see some companies, for instance, back in the 19, you’re still there, right? I didn’t hear any audio from you. Oh, your audio went silent, I think.
Anneloes: Yes, yes, I’m here.
Rick: Oh, okay. Back in the 1970s, Exxon, for instance, scientists there realized that what they were doing was contributing to what was going to become a climate crisis, climate change. And they had a whole division of scientists working on this and thinking about alternative energy and stuff like that. And then they decided, nah, that’s going to hurt the bottom line. And so, they disbanded that whole department and fired the scientists and actually started spending all this money on a PR campaign to create doubt about climate change and say that it’s not really a problem or there’s, you know, a lot of the scientists don’t believe it’s going to happen and things like that. Now, we’re at, you know, we are where we are today. And I think that companies which play that game and don’t kind of like adapt to, don’t undergo the adaptations they need to are probably going to find it’s too little too late. They won’t be able to change. They won’t be, you know, Exxon had the opportunity to get into alternative energies way back then, and they didn’t. But other companies, you know, are just more flexible, more adroit. They’re kind of going with the flow and changing. And so, maybe those will be the ones that thrive and the more ossified ones will collapse.
Anneloes: You know, and that is a fundamental pattern we’re now talking about. So again, any system that is really rigid and tries to resist the changes rather than being responsive to it, it’s their own death sentence. They are the ones that then simply not part of the future. The thing is, when they feel and sense perhaps already that they may not be part of the future, they can get more stubborn in trying to take and grab, you know, and take people down with them. And we need good strategies and policies, you know, how we work with.
Rick: But the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Yes. And it’s surprising. I mean, there have been examples. There was a big company named Enron, which is a big trader in the energy industry, and everybody thought that they were invincible. And they just collapsed like the Hindenburg. And, you know, the Soviet Union breaking up or the Berlin Wall falling. So sometimes big changes happen quite suddenly and unexpectedly.
Anneloes: Yes. And we are in the midst of a lot of that because we have these huge, massive, massive companies and organizations. But they don’t realize how vulnerable they’ve made themselves. Again, these tipping point effects, you know, can escalate in points. And this is why also to get resilient for the changes, it’s important that we change our scaling. Also go much more back to local, but then coordinate local to regional. We need a different global. Not this globalization that was just, yeah.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, look how vulnerable that is with the supply chain problems and all the boats from China getting stuck in the harbor off California because they, you know, there were no trucks. There were 80,000 truck drivers short of what was needed to move things out of the port. I mean, the whole thing just got, we’re still recovering from that. And, you know, so obviously things have to get a lot simpler. And like you said, perhaps more local.
Anneloes: Exactly. I mean, right now to me, this is a time that is showing and revealing what doesn’t work.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah.
Anneloes: And what may have worked for earlier times, but it doesn’t work for the future that is coming. But again, people, it’s so important. Don’t think that that doesn’t work, that that is the future. No, that there are worlds and systems and cultures and world views that are dying, that are collapsing, that are falling away, but they were never meant to last.
Rick: Yeah. And it’s not in our best interest for them to last.
Anneloes: No, it’s not. Everything comes, there’s a time for everything to come to an end and to a completion, but the completion is not the end of the road. Yeah. Life is very creative.
Rick: Hey, I’ll tell you one more cool thing that I read just yesterday. There’s a new battery that is being developed, which is made of aluminum and sulfur. And aluminum is one of the most plentiful metals on earth. And it can’t get overheat and explode the way lithium batteries can. And it charges up in one minute and it could completely revolutionize the whole power system where we could have these batteries in our homes, solar panels on the roofs and the energy distribution, the energy thing could be decentralized and everyone could be locally much more self-sufficient. It would also work in electric cars. So that’s just one example of something really cool.
Anneloes: Exactly. And of this, as you just said, this patent, so it’s much more decentralized.
Rick: Right.
Anneloes: So we can see in that already, even in these new technological innovations, the patents that are future fit, the patents that are going to make it, but this is coming out of the creativity of people.
Rick: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you could almost say in a sense, the world doesn’t have an energy crisis. It has an intelligence crisis or a creativity crisis, and that’s the resource that we really need to tap into. And then, quoting Jesus again, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all else shall be added unto thee.”
Anneloes: That’s it. And that we’re investing in the children, invest in their creativity. No, don’t feed them the same old, same old, but ask them what’s the future that they want? What future do they see? There are dreams and possibilities in the kids that we have no idea of, of what great inventions they may come up with. Support them, help them to develop those capacities to bring that out.
Rick: That’s why I want to live to be at least 100. I want to see what happens. Yes. It’s exciting. Give me another 30 years.
Anneloes: That’s the spirit.
Rick: So, this has been great. We were saying in the beginning, “Well, what are we going to talk about?” “Well, we’ll just wing it.” So, we’ve just spent two hours winging it and having a great time, I think. It’s amazing. And so, what would you like to say by way of conclusion and also include in your conclusion how people can plug into what you’re doing? I noticed you have on your website, you have all these webinars that people can do live and they can also get into the archive versions of them. So, what are those all about? So, if people want to get more involved with you, what can they do?
Anneloes: That’s lovely. Well, first of all, every last Tuesday of the month, I gave a coaching class where I support people to actually develop their capacities, both for inner and outer systems change, to develop your future human potential. It includes always a teaching. It includes a practice for entering into that creative state of consciousness. And that’s from where we start to see the ways forward. So, I’m just giving that always as consistent support as every last Tuesday of the month online. Come sort of recording if people can’t join live. I started that in last November and it’s been hugely successful and a whole amazing community is forming around that. So, when they go on my website, they’ll see that and there’s some little free videos as well so they can get a taste of how that is. And then there are a lot of indeed online courses and programs as a future human’s quest for where they really work on the deep changes, the deep transformations where we’re going through. There’s also the Catalyst course that Jean and I gave that’s also on demand. So, there’s a lot of resources, a lot of talks, there are a lot of free articles that you can just access. So, yes, join the community. I know that there are a lot of people here in the community where we’re really actively working towards co-creating a world that works for all and one in which we can thrive and flourish together. So, buy my website. Yeah.
Rick: And I’ll be linking to your website from your page on batgap.com and also to your books. And in the future, if you have some new website or something like that, just let me know and I’ll add it to that page.
Anneloes: Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah,
Rick: thank you. Yes. So, anyway, great. I really enjoyed spending this time with you.
Anneloes: Same here. And thank you for what you’re doing and for bringing us together in those conversations that are really important. And yeah, maybe just as a final message to all of those who are listening or watching, invest in that future here. You are part of the future, not the world that’s collapsing, but yeah, believe in truly in who you are and who we can be together and know that there are so many people out there around in the world who believe that this more beautiful world is possible and is already alive right here.
Rick: It is. Well, please give Jean Houston my love. And she’s so wonderful. And for those watching this, we’ve got a couple of interesting interviews coming up. Well, lots of interesting interviews coming out. How Brian swim in a couple of weeks. Do you know, Brian?
Anneloes: Oh, yes.
Rick: I’ve been working for years. So I’m very excited about that. And anyway, there’s an upcoming interviews page on that gap.com where you can see who’s scheduled, if you like, and you can add little, you can add reminders to your calendar program. So thank you all for listening or watching. And we’ll see you for the next one. And thanks again, Anneloes.
Anneloes: Thank you so much. And a great pleasure to be with you. Okay, take care.
Rick: Talk to you later.
Anneloes: I’ll see you later. Bye bye.
Rick: Bye.