Duane Elgin Interview

Summary

Duane Elgin explores the universe as a living, conscious whole rather than a collection of dead matter. He connects spiritual awakening with science, personal transformation, simplicity, cultural change, and humanity’s response to ecological crisis.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can a person reconcile spiritual experience with scientific inquiry?
• What does it mean to see the universe as alive?
• How can a profound awakening experience change the way someone lives?
• Is humanity undergoing a measurable shift in consciousness?
• How do materialism and consumerism affect our relationship with life and the cosmos?

Key takeaways

• Awakening can reveal a direct sense of belonging within a larger living whole.
• Science increasingly points to deep unity, energy, order, and connectedness in the universe.
• Seeing the universe as alive encourages simplicity, care, and responsibility.
• Materialism can deepen our sense of separation from the aliveness of existence.
• Mystical experiences are becoming more common and may signal cultural transformation.
• Human beings are creative participants in the universe, not insignificant observers.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done 385 of them now. If this is new to you, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, and you’ll see all the previous ones categorized and organized in about five different ways.

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My guest today is Duane Elgin. Duane, I’m going to read his bio in a second, but I just want to say for starters that I really—I say this occasionally—I really enjoyed preparing for this interview. I had a cold this week, and so I was able to indulge myself and sit around a lot. I managed to read all of one of Duane’s books, The Living Universe, and a fair amount of a couple of other ones: The Awakening Earth and Voluntary Simplicity, which I have on the shelf behind me. I forgot to get it here.

But this kind of stuff, as you’ll see as we get going in this interview, is right up my alley. Duane talks about a lot of things brilliantly that I often bring up in interviews and that really excite me. So I’m really happy to have him on the show. Welcome, Duane.

Duane: Thank you, Rick. So good to be here.

Rick: You’re welcome. So let’s do a little bio stuff on this. Duane grew up—incidentally, Duane, everybody pronounces your name “Elgin,” but I could swear that in one of your interviews I heard you pronounce it “Elgin,” but it’s—

Duane: Yes, it’s Elgin if you go to Scotland. It’s Elgin, I suppose, in the United States, so I’m okay with either pronunciation.

Rick: Okay, maybe we’ll switch back and forth for the sake of our Scottish listeners.

So Duane grew up on a farm in Idaho. Was it a potato farm by any chance?

Duane: There were potatoes and onions. We had apples and pears. We had all kinds of crops, chickens and cows and pigs and all the rest. It was a farm. It was a big farm.

Rick: Sounds healthy. And you worked there until you were about 23 years old on the farm, while obviously getting an education at the same time.

You became an internationally recognized author, educator, speaker, and media activist. You have an MBA from the Wharton Business School and an MA in economic history from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006, you received the Peace Prize of Japan, the Goi Award, in recognition of your contribution to a global vision, consciousness, and lifestyle that fosters a more sustainable and spiritual culture.

Your books include the ones I just held up, The Living Universe: Where Are We? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?; Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity’s Future; Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple and Inwardly Rich; and Awakening Earth, which I also just held up, exploring the evolution of human culture and consciousness.

Also, with Joseph Campbell and other scholars, you co-authored the book Changing Images of Man. As usual, I’ll be linking to all these books from Duane’s page on BatGap.

In addition to that, you’ve contributed chapters to 23 books and have published more than 100 major articles. In the 1970s, Duane, you worked as a senior staff member of a presidential commission looking 30 years into the American future. Which president was that, Nixon?

Duane: Yes.

Rick: And to what extent did your prognostications work out?

Duane: Very, very much so. We said in the early ’70s that by the year 2000 there was going to be a water crisis in the southwestern United States—for example, in the Los Angeles–San Diego basin. It was very clear. So here we are, really facing a water crisis in that part of the world, and we have not anticipated it in the way we could have, nor had policies to respond as we could have.

Rick: Yeah.

Duane: So it was too little, too late.

Rick: That’s—

Duane: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Because there were plenty of warnings, and that’s a much bigger and more global problem.

Duane: Yeah.

Rick: Typical and interesting when we consider global warming—

Duane: Yeah.

Rick: —which we’ll probably talk about.

So then, let’s see, you worked as a senior social scientist with the think tank SRI International, where you co-authored numerous studies of the long-range future. In addition, for nearly three years while working at SRI in the early ’70s, you were the subject in initial government-sponsored psi research into remote viewing and other intuitive capacities.

Finally, over the past 30 years, you’ve co-founded three nonprofits and transpartisan organizations working for citizen involvement, empowerment, and citizens’ voices, as well as creative uses of the new media that surround us.

I thought we might start, Duane, if you don’t mind, by talking a little bit about what you described in the appendix to this book, The Awakening Earth, where you were doing intense spiritual practice and had some kind of profound awakening. In the context of this show, that might be a good place to start.

Duane: The experience you’re describing was in 1978, a long while back. But for about six or seven years before that, I’d been deeply involved in Tibetan Buddhist meditation. At the same time, as you mentioned, I was involved with the parapsychology research there at the Stanford Research Institute. So I was developing a literacy of consciousness, if you will, over a period of years, both with feedback from very sophisticated instruments and with support from very sophisticated teachers of meditation in the Tibetan tradition.

Finally, I decided that I had learned so much intellectually and so much intuitively and experientially, but the two were not coming together. I essentially had two lives. I had one life as a professional researcher, and I had another life of deep spiritual practice and intuitive understanding, and they were not coming together.

So I took essentially a half year, in 1977 and 1978, to give myself the meditation space to bring those two together. After a half year, they hadn’t. I was more overwhelmed than ever by these two different tracks of my life.

What I did was—I said, and this was utter desperation and utter confidence, if you will, combined—“I’m going to sit in meditation until my life does come together.” Essentially, I sat for three days straight.

Rick: Without sleeping?

Duane: I slept lightly two evenings. But there was no way that I could describe the intensity of that. An analogy I would suggest is this: Imagine you have a 100-watt light bulb, and you take that 100-watt light bulb, put it up against a steel plate, and leave it there for an hour a day, or whatever it may be. The plate is going to get a little warm.

On the other hand, if you take that same amount of power—100 watts—and put it into a laser, really focused, and put it on that plate, within an hour or so you’re going to burn a hole through that steel plate.

The difference between the half year of preliminaries, if you will, was like just warming, warming, warming. Finally, those last three days were like burning a hole through the ego that was holding me back from connecting with and understanding the larger universe.

The universe said, “Well, okay, here it is. Here’s who you are. Here’s where we are.”

What finally happened was the universe said, “Well, okay, here it is. Here’s who you are. Here’s where we are.” It was utter simplicity and directness. What emerged was just a very clear insight that many people have had: I am a part of a larger liveness.

More than 2,000 years ago, Plato said, “The universe is a single living creature that encompasses all living creatures within it.” What I saw was, “Okay, here I am. I’m a part of this larger aliveness.” I’m no longer cut off from myself and the cosmos. Rather, I am completely at home.

So there was no change other than finally feeling at home in the larger universe and knowing that that is who I really am.

Rick: And that kind of stayed with you?

Duane: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Rick: Nice. Some people go through this “I got it, I lost it” kind of thing for a while. But once you had that laser breakthrough, it sort of stuck.

Duane: Yeah. It wasn’t something that was added. It was rather something that was taken away. It was like I had covered up that insight. What happened was, “Okay, let’s take the cover off and just see clearly.” So, yes, that has persisted.

The universe as a living system

Rick: Great. Since you mentioned The Living Universe, let’s get right into that for a bit. You wrote a book by that title, The Living Universe, which I thoroughly enjoyed. What’s the basic premise of the book?

Duane: The basic premise is what I just quoted from Plato: that the universe is not a collection of bits and pieces, but rather it’s an integrated whole system, a cosmic hologram, if you will. We are an integral part of that wholeness.

But the wholeness is not simply a mechanical wholeness; it’s a living wholeness. We can enter into an understanding of that living wholeness through our direct, intuitive, experiential practice. When we shift our understanding from a dead universe to a living universe, it transforms our entire lives personally and societally.

We can explore that, but this is the key transition I think we’re going through right now as a human family: to say, “No, we’re not living in this existential deadness, waiting for a miracle to keep us alive. No, we’re living in deep aliveness right now.” We can grow into an economy of aliveness and into relationships that grow our sense of aliveness.

I think that is the great transition we’re beginning to make right now as a human family.

Rick: Let’s go into what we mean by “aliveness” or “living.” Obviously, we hear these debates: Is there life on Mars? There’s probably almost definitely not life on Venus, certainly not life on the sun. They’re referring to life as biological life as we know it.

But when you say the universe is living, I’m quite sure you mean everything—neutron stars are living, empty space is living, and a rock is living. So clarify how you would define that.

Duane: Good. So there are levels of aliveness, obviously, levels of aliveness. And there’s the foundational aliveness that Plato was speaking about, saying, well, the whole thing is a living system. And then, within that living system, there are creatures of varying degrees of self-reflective, self-organizing aliveness, if you will.

We happen to be a creature that not only knows that we’re here in this universe—we know that we know that we’re here in this universe. We know that we know. And that’s a higher level of aliveness. But that doesn’t diminish the wholeness of the universe as an integrated living system.

So how would you then say that, if the universe is actually alive, it has to have a few basic properties that would go with any living system? The first property is that it must be a whole system. It can’t be just a collection of pieces. It has to be an integrated whole.

Now, quantum mechanics is telling us, deep down, nonlocality says this is an integrated whole universe. There are a lot of pieces, indeed, but those pieces are connected deep down into a wholeness as a living system.

The second thing is, if it’s alive, it must have energy moving through it. Now, it turns out 95 percent of the known universe is invisible. It’s dark matter and dark energy. There’s immense amounts of energy embedded in and flowing through the universe.

The physicist David Bohm said the universe is an undivided whole. It’s unified in flowing movement. The universe is an undivided whole, flowing movement arising moment by moment. And if we think about the energy it would take to bring this universe into existence moment by moment, it’s phenomenal. It’s unimaginable.

So, number two, it’s unified, and it has immense amounts of energy flowing through it.

Number three, there’s consciousness. At every level of the universe that we can look at, we can find evidence of a reflective capacity. For example, go down to the atomic level. The physicist and Nobel laureate Freeman Dyson said that the atom—the electron moving around in the electron shell of an atom—behaves as if it had a mind of its own.

Then we can just go right on up the chain to higher and higher levels of organisms, and we can find evidence of a reflective consciousness at every scale. So that’s number three. We see the capacity for consciousness and reflection.

Number four, there has to be some degree of capacity for reproduction, if you will, as a living system. And again and again, cosmologists are now saying, well, the universe has the ability to seed other universes. Every black hole, on the other side of a hole, is probably a white hole, and it’s budding off a new universe—a new universe—and there are billions of them in our universe.

So the point is, if we start adding up the attributes of living systems and say, does the universe have those attributes? Indeed, it does. Now, that doesn’t prove the universe is alive, but it says: Does it look like it’s dead at the foundations, or does it look like it’s alive? And I would say it’s alive.

And then you can ask, well, it looks that way, but what is it feeling? What is the experience that people actually have of living in this living universe? But let me pause here before I—

Rick: Sure.

Duane: —see if there’s anything you wanted to add, Rick, to that.

Rick: You’ve obviously been interviewed a lot. You know that you want to pause from time to time. That’s great. Sometimes I have to cut people off. Sometimes they have to cut me off. But, okay, question: Have you ever debated any of the so-called New Atheists, like Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens, or any of those guys?

Duane: Well, not those persons specifically, but certainly people who say, well, you’re crazy if you think this is a living universe. I just look around. If they were showing me the words “alive,” another person will say, well, you’re crazy if you think this is dead. Look at the beauty, the elegance, the design intelligence in this construction. The universe is so fine-tuned to be as it is.

And so what I am seeing is about 50-50. We can go into the surveys that show this is actually pretty accurate for the population at large. About half the public says, well, of course it’s alive. The other half says, well, you’re crazy if you think it’s alive.

And so this is truly a tipping point for the culture. Because if you say it’s a dead universe, then materialism makes sense. Consumerism makes sense in a dead universe. What do we have? Just a bunch of dead stuff. You better exploit it, better use it up.

And remember James Watt?

Rick: Yeah, he was Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, I believe, and his philosophy was, well, Jesus is coming anyway. The whole world is going to end, so let’s just rape the environment as much as we can and get everything we can out of it.

Duane: Yeah. So that’s the materialistic mindset of a dead universe.

If it’s a living universe, simplicity makes sense.

If it’s a living universe, simplicity makes sense. You want to take care of the aliveness of that living system, the Earth. You want to have a conscious regard for the universe, which is your larger home. It just transforms the way we relate to one another, to ourselves, and to what we’re doing here.

If it’s a dead universe, then why? It’s going to take a miracle to save us. If it’s a living universe, we’re already deep into the aliveness right now. We’re deep into the aliveness. And what we’re learning to do is live in that aliveness. That changes the entire journey.

Rick: Yeah. In a way, it doesn’t matter if half the people believe it is, or if none of the people believe it is, or if all the people believe it is, because it is what it is, regardless of what we believe.

There was a time when most people believed the Earth was flat and that it was the center of the universe, but the universe actually didn’t care. It continued to operate the way it has been, regardless of what we little humans thought.

Duane: Indeed.

Rick: When I think of this idea of a living universe—and I think about it a lot, and I’ve brought it up in many interviews—it’s like we kind of take for granted what we’re actually going through here, what we’re actually experiencing.

If we pause to consider it for just a moment, take a look at a blade of grass or something, and consider what science has told us about what’s actually going on there, and the amount of intelligence and orderliness that is operative at every single level, from the cellular down to the subatomic, you think, holy mackerel, it’s a total miracle.

It couldn’t possibly be random. It couldn’t possibly be arbitrary or capricious little billiard balls somehow bouncing into each other and creating blades of grass and everything else.

And you also think, well, where could I possibly go where I wouldn’t find that? The answer is nowhere. I mean, as you were saying, the universe is a whole. It’s a whole system. There are no gaps.

You could go anywhere, large or small, near or far, and you’re going to find laws of nature functioning in ways which we don’t even fully comprehend, and which are certainly and obviously not random.

So, you know, when I ponder that sort of thing, I wonder how anybody—especially a scientist, somebody who studies this stuff—could possibly think of it as dead.

Duane: You know, one of the most remarkable insights that I think has come from modern science in relation to what you’re saying—really, the miracle of existence—is this: If you imagine a ruler, a cosmic ruler, from the very largest to the very smallest scale, and we look at ourselves in the universe, we look out and say, oh, we’re so small, we’re just so insignificant, we’re so trivial in the larger cosmic scheme of things.

But on this ruler, from the big to the small, it turns out humans are roughly in the middle, or actually a little bit on the big side. And it means there’s more smallness within us than there is bigness beyond us.

It’s extraordinary how much space there is beyond us, and it’s just mind-boggling to imagine how much more space is there, and how much smallness there is within this. And so we’re in the middle ground. We’re giants in this universe. We are literally physically giants.

And we tend to diminish ourselves relative to the larger scale of things. One thing I love to do is to say, oh, you’re big. You’re creative. You’re a creative giant in this living universe.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that triggers two thoughts. One is just to elaborate on the smallness bit. In your book, you mention that if you took the atom and made the nucleus the size of a golf ball, then the electrons would be about a mile and a half away, or at least the inner ring of electrons whizzing around that golf ball at trillions of times a second.

And so that’s an interesting thing. It reveals amazing dynamism. Plus, I mean, the nucleus of an atom is ginormous when contrasted with deeper, more fundamental, more microscopic levels of creation. It’s huge. I don’t even know—it might even be closer to us in size than to the Planck scale or something.

Duane: Yeah, it is.

Rick: So there you go. So, yeah, that’s one thought. To think that each little atom is this perfectly functioning unit, obviously not random, obviously not arbitrary, displaying marvelous laws of nature which, again, we still don’t fully understand.

And there are more of them in a handful of sand than there are stars in the known universe. I mean, just enormous amounts. So it amazes me. And like I said before, it’s like we take this stuff for granted and just go waltzing through our day.

But there’s this incredible, profound complexity and sophistication in every little iota of creation.

Duane: Indeed.

Rick: Yeah.

Duane: Indeed.

Rick: So the second thought that triggered when you say we’re giants and all that is: What if we ask, well, what do we mean by “we”?

When we consider that the real “we,” the real self that we actually are, does actually dwarf the universe because it’s unbounded, it’s unlimited, it’s vast—then we’re really giants.

Duane: Indeed, that’s the bio-cosmic self. We are a part of the living universe. One key attribute of a hologram, if the universe is regarded as a hologram, is that each piece of the universe contains information about the whole. And that’s where so-called parapsychology and such makes sense. It’s nothing more than the functioning of the quantum realm through nonlocality. This is just how the universe works. There’s nothing magical or mysterious about it.

So when we enter into that realm, we are entering into the nonlocal reach of the entire universe; we’re implicated in the entire cosmos. The idea that we could have cosmic consciousness totally makes sense. We’re a part of the consciousness of the cosmos. And people have that experience on an increasingly frequent basis.

Let me share a statistic that’s really empowering. In 1962, a survey was done in the United States to see how many people said they had had a mystical experience—a feeling of communion with the universe, a feeling of profound love at the foundation of the universe, a sense of peace, and connection with it all. How many people had had that kind of experience? It turned out that in 1962, it was 22 percent.

Year by year, that’s been growing. The last survey that was done was in 2009, and it was 49 percent of the American public who said, “Yes, I have had a mystical experience.” So we’ve gone from 22 percent to 49 percent over a generation, let’s say. It means we are at least as much a society of mystics as we are a society of materialists. And we are in a process of measurable transformation and change. I mean, this is measurable transformation and change.

And we’re not really talking about it except on programs like this. What we’re being told is, “No, you are what you consume. Be a good consumer. Use your materialism to make you happy.” And we’re really creating a schizophrenic society because we’re divided against our own aliveness. We’re divided against our own aliveness. And the deepest wound that we have, I feel, as a human family, is the wound of separation from the living universe.

✨ Awakening in a time of planetary crisis

Rick: So as a futurist and as a scholar of cultures and their evolution, do you ascribe to the notion that there is some kind of mass awakening taking place in the world—the sort of New Age idea of heaven on Earth or an age of enlightenment coming along?

Duane: Well, I think it’s measurable that there are changing attitudes, values, and perceptions. Just like I indicated, there’s more evidence than that. So it’s not a utopian possibility.

This is from a farm boy. This is from a farm boy saying, “We’ve got to get down to Earth here and start handling things,” because we are in a time of great transition as a species, and we are not stepping up to the game that’s being asked of us.

Rick: Good. So, I mean, I don’t want to get too much into politics, but after the last election, people were sort of saying, “Oh, I thought things were going to get so much better.” Bernie gave us a lot of hope and whatnot. And then the new administration comes in and appoints people like James Pruitt to the EPA, along with various appointments that seem so regressive and inimical to environmental issues and the welfare of the economy.

I mean, we’re setting ourselves up for another bank failure, and so on. So how do you put that in the context of some kind of awakening taking place? I know that you’ve said that in 2020, you felt like we were going to really hit a wall in terms of the way we’ve been carrying on. Do you see this as a sort of necessary acceleration of outmoded ways of thinking and doing things that will bring us to that wall we need to get to in order to get beyond it?

Duane: Yeah. I see very deep, driving trends at work that go beyond current politics. I think current politics is an expression of a deeper dynamic at work: the unraveling of the industrial-era paradigm.

Let’s look at the limits of what we’re doing right now. It is helpful to just maybe start with that. If we look at just a couple of factors—population, climate, and such—when I was born, there were 2.2 billion people on the planet. Two-point-two billion. There are now over 7 billion. It means that in my lifetime, world population has more than tripled. With any luck, it will more than quadruple in my lifetime, because we’re going from 7 billion right now toward 8, 9, or 10 billion by mid-century.

Now, the estimates are that the carrying capacity of the Earth is roughly 2 billion people living in middle-class Western lifestyles. That means we are billions of people beyond carrying capacity right now, and we’re going to exceed that even more in the coming decades.

That is an evolutionary crisis. It’s not only an ecological crisis of pushing against the limits to growth that the planet can sustain; it’s an evolutionary crisis, because who are we that we would overconsume the Earth and put ourselves into such a difficult situation?

I’ve been saying since 1978 that in the 2020s, we’re going to hit an evolutionary wall. People said, “Well, that’s more than 40 years from now.” And, well, okay, now it’s three years from now. So I’ve been watching this decade by decade by decade, and I think, yeah, somewhere in the 2020s, the rubber is going to hit the road. We’re going to have to make some choices—not only individually, not only as nations, but as a human family.

If we don’t make those choices, we’re going to move from an unraveling—a very difficult situation—into an evolutionary collapse. So these are dangerous times, in a sense. If we don’t step up to the game and use our capacity for conscious choice and collaboration, if we pull apart in conflict, these are very dangerous, very dangerous times.

Rick: Just a footnote here: People interested in this notion of carrying capacity might want to watch my interview with Michael Dowd. Also, there’s a link on my page for that interview to a book by a guy named William Catton, where he talks a lot about the carrying capacity of the Earth, which I’m sure you’ve studied.

So do you get the sense that we are stepping up to the game? Or, how have you phrased it, that we are meeting these challenges? Are we just blithely going along and going shopping?

Duane: No, we’re in denial. We’re significantly in denial. And we’re in what I would call self-denial.

Self-denial is where you say, “Well, yeah, we do have, let’s say, too many people with current levels and patterns of consumption. We do have climate change, for example.” But they would say, “Climate change won’t hit us very soon. It’ll be another 50 or 100 years, or it won’t be so bad. It may actually improve our agriculture. It won’t impact the entire Earth, just some selected portions of it.”

In different ways, people are diminishing and pushing away the realities of our situation. And my sense is that by the 2020s—the next five to ten years—we won’t be able to push it away. It’ll be on top of us, and we will have to deal with the Earth that we have allowed to emerge.

Rick: Incidentally, I just want to interject that the reason I think the discussion we’re having right now is relevant to the theme of BatGap is that I do feel there’s a spiritual awakening taking place in the world. I think—this is my opinion; we’ll see what you think—that it’s in response to, or somehow in sync with, the crisis that has become insurmountable through any conventional solutions.

Ultimately, all problems can be seen as spiritual problems, symptomatic of insufficient development of consciousness and development of all the facets of personality that should go along with spiritual development. Just as a lack of development in certain ways results in problems in an individual’s life, lack of development on a mass scale among 7 billion people results in global problems.

And I think that as individual consciousness rises—as it seems to be doing more and more and more—that will bring about shifts in the world and its problems, just as it does in an individual’s life.

So I think that spirituality matters tremendously. Some people—I was actually at the SAND Conference one year, and some guy was asking a spiritual teacher who was up on stage about the environment and climate change and stuff like that. The guy sort of brushed it off, saying, “Oh, you’re just a little speck of dust. What does it matter?” But I think it matters tremendously. You wouldn’t say that if you were in a desert dying of thirst; you’d want water.

In any case, I just wanted to interject that to bring this into the picture of its relevance to this show, and let’s have your comments on it.

Duane: Well, I think we’re facing a very pivotal choice as a human family. It’s either break down or break through.

It’s either break down or break through.

We’re seeing, I think, a very predictable process of institutional breakdown, and it’s to be expected. We are transitioning from one societal paradigm of nation-states and materialism into another, which is the global reality.

In a living universe, let’s say, this is a pivotal change beyond anything we’ve ever experienced as a human family. We’ve never done this before, collectively, in such a short period of time. This is evolution in the raw. This is a hyper-compression. This is going to be a very, very demanding and difficult transition to go through.

The push of necessity, though, in responding to what you’re saying, Rick, the spiritual awakening, is being met by the pull of extraordinary opportunity. And the opportunity is for us to find, through the collective insight of our wisdom traditions, the understanding that we’re living in a living universe.

Let’s wake up. Let’s grow into that aliveness. Let’s collaborate. Let’s work together. Let’s create an economy of aliveness. Let’s create a culture of aliveness. Let’s create the artistry. Let’s create the education. This is an amazing time to be alive and to be creatively engaged in the kind of spiritual enterprise that you were speaking about. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

So on the one hand, these are desperate times in some respects, but they’re pushing us into extraordinary times of creativity and innovation globally, as well as right on the ground locally, creating new kinds of community that will support that new kind of living economy.

Rick: Yeah, one idea of the living universe is that it is responsive to what we do. There’s that old margarine commercial: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” if you remember that. And there’s going to be blowback. You can’t just dump billions of tons of crap into the atmosphere, and on and on and on, and not expect serious consequences.

So, a couple of thoughts here. Again, as a futurist, as the guy who has been studying trends all his life, and probably looking at the news every day and seeing to what extent it fulfills your predictions, how do you see it playing out over the next five to ten years? Since you said a minute ago that we seem to be in denial, or soft denial, what’s going to wake us up, get us in agreement, and make us get on board? Or is there going to have to be complete and utter chaos before we manage to sort things out?

Duane: So really, the question is: If you see someone who’s an alcoholic, they didn’t have to lose the job, the family, the car, the house, and all the rest. But perhaps they did. Maybe they had to hit bottom. Now, are we like that as a human family? Do we have to hit bottom?

Materially, another possibility is that we could visualize. We can use our mass media to say, “Look, what is it going to look like if we continue along this path? What will the world look like 20, 40, or 50 years from now? What would it look like if we took another path?” Let’s work into the future in our social imagination, rather than trying to work it out passively and letting it unfold by itself—too little, too late, if you will.

So we have, right now, a choice to either pull together as a human family or pull apart. Right now, you can see around the world—not only in this country, with the kind of pulling back to conservatism, but in France, in Italy, and in other parts of the world—that the world is kind of hunkering down and saying, “Golly, this looks like a dangerous place. I’d better take care of myself.”

Actually, the best way to take care of ourselves individually is to reach out collectively and say, “Let’s reconfigure this in a way that really serves the whole world, being sustainable over the long haul.” That’s the challenge and the extraordinary creative opportunity in front of us.

Rick: It seems like both things are happening at once, as if polarities are increasing. More and more people are reaching out, and more and more people are pulling back. It’s as if the sheep and the goats are being separated or something.

Duane: Yeah, indeed.

Rick: Well, it’ll be interesting to see it play out. I have a feeling that a lot of the great spiritual teachers who have come along have known—and have predicted, in fact—that times were changing and that things like this were going to happen.

There’s a book that I read in the ’70s by Moira Timms called Prophecies and Predictions: Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes. She took all these ancient traditions and what they predicted from around the world, correlated them with events that had actually unfolded since those predictions were made, and brought them up to the present time—which, at that time, was the ’70s or maybe the early ’80s. Then she projected forward in terms of how she thought things might unfold and bring fulfillment to those predictions.

Basically, they all agreed that there was going to be, as you have said, a time of great turmoil—but that things would look good on the other side of it.

Duane: Yeah, there is a promising future if we’ll just step up to the game. There are two ways of looking at this. One is the more research-oriented, analytical approach: “Well, let’s look at population, let’s look at resources and the environment, and let’s look at these driving trends.” I’ve done that for decades.

But people find that disempowering. They say, “Well, I don’t really understand trends, and I don’t quite know what you’re talking about.” So, in a way, we need another language for looking at our times and this great transition.

Let me give you an example. I’ve gone around the world over the last 20 years with the following story. I’ll step up to an audience and say, “Look, before I say anything, let me ask you a question. What is the life stage of the human family? Are we toddlers? Are we teenagers? Are we adults? Or are we elders?” Four choices.

“Before I say anything, I want you to talk among yourselves, and we’re going to do a vote as a community and see what life stage we’re in: toddlers, teenagers, adults, or elders.” I have people talk, and we come back. Truly, all around the world, again and again and again, overwhelmingly people say—

Rick: We’re teenagers.

Duane: We’re teenagers. We’re acting like adolescents. We’re acting like teenagers.

Rick: Remind us what teenagers do and why that’s relevant to the way we’re behaving. We’ve all been there.

Duane: Well, the teenager says, “I want it all, right now. I am what I consume. Look at the brands that I’m wearing. Who’s in, who’s out?” It’s an “us and them” kind of mentality, and so on.

Rick: And I’m indestructible. That’s another one. “I can take these drugs, I can drink this booze, whatever. I’m fine. I’m going to live forever.”

Duane: That’s right. So then I say to people, “Okay, you told me we’re in our adolescence. What did you do to move from your adolescence to adulthood? What was most important for you is probably what’s going to be most important for all of us.”

People will say, “Well, it was a role model. Someone really inspired me to live a different life.” I say, “Well, where are the role models? They’re sports stars and movie stars. Are they taking us beyond adolescence?” No.

Someone will say, “Well, it was a bigger story about life.” Well, where are the stories about life? They’re on television, for the most part, and they’re stories about pretty mean-spirited, not-so-spiritually-motivated people, if you will.

So the stories that we have—are they taking us into a more promising future? Someone will say, “Well, look, what really got me moving into my adulthood was that I took a hard look in the mirror.” I say, “Well, are we taking a hard look in the mirror as a society?”

Where is that happening? Is it on television? Well, you look at television, and we’re not seeing ourselves. We’re seeing a distorted image of a consumerist, materialistic mindset, if you will.

My point is that if we look at some of these stories—humanity is growing up—there are all kinds of insights that come from our personal experience. We could say, “Let’s have role models. Let’s have bigger stories. Let’s have these changes that we know work in our own personal lives, and let’s apply those to our collective evolution.”

There’s deep wisdom that we already have that we could apply to help us understand what’s happening and then move into a more promising future.

Rick: Okay, so the adolescent thing is one of the things. Another story of great transition that you outline is that the global brain is waking up. Do you want to riff on that one a little bit?

Duane: Oh, that’s so interesting. I’ll be standing around, and people will have very different views on what’s happening in the world. But if I just pull out my cell phone and hold it up, I say, “Is the global brain waking up?”

With that, all it takes is for someone to say, “Boy, for sure. It’s Occupy Wall Street. It’s the revolution that happened in the Middle East a few years back—”

Rick: The Arab Spring.

Duane: The Arab Spring. We are now able to mobilize ourselves with a new kind of capacity through the internet, through the global brain waking up.

It turns out that right now, 51 percent of the people on this planet have access to the internet. A majority of the people, for the first time in human history, can talk with one another through the internet. It’s already there. If we want the technological capacity to have a dialogue as a human family about our collective future, we already have that capacity, and it’s growing very rapidly.

Within two or three years, it’s not going to be 50 percent; it’s going to be 60 percent. It’s just going to keep growing. We are a wired world. We are becoming—the global brain is waking up. The question in my mind is: Will the global heart awaken fast enough to help guide the global brain and its intelligence?

Will the global heart awaken fast enough to help guide the global brain and its intelligence?

Rick: That’s an interesting question. Obviously, because of the communications, we’re aware of deplorable things that we might have been oblivious to before, such as child prostitution in Bombay or a famine in Sudan, and different things like that.

Some people feel like it’s overwhelming and they really can’t deal with all those things because their own life is such a project. But I think it’s definitely—and many people I speak with feel this way—stirring compassion and a sense that the world is my family, to have that kind of awareness of what people are going through.

Duane: You know, there’s the receptive side, and then there’s the expressive side. We’re learning, learning, learning, receiving. Soon, I think we’re going to be increasing the amount of expressing that we’re doing through the internet and through the media.

Basically, I feel we’re not going to have a real sense of hope without a sense of a strong voice for the body politic—for the citizens of this Earth. Most citizens of this Earth do not feel they have a strong voice. They feel disempowered and disconnected. The billionaires and oligarchs are running the politics, and so on.

How can we have a voice in our collective future? Well, this is it. Here, we’re connecting with thousands of people. It could be billions, potentially, because the technology is here to allow that connectivity to occur.

So we’re on the verge, I think, of discovering a new voice for the Earth by using something that’s never been there before, which is this kind of technology. We can say, “Let’s come together in ways that transcend nation-states and the gridlock of nation-state politics. Let’s call for a more promising, sustainable future for the Earth.”

I think that’s what’s going to be required. As institutions break down, humanity will need to rise up in its collective voice and say, “We have a common future that we care for.” This is a key part of the transition. As the media goes, as social media goes, so goes the future, I feel.

Rick: It’s exciting. Even back in the ’70s, when I was teaching meditation here and there, I would often say, “Look at what we can do now with video.” A teacher used to be able to reach as many people as he could walk around and see in that area in a lifetime in his sandals. It would take generation after generation for his teachings to spread around the world, if they did.

Now we have videotapes that we can send all over the world. At that point, we were starting to have satellites that could beam things live. But it’s gone way beyond that now with the internet.

There was a saying that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. In a sense, now we all own one. We can all be broadcasters if we want to be and get something out there. BatGap is an example of that.

Duane: That’s right.

A planetary birth

Rick: So you had a third story in your transition stories, which is a time of planetary birth—something new is being born, a species civilization.

Duane: So what was the story? The idea is to find stories that are common to the entire human family. Virtually the entire human family says, “Yeah, I understand that we’re maturing, we’re growing up. I understand the Internet, and we have access to the Internet, and the global brain is waking up.”

The third one that’s very powerful, in my experience, is people saying, “This is like a time of birth.” Because what’s being born is something that hasn’t existed before, and that’s a global citizen.

The birth process itself is very instructive for what we are experiencing. In birth, there’s a contraction, relaxation, contraction, relaxation, until finally that process reaches a crescendo. Then there is no more relaxation; it is just birth. And on the other side of that birth, it may be a stillborn baby, or it might be a new life of a kind that we just don’t know.

That’s where we are. We’re in times of contraction and relaxation: financial contraction, ecological contraction, relaxation. Then I think in the 2020s, this is going to be full-on labor, full-on labor, until we either give birth to a sustainable species civilization or it collapses. So that’s how I see this: a very powerful metaphor for understanding the dynamics of change right now.

Do you want to place your bets on which way it’s going to go? I tell people, I wouldn’t bet a dime that we’re going to make it. But I would bet my life. And that’s what I’ve done. So I’m not putting any money down on it. I’m putting my life down.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I’m optimistic. I don’t know. I mean, if I don’t know what the optimum population of the Earth should be, and if it’s not seven billion, and if we’re going to go through a readjustment period and get things to the way they should be, the prospect of half the world’s population not making it is actually pretty dire when you consider how that’s going to play out.

Climate change alone could cause hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people to have to migrate. And we’ve seen how that went with Syria, which was also caused by climate change.

Duane: That’s right.

Rick: I imagine that on a global, mass scale. Anyway, I don’t mean to be morbid or try to be a scaremonger, but I think it’s good to contemplate this stuff. I think it would be real.

Duane: Yeah. Let’s get real here, because we are doing ourselves a great disservice by pretending otherwise. Let’s take a hard look at what’s going down and begin stepping up as a mature human family to the realities of what we created. I know there’s a promising future out there if we’ll step up to the challenges.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, “let’s be real” is a good phrase. There’s all this sort of fake news out there these days and all this sort of denial of scientific evidence of things. In fact, you have a thing here that kind of reminds me of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief. Or maybe that’s where you got this: stages of transition—denial, confusion, anger, blame, recognition, acceptance, integration. We could talk about that for a minute.

Duane: Yes. The question is, as we go into these times of profound transition at a global scale—not just nationally, but globally—what are the psychological and cultural dynamics that will play out?

The first one is denial. The back-and-forth waking-up process itself is huge.

Rick: Even now, there’s plenty of denial.

Duane: Oh, a huge amount. I don’t think we have yet collectively awoken to the reality of our situation. A number of people have, but many people have not.

So the first stage is that of denial. The second, I would say, is confusion: “Whoa, what is going on here? I didn’t realize this was happening. I’m confused. I don’t understand.”

The third is, “Okay, well, wait. This is so messed up. Someone’s to blame. I’m upset. There’s someone I’m going to blame and be angry about.”

Then they learn more: “Well, it turns out maybe it’s me. My behaviors, my consumerism, and all the rest have been contributing factors to the world that we have.” So I have to move beyond blame to some degree of acceptance of my own participation in what is being created here.

Beyond that is the final integration: “Okay, okay, I’ll take responsibility. I’ll grow up. I’ll be a good role model. I’ll create a bigger story.” And here we go into another future.

So there’s an evolutionary dynamic of waking up, growing up, and then engaging with this new world that we have yet to really move through.

🏘️ Joining a larger community of life

Rick: Yeah. You’ve probably heard that NASA says there are probably at least two billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Maybe it’s even more than that. They now feel that there are probably more than two trillion galaxies in the known universe. You talk in your book about what physicists say about the possibility of there being infinite numbers of universes.

This being a living universe, with the abundance of Earth-like planets—and who says they have to be Earth-like?—the universe could very well be teeming with life, absolutely buzzing with life.

I saw Arrival last night, and I thought it was a fantastic movie. Do you go this far in your futurism to contemplate our joining a larger community of life forms, through something like Star Trek, once we have matured enough, once we’ve gotten past the absolute adolescent stage on this planet and are mature enough to be welcomed into the club, so to speak?

Duane: Well, I think you hit it right on the nose. The Prime Directive in Star Trek is that you don’t mess around with another species’ evolution, right? You let it go, you let it play out, and you don’t interfere.

My sense is that we are being observed by other intelligences. There’s just overwhelming evidence of something going on. But at the same time, I don’t see interference in the unfolding of what’s happening.

So I think, as you indicated, Rick, first we have to demonstrate our own maturity as a species and as a family. We can take care of our own matters; we can take care of the Earth. At that point, we’re then good candidates for the Galactic Confederation, or whatever it might be. But I think we have to demonstrate our own maturity first before we’re going to see other civilizations connect with us.

Rick: Yeah. I think it was Groucho Marx who said, “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would accept me as a member.” It’s like, who would want us to partner with them on a larger scale when we’re making such a mess down here as it is?

But it’s exciting. It might seem like “woo-woo,” but it’s exciting to consider, because consider the technologies that might be out there and the benefit that those could have, as some of our science-fiction movies and books have suggested.

If we could just get our act together a little bit more, we could make much more accelerated progress than we’ve even made and really live in a marvelous world. It’s heavenly, not only technologically and in terms of consciousness, but also without resorting to some simple agrarian, digging-with-a-plow kind of lifestyle.

It could be something that’s both technologically and spiritually advanced to a profound degree.

Duane: Yes, absolutely. I wrote the book Voluntary Simplicity, and there’s a very strong tendency for people to say, “Well, that’s a regressive lifestyle. It’s going back to the past.”

No, it’s going into a very promising future, and it’s a future we have yet to really imagine and create—a new kind of economy and all the rest. Simplicity is the foundation for sustainability in this new world.

Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian, at one time had more than 20 volumes looking at the rise and fall of civilizations around the world. He finally summarized everything he knew about the rise and fall of civilizations in one law about civilizational growth. It was called the “Law of Progressive Simplification.”

I love it: the Law of Progressive Simplification. What he said was, the measure of a civilization’s growth is its ability to transfer energy and attention from the material side to the nonmaterial side. The nonmaterial side includes art, education, and the capacity to govern ourselves with an informed body politic, and so on.

These ephemeral things are really the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement. What we need to do is create the strong material foundation for that to be developed. What we’re doing instead is privileging the material foundation and not really going for the juice, the aliveness, that’s there with the ephemeralization Toynbee talks about: progressive simplification.

Rick: Yeah. We’re saying things like, “Well, we need to cut education because the military needs more money.”

Duane: Yeah.

Rick: You mentioned in your book that American Indian lore speaks of three miracles. What are the miracles?

Duane: This is wonderful. The first miracle is that anything exists at all. The second miracle is that living things exist—plants and animals. And the third miracle is that living things exist that know they exist. That’s ourselves: the capacity for reflective consciousness.

I often say we are so absorbed with that third miracle—our reflective knowing and consciousness and all the rest—that there’s a tendency to forget the first miracle: that there’s anything here at all.

That’s where we started: the universe is a living system. Plato says it’s a single living creature, and we’re a part of that larger aliveness.

If we forget the first miracle, we’re forgetting the larger aliveness we’re part of. So it’s vital to remember the first miracle as well as the third miracle, and then, between them, the rest of life. They’re all important.

Fine-tuning and intelligent creation

Rick: Yeah. That was something you mentioned in your book, and I think Robert Lanza talks about this a lot. The fine-tuning of dozens of key factors is essential, because even the most minute variation would have resulted in no universe at all. Maybe you can mention what a few of those key factors are.

Duane: I’m not sure. I just know that if the expansion rate of the universe, for example—

Rick: Yeah.

Duane: When it was born, had been infinitesimally slower, it would have collapsed into nothingness; or, if it had been faster, it would have inflated and just exploded into—I don’t know what. But it has this extremely fine-tuned capacity, neither growing too fast nor too slowly, to be exactly steady in its development over billions of years—now almost fourteen billion years.

Rick: Yeah, and there are a number of other such things. I mean, I’ve read articles and things about this, but there are so many different factors that, if they were just a teeny-tiny bit off, we couldn’t have had a universe. It just wouldn’t have remained in existence.

The reason I bring that up, and the reason you brought it up in your book, is that it again points to there being some very profound intelligence that seems to be orchestrating things.

There are scientists like Stephen Hawking who say, “Well, yeah, but then there are probably an infinite number of universes, and most of them didn’t result in life. Ours is a fluke. It’s just a chance universe in which life was able to evolve.”

But I don’t think it works that way.

Duane: That’s an interesting opinion.

Rick: Yeah, an opinion—it’s like a desperate attempt to adjust to, you know, hang on to the materialistic paradigm, really.

Another thing you bring up in your book, which I’ve often—I mean, some of the times when we talk about intelligence governing the universe and so on, people might say, “Well, that sounds like intelligent design.” How would you contrast intelligent design, as it’s ordinarily defined, with what you’re saying?

Duane: Often, intelligent design is meant to say there is a designer that is actively engaged in the unfolding of this universe. That has, in the background, this hidden designer intruding into the reality of this world.

Another way of looking at it is to say the universe is intelligently designed itself. It has dimensions, for example, and every dimension opens up not only into a physical space but also a psychological space.

If we see the universe in three dimensions, we’re seeing the depth of things. In three dimensions, we can see nature going around and around; we can see nature’s cycles and rhythms.

If we go to four dimensions, we begin to see not only the cycles going round and round, but also relativistic dynamics—how one thing moves relative to another. Then we have the mindset that, I think, gives rise to the industrial era. The materialistic, relativistic dynamics come out of four dimensions.

So the universe is intelligently designed, I feel, in its very foundations. The dimensional structure of the universe not only structures physical space, but also psychological and spiritual space. We are learning our way into more and more dimensional openings, more and more spaciousness in how we regard and engage the universe.

Rick: Yeah. Of course, there are certain Eastern views of it that God is not only not some kind of old dude in the clouds with a beard, acting like some kind of puppeteer, but God is—I think the Upanishads say—God breathed himself into creation. The whole creation is really nothing but God, nothing but pure intelligence interacting within itself.

We are like cells or, if you will, sense organs of that infinite intelligence. Muktananda used to say, “God dwells within you, as you.” As you know, we’re kind of seeing through various instruments, whether we’re an aardvark, a dog, a person, or whatever. It’s that same divine intelligence living and experiencing a living reality through a particular nervous system.

Duane: Exactly. See, that brings us together. It transcends all of these places of division to say we’re together in the aliveness of the living universe. Simple as that.

We can recognize that in our direct experience. It’s not a concept, love. It’s a feeling; it’s a deep appreciation of our connectedness, our communion. We’re a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, as Thomas Berry very famously said.

So we’re learning our way into a universe of communion with one another and with ourselves, recognizing that there’s a vastly larger, open, evolutionary possibility beckoning all of us to step beyond materialism and into our lives.

👁️ Continuous creation and the light of the universe

Rick: As you know, when I was reading your book, The Living Universe, I stumbled upon a footnote that was several pages long, all about continuous-creation cosmology, and I found that really exciting. I had you send the text of it to me so I could send it to a physicist friend.

It gets a little heady, but let’s talk about that for a few minutes. I think it’s fascinating. Why don’t you explain what that is?

Duane: Many people have had the experience—just this last Christmas—of virtual reality, putting on one of those headsets and entering into virtual reality and feeling themselves immersed in another world.

That’s the cosmic-hologram view of things, if you will: that this universe is a kind of cosmic hologram. Moment by moment, it is being recreated. It’s being refreshed, just like a film is refreshed moment by moment with a new projection. Moment by moment, we’re being refreshed with a new manifestation of the entire cosmos.

This insight is emerging not only from the frontiers of cosmology and science; it’s also deeply present in the world’s wisdom traditions—that the universe is, or is being, recreated in its totality moment by moment by moment.

The interesting thing—there are various interesting things—is that, first of all, if it is being recreated moment by moment, then there is what we would call, in computer language, a refresh rate: the rate at which the screen gets refreshed.

So the question is, what is the refresh rate for the cosmic hologram? Because we’re inside of it, we can’t stand outside and see it. We have to make inferences from inside the hologram.

What we can do is say, “Well, there’s one thing that we know is constant, and that is the speed of light.” The speed of light is constant. Why would the speed of light be constant?

What if the entire cosmic hologram is being woven together with precise evenness and precise simultaneity across the entire universe? The entire cosmic hologram is being lifted—manifested into existence—at this continuous speed.

The premise that I’ve suggested is that the continuity of creation at the cosmic scale has been seen as the constancy of the speed of light at the local scale.

So the constancy of the speed of light is a byproduct of something happening at a much larger scale: the cosmic scale of being continuously created, moment by moment, at a very precise, even flow. That’s what I’m suggesting and hypothesizing as the source of the constancy of the speed of light.

Rick: Essentially, you mentioned in your book that the reason a physical object can’t reach the speed of light is that, as Einstein said, as it begins to approach it, it gets heavier and heavier and heavier. So you need greater and greater propulsion to continue accelerating. At a certain point, it would become almost infinite, and you couldn’t get that much propulsion.

Secondly, it begins to collapse physically, as I understand it. As you say, by trying to push the speed of light, you’re trying to step outside that very thing that created you.

You quote—might have been David Bohm here—describing matter as condensed or frozen light. And there’s a quote here; I don’t know if this is you or Bohm: “The solid, stable world of matter appears to be sustained at every instant by an underlying sea of quantum light.” Any comment on that before I elaborate or say anything more?

Duane: If this hand is getting created at the speed of light, and we move it up to the speed of light, it goes… And we try to move it faster than that, we’re going to try to move it faster than the speed at which it’s coming into existence.

So if it’s happening at the speed of light, it can’t go faster than the speed at which it’s arising in the first place. As it approaches the speed at which it’s coming together, it’s going to run into itself becoming itself. As it runs into itself becoming itself, it’s an impossible situation. It can’t go faster than that.

So there’s the self-limiting nature of relativistic dynamics that Einstein described. He didn’t know why it did that; he just said it would do that. I’m saying, “Why will it do that?” Because it’s running into itself becoming itself.

I think the basic building block of this reality is light. One way of regarding it is that it is so wonderful. Jesus was asked by one of his disciples, “What should we tell people if they ask us where we came from?”

Jesus replied—this is from the Gospel of Thomas—“If they ask you that, tell them we came from the light, from a place where light established itself of its own accord.” Einstein would have loved that: “We came from the light, the place where light established itself of its own accord.”

So we’re beings of light in a light universe, if you will.

So we’re beings of light in a light universe, if you will.

Rick: Just one more thing about this continuous-creation cosmology. We’ve all heard about the Big Bang: there’s this little, tiny point, it exploded, and it’s been expanding out for 13.7 billion years.

But another way of thinking of creation, which you’ve just alluded to, is that it’s happening continuously. It’s not just something that happened and we’re just kind of expanding out.

Physicists describe this as the manifestation from the unmanifest, unified-field level of creation to more and more manifest levels of creation. I’ve seen whole unified-field charts that explain all the sequential, spontaneous symmetry breaking as more and more diversification happens and manifestation occurs.

This is something that’s happening continuously. It’s not just something that happened a long time ago. And you’re saying that it happens at the speed of light?

Duane: Essentially, that’s a yes. That’s crudely stated, if you will, because the speed of light is not necessarily constant; it can vary. But what’s required is the consistency of creation at the cosmic scale. The byproduct of that is the constancy of the speed of light at the local scale.

Rick: Essentially, you need to consider that if you were a photon, then for you it’s almost as if you’re omnipresent. Photons coming from the Andromeda Galaxy appear to us to take two million years to get here, but from the perspective of the photon, the trip is instantaneous.

That kind of means that everything is everywhere. Everything is here now, and the photon can almost say, “I am. I’m the present.”

Duane: Yeah. The quantum reality—we know that in the quantum realm nonlocality is real. It’s been demonstrated again and again and again.

Nonlocality means that, at the subatomic quantum level, we are connecting with the entire universe as a unified system.

On the other hand, we see ourselves as very unique and differentiated from everything else. That’s true. The amazing thing is that both are true. We’re both unique, absolutely unique, and absolutely a part of the cosmic whole.

So we’re both unique and whole, and there’s no problem in having those both be true.

Rick: You were saying a minute ago that Jesus said we come from light, and we were quoting earlier that it’s all God—that people have said God is light. I don’t know how to quite tie those thoughts together, but there’s something very interesting in all that.

Duane: Oh, yeah. We’re beings of light, and we’re becoming enlightened. We’re waking up to the light within.

Rick: Here’s something nice you say: “Awakening is never finished. We will forever be enlightening ourselves, becoming lighter, so that we will have the ability to participate in ever more free, subtle, open, delicate, and expressive ecologies of being and becoming.”

Duane: Okay, something I think is really important. In my estimation, what we’re doing here is just getting a hold of ourselves. We’re not in the 3,000th dimension of an infinite universe, or the 300th, or the third. We’re in the third dimension. We’re only two steps above a black hole; we’re just getting started.

We’re just crawling out of the contraction of a black hole to get to a place of presenting ourselves as differentiated beings in this universe. I think our challenge now is to get a hold of ourselves in the sense of recognizing the light within us, the invisible aspects within ourselves, which are actually the majority of ourselves.

Ninety-five to ninety-six percent of the known universe is invisible, and that includes us. We need to get a hold of the invisible because, deep down inside, we are a body of light. As you were saying, we’re a body of love, or a body of music, resonance, or a body of knowing. These are all invisible.

But if we use our time, while we have this visible, biodegradable body, to explore the fact that we’re beings of light, love, music, and knowing, we can then take those qualities of being into the deep ecology of the universe. We may die, obviously, but our selves as bodies of light, love, music, and knowing can continue.

Then we have a body that can move into the deepest ecologies of the living universe without forgetting itself. The universe is saying, in freedom, “Do this. Discover yourself. Find yourself. Discover that third miracle of knowing that you know that you are a being of reflective consciousness in this living universe.”

Rick: I’m reminded of that quote from the Bible: “If your eye is single, your whole body will be filled with light.”

Duane: Yeah.

Living simply and serving the future

Rick: A question came in. This might be a good one for us to aim toward wrapping up on because it’s kind of practical. It’s from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California, who often sends in questions. The question is: How have your insights impacted your own lifestyle? Have you consciously endeavored to minimize your consumption and shrink your carbon footprint? Do you have any advice?

Duane: Yes, it’s radically impacted how I’ve lived my life. I dropped out of traditional employment, if you will, in 1976. That’s 41 years ago. I didn’t have savings, I didn’t have a nest egg, and I didn’t have a source of income. I just said, “It’s time, as a citizen of this universe, to step up and engage a world in great transition.”

I never would have done the work that I’ve done—co-founding three nonprofits for media accountability, writing books, and all the rest—had I been intent upon living a more comfortable lifestyle with more secure income. Often, I will have only two or three months of secure income in front of me.

Rick: Even now?

Duane: Even now. Even though I feel very grateful to know that three months from now I’ve still got some money in front of me. This is a very challenging way to live. On the other hand, I am hugely grateful for the great gifts I’ve been given for being willing to do that, if you will.

Rick: Well, that’s wonderful. As far as other people are concerned—people who are raising families and doing this and that—you’re not suggesting, I suppose, that everyone go out and quit their job. What kind of takeaway points can people take from this interview that they could apply in their own lives? They might want to make some radical change, or maybe there are some smaller, incremental changes they can make that wouldn’t upset the applecart too much.

Duane: I tell people these are the most profound turning times that the human species has ever encountered. That’s what we’re going into. Let’s not pull back from actually describing what’s going on. This is the greatest transition humanity has ever gone through, and I feel this is going to be a rough ride, just looking at the dynamics of the time.

What I would encourage people to do is find their true gifts. Find the talents and skills you have that will contribute to a more sustainable future and a more sustainable community.

Having lived in a cohousing community and something of an ecovillage community, as I look at the future, I think one of the best things to do is start developing multiple skill sets. For example, you might be a lawyer, but you could also be a gardener. You could also learn woodworking skills, and you could learn elder care or education, or whatever.

If you’re in a small, let’s say, ecovillage community and you have a range of skill sets—you know how to garden, perhaps work with solar energy, maybe work with kids, and so on—and you can bring those skill sets together, you have a livelihood. You have a future of meaning and purpose that will carry you into the future.

So I see a new kind of arrangement of skill sets to live in community in a sustainable way as we make this great transition into a more promising future. I would say, forget the mere gifts that you have probably used to earn a living. What are the true gifts that you have that will really take us into a more promising future? Now is the time to reach for those true gifts.

Rick: Yeah, I think one value of everyone studying a little bit of futurism and future predictions is that it puts things in context. It seems to me that most societies, in general, never really feel that things are always going to be the way they are now.

You can imagine people in the 1800s thinking, “We’re always going to have railroads. That’s going to be the fastest means of transportation,” along with horses and buggies. Of course, if you’re a blacksmith, at a certain point your livelihood got seriously threatened by the automobile coming along. You could either hang on to that, or you could learn new skills, as you were saying.

During the last campaign, Trump went to West Virginia and said, “I’m going to bring back coal mining. We’re going to mine so much coal.” The coal industry is dead. There was a guy on the news just the other night saying, “He said he’s going to bring back the steel mills. I’m so excited about that.”

But we have to be more agile than that. We can either do it willingly, or we can just have the rug pulled out from under us.

Duane: Yeah, the word “agile” is so appropriate. We have to be nimble, we have to be light on our feet, and we have to be able to move. These are transition times, and the ability to move—to be lighter on your feet, to be nimble—in your businesses, your work, and your life is critical, I think, for viability in the future.

Rick: You know, the thought that comes to mind when you say that is that it’s really valuable to have some sort of spiritual practice that really works for you. Most of the people listening to this show have one. It makes you more nimble, more flexible, more creative, and less habitual and conditioned. You can go with the flow a lot more and jump at opportunities when they come along.

Duane: The whole idea of a living universe is a reframing of spirituality. In my cosmology, intimacy with a living universe is spirituality. That’s spirituality: becoming intimate with the ordinary reality around us and engaging with it in its depth. That is a miracle.

Intimacy with a living universe is spirituality.

Rick: Great. All right, well, that’s probably a good note to end on.

Duane: Yeah.

Rick: So, do you want to make any kind of wrap-up plan, or was that good enough for watery eyes?

Duane: Good.

Rick: Okay, great. Let me make a couple of general announcements. As most people watching this know, this is an ongoing series, and we keep putting up a new one each week.

If you found this show interesting and it’s new to you, you might want to go to batgap.com and check out the previous ones. You can also sign up to be notified by email each time a new one is posted. There are quite a few other things on the site. I won’t run through them all, but there’s an “At a Glance” menu. If you look at that, you’ll see what’s available on batgap.com.

I really appreciate your listening or watching. Next week, I’ll be speaking to a fellow named Brian Yosef, who’s going to talk about enlightenment and awakening from the perspective of Judaism. I’ve never really covered that topic. He himself is—I’m not sure if he’s a rabbi or just very deeply into Judaism—but he has also had a very profound spiritual awakening. That’ll be an interesting thing to discuss.

So, thank you, Duane.

Duane: Great. Thank you, Rick.

Rick: It’s been a lot of fun.

Duane: Good to be here.

Rick: Yeah. I’ll probably see you in October at the Science and Nonduality Conference.

Duane: I look forward to it.

Rick: And again, thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. I will see you next week.