The Story of Gaia
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, and about spirituality and science and their interrelations. I’ve done around 670 of these now. If you would like to check out – but who’s counting Irene says. I am! I’ve been saying this for years and the number keeps going up. But in any case, if you would like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll see them organized in several different ways. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the website.
My guest today is Jude Currivan, Ph.D. I had Jude on BatGap previously a few years ago and got to meet her in person at one of the Science and Nonduality conferences. I think we’re good friends. We really hit it off both in that interview and we had some subsequent conversations with a mathematician who lives here in town and then enjoyed each other’s company at the conference. So I really like Jude and I like what she has to say, and it’s a joy to be back together with her again. Let me read her bio just a little bit. Jude is a cosmologist, planetary healer, and futurist. She has a master’s degree in physics from Oxford University and a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Reading in the U.K. She has traveled to more than 80 countries, worked with wisdom keepers from many traditions, and is a lifelong researcher into the nature of reality. She’s the author of six books, maybe seven now, Jude? Seven now, okay? Most recently, The Story of Gaia, and a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle. She lives in Wiltshire, England. So, in preparation for this interview, I listened to her book, The Story of Gaia, The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet, and it covers a lot of subjects that fascinate me, which we’ll be talking about today. I also listened to the first interview that Jude and I did on BatGap, and I would recommend that anyone who enjoys this one listen to that one also, because we covered a lot of territory, and hopefully we won’t repeat ourselves, but even if we do, it’s worth listening to a couple of times, because there’s just so much that she comes out with. And one thing I think I will ask you to repeat yourself, Jude, is in the first interview, you talked a little bit about your childhood and mystical or interdimensional experiences that you were having when you were young and have had periodically throughout your life. It might be useful to just tell people a little bit about that, just to give them more of a context of who you are and from what perspective you speak.
Jude: Thanks, Rick. And I have to say, you’re looking younger and younger than we were last time. It’s just great to be back with you, so thank you for the invite.
Rick: Thanks, Jude.
Jude: As Rick knows, I grew up in the Midlands of England, in an industrial part of England, and my dad and granddad were both coal miners, so I certainly did not come from a privileged or intellectual environment. It was a very grounded and yet community-based upbringing. And within all of that, when I was four years old, I had my first, what I might call, my first experience of walking between worlds, my first multidimensional experience directly. And that was when a discarnate light came into my room and I started to clairaudiently hear a voice, and almost an invitation to a lifelong adventure. And that lifelong adventure continues to this day. So during that period of time, I was four years old then, I’m 70 now, it’s been over six and a half decades of exploration and curiosity and discovery and joy at the incredible abundance of the entire world. And it’s a world, in my experience, that is not one that we’re still taught at school. It’s a world that is multidimensional. It’s a world of meaning and purpose. And so everything in existence has meaning and purpose in these explorations and these direct experiences. So, Rick, we can come back to that later, but I think what, for me, has been so fundamental is those adventures, those journeyings have actually always kept me open to a worldview and a perspective that’s been much greater than we normally are experiencing in our societies, at school, in our families, et cetera. But what it’s done is it’s kept me open to follow wherever the evidence leads. I’ve been willing to do that. And, of course, now, which we’ll explore, and we explored to some degree last time we were together, is that that evidence is leading us at the leading edge of science to convergence with universal wisdom teachings. And in that, essentially, a reunification of our perception of reality itself. And that’s what I’m so excited by because it’s happening now. We have the evidence now, and we have not had that evidence until the last few years.
Rick: I’m very excited about that, too, because I think that the old paradigm, the materialist paradigm, can take a great deal, if not most, of the blame. That’s the same thing, a great deal, and most, for the condition of the world we live in, you know, the environmental degradation and the mistreatment of millions and even billions of people. I mean, if you view the world as dead and sentient stuff, then you can do anything you want with that stuff and take as much of it as you want. And I really think that it’s so important for humanity to wake up to the realization that the entire world and entire universe is alive in ways that you’ll be describing today. And whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me, as Jesus said, and you do unto yourself. Anyway, I think that a shift to that perspective is underway, and I think it is vital, and you are doing a lot to contribute to it.
Jude: Thank you, Rick. I’d just like to say something, actually, because I do appreciate where we’re at, because our worldview, our collective worldview, is one of materialism and separation. But if we go back 400 years to 1623, a philosopher called Francis Bacon, who’s had a lot of blame put at his door as the father of the scientific method, in my research over many years with him and others researching his fundamental writings, that he was actually looking to integrate heaven and earth, and he was realizing it that at the time the understanding of earth, as it were, was based on superstition. So he came up with a scientific method that was able to be followed, not to dispel spirituality, not to get rid of the idea of wholeness, but to reveal it, to reveal a deeper understanding of the divine plan. And yet a lot of what he wrote about was mistranslated and then retranslated badly. But what I’ve been doing for a number of years is really inviting us to reconsider his intention, which, of course, like so many things, has unintended consequences. But part of that journey over 400 years has also moved us beyond essentially a superstitious-based worldview into a more consensus-based, evidence-based. It’s just that the interpretation of that created a schism between sort of materiality and spirituality that was, in my view, none of his intention, nor was it Isaac Newton’s intention, who revered Bacon, nor was it Charles Darwin’s intention, who also saw Bacon as essentially a way-shower. So I think we’re now on the cusp of reinterpreting those great giants on whose shoulders we stand, but also we have so much more evidence now to indeed reveal the wholeness of the nature of reality. And it is time, as you say, I wholeheartedly agree we have to grow up now. We have to wake up to appreciate, realize we’re inseparable. And then what does that call us to?
Rick: Would you say that perhaps those who ushered in and have perpetuated a materialist worldview can’t be blamed too much because there was a lot of superstition, to use the word you just used, and utter nonsense being propagated by spiritual authorities back in their day. And so they recoiled against that and just wanted to be done with it. And it was hard for them to parse out the more genuine mystical insights from the ones propagated by dogmatists. And so they just kind of threw the whole baby out with the bathwater and said, “Let’s just stick to the concrete stuff.”
Jude: Absolutely. And I’m not blaming or shaming anyone. I think that’s absolutely part of that journey. And of course, the more you go along that journey, the more that the scientific exploration becomes a form of dogmatism and scientism itself. We’re good at human beings. We want this sense of certainty. And of course, this is an explorative universe. This is an evolving universe. This is an emergent universe. I just wanted to point that out because I think there has been a lot of blame that is unnecessary. And I also would love us to start at this point and say, where now? And what is the evidence showing us now? And what can that mean for us as a species and as a species, as sort of citizens of our planetary home, Gaia, and citizens of a unified and evolving universe?
Rick: Yeah. So your first book, which I read and we talked about last time, was The Cosmic Hologram. I don’t have a physical copy of the Gaia book here, but that’s okay. That’s more what we’re going to be talking about today. And I gather that this is some kind of trilogy or sequence of books. And so, how many more will there be in this sequence?
Jude: Well, the trilogy, the idea of a trilogy came to me more than 20 years ago. And I was guided that there might be the possibility of me writing, and I hadn’t written anything then, by the way. I hadn’t written anything by that point. But here I was being sort of guided, “You’ll write a trilogy. Oh, my goodness me.” And the name came, The Transformation Trilogy. And I was told that the first book would be to help us understand the unified nature of reality. So it would be an understanding. The second book would help us experience, come into a more deeply experienced sense of that unity. And then the third book would actually serve us, hopefully, in our conscious evolution and our embodiment of unity in our everyday lives. So The Cosmic Hologram was the first book. And five, six years ago nearly now, it lays out the framework, the underpinning of a new model of meaningfully informed and holographically manifest universe, that actually six years later, ever more evidence is pointing us in that direction. And we can come back to that. The second book, The Story of Gaia, The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet, is literally that. It’s showing, the first book showed that our universe exists and evolves as a non-locally unified entity. The Story of Gaia shows that it embodies, it embeds an innate evolutionary impulse to evolve from initial simplicity to ever greater levels of complexity and individuated and collective self-awareness. The third book, as you’d expect, because the second book’s about Gaia’s story, humanity only arrives right at the end, because this is a 13.8 billion year extraordinary journey. And it ends just as our human ancestors were coming into existence. The third book, which I hope will be titled Many Voices, One Heart, will be the story of us, some of our past, but very much where we are now and what we can potentially evolve to, in my perception, become.
Rick: Nice. As I was reading your latest book, I kept thinking it would be really cool if this were some kind of a documentary with all sorts of beautiful graphics depicting the things you were talking about. Maybe the BBC could do it, or somebody, David Attenborough, you could get him to do it. But it would need a lot of computer animation, obviously, because a lot of the stuff you can’t actually film. But because it is very visual, it evokes a lot of images in the mind when you read. For instance, one of my favorite stories, and this is just totally out of sequence here, but tell the story of the slime mold, the oatmeal flakes, and the Tokyo subway system.
Jude: Sometimes a book has one story, one little vignette that everybody goes, “Oh my God, oh my goodness!”
Rick: I’ve been telling that to people. I’ll say to a friend, “Hey, want to hear something cool about slime mold?” And they say, “What?”
Jude: If I have to, Rick, if you insist. Well, the story of biological evolution, of simplicity to complexity, has been one that within the whole universal story has been essentially a story of randomness and a story where there is no innate meaning or purpose to the whole evolutionary arc of our entire universe. So I know we’ll go back and tread some of those steps, and where consciousness somehow, after all that randomness and accidental progress, somehow arises from a material brain, and only at the last steps of that complex journey. So, for many, many years, it would have been almost unthinkable for evolutionary biologists to consider that a single-celled being would be able to do the sort of things that a slime mold can do. And we can go back and unpick this and grow it, but a slime mold, there are two types of slime molds. I have to say my favorite is called the plasmodial slime mold, which means it’s a single cell, but it’s huge. It has many different nuclei within it, but it is a single cell. And then there are other types of slime molds, which are multicellular and more like social amoeba. But the one that you’re referring to is what’s called a plasmodial slime mold, a single-celled being. And there’s a particular type that’s like the rock star of slime molds when it comes to experiments, and that’s called physarum polycephalum. And in a laboratory, researchers have essentially nurtured, cultured the slime mold. And what they’ve done is they’ve cultured it on a flat surface. And they’ve actually, this is quite a few years ago now, but these experiments are ongoing because they’re so amazing. And it turns out, who knew, that the favorite food of slime molds in a laboratory are oat flakes. Yeah? Oat flakes.
Rick: I had that for breakfast, so I think I’m related to the slime mold.
Jude: We all are. We stand on the shoulders of giants, including the slime mold. So these guys, these researchers, put a slime mold in the middle of a plate, and then they put oat flakes around it. And then they filmed what happened. And the slime mold fairly quickly, I mean, no, not within minutes, but a couple of hours, reached out in an incredibly effective way to find the food, to find the oat flakes and absorb them. And what the researchers did, though, those oat flakes were not placed randomly. They were placed to position the stations in the greater Metro Tokyo transport system. So they represented stations. So the slime mold was able to show the most effective routes between all the stations in Tokyo. And when that film, and when those-
Rick: Because it formed little tendrils between-
Jude: Little tendrils. Well, it brings its membrane out and absorbs it exactly that. So it doesn’t break the membrane of its single cell, but it does, it moves it out very intelligently. And when they overlaid this process of the slime molds, they realized it was not just the most effective way of connecting stations, but it actually replicated the work that the engineers, the Japanese engineers had done with supercomputers over a long time to create the exact same patterns. Except the slime molds did it a lot cheaper and a lot quicker and didn’t take any benefit, didn’t take other than their oat flakes, didn’t require any thank-yous of any sort. But that sort of approach, that sort of complexity, that ability of complex behavior, of informational flows and processes and guidance and complex behavior, is now being used in many, many other complex systems, which would otherwise require enormous amounts and a long time of supercomputer analytics.
Rick: So you’re saying they actually still, they’re using slime molds to work out patterns like that?
Jude: Yep.
Rick: That’s very cool. And the reason I like that kind of thing, I’m sure you do too, is that I’ve debated with friends about whether there’s any kind of fundamental intelligence orchestrating the universe. And a lot of them, even people with a meditation background and so on, don’t really buy into it. And you hear people saying things like somehow the universe is this accidental random thing, and oh yes, but there are laws of nature. We don’t know how those came about, but if you grant us that one miracle that the laws of nature somehow arose, we can explain everything, and you don’t need to resort to some deep intelligence, like pervading everything, that kind of argument. Have you ever had actual friendly debates with people like that? And how do you respond to them?
Jude: I don’t bother, to be honest, because I feel that if somebody comes from that perception, I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind. I’m not trying to change anybody’s worldview. What I am doing is sharing my own experiences, and latterly in both The Cosmic Hologram and now in The Story of Gaia, I’m revealing the evidence at all scales of existence and across numerous fields of research that show that the appearance of our universe does in fact emerge from deeper levels of causation and discarnate intelligence. As many scientific pioneers have understood, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Schrödinger, John Archibald Wheeler. So, I’m just showing the evidence, and in these two books, there is the evidence of something like 20 or 30 thousand researchers across many, many different fields of research, all showing the same thing. And just to show how this direction of travel is moving, I wrote The Cosmic Hologram back in 2017. After it went to press, there were two experiments that were essentially supporting it at cosmological scales that I wasn’t able to put in that book, but I have been able to refer to in The Story of Gaia. One was in 2017, where the same mathematical informational patterns that we find from the scales of atoms on up through planetary scales, solar system scales, galactic scales, the same fractal patterning was discovered in what’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the relic radiation left over from a very early epoch of the universe that fills the whole of space. And that was a coalition of five universities back in 2017. In 2017 and 2018, a research group at MIT were able to show that one of the predictions and one of the requirements for quantum physics, which is that the entire universe is non-locally unified, they were able again to experimentally show that by what’s called entangling photons of light in the laboratory with starlight from 600 light years away from light from a very, very active, powerful galactic center called a quasar 12.2 billion years away. So these are sort of that scale, but to just add to that, this year, the Nobel Prize for physics was given to three researchers, Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger, and John Clauser, all of whom have been pioneers in this non-local quantum unification at far, far, far greater scales than the quantum. And latterly, and you may know this, two physicists called Professor Brian Cox, who’s very well known in the UK, and Professor Jeff Forshaw, his colleague, have just bought a book out in October of this year called Black Holes. And in that, right at the end of Black Holes, and I speak too about this because it’s central to what I write about in The Cosmic Hologram, and it’s central to our understanding of what we call the holographic universe model, that they say right at the end, they don’t know how it happens, but they now realize that the appearance of space and time and this energy and matter, in other words, the appearance of our universe, arises from deeper, non-physical levels of causation. Which is exactly what I wrote about six years ago, and what I continue to write about in The Story of Gaia. So this direction, regardless of what your friends are saying, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what they say. It doesn’t matter what we say. This is not about trying to persuade somebody. It’s actually to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve often heard people say that a lot of modern thinking is at least 100 years out of date because Einstein and Max Planck and all those guys 100 years ago or more came out with an understanding of the universe that many materialistic thinking people haven’t grasped yet or just ignore.
Jude: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when we look back, we look back to the sort of the mechanistic science of the late 19th century before the discoveries and the evidence of Albert Einstein and space-time relativity and of the quantum physicists. And there is an absolute, oh my goodness, what we’ve been shown here. And some of the pioneering scientists realized, the best insight into what they were discovering, and the evidence that was coming forward, was actually thousands of years old. And a number of them went back primarily to the Vedic tradition of ancient India, and the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads are commentaries on the nature of reality. And there’s one particular, the Ishavasya Upanishad, which was my comfort when I was young, because what I was being taught about science bore no real recollection to what I was experiencing. But this ancient wisdom did. And it talks about mind and consciousness aren’t something we have. They are literally what we and the whole world are. And this is what the evidence is now showing and converging with such universal wisdom, teaching, spirituality. But the point is that there was such an absolute refutation of the evidence that it was almost like a knee-jerk reaction to stay in the mechanistic mindset, the materialistic separatist mindset of the earlier era of late 19th century physics. And that’s pretty much been the mainstream perspective ever since. We’ve moved forward in terms of technologies, but we’ve not moved forward with this deeper perception of the underlying fundamental nature of reality itself until now.
Rick: Well, there wasn’t any actual refutation of the evidence of quantum mechanics and relativity, but perhaps there was an ignoring of it or something. You know, let’s get on with the business of making money or whatever, but this is not-
Jude: Absolutely. You’re right. You’re right. But it was that point of it wasn’t the refutation of the evidence because that’s been what’s driven-
Rick: Because it’s rock solid, yeah.
Jude: Absolutely. But it was the implication of the evidence.
Rick: Right, right.
Jude: The deeper implication of what the evidence was revealing to us.
Rick: When you were talking a minute ago about the galaxy that was 13 billion light years away and some photons in the lab and the complementarity, was it?
Jude: I said the word entanglement.
Rick: Entanglement, right.
Jude: Yeah.
Rick: I think what you’re getting at there might be worth explaining it to the audience is that experiments with that sort of thing have shown that there’s an instantaneous and deep correlation or connection between far distant particles which far exceed the capabilities of the speed of light. Like, something happens here and on the other side of the galaxy it happens instantaneously there.
And so, that kind of suggests an underlying field that is beyond all relative constraints such as the speed of light that underlies and interconnects everything. How did I do? I’m trying to explain that.
Jude: You did great. You did great. Basically, I think back in the day quantum physicists were realizing that for quantum physics to work at all, our entire universe did need to be what’s called non-locally unified in the way you’ve described. So, our entire universe exists and evolves as a unified entity where it knows itself simultaneously without any limitation. But that was a real dilemma even to the geniuses around at that time because the quantum physicists were revealing this as an underlying requirement for what they were discovering. And yet Albert Einstein hated the idea. He called it spooky action at a distance because he was realizing that within space-time there is a speed limit. I mean, he began by realizing the genius that is Albert Einstein began when he was 16 years old and he followed a beam of light. And he realized that no matter how fast he went he could never catch up that beam of light. And over many years and with mathematical precision he was able to show that space and time are each of themselves relative to an observer. But he went a step further and this is what a lot of folks forget. He realized that the space and time had to be conjoined into something he called space-time that was not then relative. It was invariant. And that is why we can talk about a universe that began 13.8 billion years ago where within space-time, what we call space-time, the appearance of space-time, that there is a cosmic speed limit and that is the speed of light. Otherwise we would have no notion of past and present unfolding to a future. We’d have no notion of causality within our universe and yet it’s an and-and. And so now we’re realizing that within the appearance of our universe of space-time and energy matter, the speed of light indeed is a cosmic speed limit. Otherwise we couldn’t be having this conversation. And yet, and our entire universe from that first moment 13.8 billion years ago to today and onward exists and evolves as a non-locally unified entity. So think of it as a balloon. Very, very simply as a balloon. Begin to blow that balloon up 13.8 billion years ago. Continue to blow it up. So as that balloon expands, its surface knows itself in its entirety. But within the balloon, the appearance of that inner reality of that balloon, that’s where space-time and energy matter, its appearance play out. And it’s that inner manifestation and appearance where there is a speed limit and there needs to be. Otherwise the laws of physics couldn’t work. We would not be having this conversation. And yet, our universe is a great thought, which is what we’re discovering in the minds of the cosmos, exists and evolves as such a non-locally unified, intelligent, living, whole entity.
Rick: I learned not too long ago, using your balloon analogy, that a lot of people have heard the idea that if you draw dots on the balloon to represent galaxies, let’s say, and then you blow up the balloon, then all the dots are moving away from each other. But from the perspective of any one dot, it’s staying still, and all the other ones are moving away from it. And the interesting thing is that the universe can inflate at such a rate that relative to one another, the galaxies can actually be exceeding the speed of light at a certain point. But it’s not that they are, because nothing can. It’s that space itself is expanding, and space apparently is, or maybe it’s space-time that’s expanding, and it’s so fundamental that it can’t exceed the speed of light. Did I get that one right?
Jude: You did, but I think you’re a bit out of date.
Rick: Feel free to correct me.
Jude: You’re a bit out of date.
Rick: Oh, am I good?
Jude: Well, first of all, this idea of a very, very rapid inflation, what’s called inflation epoch at the beginning of our universe, was a hypothesis to try and explain away the level of fine-tuning, the level of homogeneity, the level of uniformity at the foundations of our universe. Despite decades and decades of trying, we found no evidence that such an epoch occurred. It might have done, but it was almost a hypothesis that was put in place to resolve a non-existent problem. And the non-existent problem was non-existent because the cosmology of the time had not yet got to an understanding of a holographic universe. In the decades since, and the ever-increasing evidence that the appearance of our universe essentially is a holographic projection, an informational projection, holographically manifest, with its entirety and its wholeness, you don’t actually need an inflationary epoch to create, as it were, that commonality, that uniformity, that homogeneity. So, I’m-
Rick: But the galaxies are all rushing away from each other for the most part, aside from local situations like us and Andromeda, right?
Jude: Absolutely. But again, go back 13.8 billion years. Go back to a universe that came into being at its smallest scale, its simplest scale. Not in what we tend to call a Big Bang. We know it wasn’t big, but when we use the word “bang,” it implies chaos. It implies some form of explosion. We know that our universe began in that first moment, incredibly fine-tuned, and at its very, very lowest and simplest form of order and simplicity. So, instead of a Big Bang, our universe came into being as a first moment, more as an ongoing big breath. And ever since, as space has expanded and time has flowed forward, that big breath, and that, if you like, the bubble, the balloon of our universe has expanded. Now, I take your point around the galaxies moving apart within space-time, as indeed they are, but this model shows us why that happens and how our universe both exists and evolves. And that comes from the study of black holes. And some years ago, in researching what happens when a large star collapses into a black hole, it comes to the end of its life, it can’t sustain itself anymore, it’s used up its nuclear fuel, it gravitationally collapses. And the gravitational collapse is so powerful that it keeps on collapsing even when light itself can’t escape. And that point, that threshold where light itself can’t escape, is called a black hole’s event horizon. And just as the original star is a spherical body, the event horizon encompasses a spherical black hole. So, the question was, what happens to all the information of that star? Because if it’s lost, then we have to throw quantum physics out the door. The understanding is that no, it’s not lost, but something even more incredible is at play here. Because when the analysis was done, it was realized that that information of that star is not proportional to the volume of that black hole, but proportional to its surface area of its event horizon. And that gave the understanding for some clever folks, that’s exactly what happens in a hologram. Because in a hologram, when we bounce a beam of light off a three-dimensional object as we would see it, what happens is the light that bounces back brings lots of information about that object. That information is then arrayed as a pattern on a two-dimensional plate. And when light is beamed through that two-dimensional pattern of information, a three-dimensional hologram of that original object is formed. So the holographic principle, which I mentioned that Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw have been writing about, suggests that the boundary of what we call space-time, that expanding boundary of space from the first moment of this ongoing big breath, and the continuation of time from past to present and onward, itself is not that the information stays the same and therefore expanded, but more and more and more information comes into being on that holographic boundary. It’s called the Bekenstein bound. And the pixelation is the pixelation of reality itself. And the scale of it is called the Planck scale. And the scale of it is as small as to an atom as an atom is to the entire universe. So, it’s not like the galaxies coming apart. It’s that more and more and more and more in cosmic information, universal information is being arrayed on this boundary of what we call space-time. And then that all comes together in the work I’ve done with thermodynamics to show how that happens and how simple it is.
Rick: So, if the universe is a holographic projection, and most people by now know how holographs work, you have a piece of film and it has a squiggly pattern on it, you shine a laser through it and then you see an image of a jar or person or whatever was encoded into the film. If the universe is a holographic projection, what is the film in this case?
Jude: The film is essentially cosmic mind.
Rick: Okay, that’s what I was thinking you were going to say.
Jude: Yeah, as Einstein understood, he talked about the delusion of consciousness and the appearance of separation is not our fundamental reality. But we are microcosmic co-creators of an intelligent and living and evolving and multidimensional universe that way back, a hundred years ago, Sir James Jeans talked of as being a great thought rather than a great thing and where mind and consciousness aren’t something we have, but literally what we and the whole world are. And what we’re now seeing and the evidence is showing us, literally at all scales of existence and many, many, many different areas of research, not just of what we might have hitherto called the natural world, which I don’t like using because it still has this sense of somehow separation. But within collective human behaviors the internet and an ecosystem have exactly the same patterning, exactly the same relational dynamic patterning within them. I think we spoke last time. It’s an example that I think really brings it home to a lot of people, that the analysis of earthquakes that, their periodicity, their frequency and their destructive power, when analyzed across hundreds and hundreds of earthquakes show there’s no such thing as an average earthquake. There’s just a relationship between their destructive power and the frequency. When analysis of human conflicts is undertaken, which has been from world wars and centuries of conflicts to insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, exactly the same relationship between destructive power, in this case, fatalities, human fatalities and periodicity or frequency of those conflicts, exactly the same relationship.
Rick: So what does that mean? The more frequent they are, the less destructive they are?
Jude: That’s right. There’s an inverse proportion. So the more destructive, the less frequent.
Rick: So in other words, world wars are less common than lots of little skirmishes.
Jude: Yeah, but it doesn’t mean that there’s an average conflict. It just means if you take the whole of the analysis from the very, very large scale destructions to the small, they’re all arrayed along this straight line called a power law.
Rick: And what is the significance of this to our conversation?
Jude: Because it shows patterning. It shows underlying patterning and meaningful informational patterning. Because what we also realize, going back to the appearance of our universe, is this appearance, whatever it may be, the entirety of our universe emerges from deeper levels of intelligent causation. So underlying an ecosystem, underlying a collective consciousness is what’s called an attractor basin of data points, of informational points that together form an archetype, form a complex system, form a collective worldview.
Rick: You and I have a mutual friend who I won’t name because he’s not here to defend himself, but he seems to be arguing these days that somehow God or intelligence is coming into being as the universe evolves. And my rebuttal is, yes, if you want to speak of its manifest phase or quality or expression, but there must be a fundamental ocean of intelligence to begin with for the universe to evolve out of, because at every stage of its emergence, it displays incredible orderliness and fine-tuning, as you said earlier. And if that fundamental field of intelligence weren’t there, it would be like the universe pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. So what do you say to that discussion?
Jude: I’m on team Archer. Exactly, because the other thing we see, of course, is it’s not just that the laws of physics, which are the basic algorithms, the information instructions, of how our universe exists and evolves are so relational dynamically, amazingly fine-tuned and relational, that our universe embodies an impulse to evolve from simplicity to complexity. And you see this, I mean, I’m often asked, well, where’s the evidence for the purpose? And we can go into that because what you see reading The Story of Gaia, especially, is from that beginning with the laws of physics, which we can now restate three laws of thermodynamics, the three laws of informational dynamics or infodynamics. We see how it’s like a Rubik’s Cube, only much simpler, how our universe does this. But that intelligence is embodied, embedded every moment throughout that journey of simplicity to complexity. So yes, it’s that manifestation, but the innate cosmic intelligence was there from the get-go, is there in every moment, will be throughout this great thought form of the mind of the cosmos to the very end of its life cycle. And more and more, we’re realizing that it is a finite universe within an infinite and eternal cosmic plenum.
Rick: Which jibes with the ancient Vedic perspective, which you mentioned earlier. And I think they even used the word “breath,” the universe sort of breathed out, or sometimes they used the analogy or metaphor of a spider spinning a web and then drawing the web back into itself. So, if we want to think of it in terms of God, if we want to use that term properly understood in this context of our conversation, God has a resting phase, then an expressive phase, then a resting phase, and then an expressive phase. But the fundamental cosmic mind is there all along. It doesn’t sort of get created anew at any point.
Jude: Absolutely. The thing that I would say is, and I very deliberately use the words “the big breath” in the title of The Story of Gaia, because, as I said earlier, Rick, we didn’t start in a big bang, in that sort of chaos. It was that first moment of this incredible, ordered, marvelous, outflowing, big breath. And of course, the same word for breath, prana, is spirit. So, very much of that. I think the difference we’re now realizing cosmologically is that there’s an entire cycle, a finite life cycle of our universe. And the reason we can say that is many fold. But one key factor is that there are five key constants or measures of our universe. They’re fundamental, and they too are named after Max Planck. And they’re measures of energy and matter, space and time and temperature. Okay. What I’ve done in terms of restating and expanding three laws of thermodynamics to three laws of information dynamics is the first law restates the appearance of energy matter as being information, expressing itself as quantized energy matter, which stays the same throughout the whole of our universe’s life cycle. The second law is about space-time. And the second law shows how our universe evolves, as we were mentioning, about the out-breath of the ancient tradition of Brahman, where there’s ever more information able to be expressed through the expanding of space and the flowing of time. But the third one, apart from any other evidence, there’s lots of evidence for our universe being a finite thought, is that in a contained system, such as we cosmologically now know ours to be, temperature is what’s called inversely proportional to information content. So, our universe began with its lowest level of information content, its highest temperature. Space has expanded ever since and time has flowed forward. The temperature has dropped as the information content has increased. So, now we’re at a point where we’re only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. So, we have this cycle, this beautiful cycle of a universe that is existing and evolving, existing to evolve from simplicity to complexity. So, time will come when that bubble–and this is a metaphor, of course–but that bubble will come to the end of its thought form and then release its wisdom, its experience, back into the cosmic plenum.
Rick: I often quote St. Teresa of Avila, who said, “It appears that the Lord himself is on the journey.” And I often think of the universe as this big evolutionary machine–not machine, but this big evolutionary process–which is actually a learning process or experience for God, for cosmic mind, as well as for all of us individuals who are just shards or individuated expressions of cosmic mind.
Jude: I love that and that’s exactly it. I talk about us being microcosmic co-creators because one of the things that I think is really, really powerful now is that right at the beginning, we said that we’re on this edge. We’ve come this journey. We’ve come through a journey of perceived separation of materiality. We’re literally waking up to remember we’re inseparable. And yet, unity is not uniformity. Unity is radical diversity. So, everything in existence has meaning and evolutionary potential. So, here we are, 13.8 billion years in, as a human species living on our beloved planetary home Gaia, which we treat very badly because of that misperception of the integral nature of reality, beginning to wake up and at the bow wave of our universe’s ongoing evolutionary impulse.
It seems to me that we’re being invited now to wake up, as Ken Wilber and others say, to grow up, to clean up because of the trauma embedded by perception of separation, to show up, to link up and lift up. We are in the most incredible moment, this time it seems to me, of existential threat is evolutionary opportunity.
Rick: Yes, I agree. And there’s so many things that come together. I mean, just the invention of the internet, without which we couldn’t be having this conversation, but with which the knowledge of spirituality has propagated around the world at lightning speed. Whereas in the past, some spiritual teacher could only walk so far in his sandals in a lifetime, and then it would take hundreds and thousands of years for his message to get around, and by the time it got around, it was totally distorted. So, I almost see the internet, among other things, as part of the evolutionary drama that’s going on, as an essential part of the evolutionary drama that’s ushering us in to a more enlightened age.
Jude: And walking in her sandals, of course.
Rick: Of her sandals, of course. Or flip-flops or whatever.
Jude: Or flip-flops, or in my case, very pointed, very uncomfortable shoes, but no longer. No longer.
Rick: Take them off.
Jude: They’re off. I tell you, they’re off. Absolutely. And I do feel that all of this is part of this ongoing meaning, actually, and evolutionary purpose, because the other part of our communications technologies is that they are based on digitized information. And so, when we now understand that our universe, the manifestation of the appearance of our universe, is, not just from, is meaningful in hyphen, in a dash formation, meaningfully informed and holographically manifested. Just as our English language has 26 letters, and of themselves, A, B, C, etc., have no innate meaning, we make meaning when we bring those letters together in words and sentences and all the rest of it. And when we’re having this conversation, what I’m speaking to is being translated into long columns of ones and zeros, digitized information, being squirted over to where you are, re-translated into English, and vice versa with your perspective. So, what this is about is our universe does it from cosmic mind, using only two letters, not the 26. All the meaning that is our universe arises from the Planck scale pixelation of such meaningful information that then accumulates as atoms and molecules and planets and people and plants and all of the appearance of our universe is that innate meaningfully informed and holographically manifested. And I agree with you. This is where somebody says, “Well, where’s God?” God is all. There is no not God. There is no not God.
Rick: There’s no holes in God. God is every little thing. I think the Gospel of Thomas or something says, “Crack open a rock and there I am.”
Jude: It’s God.
Rick: Yeah.
Jude: Everywhere. Because God is reality.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Jude: God is reality.
Rick: And there’s evidence for that. That’s not just a belief. I mean, look at any little, go out to empty space someplace and analyze it if you could, and you’d find, laws of nature functioning there, and gamma rays whizzing through and all kinds of things that evidence vast intelligence.
Jude: Absolutely. And this is really what the, both the book that what The Cosmic Hologram talks about. But The Cosmic Hologram is an understanding of this. What I really felt in writing The Story of Gaia, I often say I feel The Story of Gaia wrote me. Because the reverence that I have always felt for our universe and our planetary home, literally took me on a journey through this book to become even greater levels of reverence and awe and wonder at this incredible intelligence. But beyond that, the benevolence, I talk about this book really being the science of love. It’s the cosmology of an emergent, living, conscious universe with all the multidimensionality that the ancient spiritual seekers and shamans have always delved into. We now have that opportunity, we shut ourselves off from this incredible adventure. And we can now open ourselves up to remember, inseparable, but even more, to realize that we have incredible opportunities to engage with and communicate with and learn from the profound wisdom of our planetary home and our entire universe. It’s literally an invitation, it seems to me, for us to do that.
Rick: One argument that some people use against the existence of God or cosmic mind and so on, you just mentioned benevolence, is what about the Holocaust? What about babies with cancer, all the horrible things that happen? And I always come back with, well, the universe is vast, and I don’t see how a universe could consist without pairs of opposites. So, if there’s going to be hot, there’s going to be cold. If there’s going to be heavy, there’s going to be light. Fast, slow, and good, bad. And everything sort of balances out, but there have to be these polarities. What do you think about that?
Jude: Well, certainly, as the ancient Tao and I Ching talks about, in the beginning is the one, not was, is. The one becomes two, the two becomes three, and from the three, ten thousand things are born. So, that whole journey of simplicity to complexity and ever greater levels of individuation is one of evolutionary arcs of experiences of births, of lives, of deaths, and ongoing. And I would say that the ancient traditions don’t talk about good or bad, because that’s something that’s almost like a human judgment.
Rick: Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.
Jude: In position on a universe, and by benevolent, I’m not talking about sentimentality. I’m talking about relationship. I’m talking about a universe that is innately related, where everything is in interdependent relationship with everything else. And so, 540 million years ago, we had on Gaia, an evolutionary arc that went from what was called the Ediacaran era to the Cambrian era. And the Ediacaran era was the first animals to exist and evolve in Gaia’s biosphere, and what I describe as Gaia’s Gaia sphere, because it’s completely interconnected. And it was almost like the garden of Ediacara, as it’s sometimes called, because everybody was very friendly with everybody else, but nothing was happening. There was no real evolution. It was quite static. And so, time came at the end of the Ediacaran, where there was a major environmental change. You could say it was catastrophic, but from that breakdown, there was incredible assemblage, a very quick, a very wonderful assemblage of greater levels of complexity. But that complexity then began to differentiate between predators and prey, and there’s almost like a biological arms race. Yeah, who could come up with teeth and claws and who could hide fastest? But it actually drove increasing complexity and therefore individuation and therefore self-awareness. And it goes back to your point about the balancing of this all. And it seems to me that in our journey, our journey, there is life and there is death and there is rebirth and there is grief and there is trauma. The problem is within a worldview of materialism and separation, we don’t undertake the rites of passage, the community rites of passage that go through those processes and release them. We hold on to, instead of trauma, which is a natural part of the waves, the ebbs and the flows of life, we identify ourselves with it. And when we identify ourselves with it, we continue to bear it. And I think that’s where we’ve been. And the evidence has shown we no longer need to do that. So, when somebody asks me about the Holocaust, I say God was there. God is everywhere. How could it not be? But we are, after 13.8 billion years of evolution, are a species that is self-aware. This is a species that has choice. What do we choose? In that environment, and I’ve been to Auschwitz, in that environment, we chose death. We chose all of the things that go with a perception of separation. Just as conflict, it seems to me, is a natural outcome, injustices, the imbalances between men and women, all of these are attributes of a mindset and a worldview of materialism and separation. We now have the evidence that’s showing us that that worldview, that mindset, is fundamentally wrong. And without blame or shame or judgment, to literally wake up from the illusion of separation, it’s become a nightmare. So, this is what I feel this moment of choice, our collective moment of choice, is about. It doesn’t mean that there will not be sadness. I think the Queen, our Queen, who’s just passed over, after 9/11, I think she said something about grief is the price we pay for love.
Rick: Well, after 9/11, our president at the time, George W. Bush, said, “Go shopping.”
Jude: There you go. You know, grief, and working with so many healers, and myself working as a healer for many years, it’s when we honor the sadness, honor the grief, and in our own way, and support of our community, support of each other. And I’ve had the privilege of working with and being with many, many indigenous communities. And our indigenous brothers and sisters understand how to honor and to shake out grief and move on into the joy that is our natural state of being. But that joy, to really appreciate it, again going back to what you were saying, there is that compliment where it’s not joyful. Because if it wasn’t sad, how could we really know joy?
Rick: Yeah. And I think, on this topic, it’s important to be able to cultivate a God’s eye view of things, which is as Krishna says in the Gita, “Creatures are unmanifest in the beginning, manifest in the middle state, and unmanifest again at the end. What grief is there in this?” And, I think we’ve all heard enough NDE stories and reincarnation research and all that, many of us anyway, to be quite convinced that nobody dies. And, realistically, naturally you grieve if your child dies or something, but there’s ultimately nothing more tragic about death than there is about changing your clothes into a fresh pair, fresh outfit.
Jude: Absolutely. Absolutely. And when we understand that, when we understand that, indeed, there is no separation, and that separation isn’t just within space-time, it’s beyond space-time. It’s the multidimensionality of a living, evolving, gloriously multidimensional, conscious universe.
Rick: Yeah. In the back of my mind, I keep kicking around the idea of talking to you more about cosmological fine-tuning, because‚ you can explain what that is. I’ll just keep my question that short, and then we can discuss it a little bit.
Jude: Okay, well, what we realize is, going back to the very beginning of space-time, is that first of all, our universe began in its most lowest informational and most ordered state. And that means that its entropy, which I’ve now restated as a concept, because entropy actually is about the microstates, the energetic microstates of a system. When we expand from energy, a matter, to information, we realize that the entropy of our universe, which increases from that very first moment ever since, is better determined as entropy, where entropy is the informational content of our universe. So, we’re now talking about the second law of what I call infodynamics. But the point of all of this is that it all comes together. And the way it comes together is an incredibly fine-tuned beginning. You know, the constants, there are very few, probably six is the general perception, six constants where the laws of physics come together in ways that are perfectly balanced and allow our universe not just to exist, but to evolve. And those constants, if they were different from what they are, by an estimate, at least, this is the low-cut estimate, of one in something like, let me see now, a thousand trillion trillion, then our universe wouldn’t have been able to even get going. That level of fine-tuning and the five Planck constants that of themselves are fundamentals of energy, matter, space, time, and temperature, their interrelationships and the relationships and laws of physics are, as Einstein said, as simple as they can be, but no simpler for our universe to exist and evolve. And it’s that level of fine-tuning, which is just so extraordinary. Our space, geometrically, has to be exactly flat, which our best cosmological evidence says it is, for E to equal MC squared. It all comes together. And when, a lot of scientists are really good at complicating things, because that’s a human trait, we all do it. But Einstein said the universe is as simple as it can be, but no simpler to undertake its purpose. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. And that’s what I write about in The Cosmic Hologram and The Story of Gaia.
Rick: Yeah, and the reason I find this interesting is that it again suggests some kind of fundamental intelligence orchestrating things. And as I understand it, in order to avoid that conclusion, some cosmologists or scientists come up with the multiverse theory that there are just an infinite number practically of universes, and we just happen to have lucked out to be in the one where everything was so fine-tuned as it is. One in a trillion trillion or something, whatever you just said. And the others are all duds, or duds to a great degree. And, my hunch is that if there are multiple universes, they are also abundant with life and expressing orderliness and intelligence and evolution and so on, because that’s the way God rolls.
Jude: That’s the way God rolls. I wholeheartedly agree with you. The multiverse as a premise. There’s a track in science where you can start with a sort of premise, you can move to a hypothesis, you can move on and you get more and more evidence, and it becomes a theory. And then if you get even more evidence, and it’s just about irrefutable, then it becomes a law. Now, in physics, relativity is a theory, even with a hundred years of evidence that absolutely hasn’t departed from it by an iota. Quantum theory is still a theory, even though, again, more than a hundred years of evidence has proven it every single time. But there are three laws of physics that are so fundamental that there’s no debate. One, and these are the laws of thermodynamics, and these are the three laws that I’ve restated as laws of infodynamics, and they’re the laws then that can show how quantum theory, how relativity theory comes together to co-create a meaningful, intelligent, evolutionary universe. This is, if anything, this is God’s plan. This is how it happens. So, the multiverse may indeed, there may be indeed other universes, we don’t know. There’s a likelihood there may well be. We’ve got some little smidgens of possibility that point us in that direction. But I agree with you, they too are likely to be meaningful and purposeful in whatever way they manifest cosmic intelligence. But the other part of the multiverse that was latched onto was something called parallel universes. And parallel universes really is at that basis of everything’s random. So, whatever this ostensible fine tuning is at the beginning of our universe and ongoing, because it’s embedded within our entire universe, can only be random, can only be accidental. And therefore, there must be at least that many other universes. But, the way that that was purported to happen is every quantum choice spawns another universe. Now, there’s something called Occam’s razor, which is very, very helpful in science, which says go with the simplest, because that was almost always the case. And if there’s any level of complexity beyond the simplest, there’s a good reason for it. So, instead of going through this rigmarole of parallel universes sprouting off everywhere with no notion of intelligence, no notion of meaning or purpose, and no notion of any basis in an understanding of reality or any evidence, I mean, what I’m speaking of is profoundly, fundamentally evidence-based. The idea of parallel universes has no evidence whatsoever to support it.
Rick: Yeah, it’s just a Hail Mary pass to try to avoid the conclusions that you draw.
Jude: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Well, as an example of a theory that is generally considered sacrosanct, and you’re considered to be a kook if you question it, let’s talk a little bit about Darwin’s theory of evolution. And what is it called, evolution through random mutation? You discuss that in your book.
Jude: Well, Einstein, as far as I know, actually never talked about random mutation.
Rick: No, Darwin you mean.
Jude: Sorry, sorry. Darwin, thank you. It’s been a long day. In my research and understanding, Darwin never spoke about mutations being random. He was an excellent observational scientist. And so he did not take any speculation beyond what the observation revealed to him. So he talked about variability. He talked about a relationship between a collection, a community of organisms. And further into his life, he also recognized the Lamarckian perspective of the significance of the environment. So he was, for me, he’s a hero. You might notice behind me there’s a bust of him on my shelf.
Rick: Can’t quite see it. I’ve got the Buddha up on my shelf and a Christmas tree. But anyway.
Jude: And I’ve got Charles Darwin. The actual–
Rick: Oh, yeah, there he is. I see him.
Jude: There he is. The launch of The Story of Gaia, we chose to be in a very special place. And it was where in 1860 was the first ever debate on Darwinian evolution. And we held it there because what I’m writing about in The Story of Gaia is not a repudiation of Darwin, but it is saying that those that followed him, which came from this perspective of materialism and separation, really took what he came up with so brilliantly and, in my view, distorted it dramatically, not just for the evolution of biology, but for socialism and sociality and human behaviors. And as a result, Neo-Darwinism, which is just Darwinism with genetics, carried on in many ways that perception of materialism and separation. And in The Story of Gaia, I write now about the evidence that random mutations do not drive biological evolution. What we find is that, first of all, DNA is not just a read-only template. It is a read-write template. And therefore, it allows variability, but it allows responses. It allows call and responses to signals of many sorts of the environment. There’s far more interrelationality with an organism and its surroundings. And those surroundings and that organism, to retain coherence, are in constant dialogue at cellular levels with a read-write DNA. And what happens is that when the signal is carried, when the informational signal is carried to the nucleus of a cell, and the DNA is zipped open to be communicated with, there tends to be an error rate of one in ten thousand times. But between that error rate, that initial error rate, and when all of the RNA and the other processes that go on within the cell all the time to create what’s called amino acids, to create proteins from which the body continues to be built and retain its coherence, that error rate is reduced from one in ten thousand to less than one in a billion. In other words, the cell, the body goes to incredible efforts to get rid of the possibility of random mutations. And those that get through pretty much end in literally a dead point, either sterility or disease. So organisms, biological organisms, are not driven by random mutations. They’re driven by intelligent, informational flows, processes, and relationships at all levels of complexity.
Rick: Good. Thank you. So let’s see, what haven’t we covered? If something pops to mind that you want to talk about that we haven’t talked about, let me know. But I have some notes here. I want to make sure we’re getting through them all. Earth is a living being, the very title of your book, we could talk about that a little bit.
Jude: Well, we’re in a universe that all the evidence is showing us is a conscious and therefore living, non-locally unified being that exists and evolves from simplicity to complexity as a unity that’s all pervaded by consciousness. And so my definition of living correlates with that of the ancient understanding and of many pioneering researchers now of a living planet within a living universe. And at the end of the book, what I do is I invite people through all this journey of relationship to consider that instead of terming ourselves humans, we might term ourselves Gaians. Because the difference, as my dear friend Michael Linfield taught me, is that as human beings, our planetary home is outside of us. But as Gaians, our planetary home, Gaia, lives within us. And we live within our planetary home. It’s a much more fundamentally intimate, joyful, meaningful, loving relationship.
Rick: So when we refer to Gaia or the Earth as a living being, are we saying that it is in the same way a living being consisting of billions of cells if you count all the beings such as us and animals and insects and everything else as cells within Gaia, just as we are a living being comprised of trillions of cells? And are you saying that just as we have our own consciousness and individuality and willfulness and all that stuff, Gaia is a being in the very same way with its own consciousness. It could be communicating with, let’s say, other beings if other planets elsewhere are beings, or it could be doing all kinds of things, probably beyond our comprehension, because it would be a much vaster, more intelligent, more highly evolved being than we are. Am I thinking along the same lines as you there or what?
Jude: You are, Rick, yes, but I’d expand the concept of living beyond biological life.
Rick: Oh, yeah. I mean, I would say the Sun is a living being and obviously there’s no biological life there.
Jude: Absolutely. So when we talk about, when I talk about Gaia and our entire universe is exactly as you’ve just described. So I talk about the Gaia sphere because what I write about is how Gaia’s rocks and minerals, her geosphere, her waters, her hydrosphere, her air, her atmosphere and her biological communities, her biosphere are all intimately related and evolutionarily correlated. So for the whole four and a half billion years of her being a planetary home, she has the entirety of her Gaia sphere, has ebbed, has flowed, has gone through cycles. And I write in detail about this in The Story of Gaia because it’s so extraordinary. It’s just so incredibly and meaningfully guided and informed and evolutionarily purposeful. And of course, I also write as part of the book that are the biological, her biological children didn’t emerge just on her planetary home in interstellar clouds of gas and dust. Before our planetary system even came into being, all of the forerunners, the harbingers of biological life, DNA, RNA, what’s known as lipids and sugars and amino acids, as well as masses of ice bathed in ultraviolet light, shepherded by magnetic fields. And we’re seeing these gorgeous clouds, in fantastic images from the Hubble telescope and now from James Webb telescope. But these are the birthing clouds of planetary systems. These are the crash in a way from which we emerge. And yet they are an ongoing crash that goes back to the very beginning, 13.8 billion years ago. You know, the water in our bodies is only a few moments younger than our entire universe. The story of our universe is our story, multidimensionally, consciously living. This is our heritage. This is our lineage. This is our potential opportunity.
Rick: Another thing that I think is important to bring in when we talk about Gaia as a living being, or when I say the sun as a living being, which would ordinarily sound absurd, is that there are subtler realms of creation, which science has no inkling of, and which you began experiencing as a child, living beings in those subtler realms who are communicating with you and so on. And so, when we think of Gaia as a living being, we shouldn’t just think of its oceans and animals and atmosphere and all that stuff. It would have a subtle body, just as we have subtle bodies, and the sun would have a subtle body, and that subtle body could be a very highly conscious being. And Vedic and other ancient traditions understood this. They called the sun Surya, and they thought of it as a god, which seems quaint and mythological, but what they’re really saying is it’s this powerful impulse of intelligence that just happens to be embodied in a giant fusion reaction.
Jude: Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s really when writing The Story of Gaia and The Cosmic Hologram is the evidence for all of this, and really seeing this profoundly intelligent, wise, and ultimately, benevolent, not in a sentimentality, but a wholeness that invites all of its journey from simplicity to complexity and ever greater levels of individuated self-awareness, collective interdependence, interbeing, and perhaps to complete our time today with here and now, here and now, because, over this last year, I’ve been involved with co-writing what’s called a unitive narrative with some friends and colleagues, as a real underpinning and framing of this understanding, but based on, founded on, all of this evidence. And it’s wonderful to see that there is this potentiality now to move forward together. So, for example, the last week or so, after 77 years, the United Nations have formally adopted what’s called a major NGO thematic cluster, which is a formal body able to advise and import and do all sorts of things globally. And it’s based on this unitive narrative and this unitive understanding of The Story of Gaia and The Cosmic Hologram. For the first time in 77 years, the United Nations believes that this evidence is so powerful that there’s a realization that unity isn’t an ideal, it’s real. And as my dear friend, Dr. Joni Carley, who’s been instrumental, after decades on decades of working with the UN, and we’ve got at least 16 NGOs and many more wanting to come together with this, talks about unity is our existential reality. And because the evidence is now here, I sense that this coming year, with so many other things that I’m being involved with, education, transformational leadership, so, so much more, that we can truly link up and lift up together, empowered by this understanding and inspired by its experience.
Rick: That’s nice. Let’s just play around with envisioning the future. So, how would you like to see the world looking in 100 years or 200 years or however far out in the future you care to project? What would be your most optimistic projection of the world if it really takes, if collectively we take to heart the kinds of things that you have been talking about in your books?
Jude: I’d probably say, first of all, I don’t do projection. What I’ve, what I, in my own journey over all these years, how I serve, how I sense I can serve best is by tuning and aligning with what is flowing through us, with the universal evolutionary flow and purpose. So, I talk about showing up and getting out of the way.
Rick: So, you don’t have a sense of where it’s going exactly.
Jude: I don’t need to know.
Rick: Okay.
Jude: What I trust, what I do trust, the bottom of my soul and from the bottom of my heart, is that if we, instead of trying to, we’re really good at trying to impose and judge and control. And if I’ve learned anything from nearly 70 years of exploration, is the futility of trying to do that. And how, when I have tried to do that, it’s limited me actually. When I’ve opened myself up to the potential and possibility of our universe’s great flow of evolutionary impulse, it’s been the most incredible, magical, wonderful journey. It’s when I’ve tried to hold on to it, where I’ve tried to hold on to the past or a situation or whatever. So, I don’t try anymore. I haven’t tried for a long time.
Rick: Yeah, and I don’t think anybody has ever successfully done it. I mean, people like Jules Verne predicted some things which came to pass and others, but nobody from even 50 years ago, much less 150 or something, has come close to predicting the kind of world that we now have. So, God is a better script writer than we are, I guess you could say.
Jude: I mean, there is a lot of sense to saying, “Let go and let God.”
Rick: Right, right.
Jude: God in that sense of a universal, profound intelligence and evolutionary purpose and flow. So, it’s so much, for me, it’s so much more joyous, heart-opening to just align myself, attune, learn to attune. So, what I’ve learned to do, I hope, is to hear and listen. And that means trusting my intuition. It means paying attention to synchronicities. It means breathing in and going quiet. It means actively not trying to impose my will, but actually offer myself and open to a greater will and a greater love and a wholeness that over many, many years I know we are all part of.
Rick: Yeah. Well, if I could predict one thing for the future, hopefully it will be a future, at least this is a wish that it will be a future where much larger percentages of people function the way you just described yourself as functioning, which would essentially mean human life in attunement with and collaboration with divine intelligence or cosmic mind. And as somewhere in the Vedas it says, “Brahman is the charioteer,” like, “Get out of the way and let Brahman drive.”
Jude: Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree. And it’s an incredible ride. It is a phenomenal, incredible, joyous ride.
Rick: It is.
Jude: And it just feels to me that this is the invitation for us as a species. Now, this is our collective moment of choice. Yeah, this is our potential to — I heard a lovely term the other day. I’m just in an online series for a wonderful organization called Humanities Team. And in it I call it our conscious re-volution, our transformational journey to whole being and belonging. But I talk about how instead of us consciously evolving, we consciously are re-volving, it’s a revolution. It’s much more than a few little steps. And what I love is the conscious we-volution. It’s us doing it together. So I just feel this is an incredible moment with all the challenges. But I truly believe we’re being offered this incredible opportunity by the entirety of our universe and our planetary home, Gaia.
Rick: Yeah. We’re one giant intelligent slime mold.
Jude: Yes.
Rick: So go for the oatmeal.
Jude: Go for that oatmeal.
Rick: Oh, boy. Well, thanks so much, Jude. They haven’t been having SAND conferences lately, but I hope we get a chance to run into each other in person again. It was such a delight, hanging out with you a little bit back then. And I follow your work. I see you popping up in the Scientific and Medical Network and the Galileo Commission and things like that. And so keep it up. We’ll keep on trucking and we’ll do what we can, right?
Jude: Absolutely. And we’ll do it together.
Rick: We’ll do it together, yes.
Jude: Absolutely.
Rick: Great. Well, thanks. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching. And my next interview will be with a fellow named Anthony Peake. You know Anthony Peake, Jude?
Jude: I do. I do.
Rick: Yeah. He’s written a bunch of interesting books. So, anyway, I won’t get into the details, but I’ll be talking to him next and onward we go. So, see you for the next one.