Jude Currivan Interview

Summary

The conversation explores the relationship between science and spirituality, including multidimensional experiences, subtle intelligences, spiritual abilities, and enlightenment. It also introduces a view of reality as an evolving, unified information-based cosmos and considers how deeper awareness can be embodied in ordinary life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can science and spirituality complement each other in understanding reality?
• Are psychic abilities and multidimensional experiences genuine parts of spiritual development or distractions from realization?
• How can spiritual awakening be integrated into everyday life?
• What does it mean to see the universe as a unified, evolving field of information?

Key takeaways

• Science and spirituality can work together as complementary ways of exploring reality.
• Multidimensional abilities may be innate and can provide verifiable insight when approached with discernment.
• Psychic experiences can support spiritual growth but should not become the final goal.
• Enlightenment includes embodying the extraordinary within ordinary human life.
• Reality may be fundamentally patterned information rather than matter, energy, or space-time.
• Human beings and the universe are ongoing works in progress.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. BATGAP is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Ongoing means that I’ve been doing it for seven years now and will continue to do it. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to www.BATGAP.com and look under the “Past Interviews” menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones organized in various ways. This show is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it to any amount, there are “Donate” buttons on every page of the site.

My guest today is a very interesting person. I’m very excited about this interview. It’s Dr. Jude Currivan. I’ve just been reading her book The Cosmic Hologram. In that book she sometimes refers to “polymaths” when referring to some mathematician or something, and I would say that Jude is definitely a polymath, which means that she is somebody who is extremely well versed in a wide variety of fields of knowledge.

She has a master’s degree in quantum mechanics and cosmology from Oxford, and a PhD in archaeology, studying the cosmology of ancient cultures. She is a healer, a futurist, and an astrologer. She was previously one of the most senior businesswomen in the UK, as CFO and executive board member of two major international companies. So she is an extremely well-rounded person, and she swears that she has read all those books behind her—and that’s only one wall of the room.

She has traveled to more than 70 countries, worked with wisdom keepers from many traditions, and has been a lifelong researcher into the scientific and experiential understanding of the nature of reality. She has written six books, and The Cosmic Hologram, to which I just referred, is her latest. She lives in Wiltshire, England, by the way. So, welcome, Jude. I’m really happy to be doing this with you.

Jude: Rick, it’s my pleasure to be with you guys. Thank you for inviting me.

🕊️ Bridging science and spirituality

Rick: You’re welcome. One of the reasons I’m excited about what Jude is doing is that, as you may know if you’ve watched this show, I get sort of turned on by the juxtaposition of science and spirituality. I think that they are kind of two legs of the human endeavor of gaining knowledge, and you don’t walk so well if you use just one of your legs. I think they each have something to offer the other, to enrich, deepen, and make more objective and verifiable the other’s field of endeavor.

And I have a feeling that in a few hundred years we really won’t differentiate between them; we’ll sort of regard the human attempt to gain knowledge as one unified thing which incorporates what we now think of as science and spirituality. Both will have evolved and grown tremendously by that time. What do you think about that opening, Jude?

Jude: I think it’s a great opening, Rick, and I completely agree with it. All my life I’ve had that sense that there really isn’t—it’s nonsense to have a schism between these two different ways of understanding the nature of reality. I mean, when we go back thousands of years, what is often called the “sacred science” was exactly that: it was trying to understand the nature of reality completely. And science is a great tool, but so is experiential understanding and that deeper perspective of more than just the physical reality, but of multidimensional realities, which of course is the journey of the seeker of truth through spiritual practice.

Rick: And since you mentioned that, that segues us right into a good starting place, which is that when you were four years old you began to have multidimensional experiences. As I recall, you said that Thoth came to you, and when I looked it up, Thoth is that Egyptian god that has the head of a bird. So did you actually perceive that being with the head of a bird, or was it more of an intuitive sense that that intelligence that was contacting you at that young age was Thoth? And how would you even have known who or what Thoth was at the age of four?

Jude: Ha, yeah, a very good question! I didn’t, is the reality!

Rick: He just said, “Hi, I’m Thoth.”

Jude: “I’m Thoth!” He took a while to say his name, but basically you’re right. And I didn’t understand the way that the ancient Egyptians had perceived him until a little while later, but you’re right. For me it was clairaudient—I heard a voice in my head. It was also clairsentient, so I just felt his presence. But I was hearing this voice and I did see a discarnate light. I was four years old, so what’s not to feel natural about? Nobody was telling me it was nonsense, nobody was telling me it was my imagination, and it wasn’t.

So that began a lifelong journey of exploration that I’m still on, of course. And I wondered for ages why the Egyptians had depicted him like that. They also depicted him as a baboon, and the reason, apparently, that they depicted him as a baboon was that baboons look at the sunrise as the sun rises, so they were looking straight into the sun, or at least that was the perception. So it is about clear sight, it’s about seeing deeply, it’s about understanding the nature of reality in all ways. And he’s been a mentor for me all my life.

Rick: So you’ve maintained a relationship with him?

Jude: Very much. But you know, the other thing is that what we call the “gods and goddesses” of ancient Egypt—the Egyptian word is “nata” (plural “natura”)—and that’s more like principles of consciousness or archetypal consciousness. When we talk about “gods and goddesses,” we sort of lose an understanding of higher levels of archetypal intelligences, of which he and many others form this multidimensional reality.

Rick: Yeah, and the same would be true of the gods and goddesses, or whatever they call them, in all the different ancient cultures. It is easier to make them into cartoon characters almost, and dismiss them as quaint imaginings of primitive cultures, but actually—well, I’ll let you elaborate—but what it points to is actually something very real and very deep.

I completely agree, and my whole life I’ve had these communications, not just with Thoth but with many, many of them: multidimensional beings of various levels of awareness. And one of the things I’ve always been incredibly grateful for is that the information I’ve received from them I’ve been able to validate. In other words, I’ve accessed information that I wouldn’t have accessed in other ways, and I’ve been able to verify that information.

Jude: I completely agree, and my whole life I’ve had these communications, not just with Thoth but with many, many of them: multidimensional beings of various levels of awareness. And one of the things I’ve always been incredibly grateful for is that the information I’ve received from them I’ve been able to validate. In other words, I’ve accessed information that I wouldn’t have accessed in other ways, and I’ve been able to verify that information.

It just seems to me to be a very narrow perspective to just go to Source. Yes, do that, but encompass it all, inclusively.

Rick: Hmm. You know, I get flak even from people whom I would consider fairly spiritually advanced seekers when I talk about this kind of stuff in interviews, or talk to guests who talk about this kind of stuff, because there’s a certain category of spiritual seekers who think that any of this subtle-reality business regarding subtle intelligences or beings, or anything else, is just so much “maya,” that it’s imaginary and has nothing to do with self-realization, and it’s probably just totally unreal. But even if there is reality to it, it’s a distraction; we shouldn’t bother with it, and we should go straight to the Source.

And I just tend to have a more inclusive understanding or opinion of what spiritual development entails. I think that it includes a comprehensive appreciation of the whole range of reality—gross, subtle, and transcendent—and it doesn’t exclude any of it.

Jude: That’s exactly my perspective too, and it’s been my lifelong journey of exploration and experiential awareness of all of this. And that’s not to say that we can expand our awareness fully into the luminosity of oneness, but if we’re microcosmic co-creators of realities, there is an amazing abundance of multidimensional intelligences. Are we going to ignore all of that? Are we going to ignore all the wisdom of the story of humanity so far? It just seems to me to be a very narrow perspective to just go to Source. Yes, do that, but encompass it all, as you say, inclusively.

Rick: Yeah, and what I was saying a few minutes ago about how the human quest for knowledge might look a few hundred years from now, looking back, there were cultures in which communication with and collaboration with these subtle intelligences was kind of commonplace; they helped one another. In fact, there’s a verse in the Gita that says, “You support the gods and they support you.” It’s the “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch my back” sort of thing going on.

Jude:(Laughing.) That just gave me an itchy nose, actually!

Rick: Well, call Thoth to the rescue.

Jude: Yeah, but you’re right, it was seen as a reciprocity, and of course many indigenous people still continue that perception. And for me too, it’s been an enormously powerful, empowering, supportive, nurturing, and continuing presence in my life.

And as I say—and as many, many folks have—to obtain information that I couldn’t have discovered in any other way, and it has been verified, so it’s not just imaginal; it is verifiable information. And deep insights—deep insights for me, at any rate—of who I am as a person and what the world is like. It’s a very beautiful and very all-encompassing perspective of the nature of reality.

🛤️ A lifelong multidimensional journey

Rick: Hmm. Now, when I hear something like this being coming to a four-year-old child, or to anyone of any age, but particularly a four-year-old child, I kind of get the feeling like they’re tagging you. They’re saying, “Hey guys, we’ve got a live one here. Let’s give her some juice. This person could actually be very instrumental and helpful in furthering planetary evolution, so let’s give her our support and blessings and help her along.”

Jude: Yeah, I feel that. But you know, the ability to engage multidimensionally is innate in who we are. I’m not special in that regard; I think we all have those abilities. I suppose what was great for me is that it was so early that it was natural, and funnily enough, it never occurred to me to actually have a conversation about it with any of the folks around me.

So I was never in that really difficult position of people saying, “Oh, it’s just your imagination; forget it; you’re just dreaming,” or, “What nonsense—stop it.” So I was never closed down, and I was never under pressure to close my eyes and my ears to what I was experiencing, and that has been an amazing gift.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good, and there are many people I’ve talked to who had the opposite experience, where they did start telling their parents or something and were told that they were just imagining things, or that it was bad, or whatever, and it sort of shut down.

So are you saying that throughout your 60-odd years of existence this communication has continued, or was there a period where you lost it for a while and then rediscovered it?

Jude: I think I mislaid it rather than lost it. When I was in my mid-twenties—I would say that between my late twenties and early thirties—I was in international business, as you mentioned in your introduction. I was traveling around the world and I was in a very materialistic phase of my journey, and actually, it was great! Because first of all, I did so much traveling, I was working with many, many different cultures and peoples, I was practicing my ability to communicate across a very wide breadth of people, my ability to multitask, and my ability to really ground myself. But it was very materialistic.

And so all of the guidance and all of those communications were on the back burner for, I would say, those ten or twelve years. They were never gone, and my intuition was still strong, but I wasn’t having the active, daily involvement and communication that I was having up till then and that I’ve had since.

🛤️ Journeys, initiation, and kundalini

Rick: Yeah, and we’re obviously going to get into the whole theme of your book and everything, but what are some of the more noteworthy highlights of that communication that you’ve had? I’m sure there are hundreds that you could recount, but what really stands out in your memory as being significant milestones or downloads of information?

Jude: Just to mention perhaps several: in the late ’90s I was going through a very, very challenging part of my life. I had clearly left international business—I was very clearly guided that it was the right time to do that—but it was essentially a leap into the unknown.

At the time of the new millennium, or just before that—a couple of years before that—I got a major download of information about undertaking what I thought was going to be 12 journeys, but it ended up being 13 journeys around the world to particular powerful spots, to basically be a conduit for consciousness to come through and help activate the planetary grid for whatever shift of consciousness humanity was preparing for and is preparing for, or is undergoing.

Those ended up being something like six or seven years, and the synchronicities and the guidance were phenomenal! It was so funny because often I would literally arrive somewhere not knowing why, and then turn around and everything would unfold.

So I told the true stories of those journeys in a book called The Thirteenth Step, which was also very much an inner journey as well as an outer journey because it deepened my own spiritual awareness and broadened my own ability to communicate multidimensionally. So it was very much a deep inner journey, as well as this pretty amazing outer journey of discovery.

That was one. Another one was when I was in Abydos. Do you know Abydos in Egypt?

It’s a place called the Osirion, and it’s very, very ancient. Archaeologists don’t even know how ancient it is, and it’s very difficult to fit it into their dynastic timeframe; it’s much more ancient than that.

I was there at the temple that’s next to what are now the underground ruins of a temple called the Osirion. At the Temple of Seti the First, at the back, there are three small chapels, and one of them is dedicated to Osiris, one of the Egyptian gods, or Netjer.

I asked for an initiation by Osiris, and it was a pretty interesting response I got. After I asked for that initiation, it was as though a veil had come over my eyes. I started to sob; I was absolutely racked by sobs. I would walk through the temple—I had never been there before—go to the outside of the temple at the back, and I just knew the way, even though I’d not been there before. I started to walk down in the sunshine to the Osirion.

At that time, you could actually walk down onto the ground of the Osirion, and it was covered by about that much [indicating with hand gesture] of water, so I could see where I was going. I sat down, pulled my jeans up, took two steps, and fell into a 35-foot-or-more cave or well that was filled with water.

As I’m going down, and the water by this time is over my head, I’m not panicking. I’m just realizing, “This is the initiation,” and it was an initiation by water, which was the ancient Osirian path.

The next moment, after I had the thought that this was the initiation, I was sitting on the steps, absolutely wet through, dripping wet, having somehow levitated out of that well. So that was pretty interesting.

Rick: Well, how about swimming out of it? I mean, it was full of water, so couldn’t you just dog-paddle up?

Jude: No! Because literally, it was about that wide [making a hand gesture]. I was going down, and I didn’t dog-paddle; I was literally going down at the very moment that I was thinking the thought, “This is the initiation of Osiris,” and the next moment I was literally sitting on the steps. I have no recollection of how.

Rick: Oh, you didn’t even remember climbing out? Yeah.

Jude: No, no, I categorically cannot.

Rick: And so what sort of change did you feel that produced in you, of a lasting nature?

Jude: Well, you may have heard of something called a kundalini experience.

Rick: Sure.

Jude: Well, all the time, all the time. Literally, as I sat on the steps, within about five minutes of sitting on the steps I felt that I was on fire, and the whole kundalini rising—and that lasted for—

Rick: Even though you were soaking wet.

Jude: Even though I was soaking wet on the outside, I was on fire inside, and that lasted three days.

Rick: Mm-hmm. And then, once that subsided, how did you feel you had changed compared with a week beforehand?

Jude: My sentience was clearer, my clairaudience was clearer, my clairsentience was clearer, and I began to be clairvoyant. I had never really been clairvoyant before that. So I sort of moved onto that clairvoyance after that experience.

The Debate Over Siddhis

Rick: Okay, now you’re referring to siddhis, as they’re called in Sanskrit, and there is some kind of ancient dispute over siddhis: whether they are a natural byproduct of higher consciousness, whether they are a stumbling block because they may be a distraction, whether they’re actually an aid to developing higher consciousness, and so on. So where do you stand on that debate?

Jude: I don’t have a prescriptive answer to that. My sense is that I’ve heard of people having kundalini experiences and having psychotic breakdowns as a result. Certainly, the ancient teaching was that one should be guided through these processes by some form of teacher. It happened that my teachers were primarily discarnate.

But I think it depends on the circumstances, the individual, and perhaps a karmic path for them, so I wouldn’t like to be prescriptive.

For me, it was incredibly opening. It just took me to a whole new level of my spiritual path and my spiritual awareness. That journey literally opened the way because that initiation took place before I had the download that ended up being those 13 journeys that I spoke about a little while earlier. I don’t know; I may or may not have been able to accept that download without that particular experience pre-setting it.

Rick: Yeah, like it kind of prepared the ground for it or something.

Jude: Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Now, in spiritual circles people talk a lot about self-realization or enlightenment, or a shift to the incorporation of a universal, unbounded, even impersonal consciousness into one’s living experience. There are all sorts of verses in the Upanishads which say things like, “Thou art that”—you are that universal consciousness, all of this is that, and so on.

In light of the immensity of that realization, again, sometimes people belittle various siddhis or psychic abilities or clairaudience, and so on, and they say, “Well, that’s such a small thing compared to self-realization. Don’t get hung up in that.” So what is your experience with regard to that sort of shift? Was there a watershed moment for you where you shifted into something like that, or not yet, or what?

Jude: It wasn’t a watershed moment, but there were many watershed moments. And whilst I certainly do not belittle what I call “supernormal attributes,” because we all have them and we can all learn from and expand our awareness in developing them, I do have great sympathy for not getting distracted by them or not stopping there. So for me it’s an “and, and.”

And certainly those outer and inner journeys that are ongoing for me are very much that process of progression and enlightenment—understanding it, experiencing it, and embodying the unity awareness of unified reality.

Rick: Yeah, embodying is an important term these days. A lot of people are using it because a lot of people either intellectually or experientially were focused on some sort of self-realization or impersonal realization, and then they found out after a while of focusing on that that, “Hey, I still have a life.” “I have relationships, I have financial concerns,” and so on.

Jude: Exactly!

Rick: So then the whole concern became about how to embody this deeper dimension with regular life.

Jude: Exactly, and I feel that is very, very important. Many years ago, when I was doing my PhD in archaeology, it was very anthropological as well, so I can understand. It’s called phenomenology, and it’s a type of archaeology that does recognize the experiential evidence that points to understanding ancient cultures, not just through their artifacts but through many other things as well.

But I was doing something called field walking near my home at Avebury, about 10 minutes away from where we live. It was a gorgeous morning, a bright blue sky, nobody around, but out of the blue sky came these words: “In the commonality of our humanity we’re all ordinary; in the commonality of our Divinity we’re all extraordinary.”

In the commonality of our humanity we’re all ordinary; in the commonality of our Divinity we’re all extraordinary.

For me it was such an aha moment because it’s actually about experiencing the ordinary in the extraordinary and the extraordinary in the ordinary, and embodying that on a daily level. For me, that is what enlightenment is about.

Rick: Yeah, I would agree. There is something—well, I won’t even elaborate; you made the point very well.

But just to throw in something, “enlightenment” has this sort of connotation—or has had in some people’s minds—of being this extraordinary, special, super-duper thing that you had to be some kind of spiritual Superman to attain, somebody like the Buddha or Ramana Maharshi or something.

One of the main themes of my show—in fact, the subtitle of this show—is “Conversations with ordinary, spiritually awakening people.” And I made it “awakening” rather than “awakened.” In fact, it was originally “awakened,” and we changed it because I just became more and more convinced that no one is finished; we’re all works in progress, no matter how highly evolved we may be.

Jude: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I love that, and my discarnate teacher is not just Thoth, but that’s what I’ve heard all my life: that our universe—our universe soul, a finite thought-form in the infinity of the cosmos—is evolving. We are all learning, we’re all moving, so yes, work in progress.

Rick: I would guess that your teachers—Thoth and the rest—would cop to that too, that we are evolving, and the whole universe is evolving, and everything in it is evolving.

Which is not to say that there is not a level of reality which doesn’t evolve, which is sort of eternal, unchanging, and all that. But as far as actually living and reflecting that, expressing that, could there be any end to that development?

Jude: I don’t know because we haven’t reached there yet! I mean, I suspect not. Certainly, what I write about in The Cosmic Hologram is the cosmological evidence that’s definitely moving more and more to this perspective: that ours, and in fact all universes, are finite constructions of consciousness in which there is an evolutionary process of learning, experiencing, exploring, and evolving, emergent within an infinite, eternal cosmic plenum.

So what does an endpoint comprise when ultimately there is no endpoint?

Rick: And what would be the point of an endpoint?

Jude: Yeah, exactly, exactly!

Rick: It’s like God would say, “Okay, now what am I going to do?”

Jude: Exactly! If it all began because God got bored, I can’t see that going back to nothing is going to help anything; it’s just continuing to express and explore.

The cosmic hologram and informational reality

Rick: Yeah, so let’s shift a little bit to The Cosmic Hologram. Where would you like to start with this? I have like four pages of notes. Maybe give us a synopsis of what the book is about.

Jude: Well, basically, the book is about bringing the latest scientific evidence across many, many fields of endeavor that’s showing that it is information, not energy, matter, or space-time, that is the most fundamental attribute of physical reality. So information—not random data but patterned information—is more fundamental than energy, matter, and space-time and is really, as a result, taking us beyond this appearance of duality, the appearance of materiality, into recognition—as the ancient spiritual understanding and all spiritual understanding is—that reality is essentially unified. It plays out on many, many different levels, but it is essentially unified.

So it’s not that mind arises from matter; mind is matter, matter is mind, information is reality. And ultimately, consciousness isn’t something we have; it’s what we and the whole world are. But the book doesn’t begin there. It shows all the evidence of how our universe is and progressively leads to a perspective where the scientific evidence is pointing to this being the case, the deeper fundamental nature of all that we call reality.

So it’s not that mind arises from matter; mind is matter, matter is mind, information is reality. And ultimately, consciousness isn’t something we have; it’s what we and the whole world are. But the book doesn’t begin there. It shows all the evidence of how our universe is and progressively leads to a perspective where the scientific evidence is pointing to this being the case, the deeper fundamental nature of all that we call reality.

Consciousness isn’t something we have; it’s what we and the whole world are.

Rick: Now, when you usually hear the word “information,” you maybe think of a newspaper, which actually still exists, where you have words and that conveys information, or you think of a computer, where information is encoded in bits and bytes—binary code or whatever. So you’re saying that information is this fundamental reality, even more fundamental than space and time. How is that information encoded? What is the nature of it? What is the content of it?

Jude: Well, first of all, just to perhaps take a step back, physicists have known for a very long time just how truly ephemeral physical reality is. When we drill down to subatomic levels, however solid it appears to be, everything is something like 99.9999999999999999% no-thing-ness.

And subatomic entities themselves are the tiniest excitations. They’re not tiny billiard balls; they are excitations in a field that is now being understood as an informational field rather than anything we’ve previously termed “physical.”

Rick: Yeah, so even the physical things aren’t physical.

Jude: No! I mean, we’re really having to restate our understanding of what we understand by “physical.” The only reason you can sit on a chair or I can stand on a floor is that the way those excitations relate to each other means they can’t occupy the same position, the same quantum state.

Rick: Pauli exclusion principle, right? I learned that from your book.

Jude: Excellent! Excellent! But, yeah, exactly that, and it’s just very straightforward. If they were able to align, they would move through each other and you wouldn’t be sitting on the chair and I wouldn’t be standing on the floor. But that is an appearance; it is not the fundamental nature of reality.

The other thing that’s being shown now—and again, I talk about it in the book—is that information, the same bits of information that are allowing us to have this conversation over Skype, that are the workings of our computers, that make up how we create holograms and our virtual realities, those digitized bits of ones and zeroes—that digitized information—is exactly, exactly the same as the universal information that makes up physical reality. This is being shown most recently in experiments to be as physically real as any subatomic entity.

So what physicists are beginning to understand is the need to restate the laws of physics as algorithms. We write algorithms instructing our computer programs as to how to operate. Well, the laws of physics are really the algorithms allowing our universe to exist and evolve.

Rick: So who wrote the algorithms, and in what are the algorithms encoded? In our computers, we could look at the actual code of the algorithms, and somebody actually wrote them. So how does that work for the universe itself?

Jude: Well, for the universe, the algorithms are mathematical, so they are relational. For example, when Newton—300 or 400 years ago—said that F = ma, or force equals mass times acceleration, that is an algorithm, and that explains how forces throughout our entire universe, when they’re applied to a mass, create an acceleration.

So it’s just a very simple algorithm saying, “If you apply this to that, then that happens,” so it’s relational. All of the equations of the laws of physics are algorithms! If you actually look and see how somebody writes computer code, it’s: add this to that and produce that; multiply this by that and you’ll get to this outcome.

So all the laws of physics, the equations of physics, are the relational algorithms that are just moving the information that’s expressed as energy and matter around—whether it’s in a body, whether it’s in a planet, whether it’s in a star, or whether it’s throughout our entire universe.

Rick: So if the universe conforms to mathematics or operates by virtue of mathematical algorithms that humans can understand, then it’s almost like mathematics is the language of nature, which we’ve been able to interpret and codify with our own symbols. But it’s not like something we invented; it’s more like something we discovered.

Jude: I completely agree. Another species living on a planet at the other side of the galaxy, if they’ve gotten to our level of self-awareness and experimentation, will have come up with “F = ma,” and they’ll have come up with “E = hν.” They may obviously be using different symbols, but equals equals, multiply multiplies, add adds, and divide divides. These are the relationships that apply throughout our universe, and any species getting to the level of self-awareness that actually has the ability to do what we’re doing will have discovered these same mathematical underpinnings that are the algorithms of universal existence and evolution.

Rick: And that’s one of the fundamental principles of science, isn’t it, that the laws of nature are universal?

Jude: Absolutely, yeah. One of the things I talk about in the book is the evidence that our universe is finite and undertakes a finite cycle from its birth 13.8 billion years ago—what I call the “Big Breath” rather than the Big Bang, because it wasn’t explosive, it wasn’t random; it was incredibly fine-tuned, it was incredibly ordered—through to its endpoint.

And the laws of physics, such as they are, are exactly as you say: they are universally applicable wherever we are in the universe and whenever we are in the universe.

Entropy and the evolution of complexity

Rick: As I understand it, the Vedic perspective concurs with that. I think they might even use the metaphor of breathing, but they also recognize an in-breath as well as an out-breath. Just as we breathe, so the universe also breathes in and out—or maybe multiple universes do. It’s this eternal cycle.

Jude: My sense is that, at the moment, the evidence suggests the physical laws of our universe suggest it’s a simple and what is called an “adiabatic cycle,” from minimal informational entropy to highest informational entropy. What happens then is very speculative, because we don’t have the understanding from a physical viewpoint as to what might happen then.

There are a couple of theories that I write about in the book, so there may be an in-breath, but the in-breath may be almost like the cosmic plenum absorbing what our universe has evolved to. So it may be an in-breath in a different way, but I agree with you: the Vedas have profound insights—profound wisdom for us.

Rick: One of the things they say is that when creation goes back into the “Big Sleep”—I forget what they call it—but that all the souls existing at that time go into this sort of resting state or something. Then, when the next creation comes out, the very same souls come out and continue on in their evolution, picking up from where they left off.

Jude: That may well be the case, and actually, that is very close to what leading-edge science is coming to view. The Big Sleep is—as I describe in the book—what happens when that minimum informational entropy has evolved to the maximum entropy able to be held within our universe, rather like a bubble.

Very simply, it is like a bubble growing and growing and then bursting. When our universal bubble bursts, is that the dissipation back into sleep that the Vedas talk about? Back into the infinite cosmic plenum, waiting for the next bubble to come forward and go on from where they left off?

Rick: Well, let’s define entropy, since some people might not be familiar with the term.

Jude: Okay, well, let’s go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, who was the Austrian scientist who studied what’s called the “thermodynamics of gases”—the way gases behave, things like their attributes of heat, temperature, work, et cetera.

And he came up with effectively two main laws of thermodynamics. The first one has to do with the conservation of energy and matter in a closed system, but the second one has to do with this concept of entropy.

Entropy and the Number of Microstates

Now, he was studying gases, and he was doing this even before atoms had been discovered. He predicted atoms, but they hadn’t yet been experimentally proven. What he was basically saying is that the entropy of a system describes its number of microstates—the number of states it can take.

So think about this in a different way. Think of it perhaps as a pack of cards. If you have a pack of cards, you take the cellophane wrapping off, and they come out very clean and crisp and ordered. They’re ordered in their suits, so that is low entropy because they are very ordered. There are very few microstates in that system.

You throw them up in the air, they go everywhere, and you collect them. They’re not going to be in the same order that they came out of the pack in; they now have more microstates. And if you throw them up again, there are even more microstates.

So what you get is an inevitable increase from a low level of entropy to a higher level of entropy, from a lower number of states to a higher number of states. For a long time, people have described that as “order” and “disorder,” but it actually really isn’t, or at least that can be misleading. It’s more that it is going from simplicity to complexity.

And we can redefine entropy in informational terms because of the equation that Ludwig Boltzmann discovered 150 or more years ago, which is that the entropy of a system can be stated as a constant—named after him, the Boltzmann constant—times the logarithm of the number of microstates.

Fifty or sixty years ago, an IBM engineer called Claude Shannon came up with exactly the same equation, but this time to describe the information of a system. Now, since Shannon’s time, other information scientists have come to appreciate that what it is actually showing is the informational content of a system.

So what you have is that, instead of thermodynamic entropy, as a number of microstates always increasing, you have informational entropy also increasing.

And this time, we can go back to the origin of our universe and show that entropy was at its lowest at the first moment and has been increasing ever since. Now, what that does is give time its arrow, but it also shows that it’s the informational content of our universe that is ever-increasing.

So when we look at entropy in informational terms, that gives us an understanding of how our universe evolves, because there was less informational entropy in our universe yesterday than there is today, than there will be tomorrow, than there will be the day after.

Jude: Because our universe in its entirety—not just you and I and our beautiful planet and our solar system—everything, our entire universe, both exists and evolves as a unified entity, and it’s the informational entropy that is its measure of evolutionary progress from simplicity to complexity. But it’s not that space itself is getting more complex; it’s that the informational entropy is being more and more individuated—from hydrogen into stars, into planets, into biological organisms such as ourselves.

Rick: Well, it seems to me that that’s the opposite of entropy, and let me elaborate for a moment. Let’s say you take a Volkswagen, a new Volkswagen, and you put it out in a field, and you come back 100 years later and you find a pile of rust. All right, so entropy has done its thing, and what was a very ordered thing, with specific parts fitting in specific ways, has now broken down into its more fundamental components. The same would be true of a human body—let it decompose and you’ve got primarily about four elements, with a bunch of other ones in smaller proportions.

And I think it was Ilya Prigogine who spoke of biological life as eating negative entropy, that you somehow take in orderliness from the environment and incorporate it into your structure and maintain and actually evolve greater complexity and orderliness despite the entropic influences bombarding you. So when you say that increasing entropy equates with increasing information … I don’t totally understand that; I feel that there is a loss of information.

Jude: Okay, no, there isn’t. Ilya Prigogine was a genius, but what he didn’t take account of is the finite, closed universe. What I’m talking about is that our entire universe is always increasing entropy, and therefore, to actually separate the information of an organism or a Volkswagen from the environment—you can’t do it. That’s the point.

Our universe is fundamentally interconnected, so the Volkswagen itself, the energy-matter of that Volkswagen, reduces to its metals and all the rest of it, but that information is still part of our universal structure, our universal, or univers-soul’s, continuing evolutionary process that is entropic of itself. So the problem you have is that when you try and dig it into just one bit—a person, a Volkswagen, a planet—you have to look at the entire universe as a unified and coherent entity in this regard, and the information is not then lost; it is actually, from the holographic principle, held on the two-dimensional holographic boundary of what appears to be three-dimensional space. But actually, all the cosmological theories that are moving forward are moving in the same direction of suggesting this holographic principle is fundamental to the way our universe exists and evolves.

Rick: Okay, let’s get onto holographs in a moment, but just to pursue this a bit more … okay, fine, so entropy as a whole and throughout the entire universe is increasing, but it would seem that any arisal of specificity—a planet, a fern, a dinosaur, or a human being—sort of bucks the overall trend. There is this decrease of entropy and increase of orderliness and specificity within a particular expression within the universe, no?

Jude: No, essentially not, but you’re right about the specificity. What happens is that the universe as a whole is increasing its entropy. On a planet, there is increasing entropy because increased entropy is more information. Order is the lowest entropy; disorder is … and that’s why I don’t like using order/disorder. It’s simplicity/complexity—that is the direction that entropy takes, that information takes.

It is from simplicity to complexity, but you have to look at it as a whole universe because otherwise you get into this syntropy/negentropy cycle, which is not helpful, because it is still separating units from environments and from other units. We need to look at the whole of our universe and understand that the entirety of our universe is evolving, and we are the microcosmic, co-creative representations of that. Just as we evolve from being a baby to an adult, even when our bodies move, the information of our consciousness continues.

Holographic space-time

Rick: Yeah … you mean like reincarnation, kind of thing, where the information that we accrue in one life is carried into the next?

Jude: Essentially, yes, but on a much bigger scale than that, because if we go back to the holographic principle … go back to the bubble idea of our universe being blown up from its very tiny origins, being blown up as a bubble, but the surface of that bubble is where all the information is held, which is why space has to expand and time has to flow for our universe to evolve.

Because more and more information is held on that surface-brain—as it’s called—which then appears as experience, as evolutionary processes within what we call space-time.

Rick: Okay, so you’re sitting in front of a bookshelf and there’s a lot of information on that bookshelf. Are you saying that all the information of the universe is encoded in the bubble—in the outer shell—of the universe? Do you mean that literally? To say, for instance, that all the information in the books behind you is somehow in that shell of the universe, is that the kind of thing you mean?

Jude: Yeah, and that’s what cosmologists are pointing to; all of the various theories are converging on the idea that what we call “three-dimensional space” is actually a holographic projection from that surface area, from that surface-brain.

Rick: Let’s do this from time to time because there may be some people who … and personally, I love talking about this kind of thing and reading your book and all because it stretches me. I sort of hang on for dear life while I’m reading your books, trying to understand what you’re saying, and I feel like it gets more neurons firing to do that rather than just reading a Lilian Moore novel or something.

So people who might be feeling a little challenged by this discussion, just hang in there and think of questions you might want to ask, however simple, to help clarify your understanding of this. And I do feel it is relevant to the whole spiritual enlightenment thing; understanding the way the universe works is somehow relevant to our personal realization, I feel. And maybe you could elaborate on why that is the case, just as a little interlude here.

Jude: I absolutely agree with you, Rick. I mean, if what we’re saying is that within an infinite, eternal cosmic mind, our universe—our universe-soul—is a finite thought-form that has a beginning, evolves, experiences, and will have an end, then we have incarnated as individuated microcosms of that intelligence to play our part, to experience, and to play our part, potentially, in that evolution.

So my sense, my feeling, is that this is incredibly empowering, because the other thing it does is to show us the duality, that material duality perspective—that you and I are separate, that we’re separate from our beautiful planetary home, that everything is random and meaningless—is nonsense. That just isn’t the way that reality is!

So for me as a healer, I know that if somebody has misplaced beliefs or fragmented perspectives, those beliefs will drive their behaviors. So on a collective level, it seems to me that our fragmented perspectives have driven our dysfunctional behaviors. So we pollute our planet, we’re causing environmental mayhem, we fight and kill each other, and all this is really coming from this duality-based perception, which of itself is wrong. So if we can heal our fragmented perspectives into what I’m calling the “whole-world view,” then perhaps that will play its part in helping us heal our behaviors.

Our universe is innately and fundamentally interconnected; it literally exists and evolves as a unified and coherent entity.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a great point. I mentioned to you before the interview my friend Robin, who is a mathematician. He and I spent about two and a half hours yesterday afternoon talking about your book and pontificating about various things—the two of us just speculating and discussing. One conclusion we came to … Robin sort of drew this graph with his hands where science is here in the middle, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff in different directions that science completely loses the ability to deal with. Even such things as emotions or economics or things like that—it’s just out of science’s league. And when we start talking about otherworldly beings or even what dark matter is, which should be within the domain of science, science is mute; they don’t know what it is, but they’re working on trying to figure it out.

And the reason I’m mentioning this is that it is good to have a certain humility with regard to what we know and what we’re able to know at this point, and to keep an open mind. And there are so many in the scientific community who don’t do that, who just say, “It’s only this,” or “That’s woo-woo,” or who just brush off even somebody like you who is talking about something outside of their current understanding. And the history of science is rife with this sort of thing, and I forget who it was, but someone said that science progresses through a series of funerals, because usually somebody has to die and a new generation has to come in before new ideas are adopted.

But I don’t know if we can afford the luxury at this time in our history to go through generations before we really upgrade our understanding of nature and of the way the world works and of how intimately we’re all interconnected—not only we humans, but with all other species and with the planet itself. Our very existence depends upon a major upgrade happening soon.

Jude: I completely agree. I think it was Thomas Kuhn who coined the term “paradigm shift,” and that’s exactly right. And I wrote this book not because it’s an endpoint, but because it’s a direction of travel across all levels of science, all scales of research, and all different areas and fields of research. And you’re right, all of this, everything, is a work in progress. Enlightenment is a work in progress, as you said earlier.

But I think that this is too important to keep to the scientists because you’re right, science—for good or ill, for good or ill—scientific perspectives tend to drive our collective viewpoint. And if science says that everything is just materialistic, follows a reductionist path, is random, and everything is separate, then that doesn’t just feed into science; it feeds into all our education, it feeds into our healthcare, it feeds into our economics, it feeds into everything.

And if it is wrong—and I believe, and not just believe … the evidence is … because it’s not about belief. What I wanted to show in the book was the evidence, and then people can make their own minds up, but the evidence is so broad and convergent that our perspective of the world is about to transform and desperately needs to transform. Because you’re right, we can’t afford to go on as we have gone on, with these dysfunctional beliefs driving our dysfunction.

From information to holograms

Rick: Yeah. Ronald Reagan had an interior secretary named James Watt who was noted for one thing: cancelling the Beach Boys’ performance on the Fourth of July at the Capitol Mall because he thought they were too decadent or something. So they ended up with Wayne Newton, who is this Las Vegas lounge lizard, but that’s not the point I want to make. His contribution to the climate situation or the environmental situation—which was his purview as interior secretary—was to say, “Let’s just extract all the resources as quickly as possible because Jesus is coming soon and we’re not going to be around anyway, so let’s just kind of rape the planet and be done with it.” But I’m just bringing that up as an example of how it’s important to have a deeper, more holistic understanding of the way things work, because it translates into policies that have a very real impact on people.

Jude: Absolutely. Well, we’re seeing that with the Trump administration pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and we’re seeing it in terms of a man who was suing the EPA and is actually now head of the EPA and directing it, so you’re absolutely right. And to be fair, it’s not just scientism; it’s also religious perspectives that have an adverse effect on how we look after ourselves and how we look after our planetary home.

Rick: All right, so that little interlude was all about the importance of knowledge and correct knowledge—knowledge that actually correlates with reality in terms of its impact on our personal lives, I would say, and also on our society. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to say that there are two legs to progress: one is intellectual understanding and the other is direct experience, and that one without the other can go way off track.

Jude: Sure, absolutely. I agree with you, and I think the other thing is that someone once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts.” So I know that in the current situation, who knows what’s going on, but what I try to do in the book is to be as factual and as evidentially based as I can be, and then people can go through that journey and make their own views of this. But ultimately, I completely agree with you: it is both understanding on the intellectual level and experiencing, and bringing those two together. And then embodying—embody it!

Because what do we do in the world? A friend of mine is Gordon Deveron, and he talks about head and heart and hands. This is the first book of a trilogy, and it is about understanding the nature of unified reality. The second book, which I’m just beginning to write, is called Gaia, Her Story, and it is about the experiential awareness of that and a special relationship with Gaia, our Mother Earth. And then the third book—and that’s the heart—the third book is called Many Voices, One Heart, but it’s the hands; it’s our story of humanity.

Because when we understand unified reality and we begin to experience unity awareness, what then? How do we embody it? What do we do about it? What changes? My sense of it is that everything changes. It’s like going into a dark room where you think you’re alone, you’re scared of the dark, and you’re scared of who else might be out there. Then you turn on a light and you realize that all there is in the room, and all those who are in the room, are friends. What would you do about it then?

Rick: Well, that’s great. I’d like to have further conversations when those books come out. So, holograms: the title of your book is about holograms. What is a hologram? Why is that important, so as to make it a very central theme of your book? How does it relate to the way the universe functions, and how does that all tie back to any practical significance for us as human beings, and particularly as human beings who are interested in enlightenment?

Jude: I love your questions. They’re inevitably about a million parts to answer, so thank you. First of all, you asked about what a hologram is, essentially. When we look at an object, our eyes are receiving information about that object that’s held within the light reflected off it, which is why we can’t see in the dark; there is no light to bounce off the objects around us and be received so that we can see them.

A hologram happens when you shine a light on an object so that you actually split the beam into two: one beam goes straight on, and the other beam is reflected off the object.

Rick: It’s a laser light you’re shining on it?

Jude: It’s a laser light. In our technologies currently, it is a laser light. But what it’s doing is picking up information about that object. It’s bathing that object—whatever it may be—in that light, and it’s taking an analysis of its three-dimensional appearance, all the information about its three-dimensional appearance. That light then goes back and joins the split beam. They are then shone on a two-dimensional photographic frame of some sort, and they form a wiggly pattern, like you see in an oil slick or in a puddle; they create this pattern of waves. And those waves, that pattern, hold all the information on a two-dimensional surface that’s being picked up from this three-dimensional object.

When you now shine another light through that two-dimensional film, the appearance of the three-dimensional object is then projected as a hologram.

Rick: Sure, like R2-D2 projecting Princess Leia in the first Star Wars episode.

Jude: Absolutely! And you go back 30-odd years to that, which I loved, and you look at how far our holography has come forward. The reason for that is that the pixilation—the tiny little data points that can pick up the information from an object—has gotten smaller and smaller, and of higher and higher definition. So holograms have gotten much more sophisticated, but the best pixilation we have for our current holograms is 100 trillion trillion times bigger than the holographic pixilation of space-time.

Rick: A hundred trillion trillion times smaller, you mean?

Jude: No, no!

Rick: Oh, the pixels—the pixels are bigger, that’s right. The information is less.

The Holographic Universe and Black-Hole Information

Jude: No, no. Think about a hologram and the pixilation I’ve just described. Now take the principle of a hologram and apply it to our entire universe. This began when folks were looking at black holes; they were trying to understand what happens to all the information that describes a star when a star contracts beyond an event horizon as a black hole. Is the information lost?

Well, if the information is lost, then quantum physics is in deep, deep trouble, because quantum physics says that information cannot be lost in that way. So where does it go? To cut a long story short, the analysis has been showing that it actually remains on the two-dimensional surface area of that black hole, of that event horizon.

Just as I talked to you about the bubble and the information on the surface area of the bubble, think of that then extended to our whole universe. That’s what is called the “holographic principle.” The idea is that our entire universe is a holographic projection of what we think of and experience as space-time, but a holographic projection from the holographic boundary of what we call space and time.

Now the point is: whereas the pixilation of our human holograms has become much more sophisticated, nonetheless, it doesn’t even begin to approach the tiny, tiny scale of the pixilation of space-time. That tiny scale is something called the “Planck scale.” The Planck scale comes about when we throw all the forces of nature together and certain units come out. And again, those would be the same units in different symbols, whether we’re on this planet or on a planet that is a million light-years away. Nonetheless, this comes out as a fundamental scale for the energy, matter, space, and time of our universe.

On a spatial level, it’s about 10 to the minus 35 meters. When you consider that the nucleus of an atom is about 10 to the minus 15 meters, that’s 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. So that’s the level of the pixilation: tiny little Planck-scale areas holding one bit of information for each Planck-scale area. And that is 100 trillion trillion times smaller than the pixilation we’ve managed to get in our man-made, human-made, woman-made holograms.

Rick: Right, so it’s very, very high resolution, you could say, to use that kind of term.

Jude: Yes, it’s the resolution of space-time. It’s the resolution of the existence and the evolution of our universe as a universe-soul, as a finite thought-form in the Mind of the cosmos.

Rick: So are you saying that, just as you could have a hologram of an apple and shine a laser through the holographic film and see an apple and so on, everything we see around us—the room we’re in, the people we’re interacting with, and so on—are holographic projections of information that is encoded at the Planck scale?

Jude: Yes, and essentially, it is consciousness. The consciousness, the intelligence of our universe—everything is consciousness. Consciousness isn’t something we have; it’s what we and the whole world are. So this is a way by which consciousness, cosmic consciousness, has co-created a playground, an experiential perspective that we call our universe, and that here, on this level, we call “the physical realm.”

The beauty of a hologram—a human-made hologram—is that if you take that hologram of an apple, or whatever object it is, and you cut and slice it, every pixel encodes the whole. And again, that reflects the ancient wisdom of the one being the many.

The beauty of a hologram—a human-made hologram—is that if you take that hologram of an apple, or whatever object it is, and you cut and slice it, every pixel encodes the whole. And again, that reflects the ancient wisdom of the one being the many.

Rick: But you lose resolution when you do that.

Jude: You lose resolution, yes. But essentially, a hologram is innately unified and coherent, and our universe is innately unified and coherent in that respect.

🏘️ Holographic patterns in nature and society

Rick: So a couple of interesting points come to mind here. One is that we were talking a little while ago about mathematics being the language of nature, and that the human facility with mathematics is more a cognition of what the system, or nature, actually uses than it is a human invention. But a second point here would be that it seems like holography is a way that God apparently projects a three-dimensional universe.

Jude: Yes, yes! Part of your earlier question was, what relevance is it to us? One of the chapters in the book is called “Holographic Behaviors,” because we find the signatures of the cosmic hologram—this sort of relational scaling up and scaling down, which is also a fundamental attribute of holograms—not just throughout nature, but also throughout our human behaviors.

So what scientists study in complex systems, whether they be ecosystems, economic structures, galactic filaments, atomic transitions, the growth of cities, or whatever, shows that the fractal patternings, which are geometrical relational patternings, underpin all that we call “physical reality,” and those themselves are, by their nature, holographic.

So we’re finding the signature of the cosmic hologram at every scale throughout our universe, and not just through natural systems but through human systems. For example, the analysis being done of the way the nodes within the internet work—the connections, the relationships between web pages, and how the internet works—shows exactly the same fractal and holographic structuring as biological ecosystems.

When the analysis was done recently by two Harvard astrophysicists, Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb, it was shown that if you take population density as the key factor, the way that cities grow—using the population density of people as their factor—and the way galaxies form—using the population density of stars as their factor—they grow in exactly the same way.

If you look, for example, at the analysis of earthquakes—which many folks have done, but a couple of the earliest researchers were Gutenberg and Richter—they came up with an understanding that if you look at all earthquakes, of whatever scale, and then graph them against their frequency, so that you have the size, or the destructive power, of earthquakes logarithmically and their frequency, and you plot that, you get a straight line.

So what that shows is that there’s no such thing as an “average” earthquake. All there is is a relationship between the scale of an earthquake—which we call the Richter scale—and its frequency. So an earthquake that is twice as powerful logarithmically on the Richter scale is four times less likely to occur, which makes it very, very difficult to predict specific earthquakes because they all come along this line—Jude points to a line on a piece of paper—and they have this relationship between destructive power and frequency, but there’s no average earthquake.

Jude: Now what’s crucial, and I think a real aha!, is that the same analysis is being done of human conflicts. Just after the Second World War, Louis Richardson, a researcher, analyzed hundreds of conflicts, from the two world wars down to tiny regional wars. He plotted them in terms of their destructive capacity—the number of human deaths—against their frequency, and he came up with exactly the same relationship as for earthquakes.

More recently, a team at the University of Miami has looked at insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and has come to exactly the same analysis. That is showing us that the holographic behavior of earthquakes and the holographic nature of human conflicts follow the same patterning, the same relational patterning.

Rick: And so what’s the takeaway from this? How can we benefit from this understanding? What can it do for us as a society?

Jude: Well, first of all, it is showing that we cannot continue to think of ourselves as somehow separate—that what I do to you doesn’t affect me, or that what you do to me doesn’t affect you. What it is showing is that our universe is innately and fundamentally interconnected, that it literally—not metaphorically, but literally—exists and evolves as a unified and coherent entity.

The second thing is that this plays out in our everyday lives. There is a lot of analysis, and people have studied everything from how people use their mobile phones. There was an analysis done of 10,000 anonymized mobile phone users. Everybody has different lifestyles; everybody is going to work at different times, choosing to use their mobile or cell phones at different times. They were able to show that it was exactly the same holographic patterning that would be the case for nonhuman systems.

That is why people at Google and Yahoo pay fortunes, because it gives them predictive power by understanding these relationships—these holographic signatures, these fractal signatures of the cosmic hologram—to predict our behaviors. Which means that prediction might be helpful, but what if it moves to control? That may not be so helpful.

We need to understand this because this is both empowering but potentially challenging. Not that misunderstanding is dangerous, but if we don’t understand it, we could sleepwalk into forces that we wouldn’t want to have greater control over our lives.

Rick: A lot of them already do.

Jude: They do, they do.

Rick: There is all sorts of data analysis by Facebook and Google and so on that makes them more effective at getting you to “buy the thing” or “press the button.” They know how to manipulate your attention and get your eyeballs on the screen as much as possible.

Jude: Yes, they do, and a lot of that is understanding the fractal, holographic patternings that underpin our behaviors. But the other thing is that what this also shows is that we, each and every one of us, are microcosmic co-creators.

Part of what I talk about in the book is what I call “supernormal phenomena”: that we all have abilities within us, such as telepathy, levels of precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, et cetera, et cetera, which would not reduce our humanity but actually enhance it in that regard.

But also, we have far more power. Our thoughts affect not just our emotions but our bodies. And I show evidence of experiments that have demonstrated how monks, priests, and nuns can, by thought alone, control bodies. Hypnosis—there are many, many ways in which our thoughts and our beliefs can affect our realities, so we need to understand this too, because otherwise we’re sleepwalking into all sorts of issues.

But for me, the deepest importance is understanding the integral, unified nature of reality, and that we’re not separate and we are empowered. We have meaning, we have purpose. It is very crucial that we show up at this time. As you say, we don’t have the luxury of being able to go on acting irresponsibly—whether it’s to each other, to ourselves, or to our planet—because we’re at a point of global emergency.

Unless we can transform that into emergence, I’m not sure that there will be a viable planet for our grandchildren and their children to inherit. That would be a complete dereliction of any duty we have as humans, as parents, and as microcosmic co-creators of our realities!

Unless we can transform global emergency into emergence, I’m not sure that there will be a viable planet for our grandchildren and their children to inherit.

Rick: Yeah, there’s some lawsuit afoot in the United States where a certain group of young people are suing—I don’t know whether they’re suing the EPA or Exxon or somebody—but they’re suing them for a dereliction of duty because they feel that these companies or entities are sowing the seeds for a very difficult life as they become adults.

Jude: Absolutely, absolutely. And one of the early endorsers of my book, Dr. Larry Dossey, basically said exactly this: the issues I’m raising in the book could make the difference between whether ours is a viable species in a generation or two generations going forward.

Synchronicity and co-creation

Rick: Yeah. Let’s talk about that some more, because a lot of the discussion we’ve had might seem a little cerebral to some people. We want to make sure that we’re really getting down to the nitty-gritty practicality of it.

Jude: Absolutely.

Rick: One thing I want to throw in that might get you started on that is what we were saying before about the hologram and how information is encoded in consciousness, ultimately.

There’s a really cool verse in the Rigveda which goes something like—(Rick states the verse in Sanskrit)—and I just happen to know that particular verse; I’m not an expert in the Vedas.

But what it is saying is that the impulses of intelligence that are responsible for the manifestation and governance of the universe reside in consciousness, and that he who does not know consciousness—know his own inner nature—what can those impulses do for him? But he who knows that, then those impulses are in his service; they support his life.

You were talking before about synchronicities and how everything went so amazingly well for you—that tour and other things in your life, I’m sure. That’s a practical example of knowing this deeper reality and thereby enlisting the collaboration of the impulses of intelligence that are responsible for the governance of the universe.

Jude: Yeah, absolutely right. One of the things I write about later in the book is what I call an “octave of eight co-creative principles,” which I’ve gleaned from many, many different traditions and from my own experience in life.

When we become more aware, we become more attuned to that innate intelligence. Therefore, when we are open to this, we experience more and more synchronicities, which essentially are our way-showers.

For me, synchronicities are the way-showers that I am in attunement with that highest flow. Life becomes progressively effortless. I don’t mean that it won’t have its challenges, and I don’t mean that we don’t have to show up, but it’s about showing up and getting out of the way—out of the way of the ego—and flowing with this higher flow of the universe’s evolutionary impulse, and being with that.

It is rather like being a surfer, catching the wave and going with it, rather than trying to fight it or second-guess it.

So there are really practical, everyday principles of creativity that, certainly in my life, have made an enormous difference to my well-being, my appreciation, and my enjoyment of life.

Nonlocality and supernormal phenomena

Rick: Yeah. We were talking about the holographic principle—the holographic universe—and how the pixilation at the Planck scale—and this is a bit of a segue; it doesn’t play off exactly what you were saying just now—in your book you quote Deepak Chopra, who was quoting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, using the phrase “field of all possibilities” to refer to that unmanifest field of all knowledge, or field of all potentialities.

Would you say that each of these pixels at the Planck scale has to be a field of all possibilities in and of itself, or do pixels specialize as they do on a computer screen, where they’re all different colors and they collaborate with each other to produce certain manifestations? In other words, is total knowledge contained in each one, or are points more specialized than that?

Jude: I would say that points are more specialized than that, and I think we need to take a step beyond that holographic boundary.

What I’m describing as that holographic, pixelated boundary of information is the pixelated boundary of what we call the physical realm. So that pixilation at the Planck scale, holding one digitized bit of information per Planck scale, can hold a vast, vast, vast amount of information about the whole cycle of our universe, but it is the information that is manifested within what we call space-time.

The possibilities and potentialities form different levels beyond that holographic membrane, as it were, and yet are associated with it. I’m going to be writing about that—which also plays very much into the Vedas, but also into many other traditions—to explore the multidimensionality of realities in more depth in my next books.

But what I wanted to establish in The Cosmic Hologram was that as those possibilities cohere and converge, what they tend to do is form what are called “attractor basins,” literally attracting a certain way of being. Biological ecosystems are underpinned by attractor basins; that’s how biological evolution progresses.

All complex systems are underpinned by these attractors. The entire universe is pinned by these attractors: attractors of love, attractors of fear, attractors of whatever. But when they are manifest in the physical realm, it’s that manifestation that then adds to what perhaps the Hindu tradition would call the Akashic field, as the holographic boundary of what we call space-time.

But possibilities are playing out on many multidimensional levels. Multidimensional experiences and intelligence are playing out. The holographic boundary is what gets fed into what we call the physical realm, essentially.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, obviously we understand that our—even in terms of the gross realm—our human capacity for perception is very limited. We perceive just a little sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, which we see as visible light, and a little sliver of the total range of possible sound, and so on.

Then, taking into account all the multidimensionality that you’re referring to, all sorts of subtle realms that modern science doesn’t even recognize exist, I mean, you refer to the holographic thing in the physical realm, but it would seem to me that all realms and all strata of creation would work by this principle of holography, if any of them do.

Jude: Yeah, I agree with you. It’s just that when we’re considering the physical realm, it is that particular boundary that is within what we call space-time and what we call energy-matter. It is information expressed as space-time, information expressed as energy-matter; it is what is then manifested in the physical realm that is pixelated at the Planck scale.

Rick: Well, the physical realm is just the one we’re accustomed to functioning in, but that doesn’t give it any superiority to other realms that we don’t function in.

Jude: No, no, no! Good Lord, no, absolutely not! I want to get people over the bridge, from a materialistic, dualistic perspective to a multidimensional, unified understanding of which our physical universe is an exquisite, co-creative construction of consciousness.

Rick: Hear, hear.

Jude: That just gets us over the bridge, and then we can start the real adventure.

Rick: Yeah, and that inspires me to comment on the fact that I always have the feeling—this awestruck notion that God is hiding in plain sight. You were talking earlier about how much information is potentially encoded at the Planck scale—many, many orders of magnitude beyond what we can encode through our crude technologies. But if you think about it, if you take a little leaf or a single cell in a leaf, there’s so much information in that cell—a marvelous, intricate little thing. And then there are trillions of them in one entity, and so on and so on, throughout the whole universe.

And then there’s the whole karmic thing—Indra’s net—of how everything is actually connected directly with everything else and influencing everything else, and it just boggles the mind. And so you think about the amount of information. Even the amount of information taken in by the way our eye sees, compared to what a webcam or camcorder or any kind of digital device can take in, is minuscule.

So the intelligence that is functioning in every bit of creation, every chunk of creation, every large and small, top to bottom, is just beyond comprehension. So how much data that represents is amazing to consider.

Jude: I agree. There are some suggestions that it could be 10 to the 120—that’s one followed by 120 zeroes—bits of information, which is pretty mind-blowing in itself.

Rick: That’s one big hard drive.

Jude: Absolutely. And whatever you want to call it, whether you want to call it Cosmic Mind, Cosmic Intelligence, or God, it is everything. It is literally everything. Everything we call reality is God, everything we call reality is Cosmic Mind, everything we call reality is consciousness, at many, many different levels of experience and awareness playing out.

Rick: A question came in from one of our viewers—Matt in California. He asks, “How do chakras and astral bodies and individual consciousness fit into the holographic worldview?”

Jude: Thanks for the question, Matt, and it’s a good one. I actually wrote a book called The Eighth Chakra, which was about the perception that as we expand our awareness beyond the personality, beyond the seven main chakras, we’re bridging to what I’m calling chakras, but they’re really levels of awareness, into an enlightenment where there is a twelvefold level of awareness that eventually forms a thirteenth whole, which is Buddhic consciousness, Christed consciousness, et cetera.

So, given that everything we call reality is consciousness at play, the chakric system has, if you like, a physicalized, very, very low-level energy associated with it, but it plays out beyond the level of the holographic boundary. So it fits into this perfectly, as do all the supernormal phenomena I was talking about earlier. For me, they’re not supernatural or paranormal. As Dean Radin has also pointed out, they are supernormal attributes that are innate aspects of this model that I’m calling the Cosmic Hologram.

Rick: Yeah, and I suppose Dean would agree that when you say “supernormal,” you don’t mean that it in any way violates any laws of nature. It’s just not ordinary because it’s not a common experience. But neither were airplanes 200 years ago. We saw birds doing it, but any kind of human flight would have been considered extraordinary. Now it’s commonplace.

Jude: Absolutely, absolutely.

Rick: Speaking of Dean Radin—if people don’t know, he’s at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and he does a lot of research on psi phenomena—do you have any explanation for the mechanism of psi phenomena? Perhaps an elaboration on the question is: How can we affect quantum or classical phenomena, and what are the prospects for a scientific theory in this area?

Jude: Well, first of all, all laboratory experiments have shown that reality is not realized at the quantum scale but much, much beyond that. Reality is not realized unless it’s observed or measured in some way, and how we observe or measure in laboratory conditions then guides whether that entity appears as a wave or a particle.

So, extending that, we’ve done experiments now to extend that reality to classical objects. And we’ve also shown that our universe, which is innately nonlocal—which, of course, is what all these supernormal or psi phenomena are about—in other words, phenomena that transcend the limits of space and time. Within space-time, nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and yet these phenomena and something called “nonlocal connectivity” do exactly that.

Things can change if you create a twin set of particles—quantum particles—and separate them by a galaxy or the whole universe. You switch the attributes of one, and the other will immediately switch. In other words, they’re nonlocally interconnected. No signal is going between them, and that is the same for supernormal phenomena. And what that is showing—and, by the way, something called Bell’s theorem states that for quantum physics to work at all, our entire universe must be nonlocally interconnected.

So what we have is a universe that is unified and nonlocally interconnected, and yet within what we call space-time there is this signaling speed limit, which is the speed of light. So all the psi phenomena that Dean is studying—what I call supernormal phenomena, and what I write about in the book—are a natural attribute of our universe as a cosmic hologram.

Rick: Yeah, so I think you’re suggesting that there is a foundational reality or substratum that is not constrained by time and space, that transcends those, and through which information can be mediated or transmitted. And that would explain quantum entanglement and things like that.

Jude: Yeah, that’s right. But, very importantly, those perceptions are non-entropic. In other words, they don’t dislocate the flow of time within space-time, and they don’t dislocate the causality that’s fundamental to the existence and evolution of space-time. But what they do is enable our universe to know itself as it evolves, but still within space-time, so that its microcosmic co-creators can explore and experience, as we do. You need both.

Rick: Yeah, you need both. It’s the old “boundaries and boundless” thing.

Jude: Exactly!

Rick: I was just listening to a talk by a friend, and she was talking about the value of transcending boundaries and just being unbounded and not being specific, and that has its value. But if you need to land a jumbo jet in a snowstorm or perform brain surgery, you also want the specificity, and the trick is to have both simultaneously.

Jude: Exactly, it’s both. It definitely is the and-and. It is what you were saying, what we were talking about earlier in terms of the luminosity and the transcendence, and yet communicating with, learning from, and exploring with, at many, many different levels of awareness.

✨ The universe observing itself

Rick: Yeah. So now, a minute ago you said something about—I forget how you phrased it—but are you one of these people who would say that the moon doesn’t exist unless someone perceives it, or you don’t go there?

Jude: I do go there, actually, and I don’t use the point of the moon, but I do use the idea of “if a tree falls in a distant forest and nobody sees it.” What I’m saying is that when you understand that the entire universe is observing itself, then even if there’s not a human being or a turtle or whoever watching that tree, the universe is. Whatever there is within space-time is inevitably being observed by our entire universe.

Rick: Okay, that helps to resolve that argument. I think it was Einstein and Tagore who had an argument over that. Tagore was saying that the moon doesn’t exist unless you observe it, and Einstein was saying it does. But then it gets kind of absurd. If everybody in the world agreed not to look up at the moon, would there still be tides, and things like that?

Jude: It’s a very egoistic approach to consciousness: If I’m not seeing it, it doesn’t exist. Think of the whole universe literally as a universe-soul observing itself.

Rick: Right, and it took quite a few billion years before there could be life forms capable of observing anything, but meanwhile the universe had to evolve.

Jude: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: Now, this thing you’re talking about—the universe observing itself—is very interesting, because there are some who outline the mechanics of manifestation in terms of that very thing. And I should actually reference Maharishi here because he talked about this at great length: consciousness being conscious observes itself; it can’t help but do so because by its nature it has to observe something. But if there is nothing around for it to observe, it observes itself.

But in so doing, it sets up a trilogy, as it were, between observer, observed, and process of observation, and that begins to bifurcate and symmetry-break into more and more and more complexity, which gives rise to a whole manifest universe.

He also talked about how, on the other hand, that could be happening since it’s only consciousness. How could there be this diversification? And so there’s this infinite frequency that gets set up between the one and the many, and that infinite frequency is like this hum at the foundation of creation, which has infinite potency or potentiality within it. Anyway, he explained it much more eloquently than that, but I thought you might find that interesting.

Jude: I find it very interesting, and it’s very complementary to what I’m saying in the book, essentially.

Rick: Great.

Jude: And what I love is that what he’s saying, and what the ancient perception—certainly what the Vedas taught—is very coherent and very complementary with what leading-edge science is pointing at. Which is why the whole point of this is to reconcile science and spiritual perspectives within the unified reality that consciousness is the whole world.

Simplicity, effortlessness, and the flow of life

Rick: Yeah. Here are a couple of interesting points from our friend Robin, who would like to have a conversation with you later on, when you get a chance.

Jude: I’d like that.

Rick: You might have glanced at the points he sent me.

Jude: I did.

Rick: Yeah, there are some interesting things in here. For instance, you speak of reality as being fundamentally simple, and he brought up the objection of, well, yeah, but quantum field theory and unified field theory are not simple, physiology is not simple, the course of action—all the karmic ramifications of anything—doesn’t seem to be simple. But I think what you’re getting at is that the deeper you go, the simpler it gets, and ultimately, fundamentally, the universe is simple; it gets more complex as it diversifies.

Jude: Absolutely. I mean, Einstein said, “The universe is as simple as it can be, but no simpler.” So what I was doing in the first seven or eight chapters was actually showing that level of simplicity.

But what’s so beautiful is, for example, if you look at networks—complicated networks, the appearance of complication—when you pull it down, there are three aspects of a network that matter, of their individual unit, which are shape, size, and stickiness. Three things. And depending on the shape of a unit—if it’s triangular or circular or whatever—depending on its size and its stickiness, its relationship to the other parts of the network, an incredible level of complexity can evolve. But when you distill things down, they are literally as simple as they can be, but no simpler.

And that’s why you get things like universal clusters. You look at the fractals that play out in coastlines; they are the same fractals that play out throughout a myriad of other phenomena. The phenomena themselves manifest in what appears to be very, very different ways, very diverse ways, but the rules, the underlying rules, are as simple as they can be, but no simpler.

When you understand it from an algorithmic and from an informational sense, you begin to understand why that is the case and the absolute exquisiteness of that playing out throughout the whole of physical reality.

Rick: So would a good example of that be, for instance, if you throw a ball, there are an infinite number of trajectories that ball could take, but it takes the path of least action; it takes the most efficient possible trajectory?

Jude: Yes, yes. And that plays out in quantum physics as well. The universe is essentially lazy—I don’t mean that disrespectfully—but it is the least effort; it’s the least resistance, it’s the least effort, you know?

Rick: Yeah, God did take Sunday off, right? He could have kept working.

Jude: Thank goodness He did. He could have kept working, but He didn’t!

Rick: I think that this simplicity point has relevance to spiritual seekers in that some people have this objection to spiritual practices because they feel like you’re doing something and that’s only going to reinforce the notion of a doer; it’s going to reinforce your individuality. But I think that there could be a criterion for spiritual practice that adheres to the law of least effort, and that if a practice were really natural and effortless, then you really aren’t doing anything, even though you might be sitting down to apparently do something, but you’re kind of surrendering to natural processes which conduct the whole thing for you. And so, without any inception of effort or any inefficiency, the goal is achieved—the goal being maybe transcendence or whatever the nature of the practice is meant to achieve.

Jude: I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, when I talk about effortlessness or when we talk about effort, it’s usually that there’s resistance, yeah? So for me, spiritual practice, or how we live our lives, is about going with the flow. You show up; it’s not about sitting on a mountain and doing nothing. You’re showing up for whatever’s calling you to show up, but then you try and get your ego out of the way so that you really can enter into that flow.

Rick: Yeah, you don’t even try to get your ego out of the way because that would be an effort. It could be simpler than that.

Jude: Absolutely. And that’s the spiritual path, isn’t it? So you do get to a point in your own journey where you realize that your ego is counterproductive, and you don’t become ego-less; you become ego-free, which enables that flow to happen.

I was talking with a group of friends. I’m a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, and we were up at Alex and Allyson Grey’s place—CoSM—last week. One of the things we were discussing is what is happening in the world, and the showing up and the effortlessness. We came to a perspective of perceiving life as a river, and sometimes that river is going very fast and sometimes it’s flowing very slowly. The point is that when you enter that river, you go with the speed of the river.

So you show up on the river and you don’t try to swim faster than the river; you don’t try to hold yourself back from the river. You go with the flow of the river, which is the least effort that you could bring into the situation.

Rick: Yeah, row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, you know? You’re rowing, but you’re letting the stream do the work. You’re just having this subtle intention not to go off into some eddy or get stuck in the banks or whatever.

Jude: Absolutely. And if you look at how trout and how salmon jump up the river, they have an amazing ability to do that. They’re aerodynamically, or water-dynamically, of optimum efficiency to do that, and they understand the flow. They so naturally understand that flow, and that enables them to leap to these great heights to make their way up the river.

Evolution, suffering, and planetary responsibility

Rick: You refer in your book to “our perfect universe.” Why perfect? Some people would look at it and say, “There are all these mistakes and diseases and sufferings, and asteroids wiping out populated planets and so on. How can you see it as perfect?”

Jude: Well, I was actually being quite facetious in one sense—in the sense that I love chocolate cake. I love chocolate cake, and my mum used to bake the most perfect chocolate cake. So what I looked at to begin with in the book was, I wanted to see how our universe baked its own cake, you know? What were the instructions, what were the ingredients, what was the recipe, what was the container? So, literally, to treat our universe’s existence and evolution as essentially baking its own perfect chocolate cake.

And for me, the definition of perfect is that after 13.8 billion years of its existence and evolution, my mum could bake the most beautiful chocolate cake that, when I was a little girl, I could not have enough of. So that’s my definition of perfect: that it essentially enables us to exist as a biological species!

Rick: So are you saying that the whole purpose of the universe was to produce your mom, who could produce chocolate cakes?

Jude: No, but perhaps to produce self-aware beings such as ourselves.

Rick: Right, yeah. I also think we could talk about it as—I mean, you take something that we don’t like, let’s say a disease or an epidemic or something, and look closely at what’s actually happening there. As much as we don’t like it on our human level, if you look closely at the mechanisms of it, there is vast, almost incomprehensible intelligence functioning in those little viruses or whatever is involved there. Is God making a mistake with that, or is that just part of the polarities that are necessary in a relative world? If you’re going to have hot, you’re going to have cold; if you’re going to have healthy, you’re going to have sick, and so on?

Jude: I would agree with you completely that this is polarities playing out. Our perspective is from a very human-centric viewpoint, but the viruses, which are actually more and more being seen as the guiders—the wave guides of evolutionary progress—are key. If they didn’t exist, and what they do is they don’t just mutate into evolutionary progress, but they also cull. So where there is a weakness in a species, they enable, overall, an optimization within an ecosystem.

You could argue, yes, an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and before that there was a series of extinction events. But as I write about in the book, that spurred on evolution. Because what happens is—going back to the universe being lazy—in, for example, the last 12,000 years of the Holocene era, which has been environmentally very stable, there’s been very little biological evolution. There has obviously been cultural evolution, but very little biological evolution.

Rick: Is that the era we are in now?

Jude: That’s the era we’re in now, except that we’re now entering into what’s being called the “Anthropocene Era,” which is our human-driven extinction of other species.

Rick: The sixth great extinction.

Jude: Right, the sixth great extinction. But the point is that each of those preceding extinctions, because the environment changed so much, instead of no speciation—no new species—or gradual new species, there was a vast spurring on. At the end of 66 million years ago, when the asteroid caused the demise of not just the dinosaurs but many other species, a tiny little shrew—a mouse-like organism—then started the first mammals and kick-started their evolution to ours.

So with this extinction—and we may cause our own extinction through it—it suggests to me that there could equally be a spur of different biological expressions on our planet. So it’s not about saving the planet; it’s ultimately about saving ourselves, to be very selfish. And that isn’t my perspective, but that is what we’re likely to do unless we change course.

Rick: Yeah, and we shouldn’t use the fact that life flourished after the last extinction and other extinctions as an excuse for fostering a new extinction, because we’re talking about extinguishing ourselves. And even though life may flourish after we’re gone, it’s going to take a while for it to get back to where it is now, and it might be better to avert the danger which is not yet come, to quote Patanjali, and turn it around.

Humanity’s Choice Between Collapse and Conscious Evolution

Absolutely. And as my friend Ervin Laszlo said, we’re the first generation to both have the ability to destroy life on Earth and also the ability to consciously evolve. We have this amazing point of bifurcation, it seems to me, at the moment: either we break down or we break through.

Jude: Absolutely. And as my friend Ervin Laszlo said, we’re the first generation to both have the ability to destroy life on Earth and also the ability to consciously evolve. We have this amazing point of bifurcation, it seems to me, at the moment: either we break down or we break through.

Rick: Yeah, some compare us to teenagers who have grown out of dependence on their parents and gotten into this free-will stage where we can make choices. And we can be very destructive in our choices or constructive; we can go either way, and hopefully make it through adolescence into adulthood.

Jude: Absolutely. I talk about how it is time for us to grow up. It’s enough of gurus, and it’s enough of teenage rebellion and angst; it’s time for us to grow up.

Rick: Yeah, same thing that the Hindus speak of. They have Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—the Creator, the Maintainer, and the Destroyer—and they consider destruction to be as much a part of the whole show as creation.

Jude: Exactly, and that goes back to your point about God and polarities. Every wave has a beginning, a peaking, and a falling away, and evolution plays out in those waves. The ancient tradition of the ida, the pingala, and the sushumna—going back to Matt’s question about the chakras and the meridians—this threefold, this trinitized manifestation, plays out throughout our entire universe. Whether it’s at the levels of energy meridians in the human body, whether it’s atoms having positive, negative, and neutral elements to them, or whether it’s the Vedic tradition of the Creator, the Maintainer, and the Destroyer, it is playing out at all scales.

Breakdown or breakthrough

Rick: Yeah. We have about five minutes left. Is there anything really important that we haven’t covered? I feel like I’m coming to a vast smorgasbord with a little teacup plate when I’m talking to you, because there is so much we could cover. Hopefully, we have given people a taste, and they’ll sign up for the rest of the smorgasbord with a bigger plate.

Is there anything that you really want to get in here before we close, perhaps something of a predictive nature? Are you optimistic for the future, or do you feel like you see trends and tendencies in our world leading us in a hopeful direction?

Jude: Well, I think what’s important is that when a complex system is unable to sustain itself, what happens in a complex system is that it is underlaid by these attractor basins that are nonphysical, but they act as the boundaries within which that system can operate. And when a system is unable to sustain those boundaries, it starts to fall away; it starts to break down.

But sometimes what happens is that there’s another attractor system starting to crystallize at a higher level of coherence. So you have the old—as it were, the old paradigm, going on to Thomas Kuhn and progression by funerals—you have an old system that’s breaking down, but you have this new possibility, a more coherent possibility, beginning to crystallize.

And what happens is that the two systems are, at that nonphysical, underpinning level, coexisting, but the old system has a deeper rut to it, while it’s falling away. The new possibility isn’t yet fully manifest. And what happens is that the two jump back and forth, and it’s called “flickering.”

Jude: It’s almost as though, when we look at world events, we’re flickering between the two. On the one hand, we have a lot of negativity, a lot of fear, a lot of distraction, and a lot of pain. On the other hand, we have a lot of hope, a lot of positivity, and a lot of potentiality. And so, for me, this is the breakdown; this is the breakthrough.

Every single person who shows up and says, “I want to be in that attractor. I want to start to—whatever, however small it is—what I can do can make a difference and does make a difference, however small.”

And this is nonlinear. A tiny cause can have a major effect. So if I show up, that can be the tipping point. I can be that person who tips that into reality. I can be that person who makes a small change, and my contribution, however small, can be the tipping point.

Everyone matters; everyone can make a choice in this regard.

And that’s what I’d like to say to people: everyone matters; everyone can make a choice in this regard. Are you part of the problem, or are you part of the solution? Are you part of the old, dying song, or are you part of an inspiring, empowering, new and better song?

Rick: Mm. Was it you who was quoting Desmond Tutu as saying, “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending a night with a mosquito in your room”?

Jude: I said that in an earlier book; I didn’t say it in this one, but, yeah!

Rick: I heard it in one of your talks.

Jude: But it’s so true, isn’t it? It’s just so true.

Rick: Yeah, very true. Well, that’s a good note to end on; it’s an optimistic note. And one way of elaborating on it would be to say that if you can work at more causal or fundamental levels, you have a bigger impact than you might expect—that the molecular is more powerful than the mechanical, and the atomic is more powerful than the molecular.

And there is something very fundamental or causal about the deeper spiritual levels of experience that we are unfolding, and I think that the impact of everyone who unfolds that in their experience is much larger than they realize, or than may be obvious in any superficial way.

Jude: I absolutely agree. And to really understand that, the message of The Cosmic Hologram is that everyone can make a difference. We are all microcosmic creators of our realities, and we are all fundamentally interconnected as part of a unified, coherent, and intelligent universe.

Rick: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Jude. I really enjoyed the two hours; they’ve flown by. I hope to speak with you again in the future. I’ll be linking to Jude’s website from her page at www.batgap.com, as I always do, and linking to her books and so on.

Have you got anything coming up that people can actually participate in, or should they just read your books?

Jude: What I’m doing at the moment is a lot of interviews, which are lovely, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this, Rick, so thank you so, so much. I will post this onto my website, and any events that I’m doing, along with any interviews or articles that I’m writing, will all go up on the website.

Rick: Okay, great. And you have some kind of mailing list that people can sign up for there?

Jude: Yeah, folks can sign up for my free newsletter. It’s sporadic at the moment because I’m so busy, but I’m hoping to get a newsletter out in the next few weeks. People can visit the website. We also have a Facebook page for the Whole-World View, and we also have a YouTube channel for the Whole-World View, both of which are posted to the website.

Rick: Good, great. Well, thanks so much, and thanks to your husband, Tony, for his help. We’ll be speaking again.

To those who have been listening or watching, thank you for doing so. This is an ongoing series, as you probably know. Go to www.batgap.com and explore the menus, and you’ll see all sorts of things—all the past interviews, a list of upcoming interviews, a place to be notified by email of new interviews, audio podcast sign-up, and so on. So just check out the menus; it’s pretty obvious, and we’ll see you next week.

Jude: Thanks, everyone, and thanks, Rick.

Rick: Thank you, Jude.

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