Mind the Shift

Speaking to Case Parks in this episode is a bit like having a relaxed conversation with a dear friend over a coffee or a glass of beer. And we don’t talk about the weather. We talk about humanity, the soul and how to heal. Case is probably one of the coolest dudes in the spiritual community. In his early middle age (whatever that is) he discovered that he had access to healing frequencies. Today he is a healing practitioner and also a spiritual guide with a popular website and a Youtube channel with the beautiful name Everyday Masters (and the subtitle ”Everyday people awakening to their own mastery”). ”If you would have told me fifteen years ago everything that was going to happen in my life, I would have thought you smoked crack”, says the former golf pro. ”I can honestly say I don’t remember one single moment in my life when I said I wanted to become a healer. The universe has been leaving these breadcrumbs to follow, and I just follow them.” He had a spiritual core early on but he didn’t really develop it. Then one day he came across a video with a healer floating his hands across people. It was Eric Pearl. Case bought Pearl’s book ”The Reconnection”. ”Two chapters into that book I felt my hands were like magnets. It was like my hands had this two foot sphere around them. I could literally feel the field that connects us all. And I instantly knew that this was what I had been waiting for my whole life”, Case says. What he discovered was that he was able to help people reconnect to their higher self, which in most cases has an instant soothing effect on the psyche and enables self-healing. ”It’s so natural and easy to do this for me that I can only imagine that I have done this in many lifetimes. It’s like breathing.” Four fifths of Case Parks’ clients are at a distance when he has his sessions, and, interestingly enough, those are often the sessions with the most profound results, he says. ”You don't really need your hands. I’m not doing it. It’s the universe that's doing it. I see myself as the spiritual cable guy.” Case Parks sees the earth as a place to learn and grow. Physical lIfe is to be likened with a game or a stage play. ”My job is to repair the connection between you and your higher self when the remote control to the game is glitchy. Once it’s repaired, you have your own connection. Sometimes it's completely repaired in one session, sometimes it isn't.” Case gives us a little crash course in how to start feeling the frequencies that flow through all of us but most of us never sense. ”I can't understand why everybody doesn't feel it,'' he laughs. His next project is a tv series. And a children's book.

Disasters happen when hazard meets vulnerability. You can either reduce the hazard, which can be difficult, or reduce vulnerability. ”We have been good at doing that, actually”, says Johan von Schreeb, professor in global disaster medicine at Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden. The way Bangladesh has handled its vulnerability to floods is an excellent example. Johan was one of the founders of the Swedish section of Doctors without Borders. His engagement has taken him to places like Haiti, West Africa, Iraq, Ukraine and Yemen. Last fall he was deployed in Lebanon by WHO as a coordinator. He soon learned that when disaster strikes, the help from the outside world is often irrational. International medical teams are deployed in disaster areas without really understanding the context. Countries send field hospitals more as a knee-jerk reaction than as a well-thought-out measure. After the bomb blast in Lebanon in August last year it quickly became clear that there was no need for trauma care. ”But an Italian military field hospital arrived a whole month after the blast, ready to treat trauma patients. It was almost an insult”, says Johan. Some disasters are more ”popular” than others in the eyes of outside helpers. After earthquakes aid organizations are lining up. After violence in the Central African Republic or outbreaks of disease in Sub-Saharan Africa, not so much. The pandemic has been a complex mixed bag of rational and irrational measures, knee-jerk reactions and psychology. Sweden’s ”softer” strategy has been debated. ”I don’t think we understand the degree of liberty we have been able to maintain here in Sweden, not having to meet a policeman on the street corner issuing a fine of 1,000 euros because you’re out walking”, says von Schreeb. ”I guess it relates back to trust.” We’ve had pandemics before but never this kind of harsh measures. Why now? ”Because China started”, concludes Johan von Schreeb. ”They contained it and they were quick, and to go against what the Chinese did would have been very difficult for a lot of countries. The politicians wanted to do something. And people were scared. Even in a country like France, where people often protest, people seemed to accept these measures.” ”There are opportunities to control populations by using this type of fear, and that is the scary part. You can justify these kinds of measures. Especially in countries where we have had riots for political reasons. I saw that in Lebanon.” However, except for a few countries, we have managed to expand the health care system to cope, says Johan von Schreeb. ”Like in Sweden: we never needed to use the emergency field hospitals that were set up.” The strict covid measures have arguably been more detrimental to public health than the coronavirus itself in parts of Africa. On that continent, only health workers and the vulnerable should be vaccinated, Johan says. ”But the rest … vaccinating children in Africa would not be the wisest thing to do. For the young this is not a major issue. If all are vaccinated there is no money left, and there is so much else to do in the health system.”

”Our leaders are so bad at organizing common solutions to our problems”, says Ester Barinaga, a professor in Economics who has done extensive research into social entrepreneurship and the power of bottom-up initiatives. She began her work in the suburb of Kista in northern Stockholm, which at the time was a major tech hub. She saw a divided society. The tech people had this vision of connecting humanity, but they lived in a different world than the service people of that same suburb, who in fact came from all over the world. ”The information society that promised to bring us together was actually the reason why we perpetuated division”, says Barinaga. She saw the same structure in Silicon Valley, and even the IT cluster in India had its ”ins” and ”outs”. So she began to study how cities could become more inclusive. Ester Barinaga zoomed in on alternative money systems. There are two types: crypto currencies and community currencies. They both want to rethink the current top-down system, but whereas crypto aims at creating a new standardized system, community currencies are purely local and aim at integrating economic thinking with social dynamics. There are several problems with the current money system, according to Barinaga: It is supposed to fulfill contradictory functions using the same centralized currency. As a medium of exchange money has to be spent, and as a store of value it has to be saved. Plus: most of the monetary mass is created by private banks issuing loans for private homes. ”The banks give loans to those they deem credit worthy, with a profit motive, which reinforces inequality. But they have not created the interest, so for you to be able to pay that you have to take it from somebody else. So it ties up people.” After the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 there was an explosion of community currencies all over the Western world: In the US, France, Spain, Germany, Italy. People thought: ”We may have a crisis, and I may be unemployed, but I still have my skills. I can still paint houses. Let’s create our own currency and continue our lives as we did before.” And they did. Like the gita, the choquito or the común in Spain and the wir in Switzerland (which is much older, actually). Or the amazing lixo coin in Campolide in central Lisbon, which you earn from recycling waste and can then  use to buy local produce. There is nothing wrong with a transnational currency like the euro, points out Ester Barinaga. The thing is that we need a hierarchy of currencies. ”We need a transnational currency for transnational trade, perhaps even a global currency. But we also need currencies on other levels, for other purposes, to serve the needs of regional economies with their specific properties.” ”Globalized and localized at the same time!” Like many others who have had the opportunity to compare ”leaders” with ”ordinary people”, Ester Barinaga feels that hope grows in the grassroots. ”When I look at the people, there are so many initiatives and so much knowledge. The solutions are here. That’s when I am an optimist.”

In 2012 a group called OPPT took legal action to lawfully foreclose what was deemed the ”corporatized” governments of the world. No government was able to rebut the foreclosure, which, according to the initiators, meant that the deposited documents were validated and became global law – and are so today. The general purpose of this action has been to remind us humans that we are at a point in history when the millennia-old matrix of top-down government no longer serves us. Thus it is part of a global awakening. But according to OPPT (One People’s Public Trust), the judicial action is in no way a gimmick or some kind of symbolic act, but fully legal and correct. ”The war is over”, says the Italian artist and researcher Barbara Banco, one of the people behind this initiative. ”What we see now are only ghost governments. They continue to act because people don’t know what has happened.” Yes, this is a somewhat mind blowing action, and no, you didn’t see that one coming. But however skeptical you might be to the notion that it is possible to dismantle governments in this seemingly formal way, it is a fascinating and bold story. Since Barbara Banco speaks only Italian, her words are translated in this episode by Erika Dolci, and some of the back-and-forth translations have been edited out. Joining us is also Marco Missinato, an earlier guest on the podcast, who is also engaged in the OPPT initiative. On this website you can read more about OPPT and the foreclosure of governments. You can access the relevant documents, also in English.

Branko Milanovic is probably the world’s foremost researcher on inequality. His ”elephant graph” became famous some years ago because it highlighted what many intuitively knew: During the two decades up until the financial crisis, incomes in Asia went up a lot, as did the incomes of the richest percent in the West. Squeezed in the middle was the middle class in the West, whose incomes stood still. ”It highlighted the plutocracy and the contradictions of globalization”, says Milanovic. He points out that the connection between wealth and political power is stronger in the western world than many realize. The US is the most dramatic example. ”Issues that matter to the upper middle class are much more frequently discussed in parliaments than issues important to people who are poor.” Will the pandemic exacerbate or diminish inequality? ”It’s complicated.” Some rich countries have had big drops in GDP, China has fared well, while India has fared poorly. Also within countries you see contradictory movements. Affluent people have been able to continue working from home, but on the other hand government transfers to the less affluent have more than compensated for their losses. ”It’s too early to draw any conclusions.” The rise of Asia means there is a rebalancing of the world happening. The relative wealth of Asia is catching up to where it was before the industrial revolution. Now it is Africa that is at the center stage of development. Africa needs sustained growth of around 7 percent a year for two generations to achieve any substantial catch-up. ”Without convergence of African incomes we will have two big negative effects: large migration will continue and global inequality will increase.” Milanovic is personally in favor of migration as a means of diminishing global imbalances, in the same way that capital is allowed to move. But the resistance among people in the receiving countries is real. Therefore he suggests a kind of sub-citizenship for immigrants that would allow for circular migration. ”My fear is that if we accept the reluctance to allow migrants in we will get ’fortress Europe’. The middle way is to make it possible to migrate to Europe and make money but not to have an open way to citizenship and permanent residence. But workers’ rights must be the same for all.” What about the many protests we see in the streets across the globe? Are they an indication that there is a growing popular resentment against the system? ”The resentment is there. But they are not questioning the way capitalism is organized. They are questioning some of its side effects: inequality, unfairness, environmental damage”, says Branko Milanovic. He sees two grassroots trends that could constitute some kind of alternative to traditional capitalism: ”One is the movement of stakeholder capitalism. Then the shareholders would not be the sole factor influencing corporate decision making. The other one is the green economy. There I am more skeptical since they talk of degrowth.” ”If our value system were to be changed, so that acquisition of wealth weren’t our priority over priorities, capitalism would change.” Branko Milanovic is currently a visiting presidential professor at the City University in New York. Here is his CV.

One of the ambitions of this podcast is to span the border between science and spirituality. Could one have a more apt experience for that endeavor than to physically die but yet retain a high level of consciousness, come back to life to tell about it and decide to work as a scientist? That is Ingrid Honkala’s story. Ingrid’s near death experience, already at the age of three, has had a profound impact on her life. She technically drowned, but during those minutes of physical death she felt complete peace, absolute presence and agelessness. ”For the first time in my short life I felt home”. The memories are still crystal clear. ”It’s not like a dream. And it’s not just memories, it’s a sense of still feeling it.” After her NDE, she was endowed with new gifts, a new perspective on life and contact with beings of light who have guided her since. ”I now knew how to read and write, and when I went to school I realized i didn’t need to learn the things that were being taught, I was just remembering them.” But during her early years she struggled to fit into the mainstream. ”I was looking at other children and I couldn't relate. I knew I had always existed. They didn’t know anything.” However, she chose a scientific career and became a successful marine biologist and oceanographer, working for the Colombian and the American navies and for Nasa. People asked Ingrid Honkala: How could you decide to become a marine scientist after you almost drowned? Weren't you afraid of water? ”It was the opposite. Drowning brought me to see the light.” We are here to experience polarity and contrast, Ingrid thinks. ”Life is not meant to make us happy in the outside world. Who said that? Life is meant to challenge us so that we can find happiness within ourselves. To stop looking without.” ”In the depth of you, there is no persona, no name. The deepest parts of the ocean are not aware of the waves on the surface.” ”The more you misalign from the present, the more you suffer, because you're living a life of expectations. You want ’something else’.” People ask how it is possible to bridge science and spirituality. Well, that separation is only in the mind, explains Ingrid: ”Spirituality is not a belief. It’s science, because it's experiential. It’s drinking the orange juice, not describing the ingredients and how to make it.” Here’s Ingrid's book ”A Brightly Guided Life. Here’s her website. If you want more testimonials from scientists who had NDE’s, listen to Dr Eben Alexander in episode 24.

It can be used as one of many tools to understand life, and it can be used as one of many models for explaining the universe. Sounds like something everyone would embrace. But to most people, astrology is still controversial. The fall from grace began when Newton introduced his mechanistic world view. But we have come far since then. What it is really about is to interpret energies that modern science basically tells us we are all connected to on the quantum level. ”The whole thing is really about frequency”, says Pam Gregory, astrologer. ”It’s about archetypes, symbolism and frequencies that correspond to different parts of our consciousness. I’m not a psychic. I’m a translator.” The birth chart can be described as an imprint, which doesn’t mean our fates are chiseled in stone. We have free will. The imprint is a blueprint. We must do the actual construction work ourselves. Simplistic descriptions about sun signs and star constellations and planets affecting us directly are skewed or sometimes incorrect and gives astrology bad reputation. Most skeptics don’t want to dive deeper into the subject, which is kind of a catch-22 situation. Perhaps the time is ripe to take off our blinders and open the door to understanding the universal energies that affect us. After all, we’re all bathing in the quantum soup. Pam Gregory discovered astrology at the age of 21, when she had her birth chart read thoroughly for the first time. She was blown away by how spot-on it was. ”It was a whole dimension of meaning that i had been completely unaware of.” She had a so-called ordinary job for 35 years before it became possible for her to go all-in and work as a professional astrologer. Pam’s first book, with the ingenious title ”You don’t really believe in astrology, do you?”, unveils the seeming mysteriousness of astrology with beautiful clarity and scientific rigor. She explains how it goes perfectly well with the theories about a holographic universe, a unified energy field and, of course, quantum physics and its non-local causality. Few have missed that we live in turbulent times, and this is astonishingly well reflected in astrology. There were scores of predictions about a wild 2020, for instance, and this year starts off much in the same intense way, according to the properties symbolized by certain planetary aspects. ”Hold on to your hat”, is Pam’s advice. On Pam Gregory’s website you can learn more about her and her work, you can buy her books and also subscribe to her ambitious monthly newsletter where she analyses and reflects about what's going on in the human collective.

We have been conditioned to believe an upside-down narrative about the human condition. We are told a false story about a species with an intrinsic selfishness that has to be checked with laws and top-down control. But human beings are inherently kind. If no outer force meddles with the social dynamics, people treat each other with respect and kindness. For millennia we have been living in a gloomy dream. As if the movie ”The Matrix” were a documentary. It’s, frankly, outrageous. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman brilliantly unveils the lie in his book ”Humankind”. It should be compulsory literature in every corporation and every authority. The untrue image is reinforced by the media. The news media narrative is practically based on the false assumptions about human lowness. News requires drama, conflict and speed, which filters out the big story: a slowly but incessantly evolving humankind. The good news I bring here is that I believe we are in fact leaving this false narrative, this toxic mindset, behind. About the media’s negativity bias: Listen also to Ulrik Haagerup, episode 6.

Blossom Bamboo is a multifaceted and loving human being whom one might perhaps describe as an ”explorer and harnesser of bodily and spiritual power”. A tantra therapist running her own podcast about ageless living, Blossom is a survivor of domestic violence and emotional neglect and a ”recovering Christian”. She is, as she puts it, a ”stigma stomper and taboo tackler”. She talks about her breaking free from harmful patterns in her family: toxicity and conflict, unhealthy bonds between mothers and children, communication through aggression, physical or verbal. ”This was the blueprint the children were given. I knew that wasn't the way I wanted it to be. It’s up to me to break that chain. I am the link in the chain that is split open”, she says. Blossom Bamboo comes from a family with a long tradition of Christianity. ”I try not to identify with labels like Christian. It fucked me up in a big way. At the same time I became more open to connect with spirit. My first spiritual experience was in a church.” Blossom is on a path, she says, of reuniting body and spirit. This has its roots in a personal history of much focus on the body; sexual abuse as well as more healthy experiences. One tool to integrate body and soul is tantric yoga. ”There is a connection, which I didn't have before. I can’t not have a focus on my body. We have bodies. Bodies are like antennas. That’s how we plug in.” ”When I started with tantra, I realized that I had been experiencing these things without knowing. I experienced things during sexual contact that others didn't.” ”If it wasn't for sexual energy, none of us would be here. Orgasms give moments of oneness. But there are many other ways than sex to reach that state”, says Blossom. She cultivates the notion of ageless living (”I’d rather die living than live dying”). This is highlighted in her podcast ”Past the Pause”, which is about living life fully after menopause and liberating yourself from societal constraints. In this day and age, many feel that the world is in a constant state of crisis, which creates fear and anxiety. But it all comes down to perception, which in turn requires focusing inward and finding neutrality, says Blossom Bamboo: ”I grew up in a permanent crisis. Sometimes I equate it with growing up in a war. Going through those crises as a child has shown me what I don't want so much as to illuminate what I do want. So there is an inherent value in crises.” ”We can shift the focus of our minds onto peace and harmony, beginning with self-intimacy. And this is also ageless living: When you look at things like a child does, when you take good and bad, right and wrong, out of the equation you often see more clearly what is happening.” Blossom Bamboo, an American, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, since the 1990s. Links to her podcast and to her Facebook page.

Peter Koenig is a Zurich-based British businessman specializing in the mental constructs surrounding money. He challenges conventional views, suggesting that money is just a projection of our inner security. Koenig believes that our relationship with money often leads to a never-ending quest for more, disconnecting us from our true self. He advocates for affirmation therapy to combat fear and insecurity, allowing individuals to embrace spending on things they love. Additionally, he discusses innovative money systems that prioritize community and personal values.