Mind the Shift

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.

The extraordinary Jaime Onofrey, or just Jai, defines herself as a connoisseur of consciousness. She is a positive, creative powerhouse, which is the more impressive considering the number of difficult challenges she has lived through. Already at a young age she experienced a decline from being a successful athlete to having serious physical problems. She had been in an abusive relationship. And she had had no less than two near death experiences, during which she flatlined. At one point she was left for dead in a hotel room. ”It’s part of my soul mission to befriend death and see that it's an illusion”, she says. At the age of 24 she was at a crossroads. She had physical as well as emotional issues. She had difficulties digesting. ”I was a shadow of my old self. I knew that if i didn't do something drastic, something extreme, I would never have the life I was destined to live.” So she went alone into the desert for the biblical 40 days of fasting, inspired by the spiritual teacher Gabriel Cousens. It was life changing. ”I became like a scientist” She meditated, swam in the ocean and took in the sun’s rays through her eyes and her skin. And she had her enema bag with her. ”Finally, on the 39th day, I released six feet of mucoid plaque, rubber hard. My whole body was shaking. Early child memories came up. I purged rage, sadness and resentment. It was like having a good cry, and then a good scream.” On day 41 she had a final purging, and then it was all done. Her eye color changed, she says. ”The peace I felt was extraordinary. The desert came alive to me. And then I was hungry. I had cantaloupe juice. It tasted like an orgasm.” Just before our conversation, Jai had been to an Ayahuasca retreat. It was not her first one. ”The intelligence of the plant kingdom”, Jai puts it, ”has come forward and offered this unique combination of plants and roots that can create a medicine that is a portal to higher consciousness”. But she cautions against believing it is some kind of magic pill: ”It requires preparation. You really need to surrender to the process, which for humans can be really difficult sometimes. I don’t recommend it for many people. It can do damage.” Today she is passionate about ”Thrive Tribes”, an ecosystem of communities to raise human consciousness that she has initiated after having been guided from higher realms to do so. Jai brings into the project many years of experience from the film industry and from working as a spiritual entrepreneur. ”We are in one of the most extraordinary transitions in human history, and we are all called to participate. The ’Thrive Tribes’ is a global movement for transformation and change. It is really about accessing our human potential.” ”The tribes are all connected. They are basically the same, but there are twelve different ones so people can connect with those that they feel most compelled to join right now. Each sector works on an aspect of humanity that needs to be elevated”, Jai explains from her home in British Columbia, Canada. Here’s the Thrive Tribe website and here’s Jai’s own.

My interview with the amazing Marco Missinato – composer, photographer and spiritual explorer – evolved into a beautiful and mind-expanding conversation about the experience of the soul and humanity as a collective on this Earth. We are in the midst of a huge shift in consciousness. Within a decade or two, Marco thinks, the ego mind will have lost its grip. We have already unplugged the matrix we’ve been conditioned by for millennia. Missinato was a sensitive and creative child. But, essentially, we all are, he says: ”Every soul comes into this operative system with a huge amount of creativity and with its own uniqueness.” He found music early. ”Sound and music have the ability to instantly dissipate the illusion of separation, the polarity game.” When he arrived in America in the late 70’s Missinato immediately felt a sense of spaciousness and freedom that he could not find in Italy as a young creative person. A few years ago, however, he felt that his American experience had come to an end. He now lives in Rome. Marco explains the creative process, which is applicable to anything we do in life: Follow your joy by taking action with no expectations of the outcome. ”We have all these expectations because we have been programmed to believe in scarcity. When we are children we just play and don't have any expectations. Then many forget how to do that.” Perhaps we who are here now will live to see that program change. Missinato points out that the societal matrix we’ve been living in longer than anyone can remember is coming to an end. ”We can see that things are falling apart. We are going back to the original operating system, where there are no such things as disease or scarcity.” Marco Missinato thinks the process of shedding the ego mind will be more or less completed by 2030–2035. ”But it’s going to be quite intense in the years to come.” It is important in these turbulent times to embrace neutrality, he emphasizes. Where does he get his knowledge and information about these things? Basically by remembering, he says. ”Everything is inside ourselves. Nobody can teach you anything. Others can only help you remember what you already know.” Marco’s website is the best entry point to his music, photos and words. 

”I am actually astunned. I don't understand it. All the pandemic preparedness plans were there, and they were just ignored.” The words are Martin Kulldorff’s, professor of medicine at Harvard, and he refers to the harsh covid-19 policies that have been imposed almost worldwide. ”It’s a huge experiment. And it's a terrible experiment because of the collateral damage.” Martin Kulldorff’s research areas are closely connected to the pandemic. In October he published a declaration together with epidemiology professor Sunetra Gupta and professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya. The three experts expressed a fear that the remedy, lockdowns, will show to be worse than the disease. Three basic principles of public health have been thrown out the window this year by most countries, according to Kulldorff: To look at things long-term, not to focus on just one single disease and to protect everybody in society. ”We have seen outbreaks of measles you wouldn't have expected under normal circumstances. Cancers are not being detected. And mental health is deteriorating.” ”Low risk people and affluent people, who can work from home, are being protected, but the working class is being exposed.” Thus, lockdowns are exacerbating the societal inequalities. Closing schools makes no sense whatsoever in this pandemic. Mortality from covid-19 is more than 1,000 times bigger for elderly people than for children. A seasonal flu is more dangerous than covid for the youngest. ”Every year, between 200 and 1,000 children die from the flu in the US. But we don’t close down the schools because of that.” Instead of all-encompassing lockdowns, Martin Kulldorff would like to see different forms of focused protection to keep vulnerable groups as safe as possible. The vaccine will be an excellent tool for focused protection of the vulnerable, says professor Kulldorff. But to make vaccination mandatory is a bad idea: ”A key principle of public health is trust. If you try to mandate something, that's going to lead to a lot of suspicion. The trust has already taken a hit because of the lockdowns.”

”A lot of people today are deferring their future to a very limited number of leaders – political leaders and powerful tech company leaders. That’s a tragedy.” ”There is a sense of ’postalgia’: a hankering for the present: ’This is as good as it gets. The future will be worse.’ This is a paralyzing mindset. It can spiral into nihilism”, says the Johannesburg based futurist, trend analyst and economist Bronwyn Williams. She challenges the doom and gloom and points to doors that can lead to a bright future. There is more hope and energy in some of the younger economies, with much larger youth bulges, than in the West. ”There is a lot to learn from younger countries about having more optimism about the future.” One of the reasons behind the widespread gloom is the unequal distribution of the benefits of globalization. The distribution of wealth is tightly tied to the systems of money and nation states, which we are so used to we hardly ever question them, but which are not nature-given. ”Money is propped up by faith and by force. We have to believe in it for it to work. Money itself does not have any intrinsic value. We have value. Our time has value. Our labor has value. And the real natural resources.” ”We need more equitable money, not money that makes some countries richer at the expense of others.” Cryptocurrencies are only backed by faith, not by force and the nation states. They are an interesting alternative, says Williams. But not necessarily the solution. The catch is how to arrange for social welfare in a borderless space. One idea floating right now is called open basic income. There are also trials with digital citizenship out there. In the future perhaps we can base citizenship not on our place of birth but rather on our values, reasons Williams. ”Some want more security and more rules, some want more freedom and less rules. Maybe we can group those people in a way that's fair?” She gives two examples: the democracy movement in Hong Kong and the polarization after the US election. ”How to take the ethos of Hong Kong’s freedom movement somewhere else even if the territory has to cede to mainland China? And what if there was a way to let both sides get what they want after the US election? Subscribe to either a left wing or a right wing agenda? Pay one’s taxes to either?” Here is Bronwyn Williams web site. Here is her upcoming book ”The Future Starts Now”.

In the mainstream journalistic and activist narrative, climate change is happening but skeptics deny that. ”That’s a crazy argument. Nobody denies that the climate is changing”, says Vitezslav Kremlik, a Czech historian and sociologist. The honest discussion, of course, centers around the question to what extent humans contribute to that change, and what can be done about it in a reasonable way. Those who spread exaggerated warnings about the effects of global warming are ”merchants of fear”, according to Kremlik, who has studied the postmodern mix of science and politics, has a popular blog and is a frequent guest on Czech media where he discusses climate issues. Kremlik points out that alarmists are not wrong about everything, and he finds it sad that they can never make the same admission about the skeptics. It should be possible to have a decent debate about, for instance, the rebounding from the so-called Little Ice Age. It should even be possible to reach some kind of consensus. ”But that’s not desirable for the alarmist side.” At its core, the debate isn’t really much about the science around climate change, it’s about growth, says Vitezslav Kremlik; whether growth is a good or a bad thing. The environmentalists ”have a Malthusian thought that growth is some kind of cancer.” How do we interpret the last two centuries of development? Is it a story of progress or a story of environmental holocaust? Kremlik’s viewpoint is clear: ”We have liberated ourselves from the Malthusian trap and almost eradicated extreme poverty. It’s a miracle.” The ”97 percent of the scientists...” argument is partly a straw man argument. No serious scientist says that the globe isn’t warming. Historically, disasters were blamed on God’s wrath. ”We thought we got rid of superstition. But it’s still here – but it is disguised as science. We are really bad at estimating risks. We react much stronger to events than to trends.” Although the environmental movement is right on some things, it is not willing to discuss its problems or rectify its mistakes. ”It is turning into a dogmatic religion. I think it will fall apart. But it won’t happen next year”, says Kremlik. Vitezslav Kremlik’s book is entitled ”A Guide to the Climate Apocalypse – How the Merchants of Fear Forged a New Religion”.

You are not the labels that are put on you. You are not the roles you play. You cannot be defined by your political preference, class, profession, marital status, sexuality, citizenship, favorite football team, diet, hobbies or the amount of money on your bank account. Although you are a part of all that is conscious, a spark of the universe, you are also just you, the unique you entity. It is actually possible to escape most of those labels and roles, if you want to. You are freer than you are conditioned to believe. Nobody but you has any right to tell you what path to choose in life. Unsolicited advice has nothing to do with you. They are just projections.

If you had the power to start society from scratch, meaning the world would be one large common, how would you organize it? What rules would you set? If any? Corin Ism has done that experiment. She has lived in a simulation of the planet Mars and developed design principles for space societies. Corin Ism is a power innovator. As the co-founder of Foga, the Future of Governance Agency, she is on the forefront of all that has to do with shaping governance to better suit our connected world. ”We are different now, not because the internet exists outside of us but because it is a part of us. I am someone else when I have access to Wikipedia than I would be without it”, she says. ”This changes our capacity for empathy. The fact that we can feel close to somebody on the other side of the world is a new feature of this species.” ”And that opens up another way to organize societies than that which means you get a lottery ticket when you are born. The passport you get will affect your life more than your gender or any other circumstance.” Many are familiar with cryptocurrencies’ use of blockchains. Fewer have considered blockchain jurisdictions like being a citizen of a bit-nation without physical territory. But this is one of the cutting-edge ideas about future forms of governance to which Ism dedicates most of her time. She eloquently makes it crystal clear that much of what we see as natural in our societal matrix, to the point that we seldom even think about it, is far from self-evident. Such as the financial system, the military or the nation state. Humanity and the world we inhabit are changing. Fast. We have every possibility to shift our mindset from scarcity to abundance. Ism talks about an awakening, but without the spiritual component (possibly it’s the same thing but seen from different angles): ”Nation states and the obsession with territory is contingent on us as very physical beings. But I would argue that we are getting less and less physical". ”We have changed as a species, but we haven't really woken up and celebrated that.” Here’s the website of the Future of Governance Agency. On Corin’s personal website you’ll get a panoply of her many achievements (she is, for instance, also an artist). * Corin was formerly known as Carin