Mind the Shift

This is part two of my conversation with Michael Le Flem about Atlantis. For basics about Michael and his book Visions of Atlantis, see show notes for part one (episode 114): In this episode, we dive deeper into the details of what has been told and written about Atlantean science, technology and worldview, not least by the two unconventional sources Frederick Oliver and Edgar Cayce. Experts have tried to debunk their methods – Cayces in particular – but it has proved to be impossible to explain how they know certain things. We also talk about the often hollow arguments from skeptics. Why do people find evidence for the lost civilization almost everywhere? Because Atlantis was said to have been an empire, not unlike the British empire. Why hasn't any evidence of advanced technology been found? Because nothing advanced would survive the test of time – except stone structures, and those abound. The evidence is actually staring us in the face. There are also fascinating similarities between languages on either side of the Atlantic. Michael’s website Michael’s book Visions of Atlantis The Edgar Cayce organization AER Frederick Oliver’s book A Dweller on Two Planets

”In the good old days, those of us with solid scientific training understood what we didn't know and we were excited about the knowledge frontiers", says professor Judith Curry. ”Now, ecologists, economists, social scientists and other people who don't really understand climate dynamics are busy reciting alarming talking points rather than showing any understanding of what's really going on.” Curry is one of the world’s top climate scientists. However, she fell from grace with the mainstream scientific and political community after having dared to openly criticize the biased and manipulative research methods revealed in ”climategate” in 2009. She was ostracized. Some years later, she left her tenured position at Georgia Tech to become a full-time consultant in the private sector. ”I saw the writing on the wall”, she says. She had made attempts to find another academic position, but she was told there was no point. Headhunters said: ”You're a great candidate, but no one’s going to hire you, because if you google Judith Curry, what you get are things like ’climate denier’ and ’serious disinformer’”. ”The whole field has become highly politicized. Everybody thinks they are a climate expert. It has become quasi religious”, she says. Sadly, even the scientific journals have become politicized. ”If you have something skeptical to say about climate change, don't bother to submit it to Science or Nature.” Going into the technical details of the climate debate, Curry assesses that the weakest part of the alarmist argument is that warming is dangerous. ”Extreme events have little or nothing to do with the slow, incremental warming that’s going on.” The 1.5 and 2.0 degree targets are purely political, she says. ”The policy cart has been out there in front of the scientific horse since 1992.” ”When and if we meet the 2 degrees target will largely be determined by natural variability factors.” Besides, she adds, the baseline for these targets is the 1800s, which was at the tail end of the little ice age. ”Why people think of the pre-industrial climate as some kind of nirvana, I don't know.” This year, 2023, has seen some spectacular records that the mainstream immediately connects to human emissions. But the fascinating thing is that the suddenness of the temperature spike as well as the slowing of ice growth in the Antarctic are basically evidence that the incremental CO2 levels can’t be to blame for the 2023 events. Interestingly, Judith Curry more or less coincides in this with one of the alarmists’ most revered scientists, James Hansen. Many factors are likely at play, such as reduced cloudiness and less aerosols, volcanic activity and ocean current oscillations. Many point at a looming El Niño, but as a matter of fact, this warming phenomenon hadn’t really begun when the temperature spike started.  ”The CO2 increase is lost in the noise here”, says Curry. Are the oceans, and also the Antarctic ice sheet, perhaps being warmed from below? ”I pay more attention to this possibility than most people do. There is a lot of volcanic activity. To think that atmospheric CO2 is the driver of what’s happening with the west Antarctic ice sheet is rather a joke.” Why aren’t more people looking into these things? ”Well, because people really like this narrow framework, that everything is CO2. Every career, money and policy depend on this.” But she thinks we may have reached ”peak craziness”: ”I wouldn't be surprised if we twenty years from now have a different view of what exactly is going on.”

Atlantis is the ultimate myth of humankind – and it has to be pointed out that ”myth” does not equate to ”made up”. Many truths have been conveyed in mythical form. Troy was considered a mythological place created in Homer’s mind until Heinrich Schliemann actually dug up the ancient city in western Turkey in 1870. Historian and independent researcher Michael Le Flem has dug deeper than most into the myth of Atlantis. It is a stretch to say he has managed to dig up the lost world, but the evidence and the indications in his impressive book Visions of Atlantis are both comprehensive and compelling. Le Flem makes reference to basically every known source (including Plato, of course) and many not so known sources. Two of them would be controversial to the mainstream. Frederick Oliver and Edgar Cayce, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, respectively, were able to psychically channel enormous amounts of information about Atlantis. As strange as this sounds, Oliver and Cayce made technical, scientific and geological references they could not possibly have known about in their ordinary state of awareness. Much of it has since been corroborated by hard evidence, for instance the extinction of megafauna, the cultivation of the Amazon and mastodons roaming on the continental shelves (which were plains 12,000 years ago). ”These things are beyond coincidence”, says Michael. ”The information given by Oliver and Cayce fills in missing pieces from pre-Platonic records.” Some of what they conveyed about the Atlantean civilization is mind-boggling. They described craft that would be called UAPs today. They talked about devices eerily similar to modern-day smartphones. Michael is rigorous in his research, but he is also driven by curiosity and open-mindedness, hallmarks of true science. ”Don’t be afraid of the Michael Shermers of this world. They are just annoyed that their little world is being upset”, he says, with reference to one of the leading materialist skeptics. ‼️ Please note that Michael and I plan a part two of this conversation. Due later in the fall. Stay tuned. Michael’s website Michael’s book Visions of Atlantis The Edgar Cayce organization (AER) Frederick Oliver’s book A Dweller on Two Planets

For almost half a century, professor Bruce Greyson has researched the interface between life and death. He was a materialistically trained doctor when he first came across near death experiences. He was intrigued, began researching them and thought he would soon come up with a simple physical explanation. The more cases he studied, the farther away from that he came. The research material has increased since the 1960s because of our enhanced capability to resuscitate people with cardiac arrest. ”On the other hand, we have accounts of NDEs from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt that sound exactly like the ones we hear today”, says Bruce Greyson. It is estimated that one in every 20 people in the US and Europe (areas that have been surveyed) have had an NDE or NDE-like experience. Some common features are: • Thinking faster and clearer • An intense feeling of peace and wellbeing • Being in the presence of a loving, living light • Paranormal phenomena: leaving the body, ESP, etc • Reaching another type of existence • Meeting dead loved ones or deities A few NDE’ers have unpleasant experiences. ”That is often people who have a strong need to be in control of their life. It can be terrifying to be out of control. When they surrender, it becomes a pleasant experience”, Greyson says. He thinks it is important to document corroborating evidence, such as NDE’ers’ account for things they have seen or heard in the hospital or outside it while being clinically dead, things they could not possibly have known about if they had not in some way left their physical body. One mindblowing case is a clinically dead man in a hospital in South Africa who experienced that he visited another realm and met the soul of a recently deceased hospital nurse – before any of the nurse’s loved ones knew she had died. The fact which most challenges the notion that the brain produces consciousness is that the brains of NDE’ers are flatlined. There doesn’t seem to be any activity going on. Standard explanations don’t hold, like lack of oxygen or influence by drugs: NDE’ers have better oxygen supply than those who haven’t had the experience, and drugs seem to inhibit the possibility of having an NDE rather than induce it. It is as if the brain has to ”get out of the way” in order to have these experiences. ”People use the metaphor of looking up at the sky during the day. You don’t see any stars, but it’s not that the stars aren’t there, it’s just that they’re blocked by the sun. And that’s the way the brain filters out thoughts for us”, Greyson says. Bruce Greyson has mostly studied NDEs, but lately he has also done research on what he and a colleague have labeled terminal lucidity, when people with dementia or Alzheimer's suddenly become lucid a few hours or days before they pass away. Will the world one day accept that there is more to life and death than what is physically measurable? ”I have spent my career lookin at scientific evidence, and that’s ultimately not what convinces people”, says Bruce Greyson. ”What convinces people is personal experience, usually. So the more we can do to help people having these experiences, by meditation or other spiritual practices, the better.” University of Virginia – Division of Perceptual StudiesProf Bruce Greyson’s websiteAfter (book) Irreducible Mind (book) IANDSNDERF

What if AI is an expression of what could be described, with a Gnostic term, as archontic intelligence? Is it the latest innovation by a force that has been manipulating humanity for millennia? Per Shapiro used to work for Swedish public service as an investigative radio reporter. He grew increasingly frustrated with the constraints of the mainstream narratives. When his boss demanded that he redo a documentary about the pandemic that challenged the official view on vaccines and other restrictions, because it ”sounded like conspiracy theories”, Per decided to quit. He started his own independent channel. Per speaks passionately about some of the most toxic and manipulative terms in journalism (and elsewhere): conspiracy theories, false balance and guilt by association. Shortly after leaving mainstream media, Per felt compelled to write a book about the way he sees what is happening with society and humankind. The title would translate to The War Against Life. At the very beginning Per quotes captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick: All my means are perfectly rational, it is my goal that is insane. This quote sums up much of our overarching societal structures, in Per’s view. ”Intelligence is something other than wisdom. Intelligence is the ability to solve complex problems, to achieve complex goals. To be wise takes experiencing the world, experiencing yourself as a part of the world”, Per says. He makes an analogy with cancer cells. ”You might say that a cancer cell is more intelligent than a healthy cell, because it achieves its goal more efficiently. But it lacks the experience that it is actually a cell in a body, on which it depends for its life.” ”This is a metaphor for how we live our lives on this planet.” Many say that capitalism is the root of our problems. No, says Per: ”Capitalism is the symptom of a culture which is disconnected from the earth, from nature.” The Swiss mystic, scientist and psychedelics pioneer Albert Hofmann – cited in Per’s book – said that the Western psyche has been struck by a schizoid catastrophe – a mindset of being separate from nature, from life itself. Per’s book is first and foremost inspired by the Gnostic message and worldview. He has had several conversations with mythologist John Lamb Lash (also interviewed on this podcast), who has devoted his life to interpreting the Gnostic message. In Gnostic mythology, the wisdom goddess Sophia is Earth itself. ”It’s important to know that this is not an abstract deity somewhere far away, this is a first hand experience of the only source of power you will ever have”, Per says. ”When we have lost this connection to our true source of power, we can more easily be manipulated to believe in illusions of power from other sources.” One of the most difficult parts to understand in the Gnostic mythology is the archontic influence. Per agrees with John Lamb Lash that it can be described as a mind virus. It can hijack your thoughts and ideas. One sneaky archontic modus operandi is counter mimicry: to artificially simulate real experiences. ”It piggybacks on our god-given faculty of imagination. But it turns it around so it becomes a simulation”, Per says. Transhumanism and AI come to mind. ”We have come to view ourselves with an archontic perspective, as if we are machines that need upgrading.” Per shares a deep concern about AI with his brother, MIT physicist Max Tegmark. Max has talked about this in several podcasts and radio shows. Bizarrely enough, the MIT professor has been fiercely attacked from the mainstream, not only for his AI worries, but also for lauding the work of his own brother, ”a known conspiracy theorist”. Per’s channel ”Folkets Radio” On Youtube Per’s book

Anoop Kumar has started a health revolution. Through an enterprise that bears precisely that name, he and his associates want us to understand that healing is possible. In Western culture, we have no idea what health is. Modern medicine is the true complementary medicine. What should be defined as conventional medicine are the methods of healing that have been around for millennia. Anoop Kumar talks about four engines of health: nutrition, movement, connection and rest. And they work in our physical as well as our mental bodies. ”What does the placebo effect suggest? It suggests that the line between the mind and the body is not concrete”, he says. Anoop got in touch with the Hindu spiritual school of advaita vedanta already as a child. It is similar to what is often referred to as non-duality. He had a hard time combining those insights with western materialism. But he realized that they are both valid. After his medical training – he is an ER doctor – Anoop decided to dedicate himself to bridging the perceived gap between east and west, body and mind, spirituality and science. He does not want to label his philosophy as idealism, advaita, non-dualism or anything else. He has developed an explanatory model he calls the three minds framework. ”Everything is consciousness, and consciousness is everything”, Anoop says. ”That doesn’t mean there's no bodies, no minds, no personalities. It doesn't mean that this is all just a dream and it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that we can’t work with the body or that modern medicine is useless.” ”None of this is true. There are so many misconceptions associated with this.” One oft-used metaphor to understand how consciousness is fundamental is that consciousness is the ocean, and we and everything else we perceive as separate are the waves, or even the ripples. Different expressions of the ocean, but all water. ”At deeper levels of reality, as we go deeper into that ocean, there is a radiant non-duality. The best word we have for that is consciousness.” There is a real shift happening in health care right now, according to Anoop. And not just in health care. The bigger picture is that amazing things are happening, but at the same time, darker things also have to surface. ”It's almost like an abscess. We’re getting to that eruption phase.” Anoop Kumar has published two books; Michelangelo’s Medicine and Is This a Dream? Health revolution Online course (at a DISCOUNT) Anoop’s website Anoop’s books

Already as a child, Alex Sanfiz had a sense that there was something off with this reality. He has continued ever since to question how human experiences are described. Many thinkers talk about the concept of us living in a simulation, or a simulacrum. In his challenging book, The Spiderweb, Alex elaborates his version. It is a way of describing the human predicament you have never come across before. The reason why humans are anxious is that we are trapped in something Alex calls the allowance grid. ”In a way everybody is suffering from anxiety. The order of this reality is in itself obsessive and compulsive”, says Alex. ”But those who have what is called obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, have a magnified allowance grid. Their mobility is extremely restricted. They constantly run into these walls of uncertainty. Basically, the whole of humanity is living in a loop. ”So collectively, we are obsessive and compulsive.” Few can break out of it. because few know that the mind works just like a computer program. ”But with sufficient awareness, it is possible to separate yourself from the allowance grid and watch it from above instead of going down with the matrix.” ”Those who have been able to break out of the allowance grid are the ones we call enlightened.” Ancient philosophers, sages and shamans in the Vedic, Egyptian, Gnostic, Nordic and other traditions knew that we live in a container of sorts, that this physical reality is not the real thing. Alex’ model may seem a bit harsh if you search for a philosophy that provides you with a higher meaning to life in a comprehensible way. He does not pay that much attention to creation or the afterlife. He focuses on the trap we are in here and now. Alex does not like the popular idea that this earthly life is a school, that we suffer to learn lessons. ”I don’t think that’s it. If you teach the mind that with suffering comes reward, guess what you’re going to do tomorrow? You’re going to suffer. It’s like dopamine.” Are so-called mentally ill people really insane, or is it that insanity has been normalized? ”Mental illness is always determined by what is the standard in society. It’s an economical term. Its purpose is to never normalize people who are thinking differently”, says Alex. ”Krishnamurti said: it is no sign of a healthy mind to adapt to a society that is profoundly sick.” Alex mentions the insanity of the fact that healthy people can stand in line to be treated with genetic therapy. Is it possible to ”crack the code” through psychedelics? ”They can create a shortcut to what is really going on by altering the mind, but I don't recommend it. You have to be extremely careful. If you break the lock too hard, it is damaged for good.” If you try to reach a higher consciousness, to reach God if you will, not only God is listening, Alex points out. ”Carl Jung said: beware of unearned wisdom.” Alex takes experiences of past lives and near death very seriously, but he is not sure they reveal exactly that. ”Consciousness is expressing itself in different ways, and separation is always illusory. So if you go back to the original consciousness, to source, you can access many other expressions of life, not just yours.” The brain is a CPU with very limited capacity, according to Alex. Information is filtered. ”The things you put your attention on, you will have more of. It weaves. If you try to get something the computer is not designed to gather, you'll break it.” People in power are mostly at the low levels of consciousness in this reality, in Alex’ view. ”To me, there are no people as basic as them. They cannot have any influence on those who have reached a higher level of consciousness.” The catch-22 is that high-frequency humans don’t want to be in power. They don’t want to rule others. Alex’ website

John Lamb Lash is arguably the heaviest authority on the Gnostics, at least the Nag Hammadi Library. The Gnostics were vehemently opposed to the Abrahamic religions. Is that relevant in today’s secular world? Well, yes, because the secular world has inherited more features from traditional religions than we think. The Gnostic message is one of liberation from the shackles of both religious and secular ideas that enslave us under artificial rules and renege our divinity and natural connection with Mother Earth. There is a mainstream also in spirituality. Some things John Lash says are controversial, and some of the Gnostic content, as John interprets it, is outlandish, even by the standards of this channel. But whatever you think of it, it is a fascinating and thought-provoking message. John Lamb Lash has written a number of books, but the pivotal piece of work on the Gnostic worldview is Not in His Image. ”My work is an arrow, and Not in His Image is the head of that arrow”, John says. ”The Gnostics were the first noetic, cognitive psychologists. They still get a bad rap, except from those who have read my book.” The first quarter of the book is about the basic problem in humanity. ”What I found is that the basic core problem that underlies all other problems in our world is an ideology of master race supremacy. It is a subject that goes very deep, into the wounding of civilization and into our very sense of humanity. The battle between good and evil is right here, it is in the human heart, and in our minds.” The idea of an off-planet male god, redemption and a savior – the Gnostics saw all of that as insanity, according to John Lash. ”I want to liberate people from this, to the best of my ability.” In today’s world the tzaddik, the unnatural and detrimental ultra-righteousness, is represented by technocracy, like the transhumanism movement, says John. ”They think they are going to tell you not only how you can live, but how you must live. The goal of this insane ideology that came into our world is to destroy our inherent sense of what it is to be human.” The latter three quarters of Not in His Image is about the solution. The Gnostic myth about how humanity came to be is different from other creation myths. The core of it is that the goddess Sophia – an aeon, not the ultimate source – dreamed up and manifested our planet, including its plant and animal kingdom and anthropos. Thus, Sophia not only created the earth but is the planet. And we are, basically, her. ”To Sophia it's like a dream. To her the earth is like your body is to you in a dream. You are a character in her dream”, John says. But we forgot our origins. Only a few indigenous peoples have always remembered. At one point, a ”mind virus” managed to enter human minds. It originated from inorganic entities that Sophia had also manifested, but by accident: the archons. It was then salvationist religion was introduced. This is the one aspect of the Gnostic worldview that is most difficult to interpret and describe. At first the ”virus” operated through religion, but it has mutated. ”Science was taken out of the realm of the senses and spun into a mind game, which goes nowhere”, John says Before this ”infection” broke through, the indigenous cultures of the world, meaning most humans, knew we were in the presence of a divine force, the earth mother. And so did the Gnostics. They dared to say openly that the newly introduced off-planet male god was a pretender god. Hence, they were brutally persecuted and massacred by Christians in the early centuries of the Common era. The good news in our day and age is that the archontic influence is dying out, according to John Lamb Lash. ”The correction of the insane behavior of humanity is happening today.” Not in His Image (book) Nemeta (JLL’s Sophianic school) Sophianic Myth (Youtube) Sophianic Myth (website)

Neuroscientist Mona Sobhani made a profound and brave inner journey. It amounts to a transformation, an awakening. She used to be a hardcore physicalist. Around 2018, in the midst of a life crisis, she began questioning the tenets of conventional western science. They didn’t hold when it came to explaining many nonphysical human experiences. So, she dove into the literature, did dozens of interviews and wrote a book about everything she learned and experienced on the way. ”I eventually became much more open minded”, she says. ”But I had an ego struggle. It’s hard to let go of this box of beliefs. You just ignore things that don’t match the beliefs. That’s how the human mind is built. My mind was constantly being blown, with each interview I did.” Mona’s ”Old me” would have dismissed someone’s story about a spiritual experience as imagination or misinterpretation. Her ”New me” will listen with curiosity and compassion. Everybody experiences the world in a unique way. It comes down to the first-person sentient experience, which is the hard problem of consciousness in science. ”In neuroscience, we don’t have any way of measuring how it is to be you or me. You just have to take people at their word”, Mona says. ”Consciousness is the beginning, the middle and the end. What else is there? You can’t really tell somebody that they didn’t experience something, even though we do that all the time.” She soon realized that you have to ignore a lot of evidence to make the physicalist paradigm work. ”And that’s not a very good model.” Mona Sobhani thinks there might be a paradigm shift underway in neuroscience. New papers present theories that say consciousness could be an energy field and that there is an interaction between the field and the brain. Some physicists today say things that intuitives have said for a long time and that are found in ancient texts. Mona’s book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, is packed with references to scientists, philosophers, studies and books. It covers every conceivable spiritual field. She has herself acquired personal experience from many of them, like intuitive readings, meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, astrology and tarot. Psychedelics can broaden your consciousness vastly, she says. ”The boundaries between you and the rest of the world get blurred.” ”It’s such a big problem that neuroscience only focuses on the everyday waking state.” It is difficult to find incentives for truly novel research in our current system, according to Mona. There is much bias and inertia. Scientists who apply for a grant must follow old research closely. ”You can only move just a little bit further. You must not shock the reviewers. True innovation is not rewarded.” The media is tainted with a similar bias. And when scientists communicate, it is often ”a disaster”, Mona says. ”They often say ’there is no evidence for that’, but that is misleading. What it really means is that it hasn’t been investigated. But the readers never know that.” Mona’s website Mona’s book

The human species has been around for some 300,000 years. A typical mammal lasts for a million years. We are not typical.  ”You might think we are in the middle of history. But given the grand sweep, we are the ancients, we are at the very beginning of time. We live in the distant past compared to everything that will ever happen”, says William MacAskill, associate professor in philosophy at Oxford university. MacAskill is the initiator of the Effective Altruism movement, which is about optimizing the good you can do for this world. In his latest book, What We Owe the Future, he discusses how we should think and act to plan for an extremely long human future. The book is basically optimistic. MacAskill thinks we have immense opportunities to improve the world significantly. But it dwells on the potential risks and threats that we must deal with. MacAskill highlights four categories of risks: Extinction (everyone dying), collapse (so much destroyed that civilization doesn’t recover), lock-in (a long future but governed by bad values) and stagnation (which may lead to one of the former). As for the risk of extinction, he concludes that newer risks that are less under control tend to be the largest, such as pandemics caused by man-made pathogens and catastrophes set off by artificial intelligence. Known risks like nuclear war and direct hits by asteroids have a potential to wipe out humankind, but since we are more aware of them we have some understanding of how to mitigate them or at least prepare for them. Climate change tops the global agenda today, but although it is a problem we need to address, it is not an existential threat. Artificial intelligence could lead to intense concentration of power and control. But AI could also have huge benefits. It can speed up science, and it can automate away all monotonous work and give us more time with family and friends and for creativity. ”The scale of the upside is as big as our imagination can take us.” Humans have invented dangerous technology before and not used it to its full detrimental capacity. ”It is a striking thing about the world how much destruction could be reaped if people wanted to. That is actually a source of concern, because AI systems might not have those human safeguards.” One prerequisite to achieve a better future is to actively change our values. There has been tremendous moral progress over the last couple of centuries, but we need to expand our sphere of moral concern, according to MacAskill. ”We care about family and friends and perhaps the nation, but I think we should care as much about everyone, and much more than we do about non-human animals. A hundred billion land animals are killed every year for food, and the vast majority of them are kept in horrific suffering.” William MacAskill thinks some aspects of the course of history are inevitable, such as population growth and technological advancement, but when it comes to moral changes he is not sure. ”We shouldn’t be complacent. Moral collapse can happen again.” William thinks we are at a crucial juncture in time. ”The stakes are much higher than before, the level of prosperity or doom that we could face.” William and I have a discussion about the possibility that alien civilizations are monitoring us or have visited Earth. William is not convinced that the recent Pentagon disclosures actually prove alien presence, but he is open to it, and he has some thoughts on what a close encounter would entail. We also talk briefly about the possibility of a lost human civilization and the cause of the extinction of the megafauna during the Younger Dryas. We have some differing views on that. My final question is a biggie: Could humankind's next big leap be an inward leap, a raise in consciousness? ”It is a possibility. Maybe the best thing is not to spread out and become ever bigger but instead have a life of spirituality.”