Mind the Shift

After having written two books about investing, value investor Vitaliy Katsenelson thought, like Freddie Mercury once, there must be more to life than this, and wrote a book about life. Vitaliy had written tons of articles about investing and always included personal and philosophical parts, and he learned that it was those parts that many of his readers appreciated the most. His new book is entitled Soul in the Game. He uses the word soul in a non-spiritual way. ”I don’t know where it comes from, but when I see people who have this passion for certain things, I know they have soul in the game, and then they have a lot more meaning in life”, Vitaliy says. He thinks writing has made him more philosophical. ”I get up at 4.30 or 5 o’clock every day and write for two hours. So I have two hours of focused thinking. When you do this for a long period of time, you kind of rewire your brain. You become more mindful.” Vitaliy Katsenelson grew up in Soviet Russia and moved to the US when he was 18 years old, around the time of the Soviet collapse: from a life in the hub of anti-capitalism to a successful career as a value investor. Has this background in a communist dictatorship been a help or a hindrance when exploring the landscape of capitalism? ”I came from Murmansk with very little light to Colorado which has an insane number of sunny days a year. With capitalism it’s a similar contrast. I appreciate sunlight much more than somebody who was born in Colorado, and I probably appreciate capitalism much more than people who are born into capitalism.” We have a lengthy exchange about what is happening in Russia today and with the invasion of Ukraine. ”I used to be proud to say I was from Russia when people asked. Now I am embarrassed.” ”The Soviet Union was more scarred by World War II than any other country. I grew up learning to hate Nazis. What Russia is doing now to the Ukrainian people is basically the same thing Nazi Germany did”, Vitaliy says. It is a sad fact that Russians have never experienced mature democracy. ”Most Russians are brainwashed. My father said something I think is really true: Russians fall in love with their leaders. And doing this, they end up giving them unlimited power”, Vitaliy says. Two things in life have a special importance to Vitaliy (apart from his family): stoic philosophy and classical music. ”The Stoics give you this roadmap to life. How to minimize suffering and get the most meaning out of life.” Vitaliy highlights three Stoics: Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. ”Epictetus has this one quote that got me hooked. It sounds so trivial and simple, but it clicked with me: ’Some things are up to us, some things aren’t’. That’s it. It's the cutting of control.” ”Up to us is basically how we behave. How we react to things. And also our values. Everything else is not up to us. I can choose to get upset by things that are not up to me, like getting stuck in traffic. Then I will end up having a miserable life.” It is not that there should not be any pain in life at all. Vitaliy completely agrees with what many spiritual teachers say: pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Vitaliy listens to classical music when he writes. It makes him more creative, he says. He gravitates towards the Russian composers, ”because their pain clicks with me”, but his favorites constantly change. ”If you understand how difficult it was for many of these composers to write this music, you understand your struggles aren’t unique to you. I write and so I can relate to the creative process. And as an investor as well. Investing is also a very creative endeavor.” Vitaliy’s about page Soul in the Game

In modern society, we learn to live in the day world and to shun the underworld. To get out of pain as fast as possible. But the pain we avoid will inevitably come back to haunt us, in some form. ”The dark places in life are not enjoyable. The goal is not to spend our life in those places. But we are too quick to pull the ripcord”, says Jungian and archetypal psychologist Joanna LaPrade, author of a new book entitled Forged in Darkness. The Many Paths of Personal Transformation She promotes self-awareness as opposed to the ”mechanical” modern self-help model. ”An approach to self-awareness is so much richer: what is unique to you, how can you manage it? Thus you can pull on your resources, your nature, what inspires and strengthens you.” Carl Jung advanced the concept of psychological archetypes. He found them in ancient  traditions and in Greek and other mythologies. The striking commonality between archetypes in different traditions all over the world laid the ground for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. In her book, Joanna LaPrade explores different ways of journeying into the underworld to manage inner pain. She does it through the heroes and gods in Greek mythology who make precisely that journey (not all of them do). Heroism does not only come in the form of strength and willpower (Hercules), as we usually see it in the West. A hero’s journey can also be about listening and showing weakness (Aeneas), or using feelings, learning from mistakes and letting go (Orpheus) or to be clever and eloquent and ask questions (Odysseus). Investigating one’s depths can also entail ecstasy, release and to embrace nature and body (Dionysus). LaPrade discovered Jung in her early twenties in a very ”Jungian” manner via synchronistic events and a numinous dream that pointed out to her that her path was to help people cross thresholds in life. She is also deeply influenced by the Jungian writer and mythology professor Joseph Campbell, whose notable book The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a distilling of hero mythology. ”The hero is that part of us that is able to recognize when old life is worn out and needs tending. It is the courage and the bravery that it takes to leave the comfort of the old in us and set out on some kind of journey in ourselves and in our world, where we cross a threshold and become more than we used to be”, says Joanna. She points out that in her work as a therapist, she has yet to meet anyone who talks about having become more than they thought they were without first having visited places of suffering. Inner pain and suffering can express itself in the body in the form of illness or injury. The Western world is influenced by the cartesian idea of a separation between mind and matter. ”But we make a really big mistake when we separate soma and psyche”, Joanna says. And we also make a mistake not to realize that those ailments may want to tell us something. ”Working with cancer patients, I would say most of them have said ’cancer was the greatest teacher of my life’.” Toward the end of our conversation, we engage in an interesting and deep exchange about the possibility of living in the present moment and whether or not one can actually free oneself from suffering, as many spiritual teachers say. Jung versus Buddha, in a way. Do we reach any conclusions? Listen and find out. Find Joanna’s website here. Find Joanna’s book here.

Have you noticed that things mysteriously disappear and reappear? That broken items inexplicably get repaired? Perhaps even that deceased people or pets suddenly reappear as very much alive? Don’t think you are losing your mind or suddenly suffer from amnesia. You are most likely experiencing what Cynthia Sue Larson calls reality shifts. This is a phenomenon closely related to synchronicities as well as what is often referred to as the Mandela effect, a kind of timeline jumps, where some people’s memories of universal events or things deviate from what seems to be the consensus memory. Cynthia first began to observe weird reality shifts in the 90s. Having a science degree, she began connecting the dots employing quantum physics, but she combined science with the spiritual insights that she also acquired during the same period. ”Consciousness interacts with quantum reality. Somehow we are entangled through space and time”, she says. Time is a weird thing. It can slow down or speed up. We all experience it differently in different situations and contexts. ”Sometimes it is as if a change has happened in the past and a different decision was made. We can start learning from experiences that we haven't even had yet.” (This both pleasant and deep conversation made me realize I really must learn more about basic quantum physics. I have a feeling those references won’t go away any time soon on this podcast…) Cynthia likes to see life as a waking dream. It is real on a superficial level, but the baseline reality lies beneath the physical reality. She thinks we ought to live as if we are in a lucid dream, where we know we are dreaming but can change how it plays out. ”This is a participatory universe, as the physicist John Archibald Wheeler said. If we ask the universe a question, we get an answer.” Cynthia Sue Larson makes several references to quantum physicists and other scientists, like Carlo Rovelli and what he has said about zero entropy, which may be a scientific way of describing God. From that place all can be seen. In our busy lives, characterized by entropy, it is very hard to see the whole picture. ”We draw the energy required for these shifts from zero entropy”, Cynthia says, ”that non-linear experience, being in that lucid dream where we have access to everything, where we feel connected with everyone.” According to tests, some people are more prone than others to experience reality shifts, namely those who score high on intuition, empathy and emotions. Cynthia Sue Larson has written several books about these fascinating phenomena, she runs a website where people can share their experiences of shifts and jumps in space and time, and she is the first president of the International Mandela Effect Conference. Cynthia’s website Cynthia’s books International Mandela Effect Conference

We all dream. Even the most hard-nosed materialist does. When a dream is powerful and seems to carry meaning it shakes you, whether you are spiritually oriented or not. – Dreams for me are the portal, the opening to the part of you that is invisible, unseen, unconscious, expansive and infinite, knows past, present and future and sees beyond the material, says Theresa Cheung, a returning podcast guest (our previous conversation is in episode #55) . Cheung is a successful and prolific writer of all things spiritual. She loves to write and speak about these things for people who are skeptical, and she always employs the power of doubt. Her latest book, How to Catch a Dream, is about lucid dreaming. – It is an entry point for an understanding of ourselves as spiritual beings having a human experience rather than human beings having a spiritual inside. The interest in the significance of dreams and dream interpretation is booming. Only twenty years ago, taking dreams seriously would have been considered woo woo in most camps. Theresa Cheung credits the younger generation for the change. If people looked inside for self-knowing, there would be less strife and violence in the world, Theresa thinks. Rulers who feel tortured inside inflict their pain onto the world outside them. – Your dreaming mind and your waking mind are one, they are interconnected. People separate waking and sleeping, like you're a different person when you dream, but you’re not, it's all your consciousness. But in dreams you interact on a symbolic level. In ancient times, people were better at thinking symbolically. We have sadly turned that ability off. But reading poetry, watching films or even playing computer games we can ignite that dreaming language. Your mind doesn't know the difference between sleeping and waking, so if you learn something in a dream, you can do it also in your waking life. The ultimate high in the dream state is lucid dreaming, when you ”wake up” in a dream and realize you are dreaming. – Then you can role play, you can be, do, experience anything. There are no limits. Think about that! The only limits are logic and reason, says Theresa. – I believe that what you meet in a lucid dream is the part of you that survives bodily death. Theresa Cheung says she finds the most clarity in the Jungian approach to dream interpretation. The characters we meet in a dream can be delightful or scary, but they are all aspects of ourselves. Most of the time they want our attention. They want to tell us something – There is night and day within all of us. Sometimes the monsters that we meet just want a hug. They want the dream God that created them, which is you, to love them, for all their sins. She strongly recommends journaling your dreams. Doing that will enhance the possibility that you will experience a lucid dream. According to Theresa Cheung, dream decoding may in fact be as useful a tool when we are awake as when we are asleep. – Increasingly, I am advising people to interpret their waking life as if it was a dream. What’s the hidden meaning behind this situation? What does this person trigger in me? – Life gets so interesting and fascinating. You become like a dream decoding detective. Theresa's website Theresa’s books

What is complementary and alternative medicine and treatments (CAM)? The definitions vary in different parts of the world. ”But at least here in Denmark, the definition is not based on evidence, on whether it works or not, but on the formal status of what is being done”, says Jesper Odde Madsen, who is a guest on the podcast for the second time. Jesper is a Danish science journalist and communication consultant with a focus on complementary and alternative medicine. He has an affiliation with the Galileo Commission, whose aim it is to expand science and free it from its underlying materialist assumptions. To what extent different kinds of CAM are accepted, or tolerated, also varies widely. Yoga and massage are popular. Homeopathy is a no-go zone in most of the West, whereas it is considered more or less normal in India. Conducting research on CAM is an uphill battle. Jesper Madsen talks of four main obstacles. ”There is no money in it. You can't get a patent by treating people with reflexology or acupuncture. You won’t make a career of studying these methods. There are no international organizations to back this up. And communication between the stakeholders is random or at least limited.” There is also a methodological dilemma when it comes to conducting CAM studies: The holy grail of western medical research is to employ RCT, randomized control trials, to show whether a treatment works or not. ”But here is a secret: When you want to study something, you should choose the trial method that's suitable for the thing you want to investigate. This truth has been kept away.” ”All governments listen to mainstream doctors. And mainstream doctors say: we must have RCT. Amen.” Alternative practitioners have a holistic approach. Before they apply their treatment, they learn things about every individual patient. And afterwards they talk to the patient and give advice. ”The point is that most alternative treatments consist of several parts, and only one of them is the technical fix, like needles in your arm”, says Jesper. ”There is nothing wrong with RCT but you have to start with the research question and analyze the issue before you make the choice of which investigation design to use.” If you make the method in itself a criterion of quality, then it is a question of belief, according to Jesper Madsen. ”And that is exactly what I have heard medical doctors say about alternative treatments: that they are beliefs, almost religious.” Is the placebo effect in essence an alternative treatment that the mainstream is using without knowing it? ”Yes. I am happy about the growing interest in studying the placebo. Even many doctors say today that this is more than just noise. There is a link between the psyche and the physical body. It would be great if we could take this seriously. But it will be difficult to make money on it.” Why are journalists reluctant to cover CAM in a neutral way? Are they also afraid of being ridiculed? ”I have been asking myself this question for years. Journalists tend to go to the usual mainstream sources. They tend to have a belief in authorities. I think this has been shown during the pandemic.” How to break the materialist paradigm, take down the ”wall”? ”It is not a question of evidence. We have the evidence. It is a question of reaching a critical mass of people and events. Maybe even that some researchers die and the younger ones think differently.” Personal website (English) Non-profit website & newsletter about CAM The Galileo Commission Presentation & speech, World Health Congress, Prague, 2021

Philosophy is life. It is always present in life. In a way, every human being is a philosopher. But we also have collective thinking and collective experiences, and that's what a professional philosopher deals with. Philosophy professor Jonna Bornemark works at the Center for Studies in Practical Knowledge at Södertörn university in Stockholm. Many Swedes have come to appreciate her everyday approach to philosophy. She often appears in the media. A couple of years ago she released a book about judgment that was much discussed, and her latest book, about pregnancy, was on the shelves a few days before this conversation. Jonna Bornemark argues that the room for judgment has shrunk in modern professional life. And the room for action. ”To follow a manual is not to act”, she says. In every profession there is a space for collective judgment. Professional knowledge can be developed within this space, according to Bornemark. We sometimes talk about judgment as a personal characteristic. ”I think  that is unfortunate. Instead, it is a kind of knowledge. We can be differently skilled at it.” Jonna Bornemark hesitates to liken judgment with intuition. And she does not like the concept of ’following one’s gut feeling’. ”To follow only one source of knowledge, your feeling, is not judgment. We should follow as many sources of knowledge as possible.” Often we have to act fast, and sometimes we just have a sense that we must act in a certain way. ”That may seem like acting on gut feeling, but when you look at it closer, it is much more.” ”To have judgment is to be intimately in touch with the newness of every situation. To be able to always act without knowing everything.” Not-knowingness fills Jonna Bornemark with a euphoric feeling. ”It means we can always explore more. To some it may trigger anxiety because you are not in control. To me it is mainly positive.” The constantly moving horizons of uncertainty and of not knowing are the lifeblood of science, but the scientific and educational systems are bad at acknowledging this, Bornemark thinks. Sometimes we need to use our judgment to deal with conflicting forces. Jonna Bornemark has coined the term ”pactivity” for situations where we are passive and active at the same time. She first felt the need for such a concept when she tried to understand the experience of giving birth. ”The labor pain was not mine. It belonged to life itself. I experienced it like some kind of monster going through me. But I had to not object to it, that would have been dangerous. I had to continue its movement in order to give birth. So I wasn't purely active and I wasn't purely passive. I was pactive.” When does life begin? ”It is a continuum. To draw a line, to give it a timestamp, is just a human desire. The logic of life is the logic of a continuum. That is why we need to look at the question of abortion anew.” The fetus probably doesn't have the sense of ’I’. Even a newborn displays a sense of oneness. When does the sense of a separate self begin? Is it conditioned? Is it possible to maintain the sense of oneness throughout life? Those are questions we raise during this conversation. Bornemark doesn’t like the reductionist materialism that is so prevalent in society. ”It is a poor worldview. And not true. But I like matter.” ”One way of responding to reductionist materialism could be to only emphasize the spiritual side, but my response is to work with the concept of matter, to re-understand what matter is: living, self-forming – and also including the spiritual side.” Jonna’s university profile https://tinyurl.com/ywsh5bne Jonna’s books https://volante.se/forfattare-och-talare/jonna-bornemark/

Bernardo Kastrup, a prominent thinker at the crossroads of spirituality and science, shares his insights on metaphysical idealism, asserting that reality is fundamentally mental rather than material. He critiques materialism, arguing that qualities can't be dissected from quantities, emphasizing our perceptions as constructs influenced by consciousness. Kastrup also explores the limits of AI consciousness compared to human experience, and introduces thought-provoking metaphors like whirlpools, illustrating our interconnectedness in the vast stream of consciousness.

Life was a winding road for happiness specialist Monique Rhodes before she found her calling. In her late teens she was so depressed she tried to take her own life. Then she traveled the world. For thirteen years, all she owned would fit in a bag. She lived in slums and castles, she criss-crossed India on a motorbike. She was also an accomplished singer-songwriter. While in India, Monique understood by accident that she was a good meditation teacher. She began to develop a mindfulness meditation program that is now used at thirty universities and colleges around the world, the 10 Minute Mind. She has since developed other programs, like the Happiness Baseline. She runs a daily bite-sized podcast, In Your Right Mind. And she has worked with a number of well-known spiritual teachers and leaders, like Eckhart Tolle. ”Learning how to deal with your thoughts and emotions is difficult for young people. I asked myself, sitting in a hospital bed, why is it that some people are happy and that others, like me, are struggling so much? Is it something I can change? That's where all the adventures came from. And it completely transformed my life”, Monique says. ”Today I work with thousands of students around the world, teaching the things I wish we were taught when we were younger.” So, what is the secret? Basically learning how to bring back the scattered mind to the present moment as often and as long as possible. ”Build a relationship with your mind, learn how to work with it. It’s problematic to dance away into the past and into the future. Those are places that don’t exist. The only moment that is real is now.” ”We live in our thoughts without connecting to our heart. We don’t know how to manage our minds.” Monique reads a lot, she says. ”We have a propensity to not hold our focus for very long on specific things. Reading is a good antidote to that.” The core of Monique Rhodes’ message is this: Happiness is a habit. When we experience something we judge that and react to it based not on the present moment but on something in the past. It may remind us, subconsciously or consciously, of something that happened to us before, positive or negative. ”This is how we relate all the time.” Meditation slows down that automated process. ”You begin to learn to be more in the present moment. Every moment we have a choice as to how to react.” Many people think meditation is not only woo-woo but also difficult. It’s not. This is what meditation is, according to Monique Rhodes: ”Get your mind into the present moment. Your mind will go off, you bring it back. Your practice is in the bringing back. Every time you bring the mind back, you build a muscle.” Monique Rhodes describes herself as habitually courageous, habitually positive, habitually grateful and someone who habitually sees the goodness in people. ”Because I have built a series of habits around this.” At the same time it is important not to just sit in a glorious feeling of wellbeing all the time. The risk is that a kind of arrogance seeps in, as Monique puts it. ”We have a tendency not to see the light that exists in the negative things that arise and to fear the shadow side when positive things happen. But if you allow it all to just be, you can stay in a pretty happy place most of your life.” Monique’s website The 10 Minute Mind In the Right Mind podcast

A few weeks into 2022, the Covid policies are shifting dramatically in many countries. Restrictions are being rolled back. This conversation with Nils Littorin is a bit like a posterior assessment of what worked and didn’t work during this huge health policy experiment. Dr Littorin, a microbiologist, is the initiator of the so-called Doctors’ Appeal in Sweden (Läkaruppropet in Swedish), a manifestation against harmful restrictions and for the shielding of vulnerable groups. It is inspired by the Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020 by three professors at Oxford, Stanford and Harvard. As of February 2022 around 25,000 people have signed the former and almost one million the latter. Sweden has been the ”control group” in the global lockdown experiment, with far fewer restrictions than most other countries. But even here, many are frustrated. ”There is a pretty strong undercurrent of discontent with current covid policies also in this country, including vaccine passports”, Nils says. ”That tells you something. That tells you that these measures are not serving any good purpose.” ”I am for logical logical measures that protect the vulnerable. The measures that have been taken don't protect the vulnerable. No measures can stop the virus. It has been shown all over the world.” ”You cannot find any epidemiological studies that show that lockdowns or harsh restrictions work in the sense that they reduce the excess mortality. On the contrary, there is no correlation.” ”Unfortunately, a lot of politicians act and talk as if there is not only a correlation but a causal relationship between lockdowns and reducing the spread of the virus or deaths or hospitalizations”, he says. Aside from the brain, the immune system is probably the most complex thing in the body. It is not defensible, says Littorin, to force onto people preliminarily approved medicines that affect bodily functions with such complexity. But he is definitely not an anti-vaxer. ”I am not against these vaccines. Those who need them should take them. But it has to be by consent within a doctor-patient relationship.” ”I am worried that we are violating that trust now, that doctor-patient relationship. What will people expect from health authorities next time?” ”Because of the fear porn propagated by the mass media and careless politicians, many people believe that these vaccine passports protect them from transmission. If you look at the data, they don't, especially not now, with Omicron.” In Nils Littorin’s view, the vaccine passports should be ”thrown in the garbage bin of history”. ”And the leaders who advocated them should sit beside the bin and contemplate how they could do it.”

For a human being life on earth begins when she takes her first breath. There are reasons why ancient traditions always emphasize the importance of breathing and posture. ”If breathing were only a matter of getting oxygen, then the best way would be to breathe in and out as quickly as possible”, says Paul J Scanlan, author of the book The Body Heat Fiasco. Or to pick it up through gills, receptors or some other kind of bodily process, one might add. We all know that quick breathing is bad. We feel better when we breathe calmly and deeply. But western medical science doesn't understand why. So why else do we breathe then? In his book, independent researcher Paul Scanlan compellingly (and partly funnily) explains how breathing heats our bodies. ”Warming air is a defining feature of being alive”, Paul says. The mechanism is amazingly straight-forward: squeezing air in the respiratory system. That a gas heats up when compressed is basic physics. For instance, a diesel engine doesn't have spark plugs. Instead, the piston squeezes the fuel mixture to ignition. It is strange, when you think about it, how vague our knowledge about body heat generation is. And yet, we wouldn’t be able to live on this planet if our body temperature weren’t somehow kept at around 36.9 degrees Celsius. According to the standard view, in warm-blooded animals like mammals and birds body heat is generated by a chemical burning, primarily within a fatty tissue called BAT. Thus, the reason why the air we exhale has body temperature is because it has been heated by the body. According to Scanlan there are numerous gaps in the century-old standard model. One example: Pigs and birds are warmblooded, but they don't have BAT. Another example: If chemical reactions generated body heat, a chick in an egg close to hatching would be able to heat its own body, but it can’t, it is wholly dependent on its parents to keep warm (thus being ”coldblooded” until the moment it comes out of the egg and can breathe). And when it comes to heating inhaled air, it actually works the other way around, says Paul: ”The warm body is assumed to warm 7.5 liters of air from, say, 2 degrees Celsius to 36.9 degrees Celsius every minute. If you had a tube through which the same amount of air flowed, known physics would say the tube needs to be pretty hot for the air to heat up that much by somehow just touching the sides of the tube. How hot? Let’s just say it has to be hotter than 36.9 degrees. But there is nothing between the nostrils and the lungs that is hotter than that!” Some of the more compelling pieces of evidence in Scanlan’s book are about humans who are able to endure extreme cold. A case in point is ”the iceman”, Wim Hof. ”Hof does special things with his breathing. He can compress the air very well. But to get to that point he focuses on his alignment and meditation. The classic for meditation and yoga is concentrating on breathing.” Paul Scanlan’s model doesn’t dismiss that some heat is generated by way of chemical processes, which is relevant in some contexts. He has presented a couple of papers about his controversial findings and also had one published in a peer-reviewed journal. He has received polite response from the mainstream, but nothing more than that. Actually, the golden thread in The Body Heat Fiasco, as well as in the two or three books Scanlan plans to write, is not breathing so much as tension. Or rather tensional integrity, for which breathing plays a pivotal part. His next book will explain how our vision works (he has been able to eliminate his own dependence on glasses). And after that he will take on cancer. Book Paper Paul on Twitter