Mind the Shift

When Graham Pemberton was 29 years old, an often crucial point in life astrologically known as the first Saturn return, he had a powerful awakening. Previously he had adhered to atheism and existentialism and had a period of left wing political activism. ”I began to feel severely depressed. I then made a decision, influenced by someone who was like my mentor, to look inside instead of outside. This inward looking triggered a spiritual awakening.” Graham experienced ”a lot of weird stuff” like vivid dreams and wild synchronistic events. ”The whole world went completely mad. The veil was lifted, if you will. I saw that things were interconnected, and I realized that consciousness has nothing to do with the brain.” One powerful dream told him that his life hitherto had been like a Monty Python movie, and now it was time to get back to normal. The dramatic character of Graham's intense six-month awakening period eventually dissipated. But his life view had changed for good. I got in touch with Graham after having read some of his many in-depth essays and articles on Medium about spirituality and modern science. Lately, he has explored just about every influential book that has been written about the connection between quantum physics and mysticism. There have been some fascinating ups and downs in the interest for this topic in the mainstream. Two books in the 1970s by Fred Alan Wolf and Fritjof Capra triggered an uptick. Ten years later Ken Wilber tried to take the hype down, and then in the 1990s the quantum–spirit connection became more prominent again. Pemberton has written a whole series of articles about Danah Zohar’s ”The Quantum Self”. Recently, Carlo Rovelli is with ”Helgoland” trying to take quantum physics back to almost materialism. Like many others who have looked seriously into this topic, Pemberton thinks David Bohm was the most spiritual among the leading quantum physicists. ”You could argue that quantum physics destroyed materialism a hundred years ago. But the question is, how much further have we come?” asks Graham Pemberton. ”All we can do is keep working. However, if history means anything, a new paradigm will eventually take over.” Stanislav Grof is another of Graham’s heroes, as is Carl Jung. We discuss whether Jung is still today as ridiculed in academia as he used to be. We conclude that Jung has had a profound significance for the spiritual growth of both of us. Graham Pemberton is also a musician. ”That is the path I should have taken in my youth.” His songs are of a singer-songwriter type. Many of the lyrics are about the same esoteric topics that he writes about. During his period of spiritual awakening, Graham Pemberton’s mentor pointed out that Graham was going through a heavy Saturn return. This information had a powerful impact on him. His growing astrological insights led him to later write a book about how this ancient knowledge might be true–from an outsider’s perspective. It has not been published, but Graham puts it out on Medium, bit by bit. ”It is to a large extent based on quantum physics. Everything is interconnected. There is no reason why any part of the universe couldn't affect us.” Graham and I also have a somewhat animated discussion about whether it is possible to raise consciousness by way of traditional politics or not. And whether democracy stops at the borders of the nation state, and if that has anything to do with spiritual awakening. Please find Graham Pemberton’s websites here and here. If you want a deeper understanding of Graham’s thoughts in this episode, he elaborates on some of them in this article.

A deep interest in a combination of communication, spirituality and science entices me, I must say. And it was likely not by coincidence I discovered Gerald Baron on the blogging and writing platform Medium. A grandfather of nine, Gerald is now mostly retired and can spend much of his time following his heart-felt interests. Gerald had a career as a teacher and entrepreneur in communication and PR. He was the head of a company at one point, but he gradually realized he wasn't a ”CEO type”. ”Those who are financially successful have certain personal traits, they are perhaps more inclined to steamroller other people, sometimes sociopaths”, says Gerald and gives the prime example of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs. Does it have to be that way? ”It is an old question … The capitalist system is terribly flawed, and yet it has generated wealth for a great many people. It works because there are people who are willing to do what it takes to be successful. Which is exactly why it needs moderation and controls”, says Gerald. Perhaps there are big changes underway in the world. We agree that this is true when it comes to science. ”Major paradigm shifts will be represented in some significant changes in worldview. The foundation of science is crumbling, and most scientists understand that.” But we are a generation or two away from the general public really understanding it, Gerald Baron thinks. He refers to Carl Gustav Jung, who described a quantum reality before quantum physics was discovered. ”The conscious mind, wherever and whatever it is, has a role to play in bringing reality into existence. When we exercise our conscious minds we bring something into existence that wasn't there before.” Open minded forerunners in science, not least in quantum physics, realized that the new findings undoubtedly mirrored much of the spiritual realm. ”But physicalist evangelists shoved those ideas aside.” Digging deeply into the new science has affected Gerald’s Christian faith, but science also validates much of what the Bible tells us, he says–including parts of the scripture that are seldom highlighted in the general discourse. Sometimes new findings clearly contradict the Christian worldview. One such example is the studies at the University of Virginia that show compelling evidence of reincarnation. And it is not possible to deny evolution, he says. ”The delta variant makes that very clear to us every day.” ”My issue is with exclusive evolution, that evolution is the answer to everything. Even cosmology.” ”There is evolution, but it is not random. The digital code in our DNA is remarkably complex and carries meaning. In science we know of no process of creating meaningful code other than through an intelligent mind”, Gerald says. The more physicalists find out about the complexity of life and how absolutely remarkable it is, the goal post of coming to an answer through chemical evolution keeps moving further and further out. ”It is looking more and more like alchemy.” Despite all this, the public, via the media, still believes that neo-darwinism is an established fact. Gerald Baron has issues with the media. He has written two books about how it functions in its relation to the rest of society; ”Now is Too Late” and ”Black Hats White Hats”. He has coined the acronym FUDO to describe the currency of the news media. It stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt and Outrage. ”And outrage is the preferred one.” Activists feed the outrage, and they know that: An activist makes some claim and the journalist repeats it. ”Even a small number of activists can be remarkably effective in making huge changes”, says Gerald. Gerald’s website: grbaron.com Gerald on Medium: https://gerald-baron.medium.com

This episode is in my mind one of the most powerful on this podcast so far. What is spoken  about is both deep and light and incomprehensible and self-evident at the same time. Is it possible to end individual suffering in this lifetime? Yes, it is. Angelo Dilullo, a medical doctor and the author of ”Awake: It’s your turn”, is living proof of that, and in his book he eloquently points out the ways you can go about achieving just that. You don’t need to go anywhere. It may take some time, but at the same time there is only this moment, and awakening to a deeper and more truthful reality where you rid yourself of the illusion of separation and time is accessible to you always. Always and everywhere you are. ”It's a lot like taking the red pill in the movie ’The Matrix’”, Angelo says. Or, say many who have experienced it, like returning to the magical state of early childhood. ”You are stepping foot on a path that is very mysterious, and it gets more mysterious as things go on. There are aspects of it you just cannot prepare for. And that's good, it has to be that way. Because the seemingly separate identity is deeply rooted in our personality and identity structures. When you come to the roots of that identity, the defense mechanisms really start to come online, and you feel ’if I take another step I'll be totally in the unknown’. When you are totally ready to look thoroughly into what you are (and what you are not) by self inquiry, a one-pointed approach and other inner avenues, you will experience the dissolution of seeming barriers that were never there. ”The strange thing is that what goes away internally is so profound that you would have never been able to imagine what it's like when it's not there”, Angelo says. ”We have a seeming sense of the separate one that moves from moment to moment or collects experiences. It seems that that's what we want to have here, this agency, this ability to manipulate external experiences. But what you ultimately realize is that that is what is causing all our suffering, all our struggle and all our feelings of insecurity, lack and scarcity.” Strange things happen: Even the sense of being in a body goes away. ”It becomes impossible to differentiate between what I am experiencing and what you are experiencing. But at the same time you don't lose the ability to raise your hand when someone calls your name.” It is a question of a relative world and an absolute world, ”and I can operate in the relative world”. It is not about shedding all that one has collected in life and that has made one feel safe. ”It’s about clear-seeing. It's about looking closely enough at what is actually happening to see it for what it is.” After the first awakening there is a honeymoon. But then the work begins towards deeper realization, and there will be shadow phases. It is also not about pure bliss. It is more like equanimity. And it is not about getting rid of emotions. Emotions are still there but experienced with equanimity. It is the resistance to emotions that is the problem when we identify with the mind. Angelo Dilullo’s own awakening happened from a place of desperation. Hear him tell about when ”the bottom fell out” and when ”the universe disappeared”. Angelo also touches on quantum physics and a possible collective awakening. ”What we are talking about here was woo-woo 20 years ago, but pretty soon it will be mainstream.” Angelo’s book: https://tinyurl.com/nb2ma4ww Angelo’s website: www.simplyalwaysawake.com Angelo’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SimplyAlwaysAwake

Welcome back! I hope you all had a wonderful summer. This first episode of season no 3 circles around healing, the mind–body connection and the importance of being close to nature. And many other things. ”We have a tremendous inherent ability to heal ourselves. But we are told – and tell ourselves – stories about our predicament, our sense of victimhood. We can all learn how to be the masters of our own lives”, says Branka Androjna. Branka is a teacher, life coach and podcaster who lives in a house on the outskirts of Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana with her husband (”my true soulmate”) and their two daughters. She does her coaching and podcasting under her artist name Milangela. And artistic she truly is. And good with crafts. She does this interview in a corner of her house which is  adorned with her paintings. We are all in essence creative, according to Branka. But some seem to express it more than others. Perhaps many of us have been shamed out of being creative, as Brené Brown says. ”When I create, say when I paint, I get so absorbed in what I do that I am not thirsty, I am not hungry. I am not here. After two days I awaken to what has emerged ... To me this is at first like flirting with the divine, and then it's like making love to that magical divine collective intelligence.” Experiencing the bliss in the midst of the creative process is part of the healing process, in Branka’s view. And there is something with England... Branka went there as a teenager and immediately felt at home. She fell in love with the mysterious English way of life. Not least the language. As she returned she worked for many years at different language schools. Although people around her have always confided in her, she says that she in her younger years lacked confidence and was self-conscious. At one point her life entered a downward spiral. She experienced physical illness as well as pain in the soul. ”I felt like a complete victim. I was searching for the culprit. Being a victim I deprived myself of the ability to do anything, really.” ”I was in really bad shape. I hit rock bottom when my daughter asked me if i was going to be there for my family the next day. From that day on I intuitively took all the right steps. I knew nothing of inner work, but I did it”, says Branka. Starting the podcast ”Milangela’s Soul Garden” was a leap of faith. ”I found my voice. But it was not the voice telling my story.” That’s why she decided to become a life coach. ”I opted for vulnerability. I wanted to help people not to fall into pitfalls, not to be bruised, like I was.” With her coaching she wants to equip people and make them realize the might there is in every single one of us, she says. ”I invite people to willingly suspend limiting beliefs and instead insert more positive and constructive beliefs. To put a positive thought into your mind can cut off a vicious circle and actually change the chemistry of the body.” Being in nature and eating healthy foods are also part of Branka’s coaching method. ”Without nature I think I would be in trouble in my healing process. Back when I was really frail, I used to go out barefoot and hug trees.” Branka wraps up by quoting Wayne Dyer: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Branka’s/Milangela’s podcast (Anchor); podcast (Itunes); FB page; Instagram

The podcast is taking a summer break on the audio platforms, but it will keep on humming on Youtube in the form of a series of look-back episodes. Have a wonderful summer, all of you!

A few centuries ago, science got cut off from spirituality. When the search for the depths of a human being was resumed in the west In the early 20th century, it was in the form of psychology. Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung are considered to be the founders of modern psychoanalysis. Bit by bit, Jung distanced himself from Freud’s more materialistic viewpoints, and eventually his ideas came to inspire the spiritual community. ”Depth psychology really needed to come into fruition when it did because of the ’death of God’ phenomenon. Ordinary religion was not working as a container for people's numinous experiences”, says Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst, author and podcaster. ”In one sense you can see Jung’s life work as an attempt to reconcile science and mysticism. He saw himself as standing at that intersection.” Although Freud dominated psychology academia for most of the last century, there was an interest in Jung's thoughts all along. In the 50s Joseph Campbell's book ”The Hero with a Thousand Faces” was very influential. In the 80s there was another Jung explosion. In the 90s there was yet another wave, and in the 2000s, Jung's previously unpublished ”The Red Book” became a surprise best seller. Lisa Marchiano stood at a crossroads in life when she at age 28 suddenly realized that she had to shed the idea of becoming a lawyer and instead train to become a jungian analyst. It all began with her coming across a particular book time and time again, a book that made her cry each time she opened it and read a few lines. ”Freud thought that one’s personality is established in early childhood. But the development of a personality happens over a lifetime. We continue to grow and develop. In fact, some of the most important changes happen in midlife”, Marchiano says. Jung called this the individuation process. It is one of his most central concepts. Another concept is the shadow, which is the part of our personality that is disallowed – some of it by culture. Anima and animus are the masculine and feminine elements that we all contain. ”We should all develop them both. Some elements are more associated with women and some are more associated with men. But it is a thorny subject.” Inspired by Iain McGilchrists book ”The master and his emissary”, Lisa Marchiano speculates that the concept of masculine and feminine in the psychological sense might be something like the different kinds of awareness that are generated by the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Marchiano’s recent book ”Motherhood” is a jungian attempt to understand how a person evolves by becoming a mother. ”I wasn’t interested in how to become a better mother. I was interested in the psychological change ı was going through. How does this entail growing? How is this individuation?” ”If you really want to learn more about yourself, relationships are the best way to do that, and the relationship that is most likely to catalyze self knowledge is parenthood. It's so hard, it doesn't go away, and the stakes are really high.” Carl Jung wrote that we don't solve our problems so much as we grow larger than them. A lot in the book is most probably relevant to fathers too, Marchiano thinks. Lisa Marchiano’s website: https://lisamarchiano.com/ The podcast she co-hosts: https://thisjungianlife.com/podcast/

Are we alone in the universe? The journalist and author Clas Svahn has spent a large part of his life trying to answer that question by listening to, watching and reading thousands of reports and thoroughly dissecting them. He was for 22 years the director of the organization UFO Sweden, he has written dozens of books about mysterious phenomena, not only UFOs, and he is now an internationally renowned expert on UFOs. Or UAPs, as the US military now prefers to call these unidentified aerial phenomena. The name change is meant to separate ”proper” sky observations from the reports the military is swamped with about cattle mutilations, crop circles, abductions and other things associated with the UFO phenomenon. We recorded this episode the day before the much hyped UAP report from the US government was released. In the interview, Clas anticipates most of what it contains and does not contain. The report is about over 140 observations and recordings of strange objects. ”Pilots have witnessed that they have seen these objects every day for several years”, Clas Svahn says. Clas has been gathering and analyzing UFO reports since the 1970s. He is very used to the concept being ridiculed. With this report, the issue is suddenly taken seriously. ”I am very glad that this is happening. So many reporters have been ridiculed. They are just telling what they have seen. You have to treat them properly. So this is exciting.” UFO/UAP observations come in many shapes. There is the probable asteroid Oumuamua in 2017, which the renowned astronomer Avi Loeb suggests could be something from an extraterrestrial civilization. There is the sharp picture of an apparent flying saucer over lake Cote in Costa Rica in 1971. And then there are tons of blurry mobile films, like those allegedly showing a rotating pyramid over the Kremlin in 2008. To Clas Svahn, the latter category is ”noise”. But there are plenty of other good pictures. Unfortunately, the sightings are often not backed by photos and vice versa. Clas has interviewed hundreds of people who have seen strange things. He tells about a Swedish fighter pilot who tried to reach a strange object over the Baltic. The object was too fast and eventually vanished into space. The most well known close encounter in Sweden occured in May 1946. The person who had the encounter, Gösta Carlsson, became a famous businessman, and he made his fortune from ideas he said he got from the ET’s that he met. Clas wrote a book about Carlsson. The most intriguing stories are actually those about encounters and abductions, says Clas. ”I mean, things you see in the sky could be anything.” He refers to a fascinating story by a married couple in southern Sweden, in which both experienced an attempt by a group of alien entities to abduct the woman. Even if no close ET encounter is ever proven, people will never stop reporting strange things in the sky, Clas thinks. At the same time it is very possible that what UFO reporters experience today will not be understood until tomorrow. ”We must be very open to looking in new directions. There will be revelations in science that are so new to us that we will find them nearly magic.” UFO Sweden’s website, including Clas Svahn’s blog: www.ufo.se Archives for the Unexplained (the world’s largest depository of its kind): http://www.afu.se/afu2/

In the Nag Hammadi texts, Jesus says: ”If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you, but if you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.” We have been conditioned to dismiss all signs of an inner reality and a connection with the universe. We have for millennia rejected the feminine principle and energies. The shaman-mystic knowledge about our true essence was with us when homo sapiens first appeared on this earth. The San people in southern Africa, direct descendants of the first modern humans, are living proof of that. Despite attempts by religious and secular rulers to quash this wisdom, it has survived throughout time, thanks to courageous groups of humans who have carried it with them under the radar, often at great risk: the gnostics, the sufis, the cathars, the rosicrucians and even the romantics in the early 19th century. This is the wonderful and often eye-opening story that Betty Kovacs tells us in her book ”Merchants of Light”. Kovacs has herself had personal experience of an inner reality, or higher dimensions if you will. In connection with the death of her mother, her son and her husband within a period of three years, she experienced altered states of consciousness. Judaism's first temple tradition was shaman-mystic. The feminine was seen as equal with the masculine. But around 600 BCE this tradition was destroyed. Texts were burned. Some were rescued, however, and lived on in kabbalah. Christianity’s counterpart to this was the clampdown of the Roman church from the fourth century CE, when the shaman-mystic tradition that Jesus himself represented was suppressed, and the early gnostic Christians were bloodily persecuted. What the church fathers resented was ”the tradition of going inward and experiencing the divinity of who we are and becoming the Christ”, says Betty Kovacs. The repression was terrible. ”The church fathers prepared us for totalitarian regimes.” After seven hundred years of spiritual darkness in Europe, a window opened up during the High Middle Ages. Cathedrals were built in France to revere personal connection with the higher realms and the feminine principle. ”They taught the hidden tradition.” The cathedral builders and teachers were influenced by the more open and tolerant islamic culture in Spain. But it did not last. Ironically, it was the Roman church that determined the development of materialistic science. But maybe we are leaving the spiritual wasteland. Our time could be one of rediscovering ancient spiritual knowledge and letting it merge with science. In the 20th century we began to understand the all-encompassing quantum field and that the heart is in many ways superior to the brain. We began to collect thousands of accounts of near-death experiences and found that they seem to be real. And we rediscovered the ancient shaman-mystic texts from early Judaism and Christianity. ”All these things are synchronistically happening. When I feel depressed over all the violence in the world I think about that”, says Betty Kovacs. ”We are beginning to bring together our past and realize our potential, at the same time that we've got to do business with what was not brought forth, the darkness we've allowed to be in the world.” Website: https://kamlak.com/ Books: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=betty+kovacs&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

”We do not experience electro-chemical impulses. What we experience are colors, movements and shapes”, says Etzel Cardeña, one of the leading researchers on parapsychology in the world. What he is referring to is qualia, individual instances of subjective, conscious experience, whose origins have not been possible to directly connect to the brain. ”We don’t have anything even close to a satisfactory account, from a reductionist or materialist position, for how we are conscious of anything”, says the professor of psychology at Lund university in southern Sweden. There is evidence that we receive information that is not coming from the senses, information that is temporally and spatially distant. There is also a lot of nonsense being said in the context of parapsychology. Therefore, Cardeña points out, the scientific method is crucial. Researchers must be able to independently confirm what people say they are experiencing and discount alternative plausible explanations. Properly made studies point to an array of  psychic abilities that seem to be real. Cardeña lists four main categories: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis or telekinesis. It is actually common to have experiences that resemble at least the first three kinds of phenomenon. Many dismiss them because of fear. They hear these kinds of experiences are ”paranormal”, i.e. not normal. But we all have these abilities. Some are better at them than others. ”It’s no different than the ability to hit a tennis serve”, Etzel Cardeña says. How can they be explained?  A tenable theory is that time and space are not as we experience them in everyday life. There might be more dimensions. ”On some level where distance doesn't make any difference we might be interconnected in a way. Past, present and future might be adjacent.” And what about altered states of consciousness? The truth is that we all go through different states of consciousness every day: we sleep, we dream, we have deep sleep, we are in between waking state and sleep. ”This is not paranormal. We have them for a number of reasons”, Cardeña says. ”Our waking state is good for some things but not for others. It is good for reacting to the senses. But it is inflexible. You ruminate about things. In other states you may have another flexibility. In a dream you may come up with a creative, novel idea that you would never have come up with in the waking state. It’s the same with psychedelic drugs.” Etzel Cardeña is somewhat skeptical of the idea that altered states of consciousness of the kind that for example near death experiencers report represent something ”higher” in ourselves. And when asked if he thinks the shaman-mystic traditions have insights about consciousness that were lost when western science came along, he answers by rejecting the notion, held by some, that everything was ”hunky-dory” until science came along and then it went down the drain. ”People have done ghastly things in shamanic and non-shamanic traditions alike. Humans have been in many ways terrible all along, with or without science.” Cardeña is also skeptical of the idea that humankind is becoming more enlightened. ”But fortunately there have always been people who have been caring and compassionate, and thanks to those people we haven't destroyed humanity or other sentient beings on the planet.”

One of the most contentious issues of our culture is about differences between the sexes. From a higher perspective this isn’t even an issue, but at the level of the physical world, I think there is a point in giving the matter a thought or two. My take on this focuses on sexuality, where there seems to be at least some variation that is corroborated by science. Sex drive per se is not stronger in any of the sexes, but my conclusion is that there are two overarching differences in the way sexuality expresses itself. If these are not understood, we may never overcome some unnecessary misunderstandings between men and women. A fascinating look into one of the few remaining matriarchies, the Mosuo in southwestern China, also gives us some clues as to what we probably ought to understand better. For links to referenced scientific studies and reports about the Mosuo go to my corresponding story on Medium.  Listen also to episodes 59 (Kajsa Ekis Ekman) and 53 (Bettina Arndt).