Mind the Shift

When the groundbreaking 17th century scientist Galileo Galilei looked through the telescope that he himself had constructed he saw Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. He understood that the planets were orbiting the sun. This completely upended the church-dominated worldview of the time, and other scholars refused to even look through the telescope, because they ”knew” what Galileo said he had seen could not be true. Galileo’s ideas were so revolutionary that he ended up being suspected of heresy. Today it is mainstream science that doesn’t dare to look through the telescope, figuratively, and this time the ”heresy” is to claim that consciousness is not produced by the brain. Galileo’s example inspired the founders of the Galileo Commission to name it after him. This project of the Scientific and Medical Network, a worldwide professional community, aims to expand the scope of science by crossing the border to spirituality. At the core lies the notion that consciousness is nonphysical. ”The way science has developed, the outer is considered primary. Matter is primary. So anything inner or in the mind or consciousness is to be explained by the primacy of matter”, says David Lorimer, head of the steering committee of the Galileo Commission. ”But what is very clear is that science also depends on consciousness. Theories and structures are produced by consciousness. Planck, Schrödinger, Pauli and others realized that you can't take consciousness out of the equation. You can't close the loop without including consciousness.” Lorimer began his career as a merchant banker but ”pressed the eject button” at the age of 24 and entered a world of literature, poetry and science. He has written or edited over a dozen books, with titles like ”The Spirit of Science”, ”Thinking beyond the Brain” and ”A quest for Wisdom”. The Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg was an early source of inspiration, and David Lorimer has been the president of the Swedenborg society. Nowadays there is all sorts of evidence from experiences which are often called metaphysical, like out of body experiences during episodes of clinical brain death, precognitions and clairvoyance, which more than indicates that the idea of material primacy is wrong. But to challenge it is still controversial. Why is it so hard for scientists to shift their viewpoint? ”The power of the mechanistic metaphor is huge and goes back to the 17th century. Newton's universe is a clockwork. We now know it isn't true, but it is powerful. We have a metaphysical battle going on here”, says Lorimer ”The difficulty is the entrenched view and the fact that this entrenched view is regarded as scientific rather than philosophical. A vast majority of scientists don't know that they are making assumptions about consciousness and the brain. They just think it's a fact that consciousness is produced by the brain.” But what is credible and plausible changes with the advancement in knowledge, David points out. ”Our job is to make these areas more credible and acceptable. It’s an expansion. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” ”The problems of our species are not going to be solved by a continuation of materialism and consumerism. We need a spiritual awakening so that we understand that we are all deeply connected and deeply embedded and connected with natural ecosystems. There is one life, one mind, one planet.” David Lorimer’s website: https://www.davidlorimer.co.uk/ Galileo Commission’s website: https://galileocommission.org/

Are we actually obsessing when we think we are focusing? Being able to focus is something much more profound than being able to peak perform, explains Christina Bengtsson. The definition of focus has been watered down. ”It is really about daring to find and concentrate on what you feel is important in your life. Following your heart, you might say. You may call that spiritual, but it doesn't matter. We don't need a name for it”, she says. ”To be in your heart is to reconnect with your core identity and find your core values. You find self esteem. Then you are closer to your gut feeling of what is right and wrong.” Christina Bengtsson is an inspirational speaker, an author and a former military officer and world champion precision shooter. Her military background has given her thousands of hours of focus practice. The military is in some respects better at focusing than other sectors of society. It is easier to do that when there is a threat. But in our safe, modern era the brain cannot see the difference between real and perceived dangers. It reacts to a pling from the phone as if it were a threat. ”We need to change the brain from automatic attention mode to more controlled attention mode.” Focus is the absence of distractions. So how to remove yourself from the innumerable distractions of our time? What is required is discipline. The discipline to resist impulses, according to Bengtsson. ”Give yourself just two seconds to think before you post on social media, for instance, or before you say something to somebody.” Christina Bengtsson is well aware of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle. Focus is presence, basically. Being in the now requires practice – and also an understanding of what being in the now means, she says. She meets many business leaders who struggle to stay on target. ”But it’s a misconception that you must keep focus on your original goal. You must ask yourself: perhaps I can go even further. Perhaps I can find another dimension. Perhaps I am not focusing right now, perhaps I am obsessed.” ”Sometimes people lose their ability to focus by focusing too hard.” Empathy is a shortcut to focus, Christina explains. It helps you be present when you are interacting with another person. ”So many people go around thinking they don't have time. But we live longer now than ever. I say differently: I have time. There are so many things I don't have to do.” Christina Bengtsson’s website: www.christinabengtsson.com Christina Bengtsson’s book ”The Art of Focus – 10,9”: https://amzn.to/3nMByTt

Theresa Cheung is a successful and hardworking writer and communicator about all things spiritual. She emanates positive vibes as she seamlessly jumps from one aspect of the esoteric to the other in this episode. Cheung is a serial writer and has published dozens of books, whereof many have become bestsellers, like ”The Dream Dictionary”. She has a degree in theology from King’s College, and she loves to cross over the border between science and spirituality. ”I don’t enjoy reaching out to believers. I love taking this spiritual message to people who are going to laugh and ridicule it. I want to try and mainstream it. Because supernormal abilities are normal”, says Theresa Cheung. A few years ago she wrote ”The Premonition Code” together with neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, a groundbreaking book about our ability to sense the future and how we can train that ability. It is about taking hunches and intuition seriously. Cheung and Mossbridge have also developed training tools and a course around the book. Time is an elusive concept. Every instant instantly evaporates. So maybe there are no instances, in plural, but rather just one moment, where the state of things constantly shifts. Then perhaps the idea that the future is in a way accessible in the only ”now moment” is not that strange. ”I love the idea that our future selves are pulling us. Your future selves can impact your present. In every instant – in the now – I am creating my future. There are ripple effects”, Theresa says. ”We are not going to understand what time really is. Once you resign yourself to that and open yourself to whatever insights come to you, you will realize that you are infinite potential.” Precognition is actually less and less considered woo woo. It is not only in movies like ”Minority Report” that this sixth sense is being utilized, but also by intelligence agencies like the CIA. ”And I have discovered that there is a whole world of professional intuitives, remote viewers or precogs working under the radar for major companies”, Theresa Cheung discloses. Cheung is also the uncrowned queen of dream interpreting. There is so much information about yourself and your life’s journey to be harvested from your nocturnal activities. ”When dreams start becoming vivid I am very excited about it, because it is like your soul is crying out for more attention. Sometimes it is sending nightmares to do that. Tough love. We don't grow in our comfort zones.” She thinks 99 percent of our dreams are symbolic and psychological. ”They are an internal therapist – and much cheaper.” Is humanity shifting? Theresa Cheung sees a hugely growing appetite for life beyond the material world. Not least because of the pandemic. ”If there is anything positive coming out of the pandemic, it has made us all focus much more on the meaning of our lives, what really matters. For me that is a shift. The world will not be the same after this”, she says. ”And it is hugely exciting.” Theresa Cheung lives in Windsor, UK. Her website is theresacheung.com. The website for ”The Premonition Code” is just as straightforward: thepremonitioncode.com

What is consciousness? Is it really more rational and straight-forward to see the world with materialist eyes than to acknowledge a nonphysical core and inherent meaning? If you follow the mainstream discussion, especially in the Western world, it may seem that way. But as I try to show in this episode, that worldview may be a product of what we have been conditioned to believe rather than the most clear-cut and simple way of understanding what a human and her world truly are. No wonder consciousness researchers talk about ”the hard problem”. I employ a scientific tool called Occam’s razor. But I enhance it a bit. Because, what is simpler: to think or to understand intuitively?

Bettina Arndt began her career as a vocal feminist and earned fame in her native Australia as a sex therapist. This was in the 70’s. “I celebrated the change. It was wonderful to see opportunities opening up for women.” Then feminism went too far, she thinks. Sometime after the 1980’s it has been more about advancing women at the expense of men than reaching equality. Today the culture is increasingly anti-male, in Bettina’s view. ”I think the fourth wave feminists are keen on getting vengeance for imbalances in past history.” The last few years Bettina Arndt has dedicated most of her time to fighting for the rights of unfairly treated men, especially men falsely accused of rape. She fights against the unofficial ”kangaroo” courts set up at college campuses to speed up the handling of an alleged ongoing ”rape crisis”. The goal of these tribunals is to get more convictions. ”They are stealing young men’s degrees.” Earlier this year she launched the campaign ”Mothers of Sons” to highlight the problem of falsely accused men who are denied access to their children. Arndt’s fight for fairer treatment of men has made her ”enemy no 1” in he Australian feminist  community. It was extremely important that society started to change the laws in the 60’s and 70’s to ensure the protection of women, she says. ”But it has absolutely been misused. I talk about a ’domestic violence industry’, which has become a huge cash cow for feminists. That is how they get most of their funding.” Most violence within couples is two-way, Bettina explains. In most surveys about domestic violence the question asked is who is the victim. But when the question instead is about who is the perpetrator, just as many women as men admit to being that. When violence begins, however, women are more at risk of serious injuries and death. Couple’s fights are often about the children. ”Today men are stuck, because they know that if they leave, they are going to lose their children”, says Bettina. In 2018 Bettina Arndt published ”Mentoo”, a compilation of articles about society’s ever more unfair treatment of men. It was a reaction to the metoo movement. It goes without saying that there are men who misuse their power and that it is important to stop that, she points out. But what bothered her about metoo was the alleged and displayed fragility of women. Oddly enough, it is still problematic to discuss differences in sexuality between the sexes in an unprejudiced way. ”We have a widening sexual gap between men and women, and it is increasingly because of women’s lack of desire”, says Bettina Arndt. ”Nobody talks about what it is like for a man to feel like a beggar, to grovel for sex, to feel that there is something wrong with him for wanting to have sex with his wife.” ”Women are talking ad nauseam about their wants and their needs. But this is the number one thing that men long for in their long term relationships.” Links: Bettina Arndt’s website, the book Mentoo, the book The Sex Diaries, the Mothers of Sons campaign

On October 1st 2017, Catalonia held an unofficial referendum on independence from Spain. Madrid chose to respond in the toughest possible way. Riot police raided ballot stations, and hundreds of Catalan voters were injured. The plebiscite was clearly illegal, but it has also been disputed whether Madrid’s violent reaction was in accordance with relevant laws. ”The Spanish state had other options on the table than using the criminal code”, says Tania Verge i Mestre, a professor of politics and gender at the university Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Spain could obviously have treated the referendum as an administrative violation. Or just ignored it. As an outsider, a globalist and a lover of Spain – including Catalonia – I personally was surprised, annoyed and also frustrated when I learned about the growing independence movement. Why create new borders in a world with too many borders? ”It has nothing to do with resentment towards Madrid. Half the Catalan population are born or have parents who are born in other parts of Spain”, says Verge. An opening was underway some years ago, as a matter of fact. Politicians had negotiated a compromise proposal on the division of power between Madrid and Barcelona. But it was rejected by the constitutional court in 2010. This setback created a serious legitimacy problem and triggered, together with the financial crisis, the independence movement. Today most leading Catalan politicians are either in prison or in exile. Tania Verge was herself tried in court in early March of 2021 for her participation in the referendum as an election official. She is accused of sedition and risks imprisonment. Does she then see any movement in Madrid towards a softer stance? ”The language is different when (Social Democratic) PSOE is in power. But in practice very little happens. It is like a stalemate.” Some outsiders accuse Catalan ’independentistas’ of being selfish – that they do not want to share their greater wealth with poorer parts of Spain. But Tania Verge stresses that she and many other Catalan activists are on the left wing. She is also an activist at various feminist collectives, including feminist pro-independence groups. Feminism can contribute to rethinking the nation state, according to Verge. ”Being a left-wing feminist for independence also means wanting independence from centralism, patriarchy and capitalism. It means redefining the boundaries of a state and how to design structures. The Catalan identity is a moveable identity. It must reflect all the people living there at a certain time. We should not repeat all the pitfalls of the old 19th century nation states.” Here is a link to the website of Catalan feminists for independence. Other links Tania Verge recommends are to this blog post on the subject and to the book ’Terra de Ningù’ about feminist perspectives on the repression. Note: all is in Catalan.

The world is better than most of us think. There is a gap between the factual global trends and what the majority who never checks the numbers but only read headlines think are the trends. (And why so many spiritual people adhere to the pessimist camp is an enigma.) Going back just a little bit in history and realizing how often we have falsely believed we have been on the brink of collapse is sobering. In this episode, I walk you through ten canceled modern-day apocalypses. (Disclaimer: The review has a shamelessly Western perspective.)

”It is a shame that scholars and academics act this way”, says independent researcher of ancient history Andrew Collins after having told that a chief archaeologist yelled at him at a site in southern Turkey: ’We don’t want your pseudoscience here’. Collins has written over a dozen books about the origins of our civilization, all with more or less alternative views to the mainstream narrative in textbooks and history books about how it all started. Like it is with many mavericks, Collins breaks new ground. Years after having scorned his ideas, some scholars have come around and adhered to Collins theories. Since the mid-1990’s, the focus of Andrew Collins’ work has been on the pivotal megalithic site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, dated to some seven thousand years before the hitherto known earliest civilization. ”The most significant thing about Göbekli Tepe is its age. And its carvings are not like anything else in southwest Asia”, Collins says. Göbekli Tepe does not resemble anything that came after it. Andrew Collins (and others) conclude that the megalithic complex was built to ward off a threat from the skies, from celestial tricksters that were interpreted as foxes, wolves and other canines but by all accounts were parts of an exploding comet. The monuments represent a fifteen hundred year old collective memory of a huge cataclysm involving enormous conflagrations and floods that may have wiped out the majority of the human population. To make sure this never happened again, it was necessary to somehow appease the celestial forces. Based on findings, Andrew Collins and Klaus Schmidt, the archaeologist who rediscovered Göbekli Tepe, think that an elite group arrived in the area from the Russian steppes and convinced the local population that they knew how to avoid a second apocalypse: by dedicating hundreds of years to building advanced monuments. The pillars and blocks bear symbolic references to the stars, thus perhaps functioning as stargates between this world and the next. But already tens of thousands of years before these events, impulses of civilization had come from Siberia and Tibet, where the recently discovered so-called Denisovans had lived for 200,000 – 300,000 years (i.e. since before the latest ice age). Gene analyses show that modern humans interbred with the Denisovans, just like they did with the Neanderthals. ”The sophistication, the technology and the art that were in the mindset of the people who created Göbekli Tepe originally came from Mongolia and Siberia. I would put my money on that”, says Andrew. He is not into the more daring theories proposed by fellow mavericks about influences from the lost civilization of Atlantis or ET’s visiting Earth in physical form to assist or manipulate humankind in various ways. But he does think it is plausible that humankind has been mentally, non physically, affected by extraterrestrial intelligence, probably since the very beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago. Collins zooms in on the origins of our civilization, but to understand how it all really began after the first push out of Africa one has to go many times further back. That is precisely the topic of his next book, where he will delve into new incredible discoveries in Israel. It would seem that there, 400,000 years ago, shamanism was invented. What are the intelligences behind all this sudden development?

The entrepreneur, speaker, writer and life coach Daniel Mendoza had a challenging childhood and adolescence, to say the least. His family fled from his native Uruguay in the seventies, and after having hopped between a few countries they ended up in Sweden. The human environment in Daniel’s early life was soiled with lovelessness. His father was violent. Daniel got into fights all the time. But he never wanted to hurt people. He was blessed with a pure heart and an inner belief that there is hope. ”Tomorrow is going to be a better day”, he said to himself. A human encounter in his early twenties turned out to be pivotal. It was an epiphany. It showed Daniel how much good there is within us humans. He made a u-turn and decided to choose a positive path. He decided to study economics. That didn’t quite resonate with Daniel, but it propelled him to the next chapter in his life: the creation of a very special newspaper, Good News Magazine. This journalistic product prompts me, the former journalist, to ask questions about the reasons why one should publish positively focused news. Is the mainstream media telling a falsely negative story about the world and humankind? Or is the world such a problematic place that we need to tell the positive stories as well, so that we can get the strength to find the solutions? Daniel and I have an interesting discussion about these things. At one point Daniel employed a person who was openly neo-nazi and who insulted him every day for two years. ”I knew that this guy needed trust”, says Daniel. ”And I needed to start by listening to him. I knew there was a reason why he said the things he said.” This is the way Daniel Mendoza sees people. ”What if we can leave every child with a feeling that it is possible to solve our problems?” he says. Early in life Daniel realized he had to face the problems in order to solve them. This began with him ending up in fights. But it transformed into a drive, a desire, to focus on the positive, on the solutions. ”I will never forgive the things my parents did, but I will not be angry with them. We judge the person, but we cannot blame the person, we have to understand what lies behind. There is good in everyone.”

Few fields of research offer more insights into what we really are and why we are conscious about things at all than the study of near death experiences. It is also one of few areas where science truly spans the perceived borderline with spirituality. That is why cardiologist Pim van Lommel has made such a tremendous contribution by conducting large, longitudinal studies on hundreds of people who have suffered cardiac arrest and have been declared clinically dead but later resuscitated. Many of these patients experience being clearly conscious during the period of clinical death. Around four percent of those who have had a flatlined EEG report some kind of experience of enhanced consciousness in another realm, despite the fact that their brains have not been functioning ”To me the brain has a facilitating function, not a producing function. It is like a computer connected to the internet. When you turn it off, the internet is still there”, says Pim van Lommel. ”Consciousness is like gravity. We can not measure gravity, we can only measure its physical effects. It is the same with consciousness, we can only measure the effects.” Van Lommel started out as a hard-nosed physicalist himself, but an encounter in 1969 with a resuscitated patient, who was very disappointed that he had been revived, had a profound impact on him. In 1986 he read George Ritchie’s book ”Return from Tomorrow” about a profound NDE, which made him even more intrigued. Van Lommel started to ask resuscitated patients about their experiences, and to his big surprise, 12 out of 50 patients he asked gave accounts about NDE’s. That was when he decided to kick off a large study, which lasted for more than a decade. The results were published in The Lancet in 2001. The article gained much attention, as did van Lommels book ”Consciousness Beyond Life”, which came out in its first edition six years later. Much has happened since then. More studies have been made, notably by Bruce Greyson at the university of Virginia. Science is slowly embracing the nonphysical. But there is still a hard core of physicalist skeptics. The Wikipedia page about Pim van Lommel has for instance been hijacked by skeptics. ”They are frightened, because this threatens their world view”, says van Lommel. This also goes for many active scientists. ”If they said consciousness is not in the brain, they would lose their research money. Some professors have told me privately that they agree with me, but openly they will say that my conclusions are nonsense. Until they retire…”