Mind the Shift

In this winding conversation with Bo Ahrenfelt, some truly interesting aspects of psychology come to the surface as we cover the nature of the mind, social interaction and the dynamic between the individual and the collective. Bo Ahrenfelt is a psychiatrist, but he broadened his approach early on and has worked for decades as a consultant with collective and individual development in organizations and corporations. Long before his professional career he had an inner knowing that consciousness is something outside of the brain, he says. He has been influenced by buddhism and other eastern psychology, but he embraces Western teachings as well (”I am an inclusive person”). ”How can we understand each other without talking? A group of hunters a few thousand years ago knew exactly what to do without talking to each other.” When he was a teenager, Bo did a non-material experiment with some friends: they tried to make a man turn his head towards them just by staring at the back of his head. It took them a couple of minutes. What kind of energy was it that the man felt? Bo Ahrenfelt is wary of wandering too far into what he considers to be religion, however. The term spirituality belongs there, he thinks – even though he is on the list of advisers to the Galileo Commission, whose goal is to overcome the divide between science and spirituality. ”Not knowing is a very creative state to be in. Like Jesus said: be like a child. Open your eyes if you want to see reality. Otherwise you only see yourself”, Bo says. Having worked a lot with social interaction, he has come to see group dynamics a bit differently than the mainstream. ”Our society thinks there are ’stages’ and ’steps’ in the group process. That’s bull, because everything comes from within us. The group process is the relationships between individuals. There's no such thing as ’steps’. It's all a soup.” In this soup of relationships there is one salient phenomenon: most of us don’t like change. ”The resistance to change is very obvious to anyone who has worked with personal, group, organizational or scientific development. And it is a good thing. There is great meaning in resistance, because without resistance there is no true change, there is just obedience.” Those who want change are forced to think twice and listen to others. And compromise. One plus one can make three. ”Or a peach”. On a universal level, change is the only constant. This is also, as it happens, almost exactly the title of Bo Ahrenfelts best-selling book ”Change as a state of Being”. How can we learn to embrace that nothing lasts forever? ”We can’t. If we accepted it we wouldn't survive as a species. Every change has a possibility of being a threat. And we have to handle that.” At the same time, it is obvious that things don't look the same, things don't work the same and humans don't behave the same way they did decades or centuries ago. So, what is it, ultimately, that is pulling us forward? ”I think it's like sexuality, hunger and thirst: it’s a drive. I strongly believe what I learned from humanistic psychology, that wanting new knowledge is also a drive. It’s part of nature.” Books by Bo Ahrenfelt: https://tinyurl.com/3zfx678s

There is a shift going on in our perception of sex and gender. One specific development is a shift from emphasizing biological gender, or sex, to emphasizing psychological gender. That is, you are the gender you feel you are, no matter what you have between your legs. But should young boys and girls who feel they’ve been born into the ”wrong” kind of body be allowed to go through advanced surgery to physically correct their biological sex? This question and this change is something the Swedish writer and journalist Kajsa Ekis Ekman has pondered a lot. In her book ”On the Existence of Gender” (translated from the Swedish title) she thoroughly dissects what is happening and reveals that the shift has some pretty unexpected – and unwelcome – ramifications. Counterintuitive as it may sound, this new perception of gender is a setback for the decades-long fight for gender equality, according to Ekis Ekman. Why? Because the biologism that many feminists wanted to do away with is in a way back, but this time in the form of the notion of a fixed, inner essence of gender. ”Earlier, sex was seen as something that was just there and gender was seen as a construct. In the new definition that is taking hold you basically switch these two around: you are born with an innate feeling of gender, whereas sex shouldn’t be used at all”, says Kajsa Ekis Ekman, a combative writer and a pronounced socialist and feminist. Boys who behave in traditionally feminine ways and girls who behave in traditionally masculine ways are both told they should embrace their feelings of being born into the ”wrong” bodies. In this way, we are back to an emphasis on the traditional gender roles, Ekis Ekman says. The concepts ”woman” and ”female” are effectively obliterated in many contexts, whereas men’s spaces aren’t being questioned in the same way. When the main thing is what gender you feel you are, it all comes down to stereotypes, Ekis Ekman reasons. ”If it has nothing to do with the sex, if it has nothing to do with the body, why even connect it to male and female? Why not call it a personality?”, she wonders. If the sexes are to be scrapped it will also be difficult, if not impossible, to keep statistics about gender discrimination: pay gap, criminality, health treatment etcetera. And what about the overarching issue of possible innate differences between the sexes, apart from some obvious physical ones? Kajsa Ekis Ekman thinks that neither the idea that ”all is biology” nor the one that ”all is social structure” is sustainable, although she stresses that the differences in the brain that have been debated seem to be more of tendencies than of known differences, because they overlap. ”But the fact that men can't have babies and women can't produce sperm does not overlap. A woman can't escape the consequences of sexuality the way a man can. That’s always going to be a factor.” Kajsa’s Instagram handle: https://www.instagram.com/ms.ekis.ekman/ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044241859116 Latest book ”On the Existence of Gender” (”Om könets existens”): https://www.bokforlagetpolaris.se/om-koenets-existens/t-0/9789177954552 Other books: https://www.adlibris.com/se/sok?q=kajsa+ekis+ekman

When we hear about rigged elections in Sub-Saharan Africa, many say: ”Well, what can you expect?” The underlying assumption is that it is sad but unavoidable that democratic flaws have to be tolerated in immature and poor countries. Wrong, thinks Nic Cheeseman, professor of democracy at the university of Birmingham, UK. All countries must be measured with the same democratic yardstick. ”Many African elections are actually more advanced than elections in Europe. British elections are very manual and old-fashioned”, says Cheeseman. Fraud and rigging is not an African problem. All the main tricks described in Cheeseman’s and Brian Klaas’ book ”How to Rig an Election” have been used in Europe and America. Some subtle ways are still used on every continent, like ”gerrymandering” and putting up high identification and registration thresholds for voters, which typically disfavors minorities, the poor and the less educated. ”In which country in the world every main party has been fined by the electoral commission for breaching campaign finance laws in the last three years? The answer is the UK”, says Cheeseman. ”It is patronizing to think that African nations can’t reach the same level of democracy as Europe has. Look at countries like Ghana, South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius.” Democracy is also what Africans want. This is what polls on the continent consistently show. It is of course true that democracy in Africa is young and still feeble in many places. Hence the idea some have that maybe electoral democracy is premature. Maybe there should be another order of events: first wealth and health, then elections. But this is also a flawed idea, according to Nic Cheeseman. There is no order of events. Democracy and development happen in tandem. ”It is not true that poor people are not able to make informed choices about their future. Look at Zambia and Benin which were very poor when they made their transition to democracy.” ”And there is no particular connection between wealth and the possibility to hold elections. If you really want to, you can hold a piece-of-paper-and-pen election extremely cheaply.” Also: holding free and fair elections and building accountability has shown to be a driving force for governments to perform better. ”If we go back to the 70s and 80s, in none of the countries that had the most benign autocrats we can imagine today, like Nyerere and Kaunda, we saw the development of thriving conditions for democracy”, says Nic Cheeseman. ”It's the curse of low expectations.” Democracy creates a stronger rule of law, which addresses corruption, which enhances economic growth, which gives rise to stronger civil society. It becomes a virtuous circle. ”The best model for the future is to see development and democracy side by side. The China model is nothing that works in Africa.” Nic’s personal website: https://profcheeseman.wordpress.com/ Nic’s site Democracy in Africa: http://democracyinafrica.org/ Nic’s profile page at the University of Birmingham: https://bit.ly/3v1yoh8 Nic’s books: https://amzn.to/3tUM9gx Nic’s Twitter handle: @Fromagehomme

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.)