My guest for this week’s podcast is the wonderful Dr Jude Currivan, who I’ve known for several years now through her work with the Whole World View community. Jude is hard to categorise, as she combines and transcends many diverse worlds. She is a mystic, a successful international businesswoman, has a Masters in Physics from Oxford, specialising in cosmology and quantum physics, a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Reading. But above all, I would say she is a powerful agent for conscious change and evolution, as well as one of the warmest, most delightful and delight-filled human beings that I know.
She and her husband, Tony, live near Avebury – Avebury is famous as the site of the largest stone circle in the world, which is about 5,000 years old, and is one of the most significant pagan locations in the UK.
We touch on divinity and humanity, science and spirituality, mysticism, complex systems, intuition, coalitions of the willing, The Celestine Prophecy, Gaia, internet bullying, Buddha babies, the year 2067, the Big Bang (although Jude contends that it wasn’t Big and it wasn’t a Bang), Abba, forest bathing, kohlrabi and brassica massacres – and literally the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you will too. My main takeaway was this beautiful perspective that we live in a participatory universe, that our apparently individual consciousness is a fractal of the one cosmic mind, so we are connected in ways that we can’t see. It seems there is growing evidence – both from science and from anecdotal evidence – that even though they’re invisible, these connections are very real. We’re in this volatile state between the old, materialist worldview, and the new paradigm in which consciousness is key – maybe even the ground out of which all else arises.
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And don’t forget – last week’s conversation with Tim Jackson: Happiness and Wellbeing in a Post-Growth World, is now available to everybody, for free, on Spotify!
My favourite quotes:
Often children do have these [mystical] experiences, but we live in a society where the entire society is based on a worldview of materialism and separation. And those experiences, whilst many people have them, and they’re natural to us, are just denigrated, or peripheralized, or told they’re imaginary, or they’re not important. So for many people they get squished out early. And what I’m finding now is that people are waking up to realize how enriching these communications and adventures can be.
This emergent new science is radically different from the old science of materialism and separation, a radical new view of reality of multidimensionality, ultimately a unified cosmos, a cosmos where mind and consciousness aren’t something we have, but literally what we and the whole world are, an evolutionary cosmology, a universe that doesn’t just exist and evolve in this profoundly interconnected and unified way, but has this impulse to evolve from simplicity to complexity.
Collectively, we’ve had a worldview that’s really based been based on the old science. And it’s the old 19th century science, a science of materialism and separation. And sure enough, when we look out, our world does appear to be made up of separate things. And so we’ve behaved accordingly, whether that’s the way our governance, our education, our organizations, our health care, all of that. That’s driven how we behave with each other, it’s driven the way we behave with our planetary home. And it’s totally unsustainable, as we know. So we’ve come to the end of the road of any way in which we can have that worldview be other than destructive.
What happens in evolutionary biology is that when a system becomes unsustainable, whether it’s an ecosystem or a weather pattern or whatever, it literally begins to break down. And yet, at the same time that it’s breaking down, a new level of potential emergence, a higher level of complexity, begins to potentiate… what we find in evolutionary biology is something called flickering. When something flickers, it’s when the old system can no longer sustain, but as it breaks down, it’s also creating a bridge to this newer possibility. So it jumps forward and it jumps back. It flickers between the two states. And depending on the level of potentiality and coherence of the emergence system, it can prevail, and evolutionary progress continues.
In this emergent new science, our entire universe exists and evolves as a unified, fundamentally sentient intelligent entity. So yes, we’re contributing to its journey of evolution of our entire universe, and our beloved home Gaia, regardless of whether humanity itself goes extinct or not.
All the evidence is telling the same new story, the same new narrative. And it’s turning the old science upside down, because it’s showing us that our universe exists and evolves as a unified entity, everything is in relationship to everything else.
For me, the opposite of love is fear. Love connects, fear divides. So in a sense, the old science was a cosmology of fear, a cosmology of scarcity, a cosmology of separation. And then the evidence of this new science is helping us wake up, to remember we’re inseparable. It’s innately a science of love, of relationship.
[On the hard problem of consciousness]: It’s the wrong question. Because there is no separation of materiality and immateriality. When we see that mind and consciousness are what we and the whole world are, then what we’re seeing is a differentiation into the appearance of a physical body. But the appearance of the physical body is still ultimately, consciousness expressed as meaningful in-formation expressed as energy, matter, and space-time. Once we get past all of that separating out and realize that it’s a differentiation, not a separation, we’re making headway.
[On how we can experience the unity of everything]: Do what makes your heart sing. What is it that when you experience it, you just feel love? It may be looking in the eyes of that Buddha baby, it may be a sunrise, it may be being with a tree and, or in a forest. In writing Gaia: Her Story, my new book, I’ve been in awe of this interrelated web of life, that the indigenous traditions have always maintained and spiritual seekers have always sought. So I would ask the question of everyone, if you’ve have something that makes your heart sing, go with it, live it, be it, because that is the way into remembering, literally re-membering that relationship, that love, that entire relationship.
Another way into this great adventure of re-membering and experiencing unity awareness is intuition. Intuition is our superpower. It really is. If we listen to our intuition, and don’t discount it, but realize that it’s that resonance that connects us with everything else around us and beyond our horizon. The more we actually listen and follow and hear our intuition – the more it helps us to take this great journey of homecoming to who we really are.
[My work is] helping and hoping to bring forward this new perspective, this new whole worldview, where science converges, and integrates with spirituality, and consciousness, and reveals a meaningful, purposeful, evolving universe, in which we have parts to play. If I can share that with others, and they get that not just here in our heads, but experience it in our hearts, and embody it in our purpose, then [the year] 2067 can actually be a world that is truly transformed. Because our collective dis-ease is our fragmented perspective of the nature of reality. It’s a more fundamental dis-ease than any pandemic. So if we can heal that dis-ease, which we now have the evidence to show is based on a wrong perspective of reality, and instead come from a lived science and experience of love, then we can literally come together to transform how we are with ourselves, with each other, and above all, with our planetary home Gaia.
We belong here, we belong to each other, we belong to our planetary home, we belong to our entire universe. We are loved, we are supported. And if we can wake up to that knowingness, we literally can change the world, and heal ourselves and heal our relationship with the whole world.
It’s so crucial that we begin from the perspective of unity, this wholeness, this understanding that we are all profoundly, fundamentally, not just interconnected, but we are all microcosms of the whole.
Life is nonlinear.. it seems to me that this is our opportunity, wherever we’re called, however we’re called. Each of us is [called] at some point, and we have to link up and lift up together, and co create something that’s greater than the sum of all its parts.
Show Notes and Links:
Don Hoffman: The Case Against Reality
Jude’s book: The Cosmic Hologram: In-Formation at the Centre of Creation
And her organisation: Whole World View
Featured image by Federico Beccari on Unsplash