Mind the Shift

By Anders BollingSociety & Culture

Mind the Shift episodes

April 24, 2024 125. "Paranormal" is Perfectly Normal – Dean Radin
Professor Dean Radin is one of the world’s leading authorities on psychic phenomena. He is the chief scientist at IONS, the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
“I don’t like the word ‘paranormal’ when referring to these experiences”, Dean says.
“Paranormal phenomena cover such a huge range of things that are strange, that it tends to collapse psychic experiences into things like search for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. But psychic phenomena, like synchronicities, are extremely common.”
Are psychic phenomena akin to spiritual experiences?
“I would say there is an overlap.”
The overlap, he explains, is when people say they have felt a strange, very intimate sense of connection with other people or with things elsewhere.
“The line between science and spirituality is arbitrary. There is a spectrum.”
A synchronicity can be described as ‘smart luck’, as opposed to ‘dumb luck’.
“In many ways the kind of research that I do attempts to evoke synchronicities in the laboratory. What some would call a coincidence we would call a synchronicity when we study for instance telepathy”, Dean says.
As we record this episode, Dean Radin is conducting an experiment aimed to test the quantum observer effect.
“To test it properly it takes an act of subjective awareness of what is going on. It is correlated to brain activity, but it is not physical. Maybe that’s what will break the chain and cause the measurement to actually occur.”
“If the results are replicated in lots of different laboratories, it directly informs an outstanding and long standing problem in the interpretation of quantum mechanics.”
The ‘Sigil’ experiment, as it is called, is due to be finished by the end of April.
The placebo effect is basically the same phenomenon – mind affecting matter.
“Can we see differences in the behavior of cells, be it plants or the human body, depending on what people are beaming mentally at them? The answer is yes.”
“For everything from photons, to chemical processes, to cells, to small animals, to human physiology and maybe all the way up to the global level, we do see that consciousness seems to be involved at every single stage.”
And yet there are so many skeptics, and so many psi researchers are being mocked.
“In mainstream science, these things are taboo. I know many academics have these experiences themselves, but you can’t talk about it, at the risk of your career”, Dean says.
“Materialism is an extremely powerful worldview. So powerful that it has given rise to the technologies we have today. But it leaves out something.”
However, in the last 30 years, the philosophy of idealism has begun to penetrate within the sciences, according to Dean Radin. Idealism posits that consciousness is fundamental and that matter arises from it.
“You see it in physics, in psychology, in neuroscience and in mathematics.”
There is a materialist ‘police’ that is active on Wikipedia and in public debate. But it is a vociferous minority, Dean thinks.
“They are only maintaining the taboo. But taboos don’t last forever. When you talk to academics privately after a couple of beers, everyone eventually reports they have experiences of this kind, and most are actually interested.”
So, if idealism is penetrating science and things seem to be changing, what will be the final nail in the coffin for the taboo?
Judging from the brief opening in consciousness studies that was seen in the 60s and 70s, Dean thinks the renewed research on psychedelics might be that nail. Another candidate is quantum biology. Scientists now suggest that the brain operates in quantum ways.
“That was a very fringy idea 30 years ago.”
Dean’s personal website
IONS website
1 hr 22 min
April 12, 2024124. Love and Time – Julia Mossbridge
Julia Mossbridge is a scientist in the true sense of the word, a curious and open-minded investigator and seeker. She has balanced beautifully on the perceived border between traditional science and the esoteric realms.
She has created two institutes, whereof one bears the intriguing name The Institute for Love and Time (TILT). It is about creating technologies that support wellbeing related to feeling unconditional love.
How can love and time go together?
“Both are powerful and healing to humans”, Julia says.
On a deeper level, she explains, people experience that when the boundaries of time are removed, the conditions of connection are also removed, which opens the door to unconditional love.
The way Julia describes the experience of time is somewhat at odds with the “live in the now” mantra. We can extend the self in time, she says. And by doing that we break down boundaries.
“It gives you a lot more chances to do good for yourself and the world. It doesn’t have to be all at once. We have all this time.”
“Folks say you can’t do anything about the past, and the future is all about potentialities, so you can only do something about it in the now. The reason this is so enticing is that we’re built to experience free will. So that’s how we’re gonna make a lot of money on self-help books”, Julia laughs.
“I think it’s a racket. I think it makes people look for control rather than take responsibility.”
In reality, we are not in control. Everything we experience has already happened. That has even been measured (the thought of doing something sudden arises after we’ve done it).
“To even come close to being in control, we must extend the definition of ‘I’. To really be in control we must extend it indefinitely to include the whole universe and everything that has happened and everything that is going to happen.”
The Iroquios have a word for this extension: the long body.
Julia Mossbridge has done extensive research on precognition, the intuitive knowledge about a future event. She uses a metaphor: An event that triggers precognition is like a stick in the stream of consciousness. The stick creates a wake, which is the slowly fading memory of the event after it has happened. But on the front end it also creates an area where the “arrow of time” is reversed.
“There's backpressure. The stream of consciousness ‘prepares’ itself to go around the stick.”
Precognition most commonly appears in dreams.
“The conscious mind is like our story of what is happening, but the unconscious mind really has access to all the incoming data from the universe”, Julia says.
She agrees with psychology pioneer William James that the brain is like a filter.
“When your brain is damaged, you're not changing consciousness, you're changing the capacity to receive it.”
She is also in agreement with the theories of cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman, who describes physical reality as an interface, where living beings are “conscious agents”. If we were to look “under the hood” (which may be what enlightenment entails), we would see a completely different reality that doesn’t make sense in the physical world.
Mossbridge also delves into what AI does to us, and with us, and what we can do with AI.
“Human potential is going to explode with AI if we do it right. It can be a partner in our evolution. We are in this together.”
Julia’s bio:
Affiliate professor in the Dept. of Biophysics and Physics at University of San Diego

Senior consultant with Tangible IQ

Co-founder of TILT: The Institute for Love and Time

Founder of Mossbridge Institute

Author and co-author of multiple books and scientific articles related to time travel, artificial intelligence and unconditional love

PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders (Northwestern University)

MA in Neuroscience (UC San Francisco)

BA in Neuroscience with highest honors (Oberlin College)
Julia on Linkedin
Julia on Medium
The Institute for Love and Time (TILT)
The Mossbridge Institute
1 hr 23 min
March 28, 2024 123. There Is No Death – Craig Hogan
Why are we so afraid to die, I ask afterlife expert, researcher, coach and writer Craig Hogan.
“It’s a misunderstanding. People think this life is all there is. But we don’t die. Transition happens seamlessly. There is no pain.”
Craig Hogan and his associates try to teach people about this.
If we knew we were immortal, we would arguably live our lives differently. We wouldn’t pursue things selfishly. We would realize we are on this journey together with the people around us.
There are innumerable reports from people who have been in contact with deceased loved ones.
Craig has himself had many experiences in which he has communicated with the other side.
There are also many widely known accounts of contacts with the afterlife, such as the ones of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Raymond Moody and J.B. Phillips.
Anybody can get in touch with the deceased, says Craig Hogan. You don’t have to go through a medium. But you need to go into a meditative state and empty your mind. Ask a question or make a statement to the deceased person you want to contact.
“You will get responses immediately, in one chunk, not in words. It’s telepathic”, says Craig.
So what is the afterlife like?
“We need consistency, so it’s very much like our earth life. People have bodies. There are houses and streets and different cultures and nationalities. People first use the language they are used to, but after a while they drop language, because they don't need it. It is like earth but without the problems. There is no old age and no ailments.”
When we pass, we don’t actually go anywhere, Craig explains. It’s already here. It’s all about a change of focus. It's like changing the frequency on the ‘life radio’.
For some there is a ‘second death’. These people don’t understand that they have passed at first. Or they don’t want to leave the earth plane for some reason – they may have unfinished business, or they don’t want to leave the sensual pleasures, or they are afraid they are going to go to hell.
“So they stay earthbound for a while. They walk around, ride buses, and go to church. Some become poltergeists.”
“Then there is another category of almost demonic influences. These are negative thought forms produced by people or groups of people who want to impede other people’s progress because of the anger and violence that exist on earth.”
But eventually, all go to life after this and get to have a respite. There is no hell.
“This earth plane is a school. The purpose is to teach us lessons. We are growing in love and compassion”, says Craig.
Before we are born our souls and guides get together and plan the circumstances and the kinds of struggles we will have in life. Afterwards we can share our learning with others that are within our higher self.
Reincarnation is misunderstood, according to Craig. We stay the individuals we are, but we are part of a higher self which has thousands of people in it.
When a new life is planned, the planning group will take pieces from other lifes, so that the new person will learn lessons that were not previously learned. That is where past life regression comes from, Craig explains. Lives are intertwined. You tap into experiences of another life.
“So, we don’t come back as some other person.”
Humanity once knew about the afterlife but forgot. However, when we regain that knowledge, it will be on a higher level. We have understandings today that humankind has never had, Craig points out.
“We are in the most mature state of understanding the life after this life. We are going far beyond the insights we used to have.”
Within a few centuries, a new kind of earth will arise, he thinks.
“There is no need to feel fear about the end of this life. There is no end.”
Craig's organization Seek Reality

1 hr 4 min
March 13, 2024 122. The Maya Saw this World Coming – Carl Johan Calleman
The ancient Maya taught that consciousness is primary, and that matter is the manifestation of a thought, if you will, that arose in the all-encompassing primordial consciousness.
This knowledge is at the core of the work of Carl Johan Calleman. He is originally a trained biologist and chemist, but he has dedicated most of his career to studying the wisdom of the Maya and has written eight books on the subject.
There is a hidden meaning behind the mythical plumed serpent, theme of the Kukulcan pyramid in Chichen Itzá, Carl Johan explains:
Consciousness has expressed itself gradually in the universe – it has come in nine waves.
The first wave was what modern science calls the Big Bang.
This worldview means that evolution undoubtedly takes place, but it is purposeful, not random.
“Established science has been fighting this idea of a living universe for a long time”, says Carl Johan.
Why do the structures of the universe on all levels hold together? Because there is an underlying purpose, and because the universe is holographic: an atom is subordinate to a molecule, which is subordinate to a cell, which is subordinate to a whole organism, which is subordinate to a planet, a solar system, a galaxy and so on.
“Otherwise everything would be just floating around in a soup of nothingness.”
Evolution is quantized, as Calleman sees it. It takes quantum leaps, namely in the form of the Mayans’ nine waves, which in turn have peaks and valleys.
This entails that technically advanced civilizations could not have existed before the sixth wave, which was activated in 3,115 BCE.
“Yes, this is what you should expect if you adhere to the idea of a quantized evolution. It should not happen gradually.”
With every new wave, a new state of consciousness becomes downloadable. The human mind changes.
The peaks and valleys correspond to creative and destructive periods in humanity. The rise and the collapse of empires, for instance.
The ninth wave is the final one. And it is already here. Forget the trope around 21 December 2012 – the ninth wave was activated in March of 2011. That year was indeed eventful.
All the earlier waves are still running. Not every human and not every other organism will be fully influenced by the most recent wave. Some remain in a lower vibration. Myriad animals and plants that came into creation with earlier waves are still here.
But the ninth wave makes it possible to reach peak consciousness.
“That’s where we’re meant to go. That’s the highest frequency.”
This ascension, as some call it, will be easier for the younger generations, Carl Johan Calleman thinks.
“They will be able to create peace and unity, a form of heaven on Earth. But the time period until that happens will be very difficult. Maybe we will see a global dictatorship.”

1 hr 25 min
February 29, 2024 121. Alternative Archaeologists are Also Wrong – Robert Schneiker
Geophysicist Bob Schneiker stumbled upon the debate about the age of the Sphinx by chance. He got hooked, and the more he found out, the more convinced he became that Robert Schoch and other maverick researchers are wrong about the dating.
“I was surprised to know that Schoch used erosion on the Sphinx as evidence of an older civilization than the dynastic Egyptians”, Bob says.
The geology and the surface patterns have been interpreted wrongly, according to Schneiker. The geological history of the area reveals that the Sphinx cannot be older than about 5,500 years, he claims.
Schneiker (and others) conclude that the Nile flows during the African humid period 12,000 to 5,500 BCE would have inundated the Sphinx and consequently destroyed its brittle limestone, had it been carved out during that period. (Not all studies conclude that the water table of the Nile actually got that high, however.)
Another site Bob has looked into is Göbekli Tepe. He agrees that this construction has upended much of what archaeologists used to believe about our past. But he points out that it cannot be linked to the Younger Dryas and its purported cataclysm, because it is probably much older than that.
This also goes for the channeled Scablands in the northwestern USA, another place that some alternative researchers tie to the Younger Dryas.
Certain “smoking guns” indicate that something very dramatic happened on the planet during that period, like the ubiquitous “black mat” soil layer and the sudden disappearance of megafauna. One mainstream theory regarding the latter is overhunting by humans. Schneiker concurs with that theory.
He is not as impressed as most other independent researchers by advanced megalithic sites like Giza, Baalbek, Ollantaytambo, Sacsayhuaman, Tiwanaku and Easter island.
“Most of them are not that old”, he says.
Scientists and researchers on all sides have blind spots. Bob is an honest truth seeker, just like the independent researchers he challenges. It’s likely that he sees things they haven’t acknowledged. Which is interesting, because they often point out that because of the fact that academia stonewalls its research, the only ones who can push the boundaries are the mavericks.
“Yes, that happens, but how many mavericks do we not hear about because their ideas are so crazy?”
__________
✅ Resources
Bob's website
• Alternative researchers that Bob challenges:
Randall Carlson's Youtube channel
Robert Schoch's website
1 hr 38 min
February 14, 2024 120. The Grip of Climate Culture – Andy West
Climate catastrophism displays all the core features of a cultural entity, says Andy West, author of The Grip of Culture.
Other cultural entities are religions, ideologies, sometimes cults and even strong philosophies. The underlying behavior is identical. You can measure it, and that is what Andy has done.
“This comes from a deep behavioral legacy from our evolutionary past. We are very susceptible to groupthink.”
Andy’s most groundbreaking finding is that there is a close connection between religiosity and climate catastrophism. The correlation is almost perfect. But it is perhaps not intuitive:
When unconstrained questions are asked about climate change, a large majority of people in religious countries will answer that it is dangerous, whereas a large majority of people in secular countries will be less worried. When constrained questions are asked, i.e. questions about the need to take action in different ways, the situation is exactly the opposite.
A culture is always based on stories. If it were based on facts and truths, it would not be a culture.
“If you want to glue millions of people together, it’s not good to use rationality, it is actually better to bypass it and use emotion. If you base it on rational arguments, people will have different opinions or different angles on it.”
The further distanced from truth, the better cultures work. Especially if authorities are on their side. If someone questions the culture, “it’s bonkers”. End of argument.
“Climate catastrophism detached from science a long time ago”, Andy says.
Al Gore’s climate film An Inconvenient Truth from 2006 was a turning point.
“It was completely full of classic cultural memes. I started to research what was behind. I quickly realized it had left science already then.”
Are there elitist agendas?
“Yes, but they’re not the prime cause. The prime cause is the culture, and the agendas have effectively taken advantage of the culture.”
Andy points out that cultures are not bad per se. They are inevitable, and they can be either detrimental or beneficial. Civilizations are based on cultures. Without cultures, no team spirit.
Isn’t the climate disaster narrative a useful crisis for leaders who want to exert control?
“It’s not wrong, but it’s not exactly right either. Leaders have taken advantage of it as it has grown.”
Andy has found that the US is a special case. It isn’t possible to just test two cultures, religion and climate catastrophism, in America as in most other countries. What complicates things is the Democrat/Liberal and Republican/Conservative tribalism
“So the US effectively has four cultures. It ends up being a worst case scenario. Everybody is behaving culturally.”
Will this new culture, climate catastrophism, come to an end, and if so, when and how?
“It’s in all our institutions and all our policies. It’s in the heads of millions of people. It’s not going to go away easily or quickly. I think it will evolve and change over time, like it has already.”
Andy's book
Andy's X account
Climate Etc blog
1 hr 15 min
January 31, 2024 119. Are We Re-Living Our Past? – Aleksander Czeszkiewicz
The word prodigy comes to mind when you learn about the young Polish independent researcher and writer Aleksander Czeszkiewicz.
Already as a child, he read heaps of books about our distant past and scrolled through ancient texts, and increasingly he also delved into spiritual traditions.
“I was interested holistically in the universe, the earth, and history. At school everything was uninteresting to me. There was no place for imagination. At home I could speculate about the existence of Atlantis. I was free. At school, I was not free”, says Aleksander.
At 17 he wrote the first book of his own, which he entitled Deja Vu – Has Everything Already Been? He had to wait until the age of 18 to publish it because of legal requirements. The year after, he translated it to English himself.
The idea of constant progress, that we are at the peak of civilization, is fairly new. Centuries ago, the point of view was rather that we had fallen from an earlier golden age.
“There was also the more neutral idea that human development is cyclical. This was prominent in ancient Greece and ancient India”, Aleksander explains.
The Vedic cycles are called yugas.
“With all the scientism, materialism and atheism, I think our time resembles the description of the Kali yuga, the dark age of materialism, in the ancient hindu tradition.”
The Mahabharata pinpoints a date for the start of the latest Kali yuga: the 18 February 3102 BCE, which happens to coincide with the beginning of the civilizations whose legacy we are still in.
But there are yogis who believe we may be in the intermediate Dvapara yuga.
Before the archaeological discoveries in the 1800s, we knew nothing about ancient Egypt, Sumer or other early civilizations. The texts about them were considered fairy tales.
“What if we are in a similar situation now, when we make so many more discoveries? Maybe we will find evidence for Atlantis?”
Homo sapiens has been around for at least 200,000 years. It is not likely that we remained cavemen for 95 percent of that time and then suddenly decided to build civilizations, Aleksander thinks.
“There are so many known historic texts from Greece, Egypt and the Arab world that tell us straight out that there were mighty kings and civilizations tens of thousands of years ago.”
Most flood myths – and there are many all over the world – can be correlated to the geologically dramatic end of the last ice age.
Will you be able to dig up even more conclusive evidence of lost civilizations than the many independent pioneers you are leaning on today?
“I think what has been uncovered is the tip of the iceberg. To think we know it all is arrogant. I personally love diving into old texts. They show such a holistic picture of everything. But of course I also want to explore the physical remains.”
Aleksander’s book is only the beginning of his research, he says.
“My next project will be of a more metaphysical and philosophical nature. A spiritual exploration.”
Aleksander thinks many of our current problems relate to the fact that we never yield, stop and let ourselves relax, feel in and listen inwards.
“We should not only chase results. We need to be here now. The grinding mindset is toxic.”
He foresees a huge paradigm shift as a result of an expanded human consciousness.
In his view, society is tarnished by a kind of modern ”satanism”: Some want to exert control and keep others down.
Aleksander is planning on publishing his second book later this year.
Aleksander's book
His website (int)
His Youtube channel
1 hr 42 min
January 18, 2024 118. The Poverty Fix Nobody Talks About – Lant Pritchett
When Lant Pritchett worked as a development economist (many years at the World Bank), he noted the approach was very place centric. It was about how to develop Senegal, India, Nigeria etc. Mobility was not a big deal.
“I realized gradually that the mobility of people across places could be at least as big a way for people to improve their well being as the efforts to improve places”, says Lant Pritchett.
“The wage differentials, which are driven by productivity differentials, are so huge that the ability of people to move from low productivity to high productivity places is far and away the largest way to improve human well being.”
Lant co-founded the advocacy and action group/think tank LaMP to promote labor mobility. The acronym stands for Labor Mobility Partnerships.
The economic development models that were developed some decades ago got one thing completely wrong: productivity didn’t converge. Education, health and even capital per worker converged, but productivity didn’t.
“Productivity isn't primarily about knowledge, it's about complex features that we now call institutional, political and social.”
The a-ha insight is that the world has people in poor places, not poor people.
“It’s simply hard to make a person productive in rural Ethiopia, and there's no magic bullet.”
To many people, the term migration brings up images of people moving permanently and acquiring new roots. But if the world could achieve well-organized and orderly temporary labor mobility on a scale that is an order of magnitude larger than today, this could bring tremendous benefits, according to Pritchett.
Calculations show that the gains would be at least 20 times the size of the ODA in the world.
In the migration discourse the elephant in the room is the fact that the labor force is shrinking rapidly in the rich parts of the world, relative to the aged population.
How to deal with this demographic transition if you only talk about permanent migration and refugees?
“You can’t. The only way is to open a third question: who are we going to allow to live and work on our sovereign territory, without any expectation they are becoming citizens?”
Is the temporary nature of this mobility meant to appease those who worry their national identity is being threatened? In a way, Lant says.
“But appease is a stronger word than we need. It's not just a necessary appeasement objective, it’s a legitimate objective to want to preserve a sense of 'spanishness' or 'englishness', even if those are socially constructed and imagined identities.”
What about the risk of brain drain in the countries that provide the labor force?
“Brain drain gets attention because it rhymes”, Lant says smilingly.
“There is not much analytical foundation for the claim. If we used the rhyme cortex vortex, brains moving round in a circular way, we would have a more accurate and interesting picture of what is going on.”
Isn’t living where you want as basic a right as free speech or religious freedom? Are we primarily humans or are we primarily citizens?
“Ah, there's the rub of it.”
“I think the conversation on open borders versus closed borders is silly. Open borders is not politically how the world is going to be organized in the foreseeable future. And there is something unique, valuable and important about maintaining identities.”
“But these identities can change over time, and they can be inclusive.”
Lant’s website
Lant’s scientific paper “The political acceptability of time-limited labor mobility: Five levers opening the Overton window”
LaMP:
Hein de Haas’ book “How Migration Really Works”
1 hr 10 min
December 13, 2023 117. Humanity’s Epic Awakening – Mary Reed
Mary Reed was a staunchly agnostic healthcare executive in Washington DC when she began venturing uncontrollably into mystical realms in the company of divine masters.
”I went into the body and the being of Jesus on the cross at the moment of crucifixion. As an agnostic, that was wildly out of the blue. But in that experience, which went on for three and a half hours, I got all of this information about humanity and what is happening in our world”, Mary says.
Deeply confused by events like this, she moved to the Himalayas and spent seven years coming to terms with her unexpected abilities.
The first ”voice in her head” (not really a voice) appeared in 2000. Since 2020 Mary also channels lessons from a collective of divine beings called Consensus, which presented itself to her.
Today Mary considers herself a mystic wisdom guide. Despite certain transformative events, arriving at that place has been a gradual process.
”It just keeps coming.”
It takes many years to integrate a spiritually transformative experience, which every NDEer can attest to.
Mary is the author of the award-winning memoir Unwitting Mystic, and the sweeping newest release, Humanity’s Epic Awakening.
In the latter, Mary explains that the awakening we are about to experience (and are already beginning to experience) will entail the end of many deeply rooted human ideas, such as hell.
”What we are waking up to is already here. We are just not aware of it yet. But we will be soon.”
The most central part of her message, she says, is that nothing should be rejected. The old paradigm of good and bad inherently always puts us in conflict.
”We label certain things bad and want them to go away. It’s like wanting one part of us to go away. No bad you see in the world today just happened. It’s being recycled.”
Mary saw this extremely clearly when she had a vision of a block sitting in her stomach. It was the collectively rejected block of pain of all of humanity.
”This pain does not want to be rejected, it wants to be embraced”, Mary says.
”Awakening isn’t intended to be a polite experience, it’s intended to be an honest experience.”

Mary’s website
Mary’s book Humanity’s Epic Awakening
Mary’s book Unwitting Mystic
1 hr 8 min
November 30, 2023 116. Visions of Atlantis (part II) – Michael Le Flem
This is part two of my conversation with Michael Le Flem about Atlantis. For basics about Michael and his book Visions of Atlantis, see show notes for part one (episode 114):
In this episode, we dive deeper into the details of what has been told and written about Atlantean science, technology and worldview, not least by the two unconventional sources Frederick Oliver and Edgar Cayce.
Experts have tried to debunk their methods – Cayces in particular – but it has proved to be impossible to explain how they know certain things.
We also talk about the often hollow arguments from skeptics.
Why do people find evidence for the lost civilization almost everywhere? Because Atlantis was said to have been an empire, not unlike the British empire.
Why hasn't any evidence of advanced technology been found? Because nothing advanced would survive the test of time – except stone structures, and those abound. The evidence is actually staring us in the face.
There are also fascinating similarities between languages on either side of the Atlantic.

Michael’s website
Michael’s book Visions of Atlantis
The Edgar Cayce organization AER
Frederick Oliver’s book A Dweller on Two Planets
1 hr 28 min