Morgan Giddings Podcast

Have you felt that pressure to show up as if you have the answers? I have. For a long time it is why I barely showed up here at all.

In this short video I talk about being done with the gurus — the business experts, the technology authorities, the spiritual channelers, everyone who seems so certain they know what is happening — and about what I am doing instead. I come at it from a bridge: years as a professor working on the Human Genome Project, and more than a decade asking what consciousness actually is.

The more I learn, the less I know, and I have stopped treating that as a failure. So this is the Lab of Morgan: I share what I am exploring and what I find, not to replace your authority, but for you to do with it what you will.

What is your experience with gurus and authorities — and did you feel that pressure to perform certainty too? I read everything, and it shapes what I make next.

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Have you ever been sure something was going to be terrible, and it ended up being really good in the end?

With the U.S. midterms coming up, I keep hearing people say how worried they are. In this short video, I look at that worry from the bridge between science and spirit: why we’re not really good judges in the moment, the weird loop of imagining how bad we’ll feel about something that might never happen, and why I try not to label things good or bad at all.

This isn’t a prediction. It’s an invitation: whatever happens, we will find a way through.

What’s your “bad thing” that turned out to be good? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

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I’ve been sitting on this video for a while, and that’s sort of the point of it. Back in 2013 I wrote a book called Create or Die. The original idea behind it was metaphysical: that this universe exists to create, and that there’s a force of creativity flowing through us. A book advisor told me to tone it down and make it practical, so I did. People who read it enjoyed it, but I felt like I had failed myself. That pattern of holding back has followed me ever since, into my writing and into why I haven’t been posting much lately.

I come from an academic family, and I spent much of my life as a professor doing Human Genome Project–type work. In those circles, suggesting that consciousness might exist beyond the brain’s hardware is just verboten. What gets me is that science is supposed to be an open-minded process of asking questions. In the video I talk about the Princeton PEAR project, Dan Shechtman’s quasicrystals, and the well-known colleague who once asked me whether this was all “a bit of wishful thinking.” I also admit that I’m pissed off about how much shame I’ve carried, and about the practicing scientists I know who feel they have to hide in the closet with their own curiosity. I don’t let the spiritual community off the hook either: I receive channels all the time these days, and I question every one of them.

So this is my commitment, said out loud on camera: I’m getting back to writing and recording regularly about my own lowercase-s scientific journey into what’s going on right now. If you’ve ever felt ashamed for asking these questions, or felt you had to keep them to yourself, I’d really like to hear from you. Leave a comment here or on the video, under an alias if you need to. We’re all scientists of life, and I’d like to have these conversations in the open.

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I recently heard someone describe it that way, and my first reaction wasn’t awe. It was “how boring is that?” A world with no contrast would have no blue sky against a slate-blue lake, no hot and cold, no mountain winters giving way to summer. That contrast is what makes up our entire life.

As a former science professor, I don’t take popular ideas on faith, even spiritual ones. So I went digging into what non-duality actually means, and what I found surprised me. It pulled me back to a freezing night in a sleeping bag not rated for the cold, to David Hawkins’ scale of consciousness, and to one of the darkest stretches of my career, a string of grant rejections that had me convinced I was doomed. Each of those pointed to the same thing, and it isn’t what most people mean when they talk about “leaving duality.”

If you’ve ever felt pressure to transcend your emotions, rise above struggle, or wait for the day life finally flattens out into peace, this one is for you. I’ll share where I landed on what awakening might really change, and what I hope it leaves exactly as it is. Read on, then tell me: which of your challenges did you choose, and which ones just keep showing up?

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I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from making videos — it’s been a personally tumultuous few months, and I didn’t have the clarity to sit down and record until now. But something I kept coming back to during that stretch was this idea of receiving, and I wanted to make it the thing I came back with. Not receiving in the small sense — the groceries-and-paycheck sense — but receiving as an actual energy, a kind of openness. I know that might sound airy-fairy if you’re coming from a materialist, intellectual place, like I have been for a lot of my life and still slip back into sometimes. But I’ve watched what happens when I actually open to this, versus when I don’t, and the difference is real enough that I can’t just write it off as coincidence.

Here’s the thing I think most of us get wrong: we’ve been trained to treat receiving as transactional. Before we can accept something good, we feel like we have to earn it — enough money, enough effort, enough proof that we deserve it. And if we haven’t put in the “adequate” amount, receiving feels illegitimate, almost embarrassing. But that’s training, not reality. No deer standing in a field of grass is proving its worthiness before it eats. The other block, just as sneaky, is confusing receiving with taking — as if every time something good comes to us, we’re pulling it away from someone else. But when someone genuinely wants to give you something, receiving it is its own form of giving back. Shutting that down doesn’t make you more ethical. It just stops the flow.

I think a lot of the manifestation conversation happening right now skips over this entirely — it’s all about getting specific, visualizing the exact outcome, working harder to force it into being. And sometimes that works. But some of my best moments have come from releasing the grip on the specific thing and just staying open to what shows up instead — which is usually better than what I would’ve planned anyway. If any of this lands for you, I’d genuinely like to know: are you a good receiver, or is this the part of the cycle that’s broken for you too? — I read everything, and it shapes what I make next.

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The same is true economically. Some people get wrecked by a downturn. Others don’t. Some do better. The difference isn’t the economy. It’s what I’m calling your immune system against it.

After a decade-plus of coaching, I’ve found it comes down to one word: receiving.

Most people — especially people on a conscious or spiritual path — think they’re good at it. They’re not. I’m not always good at it either. And I catch myself in exactly the trap I’m describing partway through this video.

The core confusion: we’ve equated receiving with taking. And because we don’t want to be extractive, we shut the whole channel down. Then we wonder why things feel so tight.

If you’ve ever deflected a compliment, undercharged, or felt vaguely guilty when something good came your way — this is the video.

What does this show up as for you? Money, opportunity, beauty, connection — I’m curious where the blockage lives. Drop it in the comments.

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I’ve been getting downloads from higher guidance for months now. A few weeks ago, one stopped me cold: “HEAVEN ON EARTH,” in all caps. My first reaction was relief — like maybe all this chaos is actually going somewhere good. But the more I sat with it, the more a different question started nagging at me.

What if we get there? What if this reality actually does resolve into something closer to paradise — no more struggle, no more scarcity, everything just... easy? I started thinking about entrepreneurs I know who sold their businesses, moved to the beach, and were restless within six months. I thought about why I still choose whitewater over flat water. Ease isn’t actually what any of us are asking for, even when we think it is.

This piece is my attempt to work through that paradox honestly — inspired by creator Mel Lawson’s recent video, though I land somewhere a little different than she does. I don’t think the goal is escaping this reality. I think the goal is figuring out exactly what needs to change here, and what doesn’t.

This video was sparked by creator Mel Lawson's take on ascension (watch her full video here:

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I woke up in a soaked tent in the Idaho wilderness with two questions on my mind. Is ascension actually real — or is it just another thing people project onto an uncertain world? And if it is real, why does everyone seem so anxious about the timing?

The first answer came clean: yes, it’s real. But what it actually is gets misunderstood constantly. It’s not a supernatural event dropping from the sky. It’s a structural shift — humanity moving out of an architecture built for chains and into one built for genuine freedom. Not the kind you earn after 40 years of grinding. The kind that belongs to everyone, regardless of where they started.

The second answer came from the river. I was debating two lines on a Class Four rapid — which one depended entirely on the conditions that day. Rain levels, energy, who was there. Four days earlier, same river, completely different game. That’s the message. Prophecy assumes a fixed timeline. Reality is dynamic. The question was never when it is happening — it’s what are the conditions right now, and what do I do with them? Small moves toward freedom compound. That’s how it works.

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There is a voice most intellectually-trained people know intimately. It arrives not when you’re being careless — but precisely when you’re starting to believe something real. It calls itself skepticism. It calls itself rigor. It has a whole career’s worth of credentials behind it. But underneath the credentials, if you trace it back far enough, there is something much older and much more personal: the shame of being the kid who believed when they shouldn’t have. The one who got laughed at. The one who was the mark.

That shame doesn’t stay in childhood. It follows you into the seminar room, into the peer review process, into every moment you almost trusted something you couldn’t prove. And here’s what took me on a remote camping trip in Idaho, a major earthquake I didn’t know had happened, and a spiral of twelve dark hypotheses to finally see clearly: doubt is not a neutral observer. It is an active contaminant. It jams the receiver. And we have been trained — rewarded, even — to call that jamming a virtue.

In this exploration, I walk through what actually happened on June 24th, what my body knew before my mind would admit anything, and what the snipe hunt I was sent on as a young Scout has to do with all of it. If you have ever felt the pull of something deeper and then watched your own mind dismantle it before it could land — this one is for you

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I spent thirty years trying to prove this wrong. Physics didn’t give me the answer. Neither did AI, biology, nor the Human Genome Project. Neither did consciousness research, Akashic records, or the metaphysical rabbit holes I kept falling into and climbing back out of. Every time I thought I’d found solid ground, the next clue appeared. Every time I tried to poke holes in where the trail was leading, it held. The conclusion I kept arriving at — reluctantly, irritably, skeptically — was not the one I was looking for.

Here’s what irks me most about the current moment: everyone seems to have the answer. Scientists say trust the data, turn the crank, stop asking why. Channels say trust the higher entity, we’ve received the transmission. Both are making the exact same mistake — demanding you surrender your own inquiry to their authority. And I don’t care how credentialed the scientist is or how luminous the source claims to be. Confidence is not credibility. The most trustworthy conclusions are the ones the person didn’t want to reach.

Which is why I’m telling you this now. Not because I’m certain. Not because I have the full map. But because thirty-plus years of relentless, skeptical, never-stop-questioning inquiry landed somewhere I genuinely did not want to arrive — and every time I pushed back, it held. What I found at the end of that trail is either the most important thing happening in human history right now, or the most elaborate self-deception I’ve ever constructed. I’ll let you decide which. But first — follow the clues with me.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innerways.substack.com/subscribe