Gaia / Earth

I don't think we can continue to run this planet on the basis of egoic consciousness. The egoic consciousness, and I think ego is a beautiful thing. I'm not going to badmouth ego. Individual consciousness is a magnificent, beautiful, potentiating, empowering thing. But left to its own devices, it also tends to be cut...

No, you understood. You got it correctly. It's kind of jumping ahead to the story. Let me back up and work to that point. Okay, if you work, and I think in order to extract the maximal psychological, psycho-spiritual and philosophical value of these experiences, it's very important to create a container, what I...

Well, Norma, your experience speaks to me. As I get older, I feel the same. I'm 75 now, maybe a couple of years behind you. My arms and skeleton are getting weaker, like they're falling off, and with them, memories fall off. It's easier to move into egoless places because my skin is wrapped...

Yeah, now I would add the third piece, and that is the body's wisdom. Of course, this is the context within which head and heart meet. One of the reasons we're in so much trouble in terms of the planet is our theologies and philosophies have tended to aim us away from the body,...

Yes, he's updated it, put it in a new edition. Duane Elgin is a dear friend, great colleague. Jokes, he's one of my heroes. He's been trying to raise the alarm about humanity's peril and what we're doing to the planet and the limitations of our understanding of the universe, the consequences of buying...

Jumping many years ahead in my work, I summarized my experiences of our time in history, what's happening underneath the surface, where we're going, in a chapter called The Birth of the Future Human. There I was given a number of visions over many years of humanity coming to a turning point, humanity coming...

Well, the classic understanding of the Bardo, I think, was affirmed in my sessions. There are many, many layers of spiritual reality. When we return to that layer, it reflects our spiritual development or maturity, and it's a social domain. There are other beings there—not only other incarnate beings or discarnate beings, but also...

Well, the classic understanding of the Bardo, I think, was affirmed in my sessions. There are many, many layers of spiritual reality, and when we die, we return to that layer that reflects our spiritual development or maturity. It's a social domain with other beings, not only other discarnate beings but also guardians and...

In some of my deepest experiences, there are moments, even after a session, where something falls away, something opens. I experience the world as truly living and breathing as one. I feel like my feet are rooted in the earth like a tree. I look down at the grass and feel a complete continuity...

Yeah. And in that context, I want to put on the table one fundamental axiom of my thought. I know Duane shares this axiom, and I suspect everyone in this group does too: the concept of reincarnation. My first book was on reincarnation, starting with the empirical evidence, which I believe is overwhelming. I...

I was first trained as a historian, then in the philosophy of religion. I spent years studying great thinkers in history in these fields, so I had a sense of great beings who contributed to the tapestry of learning that I inherited. This session was about liberating me from responsibility to the intellectual lineages...

In this, over a year and a half of work, I repeatedly sensed entering a reality more real than time and space and dealing with phenomena more real than my personal existence. This touches on an ancient idea traced back to Plato, who conceived archetypes as eternal ideas. I experienced them as living entities...

Which was okay as long as we were thinking that time and space had only been around for a few thousand years. But now that we understand we're talking billions and billions of years of evolution of time and space, it doesn't seem to be a very satisfying account to say that after all...

Young souls become old souls. Old souls eventually become complete souls, and that's what I think of as the birth of the Diamond Soul. Now, many people have had these visions, have had this understanding. They use different words to describe it. Some people talk about Homo noeticus, Homo luminous, Homo spiritualis. There are...

Yeah, maybe as a footnote to my earlier comment to bridge into this new wing: I think Sri Aurobindo's critique of Buddhism is correct in criticizing Buddhism for not sufficiently confronting the fact of existence—the extraordinary power and majesty of existence. In rejecting anything static and form-based, in its agnosticism and anti-theism, Aurobindo says...

When you have an "up and out" theology, where the goal is to become spiritually awakened or saved and then leave time and space, you create a gap where the physical world isn't valued as deeply as the spiritual world. We therefore lack an answer to the question: What is the purpose of time-space,...

It's a large question. Some of my deepest experiences, there are times when, and even after a session, something opens, and I experience the world truly as living and breathing as one. My feet are rooted in the earth like a tree. I feel complete continuity between everything around me and my own being....

Thank you. A question from Catherine: Buddhists say reincarnation is like transferring light from one candle to another. What do you think of this? It's like transferring both personal and collective karmic stuff. The Buddha used a similar metaphor with candle flames to discuss the self, leading to a subtle description of reincarnation. The...

And if that sounds at first disappointing, where we would say, "Oh no, I want heaven, please. I don't want a transformed body here, because here is still too difficult," I think we may be underestimating what is possible and what it would really feel like to live a truly fully spiritualized, enlightened existence....

Yes, I completely agree. This happens in a psychedelic session too. I affirm what you're saying about the weight practitioners experience. It's past lives' karma and collective karma. Great beings have taken on responsibility for humanity, engaging darkness from our collective history. We have to move quickly through this transformation, no getting stuck in...

Yeah, well, you know, we're organically embedded in the collective psyche, just like we're physically embedded in the ecology of the earth. You can't separate us from the ecology that surrounds us psychologically. We are embedded in the collective psyche. My experience has spent a lot of time exploring the intimacy with which we...

I've picked this picture of the Earth to start with because the Earth is going into convulsions. It seems like there's no way to stop it. Now, we can ameliorate it, but we're going into the dark night of our collective soul. We have set in motion a sequence of events that's taking us...

Yeah, basically working the way I did, I found that my sessions had two phases. Though, at the beginning of every phase, there was some type of intense cleansing or purification process. If I surrendered to that completely, it would eventually hit a peak threshold, and then there would be some type of death-rebirth...

Audience: ** Yeah, we have all sorts of ideas and stories we tell ourselves about what this totality consciousness is and isn't and what it can know and can't know. And I think a lot of that is just cultural scripting. It's our best guess. It's our best cultural guess, and our best cultural...

Yeah, you know, we have all sorts of ideas and stories we tell ourselves about what this totality consciousness is and isn't, and what it can know and can't know. I think a lot of that is just cultural scripting. It's our best guess. Our best cultural guess, and our best cultural guess is...

The psychedelic agents we have access to today are so powerful that I believe they mark a new frontier in human experience. We can shatter the shell of the earthbound mind so consistently that it becomes hard to describe the depths of cosmic communion that follow. By taking our life to its limits and...

Yes and yes. Intention is powerful, especially collective, focused intention. It influences our body, circumstances, and people. David Nichols wrote about subtle activism, where global meditations integrate consciousness into prayerful exercises. Spiritual traditions organize students worldwide at certain times for powerful practices. The spiritual universe is highly populated. Sacred medicine traditions encounter life forms...

I was then blessed with a second marriage with Christina Hardy. Christina is also a journeyer and understood the dimensions I experienced. She's an astrologer, deeply a daughter of the earth and the stars, grounded in the textures of time and space. In my most intimate relationships, I've been with two women who understood...

When I first entered archetypal reality, my identity as a human being began to fall away from me. I found there is an identity we have as a human being deeper than the identity we have as a specific human being. To enter into archetypal reality, I literally had to leave behind the entire...

When we make this transition, and we will all be there in some way, shape, or form, we will feel it, will be part of it. It's going to be multiple generations, but we will all be part of it. When it happens, and as it happens, and as this exquisite creature comes out...

Robert Monroe, who I talked about in Dark Night, Early Dawn, my second book—and we're not going to talk too much about today, but he's an interesting man—went out of his body when he was 40 years old, traveled over the universe, and wrote three books, autobiographical books describing what the world looks like...

If I were talking to my younger self, or if I'm talking to my own children, who are young adults now, I would recommend it partly depends on what you're trying to accomplish. When I got into this work, I was seeking enlightenment, like what most of us were seeking—to be a better human...