A New Consciousness, Culture and Cosmology for the 21st Century

We are creating a new world, and you are invited.

We are in unprecedented times, facing an uncertain future. What we do next is really important.

We need next level thinking. And the issue facing humanity now is very clearly this:

— what does next level look like?

We can’t solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

What does the future look like?

Have you ever seen a movie about the future that wasn’t a dystopian-sci-fi-zombie-apocalypse nightmare where all the humans were struggling to survive? If that’s humanity’s go-to vision for where we are heading, is it any wonder we are feeling anxious now, at the tipping point of a new era of human evolution?

Where are the signposts telling us This Way To A Positive Future?

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.

Frederick Jameson

Our world as we know it is built on a few fundamental ideas – all of which, as it turns out, are untrue. These outdated beliefs hold in place our culture, our economy, our families and our sense of personal identity.

What happens when those beliefs begin to fail us?

The world is getting weirder

When Einstein discovered relativity it changed our experience of reality forever. The laws that had governed our universe fell like dominoes as scientists grappled with new ideas – like:

• nothing is actually physical
• everything is connected to everything else
• we can’t know anything for sure
• our universe is created through our participation

The mysteriously weird quantum realm was first discovered in the early 1900’s. It’s well and truly time we came to grips with it. In fact, we don’t have a choice. It’s here whether we like it or not.

The thing is, quantum reality requires us to shift our thinking about our everyday lives in really profound ways. It affects every aspect of human existence – our consciousness, culture and cosmology.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Niels Bohr, Quantum Physicist

The Myth of the Material World

In the last 100 years, our everyday world has been shown to have a counterpart. Our macro-world of things conceals a micro-world of energy fields and wormholes into other realities. The discovery of a quantum world continues to throw scientists into a state of confusion, because – it completely shifts our view of what reality is.

Take a moment to consider this. We have a highly practical, well-proven version of quantum science – it’s used in USB drives, MRI machines, computers, televisions – that also paradoxically throws everything we know about reality out the window! Quantum mechanics works really well, but no one really knows how or why. It’s a ghost in the machine of our everyday life.

We do know this to be true. In the quantum realm there are no such things as things.

Consciousness creates reality

Every time scientists think they have found the smallest building block of matter, it resolves into something smaller, which in turn reveals itself to be another field of energy. Not a ‘thing’ at all. The science indicates that when these intelligent fields are excited they interject themselves into the physical world as things – tables, humans, zebras.

Who’s doing this excitation of the fields? We are pretty sure humans do it through intention and measurement. If we intend for something and we are measuring whether it happens or not, the field will respond to our intention.

John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, concluded that consciousness doesn’t merely affect reality, it creates reality. And he had the maths to prove it.

Most of us, including scientists, still cling to the idea of a solid world, but all the evidence is against us. And while that evidence has been building over the past 100 years, our sense of identity, our culture and our whole world view is still built firmly upon that dissolving base of materialism.

Which leaves us in a tricky spot really.

If reality isn’t what we’ve always thought it was, and everything we thought was real is dissolving, where to next for humanity? Who is in charge of doing something?

Why doesn’t someone do something?

We used to think we knew who was in charge. It depended on our circumstances and beliefs. Maybe God or Allah. Perhaps the President or some other head of government. It might have been the ‘head’ of your household who got to make the rules.

Quantum science puts the whole idea of who’s in charge into a very weird place. Instead of a ‘head’, we sit amidst nested intelligent fields.

We are, in fact, a whole web of consciousness nested inside other webs of consciousness. You have more cells in your body than galaxies in the universe, nearly 40 trillion. Your cells are miraculously nested into your body, which is nested into your family, community, country …. you get the picture.

No one is in charge!

The important thing is there is no ‘head’ of anything. Just nested webs of intelligence all making choices that radiate out to other webs. This has massive implications, which we’ll talk more about later.

As I was writing this article, in early 2020, it was as if we were stuck in a kind of limbo, wildly looking around wondering … who’s in charge? Why don’t they do something??

But the truth is, there is no one in charge. Which again, leaves us in a tricky place because, well not to put too fine a point on it, we are creatures of obedience brought to the edge of extinction. We are complicit.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

The Dispossessed – Ursula K Le Guin

Who made the rules?

So then, it’s up to us to save ourselves. But surely, there must be some rules? Universal rules or natural rules?

I like to think some Grand Designer created the basic algorithms for our universe and then let consciousness loose to play.

Some people can’t believe in a God they can’t see. But physicists have never actually seen most of the things they study. No one has ever seen a particle or an electron. They’re just too small. Most of what we know about this new reality, we learnt from maths. And sure it looks more like this:

than the math you and I did at school .

The profound nature of maths

Let’s take a moment to appreciate how profound mathematics is. Somehow, and no one really knows how, mathematics describes our universe. Precisely.

We don’t know why mathematics can so accurately describe reality, but it does raise questions about who’s in charge of the universe!

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.

Paul Dirac, Nobel prize winning physicist and mathematician, from his book Picture of Nature.

So we have figured out that the world is made up of interconnecting fields of energy, and that human consciousness draws that energy into the material realm as stuff.

Where do we even go from here!

We are just information fields

The most recent findings in physics suggests that information is a more fundamental property of our world than matter, energy, space and time. We have been persuaded that we live in a random world, but it seems that everything manifest in our reality arises from a deeply ordered level of non-physical source.

That includes you and I!

Most of us, including scientists, still cling to the idea of a solid world, but all the evidence is against us. And while that evidence has been building over the past 100 years, our sense of identity, our culture and our whole world view is still built firmly upon that dissolving base of materialism with someone at the ‘head’ calling the shots.

Which brings us to our current tipping point.

We have to completely shift our thinking about the nature of consciousness. There is no one in charge, which means you and I have just as much of a powerful role in this shift as anyone else.

Science of Consciousness

It’s time for us all to stop being spiritual.

Spirituality is a part of an old world consciousness that splits the physical from the non-physical.

In our old reality, we could be spiritual on the weekends, but not at work. Because we don’t want people to think we are weird. We can be spiritual when we are with our friends, but not when talking economics and politics with our family. Or we chose not to inhabit any spirituality at all because it’s all woo woo, superstitious nonsense.

That split in our realities is coming to an end. We are realising consciousness-in-form. And the science totally supports me on this.

I talked earlier about the material world dissolving, about it not being real. That’s not strictly true.

Life is not an illusion

In Human Design, Ra Uru Hu taught that our world is an illusion. It’s a common spiritual teaching – the maya, the illusion of physical form. This is a dangerous and disempowering idea at this dawn of a new era of consciousness.

What we see now is that it is not so much an illusion as a denser dimensional version of a reality that arises from the unified field. Stay with me. There are three layers –

• Layer 1: the unified or quantum field, where everything is pure potential and there is no form. It’s likely this field exists outside our universe, but permeates it completely.
• Layer 2: the level of conscious creation, where the template of form arises from the unified field
• Layer 3: material reality – a dense physical version of layer 2.

So reality is not so much an illusion as an unfolding of a more subtle reality, which in turn is called forth by consciousness. More

Your quantum brain

Science is increasingly having to acknowledge that our physical brains do not have the capacity for this type of consciousness. But if consciousness doesn’t happen in our heads, where does it happen?

What if our brains are part of a holographic network of consciousness? It makes sense, because how else are we accessing that second level – the place where form is drawn forth from the unified field?

What if our brains have both a physical component – the local network, and a non-physical or quantum component – the non-local network that connects us to unified consciousness? This is called the holonomic brain theory, and it has a lot of support in the scientific community.

Might we be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness – of happiness, pain, love, beauty, etc – fit into such a computational picture?

Sir Roger Penrose, Mathematical Physicist

If our brains are connected to the unified field, who’s doing the thinking? Maybe us. Perhaps guided by some kind of divine universal algorithm on a mission. Maybe our minds are instruments of universal creation and we are only just learning what they are really for. Is there a greater purpose to our thinking, to our conscious awareness?

The Grand Design

Science has recently come to the point of openly asking the most important question of all – is there a Grand Design?

To quote astrophysicist Erich Jantsch:

Mind co-ordinates the space-time structure of matter.

Erich Jantsch, The Self Organising Universe.

That’s a pretty spectacular claim.

What if we are just at the beginning of growing into our capacity for conscious creation? What if this is why we can’t rely on our leaders anymore? Because we are stepping into a new relationship with consciousness, and it is initiating our personal capacity to create. At a universal level.

The consciousness within you wants to witness itself in it’s own creations. You want to experience the process of bringing your desires to frution. To do this, we must become aware of our unique and individual desires by tuning into the multitude of awareness systems each of us possess.

But if we allow ourselves to know all we can know, to be aware of all our inner intelligence, to fully inhabit our own desires, what then?

We must give ourselves the kind of freedom of thought and experience of self that goes against all the old rules of religion, and even most spiritual practice.

We have to step beyond our current culture. This is where we are right now, standing on the emergent edge of epochal cultural shift.

On the Edge of Culture

Every culture around the world is based on spirituality and religion. The archetypes of religion shape us all, even if we have never attended church in our lives.

The Culture Hack

The human brain couldn’t get any bigger and still make it through the birth canal. So life, in her clever way, created an evolutionary hack and called it culture. We got smarter by hanging out with others. We learnt to read and write and cook and build things. We made rules and created religion.

Building Blocks of Culture

Consider the effect of the cultural meme – survival of the fittest. It informs conservative policy in many parts of the world and has huge impacts on humanity.

What about the machine metaphor? The Cartesian idea that the world is a clock and that we are cogs in the machine, it took powerful hold at the time of the Industrial Revolution, just as many left the natural rural environment and were plugged into mechanised assembly lines.

These two ideals underpin so much we call culture – the rules for being a good citizen, being responsible, upholding the values and the laws.

But they also blinded us to important creative qualities, notably caring and play. Over time humans developed a deep belief that we would only survive if we obey those who are ‘fitter’ – more money, power, influence, closer to God.

The more widgets you produce, the better cog you are, the more deserving you are of survival (and the benefits thereof).

Becoming a living thing

As an ideal widget you have little personal autonomy over your life. You get kudos for ignoring your own inner truth. Being ‘normal’ is rewarded, fitting in essential.

As we begin to free ourselves from the trap of regimentation, we are discovering the practical benefits of recognising ourselves as living systems. It’s becoming almost impossible not to notice that we are forcing ourselves into a kind of slavery, being captured by a data rich world.

Living systems have the qualities of self-determination, self-organisation, self-renewal. While mechanised systems are built for a particular purpose – to manufacture some kind of widget, living systems (you, me, Gaia) are here for the purpose of creation.

What’s love got to do with it?

Charles Darwin believed the next level of human evolution was moral intelligence – an increasing capacity to care for each other.

Your body and brain were made for love, and made to benefit from loving. Learn to seek love out more frequently and it can elevate you, your community, and our world far beyond what you and I can today envision.

Barbara Fredrickson, PH.D (2013) Love 2.0: How our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do and Become. P192

The underpinnings of our existing culture are dissolving. With what shall we replace them?

The Moral Arc of Evolution

Most people imagine the phrase survival of the fittest to be an accurate statement of Darwin’s mapping of evolution. Darwin’s book On The Origin of Species is considered the foundation of evolutionary biology.

However, Darwin wrote another book specifically about human evolution, which he distinguished from all other forms of evolution. That book is called The Descent of Man.

In this lesser known work, and in his personal journals, Darwin builds an extraordinary theory of human evolution where the drive towards goodness is as powerful as the physical drive of hunger. Now if you are thinking, well that’s all nice and everything, but …

Lynn Margulis, leading authority in evolutionary biology, has questioned why ‘evolution’ would make such a huge investment in sex. It’s not necessary for reproduction, so what purpose does it serve?

Margulis says that organisms engaging in sex were forced to go beyond pure self-involvement to look to and care for the other. We began to care for our young, for each other, and we learnt to play.

From the standpoint of human evolution, no development could have been more fundamental than the capacity for play.

Paul MacLean, Neuroscientist, who devised the concept of the Triune Brain

Darwin takes that early emotional capacity for care and play, and draws the conclusion that if we are to have passion, we must also develop a conscience. Paul MacLean believes our emotional brain, more recently coupled with the prefrontal cortex, creates a visionary neural ladder for ascending from the most primitive sexual feeling to the highest level of altruistic behaviour.

This human conscience creates a moral imperative to evolution, that we become more caring. It leads us to risk our lives for others, and impels us to a deep feeling of right, or duty to some great cause.

Abandoning the Iron Age Gods

While the old forces of the Iron Age Gods demand complete obedience as they send you off to build more widgets, evolution has other plans. Love, creativity, pleasure, free will and play are high on her agenda.

Our current version of leadership has its roots in the Abrahamic religions that arose about 3000 years ago, and from which Judaism, Christianity and Islam arose. Based on God’s test of Abraham’s obedience, this type of leadership requires utter obedience.

In the old tribal energy the survival of the tribe was more important than the survival of the individual.

As we come blinking into the light of a new reality, we are discovering a new kind of creative free will and are no longer prepared to live by these old Iron Age tribal rules.

In the collective energy – a web of intelligent consciousness that I call the Matrix of Brilliance – the more you shine as your beautiful unique individual self, the more the collective as a whole flourishes.

And as it turns out, there is science to support this idea of the Matrix of Brilliance. David Bohm’s plasma theory brings a fourth state of matter (beyond gas, liquid and solids) into play.

Plasma functions in a collective way, oscillating as a whole. Yet it is built out of particles, each of which moves freely with its own individual movement.

David Bohm

What does it mean to create a new culture? There is no top down ‘command and control’, no fixed outcomes you must work towards. Instead you are here to become more and more aware of your personal blueprint for creation and to imprint that upon our collective material reality.

The pathway from here requires each one of us to attune to what we truly know – our own inner mystery. We have to learn to use our imagination to create a new world beyond the worn out old limitations of the one we are accustomed to.

It’s time to be uncompromising in caring, in loving, in playing, in refusing to continue to participate in a world that denies the truth of what humanity is capable of.

Each one of your has a unique and specific intelligence, a particular part to play in this transition. You have your invitation. I know, because you are here.