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Peter Russell discusses the crumbling barriers between science and spirituality, and what contemporary research may be telling us about the origin and nature of consciousness.
Western science has had remarkable success in explaining the functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind, it has very little to say. And when it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if minds did not exist. Yet without minds there would be no science. This ever-present paradox may be pushing Western science into what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift – a fundamental change in worldview.
Peter is one of the leading thinkers on consciousness and contemporary spirituality and author of a number of books including From Science to God: A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness, Waking Up in Time: Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change and The Global Brain: The Awakening Earth in a New Century. He believes that the critical challenge today is to free human thinking from the limited beliefs and attitudes that lie behind so many of our problems – personal, social, and global. His mission is to distil the essential wisdom on human consciousness found in the world’s various spiritual traditions, and to disseminate their teachings on self-liberation in contemporary and compelling ways.
Peter is a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, of The World Business Academy and of The Findhorn Foundation, and an Honorary Member of The Club of Budapest.
www.peterrussell.com
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Tangerine Dream ‘Cloudburst Flight’

Former oilfield executive Ian R Crane has engaged industry sources and independent researchers to lay the foundations for his investigations into fracking – mining of shale and coal seam gas. Ian asks whether this ‘miracle’ of nature really will be the solution to our nation’s energy problems. Is it going to be the best thing for us since North Sea gas, or are there hidden dangers which could impact upon communities in ways which need open discussion?
Across the UK, a backdrop of unemployment, national debt and austerity is creating a distraction from more long-term problems. While such issues will take decades to address, the potential hazards brewing in the background, which the wider public remain complacent about, are likely to take centuries to put right. Ian considers whether corporate profits are being put ahead of the health, safety and the well-being of our natural environment. We are subjected to increasing restrictions on food and health choices, all in the name of protecting us. We have more surveillance and monitoring to safeguard us, and further restrictions on the media are forthcoming. Are such actions justified, and considering our safety is supposedly paramount in these areas, will fracking be subjected to equal levels of caution?
Our national debt has risen by 4%, from 82% to 86% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), despite all the austerity measures put in place – creating a trillion dollar debt. As economic experts will tell you, once it goes beyond 100% (UK debt greater than annual turnover) our problems will escalate. Is fracking a short-term gain for a long-term loss? A credit crunch turned into an environmental crunch, while bankers’ bonuses continue to increase?
Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda are being fought and funded by the West at one and the same time, and yet the people of Britain just shrug their shoulders. Are we heading towards another World War, and if so, who actually is the enemy? Given the virtually unlimited resources supposedly available via fracking worldwide, will global peace break out, or will this represent the beach-head in the next battle for energy supremacy?
Ian R Crane is an ex-oilfield executive who now lectures, writes and broadcasts on the geopolitical webs that are being spun; with particular focus on US Hegemony and the New World Order agenda for control of global resources.
www.ianrcrane.com
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Brad Fiedel ‘Terminator 2’ OST

Paul Levy discusses his book Dispelling Wetiko – Breaking the Curse of Evil.
There is a contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the human soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently manifesting itself in the form of unprecedented conflicts and crises on a global scale. This collective psychosis or mental virus – which Native Americans have called wetiko – covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering us oblivious to our own madness and compelling us to act against our own best interests.
Wetiko distorts our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge, acting through us while simultaneously remaining hidden. Unconstrained by conventional laws of time and space, this ‘bug’ in the system deceives us by working with the projective tendencies of our mind to appear external to and other than ourselves. Thus, the conflicts and crises which threaten the collapse of political, social and economic systems, and perhaps even of the biosphere itself, are nothing less than a revelation of our own internal darkness, the side of our nature that we all too often deny. Quantum physics is now revealing to us the dreamlike nature of reality and, as with our dreams at night, events in the so-called waking world are symbolically reflecting a condition deep within the psyche of humanity.
Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko is both a profound truth and an antidote, which once recognized can help us awaken and restore sanity to society. Whether wetiko destroys our species or catalyses a deeper process of global awakening depends upon recognizing what it is revealing to us about ourselves.
Paul Levy is a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence and an innovator in the field of dreaming. A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years, he has studied with some of the greatest spiritual masters of Tibet and Burma. He is the author of The Madness of George W Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, as well as Wetiko: The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity.
www.awakeninthedream.com
Other interviews with Paul Levy
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’The Damned ‘The Year of the Jackal’

Dean Puckett discusses his latest film Grasp the Nettle, a documentary which follows the exploits of a ragtag band of land rights activists in London as they struggle against corporations, government, police – and themselves – in their efforts to create alternative communities outside the framework of consumer society.
When an eco-village pops up on a piece of disused land in West London, Dean gives up everything – his flat, job and normal life – to live among its eclectic inhabitants in an effort to understand what makes them tick. Before he knows it, he is pulled into an epic, inspiring and at times harrowing journey of discovery, as he follows the villagers from the suburbs to the heart of London outside the Palace of Westminster, where they occupy Parliament Square. Their ranks swelled by the homeless, the visionaries and eccentrics of the new-found Democracy Village clash with authority, and each other, as they grapple with how to balance their ideals of freedom with the increasing chaos around them.
Shot over three years in the aftermath of the 2008 banking collapse, Grasp the Nettle is an intimate exploration of the rise and fall of two radical social experiments, pioneered by the loved and the lost of a city reeling from the impact of economic and ecological crisis. In the process, it asks hard questions about the nature of freedom and the meaning of activism in these ‘interesting times’.
www.graspthenettlefilm.comwww.deaddeanfilms.co.uk
Related interview:Nafeez Ahmed
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Jim Holt discusses his book Why Does the World Exist? ‘Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?’ remains the most curious and enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving beyond the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, celebrated essayist Holt enters this fascinating debate with a broad, lively and deeply informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. With sly humour and a highly original personal approach, Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective. Suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang, he tracks down, among others, an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Nobel Laureate physicist, a French Buddhist monk, and novelist John Updike just before he died, to pursue this cosmic puzzle from every angle. As he pieces together a solution – while offering useful insights into time, consciousness, and eternity – he sheds fascinating new light on the meaning of existence.
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Cwtch ‘Identities, Realities, Values’

Author James Swagger on his book The Newgrange Sirius Mystery: Linking Passage Grave Cosmology with Dogon Symbology. Topics discussed include archaeology, astronomy, alternative history, rock art, Atlantis, Hyperborea and lost civilizations, The Deluge and sunken land masses, polar shifts, solar flares, entheogens and altered states of consciousness, and the design and purpose of megalithic sites throughout Europe.
James was first introduced to topical science writing for a historical mysteries magazine in Ireland. This whetted his appetite for researching ancient knowledge and lost science, and he initially sought out the megalithic monuments of Western Europe in his spare time. His embrace of a multidisciplinary approach to the research of megalithic sites, and the larger view of passage grave cosmology, produced his first book, The Newgrange Sirius Mystery.
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Klaus Schulze ‘Stardancer II’

Tammy Strobel on her book You Can Buy Happiness (and It’s Cheap): How One Woman Radically Simplified Her Life and How You Can Too.
While the new field of happiness research makes headlines, and the 99% face austerity at every turn, blogs like The Art of Nonconformity, Zen Habits, and Miss Minimalist attract millions looking to find more happiness, community, and fulfilment in less stuff, less debt, and less wage-chasing. Tammy Strobel and her husband are living the voluntary downsizing or smart-sizing dream and in You Can Buy Happiness, she combines research on well-being with numerous real world examples to offer practical inspiration. Her fresh take on our things, our work, and our relationships spell out micro-actions that anyone can take to step off the getting-and-spending treadmill and into a life that’s more conscious and connected, sustainable and sustaining, heartfelt and happy.
Tammy blogs regularly at www.rowdykittens.com
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Steve Roach ‘Structures from Silence’

Dr. Amit Goswami discusses some of the ideas and concepts in his book God Is Not Dead: What Quantum Physics Tells Us about Our Origins and How We Should Live.
Dr. Goswami’s hypothesis is that quantum physics holds the key to all the unsolved mysteries of biology – the nature and origin of life, fossil gaps of evolution, why evolution proceeds from simple to complex, and why biological beings have feeling and consciousness. In God Is Not Dead, Goswami moves beyond theory and shows how a God-based science puts ethics and values where they belong: at the centre of our lives and societies. He provides a scientific model that steers between scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism; a model that has implications for how we live both individually and collectively.
Dr. Goswami is a theoretical nuclear physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Oregon, where he taught for 30 years. He was featured in the hit movie What the Bleep Do We Know? and in Who’s Driving the Dream Bus? He is the author of many books, including The Self-Aware Universe, and is considered the founder of the new paradigm of science called science within consciousness.
www.amitgoswami.orgwww.quantumactivist.com
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Klaus Schulze ‘Schwanensee I’

Author Thomas Sheridan on his latest book The Anvil of the Psyche.
This is a two part interview. Part one is here.
Ask yourself: what is popular culture? How does it come into existence? How do universally accepted ideas of art and creativity, mass media, publishing and financial constructs, and political and social doctrines arise? Are mass social and cultural movements – coupled with one’s personal and social identity – always a natural flow of social, economic, philosophical, spiritual and artistic threads of the collective human experience? Do they organically emerge from the underground to gradually become mainstream cultural and social consensus? And from these options and opinions, do we pick and choose objectively? Do we, as the consumer, the investor, the voter make our individual decisions, affiliations, allegiances and even our emotional attachments, determined exclusively by our own choices? The answer to all these questions is NO!
In The Anvil of the Psyche, Thomas Sheridan seeks to show us how controlled we really are, the often detrimental effects this has upon us, and what we can do to build a firewall for our minds. Topics discussed include politics, sport, advertising, mainstream media, personal identity and perception, magic and symbolism, conceptual and modern art, Hollywood, and popular music including The Beatles, Lady Gaga and U2.
www.thomassheridanarts.comIllustration by David Dees
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’

Author Thomas Sheridan on his latest book The Anvil of the Psyche.
This is a two part interview. Click here for part two.
Ask yourself: what is popular culture? How does it come into existence? How do universally accepted ideas of art and creativity, mass media, publishing and financial constructs, and political and social doctrines arise? Are mass social and cultural movements – coupled with one’s personal and social identity – always a natural flow of social, economic, philosophical, spiritual and artistic threads of the collective human experience? Do they organically emerge from the underground to gradually become mainstream cultural and social consensus? And from these options and opinions, do we pick and choose objectively? Do we, as the consumer, the investor, the voter make our individual decisions, affiliations, allegiances and even our emotional attachments, determined exclusively by our own choices? The answer to all these questions is NO!
In The Anvil of the Psyche, Thomas Sheridan seeks to show us how controlled we really are, the often detrimental effects this has upon us, and what we can do to build a firewall for our minds. Topics discussed include politics, sport, advertising, mainstream media, personal identity and perception, reality TV, subliminal messages and popular music including Elvis and Michael Jackson.
www.thomassheridanarts.com
Illustration by David Dees
Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’Brian Hodgson ‘The Mind Robber’