Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, I am so excited that my guest is Dr. Jude Currivan. Let me tell you a little bit about Jude. She’s a cosmologist, a planetary healer, and a futurist. She’s someone that I met a few months ago in an online conference. And within seconds of hearing her speak, I knew she needed to be a guest on Insights at the Edge.
She has a master’s degree in physics from Oxford University and a doctorate in archeology from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. She’s traveled to more than 80 countries, worked with wisdom keepers from many different traditions, and has been a lifelong researcher into the nature of reality. She’s the author of six books, most recently The Cosmic Hologram and a new book. It’s called The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet. Jude, welcome.
Jude Currivan: Thank you, Tami. It was so wonderful to be with you online. And when I heard you, I thought, “This is an incredible woman,” so I’m just delighted that we’re here together today.
TS: I want to start with getting behind your eyes a little bit if I can. And what I mean by that is in reading a bit about your life and learning that from a young age you had access to multidimensional awareness and intelligence, and now you’ve studied so much science, physics, archeology, I want to understand in this hour that we have together if I can, and if our listeners can, how you see things. How you see things, how you experience things, how you see and sense this evolutionary time that we’re in. So this is a big open question. But if you will, take me a bit here at the start inside Dr. Jude Currivan.
JC: I’m not sure I’d welcome anybody into that experience. But yes, we all see through our own eyes, don’t we? And for me, my eyes have seen, since I was four years old, reality perhaps in quite different ways than a lot of other people do.
And yeah, I know that it’s not that I’m unique. I know we all have this natural attribute. It’s just that for so many of us, our explorations as very young kids often—I don’t know if you had an imaginary friend, or whether you saw lights around people, or whether you had experiences that were natural to you and yet perhaps not so for other folks.
But for me, I’ve been what I call “walking between worlds” since that very early age. Because from then, I could see auras around people. I was having precognitive dreams. I was having out-of-body experiences. And when I was four years old, a light came into my room. A discarnate light came into my room, and I heard a voice. And that voice and those many voices have been with me all my life. But it’s been a much more interesting journey from that point onwards, because from then, I realized that the appearance of our world was not its deeper or grander reality, beautiful that it is.
And so my journey from very early on was that curiosity. Well, if I was experiencing reality in these ways, and yet when I went to school, I was being taught something quite different, was I crazy? Was it just my imagination? Or was there something deeper at play here?
And what I turned to, to help me navigate this walking between worlds, was ancient wisdom. It wasn’t the science of the day or even today’s science to some degree, although that’s absolutely on the threshold of revolution now. But it was the ancient wisdom, especially that of ancient Egypt and ancient India and ancient China. And when I started to read the writings of ancient India, I started to realize that what they were describing was the way I was experiencing the world.
So that really encouraged me to keep going and to not feel that I was crazy. And also, I was continuing to have all of these incredible experiences of what are now being called “supernormal phenomena,” but then would’ve been called “para-supernatural” or “paranormal phenomena.” Now it’s much more supernormal phenomena. So that’s the lens through which I don’t just see the world—it’s my world.
TS: Can you tell me, when you say supernormal experience, can you give me an example of something to make it real?
JC: Telepathic communication. Synchronicities are supernormal. Because the old paradigm of science—a science of materiality and separation—doesn’t have any place for telepathy or precognitive dreams or out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences or synchronicities. It doesn’t have a place for our intuition. That’s what I mean. And intuition is perhaps our most pervasive superpower, but all of these are supernormal.
TS: Now, why I am so excited to talk with you is that I’ve spoken—through the course of Insights at the Edge, I’ve done almost 1,000 interviews at this point—with people who have the kind of multidimensional access that you’re describing, but not a single one who has the cosmological background, research, and intelligence that you have.
So putting this all together is what I’m really excited about. And I’d like to understand when you talk about the “big breath” and renaming the big bang the big breath, why that’s important, how that changes our view of what we’re doing here.
JC: I think it really does change our view. And the reason is, I guess as you said, when you were at school, when I was at school, kids still at school are still taught that our universe began with a big bang. And we know it wasn’t big. That was just a facetious name. But when we use the word “bang,” it’s implicit that it’s chaotic. It was an explosion, really random without meaning. And that’s been the cosmology that we grew up with, that our universe began a long time ago—we now know something like 13.8 billion years—as a big bang.
So the whole cosmology, the whole way in which we view the world seen through that paradigm of science, is a world without meaning or purpose. Beginning with a chaotic big bang, somehow evolving from simplicity to complexity, somehow with consciousness arising from brains way down the line. But essentially, all of it as part of a random unfolding.
And now that’s being turned completely on its head. We now know that, yes, our universe began 13.8 billion years ago. But instead of a chaotic big bang, it began as I describe it as the first moment of an exquisitely fine-tuned, amazingly ordered, and meaningful big breath, an ongoing big breath. So ever since, as space has expanded, and times flow from past to present to future, that big breath of our universe has continued. And so our universe is being shown with evidence at all scales of existence now and across many fields of research to meaningfully exist and purposefully evolve.
So when we talk about the big breath, not only does it embody that meaning and purpose, but it also brings that vastness of our universe’s big breath breathing through us in every moment of our breath. So it brings that incredible story of our universe into intimate relationship through our breath. And that’s why it feels that it has such an “aha” potential to really experience that relationship. And that knowing that if our universe has innate meaning and evolutionary purpose, so do we.
TS: There’s so much here, Jude. And I’m a little nervous, to be honest, that I am going to sound highly uneducated about astronomy, cosmology. And the truth is I am. But I want to ask you my really genuine questions and trust in that. Which is something, whether it’s the big bang or the big breath, a place where my understanding goes into fuzzy existential confusion and a kind of angst is, so what was there before? How does something come from nothing? How does a breath start when there wasn’t a breath? And I wonder what your understanding is of that.
JC: It’s a perfectly appropriate question. It’s a question we’re still asking. As cosmologists, we don’t have the answer. As someone who has played in the nature of consciousness all my life, I would suggest that we can reframe our universe from being a great object to what Edwardian scientist Sir James Jeans called “a great thought.” So our universe is a great thought, a finite thought in the infinite and eternal mind of God, of great spirit, of great mystery, of cosmos, of cosmic mind.
And again, this is how the ancient Indian sages perceived the nature of reality, that mind and consciousness aren’t something we have. They’re literally what we and the whole world are. So their description is of an infinite eternal cosmos. And from that cosmos—they would have not defined in these terms, but I actually believe they understood this in their sense—thoughts that we call universes arise. And in that infinity and eternity, they arise in a way that enables our universe as a great thought to exist and evolve in a meaningful way, from simplicity to complexity. And as a whole unified entity.
Literally, within a thought, you can’t separate anything out. It is the wholeness of that thought, is that continuation of that thought, whether it’s, “What am I going to have for breakfast?” to “Oh my gosh, I’m in love with this person.” It’s a thought. And the way that we think are microcosms, microcosmic cocreators of the universe’s thought, the great thought that is our universe.
TS: So I notice I feel incredibly uncomfortable considering the universe as a “thought,” as a thought. I feel so uncomfortable with that. When you were talking about it not being random, but instead being meaningful, I felt good inside. I was like, “Yes, it’s meaningful. I always sense that.” But when you say it’s a thought, what occurs to me is that feels so ephemeral, so insignificant, here then not here, just made up. To be honest with you, Jude, I don’t get that. Help me.
JC: You don’t get it because you’re thinking in terms of human thought, not universal thought. And to say the difference is like taking a cell of your body and your whole body. It’s a difference in absolute scale of what that means.
And when I talk about a thought—and there is a lot of evidence for this, I’m not just speaking philosophically, I’m being based on the best evidence we now have—is that the appearance of our universe, its energy and matter and its space and time are real, but they’re not its deeper fundamental reality. Those appearances arise from realms of causation that we would describe as discarnate. They’re not physical in that sense, but realms of intelligence and causation. Meaningfully at the most minute scale. But then that scale of that meaningful information of that thought becomes the atoms, the molecules, the stars, the galaxies, the planets, the plants, the people of reality.
And when you say “ephemeral,” it’s not ephemeral in the sense that it’s just passing, but it is so in the sense that when we drill down, as cosmologists, as scientists, when we drill down smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, when we get down to the scales of atoms… You and I were both taught that atoms are rather like miniature billiard balls, with billiard ball electrons going around, billiard balls nuclei of atoms. That’s not what atoms are like at all. When we drill down, there’s literally 99.999999999999% no thing-ness. What is, is relationships. And relationships of information. And those relationships of information are exquisite, are fine-tuned. They are essentially the relationships we call the laws of physics.
But from those, that meaningful underpinning causative intelligence that is our universe emerges as its appearance, of everything that we call energy, matter, and space-time.
TS: So our universe isn’t random. There’s meaning in it. Some kind of evolutionary, could we say, directionality? And if so, what is that directionality?
JC: I would say yes. And I would say there’s a huge amount of evidence. The way that the universe came into being at that first moment of the big breath, the fine-tuning was extraordinary. I mean, if the balances of the relationships between what was coming into manifestation was different by no more than one in a trillion, more than a trillion, trillion times. I mean, it was so extraordinary.
But what that did is it didn’t just enable our universe to meaningfully exist. It gave it an innate and embodied evolutionary impulse, to evolve from simplicity to ever greater complexity. So over this nearly 14 billion years’ evolutionary journey, we’ve gone from this simplicity of the simplest of atoms over hundreds of million years to being shepherded by cosmic sound, by the primordial arm of our universe, and by magnetic electric fields and gravity into the first stars. And the stars then into generations of stars and galaxies and black holes.
And when those stars lived their lives, used up all their nuclear fuel, and that process itself was enabling those very simple early atoms of hydrogen and helium to then alchemize, to transmute into carbon and oxygen and nitrogen—all the elemental abundance that makes us up. When those massive stars died, they exploded, and they shared that elemental abundance with the interstellar medium. And so after 9 billion years within galaxies, interstellar clouds of molecules and ice were forming, right to the threshold of biological emergence, but not there. Because they were forming in outer space. They could form so far in terms of that complexity.
But then what happened is further supernova, their explosive shockwaves collapsed areas of these clouds to form planetary systems. That happened to us in our system 5.5 billion years ago. And again, not in chaos, not randomly. Those shockwaves were perfect in the sense of their strength and their frequency to shock that cloud into a harmonic disc, with a central star to form, and planets surrounding it in harmonic orbits that over time became our planetary system.
And that enabled the next level of complexity to emerge, because you can only get biological organisms with all that we need to exist and evolve on planetary homes with water, with sufficient gravity, with sufficient stability, with sufficient warmth and heat able to do that. And that’s what’s happened. And here we are today.
So that’s what I mean by the evolutionary directionality from that initial simplicity. Every step of the way to us and our planetary home. And many, many, many other planetary homes likely to be not just within our own galaxy, but throughout the universe.
TS: And what do you see as the inherent value, we could say cosmic value, of this increasing complexity? Here we are, the value of the human species, if you will, the great destroyers of so much of our ecosystem currently. What’s our value in this evolutionary thought?
JC: Well, given that in this perspective, everything in existence has meaning and purpose and therefore value, we’ve come to a point where our planetary home, Gaia, has nurtured the emergence of biological life for the last 4 billion years. She’s managed as a planetary mother to enable that incredible evolutionary arc of complexity. And it’s not been plain sailing by any stretch. There’ve be catastrophic breakdowns and breakthroughs. That evolutionary emergence has pulsed forward.
And we are now that benefactor. We are incredibly privileged as benefactors of that amazing evolutionary journey of both our planetary home but the whole universe. Our story is the story of our universe. The hydrogen in our bodies is only a few moments younger than our entire universe. The water in our bodies, the water in Gaia’s seas and rivers and oceans.
A recent analysis showed that at least half of that is older than our sun, older than our planetary system, came from those interstellar clouds. This has been an incredible assemblage, purposeful, intentional, directional, to bring us to this point. This is our value.
Our evolutionary journey to this point has been nurtured with such incredible, I’m going to say, love and benevolence to this point. And yet we’ve forgotten, it seems to me, who we are.
So we’ve actually been going through a journey where we’ve bought into the appearance of our universe of separation and not remembering its deeper wholeness. And that to me is a disease of separation that’s driven so much of our dysfunctional behaviors.
So our value is inherent, but our value is even more destined to be of that, if we can wake up to remember we’re inseparable and grow up to become and evolve to become coevolutionary partners with our planetary home, Gaia, and with our whole universe.
TS: One of the other points that you make in The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet that has stuck with me and made me seriously uncomfortable is the notion that our universe is finite. This growth and greater and greater complexity, all interconnected, purposeful, has a finitude to it.
And I think what that brings up for me, and part of the reason I asked where’s this all taking us, is, OK, it’s finite. I come to the same question of—it’s a terrible question. Who cares? Who cares? It’s finite. Who cares? When it was random, someone could say, “Come on, it’s random. Who cares?” Now I believe it’s deeply meaningful, but I’ve still come to the who cares thought. Can you help me with this, Jude?
JC: I guess it comes to a sense of our own journey of life. We are finite beings, at least in our human form. If we are spiritual beings having a human journey, our human journey per se is finite. Does that negate our value? Does that negate our purpose in being here? Does that mean nothing? I would say no. It means everything to have the privilege of this earth walk.
Universes per se—and again, I’m going with the best evidence we have at the moment. Our universe began in a finite time frame, 13.8 billion years ago. It began as a finite extension in space and time, because the best cosmology now is that our universe manifests itself holographically as a cosmic hologram. It’s real, but that’s the way cosmic mind has created this incredible experience of a universe.
So if we go beyond our universe, beyond the space-time of our universe, beyond its manifestation as a finite thought form, we go then into the infinity and eternity of cosmic mind. And what we do there is we perceive perhaps that from the ground of being, from God, creates and is cocreated through the emergence of universes.
Because in this perspective, everything is cosmic mind. Everything is God. Everything is part of an infinite eternal plenum, ground of all being. But it’s from that, that finite universes experience themselves.
And what happens then at the end of a finite universe is not that its experience, its informational expression, is lost, but perhaps we can start to consider it as the end of a thought bubble, where that bubble just bursts back into the infinity and eternity from which it came. So nothing’s lost. And the best understanding we have from what preceded our universe is that it effectively budded off and from a preceding universe.
So it’s almost like the grandest sense we could ever have of reincarnation, of this ever-ongoing, ever-learning, ever-evolving way of universes and the cosmos knowing itself through its experiential expressions of knowing.
TS: Now, you used the phrase “the cosmic hologram.” And of course, that’s the title of one of your previous books. Help us understand this holographic nature of the cosmos.
JC: OK. Well, that started with the study of black holes. Because there was a big question in cosmology, is that when a massive star at the end of its life has run out of nuclear fuel, it can’t support itself. It can’t support its bulk anymore. It gravitationally collapses. But when stars are very massive, that gravitational collapse can’t stop. It just keeps on going, and keeps on going, and keeps on going.
And a point comes where that inflow, that in-fall, is so powerful. The gravitational force is so powerful, there’s a point reached where not even light can escape. A threshold is reached beyond which not even light can escape. And that’s called the event horizon.
And when you look at a black hole, it’s the spherical shape of what the original star would be. Its surface is that threshold, that event horizon. And within that is blackness, because you can’t see it, because even light can’t escape.
So cosmologists were asking ourselves, “What happens to all the life story of that star? All the information that that star has lived through to that point, is it lost?” Because if it’s lost, there’s a major issue, because it means that quantum physics can’t work at all. I won’t go down that rabbit hole, because you need at least a lot of science to go down there. But basically, if the information is lost, then the whole world can’t work as we thought it did in terms of quantum physics.
And what we’ve now discovered is it’s not lost. All that information is held on that surface area, that event horizon of the black hole. Now that is weird, because what you’d think is that the information—you think of information in a book. If a book’s thicker, if it has the same font, if it has more pages, information is proportional to its volume. But the point of this is the information is proportional to the surface area, the two-dimensional surface area, of a black hole. And so people started to think, “Well, where have we heard this before? Where have we seen this before?”
Holograms. Because in a hologram, light is shone off a three-dimensional object such as a sphere. And what is bounced back brings back information about that sphere. But the information is captured on a two-dimensional surface. When light is then projected through that two-dimensional surface, a hologram of that three-dimensional object appears, and you can walk around it. Different perspectives. It’s 3D or 3D appearance.
So cosmologists took that understanding of black holes, and they expanded it to the whole of the universe. And created—not created—and discovered something called the holographic principle, whereby all of the appearance of our universe, it’s three-dimensional appearance of space and one-dimensional time, is actually a projection from the boundary of what we call space as a holographic projection. So our universe is essentially a hologram.
And the point of this is with a hologram, the whole of a hologram is reflected in every little part. And what we’re finding is the patterns that describe a human hologram, we’re finding the same patterns of relationships that scale up and scale down throughout the universe. So we’re finding all the evidence that supports this as a very—the best understanding that’s emerging of how our universe is, exists, and evolves.
TS: So if each one of us is holographically connected to the whole, how does that change from your perspective how we treat ourselves, work with ourselves, manage our own beings?
JC: Well first, it means that we’re inseparable. We’re inseparable not just from each other and our planetary home and our solar system, but from literally the whole universe. Our entire universe is innately whole and fundamentally interdependent.
So it means that we can’t keep thinking of ourselves as separate from each other. We can’t keep treating ourselves and our planetary home as though we’re separate from each other. It means that there’s a deeper realization that just as every cell of our bodies—we’re communities, each of us, of something like 37 to 40 trillion cells. Each of our cells is part of that community. In that sense, we can begin to consider ourselves, each of us, as part of the community of our universe, part of the relations, part of citizens of a universal web of life that has meaning and value and purpose. And that, I think, turns everything not just upside down, back to front, but it’s an awakening to who we really are.
And that means also, going back to what we were discussing at the beginning, that we have natural attributes of non-locality. We have natural attributes that can tap into this universal non-local unitive perspective. If we don’t trust our intuition before, this invites us to trust our intuition. It invites us to pay attention to synchronicities. It invites us to open our perception much, much wider than we have done.
Because in so many ways, because we’ve been taught and our societies are based on a mechanistic, materialist paradigm of separation, we’ve closed our eyes, and closed our ears, and closed our sense and our sentience to so much more than we’re able to access.
TS: So Jude, I think I’m able to travel with you to some degree to understand this inherent value of this whole interconnected, miraculous, deeply gorgeous, exquisite, unbelievably designed hologram that we’re a part of. I can kind of get that. When it gets to the notion of purpose, though, I’m still a little having a question mark inside. What’s the purpose of all of this?
JC: I think it’s a very personal question, and you’d have to ask the universe.
TS: What about to you, when you ask the universe?
JC: For me, at the end of The Story of Gaia, my answer to this is that it’s an exploration from unity, to unity in diversity, to an experience of unity in diversity, to a unity in a remembered belonging, to a completed unity.
So in other words, our universe is taking itself on a journey of exploration through its individuated, differentiated aspects that begin in a very differentiated but pretty same-y way as atoms. But the more that complexity has emerged and evolved through our universe, there’s been more and more individuated self-awareness within that wholeness.
So each of us in that sense are representatives, are microcosmic cocreators, of our universe’s exploration of the very nature of its consciousness, its sentience, its possibilities, its potential. That is my response to that.
TS: And then here we are at this moment in time, human beings on Earth, when some people believe that there’s a potential for a sixth extinction of some kind here on Earth. And I wonder from your perspective, from The Story of Gaia, what do you think is at stake here, if you will?
JC: That’s such an important question, because I also hear, Tami, that people say, “If human beings go extinct, Gaia will continue.” And I think it’s both/and.
When I look at the incredible journey of the last 4 billion years of Gaia and how she has continued to nurture the evolution of ever-greater levels of complexity, not just through her biosphere, her biological children, but as a sentient planetary home, whereby everything within her sentience is interdependent and interrelated. So the rocks and minerals of her geosphere, her waters of her hydrosphere, the air of her atmosphere all work in collaborative relationship with her evolving biosphere.
And through that time, in times of stability, there’s been very little progression of evolution. In times of great cycles, of the tilt of Gaia’s orbit, of axis of her elliptical orbit around the sol, there are bigger, longer cycles and there’s been more progression of evolution. And it’s been in times of catastrophic change, of incredibly rapid change, where there’s been both breakdown and breakthrough. And that breakthrough in that breakdown transition has been incredibly rapid.
And so instead of linear evolution through slow changes in DNA—which are not random. They’re not random. They’re always collaborative and guided as part of this whole process. Nonetheless, in those catastrophic times, there’s been incredibly rapid emergence and evolution of greater complexity.
So from all accounts, we are in the throes of a sixth mass extinction, pretty much driven by humanity’s dysfunctional behaviors. And it may well be that if there is that level of breakdown, that to continue that process, Gaia’s innate sentience will drive rapid emergence to great levels of complexity.
But we’re at a time also now where perhaps we are the first of her biological children. We can’t biologically evolve, in the sense that the greater complexity of a biological organism is, it trades off complexity and flexibility. But what we can do is we can consciously evolve. And if we can consciously evolve, for the first time as far as I’m aware in our planet’s story, we are a species that can become coevolutionary conscious, coevolutionary partners with her ongoing emergence.
That’s why it matters. If we go extinct, and the damage we’re doing, she, I think, would do everything possible to get rapid emergence. But we’re probably talking about a number of millions of years to do so.
And why would we do that to our planetary mother? Why would we actively destroy and put an absolute barrier to her ongoing emergence and cause her to go through that level of disruption to continue to evolve? Whereas we do have the opportunity and we do have the choice to wake up and to—
TS: Can you help me understand more what you mean by “conscious evolution”? I don’t feel like I fully appreciate it.
JC: OK. By conscious evolution, I mean the evolution of individuated self-awareness. So if we go back 3.5 billion years, the biological life-forms on Gaia were single-celled. Now they embodied sentience, because our entire universe is sentient. But I don’t think they were probably capable of sending humans to the moon, or having the wisdom identified in the Upanishads, or all that we are able to do. Because we’re communities of 37 to 40 trillion cells each, and we are a community of 8 billion humans.
So that embodies much more self-awareness. And I’m equating self-awareness in that sense with consciousness. So we’ve come as part of that journey to this point. So if we are able to expand our awareness to remember that we’re part of this journey, to remember that we are cocreative microcosms of this incredible evolutionary progress of our universe, that’s what I mean by conscious evolution.
I mean, think back to when we were kids. I’ll try my best to think when I was three, four years old. I can barely remember that, but I did not have the self-awareness that I have now. And I suspect that you didn’t either, because that’s what a life journey is about. We evolve our consciousness. We develop our consciousness. We learn life lessons, we grow, we experience, we explore. And that’s an ongoing process, fast or slow.
So that’s what I mean by conscious evolution on both personal levels, but also collective levels and planetary levels and universal levels.
TS: Jude, I find you to be such a revelatory presenter, teacher, author. And I want to ask you a question I’ve never asked anyone, which is one of the authors that we work a lot with at Sounds True is Caroline Myss. And I’ve spoken a lot to Caroline, and she talks about how her definition of God, that God in her view could be equated with the laws of the universe. If we understand the laws of the universe, we will understand the nature of God. And that makes sense to me. And the question I want to ask you is, what do you think are the most important laws of the universe that we can appreciate?
JC: The law of love. Because if we start to really perceive at its most foundational level, love is about relationship. And our universe is innately related, every part to every other part, and as the whole. So the laws of physics enable those relationships to be played out. It enables those experiences to be played out at ever greater levels of complexity.
And I agree with Caroline. The laws of the universe are the ways by which that incredible journey of evolution and emergence and experience and of a living universe, I would say a loving universe, play out. So they are God, but also the entirety of what is expressed and what can emerge because of those incredible relationships is the wholeness of God.
So when we say E=mc2, it’s so simple. When we look at the laws of physics, we can go into nth degree of complexity. But at their very foundation, they are as simple as they can be, but no simpler, as Einstein said. And I’ve added for the universe to fulfill its evolutionary potential.
And for me, it’s that our universe has evolved its own benevolence through those relationships, through biological organisms, and planetary sentience, and every level of sentience that can experience love. Not in the sentimental way of love, but just in that sense of inter-being, of interdependence that is love.
TS: Now in the very beginning of our conversation, I said I want to have a bit of the experience of getting into the inside of Dr. Jude Currivan. What’s it like? And you said, “Oh my, really? OK.” Something like that.
And as we’re talking, what I’m sensing is what it might be like to feel, appreciate, and know this vast and glorious interconnected being that we are in our hugeness. And I wonder, though, if you can describe that for me. So for you—so, for example, your version of being in an awake or meditative state, whatever you might call that, what that actually feels like to you and what you’re experiencing.
JC: Joy, gratitude. Every morning when I wake up—I’m very fortunate, because I like to sleep with the curtains open. My window of my bedroom looks out over a year into the sunrise each morning and full moonrise. And the other side looks at sunset and moonset. So it’s a lived experience of relationship with the whole world, literally.
I’m a gardener, so it means that this time of year, I’m getting my potatoes ready to put into the ground, and I’m getting my broad bean seeds ready to plant. And that whole process of nurturing a garden, and being loved by a garden, and being able to engage and communicate with the divas to ask for advice. To have conversations with the trees in my garden, to hear their wisdom. That’s my lived experience.
And so for me, I am part of a family of life, just as Indigenous communities feel that way. I mean, you mentioned my journey to more native countries. I’ve worked with the wisdom keepers of many traditions, incarnate and discarnate.
And so for me, my mum used to say I talk with anyone. She didn’t really have the full knowing of who I was really talking with. But it’s that incredible openness of a whole world that I am in relationship with, I’m a relative of, I’m a citizen of. I’m a grateful, loving, joyful participator in. I’m an adventurer in, I’m a child of curiosity in. And a very grateful and joyful child to be so.
TS: I want to call our conversation “The Big Breath of the Universe.” And I want to ask you, at the end of the final exhale, the finitude that we are, do you have a sense of what that will be like?
JC: On a personal level or on a universal level?
TS: Universal.
JC: I suspect by then that all the sentience, all the planetary journeys, will have completed. In a few billion years, our sun is likely to expand, to use his fuel and expand as a red giant. And likely to expand to encompass the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Gaia, possibly Mars.
By then, I don’t know what level of biological sentience there is. But I would say that when we and our sentience get to the end of our lives, our consciousness does not end. It’s rather like at the end of our lives, we take off the clothes of our being human, and we move on to still remain as conscious entities within our ongoing journey of our universe.
So my sense is—and I’ll meet you there one day, one way—that all of the accumulated sentience, experience, evolutionary complexity of the whole story of our universe is there at the end, waiting for a gentle release back into the infinity and eternity from which we come.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Jude Currivan. What a revelatory human and provocative conversation. What I notice is stirred up in me is a deep appreciation of the smallest of the small and the biggest of the big.
Jude Currivan’s the author of The Cosmic Hologram and a more recent book called The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet. What an unusual, great gift of a human you are. I’m so happy to know you.
JC: Thank you, Tami. Thank you.
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