A Unitive Vision For Humanity

Abstract

Marking the centenary of Jan Smuts' Holism and Evolution, cosmologist Dr Jude Currivan argues that a century of scientific evidence has caught up with Smuts' intuition — and that it now points, compellingly, to a universe that is whole. Drawing on her Club of Rome discussion paper The Unitive Science of a Living Universe, she presents the key attributes of this picture: a universe finite in space and time, innately relational rather than made of separate objects, and patterned by self-similar holons (fractals) repeating at every scale, from the cosmic microwave background to galaxies, ecosystems and the internet. She traces the same statistical "power laws" through earthquakes and human conflicts, and walks through black-hole thermodynamics and the holographic principle to the 2018 cosmic-scale non-locality experiment (using 12.2-billion-year-old quasar light) and the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, as evidence that the universe is non-locally unitive and information-based — pixelated at the Planck scale, a "great thought" or living, sentient cosmos.

From this she reframes our "polycrisis" as a metacrisis of worldview, and invites a metamorphosis — the shift from a consuming caterpillar species to a pollinating one — proposing love as a universal principle of coherence and wholeness. A question-and-answer session follows with Jeff Blumberg (Smuts, relativity and the hard problem of consciousness), Marcus Link (storehouse consciousness and evolving archetypes), Michael Stock (hope in an age of anxiety) and Prof Kobus du Pisani (Smuts scholarship and sustainability).

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Transcript

Welcome and recap — Michael Stock

Michael Stock: Good morning, and welcome to our Centenary Festival of Holism and Evolution. Just out of interest, to help us all know where we are, would you like to raise a hand if you were up early, or two hands if you were up very early? Okay, lots of good energy, thank you. My name is Michael Stock, as many of you will know, and Claudius asked me to say a few words at the beginning and at the end of each day. It would help us if you would kindly put where you are in the chat, and, if you would like to, share in a word or two any thoughts about today — and enjoy a deep breath.

You might like to know I'm in Bristol, in the west of England, and I was up very early this morning, which was fantastic, because I got to see a family of young fox cubs that I hadn't seen before, playing about. And on the Bristol theme, I have a neighbour down the road called Martin Dohrn, who was a filmmaker with David Attenborough, and he recently made an absolutely wonderful BBC documentary called My Garden of a Thousand Bees, in which — and you might like this — he patiently observes their lives, observing that bees are obsessed about homes.

Today we have a larger space, with more time, more great speakers, and a tea break after about an hour and a half. We will listen to Dr Jude Currivan with a unitive vision for humanity, then David Lorimer after the break, with inwardness and agency in the evolution of consciousness. And then, lastly, Claudius will be in dialogue with all the presenters.

But first, a quick recap from Marcus Link's extraordinary presentation yesterday, Keystones in the Patterns of Place, described by Benita as eco-poetic — which is a beautiful way, I think, of describing what I experienced as a waterfall of images, poetry, philosophy, history, nature, with a touch of technology, exploring the relationship of our personal footprints and ecological patterns with, sadly, lost connections to a more holistic and older way of knowing and being. For those of you who were on the call, you might have noticed and liked that Klaus and Marcus took slightly different views from straight history about whether the well-known examples of overshoot, exploitation and degradation, like Easter Island, are typical or inevitable. More on that later.

There were two of Marcus's ideas which deeply resonated with me. The first was from William Blake's concept of the imagination — not as escape, but as a way to encounter nature — which tied in with what Jeff Blumberg had told us earlier about Jan Smuts' spiritual views and nature's way. The other thing that resonates still this morning was Marcus's question for us: what kind of storyteller am I, with the footprints of my life? I wonder what question you are holding this morning.

So, as we often like to do, let's take a few deep breaths to enjoy the start of the fourth day in this wonderful Festival of Holism and Evolution.

Introduction — Claudius van Wyk

Claudius van Wyk: Thank you, Michael, for that wonderful recap. It brought back lots of rich feelings for me. I'm deeply honoured to welcome and introduce Dr Jude Currivan.

About ten years ago there was a conference around holistic farming, in London, at the Rural Steiner centre. It was organised by Christopher Cook, and the guest of honour at that stage was Allan Savory, with his holistic management processes — which inspired all sorts of people, including Marcus. But we made a connection there with Jude, Dr Jude Currivan. It's been such a privilege that Jude has addressed us before, that she's going to be addressing us now, and we've had the opportunity of visiting Jude at her lovely home.

So — Jude is a cosmologist. And what is beautiful about that is that chapter 12 of Holism and Evolution was cosmic holism, universal holism. Jude is going to give us the context of that, and how it relates to us personally. She's a planetary healer. She's a futurist — so the liminal space we'll be facing is going to be imagining the future. And she's an award-winning author and filmmaker. She's an Evolutionary Leaders Circle council member, an associate member of the Club of Rome, and previously a senior UK-based international businesswoman. She's a lifelong researcher into the unitive nature of reality, and a co-founder of WholeWorld-View.

We will be offering Jude's paper to the Club of Rome; Michelle will be putting that in the chat box, along with the link to Jude's network, which we encourage you to follow. Jude's work aims to empower collective and planetary healing, and the conscious evolution and transformational change in the world. Jude, it is an honour to have you with us. Over to you.

The talk — Dr Jude Currivan

Dr Jude Currivan: Thank you, Claudius. It's my delight, always, and what a wonderful opportunity for us to gather to honour Jan Smuts, who was such a pioneer of this understanding. I really want to dwell on that a little, and I have some slides to share, and then we can open to questions.

Back in 1926, the prevalent worldview was really that of late-19th-century science: a mechanistic universe, a universe of separation. Even though, by 1926, the quantum physicists and Einstein were already giving us profound clues that that paradigm was no longer valid — that it needed to be both included and transcended — nonetheless, the worldview that drove the Industrial Revolution, and all our structures, were based on that mechanistic perspective. And they still are. A hundred years on from Jan's wisdom, we still have a world run on the idea that our universe is a mechanism.

That wouldn't have been so challenging if it had just been a scientific perspective. But because its technologies were so powerful and drove the Industrial Revolution, they drove our economic and financial system. They pervaded the way we educate our young people — not to educare, not to bring forth what is divinely within them, but to enable them to become cogs in that machine. It pervades our so-called healthcare system, which is actually not a healthcare system so much as a disease system, insofar as it seeks to keep people physically well enough to be those cogs. So Jan's prescience in writing Holism and Evolution was phenomenal, given those surroundings.

What I'd like to share today is how, a hundred years on, the evidence that supports his insights is now so compelling that, as Claudius mentioned, the Club of Rome have invited me to write a paper called The Unitive Science of a Living Universe. Not only the Club of Rome — it's also been adopted by the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organisation founded by Oppenheimer and Einstein and including people like Picasso and many others; and, thirdly, it's been adopted onto the UNESCO Bridging website. So this unitive vision for humanity is now getting some major movement forward.

But, as Newton said, we all stand on the shoulders of giants — and I feel so honoured to stand on shoulders that include Jan Smuts. When he had his insights of patterns and holons and an evolutionary universe, they were fundamentally correct. Some of the evidence I'll share today supports that, but go to the paper, or the books I've written, for vastly more.

Today I really want to invite a question: if we see the world through the lens of wholeness, what changes does that make in our choices and behaviours? Because we've been seeing the world, collectively, through a lens of separation. As a result, I'd suggest we have what I call a dis-ease of separation. That can be turned on its head with all the evidence, and it invites us to ask new questions from this position of wholeness and interdependence — far more even than interconnectedness, a fundamental interdependence within a wholeness. And that's what Smuts saw, a hundred years ago. He doesn't need validation — he was right — but anything I can do to help humanity see that rightness, and be invited into this adventure of what this unitive vision means for us, perhaps to still be able to choose and step into our emergent future as a keynote species on our planetary home: this, for me, is the opportunity the universe is now offering us.

Dr Jude Currivan: [sharing slides] I had to do theoretical physics for my master's at Oxford University, and I specialised in cosmology and quantum physics — because I'd walk into an experiment and it would blow up, or break down, or blow a fuse. So the professor said, "Jude, please, just go away and study theoretical physics. We can't afford you in the laboratory."

This image is taken from the Club of Rome paper, because it shows what the evidence is now revealing: the fundamental attributes that, when they come together, offer a cosmic perspective — a unitive vision that correlates with, underpins and takes forward Jan Smuts' perspectives, not just in the physics of the world but in the metaphysics, the deeper nature of reality.

The first attribute: the evidence now strongly suggests our universe is finite in space and time. It began around 13.8 billion years ago, in a minute state, and ever since — as space has expanded and time has flowed forward — it's undertaken an evolutionary journey. The evidence is that the journey is likely to come to an end; the latest study, only a few weeks ago, suggested perhaps tens of billions of years ahead. So we don't need to make plans for that — we're okay — but it's not likely to be trillions, and it isn't infinite. And yet, as Sir James Jeans once said, we might consider our universe as a great thought — now a great finite thought — in the infinite and eternal mind of God, or cosmic mind, as Einstein would say. So we position our evolutionary journey in the context of a finite journey for our universe, set within an infinite and eternal plenum — God, great mystery, great spirit, whatever term we use — that is ultimately infinite and eternal.

The universe is also innately relational. This converges with universal wisdom teachings and Indigenous teachings: it is not made up of separate objects. It is related, and those relations enable it to be exquisitely fine-tuned, extraordinarily ordered, innately meaningful and purposeful — with those relationships revealed in the holons, the fractal patterns, that pervade space-time and show up at all scales. We see them when clusters of atoms phase-transition from a metal to an insulator and the electrons cluster in these holonic patterns. We see them in ranges of mountains, clouds and weather patterns; in the solar wind, which is fractal; in galactic structures and vast clusters of galaxies; and in the relic radiation left over from a very early epoch — about 380,000 years into the story of our universe, when space had expanded and cooled enough to become transparent to light. In that relic radiation we see the holonic, fractal patterns, which is so beautiful. So what Jan saw, we now have the evidence for, at all these scales. They scale up and down, and they nest in each other — from atoms and molecules to stars and galaxies, to planets and plants and people.

And we see them not just in natural systems like ecosystems. The same patterns underpin human-made systems such as the internet — the same nodes, the same relationality, the same multi-level holonic, holarchic relationships. We see them in the so-called power laws that describe the relationship between the frequency of a phenomenon and its destructive or creative power: in how cities grow in population density, how galaxies grow in the density of stars. When we graph thousands of earthquakes from smallest to largest against their frequency, we see a straight line — there's no such thing as an average earthquake. The only relationship is between frequency and destructive power: the bigger the earthquake, the less often it happens. But it scales across hundreds of thousands of levels, from tiny tremors to vast earthquakes such as that in Japan, fifteen years ago or so.

And, crucially, when we analyse human conflicts, we see the same relationships. After the Second World War an analysis was made of hundreds of conflicts, including two world wars but also many smaller regional ones; and researchers at the University of Miami did the same for insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. They found the same relationship between frequency and destructive power — in this case, the number of deaths — and when they mapped it, it was exactly the same graphical representation as for earthquakes. We cannot separate ourselves from our universe in any way at all. We are literally inseparable — and yet we are each unique, differentiated, in vast diversity and complexity, as is the whole universe.

The way this is manifested is holographically. Take the study of the thermodynamics of black holes, and the question: what happens to the information held within an evolving star? When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it uses up its nuclear fuel and collapses; if it's massive enough, the gravitational collapse cannot be stopped, and it collapses inside an event horizon, where not even light escapes. What happens to the information? If it's lost, we can throw quantum theory out the window — literally; the maths just doesn't work. So what we've come to realise is that it's retained — mixed up, but still there. But instead of being proportional to the spherical volume of the black hole, it's proportional to the two-dimensional surface area of its event horizon.

That went off like a lightbulb for physicists and cosmologists, because that's exactly how a hologram works. A hologram works by throwing a beam of light at a three-dimensional object; the light reflects back carrying all the object's information, which can be recorded on a two-dimensional surface; then another beam of light, put through that two-dimensional pattern, projects a three-dimensional hologram of the original. So since this was understood, about 15 to 20 years ago, we've continued to develop the understanding that our entire universe exists and evolves as a cosmic hologram. It's a both-and: within space-time, nothing goes faster than light; and yet the unitive wholeness of our universe means that on its holographic surface of space and time, all the information accrued from its very first moment, 13.8 billion years ago, to now has continued to accrue, telling the evolutionary story of our universe.

What this means is that non-locality — a phenomenon of quantum physics showing that, for quantum physics to work at all, our universe must be unitive — has now been proven. It took a very long time, but in 2018 an experiment by a coalition of researchers, some at MIT, was able to non-locally entangle laboratory photons with starlight from 600 light-years away; and the whole quantum cascade was triggered by photons from an incredibly energetic galactic centre — a quasar — 12.2 billion light-years away. Those photons left the quasar 12.2 billion years ago, were collected down a telescope, and triggered this non-local entanglement. That showed that the whole universe, at cosmological scales, is non-locally unitive within a holographic perspective. This was so important that in 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics was given to three seminal researchers in this field — and the Nobel Prize is only given for settled science. No cosmologist would argue against this now: our universe is a unitive entity. We are literally inseparable from its wholeness — and yet its evolutionary journey has been from simplicity to ever-greater complexity, diversity and individuated self-awareness. This is settled science. We can argue the details, but not the wholeness of this insight.

We now also understand that reality, in its holographically manifested nature, is pixelated at what's known as the Planck scale. Our holograms and communications technologies are pixelated with ones and zeros that come together to form meaning and intelligent communication. The pixelation of our universe at the Planck scale is a trillion-trillion times smaller than our best high-definition technologies — as small, relative to an atom, as an atom is to the entire universe. The importance of the Planck scale is that it doesn't matter what units we measure in — metres and seconds, inches, miles, or jelly babies — because it falls out of the laws of physics: one Planck distance is the distance light travels in one Planck time, so it normalises to one. Any species able to understand the universe in this way would almost certainly understand its pixelation at the Planck scale.

And crucially — both the cherry on top and perhaps the underpinning — meaningful information, not random data, but in-formation as I term it, is the underpinning and framing of all of this. Because information underpins and frames the appearance of our universe, the energy, matter and space-time of our universe are not its most fundamental nature. They arise, holographically manifested, from deeper realms of non-physical causation. And so the unitive science of a living universe expresses that our universe is indeed a great thought — a sentient, unitive entity, emerging from deeper realms of cosmic causation and intelligence: cosmic mind, as Einstein called it; God, as we might; great mystery, as Indigenous traditions may call it. This is what we can stand on: unity isn't an aspiration. It is our existential reality.

The same patterns shape everything, and they don't just pervade so-called natural systems — they pervade everything we co-create together. Universal reality is built on relationships and interdependence, with innate meaning and inherent evolutionary purpose, and our entire universe is fundamentally unitive. This invites us to consider a wider perspective on who we really are, and who we can evolve to become.

This new discussion paper matters to me because of how science is now converging with perennial wisdom teachings, spiritually based traditions and Indigenous knowledge, in a deeper understanding of a living universe. We are its microcosmic co-creators; and we, our planetary home Gaia, our solar system and our entire universe embody meaning and purpose. I'd suggest that embracing our wholeness and awakening our hearts allows us to become self-aware, conscious, co-evolutionary partners with the universe's ongoing evolutionary potential. That's really the response to: could we be a keynote species going forward? Can we evolve? Can we grow up? Can we remember who we really are? This is the question.

And this is a beautiful quote from Jan Smuts: "The intimate rapport with Nature is one of the most precious things… Nature is indeed very close to us, sometimes even closer than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but the extension… The emotional appeal of Nature is tremendous, sometimes almost more than one can bear." Back in 1926, he was not able — other than in his inner vision — to perceive the vast clusters of galaxies, because the technologies the old mechanisation of materiality brought forward are marvellous, and they are revealing the divine nature of reality. The materiality is revealing the deeper, fundamental, divine nature of reality. So I'd suggest what this is inviting us into is what the ancients would have called sacred science — the realisation of the innate sacredness of the whole of reality.

Another quote: "Instead of the atomistic, mechanistic, or even the mathematical universe, we have the genetic, organic, holistic universe." Physics is mathematics made real. Mathematics is a language — but it can take us anywhere, including round in circles and into gobbledygook. Mathematics embraced and embodied in the relational nature of our universe, and in its emergence from deeper realms of causation, is a very beautiful expression of that language.

"Evolution," he said, "is the gradual development and stratification of progressive series of wholes." The unitive science of a living universe sets out that whole evolutionary journey in much greater detail, with the evidence — this holarchic, holonic nesting of wholes, stretching from inorganic beginnings and simplicity to the highest level of spiritual individuation, through the universe's entirety and within us as microcosmic co-creators.

What this also does, for me, is invite us to take love seriously. It's a wonderful sentiment — but the universal relationality of a living universe invites us to take love as a universal principle of coherence, healing and wholeness. So one of the projects I'm working on with many wonderful colleagues is a science of unitive love: to bring together this cosmological perspective at all scales, and us within it, embracing unitive love and our healed relationship — our wholeness with the universe's wonder and beauty. This is what soul is: emergent, evidence-based, converging unitive science with Indigenous and perennial wisdom, with love as a natural attribute of the unitive nature of reality. We'd love to keep close to what you're all doing, because we hope this helps to inspire and empower the experiential embodiment of this unitive vision for humanity, founded on love and pervaded by love.

It also invites us to reframe what's sometimes called the polycrisis. The polycrisis is named from within a material, mechanistic worldview; if we step deeper, it's a metacrisis of our metaphysical worldview — within which, of course, Jan was such a key voice. And when we reframe it, evidence-based, into this unitive perspective, we can reframe a metacrisis into a metamorphosis: us, perhaps, as a caterpillar species. I love caterpillars, even when they eat all my cabbages. But a time comes when a caterpillar goes into a chrysalis, and that part of its life cycle breaks down — it becomes a nutrient soup, though we now know it keeps a memory — and breaks through into the imaginal cells of a butterfly. A butterfly sees the world through completely different eyes. A caterpillar has simple eyes, enough to find food and know up from down; a butterfly sees through complex eyes — nuances of colour, richness, diversity — and is therefore able to be a pollinator rather than a consumer.

So this is an invitation, through this vision, to make choices and step into an empowered sense that, yes, we are in turbulence — a birthing canal, potentially — but of a metamorphosis into an utterly new and wondrous adventure as human beings. And this can empower transformational change. When the quantum-physics discoveries and relativity arrived, people got very excited, but most folks didn't really see them as relevant to their lived lives. This is far more than a scientific revolution, because this unitive understanding is an opportunity to frame a societal and cultural invitation for us to consciously usher in our next evolutionary steps as a species. It can inspire us to re-member — not just intellectually; we've dis-membered our collective psyche through this mechanistic perspective. And I'm not blaming or shaming that journey — it's brought us to where we are now — but where we are now shows its continuance is unsustainable. At the same time, we are able to wake up, remember who we really are, and co-create who we can evolve to become. To reframe what is happening as a metamorphosis; to transform from the inside out — the inner being to the outer doing — seeing, behaving and choosing in the world through new eyes.

Very briefly, what this could mean in practice: to help heal the traumas of our collective dis-ease of separation; instead of conflict and war, to apply this understanding to reconciliation, peacebuilding and justice; to transform education into learning ecosystems, including planetary regeneration; to apply it not to hierarchical governance from the old mechanistic worldview, but to multilateral, pluralistic governance and leadership, and to being a good ancestor for future generations. How can we bring this unitive science — with its empathy, compassion and ethics — to AI and technological innovation? The old science often purported to be values-free, or values-light; but in an interdependent understanding of our universe, science cannot separate itself from that relationality while still being objective. It cannot be apart from, because none of us are apart from — we are all a part of.

And, very importantly, to transform economics into an evolutionary perspective and potential. I'm working with leading-edge economists, including John Fullerton, who has just written a book called Regenerative Economics, coming from this unitive perspective, on how it can transform economics and our financial system. And I was with Imma Gilchrist recently, and David Lorimer, in Oxford, on how the philosophical, intuitive understanding of universal beauty, truth and goodness can be embedded in our lives — framed by standing on this unitive perspective, and coming to realise ourselves as Gaians: as regenerous stewards and co-evolutionary planetary partners.

And, with Jan Smuts: "The world itself is good… We need not approve of all the items in it, nor of all the individuals in it; but the world itself, which is more than its parts or individuals, which is ultimately spiritual, is in a fundamental relation to each of us, deeper than all other relations. It is a friendly world; it is a living world; it is our world."

I'd like to complete with some words from my most recent book, and I'd invite us to hear these with the ears of our hearts:

For some 13.8 billion years, the Universe Soul's innate unity has been progressively embodied in increasing complexity and diverse expressions. With the parental care of our Sun and our Moon, and that of her solar siblings, our planetary home Gaia's inheritance was the abundance of elemental resources bequeathed by ancestral stars, and a place of birth so perfectly nurtured by water and light for the emergence of a living geosphere.

As a planetary mother, even when faced with mass extinctions, she not only endured but resolutely recovered, going on to serve the Universe Soul and her own indomitable evolutionary impulse. At this completion of her story — at least for now — I not only remain in wonder at the audacity and visionary magnificence of a cosmos that could dream such a thought as is our universe and Gaia; but, in seeking to understand how this living marvel is co-created, my awe has risen to such heights of reverence and love that finding words to describe them has become nigh impossible.

As I've continued to seek a deeper sense of how our universe is as it is, a possible answer to the initial question I asked at the beginning of the story of Gaia — of why — has also emerged. It tells of a universe that learns, through its holographic and holarchic manifestation, whether explorative, experiential or evolutionary, reflections to further know itself. Its innate unity, through the co-creative appearance and tensions of its dualities, with their universal masculine and feminine attributes, then reconciles in the trinities of their child expressions, flourishing in the diversity and complexity of its ongoing journey, and will ultimately come full spiral: from unity, to unity in diversity, to remembered unity in belonging, and an ultimate return to unity.

I describe its story's beginning not as a big bang — it was minute — but as the first moment of an ongoing, beautifully, exquisitely, experientially evolutionary big breath, whose big breath breathes through our little breaths in every moment.

So, to complete: we are the youngest of Gaia's organic children. We embody her legacy, and that of the Universe Soul's evolutionary arc. And we stand together with them at the bow wave of their, and our, next emergent possibility. We are the latest of our kind — and yet we are not alone. We, and her entire family, are Gaia's.

Thank you, everyone.

Response and dialogue — Claudius van Wyk

Claudius van Wyk: Jude, thank you so much. That was beautiful, elucidating and encouraging. Your image of the caterpillar as consumer, and the butterfly converting to the capacity to be a pollinator, is stunning. And that constriction in the shell in which the caterpillar finds itself, and has to fight its way out of to be liberated, to be able to fly — as an analogy for our human evolution — is stunning. Thank you so much for sharing that.

What we're going to do now is open, firstly, to Q&A and observations, and then go into breakout rooms to contemplate that very question you raised at the beginning. So, first of all — anybody ready to engage with a question or observation for Dr Jude Currivan? Jeff Blumberg.

Q&A

Jeff Blumberg: Thank you, Claudius. How many comments and questions may I have?

Claudius van Wyk: Just the one.

Jeff Blumberg: Well, firstly, Dr Jude, thank you very much — it was phenomenal to listen to your interpretation, your close reading, of Smuts. It warms a Smuts scholar like myself very deeply. In your quantum-physical way, you gave scientific support to Smuts' idea of God. I get quite emotional, having listened to you interpret what he was saying in modern scientific terms. It's incredible.

There are a couple of physics questions I'd like to ask, if I may. Smuts read the general theory of relativity in 1920, some years before he wrote Holism and Evolution, and it changed everything for him. He'd read the special theory ten years before, but the general theory changed things quite a bit. His understanding of space-time and gravity changed his theory of matter, and he saw space-time as something structural — and that was how he interpreted the holistic nature of space-time: structural, and therefore holistic. I've never had the benefit of speaking to a professional physicist before, and I wondered what your opinion would be of that interpretation — how he saw holism in the new physics. That's why he changed his argument, from attacking the mechanistic scientific world to accepting it as a new holistic world; the new physics was more holistic for him. But, as I think you said in your talk, the scientists themselves hadn't realised the consequences of this deep change.

And then one more, which you can think about. You speak about the great thought, and my first thought was: do you think mind is primordial? If so — Smuts had quite a bit to say about panpsychism, and he rejected panpsychism, because it contradicted his theory of evolution. If mind was there at the beginning, where was the opportunity for it to evolve? I'll leave you with those two.

Dr Jude Currivan: Thank you for those, Jeff. One of the things I absolutely love is his willingness to follow where the evidence leads — that's the mark of a good scientist, someone curious. His curiosity was the nature of reality, which is my own lifelong curiosity too. And in my journey, where the evidence has gone beyond a theoretical framework, I'm happy to discard the framework and follow the evidence. Throughout the whole journey of science, that's enabled us to include and transcend.

When he was writing, Einstein took the view that cosmic mind is foundational. That was also the view of Max Planck, and subsequently of David Bohm. It's my view, and it's been the view of many pioneering scientists, as well as spiritual seekers and wisdom keepers throughout the ages. What the evidence is now showing, ever more compellingly, is the perspective the Vedas taught us: that mind and consciousness aren't something we have — they are literally what we, and the whole world, are.

On space-time: we're now seeing that energy, matter and space-time are emergent phenomena of a manifested universe, arising meaningfully from deeper, non-physical realms of causation. Einstein, to begin with, didn't really dwell on the evolutionary aspect of the universe, so what came forward was the idea that past, present and future are all part of a "block universe." That's no longer how we'd perceive it. What we now have is an evolutionary story that began 13.8 billion years ago and moved from simplicity to complexity and individuated self-awareness — and we're now on the bow wave of the emergent potential future. That future journey may continue for another tens of billions of years, and we may or may not be part of it, depending on the choices we make pretty much now.

So what I'm sharing is very much in line with Jan's holism. I'm in agreement with general relativity; I think we now have a better understanding of what time is. Time, essentially at the Planck scale, maps the journey — it tells the story of the evolution of our universe from its first moment, through its past to its present, and then opening into the emergent potential of the future.

On panpsychism: what I'm sharing is the view that universal mind is innately there from the very beginning — and yet the story of our universe, as a great thought, is that thought differentiating itself into individuated expressions of self-awareness. That's the journey from the first atoms, through stars and galaxies, through interstellar clouds of molecular hydrogen, where — even before planetary systems were born — all the building blocks for further emergence were present. Just over a year ago, material was collected from a 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid called Bennu (I love that the probe was called OSIRIS), brought back and analysed; it showed that 4.6-billion-year-old material had all the amino-acid building blocks of proteins and all five nucleobases for DNA and RNA. That asteroid was one of the oldest parts of our solar system, which collapsed around 5.5 billion years ago from one of those molecular clouds. So the building blocks for further emergence and complexity were already there, even before our Sun and solar system — and many, many others — were born. We now find more planets and stars in our galaxy every day that are like Earth, many capable of having water, and therefore potentially planetary homes for further emergence of individuated complexity and self-awareness. So it's a whole step beyond the old notions of panpsychism — a perspective of an evolutionary universe of meaning and inherent purpose.

Claudius van Wyk: That's so beautiful — thank you for bringing into my mind Smuts' statement: the universe is individuating even as the individual universalises.

Dr Jude Currivan: Exactly — and that's the cosmic hologram, the wholeness. In a hologram, the wholeness is in every pixel, every part of it. That holographic principle is the attribute that enables the wholeness of our universe to express itself, as you described, in every part of its adventure and evolutionary emergence.

Claudius van Wyk: It's now eleven o'clock and the next presentation is at half past, so we're debating how much time we have for breakout rooms and tea. Let's see how far we get with people who want to engage directly. Who's next? Marcus.

Marcus Link: Thank you so much, Jude — I really appreciated that. I've heard you speak several times, and each time I discover new things; it's as though the holon builds as I hear you again and again. You do such a great job of bringing together so much complexity, but making it accessible rather than simple — that's a great gift.

My small contribution on this question of mind-first or not: what popped up for me was the particular Buddhist school that talks about storehouse consciousness — the place, if you like, in which the non-manifest archetypes exist. That's what led me, in my talk yesterday, to equate the stories we tell with the ecosystem we live in: when we tell a story of climate change, we get climate change. The interesting thing is that some people imagine the storehouse as a fixed thing — but what becomes really clear through your expression is that the storehouse is an evolutionary thing. The archetypes change themselves; they go on an evolutionary journey. We have this relationship between information on the 2D level and the manifest, expressed universe on the 3D level, constantly in a connected unity — the origin and the latest expression always together, but the origin has also undergone an evolutionary process at the same time. So there's the protoplasm and the final expression always at the same time, influencing each other. That came to life for me, beautifully, in the way you brought it together, connecting to so many traditions and their intuitions about the nature of the universe. Thank you.

Dr Jude Currivan: I agree. For me — some of you might know — I've been what I call "walking between worlds" since I was four years old, so my whole life experience has been one of engaging with many different levels of sentience, most of them discarnate, whether that's the Apukuna, the spirits of the mountains, or archetypal intelligences in many other ways. My experience is that the archetypes themselves, which are part of our collective psyche, are also evolving. As well as a cosmologist, I'm also an astrologer — because if we take the unity of reality seriously, then everything in our universe is part of that overall living sentience. Over a number of years, as an astrologer, I've found a perspective that the archetypes are themselves evolving, because we have that continuing relationship between our own psyche and the wider psyche. Speaking with Rick Tarnas, who wrote Cosmos and Psyche, he speaks to this; more and more astrologers, through their inner journeys, are appreciating it, as are cosmologists from the other side. And I just wanted to clarify something Jeff mentioned: I'm not a professional scientist or physicist — and I'm delighted I'm not, because if I were, I would not be having this conversation.

Jeff Blumberg: That makes a lot of sense. My understanding of the current controversy between the hard problem of consciousness and the split in the physics community is very confusing to a layperson like me. I had at one time thought that Smuts prefigured the hard problem of consciousness in his Chapter 9, "Mind as an Organ of Control," and then in the unpublished essays he wrote, which I will release — they build on his theory of mind. In my opinion, as a layperson, I believe he prefigures what David Chalmers is talking about today as the hard problem of consciousness. But that will be revealed in my book.

Dr Jude Currivan: I look forward to that — because for me, the hard problem of consciousness is asking the wrong question. The question is: how does immaterial mind arise from material brain? I suggest that's the wrong question to ask. The other point you're perhaps referring to: for me, the universe is a living universe, so sentience is all-pervasive, whether we as human beings are here or not. If you'd asked most cosmologists twenty years ago whether they believed in extraterrestrial life, most would have said no; very few would say that now. And DNA was "right first time," over five billion years ago, because it's so fit for purpose — for me, a wonderful expression of the innate intelligence of our evolutionary universe. Thank you.

Claudius van Wyk: Thank you. Michael.

Michael Stock: Thank you, Claudius; thank you, Jude — I was entranced. It seeded so many lovely thoughts. I have a question, if I may. I was really enlightened on the first day, listening closely to Professor Kobus du Pisani — thank you again for that talk — where he explained very simply that what Jan Smuts wished to do with his book was, at one level, to bring hope to people in an age of anxiety, after the end of the Great War. I wondered if you had any thoughts about how we, in our journeys, can bring hope to the people we know in a time of anxiety.

Dr Jude Currivan: Thank you, Michael. I wrote a book called HOPE: Healing Our People and Earth quite a while ago now, on this very point. For me, this does offer authentic hope, because what we can now say, evidence-based, is that unity isn't an aspiration — it is our existential reality. That's why I'm inviting us to take love seriously, and to see this as far more than a scientific revolution, because it affects everyone: it's about how we relate to each other, what choices we make, how we see the world, and what we do about it.

I think that's why the Club of Rome asked me to write this paper. Back in 1972 they commissioned a report called The Limits to Growth, led by Donella Meadows. What Donella spoke to was the theory of change — how change comes about. She described a ladder of interventions: at the bottom you can change goals, key performance indicators and so on, but the most important way to transform is through a change of worldview, a change of mindset. For me, that's the change from seeing ourselves and the world as separate to seeing ourselves as unique expressions within its wholeness — which is very much what Jan was seeing too. But now we have a hundred years more of conflict, and of unsustainability, because we haven't moved on from there — at a time when the evidence is now so compelling, at every scale and across numerous fields. After Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome's whole approach was whole systems — but they've realised their whole systems aren't whole enough; they've got a hole in them. So I've got what I'm calling a "Trojan mouse" within the Club of Rome. The beauty of it is that both co-presidents and the Secretary-General invited this, at the highest level; they realise it can take them to their next level of significant interventions through a change of worldview — that Donella spoke to back in 1972.

Michael Stock: Thank you so much, Jude.

Claudius van Wyk: Wow. Professor Kobus du Pisani — I'm talking to you. What's your experience now, having opened the space for us on Wednesday night?

Kobus du Pisani: Yes — I'm amazed at the presentations. I was very much impressed by Jeff's research. In my opinion he is probably the person who has done the most comprehensive research of Smuts' writing since Hancock and van der Poel; I don't think anyone else has gone into the writings to the same level. He said he'd had 20,000 images of documents. He has an extensive knowledge of Smuts' thinking as expressed in his writings, and he built a good argument on how Smuts viewed what he called his "new idea of God." I think he took that aspect of Smuts' worldview a step further than anyone else so far, so I'm really looking forward to the book he's going to publish.

Then Marcus's presentation made me think about Smuts' disposition in the whole discourse on development versus sustainability. When I listened to Marcus, I was thinking that Smuts, in a way, was building a bridge between that 19th-century idea — when he was at Cambridge — of the great idea of progress, on the one hand, and, much later in the 20th century, the whole discourse about sustainable development. I was wondering whether the people who came after him a few decades later — starting maybe with Rachel Carson, and then Lovelock, with the Gaia thesis, and the deep ecologists — were aware of Smuts' holism. Did they read Holism and Evolution? That image Marcus showed of the tree, with the roots and all the different species, was a beautiful image of this whole idea of interconnectedness, to which Jude also referred today.

Today's talk I'll have to sit with — I've made notes, and I'll have to go through them again, because it's so fabulous. I spoke, on a different level, about hope in the 1920s, but your presentation took it much further — a much deeper sense of the hopefulness of this evolutionary universe. It opens wonderful perspectives for us. These talks are very enlightening, and I'm looking forward to your publication, Claudius, of all these papers — it should be mind-boggling. Thank you for everything you've done to organise this event.

Closing

Claudius van Wyk: What a pleasure — thank you so much. Is there anybody else who wants to make an observation? We need to break for tea before we start with David — and welcome, David! Then, Michael, it's over to you to thank our speaker, and we'll take a ten-minute break.

Michael Stock: Thank you, Claudius. Jude, I've given you a flavour of what I think about what you brought — it was enchanting. I began with curiosity, and now, speaking personally, I am completely energised and focused. You've helped me understand the opportunity not to think of the sea of troubles, but to think of beauty, and how much further we can explore those deep patterns. A couple of things I wrote down, which I'd like to read as examples: if we see the world through the eyes of wholeness instead of separation, what does that mean for how we live? And — this is my last point — I absolutely loved the clarity of the invitation to butterflies: from metacrisis to metamorphosis. I thought that was wonderful. To be continued, I think. Thank you very much indeed.

Claudius van Wyk: Thank you. And a last word from you, Jude.

Dr Jude Currivan: Just to thank everyone. When we come together like this, it's part of our remembering — because we do know that we're inseparable. We embrace the joy, the beauty, the truth, the goodness, the love that is our fundamental nature. So it's an invitation to continue. I talk about linking up and lifting up. To complete with gratitude, love and joy, and an invitation to continue to link up and lift up: these are amazing, challenging times — and yet, together, we can do this. We can do this.

Claudius van Wyk: Thank you so much. [After the break, David Lorimer's presentation, followed by a conversation with all the presenters.]