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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Love as the Timeless Source of Wholeness with Glenn Aparicio Parry
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Love is beyond words. Love is beyond knowing. Love is more than an emotion. Love is even more than a force. I say it's a foundational force, but it's more than that. Love is a vibration, but maybe it's even more than that. Love is something so beautiful, so cosmic, so large, that we can never fully understand. So it's much better to think of love as the beauty of nature.
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Keep watching to learn more.
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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offered distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org.
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Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore love as the timeless source of wholeness. I'm very honored to have my good friend and neighbor here with me in my studio in Albuquerque, Glenn Aparicio Parry, who has been a guest on New Thinking Allowed six times previously. His newest book, Original Love, the Timeless Source of Wholeness, is the third book in a trilogy, each one beginning with the title or the word original. Original Thinking, a radical revisioning of time, humanity and nature. It was his first book, Original Making America Sacred Again. And now Original Love, the Timeless Source of Wholeness. Glenn is also on the faculty of the California Institute for Integral Studies. Welcome, Glenn.
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A
It's so good to be with you, Jeff. Thank you.
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B
I have to say you're probably my closest friend here in Albuquerque.
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A
Wow. Thank you, Jeff.
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B
I would say that you're living a charmed life to some degree, having written a trilogy of books. It shows that a you have a focused mind trying to get as deep as you can back to the source of all things.
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A
Yes, of course. I didn't know it would be a trilogy when I began. Each book had an origin story and the first one came about because we were convening these dialogues for the SEED Institute that I was the founder of. We were convening dialogues between Native American scientists and Western scientists. And in the very first one, the inaugural in 1999, Leroy Little Bear, who was the moderator, he asked the question, is it possible to come up with an original thought. This was on July 4, 1999, in the old Sheridan now Hotel Albuquerque. And when he asked that question, it was the most interesting thing that happened. All the Western people in the room, with the exception of one or two, I think Lee Nichol didn't do that, tried to think of something brand new that had never been said before or never been done before, where the indigenous people took the question as an invitation to connect to origin as a place. And that's when I realized that Western culture had essentially replaced place with time. So, you know, if you ask a Western mathematical cosmologist, even the best one I know, Brian Swim, ask him about the origin of the cosmos. Brian does understand that he needs to tell that origin story as a story, and he's done a fantastic job of that. But he will go. He will be talking about time 13.8 billion years ago. He won't be talking about place. If you ask a Hopi elder, what about the origin of the cosmos or the origin of their existence here, they'll take you to the specific place of where the little Colorado meets the big Colorado, Colorado River. So anyway, that was the origin of really all the books, because out of those dialogues, I realized that if we were going to be. That question always stayed with me. Is it possible to come up with an original thought? And like you said in your intro, I was trying to get to that source. And in fact, that's why I wrote the book Original Thinking, A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity and Nature. So I'm looking at time more closely, and then I'm looking at what does it mean to be human more closely. And I'm looking at the natural world more closely. And that's been consistent through the other two books. The first book, Original Thinking, is more a book of ecopsychology, connecting our thoughts to nature. Second book, Original Politics, is more about what we do in the world. And I'm examining. I'm calling it Original Politics. Original Politics. I expand the definition of politics to include the natural world, to include what nature wants to happen. Because in the Western world, ever since Socrates, really, the greater good became redefined as the greater good for humans. And I would consider that to be a big problem because we humans are still made of light, air, water, earth, spirit, if you will, we are made of the elements. We are not separate from anything. So if we try to separate ourselves like humans have done, to make themselves separate and transcendent from the natural world, that causes problems. That causes big problems. And now I came to the book Original Love, but that has its own origin story. Do you mind if I share that?
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B
I would love to hear.
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A
Okay. Because this book has the most unusual origin story. My wife Tomoko, seven years ago, one morning just walks in breakfast and pronounces, you are going to write a book called Original Love. Tomoko never predicts my future. You know her well, she doesn't do that. She doesn't predict my future. She hadn't done that before and she hasn't done that since. But I would say spirit spoke through her so that I would listen and do it. And in fact, all books I write, I pray to the ancestors to try to get a vision of what I'm supposed to do. But in this case, it was presented directly from Tomoko. And then one year later, I'm in Taos, New Mexico, and a woman named Jean ellisankari is asking me to teach at UNM Taos. But she interrupts herself in the middle of a sentence to say, I just got a download. You're going to write a book called Original Love. And it's going to be the third in a three part series with original in the title. Now here's the funny part of the story, Jeff. I had changed the title of Original Politics to Sacred Politics. And Select Books had given me a book deal with that title. And it was the working title, I think, for at least a year. And I had to change it back. This spirit was saying, okay, this is supposed to be a trilogy. That's the first time I knew it was a trilogy. And so I connected Original Politics to Original Thinking. And then I got like a week later I got my own download for how to write the book Original Love. And it's really more a book about remembrance of love for Mother Earth than it is a book about romantic love. Although I don't exclude that I tell the story of psyche and Eros and whatnot. So romantic love is part of some larger, larger force. And that's really where I was delving into looking at love as an original vibration in the cosmos. Love is an original foundational force that's always been here, that always will be here.
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B
In other words, if I understand you correctly, the reason that we're here, the reason that there is such a thing as physical reality at all instead of just nothing, is because of a primal act of love?
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A
I think so. I mean, nobody knows everything about love, and I don't want to pretend to do so. That would be foolish. But I do sense that whatever love is, it is immense. It is enormous. It is a quality that's always been here. And the ancients knew this. Like Empedocles, he told the story of the origin of the cosmos. And he said that at the origin, there were four roots, and he named them after gods and goddesses, Zeus, Hera, Nestes and Adonius. Later on, people said that those four roots are the four elements. Empedocles actually said four roots. But that may be a minor point because he said that those four roots are mediated by the forces of love and strife. Then what's really interesting is he said that in the beginning it was just the four roots and love. Love was what connected the elements together. Love is what brings the roots together. Love is what unites. But then strife came into the picture. And the reason why Empedocles said strife came into the picture was because the universe wasn't fully formed until strife came in. It needed something to set it in motion, just like this vortex of energy, what indigenous people tend to refer to as the flux. You know, this flux. And David Bohm also referred to it in a similar way. So, yeah, I think that we need strife. We may not like it while it's happening, but strife somehow brings everything into motion. And then. But when there's too much strife, too much stress, what is going to heal? That's love. Love is what heals. Love is what unites. That's why I ended the book on politics, believe it or not, with love. And at that point, I did know I was going to be writing the next book on love, but still I ended it with love, because that's probably the only way out of politics, is love. Love is what if we love each other, if we love our neighbor, if we love the person who has a completely different political view, something shifts and it's kind of beautiful.
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B
Now, you mentioned Empedocles, a pre Socratic philosopher. Probably most of our viewers will not be familiar with who he was and why he's important to you.
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A
He's important because he's telling that story. But there's a lot of ancient stories that I consider really important. For Empedocles, I recommend Peter Kingsley. He's written a lot about pre Socratic, the pre Socratic philosophers.
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B
He claims they were really shaman.
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A
Well, I think so. I would agree with him there.
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B
Or they were so much closer to the original animistic, shamanistic outlook of humanity, I think so.
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A
You know, I've never told you this, but I once went to a psychic when I was in my twenties who told me I was an Ancient runner in Greece and I would run messages. I don't know whether it was war or whatnot, but actually it kind of rang true. Because when I read about the ancient Greeks, I kind of feel like I'm remembering something. I'm remembering something, and sometimes I have an intuition about what is really true. That doesn't mean it's absolutely true, but that's what it feels like to me. And so I think that's very true. What Peter Kingsley said. Those ancient Greeks and all of the ancient Western world was much more shamanic than it is today and much more connected to nature, much more sensual. My God, what's happened recently in the last 700 years or so? We're very disconnected from the natural world, but we were not.
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B
Well, as a matter of fact, I know there are some thinkers who say the problem started with Plato. He began separating us out from the natural world with his ideas of this world of pure forms and the otherworldly quality of Platonic philosophy.
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A
That's possible. I mean, I tend to look at what Socrates said. So it's even before Plato. So Socrates said he learned more from men and the Plan Plaza than he did from walking in the woods. And I'm like, are you serious? Because what I do learn when I walk in the woods is not information, but there's something that. It's a kind of love, really. It might be the fact that if you want to talk about conspiracies, we talked about. I wrote a book about politics. There's only one conspiracy I really believe in. That's because the word conspiracy comes from conspire or to breathe together. So what breathes together? Plants, trees, phytoplankton and mammals. We breathe out what they breathe in and we breathe out what they need to breathe in. So we're in a sacred circle. So when we walk in the woods, we are receiving some kind of very special blessing. And maybe that's not some kind of wisdom in the normal sense of the word, but I think it actually is very deep wisdom.
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B
I agree. For me, how I relate to that idea, Glenn, is I read this once. I presume it's true. I can't say for sure. But of course, when we breathe in, we're breathing in countless molecules of air. And what I read is we're breathing in. With every breath there will be at least one molecule that's been breathed in by Hitler, for example.
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A
Yeah, well, that's true. We're breathing in the same air that the ancestors did. In fact, that's something that I Pray about a lot. Every breath that we take in, we're breathing in the same air that's been recirculating in the atmosphere since time immemorial. We're standing upon the same earth since time immemorial, we're drinking the same water because water circulates in time immemorial. And water and thought are very related because that's something I wrote a great deal about extensively.
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B
About water.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, if you think about. We even use all those words, we draw little cartoons on top of people's heads. Like, you know, a cloud. It could be an angry cloud, or it could be a brainstorm. You know, lightning. You know, something. And if you look at a brain and you look at the outer atmosphere, the neurons are firing similar to the way lightning is in the atmosphere. You know, that's something Paula Gunn Allen said to me a long time ago, and I think it's true. So, yeah, we're related. We are part of the Earth. So that's in my three books that I've written. One thing that's consistent is about time. I'm reframing original to mean both place and time, both old and new. I'm also reframing what it means to be human instead of as separate and transcendent from nature, to what connects us with all there is. And that's, I think, something I always think about, because we have some 98.5% the same DNA as a chimp. Chimpanzee, but we have the 50% the same DNA as a banana. So we're interconnected with everything. And so this concept that came about, really, in the Renaissance. And there's one other thing that's consistent. In all my books, I talk about something that maybe sound a little obscure, but I talk about linear perspective or the advent of linear perspective in art, because that happens in the renaissance almost exactly 600 years ago. And because of that, we start to make ourselves separate from the natural world. We imagine what is linear perspective. It's a view from one stationary eye out on the landscape, and you see these lines going from, like, a railroad track or something. And we brought it into our language. We say, things closest to us are in the near future. Things distant from us are in the distant future. So linear perspective becomes our language, and it becomes the beginning of linear time, which is not as old as people realize. The whole concept of a timeline is 250 years old. Now, that sounds ridiculous, but. So we've come to think that time is aligned, but the ancients and indigenous peoples today still understand that times unfolding in a circle. And frankly, that's the way I plan all my books. From seed to root to bud to fruit. And then the fruit gives off a seed that goes back into the ground. The whole cycle begins again. And that's really what, that's how the natural world operates. So the idea of linear time, that everything is cause and effect, that works well on a billiard table if you're playing pool. But it isn't really the way the natural world is working. Things are happening all at the same time. OSHA is growing next to cottonwood trees down by the creek, by the river. Osha, bareroot, bare root, not the safety, whatever the acronym is, not the acronym. The bare root, bear root grows by the river, you know. And all the ancients looked at how things work together. We used to have those dialogues at seed. And we were always talking about time. We were talking about it with quantum physicists who had some very advanced ideas about time, realized that time could go backwards and things like that. But there was one native man there, a dear elder named Toba Saniquikanu. His original name was Peter Kelly, original given to him as his colonial name. And he used to stand up, he was like a 6 foot 3, 100% Anishinaabe man. And he would say, my name is Peter Kelly. Do I look like an Irishman? So he was quite the guy. But he said at the dialogue circle, we were talking about time. And he asked the question, what kinds of things want to happen together? And a light bulb went off for me. I said, wow, if you look at the world this way, you're now looking for relationships and alliances. You're no longer looking for causes and effects. What kinds of things want to happen together? To me, a maybe more productive way to look at the world. And that is the way that I prefer.
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B
Well, you talk about, amongst other things, gravity as being an example of love. You reference the moon, for example, quite a bit. And the way it seems to constantly circle the Earth. The centrifugal force of the moon and the gravitational pull of the Earth balance.
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Perfectly well, that's true.
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I mean, I look at what scientists call gravity, you know, what was proposed by Newton and call gravity. We don't really understand what that is. We just know that it exists. But it's really in a power of allurement. At least you could look at it this way. It's a power of allurement. So what is it? What is that force that makes the moon want to circle around the Earth? I mean, I don't know, but what is that force that makes the Earth want to circle around the sun? It's a power of allurement. So you could call it gravity, but that's a very grave term. So why don't we call it love?
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B
Isaac Newton, as I understand, was really puzzled by gravity. It didn't make sense to him. He thought of it as action at a distance. It didn't seem to fit normal Newtonian mechanics at all. And it's still a mystery today. It's the big issue in physics. Can we unify gravity with quantum physics?
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Well, if you're talking about physics, just change subjects, but stay on physics. The physics term that I think is the best way of describing love is quantum entanglement. So this is, you know, this came from Bell's theorem, you know, so particles that are separated, they could be separated any distance, but they still maintain an inverse relationship to each other. How do they do that? Well, there was one dialogue circle where he's now in the spirit world. Phil Duran, he was a physicist. He was also of Tigua descent. So he was a native physicist. There was another one, Fred Begay, who worked in Los Alamos labs. He never was in our dialogue circle, but we knew about him. And these native physicists. What Phil said is that's the nature's way of saying, I shall always be your valentine. The particles that, no matter how far they're separated, maintain their relationship with each other. I thought that was very sweet. I thought that's actually what it seems.
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B
To me to be an expression of the fundamental principle that to my knowledge, mystics of every culture and every age have said that we are one with everything.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And in your wonderful work, Jeff, one of the things that you've done that I really appreciate is when you've worked with people that have had a so called near death experience, which really is a death experience. But because we think of time as a line, we think of you were born and you died at a certain time. So we think, oh, okay, we'll call it near death. It's really a death experience.
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B
I think of it as the early stages of moving into the Bardo planes.
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A
Okay, all right, that's a good way of looking at it. But one of the things that you discovered is that people often report a cosmic level of oneness when they're in that so called near death experience. And that I think is something that we need to aspire to in life. And I said somewhere in original love. And I Think it was in chapter one, which was pretty channeled through me, but I said that most of us have to die to realize this oneness. But you can come home while you're still alive. I think I was quoting or thinking of the theosophical way of looking at the world, that the human is a spark from God on a return trip there too. And so we're always going back. So that's why we have this spiritual yearning. We're yearning to return to wholeness. We're yearning to return to love. And that's why the book Original Love is so wrapped up. That's why the subtitle is the Timeless Source of Wholeness. Because wholeness is about love. Love evokes wholeness and wholeness evokes love.
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B
You mentioned Empedocles insisting that strife was equally important.
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A
Yeah, well, the universe wasn't fully formed until strife came about, but there's a lot of strife. Here's another origin story that I love to told in the very beginning of the book. I think it's in the second chapter, the separation of the sexes. Now we have the biblical story too. The biblical story. Everybody knows Adam is supposedly the first human created and Eve is created out of Adam's rib. But what resonates for me more strongly is the ancient story of the separation of the sexes which Plato, the aforementioned Plato tells in the Symposium through the character of Aristophanes, who was a real character who lived like 460 BC or something. But he is a fictional character in the Symposium and he tells this story that originally humans were all double sexed beings. Most of them were male, female, some were female female, some were male male, some were maybe androgynous. But these double sex beings had double of everything. They had four arms and four legs, they had only one head, but they had two faces. They moved very fast by doing cartwheels. And the gods became leery of them. They were worried about these humans. They had so much power. So that's when they deem that we have to cut these humans in half like a flatfish. And when they did that, according to Plato's story, this very interesting thing happened. The two halves clung to each other, they just hugged, they did not eat, they did not sleep and they started to die. And that's when Zeus takes pity on them and rearranges their genitalia so they can have sexual intercourse. And by the way, the old story says that humans used to reproduce by throwing their seed on the ground like a cicada. But so now for the first time, they're going to reproduce through sexual intercourse and they're going to be able to hug each other. And that's why we talk about finding our other half. I don't think, really, it's quite accurate in a way. And I'm not saying that this is a true story, but the theosophists actually think it's true. They do, they do. But mostly people think that it's just a fictional story. But. But fictional or not, it has a strong power. People want to find their other half, and when they do, it's beautiful.
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B
I do know of various cases where people proclaim, I have found my soulmate, and then they get divorced. Over time, I think it becomes sort of a romantic infatuation which has a temporary role for them in their life.
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A
I'm sure you're very super familiar and have interviewed tons of people that talk about anima, animus and that effect that that has.
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B
Well, no, amplify, please, because while we talk about it, every conversation is new.
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A
Yeah, I mean, there's essentially four people in any relationship. The anima, the feminine aspect, is what a man needs to internalize, and the animus is what a woman needs to internalize. But I'll tell you that psychology has been changing a lot because in the old days, because the society as a whole was a little too sexist. They tend to look at women that have a strongly developed masculine side as there's something wrong with them.
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B
And vice versa.
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A
Yeah, well, yes, vice versa, but it was more directed toward women who had a developed animus. They had all kinds of complexes for that that they would identify. But I would say on the whole, all people need to bring in more of the feminine now. And that's something I explore in the book because I looked at the mythological age and the first. The first mythological age was the age of goddesses. The second is the age of gods and heroes. So when Joseph Campbell talks about the monomyth and he's talking about a male hero, that to me is. It is a very powerful story and it's very much holistic, just like the earlier stories of the goddesses. But it paints things in starker distinction. Let me put it to you this way. Okay? So the goddesses, they were comfortable in all the realms. The goddess, the great goddess was comfortable in the heavens. The goddess, the great goddess was comfortable on the earth. And the great goddess was comfortable in the underworld. So there are stories about the goddess going to the underworld and she was visiting her sister, Ereshkigal Inanna. Well, Inanna as Inanna was visiting her sister Ereshkigal. Yes. So we're talking the Sumerian story. There's so many other names for the great goddess. But if we want to talk about Inanna is visiting her sister Ereshkigal and she does that during the three day period where the new moon is there. So the thing that happens when she goes into the underworld, Ereshkigal puts her on a hook. She's lifeless for three days.
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B
Like a piece of meat.
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A
Like a piece of meat. But Ereshkiko also gives birth during those three days. And who she's giving birth to Inanna. So she gives birth to the great goddess. The great goddess is dying and reborn and then takes her place up in the heavens afterwards. So it's really very similar to the Christian story. I might get in trouble here by saying this, but the story of the resurrection is in some view, some, I say is a retelling of that story.
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B
That myth of death and rebirth is pretty universal in every culture. They have a version of it.
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A
They do. And they also have a version of virginity. Even so the great goddess is a virgin in the sense that Mother Mary gives birth to Jesus Christ, is a virgin in the original meaning of the word, is really a being that is both of life, of death and rebirth. It's all things has the capacity that virgin has the capacity to give birth in and of herself.
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B
Well, you can't have death and rebirth without having some measure of strife.
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A
Oh, that's for sure. I mean, I've never given birth in this lifetime in this body. I don't know about my past lives in feminine bodies, but obviously birth is a bloody affair. And amongst the Japanese, when I turned 60, my wife Tomoko threw me a Konreiki birthday party. And the color that Japanese wear when they turn 60 is red. And that's because they consider age 60 to be a rebirth. And birth itself is a bloody affair. So that's why they wear red.
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B
It seems to me that when we talk about love, we have to confront the opposite at the same time. If we lived in a universe that was love, you might say we're in heaven or we're having a near death experience. But here in the physical realm, everybody suffers a certain amount of trauma, a certain amount of pain, certain amount of suffering. Sometimes it's very minimal, sometimes it's enormous, but nobody is free from it.
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A
So what is the opposite of love for you? Is it fear or is it hate?
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B
I interviewed many years ago, Jerry Jampone, who had a bestseller in his Book Love is letting go of fear. So I'm inclined I would go with fear. But there's also indifference. Indifference can often be the opposite of love.
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A
There's no doubt that we're going to go through strife. We suffer. We suffer. The Buddha understood that. We all understand that. We've lived it. But you introduced me saying, I live a charmed life, and mostly I do, because I do wake up every day, and it's such a blessing to be alive. And I learned this from indigenous peoples. I learned this from Grandfather Leon Sekatero, probably the most. And he would make a prayer to the four directions. But when he prayed to the west, he prayed to the ancestors. And he was thankful for everything that had happened to bring him to this moment in time, everything that had happened. And he's the same person who, in his lineage, his people, had suffered. During the 1860s, Kit Carson came and he rounded up the Navajo from Canyon de Chelly and walked them 300 miles to Fort Sumner on what's called the Long Walk. And before they walked them, they burned the fruit trees and starved them. So they were walking in a great land, weakened state, and a lot of them died along the way. And then they were supposedly going to become farmers, which is not the way that they lived before. So Leon, he actually had gotten past historical trauma. Now, this is a very delicate subject to bring up. He told me that himself, but he didn't say that publicly, and I guess I am now. But, you know, he's in the spirit world now. And I think the reason why he didn't say it publicly is because everybody's in a different place, and there's a lot of people who haven't got past historical trauma. And he didn't want to belittle in any way what they're going through.
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B
People are in pain. Many people are in pain. Pain and suffering. I hear from viewers on a regular basis who post comments on this channel to the effect that they would like to be dead, and they certainly don't want to be reborn. They think that this life on this planet is nothing but pure suffering. I've certainly heard from many viewers who have suffered from physical and sexual abuse since childhood. And then it continues as they become adults. Their life feels to them to be miserable from start to finish. Of course, you and I both know you can read great literature about people who have suffered the worst crimes, the worst slavery, even people like the philosopher Epictetus, who was a slave. Epictetus, who find that even in the middle of the worst kind of suffering, There can be moments of great love and wholeness.
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A
Well, yes, and I'm very moved by stories of, like, Sri Aurobindo. And Sri Aurobindo, of course, you know, was a contemporary of Gandhi, and originally was. He was also a bit of a forerunner of Gandhi, but he was a contemporary and he was a political. He was a political activist. And then he got thrown into jail for that. And while he's in jail, he has this awakening experience, an enlightenment experience, you might say. And he begins to see the prison guards and the whole prison, the walls and everything become part of creation, part of creator. And I'm getting chills thinking about it, actually. It's pretty special. And I think it's important to realize that that metaphor is true for everyone, whether you've gone to jail or not. A lot of people are imprisoned by their own thoughts. So in some way, we are incapacitating ourselves or limiting ourselves by our thoughts. And I tend to think of thoughts as our friends that we like to have hanging around us. So we tend to be a little bit even, you know, I'm sure even you, Jeff, you've been an incredible explorer, a pioneer of consciousness, and you're an inspiration to me. But even you, even me, everybody that we've ever met, everybody, everybody is somewhat imprisoned by their own thoughts. And it's useful to think of ourselves that way because then we can begin to get out of. There is strife in our thinking. There's strife in actions. And God knows there's strife in the political world right now, a lot of it. It's also true. And I always come back to, you know, the sun is 93 million miles away, but somehow it's giving off just the right amount of light, warmth and energy. Those phytoplankton and the plants and trees are giving out just the right amount of oxygen to us that we're giving back to them. The water is keeping us alive. And water is. I think that hurts my heart the most. Water has been despoiled more than any other element that I know of in my lifetime. Because when I was a kid, I was 15 years old, going around 14, actually, going around Spain, stopping at places called Agua Fresca, because I'm Aragon Spanish and Basque and Jewish. Those are my roots and my Spanish relatives. I was going around the mountains, areas of the High Pyrenees, and we would stop the places that they knew were Agua Fresca. And I just feel like most people are not doing that anymore because the water's been spoiled maybe still in the high Pyrenees, it's okay, but in a lot of places it's not.
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B
In many places you cannot get clean water.
- [42:43]
A
You can't get clean water. And that's really a horrible thing because water is life. In fact, Grandmother Flor de Mayo would say that the essence of water is love and light. That appeals to me. I don't know how she came to that conclusion, but I love it.
- [43:05]
B
We're about 70% water, the human body.
- [43:08]
A
Yeah, we are. People think of rocks, they always think of rocks as immovable, solid. That they don't change.
- [43:16]
B
Rock solid.
- [43:17]
A
Rock solid. But of course they change. I mean, we get the Rocky Mountains, the mountains rise and then they also erode and they go all the way into sand. And that's why William Blake talking about holding eternity in the palm of a hand is very appealing because. Because it's true. It's true. So I've always, you know, I once presented at a conference called Sand Science and Non Duality in California.
- [43:46]
B
Yeah, it's a well known conference.
- [43:47]
A
And I told the presenters, I think they thought I was joking, but I wasn't. I told them, you should use sand timers. Your conference is called Sand. You should use sand timers. If you want people to talk for 20 minutes, use a sand timer, turn it over, you know, and then you'll actually be. Then that's real. The minutes on a clock are not as real to me because that's something that just a day is real. The sun comes up or. I know Bucky Fuller wouldn't agree when I said that, but sun comes up to our mind and the sun goes down. And then. But then after that, we just chop up the day into little fragments and we name things hours, minutes. And then we balance it a little later with a leap day and whatnot.
- [44:42]
B
And I've worn a watch most of my life. Our lives become regulated by the clock.
- [44:52]
A
Yeah, I don't do that. I don't wear watches. And I used to run conferences without watches. But I would also build in buffers because I really think it's important to do that in a conference. Especially if you're. Some of the conferences I ran were very. They ran themselves, you know, Leroy Little Bear was the moderator and he, you know, the dialogue went till its natural conclusion. Then we said, it's time for lunch. It's time to satisfy gut feelings, was what he would actually say. And then we'd come back, you know, after we would say that was more or less on a time or a schedule. But it's useful to set time but we should also be aware that it is an illusion. And if we think about it, colonization is almost always about the imposition of one view of time on another culture. Indigenous cultures have a very different view of time, which is really in tune with the natural rhythms. So do the Hispanics. So do Africans. So all the colonialism from Europe has been imposing a sense of time. The British trying to tell the Indians of India how to get places on time didn't work out so well.
- [46:15]
B
Well, it seems to me that we're being colonized by technology right now. It's not just time. It's your iPhone, and now it's AI. It's as if we are so immersed in technology, it's coming to a point, and we've done several interviews where technology is becoming so dominant, we're being ruled by it.
- [46:40]
A
Yeah. If I'm really honest, I mean, I feel like I would almost like to discard a cell phone. I was listening to an interview with Rupert Sheldrake just recently, and he said he doesn't have a cell phone. And I thought, wow, good for you.
- [46:58]
B
I've done 35 interviews on this channel with James Tunney, who does not carry a cell phone.
- [47:04]
A
I admire those people. It's hard to do. I think I became addicted myself with a cell phone when I could play music through it, and even in my home stereo system. That was when I kind of gave up and I said, okay, I'm going to do this, but it is dangerous. It's dangerous. And you just opened up a very big subject.
- [47:28]
B
It's a huge subject. We come around to it very often more and more now with the advent of AI because it's popping up everywhere. All of the old software programs I used to use still use now, have an AI component built in.
- [47:45]
A
Well, I did talk a little bit, very little bit about artificial intelligence in the book Original Love. And I look at it through this lens. You know, when we look at love in modern times, we have to realize that we're really still very much embodying an ethos that began during the Industrial Revolution. So that's where the idea started with progress, progress, progress, progress.
- [48:19]
B
But it comes with civilization, but it.
- [48:21]
A
Comes more, I think, with civilization, and civilization living in too tight proximity and cutting out the. The habitat of animals. And I think that's caused. And the way that we treat animals as, you know, beneath us, completely beneath us. I think that to get back to the point, our times are closer to the Industrial Revolution than we realize. In the Industrial Revolution, we were. We were Creating the first machines to automate things. AI is a lot like automation, except that it learns from the regularities in the data and improves. So that's what makes it superior, maybe to just a machine. But it's still very dangerous. It's still not. You know, I don't like the term artificial intelligence, because I don't think there's any intelligence. I think it's. Yeah, Intelligence itself comes from the source. It comes from the source.
- [49:32]
B
Well, you're expressing an ethos which is we need to be closer to nature. And yet, at the same time, if we're talking about love, I kind of feel like we should love our technology as much as we love nature. It all comes from the same.
- [49:51]
A
Well, that's beautiful. I like that. And I love it when people name their cars, because then they're building a relationship with them. Even artificial intelligence, there's an input from humans, and so there's actually some really fascinating work going on with Steven Dinan. I don't know if you interviewed him with the SHIFT Network. He's the head Shift now.
- [50:16]
B
I know nothing about him.
- [50:18]
A
Okay, well, Stephen is doing work where he is befriending artificial intelligence and having dialogues where he's bringing in spirituality. There may be others doing this.
- [50:30]
B
Many others I know of.
- [50:32]
A
Yeah, I think it's good. You know, so they're bringing in love. They're bringing in. So. Because that is the input that's going into.
- [50:42]
D
Our AI we recently released an.
- [50:46]
B
Interview with Deepak Chopra, who has a new book about AI, Dharma, and Higher Consciousness. And he's using AI and has a Deepak Chopra bot which serves as a spiritual advisor. I've heard from many viewers who say, no, don't go in that direction. You don't want to use AI as your spiritual advisor.
- [51:10]
A
Well, you know, to each his own. Because I do think there is something to the idea that if we give some spiritual or loving input to artificial intelligence, that it will evolve in a certain way that will be more palatable.
- [51:30]
B
I probably know of a dozen who are working on. Exactly. But I'm under the impression these will be small players, a cottage industry of AI bots that are programmed to be loving and kind and have spiritual values or feminine values or indigenous values. But the large corporations are looking at weapons of war.
- [51:57]
A
I personally don't really use artificial intelligence at all, except I am using it when I Google something because it's built in. And there's probably more things that I'm unaware of that are built in. But I do believe in my heart of hearts that it is possible to pray and to access source. And that's really what all my work's been about. So I have a hard time with it at all. But I do honor what's going on with people trying to improve it. Because I do understand that it's coming, whether I like it or not. It's more than coming. It's here, and it's affecting our lives.
- [52:38]
B
Let's talk about something you do use, which is ritual and ceremony.
- [52:45]
A
Well, you know, one epiphany I had when I wrote the book Original Love was that almost everything I'd been studying for, really, since I met Dan Moonhawk Alpha, who you knew in 1983 in California Institute of Integral Studies. Yes. He was teaching a class, anthropological linguistics. And it was the confluence of Native America consciousness, quantum physics and language. And so I had an epiphany that everything that I've been studying since then that I was calling Indigenous wisdom could also be. A great deal of it could also be called feminine wisdom. I realized that feminine wisdom is so old, so much older. So both feminine wisdom and indigenous wisdom have become marginalized. And I wanted to bring them back. You mentioned ritual. I was amazed to find out that the word ritual comes from the Sanskrit word ritu, which means menses. So that means. To me. I mean, I don't think it necessarily proves it, but it gives me a very good indication that the first rituals were about a woman's connection between their body and the cosmos, obviously first connection to the moon. So the menstrual cycle was in antiquity always well coordinated with the moon. Today, things have got so a little bit shifted. But still, that's why the moon is such a prominent part of the book, Original Love, like you indicated before. And actually the COVID which my beloved wife Tobako found is a Japanese artist, Kazuko Shihashi, and a beautiful image of a moon and flowers growing up toward the moon. And it just expressed everything that I wanted to express. Because the moon is very feminine. Not in every culture, but in almost every culture, the moon is considered feminine and the sun masculine. Not in Japanese culture, the sun is. Amaterasu is the sun goddess. But there's a few exceptions. But love is feminine. I mean, women are the life givers. We all came from a woman. We were all born in the womb. We were all raised in the womb. We were all connected in that way. That's how the book unfolds. Original Love, it's really about. The first part is about the archaic way of knowing when we're just one with everything. There is no mother. There is no other. It's just oneness. Complete and total oneness. Then we separate from the womb. We separate from the womb. And that's equivalent to an infant being born who's still really close to the source, really close to their mother. And that's a very powerful form of consciousness. That's where we have magical consciousness. I wrote about that, too. And I just wrote a substack column about it as well. Because when I was a kid, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but I used to be able to control the roll of dice. Yeah, I would be able to. You know, I played this game, stratomatic football with my brother. And there was a. My favorite team was the New York jets, and Joe Namath was the favorite corps. And if, you know, knew about Broadway Joe Nady.
- [56:36]
B
I remember.
- [56:36]
A
Yeah, he was very famous and he was a celebrity. I mean, all the women loved him. And he used to party a lot, sometimes got drunk before a game, and he would have some very not so good games. And so his statistical probability on his card was just over 50% to complete passes. But he also threw a lot of successful long passes. So I still remember this strangely. But if you rolled a 3 or an 11, it was an automatic long gain no matter what the defense called. And I would sit there and roll threes and elevens all day long. And my brother's friends got, you know, they didn't even want me to play anymore because it upended all their ideas about things. But what I realized eventually is that, not that I was doing anything special, I think all young people have greater access to this form of magical consciousness. Later on, I was in my 20s and I went to spoon bending parties in California. I know I talked to you about that. And people were yelling, bend, bend, bend. And they were able to bend spoons, and I was able to bend spoons. But the children. The children could bend big metal bars. And they did that because they didn't know they couldn't do it. Nobody told them they couldn't do it. And so their consciousness was freed from all that doubt and they were able to do it. So I took a big detour here. But that's the arc of the book is from archaic consciousness to magical consciousness to mythical consciousness, which breaks up into the two eras of the age of goddesses, then the age of gods and heroes. And then you get into the mental era, which is love in modern times, which is when the mental aspect of love is mostly involved in all the projection and God knows what. But then what Gepser and Aurobindo were envisioning was integral consciousness. An integral consciousness is a time free consciousness which enables you to recollect, remember and revitalize all the ways of knowing that we used to have in prominence. So those archaic ways of knowing, how we're one with everything, those magical ways of being able to be one with universal will and be able to control things with your mind, psychokinesis and what have you, many of the things you've been studying, the mythical ways, those stories, those beautiful ways of uniting with spirit that's there, all those ceremonies, I love ceremonies, are like a recollection of what it felt like when we were connected with everything. All those things are ways of learning, relearning actually how to love.
- [59:50]
B
You are the president of the Gene Gebser Society. It's an important reference I could have used in the introduction and the different stages, the mythological, the magical stage and so on. A lot of that comes out of his work.
- [60:07]
A
It does well, he's the one who coined the terms, at least their English translations. The archaic, magical, mythical, mental and integral structures of consciousness. And what Gepser understood, just like Sri Aurobindo understood, was that these structures of consciousness, one emergent structure, did not make the previous structure obsolete. They all coexist. But as the emergent structure comes in, it represses previous structure. So when mental consciousness comes in to fold at first it's very beautiful. So the ancient Greeks, the mental way of seeing was not just the most accurate way, it was also considered the most beautiful way of thinking. That's why for the ancient Greeks, divine proportionality was so important and it was a relationship between things. So the very way we talk about rational thinking, the word rational comes from ratio, which means the proportion between things. So all this stuff comes in. But I hope I'm not losing you here. But I mean, it's like.
- [61:24]
B
I know it might seem like a tangent to go into Gebser's ideas, but I thought it was very important that our viewers know more about the.
- [61:33]
A
I am the president of the Gene Gepser Society, but I'm not the best Gaepser scholar. And my role in Gepser Society has been to facilitate dialogues. And I love doing that because you don't need to know the answer when you're facilitating a dialogue. You just need to ask the right question, something you're so good at.
- [61:51]
B
Well, I think the reason that Gebser is important and I wanted to Highlight your involvement with the Gebser Society is because for people who are interested in the large picture, why are we here? What is the role of humanity in this world? Gebser is an important thinker.
- [62:13]
A
He is. Now, I personally came to the idea of original thinking before I ever was introduced to Gabser. But Lee Nichol, who was David Bohm's editor, introduced me to Gabriel around 2004, and I was writing my doctoral dissertation then. And so I realized that Gaepsir really had something important to contribute to a way of looking at indigenous ways of knowing. Even though Gaebser didn't seem to have a lot of experience with indigenous ways of knowing or even the Vedic ways of knowing. Of knowing. But later on, he realized how much his work was similar to Aurobindo's and went to visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and met the mother.
- [63:07]
B
I see.
- [63:07]
A
And had mystical experiences in India. So, yeah, it's all connected. It's all connected. But I think Gepser is very important. Can I say one more thing?
- [63:21]
B
Of course.
- [63:22]
A
Gemser taught me a lot about time freedom. Now, I don't use that word in the subtitle of original love for a very specific reason. I said original love, the timeless source of wholeness. The word timeless is more accessible than time freedom. So Gebser meant time freedom in a very specific meaning, which is really about undivided presence. Undivided presence is what brings together the actuality of yesterday, today and tomorrow as one force. And it's time free. It breaks all the barriers of time limitation that we tend to have in our waking existence. But Jeff and I know that you got started on your path because of the dream that was sent to you by your uncle. And when that dream came to you, that dream came at the exact time that he had died. But it's also in a way out of time, because he was probably able to reach out to other people almost simultaneously. I don't know. But he reached out to you and he gave you this very powerful message that is timeless. It's timeless, but it's also time freedom. Time freedom is important because that's the way we dream. Normally when we wake up, we put it back in our normal way of thinking. The first thing we stick in there is our ego. So we even call it like the dream ego. But I really don't experience dreams that way. I don't know. Maybe you experience it differently. I experience a dream as consciousness is everywhere in the dream, everywhere. And later on, I tend to identify who I was, or I was there and I was looking out on something else. But I don't think that's really the way I experience it while I'm dreaming. Does that make sense to you?
- [65:37]
B
I'm not in your dream, so it's hard for me to say. But I'd like to come back around to ritual and ceremony. I know they're very important in your life. And you close your book by suggesting to the reader a kind of a ritual involving the moon to give thanks to the moon. And I think you close your book by suggesting the moon will hear you and the moon will respond in some way.
- [66:07]
A
Well, I'll share with you something that is not in the book, which is that grandfather Leon Sekatero, he's the one who told me that you can communicate psychically with other people through the moon. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because the moon is a reflector of light and light is consciousness. The indigenous people believe that anyway, that light is consciousness. And so if you send your thoughts through the moon. That's what I meant by the moon will hear you and the moon will reflect it back to earth. The moon is a container, almost like a crystal. A crystal contains memory, which a lot of people have spoken about. The moon also contains consciousness, memory, all of that. It's pretty magical, the moon. So if you were to. And I invited the readers or for the audiobook, the listeners to go out right after the moon has risen and bring an offering. Because I believe that any ceremony or ritual should always include an offering. It's not a one way conversation, it's a two way conversation. You want to make an offering to the spirit of the moon, the moon goddess, sometimes called Grandmother Moon. So we make a offering to the moon and a prayer. And then I connected that to this amazing poem which is by Rumi. And he talks about. He talks about opening up the. That the moon will not use the door. The moon only uses the window. And he talks about opening up the window because he wants to feel the moon pressing against his face. And he wants to invite the moon in. But the moon never uses the door. The moon only uses the window. And I don't know, it gave me chills to read that poem. That's what reminded me of something that my wife Tomoko had told me. That was a story. Natsume Soseki, who lived in the Meiji era in Japan. And he was a professor of literature and also of English. And when he had English students, he asked his students to translate the English phrase I love you. And his students. His students translated it as kimi o aisu. And that's because the Japanese word kimi means you and AI means love. So it was a literal translation. But Soseki says, no, that is not the correct translation. The right translation would be something like honya no suki wa kire des ne. And that means, the moon is beautiful tonight, isn't it? That was so important to me because love is beyond words. Love is beyond knowing. Love is more than an emotion. Love is even more than a force. I say it's a foundational force, but it's more than that. Love is a vibration. But maybe it's even more than that. Love is something so beautiful, so cosmic, so large that we can never fully understand. So it's much better to think of love as the beauty of nature.
- [70:13]
B
Glenn Aparicio Parry, what a joy to be with you today.
- [70:17]
A
Always a pleasure.
- [70:19]
B
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, your passion, your wisdom with me once again and with the New Thinking Allowed audience.
- [70:29]
A
Thank you, Jeff. It's a joy. It's always an honor to be with you.
- [70:34]
B
You.
- [70:35]
A
Thank you.
- [70:36]
B
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here. Foreign.
- [71:09]
C
Book four in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [71:23]
D
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org for early access to.
- [72:08]
B
Our videos and livestream events.
- [72:12]
D
Sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org.