Jude Currivan: The Story of Gaia
French philosopher and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said, “someday we should harness the energies of love. And then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire. That someday is here. And now, as we wake up to the radical reality of a unitive narrative, we would also discover, as a species and perhaps for the first time, who we really and truly are and who we can evolve to become.” With me today, to shed a powerful light on that no longer, the radical reality is Cosmologist planetary healer, futurist author, and co-founder of wholeworldview.org, Dr. Jude Currivan, who’s traveled the world for more than two decades in service to planetary healing. The author of seven non-fiction books currently available in 16 languages in 26 countries. Dr. Jude Currivan joins me to discuss her latest book, The Story of Gaia: the Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet.
An Interview with Jude Currivan: The Story of Gaia
To listen to the full interview of Jude Currivan by Sandie Sedgbeer on the OMTimes Radio and TV flagship show, What is Going OM, click one of the players below.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Now, you studied archeology, ancient cosmologies, and quantum physics at the University of Redding and at Oxford. I want to know what inspired your interest in those subjects.
Jude Currivan: It’s a very long and very scenic route. When I was very young, from the age of about four or so, I started to have what we might call multidimensional experiences. I’m sure many, many children do. And fortunately for me, I didn’t tell anybody about them. So, nobody said this was nonsense. And I was having so much fun, I just carried on. So, from that very earliest stage, I was fascinated by the natural reality because what I was experiencing was beyond what seemed to be our physical Universe. At the same time, I was also fascinated by the snippets I came across of ancient wisdom teachings, especially those of India and Egypt. So, it began a lifelong journey of curiosity in terms of the ancient insights, because what I was experiencing accorded far more closely with what I was reading about the insights of the ancients. So ancient. So that fascinated me because I could find a resonance there. I could find some validation in what I was experiencing. But also, at the same time, I was so curious as to what leading-edge science was telling us because it seemed that, with the 20th-century revolutions of quantum physics and relativity, we were being given the same insights these ancient sages had.
And yet that was not what I was being taught. So, I thought, right. Two flows here. One, the ancient wisdom, and two, what is leading edge science about? And might it find its way forward to more closely reflect what the ancients perceived and what I was experiencing directly.
So I did a master’s degree in physics at Oxford University, specializing in quantum physics and cosmology when I was 18. So that was in my late teens and early twenties. And then, I had a whole life before returning to academia to do my Ph.D. in archeology at the University of Reading, studying and researching ancient cosmologies. And I found that all those threads have now converged; they’ve all become a tapestry with the latest science confirming that ancient wisdom and those direct experiences that have happened for people since time immemorial.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Isn’t it interesting how we find how it all converges later in life?
Jude Currivan: I think it was Søren Aabye Kierkegaard that said, we live life forward, so we understand it backward.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So when you were studying, were you the only female amongst the group of men?
Jude Currivan: Well, back in the early 1970s, when I was doing my master’s degree at Oxford, I think six women and 200 men were in the faculty.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So how did the men relate to you?
Jude Currivan: Actually, it was fine. They were fine because I’m a bit of a boy myself, I was a tomboy when I was a kid. So I sort of settled in as pals with them. And I was very fortunate because one of the professors there, Dennis Sharma, who had been Steven Hawkins’s mentor at Cambridge, came over to Oxford and became a mentor for me. And he just loved people who were curious and open-minded. And he gave me some brilliant advice, supported my curiosity, and realized that I needed to go beyond what I was taught there at Oxford.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Your new book is just full of science and research. And also some quotes from ancient texts. How did the ancients know this? I mean, it’s taken us this long to get to a point where we’re probably using a lot of technology they didn’t have. So how did they know this?
Jude Currivan: We now understand that our Universe exists and evolves as non-locally unified entities from its very beginning through its entire lifetime. So although there is a speed limit within space-time, which enables a sort of flow of time from the very beginning, a causation from the very beginning within space-time, our Universe knows itself in its entirety all through that process. So we, as microcosms of our Universe’s intelligence, also have that ability to tap into deeper, multidimensional levels of awareness. That’s what spiritual seekers have done throughout the story of being human. That’s what the ancient sages did. That’s what shamans do. That’s what, seers do. So we have that ability that isn’t a requisite of technology. It’s a natural attribute of our innate awareness as part of a universe that itself is innately aware. And I think what we’ve done over the last few hundred years – and I’m not putting any judgment on this – we’ve separated ourselves from that natural ability. And now we’re beginning to remember that. But in the meantime, of course, that journey away from that wholeness or perceived wholeness, but it is whole, came along a line of technology. So as you say, our technologies are remarkable. We couldn’t be having this conversation without them. And yet almost because and as a result of that technology and that perceived separation, we’ve learned, again, technologically what our ancestors intuitively knew because it is our innate way of being.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So the technology itself, which has divided us, is also bringing us back to unification.
Jude Currivan: Exactly. It’s extraordinary. And you know, when we talk about holograms, high definition, and information, this is the language of leading-edge science. But, still, it’s also aligning and converging now with those ancient spiritual teachings. So it’s using a different language but the same perception of the unified nature reality.
Sandie Sedgbeer: It’s refreshing to hear something positive about technology. We hear how it’s destroying everything, so, it’s nice to know. It confirms what we need to remember.
Jude Currivan: I think so, and technology, certainly the technologies we’re talking about, are neutral. It’s how we use them. It’s our level of consciousness, isn’t it? Our level of awareness as to how we put them into use. So, if we still have a paradigm as a collective awareness of separation, and not yet fully waking up to the realization we’re inseparable, then how we use our technologies, and the technological potential will be coming from that paradigm.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Absolutely. So, in the book, you give us all the science that the Universe did not begin with the Big Bang theory, as many think, but with a fine-tuned, ongoing, and very meaningful breath. So, how does technology tell us this?
Jude Currivan: We have telescopes that can actually look far out into space. And, of course, because the speed of light is a finite cosmic speed limit, as we look out, we look backward. So if we look out, say, 600 light years, and a light year is a distance that light travels in a year, we’re looking back 600 years. So we are able to go back for billions upon billions of years and realize that our Universe did – Indeed, the best evidence we have says that our Universe – began a finite amount of time ago. The best estimate we have is 13.8 billion years since it began the tiniest tiny state.
And the Big Bang was always facetious because it was always known that It began in a small state, but not as a bang, not as implied chaos or randomness. We now know from those same measurements and many others that our Universe began in an incredibly ordered state and also incredibly fine-tuned. When we look at the constants of the laws of physics. You know, the estimate is that if they were different by something like one in a thousand trillion, trillion, then we wouldn’t be here. Our Universe would’ve stalled before it started. So incredibly fine-tuned, incredibly small, and, therefore, much more likely to be a deep breath than a Big Bang.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So that leads to the question: Who’s breath?
Jude Currivan: Indeed! And the question is, what? By what name do we choose to call the Cosmic mind, you know, the infinite and eternal cosmic mind. Do we choose cosmic mind, which was a term that Einstein used? Do we choose God? Do we choose Allah? Do we choose Great Spirit or Great Mystery? The ancient Vedic traditions talked about the breath of Brahman, breathing our Universe into being. But we’re part of that. It’s not this idea that somehow a creator breathed our Universe into being and then went away to something else. Everything, in reality, is that creation. Everything in that reality. Sir James Hopwood Jeans, who you may know, was known, was an Edwardian philosopher who, over a hundred years or so ago, spoke about Universe being more a great thought than a great thing (1). And indeed, this is what we’re realizing. This is the ancient Indian teaching, which says mind and consciousness aren’t what we have. They are what we and the whole world are. And our Universe is a great finite thought in the infinite and eternal mind of the cosmos.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You make it very clear in the book that it’s not just the fact that it was a big breath. It was a very meaningful breath. So, tell us a little about the evolutionary purpose and the meaning of all of this.
Jude Currivan: Well, what we’re finding, and again, these are across all scales of existence and across many different fields of research – not just cosmology and physics but biology and the study of human systems. So, across many fields, from the smallest of the whole Universe, we’re seeing the same mathematical patterns of relationships. So yeah, those patterns are dynamic, and they’re evolving, but those patterns are innately relational. They scale up and scale down. And they’re core fractals. There are other patterns. But fractals are a great example, and they are universal. And we find them from the way electrons cluster around atoms. The electrons cluster in these patterns when they change their properties from insulators to metal. We find them in plants. We find them in river systems, coastlines, clouds, and ecosystems. We find them at the level of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. We find them in our galaxy. We find them in the relic radiations, those left over from a very early era of our Universe in the patterns that fill the whole space. And we find them in collective human behaviors. So, we see these patterns everywhere, indicative of a unified universe. There is no separation. Secondly, a profoundly relational Universe. And because they’re not random patterns, they’re not random. They are exquisitely resonant, harmonic, and relational. So, that’s where the meaning comes in.
And we went down even deeper and found that our Universe embeds that meaning using just two letters. We talk about our language, 26 letters with no meaning, then words and sentences, poetry and songs. Our Universe creates the entirety of its appearance, including us using two digital letters, digitized letters, ones, and zeros.
And from that, at the tiniest scale, which is way smaller than an atom, it creates everything from atoms and molecules to planets, plants, and people over billions of years. So there’s innate meaning embodied. And when we go back to that first moment, it was as simplest as it could be, but no simpler. And because those patterns are not just static, they’re related. They’re not just relational and static. They’re dynamic, and they’re evolutionary. So our Universe has undertaken this incredible journey, this evolutionary journey from simplicity to ever greater levels of complexity and diversity and individuated self-awareness. So that’s what I mean by meaning and purpose. Embodied.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You start some of your chapters in Gaia’s voice, as she’s telling her own story. Were you connecting with Gaia and channeling those pieces, or did you just use that as a device?
Jude Currivan: No, it was not a device. I feel, first of all, the book wrote me, and that Gaia wrote the books through me. So I was in service to her sentience and all her children. And so it was a very profound experience for me because although I started writing the book with an enormous love and respect for Gaia, what I discovered in writing was just so extraordinary, so incredible that I completed the book almost lost of words. For an author to say ‘I was almost lost for words because of my love and respect.’ She’s adamant, you know, this whole Universe and Gaia are just extraordinarily adamant in that embodiment of their evolutionary impulse, which flows through us too. So, I felt incredibly privileged to be in a position to be able to be some form of a channel of this understanding.
Sandie Sedgbeer: It is the most incredible story. And we can only look at some key points here. But one of the things I wanted to talk about, which is something all of us really need to comprehend is that there’s ever-increasing evidence that mind and consciousness aren’t something we have, but rather that we and the entire world fundamentally are. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? And from that, everything else has to change.
Jude Currivan: Yes, exactly. Because the old paradigm we are taught at school that our societies are structured around is a worldview of solely Materialism and Separation. And our worldviews guide our behaviors. They’re our mindset. They’re how we perceive ourselves, the world around us, and each other. And we now have the evidence. It’s not just an idea; we have absolute evidence. And that’s why the book is full of that evidence. Because without it, I don’t think the gauge would be shifted because this is a radical misunderstanding of who we really are. And although, spiritual traditions and religion have taught us this, our secular world has peripheralized this and basically said, no, no, no. Now that secular worldview is being turned completely on its head by evidence, as I say it.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So why are so many scientists saying no to this? Why are they arguing against it when the evidence is there? Graham Hancock has just done a new series on Netflix, and I read the most vicious piece about it, saying how stupid it was and how crazy everyone is for making this such a popular program. Why can’t people accept this knowledge?
Jude Currivan: To be honest, as both a cosmologist and an archeologist, that has not been my experience of archeology. What archeologists seek to do, as any good scientist would seek, is to follow the evidence. And where there is good evidence in the main, I feel archeologists have been willing to accept that. So, for example, Göbekli Tepe, which I visited, is one of the most ancient, monumental, absolutely extraordinary sites. It’s archeologists that have excavated that. And the archeologists have said it’s eleven-and-a-half thousand years old. Work that’s been done in Malta, in terms of the alignment of virtually all the Maltese temples to the star Sirius… I think the difficulty is where there’s a mix of lack of evidence in the main, and then a lot of speculations come into it. And in my experience, and certainly my own journey, the best guidance I’ve ever been given was by my mentor Dennis Sharma at Oxford. He said: “Jude, it may not make you popular, but follow the evidence wherever it leads.” And that’s what I’ve sought to do. And I think with these ancient discoveries, we still have so much we don’t know.
But if we can get the evidence, a lot of it is likely to be under the sea, then I do feel there will be more acceptance of that part of our past. But just coming to the more generic point now, in terms of what I’m sharing, this emergent cosmology of a conscious and evolutionary universe, the Nobel Prize in physics this year was given to three researchers, all of whom have been fundamental in enabling this understanding to come forward. And there’s a new book out on black holes by Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeffrey Robert Forshaw, concluding that our Universe’s appearance arises from deeper and non-physical levels of causation. They don’t know how, but they conclude this because this is where the evidence is.
I’m saying this is evidence, not just cosmologically and from black holes. This is the evidence of all scales of existence in our Universe. Its appearance of energy matters. Space-time does indeed emerge from deeper levels of causation. And that causation is essentially cosmic consciousness that expresses itself as meaningful information, digitized in-formation from which builds up all of the appearances of our Universe.
So we’re on that road, and as the evidence moves forward, sure, there will be people who cling to our paradigm. But just as when quantum physics and relativity physics came through, they also came under a huge amount of criticism. But the evidence was able to overcome those because it was so powerful. And the evidence, now, this is the direction of travel. Whether anyone likes it or not, this is what has repeatedly shown the Universe to be. It’s the fundamental reality.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So what implications does this have on religion?
Jude Currivan: I feel it honors that because all religions and spiritual traditions really speak to the appearance of our world emerging from what’s sometimes called spiritual realms or multidimensional realms or the ground of all beings.
We talk about God and Allah and a great mystery. This shows that we are inseparable from God, from Allah, from great mystery, because some religions support a sort of a God out there or a deity. And here, this says, we are intrinsic microcosms of the wholeness of being. So, therefore, there is no deity God outside of us. And we are not the whole Godhead, but we are microcosmic co-creators. And it’s the innate meaning and evolutionary purpose and ineffable being.
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