The Resilient Mind - The War on Consciousness (And How to Win It) - Gregg Braden

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Gregg Braden is a five-time New York Times best-selling author, scientist, educator and pioneer in the emerging paradigm bridging science, social policy and human potential.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to The War on Consciousness with Greg Bredden. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Talk about spirituality. The truth is that the people have assigned definitions to spirituality that limit our understanding of spirituality. The true definition of spirituality is it's all about relationships. And it's about our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with the earth, with the past, with the future, with God, with other people. And those relationships are all defined by the sciences. So it made perfect sense for me through a scientific lens to explore these relationships.

And I think there wasn't any great awakening moment. But I will say, a lot of my community know about this. I was during the Cold War years, I was tapped as an Earth scientist for my expertise in computer science. And it gave me a front row view to the horrors that were happening during the Cold War when the former USSR and the former USA, because it's it wasn't the same, you know, it's a very different country now. When those two superpowers came about this close to doing the unthinkable with nuclear weapons. It was an absolutely insane time. And my feeling has always been, Alex, that if we know where to look into the past and how to interpret the wisdom of past civilizations that we would find the key that would help us to become

greater than the differences that separate us and led to the wars like the Cold War that I was working in so I really wanted to devote my my time to finding what is it that our ancestors knew that we've forgotten or what did they know that we're only beginning to understand that could help us create the kind of world in reality that we know is as possible in our hearts and and spirituality and science seemed to me like a reasonable path to to pursue that there's a battle unfolding in our world right now that's playing out on many different levels. There is a battle for our beliefs, what we believe about everything, what we believe about climate change, about pandemic, about 5G, about, you know, Kim trails, all those things. There's a battle for our thoughts and that battle is

playing out every, every minute of every hour of every day through the news feeds of legacy media that are pushing us to embrace a way of thinking that supports very very specific agendas there is a battle playing out in the classroom in terms of the textbooks and the the teachings who we are where we come from and and this battle is is all over what is called well it's it's our story the story of our past but all of this in my experience in my opinion is providing cover for an even deeper battle. And there is literally a battle for our very humanness. Our humanness is on the line as advanced technologies

are being proposed to replace our biology. So everything from artificial intelligence to chemicals in the blood, chips in the brain, sensors under the skin, all of this. So there is a battle for the way that we have been taught to think about ourselves. And that battle is, fighting tooth and nail to hang on to what's called the standard model. So the standard model says that we're born into a dead universe,

a dead inert universe, big bang, just happened to occur. Lucky physics is what it's called. And that we are the product of random genetic mutations. Lucky biology is what it's called. And that civilization began in a primitive state and evolved slowly, gradually over long periods of time. this is all part of the standard model that's being fought for the problem Alex is that the data as a scientist I can look you and our viewers right in the eye and I can tell you this straight up

without any any hesitation the data doesn't support the standard model the data now tells us that the universe appears to be alive that functions as a as a living being it makes intelligent decisions when there's a star that's going to explode and can damage other star systems or other solar systems. They will change their course to avoid the the energy that's coming from from these exploding stars and the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Telescope were the first to actually capture these things happening. And it was, if it was just once, it could be a fluke, but it was happening again and again and again. The universe appears to be a living entity, alive, conscious. Humans, there is no physical evidence to

support the theory of evolution as we are teaching in our schools that we evolved from primitive you know less less evolved beings than we are it's speculation its theory and now the DNA studies are telling us that we appeared mysteriously about 200,000 years ago we can extract the DNA from ancient forms of life now and compare their genome to ours and it tells us Neanderthal is we didn't descend from Neanderthal we share DNA because we interbred with them. So the point of all of this is the evidence doesn't support the standard model. The standard model keeps us feeling powerless and separate from our world and makes us vulnerable to other people's ideas of how we live our lives and what kind of society is, what kind of a society is possible. When it comes to civilization itself, the same thing is happening.

When I was in school, you know, again, 50s, 60s, early 1970s, I was taught that civilization began and what's called the cradle of civilization, the Indus Valley, about 5,000 years ago, the Tigris Euphrates Valley. That idea has gone right out the window, but it's still being taught in the mainstream curriculum. We now know there was not a single cradle of civilization, but there were apparently six simultaneous cradles of civilization. Tigers Euphrates was one of them. Egypt was one. There was one in Mesopotam, well, Mesopotamian, Mesopotamia, there was one in China, one in northern in the northern Peru.

It was called the Corral civilization. Mesoamerica was another one of those civilizations. And what's interesting is they all had similar technologies. And they all had the, you know, the pyramidal technologies. They all had cosmologies that tell us things about our solar system. our Milky Way that we only rediscovered in the 20th century. And some of this stuff's thousands of years old. They had architecture, they had agriculture, they had mathematics.

And so the question is, you know, where did all of that come from? How did all of that happen? And as a scientist, what I have to say, honestly, when you look at the data and you look at the genetic manipulation that had to occur for us to be who we are, human chromosome number two is very well documented as being effused a chromosome that's a result of a fusion and genetic manipulation that cannot happen under natural circumstances and it's responsible for our ability to have empathy and sympathy and self-regulation of our biology it's responsible for a brain 50% larger than our nearest primates it's all because of that chromosome and

chromosome seven is the reason that we have complex speech and why you will never hear a chimpanzee saying Led Zeppelin stairway to heaven, because their chromosome seven does not have the mutations that ours does. Ours all underwent the mutations at the same time rapidly in the same period of time, not slowly gradually over long periods of time. And scientists know that these things cannot happen under natural conditions. So as a scientist, I have to say that it appears that there's some kind of intervention that has happened in our past 200,000 years ago and signed this degree on the date.

So, you know, we appeared 200,000 years ago. No, no controversy around that. The question is, where do we come from? That's where the controversy is happening. So the civilizations that we have been taught in the past, we were taught that civilization began 5,000 years ago. Now what we know is that 5,000 years is the most recent 5,000 year cycle. And it's we've been taught the history only of the most recent 5,000 year cycle. And there was another one before that. And that's where you see things like the Gulf of Kambat in India under 120 feet of water, 9,500 years old, a city three miles long, five miles wide that matches the description in the Bhagavad Gita that everybody thought was a fairy tale. And that's where you see.

see other places like Keral in southern Peru. Coral collapsed when we are taught that civilization began. Coral collapsed 5,000 years ago, but it goes back another 2,000 years before that. So there's another 5,000 year window and now Gobeckley-Tepe and what we're finding now in Antarctica, now that the ice is melting, satellites are showing complex archaeological structures Under underneath the ice, that ice has been there for 20,000 years. The question is who is building this stuff 20,000 years ago. So now you've got a third 5,000 year cycle.

And these cycles are very familiar. They're 5,125 year long cycles that are called Great World Ages that make up the Mesoamerican calendar, many people call them the Mayan calendar that are driven largely by climate change and by Earth's location in space relative to the sun. Earth does a dance. So it's a tilt and angle and a wobble the Earth is doing on a regular basis. Molonkovic cycles is what these are called

in geologic terms. And that drives a lot of the change. So now we're looking back, we're looking back at pre-E Ice Age civilizations, you know, over 20,000 years BP before present. And this, standard model is pushing back on this. So as a scientist, I can tell you what happens.

When the discovery is made, Alex, it doesn't fit the traditional model. So whether it's evolution for humans or whether it's civilization, you know, for the planet. If the discovery doesn't fit, it's called anomaly. And then they take the anomalies and they put them into a pile over here. And they say, you know, we'll come back and we'll look at that later. Well, now what's happened is the pile of anomalies. is actually so great it's rewriting the traditional story. So I have friends in academia.

Well, they're friends until we have this conversation. And I, you know, and I ask them. I said, well, how come you can't, why can't you teach this to your students? Why not share everything with our young people, give them the old ideas, given the new discoveries, and let them, you know, let them figure it out. And what this particular is a male, he's a professor at a well-known university, he said, you know, we're going to leave that battle for the next generation of professors. He said there's a new generation of college professors. We're going to let them fight that standard model because we don't want to change the books. We don't want to change what we've taught for 40 or 45 years. So here's the net result is that we have a generation of young people now that. are dedicated and really want to solve the problems that we have left them, but we're asking

them to solve the problems through the same thinking that we use to create the problems. We're not sharing the new information. So of course that's changing. It's changing very slowly. And so it's a long answer to a short question, but I think the, what we have to say is there has been intervention and all of the evidence. If you look at the DNA evidence, it supports that. that through genetic manipulation, cultural evidence.

Every indigenous tradition I've ever studied, Alex, not one of them says anything about evolution, slow, gradual change. They all say we're the product of a greater cosmic community. We have relations that extend beyond this world. They all say that from the Tibetans to the shamans and the Yucatan and certainly in the Andes, the native indigenous traditions.

traditions throughout the Americas. They all say this. So this is the cultural evidence. The archeological evidence, I am a consultant as a geologist and a linguist. I'm a consultant on a couple of archaeological projects that are now revealing archaeological evidence depicting direct relationships between people of the earth and people from beyond the earth. And what's interesting is on these archaeological artifacts, there are maps of our solar system that are showing rings around Neptune, for example, that we didn't even know had rings until, you know, relatively late in the 20th century. And they're showing, of course, the rings around Saturn and also the rings around Jupiter. They're showing the relative sizes.

They're showing the moons of the different plants in our solar system. But the interesting thing is they're showing it as if you were coming inbound rather than from Earth, leaving our solar system and you have to say where does that stuff come from and if you see one or two you could say well maybe it's a lucky fluke we're literally talking about hundreds of artifacts depicting the same things but they are they're recorded in different media different most of it's on stone that we're seeing so so now we've got archaeological evidence we've got genetic evidence we've got cultural evidence uh and archaeological evidence because we're we're we're what we're seeing is these archeological sites are now being dated 25, 30,000 years before, BP,

before present, ice age or even pre-ice age. And none of it fits the standard model. None of it supports the story that we've been taught. And this is what I know my dear friend Graham Hancock talks about this a lot. David Hatcher Childress, you know, a lot of we've been around for a long time. But I think what's happening now is that the world is changing and we're up against against issues and problems that we can only solve by being honest with ourselves about who we are. And so now the data supports a new human story. And the question is, do we love ourselves enough? Do we love the world enough to embrace what the evidence is saying to us and follow it where it leads rather than taking that evidence in trying to cram it into a preexisting story where it does.

fit and that's the spiritual endeavor I think that's up for all of us right now. So for those listeners that are familiar with Gaia, I did an entire series called Missing Lengths Season Number Two. The entire season was dedicated to this conversation. I think it was 13 episodes. The bottom line is just to summarize, it's called the forbidden question in the world of physics and the question is are we living in a virtual reality or in a computer simulated reality? A lot of people will say, well, no, you know, everything here is real. And the question is, if you were in a simulation, how would you know that's a simulation if that's all that you've ever known? And the idea is not new.

It was first proposed back in 1940s, the thinking that we may be living at that time, the term virtual reality wasn't popular term, but the idea of a simulation was. And, and, and, and, And the first computers were being built back in the 40s and they were saying, is it possible that we are the product of an advanced civilization or maybe we are the advanced civilization and we've placed ourselves into a simulation to learn something. That's the purpose of a simulation is to learn something in an immersive environment, to learn something in that environment that you're going to need when you go somewhere else. So when you look at the ancient traditions, every one of them says that this world isn't real. They say we're living a dream or we're living

the, you said the Hindu traditions that's called the Maya. The Maya is the dream. Christian traditions, you know, say that this world is temporary. We're from someplace else. We're going to learn something here and then then we're going to leave. It's not going to last long here. We're going to go somewhere else. So they all support this. But that's not science. Where the science gets really interesting is 1991. Nick Boastrum, I didn't know we're going to have this conversation, so I'm doing this all from memory from top of my head. But it was Nick Boastrum that wrote the first paper and actually it was a PhD thesis asking, are we living in a simulated reality? And you now can get a graduate degree in exploring the question of whether or not we are living in a simulation or not. But he wrote a paper and he created a very complex algorithm, plugging in many variables from everyday life.

So what Bostrom did was he created this algorithm plugged in all these variables from everyday life. And the algorithm came back and said the odds are much greater that we are living in a simulated reality than that this is what's called a base reality. Stephen Hawking was exploring this before he died. He said, this is the big question we have to ask ourselves. Are we living in a base reality or is there another base reality out there? And we are one of many simulations. So when you think about this, you know, it actually makes a lot of sense because in a simulation, who benefits from the simulation?

And the answer is it's the people in the simulation because they are the ones that are learning. When you look at the properties of a simulation, whether it's a flight simulator teaching pilots how to fly or a docking simulator so SpaceX can connect to the space station or, you know, a simulator so you can set up solar panels on the surface of Mars, you need to know how you do it before you get there. So every simulation has a beginning. It has an end. Every simulation has rules. If you, you know, follow those rules, the simulation is going to go much easier for you. Every simulation is based upon cycles. The computer will generate cycles of time or cycles of experience that repeat in the simulation. Every simulation, this is really interesting, every simulation has a way for those in the simulation to communicate beyond the simulation when they need help. So, you know, if you're in a flight simulator, you got crossed winds and you say, hey man, I've got cross. You're on a radio talking to someone that's not in your simulator. So when you compare those, you compare those to what we're living right now.

We have, the universe has a beginning. And mathematically, we can tell you when it's going to complete solar system and life. We have beginnings and endings. We have rules that were left to us by our ancestors a long time ago. And if we follow those rules, life gets much easier. We're all told that this is a dream or an illusion or a Maya. And when we get in trouble, rather than asking somebody else in the same situation, we were taught that we have the ability in consciousness to go beyond the simulation, to ask your higher self, which may be you, your higher self may be you outside of the simulation that you're communicating with or to ask God, you know, who may be the architect. the simulator or ask your ancestors who have died or you know who are now sitting

outside the simulation and what seems like a lifetime of a hundred years for us could be 10 minutes in a simulation it so our entire lifetime our perception of time could be 10 minutes we may be the product of a highly advanced technologically sophisticated civilization that's very ancient that has run into some problem and that problem probably is mirrored in the simulation. It could be an ecological disaster. It could be war. Maybe we are living in a world where we're about to destroy ourselves in war. And we're all in the simulation saying, is there another way? And if that's true, it would make sense that you would have multiple simulations. And physics now tells us the multiverse, multiverse theory. So, you know, a lot of

these things, different languages are telling us, they're pointing to the same thing. When you, I just I just did a, I was just on the webinar earlier today and there was a physicist that I was talking to that was telling us how we are essentially, we're 99.999 and he went out like six decimal places empty space. There's not much to us here. So and that is precisely the way you would expect a computer to build an avatar in a simulation. So one of the interesting things that Elon Musk talks about when he's a strong believer that we are in a simulated environment. He said, you know, we've only had computers 60 or 70 years and we are building environments that are essentially indistinguishable from everyday life.

You go to Disney and you see this on a large scale. You go into some of those rooms. It's all computer generated and it looks just real as hell. You don't know the difference. What would we be able to do as a civilization if we had had computers for five or 10,000 years, which is nothing in simulation. How real would our simulations be? And then you look at the themes that are playing out in our world today and the overriding theme of good versus evil and the ability for us to find a quality of love within us that transcends the hurt and the suffering and the evil that we find around us. Maybe that's the theme that's playing out here because we're going to go to a world where we need to know those things. So we could go on and on, but the bottom line is the science actually

now, now a new, a new experiment was done in 2014 that is showing, I mean, this gets pretty wild. It's in the experiments, an object only exists if it's being observed. If it's not being observed, it's not there. Here's why that's important because in a computer, when you play a computer game, And that computer cannot hold an entire city in its memory because it takes up too much memory. So it's only when you are in that part of the city that the walls and the buildings become apparent. If nobody's there, you don't need that. What the experiments are showing is in our physics lab simulations is that things only exist

when they're being observed. If they're not observed as particles, then they become waves. It's still energy, but it is the observation, the interaction that collapses the waves into the particles that we call reality. And that is exactly the way that our computers work with simulations today. So it's a big question. The thing about the Matrix was the theme. What the Matrix said is that there's a world we cannot see that influences the world we can see. And we are in both of those worlds.

Now, you know, all the Hollywood fighting and all that, they did that to make it palatable. But the theme, so there is an emerging philosophy that's in the scientific community that says consciousness informs itself through the things that it creates. In other words, I write a book or an artist creates a painting or a sculpture. Hollywood makes movies. Where do those ideas come from? It, this philosophy says that those ideas come because we as a mass consciousness are asking ourselves to remember something about ourselves. And one of the ways we're doing it is through what we call entertainment. But the entertainment is actually telling us something, you know, very important about ourselves.

This philosophy extends to technology. It says all the technology that we've ever built is complex it is. it mirrors something that we already do within us. And I just did an entire program based upon this. And as a scientist, I have to say it's true. I have yet to see any technology in the world around us that doesn't mimic what we already do in the cells from the building of the internet to the way information is stored on the chip, even blockchain technology that now is going to revolutionize the way that finance and money, what they mean to us in our world. Blockchain mimics. the way information is stored in the genome.

In the genome, there is a transparent, immutable record of every genetic transaction that has ever occurred leading up to the current moment, to the current genome. That is the beauty of blockchain technology because it is a transparent, immutable record of every digital transaction that has ever occurred, so it cannot be manipulated the way current, you know, centralized financial system

are and things like that. It looks like the technology that will free us from the shackles of fear and greed financially mirror the way that we store information in the cells of our body. Consciousness informs itself through its creations. So the simulation may be telling us the same thing. Maybe our ability to simulate on a computer a game, we may be reminding ourselves through that, that we are living that in our lives. And if so, then how many layers are we into that simulation? Where is our base reality? That's another conversation, I think, that we could have.

You know, it's a perfect example of where the false narrative of obsolete science being held in the classroom has hurt knowledge in the past. It's a perfect example because Gobeckley-Tepin, It's a series of mounds. They were discovered in southern Turkey. They were discovered. There was an American archaeologist who made the discovery back in the 90s. And he dated these things and they came back over 10,000 BP before present. And he had learned what all of us had learned, that civilization began 5,000 years ago. And so to have a date twice that, he said, well, there's a problem with the machines, he walked away from the discovery of a lifetime. And it was until a German archaeologist went to the same site and he believed the data. And he very famously said, he said, if I don't

leave right now, he said, I'll spend the rest of my life here. And he did. And he died, I think it was 2000, I think he died in 2017 or 2018 at the site. So Gobeckley-Tepe is a series of round temple sites that have been buried intentionally by whoever was living there. They were buried 8,000 years ago. We don't know why they were buried. If they were buried to protect them or to hide them, we don't know the answer to that. But now, and only a couple of them have been excavated. So Earth penetrating radars showing there are about 20 of the temple sites. Only a couple have been excavated and I think one or one primarily is available to the public right now. It's an ongoing archaeological site. But now they're they're showing the dating is showing that

was buried 8,000 years ago, which already blows the timeline. But that now they're going back over over 13,000 years BP before present. Well, the reason this is a problem, two reasons. One, it's older than 5,000 years of the cradle of civilization. But number two, as a geologist, is fascinating to me because the last ice age ended right around 12,000 years ago. And then there was a period of unsettled weather for about 4,000 years when the ice melted and the great floods happened on the earth. We can see that. So if the ice age ended around 12,000, and we're now dating 13 to 15,000 that means these were either built during the Ice Age, which is unlikely, or they were built pre-ice age and then the ice, you know, was in all of this, you know, these other things

happened that were allowed them to be covered. So the truth is we don't know who built these and there appear to be no written records. And you find this time and time again, and lead groups into Southern Peru every, I have for 40 years now. COVID was the first time in 40 years that we didn't go to Peru at least once with a group. And we'll be going back in 23. What we find in the pre-Incan sites like Tio Hanoco and Bolivia and even in some of the archaeological sites in the Sacred Valley in Kusko, no written records. So you see this time and time again, Keral, Peru, no written records.

or did they have written records that we simply haven't recognized? Were they using a form of communication that we're only beginning to understand? And that's the evidence supports that. And then that's the beginning of another conversation. So, Gobeckley-Tepa is a tangible mystery because you cannot deny what the evidence is showing. Antarctica is blowing those dates right out the window. The problem is Antarctica is off limits to civilians. So there's a little place on the Ross shelf where civilians are allowed, you know, a little day trip.

But the interior of Antarctica is is off limits. Well, this is what's interesting. Back in the 1950s, this is at the, you know, during the Cold War years, Antarctica was kind of divided up. It was said it was an international, you know, international continent. Nobody owns it. But at the same time, the superpower. at the time put military bases. China's got their base. America has their base. Russia has their base. The interior of the continent, once you get beyond the ice, appears to be desert. There is no ice. It's and it's got to be one of the driest, it's zero humidity, one of the driest places on the face of the earth. Yeah, it's a fast as a geologist, I'm fascinated by it. So I think probably some of

the tallest mountain ranges are underneath that ice right now. The ice is about two miles thick. And it's been there around 20,000 years. Now that global warming is melting the ice, what the satellite imagery is showing are complex structures. They're not like little pole huts, you know, and hunting villages. I mean, these are big complex structures. And they are believed to be relatively intact. And either somebody built them in the ice or they were there before the ice occurred 20,000 years ago. And there's a lot of mystery around that.

well, you're from the film industry in LA. You probably heard some of this. They had film crews that have gone down that have never been seen again. One of them very famously was from, I think, UCLA. And they were, you know, relatively young people. We don't know where that film crew is. The parents are, you know, working with agencies to try to find it out. So I think whatever we discover when, and it will be revealed, when it's revealed in Antarctica, will blow the Goldbeckley. Tepe dates right out the window and all of it, all of it says to us is that there's a new human story emerging. We are not what we've been told. We're more so much more than we've been led to believe in the past. The better we know ourselves, the better equipped we are to deal with

the crises and the challenges that life brings to our doorstep. And the better we know ourselves, the less we fear change. And this is a big one, Alex, because the world is changing and people are being conditioned to be afraid of the change. And that fear makes them vulnerable to other people's ideas of what the world should look like. And we need change. I mean, I think the global financial system, for example, it's buckling and collapsing under its own weight because it's unsustainable. Our energy equation on the planet is unsustainable in its current form. The way that we're growing food is unsustainable in the presence of changing climate, which changes the local weather. The good news is that we already have all the answers to all the big problems facing us right now.

We've had them for almost 70 years. We've had the answers to the technological answers to energy, to food, to climate. I mean, all finances. We know how to build economies based on sharing and cooperation rather than scarcity and competition, which is what's playing out in the world right now. We already know all this. What's lacking is the leadership that makes these things a priority. It makes human life a priority in our lives. And when I say leadership, I don't mean America or Europe or, you know, China or Russia or anything. It's just the leaders. We're all leaders. We're all leaders. It's about the way that we think about ourselves and our brothers and sisters on this planet. And then the way that we we transform our thinking into the choices that we make politically, financially, economically.

And it's a very empowering way to begin to think about our world, but it all begins with our story. So our story, we've just covered some topics here today that change our story and that give us new ways and new reasons to think differently about ourselves and in powerful ways. But I think it's important to do it in kind kindness. I think it is counterproductive to be angry. We could be and a lot of people are. As a scientist, here's how I look at this, Alex. I say that we are on a big learning curve and that we've made choices in the past as individuals and societies based on what we knew at the time. You know, we couldn't possibly have known in the 1950s what we know right now about DNA and

biology and about energy production. So those old ideas, they served us and they got us to where we are and now we can let them go gracefully rather than struggle to try to hang on to things that don't work. And let's embrace the new technologies that are out there and the thinking that makes them possible in our lives. And I think for the first time and a long time, we're going to find out what it really means to be human in this beautiful world that supports our humanness. And it's easy to get stuck in little people pieces of this have become angry because of where the world is now. But I think we are better served by allowing those pieces to support a big puzzle.

Look at that big picture and say, yeah, you know, the world of the past is changing. And the good news is that we do have new solutions that requires to think very, very differently about ourselves and our relationship to the world. And that's why these discoveries are important. So I have to acknowledge as a scientist is a very different way of thinking. This is different than what I was taught when I was in school. And in the scientific community, there's a struggle in the scientific community because there's the old story and then there's the evidence that doesn't support it. And the scientists are saying, you know, what do we do with that and how do we embrace that?

And then some of them have pressure, economic pressure. You know, if you teach these new discoveries, you're going to lose your job. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.