New Paradigm Science, Spirituality, and Jude Currivan
I first became aware of Jude Currivan when I read The Mysteries of Reality: Dialogues with Visionary Scientists by Gayle Kimball. This book was recommended by Medium writer Geoff Ward who said that it “features interviews with 19 scientists, all of whom are of the conviction that the materialist paradigm is destructive and limits human abilities and potential, and must be replaced by a more accurate expansive and useful understanding of reality”. They were all therefore challenging mainstream science.
I duly bought the book, and was immediately impressed by some of the well-known names included there, for example Bernardo Kastrup, Dean Radin, Russell Targ, Fred Alan Wolf, and Eben Alexander. I also discovered some names new to me discussing themes of special interest, for example, ‘Beyond Materialism: A Panspiritist Perspective’ by Steven Taylor, ‘Logical Transcendence and Meaning Fields’ by Imants Barušs, and the focus of this article ‘A Conscious Holographic Universe’ by Jude Currivan. Such a book makes one optimistic that the bankrupt, out-of-date physicalist worldview of mainstream science is gradually disappearing.
Currivan describes herself as a cosmologist, an astrologer, healer, and futurist. She is the co-founder of WholeWorld-View, and also one of the contributors to the website Evolutionary Leaders.
Reviewing Kimball’s trilogy of books, she says that the 65 interviews “reveal a visionary science seeing beyond a material world view, based ultimately on the oneness of all creation and the naturalizing of non-local awareness and supernormal phenomena. And founded in an emergent and yet ancient perception that mind and consciousness aren’t something we have but what we and the whole world are”. This would seem to be exactly what the world needs right now — science informed by a deeply spiritual worldview.
Here is some of her background, as recounted in the interview in Kimball’s book. From an early age she “was intensely curious about reality” and fell in love with the cosmos. At the age of five she was reading books aimed at teenagers. She was also having out-of-body experiences, telepathic experiences including remote viewing, and precognitive dreams. She was also communicating with various discarnate entities, the most important of which “named himself Thoth and became my guide and mentor”. She first became aware of him when “a discarnate light came into the corner of the (bed)room like an orb. I started hearing clairaudiently and entered into a conversation. I felt loved and accepted”. This relationship has continued throughout her life, and she says that she has also “learned from many other discarnate beings”.
It would seem that at an early age she was being prepared to see the limitations of mainstream science, and to seek to go beyond them. Also, by revealing this type of material, she is also making it easy for mainstream scientists to dismiss her and her ideas!
She then mentions some themes we would expect from a spiritually oriented new-paradigm scientist: that “everybody is a microcosmic co-creator of the multidimensional intelligence of consciousness of our universe and beyond”; “being open to the possibilities of the natural world communicating with us, through the realms of animal and plant communication”; “open up to the multidimensions of the elemental realms, the devic realms and the angelic realms”; seeing synchronicities “as real opportunities to enter into the wonderful adventure of an exploration of multidimensional realities”.
She studied physics (thus quantum physics and general relativity) at Oxford University where she obtained a master’s degree. She says: “I naively thought I would encounter the leading-edge thinking of science. I actually did; it’s just that it wasn’t as leading-edge as I hoped it might be”. She was “expected to sail through into a doctorate and into academia”, but because of personal difficulties didn’t get the expected level of degree. This turned out to be fortunate because “the universe had other ideas for me and thank goodness it did, because if I’d gone into academia, I’d have been limited and surrounded by peer-group pressure to conform. I knew from what I’d experienced at Oxford how limited mainstream science was — albeit leading-edge at the time — and has remained so to this day”.
Instead she went on to have a career in business, which was “wonderful because it made sure that I was grounded in society, organizationally and globally”. She left this career around 1996 because she was being “asked to speak about transformational changes around the world, including for organizations and leadership”.
I recently became aware of her latest book The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of our Conscious Planet. I’ve ordered this and am currently awaiting its arrival. It sounds exciting, following in the footsteps of James Lovelock and Peter Russell’s The Awakening Earth.
I’ve recently acquired and started to read her earlier book The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Centre of Creation. Here are some excerpts from the tributes paid by others at the beginning:
- Eben Alexander: “Jude’s formal training in physics combined with her transcendental spiritual experiences beginning at an early age set the stage for a fascinating tour of the fundamental underpinnings of reality”.
- Larry Dossey: the issues she addresses “will determine our fate as a viable species”.
- Jim Garrison: “Jude Currivan has thus pointed to the future by giving scientific description and credibility to the most ancient awareness of our species, that we are inside and not separate from all that is, that we are in fact shaping life even as it shapes us. This book is the new story for a planetary civilization”.
- Duane Elgin: “The Cosmic Hologram masterfully brings together extensive scientific knowledge, spiritual insight, and embodied wisdom in a seminal book of sweeping exploration and discovery”.
- Oscar Miro-Quesada: “A compelling tour de force of interdisciplinary scientific scholarship… a revolutionary mind expanding and soul restorative plunge through the rabbit hole… a must-read for anyone even vaguely attuned to the importance of evolutionary human spiritualization…”
The foreword is by the visionary scientist and prolific writer Ervin Laszlo. He says that the book addresses an ambitious undertaking: “It is not only to find what the universe is, and how it is put together, but also why it is (his italics). This ‘why’ applies also to our being in the universe; it asks about the meaning and purpose of our existence… A reasonable answer to (this question) can be found, within the enlarged confines of the science now emerging at the new frontiers”.
Currivan’s preface immediately makes a connection with the ancient Eastern Wisdom, a familiar theme nowadays with new-paradigm scientists; it is called ‘Indra’s Net’. Amazingly (to me), “some three thousand years ago or more, this ancient numinous image of the Cosmos was first expressed in the sacred Indian text of the Atharvaveda and termed Indra’s net; it was the means by which the Vedic deity Indra, god of the heavens, created the appearance of the whole world. Now, its revelation of integral reality and self-reflection at all scales of existence is being rediscovered and restated in a less poetic but equally majestic and scientifically based language”.
She later says: “From the beginning of my lifelong quest to comprehend the deepest nature of reality, I’ve also been fascinated with the ancient wisdom of cultures such as Egypt and Vedic India. Both of these traditions sought to explain the world and the perception of reality in terms that I was coming to recognize in my own explorations. These cosmologies deemed consciousness and an underlying cosmic intelligence to be the foundation of the Cosmos and primary to its expression in physical form, viewing this intelligence as all-pervading and essentially being all that we call reality (her italics).
It’s taken until now for science to start to catch up with the metaphysical insights and experiences of sages, shamans, and seers throughout the ages that are described by the metaphor of Indra’s net”.
She goes on to say that the hypothesis of the holographic principle is compelling in this regard. She will “explore and scrutinize the unfolding evidence that our Universe is indeed a cosmic hologram, embodying its innate attributes of self-similar patterns of information and harmonic order that underlie all physical appearance on all scales of existence”. She thinks that such a perception of reality “has the potential to offer a ‘theory of everything’ ”, by which she presumably means a synthesis of quantum physics and General Relativity.
Perhaps you won’t agree with her conclusions, but anyone interested in such questions should at least find her books worth a read. If what I’ve said so far isn’t enough to persuade you to become interested in Jude Currivan’s work and read her books, then nothing further I write here will change your mind. She is someone who has devoted her life to deeply exploring the nature of the universe from both scientific and spiritual perspectives, and is an outstanding example of one of my favourite themes, the reconnection of modern cutting-edge science with the Ancient Wisdom, thus the reunification of science and religion.
I have to leave it here, because I want to read more of her book.
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“The cosmic hologram is the twenty-first-century equivalent of Indra’s net”. (Jude Currivan)
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