What Are We Becoming?

Moving from Matter to Mind

[This article is an 8/10 on the materialism-to-mysticism scale]

The Leading Edge recently hosted an event in London with cognitive science professor and wisdom icon Dr. John Vervaeke. He made the eyebrow-raising prediction that biologist Dr. Michael Levin will be the most famous scientist of our era.

One of the central findings of Levin’s work is that, if I understand it correctly, cells in our body use bioelectrical signals to communicate. These signals form patterns and gradients across tissues, a bit like invisible electrical maps which tell cells where they are and what to become.¹

In experiments with tadpoles and flatworms, Levin showed that, by changing the electrical signals between cells, he could change what they “build,” even without changing their DNA. In frogs, he found that tweaking voltage signals made eyes grow in unexpected places, like on the stomach or tail. In planarian worms, he used drugs to change the bioelectric pattern so that after cutting off their heads, they grew two heads instead of one.

Levin’s work seems to imply that many living systems, from single cells to whole organisms, show some degree of coordinated communication and problem-solving ability. This implies that something like our body is a network of “intelligent” agents constantly evolving toward a shared goal.

This made me ponder some **wildly speculative** interpretations of Levin’s work. For example, if our cells contain the map of the whole body, do we each contain an image of what humanity is collectively becoming? And how are we being “electrically” pulled towards it?

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The Birth of the Imaginal

When a caterpillar is becoming a butterfly, new “imaginal cells” emerge. At the appropriate time, hormones tell the caterpillar to dissolve its old body. Those dormant clusters wake up, grow, and use the leftover material to build a butterfly.

In my recent electrifying conversation with Tim Freke, he argued that the “imaginal” is also the most emergent part of our human experience.² As he puts it, the universe has gone from hydrogen to ideas. Humanity has increasingly evolved the capacity to enter and explore a realm of mental abstractions. From shamanic times to today, he believes that what we call “spiritual” experience represents humanity developing an emergent ability that he calls “psysensing.”

The imaginal is not the same as our imagination. Our imagination is where we individually play around with ideas. The imaginal is a more objective (or at least collective) realm. It’s where our consciousness goes in dreams, and most notably after death. In Levin’s framing, each cell’s electrical “mind” participates in a wider bioelectric field that coordinates the intelligence of the whole organism. Do our private visions also make up part of a deeper, collective coordination layer? Does this imaginal space store the blueprints for what we are becoming?

As bizarre as the idea of an “objective” imaginal world probably seems to us, it’s consistent with the Jungian interpretation offered by Dan Lawrence in his mind-blowing Leading Edge lecture on dreams.³ Dan argues that our dreams contain objective content, not just symbols subject to our own personal interpretations. For example, Dan talks about a client who dreamed of a huge millipede crawling on his arm. The client’s subjective interpretation was that the millipede was scary, and so it represented a potential risk in his life. And yet, when he and Dan stepped back and analyzed this particular species of African millipede objectively, they realized it’s completely harmless. In fact, it repels predators with a foul-smelling substance. This alternative interpretation might have reflected a way that Dan’s client was repulsing others in his life. This presents a wild implication: that our dreams somehow contain information that originates outside of us, thus they may also provide insights that aren’t yet known to us. Dreams can therefore be precognitive because they contain information from a broader field, rather than solely from our own conscious experience.

Freke argues that the imaginal realm is also where consciousness goes after death. If that were true, you’d expect there to be a high level of consistency in post-death experiences. This is indeed confirmed by thousands of Near Death Experience reports since the 1970s. They consistently describe a transition through darkness or a tunnel, typically toward light and with a strong sense of peace. Respondents often encounter meadows, gardens, trees, water, vivid colors and an overall sense of it being “more real than real.” Freke suggests that, just as blindness sharpens the other remaining senses, death intensifies our imaginal “psysensing” once the bodily senses shut down. NDE survivors also report meetings with deceased relatives, familiar guides, or “beings” within that landscape. Although there is still room for justified skepticism,⁴ these are all features you’d expect if the imaginal realm is something that’s collectively experienced. One of Freke’s most mindblowing ideas is his claim that our spiritual experiences, especially post death, are themselves collectively evolving.⁵

Perhaps coincidentally (!), this framework is highly consistent with the Law of One’s account of humanity’s next stage of evolution. I always expect it to be immediately disqualifying that I’m so fascinated by something allegedly channeled from an advanced non-human inteligence. But, if I understand him correctly, Levin’s work also opens the door to non-physical worlds and intelligences (I’m just taking it much further than I imagine he would!).⁶ According to Ra, we are currently in Third Density, moving towards the Fourth. This is where the “veil of forgetting” dissolves between our conscious and unconscious mind. One wonders if this archetypal space is analogous to Levin’s realm of forms.⁷ Fourth Density is a domain that’s perceived as luminous, transparent and highly responsive to thought. In fact, our thoughts manifest much more immediately there. We also evolve telepathic communication as our thoughts become transparent and shared. After death, Ra reports how certain helpers assist in our healing process, provide feedback on our experiences and determine what needs to be learned in our next incarnation. This is obviously closely analogous to the “life reviews” reported by NDE experiencers.⁸

Perhaps coincidentally (!), these descriptions are also closely analogous to the phenomena described by the non-speaking autistic children in the viral phenomenon The Telepathy Tapes.⁹ They report going to a place outside of conventional space-time called “The Hill” where non-speakers can communicate nonlocally. They also have psi abilities, not limited to telepathy, and constantly stress the central importance of love and our inter-connectedness. Neuroscientist (and previous Leading Edge interviewee¹⁰) Dr. Julia Mossbridge has suggested these abilities may be enhanced by right-hemispheric autism, which allows them to be more tapped-in to the collective field.¹¹ Like Freke’s psysensing, one wonders if a loss of individual motor function has allowed these non-speakers to compensate in their ability to access the imaginal realm. It also supports his thesis that the imaginal is the leading edge of evolution, because these emergent gifts are increasingly manifesting in mental, not physical space.

In Ra’s Law of One, Fourth Density is where individual self-awareness gives way to a more collective intelligence bound by the vibration of love. Ra calls this a “social memory complex.” From a less mystical, Levin-style systems perspective, that could be the moment when human bioelectrical, informational, and emotional fields achieve sufficient coherence to function as a single distributed intelligence.

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Following the Charge

Freke describes the evolving human as a “Unividual.” We are each increasingly individually differentiated but integrated with the whole. It has been a startlingly consistent finding from my research across stages of human development that our faculties get more subtle as we evolve and integrate. This involves an increasing attunement to the world at a fundamentally energetic level. We also get a finer balance of love and power.¹²

Ra says the purpose of our Third Density incarnations is to choose between service-to-self and service-to-self-and-others. If 95% of our decisions are oriented to ourselves we will “graduate” from third density on the negatively-polarised path. If 51% of our decisions are oriented towards others we will graduate on the positively-polarised path.¹³ A fine balance of love and power. One purpose of this density is to learn the lessons necessary to make this choice consciously of our own free will.

Levin has found that cancer arises when cells electrically and informationally “fall out of sync” with the rest of the body. They then grow at its expense. It brings to mind the damage caused by the isolated left hemisphere or the sociopathic CEO. Pure “service-to-self.” You could describe humanity as a species that’s currently so dissociated from the broader electrical field of collective intelligence its growing at the expense of the whole. Levin has found that varying the field might turn the cells less cancerous again. Perhaps this is analogous to a return to the field of “love,” or in Levin’s framing, coherence between individual and collective goals.¹⁴ It’s also noteworthy that our hearts are electromagnetic transmitters and receivers. The physical organ we most associate with love is also bioelectrical and associated with relational coherence.

If the imaginal realm is a place where thoughts manifest more immediately, it would make sense that one purpose of this density is to learn how to co-create in a coherent way. If we manifest from fear and scarcity we create decoherence, rather than from love, which creates greater coherence. This isn’t an arbitrary moral imperative to “keep your thoughts pure,” it’s the fact that destructive thoughts keep us individually dissociated from the imaginal field of collective evolution. This is why consciously choosing our differentiated path of integration, what we love in service of love, is so important. It allows the whole organism to increase coherence and complexity. This is also why I believe money is central to this stage of the path: for many people it represents the most obvious form of energetic manifestation and the source of all our fears around scarcity.¹⁵

If Freke’s work is right, the world of ideas is likely to be more important than most of us think. Collectively synthesizing transformational truths isn’t a distraction; it might be the most emergent level of our experience. We have developed the remarkable power to comprehend abstractions like financial derivatives or corporate law. If Levin’s work is right, I believe we need to take the idea of energetic charge more seriously. We can employ our individual analytical skills in collective pursuit of the ideas and relationships that electrify us and bring us alive. Indeed; Levin’s lab recently published a paper arguing that aging in cells may be best understood as a loss of goal-directedness.¹⁶ Which brings to mind studies that claimed to find that curious people live longer. And, if Levin is right, we also need to take the idea of the intelligence of fields more seriously. The ideas you pursue may also be pursuing you. Books fall out of shelves as you pass, you get sent links exactly as you’re researching a topic and chance conversations spark the next fire in your soul. Watching the world respond to your curiosity increases your confidence in the intelligence of reality. This enhances your faith in pursuing ideas that evolve your worldview, which in turn accelerates your evolution in a perpetual upward spiral.

1. For more background check out this two part conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

Packy McCormick

also tackled his work in brief in Take Weird Ideas Seriously.

2. Our conversation: At the Leading Edge of a New Worldview

3. Dan’s lecture.

4. A kind reader sent me this article from Michael Shermer, who I understand is a “good skeptic,” rather than a “professional skeptic.” He’s addressing the current focus on terminal lucidity and his perceived lack of empirical evidence. As we/I explore the deeper woo, I think it’s excellent cognitive discipline to engage with honest skepticism. My general stance is it may never be possible to get satisfactory replicable proof of the most emergent level of human experience. Maths and physics replicates, but the happiest moment of your life doesn’t.

5. From At the Leading Edge of a New Worldview: “Freke believes that our spiritual experiences themselves are evolving, especially our post-death experiences. He said that the Tibetan Book of the Dead makes reference to the deceased moving towards a divine light. But there’s no mention of this phenomenon in the Ancient Egyptian accounts thousands of years before. By the time of the Greeks, the underworld was somewhat shadowy and unformed. Then different religious groups experienced it as reunion with a monotheistic Jesus or Buddha. But now contemporary “life reviews” tend to not only show us the events of our own life, but also how they impacted everyone we ever came into contact with. As we become more interconnected as individuals, our spiritual experiences are evolving in tandem. Our afterlife experience is itself becoming more “Unividual.””

6. From Levin’s conversation with John Vervaeke and Jonathan Pageau. “What we study in our lab mostly is anatomical state space. These spaces are as real to these beings that live in those spaces, I think, as the three-dimensional world is to us. They are as fictional and as constructed as the 3D world is by us, I think, and they are real and also constructed to the same degree. There are many different kinds of embodiment that we do not traditionally recognize as embodiment. There’s actually a good chunk of my lab now devoted to creating tools—empirical tools—for people to use to recognize beings in nontraditional spaces and to communicate with them. This is one of our goals: to enable you to recognize, communicate with, and ethically relate to beings that live in all kinds of other crazy spaces that we can’t visualize. So I just want to be really clear that, to me, it’s not that, okay, there are forms and then there’s the 3D universe. There are many other spaces, as far as I’m concerned.”

7. For more on the veil of forgetting, and the surprising role of tarot, check out Plasma, Tarot and the Will to Know. It was pretty wild to see Elon Musk recently tweet: “Perhaps our purpose is to make the mind of a sentient sun.” This is pretty much the worldview of the Law of One.

8. In

Mona Sobhani, PhD

’s excellent book Proof of Spiritual Phenomena she tells the story of psychiatrist Dr. Brian Weiss. He unexpectedly experienced a range of inexplicable yet therapeutic experiences when patients regressed to past lives under hypnosis. Mona summarized his findings: “We have souls that incarnate on Earth to learn specific lessons through the events and relationships that make up a lifetime here. The point of learning the lessons is to evolve our souls and advance up through levels of spiritual being. With each advancing level we become more like the Source, or Godlike, which is apparently ideal and worth striving toward. At some point when you have become an advanced enough soul, like the Masters, you stop incarnating and help other souls.” Weiss claims he gleaned this information through direct contact with the “Masters”, these guides for other souls, while his patients were hypnotized.

9. Check out my interview Inside the Telepathy Tapes with

Mona Sobhani, PhD

, the producer Ky Dickens and scientific collaborator Dr. Jeff Tarrant.

10. The Science of Love, Power and Precognition

11. Check out 1hr 10min into this interview with Ross Coulthart

12. See our recent interview with Tara Springett on her Stairway to Heaven model.

13. We actually asked the Law of One scribe Jim McCarty about the difference in the ratios in our interview: “I really don’t know. At one point, Ra indicated that the negative path is much more difficult and they don’t explain why. But then at another point, they indicate that it’s just as difficult to be 51% in service to others as it is 95:5 service to self. That’s one of the places where I’ve never really understood why it was said to be so more difficult.”

14. I actually asked Dr. Iain McGilchrist about this (and The Telepathy Tapes) during a recent interview with

Alexander Beiner

and was very moved by his answer.

15. See my essay: Join the Integration Economy

16. Aging as a Loss of Goal-Directedness: An Evolutionary Simulation and Analysis Unifying Regeneration with Anatomical Rejuvenation and Curiosity and Mortality in Aging Adults: A 5-Year Follow-Up of the Western Collaborative Group Study.