The Power of Quantum Thinking | Dr. Vandana Shiva at Consciousness Symposium (2024)

apath is the South African word for separateness and ruling on the basis of separateness and superiority ecological apath is the basis of the rest of the beings are inferior and they are objects for us for manipulation whereas an entangled world is a world where all life is entangled good morning everyone it's another honor to introduce vanana Shiva vanana is an India scholar an author an activist she holds a PhD in physics and has written more than 20 books let me read you a few of the titles these include making peace with Earth Staying Alive monocultures

of the Mind the critizing biology soil not oil and stolen Harvest let me also read part of vanana CV she's based in Delhi and she's referred to as Gandhi of grain for her activism associated with the anti-gmo movement Shiva is one of the leaders and board members of the international Forum on GL globalization and a figure of the anti-globalization movement she has worked as a consultant for the Indian government and abroad and in NOS such as the international Forum on globalization wom's environment and development organization and third world Network bear with me she's a co-founder

of the gender unit of the International Center for integrated Mountain development and the women's environment and development organization and vanana has received numerous International honors such as the John lenon Yono grand for peace in 2008 Sydney's peace price in 2010 Calgary's peace price in 2011 and the right livelihood award in 1993 which is regarded as the alternative Nobel Prize and when I hear vanana speak she brings the theory but what I really really admire of of what you do is that you are able to inject that into the blood system of the world so when

we speak about Consciousness I always think of you as the embodiment of Consciousness for real so thank you very much thank you very much Alex and thank you Elizabeth and the team that has organized this Symposium uh outside the fact that it was going to be UNC Consciousness I knew nothing about it um I'm happy to be here apologize that I'm late and I'm late because I had a commitment an annual commitment uh I have for farmers in central India uh interesting place both because that's where Gandhi moved when he left politics to build the

movement for freedom and as you know he be built it around spinning cloth he said till we are free of the empire of cotton and make our own clothing we will never be free we can shout as many slogans as we want to we can go to jail many times but our freedom will come from making our own cloth because the British Empire was a Empire of cotton and that's the place where we started the organic movement in India in 1984 in an organized way also the place where the GMO BT cotton was introduced in

a very very big way it became the capital of the BT cotton but it emerged very fast to be the capital of farmer suid and when that started I started to work in that area and made a commitment to the farmers there I'll be with you once a year every year to ensure we make the shift and that date was you know know that's where I was I I said I would talk on on Quantum Consciousness and I definitely will not talk because I am not a biologist I'm not a neuroscientist um I'm someone trained

in quantum theory who has brought that learning to life to Everyday Life um and a century ago the quantum Consciousness started to emerge in the world and it was Radical both because of what it was but it was Radical because of the Paradigm it was shifting away from the mechanistic Paradigm and uh I'll talk a bit about those details because uh most of us you know don't have any idea of the roots of how much time and energy of the empire was spent on building a mechanistic science and istic philosophy as the only way to

think as the only legitimate science um so the significance is huge but I think the potential and quantum theory is totally based on potential the potential is even more immense because every door that the mechanistic thought shuts down the quantum thought opens up and I think that's the power that's the power so a century ago quantum theory showed that the mechanical view is false at every level the world is not constituted of static things but of potential and transition probabilities that all we have it also recognizes interconnectedness through the principle of non-locality non-separability in tanglement

action at resistance because all of mechanical philosophy is based on the fact that everything is static and iner till you move it by force force comes into the picture for any shift whereas quantum theory recognizes this change is the only thing that's the basic process and in the world Dynamic change is what we have the classical I don't really like the word classical because it makes it you think that it's something more sophisticated you know classical music is fancier than the Highland music you were listening to last night you know uh uh there's nothing classical

about it because a short 300E bad experiment with violence very very bad experiment um so I just called it the mechanistic philosophy and the mechanistic thought and the core part of it is separation of separation of every kind separation of humans from nature separation of Observer from observed separation of every part of every being and the quantum world is based on total non-separation as neilb stated the extension of our experience in re recent years has brought to light the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and as a consequence has shaken the foundation on which the

customary interpretation of observation was based and interestingly the quantum uh physicist and if you think of it you know normally there's one system imposed you know and and that is called the scientific theory of the time but Quantum the theory emerged with a play you know in inquiry by different scientists all debating each other intensely should just follow the debates between Einstein and bour and uh Heisenberg and B uh they worked out equations on which everyone agreed and then they thoroughly disagreed on what that meant um but every one of them I think because a

shift was so huge from the me mechanical World which was the context in Europe at that time um interestingly so many of them turned to their Consciousness to In terms to understand the reality they were dealing with to the vas and the Ops because that's where the wide of Consciousness was available so max plank who actually is the founder because his his U understanding that energy is absorbed and released from materials in discrete uh packets that's where the word Quant begins he says I regard Consciousness as fundamental I regard matter as a derivative from Consciousness

everything that we talk about everything that we regard is existing postulates Consciousness so not the typical view that Consciousness is a product of a part of our biological function called the brain the opposite flow is there and shinger was inspired very much by the openads he said mind there's only one mind there's no separation between subject and object the barrier between them cannot be said to have been broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences for this barrier does not exist individual consciousnesses are manifestations of a single mind and what I

find interesting is that till till a even less than a decade ago the focus was on the mind and suddenly there's a focus on Consciousness studies you know cons ious as an object to study uh and then of course we get from that all the flow of and you know do the computers have a Consciousness and will artificial intelligence has a Consciousness and sha goes on to say unification of Minds is consciousness I hope know with I see it as the the holding together of the universe one mind the self is borderless the same elements

compose my mind and the world the world is given to me only once not one existing and one perceived subject and object are one I mean I the first time I heard the word hard problem was at your seminar at Pari and I said typical of cartisian thought to take a constructive divide and then keep wondering how you'll overcome the Divide rather than realize that the Divide is constructed um and uh and these were the the the big U big understandings of the quantum um thinkers and physicist my own um entry into quantum theory is

I I've grown up in the Himalayas in the forest of the Himalaya M my father who was first in the British Army and then joined the forest and became a conservator uh at at that time our forest was still forest and the Himalaya was still Himalaya they weren't crumbling under the burden of blasting for dams and highways and trains um they were stead vast as Krishna has said I am a Stead fast as the himalia uh and in uh you know when we traveled we stopped in what were called rest houses and we traveled on

hor back and and these rest houses are tiny like just like their libraries in this house you know the the books for you to pick up and there'd be little two or three shelves and one little book I picked up a young girl was on science and social responsibility quotes from Einstein that's all it for course and uh and inspired me hugely yeah the idea of being a Seeker but also being related both to the consequences of your actions as well as to the Society of which you are part and I said that's the kind

of person I want to be and went to schools we didn't teach physics I you know but I still learned my physics and did uh and I joined for a PhD in India but my guy the top particle physic of India was was so good that he kept being appointed to this new department and this new University and you know he shifted for universities in one year when I joined and by the end of it I said Dr biswas I cannot and in India registering in a university finding a room a hostel is not an

easy job uh so by the fourth shift I said Dr biswas I'm leaving and I will uh you know continue the work that I was trying to do with you and in that period I got to read a lot you know know guide isn't there to guide you you know others guide you and uh I started to look for all the big because the quantum F puzzles throw themselves up and I I found B you know as as the person who was giving deep explanations of what was going on so I wrote to B and

I said I want to join you H he was at burbeck and he said I'm sorry we have no fellowships in England but my student boob Jeffrey boob with whom do he did the second hidden variable Theory uh he's in Canada and in Canada at the University of Western Ontario they had started something unbelievable called the collum and quantum theory the uni the coun Canadian Council attracted the best Minds physicists logicians philos anyone thinking about quantum theory from any Dimension and put them together and that's where Jeffrey boob was when I wrote uh of because

I had to go through the rituals of getting graduate school and completing all the requirements which I did uh because I knew exactly what I wanted to study and what I wanted to study was solve the two problems that are still preoccupying it's not over actually uh the two problems uh that you know arise all the time in quantum theory the first was hidden variables the idea that somehow you can find determinism but the problem grew deeper because Forman wrote a paper saying it's impossible and uh bom as he was always looking for wonder he

said well I'll make it I'll do it uh and I don't have to sacrifice quantum theory for it so hidden variables one and the other was the whole issue of non-locality that gets thrown up with the Einstein podski Rosen Paradox um but both the the very idea of entanglement of the Observer and The observed as well as systems related to each other no matter how much they are separated in space and time uh they involve entanglement and that word was used by shinga he said entanglement is the characteristic a trait of quantum mechanics it's very

fashionable these days in every discipline um so the four lessons I personally learned uh which have stayed with me uh is first the fact of non-dualism I think that's why so many of the founders turned to the non-dualistic philosophies of India you like vidanta uh bore called it complimentarity repeatedly that there is no Observer observe divide no excluded middle and I take it even more to say there's no either of you know and Bush was just ifying the Iraq War remember he said either you're with us or against us I said so much of this

either or mentality is at the root of the hard problem in politics yeah because you first divide um and the Beautiful part of there being no obser observe divide is there is no thing in the world there's not no stuff in the world the world is just put potential waiting to happen and that potential becomes the particle or the wave through the not an interaction interaction is between two existing things but an interaction where what you're observing the is transformed from potential to real in the process of the observation and the measurement and world is

not made of individual entities as B put it Atomic physics has taught us that the unavoidable interaction between the objects and the measuring instrument sets an absolute limit to the possibility of speaking of a behavior of atomic subjects which is independent of the means of observation remember the entire edifice of uh the mechanical science and the Word overused was objectivity that there's a static world out there and the more powerful you can be in terms of getting to it you know the more objective you and I'll come to some of the quotes of the founders

of that Philosophy for Bo in the quantum world no result of an experiment can be interpreted as giving information about independent properties of objects and as a result it inherently connects uh the situation and phenomena in relationship and at the larger level it just tells us that we are part of nature that we are seeking to understand we are not Spectators we are not Masters the second big principle is of course non-locality uh thrown up by Einstein's uh imaginary experiment called the uh epr Paradox where he showed that when a Quantum system is subdivided and

the two subsystems are separated in space and time their state is nonseparable uh and this non-separability no one could disagree with it the interpretation again Wass you know uh does it mean that we could somehow build locality through other schemes uh and again bom puts it so well the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with another one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they're sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth but because their separateness is an illusion at some deeper level of reality such particles are not

individual entities but are actual extensions of the same fundamental something and I call this same fundamental something Consciousness um and from this then arises uncertainty and indeterminism as irreducible so when po poan wrote his paper and U and then B responded by creating a Quantum uh hidden variable Theory uh and then the world thought hidden variables was about bringing determinism back into the picture and he says so clearly that was never my intention my intention was merely to say that you can never ever tell beings who can imagine to not imag yeah as he says

to show it's wrong and throw out hidden variables because they could not be imagined is just bad science because imagination is what makes us creative thus the existence of even one consistent theory was enough and I made a consistent theory that could reproduce all the quantum phenomena it didn't try and undo it if one such theory is possible then the natural implications go to this argument one why not try and find them yeah that is the work of the scientist not blocking out saying this is impossible and that's impossible um and Ne never was it

about bringing back determinism he accepted totally indeterminism as irreducible and then later his student boom who became my guide um continued the same work of maintaining Quantum probabilities by adding addition variables but still getting the quantum probabilities uh another feature of the quantum learning is to get away from reductionism because all of mechanical thought which is based on inert objects is also based on separating parts of the object it's based on uh uh reductionism uh and the the quantum scientists constantly talked about wholeness uh Bor talked about uh complimentarity as a as a phenomena of

quantum honess um Warner Heisenberg said the world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events in which difference different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the whole In classical Mechanics Parts determine those of the whole the situation is reversed in quantum mechanics it is the whole that determines the part and David bow then did a book called wholeness and the implicate order and uh and it's a very you he he really liked to go deeper to deeper levels and uh he says there is an unfolded implicate order and space and time are

no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence of Independence different elements rather the entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible from which are ordinary Notions of space and time along with those of separately existing material particles are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order these ordinary Notions in fact appear in what is called an explicate or an unfolded order and later when I started to work with seeds I realize in that little seed is the implicate order of the plant it'll become the tree it'll unfold into and uh and

this basically is the power of reproducing patterns while changing all the time because those two things again were separated in mechanical philosophy you know either you can be the same in static or you can be changed through Force the self Evolution the self organizing the auto poesis of the Living World didn't even have a place in it I could go on and on and on with this but let me just share with you some quotes which I feel are still dominating our thought from the founders of what the mechanical framework is people assume that the

mechanical framework was founded by Newton you know with his equations but Newton came 100 years after the real Founders who are bacon and deart one century before Newton they laid out the foundations and um and E even though bacon is so important to both the you know the Empire it was then and the reach of the Empire he's I I find him as kind of an unknown entity uh most people forget he was the chancellor of England at that time and as the chancellor of England that time he was also made in charge of the

Inquisition and what is happening in the early 17th century on Inquisition who was being tried the peasants who were defending their Commons they were part of what would the women who knew mid viy women who knew their herbs I know these have been presentations at this SE Symposium they were all wiches and and again the other part is long before this rest of the world was colonized Europe was colonized through a paple buol 10 years before the paple bulf that followed Columbus and this was about not allowing ders of thought yeah treating any freedom of

thought as part of in I think two Bishops in in Germany wrote a book called The Hammer of the witches yeah and 9 million people were killed for thinking to in their own way um so Beacon was not just the uh Chancellor he was chief of Inquisition but he has been rendered the father of modern science you know what science will be has been defined by him and he talks about in his Noble orm he talks about a new instrument of human inquiry that will satisfy Humanity's Imperial Ambitions again see see Humanity's Imperial Ambitions the

poor people who are being colonized are not part of the Imperial ambition yeah over the natural world yeah bacon assumed that thinking mechanically in denial of our relationship with nature and Nature's living process will lead to infallible knowledge and totally ma total Mastery of a nature so the the seeking of determinism was a seeking of control and with it came arrogance and the concept of Mastery as Jason hickle has written in Book for which I was asked to write a promotional blur bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world and to replace

it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature he transformed nature from a nurturing mother to a common Harlot for bacon Science and Technology were to serve as instruments of domination and then he wrote a book most people don't know a book called the masculine birth of time that all knowing that was in relationship with nature knowing that we part of nature was somehow effeminate and feminine he had to build this new kind of Science and he said the only way and this comes out of his being in charge

of the Inquisition he said only way you can know the secrets of nature is through violence we have to force her out of her natural state and squeeze and mold her and then we can manipulate her and the whole idea of extraction flows from that he even says we've got to declare war on nature so that our our forces our United forces can be against the nature of things to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds and extend the boundaries of human Empire so far as God Almighty in his goodness must permit and then Bo

became the founder of the Royal Society and the first director you know the Bo's law comes from him but he was also the head of the Church of England and he says the idea that we must respect nature and have rence to Nature the session we had yesterday afternoon on Daoism and on uh the Mayan philosophy uh that it comes in the way it's an embedment for our creating an Empire over lesser creatures of the earth and that's where anthropocentrism begins that the rest of life is just for our exploitation it doesn't have life and

of course deart took it further by dividing the world into rest extens and res of cognant and you know for me a lot of deart is still so alive yesterday's discussion on artificial intelligence took me to the fact that the whole philosophy of the trans transhuman Phil philosophy is bringing dear to life in this period and um and he basically by dividing he and imagining that he's a is a thing I'm a thinking thing without a body a think therefore I am is what he said and and this is how sophisticated he is next I

examined attentively what I was I saw that while I could pretend that I have no body and there is no world and there no place for me to be I could not for that pretend I did not exist that I could could imagine everyone around me did not exist you don't exist none of you exist I saw that the only thing I could be sure of that I think and therefore I exist and everyone's creating hard problems out of nonsense like this there is no division between mind and matter and what is called Dead matter

as Dr ex turn which means you the the world only has Dimension and weight because that's all you could measure at that time you can measure a few more things now but the world was reduced to the measurable not the experienced not the consciously lived let me in the few minutes left share with you how my Quantum thinking still people ask me the question you know how did you shift from that work to the work you do today and I said I didn't shift I continued on the basic foundations of indeterminism entanglement nonlocality and out

of all this comes the recognition of participation that if there is no Observer observe divide I cannot be the master then I can be a participant it brings with it humility and for me Consciousness as I said is is the connector it's is the seeing the being the doing all of it in one not divide it into different dimensions and that's why you know it's interesting my because a lot of the bio is usually downloaded from uh websites you know uh and the interesting thing this all of us who live from Integrity of our Consciousness

we are defined as anti you know I'm defined as anti- globalization rather than a defender of local sovereignity yeah I'm defined as anti-gmo rather than defender of autop pois of life because let me just run through quickly so I went back to India and I had two paths before me to continue the work that still excites me you know this is the reason I was so interested in coming to this meeting I still get so deeply inspired by the quantum world and I could continue in tataa Institute of Science and insute of Science and here

was in India I was seeing new issues coming new ecological issues growing I just participated in the movement of chipco to protect the Mountain Forest and these are life and death issues today one area where beautiful forests have been deforested for tourism and building more rest houses and guest houses and hotels has just had a landslide where 350 people have been killed in Ward so you know what what the women of my region were doing in the' 70s is more than ever relevant today uh or around that time i' done my MSE honors in particle

physics from the University of Punjab 84 Punjab erupted in huge violence 15,000 people were killed and I took my Quantum thinking to understand was that I was doing a a program for the United Nations University and um I asked a simple question so what changed the potential of the Punjab of peace that I knew to a Punjab of violence that is there now yeah so what is the contextual causality of that shift in the potential and then of course when I started to look I realized something called the Green Revolution had been invented uh even

yesterday it came up in the discussion the world would have stared without it not true uh just I mean by observation I could see these fields are empty linear lines of one crop whereas we have systems of nine crops na the movement I started means nine crops 12 crops and my eyes could tell me that the more the biodiversity density the more the food that you're growing so I started to evolve new systems of of of measurement uh the typical system in the Green Revolution is yield per acre where you take a part of a

part of a part of a farm that goes as a commodity to the market and only measure that you don't measure the state of the soil you don't measure the state of the farmer you don't measure the state of the food uh or the biodiversity that went or the emissions that were created and I said what matters about food is the health that gives you so we instead of yield per acre of a commodity we will measure Health per acre of an ecosystem and of the food that it produces and our Studies have shown that

you can have two times of food the world needs by protecting the biodiversity of the world and intensifying it and this brings me all you know and then of course was the GMOs came along maybe in the question answers we can talk a little more but it it was based on you know dayart on uh drugs uh Master molecules one molecule in that beautiful oestra of molecules as the master determining the rest and the one that's inert without the rest and uh genetic determinism so I I've never done biology I haven't had a class of

biology but I live in a world that's a living world and you can reach out to friends who know more which I did some amazing people I mean The two scientists in England that I interacted a lot with to understand these complications one was Brian Goodwin I don't know how many of you know know him he uh I was a development biologist development had disappeared and the other was uh Dr mayano uh now the quantum theory began with a Quant and uh five years after Plank's paper Einstein wrote his you he wrote five papers at

a time can you imagine five papers and one of them was on uh for the photoelectric effect that light itself comes in qu and he defined the photon and the photon is at the heart of life so in the last few months there's been a fascinating debate someone asked Mr Gates so a lot of people want to plant trees to deal with climate change and as is typical of him he says but those are idiots we are the science people we know it's nonsense that trees can do anything it's because of those big carpet uh

carbon capture machines that are being put up is what he hopes uh will absorb the excess carbon dioxide so the you know all of life begins with the sun's energy and with photosynthesis and all of photosynthesis is a photon lifting an electron out and then the electron falling back into its original state and that energy is the wondrous energy that keeps the world going shringer asked a very basic question in a little book called what is life here's this Quantum physicist with the Scher equation asking what is life and he explains that life creates negative

entropy because all machines create entropy which is waste energy which can't be used and that's the pollution I mean one could think of climate Havoc as entropy problem um so how come life doesn't not no it doesn't create entropy plants don't heat up they're working away but they don't heat up because their energy is not like the energy of a machine their work is not like the work of a machine and for that you got to go back to the photon you got to go back to photosynthesis you go back to the relationship between the

quantum view of the world the idea of autop poesis the fact that life organizes itself and is able to store energy for its growth yesterday I think there was a lot of talk about machines don't grow they don't replicate but they do use a lot of external energy and I think the beautiful thing about uh about these connections that we need to make much more in our basic thinking is they open up the door to creating a world of deep participation not just among human beings but between all beings and that's what I call up

Earth democracy I I call the dominant system ecological apath apath is the South African word for separateness and ruling on the basis of separateness and superiority ecological apide is the basis of you know an Empire over the world on the basis that the rest of the beings are inferior and they are objects for us to be man for for manipulation whereas an entangled world is a world where all life is entangled and instead of some powerful man determining the future of extinction of the rest of Life all beings are determining each other being so there

two words that U you know we use the word soam you are therefore I am and that to me is entanglement and the Africans use the word umuntu which means the same thing you are therefore I am and ecologically you know you could turn to the tree and say that's where we get our oxygen you can turn to the Lakes you can turn to the grass you can turn to the soil I'll leave you with two question questions that I think are growing in my mind they're definitely growing more and more talk about Consciousness being

in the brain and the you can study the brain and you get the study of Consciousness but if new work and ancient learning of ayurveda teaches us that it all begins with the gut and scientists are now calling the gut the second brain what about Consciousness then related to this is the fact that new work is showing that U the health of the soil and the biodiversity of the soil is totally entangled with the biodiversity and health of the gut is one continer and you cannot divide them you can separate them without consequences both for

the planet as well as for all chronic diseases now are being recognized as being diseases of the gut microbiome and metabolic disorders but but also the gut and the brain are connected and the roots of the plants is where the neurological activities in the soil takes place and you just add a little organic matter and life bursts in the soil nutrition increases in the plants and Darin called the roots of the plants the brain of the plant and you know so how how can we localize neur the brain activity only to one human being one

species and one part of one species when the it's pervasive everywhere and I think opening up to The Wonder of creativity Consciousness and life is the work for Staying Alive with other life on this beautiful planet thank you [Applause] hello okay thank you Vandana I received your presentation as a blessing thank you all right we have about maybe 10 minutes May 15 for questions yes Philip thank you that was really fascinating I I really like the idea of um Consciousness playing a fundamental role in quantum physics and removing the hard problem and I'm actually developing

such an interpretation myself with the philosopher of physics but I'm not I'm not saying and maybe you can help me understand this why it's something we find on all interpretations of quantum mechanics I mean I can see if you think uh Consciousness collapses the way you function or the Observer collapses the way you function okay you've got some Central role for Consciousness but if you have The buium View you like or the Everett view where you don't have collapse or if you have something like grw or penrose's view where you have collaps but it's nothing

to do with an observer then I don't see why Consciousness what has to play a central role and and then maybe we're back to the hard problem I don't know how you see what I mean yeah for me quite simply uh understanding and knowledge doesn't begin with the small part of human history so I never cite you know so and so says this and so and so says this and that's the rest of the world partly because I've been humbled by Ordinary People in my country you know I say I did a PhD on quantum

theory in in Western but I did a bigger PhD with the women who never been to school who did the chipco movement who taught me about every plant who taught me about biodiversity who taught me the connections between the forests and the rivers and landslides so I think part of the whole bonian idea was not just turning nature into a slave but also a rule of a few experts and and it's a very artificial construction because I believe everyone is an expert you know people who clean this building are experts in C keeping it clean

clean the people who are serving us are experts in service and I think the hierarchy the epistemic hierarchy that has been created not just between humans and nature and object and observer but between some people and others is a very big part that's the hard problem apide is the hard problem and if we can address that and find ways to participate with respect dignity celebration Joy we address the heart problem thank you and one just one more little thing about this the quantum world is not in the cartisian world it's in uh in a face

space uh a lot of Indian interpretation is in spaces that you cannot reduce to the typical space time and physical space and they talk about us as humans as having multiple sheets all of which have consciousness the outermost layer with which we interact with the world is how we eat food so it's the unner Kos and then is the way we breathe it's a more subtle level and then how we sense the world and then how we process the knowledge through wisdom and I think that's part of the missing debate on artificial intelligence wisdom which

is your s right-wing brain you know competition can be done with the left brain but all of the distillation and processing and then finally the ultimate state is pure Bliss and pure joy the BL so what is the objective of life if some can say it's staying alive biologically but for Indian philosophy it has always been finding joy in the Oneness with the Consciousness that is of the world so it's not about just one phenomena called the quantum collapse um thank you for your talk and um I kind of have a two-part question I guess

which is um you know I I saw you speak 15 20 years ago you've been doing this so such a long time going all over the world and speaking to people writing multiple books um just working your butt off to try to change people's minds and um my question is kind of why do you think this other point of view is so seductive and how do you see like do you see change do you see people's minds being opened to new ways of thinking not even new ways old ways of thinking about things well first

I don't think the issue is right now it's not seductiveness seductive means everyone is going along with it I find more and more people having doubt yesterday's presentation on the rising generation was you know lack of trust so old young nobody is falling into it uh what I see is coercion and in in a sad way you know uh this idea of nothing changes without Force um more and more force and violence being used I why did I quote from bacon and from deart because they always talk about violence and force for them that is

the way to establish your power and you know and for people because we've divided our world into so many silos people think I'm you know I did g Green Revolution I did GMOs Global but these are all words that divide up the common life experiences of ordinary people you know and uh and people are being this closure why do I work on seats because there was a meeting in ' 87 where the pesticide industry said now we have to make up profits from seed and the way to do it is to do gentic engineering so

we can claim we've invented something new and patent life through patents on seed is where we'll make our money and then they said in a way to force Farmers to stop saving seeds by making it illegal to save seeds we will write an international law which became the trade related intellectual property rights law of WTO all three Reef statements were blatant outrageous unscientific statements that seed is an invention of the corporations it's therefore intellectual property and that you can criminalize the basic acts of taking care of life and so I said I'll save seeds and

I will deal with the laws and I will deal with the laws also in ways which Gandhi taught us Satya the urge of Truth you know he practiced this in South Africa first but uh he did the salt saag when they tried to monopolize salt making he picked up salt from the sea and said nature gives it for free we need it for us survival we will make salt we will not obey your laws so we translated that into the seed saag seed is brought To Us by Nature her Evolution and our breeding over thousands

of years and we will continue to save and share seeds as our moral and ecological and duty of Freedom we will not obey laws that prohibit saving and sharing seeds so we did that but we I also helped write our laws which says plants animals and seeds are not human inventions that's addressing the anthropocentric arrogance of ownership of a life and you said I've been going long but you know trees have been going long this plan is been going long and I come back to the negative entropy that you when you work in alignment with

living systems and their laws a tree doesn't burn out does it why should one burn out when you do the right thing you find Joy yes we have time for a final one um oh dear I love Bacon's book on gardening and um you know I I wondered on a practical level um you know in your quitan life you know how how far in 2024 should we take this because when I stand in my garden and I smell the camomile lawn that I partly grew because of reading bacon um I do have to admit that

that um when I haven't been weeding I feel overwhelmed and when I've been weeding which I call tending I feel a sense of bliss and I feel the closest to Consciousness as it's been described to me in the last few days so as a Westerner who lives you know in the country just outside London should I give up gardening how far should I take it well in my worldview um having acted ecologically and understood systems and underst understanding where the world is being taken where the slogan now sadly you know if if you and I

know the protests happening here right now but every European country has had protest since January because slogan now is farming without Farmers food without Farms farming without Farmers is me just look at the laws being put don't grow food you if you don't grow food you'll be paid if you grow food you'll be punished uh but food without Farms is basically Factory food and the uh and the propaganda is it'll solve the the climate problem Mr G I've just finished writing a new book which will come out called nature of nature the metabolic disorder of

climate change because the argument is being made if you make produce food from the lab you will solve the climate problem opposite you will need five times more land for the feed stock of of the microbes the cells whatever is working in those Vats and because it'll be worked working with huge energy and huge entropy you will have 25 times more emissions than we have today it's not a solution so gardening is not just it's it's tiring but it's joyful as you said in the place where I've come from with that obligation um when I

would go to this region the men had committed suicide because they had planted Bey cotton used more pesticides and then finally the creditors who are the Agents of the companies would come and say your land is mine but I never sold my land he said but we gave you this and this and this on credit he said but I never sold my land they just fill a form and uh and try and grab the lab and he'd go and take one last credit for buying a bottle of pesticide and going to his field and ending

his life and I'd then go visit the wi widows and you know they've lost their land they lost their husbands and they seen a hope so so that's when I started The Gardens of hope I said you know you have children to take care of you can grow some vegetables but your mind will be preoccupied exactly like you're saying you know just becoming part of the earth and becoming part of the earth is joyful a lot of people say oh Farmers don't want to farm I said I've never heard a farmer saying I don't want

to farm I've heard others saying let's get rid of the farmers from the land the two different you know responses so why is the garden so important for the future during covid lockdown look at the way Garden spread in the communities where we work these Gardens of H started is what we people what saw communities through because the places that were growing monocrops for the global market there was nobody to pick it up the supply chains had collapsed and these Gardens were taking care of people and of course the storm will come and the flood

will come and the gardens will get destroyed but you can plant it again but you don't object excuse me but you don't object to putting my joy um as more important as the Mastery over the lawn no how's joy and participation Mastery it's not but I'm I have to kill weeds to make it look pleasurable otherwise it's just chaos but you know the there's a very beautiful opad in India which is a very good way to get rid of all the puzzles in the food system because in the west because everything has been developed as

Outsiders we are outside nature we are outside the food cycle and then we try and invent and these that's why where the fake food is coming up you know oh I'll be outside the you're not you're still in the food system just more distant more intensive in energy more intensive in resources uh so the th Nisha says everything is food everything is something else is food a the second thing it says is of course to eat some you know when the microbes will eat us they're having the feast yeah so so eating is not the

crime eating is not the crime killing thoughtlessly that is the crime so recogniz give you a simple example and conclude so when I was working with chipco um you know we'd go to the forest I wanted to understand you the work of the women how much load are they carrying and woman stopped at the border of the forest and she took off her slippers and I thought she had a thorn so I said wait I'll take it out she said no no no I'm just taking my slippers to pray to the forest goddess to apologize

and say I am coming and of course I will hurt you a bit but I promise I will never take more than I need I will just take enough to take care of my cows and my family so the sense of enoughness and limits which is a sense of respect for the other to whom you're related that's where that's nonviolence violence is getting rid of that relationship and not knowing when to stop wonderful all right wonderful thank you