Fighting for Our Conscious Evolution

Fighting for Our Conscious Evolution in a Chaotic and Changing World

Interview with Kingsley Dennis

Author: Jaime Leal Anaya

The times of Charles Darwin, one hundred and fifty years ago, and the beginnings of the theory of evolution of the species, were critical and chaotic times of change in our society. Many people were appalled at the suggestion that we evolved out of primates and not directly from clay and the hand of God, yet others kept searching for new ways of understanding the structure and systems that make us human, intelligent, and evolving beings by the hand of our own free will and choices. Many new discoveries in science have been made since then, the mapping of human DNA, understanding the power of the brain, how it works, and the real impact of our thoughts in our environment and ourselves. This knowledge has broadened the scope of human evolution beyond mere biology to now include the evolution of our mind, consciousness, civilization and society.

What are the agents that help our conscious evolution? What are the factors that seem to impede it, slow it down or work against it, apparently behind the scenes, in a Machiavellian and targeted way? What are the tools we must recognize and implement to help humanity accomplish its next stage of evolution — a fully conscious evolution?

SuperConsciousness had the opportunity to explore these questions with sociologist expert, writer, and cofounder of WorldShift International, Kingsley Dennis, PhD. His latest new book, The Struggle for Your Mind, Conscious evolution and the Battle to Control How We Think, is a thorough and well-researched contribution to the current global effort from many groups and movements in the world seeking real change to build a new society and become a more evolved humanity. Enjoy!

SC: Would you be able to tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, and what led you to write your new book, The Struggle for Your Mind?

Kingsley Dennis: For many years I worked as a sociologist at university and so I’ve been very aware of social systems, group consciousness, individual consciousness, and also throughout my life I’ve been following conscious evolution and more spiritual subjects and concerns. I lived and worked for five years in Turkey, in Istanbul, where I had contact with spiritual traditions. I came to a point in my life where I wished to combine both elements, my professional sociological background and my very deep personal interest in consciousness studies and conscious evolution. I wanted to bring them both together because this is a perfect time where we have the readiness to understand how these concepts are working together rather than apart. I was part of a Sufi Mevlevi group in Istanbul and spent a number of years being exposed to their traditions and teachings.

For five years I was based in Lancaster University, which is in the Northwest of England. I was a coordinator of the Complexity Network Group and so I was looking at how online community networks were coming together in a form of collective consciousness but were using social media to share their experiences and to connect. From that I had a very strong sociological interest in the human experience and also on how human consciousness was becoming more shared, more global. Obviously, that triggered in me to want to have further research in the ethereal or non material aspects of consciousness and how that was filtering out through our technologies and our social systems. I view technologies and social systems as being an exterior manifestation of what is already happening at the inner or non-material level.

SC: The main title in your book, The Struggle for Your Mind, seems more of a personal conquest at first. But the subtitle — Conscious Evolution and the Battle to Control How We Think — definitely broadens the personal struggle to possible external influences of control. Can you comment on this?

KD: This is the core question, the individual interior self and how that relates, corresponds, or resonates to our external environment. This has been an ongoing situation throughout our civilization. We are susceptible or vulnerable to external impacts. There are social impacts and there are technological impacts and we are developing, especially this century, a level of awareness and consciousness which is manifesting more and more. But in order to have social civil society, nation states, and governments, they have been maintaining a collective control or management of individuality. There are certain social structures which have always been used to manage and influence thinking patterns throughout the collective society. Sometimes these are called ideologies. What I see happening is that there’s an increased interior and individual awareness, which is manifesting more and more. This is manifesting in our social lives with social protests happening around the world, people trying to develop alternative lifestyles. They are less and less manipulated by what the government says, what media says, and they’re developing their own awareness. This is a potential threat to authority and governing structures in play now. I call this the clash of mythologies. You have the old mind, which is trying to control the mass consciousness, behavior, and thinking patterns, and is a vertical, top-down hierarchical system. Then we have a lateral, horizontally distributed understanding: global connectivity, people sharing information, coming together throughout the world through virtual networks and an increasing awareness. This is clashing or conflicting with the control mechanisms and is what’s happening now.

SC: There are many fundamentalist religions that actually believe in Satan and hell and demonic influences in our evolution, correlating to the opening metaphor story of Satan and his minions in your book. Yet it is very interesting how the fundamentalist religions themselves have played a big role in preventing our conscious evolution and preventing people from thinking freely or exploring different options, sometimes even new scientific discoveries. What’s your view of religion in relation to the concept of conscious evolution?

KD: Religion is just another social institution. The original element of religion would have been an energetic evolutionary impulse, such as the impulse behind Christianity, Judaism, Islam. The original impulse would have been very beneficial but what happens is that evolutionary impulse over time in our physical environment becomes crystallized, becomes set like stone and it loses its kinetic power. Over that, you have a hierarchical system, so Christianity and the Catholic Church, for example, became a hierarchical social system. Then those systems operate by a form of polarization between good, evil, light and dark. Humanity is in a sense socially conditioned into a polarized world but in the original teachings there is no polarization, and good and evil are an aspect of the same divine energy. What we’re dealing with now is something which has been corrupted. I see orthodox social religious institutions as being a decayed form of an original impulse. When you have polarization, division, that’s a sign that something has lost its original power. This polarization causes discomfort, causes warfare, causes a lot of death and chaos. What we need to do is go beyond polarization back into unification. Consciousness is unification. Social structures are polarization. They’re two different things.

SC: You use all three enigmatic words in the title of your book: mind, consciousness — conscious evolution — and also thinking. Can you tell us how are mind, consciousness, and thought different or the same?

KD: Consciousness and mind and thought are different things. I would say that consciousness and the consciousness of humanity exists external to our physical bodies. That’s why we can talk about collective consciousness or quantum consciousness or the akashic field. This is an energetic field of intelligence, which exists beyond the physical. The mind is what we can refer to as the physical apparatus or organ within the body, which picks up on the external consciousness and thoughts are what we produce from that. For example, when you turn on the television, the TV program is not inside the television, it exists outside of it in terms of the broadcast. The TV is an antenna that picks it up, and the technology inside is what translates it into pictures. In this analogy, consciousness is the broadcast, the mind is a television’s antenna, and the thought is the picture which gets interpreted.

SC: In reference to the external forces that influence us, you say in your book that “these forces are aware of our true power of human consciousness.” What is so powerful about human consciousness?

KD: Human consciousness has such a powerful capacity to interact with the material environment. Science is actually verifying that we live in an energetic environment and, therefore, matter is a secondary manifestation. Our old mind would say that matter is first and consciousness second. But this now is no longer a valid paradigm. Hermetic sciences always said for centuries, all the way back to Egypt, that the universe is mental. The universe, or what we know as the universe, exists as mental conscious energy. If you understand that, matter is formed from the power of intentional consciousness and focused thought.

If we could develop the power of consciousness we would have a much greater participation of how reality and matter manifest around us. That is very dangerous if people are not aware of how to use that. Obviously, to have a governing society, you don’t want people trying to manifest their own reality and participate in their own sense of the world around them, because they’re much more difficult to manage then. So there are forces which are trying to keep this knowledge away from us. Centuries ago this knowledge was maintained only in mystery schools. The initiates had to go through long training to gain this knowledge because it’s very powerful. Today this knowledge is now being distributed a lot more freely because people are more prepared to understand this reality and understand the true capacity of focused thought. Meditation practices, visualizations, are a way of concentrating our thought. Let’s use a metaphor or the analogy of the laser. If you enter a room and switch on the light, the room is illuminated by light but the light is not powerful. But if you take that light and concentrate it into a laser beam then you can cut through a wall of a room. Thought is like this. If it is dispersed, it’s not concentrated and has lesser power. If you can focus it, then it has great power to manifest. The difference of consciousness is we are moving more from a dispersed consciousness towards a concentrated form and it has greater capacity to interact with our material environment.

Enlightenment is access to the consciousness field. By going through certain exercises and focused intention — the prime keyword is to focus how we think and our thought processes — allows us to access the consciousness which exists outside of us. The mystery schools knew that this was a very powerful access to that consciousness, so the initiates had to go through deep training. The capacity of consciousness within people is very powerful when concentrated. That’s why it doesn’t come overnight. People have to work on themselves. I’m disconcerted about certain New Age teachings that say illumination comes easily, you should just sit down and meditate for half hour every day and you have higher consciousness. No, higher consciousness takes real work on one’s self, real inner change, because it’s a powerful tool of focused intentional thought. More people are becoming aware of this and taking it very seriously in a lot of inner work. We are going to see a rise of a lot of increased conscious people upon the earth, especially the younger generation.

I see orthodox social religious institutions as being a decayed form of an original impulse. When you have polarization, division, that’s a sign that something has lost its original power. This polarization causes discomfort, causes warfare, causes a lot of death and chaos. What we need to do is go beyond polarization back into unification. Consciousness is unification. Social structures are polarization. They’re two different things.

SC: You speak about the various forces that prevent or slow down our conscious evolution. You say that they target the remaining spaces left of free choice and free will? Can you comment on how we are doing at this point in our evolution, in this battle for free choice and free will?

KD: There are governing ruling structures which want to control all our thought patterns. So we don’t have space and time to put into conscious awareness. What I see happening is that we’re going through a transition period where not only our social structures are falling down or collapsing, such as the economy and similar social structures, but there is increased energy entering into the earth at this time. These are evolutionary moments.

My personal understanding is that our DNA is being responsive to these increased energies coming into the earth. What happens is that the DNA gives off an electromagnetic field of energy. According to biophysics the DNA is a liquid crystal which emits bio-photons so it’s very susceptible to an external energy environment. Because of this increased energy environment, it’s impacting our DNA. So we are having change agents, people who are becoming more aware of the outside environment and the changes which are happening. But these are only sporadic people and is not a mass movement. Many of the younger people are being born and are growing up within a different energy environment. If you’re born into a different energy environment, your DNA will react and respond differently. So many of the younger people are hard-wired to a different energy environment and they understand that something is not right. If they go to school, they lack attention because the education we give them is not fulfilling them. Unfortunately our educational institutions are giving them drugs like Prozac or for Attention Deficit Disorder. This is totally incorrect because our younger generation doesn’t need drugs, what they need is a different social nutrition, a different spiritual nutrition to feed them. These people will be the beginning wave of a new generation to rise up which won’t accept the old structures, the old mind. They’ll be thinking differently. If we don’t change our educational structures we won’t be able to deal with these new generations of children. I think in 20 years’ time and by 2030 we are going to see a youth generation between 20 years old who are going to react and respond very differently to the world today and they will be bringing in change.

If we could develop the power of consciousness we would have a much greater participation of how reality and matter manifest around us. Obviously, to have a governing society, you don’t want people trying to manifest their own reality and participate in their own sense of the world around them, because they’re much more difficult to manage then.

SC: Are you referring to movements like the Arab Spring last year and the Egyptian revolution, which got going through Facebook and social media and the youth? Was that part of this conscious evolution that you are speaking about?

KD: I think these are the first wave and technology is very interesting because a lot of the younger generation understand technology immediately. A lot of us, especially, the older generation, are worried that technology is being used for controlling people, which it is. We are saying that technology makes the younger generation illiterate, etcetera, but on the other hand, the younger generation is using technology in a very different way, such as the social protest movements and Arab Spring. They are using technology to come together and form these protest groups. They are hard-wired differently. They look at technology and say, “Wait. I’m not going to use this for it to control me. I’m going to use it to connect with my fellow brothers and sisters.” So this is a different way of thinking. It is the old mind versus the new mind. Young people are really doing it for themselves and using technology to empower themselves and that’s very interesting. According to neuroscience, we have neuroplasticity. Our brainwaves, our brain patterns, can be changed according to how we use them. If we use technology in a different way, we can actually rewire our neuropathways to understand technology differently.

SC: This is a fascinating part of your book, where you speak about cultural evolution, neuro-genetic evolution, and then conscious evolution. Can you describe what these three forms of evolution are?

KD: Our general conception of evolution is biological evolution, the old Darwinian evolution. This is a very slow process over many, many, generations. We do have biological change in this way. Then we have social/cultural evolution whereby our artifacts, our literature, our thinking gets passed on through books and through ideology and through religion. Every generation can learn the previous patterns of knowledge. That’s social/cultural evolution, what we pass on. We can read a book today that someone wrote a hundred years ago and we learn from that. That’s a quicker form of evolving than Darwinian evolution.

The third stage is neuro-genetic evolution. Our DNA is being changed by our shifting energetic environment upon the earth. Ten percent of the DNA is used for protein building, that’s what we know as DNA. The other 90 percent is often referred to, misleadingly, as junk DNA. But this DNA responds to the environment and is part of our energetic field around the body. If we are born to a world that has a different energetic signature, the DNA will respond differently and pass on information on to the child differently. The child responds to the environment immediately. Bruce Lipton has talked about this in terms of epigenetic process in evolution. So the cells of our body, our DNA can actually change within a generation itself.

Biological evolution can take place in many, many generations. Social/cultural evolution can take place over one generation to the next by passing on our information through literature, films, religion, etcetera. But neuro-genetic evolution can be shifted within a generation and that is a “gnosis.” Gnosis is interior knowledge, which we pick up and is going to be very effective for a few generations of human evolution.

SC: What is neuro-censorship about that you mention in your book?

KD: This goes back to programming using neuro-signifiers, and propaganda advertising being very effective. Neuro marketing is an area of advertising which is very popular these days. If you advertise a film which has won an Oscar, the film has this big golden Oscar and this is a very visual signifier because the brain responds to these images. If you have advertising which shows little puppies wagging their tails, or little cats purring, that’s an emotional response. When you have politicians, likewise, talking about “hope”, “change”, “Yes We Can”, these are strong signifiers which the brain picks up. Advertisers and PR people are very clever and what they do is that they experiment first on how the brain reacts to the signifiers. They use EEG scans, they pick up the electromagnetic impulses from the brain. They put a person in front of a television and they scan how the brain reacts to these signals and they know that emotional responses, linguist responses, bypass the brain and give a subliminal response in the individual. When we watch TV we know that we are being targeted to have a certain reaction which is often unconscious. Politicians use that a lot. It’s also been used in NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. We react to language, to emotional stimulus, to visuals, but this is all very highly programmed. It’s not an accident they use these visuals, that politicians use these words. They’ve been tested before to make sure that they have a very strong response. If you want to read more about this, Google neuro-marketing. It is happening now and is a very sophisticated technology.

It is the old mind versus the new mind. Young people are really doing it for themselves and using technology to empower themselves and that’s very interesting.

SC: You also mentioned about the esoteric and spiritual traditions using conscious intention as a tool for DNA mutation and evolution, that spiritual practices can actually have an effect on our physicality. Tell us more about this.

KD: The spiritual traditions always knew about the influence of the mind upon one’s cellular structure or DNA but centuries ago they didn’t have the vocabulary that we have today. DNA was not discovered officially, so they couldn’t talk about that. What spiritual esoteric traditions teachings did is they introduced such things as prayer, mantras, visualizations. They used certain colors such as meditating within a room of certain colors or certain sounds or certain smells. This would impact one’s interior state. Think about it in terms of modern science. If we have a mantra or a Dhikr, if we repeat certain sounds, certain words over and over, everything is a vibration structure. Words are vibration, sounds, colors are vibration and DNA is an electromagnetic energy field. Therefore, it is influenced by vibration. By being in this meditative state we are giving certain impulses into our interior cellular structure and that can have an effect on our development, understanding, and consciousness. Ancient traditions actually understood the science of our cellular structure very, very well. It’s just that they did not have the vocabulary to explain it.

SC: There’s a great line in your book that says that the human being is really an unfinished project. In connection to this idea, you describe psychic ability in a very different way from the traditional understanding. You consider being open to new ideas, creative thinking and visionary concepts, and a drive for self-actualization as physic development. Can you tell us why?

KD: I refer to the human being more in terms of the human becoming, because the human body is a physical structure which is incredibly well formulated but yet consciousness is an element which operates throughout the body. Our access to consciousness is not a finished project. We can open up and develop our access to greater consciousness. That is the unfinished project also. I feel is part of why we are here on planet earth, to develop our access to the greater consciousness and filter that into the planet and also develop our physical structures and societies by being energy filters and energy processors.

We are “becoming” in terms of our increased access to that. When we have increased access, we start to have what we may call anomalies. For example, 100 years ago the great work Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke. This work talked about these initial people who had transcendental experiences and didn’t know how to interpret them. These transcendental experiences are the beginning signs that we are opening up our conscious awareness and maintaining contact. I call this “polishing the bridge”. Polishing the bridge between our own sense of self towards the greater higher self, and the more we polish that bridge the more we have inflow of physic experiences.

Many people find that they have an inspiration between waking and sleeping. These are the states where we can ease the mind, as the mind is constantly talking to itself, chatting away. This is a disruption between the consciousness or higher consciousness and what we filter in our bodies, our minds. There are certain states where we have greater psychic access to these states of consciousness.

I feel that these states are developing more and more. Many young children today have been called indigo children or similar names because they are already having greater access and greater awareness of these psychic states. I don’t want to talk about these psychic states as being esoteric; I want to say they are the new normal. Initially they may be anomalies, but all paradigm changes begin with anomalies and over the next years more of us, yourself, myself, general people are going to have flashes of inspiration, flashes of transcendental moments. These are the new consciousness coming into awareness, coming into manifestation, and this is going to become the new normal. We shouldn’t talk about it as being New Age or weird or strange. Our role is to try to normalize the new “human becoming”.

SC: Why is it that we haven’t been able, collectively as a civilization, to rise out of the sedative state, the amnesia state you mention, in spite of all the good will on earth?

KD: It’s not just a case of turning on a light switch and everyone wakes up. If everyone woke up, society would collapse. Its sounds strange but it’s true, because we have to shift or transition to a new society in more of a gradual move. There will be people waking up at different times and participating in this move. Some people in this generation won’t wake up perhaps in this lifetime. It is partly outside influences and partly inside work. It is not just a gift to us. We have to work on it, be aware of it. The first question is we have to be aware that we are a conscious being and we are a human becoming in this physical 3-D world.

More and more people are going to be aware of this and waking up but not all at once. It doesn’t work like that. If everybody woke up all at once the systems would collapse. People would not go to work, not accept the economic system. It would not benefit society. We must change in a way which is beneficial to our external world in harmony with our inner world. It’s not about having an electric shock. It’s about having a gradual understanding and awareness that we can work with. Spiritual realization must be applicable to our external world.

SC: You said that humanity is in a threshold, a transition period, but it hasn’t reached the tipping point. Are we going to reach this tipping point soon? How are we looking?

KD: What I say is only my own intuition and my feeling is that we will reach the tipping point. We don’t need a majority of people for the tipping point. In fact, we need only a minority but we need a minority of consciously aware people who are focused and can project their awareness into our external environment. I feel the next ten years, especially, are going to be a kind of disruptive time whereby there will be many people waking up but being shocked by the reality of the situation. When you are aware of what’s really going on, how the world really works, how we are programmed, how we are so conditioned, how our social matrix tried to manipulate us and brainwash us, it is very unsettling. At first it may be a shock and then we need to work with that to bring in a new understanding, to bring in new thinking, to talk to our family, our friends, our communities and do our work. I feel that although this initial shock may come about, a tipping point will come. Imagine 10 years ago having this conversation. It would have been very difficult. I can’t speak with my grandparents about these subjects because they look at me strangely. Even my parents look at me a little strangely, but if I talk to people like you or people in our generation or younger, they understand it. That’s a sign that we are moving towards a tipping point.

SC: You touch on some of the Mayan culture and their teachings in your book. How do you see the various prophecies and traditions of drastic changes happening in 2012 in relation to what you’re talking about?

KD: The 2012 movement is very hard to ignore and I feel it’s a case of polarization and that on the one hand the ancient indigenous traditions such as the Mayan prophecy, but not only the Mayas, the Aztecs and the Hopis have talked about the different cycles, the different ages and 2012 is astronomically and astrologically significant. What is important is that it represents a very definite positive time whereby we need to start changing our paradigms of thought. This is the time to catalyze a new consciousness.

2012 will pass. It will pass, it won’t be the end of the world. For me that is an important marker because when it passes people will say, “Okay, we’re still here. The world is still a bit chaotic, so what do we do?” Okay, now it’s time to work, time to work in the world, to work on yourself, to work on consciousness. Because the end hasn’t arrived, we have the future to look forward to.

On the other hand, I talk in the book about what I call the Armageddon Meme. There are many elements in society which have used the Mayan 2012 calendar to instill fear in people: that we are going to have this polar shift, we are going to lose continents, and are going to have many deaths. When you have fear you have disempowerment. People then give away their responsibility and say, “Okay, I’m afraid. I give my responsibility to the governments. You sort it out.” This is dangerous. I feel there has been a deliberate manipulation of 2012 to create insecurity and fear. I feel it’s our responsibility to use 2012 as a positive marker by saying when we pass it we are still here, it’s time to get to work and use consciousness for the betterment of our societies, which is the original intention of the Mayan prophecy. A new world is coming into being and it is human becoming, not human end.

SC: You say that humanity will be forced into change and how we deal with it will be a measure of our maturity as a species. If it is really up to us, then, how we will fare in this moment of change and transition in our evolution?

KD: It is totally so. We are a collective family. It doesn’t matter so much about our physical circumstances or status. We are a collective species called humanity and earth is our responsibility as collective custodians. Why do we want to give away our power? Why do we want to say, “Oh, there’s an elite minority who control the governments and financial institutions and corporations. They will sort it out.” No, that’s totally upside down. We need now to understand that humanity has a collective responsibility to act, both collectively and individually, to take power back into ourselves and work with the earth, work in harmony with environmental structures, and understand how evolution works.

I feel there has been a deliberate manipulation of 2012 to create insecurity and fear. I feel it’s our responsibility to use 2012 as a positive marker by saying when we pass it we are still here, it’s time to get to work and use consciousness for the betterment of our societies, which is the original intention of the Mayan prophecy. A new world is coming into being and it is human becoming, not human end.

Evolution works through participation. Human “becoming” is human becoming responsible. We may not have a choice in what happens upon the earth. The earth is shifting, there will be physical changes, water cycle changes, geographic, geophysical changes, such as earthquakes, which is the earth realigning itself. We can’t control that nor should we but we can respond to it. The sign of our integrity, the sign of our maturity as a species is not by trying to control things but responding to events with consideration, compassion, equilibrium, harmony with our environment and fellow humanity.