“The modern man is completely bugged by the idea of a sequential time that would only go in one direction, from the past to the future.”
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Advances in science, at the crossroads of quantum physics and botany, are upsetting our linear and sequential conception of time as it flows from the past to the future. Contrary to this conception, time would be retro causal: in their book “Remembering the Future”, ethnobotanist Romuald Leterrier and science journalist Jocelin Morisson combine both ancestral and shamanic teachings with the most advanced knowledge of science. To show us how, in the form of synchronicities, we can access information of the future, hence having the possibility to modify it.
In your essay "Remembering the future," you say that "our intentions cause effects in the future, which become the cause of effects in the present". How to remember a future that has never been lived before? In short, how can we think of this temporal bug?
Romuald Leterrier: Is this really question of the bug? Our consciousness has the possibility as shown in the book to be able to go back and forth through space-time. If there is a bug, it lies in the fact that we have been formatted to have a linear view of time while we realise that memory can work in the other direction, meaning from the future to the past.
Jocelin Morisson: The sentence you quote summarises the theory of double causality by Philippe Guillemant, the physicist who wrote the preface to the book, and based on the idea that the future already exists, meaning that at every moment, we have a future except that it is not densified nor materialised because there are several futures that are superimposed as in a quantum physics experiment. But the fact is that this future is not created in real time as the world is not created progressively; we have at every moment a future that already exists. Therefore, we can intend to make a future more or less desirable for us and for the collective. Finally, it is the consciousness which, by an effort of concentration and a certain quality of soul, makes a future come into existence rather than anything.
According to Nietzsche, Einstein and many physicists today, "it is our future that determines our present". To question the vision of a future that does not exist yet and to oppose the perspective of a future already realised, does this not hypothesise a bug of our free will? Everything would already be there?
RL: It’s the opposite! We demonstrate precisely that by receiving the information of the future, we recover free will and an ability to act on our destiny because it allows us to make decisions in conscience. It is very interesting for me in this sense to use this so-called synchronicity technique, which could be compared to a GPS system that would guide us in our life.
JM: The future is likely to send information to the present in the form of synchronicities to allow us to deviate as opposed to finding ourselves on a linear timeline which would not be the right one for us. We have an ideal path of life, which ancient traditions call that of the soul, and which we ourselves call the “self”, being fully realised. Free will is therefore relative insofar as this path of life acts as an attractor that draws us towards a kind of ideal future.
We would have this free will from the moment we master this method of synchronicity. To not control it is to blind us from our future?
JM>/span>: The freedom we have is relative and not absolute; we have the choice to conform or not to the ideal path of life we have. There is for me a notion of realisation of the person who goes through this path which is the integration of the “self”.
RL: Not at all. We already have free will by nature. I oppose certain spiritual doctrines that advocate pre-determinism;I try to show people that we are free because we have the opportunity to make choices. The synchronicities method that has been implemented at the retro-cognitive level works. We all have the ability to remember and to be affected; we then all have the opportunity to remember the future. When I speak of a path or objective of ideal life, I do not speak from the point of view of the ego or the “me” who may be interested in materiality. I speak here of an ideal journey from the point of view of the “self”, the “self” being something transcendent: we would all be connected to a unitary and collective archetype that would lead to a perfectly integrated personality development at the level of its psychic components.
The phenomenon of retro-causality on which you rely to elaborate your proposal of synchronicity, does it not finally showcase a mental bug, a bug of our thought as it has always been conceived?
RL: We have been used to thinking linearly, with the idea of a sequential time that goes only in one direction, from the past to the future. The modern man is completely bugged by this. Ancient traditions from the first peoples like the Australian Aboriginals or the Amazonian indigenous with whom I worked, do not have this conception of linear time. For them, living symbiotically in and with nature, time can only be circular and naturally cyclical. In doing so, they incorporated the fact that they are not subject of time but that they could be participants. Thanks to this creative awareness of time that works by time loop, they have managed to develop the whole basis of their shamanic spiritual practices.
JM: Indeed, it reveals a bug of the mind that sees itself immersed in a linear time that flows in the direction of the arrow of time. The mind feeds on the illusion that we are only a physical body and that’s the first bug. On the notion of time, it is useful to recall the distinction made by the Greek philosophers between the ordinary time called Chronos, the cyclical time baptised Aiôn we have just mentioned and the gap in time called Kairos, which represents the right moment to act, consciousness outside time.
To access the experience of this flexible space-time, you advocate the abandonment of our mental conditioning, beliefs, judgments, egos: in other words, Man could not access this experience in an immediate and natural way?
JM: For me, there is a deconditioning of the operating mind to emphasise intuition and the state of mind that we have when we do, for example, meditation, moments during which we put the mind at rest. This does not mean that all thought is suppressed, but that one is the observer of one’s own thoughts. I think that, to have the best intentions, they must be nourished by intuition, by which that is no longer reasoning. This state of floating attention indeed imposes to put to sleep our egotistical and mental part that is aspired to success and is related to the materialistic order.
By linking ancestral and spiritual knowledge particularly shamanic and scientific knowledge including physical, you bring an element of response to a bug so far unsolved for the majority of people which is the alliance between the rational and the spiritual. With this approach, consciousness is no longer a bug for science? It is no longer the blind spot?
RL: The first peoples had the intuition for things that are being discovered by science today. They intuitively grasped the workings of the universe, not only its physical but also biological laws, and expressed them in a mythological and abstract way through shamanism and rituals. Therefore, there is a real convergence between contemporary high-tech science and millennial traditional knowledge.
Can we apply your thought, not only at the individual level, but also at the collective level, such as communities and nations? Can one suppose that if, tomorrow, the political leaders exercised retrocognition, they would put in place a more desirable future?
RL: It has been understood in our research that most people are formatted for the future with a vision rather catastrophic or even apocalyptic. It’s a kind of traumatic global societal veil, which prevents us from going beyond our problems because we are formatted by this bug.
JM: Because they are immersed by definition in ego, power, and materiality, it is hard for today’s leaders to practice retrocognition to create a desirable future. The process must start from the ground up: it is the individuals and the community in the broad sense who will elect individuals who share this vision.
Let's end this interview with our two traditional closing questions. First, what is your personal definition of a bug?
RL: The bug for me is an opportunity: it’s perceiving a problem, a concept, a reality from another angle.
JM: I’m thinking of a bug in the matrix, meaning the idea that our knowledge would be unstable and would distort the conception of reality, of space-time, of consciousness. There is a bug in the fact that the materialistic vision is no longer operative today.
And in your respective field, what is the biggest bug?
RL: It is the reality that is a global bug, itself linked to our materialistic conception, which is a complete bug of reality.
JM: The biggest bug is to believe that we are beings made of matter, that we are simply bodies from which consciousness emerges.