Upbeat Evolutionary Perspective on Thriving ~ The THRIVE Movement

Audio Transcription

Randall: Hi Foster.

Foster: Hello, Randall.

Randall: How are you?

Foster: I’m doing very well. How about yourself?

Randall: I’m doing pretty well. So, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at the project at all, but basically what I’m doing is I’m talking to various people representing various archetypes of humanity and I’m asking them all pretty similar questions.

Foster: Yes, I have looked at the site and I’ve been watching some of the videos for quite some time. I really congratulate you on what you’re doing.

 

Randall: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I guess you would know then that the first question I ask everybody is “How would you describe the present state of the world?”

Foster: Great question. I think, as Bucky Fuller said, we’ve got two choices: utopia or oblivion. I would say thriving or extinction and I don’t think there’s ever been a time that is more exciting for a human being to be alive on this planet. I don’t think there’s ever been a riskier time given that we can now destroy life, as we know it on this planet, in a matter of minutes. At the same time, there’s never been an era where a single person, like yourself with this project, could reach millions of people or hundreds of millions of people with the possibility of altering their consciousness in beneficial ways.

I kind of see what’s going on as a blending of three realities — three parallel lanes on the highway of evolution, if you will. One of them is the regular reality that we all kind of assume and take for granted that we get from the mainstream media, education, our families, and so forth. For a lot of people, that’s all that exists. Then, there’s another whole reality that I would call the “spiritual reality”, which is of the unseen world of spirit, of consciousness, of awareness, of the invisible interconnection between all entities of life everywhere in the universe. More and more are wakening up to that through channeling, through meditation, through extra-terrestrial contact, through people just waking up to their hunches — whatever you want to call it. That is more and more pervading the so-called normal, accepted reality. The third reality that I think of is the “covert reality” and that’s what’s going on — it’s mostly invisible — but it’s intentionally hidden. This is the reality of the cabal of international bankers who’ve been wanting to control not only currency, but to control food and to control media and to control education, to control economics — to control people’s lives really in every way that they possibly can. Fortunately, through the dawning of the Internet, we’re all realizing our interconnectedness, even in technical terms, so that the truth is much more able to get out. People are much more able to not only become more aware, but become more aware of critical things. At this point, I don’t think that those realities can ever be fully hidden again. The exposure of that covert reality is giving me great hope that we’re actually on the verge of what I would call “the great liberation” or “the great arising”.

Randall: That cabal that you speak of, I don’t know how you see the consciousness, but do you see that as being a part of the evolution of consciousness? In other words, are we here to be challenged? Is that how consciousness grows in this world and they’re just a physical manifestation of that challenge?

Foster: I do. I see the workings of the entire universe as a single whole. Just as when you go into the woods and you see trees that have fallen, some that are struck by lightning, and you see animals who are out hunting each other and so forth, it’s not all pretty and it’s not all fun for different participants at different times. And yet, I see the common theme throughout all the different forms of life on planet Earth is that consciousness is evolving. I see this 3-D reality as a very intense school for metaphysical consciousness where it actually gets embodied in physical form and has to deal with physical realities: food, hunger, sickness, strife, and all those types of things. In the process, I see that the life force itself — literally, the universal awareness or consciousness — is using this reality not only to glorify life itself in all of its complexity and beauty, but also to have a school where each of the monads, or each of the individual sparks of consciousness, that I think each of us and every other being is, has a chance to come up against the constriction of physical reality and learn, literally, in every single moment from the bio-feedback of the universe what works and what doesn’t. What is harmonious and what is in conflict. What evolves our evolution and what constricts our path.

Randall: It seems that the majority of the forces ruling the direction of the world seem to be more unconscious than conscious to that degree? Does it need to be 51% of awareness to change or is it a critical mass of energy?

Foster: Fortunately, not 51%, in my belief, and yet, it does take a critical mass. I think it’s easier to compile a critical mass now that we can all amplify what we learn through the media and through other technologies, but the American Revolution, in my understanding, was really fought by 5–6% of the American population and that set a whole new level of the bar for freedom in the world. We’re not all the way there yet. We can get to that later on. But, that only took 5–6%. Ken Wilbur says it takes 10% of a population, roughly, to change a paradigm. And Paul Ray’s work on the Cultural Creatives, he’s now updated his information from 20 years ago when the number of people in Europe, Japan, and the United States was around 10–15% who were actually shaping their lives around social justice, around the environment, around spirituality and now those numbers are between 30–35%. So, I really believe that we’re actually already there in terms of critical mass of awakened people and yet, at the same time, there are still critical understandings that are missing and actions that still need to be taken.

Randall: It’s a funny thing because I talk, obviously, to lots of different people from different perspectives and a lot of people who are “spiritual” still fall prey to the same inner conflict that the book of humanity does. There’s competition, even between environmental groups. There’s competition between spiritual groups. It seems like the core is not being worked, being matured in a certain way. What do you feel needs to happen for real change to take place in this world?

Foster: I think that competition is actually necessary, as long as it’s ethical competition. I think each of us is here because the sperm that we originally were slammed like hell and actually beat all of the other 60 million other sperm in that particular race. We all came here with tremendous intention in a natural competition. At the same time, we’re having to learn collaboration now at a whole new level in order to survive. The work of Arthur Young on the evolution of consciousness shows that we’re in the same phase in human evolution in the octave, in the arc of human evolution that he identifies, as the molecule is in the overall arc of evolution in general from pure energy, to light, to sub-atomic particles, to atoms, to molecules and then makes this turn, it does the maximum retraction, and then life energy takes this turn and begins ascending, expanding again, into plants that can grow, animals that can grow and move, and then humans that can grow and move and then, reflect on itself. And yet, in the octave of human evolution, I think we’re in that same middle state. What the molecule had to do was to master ambient energy inside itself and outside itself. It needed to balance the forces in order to learn to sustain temperature and once it gained that skill, through its own collaboration and in competition, then all life as we know it, including ourselves, is based on that skill. I think we’re at that point in human evolution where we’re on the brink of self-destruction and at the same time, we’re a moment away in evolutionary terms from actual liberation and prosperity and security like we’ve never known before. But, I think, most fundamentally what it’s going to take to make that turn and actually move into what Daune Elgin calls “the next phase of reconciliation” where we actually learn to be in harmony with our bodies, with our emotions, with our minds, with one another, and with the environment, those are the skills we have to learn in order to survive right now. There’s been tremendous activity, particularly in the transformation and the consciousness and the spirituality movements and a lot of social activism. There’s been a tremendous amount of work that people have been doing on themselves and then in collaboration with each other to learn those skills.

I personally think that the main thing it’s going to take right now is the understanding (and this is an intellectual understanding, a spiritual understanding, and it’s an ethical realization) of what my colleagues and I call a “universal morality”. I think we’ve been fooled by government schools, and by the military industrial complex and by many religions. We’ve been fooled into a relative morality where you’ve got your truth and I’ve got my truth and different cultures can do different things to different people and it’s okay. I think that we’re on the verge of a realization that is even more dramatic and profound than going from a flat earth to a round earth realization, going from thinking the Earth is the center of the universe to realizing that we revolve around the sun that revolves around the center of the galaxy. That realization that I’m talking about is what’s known as the “non-aggression principle.”  In my decades of research for creating the THRIVE movie, the one thing that we found (in collaboration with my dear wife, Kimberly, who’s the co-creator of that film) is that no one wants to be violated against their will. It’s hard to get everybody to agree on one thing. We found, unfortunately, a lot of people who think that they should be able to violate other people because they’re richer, smarter, whiter, holier-than-thou. Whatever excuse they used, they think they should rule other people. But, fundamentally I think we’re being shown by the universe a fundamental principle, which is kind of like The Golden Rule, and every culture has their version of The Golden Rule, but it’s even more profound because it’s not just treating someone else the way you would want to be treated, but actually not violating them in any way: not injuring them, not stealing their stuff, honoring the sanctity of their body, of their property, and so forth. Most people we talked to say ”yeah, of course”, but then we turn right around and give the authority over to other people to take people’s money in the form of taxation, rule them in terms of arbitrary laws, kidnap them in terms of the draft in different countries, put them in jail for victimless crimes, and so forth.

For a long time, in my study of the evolution of consciousness, the most lethal force on the planet was various religions because the crusades in the name of religion have literally killed millions of people. Now that’s been surpassed by the nation-state, by the whole idea of government — that a few people should rule others. Now, in the 20^th century alone, over 200 million people were killed by their own government within their own territory, and that’s not even counting all the war. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” We’ve been taught that with democracy, we’re the shining light on the hill. We’ve finally arrived at enlightenment. We have come a long way from the pharaohs to the kings and the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, the dictators, the Socialists, the Fascists, Communist dictators. To get to democracy was a huge amount of progress and, in answer to your question about what it’s going to take, I think for us to survive we’re going to need to get humble enough to realize that democracy is not going to do it; that democracy, though a great improvement, is still mob rule. A few people get rights that other people don’t have and as soon as anyone has had that advantage — whether they’re a pharaoh or a priest or a king or a dictator, or a president or a senator, or whatever — it always goes bad. It always ends up leading to tyranny throughout history. I think what we have to realize is that if we really believe the non-aggression principle, which is what we teach our kids in elementary school — don’t steal the other kids stuff, don’t lie, don’t hit — if we actually took that seriously as adults, and lived according to the non-aggression principle, we would still have rules, but we’d have no rulers. We would have security forces, we would have private insurance, we would have private dispute resolution organizations, but no one — no small group of people, no corporations, no banks — would have a monopoly on force and money. To me, that’s the basis of the universal morality that we’ve been seeking throughout the history of humanity on this planet and I think we’re on the verge of discovering that.

Randall: As individuals in this play, what is the core value by which you personally measure your actions in the world?

Foster: I think the core for me is freedom. Freedom for myself and freedom for other people I would say is my core value because that includes the non-aggression principle. It means that no one gets to violate anyone else against his or her will unless it’s truly in self-defense. To me, that’s the bottom line on which we base our rules. In answer to your previous question, “what’s the critical mass?”, we don’t have to have 100% of humanity fully enlightened. We’d be in real trouble if we did given the predicament we’re in, but I think we need to find enlightened guidelines, enlightened rules. No rulers, but enlightened rules and those rules are based on the protection of every single person, every single being’s freedom. Once that’s there, in the moment or in the whole epic of time, what that allows to be fully expressed is compassion and creativity.

Randall: Is it just that we’re all locked into being what we are? Do we have free will?

Foster: That’s a profound philosophical discussion, which would, like any other useful philosophical discussion, would demand a definition of terms. It really depends on who we thing we are. If you think that you’re just this encapsulated ego, then there’s a fair amount of evidence that you have free will because you can go run your head into a wall if you want. You can behave badly. You get the consequences, but you’ve got a certain amount of choice. At the same time, if you in the course of your spiritual growth, expand your sense of identity from your body to your awareness to your interconnectedness to all beings on the planet to your interconnectedness with the entire universe, then once you reach that interconnectedness with the entire universe, we can realize ourselves as a “two”, what we call the torus in THRIVE, this donut shaped spiral vortex. In fact, I have one on my desk here. This is a torus. It’s a distinct entity from everything else around it and yet it’s got a hole in the center. It’s both distinct and unified with the rest of the world at the same time.

That’s what resolves that question of free will for me because I do observe that I have the “I” that means something to me, this observer, which transcends all my physicality. I’ve been there when every cell in my body has changed to a new one within the last seven years and yet, who I identify as “I” is still here. So, there’s some metaphysical entity that I can identify as individual, but at the same time, I see that as simply an expression. It’s the entire universe expressing itself through my torus. I think that recognizing the free will that we have. I can hold my breath if I want through my free will, but after a minute or two, I’m going to need to surrender to something bigger than myself because I’m being breathed by the universe.

I was a peak performance athletic trainer for a long time. I would teach athletes you’ve got to balance those two. You need to surrender to being guided by the universe and everything that you’re doing to fulfill your intention and then, at the same time, after an event or between points (if you’re a tennis player or whatever) you need to surrender to the universe to allow yourself to be breathed. You need to pant to recover your breath.

I think that we have something very valuable called free will and it’s in a larger context of purpose because purpose and free will are different. I observe that, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing in the universe that I can identify that exists except on purpose or by purpose, whether it’s a chair or a cell or a human being or the galaxy itself. Whether we know that purpose or not, it is in the process of fulfilling purpose. Each of us as individuals go through different phases in our life when one phase will be more seeking, another is finding, another is integrating, another is teaching. And yet, all of those, to me, are simply different dynamics. They’re like the colors on this torus that’s constantly unfolding and yet they’re all part of the torus of our Self, which to me is the torus of purpose. The torus that we are, whether it’s our skin or the energy around our body, is in a toroidal shape and, to me, that has all those different aspects and it’s always got direction. Everything in the universe has direction built in and it’s up to us not to just make it up, but to discover it within ourselves and then align our action with that. And when we do, not only are we more effective and productive and happier, but also we have the opportunity to experience that we’re leading fulfilling lives.

Randall: What practices do you do to hone that experience, that understanding?

Foster: There have been many, many throughout my life. I started with sports and then Zen meditation, and then went on to yoga and self-hypnosis, then martial arts. I trained and taught the non-violent art of aikido for 15 years. That was really my primary teacher about how to become one with the universe and become powerful and gentle at the same time and to use that power in a non-violent way. Now, I meditate. I swim. I’ve gotten a lot of insights from training at The Monroe Institute. I also ran a company in Silicon Valley for eight years called “Mind Center” where we created the state-of-the-art in brainwave bio-feedback technology and used that to help people to relax, get more creative, to reduce stress, and also to accelerate their spiritual realization.

Randall: That’s something else I’ve been very interested in: what you call “the zone”. Everybody — athletes have experienced it, artists have experienced it — everybody experiences “the zone”. It’s almost like that’s a commonality that everybody can understand even though it’s abstract.

Foster: Let me mention that the consulting service that I had for many years was called “Zone Sport”. The point of it was to assist very accomplished athletes already in learning energy principles, whereby they could more voluntarily access that zone. You’d see an athlete come off the court sometime and they’d lost and they say, “It was just a bad day. I couldn’t find it today.” What I was helping people do was learn the energy principles by which you can center, by which you can relax, by which you can connect with everything else and then send your out effectively so that you can actually put yourself in the zone. To me, it’s much bigger than winning some sporting event. That zone is an indication of the experience of, or the state of, what I would call love. In the martial art of aikido, “I” (the Japanese kanji for “I”) means to meet or to merge or to come together. It means it’s a great love. Being at one with. The athletes that I worked with, of course, they wanted to win an they wanted the money I they were professionals and they wanted the recognition, but, ultimately, it was being in that state, that state that they had loved as a kid when they first picked up a ball or bat and that later on in life they just came to know that that state, whether it was in a sport or making love or talking to a friend or consoling someone who’s in distress, that state of being connected with yourself, with another, and with the universe, I think, is what we’re here to learn and I would call that “the zone” and I would call that love.

Randall: And our link with intent.

Foster: Yes, exactly. Align your intent with your purpose and align that with the natural flow of energy in the universe. That’s a lot what this toroidal awareness is because as far as we can tell every energy system in the universe — from a galaxy to a solar system, to a planet, to a cell to a human being — is this toroidal form. It’s the only form by which the universe sustains a healthy system. Given that we’re having to learn how to create healthy systems in order to survive, it would behoove us to pay attention to what the universe does and what the universe does is create these whirling vortex systems. We need to learn how to tune our own bodies that way and then to allow our emotional torus to flow and our mental torus and then to recognize that same wholeness in the hydrological cycle and in the atmosphere of the Earth.

To further answer your earlier question of “what’s it going to take?” — and that’s the question we asked in our movie; the title was “THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take?” — to me, as I, over the past decade, have written hundreds of articles on the major issues that we’re facing in all of what we call the 12 main sectors of human endeavor, it was a fairly depressing endeavor because there were so many problems until I began to realize that, first of all, it was very few people who were perpetrating most of the problems and once we discover it, they’re in the process of getting obsoleted. But, even more importantly, there is a common problem and a common solution to all the different issues and that is wholeness. Whether you look at the economy, the environment, non-truthful media, whatever — they’re a breakdown in the wholeness of a natural system. What we need to do to survive and thrive is to learn how to recognize the wholeness of an ecosystem, the wholeness of a human being, the wholeness of a natural economy and then align all of our work, wherever our passion is, in restoring the wholeness of that system. So, in food growing, it’s going from pesticides and herbicides and chemical fertilizers back to organic polyculture. In energy access, it’s stopping the violence of burning and exploding and crushing and all these ways we’ve been creating electricity and allowing out what we call the “new energy devices”. These so-called “free energy devices”, which all mimic and resonate with life-energy, they dance with life-energy instead of fighting against it and they pour out clean, boundless energy. In economics, rather than some centralized, coerced forced system, it’s an honest and asset-backed money. It’s a true free market of voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. In education, it’s voluntary, child-centered learning instead of forced schooling of state propaganda. I could go on and on. In media, it’s truthful reporting of relevant facts.

The last thing I really want to say is that when we look at what’s the wholeness, what’s the torus, at the human level, the key misunderstanding that we’ve been under (because we’ve been duped by people who want to control us) is that the fundamental unit is the group. The fundamental unit, in reality, is each individual that you referred to before because that’s real. It’s like corporate personhood. The group is a fiction. It can be a useful fiction to recognize that you get a dozen people together you can call them a group, but it’s still a collection of individuals, each of whom should have their rights honored. This notion of sacrificing your rights or your money or your security for the good of the group is what has led to destruction of billions of lives throughout history and now has us on the brink of total extinction. If we recognize that the ecosystem for humanity is the individual and honor each individual’s rights, then each individual will be safe and free and prosperous to naturally come together in community and collaborate, which is what we all want to do anyway when we’re healthy.

Randall: And that’s the paradox of this individual awareness, isn’t it, this dimensional awareness that we are in? Because it seems like we have to develop our individuality in order to become part of the whole.

Foster: Exactly. Everybody wants to be free as far as I can tell. You might want to be led by someone that you respect, but you want to be free to choose whether you want to join an organization or not. The key I think is emerging now because I’ve been invited to many, many conferences, festivals, events, and so forth over the last few years that originally used to be music or they were meditation or they were dance or they were economics or they were UFOs or they were energy, etc. Now, when I’m invited to those things, I find that they really want to be in this conversation. Of course, they want to dance, they want to have a good time, they want to eat, they want to commune together, but every single one — whether it’s interviews on the radio, or conference presentations, or festival events — people want to be in this conversation of how do we match our inner liberation with our outer liberation. You can’t go too far in liberating yourself if you don’t pay attention to everyone that’s suffering around you. And you can’t go to far into your activism to try to create more social justice or environmental restitution if you’re not also in the process of liberating yourself inside.

I think we’re at that moment in history where things have been contracting tremendously. I’m a geometer by trade. I’ve studied cosmic geometry my whole life, so I’ve got all these models in my office. There’s one that might be useful to describe this. This is a model that shows the duality of natural geometry. In the center here in read we’ve got a cube. The dual, the partner geometry for the cube is the octahedron. If the cube expands, at the same time, it’s dual in green (the octahedron) will contract. Really, what’s going on in the universe is this pulsing between duality all the time. So we’re going through the most major contraction in history with looking at the possibility of a global police state and at the same time, there is emerging and expanding the greatest movement for spiritual liberation — decentralized, non-dogmatic — that any of us has ever seen and throughout history. I think we’re right at that turning point — and maybe the end of the Mayan calendar, the astrological era that changed then, is supposedly the beginning of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, this new awareness coming in — and I do believe that our consciousness is now integrating the rationale of logic, of the universal morality, along with the metaphysical, spiritual experiences of oneness, of interconnectedness, of inner guidance.

Randall: Wow. You’re awesome. I’m sure you’ve done interviews before. It’s a tough position in a way because you go through so many points, I try and remember something to go back to, but you’ve gone to three or four things ahead of that and they’re all equally as exciting, so I end up just listening and forgetting what I was going to ask you.

Foster: Well, I love your questions and as I’ve listened to some of the other interviews that you do, I really admire that you and your team are willing to ask the big questions, the core questions that most people get kind of embarrassed sometimes to be asked — about purpose and free will and the state of the world. This is actually what we all want to know, but it’s not actually brought up in regular social interactions these days. So, thank you for doing it on a very big scale.

Randall: What’s really interesting for me is when I ask somebody who’s not used to those kind of questions, whether it’s Noam Chomsky or Gwynne Dyer — very practical-minded people, very brilliant men and lovely people — and I do try to poke them in areas that they’re not necessarily used to being poked in just to see because I agree with you. From my point of view and this project is trying to bring everybody into it. That billionaire capitalist has a purpose, has a role, in the unfolding of the universe just as you and I do and somehow, it all has to be integrated from my point of view.

Foster: I love that you have the art at the core of what you’re doing. The Arts is one of our 12 major sectors and I’ve never seen a culture that’s survived without having really vibrant art and usually the ones that have faded, you see the arts go first and, unfortunately, it’s starting to happen in many schools and so forth. But, the fact that you, in a sense, started with a song that really meant something and invited people to resonate with that melody all over the world I think gives a lot of strength to your project because I know that when we made THRIVE, when we had the first rough cut done, the guy that we had selected to do the original score for the film, he said, “Oh good, congratulations! You’re 49% of the way there.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I’m talking about the music.” I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. I know music makes a big difference. But, when he finished three months later, writing and integrating the music into the film, it was at least twice as powerful. We explored a lot of very challenging subjects in a very intentionally safe way and the music that we put in to accompany the film allowed people to feel safer and to open their hearts and to open their minds in a way that we’re not as apt to without the accompaniment of harmonious arts.

Randall: Good. Then you know what’s coming at the end of this.

Foster: I’ve heard about that.

Randall: Also, it’s because music is a common denominator, whether it’s a billionaire capitalist that wants to wake up richer than he was when he went to sleep, he still loves music and he relates with his soul to music even though intellectually, spiritually, or philosophically, you might have a totally different point of view.

Foster: Absolutely. We’re really seeing that also that the people who are passionate about nature or passionate about geometry and mathematics and sports and economics and so forth are beginning to move to a level where people are seeing that it’s all about pattern and we are made of the very geometries of nature. That’s why we resonate with them when we see the beauty of the patterns of nature because that’s who we are. Now, we’ve got to take the next rigorous step of having systems — communications systems, economics systems, agricultural systems, and so forth — which are in complete alignment with those natural patterns of nature.

Randall: And it seems those patterns are dimensional, that it takes a subtle understanding to see the patterns that aren’t so obvious, that are moving everything that we don’t see.

Foster: Yes, exactly. And at the same time, I think that the patterns repeat fractally in different dimensions. So, we can look at a crystal, we can look at a leaf or a flower, or look in another human being’s eyes and you’ll see the same pattern that are there at the level of the clustering of galaxies. I spent several years 3-D computer modeling the periodic table of elements in a whole new way that hadn’t been done before and it was all based on 16 understandings that I had about the natural patterning of nature. It did in fact allow our team to predict and then build working computer models of every single shell of the 92 elements of the periodic table, which to me are simply the patterns by which spirit is manifest into what we call matter.

Randall: Do you have moments of internal conflict?

Foster: Absolutely. I’ve come to recognize those as, in a sense, the most powerful learning experiences. I don’t long for them. I don’t seek them out. But, in the process of seeking deeper truths, I’ve noticed that they continually arise. I’ve been on the planet for enough time to recognize that those conflicts are based on some sort of misunderstanding on my part, that I am not sufficiently aware yet of how to resolve something in my mind — some artificial conflict or illusion — or to allow myself to feel a very powerful emotion without being blown away by it or being irresponsible with it, but at the same time, honoring it. The conflicts that I often experience are just in my own capacity to understand something. My wife, Kimberly, and I, we were talking about some of the interesting topics that THRIVE is exploring the other day and she all of a sudden just pauses and says, “I can’t believe what I believe!” For both of us, it’s really nice that we have each other to talk things over with because most people (at least before THRIVE came out) would have thought that we were crazy talking about free energy and extra-terrestrials and banking scams and ancient culture visitors and all these types of things. In each one of those areas that I’ve explored, there were conflicts, whether it was martial arts or free energy or new physics or whatever, but if I stuck with them, the conflicts would always end up resolving themselves at a higher level. I read once that somebody asked Gandhi’s wife, “What’s so special about your husband?” And she said, “Well, he’s just like the rest of us except that his thoughts and his speaking and his action are one.” I think Gandhi is someone who had spent a long time really working on the conflicts inside himself and someone who had also come to the realization of what he called hind swaraj, which is self-sovereignty. It’s the very same non-aggression principle — self-ownership, non-violation — that I was talking about before. So, I honor the conflicts. They don’t happen as often and I’m usually able, particularly from my aikido practice, to get out of the way and go with what the universe is trying to show me a lot more easily than when I was younger and stronger and more stubborn.

Randall: In that moment, when you feel that contraction and you feel that constriction in your belly maybe, what do you do? How do you pay attention and what do you do physiologically and emotionally, intellectually, spiritually.

Foster: That’s a great question. What I’ve found works best for me (I don’t always remember to do it and I try to remember as soon as possible) is first of all I just pause. And, in that pause, I drop my shoulders. Drop my belly. Any tension in my body (what they call in aikido “weight on you”), just relax. Then, I tune into my breath because in relaxing my body, then I’m able to follow a free process of breathing, which was being constricted by my holding my body. Then, as the breathing goes free, I allow whatever emotion I was stopping to come up in a manageable way.

Then, I found that in the process of allowing the emotions to flow, at the base of fear, I’ve noticed that the emotions kind of stack in our bodies. When we’re feeling normal and healthy, we’re not paying any attention to our emotions, but if something triggers our fear (what we call fear), we’re getting an abundance of vibrations, an overstimulation in the belly. We’ve come to call that fear in our culture. If we’re not comfortable with being afraid, then we clamp down on that and push it up into chest and throat area. Then we’ve lost our connection and that feels like sadness — sadness over loss of a dream, a loved one, an outcome, or whatever — and if we’re also not good at allowing ourselves to be sad and to process that, we clamp down on that and it pushes it up into the face and that comes out as anger. If we don’t allow ourselves to be angry responsibly, then it pushes the emotional energy right out of our body and that’s the beginning of depression. We’ve literally depressed all of the natural emotions. When we come back into healing (and this is kind of the process that I was describing), if you relax and allow yourself to feel, often times, anger is the first things that you feel because that’s the last thing that you repressed. That’s your body trying to wake you up and get your attention to take necessary action. If you can allow yourself to feel angry responsibly, then it disappears. Then, the sadness comes up. You allow yourself to cry, sit with the sadness, or whatever, then that goes away. Then the fear comes up. If I allow myself to feel the fear fully, then it too disappears and the energy of my emotional body then goes back to the center of my physical body and I’m once again aligned. Then you feel good again. The neat thing is that’s the contractive side. That’s the contractive energy moving in.

But, the expansion on the other side is when you’re feeling healthy. Then, your energy starts to rise up your spine again, but this time in an expansive way. So, you’re getting this stimulation in your gut and it’s excitement and it keeps expanding and it moves into your heart and its enthusiasm (en theos, you’re in god). And if you keep allowing it to expand, it encompasses the head and it’s smiling and it’s happiness. And if you fully let it encompass your energy body, I would call that bliss. Bliss is a very healthy state for healing, for intuition, for learning from the cosmos. At the same time, it’s not all that good a state for doing an interview or driving a car or managing some difficult mathematical problem because you’re not focused in the mental level. But, the freer one is to allow the contractions to disappear on your body, your emotion, your mind, you breath, the freer you are to then be in that state of centered energy which naturally expands to the next level that you’re ready for.

Randall: You mentioned the word “god”. How would you define that for us?

Foster: God, for me, is simply whatever anyone chooses to use that word for. I rarely use it because it’s so misunderstood. We all have such different definitions of it. If I had to define it and I knew someone really wanted to know what I meant, I would call it the life force, itself. The boundless, universal life force that is behind all of the arrow of time, the direction of evolution of consciousness towards more awareness, more complexity, more love, more compassion, and so forth. That force, which is not a thing, it’s not located in any particular place. It’s certainly not in one entity separated from anything else. It’s the life force, itself that is in not only in sentient beings on planet Earth, but metaphysical beings throughout the universe and every dimension and in so-called empty space. I view the entire universe as alive and unbounded. To me, all of that, unbounded, and all of the intelligence and the direction that it implies, if I had to use the word “god”, that’s what I would mean by it.

Randall: And what do you think our role is in that? Do you think our expansion is its expansion? Are we the same thing? Are we it expanding?

Foster: We’re a hologram of it expanding. Every cell in our body has evolved through that arc I described before from pure life potential into the push and pull of sub-atomic forces into identifying as an atom and then encompassing itself as a cell and then as a molecule. That’s what we’re made up of. At every level of the octave of evolution, it is the same process that is going on, but each level gains a different power. And, as human beings, we’ve gone from potential to being able to bind with something else and then to identify ourselves and then to combine and then to grow and then to achieve mobility and finally self-reflection or dominion in the good sense of the word, in the sense of being able to look out over all of that which we are. And yet, we’re just a tiny, little speck, but we are, at the same time, a hologram of the boundless universe. I think that the whole universe is doing exactly the same process of evolution that every cell in our body and our body and the Earth, itself, is doing. So, I think we are god; we are the universe learning to know itself through our particular torus, through our particular consciousness. And not only to see itself, but then to align and gain more and more powers of recognition and harmonious alignment with life force.

Randall: Love is another word that everyone has his or her own interpretation of. How would you define love?

Foster: For me, love is most fundamentally a state of being and it’s a state of being that one experiences more and more of the more, in this case ‘I’, align with natural forces — the more I align with gravity, the more I allow myself to breathe, the more I allow myself to feel my emotions, the more I allow myself to be in awe and wonder at the mystery of what we’re involved in here, and the more I honor other people and allow them to be (don’t let them trample over me in any way, but at the same time don’t aggress on them in any way) — the more I align with that at any moment, the more love I experience. I mentioned before that the “I” in aikido means “the great love”. It’s not the love of “well, I used to be in love with her, but I don’t think I am anymore” or “I love this person more than that”. It’s not that kind of relative, changing love. I think what the founder of aikido meant by “the great love” was this realization of one’s self as the universe and then the practice of bringing each aspect of our bodies, of our minds, of our emotions, and our spirit into alignment with those natural forces. And in watching myself, the more I do that, the more love I feel. The more I see that in other people, the more I see that they experience themselves as lovable and are more capable of loving others and also in surrendering to this incredible bliss of being “in love” with the universe that we actually are in the boundless reaches of our realized identity.

Randall: Have you always thought like this or was there a defining moment in your life that shifted you or has this been a steady progression?

Foster: There have been many. One of them, maybe the earliest that I remember, was the one that I depicted with some graphics in our movie, THRIVE, where I was riding on a school bus and I was looking out the window and just sort of daydreaming. I was thinking about energy because not too long before then, I had been in my sixth grade elementary school class and we had done our first air raid drill. We had been told about the possibility of nuclear war and so the siren would go off and we would all dive under our desks and cover our heads. I remember vividly sitting under that desk with my arms over my head saying, “I don’t think this is going to help and if this is the best the adults have to offer me, in relation to this explosion that they’re describing that somehow they created, I’ve go to figure this out.” I, frankly, became obsessed with energy. I went on a fast track in physics in high school and spent all my free time in the lab doing energy experiments and that is what I think led to this daydream on the school bus where I was looking out the window and all of a sudden I was seeing this whirlpool vortex floating in the air. Then, the vortex turned into a solar system — the sun at the center with the planets going around outside. And then that changed into an atom, which was the nucleus at the center with the electrons the way they were depicting them in those days going around the outside. I saw the similarity and then I saw myself in that pattern and I just had this whole-body realization that there is a fundamental energy pattern in the universe and I am that pattern, somehow halfway in between a tiny little atom and a vast solar system and I need to figure out what that pattern is so that I can do everything in my power to keep us from blowing ourselves up.

My first major activism was in the nuclear freeze initiative and then I spent a lot of years working on both energy studies and consciousness studies, new physics that finally led me to a realization of the fundamental principles of a unified field theory that ultimately took me into the laboratories of a number of free energy inventors who had working devices sitting on their bench that I got to experience and it just moves you to tears to realize there’s absolutely no good reason to be polluting the skies, causing asthma, taking other people’s natural resources, and fighting wars when we already have multiple technologies that dance with the universe and then flow out in a boundless, clean, and inexpensive energy. I would say that was the first turning point because I finally resolved this issue of how can we be powerful and gentle at the same time. The realization of that vortex pattern led me to aikido, led me to free energy, and it led me to even understanding economics and ecosystems as an expression of personal liberty, collaboration amongst human beings, and then, technological harmony with natural principles.

Randall: You’re a real treat to listen to, I’ve got to tell you.

Foster: Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s really an honor to be invited onto this program.

Randall: It’s our honor. The last thing I ask everybody, and everybody gives such wonderful, profound statements, if you could have a public service announcement to the world, if you could give a message to humanity, what would you say?

Foster: I would start with reminding people, or letting them know if they don’t already, that we already have what it takes to thrive, just as in the Amazon jungle. Supposedly, the antidote for any toxin — a bee sting or a scorpion or whatever — is within 100 yards of the actual plant, insect, or animal itself. In the same way that I think the planet provides for all our needs, I think that we already have on planet Earth what it takes to thrive. We already have enough food, clean water, plenty of energy and we need to wake up from the illusion of separation as beings and the illusion of scarcity as a civilization and the illusion that aggregated authority is even safe, much less our savior. We need to recognize enlightened rule — protective of individual rights, not coercive or aggressive in any way. Rules, but not rulers. We need to learn to recognize the wholeness of natural systems, wherever and whatever they are and then do everything in our power to restore that natural wholeness. And, if we can in time (which I’m very optimistic that we can) we can actually not only survive on this planet, we can thrive in love with each other and in a healthy ecosystem.

Randall: Thank you so much, Foster. This has been marvelous.

Foster: Thank you.