DESMOND: Hello, I'm Desmond Berghofer from the Visioneers Network welcoming you to the next episode, episode four, on our Journey of Extraordinary Wisdom. My partner, Dr. Geraldine Schwartz, will introduce our next wisdom keeper. Here's Gerri.

GERRI: Hello everyone, and a special welcome to those around the world who are listening to us today.

I am so proud to introduce our next wisdom keeper, Anne Baring, to you, but before I do I'd like to say just a little bit about my own experience with her. Two summers ago, I came across her book, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul. Here it is, and you can see it's full of stickies and all the various things that I want to put in so that I could remember these things.

This was a Covid summer, and I had more time than usual to read, and every morning I really looked forward to getting up and reading more about Anne, because I learned something about myself as a woman and about the history of femininity that I had never known before, even though I'm an inveterate reader.

So, you are about to hear something very special. Here's the story. First of all, Anne speaks to us in the most authentic spiritual voice that transcends the beliefs of particular religions, to clearly and purposefully articulate the truth, the truth about the primordial essence of the human spirit. In the biblical tradition of tender openness to directives and insights received from whatever angelic source of the great mysterious divine intelligence, Anne listens deeply, and puts whatever she hears in story and context so that we may understand.

The story she tells is the story of every woman who has ever lived. Her prodigious extraordinary scholarship on the feminine ebb and flow from power and strength to constraints, even to the point of slavery, paints the deeply coloured picture we all of us need to know. Indeed, the plight of women in Afghanistan today mirrors the ancient experience over the last four thousand years that Anne so poignantly describes.

Her perspective is that every daughter and son is our daughter and son, every mother and father our mother and father, every sister and brother our sister and brother. This gets to the very heart and reason why this should interest each of us profoundly, and so we cannot help but pay attention. Anne's life 's work and insights are eloquently expressed in one of the most important books on the history of human intelligence, especially of human spirituality, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul. It stands tall among all books across language and tradition to inform us of the importance of including the feminine strengths of intuitive compassion and rational thought in the powerful response we need to make in order to deal urgently with our current common crisis.

She tells us that evolution, which is built into the fabric of all life on this planet, needs to make a leap the size of soul, as we are presented with a choice and opportunity that only comes at the time of great crisis, like ours. To get the answers we need, we must begin by asking the right question. In her book, The Dream of the Cosmos, Anne asked this question for all of us. This is the overarching question:

What is the emerging vision of our time that could offer a template for a conscious awakened humanity?

Her answer sets the route ahead in the upshift position. Her vision takes us beyond the constraints of specific nation, race, belief, or gender to offer a new concept of spirit, recognizing the sacredness and the indissoluble unity of the great cosmic web of life, and encourages all of us to take responsibility for our own decisions and our own actions. It puts the planet and the life it sustains in the primary position. It asks us to relinquish our addiction to war, to weapons and the pursuit of power that truly threatens our very survival. From that perspective, our choices cannot come from the limited consciousness now creating the crisis.

Listeners, we need something new, we need a new story, we need to move our moral compass just enough to make a big difference, and Anne lays out the path for us to do that. She tells us we need a transformed human intelligence to take advantage of this moment of choice that will preserve the divinity that dwells equally in all of us. Such wisdom is truly worthy of the Visioneers award of Heroine of Humanity.

And now, here is Dr. Desmond Berghofer to tell us how Anne 's contribution is integrated with what we have already heard from our previous wisdom keepers, Drs. Willis Harman, Ervin Laszlo, and Jane Goodall. So, all of you, here's Des.

DESMOND: Hello again.

As Gerri has said, Anne Baring's wisdom takes us into a new spiritual dimension of the global mind change we are exploring in this Journey of Extraordinary Wisdom. Like Willis Harman, she tells us to reject our dependence on armaments and predisposition to go to war. Like Ervin Laszlo, she calls for a new planetary consciousness, and like Jane Goodall, she puts conservation and preservation of life and the planet at the forefront. All these require a global mind change. However, Anne's concept goes deep into change of spiritual and religious beliefs as a prerequisite for the change we must make in behavior.

Witnessing from an early age mystical experiences and revelations of her mother, Anne pursued a life of spiritual exploration, including training as a Jungian Analyst, that over a lifetime of study and writing has produced a worldview of extraordinary breadth and depth. A particular focus has been the role of the feminine mind in world cultures, from its profound central influence in primordial times going back up to 50,000 years, to its grave degradation, beginning four thousand years ago and continuing into our post modern age.

In the following interview with David Lorimer, you will hear Anne reveal her profound insight about the challenges facing humanity today, that with the loss of the feminine influence came also the loss of our sacred connection to nature. Ancient cultures steeped in the worship of the great mother goddess experienced nature as something vitally alive, with which humans had a sacred bond. When this intimate relationship with nature was lost, the natural world came to be degraded in the human view to little more than a source of resources to be exploited, and to be a dumping ground for our waste. Combined with the economics of growth in capitalism, the result for humanity over hundreds of years has been little less than catastrophic, as the enormous growth in population combined with ever increasing growth in production and industrial power, has despoiled our planet and caused a massive loss of biodiversity and extinction of species, that may ultimately include our own.

For Anne, the way out of our predicament is to embrace a new spirituality that restores the nurturing influence of the feminine, and is anchored in the belief of Universal Mind that is both the source of every thing and the energy of love and continuing evolution, not only of the human species, but of the universe itself. An evolved humanity will be guided by values of compassion, reverence for life, a sense of oneness and unity, and an overwhelming expression of love for everyone and everything. Human beings will act as co-creators of an unfolding reality of goodness.

Anne is hopeful that the required shift in worldview among a critical mass of humanity is now well underway. She is encouraged by the number of thought leaders and organisations that are making their own contributions to the shift, including the Visioneers, and she is particularly excited by the discoveries in quantum science that are revealing an extraordinary web of relationships or field of consciousness underlying the physical universe.

In this episode, you will hear Anne in her own voice in conversation with David Lorimer speak to her beliefs and hope for the future. When you're finished listening to Anne and David, put on episodes seven and eight of the Visioneers Audio Theatre, also released today, and be touched by deep feelings of love and sorrow, outrage and compassion, inspiration and hope, that are very much a part of the human journey.

To conclude, let me quote Anne's own words from the Preface of The Dream of the Cosmos:

“It is inconceivable that our extraordinary species, which has taken so many billion years to evolve to conscious awareness, should destroy itself and lay waste to the Earth through ignorance of the divinity in which we dwell and which dwells in us. The very challenge of our times offers us the choice between continuing to follow the patterns of the past, or creating new patterns, living and acting from a different relationship with life, committing ourselves to the immense effort of consciousness we need to make to understand and serve its mystery.”

And now, here is Anne with David.

DAVID: My name is David Lorimer and I'm here with the author Anne Baring to talk about her vision of the world. Anne and I are very old friends, and we've spent a lot of good time and conversations together. So, Anne you're in your beautiful habitat in Hampshire in your library, and I'd like to start by asking you about the source of your quest, or the sources of your quest for wisdom and understanding.

ANNE: Well, I think my quest started without my really being aware of it with messages that were received by my mother and a friend of hers, beginning in about 1943 in the middle of the Second World War. And they started with the experience of revelation which they had in New York in which they were sitting in their sitting room and suddenly there was a tremendous lightning flash and a clap of thunder and the window blew inwards, which normally it never did, because they didn’t open it, because it was February, I think, 1943.

And they felt a great Presence in the room, and they fell on their knees and they asked the Presence: What should we do? Should we pray? How should we respond to you? And the Presence said: Follow your heart, and then they said: Should we pray in church? And it said: Your church is your own soul.

So that was the beginning, and then the messages started after that fairly frequently maybe once a month, and in their essence they were warning, really they were saying there is a great crisis for humanity, and if humanity doesn't change course, doesn't change the path it's on, it will bring catastrophe upon it. And the messages were very loving, but they were also specific that we had to change our understanding, or our consciousness, or else we would get into huge trouble later on. They also predicted a year in advance, they predicted the release of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. They said it would be like a bolt of lightning in a blue sky. I always remember those words.

So, anyway, they were my initial teachers. Some of them were from Saint Francis, some of them were from Jesus himself, as called Master Jesus, and those were the two main teachers, as it were, so we observed all this and absorbed it. I was about thirteen at that age, the first time, and that took me really, to give a foundation for my life if there's something else something else I need to know about, something else I may need to do. What could that be? And so that was the sort of guiding presence that led me first of all to university to get a university education, then to travel all over the far east, and then to begin to write my books.

And when I was about forty I had a visionary dream, an extraordinary dream more powerful than any other, which changed the course of my life. It was a dream of a cosmic woman reaching from Earth to sky, and she indicated that she had a great wheel in her abdomen, and I had one in mine, I was lying on the ground looking up at her, and she indicated to me that I was to centre my wheel, it was too far to the left. And as a Jungian Analyst by that time, I realized that that meant that I had to become more conscious, that is to say, more aware of what I was doing and what was demanded of me.

And so this led me to embark on a new path, really, of rescuing the divine feminine from the, as it were, the loss of it, the disappearance of it, what had happened to it, why had it disappeared, what were the reasons and the causes that led to its disappearance, and to bring it back into human consciousness. That's what my whole work has been about.

So, those are the two great influences on my life that have been my guide and my inspiration, and to whom I've devoted myself really, in the way of a religious calling, if you like, something that I had to do, that I had to respond to, but didn't know what it was exactly, what it was, and was revealed to me little by little as my work unfolded, until finally I was able to write my final book The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul.

DAVID: Yes, well it's, and I think that your work is extraordinarily important as part of this revival of the divine feminine and the study of the goddess, your first foray with Jules Cashford known as the Return of the Goddess, sorry The Myth of the Goddess, and so your quest really began,

as it were, from the inside out combining, as you say, these messages with the dream. And dreams have always been important to you and also to Jung and, you know, who was a great inspiration to both of us.

So, let's move on to the separation between spirit and nature, and how you feel that is best addressed. Obviously it's related, to the loss of the divine feminine as well, and the role of science in this.

ANNE: Yes, it came about gradually without people being aware of it, but in the ancient cultures of, say Egypt and Sumeria, Greece, the goddess was always honoured, the goddess was certainly in the early civilizations the primary image that was worshipped by people, and then gradually around four thousand years ago it shifted gradually to the image of the Great Father God rather than the Great Mother Goddess, and when it shifted, we lost the connection with the sacred Earth. The Earth was no longer sacred, the whole emphasis was on the transcendent image of the Father God, and slowly this cut off our connection with nature, and we no longer regarded nature as sacred, and we no longer regarded all the life of the planet around us as sacred, whereas before it had been part of the goddess, it was the goddess, as it were, all the manifestation, because life came forth from her womb, and everything was connected because of that, but with the transcendent Father God you no longer had the sense of relationship, and the connection with nature, and so little by little that was lost. There were specific things, which I won't go into, which contributed to it, like the myth of the fall, for example, but it was just a general movement from the Great Mother Goddess to the Great Father God, and now we're left with only the image of the male God and this is a catastrophe for us, because we need to reconnect with nature, and we need the image of the divine feminine, who was also known as the Holy Spirit long ago, that we need the image of the Holy Spirit, which was also carried in the image of the grail, the grail being a vessel and a cup, it was a synonym, as it were, for the Holy Spirit.

So, we need to recover that image and that connection in order to re-sacralise the whole planet, and to sacralise what we are. We are part of the divinity that we've been worshipping for thousands of years. So this is a huge shift in our understanding, a shift from worshipping something far distant in Heaven, so to speak, to participating in the sacred ground of the universe and realising that everything we do, everything we create, comes from that Source and that that Source is love. That is what holds the whole universe together, and us as well, so to speak.

So, these were all realizations or understandings that came to me gradually and I memorized in my book, The Dream of the Cosmos, but it's taken a lifetime to do this, and I'm now ninety, and I've certainly worked at this since my forties, so that's fifty years of bringing the feminine into consciousness, and expanding my own understanding, until with quantum physics we are given the opportunity of understanding this ground of the universe as something quite different, something alive, vibrant, loving, embracing that we haven't thought of in that way, and as part of it, we're not separate from it, we're not observing it, we are part of it, intrinsic to it. Our consciousness is part of the consciousness of the universe.

And I had to work my way through materialist science, and its, I believe, totally dreadful beliefs, because it's taken away the soul, taken away God. They've seen the universe as something dead, lifeless, they've shown that our lives are meaningless, all of which has affected the psyche, because the psyche knows that none of that is true, but it can't do anything about it, because there's this great barrier, or firewall, intervening between it and what it wants to communicate with.

DAVID: So, I just wanted to highlight this sort of further separation, if you like, during the seventeenth century, moving away from the Renaissance Anima Mundi and the Platonism of the Pico and others in Florence and the rise of this mechanistic impersonal view, which, I think, further separated us from nature and was associated with the impetus of capitalism, which not only de-sacralised nature, disenchanted nature for us, but also just used it as a human resource. And so we now have a situation where the exploitative mentality associated with this view is somehow, you know, running rampant and that's the fundamental danger of our facing extinction.

ANNE: I remember that the messages said that one of the greatest dangers came from atheism, and that is precisely what you've been describing, and what I've tried to describe as a soulless universe, and that we have no responsibility to anything at all other than our own needs. This is a catastrophic misinterpretation of our role on the planet, and I hope that soon it will vanish, as with other beliefs that are no longer relevant or valid, that it will gradually disperse.

But meanwhile we're left with the aftermath of it, and we need to address, we need to re-sacralise the whole cosmos and re-sacralise the planet and ourselves and all life on it as our very first step in trying to formulate a new relationship both with the planet and the cosmos.

DAVID: And one of the implications of what you've been saying, sort of from the point of view of science, is their view of death, and so that they regard the consciousness arising from brain function, and therefore the death of the body is the extinction of the person, and this I think is related to what you've been talking about, you know, with the insistence on a meaningless purposeless universe.

ANNE: Yes, because if we're reduced to a mechanism and consciousness originates with the physical brain, then it cuts off our relationship with everything that is beyond. It cuts off our immortality, which was always known in ancient cultures, say in Egypt, particularly in Egypt, but also in India and in China. It's been known for millennia that we are immortal beings, here incarnated on the planet for a specific reason, to grow, really, to grow our souls. And that materialist idea is the most, I mean, it's like taking a pair of scissors and cutting off a lifeline. It's really given rise, I think, to so much mental illness, because if you have the belief that there's nothing beyond, anyway you're miserable, and stuck in your life, there's nothing to help you, there's no foundation, there's nothing there at all. So people commit suicide, thinking that they're going and that's the end, so to speak. And then they will find themselves still alive on the other side but with this great wound that they've inflicted on themselves and for the wrong reasons, because it's simply not true that we don't survive.

And I can say that with utmost conviction having studied the work of the Indians the Upanishads and the great Vedic teachings, and I've studied Egypt and it's great huge knowledge that it transmitted to future civilizations, but which was lost gradually, because we thought we knew better, and other religions replaced the Egyptian one, but it was carried through in the Gnostic tradition, thank God, and in Kabbalah it survived, so there are remnants of it we can turn to for help.

DAVID: Yes, now I think there's a revival of Gnosis as well as the sacred feminine in our time and we're both interested in the message of the Cathars and in particular of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of the Beloved Companion in that respect. Anne, perhaps you could say a little about that.

ANNE: Well, I was always attracted to Mary Magdalene, because my mother was interested in her and actually wrote a book about Mary, Martha and Lazarus, a book of poetry in 1947 or 8, I think it was published, so I had that as a ground, as it were, but then I became more and more interested through the Cathars, through their church of the Holy Spirit, which was founded in 1167, I think, in that area south of Toulouse and the Languedoc, and I became interested in their early Christianity, which they were trying to revive in the twelfth century, going back to the true teaching of Jesus, bypassing the teaching of the Catholic Church in Rome, and trying to revive a very simple life of care and devotion to the people around them, and also being in touch with other dimensions of the universe, in touch with the stars, because they actually were astronomers, as well as herbalists and healers.

So, I became very interested in that, and my parents happened to move to that part of France and so for twenty years I was able to visit and explore all the Cathar sites and really steep myself in the Cathar teaching, and that led me eventually to this Gospel of the Beloved Companion, which was published in 2010 by Athara, translated by Jehanne de Quillan, and there I found to my delight the authentic Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which must have been the prototype or one of the underlying gospels that the later gospel writers based their gospels upon.

So, there I found that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, which I'd always felt was true. I didn't know the truth of it, I couldn't prove it till then, but reading that gospel it's as plain as daylight that they were married, that they deeply loved each other, and that Jesus appointed her as teacher of the disciples, and gave her the name of the Magdala, which means tower, which was related to the great tower at the back of the First Temple in Jerusalem, where the priest used to enter the tower, climb a flight of steps and commune with the Divine Mother who at that time was called the Holy Spirit and divine wisdom. So, there was the tradition behind the story of Mary Magdalene and Jesus that was the lost tradition of the First Temple and the Shamanic communication with other dimensions of reality and bringing down the teachings from those dimensions on how to live life, how to teach the people to become more conscious, if you like, the people of that time.

So, that gospel was a tremendous turning point in my life when I realised that the messages were true that I'd been given as a child, that all this was real, true, and immensely valuable, and that I should put out the teaching, which I have on my first website, of the messages, which was basically to treat life as sacred, and they said we do the tapestry if you give us good thread. I think that's a lovely phrase, give us good thread and we do the tapestry, give us good thread. They also said to look after the birds, and to beware of polluting the waters of the Earth with atomic explosions and beware of new scientific discoveries which were being worked on in secret, which could alter the climate of the planet, and bring disaster in in its wake. So that was quite a mouthful to absorb and put out.

DAVID: Yes, and it relates back to our earlier theme of the divine feminine, doesn't it? bringing the divine feminine back, I mean. I think that there is a sense in which this is happening spontaneously and quite widely, but is there anything that we can do, do you think, you know, to catalyse this process, because Iain McGilchrist's version of this would be to say that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain are out of balance. The right hemisphere, representing the intuitive and the imaginative and the creative, and we're dominated by this mechanistic mentality and accounting mentality of the left hemisphere.

ANNE: Well, I think possibly, so many people are working on this now, including yourself and Iain McGilchrist, and so many people are working to help the Earth, and to change our awareness of our relationship with the Earth, I mean, from Greta Thunberg to the wonderful David Attenborough, what he's done is a huge amount of changing our consciousness with his marvellous videos and his teaching, he's basically a teacher, he would never call himself that, but that's what he is. And we're listening to him and taking in what he's been saying, and also I think we have to go back, I think, to the image of the grail and the Holy Spirit and also to the fact that in that Gospel of Mary Magdalene Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit, I think, over eighty times, not God the Father but God the mother, and he refers to the mother as really teaching him and that he is her son, so to speak, so this is a totally different kind of instruction that we've been given through that gospel, if you like, and I think this is coming through. There are many many people who have written about Mary Magdalene now. Their books are published and easily accessible.

And there's also teachings of many many people all over the world, but particularly in America, people like Deepak Chopra, Michael Beckwith, I can't remember all their names really, but I’ve been following them for many years. The man who runs the Shift Network, for example, and for years has been bringing to people's awareness different methods of reconnecting with the Source and of developing a different kind of consciousness and different skills that we can develop in ourselves, skills that we have latent but haven't been addressed, because we've been living through the left hemisphere of the brain and we've cut off the access to the imaginative creative right brain, which is why our culture is so dead and so lacking in depth.

And so lacking in wisdom, that precious word wisdom, that we need to bring back, because this is what our politicians are missing. They have plenty of political skills, plenty of knowledge, plenty of experience, but they don't have wisdom, and if you take Putin and the Chinese leader and the American leaders, they do not have wisdom, well the English, no.

DAVID: It goes back to Plato and the guardians, doesn't it? But no, the rulers, that those who are steering the ship, as it were, should be those who have had a vision of the good, and I can't think of any politician who really fits into that category.

ANNE:: Because they haven't got the framework to know what they're missing. No problem, they're doing their job on a certain level. but they're missing the whole level above that, which would give them a different orientation on their contribution to working for the country, whatever it might be. They haven't got that extra dimension. Wisdom is missing.

DAVID: Yes, even practical wisdom. I want to go on to your wonderful phrase the situation that humanity is now in is at a crucial point of choice or a crucial moment of choice. And how do you see this and our possibilities for the future?

ANNE: Well, the fact that we're becoming aware that we are at this crucial time of change is really the first step, and i think that if you compare it with alchemy, we're in the stage of the Negredo, the darkness, the blackness. We can't really see where we're going, but there is the promise of the next phase coming along, which is called the whitening or the Albedo, and we can know that after this very dark phase when everything is confused and we can't quite see what to do or how to do it, there will gradually come a lightening, or a brightening, or a revelatory experience of what needs to be done. I think.

I really do trust that, and I also trust that we're being guided by people in the cosmos who are far more advanced than we are and who are interested in what's happening on this planet, and who are helping us. So, while this is a dark phase and it is a crucial time of choice, it's also like the story of the sleeping beauty. We're working through the hedge of thorns, which we've put up, it's our fault that they exist or that it exists, and we've had many people who've tried to get through that hedge of thorns, but perhaps now collectively we can work our way through it, and wake up the sleeping beauty, which is the faculty of the feminine which we need to balance our very male or masculine culture with the qualities of the feminine, and then together the masculine and the feminine together can create this new kind of civilization, longing to bring into being, but which can't be brought into being until we’ve been through the Negredo and the Albedo, and we can reach the final stage of alchemy, which is the Rubedo or the reddening of the dawn and the coming of the light, because that's what we're all waiting for, the revelation that we are part of what we've been worshipping for years and that we are intrinsically divine and immortal beings.

DAVID: And there is, I think we both believe, there is an evolutionary process going on here, and Chris Bache has a similar sort of vision of going through the tunnel, if you like, to the other side to a new dawn. But the crucial point or the crucial question is how this process is evolving, and I agree with you. I think we just simply have to trust and work with intent at these different levels, because I'm sure you're right, that we are being helped by invisible helpers, invisible beings and to move in this direction, because we need all the help we can get, I think.

ANNE: Well, we do. We've come up now face to face with the oil crisis, and because Putin is cutting off the gas to central Europe there will be great hardships ahead, unless he has a change of mind. So we're up against the physicality of this needed change. As well, we have to find new forms of energy, we ought to be praying for new forms of energy. I know that there are scientists working on it at the moment, on nuclear fusion rather than fission, and on also creating small reactors, as they were, that people could use even in their own homes, which wouldn't leave this deadly residue that the large ones are leaving, because that's a big problem now, how to deal with the residue of all the reactors that are now built on the Earth,

So that, you know, there are practical, problems which people are aware of and I think that we will work our way through it, but we have to trust and we have to use the imagination and think of new ways of surviving, because it may come down to that. It won't be an easy time and I see it as certainly as a birth process, a birth, a spiritual birth into a new level of consciousness, which will involve the pain and difficulties of ordinary birth bringing forth this child of the union of the male and female principals, restoring the female image of divinity and deity so that God is not lonely up there and has a partner. And that partnership will come down in forms on our planet which will be able to help us create this new kind of civilisation.

We have to overcome the power principle. That's the second thing. Apart from the energy thing, we have to overcome the power principle which Jesus called the Master of the World, and it's good to name it as that because we can see it at work. We can see it at work with Putin, we can see it at work in America, always wanting to be the dominant country. You can see it in China. It has to be overcome if we are to work together, each of these nations working together to solve the problems that we face, and that's the only way we're going to get through this. We can't get through in rivalry between the different nations, that will destroy us.

DAVID: It's self destructive. So, one could summarise that by saying that we need to move from the love of power to the power of love. And love needs to be recognized as the incredible power that it is, and we've been worshipping the wrong power, if you like. Well, I think, I sometimes say that I don't think we take love seriously enough, and if we understand it, then…You know, I was at a funeral of a neighbour this week and there was this palpable sense of the power of love being expressed through this person 's life, and what other people said about them, and so it's very present to all of us, but we need a new metaphysics of love I think, and where we really understand how it can act as a dynamic force, almost which Peter Deunov talked about in terms of creating a culture of love.

ANNE: I think Teillard de Chardin also says when we discover love, I can't remember his exact words, but he certainly stressed that. And he experienced before he died an extraordinary influx of love into his being, as indeed other people have experienced, so there are openings, as it were, in individuals who are suddenly having this opening of the heart, and the love pouring through their heart. I remember the physicist. Can you remember? Help me here with his name.

DAVID: Naseem Haramien.

ANNE: No, not Naseem, the Italian man who invented the microprocessor.

DAVID: Oh, Federico Faggin.

ANNE: Yes, Federico Faggin, he had that experience and described it wonderfully in his book. I wish I could have it. I have it in slow increments, but not all at once, like a great explosion in my heart, as it were, which must be so wonderful to experience.

DAVID: But I think that is coming into the world now. There always were mystics, still who are speaking of this in the way that you've spoken about it.

ANNE: And this fire of love has to be set going in all our hearts, and expressed in the most ordinary ways like the love of an animal, or love of a dog or a cat, the love of our children, the love of our parents, the love of whatever we brought into being in our life as a creative expression of our being. All that is the creation of love, and I think that needs to be talked about more. And children can be taught this in kindergarten, they can have their empathy developed, because they have a natural empathy, children, with whatever is around them, with whatever they touch basically, whether it's a dog 's fur, or the leaves of a tree, or whatever, they have that empathic gift, which we can develop in kindergarten and help them to grow into their full expression of their divinity as well. I think we have to change. We need not a new religion, but a new spiritual understanding of the fact that we're spiritual beings connected to the cosmos in every atom of our body, that the body is not a mechanism, but a sacred organism, and that you can't maltreat or mutilate the body without great harm to the psyche, and this goes all the way through our attitude. In medicine we need to change our attitude to the body, so that it's something sacred, not something that we can just fiddle with, and put a part in here and a part in there and change it in that way. So, there's a huge change in many levels, I think. As we're talking, this is becoming more clear.

DAVID: And, well, it stems really from this, and a change of heart and change of metaphysics and understanding of the intrinsic sacred nature of and oneness of life, and the power of love, and that's the pivotal realization, I think, you know, which everything else can flow from, whether it's medicine, science, education. So, we need to see if we can formulate this kind of leverage.

Now, what is the central message to put out in a very simple way that normal people can understand and be part of it?

ANNE: Yes, indeed, I think we go back, I often go to the actual words of Jesus about the kingdom of heaven within us and around us. He said it spread all around you but nobody sees it. So, those two things, to remember that we carry the kingdom of heaven within us, and that we're looking out around us at our environment as the kingdom of heaven as well. Those two things can change our perception, I think, and, as you say, to bring love, and what he said to the disciples: Love one another, is so clear and it's so simple, but it's something that we haven't really been able to do on a massive scale, on a global planetary scale, and maybe we need to up the level, so to speak, as you're saying, that they don't have to quarrel over, they don't have to debate, but can just accept as the essence of their own being.

DAVID: I think there's one of the Visioneer documents is Humanity 's Golden Peace, and they talk about waging peace and I think that what we need to start with is cultivating this peace within ourselves, and then that can radiate out, so we've all got a part to play, I think.

ANNE: Yes, we do, and I think their image was really so apt and so beautiful, to wage peace and a golden peace, to really look forward to a different kind of creation from what we've had before. I think it's a tremendously valuable contribution, and the image of gold that we can hold, that we are, as it were, golden and can create gold and can invoke the gold, ask for the help from the treasury of the cosmos. I like that word, just came into my head, treasury of the cosmos.

So, I think that there's so much, and they've given the kick start with this website, they've kickstarted the whole new program really of what we could accomplish on this planet if we really put our hearts and our minds to it, and if we really called upon the love that we are to integrate this new vision and to express it in different ways, many ways which will have been expressed on that website, and that's what's so wonderful about it, that it gives us all the different images of what we are, how creative we are, how loving we are, how imaginative we are, and how we've developed actually as a race in all those directions. We have great capacity now to do different kinds of things, instead of destroying, instead of making terrible weapons, which is not based on love but on anticipated hatred. We have to drop all that, drop the huge amounts of money spent on developing weapons, but to do that we have to persuade governments to take a different course.

So, that's part of the work that will be ahead.

DAVID: Anne, thank you so much for sharing your vision with us today. And our greetings to all those who are listening to us.

ANNE: Yes, indeed, I would just like to open my heart to all those who are listening, and ask them to open their hearts, which probably already are open, but to join with me and join with

Gerri and Desmond Berghofer in bringing through this vision that they've had, in devoting our lives to enhancing it, and manifesting it, and distributing it in as many ways that we can.

GERRI: Wow! If you've ever really wanted to know what true wisdom sounds like, consider that you've just heard it. Anne calls on humanity to recognize who we are, all of us. She understands that we need to rescue, empower, and indeed welcome the contribution of the divine feminine to help us solve the multilayered complex problems that we have in our time. And she also understands the Visioneers values of waging peace, and the mission that we have expressed on our website, to combine the voices of all of us, all of us in our beautiful diversity of race and gender and generation and belief, as humanity itself calls on us to choose to evolve, not only our powerful minds, but also our hearts, and even the divine spirit nestled in each of us.

Anne is a model and example of the possible human that we need to become, the topic of our next wisdom keeper.

So, in order to allow you to consider, to think deeply about what you've just heard, listen to the poetry duet with words spoken by Tatiana Speed and music by Lori-Ann Speed. Here they are.

TATIANA: I reach out to the world from the shoulders of mighty women, Giants of love, wisdom and strength. Once they towered over me, and I grew strong in their shade, sheltered from the wind, and nourished by the deep Earth. Now they lift me up, and upon their shoulders I reach past the Earth to the sun and moon, my mortal eyes dazzled by the light. I face the tribulations of this life willingly, with their example before me.

These women, forged in the fires of adversity, stalwart Athenas rising from ash and soot with flaming sword and shield. These women, triumphant goddesses of love with hearts flayed open by grief. I have bathed in their rivers of tears and been cleansed. These women with feet calloused and leathered from the dusty road and long journey, carrying the weight of love.

What flesh and bone was crafted with such strength. And yet they shine, these women, alchemists of darkness, transforming each hardship and heartbreak into a spectrum of light, by which to bless this world. What could I ever fear with such examples before me? What could defeat such women when their hearts can hold it all?

These women, these giants, I reach out to the world from their shoulders, and I say truly I did not make myself. Their patient hands have woven the vast tapestry of my being. They have sown each multicoloured thread of essence, cut and shaped each cascading layer of fabric, molding my character by their hidden designs, until I behold myself, adorned by their love, strength and wisdom, awed by the beauty.

When I forget courage, or my strength deserts me, I walk through their stories, viewing the gallery of their lives, as a connoisseur of great art stands in silent devotion before the masterpiece. Wrinkles of experience etch beloved faces that have laughed and wept, ripened flesh made whole by the courageous act of living. Reflective beauty no mortal hand could sculpt. If I know which way to walk, it is because their feet have laid the trail. I stand humbled by their shadow while they reach down and lift me to the light.

And when I have grown strong enough to stand on my own two feet, when like a giant, I rise, my feet heavy on the Earth and my face in the sun, I will hold out my arms to the woman after, and reach down to lift her up on my shoulders. She will soar, amazed at the endless horizons and the beauty and strength of her soul.

Oh, women, we are giants!