Our Autumn 2026 Issue has hit the shelves, and this issue’s theme is Appreciation! Ahead of our November event with him, we interviewed Dr Bruce Lipton to learn more about his new book, Beyond Darwin and what his recent discoveries mean for humanity! The magazine is now available at a health shop near you, or you can subscribe to have each issue delivered right to your door at https://www.positivelife.ie/subscribe/
From Competition to Co-operation
RE-CREATING A CONSCIOUS CIVILIZATION.
By Alison McEvoy
Bruce Lipton is a best-selling author, epigenetics pioneer and a former medical school professor. His new book ‘Beyond Darwin’ releases this August and we sat down with him in advance of its release to find out what his most recent message for humanity is.
Civilizations throughout time have had their beginning, flourishing, decline and ending. Many remains exist, some more intricate than others. Standing in Palenque, the ruins of a sophisticated Mayan city in Mexico which perished in the 8th Century, a realization ran through me. I came to understand that our cities, constructions and civilization too would end up this way, for one reason or another. What I didn’t imagine, was that we might take nature down with us.
The natural world has persisted through all these rebirths and declines. Without nature; the soil, the trees, the rivers and plants…there is no rebirth, no renaissance – nothing left to live off while we ponder, imagine and recreate our civilizations time and again. We cannot forget that nature is our foundation and must not be endangered through the twists and turns of our evolution and yet, this is where we find ourselves. In a state of forgotten remembrance that we are nature and destroying nature means stripping ourselves of the ability to live, dream and build on this earth.
“We are not sustainable as a civilization. We have one planet. We’re destroying the eco-system, the web of life. We are polluting the air, oceans…we are destroying ourselves.”
ENTERING THE COCOON
As the destruction phase continues, people will start waking up as they are affected by the void left in the wake of decaying resources. Herein lies the hope for a rebirth before the destruction reaches the planet in its entirety. Bruce has a powerful metaphor for this phase.
“Our civilization is like a caterpillar. It is voracious. It will eat everything it can eat and when it runs out of food it goes into the pupa and the reason is this – it can no longer continue living the way it was living. When it runs out of resources all the cells that had a job don’t have a job anymore… they have no work…the organs start to break down…the caterpillar, the cells, the community [of cells] have lost all their jobs… [However,] in that community there
are specialized cells. These are the cells that see another way of living. These cells organize the soup of cells to say let’s create a better version…assemble into a butterfly.”
“The butterfly hardly even touches the planet. The butterfly has the least footprint on the planet.”
The swing from being the voracious caterpillar to the light-footed butterfly is the vision which Bruce carries for our civilisation. It involves a total re-organization of being – a complete transformation. The caterpillar is nothing like the butterfly.
CULTURAL CREATIVES PAVE THE WAY
The ‘specialized cells’ which Bruce speaks of amid the metaphor, are the ‘cultural creatives’ of our society. These are the people he envisions, calls out to and champions as the rebirthers of our civilization.
“The cultural creatives are going to manifest a new civilization… They are the seeds of a new civilization.”
These are the people who stand outside the system as it is, either by choice of by finding themselves without the necessary resources and work to survive within it.
Bruce shares crucial advice from his position as a wise elder, for these cultural creatives. Finding themselves outside of or struggling with a system which is organizing the society they live in causes stress, tension and a depletion of the very creativity and courage that they need to reorganize society.
“Start to build up community. We only have power in community. When people are in stress, they separate and protect themselves…you wall yourself off from everything… The only way around survival stress is to form community… people working together – this is the return to power.”
FOUNDATIONS FOR COMMUNITY
Unsurprisingly, part of the philosophical foundation which this civilization was developed from by the people at the time of its conception, is one which fosters competition rather than community. It is Darwin’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest in the struggle for life.’
This philosophical underpinning, this shared belief, has led to a civilization which competes rather than unites. One in which the ‘strongest’, or those in most powerful positions, feel entitled to most of the wealth and resources.
“1% of people own half the wealth and the other 99% are competing with each other for what’s left of the pie. We have to stop that competition… Life is not a struggle. It’s wrong. The philosophy is wrong. The competition that results is wrong… Darwinian theory is wrong and so we’re creating a civilization based on a wrong foundation.”
If the wealth was spread out, we might see that the competition is not real. It is manufactured by the hoarding and hiding of resources. So, are we happy to continue the fray inside the arena of the amphitheatre of life while the upper echelons look on from the top tiers? Surely not.
Bruce returns to the wisdom of the ancients, backed by quantum physics and more, to show us that life is not in fact a race, a struggle, a contest between the fittest contenders, it is in fact a garden which are we part of, responsible for and deeply connected to.
“The garden from which we come is the height of co-operation. The garden is not a battleground. Every organism in the garden is participating in the community. The garden is community!”
TENDING THE GARDEN
The first step for Bruce is to tend to ourselves, to the piece of the garden that we in fact are as part of life and nature ourselves, human children of the mother earth.
“Who do we think we are!? We are nature. We should be listening to nature… Before you can change the world take care of your own backyard…Each of us is a creator. We’re not creating the whole world, we’re creating our piece of the world.”
As we each tend to our piece of the world, care for the homes we live in, the workplaces we frequent, the streets we walk and the lives we touch on a regular basis, we are contributing to a vastly greater good.
We must also remember to work together in this caretaking and tending. The vision which the wise elders of our time are calling upon is an ancient vision where men and women worked together in co-operation and harmony, thus breaking the pattern of domination and suppression of women and enabling women to free up their full potential and creative input into society, rather than struggling under thumbs of oppression and fear.
“The women got left out with the development of the church. Before the church, the Greeks were the civilization that were shaping our world and in that civilization the women played a major role. They were the priestesses of that civilization… When the church took over, they had to get rid of the women because the women had that awareness, that consciousness and they needed to break the women…move from a maternal society to a paternal society. Eve became evil… Mary Magdalene was called a whore, and she was actually a queen…They needed to demote women.”
“[Now] it requires both men and women to live in harmony and to manifest this world. It’s not a man’s world… [it’s] co -dominance of male and female.”
Tending the garden thus involves both getting “back out and roll up our sleeves” through growing from the earth in our own patches, but also in “gardening with people to help them grow and fertilize our minds.”
Nurturing, encouraging and validating each other’s creativity and highest self-expression is the opposite of a survival competition where we are stuck operating from the oldest parts of our brain. Bruce shares a vision that is a call to action which sees us emerging from the ‘survival of the fittest, hyper-competitive civilization to a more evolved state which engages our higher consciousness to form a co-operative, peaceful, creative civilization where people live well and enjoy life to the fullest.
ACTIVATING THE NEW PHILOSOPHY
With a new philosophy, a new programme, running a new civilization life can become a ‘heaven on earth’.
If we go to the microcosm and look at one individual life, we know that the first seven years of a human life are the ones in which we receive all our personal programming. We are in observer mode as children, watching, receiving information from the adults and others around us which sets a programme in motion for how we see life, live life and interpret life from aged seven onwards.
Many of us will know how difficult it is to change that programme, to alter those belief systems and complexes of thought. They are wired into us deeply even if, as adults, we begin to realize that those patterns of behaviour, belief and emotion programmed into us do not serve our current desires, hopes and dreams.
Bruce identifies the education system as one way in which we can reach young people purposefully, and nurture their creativity, activating programmes which will allow them to flourish.
Another way we can find ourselves plucked out from under the thumb of our both our personal programming and the overarching civilization’s philosophy, is when we fall in love.
“The brain is a computer. In the first seven years of life, it functions at a lower vibration called theta. It is observing others and getting programmes. Downloads of how to behave… When you fall in love you stop playing the programme and you become creative…the heaven on earth… the honeymoon… Why can’t we have a honeymoon every day of your life? You can. It’s just a programme that destroys it and that’s why half of the marriages fall apart. When you fell in love you were not playing the programme but as the programme starts to play – and most of them are negative – the relationship changes from honeymoon to regular life…”
CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION
For those of us well past the age of seven, the way forward involves a conscious evolution, taking us away from the current chaos among each other and destruction of the earth’s resources. We are required to consciously step away from the current underpinning philosophy of competition and survival of the fittest.
This conscious evolution is what Bruce is championing and wants to propel people towards. During his evening lecture this November, co-hosted by Positive Nights and Seminars.ie, Bruce intends to discuss his new book ‘Beyond Darwin; How Epigenetics, Quantum Science and Co-operation Shape Humanity’s Future’ and to empower people with the knowledge needed to make this shift in consciousness.
“Knowledge is power. I will explain how you get programmed. I will explain how you get out of the programme because I want people to have their power and the knowledge I’m offering is personal empowerment where people can take their power back and become the real creators that each one of us is. And if you take your creative power, you will manifest heaven on earth if you get it out of the hands of the people who have the power now.”
“I want people to have the power [to get out of the programme]. Why? Because I trust the people…people have the same wishes; health, happiness, peace, safety, a job, they all want the same thing.”
HOPE
‘Where there is life, there is hope’ (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
We are all still here, we are alive and thus a brighter future is possible. When I walk along the seafront in Dublin, I
sometimes wander back in time in my mind and imagine how beautiful it must have been when those seas were crystal clear. I’m glad that my son can still splash in the water surrounding our beautiful island, in certain places, but given the rate of change, I often feel sad for what my great grandchildren might find when they walk to the coast of Dublin. I hope that what they see, smell, feel will lift their spirits and that hope translates into many small actions that I take and many others that I chose not to take. My hope, for example, translates into not pouring bleach down my toilet and not using ‘unsafe for marine life’ dishwashing liquid or detergents. Let’s translate our hopes, dreams and wishes for life on earth into as many actions and attitudes as possible. The soil of our lives is where we can plant seeds that will grow into a better future.
The fundamental mode of hope Bruce identifies is that of operation from CO-OPERATION, and not competition. Co-operation with each other, across genders and with the environment. It is this that will ensure the transformation of our civilization and survival of our planet and ourselves.
“The natives…whether druids from Europe or Native Americans…or aborigines in Australia, all saw that the environment, the eco-system was a garden and they all said – we are gardeners. That’s our job.”
Bruce Lipton’s new book ‘Beyond Darwin’ releases on August 18th, 2026. Come join us in November for a very special evening with Bruce.
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