Birth
and why your life is not a test | Recording of Bernardo on the origin of thought, creativity & life, 2nd June 2026
Recording thumbnail: blue womb by @alex.mlod.art. Prints available at www.alexmlod.art
Date: 2 June 2026
Title: Who solves the problem before you know the answer?
Duration: 5:51
https://vimeo.com/1228066375/e406bfcc31
0:00:00 Welcome: the birth of a life and a thought
0:03:21 How does a new point of view arise?
0:11:52 Does nature plan each new life?
0:17:35 Could a soulmate be your missing counterpart?
0:21:22 A mother’s account of birth and the ancestors
0:28:28 How might a parent’s inner state reach a baby?
0:31:01 What animals notice that we overlook
0:33:42 Raising a child with mystery still open
0:39:57 Can anything be born outside time?
0:43:27 A new life within another: where is the boundary?
0:46:37 You are a pattern, not the material passing through
0:55:08 Are the egg and sperm separate minds?
0:58:42 How a thought arrives before its words
1:01:35 Who solves the problem before you know the answer?
1:07:18 Why even chess calculation needs intuition
1:12:01 Ramanujan: why intuition still needs confirmation
1:15:10 Could language obscure communication with animals?
1:20:18 A grandmother’s account of remembering birth
1:30:37 Could reincarnation work without a travelling soul?
1:35:08 Are genes and environment the whole story?
1:38:15 What would you want to survive death?
1:45:09 What are we born with?
1:49:29 If your gifts are nature’s, where is your self-worth?
1:55:04 Will God remember that we existed?
2:04:27 Have we been praying backwards?
2:06:06 Can we imagine everything outside time?
2:12:17 Would a collapsing universe bring everything together?
2:14:43 Closing reflections and the next meeting
If Bernardo is correct, your life is a thought in universal mind. Not a mysterious separate mind "out there", but rather the same consciousness looking through your eyes right now, and that of every other living creature.
Whilst all of existence is one great movement of mind, your lives are special kinds of thought - patterns of thought in fact. Swirling around themselves like whirlpools so internally integrated that they each form a unique perspective on all your other thoughts, represented on a dashboard of perception as planets and stars, your neighbour, your cat.
So how are new thought-patterns born? Where do their contents come from? And where do they go when we "die"?
In this meeting Bernardo shares his perspective on birth, death, the ancestors and animal communication.
It was one of the most shamanic in tone whilst remaining tethered to the analytic rigour for which Bernardo is so admired.
I look forward to hearing your reflections. With appreciation!
Amir
We discuss:
- The innate seeds we bring to the world as priors.
- How decisions are born from intuition then rationalised
- A toddler re-enacts their traumatic birth
- Ramanujan's uncanny mathematical intuition and what it reveals about the mind
- Are we remembered by God after we die?
- How Western prayer gets the relationship with God backwards
- On raising children with a sense of mystery, not doctrine
Bernardo Kastrup
Analytic idealism
Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).
As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV.
Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the magazine of The Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. His most defining book is Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.
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