Greg Sams’ latest book Sun of gOd argues that the sun is a conscious entity. Bella Land talks to Greg about his theories and his life as a ‘new age’ guru and inventor of the VeggieBurger.

Interviewed by Suzanne Bella Land

SBL:  Greg, how did your interest in galactic phenomenon, quantum physics

and the nature of reality arise?

GS: I had a microscope and a telescope by the time I was ten and spent a lot of my pre-teen years peering into the other¹ worlds they revealed. Then I read The Dawn of Magic, finding out about Charles Fort and many weird and wonderful things of the sort that were not taught in school. My display of the solar system and its workings won first prize at the eighth grade science fair, and at the age of 16, I spent several hours in a Spanish field, seriously attempting to teleport to a star.

SBL:  So this interest has been since child-hood.  Greg, when I first met you in London in the early 90’s through mutual friends and then visited your shop, I’d never seen so many beautiful fractal designs as I did at ‘Strange Attractions’.  At the time it seemed as if your initiative was to spread the meme of appreciation for chaos theory and by extension to celebrate the natural interplay of order and chaos within existence. Was this the case?

GS: In part, yes, and chaos theory, to me, was the proof that everywhere in the Universe things were self-organizing into harmonious systems, without central control. What resounded for me was that human beings are unique in preventing this natural evolution of a system, believing that better results can be achieved through coercive central control, however well meaning. It’s how we try to run our world, and it sucks – delivering us wars, refugees, famines, repression.

SBL:  Would you say interest in chaos theory has increased since the 90’s?

GS: Most people are aware of chaos theory now, and know about things like the Butterfly Effect. After a few years of owning the shop I realized a book needed to be written that hadn’t yet. So in 1998 I published my first book, Uncommon Sense – the state is out of date, which very clearly put forward the most important message that chaos theory has for us as a society. The one constant on all my flyers for this book has been: NOT RECOMMENDED BY LEADING POLITICIANS.

SBL:  Is there a relationship or commonality between your interest in quantum physics and your current fascination with the SUN?  

GS: I’m just a simple country boy, but darned sure it is all connected.

SBL:  In your book  Sun of gOd, you put forth a convincing argument that the SUN is a self-aware, sentient entity with an interconnected consciousness.  We’ve heard this said regarding earth aka Gaia, but it’s not popularly said of the Sun.

GS:  It used to be pretty conventional, and was understood on every continent, culture, or century you cared to choose - up until the Christian era. It’s incredibly absent from our understanding of the world we live in, even though nothing could be more relevant.

Today, of course, most people will spend more time contemplating sunglass styles than they will the most important thing in their life – the Sun.

SBL: As children we are naturally drawn to depict the Sun, often with a smiling face in the middle and Sunrays shining all over everything.  Why do you think this is?

GS: That¹s a great example of how innate and natural it is to see Sun as being alive. What is difficult to explain is just how our culture continues to live in ignorance of the happy conscious loving Sun that a young child so easily recognizes.

SBL:  Why do you think the SUN has stopped being universally revered?

GS:  It’s a pretty grim story at times, but a willingness to kill large numbers of people and start with fresh generations can be very effective at changing fundamental cultural attitudes. So many other things, from the quantum to the galactic, make sense once you just put this firmly in the picture.  There has been no inkling of it in our culture now for up to seventeen centuries, depending upon where you come from. It is also a really BIG subject to take on board after being so long under wraps, and then, for many of those seventeen centuries people were burned for holding such beliefs. When I was writing Sun of God, I realized how much of Pre-Christian culture has been destroyed.  It’s a fascinating story why it got covered up.

SBL: And why it is such a taboo subject?

GS: Yeah, why its so damn taboo, and why so many people got burned for

Chanting for dancing naked under the moon and worshipping the Sun.

All pre or non-Christian cultures saw the earth and Sun as alive – it is the natural way to look at it. There is so much interest today in Mayan calendars and pyramids, the ancient Egyptians, Native American culture, Celtic monuments like Stonehenge and the Hindu religion. All of these incorporate a view of Sun as divine, yet we still seem to tiptoe around that defining part of their culture.

SBL:  In your book, through multi-faceted means, you resurrect the ancient idea of the Sun’s sentience and bring various approaches into the discussion from quantum to anthropological, to philosophical and poetic.  Can you speak a bit about this? 

GS:  I’m really trying to put some new thought into the meaning of it all, knowing that stars are living beings, and that we live in a galaxy full of them, all sending electro-magnetic signals outwards, rather like the neurons in our brain. And this asks the question of how clouds of simple gas self-assemble into such a complex construct as a star. And of course, light, the most mysterious of the quantum characters, is what the Sun is all about, and we shed some light on that.

SBL: It’s a stunning line of thought and also interesting how light is used in language as a medium of understanding, as you just demonstrated,

GS:  Right, it’s built into our understanding, we say that ideas are brilliant or people are dazzling, the light of my life…

SBL:  Illuminating thoughts, radiant beauty…. And the Sun is something that as children we are naturally drawn to depict.  It’s also a symbol of joy and health…a smiling face is very often drawn in its center. Children’s art is full of Suns and Sunrays shining on everything. Why do you think this is?

GS: That’s a great example of how innate and natural it is to see Sun as being alive. What is difficult to explain is just how our culture continues to live in ignorance of the happy conscious loving Sun that a young child so easily recognizes.

SBL: It’s something innate. What was the timeline on writing Sun of gOd and your approach to writing it?

GS:   It was seven years in the making, and though at times it may have been day and night, it was never 9 to 5. The concept and structure of an entire chapter might come to me on a Greek island, and then be finished months later. The Island might be Samothraki and my mate Stella Nutella could be playing a wicked set, but I might have to exit the dance floor to scribble under a nearby tree.

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SBL:  That sounds in keeping with your spirit!  What was the premise you had in mind for the book when you started to write it?

GS:  I was actually embarking upon a book about the innate intelligence of the organism, which would investigate the intentionality of evolution (I later found out that a guy called Lamarck beat me to it a couple hundred years ago). But my first attempt at writing this quickly went into solar ‘topic drift’ and I soon realized that this was a bigger and more exciting subject – a very big “elephant in the room” that just so much needed exposure. I tell people “I’m bringing the Sun back in from the cold.”

            But I’d thought of the Sun as being a living intelligent thing since my taste of university at UC Berkeley in 1966, but I’d never devoted a lot of thought to it – I was always oh-so-busy doing other things. The book itself is not all about the Sun. It uses the awareness of a conscious Sun as the basis for looking, in a very different light, at much of what we already know about the world.

            I’m simply not a scholar when it comes to the history of solar worship, much of which was written down by the people who destroyed every vestige they could find of it. I was just saying “how do we interpret having a conscious Sun in OUR civilization?”  I studied a lot about the Sun and was amazed at the stuff that scientists have only discovered in the last 10 or 20 years.  And everything that I discovered just served to underline my conviction that the ancients were right to see Sun as a living being.  Its intelligence is at such a scale that dwarfs out own notion of intelligent life.

            It’s made up of electromagnetic energy, it’s an engine of light and we use light as the most efficient medium for transmitting our own information technology.  It’s an incredible medium.  And the Sun is a rather complex, multi-layered organism. It’s not just some accidental ball of fire in the sky. Of course, a living Sun makes us see galaxies in a new light. Within galaxies stars are living grouped together in communities, rather than being randomly scattered around.  And all the stars are constantly moving around, which is what apparently stops gravity from pulling them all together into one big lump.             As the book developed it became clear that as we look more into the subject we begin to see light itself in a new light. Eventually it becomes clear that everything shares in a consciousness that makes up our universe. And drawing lines between people and other animals, or trees and blades of grass, becomes really difficult.

GS:  Everything is a manifestation of it.  We are all stored solar energy.  Solar energy accumulates in plants.  If you eat animals, their diet is ultimately plants and we are all just recycling the Sunlight originally absorbed by the vegetable world.  We are this energetic being that takes in fuel and turns it into something else and it’s like an energy reincarnating itself. 

SBL:  When I was a child, my mother told me that we are partially composed of stardust.  It was the most spectacular thought and still amazes me and as you know, it’s true!  It makes sense that we would naturally attune to that of which we’re made, wouldn’t it?

GS: It most certainly does.

SBL:  Have you ever done a Sun bathing ritual or a Sun eating ritual?

GS:  I’ve got a few different ways of communing with the Sun, but deeply breathing in the energy of the Sun and infusing my body with it is a constant component. How about you?

SBL:   Similar to yours…at Sunrise or Sunset, preferably in a naked state, using breath, your imagination and your hands in an energy receiving and giving way, you usher the Sun’s rays into your body and imagine that you are being cleansed by the Suns rays and allow them to radiate everywhere.  When you’ve been cleansed you can do the same thing again, except this time eat the Sunrays in every part of you, including spiritually while sharing this nourishment to all on a spiritual level. I was told that it is an American Indian ritual.  Don’t know if it is, but it’s incredibly clarifying and healing.

GS:  (laughs) It really is.  It was a sad day when we started going inside and looking at the floor to pray.

SBL:  Did you work off of, or collaborate with the Gaian ethos in the writing of your book?

GS:  As an old hippie and natural foods entrepreneur in my earlier years, I always agreed with the Gaia ideology but it’s well-trodden ground and I realized that a couple chapters were needed on religion and organized religion so I studied many of the world’s religions taking a fairly cursory overview of the history of organized belief systems. Zoroastrianism was one of the most fascinating belief systems to learn more about.

SBL: In what ways?

GS:  It was the first really big organized religion, having a huge impact upon many core aspects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Zoroastrians were the first to recognize a universal god, of light, though not an exclusive god. They were the first religion to recognize “goodness” as a virtue, and innovated many other concepts that are still going, like heaven and hell and a day of judgment. And they knew about the Sun!

            For me, recognizing the nature of that which is the most important thing in our lives, adds a huge piece to the jigsaw puzzle of our cosmos. So many other things, from the quantum to the galactic, make sense once you just put this firmly in the picture.

SBL: The galaxies are full of exquisitely beautiful, perfect and ingenious dances, patterns and music, echoed back here on earth…secrets beyond measure ….Has your exploration of the Sun led you to other sorts of epiphanies you’d like to share about? 

GS:  I had an epiphany in my Goa garden where I suddenly realized that light is intelligence. It just made so much sense at that mad moment, and has integrated with everything I have discovered since - everything else that goes into the picture adds to the coherence of it.

                        And trying to get my head round the nature of light was, is, and always will be a trip.  How it doesn’t experience time, it is always everywhere at once, because it is traveling at the speed of light, so time doesn’t exist for it, so the light that leaves a distant star reaches our Sun at the same time it left, in it’s world.  In our dimension, it’s traveled all that distance and when it lands at the back of our eyeball that’s an actual posse of photons that came from all those light years away.

GS:  We’re absorbing energy from a distant world, though in its timeless world it’s still at the star from which it came.

SBL:  And so we are also being nourished by starlight photons…. the ancients must have realized these celestial principles, to have come up with their cosmologies, the zodiac, Stonehenge, the pyramids etc.   They must have been sensitively attuned to the cosmos or had ways to attune.

GS:   Stargazing….going outside stargazing.  That’s what people used to do a lot, before electric lighting, radio, TV, computers and all the other competitors for our attention came along. In that cosmic interaction our ancestors were actually absorbing the vibration of those stars and the planets and so got information about them that we don’t even think of. Ancient people sought to understand the characters of these things because they were in a close relationship with them.

SBL:  If a person whose sensitivity has been dulled by modern lifestyle lives out in nature for a while, couldn’t their sensitivity be awakened even if they’ve been media bombarded since birth? 

GS:  I think the potential is always there, sure.  Human beings made all of those understandings and connections and that means they can be rediscovered.  That doesn’t mean they all will be, though.  We’ve lost touch with our senses and as smart as we thought that we were when the tsunami hit, it was all the other animals that ran, that knew what was going on. 

SBL:  Yes, reportedly, in addition to the elephants, even the domesticated animals knew.  What to do about the mechanistic and consumerist mindset?

GS:  People are getting out of touch.  We’ve got to get out there too, even if it’s just to a park or garden to get in touch!  Let the Sun’s rays hit you and feel the light of the moon and the rustle of the trees. You can’t get these energies from a screen, however powerful your computer is.

SBL: A nice way to get out in the elements is to fly kites!   You’re a long-time avid kite flyer. The last time I saw you we flew a kite in Hyde Park on a nice windy day.  What do you enjoy about kite flying?

GS: Yes, thanks for the happy reminder.  Kite flying gives me a good excuse to get outdoors in the wind and look up in the sky and it’s nice if I’m by a lake as well. Sometimes the kite demands attention and you’ve got to look after it when the wind is dropping or getting really strong, but it’s just a great place to be.

SBL: Your father got you into it as I recall? 

GS:  Yes, my father invented a rather special flying device, which he refused to call a kite, and which technically was not, as it lacked a wing.  It’s on sale as the UFO  (unconventional flying object) kite, made by Cochrane’s in Oxford.  I used to love flying them with my dad. He caused stirs all over the world with it. It is made from reflective foil and flashes as it spins as it flies, looking very like a UFO when it would be flashing the Sun’s light.

SBL:  When did the intelligence of the SUN first strike you?  How did it strike you?

GS:  Well, it struck me at the top of strawberry canyon in Berkley in 1967, I guess.  I was on my first acid trip.  I was up at the top of that hill and I stared into the sun for quite a while. I couldn’t do that now; I’d probably go blind.  It wasn’t an epiphany.   It was just recognition that this was an entity, a conscious thing there. Look at this thing that gives us life.  We think it’s dead, that’s kind of ungrateful.  I never got beyond that until I started to think about the next book to write.  I was going to write about intelligent evolution and this is a different take on that, so topic drift led into recognition of the Sun as a celestial being and that just took me over and became a bigger book which is about the oneness of it all but the Sun was the key to getting there.

SBL:  I’ve had similar feelings and moments with the sun, a kind of relating, empathizing and just sensing that it is exceptionally wise, as if it understands everything.  Perhaps many people feel this but don’t say so?

GS:  Yes, I suspect there are many Sun lovers who don’t yet know it, or are in hiding.

SBL:  The intelligence of light.  Even just thinking this thought changes consciousness and perception.

GS:  And reflects in language, as we said earlier, you know, you shed light on something, in light of this…testifies to this to this.

SBL:  A subconscious awareness.  So, what you’re saying is that we really do revere light, and it’s properties, but have conceptualized it into some other realm.  There is a disconnect.  Divine light for example is not normally associated with the light we experience during the day from the Sun, or bounced off the moon.  It is commonly thought to be something perceivable only in a metaphysical state.

GS:  Yeah, we have this silly thing that divine light is invisible.  Well, ALL light is invisible.  You only see “visible” light when it bounces off of something else.  At night, you don’t see the light of the Sun streaming through space until it hits other planets.  And you say, oh yeah, there’s light out there. Maybe there is a hard-to-reach ineffable “other” light out there, but that’s no reason to ignore the one that blesses us every day.

SBL:  I see…literally! 

GS:  It’s all part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so it’s vibrating photons.

SBL:  Light then be said to be the alpha and omega, birthing itself? Does light have to be sparked into existence or is it the eternal spark without beginning or end?

GS: As energy, photons don’t require a space or a place to be and they don’t experience time so they could have existed before the Big Bang. If energy is what was originally condensed into matter, then you next have matter re-forming as an energy-creating device, a star. And this star is an amazing medium for the transmutation of simple hydrogen and helium atoms into all the other elements of the Periodic Table.

            And on our little planet we have these same elements transforming into devices that take in the pure energy of light and transform it into the energy of life, experienced through human beings and redwood trees, butterflies and daffodils. …and it’s this sort of birth and re-birth going on all the time, between energy and matter.

SBL:  That reminds me of this beautiful thing my father said.  Having read a lot of the natural philosophers, Steiner, Goethe, Ernst Laird, he suggested to me that matter is solidified light.  This thought has since become part of my psycho-spiritual fabric and seeped into poetry. What do you say to this?  Are we made of solidified light?

GS:  Yes, we are – you were lucky to have such en-lightened parents!  We are all materialized energy and energy is light. Save for the hydrogen, all that makes up us, and everything else, was once forged upon a star. 

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