Evolution of Consciousness: Order of Nature, Karma, and Lessons from Deep Trauma
By Brian Poulsen | March 2026
Chapter 1: Nature’s Hidden Order
In my previous publication, I delved into a foundation of raw data. Through a comprehensive AI analysis of over 2,500 scientifically documented cases from the University of Virginia, a pattern emerged that was hard to ignore. We looked at the dry numbers and the mathematical probability that consciousness survives physical death. The conclusion was overwhelming, leaving us with a solid, data-based anchor to hold onto.
But once you have accepted the premise – when the burden of proof has been lifted, and you are left with the realization that death is not a final full stop – a new set of questions naturally arises. For it is one thing to get confirmation that the system exists. It is quite another to understand how these deeper laws of nature actually function in practice. Especially when we begin to look beyond the most familiar human frameworks and into the corners where nature shows its more complex, violent, and imperfect sides.
In this work, I will therefore dig a little deeper beneath the surface. We will look at the journey of consciousness from a much larger perspective. A perspective that does not necessarily begin with modern humans, but which draws threads deep into the animal kingdom and our shared evolutionary past. For if consciousness survives physical death, it is only logical to assume that the exact same laws also apply to the mammals from which we once evolved, and with whom we still share the planet today. We will look at how our own consciousness is actually still deeply connected to that of animals, if only we dare to open up to it – simply because we all exist within and originate from the exact same system of consciousness.
With this as our starting point, we will examine how ancient traumas from distant lives can overwinter and settle as inexplicable psychological scars and phobias in our present everyday lives. We will look at the law of cause and effect, and examine how the suffering we inflict on our fellow creatures inexorably returns as an unavoidable lesson for our own minds. And finally, we will see how biology’s merciless principle of the survival of the fittest actually constitutes the ultimate and most logical framework for the journey of consciousness toward something better. It is a journey from cold evidence to the deeper, underlying principles.
Chapter 2: The Echo from Millions of Years
To understand how our consciousness functions today, we must acknowledge where we come from. We have to rewind time – not just a few thousand years, but more than four million years. Back to early hominids like Australopithecus, to the discoveries of Ardi and Lucy, and later to Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. Even though science today describes these ancestors as primitive, they were the pinnacle of intelligence in their time. And more importantly: They lived in a total, unfiltered fusion with nature, exactly as their ancestors had done for millions of years before them.
Compared to the time we have walked around in modern civilizations, our consciousness has spent 99.9% of its existence surviving on the savanna, reading the weather, sensing predators, and understanding the non-verbal signals of the pack. Life was merciless and extremely dangerous. A sudden shift in the wind heralded storms that could kill by freezing. A rustling thicket could mean an ambush from a predator. And the threat did not only come from large animals; even the smallest creatures posed a constant mortal danger. Insect stings, bites from venomous snakes, or small creepy-crawlies demanded a deep, built-in vigilance, for there was no antidote or medical help. We were prey just as much as hunters, subject to exactly the same laws of nature as all the other mammals around us.
We are all offspring of this distant past. Even though we today navigate paved urban spaces and let ourselves be consumed by digital screens, the evolutionary coding does not disappear. Just think of modern man’s deepest urges – our desires, the urge for sex and reproduction, lust, dominance, pack mentality, curiosity, daring, and our inherent hunting instincts. All of this still permeates our behavior, even though we have long since left the savanna and essentially do not need to hunt or seek new horizons to survive. City life merely drowns out this primal nature with its constant noise, its artificial light, and a synthetic sense of security. But the old antennas of consciousness are still there. If you unplug and step outside the civilized bubble, you quickly discover that the frequency is still broadcasting.
Between 2014 and 2018, I lived in southern Lolland, close to Rødsand. It is an area that breathes history, filled with burial mounds and dolmens from the Neolithic period, and where nature in many places is left to its own devices. I spent countless days alone out there, from early morning to late evening, often isolated so far from other people that no one would have found me if I had collapsed. Over the years out there, I began to notice a slow but distinct change in the way I perceived the world. As the noise of the city left my system, it was as if I slowly began to rediscover a direct connection to the wildlife and nature around me. It was about moving through and genuinely feeling nature – hearing it, sensing it, and suddenly noticing details and connections that you otherwise never observe.
One day, I stood by a lake throwing bread to two mute swans. One swan came very close and ate eagerly almost directly from my hand. The other stayed out on the water, seemingly uninterested. When I nevertheless wanted to throw some bread to the one in the back to share equally, something highly peculiar happened. This was where an almost telepathic exchange arose. I suddenly knew – not because I am an ornithologist and can tell them apart by their exterior, because that is almost impossible with the naked eye – that the swan out on the water was the female, the wife of the one in front of me. This knowledge lay embedded in the very understanding that arose between us. I got a crystal clear sense that she was directly shaking her head, telling me that she didn’t want any, while the male in front of me signaled with his greed that he wanted it all.
Another evening, I was coastal fishing from a rocky point. A few swans had taken up position behind my back to preen their plumage – they were completely comfortable with my presence. Suddenly, I heard a quacking from one side, and when I turned my head, I saw another swan swimming directly toward my casting direction. Again, I experienced this lightning-fast exchange of intention. The swan wasn’t just quacking into the air; it was specifically making me aware of its presence. It was simply asking me to take a break from fishing so it could pass safely. I stopped, and as we looked at each other, there was a deep, mutual, and non-verbal understanding of the situation before it calmly swam on.
Behavioral biologists will typically dismiss this kind of thing as man’s unconscious ability to decode animal body language and micro-signals. But body language is merely a physical manifestation. The underlying mechanism is far deeper.
This is also supported by the renowned British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who for decades has researched what he calls “morphic resonance.” His research points out that nature is bound together by invisible fields of information, where intentions and knowledge can be shared instantly within a species or across related consciousnesses. It is the same mechanism that explains the widespread phenomenon of “telephone telepathy” between humans: That you suddenly think of a friend seconds before the phone rings, and it is indeed that exact friend on the line. Or that out of the blue, you know exactly what a buddy is going to say long before they open their mouth. It also explains the phenomenon of horse whisperers, who are not only able to calm animals but can generally engage in deep, intuitive, and almost everyday communication with the animal completely without using physics. It is not magic. It is an ancient frequency we are all still connected to.
But this connection also contains much darker and more rigid frequencies. Like one day, for instance, while walking along the untouched coast, I found an old skull from a fallow deer buried in a pile of seaweed. I washed it clean in the ocean, after which I sat with it in my hands for a long time. I turned it over and over, studying it closely and observing its details while wondering about the animal’s fate. When I fell asleep that night, I had an extremely intense and vivid dream about a goat – which clearly represented the fallow deer. It was tied to a wall and seemed violently thirsty and suffering, but there was nothing I could do to help it, and in the dream, it slowly died of thirst. The next morning, the feeling of the animal’s panic, the burning thirst, and the endless exhaustion sat deep within me.
The skeptic will immediately say that my brain was just processing the day’s impressions. But here it makes sense to bring in the philosopher Martinus, whom I also leaned on in my previous work. According to his cosmology, physical matter is not just dead substance; everything is permeated by spiritual energy and forces of consciousness. If a being experiences intense terror at the moment of death, this vibration is deposited in the matter. A similar phenomenon is called psychometry – the idea that violent events leave an energetic imprint in physical objects. In other words, I wasn’t just holding a dead bone in my hand that day on the beach; through my physical contact with the skull, I held a direct energetic imprint of the animal’s powerlessness, which my subconscious effortlessly decoded in the silence of the night. I had no doubt whatsoever that the fallow deer whose skull I had found had been helplessly stuck somewhere and had died of thirst and starvation.
And it is exactly this form of stored powerlessness – the extreme traumas and fatal accidents from a past we have forgotten – that is a crucial clue in understanding our own minds. For consciousness takes its scars with it, and sometimes they surface in our modern lives in ways that short-circuit all logic.
Chapter 3: When the Past Bites
When you understand how many millions of years our consciousness has spent in nature’s merciless struggle for survival, it casts a completely new light on the reactions that often short-circuit our modern logic. This was emphasized to me in a rather unexpected way during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I was sitting at a vaccination center, waiting out the mandatory minutes after the injection to ensure no allergic reaction occurred. Here, I fell into conversation with the man walking around keeping an eye on us. He was wearing the classic white doctor’s coat and appeared as the epitome of experienced, trustworthy professionalism. He turned out to be an older chief physician close to retirement age, but obviously still active; a highly educated and recognized man who had devoted his entire life to research and the hospital system, and who was now lending a hand at the center. At one point in our conversation, I wonderingly asked him about the peculiar fact that many adults were absolutely terrified of getting vaccinated. Not because they were afraid of the vaccine itself or the contents of the liquid, but solely because they suffered from an extreme and unmanageable fear of needles. The fear of the syringe itself, of the sharp metal piercing the skin, was enough to keep them away.
The older chief physician calmly explained that he viewed this phenomenon on par with all sorts of other phobias. He believed it was a deep, built-in terror stemming from our distant natural past and past lives. A time when a simple sting from an insect, a stinging marine animal, a venomous jellyfish, or a scorpion was literally a fatal death sentence. That resonated deeply. For when you know nothing of venom or anatomy, it must have been a completely incomprehensible and demonic experience to see a strong hunter collapse and die from a simple little prick in the skin.
I personally know everything about that paralyzing, illogical fear. I have suffered intensely from arachnophobia – a panic-stricken fear of spiders. I have always known rationally that the small Danish spiders can do me no harm, yet shivers have run down my spine at the sight of them. A pure, unfiltered echo from a past where an encounter with a venomous spider meant death. Over the years, I have worked intensely to process this fear. Today, I no longer kill them, but carefully catch them in a cup and carry them outside. That change occurred as I came to understand what the philosopher Martinus describes: That all life, no matter how small, has its own subjective experience of living. A spider is also a consciousness, driven by the exact same basic fight-or-flight instincts for survival as we are. Understanding the nature of the counterpart was the key to dampening my own fear, but it does not erase the original scar that caused the phobia.
I experienced an even more extreme example about 20 years ago with a person I knew. She suffered from a snake phobia so severe that it defied any rational explanation. For the same reason, she completely refused to watch nature programs, as the risk of encountering a snake was too great. But if an image of a snake suddenly appeared in a regular movie or a news broadcast, she went into total physical panic. She gasped for air, broke into a cold sweat, and trembled all over her body as she tried to flee the room. It was so violent and physically paralyzing that one day I told her that such deep terror could not possibly originate from this life. It had to be a trauma from a past life.
Established science and psychology will often try to explain such extreme reactions with suggestion. This is a theory that the phobia is learned; that the fear has been planted in the subconscious through frightening stories, movies, or the reactions of one’s surroundings during childhood. Others in the scientific community lean towards the so-called “preparedness theory” – a hypothesis that the fear of snakes, spiders, and sharp stings is a general survival mechanism simply coded into human shared DNA through evolution.
But when you stand before a person who is cold sweating and hyperventilating over a TV image of a reptile, suggestion seems like a downright ridiculous and inadequate explanation. And if we buy the premise that it is coded into our DNA as a collective defense mechanism, we are left with a massive problem: Because how would a specific, individual, and paralyzing fear ever be placed in our genetics from the start? It is essentially just a convenient guess from a science that refuses to relate to the true nature of consciousness.
This is where science reverses cause and effect. Biology and our DNA do not create consciousness; it is consciousness that takes up residence in biology. The physical body dies and disappears, but consciousness exists and builds upon its experiences. Extreme phobias are not just an impersonal, biological pack mechanism or a learned childhood scare. They are individual, psychological scars from fatal traumas in past lives, which consciousness inevitably drags with it into the next biological shell.
This connection is not just philosophy. It is backed by hard data. As we delved into during my previous publication, researchers at the University of Virginia have collected and verified thousands of cases involving children who remember past lives. Their massive amount of data shows a shockingly clear pattern: Over 35 percent of children who remember a violent death from a past life exhibit extreme and inexplicable phobias, often long before they have even learned to speak. And the phobia almost always matches the specific cause of what they died from in a past life.
But logic dictates that it does not only have to be our own death that codes the phobia into us. If an ancient hunter was killed by a snakebite, the terror settles into his consciousness. But an equally deep, paralyzing trauma will arise in the mother or father who stands powerless watching their own child be bitten and die from the venom. That kind of grief and total powerlessness undoubtedly burns itself into the consciousness with the same, if not greater, force, and is carried forward as an inexplicable, black hole of fear into the next life.
In other words, phobias are not just a technical glitch in our DNA or a scary story from childhood. It is the past remembering.
Chapter 4: Mammals and the Echo of Our Actions
When we begin to accept that consciousness can survive physical death and carry its traumas forward, an unavoidable question arises: Does this only apply to humans? If, biologically speaking, we are merely highly developed mammals that once roamed the savanna, it would be a massive logical flaw to claim that the deeper laws of nature only apply to one specific species.
Animals have a consciousness too. They have a will, they feel fear, they form bonds, and they have their own subjective experience of life. And precisely because of this, they also take their scars – and their love – with them. I experienced a rather thought-provoking example of this myself during one of my many walks in the nature of Lolland.
As a young man, I was incredibly close to my dog, a Golden Retriever. We were inseparable, and he followed me everywhere until he tragically had to be put down at the age of 11 due to cancer. Many years later – during the period when I was beginning to reconnect with nature – I was walking down a very long, straight gravel path one day. Several hundred meters ahead, I could make out a man walking toward me with a dog.
Under normal circumstances, a dog on a path will always sniff around to the left and right, investigate the vegetation for scent trails from other dogs, and mark its own territory by lifting its leg. That is the absolute standard behavior of a dog. But all of that was virtually non-existent here. Even from that long distance, I could see the dog beginning to pull violently on its leash. It was completely fixated on me.
As we got closer, I saw that it was a Golden Retriever. It was uncontrollably, almost overly happy. When we met, it immediately jumped up on me and licked my hands eagerly – a crystal clear, typical canine behavior that serves as an acknowledgment of both acceptance and submission. But immediately after this welcome, it did something very specific: It turned around and sat down heavily with its back pressed firmly against my legs. Exactly the way my own old dog had always done.
Now, any veterinarian or dog expert would rightly object that this is not unusual at all. Seeking physical contact in exactly that manner is a well-known, breed-specific behavioral pattern for a Golden Retriever, and its joy could simply be due to a friendly disposition. The biological explanation is right there for the taking. There was just one detail that completely short-circuited that logic: While I was greeting the dog, the man stood there looking like a giant question mark. Visibly shaken, he told me that he had never, ever experienced anything like this before. His dog never usually reacted this way, and it had never pulled so purposefully or exhibited that kind of overwhelming behavior toward a complete stranger.
To the dog, I probably wasn’t a stranger at all. It sensed a frequency it knew. If humans reincarnate, it must apply to all conscious life. And if animals are subject to the same cosmic laws as us, it also means that we bear an enormous responsibility for how we treat them.
The philosopher Martinus, whose logic I often mirror myself in, points to something absolutely central: Because all life has an experience of existing, any animal will experience an unnatural death or slaughter as a violent trauma – a disaster that interrupts its life experience. Regardless of whether we call it “food production,” that concept does not exist in the animal’s consciousness. To the animal, it is pure violence. The optimal, trauma-free exit from life for any creature is to die naturally of old age, having lived a full life. For this same reason, Martinus himself lived as a vegetarian.
This brings us to one of nature’s most merciless, yet consistent mechanics: The law of cause and effect. Or what many know as karma. It is not a mystical punishment system invented by an angry god, but simple energetic physics. The suffering you inflict on other conscious beings – consciously or unconsciously – inexorably returns to you as a consequence you must live through in order to learn and develop.
Within karmic logic, this points to a terrifyingly precise dynamic, especially when we look at the way we humans treat animals. It doesn’t even take an entire working life at a slaughterhouse to set the balance in motion. Just a single act can be enough. We find a classic example in hunting. Every single year, you can read in the news about hunters who, under completely illogical circumstances, are seriously injured or accidentally shoot each other during the hunt. The act is the same, regardless of whether society calls it sport or wildlife management.
If a human inflicts a specific, violent trauma upon an animal – such as the sudden, fatal blow when a captive bolt pistol fires a metal bolt deep into the animal’s brain – it creates a massive energetic imbalance. In its purest, physical form, it is extreme violence against another conscious being.
According to the law of karma, this energy discharge is stored in the consciousness and will require equalization. This equalization does not happen as a punishment, but as a mathematical return of the exact same energy. In a later life, or perhaps as a sudden tragedy late in the same life, logic dictates that the consciousness will attract an accident with identical mechanics. A sudden, massive trauma to the skull, caused by an external impact or a violent accident, will strike the individual – simply so that the soul can experience on its own body and fully understand the suffering it once caused.
But here it is crucial to understand that this karmic accounting is not a blind, mathematical system of revenge that punishes one-to-one for all eternity. If a soldier has killed a hundred people in war, or a butcher has taken a hundred animal lives, they do not have to suffer the same violent death a hundred times. The law of cause and effect is an educational process, not a calculator. Once the soul has felt the suffering on its own body and has genuinely learned the lesson, its frequency changes. The remaining “ninety-nine” actions do not disappear into thin air, because the energy must inevitably return to its source. But because the consciousness is now receptive and has grasped a deep revulsion toward killing, the karma no longer strikes as a fatal blow. Instead, it equalizes itself in a much milder form – perhaps as unexplained, fleeting memories, psychological shadows, or minor accidents that quickly fade into recovery again. Nature does not waste time forcing a creature to learn a lesson it has already understood.
And this is exactly where the core of the entire system reveals itself. It is not about revenge, but about learning. When the consciousness has felt the pain – when the hunter has felt the burning terror of a fatal gunshot wound, or when the violent blow to the skull has settled deep in the soul – an unfailing, instinctive resistance is planted. In the next life, the very thought of inflicting the same kind of damage on another being will awaken an inexplicable and deep physical discomfort. The individual will instinctively refuse to step into the same pattern again. It is this merciless, yet rock-solid and fair mechanism that step by step, life by life, filters out raw brutality, simply because it hurts too much to execute when the bill has to be paid, and because it is too destructive to maintain the balance of nature in the long run.
It is a brutal thought. But if the law of cause and effect is universal, it draws threads far beyond our own species. Everything we are is everything we come from. And the laws that govern our behavior, our development, and our evolution are not stopped by whether the recipient of our actions walked on two or four legs.
Chapter 5: Cosmic Evolution
Actually, the proof of this built-in, cosmic compass is all around us. Throughout all cultures, religions, and eras, humanity has always invented systems for introspection, remorse, and changing course. Whether we wrap it in a Catholic confessional, a Buddhist teaching on karma, or we experience a sudden “wake-up call” where a severe health crisis forces us to radically change our lifestyle, it is exactly the same underlying mechanism at play.
Our consciousness instinctively senses that a destructive pattern will lead to ruin, and it proactively attempts to course-correct in order to improve its own conditions. It is the exact same mechanism that makes me catch the spider in a small cup today and carefully carry it out into nature, rather than crushing it. I have no desire to attract that ruin myself. This is not about man-made morality or the fear of a judging god. It is the built-in survival and improvement instinct of consciousness in pure practice. Deep down, consciousness knows the law of cause and effect.
But when you have pondered these connections for decades, as I have, a completely overarching question inevitably arises. If there is a fine-meshed karmic account, if consciousness survives physical death, and if we intuitively try to navigate away from suffering – why on earth does this system exist at all? What is the meaning of it all?
The answer lies right in front of us, deeply embedded in the natural science we already know. Charles Darwin was absolutely right when he formulated the principle of survival of the fittest – best suited or best adapted survival. His theory of evolution is brilliant and flawless. We just need to zoom out from the microcosm of biology – the narrow, short-term view of the individual life – and instead look at the whole in an enormous, macrocosmic perspective.
The order of nature knows that a destructive pattern leads to ruin, and it constantly attempts to course-correct to improve its own conditions. It is the very immune system of the universe. In a narrow, biological here-and-now picture, “the strongest” might be the predator that bites the hardest, or the human who most cynically bulldozes their opponents. But in the grand, cosmic accounting, brutality is a terrible survival strategy. It creates suffering that will inevitably return and strike the originator with full force. A system built exclusively on selfishness and violence will ultimately eat itself from the inside out.
Therefore, the true winner of evolution – the one who is actually the most fit to survive in the long run – is the being that, through countless lives, has felt the consequences of its actions and thereby developed its empathy. Life by life, raw brutality is filtered out, simply because it hurts too much to execute when the bill has to be paid, and because it is too destructive to maintain the balance of nature in the long run. What remains is a consciousness that understands how to cooperate, create balance, and show consideration. Darwin is not taken down; his principle is simply expanded from applying to physical claws to applying to the maturity of consciousness.
And it works. If we look four million years back to our earliest ancestors on the savanna, life was a raw, unfiltered struggle for survival, where empathy was not a luxury one could afford. Slowly, but surely, we have moved forward. Despite the fact that the world today can still seem chaotic, we have built societies based on human rights, justice systems, care for the vulnerable, and animal welfare. We are getting smarter.
But here, you almost always encounter the same instinctive resistance or wonder from people: “If the system is really so intelligent and has been running for millions of years, why is there still an incomprehensible amount of cruelty, war, and darkness in the world?”
That question is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how we learn anything at all. The answer, which the philosopher Martinus also describes with incredible precision, is contrasts.
Everything you can possibly think and sense is dependent on its opposite. One simply cannot exist or be understood without the other. What meaning does the word heat have if you have never felt cold? How will you understand the light if you have never been in the dark? And most importantly: How is a consciousness ever going to learn to appreciate love, peace, and tolerance if it does not understand the contrast in the form of hatred, war, and suffering?
The world is not broken because darkness exists. The world is exactly the stage it needs to be for the teaching to take place. We must experience the pain of loneliness to be able to feel the value of unity. We must learn not to kill by feeling the consequence of being killed ourselves. Our reality must contain all these extremes so that we, individually and at our own pace, can complete the individual learning that slowly raises our consciousness and drives evolution forward.
This very principle of contrast is such a crucial law of nature – and so massively overlooked in the modern debate – that it demands and deserves its own in-depth exploration. I will unfold this in my next work.
But until then, one thing is clear: Consciousness does not die with the body. It remembers, it learns, and it unceasingly shapes the next step in evolution.
Epilogue
When you, like me, have spent decades pondering the nature of consciousness, evolution, and the deeper laws of the universe, you quickly learn one crucial lesson: Humility. I certainly do not claim to have cracked the entire cosmic code. Even though the pieces of the big picture are beginning to come together, there are still events, phenomena, and anomalous patterns out there that I cannot yet fit into a logical framework. There are things that remain uncertain to me, and which I am simply unable to explain. Yet. But it is precisely this incompleteness that drives the curiosity and the work forward. I am not trying to deliver a finished, dogmatic truth; I am trying to decode a mechanism.
And it is exactly that mechanism we will dive much deeper into next time. As I mentioned at the end of the article, we simply have to understand the law of contrasts. Without the innermost understanding of how light and darkness condition each other – a principle the philosopher Martinus has described with incredible precision – we actually understand nothing of our own adversity and existence.
In my next publication, I will therefore fully unfold the principle of contrast. In that connection, we also cannot avoid looking much closer at the law of karma. We have only just scratched the surface of it here. To truly understand the true nature of karma – and not least the suffering that inevitably accompanies it as a teacher – I will draw threads to selected elements from Buddhism. Not as a religious superstructure, not at all, but because their ancient, almost technical observations of suffering in particular contain some incredibly precise points. Points that fit perfectly into the scientific and cosmic logic we are uncovering.
Thank you for reading along. We are far from finished yet.
Until next time – keep seeking the light in the logic.
Martinus: The Philosophical Depth
In my articles, I have drawn on the Danish thinker Martinus (1890-1981). His work is enormously extensive and can be very difficult to access for a beginner – I have studied it for years myself and still feel only halfway through. It is logic on a very high level, requiring patience to let settle.
If you are curious, I recommend these entry points:
- Introductory Video: A short (but slightly dry) overview of 9 minutes (in English): Martinus Cosmology – an Introduction. Or you can visit The Martinus Institute’s YouTube channel in English here: The Martinus Institute
Be prepared that it takes time. These are not quick answers, but a deep understanding of the mechanics of life.