Top Religious Scholar: “Aliens Aren’t What You Think!”

Our American Alchemist this week is Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, author, and founder of the Archives of the Impossible. --------------------- You can support American Alchemy by signing up with our incredible sponsors below! Venice: Explore Venice AI at https://venice.ai/americanalchemy and get 15% off with code americanalchemy Zbiotics: Go to https://zbiotics.com/JESSE and use JESSE at checkout for 15% off any first time orders of ZBiotics probiotics. Quo: Try Quo for free and get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.quo.com/JESSE Grab your American Alchemy merchandise here! https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ --------------------- Few academics have ventured as deeply into the unexplained as Dr. Jeffrey Kripal. From his own life-altering mystical experience in India to decades spent investigating UFO encounters, near-death experiences, and the hidden dimensions of human consciousness, Kripal challenges the boundaries between science, religion, and reality itself. In this conversation, he and Jesse explore levitating saints, alien abductions, precognitive dreams, time travel, and the possibility that the beings we call "aliens" may be connected to a deeper part of ourselves. Kripal also shares how his Archives of the Impossible at Rice University grew out of conversations with legendary UFO researcher Jacques Vallée, preserving decades of extraordinary research for future generations. Explore Dr. Kripal’s Work: Official Website: https://jeffreyjkripal.com/ Center for the Impossible: https://www.impossiblearchives.org/ Newest Book – “How to Think Impossibly”: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo216049049.html New TV Series – “Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena”: https://www.impossiblearchives.org/archives-x-1 --------------------- Support Our Other Projects Below! Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@jessemichelsclips Apply For Jobs ➤ https://jobs.gusto.com/boards/american-alchemy-3758eda5-237b-45f1-b043-da80a300714e Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] --------------------- TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Introduction 0:04:30 From Seminary to Religious Studies 0:05:02 My Eros Has Been Crucified 0:08:14 Kundalini Awakening in India 0:13:50 The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 0:15:32 Sex and Alien Encounters 0:17:11 David Huggins and Crescent 0:19:30 Who Are the Beings? 0:21:23 John Mack's Double Identity 0:25:16 Don't Reduce the Phenomenon 0:29:08 Jacques Vallée: Was It Worth It? 0:31:36 Disclosure Means Apocalypse 0:32:42 Ontological Shock 0:35:10 Where Is Disclosure Headed? 0:36:39 Has Humanity Been Colonized? 0:41:13 Trauma as a Doorway 0:42:57 William James and the Sick Soul 0:45:07 The Paranormal Is Traumatic 0:48:19 Sexuality and Spirituality 0:51:54 Ancient Mystery Rituals 0:52:36 Sponsors (ZBiotics) 0:53:54 Psychedelics and the Fear of Death 0:57:31 The Murder of Ioan Couliano 0:58:43 Couliano's Fourth Dimension 1:02:00 Visualizing the Fourth Dimension 1:04:47 Sponsors (Venice) 1:06:20 Precognition 1:07:49 Eric Wargo's Time Loops 1:11:17 Against the Fermi Paradox 1:12:39 Michael Shermer, Secret Mystic? 1:14:36 Time Travelers and Tim Taylor 1:20:24 Religion as Special Effects 1:21:53 Whitley Strieber 1:25:03 Flying Saints and Levitation 1:30:19 A CIA Officer's Time Slip 1:32:36 Children Who Remember Past Lives 1:34:58 Consciousness as Transmission 1:37:26 Sponsors (Quo) 1:38:32 Antennas and Plato's Cave 1:41:49 Myth-Making Creates Reality 1:44:39 Saucers in the Hangar? 1:48:28 Fraud, Mimicry, and Real Magic 1:50:51 Mind Over Random Events 1:53:47 The Problem With Ancient Aliens 1:55:42 Saint Francis and the Stigmata 1:59:36 UFOs and Human Souls 2:00:38 A New Axial Age 2:04:14 UFOs, Nukes, and John Mack 2:05:29 Stan Grof and Eleusis 2:08:26 Aldous Huxley 2:10:50 Parapsychology Follows Technology 2:13:41 What Is Gnosis? 2:14:13 Elizabeth Krohn, Struck by Lightning 2:19:07 Electromagnetic Anomalies 2:26:25 Poltergeists and Sexual Energy 2:27:46 Trauma, Ritual, and Jake Barber 2:31:45 Demons and Human Suffering 2:32:48 Rudolf Otto and the Numinous 2:34:38 Rosicrucians and the Invisible College 2:37:08 Karin Austin's Telepathic Bug 2:40:31 The Devil and Forbidden Knowledge 2:46:03 The Archives of the Impossible 2:47:56 The Case for Secrecy 2:51:45 Nietzsche and Undigested Knowledge 2:54:43 Archive X and Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  In 1989, during a major Hindu festival called Kali Puja, I had what most people would think of as a Kundalini awakening, in which I left my body. And I was like, oh my God. And I came back into the body and felt this incredible charge or transmission.

• 0:48Speaker 04

  Really?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I knew something had been transmitted into me.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, you are a renowned professor of religious studies at Rice University. But beyond that, you've lent your credentials to all sorts of things: paranormal, UFOs, near-death experiences. You also created The Archives of the Impossible, which obviously explores the nature of reality. One of my favorite books of yours, it's called Changed in a Flash, and it's about a woman who gets struck by lightning. What happens next?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  That's Elizabeth Krohn. She follows this light, and she has this elaborate near-death experience. She spent two weeks talking to God.

• 1:26Speaker 05

  It was like an instantaneous download of information.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  And so she'd ask, who's gonna win the Super Bowl, and who's gonna be the next president? And it all came true.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  They experienced the future. They're not guessing. The brain exists in the future. The human being is a tesseract, a four-dimensional worm spread out in time.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  You have Charles Chase, who was director of Revolutionary Technologies at Skunk Works, I believe invited you to lecture on flying saints.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  He did. Charles felt that it was somehow related to how UFOs propagate through space and time.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  That's fascinating to me. I was talking to Hal Puthoff one time, and he was saying, you know, everybody's speculating about Al-Kubiri warp drives and negative energy and negative mass, and what if it was a medieval secret society, and they knew how to fly, just people knew how to fly, and they just put metal capsules around themselves. He's basically defending the idea that this is real history.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Well, because it is.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  There was an alien experiencer who I believe you might have had some contact with named David Huggins.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  The core experience of David Huggins is with this being or entity named Crescent. She was this tall, female entity that he had intercourse with.

• 2:41Speaker 06

  And the next thing I know, I wake up, I don't know how much later, and she says, David, the baby's dying. And I go, baby? What baby?

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Can we say anything about these beings?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  My sensibility is that it's us. And by us, Jesse, I don't mean Jesse or Jeff. I mean some other realm of mind or consciousness or humanity, mystical forms of sexuality. Says, well, there's another way.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  Very interesting.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. What I can tell you for certain is that disclosure, it's a literal translation of apocalypse. And people mostly think of apocalypse as the ending of a world, but they don't generally understand that it's also a revelation of reality.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, this has been a long time coming. I'm really honored to have you here. You are a renowned professor of religious studies at Rice University. But beyond that, you've lent your credentials to all sorts of things that usually somebody of your background doesn't like to, you know, sort of wade in these waters, you know, paranormal, UFOs, near-death experiences. You have gone, basically you've jumped into the deep end of all of these topics, but you've lent your sort of rigorous academic background to them and your name to them. And I can't wait to have this conversation. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And for the purposes of this show, which obviously explores nature of

• 4:37Speaker 04

  reality, but, you know, specifically the UFO phenomenon, you also created The Archives of the Impossible.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Along with Jacques Vallée, you have archives from Edgar Mitchell, NASA astronaut, of course, Whitley Strieber, and many more. And so I'm really excited to have you, man.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Great. That's great. I'm happy to talk. I'm happy to blab.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Let's do it. Let's blab.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  All right.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Why did you want to study religion in the first place?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  That's a long story. I, you know, I started out, I had a, I thought what was a religious vocation. And I started out in a Roman Catholic seminary, in a monastery, actually. And I studied religion because that didn't work out, basically. And I had questions that I wanted to ask that, that couldn't quite be fit into that particular training.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  I want to get into why that didn't work out, because you have, you have a chapter in one of your books that's titled, My Arrows Has Been Crucified.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  What does that mean?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Well, that refers to this period of my life, you know. I was, I was anorexic. We didn't even have a word in the late 70s and early 80s for that. I mean, I think Karen Carpenter died in 84 or so, and then the culture had a word. But I was, if you would have asked a young Jeff, you know, why he wasn't eating, he would have said something like he was fasting. He was trying to be holy. He was trying to be a saint. And he was. And that, that was very genuine. But on another level, there was this psychological suffering that, that was tied into this. And that's really what turned me into an

• 6:26Speaker 01

  intellectual, Jesse, to be, to be clear about it, is I learned that there were other motivations behind religious motivations, you know. And sometimes they were instinctual, sometimes they were, sometimes they're sexual, sometimes they're emotional. But I, I learned through, because I had to, to survive, I learned to distinguish between what I was doing and what I believed and what was actually the case.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  The religious impulses maybe, in theory, supposed to be the most immune from human nature, but it is often motivated by our most base impulses.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I, I think so. And, and again, it's not that there isn't this, this transformation or sublimation of those impulses, but definitely, this is an, definitely anorexia was a form of embodiment and a form of obsessive, emotional. I don't know how else to put it. I mean, I was dying. I was literally dying. And I got down to 125 pounds. This year is about 220, you see here. But so I was, I was, I was basically on the edge of, of death. And it

• 7:48Speaker 01

  really was the monks and, and psychoanalysis that brought me back and that cured me, really, or healed me of, of this, this condition I had.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  And was that somewhat inspired or aided by a version of Christianity you held in your head? Was, were there, you know, particular saints or monks that you were looking up to?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Certainly, the, the, the anorexic behavior was, was, in my own conscious mind, was driven by religious impulses and by saints. I was reading the lives of the saints, and I was fasting, and I was, I was pursuing holiness, essentially. So it definitely had a grounding in my, my own religious tradition. But there was something else going on, you know, as well, that was, that needed to be addressed.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  You had an experience in India early on that was sort of the inverse of that, sort of flipped on its head.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  What religion might mean.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so, so I get asked about that, that experience a lot. I, it's worth, it's worth describing, because I've written about it explicitly and theorized it. I mean, basically what happened was, I was asleep. It was during a major Hindu festival called Kali Puja. And basically, I had what most people would think of as a Kundalini awakening. There was, there was some kind of energy or force that came out of my body or came out of the room and overwhelmed me, you know, physically and spiritually. And I had an out-of-body experience. I had a, basically, a near-death experience in which I left my

• 9:35Speaker 01

  body, and I came back into the body and felt this incredible charge or transmission that was really overwhelming. That was in 1989. So I was all, you know, I was all of 27 years old. I was a, I was a young man. And I haven't had it since.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Was there an emotion associated with it?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  It was profoundly, it was, I wouldn't say it was sexual, it was erotic in a kind of spiritual or mystical sense.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  You know, looking back on it, Jesse, I, what I really think, because I've thought about it endlessly for almost, what, 37 years now.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I think it was basically all of my books flowing into me. I mean, I think there was a kind of precognitive or, or creative element to it. I of course didn't understand anything that was transmitted into me. I mean, I was like, but I knew something had been transmitted into me.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Really?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I absolutely knew.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  You felt like content was transmitted in you?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely, instantly. And, I mean, I woke up and I was like, oh my God, that was, that was incredible. And, um, and, and, and I couldn't have told you what the content was, but I was writing my dissertation at the time and it was very much about the dissertation and I wove that into the dissertation in a kind of implicit or, or secret way, I guess.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  And the dissertation was on Ramakrishna?

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was my first book, basically, Kali's Child. And that whole book is organized around basically the, the god, Shiva, on top of, or below the goddess Kali. And so I, I reflected on this, this iconography and that's essentially what I experienced. It was, I was basically Shiva. I was asleep or I was, was dead or I was, I mean, there are different ways of framing that, that state.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  But, um, it was ecstatic.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  It was, and it wasn't minor, Jesse. It wasn't like some dream I had. It was really physical and powerful and, and transmissive in some intellectual and spiritual way.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  And so it was almost like what you were studying, the barriers between you and that broke down.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  There was no binary between the academic researcher and the experiencer, none. And, you know, my second book was all about that breakdown, by the way, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom is all about the mystical experiences of scholars of mysticism. And I've really felt, certainly since that experience since 1989, but really in all my work is, is a kind of challenge of that breakdown between those two, those two modes of, of being, as it were.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  How did that reshape your understanding of religion? So going from this kind of, you know, anorexic, maybe trying to, you know, inhibit your worldly impulses and then you have this ecstatic, very worldly experience. Obviously, you know, it almost seems otherworldly too, but.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I was always interested, from the very beginning, I, my sensibility was that there was something profoundly spiritual about human sexuality. And I was interested in the most ecstatic experiences that were also erotic. And so I, I was already challenging that binary between the body and the spirit, as it were. And this just confirmed that, you know, in a, in a big, direct, personal way.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  And Ramakrishna himself had had some similar experiences?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he was, he was, um, you know, he, he was spiritually activated for sure. And he was a, radioactive is, is the word that keeps coming to my mind. I mean, he would just touch people and they would go into ecstasy. And so I think he, he was very much in this same, uh, mode, but he was an active agent of it. He was a, he was a medium of it. I wasn't a, a medium. I wasn't a, a spiritual teacher or guru, but certainly I was the, the object of, of this, this awakening.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  When you see depictions of like the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, for example, it feels like it's sort of sexual in nature or something. And then that seems somewhat heretical to say or something.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, it is, it is sexual.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  And it is, it is heretical.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I, you know, again, I was trained and grew up with, with Teresa and ecstasy. And you're talking about the Bernini statue, which I've seen actually in Rome and it's over an altar, actually. And so there's something, we, we talked about the bridal mystical tradition a lot in, in the Catholic tradition. And so there was this linking of, of, of human sexuality and, and, and mystical experience in a very dramatic way. And I don't, to this day, I don't think we understand that. I don't, I don't think, you know, I, I know we'll get to the UAP or the UFO issue later, but I think this, this topic of the sexual comes up constantly.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  And it's just brushed aside because, because people don't know how to think about it. And, and they aren't aware of these long mystical traditions that have thought about it and have, uh,

• 15:43Speaker 01

  framed it in different ways for sure. But I, I do think that there's this profound relationship between human sexuality and, and, and human ecstatic experience that, that we just don't, we don't give enough attention to.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  That also feels like a dirty little secret that gets shoved in the trunk around alien experiences, quote unquote, alien experiences, whatever they are. Like when you, you know, Betty and Barney Hill, uh, you know, they were interviewed after their experience, you know? I think Barney only very reluctantly said that gametes, you know, sperm samples were, were taken in his case. And I, I believe Diana Pasulka, another religious scholar, also discusses, uh, the ecstasy of Saint, you know, Teresa, uh, also accompanying a being, sort of spearing her in the heart or something.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's the, the, the angel, as they call it, you know, the, the, the male angel. And yeah, I mean, it's not even a dirty, it's not a dirty little secret to me. It's just like, it's so obvious. It's like, yeah. I guess it's a, it's a secret in the sense that it doesn't get talked about enough or integrated enough, or it's made fun of, but it's, it's just obvious to me. And maybe what drives a lot of my work is that I take that very seriously because that's, that's really what I've been interested in from day one.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  What's the honest empirical thing to do is to take seriously the, the facts?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And, and to take it ontologically or to take it as a part of the human experience or a part of human reality. And I, um, I just don't think we do that.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  There was a, an alien experiencer who I believe you might've had some contact with or at least studied named David Huggins.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Who lost his virginity to what he describes as an alien being.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, do you want me to talk about David?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, tee you off.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  I mean, Brad, Brad Abrams was, was, uh, came to my home. I'm in that movie, actually. It's called Love and Saucers. It's a great movie. And David, um, what's great about that movie is it doesn't land. It doesn't dismiss David's experiences of, of sexual intercourse with, with, with the entity, but it doesn't affirm them either. It just stays, it just reports it. And I think that's, that third space, as I call it, is, is the right way to go about this. And David's just, you know, he's like Whitley Strieber, you know, my, my, my, my language

• 18:32Speaker 01

  around Whitley is your, your sin is, is you're, you're just too honest. You're just, you're describing what actually happened and you're not lying about it. You're not, um, you're not not saying, you, you're, you're saying too much for, for most people. And I think David's a lot like that and he just says too, too much. And, and I don't, I don't mean that negatively because it's not too much for me, but it's, I think it's too much for most people.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  What is the core experience, just for the audience who wants the context?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  The core experience of David Huggins is with this being or entity named Crescent. I called her Crescent and she was this tall female entity that he had intercourse with. And he was shown all these hybrid children and it's kind of a classic, you know, abduction experience in that sense.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  And then, you know, he becomes a painter later in life and he starts to paint these, these images. And I, I do think that there's something about creativity and there's something about painting and, but also writing that is really crucial here that we don't, we don't quite understand either. I think a lot of these experiences are, result in a kind of wild creativity, whether it's the visual arts or whether it's the creative arts or, or writing.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Can we say anything about these beings? It feels so hard to say things that are definitive about the beings. And I find that when I speak to sort of deeper thinkers like yourself, they say, oh, I'm sort of in the Jacques Balle, John Keel camp. And I, you know, I sort of am too, you know, where it's like, you can't take these things at face value necessarily, you know, that they're, they might not have literal meaning and they're more sort of mythological or archetypal. And then simultaneously, how does that not end in this sort of radical Cartesian doubt? Or it's sort of, you know, this everything is everything?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Where we can't make progress?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the, that's the $60 million question right there. I, my.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  My sensibility is that it's us.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And by us, Jesse, I don't mean Jesse or Jeff. I don't, I don't mean this sort of superficial social ego. I mean, some other, other realm of mind or consciousness or humanity. And I think that that other realm is profoundly spiritual and profoundly sexual, frankly, at the same time. So I guess I do, you know, when I, when I reduce it back to the human, I don't mean the human as what you, what is generally meant by the human. And I think that's that, that's that third space that gets, that gets dismissed a lot, or that this isn't understood.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm not the rationalist debunker, but I'm not the literalist religious believer either.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  And I think that's why I get along so well with debunkers and, and believers, by the way. Because I really do understand where both are coming from.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  When you say it's us, you know, John Mack actually described this sort of identification with the beings that were performing the abductions on the part of the experiencers, which is fascinating.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  Very powerful dimension of this phenomenon is what I call the double identity aspect. The experiencers, as they're called, will often experience themselves as aliens, that they have a whole other identity as an alien.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  And then obviously, when people have psychedelic experiences, it seems like these sort of subconscious archetypal beings seem to talk of them, talk to them. And they're of us, you know, common taxonomy. Sometimes there are actually, you know, specific, you know, kind of morphologies in which they show up and they say sort of consistent, somewhat consistent things. So is that what you mean? Or what do you mean when you say it's, it's us? Or is it impossible to talk about?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  I don't know what I mean. And I, and I say that in all honesty. I, I, I don't think we have conceived how awesome we are, how, how cosmic we are.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  And the, the experiencer community in particular has, has really changed me and transformed me along the physicality and the kind of the literalness of, of these experiences. So I want to, I want to honor that. And John did too as well. But I, you know, he was also a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist. And he, he was struggling. I mean, I know John Mack both through, through Karen Austin, who was, is my assistant now. And Karen was one of his experiencers and was John's assistant. So there's a direct lineage there. But I also know Mack through his books.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  I did not know him, you know, when he was alive. But he struggled, you know?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  What, what really sticks out with, to me in his books is a couple of things. Is his willingness to listen to people and to struggle with the, the fact that these experiences often start out with terror and they're very negative. And that they sometimes, not all the time, they morph into transformation and they become very positive. And he wanted to, he wanted to deal with both of those. He wanted to develop a model that, that could accept both of those. And the other thing that sticks out at me, that really strikes me about John's work

• 24:36Speaker 01

  is how often it returns to the sexual. I mean, his books are filled with peters and vaginas and sexual fluids and intercourse and hybrids. And I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And I think that's right. I think that's actually what's happening. There's something to do with human reproduction or something to do with the sexual, the sexual being that is not just sex. It's not just instinctual.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  What do, what do you think it is? There, you know, UFO researchers like Steve Aspen, who wrote a great book called Out of Time, which is about this like intergenerational breeding program between, you know, these beings and humanity. That might be too literal for, for you. And then on the other side, you have people saying, oh, it's all, it's all demonic or something. And of course it's sexual because it's, you know, it's sort of tempting or something. So yeah, what, what can we say about it?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  It's definitely not all demonic.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  So I agree with that. Yeah. And I also, I think that ends the conversation. Then it's like, what do you mean by that? What is that?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things I say a lot is don't reduce the phenomenon to your worldview. And sometimes that worldview is religious. So they'll say, oh, it's a demon, or it's an angel, or it's a god, or what have you. But sometimes it's secular and scientific. And they'll say, oh, that's just a hallucination or a bad dream or a sleep paralysis. I'm like, don't do that. That's just not right. And so when I say it's not right, I mean, if you actually listen to people who've had these experiencers, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. The, the secular scientific reduction does not work. But the religious belief doesn't work either.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, breaks everything.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  It, it, it just, it stops the conversation, as you put it. And, but so does the secular scientific explanation. Yes. Because it's not really an explanation. It doesn't really explain anything. It just invokes a word like hallucination or sleep paralysis. And it just, it just stops it. It just stops the conversation. And what I want to do is like, no, let's have the conversation. Let's keep going. And that's why I think this earlier fascination I had with, with erotic forms of mystical experience or, or mystical forms of, of sexuality is really crucial.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Because it just breaks down that binary between the, the religious believer and the, the secular scientist. And says, well, there's another way, there's another way forward here that is neither of those. And I don't, Jesse, I don't know what that is.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Again, I don't think we've had that.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I think.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  We haven't had that conversation.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  That's right. And we need to have the conversation in order to then crystallize some analytical overlay that we're confident and we need to be able to sort of talk about this stuff freely.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think the, the problem is, is even deeper. I, it's not that we can have that conversation and come to some analytic overlay or explanation. I don't think we can ever explain it rationally. But I don't think we can explain it religiously either.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  I, I think, I mean, I know a lot about religion.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And it just doesn't work. And, and I haven't seen anything that does work. So that, that's why I'm so fascinated by the phenomenon as, as an intellectual is because nothing worked.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Is, do you think it's sort of intended to break all of your prior conventions? So there's a, a great author named James Madden. He's, you know, also a scholar and he's a, a Platonist. And he talks about these as, as, you know, unidentified platonic hyperobjects.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's Tim Morton, by the way.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Ah, interesting.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's Tim's, Tim's language. I know Jim well.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And I know, I literally had Jim and Tim at, to dinner together and had them talk about the, the hyperobject stuff. And I think that is where you want to go or where we want to go. And I think this is why I keep saying, it's actually the humanists and the historians and the philosophers who have the goods. Let's listen, let's listen to them. And it's not that they have the only goods. I'm not saying that. It's that, that they have goods that we really need to hear.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  In terms of what it intends, I think attention is always a, frankly, a dangerous thing to think about. But I, I do think there's something about breaking one's categories that's crucial here.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Well, to me, I'd almost say, you know, I just got lunch with Jacques Balle like a, a week or two ago. And I, we were talking and I was like, was it, has it been worth it? You know, so you wrote, he wrote Invisible College in 1975. And he wrote about how this whole thing is this sort of control system, you know, sort of BF Skinner intermittent reinforcement. It keeps you running on this treadmill forever. And I was like, are you glad that you didn't stop and that you kept going? Because I feel like in some ways, he's this incredibly rich compendium of just, you know, encyclopedia of all this information.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  And then in others, I feel like it's hard to say a lot more about the phenomenon than it was at the time.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  So I know Jacques really well.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  My feelings about this are.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  That, how should I put this? People don't read. We've been here before. Been here many, many times.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And Jacques knows that. And the beauty and power of of Vallée's books is that they combine the sciences and the humanities in really striking ways. And that's really what I'm trying to stand for is how do we do that? How do we? How do we extend that? That that Vallée and system? You know? And maybe we'll come to different conclusions. I'm not. And I think I think that's very faithful to Jacques, by the way.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  It is. Well, I would almost say that a design feature of the whatever system exists is this sort of missing variable Lucy with the football phenomenon. I I know a lot of, you know, UFO researchers who are like a dog with a bone, running, speed running truth. And you know, I've been there myself. And it's very common for them to sort of almost get there. And then there's like a missing hard drive where there's like mud slung on a thing that kept it keeps it in this sort of liminal space. So and then and then you end up with this disclosure, which is this sort of jagged, messy, slow consensus shift that feels like it's happening

• 31:54Speaker 04

  higher and we're we're sort of like nodes of it. And, you know, Whitley is this important node and other people are important nodes, but it it just doesn't happen all at once and we're all sort of chasing our tails.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  So so so we got right into disclosure here. One of the things that really strikes me about disclosure is that it's a literal translation of apocalypse. That's what apocalypse means, by the way.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  It means taking the lid off or something. It means disclosing.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Unveil unveiling.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  And people mostly think of apocalypse as the ending of a world, but they don't generally understand that it's also a revelation of reality. And so this this disclosure movement, this is why I keep saying you really, really want to listen to the historians, particularly the historians of religions, because they're the ones who know the most about the the apocalypse, as it were, the apocalyptic language. And they're not.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  They're not going to be duped by the by the bone. They're like, yeah, that's that's a bone. Yeah, you you can you can run with that or the dog can have that. But then there'll be lots of other bones, you know? And what, you know, one of the things I often say is, you know, we we hear a lot about this phrase ontological shock. Which, by the way, John Mack popularized in the 90s, but he actually got it. We don't know how. It actually originates in a in a liberal theologian named Paul Tillich in the 1950s. It goes way back. It goes back to the 50s. And Tillich really is talking about my my discipline, the history of religions and the history of mystical literature.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And he's talking about how certain kinds of experiences are shocking to people because they realize that reality isn't what they thought it was. And there's this terror aspect and there's this transformative aspect to that. And human beings can respond in terror or in transformation. I mean, you you see both.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And so where I'm coming from as a historian of religions is

• 34:08Speaker 01

  I I have seen many, many forms of ontological shock, Jesse. I think I think the religions are all about ontological shock. It's one ontological shock after another. And so I think human beings in particular have always been shocked by by these different revelations of reality. And so this does not surprise me.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  But it also pleases me. Put it that way.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's almost like ontological shock, little ontological shocks help us evolve and kind of like the monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey. It's like everything seems very emergent and organic and sort of Darwinian or something. And then you just get something dropped in your reality and you're like, what is that?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I mean, this is why I love I again, I love the UFO topic or I love the abduction phenomenon because it's it's it's a it's a vast, I told you so. It's not what you think it is.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Clearly.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  It's but I mean, I'm saying to this to the to the debunkers and to the the rationalists and to the the science, the scientific rationalist debunkers. It's like, it's just not what you're saying is not.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  It's just not true. It's it's just not what a human beings are experiencing. And and that's what I mean by this vast, I told you so. It's like I told you so.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Where do you think it's all headed in our lifetime? Because it does feel like, you know, maybe it's not the ultimate crescendo or the apocalypse, but it feels like we're experiencing a local sort of peak.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  No, we definitely are.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  You you know, my my joke, I tell a lot of bad jokes is that we're going to lose this one. It's going to get messy. Because apocalyptic scenarios always get really messy and they they always somebody always loses. And I know from the history of colonialism as well, that it's never it's not good for the the culture that's colonized. You know, and we haven't talked about the history of colonialism here, but I think that's really integral to to what's going on, too. And I think one of the one of the things that's that's happening is

• 36:38Speaker 01

  people are becoming aware that

• 36:43Speaker 01

  something is happening, not just not just to reality, but to them. And and I think that that's really powerful and it's positive, but it's also messy.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Because I don't

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I don't know if our institutions can take it, to be really frank about it. And by institutions, I mean our our scientific institutions, but I also mean our religious institutions.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Do you think humanity has been colonized?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I think humanity has colonized a lot of a lot of different peoples. And I think that the

• 37:22Speaker 01

  one of the things I I sometimes think is that the the abduction experience, this issue of of of colonialism,

• 37:31Speaker 01

  that the colonizer is becoming colonized through the abduction experience.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  I don't know if we've been colonized in the sense of some kind of alien colonizer, which I think is behind your question. But I think human beings are becoming more aware that they themselves have participated in this colonialism.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  He reminded me of this crazy, trippy conversation I had with Jacques Vallée.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  And he said one of his

• 37:58Speaker 01

  I've had many trippy conversations with Jacques Vallée.

• 38:00Speaker 04

  I believe that. I believe that. It's almost like he speaks in sort of Kabbalistic code or something.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  He does, he does.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  He recommended this book and it was I think it was Michael Rockefeller, this sort of he was this kind of black sheep of the family and he was very interested in art and indigenous cultures. And I believe the book is called Savage Harvest. And he went to like Papua New Guinea or some adjacent, you know, island in French Polynesia. And he was trying to, you know, he's really interested in the art there and he and the culture. And then they ended up doing some horrible ritual with him. They sort of, you know, turned on him and then it was, you know, like a an Aztec like human sacrifice occurred with with him.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  And Jacques mentioned that as somehow being very important to his UFO worldview. And he was showing me the book in this sort of like, I'm going to show you and not tell you, you know, read the book sort of thing. And that just always stuck with me so much. And I think I got like halfway through the book, but it was when you said colonizing, I was like, yeah, I don't know.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  My my

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I have a lot of gut feelings. My gut feeling, I mean, the the the notion of colonization, it goes back to Charles Ford, of course, in the 1920s, but it also one of the early science fiction alien invasion stories was War of the Worlds. And it's about colonization. And basically what H.G. Wells is doing is he's asking the question, well, what happens if England, who was the greatest colonizing power of the time, is itself colonized? And so I think that issue is at the gut of science fiction, for sure. And I also think it's at the gut of our his of a lot of historical experience of of

• 40:02Speaker 01

  human beings. And so I think it comes up in the abduction experience, but I'm not

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I wouldn't go so far as to say something else is colonizing us, but I would say we're becoming aware of our own colonial history. I think that's a that's a fair statement.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Let me let me back up on this and and and say more.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  No, one of the premises or the the bases of a lot of humanist and social scientific discourse is that

• 40:37Speaker 01

  We're not really in control of what social reality is, that it's deeper than we think. And this is kind of what I'm trying to get at. There's something deeper about social reality, or there's something deeper about our histories that we need to struggle with. We need to like confront. I think colonialism is one of them. I think slavery is another one, by the way. We just, and the abduction experience throws this into relief, basically, in a really powerful way that I, because then the experiencer himself, or herself, or themselves is in fact colonized or abducted, as they say.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  You know, there's a lack of agency there. There's a kind of enslavement or abduction.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  And you mentioned trauma as being this important, common foundational pattern among abductees. But then you have quotes like Rumi, you know, the light comes through the wound and you know, things like that, where the traumatic void that someone might feel then causes them to regain wholeness. And that journey is somehow very transformative.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  it's such a huge issue. I mean, there's this distinction in the study of religion between the once born and the twice born, that goes back to William James. And his basic point is that people who are healthy and happy and put together well don't have religious experiences. People who have conversion or profound religious experiences are messed up. They're traumatized in the language that you're using. And I think there's really something to that.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  I, you know, I've spent a lot of time with near death experiencers and the near death experience. And it by definition is a traumatic, physically traumatic event. I mean, you almost have to die to have a near death experience. But some people do have near death experiences, but not everybody. They're not automatic. They're not guaranteed. And I think that's what's really difficult about this, is we don't really understand why some people have them and some people don't.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Hmm, to the William James point, there's like this brokenness that leads one to, you know, wholeness or salvation, or to attempt some greater inter-unification. There's this inner division initially. Okay, so I want to talk about William James. He's a Harvard psychologist, brother of Henry James, the father of American pragmatism. But he was also way more mystical than anyone gave him credit for. And in 1902, he wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience. In that book, he does something that nobody else was willing to do at the time. He takes the people who say they've directly encountered God,

• 43:52Speaker 04

  and he treats them as data. Not as crazy, not as saints, of course, as human beings, but also as important testimonial data. And here's the thing that jumped out at me. Over and over in the accounts that James collects, the divine doesn't need to show up as a nice idea in your head. It shows up in the body, and usually in the broken part of the body. James has this phrase, the sick soul, the person who is fractured, physically or psychically. And that fracture is the doorway. Look at George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. James spends real time on him. Fox is walking barefoot through the field in a kind of trance. He's got what James basically calls

• 44:36Speaker 04

  a pathological nervous system. He's seized, he's shaken, and that's when the Lord opened up to him. The voice comes through the wound. It's not in spite of the suffering, it's through it. James basically says the hinge of religious genius is a nervous instability that most of us would call a disorder. What's maladaptive in society is adaptive spiritually. Now, put that next to UFO experiences. Jacques Vallée in Passport to Megonia, Diana Pasulka in American Cosmic. What do experiencers that come into close contact with UFOs report? Burns, scars, implants, a body that gets marked and then downloads,

• 45:21Speaker 04

  voices, a sense of being spoken to by something vastly more intelligent than you. The same architecture. Contact enters through a wounded site in the body, and the wound becomes the channel.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  My model of the paranormal is traumatic. Basically, what I think, Jesse, is that everybody lives in a world. Everybody lives in a story. They may not be aware of that story. It's a religious story, or it's a secular story, or a scientific story. But they live inside a story. And when that story starts to break down, they sometimes have this paranormal experience. And what a paranormal event or experience is about is basically them, I think, on some other level, saying, don't live inside this story. This story isn't working for you anymore. Tell a different story. Be different. So I think there's a healing.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  What I want to say is there's a healing impulse to these experiences, but they happen in trauma. They happen in suffering and illness. And you can always point to the illness and say, oh, that's the cause. But that's actually not the cause. It's actually trying to heal the person. It's trying to bring the person out of whatever the person is suffering. And so I think where I'm trying to go with this, I think there's something terribly serious about paranormal events that are fundamentally about healing on a psychological or a social, or even a social level. That's what I'm trying to say.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  What William James also kind of gets into in The Varieties of Religious Experience is this idea that religions often have sort of a mystical inner core. And, you know, certain people who experience something that is very hard to translate and ends up getting relayed in sort of a game of telephone. And then you have these sort of garden variety churchgoers who are just happy to show up. You know, they're inherited. You know, they have rituals and stuff. Would you also sort of subscribe to that?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so the beauty of the Jamesian approach is it really distinguishes between religion as a social institution, which I think most people do, actually. They think of religion as what goes on at church or the synagogue or the temple. And what James was doing is, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about extremity. I'm talking about conversion. I'm talking about human beings who have profoundly life-changing experiences. He's talking about the twice born. He's not interested in the once born. He's not interested in religion as a social institution. And that's really what I'm trying to get at as well, is I'm not, I'm not as interested in what makes people whatever they are,

• 48:20Speaker 01

  because it's their families, by the way. It's their culture, it's their language, it's whatever. I'm really interested in those moments in a human life where something doesn't fit in. And something happens to the individual in which the story begins to break down. And again, that story can be religious, or it can be secular, scientific, but I think it's always gonna break down. And the story, one of the stories I tell here, it'll go back to the sex stuff, which was, we began. I taught this course once on sexuality and spirituality. And I thought, well, I began it by going around the room

• 49:04Speaker 01

  and having people tell their stories of sexuality and spirituality in their own lives. And I thought, this would take, you know, one day, or maybe two days. It took like a week and a half. And we met almost every day. And people were bawling, people were crying. And I realized that

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Almost no one has a story in which those two things fit together really well. There was only one happy story in the whole room, by the way. And that what they most wanted from me as a teacher was not to solve their problem, which I couldn't do, but to explain to them why there's a conflict. And I could do that. I could do that really well, depending on whatever their their their religious tradition or their cult, their cultural conflict was. And I could tell them, well, here's, here's where where the problem is. But I, I couldn't resolve that for them.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Hmm. I mean, the traditional conflict that somebody might point out is something like, you know, we have these evolutionary instincts. You read a book like that's popular today, like Sex at Dawn or something. And then you compare that with religious conventions. And obviously, there's sort of a tension there. Do you think it goes deeper than that?

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it always goes deeper. I mean, but I mean, basically, one of the things that I pointed out to them was that all of our religious models of human sexuality are agricultural. And we know they're just all wrong. And it's really modern genetics and biology that has pushed us into this new paradigm. And so we're all living, if to the extent that people are religious, and I understand that some people are not, we're living in a, they're living in a vast anachronism. Because they're basing their their moral values on a system that understood sexual, human sexuality, in this case, in agricultural terms, and it's no longer agricultural.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  And that, and I'll just give you a simple example of that. We, you know, historically, we think of of sexuality in terms of the male who who plants the seed in the soil, as it were. That's the agricultural metaphor that was used over and over and over again, frankly. And if that's your understanding, then of course, it's the male who owns the seed. It's the male, it's the male who defines the essence of the person. And so you get, you get patriarchy, you get, you get the dominance of the male. Well, we know that's just wrong. We know that there's chromosomes from the woman as well as the man, and and that's what what produces the the human being. So

• 51:56Speaker 01

  but we haven't caught up with that. We haven't caught up with that genetic understanding in our, in our moral systems.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  Hmm. Going back to what you were saying earlier, where some people have near death experiences, others don't. I think there's a Confucius quote that, you know, it's like every man lived, lives twice. His second life starts when he realizes he only has one life to live. So it's sort of paradoxical. And then you look at sort of ancient mystery rituals, and it seems like there is a simulation of a near death experience occurring, often what seems to be aided by, you know, pharmacopeia or drugs, you know, Brian Marescu and Carl Ruck and others write about these sort of Eleusinian mystery rituals.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  It seems like in those rituals, and it's hard to approximate exactly what occurred, but it seems like there's violence and and sex are also a part of those those rituals.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, what what do you make of that in light of what we're talking about now?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I get, we get asked, I get asked the psychedelic question all the time, by the way.

• 53:05Speaker 04

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• 53:48Speaker 04

  I have Zbiotics before my first drink of the night, and I wake up feeling totally normal the next morning. So go to zbiotics.com/jesse to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use Jesse at checkout. Zbiotics is also backed with a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com/jesse and use the code Jesse at checkout for 15% off. And it seems like there is a simulation of a near death experience occurring,

• 54:29Speaker 04

  often what seems to be aided by, you know, pharmacopeia or drugs, you know, Brian Marescu and Carl Ruck and others write about these sort of Eleusinian mystery rituals. It seems like in those rituals, and it's hard to approximate exactly what occurred, but it seems like there's violence and and sex are also a part of those those rituals.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, what what do you make of that in light of what we're talking about now?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  I get, we get asked, I get asked the psychedelic question all the time, by the way. Again, I think psyched, I think human beings have been ingesting plants and substances for as far as we can see back. And they've done this to alter their state of mind and to alter their their consciousness, as it were. And the, the idea of dying before one dies is is basic to hu- human beings. I mean, we all die. You're gonna die, Jesse. I'm gonna die. We're, we're organic beings. And to the extent we know that, we want to know what that's like before we do it.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  And then we can be released from that that fear essentially. I think that's, again, religion, basically, is is it revolves around the the awareness of death and and and the suffering that that that ensues there. So I take, I take all of that very seriously. I just, I just think it's obvious. That's what, that's what the history of religions and the history of civilization is about.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  There's this idea that the soul can be somehow liberated from the body, or you can experience, you know, the the Greek term, knowesis, knowledge of the the soul. And then you come back with a greater sense of of purpose?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And of course, the idea of a soul as separate from the body is a classical religious, religious idea. I think what's actually happening in these states is that, you know, this will sound, this will sound esoteric, or it'll sound paradoxical. But there's nothing to die, you know, and and you realize that the soul or the person, it's it's just a grammatical fiction, really. And once you realize that, and and I have not realized that, and I suspect most of our listeners have not,

• 57:02Speaker 01

  but so they still think they're a person or they're they're a soul, or as it were, we're gonna suffer because we're gonna lose that person, or we're gonna lose that soul. And once you do experience that dramatically, and I think psychedelics is one way that this is often done, you just lose all fear of death. Because there's nothing to die. Speaking, that's, that's paradoxical, I think.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Yes. It is, right. It is.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Let, let me put it this way. What we call consciousness or mind may not be personal. And so the person dies, the, the, the, the identity, the body just is an organic being, as I say, and but but that doesn't mean consciousness ends, you know?

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Speaking of death, you experienced what I can only imagine to be a kind of traumatic thing that you were in proximity to at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  Can you talk about that?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  You were talking about Yohann's.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yohann's murder. I mean, I can talk about it for sure.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  They're definitely, Ioan was killed in

• 58:25Speaker 01

  May of 91.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Who is Ioan for the audience?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Ioan Kuliyanu was the successor, really, of the person who founded my discipline, Michio Eliade, and there are different theories about why Ioan. Ioan was assassinated. And we don't know why, actually. And there are different theories about why he was assassinated.

• 58:49Speaker 04

  Why would a divinity school professor ever be assassinated? And it was in the bathroom or what happened exactly?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  It was on the third floor in the bathroom.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Well, he was Romanian, for one thing. And he was very much a critic of Romanian politics. So that's one theory, is that he was he was killed for political reasons. He was also very interested in the paranormal. And wrote a wonderful essay I still assign to all my graduate students called A Historian's Toolkit for the Fourth Dimension.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  Whoa, cool.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  It is, it's like, that's Ioan. He was thinking about the paranormal in geometric or mathematical terms, you know, already in the 1980s and early 90s. Because he died in 91, so it's probably mostly in the 1980s.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Do you remember any of his specific ideas around that?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, I just remember them. I teach them.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  I mean, basically, this is Flatland.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  He thought that a lot of paranormal experiences were perfectly natural once you posit a fourth dimension. And that things like ghosts and telepathy and precognition make no sense if if we're stuck in these three dimensions, you know, and in this this linear time. But once we posit another dimension, they just make total sense. And the image he gave was from Flatland, this novel written in the 19th century is it's it's if you have this two dimensional worldview and this three, this third dimensional sphere interacts with it, it's it's going to be magical.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  It's going to be religious. It's going to be miraculous. But it's not. It's just, you just have another dimension. You have a third dimension. You have an up there. And there's no up in in Flatland. And so Ioan was thinking about these these paranormal experiences already, you know, in the late 1980s.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  I think in in in geometrical terms.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  Fascinating.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Very interesting.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is. And I I was not a student of Ioan's. But I certainly knew him. And he was very much a part of my program, you know, that I was I was was at at the University of Chicago.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  Wow. And do you, so you think, I guess, because you were talking about theories as to why he was killed. Do you think that might have had anything to do with what happened to him?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just don't know.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  We, I was just a kid. I was a student. And it was, it was traumatic to have one of your professors killed. I mean, that was really, and by the way, at this point, I don't think any American professor had ever been killed.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  And we didn't, again, we didn't know why, or we didn't know. We certainly knew how, but we didn't know why. And that that made it even more difficult. But but I do think Ioan's interest in the paranormal and what Eliade was calling cultural fashions, really, before he died. I think that's where the history of religions was going.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  I think it was headed that way. And so I think what I'm doing now is very much in that same line. But was that picked up and was that really done? No, it was not.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  There's a visualization of the fourth dimension going viral on Twitter right now. Where you see like a, almost like time lapse, time scape of an individual or an object. But you see it in sort of a block form and you're like 360, you know, moving around that block.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  And it's fascinating. It's really interesting to to visualize and see. And obviously, you have Flatland by Sir Edwin Abbott is a great.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  It's already like 1884 or something. I mean, it's early. It's like, right when the geometry is is is created, they start talking about this other dimension as really a way of talking about transcendence, I think. Because transcendence.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  I know you're not asking me for this, but but transcendence historically is up. And it's because we're stuck on a two dimensional plane. It's because human beings are stuck. And so the point where you meet the gods is actually on a mountain or on a hill, because it's the place where up meets meets that two dimensional plane. And so, and this is why angels have wings and the gods are always coming down from the sky. And it's because up is transcendence. Well, what happens when human beings go up? There's nothing there. And so you have to move, you have to think about transcendence in another way.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  And I think the fourth dimension or hyperdimensionality is a way, as a one way that you do that.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  You start, you start to think of, and by transcendence, I don't mean, I just mean something that's not normal to the human experience. I don't, I don't mean genuine or true transcendence, although some people still definitely believe that.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  I'd I'd almost say also that the fourth dimension in this model has to be weirder than the fourth dimension we traditionally conceive of, because we think of the fourth dimension is just time. And then we think of Zeno's arrow of time is sort of fundamental. And so if you, you know, it's just like a river, you can never, you know, step in, you know, the same part of the river twice. But what if you could see the whole river at once, including the parts you haven't reached yet? That viral animation I mentioned earlier gives us a way to picture it. Normally, a video plays one frame at a time. But in that visualization, the entire film strip is compressed into a block, smearing each pedestrian into a weird ghostly trail.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Their different moments layered together in the same shape. Now imagine doing that with your entire life, every moment connected. What would the whole thing look like? We used one of my favorite AI research tools and a sponsor of this show, Venice, to dig deeper into the physics behind this fascinating visualization.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  Technically, it isn't a literal view of four dimensions. It stacks 2D frames along a third axis, using time as depth to create a 3D block. But under that visual is a real concept called a world line. The unique path a single point carves through 4D spacetime. Scale that up to an entire human body and you get what physicists call a world tube. In the block universe model, your past, present and future form a four dimensional structure. Seen from the outside, you wouldn't look like a person moving through time. You would be your whole life at once. Newborn you, present day you,

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  and every future you up to your final moment, bending through every place you ever stood. All fused into one 4D object that might look like a big frozen worm. The version of you here right now would just be one slice of it. And if consciousness could reach beyond that single slice we call now, maybe precognition doesn't involve predicting the future. Maybe it's retrocausal, information bleeding back from a future you who already exists somewhere inside that block at a point in your life you just haven't reached yet.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  One of the things that, I guess, one of my bad jokes is that don't listen to people.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Because once you start listening to people, you just go down one rabbit hole after another. It's, it's your worldview will fall apart if you just listen to people. And I mean, listen. I don't mean, I don't mean hear them. I mean, like, really, really take them seriously. And one of the things that people have

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  the experience of commonly is precognition. They experience the future. They're not guessing. They're not, I mean, we have all these words like intuition and and and guessing and prediction that are basically Flatland terms. But if you talk to people who have actually had these experiences, they're not predicting something. They're like seeing something that will happen and then it happens. And so, once you start to take those precognitive dreams or visions or experiences seriously, then all of your models of of this three or four dimensions just start to break down.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  And

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  You just go down one rabbit hole after another.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  You do. And then simultaneously, I love physicalist attempts, even if they're futile and fall short, to reconcile precognition with, you know, our science today. And so you have somebody like Eric Wargo, who talks about kind of the long body.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  As this sort of quantum thing that's ported into our 3D body and talks about the brain as possibly kind of a biological quantum system, similar to like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hamerov.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 04

  Where we might be accessing a pre-knowledge state of what we what we know in the future, which is, you know, in certain quantum interpretations, very possible you have temporal non-locality, you can reverse qubit positions and quantum computations.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  So theoretically, you might know what you know in the future, and you might know certain things that are adaptive. It seems like if you were to anecdotally, at least in my experience, when you talk to people about precognitive experiences, they are generally the ones that are most significant. So it's like, don't get on that plane, final destination sort of stuff, you know, or very important geopolitical events. And I find that really interesting, too. It's almost like there's an adaptive trickling down of information from the future knowledge state into the present.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  We, so I love Eric Wargo. I, I think time loops is the most important thing in that literature since Passport to Magonia. And I've said that in print. And I love Eric Wargo. And I'm not a materialist either, though. But, but Eric is. And I'm, and then my response to him is always, well, if that's materialism, then I'm a materialist. That's great, Eric. And, and what I'm trying to get at is, you know, the metaphor I often use is, is keeping things on the table. And the thing I love about Eric's work is it keeps stuff on the table.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  It, it doesn't, because generally what a, what a physicalist or rationalist will do is he, and it's virtually always a he, it's not always a he, but, but mostly, they'll take things off the table. And then they'll say, well, I can explain everything on the table. I'm like, well, that's just because you just took everything off the table. You can't explain. You, it's circular. And what Eric does is he keeps precognition on the table. And he, then he tries to think of a model, in this case, a physicalist or a quantum, or a hyperdimensional model, that can, that can make sense of that. And I love that. I love, I think that's what

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  we should be doing. We should be keeping things on the table and then coming up with models to explain them. And if everybody thought like that, I think we'd be in a completely different world, world right now.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  I think so, too. Yeah. Because if you a priori sift out things that you don't want to put on the table, eventually the table becomes obsolete or breaks, and you need a whole new table, you know, and this is sort of the structure of scientific revolutions.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, this will take us into the UFO land, too, again, but, you know, a lot of these experiences are precognitive experiences. And I'm like, yeah, of course. And all of this literature then makes sense of that, you know. But if they don't know this literature, then they don't, don't, don't, don't know that. And they don't invoke that. And, and so, you know, I just, I get sick and tired, Jesse, of the Fermi paradox and this language of they can't get there from here. I'm like, that's a, that's a fucking spatial hermeneutic.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  You know, I'm like, what if it has nothing to do with space?

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Well, it's.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  What if it's a temporal hermeneutic?

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's bad epistemology, too, because you are moving downwards from a current model of the world, instead of just empirically studying phenomenology that that occurs. And, and that's always bad, because.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  You are not.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  Because there's a decay rate on our understanding of the world, that, you know, 50% at any time is, is going to be BS, and it's going to get overturned in the future. So why would you ping off of that as, and make that a prior, instead of just going with the data, just, just taking in what's, what's happening?

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Because the data is dangerous.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  You don't, again, you don't listen to people.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  You, you, you listen to your paradigm, whatever that is, in this case, a spatial paradigm. And you're like, that's what is true. And then you dismiss all these experience, experiences and experiences, because it doesn't fit into your.

• 1:13:00Speaker 04

  But, right. But then it goes, it goes down to this very irrational human bias that, like, like I just had Michael Shermer on the program, I sort of accused him to his face, we have a very collegial, you know, relationship. But I was like, I think you're running from your shadow. And I think, and then simultaneously, I think a part of you is a secret mystic that wants to believe.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  You know, and I, I felt like he swum a little bit when I said those things. But I think you're running from your shadow. You're a secret mystic. Do you, do you want to have a mystical experience? Okay, all right. Yes, that could be. No, no, I, I meant that. I do, I do, I do believe that. I do, I do try to keep an open mind.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  I know Michael.

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  And I actually am very fond of Michael and very fond of, of certainly skeptics like himself.

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  I am, too.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Because I think there is this mystical germ. There is, there is this desire to understand reality in a deeper sense. And I, you know, I'm often, I'm often called an atheist, and, and I suspect I am, these are the particular models of God. I mean, I suspect I am. But that doesn't mean I'm an atheist. It doesn't mean that. So what I'm trying to say is, I have a deep-seated sympathy for the debunking impulse, or the skeptical

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  impulse. But I, I also have a deep-seated impulse or, or alignment with the religious experience. And I think it's, it's really balancing, or it's really bringing those into, into contact, or getting them to talk to each other. That is really the secret.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love that. And I think it makes sense that you're a collector and a node of a lot of people on both sides because of that. Speaking of, you know, we just were talking about time loops, time travel. Have you ever met anybody who thinks of themselves as a time traveler?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I've, I certainly know lots of people who've had precognition.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  But not just precogn, you know, not on sort of the consciousness level.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:15:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  I don't. I mean, like Jacques Vallée has said to me, he doesn't understand why reincarnation is always from the past. Why isn't it somebody from the future? And I, I'm like, yeah. Why, why, why is our, why is our cognition just tied into linear causality, as if we're somehow on the, the node of all space and time?

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  You and I are in a now, and we're just, all of the cosmos?

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Is like, right here, right now? And it's just moving along? And so, and I, and I've, and I do know people who, you know, do understand descendants speaking back to them, or experiences of the future.

• 1:16:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  So that, to me, is like, that's, again, don't listen to them, because it's dangerous.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  But it's dangerous to this linear thinking that's always in the past.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  The reason I ask is because we have a mutual friend who's a University of Chicago affiliate, and very smart guy. And he mentioned this NASA mission controller, who I believe showed up at some of your conferences and engaged in interesting UFO-related discussions. And he's a constant sort of topic of speculation and discussion in UFO world. Do you know who I'm talking about?

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Who is that?

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  So his, his name is Tim Taylor.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  I always feel somewhat awkward mentioning his name. I, I kept him pseudonymous for many years. And, because I knew his name, I had even met him once. And then on another program, his name was let out. And because he sort of shows up in experiencers' lives everywhere, and has, in my opinion, seeded a lot of the modern lore, I feel kind of a duty now that his name is out, to call him by his name.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  But I'm curious as to what your take was on, on him. Did you find him to be smart? Did you feel like he was tapped into some core truths that, you know, others might not be aware of, or?

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I knew Tim.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  He was, he, as you said, he was at a number of the conferences I held, with Diana, by the way, Diana Pasulka. And I found Tim very genuine, actually. I thought he was speaking from the heart. I don't know what to make of all of his self-understandings, but I, I don't know what to make of, of the self-understandings of religious people either. I, I.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Suspicion is integral to what I do. And I also don't think, Jesse, again, this isn't really about Tim, but I don't. I don't take religious experience literally either. Like, I don't think, I don't think the experiencer is the ultimate authority of his or her own experience. And what I mean by that is, I think somebody can genuinely have an experience of the ancestor, or the ancestors, or of a spirit, or of the afterlife, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. And it's not the Blessed Virgin Mary, or it's not the ancestor, or it's not the afterlife.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  And I don't know what to do with that, other than there's a, there's a trickster element to religious experience that really strikes me as important.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Cause in his case, I just find the fact that, you know, he's this kind of vetted NASA mission controller.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  And then he's also extremely interested in people's very profound UFO experiences.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  And then on top of that, he's saying things like he reports to an angel and takes orders from an angel. Um, you know, who I think he describes as a hammer.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  That's probably Tim's experience. That's probably, he's probably being totally open and honest about that. But, but you know, again, I don't know, I don't. It doesn't bother me, is, I guess, is what you're getting at. Because I'm not bothered by people having near death experiences either. And I don't, I don't sign my name to their vision of the afterlife.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  But I think that was their experience of the afterlife, I can put it that way. And I mean, this gets us into a deeper issue of, I, you know, I'm a historian of religions at the end of the day, which basically means a comparativist. I think the Buddhist experience, the Tibetan experience is as integral as the Hindu experience, or the Christian experience, or the Muslim. I mean, I don't, I don't, none of them have the truth for me. But they all have a portion of the truth.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Um, and I think that's a very different, very different perspective at the end of the day. And so I think religion is, is revealing that there's a kind of reality behind it, but it's not always true either.

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  It's not always, there's one shock after another, is what I'm trying to put it.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  Do you think there are people in reality, or in government, who find themselves inside of, you know, what they almost feel like is a, you know, Dan Brown or Umberto Eco novel or something, where it's like, they feel like they're part of some sort of hermetic order, and they're experiencing synchronicities, and maybe even commune regularly with other beings that, you know.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  There are such people.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  But I, let me put it this way. Uh, this is, this is, this is a tougher part of my thought. I, I think religious phenomena are special effects.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  And by special effects, I mean, things that involve physical reality, but are not what they seem.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  And so I think we, as human beings, and by we, again, I don't mean Jeff or Jesse. I mean, there's something deeper in us that's a master of special effects. That is actually can create psychokinetic phenomenon, for example. Can make a table tip, or manifest a hand. But I don't think for a second that it's about that hand, or it's about that table tipping. I think there's something else going on. Uh, and the story I always tell here, and you know, viewers on other podcasts, I mean, I've told this story many times. We, I was with Willie Strieber at a conference, and we were pushing Willie on the fact that he is a science fiction writer.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  He's a horror writer, basically. And that the visitor experience looks a lot like science fiction or horror. And we were, we were basically pushing Willie on this, like, basically the question was, well, wasn't your visitor experiences a function of your sci-fi or horror writing? And Willie said something that has really stuck with me over the years. He said, he said, "Look, I know that the experiences I had in 1986, or whenever they occurred, were a function of the bad sci-fi movies I saw as a kid in the 1950s. I know that, but there's still something there."

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  So, he said, "The point, basically what we're being called to do is make better science fiction movies." And I was like, "Wow."

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  That, to me, is really interesting, because it, it doesn't remove us from this loop of consciousness and culture. In fact, it, it puts us, puts us right in that loop. But it changes how we think about the phenomenon. Because we then become the agent of the special effects, but we also, the special effects are also based on what we have seen, and what we produce as a culture.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  And so, you know, one of the ways I talk about religious phenomena, and by religious phenomena, again, I don't mean going to church or going to a synagogue. I mean, a near death experience, I mean, a psychedelic experience. There are a series of these special effects that I think are directed and written by millions or billions of people behind us. I think everyone has participated in the production of that, that event. And so I think what we're being called to do today, Jesse, is make better movies. Be better directors, be better writers, and think about what we're doing in a way that is really ethically powerful.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  And by that, I don't mean results in some kind of moral goodness, but I mean, really thinks about the human quality, or the human, human condition in a way that is not just human, is not just instinctual, or is not just material.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  Yes. Having said that, so I, you know, I'm more partial to everything you just said. And then I find it fascinating that you have a guy like Tim Taylor saying, "The next advancement in my field," you know, my field being aerospace, "will come from religion." I find that to be so fascinating. And then you have, you know, Charles Chase, who was, I believe, Director of Revolutionary Technologies at Skunk Works, who I've actually met, and I think is brilliant.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Charles Chase?

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  Charles Chase.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know Charles.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  I know, that's what I'm saying. He, um, I believe invited you to lecture on flying saints.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  He did.

• 1:25:40Speaker 04

  Because he was interested in that as a real physical phenomenon for his own work.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  It is a real physical phenomenon. And Charles felt that it was somehow related to how UFOs propagate through space and time.

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  I was talking to Hal Putoff one time, and he was saying, you know, "Everybody's speculating about Al-Kubiri warp drives, and negative energy, and negative mass, and what if it was," this is, this will always stay with me. He goes, "What if it was a medieval secret society, and they knew how to fly, just, just people knew how to fly, and they just put metal capsules around themselves?" And I was like, "What? Really? Like, you the, like, you know, heterodox, you know, physicist, NSA, CIA for so many years? That's what you're, you know, speculating on?"

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Wow, this is, it's, it takes us down many rabbit holes. I mean, so Charles invited me to MIT, I don't know what year it was, 2016 or 17, somewhere there. And he wanted me to talk about flying saints, and basically levitation. And he was, he wanted to know if it was related to, to how UFOs propagate, and, or fly, as it were. And of course, I didn't know, but I knew a lot about flying saints. And the thing about flying saints, or the thing about levitation, I don't think they're aware of how they do it. You know, I mean, when we look at the lives of levitators,

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  they clearly don't understand how it's happening. And that's what I'm trying to get at. There's, there's something going on here in which the human person, you know, the Jesse or the Jeff, is an object of some other form of agency.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  So in Saint Joseph of Cupertino's case, is he like, "Whoa, what's going on?" He just starts like going up almost.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  He's not in control.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Not in control of that. And it's, it's very much, you know, Carlos Sire is somebody I deeply admire here. And Carlos will write about the origins or the, the, the genre of demonology. And it's not that Catholic and Protestant intellectuals disagreed about levitation. They, they both were arguing that it did happen. They were arguing about the agency. And the, the, the people who thought that the levitation was a sign of sanctity or holiness were arguing for God as the agent.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  But the people who were arguing for levitation as a sign of psychopathology, or madness, or, or evil, were arguing for Satan as the agent. And so I think, this is, this is why when I, I wrote a book with Willie, we called it "The Supernatural," three words, supernatural. Because I think the supernatural is, is, is a binary. You know, it, God is the agent of the miracle or the supernatural. And God is outside the natural order. But I don't think these things are really outside the natural order.

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  Well, that's what's so interesting about Carlos Sire, you know, this Yale professor who, I mean, in this book, "They Flew," he's basically defending the idea that this is real history.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Well, because it is. This is what history is like.

• 1:29:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  This is, this is what.

• 1:29:19Speaker 04

  But that these saints actually flew, it's not just mythology.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  You know, so in my, my discipline, you can talk about anything other than what's real.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  You can never talk about reality. And what I want to most say to people, including my colleagues, is just get real. Just talk about reality. And so Carlos is doing that. He's talking about levitation as something that's actually happening. But the point is, you can't actually get into the question of demonology or agency until you think it's real.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  If you just think it's made up, or it's a social representation, or it's some kind of gymnastics or something, you're not going to get into these questions about agency.

• 1:30:13Speaker 04

  I think that's Diana Pasulka's understanding of St. Joseph of Cupertino, who she's gone very deep on as well, where she's like, I think that this guy levitated. You know, I think that this was a real historical event. And it's just so fascinating. And another weird kind of tangent, but very related. I think in They Flew, that book, you know, he goes through all of the flying saints. And I believe in a lot of miracles as well. And I believe he talks about this 15th century monk in Mount Athos, Greece, named Odysseus Maximus. And this was so trippy. One of the most interesting things I've experienced is sitting in your chair was a former head of intel and counter intel for the Department of Energy,

• 1:30:58Speaker 04

  which you think of as holding all of the crown jewels of the UFO secrets. At the very least, we know UFOs show up around nuclear sites all over the world. And then maybe it goes deeper into materials. Who knows? So he's sitting right here and he wrote a book called, I believe, A State of Mind, Faith in the CIA. He was Moscow station chief in the CIA before that. And, you know, there are people who are like, oh, you know, he's totally psyopping you and he's distracting you and whatever. And he wrote this book before I ever had a show. I don't think he was targeting me in any way. I think he really believes this. He says that he time traveled back to 15th century Mount Athos, Greece. And he lived like a, you know, Yankee in King Arthur's court for three months in, you know,

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  then, and he had all these ascetic sort of protocols where he'd build these huts and burn the huts and he would cook these meals. And he was, you know, very devout. And, and he would occasionally talk to some of his, you know, compatriots about, you know,

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  I'm from modern times. And then he, you know, went through a time slip and ended up back in 20th century Mount Athos, Greece, where he was CIA case officer recruiting spies or maybe trying to catch Soviet spies or something. So it's just crazy story. And then he finds out. So his name then was Odysseus Maximus in this time slip. And he finds out after the fact that Odysseus Maximus was this real historical character. And in his experience in that, in that three month period, he levitated. He flew. He was a flying monk.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  The farther I'm getting away from myself, that's when I start flying. That's when I start, my spiritual growth is happening when I'm being less selfish.

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  And I believe there's a little part of that, that book, that Carlos Sire book that talks about Odysseus Maximus. Crazy.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, again, I don't think we understand that. We don't, we don't even know what to do with that.

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  If you read the YouTube comments, you're right.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  But people were not happy.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  let, let me

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  make it even more complex. I mean, we don't know what to do, for example, with children who remember previous lives. We have no idea. And we don't have any idea because we haven't done it enough.

• 1:33:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. And some of that stuff, if you watch Leslie Kane's, what's her Netflix series? Surviving Death. It's like, you know, often they'll remember, you know, if they died in a violent way or something, they'll remember the way in which they died. They'll remember the whole family, their former family. In certain cases, they show up at that house. And they just know, they have all this primordial built in pre-grammar around this family that they would have no other way of knowing.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  So, so, I mean, again, from a, I mean, I know, I know those researchers. I, I, I know this literature. I've read, I've read it. But what's not clear and what the researchers will say is it's not clear whether they're tapping into a memory of a, of a previous life or whether they were actually that person. And I know from debates that, that are existed in the Hindu and Buddhist literature, this question of, of reincarnation or of identity is really tricky. Like,

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  if you, if you were a, a woman in your previous life, who are you? You know?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Well, are you that person or are you this person? Or, you know, so what is identity? What, what, it just messes with, with our, all of our notions. And I think it should. And I think these, these questions about children who remember previous lives, were they those people? Is a, is a fairly naive way of putting it philosophically. Where the memory of it might be an actual memory that exists somewhere. You know, we don't, again, we don't know because we keep identifying mind or consciousness with brain. And so we don't, we don't even have a model of that. We don't have a way of understanding it.

• 1:35:06Speaker 04

  Totally. Itok Bentoff, who wrote Stalking the Wild Pendulum, had this idea that like, identity was like, um, like a pinch, a pinch point on like a circuit or something. You know, and then you would, you would sort of go back into the source or wholeness or something. But yeah, it's sort of, it's impossible to sort of talk about this stuff in physicalist ways.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  So the, the, the image I often use is, is the cell phone. You know? It's like, you can throw the cell phone against the wall. It doesn't hurt the internet.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  But the cell phone's destroyed. So there's no ability to pick up the wifi and to create this personal screen. But the wifi itself is completely, it doesn't care. And I, to me, that's a, that's a model or it's, it's an analogy of, of consciousness. It's like, and I think that's, I think we're all cell phones, basically.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  I think so too. Yeah. And the William James and Aldous Huxley, this transmission theory of consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. If you, you could have a radio, you break the, you know, batteries, capacitors, whatever, and the music turns off. But that doesn't mean you know exactly where of all these four seasons is, is coming from. It's coming from this radio frequency.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the deeper question is,

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  well,

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  maybe everything we know, including all of our science, is just human. It's just, it's just what the brain does, you know?

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  And so what reality is then becomes, we become mediums or, or mediators of, of this reality, but we're always going to translate it in terms of what the brain and the reason and the senses do and how they, how they have evolved. And that, that is almost certainly not, not ultimate.

• 1:37:04Speaker 04

  Well, that, that seems empirically true. Like if you, in, you know, consciousness theorists like Thomas Messenger talk about this, where if you're daydreaming, you are clearly a receptacle for thoughts that are coming from elsewhere. You are not intending to have those daydreams. So what is that? And then I think maybe, you know, a deeper question would be, you know, if we are sort of antennas of sorts, you know, how do we tap into the best possible thing? And if you read, uh, you know, Plato, Glaucon talks about protocols. And so are there, are there sort of protocols to receive? And Tim, Tim Taylor talks about protocols to receive.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Tim does too. Tim Taylor, yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this, this to me is the deeper question.

• 1:37:55Speaker 04

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• 1:39:01Speaker 04

  You know, if we are sort of antennas of sorts, you know, how do we tap into the best possible thing? And if you read, you know, Plato, Glaucon talks about protocols. And so are there, are there sort of protocols to receive? And Tim Taylor talks about protocols to receive.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  Tim does too. Tim Taylor, yeah.

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  I mean, this, to me, is the deeper question. Um, you know, the Academy really goes back to Plato in some ways. The Academy was literally a stand of trees outside of Athens. I mean, and the founding story of the Academy is Plato's cave, actually. And

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  if you read the Republic, you actually read it. You don't just hear about it. You read it. You understand that

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  the cave is running through the entire book. It's central to the whole book and that it actually ends with a near death experience. And so what, the way that, and, and I think it ends with the near death experience because Plato was saying, this is what it's really about. This is, this is the core of the, the suspicion really around reason and the senses and the people in the cave who are chained down. And once you get out of the cave and see reality as it really is, and you come back into the cave, then you can become the philosopher king and you can run the kingdom, as it were, but with the people in the cave,

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  who might kill you, by the way. Um, but there's, there's an inherent suspicion encoded into that story. Uh, and of course, what rationalists do is they, they call the, the ending, the myth of Ur, because it's, to them, it's just a myth. Well, I don't think Plato calls it a myth. You know, he thinks, I mean, the book literally ends with Ur, with this, this, it's basically a, a near death experience, but it's also a reincarnation experience.

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I've never read it. And I was told that, you know, Mythos Festival and Timaeus and Cretaeus or whatever, but, you know, they, they say, uh, you know, that, yeah, it's sort of only mythological. And then you, you read about the Eleusinian mystery rituals and you realize Plato himself was definitely, historically, he would go to Eleusis 13 miles northwest of Athens, and he would take, he would trip out and he would sort of experience this primordial soul self. And there's so much language around these transcendent experiences. So to say that it's just myth, I think is, you know, dogmatic.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  We don't understand, I mean, I mean, when, when, when a historian of religion says that something's myth, what he or she really means is that's the founding story of the culture. They do not mean lie. They do not mean falsehood. They mean, you know, the, the myth of Star Trek, for example, is that every cosmic problem can be solved in 42 minutes with commercials, you know, and you, you, you, you sort of get used to that after a while, you know? And that then becomes the reigning mythology of, of, of, certainly of science, I think, that we can solve anything through, through just more technology.

• 1:42:18Speaker 04

  Well, I think that the other thing about Plato is that the myth making itself creates reality. And if you read Pasulka's American Cosmic, really that the first half of that book is about how our experiences of the UFO phenomenon are shaded by prior memes installed into us by the local zeitgeist. And so she talks about Betty and Barney Hill, when they get their regression, that's like 11 or 12 days after Outer Limits comes out and the beings look oddly similar. And you just talked about Whitley Strieber, you know, where clearly something transcendent happened, you know, but how much of all of these experiences are shaded by, you know, what, what we have in our head, like the, you know, the ability

• 1:43:03Speaker 04

  to even conceive of certain things?

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  I, I, I think my own discipline, my academics in general, were really good at context, at, at explaining X, Y, or Z because of the outer limits or because of some culture or some language. What we're really bad at is that transcendent. And we constantly make this argument that it's all context. But, but it, that doesn't work.

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  No, I think it doesn't. I think, I think at, at least.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  We haven't learned to balance context and consciousness, as it were. We, we, we, we're just, we keep saying it's all context, or it's all language, or it's all history, when it's both. It's clearly both. And, but my point is, is that because it's both, you can always go to one. And you can always explain it. If that's, if that's your worldview, that's your mythology.

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that the point would be to not pre-crystalate, not come to some preemptive conclusion and hold in, in kind of this superposition, the possibilities of, you know, what, what it could be. And yeah, it could be this sort of passport to Megonia, Jacques Vallée style thing where the, the incidental mask is, you know, you're, you're, you're placing that mask, or maybe the thing is placing its mask based on what's in the lore, kind of right now. Uh, but, but, but you definitely are experiencing something transcendent. And then beyond that, I wish we could say more. I wish we could understand, you know?

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  But we're local contextual creatures, right? I mean, we're in a language. We're speaking English now. We're, we're bound to this, this local context.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes, we are. And that, that's sort of frustrating if you're truth seeking. You, you want to get, you want to transcend that, you know, you want to understand some ultimate.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  That's, to me, that, that's what comparison is all about, is, is getting past that, that local context.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  Hmm. Do you believe that the United States government has flying saucers and hangars all around the country?

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Um, this will sound like it's a, it's, it's, I'm, I'm pushing back on the question that I don't know, but I am suspicious of that. Um, and the reason I'm suspicious of it is we're never shown the flying saucers. We're never, we don't have direct knowledge of it. We're only getting indirect knowledge of it. Now,

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  you know, where the experiencers come in is they'll say, well, we do, we do have these experiences. We talk about them all the time. And that's true, true enough. But it's not the saucer and the hangar. It's not the, the body, as it were. Um, and I know from the history of religions that countless cultures have made similar arguments.

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  You know, so I'm always suspicious of those arguments. And that's again, why I say that you need the historian or the, the anthropologist or the, the philosopher in the room, because that person will,

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  they won't, they won't deny that, but they'll, they'll put it into some kind of context.

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  I think the suspicion around the saucers and the hangars is very warranted because you have low sample size, you know, a few anecdotes. Some of the anecdotes feel bulletproof in isolation, or not bulletproof, but like hard to debunk. Um, but it's just, it's just we don't have a lot to go off of. Yeah, go for it.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  I, I mean, let me say more. I mean, so I, there's a lot of bulletproof stories in my world.

• 1:46:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  And they conflict.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  And I don't know. I, I, I, I think that the people who have these, say, take near death experiences, I think they really had those experiences and I think they conflict. Uh, and I think they're based on previous memes, to use Diana's language. Um, I think at the end of the day, we're stuck, Jesse, on mythological tracks. We're stuck in our stories.

• 1:47:27Speaker 04

  Is there some intentionality behind the myth making? So I feel like, because it's so hard to answer the transcendent questions, a more banal question that I feel like is extremely important is, for example, why post 2017 has everyone become obsessed with UFOs? And that seems important because it feels like, it feels like part of that push is intentional.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Speaker 04

  Part of it might be emergent, but what do you think is going on there?

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  I think people are finally dealing with the reality of the, of the phenomenon. I think that's that third space. And I think what people are struggling with is the, the debunking rationalist skepticism no longer works. And so they're, they're flipping over to a literalist religious belief. But there's this third response that I think is, is much more nuanced and much stronger. And I just don't think people are aware of that. I think this is the Jacques Vallée answer, basically. You know, it's like, let's be careful about jumping into this or that literalist belief. Um, but let's not dismiss the reality of

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  what's going on either. I mean, Jacques, I think, I can't speak for Jacques, but I think he really believes something is really going on, but that it's constantly fed, not only through these local contexts, but people are faking it too. They're, they're fraudulent. I mean, a lot of, a lot of the cases that Jacques is most famous for were fraudulent. He shows that they were fraudulent.

• 1:49:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  So, and I think that's true too, you know, but just because something is fake doesn't mean it's not real.

• 1:49:14Speaker 04

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  You can fake psychokinesis, but that doesn't mean psychokinesis doesn't happen.

• 1:49:23Speaker 04

  For sure. Just because you have fake examples of a thing doesn't mean it's not.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I mean by it. And you can fake all kinds of things. But, or you can mimic all kinds of things. But again, that doesn't mean that the phenomenon itself doesn't happen. Like, I think one of the worst things that ever happened to, this is another whole topic, but to parapsychology is the decision that was made at some point to dismiss a medium or an individual if they were caught cheating. I think that was a horrible mistake.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Because I think religious people fake it till they make it.

• 1:49:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  You know, I think the relationship between mimicry and, and fraud is much more complex than people realize.

• 1:50:06Speaker 04

  It's interesting. If you read like JG Frasier, you know, the Golden Bough, it's like you have these shamanic priests, you know, in these sort of, you know, small tribes or whatever. And often the, the magic is fully fake until the end, when the tribe turns on them and tries to kill them. And then the magic becomes real somehow at the end. And this is also sort of a Girardian concept too. And it's just, that's fascinating.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Well, again, if you study religion, you know, you know that things are faked until they become real. I mean, you know this, you know, and the placebo effect doesn't surprise you at all.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a sort of

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  It's like

• 1:50:44Speaker 04

  Agregore style consensus thought form that gets created and then the thought form becomes real all of a sudden and

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  And placebo is, is a part of, of all medical science or pharmaceutical science. And so we know it works. We know it works, you know, X number of times, 30% or 25% or whatever the, the percentage is. But it really works.

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  The other thing I would say, and this conversation is impossible to have kind of with any rationalist skeptic up top, because it breaks their kind of epistemology. But it's that reality itself is probably far more fractured than we could ever imagine. So if you just take at face value, these random event generator experiments, which is, you know, you tie something that is conventionally thought of as random, like radioactive isotope decay, or literally a, you know, double slit experiment where you expect, you know, 50/50 left slit, left slit, right slit. And then you say that there's an observer effect that, that goes beyond what we traditionally know as the observer effect. There's a literal skewing of, you know, I'm getting more right slits because I want more right slits.

• 1:51:48Speaker 04

  Then all of a sudden, everything becomes downstream of that. And you could have somebody like a Whitley or some of these people who have very wide apertures in their reality, because the governor placed on their own consciousness is, is off. And so they're experiencing a wider reality and you are bumping off of that widened epistemology.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  I think, um,

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  oh, this, I don't know how to say this. Particularly with, with religious truth, and by truth, I mean something that, that, that is, that actually represents or, or reflects reality. I, I think a lot of statements are esoteric in the sense that

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  it's not that I can whisper something to you and you suddenly, you know, a data point, for example. It's like, no, you actually cannot know this. You literally, I can tell you point blank what it's about and you will not understand. And, and by you, I mean, I, I mean, anybody, I mean, myself too. So I, I, I do think that there's a level of, of, of understanding that is literally secret. And it's not because of a lack of data or a lack of information. It's because the cognitive hardware is set up that it, it can't know.

• 1:53:08Speaker 04

  See, uh, Terrence McKenna has a great quote, "A secret is not something that isn't told, it's something that cannot be told." And that is a, it's a beautiful, uh, kind of, you know, expression of what you're saying right now.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, Terrence was great.

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  The truth can be self-stigmatizing to the crowd that it, you know, it isn't ready for it.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  I think it is self-stigmatizing.

• 1:53:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  I think that's what I mean by the trickster element. There's something about the truth, as it were, that, that, um,

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  it, it's, it's self-canceling. I can put it that way.

• 1:53:42Speaker 04

  It is. And you have, you know, you need to have ears to hear.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  And, and this is why, again, this is why the UFO, the abduction material is so fascinating to me because it self-cancels, it cancels itself out at some point, you know, through these, these different experiences and these different voices.

• 1:53:58Speaker 04

  Do you think there is a relationship between UFOs that we think of in the modern sense and Kabbalah?

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  oh, boy. It just gets us into a whole, this is the, um, a popular television series, by the way, um, which I profoundly disagree with. Because it assumes that

• 1:54:25Speaker 04

  Which television series?

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 1:54:27Speaker 04

  Which television series?

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Ancient Aliens.

• 1:54:29Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:54:31Speaker 04

  And it deals with Kabbalah or?

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  Well, its basic argument is that all religious truth is misperceived astronauts.

• 1:54:40Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  So it's basically an affirmation of our present mythology and it reads back onto, to the past.

• 1:54:48Speaker 04

  It's like Ezekiel's wheel was a UFO.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I just think that's wrong. I, I think that, but I also think it's wrong to take that religious understanding from the past, like Ezekiel's wheel and to read it forward and say, this is really about God, or this is about demons, or this is about angels, or whatever, whatever the language is. So I, I'm very much about, how do we not do either of those? How do we not take our contemporary understanding and read it back? But also how do we not take our religious understanding from the past and read it forward? And I'm like, what happens when we sit with things? And we just, we just sit with them. And again, I don't know where that's going.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  There's another, there's another television series that's, that's about to appear called Archive X, which is very much about my own thought and, and the Center for the Impossible at Rice. And we try to do this. We try to do that third space. Where you don't, you don't think that every religious phenomenon is because of ancient astronauts, but you also don't think that modern UFO, say UFO phenomenon is about Kabbalah. You don't, you don't, you don't do either of those.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  I meant more in the sense, not in the ancient aliens, you know, in the Book of Acts, Jesus went up on a UFO. You can always superimpose the current thing onto the, onto the past thing. I meant more in the sense of, so take St. Francis of Assisi, where, you know, on Mount Laverne in, I think 13th century Italy, he and Brother Leo, Brother Leo's in the back and he, he sees this sort of flaming torch object. And, you know, Diana Pasulka thinks maybe in the original Greek or Latin, it could have been a UFO. And maybe he died, you know, the stigmata that he received was actually

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:42Speaker 04

  electromagnetic, you know, radiation. But that's sort of what we were talking about, what, the interesting detail that she told me on, on air is that the last thing he wrote in his diary was the Greek letter Tau. And that, that represented to him somehow a forced conversion. And I think about the UFO journey for a lot of people. And it does involve trauma and it does involve feeling somewhat broken or confused. And then sort of trying to re-achieve or gain wholeness. And, um, and seeking kind of something divine in that, in that process.

• 1:57:22Speaker 04

  And that feels somewhat Kabbalistic to me because it's, it feels kind of esoteric and individual. And not like you're just going to church or synagogue or, you know, a mosque or

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Well, again, St. Francis is, that's a Catholic figure and now you jump to Kabbalah.

• 1:57:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, it's two different religious systems.

• 1:57:42Speaker 04

  But he was forced to walk the straight and narrow. There's like, there are these protocols that a person has to, you know? And he was this party guy, you know, before he was very social and

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  So take Francis. So I've been to Assisi, by the way.

• 1:57:55Speaker 04

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  That is one weird dude. Francis was weird.

• 1:57:59Speaker 04

  Talk to animals?

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  If you're, if you, if you walk around Assisi, you recognize, at least I did, that his life begins with art. He literally is in this broken down church and he sees a crucifix talking. And it says something like, rebuild my church. And he mistakenly thinks it's that church, but it's actually the church, the, the universal church. But then his life ends with art. It ends with all of these amazing, um, works of art at Assisi. But you also, at least I saw the bloody socks. You know, you, you, this object in the sky does pierce him. I mean, it's a very, again, a very physical, very, um,

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  real phenomenon. And it may have killed him. We don't, we don't know how he died. We, but we know he died fairly young. But he gets pierced by this object in the sky. And so I think there is a relationship between what pierced Francis and what contemporary experiencers see. But I wouldn't say that

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  Francis is, it's not about Christ. It's not about some Christian message. I wouldn't take, again, the past and read it forward into the present, but I also wouldn't take, again, the present and read it into the past. I would just say, well, something's going on with the contemporary experiencers that's similar to something that went on with Francis, and he was using his context and his culture to explain it. It was very Catholic, and this context and this culture, they're using it, and they're saying it's something very different. They're saying it's a UFO, for example.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  But the comparativist always stands back from both of those moves and says, okay, well, what's going on, you know, and something is going on in both contexts. So you get this localism, but you also get this universalism, as it were.

• 2:00:05Speaker 04

  You said at the Seoul conference at Stanford, you said you can't shoot down human souls. And implied in that is maybe there's a connection between the UFO phenomenon that we see in human souls. And actually, there's a Japanese Buddhist concept of hitodama, which is, you know, this plasma orb-like thing that represents a human soul. So do you think that's sometimes what we're seeing?

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think basically what's happening is people are confusing the security or the nation state with religious phenomena. But I don't, that's what I meant by shooting down souls. You can't do that. I mean, but I don't, I don't want to, I mean, maybe religion is a category that doesn't work anymore, Jess. I really want to offer that. I don't, I don't think science works, but I also don't think religion works. And so we just need, we need new categories.

• 2:01:06Speaker 04

  That excites me so much. You know, I think we're living in a new axial age where the past meaning structures are, you know, just sloughing off. And I think we're going to get this new exciting thing, maybe in our lifetime.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  That's where I think the physical experiences of the experiencers is really, is really relevant. Because you do see a lot of psi phenomena, or you see a lot of, a lot of religious phenomena in the experiencers, but they're not religious, you know. And nor should they be. Because religion is about, often it's about believing backwards, as I say. It's about affirming someone else's altered state in the past. And I think this is an altered state, obviously, in the present, but it's pointing towards some kind of future story that we don't, that we don't have. And so, like, people ask me sometimes, what

• 2:02:02Speaker 01

  do I believe? And I believe in the future. I live for the future. I live for generations that have not yet been born. And what is that going to be like? I don't know.

• 2:02:21Speaker 04

  I agree that the only guarantee about the future is that it'll surprise us, for sure. Having said that, you know, I think people think of, for example, California as the center of the future, whether it be Silicon Valley, sometimes in dystopian ways. But, you know, you were in the kind of human potential movement. You were very involved in Esalen early on.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  I still am.

• 2:02:42Speaker 04

  Still are. And so, you know, we think of these things as sort of bleeding edge of, you know, human sociology and ways of living and stuff.

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  One of the things I often say is that it's called the human potential movement, and it's not called the human accomplishment movement. It's about the future. It's not about the past. And the other thing I joke about is like, all of the visions of the future on, say, Netflix, or your, whatever your streaming service is, they're all bad. The future is always bad. This is why, by the way, I love Diana's work. The future is good. There's, there's, there's a visionary quality to the future that I think gets erased in

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  a lot of dystopian visions of the future. And I'm also, Jesse, I'm also very moved by the presence of UFOs around nuclear bases, by the way. To me, that's really powerful.

• 2:03:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's also empirically ubiquitous. Unlike the Saucers and Hangers thing, I think if any scientists were sitting here, they would either have to be sort of dogmatically opposed to the data, or just admitting that this is real.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Well, the reason I really like that idea, there's a couple of reasons I like it. One is, I grew up in the seventies, probably before you were born, at the nadir of the nuclear crisis. And I had to register for the draft in 1980, I guess it was, when I turned 18. And I registered as a conscientious objector, because I didn't think I would live to see 40. I thought the world would be gone, because there'd be an all-out nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US. That's really what we thought in the seventies. The

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  other reason I like the idea that UFOs show up around nuclear bases is because John Mack, going back to Mack now, he started out as a nuclear activist, by the way, or anti-nuclear activist. And he went to Esalen, by the way. And as an anti-nuclear activist, what people don't know about Esalen and the human potential movement, it had a profound anti-nuclear Russian-American impulse inside it. And Mack went to Esalen as part of this diplomatic impulse. And then

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  he was turned on to the UFO by Stan Grof, by the way. And, you know, his words were, "The Grofs punched a hole in my psyche and the UFOs flew in." And I think that captures it really powerfully, that he starts out as an anti-nuclear activist, and he ends up as a UFO abduction researcher. And I think that's, that's a natural development, but I think a very powerful one. It certainly describes my own, my own life.

• 2:05:58Speaker 04

  Stanislav Grof is so fascinating as a character. You know, he obviously is sort of the inventor of holotropic breathwork, which means sort of growing towards wholeness. And actually, I was really into holotropic breathwork, and I would definitely consider it a big part of my own kind of waking up.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  So was John Mack, by the way.

• 2:06:19Speaker 04

  I know. I know they were friends, too. And when I read that in Ralph Blumenthal's The Believer, I was like, wow, this is really cool.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  Well, I wrote a whole chapter on Stan and Christina, by the way, in my Esalen book. And Stan invented holotropic breathwork when LSD was made illegal, by the way.

• 2:06:41Speaker 04

  Well, so I've heard, and you could probably confirm this, that he, Albert Hofmann, Carl Ruck, explicitly wanted to recreate the Eleusinian mystery rituals in the modern day.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I know I can't confirm that, but it sounds right to me. But Stan, the reason he invented holotropic breathwork, which is basically breathing really strongly.

• 2:07:06Speaker 04

  It's hyperventilating.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  Hyperventilating, basically. And then entering altered states and having a psychotherapist there to sit with you. And this, again, is, again, what John Mack was trained in with Stan, and that he used with abduction experiencers as well. But, again, Stan invented that in the late 60s, early 70s, when LSD was legally prohibited. It was not illegal until 67 or 68, or whenever, whatever the year was. And people don't, don't realize that.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  I mean, the early psychedelic crisis in the early 60s was not because of legality. It was because psychedelic states appeared, and I think they did.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  To reproduce religious mystical states. And so the question was theological, it wasn't legal. It was how, how in the world does eating a mushroom produce an experience of God? Or, or infinity, or, or immortality? Well, it does, just does to some people.

• 2:08:25Speaker 01

  And so that, that was the early crisis. It wasn't, and the, the, the legal stuff really is only in the late sixties and seventies. When, when the, the nation state cracks down on,

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  on these altered states and these kids, these, these annoying kids, you know?

• 2:08:44Speaker 04

  Aldous Huxley famously predicted that there would be a future religion dedicated to psychedelics, where each person had their own transcendent, direct connection to God.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  Huxley was one of the, basically one of the inventors of the human potential movement. I mean, the phrase human potential movement comes from Aldous Huxley.

• 2:09:05Speaker 04

  Who would you say are the sort of godfathers?

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley. I mean, it was really Huxley. And Huxley, by the way, was very, he was very secular and I would say bitter. When he wrote Brave New World, which is what we all read in high school, and at least what I read in high school. Nobody reads Island, which was his last novel, which is very trippy. It's very much predicting the counterculture, which then breaks in, in the, in the six, after 64, say. But Huxley was also really involved in parapsychology.

• 2:09:45Speaker 04

  He was at the Roundtable Institute with Puharich and he seemed very interested.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  He was very close to Eileen Garrett, the, the medium. And he was also very involved in the psychedelic revolution. He wrote The Doors of Perception and really adopted what, what you, what you called the transmission theory. And this was the idea that basically what psychedelics do is they shut down brain processes. They don't activate them. And so more of reality is available to the person precisely because there's less of a filter. And you know, Huxley's language was, reality can appear as it really is. Outside of, or before language and culture.

• 2:10:32Speaker 04

  Which I think is really important, especially with this modern kind of AI and technology conversation. You have, one of my favorite quotes is from Marshall McLuhan. He says, who was maybe a sort of a Catholic mystic in his own right, but he, he had this quote. Every media extension of man is an amputation. And so you can think of, you know, uh, you know, AI or the tech stuff is like this new umvelt through which to see more of the world, or you could see it as an amputation of your own senses. And the taking away of those senses, and this goes back to Plato, actually allows you to see a more primordial, fundamental reality and you're sort of just trapped in your bodily prism. And once you, once you, you know, transcend that, you see more.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  I mean, the history of parapsychology follows technology, by the way, in a really, really clear way.

• 2:11:26Speaker 04

  They're like parallel.

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  Well, telepathy, I mean, telepathy is coined in 1882 and it's coined after the telegraph.

• 2:11:32Speaker 04

  That's fascinating.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and then it's the radio and then it's the television and then the computer. And now it's the internet and then it's quantum computing. I mean, it just, it just goes on and on with, and because we don't understand, human beings do not get why I can read your mind or, or how I know about something that's going to happen before it happens. And so they, they metaphorize, they, they pull. And I, and I don't think they consciously do that. There's not some agency here, but they naturally pull the computer or the television or whatever technology is, is around, they just make it work and they just come up with new words.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  But it does, it's not really about that, you know?

• 2:12:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  Telepathy is really not the telegraph. And, and precognition is really not about computers.

• 2:12:32Speaker 04

  No, I would say, you know, Jack Parsons actually reading The Golden Bough. He has this really interesting quote where he says, after reading that book, I realized science is a form of magic. Magic is not downstream of, of science. And so I think a lot of the things we think of as like these mechanical sort of processes actually come from bizarre divine revelation.

• 2:12:54Speaker 01

  Well, this is my, my problem with Arthur C. Clarke, actually, who, you know, everybody quotes him.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Every magical event is, is an undisguised form of technology. I forget the quote, but it's like, no. And this is the ancient aliens thing too. It's like, there, there's no real magic or there's no real mystical experience. It's all ancient astronauts and these dumb primitives have misperceived what's actually going on. I'm like, no, there's real magic.

• 2:13:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:30Speaker 01

  There, there's real revelation and, and.

• 2:13:35Speaker 04

  You could flip it. You could say any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology or something like that.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  I actually did flip it, by the way, in the supernatural.

• 2:13:46Speaker 04

  Oh, there you go.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I, that's what annoys me about the history of, of technology and science is that, you know, it, it, it does see magic or the magical experience as, as a primitive or, or, or previous form that of, of unknowing. And I don't think it is. I, I, I think it's really dramatically not that.

• 2:14:11Speaker 04

  What, what, what does gnosis mean to you as opposed to kind of more rote academic knowledge?

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  Gnosis is direct. It's a kind of direct knowing that, that, and which one realizes one's identity with, with divinity. That, that's what it means to me.

• 2:14:30Speaker 04

  Maybe one of my favorite books of yours is, involves a form of gnosis that is so miraculous and remarkable. It's just incredible. Everybody should go read it. It's called Changed in a Flash. And it's about a woman who gets struck by lightning. What happens next?

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  Oh, that's Elizabeth Krohn. And she gets struck by lightning in a synagogue parking lot, literally across the street from Rice University where I teach in 1988. And what happens next is Elizabeth, Elizabeth walks into the synagogue and doesn't understand why no one is, is paying attention to her. And she sees herself floating off the ground and she looks behind, she looks out the window of the door and sees her body lying, you know, in the rain with the flaming umbrella. And she realizes she's having a near death experience. And when she realizes that her boys, who are very young at this point, are taken care of by the synagogue

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  participants, then she leaves, she follows this light and she has this elaborate near death experience that goes on for two weeks.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  And, and that's what Changed in a Flash is about is, is Elizabeth really tells her story in the first half of that book. And then I tried to interpret it in the second, second half of it.

• 2:15:54Speaker 04

  It's remarkable. And she comes back describing this garden. But the garden is sort of, she says she calls it a garden, but it's really kind of beyond words and concepts that we have in ordinary waking life.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  I mean, the reason, so I,

• 2:16:12Speaker 01

  I think I met Elizabeth in 2014 or so, over in the medical center. And we had this event on near death experiences in the medical center for people who,

• 2:16:26Speaker 01

  who treat, who, who are pastors of, of, of people who, who died and who have come back. And this happens a lot in the medical profession, by the way. And doctors generally don't know what to do with this. And so they, they don't do anything with it. But, but certainly chaplains, hospital chaplains need to. So anyway, I, I heard Elizabeth's story of her near death experience. And I walked up to her and I said, wow, you should write a book. And she said to me, I don't know how to write a book. And I was like, I know how to write a book, but I don't have a story like that. And so we got together and we wrote Changed in a Flash over the next, you know, two or three years.

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  And that's how the book came to be is through this collaboration between myself and Elizabeth. And the reason I liked where I'm going with this, the reason I liked Elizabeth's story so much is she was very clear that the afterlife is what you want to see.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  So she had a really profound sense of of both context, but also of universalism, or, you know, the comparativeist, I think, is very happy with her. You die into your imaginations, which was my language. But it's your imagination is defined by the culture or by the language, you know, or the religion in this, in this case of Elizabeth. And so I interpreted Elizabeth's near death experience in Jewish terms in this, in the second part of the book and because of the garden.

• 2:18:05Speaker 05

  And the light led me to a place. I call it the garden because to me it looked like a garden, but not a typical earthly garden. It was different.

• 2:18:20Speaker 04

  What was her sense of God in this garden?

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  So God was, so she, she spent two weeks talking to God, but it was her grandfather's French accented voice. So she was talking to her grandfather, but she always, she felt very strongly that it was God. And so there was this clear sense in, in, in which the, the experience itself was not what it seemed. And that in her language, it was her grandfather's voice to calm her down and, and to get her to listen. And so she'd asked her grandfather all kinds of practical things like who's going to win the

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  Super Bowl and who's going to be the next president and all these, and that all came true. And it all, it all happened, but.

• 2:19:16Speaker 04

  That's wild. So literal predictions came true.

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  And then she became massively precognitive, by the way.

• 2:19:22Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  In, in real, in, after her lightning strike, in which she would have dreams of plane crashes that would then play out in the next day's news. And so, yeah.

• 2:19:37Speaker 04

  A lot of these people also experience anomalies around electronics, phones dying.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  She still does.

• 2:19:42Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  She, she experiences with electricity in particular. And this is, by the way, where I got turned on to Eric Wargo, was through listening to Elizabeth, because I realized, listening to Elizabeth, particularly with the plane crash dreams, that her experience of the dream was always the exact angle and perspective of what appeared in the news the next day. And so I began to suspect, oh, Elizabeth is precognizing what she'll see in the newspaper or on the computer or the television set the next day. She's not actually there at the site.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  Well, that changes dramatically how you think of these experiences.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  And that fit Eric's model, you know, perfectly. I, you know, to, to put it, to put it differently.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  I think, and again, Elizabeth differs with me here, but I think Elizabeth's brain is precognizing her own brain in the future. So it's an entirely physical experience for, for someone like Eric. The, the, the brain is, exists in the future. The, the human being as a tesseract in his own language is a four dimensional worm spread out in time. And I think that's what's happening in these precognitive dreams. But I don't think that's Elizabeth's experience because I talked to her and I asked her and and she's very, she's very articulate and she's very good with me.

• 2:21:24Speaker 01

  You know, she, she puts up with the dumb scholar of religion.

• 2:21:31Speaker 01

  And she'll say she's, you know, she'll make some comment that she's not as smart as, as, as this, but I think she is. You know, my, my joke, whenever I appear with Elizabeth, I feel like the warm up band for the Beatles.

• 2:21:50Speaker 01

  And, and what they really want to know is they want to hear the Beatles.

• 2:21:53Speaker 04

  How, how did her priorities shift, if at all?

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 2:21:58Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  She was a fundamentally different person after the vent than before it.

• 2:22:03Speaker 04

  How so?

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  In her own language, she became more spiritual, but less religious. She was more convinced in the immortality of the soul, as it were, but less convinced of the truth of her own Jewishness. And I think that's, and the other, the other major part of her near death experience was her, her conviction that she would get a divorce, by the way.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  And she did. And that she would have a daughter, she did. Uh, so it had very, the near death experience had very strong conjugal and reproductive elements to it too.

• 2:22:45Speaker 04

  And if I, wow. And if I remember correctly, she basically was holding on to this umbrella, which was essentially a lightning rod.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53Speaker 04

  And she was struck in this parking lot of the synagogue and she was kind of hovering over her body. And then did she follow a light?

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, she did.

• 2:23:01Speaker 04

  So that's also kind of an archetypal thing that people with NDEs.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  The thing, the thing about it too, I mean, it just gets weirder and weirder. I mean, this is what I kept saying, don't listen to people because you'll just go down one rabbit hole after another. But of course I do listen to people, listen to Elizabeth a lot. And what's striking about her near death experience, other than it was a lightning strike, was that the, the little boy who was struck with her, who was two at the time, grew up to be an Orthodox rabbi. He grew up uber, uber religious. And we don't know that there's a connection, but I, I can't help but think there is. And also she goes on and on about how it was her wedding ring

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  that was stuck to the umbrella that the lightning hit.

• 2:23:52Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 2:23:53Speaker 01

  So again.

• 2:23:55Speaker 04

  Her divorce.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:56Speaker 04

  The severing of that wedding ring or something.

• 2:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's a really, and she also thinks, I'm speaking for Elizabeth here, but I, I think this is fair.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  She thinks that the cloud just basically formed above her. So, and that she was intended to be struck by lightning. And that she was also, they also somehow intended also was the writing of our book. And she, when she was writing the book with me, what she most wanted was for these things to go away.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  She did not want to be the, the object of these precognitive dreams and these extraordinary experiences.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  So again, it's about healing, I think.

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  But it's, there's also a physicality to it. You know, these are, it's why I use the phrase special effects. It's, is like, because I think the electrical thing is very real. I mean, she really does have effects on light bulbs and, you know, electrical appliances.

• 2:25:06Speaker 04

  That is a common thing. I have a, one of my best friends is this guy, Amar Khandil, from a really big YouTube channel called Yes Theory. And they went to the Berkshires where there were the famous kind of whole host of abductions. Uh, I believe in the late sixties, early seventies. And there's this one woman there, Melanie, and she experiences all sorts of electromagnetic anomalies. She, you know, touches a phone and it turns off and fries and.

• 2:25:31Speaker 05

  I still turn off lights. I blow up computers. I can't go near in my husband's office. He won't let me go in the office. I don't know what the hell they did to me. I really don't, but it's bad.

• 2:25:42Speaker 04

  That seems to be just a very common thing.

• 2:25:44Speaker 01

  And also, I mean, not, I guess I am going back to it, but to go back to the sex thing. I think this electricity is often erotic. I, I think there's something dealing with our sexuality or something dealing with human sexuality that manifests as this electrical disturbance.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  So, I mean, that, that's another thing you see over and over again in the literature and nobody comments on it. And I'm like, it's clearly so.

• 2:26:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  And I understand why they don't.

• 2:26:16Speaker 04

  Why do you say that? Why do you think there's a connection between this electric feeling?

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

  I've seen too many times that, you know.

• 2:26:23Speaker 04

  So it's like an electrical shock like experience? And then there's some sort of sexual arousal.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  Or the, or the electrical experience is connected to puberty or, or, you know, the woman will look at me and say, I'm an erotic witch. You know, I mean, there are moments that the person clearly is aware of the, the sexual components of the, of the electrical haywire kind of experience. And I think, so I think what's happening is, you know, before the modern era, we understood poltergeists as loud spirits in the house. It was essentially a haunting. And in the 20th century, researchers began to suspect it had something to do with

• 2:27:09Speaker 01

  the, what they call the focal agent, who was usually a young person and they're in puberty, by the way. And so they connected it to sexuality. And, you know, where this goes, you know, to today, certainly in my own life, when I visited like Germany and visited a parapsychology center there and I met with some, some psychotherapists and they would go into houses that were haunted. And the first thing they would ask the family is, well, they would start doing psychotherapy. How do you feel, what's going on? And the family would look at them like. What are you talking about?

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  We brought you in for a frickin' ghost and you're talking about emotions in our relationships. And the psychotherapists were adamant that if you dealt with the emotional sexual complexity of the family unit, then then the poltergeist would go away.

• 2:28:07Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:28:08Speaker 01

  And so there, there is an awareness there that I think is really significant.

• 2:28:15Speaker 04

  Do you think past human ritual has involved trying to provoke sort of paranormal things to happen through some of these sort of, you know, traumatic occurrences you do?

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think a lot of ritual is designed to, to control trauma.

• 2:28:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  Essentially, and it works really well with particular individuals that it doesn't work at all with other individuals.

• 2:28:43Speaker 04

  Well, this is going back to the UFO thing coming full circle. Like you hear about, you know, Jake Barber was this whistleblower. I don't know if you're familiar with his story.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am familiar with him.

• 2:28:54Speaker 04

  I interviewed him and he talked about retrieving two UFOs specifically. And there are a lot of interesting things about his testimony, his sort of mental connection with the craft and the emotions that that evoked. But the subplot of how he describes the kind of UFO legacy program is that it's basically kind of ritually abusing young people, children and, and people from third world countries and getting them to sort of call in these sacred objects.

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:26Speaker 04

  Uh, and that's kind of, that's kind of freaky. And then you honestly, you read some of the Epstein files and it feels, feels like there's some sort of systematic exploitation of young people going on there.

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't speak to that at all, but I can definitely say there is a link between traumatic events and mystical events.

• 2:29:46Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:29:46Speaker 01

  There definitely is.

• 2:29:49Speaker 01

  And so one of the things that you would rationally, I think, conclude is that if you could induce trauma in enough young people in particular, you, you're going to get particular mystical events.

• 2:30:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:30:05Speaker 01

  And we can't do that ethically or morally, certainly in a university, but people can do that outside a university in totally immoral or unethical ways.

• 2:30:15Speaker 04

  Totally. And it's also hinted at actually even in Spielberg's Disclosure Day, where this Hansel and Gretel sort of analogy for this abduction, which goes back to Metterling's story in the late 19th century about the, you know, the bluebird, where these two children are sort of led, you know, and kind of tricked into this experience, which is very traumatic. It's also mystical.

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I saw, I saw the movie, I saw it twice.

• 2:30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  I mean, those children are heavily traumatized.

• 2:30:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  By, by the experience and, and the experience really happens to them in the movie now, of course. But I think, again, you see this in the literature over and over again.

• 2:30:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, I mean, it just feels like this dark, like, I don't even know where to, where you go with that.

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  You know, I, so certainly one of the things where I go, one of the first lessons of the study of religion is that the experience of the sacred is not the good.

• 2:31:15Speaker 01

  That you can have the sacred as terror, but you can also have the sacred as transformation. And they go together. The, the demon is related to the angel and the angel is related to the demon. And they're all part of the divine, as it were, or the sacred.

• 2:31:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And then I also think there's a fundamental distinction between the proto-architecture of what people might describe as an angelic experience, which always starts with terror and might end and transformation. And then other humans who are more powerful than innocent humans trying to provoke mystical stuff to happen by abusing those less powerful humans.

• 2:31:57Speaker 01

  Well, so again, to take this to the, to the UFO or the, the abduction phenomena. I mean, this is why I am so fundamentally against language of the demon.

• 2:32:08Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  Because I think, first of all, I've never, you know, my joke is I've never met a human, I've never met a demon that didn't look like a suffering human being. Ever. And I, so I think, I really do think on, on, on a profound level, demonic possession, which I think is really happens and people really experience is, is really human. It's a form of human suffering. It's, it's us suffering ourselves. And, and often these people are traumatized heavily by, by individuals, you know? So I have nothing but compassion for people who are possessed, but, but I don't think it's an objective demon.

• 2:32:54Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's very human.

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  But in a profound special effects kind of way, I'm, I'm, again, I'm not, I'm not arguing against the phenomena of demonic possession, but, but I am arguing about the agency or the, the ultimate source of it.

• 2:33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, makes sense. What, what do you think, you know, you talk a lot about the idea of the holy, this Rudolph Otto book and.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the negative and the positive aspect of the sacred.

• 2:33:26Speaker 04

  Yes. And he talks about, it's really interesting, like this light that is like lighter than light, like it's a, it's this almost like tear in the fabric of reality that, that people who have mystical experiences often see. And I find that just fascinating.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things, I just lectured on, on Otto, by the way. This will sound nerdy, but, but you, you have a professor on your show, so you, you like nerdiness.

• 2:33:53Speaker 04

  I do.

• 2:33:55Speaker 01

  There's something about Otto and James in particular, this very Protestant, not Catholic at all, not, not Jewish, not, not Hindu, but Protestant in the sense that the experience is based on the individual, you know? And, and it's, it's a human, it's a very individualist response. And that's essentially what I'm saying. So I'm taking, I guess, a very Protestant view here as well, that there's something about the human response to the sacred that I think is very significant here. And that can be one of profound terror or it can be one of profound transformation or both.

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  And I think this is what John was, Mac was really dealing with in his, in his abductees was, it was really both and it's not, it's not an either or. And I don't think, I don't, this is why you need scholars of religion in this zone. Not, not to reduce this to some social category, but to say, the experience of the sacred is not one or the other. It's really both and, and this really does help us understand what's going on.

• 2:35:07Speaker 04

  Often there's a trajectory in UFO research where somebody starts a little more nuts and bolts. Take Jacques Lele, himself, he was an astronomer. He was involved in the earliest version of the internet, ARPANET.

• 2:35:21Speaker 04

  And then you get into sort of more, more mystical territory. And he ultimately, I think semi conceives of himself as, he's at least very interested in Rosicrucianism and talks about the invisible college.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:35Speaker 04

  Do you think there's a relationship between these sort of esoteric?

• 2:35:38Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:35:39Speaker 04

  Orders and ufology?

• 2:35:40Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, I, I see. So I don't think, I don't think there's anybody in those orders.

• 2:35:47Speaker 04

  Really?

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  I mean, there are Rosicrucians, of course.

• 2:35:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  But, but Rosicrucianism begins as, as basically a joke.

• 2:35:55Speaker 04

  Really?

• 2:35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a kind of, there's nobody in it, but all these intellectuals want to be a Rosicrucian because they see the power of it and the value in it.

• 2:36:05Speaker 04

  Was Christian Rosenkreutz sort of a mythical?

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:36:09Speaker 04

  Probably not real or?

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:36:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:36:11Speaker 01

  Totally. And I, I think it's a genre. I think it's a, it's a game. It's a, it's, it's to use the Latin language, but that doesn't mean it's not important or it's not real.

• 2:36:23Speaker 04

  But the Templars and the Freemasons were real.

• 2:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, yeah, but again, I, I think overused. You know, if I can put it that way.

• 2:36:35Speaker 04

  Sure, sure.

• 2:36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I

• 2:36:43Speaker 01

  I don't think, I think religious identity in general is a real problem. I don't think we're,

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  as I've said on other, another podcast, I don't, I don't think anybody is, is Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or whatever. I, I think that's an identity that they put on for a time. And it might work and they might believe that, but they're not really that. And I think a lot of this is a similar kind of, we put these things on for a time. I mean, this is why I, you know, I say at the end of the day, I'm probably an idealist. I, I do think we're, we're pretending to be X, Y, and Z, but, but,

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  but we're not.

• 2:37:25Speaker 04

  Is there any moment in your own UFO research where the walls broke down? And you found yourself having a very kind of paranormal experience?

• 2:37:37Speaker 01

  So I've been writing about the UFO since the early 2000s because I had to. You couldn't understand the counterculture or the human potential movement or Esalen without really engaging the UFO in a fairly dramatic way.

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  I would say that the fundamental place where,

• 2:37:59Speaker 01

  I don't know if I turned,

• 2:38:02Speaker 01

  was, was Karen Austin, actually. Karen was, and, and just the pure physicality or the pure, the literalness of her experience really shaped me and, and changed me in a fundamental way.

• 2:38:16Speaker 04

  What did she experience?

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  She calls it,

• 2:38:23Speaker 01

  an AI consciousness infused telepathic bug. It crawled up onto her and, and, and waking, she was awake when it happened. And it came out of nowhere.

• 2:38:36Speaker 04

  What did it look like?

• 2:38:37Speaker 01

  A telepathic bug. It looked like a bug. It looked like a, a mechanical consciousness infused bug.

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  And I mean, I, we hired an artist to recreate this and Karen talks about it and, and,

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  you know, I, I use it in class and it's, it's powerful. I, I write about it and how to think impossibly. And I don't see how you think about that experience and other than physical and, and physical terms. I just, I don't get it. And so when I, like this language of AI, which is all over the place now. I mean, abductees have been talking about robots for, for 70, 75 years now. They've known forever, you know, as far as we can see back, as it were, in this life anywhere that, that the robot, as they called it, was, was integral to the abduction experience. Well, now they're talking about AI.

• 2:39:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:39:40Speaker 01

  You know, and

• 2:39:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that I've, I've speak to certain people and they're just so sure. They go, ah, it's AI. I'm like, how do you know that? You know, but it is an interesting overlay of like, you know, some homeostatic kit that is trying to like protect the earth, maybe some von Neumann replicator drones or something, you know, and it does seem like the grays in certain cases, abduction cases are very surgical. Not only literally, you know, performing surgery, but surgical in their, in their movements and unfeeling.

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the way, the way this has been told to me is, well, look, if you're going to go into the, the, the monkey tribe or the, the gorillas, you're not, you're not going to go in there. You're going to send a machine. And I'm like, yeah, you are. I, I get that. That makes a lot of sense because the monkey is going to throw the machine against the wall or it's going to smack, smack it beside the head. And if you're, you're, you're there, then that's, that's a problem. You don't want to be with the violent monkey.

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  And that makes sense to me, actually. And of course this goes into science fiction. This gets into popular culture in different ways as well. But it also gets into the history of philosophy in a really interesting way.

• 2:40:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So I was interviewing Diana Pasulka and I was asking her, why does, you know, angels and demons and the devil come up a lot in UFO research? And she told this story of being in Jacques Vallée's apartment in San Francisco.

• 2:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:15Speaker 04

  And as a joke, he shows her this book and it has 666 pages. And it's about the devil and apparently one of his favorite movies is The Ninth Gate, in which Johnny Depp is this sort of rear book dealer who's, you know, searching for the, the third of, you know, this trilogy of books that confers some sort of Faustian, you know, devil power. And so what does this have to do with UFO research is my question?

• 2:41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think everything actually.

• 2:41:49Speaker 01

  First of all, the Faust legend, this idea that, that you make a contract with the devil is, is about 500 years old. It goes back to the 15th century, actually. And we know, we know even, it's very German, by the way. And we, we know exact, and Faust, by the way, was basically what we'd call the day up professor. So the idea is that the professor or the academic or the nerd, as it were, makes some pact with the devil and gets some form of knowledge, but then sells his soul to the devil. This idea of forbidden knowledge, however, is biblical. It goes back to the origins of certainly European civilization. And I, I, my third book, I wrote a book called The Serpent's Gift,

• 2:42:34Speaker 01

  Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. And it begins with the Adam and Eve story, which is very much about forbidden knowledge. So I think what human beings have done, at least in the, at least in Europe or in the West or in the biblical world, they've demonized knowledge.

• 2:42:55Speaker 01

  And I don't think we should. And particularly with, with Jacques now, with Jacques Vallée, he's encouraged me on many occasions to read the history of the devil or the history of, of this literature. Not because he, I think he believes in the devil. I don't think he, I don't think Jacques does. I can't speak for him again, but

• 2:43:20Speaker 01

  because of this, this, this history. And I think demonology or this rational discourse about demons is also a kind of demonization of knowledge.

• 2:43:34Speaker 01

  And I, and I think it goes back ultimately, what we were talking about earlier, to, to, to this suffering, to this, this impulse to heal. And for, I think people really have this experience of being possessed by the devil or the, or demons. But I think that's ultimately a form of human suffering and they're trying to be healed or, or exorcised from this, which is their religious language.

• 2:43:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:43:58Speaker 01

  But, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's accurate and I don't think it's ours anymore. And, and so I, I think what I'm trying to say is, to speak mythically, I think we should all be Faust. I, I don't think we're making a deal with the devil, by the way.

• 2:44:17Speaker 04

  I think, I think it's tricky that like, if you, you know, Oppenheimer is seen as a modern Prometheus.

• 2:44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, he is.

• 2:44:23Speaker 04

  You know, and when you sort of steal fire from the gods, it's, you know, usually, usually those myths don't end well. You know, and so, yeah, I don't, I don't think knowledge should be demonized. I don't think the pursuit of knowledge should be demonized. My revealed preference in doing this show and sort of fault, you know, literally chasing forbidden knowledge all the time is, is obviously not that. And then I, I often also find it really interesting that some UFO researchers will dive deep into this stuff and then they'll come out and they're like, I'm a Christian or I'm a Jew, or you know what I mean? And they'll just get, you know, kind of recede back to convention. And I don't know if that's like, uh,

• 2:45:04Speaker 04

  things got too intense for me, so I, I had to like kind of retreat? Or I actually learned something at the end of the forbidden knowledge route, you know, Heisenberg has a quote, you know, uh, the beginning of the bottle of science, you take a sip or whatever and you're, you're an atheist. And then you get to the bottom of the bottle and you find God. And so is that the same with UFO research where you somehow, you realize that it was, all of this knowledge was somehow useless and it was all within or something like that?

• 2:45:35Speaker 01

  So I'm not, I'm obviously a professor and I believe in knowledge. And I believe in higher education. I believe in communicating knowledge. That's what it's about. I don't believe in demonizing it. And I think there are a lot of reasons that people and, and good reasons and natural reasons that people demonize knowledge. But I think ultimately it's a bad thing. I think, I think the same thing of secrecy, by the way. I don't think secrecy at the end of the day is the way to go.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  It's not how you, it's not how you promote knowledge.

• 2:46:24Speaker 04

  I agree and I disagree. Like, I think, yes.

• 2:46:28Speaker 01

  Let me, let me say two, two other things.

• 2:46:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:46:31Speaker 01

  Which will contradict each other. One of the reasons Jacques Vallée had the idea of an archive and our archives of the impossible, our Center for the Impossible at Rice really begins with a conversation between myself and Jacques Vallée around this notion, was he wanted to get around the silos of secrecy. And he wanted to help create a culture of research that was multi-generational and was not dependent on secrecy or confidentiality. And I thought that was a great idea. And so I've, I founded and have curated for

• 2:47:13Speaker 01

  over 10 years now, the, these, these archival collections. And they're the most amazing thing, certainly I've ever been involved in. They're astonishing. And you'll, you'll see this in the show, in, in the Archive X show. That's a real place. The archives are physically amazing. But they're also by content amazing because basically the way, the way a collection works is a donor approaches me or approaches us and says, I want to give my life work to you. My, my, my kids are not going to care about this.

• 2:47:56Speaker 01

  But, but if you take it, then it'll be preserved for future generations. And they're absolutely right about that. And so it's, it's been very easy for me to ask people for their life work. Because it's not for me. I'm not asking them to give me money or give me their books or their collection. I'm asking them to give their collection, to give their research, their files to Rice University. And that's a very easy thing to do. Okay, so there's that one thing that's against secrecy. But here's, here's the, the pro secrecy argument. And I've said this before on, on this, this podcast.

• 2:48:40Speaker 01

  I think some forms of knowledge are secret. And they're esoteric by nature. I don't think it's a matter of data. I think it's a matter of cognition. I think certain people are just set up to understand things. And most of us are not. And I don't think that's our fault. You know, Don Hoffman has this wonderful phrase. Don is a neuroscientist of, of perception. And he has this wonderful phrase, fitness beats truth. And what he means by that is we have adapted by evolution to win the game. We have not adapted to understand how the game is put together.

• 2:49:24Speaker 01

  And I think Don is absolutely right. I think most of us are clueless. And that benefits us in terms of fitness. This is why I love Plato's cave and the whole origin of the academy, I think, in that. But we're set up to, to, to win, not to know.

• 2:49:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so too. And then à la Plato, I think we're probably in some cave-like construct.

• 2:49:55Speaker 01

  We are.

• 2:49:56Speaker 04

  Where I think it's probably very adaptive to not know.

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  We are.

• 2:50:00Speaker 04

  In order to operate in that construct. And then in order to sort of ascend out or, you know, I don't know, maybe evolve, evolve past that. So the other thing that I find interesting about Hoffman's work is that embodied consciousness is theoretically not adaptive. You know, it's sort of high latency and low bandwidth and really kind of gangly and awkward. And, you know, in his model, the eight million, or I don't know if it's eight million, however many millions of species, I think it's low millions of species on earth, are just the ones that we can perceive. And there probably is a whole chain of consciousness above us that, you know, it's not adaptive for us to, to perceive. And how many of those, you know, millions of species on earth adaptively think that they are apex predators,

• 2:50:44Speaker 04

  either until it's too late or for their whole lives? They think that there's, you know, they don't know about us, you know? Maybe there are some theorists among them that talk about non-human and, or, you know, non-dolphin intelligence and that's, you know, whatever. And so I find that really interesting because then, then the kind of Plato Symposium thing is like this transpolitical, you know, truth that transcends politics is it's very maladaptive in like the city-state context. You end up getting killed. And then in the, in the higher context, maybe, maybe there is some, some higher version in which it is adaptive.

• 2:51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think we associate transcendence and getting out of the Plato's cave or the matrix with authoritarianism. But for historical and contextual reasons, they're just not true. You know, if you, if you take a comparative angle, human beings have always been about transcendence and have always been about becoming a god or, or transcending their, their human condition. That's not recent. That's not a 20th century German Nazi phenomenon. That's as old as the hills.

• 2:51:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:51:55Speaker 01

  And so I think esotericism at the end of the day is a language. It's, and languages can be used for very ill purposes, but they can also be used for very good purposes.

• 2:52:06Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. And where I would fall on the knowledge thing is we have to distinguish between forms of knowledge. And I know you're a kind of a Nietzsche scholar and fan. And I love his essay on history where he talks about undigested stones of knowledge. And, you know, he's sort of criticizing academia, which he felt shunned by in his time. And I think there's very rote knowledge or knowledge that you use for political purposes or for virtue signaling or whatever. And then there's knowledge that's a byproduct of some like mystical truth instinct. And those two things feel very different to me.

• 2:52:47Speaker 01

  I, I think, I think we're very Platonist in that we think knowledge is good. It's good for human beings. And I always wonder if it's not, you know, maybe it's not. But it, but it's still knowledge. And I don't know, Jesse, I am, you know, my, my, one of my many jokes is that I backed into the academy because it was the only institution that would have me. But it was also the only cultural form that was about knowledge. You know, my, my religion was also about knowledge, for sure. Catholicism was very much about knowledge, but there were limits to it.

• 2:53:31Speaker 01

  And I could ask questions and even get answers in the academy that I couldn't in Catholicism. And that really impressed me.

• 2:53:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:53:41Speaker 01

  Having said that, of course, the academy is not perfect. And it's filled with people and there are all kinds of limits, limits on, on what can be known. And that's why, that's why I really do believe in the broader cultural arena. Because I want other people to know things that academics can't know. And that, again, that takes us back to the show, the Archive X show. It, it's filled with people who are experiencers and who are not academics. But it's also filled with people who are academics and are researchers. And a lot of people you'd know commenting on these experiences.

• 2:54:23Speaker 01

  And I think when you put those two together, I think you have a kind of powerhouse. Because you have the experience, like the Elizabeth Krohn's of the world, but you also have the Jeff Kreipels of the world. You, you, and you, so you get an interpretation of the experience, but you also get the experience. I think those are both crucial.

• 2:54:43Speaker 04

  Well, that's beautifully said. And I hope you continue to bridge that gap and spend time both on the forefront of human knowledge, but also bringing, bringing that to, you know, rigorous places of, of study. And I'm excited to see where it all goes.

• 2:54:59Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:55:00Speaker 04

  Well, this has been amazing. I really have enjoyed this conversation. And you're so close by, so maybe we can run it back at some point. And yeah, I really appreciate your time and all your work. And, you know, you have a couple of things that you're, you're coming out with, right?

• 2:55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this big, actually. It's on AMC Plus and Sundance. It's called Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena. It's coming out October 1st. And it features our Center for the Impossible at Rice and, and our archives.

• 2:55:33Speaker 04

  And it's a website or where can people find it?

• 2:55:36Speaker 01

  On AMC Plus or Sundance.

• 2:55:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:55:40Speaker 01

  It, and then our, our, our website for the Center for the Impossible will be up too. And, and that's, that's where people can go. And then my website too, jeffreyjkripal.com. It'll, it'll be up there always.

• 2:55:53Speaker 04

  Amazing. Go check it out.

• 2:56:03Speaker 04

  If you want to go deeper on some of the crazy questions we ask on this show, check out Venice. It's a privacy-first AI platform that gives you access to some of the world's leading AI models without giving up any data about you. It gives you more freedom to explore the ideas we're all so curious about on American Alchemy without giving up your online sovereignty. Check out Venice through the link in the description. And thanks so much to Venice for sponsoring this show.