The Mystery Behind the Matrix: UFOs, NDEs & Mystical Experiences | Dr. Jeffery Kripal

A human being is essentially a splitter of reality we perceive the external world as a set of objects and we perceive ourselves as some kind of interior subject so we have a subjective and an objective um Dimension and that is fundamentally wrong that is not what reality is and the UFO is fundamentally objective but it's also fundamentally subjective so it violates this cognitive and sensory system that we are are Certainly the intelligence Community is using the UFO and using the phenomena to hide whatever it's hiding as you probably know there are two models of the

UFO one is that it all begins post World War II you know late 1940s but the other model is it's been around as far as we can see back I'm definitely of the latter Camp when people tell me it's all about the CIA or the intelligence I'm like what do you do with all these where there was no CIA or there was no I mean What do you how do you do with that welcome back to the transmission my friends one of the things you inevitably encounter when you pass through uh the portal of the

weird the esoteric the Paranormal um even just Cutting Edge science honestly is the problem of subject and object really the breakdown of subject and object to put it simply you and it whatever it happens to be and yeah on a normal basis it's not really a problem in consensus reality or let's Call it everyday uh reality things behave pretty consistently these headphones are going to appear out there today tomorrow but what about those harder to explain circumstances what about the phenomena on the frontier of human consciousness like Visions UFOs that seem to violate the laws

of physics near-death experiences according to experiencers of the aformentioned despite being weird one of the things that you'll often hear Is that they seem hyper real more real than that everyday reality we were just talking about even though they can't be measured can't be captured can't be corroborated in a lot of instances probably can't even be effectively wrapped in language and that makes sense because how would you explain or describe the impossible how do you delineate between something that's purely psychological IC or really out there or maybe this is just a false Dichotomy altogether maybe

there is no subject or object and from time to time our Consciousness is somehow just dipped in that fact of course the easiest thing to do is just diminish such experiences uh pretend they don't exist they're just the product of hallucinations made up by crazies but from my own experiences Tales From countless others not to mention the writings of brilliant esoteric authors and researchers like our guest in this one I'm pretty sure some weird does occur sometimes and has been occurring since time immemorial and that is where our truly brilliant guest in this one Dr

Jeffrey kple comes in he's been researching this stuff for decades he's also the Jay Newton Razer chair in philosophy and religious thought at Rice University he's the author of numerous books including the flip the super Humanities and his latest how to think impossibly about souls UFOs time belief And everything else I'm just generally stoked and honored to have Jeffrey kple in the mind meld I've really admired him for quite some time now um I won't go on let's get into it of course it would mean a lot to me that if you enjoy these mind

Ms you let the algorithm know by tickling it with a like a sub a comment a share it is immensely important we've also got a pretty enormous back catalog of mind melds that are Audio Only You can only hear them on podcast platforms So do subscribe to third ey drops on Apple podcast or wherever you listen and if you want to riff about this stuff with me and hundreds of other listeners directly join over at patreon.com thiri drops we do monthly Zoom hangs a book club we have a patreon only Discord server you can get

rewards like stickers pins shirts and more I do hope to riff with you there my friends but for now let's meld Minds with the wise and wonderful Dr Jeffrey kle Dr Jeff kple um I know I've already been complimenting you this morning but to me you really are a saint of this blooming unnamed I don't know mythology of the future that's that's emerging so I'm very excited to talk to you my friend very very excited good well thank you I appreciate that we you know we we were just saying that anybody I think who makes

who builds a life around the Mila of the mythopoetic and weird sort of has To moonwalk their way into this position and though I've been diving into your books and listening to a bunch of interviews I don't think I know the Genesis story of how you got here you know researching High weirdness the mystical UFOs near-death experiences Consciousness all the stuff that I and my audience are deeply deeply interested in yet there's always this sort of like uh I don't want to say Pariah maybe that's too strong of a word but there There's this Mythos

that if you're into those things as an academic you better watch out well yeah that's true I mean yeah I can tell my story um I my my only Fe as some people have heard it already and I don't I don't want to repeat myself but it does make sense I I'm not I'm not doing this because I you know for the hell of it as it were I mean it really it really makes a lot of sense I um I started out I wanted to be a a monk uh I was in a Catholic

Seminary and my Early academic career sort of you know the moonwalk image is important because I think most people in the SC in the study of Religion moonwalk their way into it basically what happens is we start in a religious community you can't ask a particular question that's really burning for that person and so you back up into the only institution that will have you which in this case happens to be the academy and so that's really how I ended up in the academy my early questions were all around um male sexual orientation actually and

gender and and mystical experience I really wanted to know um what the relationship was if any between um sexual difference and and um orientation and ecstatic religious experience and so I worked on that really for almost two decades interesting yeah and that was a very um in some ways traditional path in the academy it was it it it was we were Really working in the 80s and 90s against a lot of social pressure and a lot a lot of hate and a lot of bigotry frankly and so a lot of the things that people take

for granted today we we fought for in the 80s and 90s and in different terms of course but but certainly we fought for um I happen to be um a straight man U and so I was interested in these questions in a in a kind of heterodox way right um and I have eventually um found my way to the American or California Counter Culture and I wrote a book in ' 07 called es in America and the religion of no religion and when I was writing that book which took many many years um I talked

to lots of people lots of human beings who told me stuff that I knew couldn't happen um but I knew happened uh because I knew these people right and I knew they weren't just telling me stories and so I got really interested in in this anomalous or paranormal realm really Because of talking to people Michael I guess is what I want to say really it's people who converted me to this and it wasn't that I wasn't set up for it earlier I was I was always interested in mystical uh experience and heterodox or heretical forms

of embodiment um so I was set up for this um but um I wasn't interested in this per se until the people started telling me about it and then I started to Realize that we didn't have any way in the academy to really think about it or or or work with it all all we could do is say oh that's an exaggeration or a legend or a hallucination which is another favorite troll yeah um and I was like that that just is lame that just doesn't work um and so I I um worked on the

history or the intellectual history of of all of this and realized that all these words were coined by intellectuals By scientists and academics and and that there was great interest around it in the late 19th early 20th century and then it just went away you know in the 20th century and now it's coming back I think so that's that's a that's a brief story Michael how I got in there is an organic development it does make a lot of sense and I think today you know to to get to the other part of your question

what I try to do today is walk into University or a lecture hall and Talk about these things in the terms that they already know and that they're comfortable with and and I am of the strong conviction that most people actually are not dismissive of this they just don't know how to talk about it right and they don't want to sound like the tabloids and I don't blame them and so what I do is I go in and I just start talking about it in terms of of history and psychology and sociology and you know

Fuko and um Yung and you know Whatever whatever the case might be and they're like oh so that I think on some level it's like oh so that's how you do it yeah and and so I think that's what happens I think most people to to go back to my training and sexuality they're in the closet they're not yeah they're not um this is what a human being is and and and they know that uh and but they just don't know how to talk about it and so I I try to help People talk about

it and by people I mean academics I mean that's the world I live in that's the world I exist in that's where I can affect some kind of change um I and it's not the only world it's not probably the most important world but it happens to be the world that I moonwalked my way many many decades ago yeah I I I like that that image like some some people like you and I cannot help but be out from an early age with our mythopoetic panach and our And our inability to not chase after these

big irresponsible questions I I like I'm the same way I've I've been I've had that seeking questioning wondering disposition from a young age and for me I was I was never I was never quite fed by the available outlets for it you know the vocations I saw people doing the religions I saw people practicing but I had that roing thing that just kept me questioning kept me reading kept me Learning over the years until like I said I found myself in this weird position of talking about it all the time but it makes so much

sense that esselin would be one of the main catalysts for you to really start taking these questions and these topics more seriously because that's just that place is such a condensation of these ideas and people and conversations around all these topics That you've become an expert in and you know I know I know about it from you know Rick tarn's whole era I've talked to him a couple of times and as you as you know he um you know he's this This brilliant scholar and philosopher in his own right and he uh was the director

of I'm not sure his exact title but I just know he was the I don't know director of operations or or whatever for over a decade and you know hosted Terrence McKenna and James Helman and Alan Watts And you know all of these people that you're talking about who are um well I guess you're not talking about them directly but I think a lot of people think of when they think of esselin um and it just makes so much sense that that going into that place and those ideas and those people would really ignite these

ideas in in a very powerful way for for you and I love the way that you put it early on in your new book where it's sort of like whatever this is You use this metaphor of uh lightning flashes on a night landscape that it's like all of these experiences of the Paranormal of near death of high weirdness there's a lot that's different in the particulars but so much that same in the overall archetype of what whatever's happening in the overall truth underneath the images and I love that and and one of the things I

think you Call this out pretty specifically in a way that was a a little bit of an epiphany for me personally that I'd never quite thought about it is that it it almost seems like whatever is responsible for putting the image in front of the experiencer is like a thing in and of itself like that there's this almost this this unseen symbol software that places familiar images in front of the Experiencers I don't know what you call it Mind's Eye and that is such a fascinating idea that that that there could be this almost like

dionic symbol keeper or something that's that's showing just the thing to make sense to the experiencer as they're experiencing it and and that's an idea that's like I don't know it's like the software underneath the software but above the heart but above The hardware um or something I I don't know what how how do you how do you think about that idea with more sophisticated language than what I just used fine you invoked neoplatonism I mean come on oh yeah let's let's go there yeah I mean so I was just a kid who grew up

in Nebraska I grew up at a small town and I got to the Seminary and I started to learn about what they were calling the unconscious and that blew my mind it Just blew up everything because what it implied was that that human beings are driven by forces of which they are not aware and um that was obviously the case with sex male sexual orientation and religious vocation and ecstatic religious experience and that's why I pursued that for so many years um when you get to what what they call the phenomenon today it's obviously deceptive

it's it's not what is there but people hear the word deceptive and They immediately go to Sinister and I'm like no that's not true actually deception is a sign of intelligence it's not a sign of of ill intent it can be can have ill intent but deception is used in biology to reproduce to hide from predators to pray on other things I mean deception is used for all kinds of reasons in the in the natural world and I suspect it's being used here as well and I also you know I work I work with religious

phenomena and I don't believe These things Michael I don't believe that what's appearing is what's really there but I believe that that's what's appearing yeah you know and so there's this just kind of this Paradox where you're taking the appearances seriously but you're not essentially buying into the the the appearances and I think that's what's going on and I think if you look at paranormal phenomena or or or the UFO today you're just going to run into this deception all the time and The knee-jerk reaction is to think that it's all human based it's just

people you know screwing with other people and and creating fraud or disinformation or whatever they're doing and that of course happens but there's something deeper going on that the phenomena itself is and it may not be deceiving Us in the in in the in the way in the intentional way but I think it's speaking to us in the only way it can I don't think it can speak rationally or Or cognitively uh because that's not what it is it's it's it's something some form of Consciousness or awareness that is so beyond any kind of cognition

or sensory capacity that how is this how is it going to talk how is the fisherman GNA talk to the fish right yes yeah yeah um how is the phenomena GNA talk to us and and of course it speaks in symbols and speaks in myths and narratives and so I I just think that's how it that's how it Works that's what it is and so let's do that let's let's use methods and theor that acknowledge this narrative kind of approach to things and aren't always looking for you know material mechanisms yeah you know yeah and

and I think it's I just want to clarify and correct me if I'm wrong on this but this is my understanding of your position um you were saying that you don't believe in these experiences but from from my understanding of your your stance it's That you don't believe the images you believe the ontological yeah the content is what I'm not signing my name to it's like I'll give you a really simple example that talked about before so near-death experiencers will often talk to me and they'll tell me what they saw in the afterlife and what

heaven's like and all this and I can't believe any one of those stories because if I believe that story I can't believe all these other stories I have to dismiss all these other human beings so for me the the the argument from compassion and from a kind of capaciousness is is to acknowledge what this person saw or believes but not myself believe those beliefs yeah I I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs if I can put it that way and um so I'm not I'm not dismissive I'm not the skeptic that's not

what I'm saying but I'm also not the Believer yeah that that totally makes sense and you know one of the things I can't help but think of when when're talking about this invisible piece of software or or to use my term Dion that serves you up just the right image so that you can interact with it and understand it is the Hermes archetype like um I know there's a passage and at some point I I captured the whole thing because it was just one of the most mind-blowing passages that e Even amongst yung's other mind-blowing

passages he talks about the Hermes archetype or I think he calls it the you know the mercurious or whatever um in Psychology and Alchemy and he talks about the multiplicity of ways that this archetype presents itself like this like multi-faced you know you use the word deceptive and that's another word that you could ascribe to this archetype right and I mean he goes down this list Of it's God it's the devil it's the redeeming psychopomp it's the wise old man senic archetype it's you know and and he but he does it in a way where

it doesn't just seem like it's arbitrary and he's using a convenient uh mythopoetic hermeneutical device there and just flumping it all under Hermes like it just it makes so much sense and then if you just think about throughout the the ages the way that that God or archetype was talked about is like the Closest to man he he's the friendliest to man he he's the guide he's the keeper of boundaries it sounds exactly like whatever this nebulous thing that would serve you up just the right piece of imagery is um and speak I would love

to talk more about near-death experiences because that's something you're so um you have so much experience with and that that like this underlying the difference of the particular images yet the consistency of The underlying grammar it it seems to be just a really good example of this thing that we're talking about in general how there there is this you know this outof body thing that happens and then this sort of ascent Motif that happens and then uh meetings with various figures that happen and then you seem to hit this point where you almost go into

this nonu unitive type of place but then you're told nope you're not allowed to Go here yet and then back in you go um I I think that that might be one of the best examples of this of this whole thing I was at Harvard in May for a conference on platonism and there were all these platonist there and um they were talking about the Dion you know the Dion this and the Dion that and it was so refreshing to me because the Dion's not the demon right and as a historian of religions um someone

who Compares religious systems I'm just so aware of That and frankly the Daimon in a neoplatonic sense is way more helpful to to explain what's going on in the UFO phenomena than the Christian oh yeah I mean the Christian demon is frankly silly and not helpful at all and and it's exactly what gets invoked over and over again and there's a part of me that that acknowledges that these are demonic in the sense that they question the relevancy of the worldview that's that's At stake but they're not demonic in the Sinister or or evil sense

and um that's where I just have a huge problem with this um so I think I think the Dion is is but but it's not that I want to assign my name to the Dion either it's not that the neoplatonist had it all right and now all we have to do is become neoplatonists and we'll be fine that is not what I'm trying to say I'm trying to say look there are different moments in in human history and they Have their different interpretations of this and we need to take it all in but we need

to come up with our own reading of it and I think this is what Yung was doing by the way yes he was definitely not a neoplatonist but he definitely wasn't a good Lutheran either he was trying to lift off the off the game the game board as it were and figure out what the whole game is he was trying to figure out that that software or Hardware behind the the display and Um I like you I mean I've I've spent my whole life lecturing in Yung centers and talking to yans and I I've read

tons and tons of Yung I think he was great for for the time I think we just know a lot more now and we have to think different thoughts and say different things and it's not that we're better it's just that we're at a different place we're at a different place in in history and culture yeah yeah and I struggle with this all the time because as I've done a Deeper dive into platonism and you know I've gone I've gone beyond I think where a lot of people go with it where they you know they

go through the broad Strokes they read some of the dialogues they get a sort of overarching idea of what it is like I I man I'm on I mean I'm sure you you've you've gone if you were at that conference I'm sure you heard all manner of things from like people trying to reverse engineer the org and you like like all and I love and Don't get me wrong I love that stuff because and and maybe you feel some of this too as as someone who's decided to go a non or ISM sort of taking

all this stuff seriously yet not necessarily having uh a home to go to or a I mean I guess you probably feel a sense of community because you're with so many other people all the time that are asking these questions having these experiences but there's something in me That yearns for all of the other parts of Orthodoxy other than the Orthodoxy you know what I'm saying like the the sa the sa Community element of it and and that's one of the reasons I've I've become more and more attracted to platonism because it it feels like

it's got all the the pieces in just the places where I want them where it's like it's very very idealism adjacent it's very rational there is a right there is a wrong there is an ontological Truth but it's also somehow greater than what the human mind on its own can comprehend or or apprehend and it's always it very much likes to broadly speaking remove images from from the Divine and I mean there's a lot of nuance to this so I'm going to just cut it off here but yeah so so anyway that that's part of

my attraction to platonism and and that's one of the things that I struggle with Is I agree I was talking about this with Greg Shaw is is I and this is my term not his is that whenever I approach these things like let's take reverse engineering theor for example like like doing some kind of ritualistic practice that's supposed to help you directly commune with with the Divine or whatever it feels larpy to me Jeff like I'm pretending like I'm playing you like like I'm like I'm just pretending to be Something that I'm not and I

think part of that is because I am so removed from that cultural context and to your point earlier it implies that there needs to be some new thing like some new thing in a sort of Terrence mcken and archaic revival kind of way that's growing out of the soil of all that old wisdom but it's you know and Shamanism and and all of this other stuff and I think Yung was a great saint of that I think you're a great saint of that but yet there still Is this sort of I don't know what to

do with it I don't know what to do with this new thing or how to feel at home in it do yeah do you struggle with that oh yeah I struggle a big time with that I you know it's very lonely you know it's there there is there's no community in the sense that I had it when I was a good Roman Catholic right you know it's it's very comforting to believe something um but it's also Very limiting and when I was a young man this is go back to the moonwalk thing I mean I

basically had to choose between a tradition and community and the questions I wanted to ask I couldn't do both I could not have those questions and belong to a community and I knew that that was made very clear to me that wasn't a theoretical thing at all that's a that's just the case and so I chose The questions and and maybe that was wrong you know I I I don't want to presume that or um impose that or suggest that to other people it and when I say that the ACA the academy is a kind

of community it is but it's a contentious messed up Community as well as of course probably all communities are um but at least it's honest and open a lot about a lot of its problems and I and happen to really like that and think that that's a Good thing um but yes I I first of all I don't think you can become a neoplatonist I I think you are are going to fake it and you are going to pre pretend to be one um and I feel the same way about any historical tradition Michael it's

not it's I'm not picking on the neoplatonist I think people pretend to be all kinds of things and it doesn't really work and what I'm trying to say is can't we just be hon honest yeah and can't we acknowledge our Own situation and the way I think about this today is I don't think I will ever have a home or a community I think whatever it is I'm doing first of all it may be wrong okay um secondly it's about the future it's about future Generations it's not about this one I I don't have really

any any faith or any conviction that we're going to get it right in this generation or or that the next Generation's going to get it right or the next one I I just don't think that I think it's about the the far future as it were so that's that's a wager I mean again it could be a wrong wager I could be fundamentally wrong about that and not everybody can do that by the way um some people need a community and a tradition and I understand that but that does not allow for the kinds of

questions that I think need to be asked yeah yeah and you know use that word Lonely and and that's something Yung himself said in you know multiple pretty famous quotes is that like th this this path and I think broadly you know you you and Yung and and myself if I may be so bold are are kind of on that same path that he was on where he was trying to use all the tools available to make sense of these big questions whether those tools were gnosticism and neoplatonism or they were you know quantum physics

as he was Trying to like Square the circle of synchronicity with Paulie and I think that that's the where the real you know progress has to be made is trying to do that to the best of our ability um yet there is this thing that these old kinds of wisdom had that I'm not even sure how to talk about so I like to ask people like you and what I mean specifically is platonists they weren't unscientific but Clearly the scientific method as it exists now did not for them like they they used logic they used

rationality mathematics um and a combination of direct epistemological you know sorts of not or or roads to knowledge but we don't really know what their overall method was how they were you know you read something like the tus let's say and it's just filled with like this Pythagorean mathematical mysticism that in some instances Feels factually inaccurate but of course you're not sure if they're actually trying to posit real real facts or they're trying to just lay out this uh Mythos that really speaks to something deeply myth poetically true however there are instances where they hit

it right on the head so specifically that it's like troubling like for instance they say you know they do this famous thing where they equate each human being with a star and then they they say that Human beings are somehow like human souls are directly related to stars and like descend from stars and then of course you know thousands of years later we learn oh we're literally elementally made of stars um and I'm sure this is something that you had to have thought about pretty significantly is how do you think you know whether we're talking

about platonists or yogis or um any of these more Contemplative rationality based sorts of knowledge acquisition how is it that they were arriving at these truths that in many ways it seems like we're we're just rubbing up against again with quantum physics with this new wave of idealism yeah how do you think about that yeah and I do think I mean that's what I think about today and write about today well I think they stumbled on them because they are it to to be really Blunt about it I mean it's we are star people and

um they of course expressed that and probably knew that in ways that were not scientific they weren't talking about the elements the the you know after carbon that were fused in dying so that's not what they were talking about they were talking about something else um but they still arrived at a position that that is certainly corresponds to or can be made to fit you know a modern Scientific worldview I I suspect that's true because the world is one uh and the inside has to correspond to the outside because it's one it's it's you know

and people are people are cosmic beings and they're still Cosmic beings whether we recognize that or not and and so modern people have the same kinds of experiences as the neoplatonists did but They interpret them or not in very specific cultural cultural ways and this is the problem I have with history by the way or historians is they want to say that some particular experience or set of experiences is is relatively unique to a particular historical Epoch or era well yes but also no it's that it's that both and you were getting at yeah you

know um and so I that's my short answer my my other my other fundamental conviction is that the Modern Sciences have completely transformed the religious imagination and it's simply not possible to be religious or spiritual in a in a rigorous way today without knowing something about quantum mechanics and the Big Bang in evolutionary biology and people are having near-death experiences for example by popping into other dimensions you know they they're they're using non-an geometry whether they recognize it or not and that didn't Exist until the 19th century they're using Darwin whether they recognize it or

not that didn't exist until the 19th centur Cy you know so I and and I don't mean that Evolution didn't exist I don't mean that non- ukian geometry didn't ex I mean those methods and those Sciences were were created in that century and they simply did not exist before that um so to me it's a matter of experience and interpretation Michael yeah I I'll give you I'll give you an example that often comes to my mind there's this amazing passage in Meister eart so it's amazing and he says you know he doesn't say you know

that's Jeff say he says realizing the true nature of of man is like comparing an image of the human or image of man painted on a wall versus us it's just completely different he doesn't use the language of Dimensions or flat land which again you know 1884 Whatever but he could have it it sounds to me exactly like the same experience between a painted surf two-dimensional surface and a three-dimensional or four-dimensional human being existing outside that that two-dimensional surface so he uses the metaphor but he doesn't have the language he has the the theological language

to talk about it but he doesn't have the scientific language right and that's really what I'm trying to say is the langu matters a Lot the historians are correct to to a certain extent but that doesn't mean the experience didn't happen in the 13th century right and in the 19th and in the 21st today yeah yeah I I always used to think before really before encountering this idea that we've sort of been talking around that there there almost is this unseen presence that is influencing the phenomenology of your own experience I I used to think

that oh it's probably the same phenomenology and Then people are interpreting it differently but now I think it's even more complicated than that reading you you and and and you know neoplatonist to some degree that whatever is occurring in the Visionary space is also something you cannot trust because it is not that it's unreal but it's it's mediated by something that we don't understand and we don't even have the ability to unless maybe you have you know a what You would call a flip or some kind of uh initiatory experience that brings you in closer

contact to this almost oracular thing that is feeding you these these images or or whatever you want to call it so it's like just when you think that you might be ah yes the perennialist you know everybody's having the same experience and the putting it through a different cultural lens it's it's even probably more complicated than that but I think this is a good um Opportunity to diverge into that conversation which is the um I just lost my my train of thought there but I um oh yeah yeah initiatory the initiatory experience um in another

podcast you mentioned that you think trauma is required to have experiences like this often not always but usually yeah but I mean that man that sent up that made me think of so many things I I immediately in all caps in my notes wrote Down that there one of the things that I think they may have known in times now now lost in terms of the the the Techni that was actually being done I think they may have had reliable methods for doing initiations that were just the right amount of traumatic that it would induce

these flips or induce these new ways of seeing in with relative safety I mean there are some examples that were not safe you know you Look at some of the ordeal initiations of like Native Americans or something like that and there was a legit chance you would not make it out of those but something like ucus something like a shamanic initiation or a near-death experience um all seem like potentially ways to bring you into this new way of seeing Awakening some new kind of vision let me speak about the going up the same Mountain perennialism

Yeah yeah of course and then I'll I'll I'll talk about this as well um so we're back to Hermes you know and you know what I was one of the things I was trained in in graduate school is hermeneutics which is essentially the her Pro process and the idea of everybody going up the same Mountain by a different path is an old kind of traditionalist or perennialist model I don't think it's true I think what's actually happening is we're Creating different mountains you know so there are different Paths of different mountains that are being constructed

by different cultures however we all share the same Earth you know there's still mountains coming out of the same Human Nature nature and so there's a kind of I think there's a deeper perennialism is what I'm trying to say it's it's always human beings who are doing this but I don't think the religions are different paths up the same amount I just don't um I think they're they're different mountains um but they share the same Sky if and if I can use the the metaphor or Advance it um in terms of trauma basically what I'm

trying to say is if you listen to experiencers there's usually some heavy trauma involved and the near-death experience is a classic example because you don't get a near-death experience without almost freaking dying right I Mean come on it's traumatic by its by definition and a psychedelic state is similar by the way it is really traumatizing ing your brain or your body or the chemistry that that is you and you're not going to get that state by drinking coffee and sitting in your studio in the morning I'm sorry it's not gonna happen right you got to

do something fairly dramatic to your system to induce one of these Altered States and it it doesn't mean that the altered State is reducible to the trauma I'm not saying that but but I think they off and go together and this is why sexuality and gender are so significant there's a lot of sexual trauma there's a lot of gender trauma there's a lot of you know really War um domestic violence uh I mean there are a lot of circumstances in which human beings endure great suffering and go into Altered States and I think those are

I think the Altered States are response in some way to the trauma but I also think it's a it's there's a more going on there as well so I think it's really complicated and this is why I don't I resist this idea that mystical States or Altered States are always moral in in this social sense that we want them to be they're not they they occur in profoundly immoral context and they occur in profoundly aoral context and I So I think morality and social ethics is a different thing um I I I I consider myself

to be a very moral person Michael but I don't reduce or explain Altered States through these particular moral values or social ethics and that's difficult for some people to hear because they want they want the Altered States to be about goodness and you know being nice to one another and they're just not they're just Not yeah um so I don't know I don't know if that helps I I think I think a lot of religious practices are essentially ways of inducing trauma and not killing the person yeah I mean people don't people forget but the

basic method through most of Christian history was to meditate on a guy you know being crucified right right right um that was not a pleasant experience by the way you know and the more Gore and the more pain and Suffering the better but not too much because then you're going to kill the person and and so sometimes people actually develop the Stigmata the wounds on their hands and and their side and their feet I mean so trauma I think is like really important you don't get the resurrection without the crucifixion doesn't happen right doesn't happen

uh to speak in Christian terms you don't get the Buddhist Awakening without realizing that all Things are impermanent or were suffering either um and you so you can go through different systems and you can find the trauma that is expressed in different ways the other thing I'll say is our ancestors I can speak fairly confidently to this suffered a lot more than we do you know they didn't have Tylenol but they didn't have anesthesia either and they died quite Young and they lived very violent and very suffering lives lives for the most part and we

are largely protected from that in the in the modern West through medicine and drugs that Dole pain and as a result our our life expectancy is going up but I think our our level of trauma and suffering overall has probably gone down and and so we have fewer religious experiences and so I think we become more secular we become more materialist Oriented so I think these things are related I think if you're in a culture that that essentially suffers or or or is traumatized more it's it's more obvious to to people involved that there are

other dimensions and other realities because they they see them they experience them right right yeah yeah I don't and I don't know that's not a happy thought I'm not proposing that as but maybe there is a reverse relationship between Health and and Altered States yeah yeah and you know I think that that's another great Insight of Yung right the tree that grows to Heaven has to have roots that reach down to Hell and that's been you know that's been my own experience with Altered States I mean that's certainly what iasa was like for me iasa

was 90% torment and what am I doing I'm I literally feel like I'm offering myself up to Demons in in the not neoplatonic Way I literally feel like I'm dying this is a horrible experience the the you know the Mind's Eye visuals are like being in a fractal washing machine of chaos and there's just there's nothing good about this and that but that did and and you know this is not my only psychedelic experience but of all of those experiences that is the only one that on the third night of this Retreat that I was

doing I had a very very Clear Vision of what felt like an Encounter with a very wise senx like presence and and this was actually just before you know reading books like Souls code and coming into contact with ideas like the platonic Dion but now it is one of those experiences I look back on and I was like that might have been I might have gotten to the spot where the where you know the the Image Maker is the keeper of that threshold lives and he's like okay it seems like you need something Like this

to justify what you're going through here you go um and you know speaking of writing things in all caps that was my reaction to that experience was immediately when we got out of the maloa that night to write it in all caps like this happened never doubt that this happened because you know I know anybody who's had these experiences knows enough time goes by and it sort of becomes this dreamy nebulous Emeral thing like I Don't know if that really happened well health comes back right yeah you you become a I mean some people my

joke people ask me all the time about my like my quote unquote spiritual experiences I say you know I'm kind of a spiritual dud and you know they look at me and they're like what and I'm like no I I'm actually usually pretty happy and healthy and whole which means I'm very thick which means I'm you know keeping this stuff out you know so I can do X Y and Z and uhu Antoine fav once told me I you know I spent some time with Antoine and at esen by the way French scholar of esotericism

and he um he once talked about we were talking about this and he he described the body as a spacit and its whole purpose is to keep things out right right and and I'm like yeah that sounds right and so when you when you compromise or slice through the Space suit you know Critters get in but there yes they're they're in they're in Spa outer space as it were but that's not what the space is for you know the body and the brain are there to filter out reality not to give you access to real

this is Don Hoffman obviously yeah I I just think Don's right and I think Antoine was right with his space suit metaphor yeah yeah and this gets into some really fun territory and this is another thing about neoplatonism Particularly th though not not not particular to I amus per se but he does talk about it directly I read um Shaw's book uh theg and the Soul really recently because like I mentioned I just spoke with him and there's quite a bit of attention paid to this idea that you know what what you would call in

the in the East you know subtle bodies or I mean I guess it's the same in the west it's just different if you're using the Greek it's it's the okima panuma or Whatever versus the you probably know what the Sanskrit version is but I don't shma sharir cool cool yeah and you that's just yet another one of these pieces of uh trans transcultural knowledge that you know like I asked you before where how did they how did they come to this conclusion that I just don't know and I'm so fascinated to know and I so

badly want want to know but just the fact that They all did seemingly separate I mean yeah go ahead again I think they they did because they're human I mean it's like why why did people in the second century breathe air and people in the 21st century well it's because that's how the lungs work you know and the subtle body models first of all they're all different and yet they're also related in some way and so that's that gets us into this Um you know another way to talk and I'm sorry I'm coughing I'm just

coming off covid um there's something called the cultural Source hypothesis as as opposed to the experienced Source hypothesis and basically what the cultural Source hypoth culture source hypothesis says is it's it's all about culture it's all about history you know the the subtle body in neoplatonism is Not the subtle body in in uh ad vitto vant or some form of Hinduism much less in China or Japan or or wherever um but what the experience Source hypothesis says is no the um the nature of religious beliefs and models is based on human experience and it's the

same everywhere and always and yet it's also different because it's mediated through culture and language and so it's kind of a both and approach whereas the cultural Source Hypothesis is very much an either or approach it's all it's all language or culture and this is why I keep saying I'm really for the both and I I'm I'm not interested in the either or um so and it's so so this isn't an it's not a rejection of critical theory or cultural constructivism it's a no let's take that in and let's make that part of our model

but let's not let's not stop stop there right right yeah one one of the another big woe moment for me was I heard You I mean how I have I absolutely have to bring up the UFO UAP phenomenon to you because you just have such interesting unique things to say about it and one of the interesting unique things that you said I think this was in another podcast I don't recall for sure is you were actually drawing comparisons between the subtle body or outof body experiences or soulflight experiences and the UFO phenomenon yeah yeah yeah

go ahead yeah please well it's That's just that's part of the literature that this Flying Saucer and the Soul are related I mean we see that over and over again in the history of religions and that's something that gets alighted or or or not talked about today because we for some reason our cultural Mythos wants them to be threats and wants it to be about National Security but it's actually much more complicated than that and it definitely involves the world of The dead and and the Soul if you get if you scratch the surface and

kind of get into it in a broader cultural or historical way let's scratch the surface let let's let's perhaps go even deeper than than scratching because it's it's one of those things that I know so many I just did a a more one of my first more UFO UAP based podcasts with an author who who writes about it directly um and you know of course I've skirted up against that topic many times but it was The first time I really dove into it deeply and it's really doing pretty well and I don't know for sure

what it is that captures people's curiosity so much about that phenomenon but but I think that it's well I I think it's a few different things I think there's the sort of dark appeal that look we really have evidence of this threatening other it's not just made up there it's really out there but then It's also a path to just the opposite like a pronic kind of oh they're here to save us it's it's Angels it's it's higher life forms it's uh I don't know pleadians or whatever but whatever it is it's it's something like

I think we're P the point where you can I think we can just dispose with the idea that these things can be easily dismissed as uh you know things that crazy people think they saw or whatever you know We're far beyond that at this point but that but still there are so many questions you know and I wonder how you parse all of that because I'm very interested and open to what you just said yet you also have the Lou alzando of the world who just published a new book who is going down this road

of it is a national security threat there are hard things out there flying around crashing that we've recovered like how do you how do you balance all of that Personally so I don't um first of all lose book is complex if you read the first page he talks about the title imminent and how you know that can be followed by the word threat but it also can be followed by some kind of escaton or some kind of theological meaning or some kind of trans of our worldview so I don't I don't read Lou as just

saying one thing um I think I think he himself questions that that physicalist or or National security Paradigm I think um the UFO is so popular and so in the news because it's so empirical I mean you can get the thing on radar you can study Landing tracks you can you know um it has a very physical um presence and I think because we live in an age of Science and Technology we equate physical with real okay but it also has this these paranormal aspects and and people who Dig very far into the research realize

this very quickly um but that doesn't make it into the media Michael because it just messes up the threat the security and science Paradigm it just throws it into disarray immediately but I I want it to be thrown into disarray I think it should be thrown into disarray I think it's really confusing and it's the way I put it is a human being is essentially a splitter of reality we perceive the External world as a set of objects and we perceive ourselves as some kind of interior subjects so we have a subjective and an objective

um Dimension by our very nature and that is fundamentally wrong that is not what reality is and the UFO is fundamentally objective but it's also fundamentally subjective so it violates this cognitive and sensory system that we are in ways I find very familiar um but also very helpful and Useful um so I H I happen to love the topic um and the way I balance those two paradigms is I say well that's us that's the human being who's splitting this into uh an empirical physical objective reality and a subjective uh interior um um unreal reality

that's that's the human being that's not what's actually going on so that's that's what I do with it and somebody like Lou alzando um I love L Alando I love these are good people these these retire hired military Professionals and these science they're good people they're they're using their skill set to understand what they can understand and I'm trying to use my skill set to understand what I can understand it's not theirs you know and it's not that I think they're wrong and it's it's that I think that they're what they're saying is inadequate that's

part of the puzzle how much space do you reserve for the scop hypothesis Well certainly the intelligence Community is using the UFO and using the phenomena to hide whatever it's hiding I can't speak to that because I don't have any classified knowledge Michael um and and if that's what you mean by scops I just don't know and so I again I try to stay in my lane and I try to say what I can say historically and comparatively as you probably know there are two models of the UF one is that it all begins post

World War II you know late 1940s but the other model is it's been around as far as we can see back I'm definitely of the latter camp and so when people tell me it's all about the CIA or the intelligence I'm like what do you do with all these well there was no CIA or there was no I mean what do you what do you do with that and and of course they don't do anything with it they they don't they deny it or they whatever they do I don't know what they do do so

I Just think it's obvious that it goes back in human history and is a global phenomena and it's not that I I I again it's not that I think that the religious interpretations are correct um but there's certainly different ways of engaging with the phenomenon for sure for sure yeah and by scop I I mean some kind of concerted effort to misdirect or Opus skate or like like to what you were saying like use the Phenomenon as a cover for something that they're actually doing or that they actually know or that in a way where

they're pretending because there's still this really weird push and pull like with Lou alzando for instance there was I just saw on YouTube I didn't watch it but apparently the Pentagon has made has made a counter statement saying like some of these claims that he's making are not true so it's like what like it's like on one hand he seems to have Because I I've seen him say I have permission to say this I don't have permission to say that yet there's also the Pentagon who he apparently had permission from saying no it's not true

so is that you know it's like who who's being who who's not being forthright here who who's the one that's throwing mud on the lens you know what I know from my own institutional experience is there's no they there you know there there are multiple people involved in I Mean as in thousands if not 10 thousands yeah and they're going to and different agencies and different individuals are going to have different motivations and different claims and so again I don't try to I don't try to parse those out Michael because I do not have access

to that material what I have access to is the historical religious material so I can speak to that um and it it far transcends and predates any of this Stuff yeah so I'm like and you know one of the things I often say is that the Paranormal has always been weaponized this is not unique to the US uh if you look at the history of of what we might call Magic or or Clairvoyance it's always been used to hunt and kill animals or to go to war or to you know seduce someone else it's it's

always been used it's always been weaponized I think this is behind the fear of Sai frankly you know if this Is a Steven Browdy argument if Sai can be used for positive ends and it can be it can also be used for negative ends yeah and so there's this natural human fear of it that I think is well grounded um but also kind of naive because people have these abilities sorry they just do you can you can moralize it all you want but it's still the case you know so that's that's kind of my response

to it was there a moment or series of moments where you felt Like the preponderance of evidence really suggests that these things are real because I love that you're just blunt about it like sorry that this is real I've seen you say sorry levitation real like you know these other things that's that's what I love about it too I mean it's like sorry it's the case and I even like I mean Lou says this a bit but somebody like colum kellerer or James latky says it more not only is it real it's entirely physical and

it's Entirely paranormal and if you take either of those things off the table you are not talking about the phenomenon you're talking about whatever you want to talk about but you are not dealing with the reality of the situation yeah yeah so when I hear that I'm like you go you go get them you know yeah that's right but but in your own case was there was there something that made you that flipped you so to speak oh That's well I've talked to tons of people um who who work on this and I don't know

I don't I I can't locate one place Michael yeah I first dealt with the UFO phenomena with the esen book by the way because believe it or not the counterculture is filled with this stuff and there are novels and conferences and I mean it's just everywhere you cannot talk about the 1970s and 80s without talking about this if you're talking about religious Undercurrents um so I first dealt with it then and it was obvious to me that people were having these experiences I guess I didn't think about the empirical reality of it you know to

the same extent I do now yeah what are some of your favorite stories from you know you said you're in the you're in that ladder Camp of really believing that this phenomenon we're seeing today or at least a subset of this phenomenon we're seeing today goes Back way into history what are some of your favorite well attested historical instances of of high weirdness well the ones that are most developed in the literature is the the fact apparitions of 1917 in Portugal and Ezekiel you know which is what fifth sixth Century BCE I mean I mean

and these show up again and again and if you read if you read Ezekiel chapter one and two I mean it's It's so clear this is a UFO event you know in Ancient Ancient uh Israel and I mean he's even abducted I mean it's all there you know and it's really weird and but you see the same kinds of motifs the wheels within wheels and the abduction and the Visionary and the the cosmic human being you see all this again in the modern accounts and so there it's 2500 years yeah you know um the fattima

uh apparitions if you if you're not familiar with them were six apparitions That happened on a single on the same day every month for six months starting in May and ending in October and if you look at that those events carefully the children there's three children very small young children who had these apparitions or these Visions they didn't even say it was the Blessed Virgin early on you know it was a woman in a ball of light landing on a tree and and it was weird it was super weird and as the months go on

it gets disciplined Or shaped into a Maran apparition because that's what Catholics did um but even as a Maran Apparition it's it's an extremely strange set of events that don't really fit in to the Maran Catholic worldview um and so that's what I mean that's what I love about this stuff it it kind of fits but it really doesn't and and when you look at that that tension to me that makes it more real and and more legitimate and um I would never say that the Maran Apparition is a UFO event but I also wouldn't

say that the modern UFO events or you know Ancient Aliens or or ancient Aston I wouldn't say that you know because they're all these are all interpretations and they really don't work at the end of the day yeah the the Extraterrestrial hypothesis works for some things but not other things right yeah um so I I want to as I I keep saying I want to keep it all on the table and understand these different Mythologies that that wrap around it but I also again I don't believe the particular mythologies or the particular belief systems yeah

for sure yeah the thing that is just so I don't know ve vexing to me is that you know you read something like y yong's take on it that that that it's sort of this emerging well he he didn't know what it was right right he was completely puzzled right right yeah like an Emerging mythology and in a lot of ways he was saying exactly what we're saying right it is something I'm not saying it's a projection ontologically speaking it's something but we're projecting an an emerging mythology yeah onto this thing collectively yeah and when

I read that I'm like that is that is it but you but at the same time you hear the L alzando stories about stuff and Hangers or whatever version of that and it's it just it it complicates things in a way That yeah yeah so if they haul the bodies out and the craft I think I'll change my tune right right yeah I mean come on but the point is is that they have not and we always hear about people who heard or people that saw something have told someone else this and I know as

a historical researcher the number one rule is I have to site my sources right and you Michael have to be able to go to the same sources that I'm citing and if You can't I can't why would you believe me right you know and so I so I think again I think what someone like Lou alzando is doing or these these retired military people are doing is entirely legitimate and they're just telling us the truth that they can't site their sources for very I classified reasons um but as a historian of religions I'm very familiar

with that I'm very familiar with that that that need of secrecy or or or Esotericism and um I'm very suspicious of it but so I think so are they at the end of the day is what I'm trying to say I don't again I've sat with these people I've talked to them they're good people I'm I'm not questioning their integrity or their honesty in the least um I just think it's more complicated yeah it's way more complicated than that last question on this on this bit but I'm I'm always curious to to see how people

who Have thought deeply about this topic think about this question what is your sense on why now why why now after so much demonization have all of these people who are extensions of the the government though they have severed their direct ties or whatever you know why why are they being allowed to I think again I I belong to I belong to Big institutions you can't keep a secret Long you you you can keep it for a while you can keep it for a few decades but you can't you can't permanently keep secrets like this

and and my my other thing you know why now I get asked this a lot by the way I actually don't think the phenomena has increased or or decreased I think the cultural uptake has increased or decreased so I I think these experiences happen as much in the Amazonian Basin as they do in New Mexico um but what gets reported and what gets picked up in in the culture is is very different than what actually happens and I I'll give you I'll give you an example take the near-death experience and by the way the other

answer to your question is technology yeah yeah okay and the near-death experience is a really good example so I think people human beings have been having near-death experiences for as far as we can see back but guess what they Died you know and they and they didn't come back and tell their story after after the development of biomedical technology got to a certain point say in about 1960 or 70 people could go pretty far into the death process and we could pull them back back and guess what they did they told stories of what they

were seeing and experiencing and enough of those stories collected and it became the near-death experience in 1975 because of a book by The way um and so I think it's publication it's te it's bio it's technology it's the culture is ready for this but the culture is not ready for it you know what most people don't know about the near-death literature is that it was heavily uh rejected by fundamentalist Christians and the reason is nobody goes to hell yeah okay that's a problem that's a Big problem and this this Flying Saucer or UFO thing is

also a big problem theologically you know and so the question I get asked a lot is or I I actually invoke it I don't even get asked this do you baptize an alien and my answer is no and there's two reasons one is first of all won't let you SEC the SEC but the second reason is do not reduce the phenomena to your own worldview do not do That and baptism is a great way of just saying oh you're a creature of God you know Jesus died for you let's baptize you into my worldview let's

make you a good whatever you know I'm like no that is actually not what's going on here the this phenomena is here to challenge your worldview not to have you return to it that that sounds like the beginning of a good satirical piece of sci-fi where there's like two aliens that get baptized into competing religions that Hate one another and then now it's just as bad as it was before except we have super powerful aliens who both equally believe that they're that they're saved Under the Umbrella of some yeah that that's that's a funny idea

um yeah I mean near near-death experiences is just such that I mean I think it's like that and the UFO phenomenon those are two topics that if you look at the the numbers on YouTube like people cannot get enough of n stories and or enough of UFO stuff but again I think it's because they they shatter our our our religious worldviews our our of our ancestors and I think people are ready for a new world frankly and they don't know what that is I'm not saying that naively I don't know what that is either but

we need a new worldview clearly to to Encompass all of this absolutely yeah yeah what are some of the most unique or maybe not unique but I guess compelling near-death experience stories that that you that Are your go-tos there's a couple that I took note of and there there's one I wanted to run by you to see if you had heard of from uh from Antiquity that I heard about I think in the last probably six months on an amazing um have you heard of The Secret history of Western esot terorism podcast well I know

the book but or I know a book with that title or like that title but no I don't know the I don't listen to podcast like I don't have time I really don't have time um why I'm I'm completely blanking he he's a middle middle list was a priest at Deli wrote a bunch of biographies well there's there's of course you know most people know Plato's Cave but what they don't know is that the myth of er right which person in the same same te same platonic text and the myth of ER is a near-death

experience story you know I mean that's what it is um so I Mean that's again 2500 years ago right I don't I don't know if you are aware this but you know I wrote I co-wrote a book with a near-death experiencer named Elizabeth croh and so that's the experience I know the best because I I know Elizabeth really well and and we spent two and a half three years writing a book together I mean of course I know her story um so I mean I can talk about Elizabeth's case but there's so many of them

you Know I think that's part of their power is it's so common yeah I I was trying to think of Plutarch by the way Plutarch was was the um story and the myth of yeah that I mean that is such an immensely important um piece of cultural evidence that this is something that is not some kind of artifact of you know modern medical technology or or something like that that this is something that's goes back to time immemorial but one of the Things I yeah go ahead I'm Sor I'm sorry I mean one of the

things though about the myth of Earth it's also about reincarnation yeah and this is the problem with near-death experiences I mean you know I've been to Virginia and I can tell you the office Bruce Grayson used to have had a whole file wall on near death experiences and you walked 40 feet to Jim Tucker's office and there was children who remember previous lives right and I'm Like okay which is you know which is it is it this one life model or this this multiple life model and of course I asked that rhetoric Al but no

people don't put those literatures together right they they want to pretend that the near-death literature is distinct from the children who remember previous lives and it's not it's not distinct that's why they're in the same uh set of offices or were you know yeah um so this this Plutarch story um I Wanted to see if you had heard this one so it's it's a story that he tells and he specifically presents it as a logos so not he he says this is a logos but it's so Sensational that I fear that you will think it's

a methos when I tell you but this is a logos um so for so for people listening he's saying this is true so what he says is there's this man he gives his name I don't remember the name but there's a man who is just this Nero well like he he uh wasted all his Money became kind of just this Petty scumbag and so much so that um an oracle said that he won't he won't do better until he meets death or something like that so he ends up having this like catastrophic injury where he

like Falls and like seemingly almost like like breaks his neck or something and then boom goes out of his body like classic near-death experience stuff starts experiencing Cosmic Ascent starts and this is one of the things that Really got my attention because I know that this is in more contemporary very near-death stories a lot um and and out of body stories a lot it specifically says that he had a single omnidirectional sense and right away I was like okay that's interesting and that gives more Credence to the idea that this might be real and then

he starts he and then he he he starts feeling like he's basically float like floating almost on a uh as if on a ship Or something but he he recognizes that he is spherical at this point and um the only thing there's the flying saucer by right right right um and the only thing that he recognizes are the stars but he's seeing the stars in their sort of like hyper Cosmic luminescent emanating kind of form that we normally don't see and then he meets the the psychopomp figure shows up and starts you know basically guiding

him and they refer to it Ason um and then later on they kind of draw a correlation between the Dion and Hermes as the psychopomp but um but then they get into this whole like um very again familiar sounding thing where he's surrounded by other um Souls that are basically going through this process and some of them are not able to go beyond a certain point some of them go in One Direction some of them go in another Direction and then there's this whole really interesting sublunary sort Of Mythos that goes on where there's like

a um he has a very similar Vision to uh the three Fates where there's like a like a central point where all this light is pouring out of this point and he has the um basically has the sense that this is like Visions this is dreams this is uh Providence pouring down onto the Earthly realm um and the other thing that was so interesting is he gets to this point where he can't go any further because he Realizes he's attached to a cord that is still stuck to his physical body and he's basically told like

you're actually not dead you got to go back and then his Dion actually calls him a different name and he's like that's not my name and he's like it is now and then he goes back down so the the the um the Oracle prophecy becomes true where he does this thing again that all these near-death experiencers do where they're like a different person when they go back their Idea of what's important is totally different what reality is so so I loved that story and I've I've listened to that podcast like five or six times because

there's so many interesting things that I hear in stories from people like you where I'm like I think I heard that in this Plutarch story I got to go back and listen again um so yeah I love that one well that's what I mean by it goes way back I and so I I just don't I don't Find the arguments convincing at all that the nde or the UFO or whatever we want to talk about is is a modern contemporary phenomenon of course it is as well but it it also goes back you know millennia

yeah do do you have any sense that this oh I'm just realizing we have to wrap up in a few minutes here but um we're talking around this idea of kind of getting used to these ideas and these ideas absorbing into the Zeitgeist as Something more than just these weird phenomena that just happen sometimes do do you have any sense that there's real progress being made like you're inside of Academia are you seeing the tones on these things shift gradually or is it still pretty like a long road in your mind it's a long road

um I think there is progress in the sense that particularly younger people do want to work on this and they Understand that it's not um just made up or hallucinatory but you know they're up against a a lot of institutional pressures to you know be normal as it were and to just talk about society and and inner relations and politics and this kind of thing so there's a lot of pressure to to normalize the subject I would say um but again I think that's always been the case and I think it the weirdness that you're

referring to it's Always only weird in relationship to one's worldview right right and some worldviews it's not so weird at all um but I also think it's intend to be weird and I think we need to deal with the weirdness is trying to get our attention and this means it's has something to do with what we call the imagination too it's it's mediating itself through our imaginations and I think what we do in our culture is we just dismiss the imagination as the imaginary right we we See it as a producer of fantasy and not

a medium of Revelation to to be specific about it and you know the story I tell in the new book is that I invited all these people to elen years ago and I asked them two things one to come with a crazy story and the other to come with a theory of the imagination that can make that story meaningful well they all came with a crazy story nobody came with a theory of the imagination Nobody so that's where we're at you know and um I think what we need is a is a new theory of

the imagination that can take these things seriously but not literally to be to be blunt about it right right like am Mundus imaginalis corbon y you know yeah I mean that's a whole another conversation Corban it's too spiritual it's Too this this is where the UFO thing comes back in it's got to be real really physical and it's got to be really mental at the same time and you know Corban didn't believe in the literal Incarnation by the way oh yeah he was a Dost right yeah yeah he rejected it and um I think that's

again that's the theology but it's it's a the it's theologically significant that he denied the physicality of the phenomena and wanted to emphasize this Mundus Imaginalis or this middle imaginal world and at least a lot of the experiencers I work with they don't like the imaginal Michael because it doesn't it doesn't affirm the the physical nature of what they're what they're experiencing yeah I can see that but but I think as you I I've I've personally been able to warm up to the idea that the imaginal is not this but equally real and that on

Some tertiary level it probably is the same thing on a sort of you know yungan PA sort of pre preal or physical level there probably is this unifying reality beneath what manifests as physical or yeah that's the dual aspect monism you know I talk about a lot and but I don't I think cor bounds complicated the am imaginal is the imaginal is better than the imaginary for sure yeah but yeah well my friend I know we wanted To wrap up around 11:30 so let's do it um really appreciate your time um and and thanks for

battling the cough I appreciate it yeah I'm sorry I'm coughing so much but that's just the nature of a cough I I'll deal with it in the editing as best I can um and I'll give the people a heads up that I'm not I'm not censoring I'm not censoring forbidden material I'm no no you're not well well thank you and I will definitely gladly suggest everybody pick Up your new book and and I mean you have so many books it's like I'm I'm really excited to honestly dive more into your work because you've got so

much and I'm I'm loving everything I've read so far good