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Diana Pasulka on Religion, Atheism, Heidegger, Jung, and the Dark Night of the Soul #DisTOEsure
May 19, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?
Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
Brief announcement. Some people requested to talk on a one-hour monthly group call, either asking questions or presenting their ideas to me slash others, so a Patreon tier has been opened up for that purpose. The first call will be limited to around 10 people, and it will be June 1st, 2022, for the MetaField Theorist tier. That's patreon.com slash KurtGymungle.
As with all the Toll Podcasts, you can click on the timestamp in the description to skip this intro. Today's guest is Diana Walsh Posolka. Diana Posolka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. She's also the author of American Cosmos, which explores the connection between religion and technology, while also disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society
believe that the phenomenon has some non-terrene reality behind it. In this episode, we focus heavily on religion and philosophy, a rather technical dive into certain philosophies, as well as how us humans deal with unexplainable experiences. My name is Kurt Jaimungal and I'm a filmmaker slash podcaster
slash person investigating theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective but as well as understanding the philosophies of consciousness and what role consciousness has to fundamental reality. Recently there's been a video released on this channel called a crash course on theoretical physics which was the longest time that I've spent on any single video on this channel. If you're interested in Salvatore Piaz's ideas on quantum gravity or extra dimensions or what it means when a physicist
then do consider watching that as it's the lesson that I wish I had when I was going to university. By the way, my background is in mathematical physics, and the math in this video is aimed at the high school level. There are plenty of myths in physics that are dispelled there as well, as well as general tips on learning mathematics and physics. Feel free to share that to someone who's interested in physics and mathematics. This work was only able to be done because of Brilliant and the patrons,
Now with regard to Brilliant, they're the sponsor of this episode. Brilliant is a website and an app that has interactive learning experiences with regard to math, science, and engineering. They have lessons on information theory, on group theory, and special relativity. Group theory, by the way, is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard models
Quote-unquote internal gauge symmetries are u1 x su2 x su3 and so on. At some point soon I'll be speaking to Chiara Marletto on constructor theory, and that is heavily predicated on information theory. And so I took Brilliant's course, and it made it extremely lucid why the formula for entropy is the way that it is. Visit brilliant.org slash toe to get 20% off the annual subscription.
I recommend you don't stop before at least four lessons, and I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you now can comprehend subjects you previously had a difficult time grokking. Now, if you enjoy witnessing and engaging in real-time conversation with others on the topics of consciousness, psychology, physics, religion, then check out the description for a link to the theories of everything Discord and subreddit.
Professor, why don't you go over what American Cosmic is? And I believe you said that you have
change from being a non-believer in the quote unquote phenomenon to taking more of a stance of an agnostic believer. So what's responsible for that change? Sure. So I started the research into this. I'm a professor of religious studies. And just to give your listeners an understanding of what we do in religious studies, because a lot of people think we're like ministers and stuff. We're not.
So we're academics and scholars and it's an interdisciplinary field. So we come at religion with different tools like basically archaeology, sociology, history, you know, whatever we can use to understand the impact and effects of religion on populations. And my field has been Catholic history and looking at
Basically Catholic history, right? European Catholic history. When you say Catholic history, here's another thing that your listeners should know is that that's huge. You know, there are billions of Catholics all over the world. And so, you know, one person can't know all of that history. So we focus as well. So we're really focused generally. I've been looking at extraordinary things within Catholic history. And in Catholic history, there are saints who are said to have levitated
And by located and things like that. So I've been looking at that I've been looking at dogmas and Catholic history had dogmas of religion are formed, and then go away. And so these are the things that I've been doing almost my whole life, and certainly as a professor.
After writing a book about the dogma of Purgatory, which is a belief in Catholicism, which is a place where souls go after they die, they don't go to hell, but they also don't go to heaven. So they go to this place called Purgatory, where they purge their sins supposedly, and then, you know, then they're one with God. So this is a belief that and a practice that was within Catholic history for a long time. So I did a survey of this and
You're right, I was an atheist with respect to UFOs, never thought of them, never believed in them. I was, as many people were, on the edge of scoffing at people who said, oh, I saw a UFO, you know, it's like, right, you really saw a UFO. And so, no, I never ever thought I would be doing this kind of study.
But what happened was that in 2011, in 2012, I had been finished with this book and moving on to some new research in Catholic history, obviously. But what I had was I had been going through archives, which are really old libraries of things from like hundreds of years ago, and I'd been putting together basically reports. Catholics have always taken great notes, and they have records and
They have chronicles and things like that from a thousand years ago or more. And so I'd been looking at these and I was making a note basically of things that I couldn't really fit into, basically that were strange in my opinion. I thought, what are these things? So we're talking about orbs of light, things that are aerial phenomena, orbs that penetrate walls, you know, things that
They were usually part of the Catholic hierarchy. They were nuns or brothers, scholars.
What was it about these reports in particular that stood out? At this point, I was just focused on
What happened to the Catholic doctrine and practice of Purgatory? Prior to the 1960s, you could go to any Catholic church and there would be a place where you would pray for souls in Purgatory. And that's just not the case now. And in fact, if you asked your friends who are Catholic, hey, what about Purgatory? They wouldn't know what you were talking about. So I was looking at why did this dogma disappear, basically? And so when I was looking at these reports, I would come to reports of
Basically, here's one that I had in my book on Purgatory. It was in the 1800s, and it was this nun in France, and she would continually see an orb of light come through, penetrate her cell wall where she lived.
and basically kind of hang out. I thought you meant her cell walls. How could she see that? Oh my gosh, this is truly strange. That would be really weird. Yeah. No, where she was, she was in a convent. And so this ball of light would come and she was afraid of it. And she'd tell the people in her convent and nobody really believed her first. Then finally the mother superior came and stayed the night in her room. And she saw also,
So they interpreted this as a soul from purgatory and then they did it. They prayed it away. They tried to pray it away. And so these are the kinds of reports that I was identifying in all of these, these, um, you know, lots of different like chronicles, you know, these kinds of sources. It was unsuccessful. They're praying away. Was their prayer unsuccessful? That's a good question. Was it, it apparently was. So what's successful or unsuccessful? It appears to be cause there was no more report of it.
So I assume that it was successful, I think. Yeah. So, okay. So, um, yeah. So I had a list of these things and I didn't include them in my Purgatory book, just one or two of them. Cause I thought, well, the frameworks are so strange for, you know, how people interpreted these things. And I didn't quite understand what to do with this big list of, of reports. So I was going to move on to another book.
And I happened to show a friend of mine these reports and I said, what do you think of this stuff? And the friend looked at them and said, they look like Steven Spielberg movies, you know, like UFOs. And I thought, that's crazy. It just so happened that there was a, in my town, there was a UFO conference. So I went to the conference and I listened to people who had experiences with aerial phenomena.
And so it sounded so much like what I've been studying that I decided to turn my attention to making kind of like this comparison.
which is not, you're not supposed to do it in my field, but I did it anyway. I wanted to see if there was kind of this continuity between these reports from historic, you know, history back at least Catholic history to today. And that's how I started. Now, of course, the book became completely different than I had intended. So that's how I started. Now, the book itself, what happened when I got into the research,
was that I didn't just find out information about people who had these experiences. I also found out that there were secret programs that our government was engaged in. This is before it came out in the New York Times and I met them and I followed them around and they actually invited me on excursions like to New Mexico
to find debris from crashed saucers and things like that. I mean, it was pretty wacky. I thought it was really strange. And I was still an atheist when I was writing the book. It wasn't till the very end. This took me a few years, right? It took me years to get through. And we're now in 2022. In 2019, the book was published. It was done in late 2017. And so how many years is that? That's like, you know, six years of my life that I spent
And during that time period, I went from moving from an atheist and a scoffer to what the heck is going on here. Agnostic. What are beliefs? Okay. So in our field, so beliefs, if you ask a different, like if you ask a philosopher, they're going to have a different definition. But beliefs in our field are basically practices and behaviors and expectations of
Basically phenomena like events that are going to happen like I have a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Okay, now beliefs don't actually they can or they cannot correspond with what we call objective reality. So tomorrow, the sun will most likely rise and then my belief will be true, but it doesn't necessarily have to be true. So it's like I can have a false belief. So in our field, that's how we define beliefs.
So you said that it's practice, so some form of action, but also expectations. So the expectation to me sounds cognitive, whereas the other one sounds embodied. And does that mean that one can have a belief and not know what their belief is? Oh, definitely, you can have unconscious beliefs. Yeah. I'm sure you've heard some people say this, that atheists, at least the well behaved ones are not
Okay, so, all right.
Let's first figure out what we mean by religion and theism and things like that. For people who study religion, when we think of somebody who is, say, a well-known atheist like Dawkins,
We think that he doesn't actually, he's not had a good religious studies course, right? And this is why we think that. Because when we start by teaching undergraduates what religion is, we start by saying what you think, first of all, religion is a made up term, okay? Some, there are some societies that don't even have a term for religion, okay? A lot of indigenous spiritualities don't even think about religion. So religion is something that was created
in order to identify something. Now, generally, the people that created this term, these people came from European culture. So to them, religion looked like Christianity. Okay. So Christianity, what are the components of it? Well, you have like a God, and you have Jesus, right, this person.
And you've got these sets of beliefs and practices, which by the way are very, very different from one another. There are over, I believe there are over 10,000 denominations of Christianity. So that's a lot. And they look very different from one another. So one of the exercises that I have in my class is I show students a video of an Ethiopian mass, which is like a service, a church service. And then I show them,
But I don't tell them what it is. I say, look at this. And then I show them another service. It's a Southern Baptist service. And I say, are these two services similar? And they say, no, they're so different, right? One has like incense and chanting and the other has, you know, someone's talking and people kind of praying and
And they look very different. And so I say these, these are both Christian denominations. This is Christianity right here. And it's hard for them to believe because they look so different. So if we're talking about religion, there are some religions like Buddhism that have no idea of a God, right? There's no God like a Christian God in Buddhism. And even certain denominations of Buddhism, they look very different from one another.
Zen or Chan Buddhism looks way different than Thai Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism. OK, so all right. So the question that you have is, again, let's talk about atheists, too, because atheists are different as well. So Dawkins has an idea, kind of what I would call a straw man idea of religion.
in that it's easy to look at religion in that way and say, well, of course, the beliefs are incorrect. And, you know, there's contradictions all over the sacred texts and these kinds of things. But that's just, that's not even a definition that we would use of religion because that's a strong man representation of religion. So this, so the question you're asking me is,
atheists are already assuming they're gonna like wake up the next day and be alive and they're already assuming these things that Christians would say God or some religious people religious traditions would say have been gifts to humans right like life and that kind of thing is that what you're asking me I guess instead of going back to the same question how about I just play the atheistic part and say well the atheists may just say well I'm not believing as an article of faith that I'm going to wake up tomorrow I have the evidence just like you mentioned the Sun
Yeah, yeah, I think that's correct. I mean, I assume that I'm going to be living tomorrow as well. So I believe that. I think that's a correct assessment. But you have to understand that I'm also not in it. I'm not a person who's going to advocate belief in religion. I mean, I'm a scholar of religion. I'm not I'm not an advocate for religion. I am an advocate, though, for understanding what religion is and is not. Definitely.
You know, there are fiction, there are fiction based religions. So there are religions based on movies and things like that. Are those more satirical or are those more? I mean, there are satirical religions, but there are some serious religions that are based on Star Wars. I've met practitioners of Jedi. Yeah. And they don't believe what they're doing is a form of being facetious and mocking or having fun. Nope.
There are some that do, but there are a lot that don't. This started in the early 2000s, 2002, and I used this basically as a case to show my students that religion has a big definition. So we're talking about what's called a new religious movement.
And I used to actually think that it was going to go away. And I did think it was, you know, kind of the spaghetti monster religion, that it was satirical. And I think that it began that way or it began in separate places by different people. But it's definitely a religion. It's definitely a cultural development. And it did not go away. Is religion merely a mind virus? I'm sure you've heard that term. Can it be explained purely mimetically?
It's hard to say. I promise you, I don't know, and I'm still trying to figure it out. So I'm still thinking through it. And I have spoken to some people who are basically colleagues, and it appears that religion might even predate humans, in the sense that proto-hominants,
Neanderthals and things like that. When you look at how they buried each other, it appears that they have some ritualistic, like kind of there are some rituals that were involved that look to be, you know, religious when we take the big definition of religion, which I've kind of talked about. So I don't know. I mean, I still think that it's an adaptation that we just don't understand.
Because lots of people said it was going to go away, and that's called the rationalism thesis. As people get more rational, religion will just go away. But there are more religious people today than there ever have been in history. So that's obviously incorrect. So there's something that we need from religion that keeps it around.
Is that rationalism thesis also known as the secularization thesis or is that a separate phenomenon? No, it is. It's the same. Yeah, it's the same. So in that case, as far as I know, in the Western world, atheism is on the rise. It's just in other parts of the world where it's not. Is that correct? Yes, I believe that's correct. Yeah. So then in that case, would that not be a testament to the secularization thesis? Because it's saying that in these more
I know that this is Eurocentric and I'm going to get cancelled, but I'm just strong manning for the sake of it. Maybe the rationalists are more likely to say this, but in these more enlightened societies, that's where atheism takes the foothold and it's more of something that's akin to a religious monarchy that the religions, it's mainly through dominance and so on. So why does the growth of global religion contradict the secularization thesis?
because to me it sounds like well in this thesis is saying that in the spots where we hold the values of the enlightenment and so on is where atheism should take hold all right i think what you're talking about is a movement called um where where especially young people um they basically say that they're not religious but they might be spiritual but not religious and these people are called the nuns and they're called the nuns they're not n u n s they're n o n e s and they're called that because when they
Okay, so this is definitely on the rise.
But the thing about this is that to us in religious studies, it actually does not look secular because those people engage in yoga. Okay. And they also believe in UFOs. Right. And so when you scratch the surface of belief in UFOs, you see like, you know, transcendent beliefs or beliefs in a transcendence of, you know, this, um,
This advanced tech is somehow salvific, right? And things like that. Or on the other hand, it's very bad. You know, it's like kind of evil or something like that. So you do see a lot of themes there that appear to be religious like. So I would contest that the rise of the nuns is actually a secularization. The rise of atheism. I think that as you know, I mean, beliefs change. Atheism is something that
You know, I wouldn't ascribe it. I wouldn't say atheists are de facto more rational than religious people. That's just not right. That's not true. So I wouldn't ascribe the rise of atheism to the rise of kind of rationality or something like that, because I know a lot of people who are not atheist. They're either agnostic or theists and are very rational.
What's this association between religion and belief in UFOs? So for example, you just said an atheist may believe in UFOs and there's a religious like quality because they believe in a transcendent or they believe in transcendence.
Okay, so I just see that as it's broadly similar, but I don't see it as being wholly similar. So there must be more analogies than simply that. So why don't you outline that for the audience and myself? Yeah, of course. Okay, so when you look at when you look at
religion and you look at belief in UFOs. Okay. So what you see, first of all, let's get rid of this idea that religion has to be exactly like Christianity. Okay. And instead let's look at religion as a set of belief and practices directed toward that, which looks to be of transforming and transformative power. Okay. Cause that's, you know, that includes then Buddhism and you know, some Hinduism and things like that. So other religions other than
Jewish Christian Islam. Okay, so then you look at people who actually report seeing or being in touch with inhabitants of UFOs, and a significant percentage of them have a transformative experience after they've seen one. Okay, they're like, wow, that really changed everything for me. I just now know, I mean, I've talked to so many now, thousands and thousands of people who have had experiences of either seeing a UFO,
or believing somehow that they're in contact with UFOs. Now I'm not saying this is true or false because in my field we don't actually weigh in, very few of us weigh in on trying to say this exists or this doesn't exist. You can't prove it, right? Right now we just can't prove that.
You know, it's the same with religion. You can't prove God exists or doesn't exist. So we just don't do that. We just look at social effects, but we also identify patterns. So when people, so this is what I saw when I started my work in looking at people who've seen UFOs or believe that they're in touch with the inhabitants of UFOs, like extraterrestrials, it, I mean, we already have religions based on UFOs. Okay. So we have nation of Islam based on UFO sighting.
So a lot of times people will have transcendent experiences, either when they see a UFO or after they've seen a UFO. So the transcendent experience that changes their lives, that's like a religious conversion. Because that's, you know, if you look at the history of people who have been converted to religions, you'll see that that's the type of experience that they're having. And then a lot of times these people have intense
long term behavior changes, okay, where their value system changes, like maybe they were really about making money, you know, and, you know, and all of a sudden, boom, they have this experience of a UFO. And that, you know, these people are called experiencers, by the way, people who are people who've seen or believe they're in conversation with inhabitants of UFOs, they're called experiencers. And they've been around for a long time.
Um, but that, you know, right now that because of media and entertainment media, uh, people are more inclined to look at these events, like when they see something like an aerial phenomena, you know, they're, they're more inclined now to say if they can't identify it as a drone or airplane or something like that, they'll say, Oh, it must be a UFO, you know, which is an unidentified flying object. Absolutely. But then there's a whole group of assumptions that they bring to that.
And that's why the UFO is now like a rising, what I would call not a religion, although we specifically have UFO religions, I would call it the rise of a religiosity.
What's the definition of religiosity? Yeah. So religion looks very distinct and it kind of mimics or looks very similar to say a traditional religion like Christianity in that you have a person who has seen a UFO and then brings that information to other people and those people become converted to that religion, let's say nation of Islam or something like that. And then that's a very discreet
a set of beliefs and practices, all right? You're either a nation of Islam person or you're not, okay? But a religiosity is more like what we see with the spiritual but not religious community. It's a set of beliefs and practices that people have that they don't have to ascribe to. They don't say, I absolutely believe in this person's idea of what the UFO message is. It can be, it can
It's basically, it's not discreet. It's a dissemination of the beliefs and practices is decentralized. There's no centralized belief structure or institution and people get their information through each other on social media or through media like Star Wars or something like that, right? Or through documentaries that are supposed to actually be
And you also mentioned the phrase that there's a transformative experience where they
Radically alter their beliefs or their outlook on life afterward. I believe you said that was an element. It's not a criteria, but it's a necessary one. I don't know if it's a necessary one, but it's it's a necessary. Well, okay. There are different.
You know, there are different varieties of belief in ETs and UFOs. So some people believe that they were here in the past and maybe seeded civilization. Actually, Dawkins has a video out there if you YouTube it, you know, Dawkins ET, where he basically suggests something like that, or that someday in the future, maybe, you know, we'll be in contact with them or something like that, or that they're out there, but you'll just never be in contact with them because the universe is just, you know, huge.
Are those people who believe in the transformative experience of psychedelics somehow religious even if they're let's say one of those types who would be on the more atheistic end because the psychedelics have this quality of you ingest it sometimes you encounter some other being but you don't have to necessarily ascribe that to an objective reality maybe that's the Jungian unconscious or just the unconscious without a Jungian flair showing up
And it's certainly transformative. There's data about that. Does one who believes in the efficacy of psychedelics have some religiosity to them? Just because, like I mentioned, there's that criteria of transformative experience that radically alters. Yeah. So in the history of religious studies, we can say absolutely. Could we say that now of like European people, European white people, I guess, you know, Americans, Canadians,
You go down to Brazil or Central America and do ayahuasca and then see beings and things like that and then come back transformed, but maybe don't believe in the objective reality of those beings. Okay, so I would say that's not religious. That's, you know,
That's transformative, no doubt. But within Indigenous cultures, especially like with the Native American church, they use peyote in order to get in touch with what they believe to be presences that are sacred. And then that absolutely transforms them and informs them as well. And that's a religion.
Okay. And you can also see this within even different forms of Catholicism in Oaxaca, Mexico. So if you look at somebody like Maria Sabina, who you probably don't know, but everybody should know about her because she's fascinating. So she's one of the most famous, she is the most famous healer in Mexico. And I believe she died in the 1980s, but her whole life she was, she used psilocybin to heal people.
And people came from all over Mexico to be healed by her and she called the the beings that she believed she was in contact through eating psilocybin or drinking psilocybin tea.
She called these beings little saints. And that's absolutely a religion right there. And in fact, believe it or not, it's a it's a denomination. It's a form of Catholicism. OK. And so you can even see cathedrals down in Oaxaca that actually have mushrooms put into them because they were built by the indigenous people. And this was part of their religion. So when the Spanish came and said, you know, build this cathedral for us, they had no clue that they were actually in lane, all these like
You know, mushrooms in the architecture and you can actually go down still and see that. So yeah, so this arises. I mean, it could be a religion, Kurt. Do you see what I'm saying? It just depends on whether or not you believe that is an objective reality. That's what a religion has. It has this idea that there's something that's not subjective. There's no subjective transformation. There's both an objective reality that transforms you subjectively and then you become transformed. But this thing is objective.
Now I know people who are people here in North America who do ayahuasca together have the same visions even though they don't talk to each other and that reinforces their belief that there's an objective reality to this ayahuasca and they form churches around this okay so yeah so there's a lot of religion going on in there whether or not you can discreetly say this is a discrete religion and this is why it's just much more vague than that I know you're scientists so this is kind of like
It's just not as cut and dry as we like to say, you know, this is a religion and this is not a religion. I think it has to do with the objective reality of whether or not these people believe it's objectively true. And again, it could be or it could not be. I don't know. We don't actually weigh in on that. But I think it's fascinating. That's part of the reason I find UFOs fascinating is because at this moment in time, what do we have?
We do have people who are coming out, scientists like Dr. Gary Nolan, who, by the way, was in American Cosmic. He's James in American Cosmic, my book. And I traveled around with him. He has a sports car? Yeah. I think he has a new one now. But he had one back then, too. And so, well, that kind of threw me off of what I was going to say. I'm so sorry.
You're saying so there's credible scientists. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you have people. Yeah. And you also have, you know, these big news outlets that people trust for good or bad, right? Like New York Times and things like that. And they're basically saying, yeah, this is real. You know, these things exist and they're real. So to me, as a person who studies religion, this is the first time in my life that I've actually seen something that's religious, like this religiosity that's hooking onto an objective reality.
And this is transforming people.
Right. As we speak. And so I think that, you know, Carl Jung back in the day, you know, a long time ago in the 1940s, he basically said, how lucky are we that we get to now see we get to now be at the very beginning of this new belief system. Little did he know how intense it was going to get. Right. And so that's I think that we're at a really fascinating point. And lucky for me, I feel like I caught the wave of it right before it happened. I caught it with American Cosmic.
And believe me, I took heat for it. So, you know, I'm here hanging out with Gary Nolan from Stanford. You know, we're going into the New Mexico desert with somebody somebody who is affiliated with our space program and basically using these medical metal detectors, looking for this debris from crash saucers. Right.
at a site that's not Roswell, but is one of the sites where a crash is supposed to have landed in the 1940s. Now, to me, this was all a myth, right? And I was going out there to understand how somebody as amazing as Gary and as amazing as Tyler, who I call him in my book, Gary's come out as himself, so I can talk about him, but the other person hasn't. I'm like, how do these people who are obviously rational, how are they believing this? That was my question, because this is truly strange.
And I was just, I felt like I was a walking question mark, like constantly just what, you know, what is, are you kidding? You really believe this? Yes, they really believe this. In fact, they, they put these, you know, things into different types of, uh, microscopes and, you know, they looked at these in different ways and they were like, yeah, this is a, these, these parts are anomalous and we believe that they're, they're not earthly and things like that. I mean, it was pretty crazy. So to me, this is now,
becoming something that's being almost like mass marketed, like through media, because you know, now we don't have the same type of media that we had in the 1950s and 60s, where things were slow, things are almost instantaneous now. So when Dr. Gary Nolan say publishes a paper, boom, everybody reads it, right. And now everybody has this knowledge. And so we're seeing kind of like a bunch of changes happening at once. And I find it fascinating for religion for this kind of
What I call a religiosity. It's definitely not a religion in the old time way. I believe it's a it's the formation of a new type of transcendent religion. A couple of questions. So one is you mentioned that you took some flack. I believe you said you took some heat. Oh, yes, of the release of the book. Where did you take the flack from? Who gave you this heat? Sure. Okay. So you have to understand that I am not the only professor who's delved into this and gotten
Heat for it. So and I don't now because obviously there's a lot out there now. The government has said, yeah, we have some cases that we just don't can't explain and things like that. So thankfully my book got retro credibility. Right. So it came out before all of this happened and then it happened, you know, just within a couple of years. All right. So who did I get heat from? So I was a chair of my department and I was a full professor when I was doing this research.
And I'd won the research awards at my university, and I was a well-known professor in Catholic history. And I published with Oxford, right? So I was already pretty set that I didn't care if people were going to give me flack because I knew that my methodology was sound. So I was OK with it. But I'd go to a I would go to conferences and people would
It's not that bad. No, I know. I mean, yeah, there's no like, you know,
funding that's taken away a lot of but I didn't tell a lot of people what I was doing and then the book comes out and honestly I thought maybe 10 people would read it like you know it's an academic book and I thought it was pretty obscure in terms of like talking about how technology is shifting the ways in which people think and I was taking the UFOs and the example of this but it just kind of went way beyond what I had thought so that's how I took the heat. I had a lot of
people, um, I guess tell me that I'd gone, this is such a terrible term and I hate this term, but this was said, um, you've gone native, right? You know, in, in anthropology, this means that you now believe the people that you're studying, you know, are, are what they're saying is true. And this is something you just aren't, you're not supposed to do. And, you know, it's a completely horrible racist term.
And that was said of me, things like that. So that's the kind of heat that I took. So that's from the academic community or a subset of the academic community. What about from the public? So, for example, I imagine that there I know Gary gets this. I know many people get this plenty where there's there are the people who consider themselves to be the rational skeptics were the rational skeptics of the sort who only follow where the evidence leads them. And this is all woo.
because there's such a paucity of evidence and you're believing people based on testimony and that's not what one does in science and it's not replicable, et cetera. And partly that's true, but then the dismissal of it I don't agree with, the deriding and the snide remarks that come along with that. So were you on the receiving end of any of those? Oh, definitely. I think that a lot of people would say that it's, you know, I mean, let's take the rational
You know, the approach that this is not rational. In my opinion, that's completely rational. Like if you're seeing things and you're getting results, let's take the space program, our United States space program and the Russian space program as an example of this. Okay. And when I say an example of this, what an example of
Basically, people not following the evidence, okay? So the evidence is this, that the people who founded our space programs did a lot of weird science. Woo science, I would call it woo science. And they still continue to do that. Tyler is an example of somebody who's doing woo science. You can't replicate what he did. With Jack Parsons, who founded our space program, Werner von Braun founded, you know, he's German, but he came over to our space program.
And then, um, Konstantin Tchaikovsky, he founded the Russian space program. All of these people created the calculations that would get us off of earth, right? That would get us up into space. Okay. Well, that's big. Okay. And they did this through means that looked irrational. They had techniques they used. And as a person who studies religion, these are identifiable techniques. These are body techniques. So they're using a lot of,
what we would call, you know, like eschesis, that's a Greek word for almost like becoming very, very disciplined with respect to your lifestyle and your mind and your thoughts. So they were going into some kind of almost like an altered state of consciousness, at least Jack Parsons was, and then creating these, you know, kind of downloading this information.
Well, what does that say? I just recently given a talk and I made this case. I said, that's where the data leads us. I mean, if we're rational, we're going to say, yeah, you can't replicate that. But that's where the data says that those things actually work. Like those kinds of, you know, I spoke to Kerry Mollis here. I'm going to I don't know if you can hear that. Can you hear that? No, no, no. OK, never mind then.
All right, Kerry Mullis, he is a Nobel Prize winning, winning chemist, right? So he is a
He discovered the polymerase chain reaction. All right. Now, I suggest to your listeners that they go check out his webpage, Kerry Mullis, where he talks about, he died two years ago, but he basically talks about creativity and his means of being creative was exactly like Tyler's means of being creative and very similar to the space program, you know, the people in the space program and he's a genius. Okay. And so what I'm saying is this, I'm not a scientist, but I'm saying to scientists,
The data looks weird, right? It looks weird, but I think, and it looks like, you know, these people are doing things that are not rational, but to a person in my field, these things are actually patterns. And why would you ignore those patterns if they're giving these amazing results? If you're actually, you know, if the results are something that you would, you know, you want, why discount then the body practices that they're engaged in? That's my point. And so I think that is actually rational.
There's rationality to the woo, let's put it that way. So what if someone says, okay, the fact that these practices exist and then instigate some creative or that spur some creative insight, it doesn't mean that what they think is occurring is necessarily occurring or is objective.
and many creative people have practices that are deviating and peculiar even Newton he engaged in alchemy and let's imagine that alchemy served as the inspiration for calculus it doesn't lend credence to the objective validity of alchemy it just means that just like Wim Hof can say that hey you may have a creative insight if you run for a while then jump into a cold bath maybe that's true and there's an extremely tight relationship between our body and our our minds and it doesn't necessarily mean that there
Even if it's consistent, consistently when you jump in that bat, consistently when you perform alchemy, consistently when you meditate in this way and supposedly talk to beings and so on. Even if that's the case, it doesn't mean that the mechanisms that you think are working are the reasons. It just means the practice work. I totally agree with that. Yeah, I'm on board with that. In fact, I would suggest that that's what we that's the type you see to me, you're thinking like a person in religious studies.
You're saying there are patterns here and the patterns have to do with some body practices, right? Eschisis, body practices. But the body practices are different for each of those people and they're kind of strange. Like if you took Jack Parsons, he did a lot of really weird things. I would not want to have hung out with him, right? So, you know, he's part of some, you know, Aleister Crowley and people like that. I mean, frankly, very, very different than Konstantin Tchaikovsky.
who does very similar ritualistic things, but they are in no way does he view it as a new form of religion. You know, he thought of it as Christianity. So do you see what I'm saying? And then when Tyler's doing it here in the 2000s, he's doing very similar things, but he doesn't think of it as Aleister Crowley. He would probably be horrified to even think that it had anything to do with Jack Parsons, right?
So what I'm saying is I agree with you entirely. I think that what we need to do is we need to identify that these people do these things and what are these things and are there patterns? Yes, there are patterns, but what they specifically believe about them is based on their own interpretive framework. So Jack Parsons happened to be in LA in the early 20th century where there was a belief system in place for him to kind of hook into.
If you look at, do you know Ramanujan, the mathematician? Okay, he thought that the goddess Lakshmi was whispering those calculations, the math calculations, brilliant math genius into his ears. So that was his interpretive framework. You see what I'm saying? Also, when I was doing American Cosmic, I was reading up on creativity. And I forgot the name of the person whose work I had read, but she was really, she's really good.
And it's cited there in American Cosmic. But basically she said that if you look at the brains of people who are being extremely creative, we're talking about creative genius, what you see is that something is shut down. I think she said in the executive lope or something like that, the executive function is shut down. And the people that are being creative are attributing their creativity to something objective.
Yeah, so they're attributed to something objective. That doesn't mean that there's something objective there. It just means that that's what they're doing. Right. And so I that's the way I would like to do this research. And that's how we can avoid, you know, a lot of people are, are just they have knee jerk reactions to it, for some reason, like, that's who, you know, well, it's who that works. And I want to know why it works. That's basically my position.
I'm super interested in what constitutes a religion and what doesn't, which is why I have many questions about this. The people who label what you just outlined as Wu, the stigmatization,
Is there something that is common among those people that makes the stigmatization itself a form of religion? So that is to say, when the people who are of the more atheistic type, not picking on them, it's just the easiest that come to mind. When the atheistic types make fun of religion and they say that I'm not religious, is there something religious about that? Oh, I hear what you're saying.
No, I don't necessarily think so. I know that a lot of people say that atheism is like a religion because, you know, people are, you know, either you are, you aren't atheist and, you know, you're in our community and it's kind of exclusionary, right? And some religions are like that, not all, but some are. And they're dogmatic, like they're dogmatic atheists. I think that's what they're trying to say is there's a dogmatism about some atheists
who, like I said, like to put, like to make a strong man argument about religion and then like knock it down and say, see, there's nothing there, right? Yeah, I don't think so. I think that there's a variety of atheist beliefs anyway, right? So when I say I was atheist with respect to UFOs, I didn't believe in the objective reality of UFOs, okay? And I thought that people who did, I thought they were completely wrong.
So religion has the reputation of being shut up and listen to what I say and don't think for yourself and don't question. How much of that is true? I know that's a straw man, but how much of it is? How is it true? How is it not true?
Yeah, that's great. So within different denominations of religions, also, let's take, I'm most familiar with Catholicism and Christianity. And I would say that within Christianity, a lot of believers within certain forms of Christianity denominations that are relatively new would be like that. You know, I'm here in the South, but I grew up in California, and I was raised, you know, pretty eclectic in California, but I'm mostly Catholic, right?
And so when I came here and I taught the students, a lot of the students in the South, in the United States, didn't even believe or know that Catholicism was Christianity. They would say, Dr. Pasulka, what religion are you? And a lot of times I wouldn't tell them. I say, well, you have to, I'll tell you at the end of the semester. But I would say, okay, I'm Catholic. And they'd say, oh, you should become a Christian.
Right. So they just didn't have an idea. They just didn't know their history. You know, Catholicism actually predates their religion, which is Baptist or something like that. So I would say that probably the more recent Christian denominations are like that. And obviously, there are some Muslim denominations that are like that as well. Or they're not at least they're not like you need to belong to us. But basically, you know, we have the true idea of what a religion is, but not all. OK, so a very small minority.
in those in each of those religions, you won't find it at all, at least
Historically in Hinduism and Hinduism, you know, it's very regional and a lot of people who are Hindu would never say you there you can even convert because there are some religions that you just can't ever convert to because you actually have to be born into the culture, right? Why would you want to do that or all roads lead to Brahma, right? So they're all you know, so if you're Catholic be a really good Catholic and you can you can reach moksha
That's the idea. Okay. So a lot of people in North America, Canada, United States, they don't understand the variety of religious belief. And that's what I'd like to convey to people. If people knew that more, and even religious people, they don't even know that. Like a lot of religious people, it depends on which type of religion they're from. But they have these own perceptions of what religion is as well.
I was speaking to Coleman Hughes, and he was telling me that, Kurt, look, these conversations that you and I are having right now, these are not the kind of conversations that you can have in a church. The church would just say, this is what you should believe, and they're dogmatic, and so on. And I told him that you'd be extremely surprised. And then he said, well, most of it is the case, or most religions are like that.
That's actually true. But even if that's true, then my question to him was, because I imagine it's 70% true, maybe 30% are extremely open-minded and allow inquiry like this, even questioning of God and so on. The history of philosophy is filled with people who consider themselves Christians who are even questioning in their work, does God exist? So it's not actually true that you can't question the foundational aspects of your religion and still be a member of that religion. Then the broader question to me comes, well, at what percentage, at what point do you say,
Religion says so-and-so because a large enough percentage of people who are religious believe so-and-so. Well, it's more of a category question. So if 10% of people have deviating points of view, then do you... Okay, well forget about that. I don't know how to... Do you excommunicate them? Is that what you're asking? It's more like at what point do you generalize enough to say religion says so-and-so because 70% of people who consider themselves to be religious say it. You probably wouldn't say religion says so-and-so if 50% of people believed.
I wouldn't even say religion says so, you can't even say that, because which you have to specifically say, that's like saying, humans say so, right? Because well, which humans Americans, Canadians, you know, people from Europe or, you know, Saudi Arabia. So you have to identify which religion because if you went to Buddhist countries, even like say Japanese Buddhism, and you said, you know, they're not going to be telling you about
believing in a God, they will be telling you to question everything to the point, you know what I'm saying? So those kind of, you know, so there are so many forms of religion that I think that you can't say religion says this. You can basically say religion at this point in time in 1980 in North Carolina, you know, in Wilmington,
Baptists will say that if you don't believe this, you're going to go to hell or something like that. That's probably, you know, you can, you have to be really specific instead of general and you have to take it by case by case basis. But in my opinion, I would say that people who are religious, um, mostly are not going, they're going to allow for, I would say even 70%.
They're going to allow for you to question everything because that's how because in a lot of religions, if you go to the mystical traditions, almost in almost in every religion, there's a mystical tradition. If even in philosophy, there's a mystical tradition and that mystical tradition is generally questioning everything. OK, that's how one comes upon this mysticism like, whoa, like what, you know, this question. And I think that. That that's the goal.
Because once one does that, that's when one is open to these kinds of highly creative events. Earlier we mentioned dogma. Dogmatic has a reputation in our educated culture as being a net negative, has little redeeming qualities other than maybe to regulate the populace, and that's actually a negative anyway. So can you steel man dogma? Can you make the case for dogma?
Do I advocate for dogma? Is that what you're saying? Can I advocate for it? I think the more rational types would say that so-and-so is dogmatic. That means it's a disgraceful quality. And I don't think that dogma itself is a negative. I think it can be out of balance. Yeah. Okay. So what is a dogma? So a dogma is a belief that becomes central to an institution. Okay. So in the United States, we have this constitution and, you know, all humans are created equal.
That may or may not be true, but that's absolutely a dogma. It's ingrained in Americans. So if you're born here, you grew up listening to that, and you believe that all human beings are created equal. And then when human beings are not created or not treated equally, you hold that up and you say, wait a minute, this is what we believe.
And therefore we must act this way. And if we're not acting that way, then there's a problem. Okay. So that would be a dogma. And a dogma isn't necessarily true or false. It's just basically something that all these people hold to be true. And then we must act. It's like a belief, right? We talked about the definition of belief earlier. And then we call it like self-evident truth. That's like a dogma, right? Self-evident, right?
But it doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually true. Now, to become dogmatic means that, say, let's take the Catholic Church as an example, since I've studied that. Within the Catholic Church, purgatory is a dogma, right? The belief in purgatory, you must believe, you must believe in this place called purgatory. Alice, you're not a Catholic or go to hell or what is it? What is the else there? Yeah. So basically you're not a, you're not a Catholic following Catholic
doctrine. Okay, so you could you could feasibly be excommunicated or something like that. I doubt that would ever happen. Because now people don't even know what purgatory is Catholics or anyone, right? So but it's still there is still a dogma. So that's what my question was back in the day was like, wait a minute, people used to do this all the time, right? And even, you know, our grandparents are like, pray for the souls in purgatory. Like, we don't even know what that means. What does it even mean? Okay,
So, so that dogma seemed to have disappeared, but it hasn't actually the church is a lot, it will probably never get rid of it. So it's still a dogma, but it's just not one that's practiced.
Does that shed light a little bit on dogma? Yeah, and what's the method that dogma changes? Like, what's the updating mechanisms for dogma? Because it sounds to me the word dogma would imply that it's set in stone. This is the way it is. So how can you ever change it? Yeah, I know. That's really a good question. And I think that this is how it works. Frankly, this is what I showed.
In my book about purgatory is I showed that when did purgatory become a dogma? Well, it wasn't there from the very beginning, believe it or not. Okay, so I think the Catholic Church, this is how it views purgatory, is that purgatory is an actual state that souls do go to. Okay, and it's objective of humans.
Therefore, Purgatory was like discovered or found in the 1200s, right? All right, so that's kind of the idea or let's put it like this is kind of the unwritten history of Purgatory. This is just how people think about it. That's really not what happened, Kurt. If you go back, you'll find that people actually went to specific places where they would go into caves underground
If they were particularly bad people, okay, say like they've killed people, their bishop would send them to a place in Ireland, and there was also a place in Italy, where there was a cave, and it's still there, by the way, in Ireland, it's called Loch Durg, and it's a place called, it's on a lake, and it's an island on a lake, it's called St. Patrick's Purgatory.
This is in the 10s and 1100s, and bad people would have to go spend the night in that cave, and if they survived that cave, they would have been purged of their sins.
And so purgatory actually came from these weird these I wish I shouldn't say weird, because we still do things like this, you know, like, I'll be good, you know, I won't eat any bad food for 10 days. And then hopefully this good result will happen kind of thing. Right. So we kind of do those kinds of things. All right. So that's so purgatory actually came from some basic practices that people did, like physical practices. So it's actually a physical place.
Quick question about that. What was it about the cave that was so dangerous that made it unlikely or difficult for one to survive the night there?
I think part of it was just the claustrophobia of going into this cave for 24 hours, you couldn't eat, you couldn't drink, it's probably pretty scary. But also people believed in spirits and demons, right? And that perhaps they would meet spirits and demons in that cave. And there was a very famous book called St. Patrick's Purgatory, written by a Chris, basically about a crusader knight who went into the cave and fought demons and things like that. It was actually a medieval bestseller.
And a lot of people read it. In fact, Dante read it and based Purgatorio on this, right? So this was pre Dante. And this is where the dogma of Purgatory derived. Now, how did it leave? Well, it dogma goes away through time when people just stop knowing where it came from in the first place and what it's about. I think it's just a natural thing. Things aren't written in stone. They come and go.
So a lot of people say, well, the doctrines and truths of the church never change. Well, they look like they change, at least how we believe in them changes. So, yeah. When I was researching you, I was so pleased to see you mentioned Heidegger because not many people do, especially not in the UFO scene. What the heck does Heidegger have to do with UFOs? Yeah, that's for sure. And you mentioned that there's something about technology and the and not viewing them instrumentally that Heidegger had.
And I would like you to expand on that, please. Yeah, sure. So Heidegger, I like Heidegger and a lot of colleagues of mine hate Heidegger. And Heidegger is kind of, you know, demonized in philosophy because this is what happened to him. He's really interesting. So he was, you know, he hung out with Wittgenstein and people like that in philosophy. And he was straight up like rationalist philosopher. OK. And then strangely enough, he actually hung out with Zen Buddhists.
So there's a school in Japan called the Kyoto School of Zen Buddhism and the people that were part of that school were also philosophers. So they and Heidegger would have conversations and Heidegger actually had a mystical experience. And after that, he started to do exactly what Socrates used to do. And that's why if you look at his work, you'll see that it was like straight up kind of boring philosophy until all of a sudden he started to name everything that he wrote. It was a question.
What is technology? What is an object? Okay. And so he went at it in a Socratic fashion of basically, you know, what Socratic dialogue is, right? So the process of, okay, so it's a process, but the process is basically to ask, and we're not going to find out, we're going to find out more about it. But there's going to be a point we're going to say, I don't know what the heck that is. Right? I don't know what it is.
And that's what Socrates would say and that's why Socrates was supposed to be the man who was the most intelligent man in the world because he said he didn't know and he was honest and also really smart. I don't know. So I think dogma is knowing and that's why it has a bad name because I think at heart we all know because this is the question that that Heidegger wanted to revisit. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Like, why are we here rather than why are we self-conscious? So he was basically coming at this question and questioning everything, right? Questioning what is art? I mean, he was one of the first philosophers to really get into this question of technology. And he actually, in my opinion, he was visionary because he basically saw technology as basically becoming our infrastructure.
and also more than that, right? So he went, I don't know if you've ever read the essay, what is technology, but he goes back and he, he talks about it with respect to the, um, the Greek temple. So for the Greek temple, you know, for the Greeks, the temple housed their gods and goddesses. It housed the sacred, right? Okay. And then he goes through the medieval time period, Heidegger, and he says for the Catholics, it was the cathedral that housed God.
He said, with technology, what's going to house technology? He was looking at technology as a new form of the sacred. And that's what I find fascinating. That's what led me to Jacques Vallee, actually. Meaning that it's an interface? What do you mean when you say that the technology houses the sacred? Okay, yeah, that it is going to determine
How we live in the world and how we like our relationship with the world like is going to be so as a Catholic, a medieval Catholic, your relationship was with the world was basically the belief structure of the Catholic Church, which you know, you encountered God in the cathedral.
And then supposedly from that experience, your experience, like, you know, going to the Purgatory Cave or something like that, you it determined the way in which you lived in the world. So Heidegger was basically saying what that was for the Greeks being a temple and it was for the cathedral was for the Catholics. Technology is going to be for the people of the future. And he was basically saying, you know, his grandkids or something like that. It's common is what he was saying. But, you know, he also
envisioned something really bad on the horizon. And I'm not quite sure what it was that he envisioned, but it wasn't good. Because I end my book with a quote from Heidegger, and he didn't actually want that quote. He didn't want that quote known until he died. And then when he died, that quote could be published. And the quote is, only a God can save us now. Hmm.
And when he said God, he wasn't meaning the kind of straw man God of Dawkins religion. No, he was meaning something entirely like a mutation or something that was, you know, something that was so far out of our own experience of humans that that, you know, it would be it would save us basically. It's like if this was a story, it would be like a Deus Ex Machina. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be it. Yeah. OK, you mentioned this was related to Jacques Valley.
Yeah, okay. So, all right. So, Heidegger has always been some, you know, his, his work was fascinating to me, just as Hannah Arendt's work, she and he were, she learned from him, he was her professor. And so these kind of these
These philosophers formed a lot of how I looked at things because I grew up in California near, well, in the dot com. You know, this was like my milieu. I guess you could say my social milieu was on the nineties with, you know, the dot com stuff and everything like that. And I lived there. That's where I lived is in Northern California. So I got to see kind of technology take off. Right. And
I also so so Heidegger was always on the back burner, right? And then I met and then when I was done with my book, oh, by the way, I think he had a Catholic burial. So he wasn't actually a practicing Catholic, but he made sure that he had a Catholic burial, which I always found fascinating. So OK, so what happens then after? OK, so Jacques. OK, I attend this first. I knew about Jacques work because he wrote a book Passport to Magonia.
Yeah, for some reason I thought John Mack wrote that. Oh no, John Mack wrote Passport to the Cosmos, a reference to Jacques' Passport to Magonia. So I read Passport to Magonia and to me it felt like I was reading my book on Purgatory. And so I reached out to him through hard mail, right, like snail mail. I wrote him a letter and I sent it to him and I said, I wonder if you'd talk to me because I'm in California a lot. And he said, yes. So
So we started a correspondence. He was fascinated with my research because he wanted to see the primary sources for a lot of the Catholic, you know, because he's from a Catholic country and has that, you know, was able to read Latin and that kind of thing. So I shared a lot of my my work with him. And I went to a conference where I was it was a small conference in California and Jacques was there.
And it occurred to me, what I thought was really odd was that Jacques wasn't only a person who was interested in UFOs, but he was also a person who was pretty instrumental in the creation of technology in our country. And, you know, he had a PhD in information science from Northwestern in the 1960s. I mean, you know, so he's at the very beginning of two absolutely
what I think are inexplicably related things, UFOs and technology. It's almost as if the belief in UFOs is almost the religious support of the infrastructure of technology. That's how I saw it. So to me, Jacques was like a walking Heideggerian essay to me. That's what he seemed to me to be.
And so I couldn't stop like thinking that. And so I read everything. And this is before he put all of his stuff on academia, edu. So before that, I went to, you know, I searched everything out on microfiche, you know, in the library, and I read all of his 1970s stuff and everything. And I was like, wow, I'm right about him. He is like this hiding area. But he I don't even think he knows who Martin Heider he's never read him, I'm sure, you know. And so, yeah, so that's how then I
understood his work. And to me, you couldn't take the technological work that he did away from the UFO studies that he did. To me, they went hand in hand.
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Okay, so what I was going to ask is, is there
a higher percentage of people who are Catholic who study the phenomenon more than the general population, let's say. Have you found that? OK, so I found that because I was at the Vatican and I spent time at the observatory there in Castle Gandolfo. And I know Brother Guy Consolomano, who is the observatory. He's a Jesuit monk who's the head of the observatory. He's an astronomer.
And they have a meteorite collection there and stuff. It's pretty cool. So I got to stay there and I've known him now for, I don't know, a lot of years, I guess. And I also talked to lots of people at the Vatican, like Peter Gumpel. He's in his 90s and he was like a papal advisor. And so this is what I can say about Catholicism and
the subject of UFOs, is that the people that I've talked to are very open-minded about it, and just as curious as you and I are. And some believe and some don't believe. So there's no, right at this point, there's no definite kind of dogma or doctrine about UFOs for the Vatican, right? So, okay. So that said, when I did get into this research
some very odd things happened to me that never would have happened to me had I stayed in the study of normal Catholic history and stuff like that. Like, so I was, you know, people in my book, a lot of them, I became involved with the Invisible College. Do you know the people that, okay, so I became involved with the Invisible College. And after about a year and a half, I recognized that every single one of them
either was a practicing Catholic or had been, you know, had come from a Catholic background. And the ones that were the most intense into the research were actually practicing Catholics. And I don't understand that actually. So I'm not quite sure why that is the case, but that's the case. Do you have any speculation as to why that may be the case? Like ideas you're toying with? I mean, it makes it's going to make it's going to sound very crazy.
And I'm just, if I tell you, okay, I will tell you what my, my speculation is, but there's no proof for it. Um, it's just what I think. So it has nothing to do with me being a professor and kind of, you know, weighing down. Okay. So basically I think that, um, well, every single one of them has a clearance. Um, most of them were involved in some way with the information about UFOs and the public. And we know about project blue book.
And we know that with project blue book, there was a disinformation campaign, right? And we know some of the people that were supposed to do that. Um, it could be that people feel guilty. I'm not sure. And so they go back to the religion of their youth in order to, you know, cause it's pretty intense studying UFOs and then maybe dis, you know, make, maybe engaged in disinformation and things like that. I mean, this is pretty heavy and, um,
I didn't mean to find stuff out like that, you know, about the UFO phenomena. I just kind of happened upon it. And that the work that I do is historical work mainly. So I've done a lot of history in the campaigns and the stuff like that. So yeah, so perhaps that's the reason. I'm not quite sure.
Does the Vatican acknowledge or see any similarities between angelic encounters and alien encounters? Hear that sound?
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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Yes, some people do. Yeah, some people do. Definitely. I mean, one of the former directors of the Observatory definitely believed in ETs.
And believe that ets were another kind of subset of God's creation. Okay, so that's another thing is that a lot of people think like atheists or people that I talked to like, you know, people in Congress or something like that they're like, if we, if people find out that UFOs are real or something is going to really, you know,
You know, the religions are going to crash, they're going to implode and people are going to not believe in their religions. Well, that's not true at all, because people already who are religious have categories for anomalous phenomena and anomalous beings and non-human intelligence.
So they already have these categories in place that say atheists don't have, or some atheists just don't have. And so I think that people who are religious are going to be actually very... In fact, I think they already are. They're completely okay with the idea that there are perhaps ETs or non-human entities, non-human intelligent entities, because they already believe it, you know?
In terms of the Vatican or in terms of some of the other religious people that you've encountered who sorry that you have yes encountered that have that are devoted do they see aliens to be a modern interpretation of the of some ancient of what we placed into religious stories or do they see the aliens are now the interpretation of what was there before so hopefully you understand what i'm saying are the aliens primary and the angels secondary like the false interpretation or is it the
the angels are being interpreted from our materialistic culture as aliens or demons. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. And I have a friend, Jeff Kripal, he's at Rice University. And he talks about this, actually, I forgot he has a word for it, but I forgot what it was. But basically, he says that, you know, we tend to think that the people of the past misinterpreted
These kinds of things and they called them angels and demons when actually they're UFOs, right? They're unidentified, you know, advanced aircraft kind of things and that we have a much more accurate interpretation. He says that's baloney, you know, you know, because they're both interpretations and they're both based on what we know right now, you know, and so
who's to say, you know, people 100 years from now are going to look back on us. Look what they believed. That was really funny, you know. And so that's what I think we have to do is we have to get back to the Heideggerian impulse of basically the Socrates impulse of basically saying, what, like, what's going on, you know, and maybe try to not conclude and just kind of observe. And I think that we'll get information if we do that. That's what I think we should do.
Instead of calling it something, why don't we just observe it and note patterns? Because there are patterns. Okay, so Fatima, right? So you know about the 1917 miracle, the sun, Fatima. Oh, that. Yeah, this is a Vatican kind of Virgin Mary apparition thing. Okay. Oh, then I don't know it. It's not the sun that moved in the sky. This is different. No, it is. It's the it's called the miracle of the sun.
But it was it was supposed to be from the Virgin Mary. It was based on an apparition of the Virgin Mary. So if you look at some of those documents and again, the primary sources were it wasn't is don't attribute it to me or Jacques Ballet or even Jeff Kripal because there were two people who did this research in
I can send you the info, Kurt, please let me because these people deserve the credit, you know. Okay. I will, I'll make a note. So send info of. Yeah, they did some great research on the primary sources and what they found were that there were a lot of things that looks very, you know, what we would call UFOs because there was a man who had been with, I think there was 70,000 people there in Fatima and
He was a doctor and an atheist and he looked up and what he saw was something that looked like a pearlized disk that was spinning around and around and around, you know, so, you know, if we could just get these kinds of descriptions.
and put them all together. I think that we would get, and without any kind of dogma associated with it, like, you know, oh, it has to be this or it has to be that, because there will be a lot of that and people will be upset. And I don't know why people are so upset about this. When I first did my research, by the way, I would get a lot of emails from people. In fact, I had to report it to my university in 2018. I was just getting hammered by pretty weird emails
And so, you know, I just couldn't do my work. So I had, you know, I had to report it to, we have police at the university, we have tech experts like IT people. And so I reported that. And I remember, this is in 2018, Chris Padgett was our chief of police on the university campus at the time. And he looked at the emails and he said, this looks like religious extremism.
And I said, yeah, that's what it looks like, religious extremism. So someone who does, who has nothing to do with what I study, even identified it as looking like that. So if you just say, if you say what I just said, why don't we just observe the patterns? There will be a lot of pushback to that. For some reason, people would just be really upset about it that I don't have either a Catholic framework or religious framework. Or if I don't have the, you know, what's going right now is
the U.S. governments, these are advanced technology framework. Like you have to have that framework now or else you're going to have pushback. Why can't we just look at it and just identify what we know about it using science and religious studies and sociology and all the things that we have, all the tools that we have. That's my suggestion. Just look at it. Have you found any connection between near death experiences and the phenomenon?
or any other part of your studies and your death experiences? At some point in the summer plan on taking a deep dive into them, but starting with Dean Raiden, if you've heard of him, but I haven't done so yet. So I'm curious. Yes, I know, Dean. So, yes, I have actually. What's really interesting right now is that I'm doing some research into Japanese UFOs. And what I think is really interesting is that they're different. I would call them like different UFOs.
there's our, you know, the US military's UFO, right, which is, you know, these things that like Lou Elizondo talks about that kind of thing. Well, that looks a little bit different than the UFOs that the Japanese talk about. Okay. And then, you know, so, so near death experiences, what I found is this is that strangely, people who've had near death experiences seem to have a lot of these post UFO effects that people who see UFOs have.
Which is, I don't know if you, and again, I hate to do this, but I'm going to. The movie Arrival, I don't like to cite a movie as a framework for like, you know, talking about something. But in this movie Arrival, one of the gifts that the aliens give to humans is the knowledge of time. Like, you know, that time is actually, you know, they had foreknowledge and, you know, time is not linear. So you can know things. And so a lot of people who have near-death experiences and who have had
experiences of a UFO, all of a sudden seem to know things that are going to happen. So not all of them, but a lot of them. And so this is something that I found. I also found that a lot of people who've had UFO experiences seem to associate those UFO experiences with where people died. So I know an experiencer, he's a very well known experiencer. And he said that he saw a UFO where his wife had died of a car accident years earlier.
Now in Japan, these orbs that, you know, here in the United States, we'd call them UFOs, but they see them in Japan, where they're, they're identified as souls, like souls that have that deceased people, like during the tsunami of 2011, there were so many of these, and people saw them. And they said, these are the souls, right, of the people who died during the tsunami. And so I think that's really interesting. So yeah, there's some correlations there.
In Japan, were they referring to the orbs or were they referring to the craft when they said the souls? The orbs. Okay, you mentioned one time that Valet told you about how these alphabet agencies work, and that you were able to see how they work up close and personal, I think in terms of the strategies that they use, though I wasn't sure exactly what you meant by the strategies. Like, you mean the disinformation strategies? Like, what are you referring the collection of?
of data strategies, the silencing of people, I wasn't sure what you meant. So do you mind expounding on that? Yeah, some of the strategies that they use would be there were two specific ways in which they spread disinformation, at least when Project Blue Book was going on. And I believe they probably still do this. And I think probably, yeah, this is this is what I experienced up close. They cultivate two types of people as assets. And when I say assets, those people sometimes don't even know that they're being cultivated. In fact, they don't know.
Um, and that's why they're assets is because they're an asset to be, they're being used, right? Uh, to propagate misinformation. One of those persons is like the benefits, you know, have you heard of, uh, Paul benefits who I've heard. Yeah. So this was a person who was not mentally stable and, but was near an air force base and believed in UFOs and, um,
Rick Doty, Richard Doty, who worked for the Air Force as a special agent, he targeted benefits and put stuff on his computer to make him think that a UFO invasion was imminent. Okay.
And then, of course, benefits then looks crazy, right? Or crazier. So, you know, vulnerable people like that, they're targeted and they're used to kind of create a stigma associated with UFOs. If crazy people believe in UFOs, I don't want to believe in them. You see what I'm saying? So that happened. And then also Linda Moulton Howe, they went for people like her who was a legitimate journalist, right? She had some credentials from Stanford.
And they target her and they give her misinformation and they bring her on base or something like that. And they say, look, this is going to come out. So those are two ways that you get cultivated as an asset. You're not an asset to yourself or your life or your family, but you're their asset now where they're, you know, cultivating you. So there was a point in my research where I basically severed all ties with anybody in the invisible college, except for Jacques, who I do trust and Gary. Okay.
And Gary, by the way, is not technically in the Invisible College. Do you hear that sound?
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He's a visible one, right? But yeah, so I just didn't want that in my life at all because, you know, I wanted to do straight up research. I didn't want to, you know, because my research could easily be used to further some agenda because I'm doing historical research that's showing that these things are that these very strange aerophenomena have been around. If I didn't do that research, I didn't know this.
I would assume that there's some kind of a program like a weapons program going on. That's what I would think was happening at this point. Now there might be a weapons program growing on, in which case my research would be valuable to them. So how do I do my research and stop from being cultivated? So I guess at some point I recognize that that's a real thing. And I mean, I kind of recognize it already because I wasn't sure what was going on in American cosmic at the beginning, but I'm a researcher who's honest. And I said that.
In almost every chapter with Tyler, I basically said, you know, James and I and James is Gary, I'd say, we weren't quite sure if we were being set up for misinformation or not. But subsequently, James actually went, you know, Gary went along and, you know, checked out the debris and found that it was very strange. And so, you know, something's happening.
Yeah, he comes up a lot. I'm not super familiar with a lot of his work, but I have colleagues who are in the space program who, who read his work and like it. And yeah, so but I'm not a person who knows enough to authoritatively say something about it. Same. I'm going to be speaking with him soon, but I haven't had a chance to look into his research on the interview that you did with that UFO podcast.
You mentioned that you uncovered something that you weren't supposed to, and you don't have to mention exactly what that is. But frankly, I'm concerned about that as well. It's one of the reasons I don't like to take a look at data that's classified or that I can't share. Even if I'm extremely interested, I tend to not look at that in my inbox or take people up on their offers if they offer it to me. I don't want to be in a place where I have knowledge that I have to either lie about or obfuscate or hide, etc. I want to ask what was it that you uncovered, but perhaps you can speak around it.
Okay, I'm trying to think if this was something. I have the exact timeline, the exact statement. Yeah, so let's see if I can bring it up here. Twenty, I'll just send you the link so that you can listen to it because I can't play it for you. Well, there's a lot I felt a lot more danger, frankly, when I was when the government hadn't admitted that this was happening. OK, because it was I think there was there was danger. No, there was danger.
And what if I uncovered something that people didn't want uncovered, which apparently I think I did. So you said apparently you think you did, but you're not sure. But anyway, so if you could recall what you're referring to. Yeah, OK, so. I mean, I think there were a lot of things that happened that maybe weren't supposed to happen, but did, and it was only because
you know, I was looking into it and had the tools to help me figure it out. So I think, I mean, I think the fact that I tried to, I mean, look, it's dirty laundry for the Air Force, right? Looking into these programs and basically, you know, American Cosmic came out
and all of a sudden people are admitting that these things have happened and that there were programs of study. And so, um, and I'm not, you know, I'm actually legitimate researcher, so I'm not actually out to make a bunch of money doing this or make, you know, a movie about UFOs or anything like that. Um, I, I just happened to find this stuff out and,
You know, that's kind of weird. That's a weird position for me to be in. So I think that that's what was going on. And I'm not so I think that's what I was referring to. I mean, you know, they were doing stuff and no one knew about it. And well, some people know about it, but the American people didn't know about it. And now they do. Because the New York Times, from the people that you've spoken to, or there's what you've heard through the grapevine, is it the case that Roswell is
not the recovery of balloon debris that it indeed is some UFO craft that it's either deliberately landed or, or accidentally landed. Okay, so that's the, that's the question, right? So that's, that's the mythology of Prometheus, this, this idea that somehow we were, you know, some people call that site the donation site, right, or the gifting site. And that's very Promethean. That's right along the lines of this myth.
And so that's how I felt very uncomfortable as a person who's rational going into basically what looked to be a living mythology. OK, a mythology that was actually people actually were living and believing it. OK, so I'm not going to take the bait and say that that's the fact. I don't know if it's the fact. And I know that a lot, you know, it used to be that thinking that or just saying that would would cause one to be called
What are your thoughts on CE5?
It's such an unknown with such a drastic consequence that it's worse than playing with fire. Yeah, I'm not going to do it.
Well, forget about whether or not you're going to do it. What have you heard about it? Is there efficacy to it? What occurs during it? Yeah. So I have heard a lot of people say that they have initiated contact through the methods of CE5. I've had people ask me to do it with them, right? And be in communities of people who do it. I stay away from that. No, I'm not going to do that. Now, why do I say that? Because
Well, for one thing, a lot, you know, learning about religious traditions, you do learn that there's a lot of things that actually happen and you don't know why. OK. And so I already believe that certain things can happen. I don't really need to have a close knowledge of this, and nor do I think that we can predict the consequences. So I guess that's my point is that, yeah, I do believe that these kinds of things work. But just like we had, you know, just like we talked about with the Wu science, you know, that
Just because people are doing it and getting these effects doesn't mean that the story they're telling themselves and each other about it is true. So I guess that's how I feel about it is we're not certain about it. Why do it? And plus I've had also another thing is that I've had so many people ask me to do it, and they were almost like,
They wanted me to do it so badly that I thought, I don't really want to do this because they're asking me, you know, they really so much want me to do it. I surely don't want to do it now. Why is that the case? Cause you feel like it's peer pressure and there's something wrong about it like drugs or why is it the case that if they're putting so much pressure on you, you don't want to do it? Yeah, because I feel like, you know, if somebody's so invested in me doing it that
You mentioned that in some of the circles that you've been in that the case of Bob Lazar, it isn't as dismissed as it is in the popular culture and what he says comports with
Yeah, other reports in such a way that it makes much of his account true or likely to be true, even if certain specifics of the account isn't. Yeah, can you expound on that? Sure. So a lot of the people that I talked to in the you know, like who are like Tyler, basically, and believed Lazar, okay, which I thought was fascinating because like he's so dismissed, okay, for the most part.
But they didn't dismiss him at all. And so I thought that's fascinating. What did he see? Did he see actually extraterrestrials or did he see weapons or you know, what did he see saw something that caused
You know, a huge reaction and pushback and discrediting of him and that kind of, you know, to the point where he said, I wish I had never said anything in the first place. Right. And basically that's what some of the people told me just before my book came out. They said, there might be a point where you wish that you didn't do this. And so I'm not like,
Bob Lazar and then I'm not saying this was extraterrestrial, right? I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's a development at play and let's pay attention to it because it first it has to do with religion and belief systems. But there's something really strange about it going on and I think we have to give it, you know, look at it. But I'm not suggesting that any kind of hypothesis about it is true like he did. Like we, this is extraterrestrial. How did, you know,
I don't think he said that. He's extremely careful with his words. He would say, I don't know, all I know is that I worked on a craft and that there were documents given to me that said they were extraterrestrial, but that could be misinformation. Here's what I do know, it operates in this manner or it seems to operate in this manner. But he was extremely careful.
Yeah, no, he should be definitely that would be the correct way to go about doing that kind of thing to be involved in that is to not conclude and also to basically because there's been precedent for misinformation, you have to assume that some of it's going to be at play, especially now. And in fact, we have better tools for disinformation today than we ever did.
Better tools for recognizing disinformation or for the dissemination of it? How do you defend yourself against disinformation?
What are some of the tools? What are some of the people who are watching? Right, sure. OK, so in American Cosmic, I went through hoaxes of UFOs, right? And I said that hoaxes of UFOs have they we should credit them for the spread of belief about UFOs because a lot of people look at hoax UFOs. You know, if I let's put it this way, I've received so many videos of
unidentified flying objects, okay, and some of them look pretty legit because now I have a lot of friends who I can say what is this you know and they'll say okay it's not a drone it's not a plane it's not okay it's unidentified and then I have hoaxed ones where you know you can generally see the outlines and it looks you know okay so I showed that to a person who's very well known in the UFO community household name
who's written a book, bestseller, New York Times bestseller. And I showed this person both videos, or I showed the person one video and I said, look, check this out. And the person that did not to that person look like a UFO, because they had been so enculturated as to what a UFO is supposed to look like, even though it most likely doesn't look like that, right? But that was really a UFO in the sense that it was fully an unidentified flying object.
What is the other one was completely hoaxed and they thought that that one was legitimate video. So I don't think we have the tools to be able to adjudicate what's UFO and what's not. So I think that when we see things, especially in their video, you know, and that kind of thing, like Jacques, I had always said, believe nothing, you know, and use your discernment. Okay. So I think that, um,
In today's world of deep fakes and things like that, it's pretty impossible, I think, to figure that stuff out. So I think that the best default action is just to not believe. And if it seems crazy, it most likely is not real.
Something else I'd like you to elaborate on, if you don't mind, is the contrast between the academic world and then the government world with respect to how they operate openness versus closeness, because generally, the more skeptically minded people take the academic view, and they can't imagine that the reason for closeness would be anything other than falseness or beguiling or whitewashing. I have to admit that I myself am similar to this in the sense that while I'm not an academic,
It's the place where I'm most comfortable in. It's my training in a sense. So I have a difficult time with concealment and non-disclosure. So why don't you justify or make the case for closeness? Okay, sure. So all right. And this can be applied by the way to the Vatican as well, not just to UFO insiders. Okay, so all right. A lot of
I'll give you an example from my actual life. So something that was tangential to my UFO research, but happened during it was my Catholic research into the saints of the Catholic Church that by located and levitated. And I was going, I was, um, I had funding from a billionaire who was interested in this research, this Catholic research, he's Catholic. And so, um,
I went with Tyler, actually, I brought Tyler with me to the Vatican and we checked it out and I, you know, looked at the records and saw just, you know, so much information about St. Joseph of Copertino, who was known, you know, who was said to have levitated and things like that, some other things. Anyway, so the billionaire, who's an American, with some of the people who helped me
establish the funding to get there to the Vatican to do this research, they wanted to purchase the manuscript, which was a Vatican document. Okay, they wanted to own it. Okay. And so they said, Diana, can you convince the Vatican to give this document to us? Now, this is a document from the 1700s, that is a sacred document to a country that's not a democracy.
right? This is a pre-modern country. And so the people in the United States who were, they were comprised of academics and then a billionaire, right? And so they basically said, surely they would do that. They would give it to us so that we could study it. And I said, I don't think they're going to do that. I think that you have to be a little bit, you know, we have to be nuanced in asking for this because this is their sacred tradition, you know,
And we just can't do that. We just can't give it to them. It's like, if you ask the United States to give up the Liberty Belt, or, you know, the actual Constitution, right? I mean, we're talking about something so- And they were asking not simply to give it up, but to buy it, like offer the money for it? Yeah, you know, like we want to buy this.
and they didn't want a picture of it. That didn't suffice for some reason. No, no, they did. They wanted it digitized, but we're talking about a document of like almost a thousand pages, right? So it would take you long. And so, you know, I was kind of the middle person doing this and I, I tried to explain to them that the, you know, the assumptions that we have that things should be completely open-sourced aren't shared by other people in other places.
for various reasons. And we just, we are so arrogant that we don't see that, you know, we're like, we should have that because of humanity, right? Well, how do you know? Because, you know, things that we take, we're going to use for our own benefit, you know, so they're, they're not seeing it like we see it. So that's, that's my advocacy for, I mean, I'm not going to advocate for, you know, secrecy with respect to almost everything, but there are, if there's something secret, there are reasons that there's people want it to be secret.
I'm not saying that's a good thing for everything, but definitely. I mean, the Vatican has their sacred documents. These are not necessarily secret documents, but they're theirs and they're sacred to them.
So we did establish, we did get the document. But I kind of am the person who's the keeper of it. And I can decide who's you know, I vet who see who goes in and researches it and who doesn't. And you know what, it's a document that's written in Latin and 17th century Italian, and not a lot of people are able to look at it. Speaking of Latin, you mentioned that Tyler said,
or sorry that you pointed out to Tyler that there was some Latin written and it couldn't the lecture you were giving but the audio was not let's say was another highest quality for whatever reason the person who was recording didn't have a mic on you so the cameras all the way at the back and anytime the audience claps oh my gosh my ears just almost broke every single time because I had to turn the volume up so loud to hear you oh that's too bad between that and the camera well anyway you mentioned that you were pointing out to Tyler there's some part of something
written in Latin, he said, I didn't even know he also mentioned it's to tell them quote unquote, that they dominate. So I wasn't sure who the them and the they were referring to. So why don't you talk about that, please? Yeah, okay. So that was really interesting. So one thing that was kind of funny about my friendship with Tyler was that
He was part of the space program. He's really integral into the space program and he launches, you know, these rockets and worked with SpaceX and that type of thing. And what I found out, which he actually did not know, and I pointed it out to him, was that the whole thing was a ritual. The whole thing was ritualized. So they identified certain time periods astronomically when it would be beneficial to launch. And they also had the rockets had
I'm so sorry to interrupt. Are you referring to a SpaceX launch? I missed that.
Yeah, yeah. Well, not all SpaceX launches, just certain of them with Tyler involved. And so when he would be involved launching these satellites into space, a lot of times they'd be with SpaceX because that's who they used. I see. Yeah. So they would, they would go, you know, they've been doing this from, it looks like from the 1950s onward, they've been doing this ritual and they would even have like a chaplain there. And, you know, they would, it was very, very, listen, it was very ritualized.
And so I noticed that and I asked him about it. And I said, do you know that this is first century Latin that's written on these rockets? And he said, no, I didn't know that. He didn't even know it was Latin. And so we read them. I translate them all. And I said, this, wow, this says that. And I said, who up there in space is going to be reading this? Like, why would you put that on there? You know, that seems so strange. And he said, well, I imagine it's for them. And I said,
So the two questions that occurred is, firstly, what did it say? And then also, does this mean that Elon Musk himself is putting those messages there? Like Elon is a believer in ETs and so on, or is it just one of the staff members?
But he has nothing to do with creating the satellites or putting the Roman stuff on them. Nothing at all to do with that. That was definitely predates him. So what does it mean though? What was written on it? Yeah. So to me, it looks like what people have called like exotheology or astro theology. It's this kind of
Well, I call it, it's not a specific religion, but it's a religiosity of people who are involved in the space program. And it's this, you know, it's Roman, you know, the United States kind of considers itself Roman. Look at our, you know, architecture and that type of thing. We're like the new Imperial place, right? And so I think that's what it has to do with. They're using the images of gods and goddesses from Rome.
And what does the Latin say? Here's something for you to check out. They're called patches. And have you seen those patches? Okay, so... Haha, we don't know, or haha, we know, but you don't? Yeah. And so a lot of those are in Latin, and that's where you see... And a lot of those would be on the actual satellites. The images would be on the satellites. And then people who were working the mission, they would get the patch.
Usually you just have the god or goddess and the image like the dragon or something like that on the satellite with the Latin phrase that accompanies it. And the Latin phrases are different for each launch.
You also mentioned there's a picture of that that you were going to send to the audience at that time, because remember, I'm listening to the lecture. And you said, Yeah, if anyone's interested, I'll email it to you. Can you email it to me so I can place it on screen right now for now right now? Sorry, when I'm editing this, I'll make a note to remind you of that. Is that okay? Yeah, I could get it right now if you want. The image is being displayed right now. So if you're listening to this on the audio platforms, then I recommend you click the YouTube link in the description.
What you're seeing is the high quality capture. Unfortunately, the source images are fairly low. You also refer or not you, someone referred to the president as a short timer. OK, what does that mean? Yeah, so and I heard I'd heard this from not just Tyler, but a lot of the people who are part of the program.
that presidents are short timers in the sense that there must be a program that's not a short time program, but a long time program. And therefore the presidents come and go and therefore they're not given the information. Think of Tyler. Tyler's been doing this since he was at least 20 years old. And now he's in his sixties. I mean that he's a long timer. And so he has a lot of information and the presidents don't have all that information. They're only given the information that they need to know.
I know that we've mentioned Tyler's pseudonym plenty. And I don't think everyone here knows who Tyler is or what the story is around Tyler. So do you mind quickly just outlining that so that people can rewatch say, okay, now that makes sense. I didn't give the context to sure. Sure. Okay. So I wrote this book, I called it American Cosmic in reference to the Russian Cosmists. Because to me, Russian Cosmists is a great book for any of our listeners. By I think it's Henry Young,
And it's about the belief systems of the people who started their the Russian space program. And so when I started American Cosmic and I met Tyler, he had a very similar belief system. And Tyler was this person who actually reached out to me and he was part of a secret program. Now they're not they're known not to be secret. And he had clearances and that sort of thing. He worked for every almost every space shuttle launch. OK, he's a mission controller.
And he was a very fascinating person. I kind of kept him at a distance for about a year and a half before I actually met him in person. And then he took me and Gary Nolan to New Mexico to an alleged crash site for UFOs because he told me that UFOs from the 1940s, he told me that I didn't believe in UFOs. And he said, you only believe in them as kind of like imaginary things. He said, what if I showed you evidence that, and so this was where I was like,
Do you believe that the government believes that they understand what's going on behind the UFO phenomenon? No.
So they realize that they don't know what's going on or you think that they think that they have a handle on it.
I think that there's probably a number of, you know, how in the United States, we have different, we have Democrats and Republicans and things like that. I think that the government is pretty much the space program is like that. There's different factions within it. And some of them are tasked with trying to figure this out. And some of them think they know what it is about. And some of them know where we don't know what this is about. So that's how I think it really is, is compartmentalized. And that's why I use a lot of, I use a lot of references to this movie and book called Fight Club.
And it's basically about this person. Well, probably your audience knows, but there, that's what it looks like. So before it was the invisible college where people worked together to a scientist and they were secret and they're trying to figure out the stuff on their cover of secrecy. But then it morphed into, I think in the late eighties and early nineties, it morphed into fight club where people didn't even tell each other what they knew in order to keep the secret secrets.
Do you believe that we're dealing with multiple phenomenon that have different explanations rather than a single one? Yes, definitely. So why do you think that? Because they look very different. So orbs look different than tic tacs, which I don't even know if they are extraterrestrial. And there are things that like I could see from Catholic history from like, you know, 1400, 1500,
Have you seen this video, one video, I believe called biblically accurate angels? Yeah, that's it. I like that video.
Okay, I'll link it or display some of it here for people to watch. Now, does anything that you've learned about the phenomenon ring true with those depictions? Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you look, yeah, okay, so if you look at angels, even you have to say that even if you take this category of thing called angels, which we all think we know what they are, but if we go back to the biblical text, where they derive from, you'll see that none of those encounters look the same. So even angels don't even look the same.
to one another. So you have you have angels that take on the they look like humans and they fight with like Jacob and they almost they dislocate his hip and things like that. And then you have these angels that look very weird, you know, and scary. And then you look at St. Francis, you know, and his situation with and it looks like an angel, they call it a seraphim. Right. And it like it, it zaps him and he gets these these things which the Catholic Church calls stigmata, but they look like burns. Right.
And, you know, yeah, so I mean, once you start to get to the primary source materials of these things, they look very strange. And they don't look at all like what we have, you know, what has come down to us as what they're supposed to be like. Yeah, they're not puppies. No, they're not on the cloud with a
And you know, even the people that had those experiences back in the day never said that either. Like St. Teresa of Avila, she's a person who hadn't experienced it. Now it's made popular in Rome. Bernini created a statue called the Ecstasy of St. Teresa and it's in Rome and you can see it.
And it's this beautiful statue of St. Teresa in ecstasy, it looks like, with this little cherub like angel next to her. But if you actually read it, if you read the account of it, which she wrote, she basically says, I don't know what thing this is. I don't know if it's an angel.
And then she said, all I know is that usually I see angels in my mind as an imagination. And this one is real. It's actually fleshy and it's about three feet tall and it's all in light. And it also has this long thing that has a dart at the end, like kind of like a, uh, an arrow and it like basically sticks her with this arrow. I mean, that's creepy. And, you know, that's exactly what she said about it.
And then you have this beautiful statue that doesn't look anything like the very strange, scary narratives. Remember I mentioned that lecture where I couldn't quite hear all of what was being said? I believe you mentioned that you were studying physical evidence of purgatory, a burnt hand, I believe. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Can you elaborate on that? And then also perhaps the physical evidence of heaven.
Okay, so the physical evidence of Purgatory, I'm not saying it's actually physical evidence of Purgatory. What I'm saying is that people have, this is what the belief structure is, is that, you know, in order to create belief in Purgatory, there was a priest in the 1800s in France who decided what he needed to do was collect as much evidence for Purgatory as he could. So he went around all of Europe and he gathered this and now it's in a museum called the Purgatory Museum in Rome.
And you could actually go online and check it out. Okay. And what this museum is, I mean, a lot of it doesn't look like, like good evidence to me. Let's put it that way. I'm not convinced, but it's what people believe to be evidence of burning souls in purgatory, like a hand on a Bible. And you see the kind of the burnt print handprint on the Bible.
And things like that. So I don't think that I mean, you know, so when we look at so let's take and let's use this as an example of doing religious studies. So you take that and you say, OK, the impetus to try to prove something that we cannot see. I've even said this before in a lecture.
It looks a lot like what's going on with UFO communities right now. So the UFO community in the United States is trying to prove that UFOs exist by taking this debris that, strangely enough, I was partially responsible for getting, and at least for some of it. And now they're doing analysis on it. When I say they, I'm talking about scientists affiliated with these programs. And they're saying, yes, we have this. Well, I would be really careful with readily believing that.
Because first, you really want to really, really believe it. I think a lot of people really want to believe it. And I don't know why. But there's that is very similar to what was going on in the 1800s, with trying to prove purgatory was real, right? I don't think it's going to age well. Right there, what you're doing with this book, too, is also is finding the similarities between religion and then the UFO phenomenon or you or ufology and so on. And so
One of the advantages of calling some field by some other fields name is that you can use the old fields tools to investigate the new field. Essentially, what I'm asking is what does calling UFOs or ufology or whatever it may be, what does calling it religion quote unquote allow that wasn't there before? I can give you an example if you like.
No, you can give an example. Those are always okay. So let's say there's some class of objects or people or practices like veganism or architecture or car driving. Let's just take architecture. If I was to say architecture is mathematics that opens up that's maybe three aspects. So one would be you can now use mathematical tools to analyze architecture. And then the number two would be the vice versa. So you can now use architecture to help innovations in math. And then number three would be to
This is more of a social effect. It would elevate or depreciate the field that's being compared. So in this case, it may be a neutral to positive result. So people would now view architecture either the same or a bit more positively because the general public has a neutral to positive view of mathematics. However, if I was to make a comparison to say architectures like garbage, well, then that would depreciate people's view of architecture. OK, so calling something by something else's name,
It has certain advantages, it allows for something. So what does calling UFOs or UFOlogy religion allow for that wasn't there before? Okay, that's a great question. And I don't think I'm making that move, actually, what I'm doing, and I do this by calling the book, American Cosmic Religion, Technology and UFOs, right? And I hold those three things together.
in they simultaneously engage each other. Okay, so I'm doing I think I'm doing two things. I'm using religion, the tools of religion to study the development of belief in UFOs. And I think that that's a good thing to do because
People in religious studies, we don't have to say UFOs exist or don't exist. We can study it as a belief system. Okay. But I'm also using UFOs as a way to push the method, methodological boundaries of religious studies, because religious studies likes to reduce things just to social effects. And what I'm saying here is we have a belief system that is now corroborating itself through science.
that is something we've never seen before. No other religion, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, no other religion has actually said we can corroborate ourselves through science. Ufology has or is doing it at this moment in time and that's what I'm saying to religious studies. I'm saying
Maybe we should take a look at this because this is really interesting, you know, and I wish more people actually more people are now that, you know, the Pentagon report came out in 2021. And a lot of people in my field are looking at UFOs in a completely different way now. And so I feel pretty good about that. And also you're not trying to dismiss or make people disregard
UFOs by labeling them as religion because you have a nuanced view of religion coming from religion studies. The reason I'm making that clear is that when some people say well AI will kill us and then someone else can say that's like religion because the AI is like the devil.
or vaccine hesitancy or acceptance is that's like religion, whatever, whichever route you want to take. That usually is a way of dismissing it saying, yeah, that's just another religion, but you're not the suggestion under the underneath by this is implicit that it's, it's, it's simply not true. Look, the AI is not like a devil. So I'm calling it a religion to dismiss people who are being a bit hysterical about that and, and so on. So you're not calling it religion in order to get people to dismiss it.
No, no, no, I would never do that. I wouldn't call religion that in order to get people to dismiss it because it's not. So I think people... It's the straw man. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, in my field, there's a lot of work to do, let's put it that way, because people have so many misconceptions about religion. You know, I'm constantly doing that work and it will never be done. It's like unending. Who is the modern day Heidegger? Who's furthering Heidegger's work?
Gosh, let me think. Hmm. Um, I know there's object oriented ontology, but I don't know. Is that it? Um, I don't know if that is it. Um, like social ontology. Is that what you're talking about? No, it's Harman's work. I don't remember his name, but no people. I'm always wondering like, what are the modern, what are some examples of these modern philosophers like a Kant or Heidegger?
I'm trying to think of some modern philosophers whose work has, I mean, she's not modern in the sense that her work was in the 70s, but Iris Murdoch's work, I think is really interesting from a Heideggerian perspective, because it seems to me that she's also going back to a Socratic like understanding of basically inputting mysticism within
questioning and she's also talking about moral realism so there are things that are actually morally objective yeah that's that's that's an unpopular opinion yeah it is very unpopular but i'm attracted to it right now great well i happen to like the unpopular opinions personally i find them more interesting i think that i'm i just pretty much play the counter position which is not great because it means my views aren't mine mine are just counter of whatever exists but i
I'm just so attracted to feeling like what's happening is not correct, especially the people who adamantly say that their belief is correct. I just think, how do you know? How do you know? And it, it, it, it nettles me, it bothers me inside. Me too. So what was Carl Jung's opinions on UFOs? I know he had a whole book on UFOs. He did. Yeah.
I forgot the name of it, but it has flying saucers in the, it's called the modern flying saucers, the modern myth in the sky. Okay. And his views changed. So at first he viewed this as he viewed UFOs as an archetype, like this new archetype that he was figuring out. But then he met a lot of people in the government who actually had physical, they showed him radar,
reports and things like that. And so then he was like, wow, and then he had friends who he found to be credible, tell him about their own experiences of seeing UFOs. So then he started to realize that this idea of an archetype actually had a physical component to it. And then the last thing he wrote about it was a letter where he basically said, I think he honestly didn't know, Kurt,
Because I mean, if you read it, because I tried to read everything that I could possibly get when I was writing American Cosmic that Carl Jung said about UFOs. And what I came up with was that he changed his mind a couple of different times. But the last thing he thought was that, and I think you can see it in this letter, and I think I cite it somewhere in my book, is basically, yeah, he says, it's an archetype, but it's an archetype that has physical qualities to it, which I thought was really weird. Yeah.
That makes it unexampled in the pantheon of archetypes. They are physical in so much as they interact with ourselves and we interact with the physical world but not themselves.
Yeah, so this is interesting. So let's talk about this for a second. Okay. So right now I'm looking at there's a person and again, I will have to send you because I like to give credit or credits to you. But unfortunately, I read so much stuff, I forget the names of people. But this is a person who calls himself a story technologist. So he does like he's a tech he says that he does the history of stories. And he looks he uses
Basically, tons and tons of data just to break down different stories and to show how they actually like what they do to our brains.
And I'll send you a link to his work. But what I think is really interesting is I agree with him that there was a point in time when writing became a technology, right? And so with writing, stories were able to be written down. And so people like Plato and Socrates said, well, there's a new technology. And like Aristotle did an analysis of the technology of stories. And he said, these are, you know, in a sense, that's what Carl Jung was doing when he was talking about archetypes. So he's talking about kind of
the elements that create these stories that get told from culture to culture again and again and again, like the hero's journey. Okay, so this kind of this myth theme, you know, levy, what do you call it a myth theme? Yeah, that's levy Strauss called it a myth theme. It wasn't a myth, because it was more than a myth. It was actually the very unit that created the different myths, right? Uh huh.
Okay, so all right. So if I'm looking at stories as technology, when I went back to American Cosmic, and in order to try to push the method in my field, I had to embody and inhabit what I called a myth, which was the myth of Prometheus. I had to actually live it. And I was super uncomfortable doing that. And then after that, what happened was,
In my next book, I've morphed into a new myth, embodying inhabiting a new myth. And that myth is basically the allegory of the cave, which is by the way, not called an allegory that was a later imputation.
So this idea of the cave, which, by the way, we see it again and again and again with like the Truman Show or the Matrix, you know, it gets played out in so many different ways in our culture right now that we live in a simulation. The simulation hypothesis is basically another iteration of this myth theme. OK, yeah, so that's the that's the next that's what I it's almost as if I had to go through the Promethean myth in order to get to the allegory, the cave myth and inhabit that.
and understand it in order to write about it. Does this mean that you've managed to get out of the cave? What do you mean when you say you're living that myth? Yeah. Okay. So I feel like after I wrote American Cosmic, you know, in the myth, do you know the myth? So my understanding of the cave myth allegory, whatever one wants to call it, is that there are a set of people and they're tied up and they're looking at the wall and on the wall are images.
which are adumbrations because they're shadows from something else. Well, we don't know that. They don't know that. They mistaken the wall, the cave wall for quote unquote reality until one gets loose and then sees that these are mere projections of something else. And this outside world is the true quote unquote reality. And then people have forgotten about the third part, which is that the sun was too blinding and
they have to retreat into the darkness, essentially that there exists such a thing as too much truth, and also that they tell people and many people consider them to be decerebrate and insensate, much like right now with people considering those who, well, if you have any belief that is borderline quote-unquote Wu, then that's what one is
Yeah, so okay, so this is that's generally good. Good job. Okay. So there are two things though, that I think that we have to concentrate on. When I finished American Cosmic, I was like, kind of obsessed with the cake, the cave. And so I went back and I read different versions of it, you know, translations and everything, which then I realized, wait a minute, it's not actually an allegory. And wait a minute, it's in a book about politics. And so I thought this is strange. And I also thought this,
I thought, who are the people that tie us up? You know, because, and I asked a lot of my friends who happen to be philosophers, they said, have you ever thought about the people who tied us up in the cave? And they said, Oh, no, no, no, it's just an allegory. And I was like, I don't think so. I think that people actually tied us off. And in fact, because of my experience with American cosmic, I believe that people tied us up. Right. And so I then wanted to tell people
Yeah, I think that people tied us up. I mean, in the cave, people tied us up. I know what I'm saying is you believe now that people tied us up or are you indicating that the extraterrestrials or whatever? No, no, no, I think that we're doing it for each other.
where, you know, we're misinforming each other. Like, there's obviously this misinformation campaign that happens for UFOs. Let's just say that happened. We know it happened. Yeah. So people intentionally said, this is what's happening over here. What you see is real. But all of a sudden we're like, Whoa, what I saw wasn't real. And we and so okay, so I became kind of obsessed with that and trying to get my friends who are in philosophy to admit that people tied us up
And then I read it so many times that I realized that I was that person who was basically trying to convince people and that what happens is you have to basically just leave the cave. But there's something at the end of the cave allegory. I'm just going to call it an allegory since people have called it that, but it's not. At the end, that person who escapes the cave and then goes back and tries to tell people that they're in the cave and then they don't believe that person. And then that person spends a lot of time
You know, precious time, basically saying get out of the cave. Come on, I'll help you. But they don't and they think you're crazy. And I thought people think I'm crazy. And I said, I'm just going to stop because that's who I am in this right now in this in this myth. I am that crazy person. He's basically telling people. We got tied up, everyone, let's get out of the cave. Well, the next step is is what my book is going to be about. The next step is the step
of where that person leaves the cave and then what they do because they don't just leave the cave Kurt they actually engage in something and Plato calls it a craft or Socrates does Plato is the one who's writing it but Socrates calls it a craft not a not a flying saucer craft a craft right like a a way of being that you engage in with another and I think that's what I think that's the heart of it
And that's what we forgot. Like we've been kind of hypnotized by the, we are in a cave thing and we forgot really what he was trying to tell us. And so I'm going to go back and kind of do a reading of that. Let me recount it once more. So they see the shadows guy or girl comes out, notices quote unquote reality comes back, tries to tell people and they don't believe him or her. Then this person,
leaves to do a craft. What is meant by that? In the book? I mean, sorry, not in your book necessarily, if you don't want to give it away. But in the allegory, quote unquote allegory. Yeah. So that's the question. What is meant by that? So that's, I think, the thing we need to ask. So what happens is, is that they go out of the cave. And then he's talking to, I think it's his brother, right? Or his brother-in-law or something. So
In Plato recounts it, Socrates is talking to somebody and he basically says, and wouldn't it be the case that we engage in this dialogue or dialectic and that this is a craft and that this is what we need to do? It's almost like if you want to know the answer for how to stay out of the cave or the answer to help you
to deal with the reality that we live in is to engage in this craft. And that's what he's trying to tell us. And this happens to be in a book about political philosophy. And I think that's really important. And I think that Iris Murdoch's book called, I think it's called The Good,
something to do with the good. I just read it. But it's an excellent take on this. I think she gets it right. And the take is that the good is to be political? No, the good is to engage in this type of craft that Plato discusses. And it's an answer to the political.
Because, you know, in this talk, you and I have been talking about religion, democracy, secularism, you know, we've been talking about these different forms of government and stuff. And Plato is basically showing us something. And then Heidegger, believe it or not, goes back and he tries to recreate that through writing this philosophy where he questions everything. And so he's basically doing exactly the craft.
Although I don't think he actually gets it as much as Iris Murdoch does. So that's what's happening. And that's what our culture right now, we're stuck in the cave. And we just don't know how to get out. And I think that's it. Because it took me a while to figure it out myself. Like, what is he saying? And then I had to read it. You know how you can read something so many times, and then finally you're like, oh, that's what he's saying, right? Sometimes it takes a while to, because we've been
so programmed to read it a certain way, but actually I don't think that's the way it's meant to be read at all, the way that we've been reading it. I was watching a talk of John Verveckis on Heidegger and John was saying, in his language, so I'm going to use, and this is a bit esoteric, but he was saying that Heidegger was stating that the whole process of metaphysics for the past 2,000 years is one of distancing. We distance ourselves as a subject from the object and
This is perhaps a mis-framing and that we shouldn't be seeking propositional answers, but instead participatory answers. So that is that it's a difficult. I don't know how to. OK, let me think. So a dance is participatory. So there's a form of knowledge associated with dancing that's not propositional. It's not writing and then it's not logical per se. A hundred percent. Well, that's procedural as well. So there's another form. So are you suggesting that
Perhaps what's happened is that we've gotten lost thinking that the by elevating the propositional knowledge and what we need to do is go back to the participatory. Yeah, and and that's exactly what I'm saying. I am exactly saying that the way that we've read the cave right has been a propositional framework. We've used a propositional framework to read it and we've neglected to see the most important point that is trying to tell us and that we have to go back
and look at that and really engage with what it is that he told us back in the day. And I think that Heidegger tried to do that. I mean, he was successful, but I think that a lot of people just don't even understand what Heidegger was doing. And I think what you just said was correct. I think we have to be participatory in that way. Engage. Because the craft isn't engaging. It's a dialectic. It's a dialogue.
And you do it with a person. And you know what I find fascinating is that you also see this in Buddhism. So there are these things called the Three Jewels of Buddhism. One is the Buddha, not that you worship this guy named the Buddha, it's actually a title which means awake. And Buddhism, so you have Buddha as an example of what a human being can become, they can become awake.
And then you have the Dharma, which is the teaching. And it doesn't have to be a book. It's anything that's going to wake you up. That's the teaching. And then you have the most important point, the Sangha. And that's the community. Because human beings live together. We don't live as, you know, so we have to do this together. And I think that that's what Socrates was basically saying, saying, they're all in the cave. Like we, you know, okay, sad for them. You tried to get them out.
But now we have each other, and this is what we have to do to keep each other from being put back in the cave. I mean, he was saying that and he demonstrated it in the book. Is there an aspect of meaning associated with this or rediscovering meaning? Yeah, it's a it's a meaning that's intrinsic. Now, here's the reason I say that is because from my understanding of Heidegger and Heidegger is one of the hardest people to read.
Yeah, I agree. He makes up his own language. But he was saying, look, what a lover does is if you love your spouse, you give them flowers. You don't give them plants. You don't give them subjects of horticultural investigations. But they're the same. They're actually the same. The flower and the horticultural investigatory object is the same. However, it's wrong to give your spouse a plant for Valentine's Day.
And so it's because even though the literal is the same, the meaning isn't. And there's something about recapturing meaning or looking at something in the correct way that Heidegger was pointing to. One of the reasons I like Heidegger is that in some sense, remember I was giving you an outline of what theories of everything is? No way am I saying it's a continuation of Heidegger's project, but it's similarly themed in that he was suggesting that the
that a project should be, that we should be understanding our being in order to understand our relationship to being, in order to understand being. And well, what is being? Well, being is... I don't know how to describe what Heidegger would say being is other than existence. And earlier you mentioned that Heidegger was interested in why something exists. I think that Wittgenstein was interested in why something exists and how something exists, where Heidegger was interested in existence. What is existence itself?
I agree with you. I think so. I think also that Wittgenstein realized that language actually couldn't contain a lot of what existence is about. And then, you know, he kind of gave up on it. He said, I think his famous quote is of that which we cannot speak, we should remain silent, which I, of course, don't agree with, because then you have art, right, and music. So let's not remain silent. That would take away a good part of what living is about. So, yeah.
Well, he also was an artist. I don't know if he meant language per se, rather than art. Maybe art was all right as a mode of expressing oneself to understand the world. It's strange because I was looking up Heidegger and Heidegger apparently was an atheist, but I see him as, in a sense, wrestling with God or trying to figure out what God is. And same with Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein, I don't think he explicitly called himself an atheist, but either way, Norman Malcolm, I don't know if you know this, his friend Norman Malcolm said the religiosity that characterized Wittgenstein was greater than the average religious person. And Wittgenstein, he said he can't help but see every problem through religious point of view. So I see Heidegger similarly, or even though he may say he's an atheist, it seems like what he's doing is is trying to understand God. Well, I mean, there's a reason why I'm very attracted to his work. And, you know,
And I find it to be mystical. I think that his later work was he had a mystical experience and they tried to express that, that understanding through his. And I think that's why he went pre-socratic. He went back to, you know, Socrates and pre-socratic in order to, you know, to express what he thought we had lost as a culture. Have you heard from any of the people who are on the more Buddhist slash Eastern end that would say that you cannot discover God or
reality or whatever synonym one wants to give it that has some dramatic flair to it. You cannot discover it via an analytical approach that you must experience. It has to be something that is beyond language. Do you have firstly, have you heard that? And then secondly, if you have, do you believe that to be the case? Yes. So I would say that, um, beyond Heidegger's writing and on a Hannah Arendt's writing,
I was very influenced by the writings of the people involved in what's called the Kyoto school. So the Kyoto school was a Japanese school of Zen Buddhism philosophers. They didn't call themselves religious. Religion wasn't even a term for them, but they they were using Zen in order to explicate like philosophy. And that's how Heidegger kind of got involved with them. And one of my one of the books that I think is most fascinating, I think it's called
I think it's called The Philosophy of Nothingness, and I forgot exactly who wrote it, but it's that person. He actually went back and read Nietzsche and kind of through the lens of Zen Buddhism, and I thought it was a fascinating book. So if you're interested, it's The Philosophy of Nothingness.
So yes, absolutely. That's what he's basically saying. I mean, I also think that Nietzsche was a mystic as well. You know, his, his, his flush is, is basically mysticism. Now, Nietzsche is someone that I feel horrible for not liking because everyone likes Nietzsche and everyone likes him. But I don't, I, I just can't, I'd rather read what other people have said about him than hear, than go to the primary source, which is anathema to, to scholars because it's, well, to me, the way that I view it, it's like wine. You, you,
for me when i drank which i don't drink anymore but i was never partial to wine to wine i i i'll have some of it but then the same with the stronger drinks they don't taste good but i'm not going to torture myself by constantly drinking it in order to get the quote unquote acquired taste so i think that's what's necessary in order to understand each of properly
No, it's not. Did you not read about my Nietzsche synchronicity? Because I hate Nietzsche. Yeah, well good for you in the sense that you're lucky that you have that. No, I know because I would have continued to hate Nietzsche as well just like you and good for you. I would be very suspicious of a person who naturally liked Nietzsche, frankly. I think you have to encounter Nietzsche. So yeah, I mean a lot of what he says is horrible.
So I'm much more of a Lovecraftian in the sense that you mentioned the cave allegory and I'm much more inclined to feel like that and I used to be of the type that give me the truth no matter what form it comes. But I've had some experiences where I feel like sometimes the truth is far too much for you to handle and you can you can damage yourself drastically from an encounter with the truth. And Lovecraft had this this quote which which to me I interpret as the case for ignorance.
and it's something like the greatest mercy in the world is the inability for the human mind to correlate its contents and that one day we'll see that this unfettered scientific investigation may bring about such a terrifying vista of reality that we'll see our fragile place in it and be so frightened that we'll either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and security of the Dark Ages.
So in the cave allegory, I see that as the person who runs back in the cave. Now you mentioned that there may be a solution to that. And while I'm praying and I'm hoping that your book provides some solution to that, because right now I'm fleeing from the light, let's say. You mean you're going back into the cave? Yes, I wish and I hope and I pray for the cave. I think that the more
Yeah, that's where the Sangha comes in. That's where you have to have people that help you.
Because it's not easy to have an open mind, especially when everyone around us is like they are. And that's why it's necessary. It's not just something helpful, it's necessary. Well, I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. Do you have a title? Right now I'm calling it The Resurrected.
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Or even try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes payday unexpectedly human. Yeah. Have you gone through? Well, what's the difference between epistemic shock and ontological shock?
Okay, so I think that epistemic shock is when you realize that the world you thought you knew and the assumptions that you had about it were wrong. And that instigates probably ontological shock, where it's ontological in the sense that you can no longer live the same, like, you know, the ways in which you live now have to change. So I see them as happening at one right after the other. One is kind of theoretical, and the other is
institutional. Well, OK, to make a play on words there, I feel like I have gone through somewhat of each of those shocks and have almost been to the point where I need to be institutionalized. And so it's it's actually extremely frightening to study consciousness and what reality is and to constantly have one's worldview shattered and and and some and even do so for a living, which is what this channel is.
It's not pleasant. And it's not pleasant. Luckily, I'm just getting out of it. It's only by the grace of God, just getting out of it. But it's not pleasant. I'm wondering, what was your epistemic and ontological shock specifically? Was there a moment? Yes. It happened in, I think it was 2012.
And it was during a whole weekend. And it was just after the, you know, the, I think it was in March that the tsunami happened in 2011. And that was shocking, of course. But after that, I had a very, very real sense of impending, you know, this could happen. And it's terrible. Like a whole civilization could like get washed out or, you know, something could happen and apocalyptic kind of feelings.
And that's when I was doing the research that I was doing into the UFO realities. And that's when I went back and I looked at some of the primary source material for Catholic history. And I realized what was happening was happening now. And that's when I met people who seemed to care that I knew. And those were the people we referred to earlier.
And I guess the reality of this shocked me on a level that that I call it pre UFO Diana and post UFO Diana. Right. Okay. And it definitely wasn't pleasant. So it was and it lasted. It was for the weekend. It was so destabilizing. Great word. Yeah. So I was destabilized. So but I had a lot to fall back on because I'd studied religion my whole life.
So I knew from Buddhism and from Catholicism that there were, you know, there are ways to get through this because I read it, you know, it's called St. John of the Cross calls it the dark night of the soul. Okay. Oh, you know, you want to, sorry, sorry, just as a quick side, I was being interviewed by someone telling them about my experience and they said, Kurt, it sounds like you're going through the dark night of the soul. Yeah, that's what you, that's what it is. It's the dark night of the soul. So, okay. So think about it now I've had,
I've read all of this and knew all of these things. So I already had something to fall back on, which is why you don't. But, you know, Nietzsche comes in handy here because Nietzsche went through it too. It almost seems like he didn't survive it, frankly, because he was so, he didn't have a Sangha, it didn't seem like, and he didn't have, you know, he didn't have the, well, Heidegger had the Catholic tradition, which he was able to, you know, and he also had his friends at the Kyoto school.
you know, try going through Satori experiences and stay stable, right? So, you know, so he had like a lot of people. So I think that that's something that we have to take into consideration here is that I think, you know, stay away from like, gather around yourself some people who have been through it so that they can say, oh, yeah, been there, you know what I mean? So like, I get it, you know, so you need a sangha. So, um,
So that's what I had. I had, um, I had, I have a woman named sister Rose, so she's a Catholic, uh, Ursuline sister. And this is how she put it. She said, Diana, she said, this is what's going on. She said, you've, and Jeff Kripal has a book called flipped in which he talks exactly about this. He says you flip Jeff Kripal. Yeah. He's at Rice university. You should have him on your show. He's great.
So he's a professor at Rice University. And basically he went through the same. He was he was in training to be a monk. And then he recognized that he couldn't be. So he became a professor of religion and he had it. He had some cool experiences. OK, so but he knows what this is about. And so this is arose. Sister Rose said, we tend to think that the world is like how we were brought up to believe.
And then all of a sudden we have experiences that show us that the world is actually not like that at all. And then we sometimes we never get over that. She says, but we're here, like, you know, her order, you know, and her and the Catholic, you know, the, the people of the church, you know, that had mystical experiences. She said, this tradition is here to tell you that we are in the world, but we are not of the world. And that actually makes sense now to me, because I was like,
Ah, that's what that means. She said it's really like the way you see it now. That's really how the world looks, but it's not like how these other people see it. She said they just think that it's like that, but they're not actually, you know, it might happen to them too at some point. They might get flipped. She goes, but mostly probably won't because it doesn't happen to everyone. It only happens to a few. So does that make sense? So there are people to which this has happened
And now they live in this reality. And that reality for them is is the normal reality. What do you mean when you say it is the world is actually how it looks? Well, when I say okay, so you know, when you've you've gone through a night of the soul of the dark night of the soul, and the next day or you know, when for me, it was that weekend. And then I was I said to myself, Okay,
I have a new perspective on what life is about and now I'm going to have to live with this new perspective. I don't know what it's going to be like. And so that's what she's trying to explain to me. She's trying to explain that you don't have to go back to the perspectives and use those as tools for interpreting the world. She said,
you're fresh, it's like you're born again, you're new in this new world, and now you have to use different tools. But thankfully, because I've been studying about religion and philosophy my whole life, I had all those tools. But I just didn't know that that's what I was doing my whole life. I was preparing myself to kind of do that by learning those tools. And now like I have a lot of people who come to me who are students or
You know, who are grownups, you know, and this has happened to them and they're like, what do I do? And then I give them, you know, I say, okay, this is, you know, a lot of times in their own tradition, they'll have a book that they just, they read, but they forgot about. And then they'll go back and I'll say, Oh, so people have gone through this.
In Buddhism, the Sangha is the community of people who are waking up and helping each other stay awake. Buddhism is about waking up from the illusion.
Yeah, so they're waking up. Yeah, exactly. That's where I am. I want I used to envy people. I don't I don't want to be awake any longer. And and you know, there's great research that says sleep is helpful. Sleep is healthy. Sleep is we're not sleeping enough. I would like to go back to sleep personally. I hear you saying Yeah, I understand. But the song is there for you. When you go through the process of awakening. They're there to help you out.
Those are the three things that you need in Buddhism. Buddhism to me looks very similar to the thing that Socrates suggests we do at the end of the cave. It's this engaging kind of thing, like what you said, participatory. So it involves other people. You can't do it alone.
I also find that so that you mentioned the song is awakened people, but I find that the more I interact with people in general, the more I go out, the more it's not just my wife, because I pretty much only interact with her because, well, for the past couple of years because of COVID. And the more that I see family and, and talk to people at coffee shops and so on, and I'm friendly, the the more it well that drastically helps me, but they're not people who I would consider to be awakened per se, I just say they're people.
So am I not doing it correctly? No, no. I mean, I think you're doing it correctly because I think in Buddhism too, anything can be a teaching, like Dharma is the teaching, whatever kind of helps you. It could be circumstances. It could be events. It doesn't have to be a book. It doesn't have to be a song or movie or person talking to you.
I think that being around people though, I mean, we have been through a lot through COVID. And I think just getting out and talking to people, we're naturally, we're beings who like to be around people and then like to have our space, right? So I think that's natural. It's kind of like eating. We need to eat. So we definitely need to be around people. And I think that COVID has maybe caused a lot of us to be in the cave too long or something.
Are you an introvert? You would consider yourself to be an introvert? Definitely, I'm an introvert. Yeah, but um, but I'm a good I'm an introvert that's learned how to be an extrovert because of my job. Same, same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna tell you this and but I'm not gonna I'm gonna take this off the record. So what happened to me was I had it. It's at this point that I suggest you watch the Karl Friston episode. I consider that to be the most important of all the theories of everything
Thank you, and if you've experienced something similar just know that you're not alone.
And that the more that people talk about this sort of issue, the less humiliation and disrepute will be thrown around. Because many, many, many more people have experiences like this than you think. It's just that most people don't talk about it at all because they're afraid. And being af- I understand what it's like to be afraid, trust me. Either way, you are not alone. Luckily I haven't had- like I'm saying luckily, because I don't want any more experiences like that. That shattered me.
I encourage that you hang out with them, those people, because what I found in my life too, was that a lot of the people that seem to understand how being, like really being human and good, were people that weren't philosophers.
You know, they were people who were, I was involved in a homeschool group with my kids. And these were just Catholics who believed pretty straight up, not complicated Catholicism, right? So I wouldn't and never talk to them about the stuff I'm talking to you about. And that was as that was good for me. And that was good for my kids. So I think I go to church and a lot of my friends who are intellectuals think I'm crazy, but I go.
And I think that these things, these simple things, I think they're good. That's the aspect of religion that it's not valued enough in the irreligious circles. So they'll say, yeah, well, like if they're going to
Ascribe any salutary component to religion, they would say, well, it promotes community. Yeah, that's a huge, huge, huge yes. You have no clue. Yeah. And that's why I say the Sangha is one of the three things is called the Three Jewels of Buddhism. They definitely understand it. It's community. And did you know that in Catholicism is actually considered a sacrament community? What does sacrament mean? Oh, a sacrament means it's a it's imbued with the power of God.
Mm hmm. So community like a church community is imbued with the power of God. So I feel like I found that in lots of different Christian communities. Okay, we'll end on just a couple audience questions. And that's it. Okay, sure. But I know they're like 3040 50100. But we'll just get to a couple that are interesting. So this one comes from Juliano Vargas, virtually all contactees say that aliens
that the aliens themselves believe in a supreme creator, God or being. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but regardless, that's the premise of this question. Should we try to reconcile our current religion with the new knowledge, with this new knowledge, or just seek to be spiritual by believing in God and doing good deeds? Yeah, so my personal opinion is that since we don't know the first part of this question, we don't know that to be factual
I think that doing good deeds and having a community of support is what, in my opinion, is what we should be doing. I think that's good. Okay, how do you reconcile your Catholic views with the phenomenon? And do you struggle to keep faith when dealing with something like this phenomenon, according to Jacques Lallet's theories, which acts like a quote-unquote control system? This question comes from number two.
Sure. Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah, it's only strengthened my faith. So I am, I'm, you know, I study religion, but I am also religious. But I always have been. And this has only reinforced my faith. So the question is, I think the question that this person asks is,
And I've been asked this question by many people, by the way, also people who are part of Congress have asked me questions like this, like, and journalists, like, won't this shatter the belief systems of religious people? And my my answer is not at all. I talk on Catholic radio a lot, like on the Drew Mariani show and such. And it seems to me, and also being involved with people at the Vatican, that
Christianity already has within it, as well as Islam, and as well as Judaism, these at these three religions, and if you look at Hinduism as well, and Buddhism, you know, these are the traditional religions, you'll see that there's already categories, there are already categories for belief in extraterrestrial beings in that, you know, the
The creed of the Catholic Church basically says, you know, God is creator of all that is visible and invisible. And within that invisible category, John Paul II said angels exist and, you know, things like that. So I know a lot of Catholics like if you look at would you baptize an extraterrestrial by Brother Guy and Father Mueller, you'll see that they say they believe that if there are extraterrestrials that they're created by God.
So it's not an either or position as I look at it. It's not a question of either this or that. I think it's a both and question. Why do you think the hitchhiker effect occurs? What have you heard? OK, so the hitchhiker effect, for those who don't know, is this idea that around people who have these experiences, say they see a lot of orbs and they have paranormal experiences and things like that,
that this is kind of a contagious experience in that it'll go on, it'll hitchhike onto a person and head home with them. Yeah, so I knew a lot of researchers who saw this happen. I've had friends who were researchers who wouldn't go to places considered hot places of UFO activity because they didn't want it to come home with them. What do I think about it? I mean, that's, I don't know. It's really strange.
Do I believe that it's real? Definitely. I mean, I have no clue what it is. Do I think that it's mental or objective? I can't tell you. But do I believe that it actually happens? I know enough scientists who will stay away from hot places because of it. Yeah.
So you mentioned that some of the people who would have the hardest time were the humanists. I think you mentioned that, well, you mentioned it here, but I'm using the word humanist right now. Christians believe, and you can see this in the comment section, I'm sure you're aware of considering the alien beings to be angels or demons. But I'm wondering, is there a third option? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. What else are there besides angels and demons?
Yeah, so I mean, we have exo. So people who are doing like looking at habitable planets, like exoplanets and things like that, you know, these are straight up scientists who are doing this work. And they're out there just finding out if there's habitable planets or life out there even. And I think that that's the way to look at it. I think that that has nothing to do with the idea of these are angels or demons. We're just looking for potential planets that have even moons.
or even asteroids that have, you know, life on them. And I think that that's a scientific endeavor and that has really nothing to do with religion whatsoever. It just has to do with exploration, you know, and that's what we're doing. You know, we're kind of an exploratory species and we're now heading out into space and exploring that and that's the third option. Two religions that come up plenty when studying this phenomenon is Gnosticism. So I don't know why
that gets mentioned simultaneously with the phenomenon, but I want to know what your thoughts are. And then Rosicrucianism, if I'm even pronouncing that correctly. Yeah. Why? Yeah, I don't know what the second one is. Sure. Okay, Rosicrucianism. So Rosicrucianism is a mystical element, tradition within Christianity, that it's called the Holy Cross, the rosy cross, okay. And Rosicrucianism. And so a lot of the college people happen to be
And in fact, the term invisible college comes from the history of Rosicrucianism. And so this is a mystical tradition within European history where you can identify scientists who are also alchemists, who are also interested in non-human intelligences and things like that and getting in touch with angels and entities. So there's a whole history of this. And so that is one tradition that a lot of people identify
with people who are involved in UFO research. The other one is Gnosticism. And Gnosticism is kind of like pre-Rosicrucianism. So there were Jewish Gnostics, and then there were Christian Gnostics. So Gnosticism basically is a Greek word that means gnosis. It means knowledge. And it's knowledge of... I explained this to my students like this.
So Michael Jordan is an awesome basketball player. He's gnostic with respect to basketball. I know about the history of basketball, but I'm a terrible basketball player.
Therefore, I have information about basketball, but I'm not gnostic about it. I don't have gnosis. I don't have knowledge of it, like experiential knowledge, right? So it's an internally, it's not gnosticism is, is knowledge that you have intimately, right? So after baking an apple pie, um, a hundred times, you're going to be gnostic about it. Okay. Okay. So that sounds like the propositional versus the participatory that we referenced earlier, or is that different? That's exactly it. Yeah.
So it's an internal intrinsic knowledge. But you develop it. You might start developing it propositionally, but then it becomes Gnostic. It becomes participatory. OK, so it's kind of like an ingredient, you know, an ingredient, not an ingredient, a recipe. So there's a recipe for apple pie. I'm not a great baker, so I need a recipe for apple pie. It's not Gnostic. I'm not a Gnostic baker. But after I've made it a hundred times, I can get rid of the recipe.
See? It says propositional to participatory. That's Gnosticism. Gnosticism is also, there are different forms of Gnosticism. There was Christian Gnosticism, like I said, and Jewish Gnosticism, and the Christian Gnostics were like Mary Magdalene, and these were people who believed that they had a
an understanding of Jesus and of God that was intrinsic and that they would pass on to others. And they also had ideas of like other worldly beings and things like that. So Gnosticism was a tradition that and still around, by the way, there is a Gnostic Christian church today. And so there's only one. I believe that there are many, but I know I know of one. So. OK. But a lot of people call themselves Gnostic. And this relates to the phenomenon
I think that people, well, first of all, Rosicretionism is, relates to the phenomenon because a lot of the people in the Invisible College are in some ways Rosicretion, like some of them are overtly Rosicretion. So they're part of this tradition. The Invisible College itself, the name is Rosicretion. It's a Rosicretion term. So that's how it relates. It's also a mystic tradition, which I find interesting.
Is there any relationship between Kurzweil's technological singularity and the Omega point and UAPs? Okay. Wow, that's a hard question. Okay. So Sherdon is, his Omega point is something that's also called the nuosphere. And the relationship is that both, okay, both Kurzweil and Sherdon are looking at
Another kind
It appears to me it's linked somewhat telepathically or it's like a neural network, but it doesn't have a digital platform. It's a different sort of platform that has formed on its own.
biologically. So, but it's a fascinating thing. And if you look at Kurzweil's work, too, especially the intro to Singularity, that looks fairly spiritual. You know, he talks about it as if he also has this vision that's like a palpable vision that he has. So if any of your listeners are interested in that,
go back and reread that first part, the first the introduction and the first chapter of the singularity. And it looks to me similar to books about this that have happened in the past. I mean, it's very spiritual, let's put it that way. His the way he's writing looks it's fraught with kind of a spiritualism to it. And how does this relate to UFOs, if at all?
Okay, so does it relate to UFOs? I think that's no, not necessarily. I mean, if you could say that the kind of if you could look at this from an evolutionary standpoint, such as Carl Jung does, and also, in my opinion, so does Chardon. Okay, what you're looking at is you're looking at kind of like a
a spiritual progression of humanity. Okay, so this is what they're they're saying. They're basically saying that we're progressing into a new state of being human. And it includes this network. It includes a network in which we can communicate with each other on a different level than the way in which language is used. It's a different sort of language.
And how does that correspond to UFOs? It so happens to be simultaneous with what we call kind of in the 20th century, the flying saucer, right? So we see these kinds of things. And so you called this a new archetype, right? The image of the flying saucer, a new archetype.
You can say that these kind of happen at the same time and are they related? They're related in this way. They're related in the sense that there is a lot of people experience a spiritual transformation when they encounter or see UFOs, the singularity and the newest fear
are also conceived of as being spiritual in nature as well. So part of the people that I'm talking with today are people who believe that there are different types of networks. There's the network that we call the internet, the digital infrastructure, the internet of things.
There's going to be a biological network now that we're, you know, the Internet of Things is actually somewhat of a biological network as well, because we interact with it physiologically. But then there's another network that's separate from that, and humans have been
You use the words new when referring to Jung and the archetype that Jung considered UFOs to be a new archetype, but my understanding of archetypes is that there's a timeless nature to them and that the representations can be new
Like we could all be orbiting the same object and representing it differently, but the object itself that is trying to be represented isn't new. So did you actually say that there was a new object somehow? No, he didn't necessarily. What he said was that this was a new, he didn't even call it a religion. He called it a new myth, but not the myth, you know, not
The type of myth that we see when we say, oh, Greek myth or something like that, which basically are religions. You know, if you look at Greek myth, this was religion for right back in that time period. So yeah, so I think that is it new? It doesn't look to be new. But the ways in which humans engage with it, I think are new. Absolutely. I see. I see. OK. So what do you make of the recent UFO hearings?
Yeah, so I watched them and I found them to be interesting. I don't have a lot to say about them in the sense that, you know, the specifics, you know, do I think that's, you know, we've moved ahead with them with the topic of UFOs and things like that. I would look at it in the sense that here, give me some time because I have thought about this.
But of course, now blanked out on it. I can't remember what I was going to say. OK, I'll give you some time. I'll give you some time. So do you want me to just be silent while you think? Yeah, just give me some silent time to like kind of OK. So. All right. OK, OK, this is it. All right. Me looking at this, OK, looking at these hearings and based on my experience of the last
few years, well more than a few years, maybe six or seven years, wherein I identified what I'd call like a fight club of people who are involved in the study of UAPs and UFOs. And what I mean by fight club is I mean that these people are compartmentalized and they don't talk to one another. I can't see how a congressional hearing is going to
Here's any of the information within that fight club. I think what's happening is that there's a recognition that there is this this group of people who do this kind of study. They probably you know, they're probably different factions. In fact, there are different factions and groups of them doing pretty high level study of this stuff, but they're not talking to each other. Okay, they're not talking to each other because that's how they've been trained.
So whereas, you know, we've already talked to you and I about academics and this kind of academic ethos of sharing our sources to further and progress knowledge. OK, this is this is actually a method and we believe in it. And we even believe that this is right. OK, well, this is, you know, and for better or worse, it could be, you know, I now I was so surprised to hear that. Well, I shouldn't have been surprised that the Fight Club
um, and the compartmentalization of these groups is necessary for these groups to further their knowledge. Okay. But it doesn't work in the same way that we think democratic progression of knowledge works. Does that make sense? It works differently. It works almost the opposite. So when I see the hearings, I hear that it's a very, it's, I think I posted something on Twitter where I said, this isn't the valet
level of talking about the topic. It's not going to get that way. It won't get that way maybe ever. We can't expect it to. So for what it was, it was okay. For what it was, it was okay. It was something that recognizes at least and modifies the stigma that's been attached to UFOs for the past
50 years. Okay. And that's a good thing. That's good for me because I wrote about it. And it's good for other academics who want to go in and study it. It's good for people who've seen UFOs and have felt like they couldn't tell anyone about it. So it's good in that way. Okay. But is it, you know, frankly, I think that the fight club of compartmentalized people who study this is going to continue, probably get more funding even now because of this. But that's what I see
as the consequence of this. I don't see these two groups talking. Yeah. So it's not disclosure per se. It's more the creation of the environment that allows disclosure slash research by removing the stigma. Well, remember research has already been happening. So I think it's removing the stigma. And I mean, honestly, I think that's a good
This one comes from Tupac Cabra who has a Twitter account that's, oh, link in the description. Does the Catholic church have their own term slash practice slash training for remote viewing? And if so, does it predate the U S governments and how put offs programmed? That's a good question. They actually do. And if you, it's not called remote viewing, but it's called discernment. And so, um,
We've talked about people in the Invisible College, a lot of them being Catholics. I don't know if all of them are, but most of them are. And so one of those people is Jacques, Jacques Vallee. And when I first met him and throughout my collegial friendship with him, he's
said to use your discernment and this is something that must be developed. Okay. And so that caused me to recognize the term as being from the Catholic tradition because that's, you know, obviously, but something that we use a lot, but we don't know what it means and what, you know, what's the context of this in Catholic history. So you go back and you look at where this develops and basically it's this recognition that
Humans have the ability to see things that you can't, you know, humans in general, some humans have more than other humans to be able to see or have information about people or events that you couldn't like get in a normal way through the five senses or something like that. And that's called discernment. And so, yeah, so I think that cultivating a spiritual practice is what helps one
discern. The remote viewing community gave specific instructions for how to cultivate the ability of remote viewing. In my opinion, though, they left out some of the ways in which you can not go crazy and do it at the same time, because I think there's a point where you're going to get a lot of information that you don't quite understand, don't know how to deal with. And I think that spiritual traditions
have things in place to help people with that. So, you know, the Catholic Church has its own, you know, internal group of, you know, if these things start to happen to you, think this way. In Buddhism, you have the same thing. If you start to see these things or if you start to have, you know, recognition of events that are going to happen, ignore them or something like that. You see what I'm saying? So to utilize these talents for gain, material gain, or
for selfish reasons. I think that this is this is something that when in my personal opinion, this is not me speaking as a professor, but in my personal opinion, I wouldn't really do that. But that's how remote viewing in these communities has been used, not necessarily for personal gain, but you know, for obviously
some corporations use it to assess what other corporations are doing. Obviously, if this was something that national security would want to, obviously Russians have been doing remote viewing, the Americans have been doing it as well. So yeah, I think that you see this within different religious traditions, but the contexts are different.
When I was speaking to this guy named Thomas Campbell, not on UFOs, in fact I don't think he has an opinion on them as far as I can tell, but he has a theory called My Big Toe, quote unquote. He said that people have the ability to do remote viewing and I think you called it by location or the Catholic Church calls it by location, which is some form of astral projection.
and he said but it can only be used for non-selfish purposes and that if you wanted to win the lottery or prove it to someone else which is a strange way of phrasing it because then it sounds like it's unfalsifiable if what you're doing is trying to bolster your ego in some sense then it doesn't work so you're saying that actually no there are cases Kurt where you're aware of or you believe to be the case that some corporations have used it for profit and perhaps some nefarious purpose on parts of some governments
Or no, you're not saying that. Well, no, not necessarily nefarious if it's for national security. I mean, they're doing it in order to gain, you know, information to protect Americans or Russians to protect Russians. I mean, you know, that's their job. So they saw that this actually works. So they tried to utilize it. Ed May, who I met at the Rice Conference, the Archives of the Impossible Conference had a great presentation on remote viewing and
He would be the person to talk to. But yeah, within the Catholic Church, there is something like that, but it's completely devoid of this use. And also, I've seen these kinds of practices in Buddhism as well. But again, totally devoid of this type of, let's do this for
To find out what our enemies think or let's do this to find out what our competitors think so we could get the upper hand. I see. Okay. So the last one was pretty much just like a personal question, a personal for myself. I've been lucky enough on Toe on the podcast to get some people who have said no to virtually every other place. And I'm unsure why. And Jim Semivan said that there's the sentiment behind the scenes that Toe is a quote unquote scientific podcast and if one wants to talk
That is cool.
Is that something that could happen? I'm not saying that that has happened, but does that occur? Is there a behind the scenes kind of discourse about them and, you know, who's good to go on and who's good not to go on and that type of thing for people who talk about things that are like UFOs and things like that? Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Yeah. Right. I think so. And I think that
I mean, we talked about this when we talked about, you know, if we're talking about something like UFOs and, you know, if in fact UFOs are, say, extraterrestrial, or if in fact they are non-human intelligence, okay, that we just have not discovered yet because, you know, whales have non-human intelligence and such, we know about them. Okay, but if this is some kind of new form of non-human intelligence that is able to travel our skies and
this would be something that the military would absolutely want to know about. And so that makes discussion of it highly surveilled. Okay. And
up for potential management, therefore podcasts, you'd have to assess, use your discernment and assess and vet people or podcasters, what message are they putting out there and do you want your work to align with that message or not, that kind of thing. So there's no, I mean, there's no real kind of like non-biased media, even podcasters have their biases.
So I think that a lot of people who are at least my colleagues who are working on the topic of UAPs and UFOs generally are academics or they're associated with programs that have to do with academia or government programs. And so they're going to be pretty careful about where they go to spread their information. If they're people who've been doing this for a very long period of time, say like Jacques Vallée,
I think that his message is pretty clear. He's been out there for a long time, so it can't be used or manipulated. And I think that he's safe to go on anybody's podcast, frankly. But other people whose work is maybe different than Valet's and whose work has not been out there for years, I think they have to be pretty careful. If you were me, what would you do to help safeguard against being used for disinformation?
Right. So that's actually hard to do. I think that you have to be pretty clear in your questions and you have to be pretty clear in your intentions. A lot of times you can't control the people who you have on as a guest. And a lot of times there are unintended consequences of what you put out there. Like that happens to me. So I'll have said something and then it will be used in a completely different way.
And there's really nothing we can do about that group. So it's a public sphere that you're putting this message out in. And then what happens is that beyond your own intentions, those things then get completely changed and used. I've actually written about this, but not specifically for UFOs, but definitely for religion. You know, the rate, you know, the monk, the immolating monk, quang duke,
I can't remember his full name, but he's a Vietnamese monk who emulated himself during the Vietnam War or I believe maybe directly afterwards. Well, his image was then taken up by this band called Rage Against the Machine and put on a CD cover of theirs and then became the image kind of
came became decontextualized from the actual reason why this man actually did this was to protest suppression of Buddhism by the communist vietnamese government and so um so then people actually have tattoos of it and about i'd say it was like maybe 12 years ago when my students had a tattoo and i said you know i said the name of the monk and he said he didn't even know
He just thought it was a cool image, but he had it tattooed on his body. So I guess my point is this, is that, you know, that man did this important act for a very specific reason, but, but nobody knows about it now, but his image is out there. We all, we've all seen the image. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. It reminds me of teenagers who have the shirt that has the Nirvana logo and even says Nirvana. And then you play them teen spirit or smells like teen spirit. And you say, who sings this? I don't know. I've never heard this band before.
That's pretty funny. So the way that I try to safeguard against this, firstly, I don't think I can. And secondly is with regard to intent. I hope that this is the case. I don't consider myself to be well, I'm a selfish person, but hopefully this is the case where I'm just an extremely curious person and much like yourself, much like researchers in general. And so I have many questions. And when it comes to a physics person, I'll just say I have a professor here and it's like office hours. And so I'm just saying, I don't understand this part. How did you get from here to here? How does this make sense with this?
and then they try and explain it to me and where I don't understand I ask questions and so I do something similar with the UFO guests where I'm simply asking questions but then I also feel like that's a cop-out if I was to say hey I ask questions and then it's up to the audience to quote-unquote decide I don't like that I think that when people say that they're abdicating their responsibility of putting out quality information so I don't know how to solve that yeah I don't know if we can solve that
Like I said, look what happened to the Vietnamese bunks image. I think that's it. I took up so much of your time. It's so generous. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for inviting me on your show. Professor, thank you so much for spending maybe three hours at least with me. It's a blessing. Absolutely. It was wonderful to talk with you. Thanks for inviting me.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash c-u-r-t-j-a-i-m-u-n-g-a-l. That is Kurt Jaimungal. Its support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
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"text": " Brief announcement. Some people requested to talk on a one-hour monthly group call, either asking questions or presenting their ideas to me slash others, so a Patreon tier has been opened up for that purpose. The first call will be limited to around 10 people, and it will be June 1st, 2022, for the MetaField Theorist tier. That's patreon.com slash KurtGymungle."
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"text": " As with all the Toll Podcasts, you can click on the timestamp in the description to skip this intro. Today's guest is Diana Walsh Posolka. Diana Posolka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. She's also the author of American Cosmos, which explores the connection between religion and technology, while also disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society"
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"text": " believe that the phenomenon has some non-terrene reality behind it. In this episode, we focus heavily on religion and philosophy, a rather technical dive into certain philosophies, as well as how us humans deal with unexplainable experiences. My name is Kurt Jaimungal and I'm a filmmaker slash podcaster"
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"text": " slash person investigating theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective but as well as understanding the philosophies of consciousness and what role consciousness has to fundamental reality. Recently there's been a video released on this channel called a crash course on theoretical physics which was the longest time that I've spent on any single video on this channel. If you're interested in Salvatore Piaz's ideas on quantum gravity or extra dimensions or what it means when a physicist"
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"text": " then do consider watching that as it's the lesson that I wish I had when I was going to university. By the way, my background is in mathematical physics, and the math in this video is aimed at the high school level. There are plenty of myths in physics that are dispelled there as well, as well as general tips on learning mathematics and physics. Feel free to share that to someone who's interested in physics and mathematics. This work was only able to be done because of Brilliant and the patrons,"
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"text": " Now with regard to Brilliant, they're the sponsor of this episode. Brilliant is a website and an app that has interactive learning experiences with regard to math, science, and engineering. They have lessons on information theory, on group theory, and special relativity. Group theory, by the way, is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard models"
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"text": " change from being a non-believer in the quote unquote phenomenon to taking more of a stance of an agnostic believer. So what's responsible for that change? Sure. So I started the research into this. I'm a professor of religious studies. And just to give your listeners an understanding of what we do in religious studies, because a lot of people think we're like ministers and stuff. We're not."
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"text": " So we're academics and scholars and it's an interdisciplinary field. So we come at religion with different tools like basically archaeology, sociology, history, you know, whatever we can use to understand the impact and effects of religion on populations. And my field has been Catholic history and looking at"
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"text": " Basically Catholic history, right? European Catholic history. When you say Catholic history, here's another thing that your listeners should know is that that's huge. You know, there are billions of Catholics all over the world. And so, you know, one person can't know all of that history. So we focus as well. So we're really focused generally. I've been looking at extraordinary things within Catholic history. And in Catholic history, there are saints who are said to have levitated"
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"text": " And by located and things like that. So I've been looking at that I've been looking at dogmas and Catholic history had dogmas of religion are formed, and then go away. And so these are the things that I've been doing almost my whole life, and certainly as a professor."
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"text": " After writing a book about the dogma of Purgatory, which is a belief in Catholicism, which is a place where souls go after they die, they don't go to hell, but they also don't go to heaven. So they go to this place called Purgatory, where they purge their sins supposedly, and then, you know, then they're one with God. So this is a belief that and a practice that was within Catholic history for a long time. So I did a survey of this and"
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"text": " You're right, I was an atheist with respect to UFOs, never thought of them, never believed in them. I was, as many people were, on the edge of scoffing at people who said, oh, I saw a UFO, you know, it's like, right, you really saw a UFO. And so, no, I never ever thought I would be doing this kind of study."
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"text": " But what happened was that in 2011, in 2012, I had been finished with this book and moving on to some new research in Catholic history, obviously. But what I had was I had been going through archives, which are really old libraries of things from like hundreds of years ago, and I'd been putting together basically reports. Catholics have always taken great notes, and they have records and"
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"text": " They have chronicles and things like that from a thousand years ago or more. And so I'd been looking at these and I was making a note basically of things that I couldn't really fit into, basically that were strange in my opinion. I thought, what are these things? So we're talking about orbs of light, things that are aerial phenomena, orbs that penetrate walls, you know, things that"
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"text": " They were usually part of the Catholic hierarchy. They were nuns or brothers, scholars."
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"text": " What was it about these reports in particular that stood out? At this point, I was just focused on"
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"text": " What happened to the Catholic doctrine and practice of Purgatory? Prior to the 1960s, you could go to any Catholic church and there would be a place where you would pray for souls in Purgatory. And that's just not the case now. And in fact, if you asked your friends who are Catholic, hey, what about Purgatory? They wouldn't know what you were talking about. So I was looking at why did this dogma disappear, basically? And so when I was looking at these reports, I would come to reports of"
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"text": " Basically, here's one that I had in my book on Purgatory. It was in the 1800s, and it was this nun in France, and she would continually see an orb of light come through, penetrate her cell wall where she lived."
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"text": " and basically kind of hang out. I thought you meant her cell walls. How could she see that? Oh my gosh, this is truly strange. That would be really weird. Yeah. No, where she was, she was in a convent. And so this ball of light would come and she was afraid of it. And she'd tell the people in her convent and nobody really believed her first. Then finally the mother superior came and stayed the night in her room. And she saw also,"
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"text": " So they interpreted this as a soul from purgatory and then they did it. They prayed it away. They tried to pray it away. And so these are the kinds of reports that I was identifying in all of these, these, um, you know, lots of different like chronicles, you know, these kinds of sources. It was unsuccessful. They're praying away. Was their prayer unsuccessful? That's a good question. Was it, it apparently was. So what's successful or unsuccessful? It appears to be cause there was no more report of it."
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"text": " So I assume that it was successful, I think. Yeah. So, okay. So, um, yeah. So I had a list of these things and I didn't include them in my Purgatory book, just one or two of them. Cause I thought, well, the frameworks are so strange for, you know, how people interpreted these things. And I didn't quite understand what to do with this big list of, of reports. So I was going to move on to another book."
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"text": " And I happened to show a friend of mine these reports and I said, what do you think of this stuff? And the friend looked at them and said, they look like Steven Spielberg movies, you know, like UFOs. And I thought, that's crazy. It just so happened that there was a, in my town, there was a UFO conference. So I went to the conference and I listened to people who had experiences with aerial phenomena."
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"text": " And so it sounded so much like what I've been studying that I decided to turn my attention to making kind of like this comparison."
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"text": " which is not, you're not supposed to do it in my field, but I did it anyway. I wanted to see if there was kind of this continuity between these reports from historic, you know, history back at least Catholic history to today. And that's how I started. Now, of course, the book became completely different than I had intended. So that's how I started. Now, the book itself, what happened when I got into the research,"
},
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"text": " was that I didn't just find out information about people who had these experiences. I also found out that there were secret programs that our government was engaged in. This is before it came out in the New York Times and I met them and I followed them around and they actually invited me on excursions like to New Mexico"
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"text": " to find debris from crashed saucers and things like that. I mean, it was pretty wacky. I thought it was really strange. And I was still an atheist when I was writing the book. It wasn't till the very end. This took me a few years, right? It took me years to get through. And we're now in 2022. In 2019, the book was published. It was done in late 2017. And so how many years is that? That's like, you know, six years of my life that I spent"
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"text": " And during that time period, I went from moving from an atheist and a scoffer to what the heck is going on here. Agnostic. What are beliefs? Okay. So in our field, so beliefs, if you ask a different, like if you ask a philosopher, they're going to have a different definition. But beliefs in our field are basically practices and behaviors and expectations of"
},
{
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"text": " Basically phenomena like events that are going to happen like I have a belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Okay, now beliefs don't actually they can or they cannot correspond with what we call objective reality. So tomorrow, the sun will most likely rise and then my belief will be true, but it doesn't necessarily have to be true. So it's like I can have a false belief. So in our field, that's how we define beliefs."
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"text": " So you said that it's practice, so some form of action, but also expectations. So the expectation to me sounds cognitive, whereas the other one sounds embodied. And does that mean that one can have a belief and not know what their belief is? Oh, definitely, you can have unconscious beliefs. Yeah. I'm sure you've heard some people say this, that atheists, at least the well behaved ones are not"
},
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"text": " Okay, so, all right."
},
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"text": " Let's first figure out what we mean by religion and theism and things like that. For people who study religion, when we think of somebody who is, say, a well-known atheist like Dawkins,"
},
{
"end_time": 940.64,
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"text": " We think that he doesn't actually, he's not had a good religious studies course, right? And this is why we think that. Because when we start by teaching undergraduates what religion is, we start by saying what you think, first of all, religion is a made up term, okay? Some, there are some societies that don't even have a term for religion, okay? A lot of indigenous spiritualities don't even think about religion. So religion is something that was created"
},
{
"end_time": 962.142,
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"text": " in order to identify something. Now, generally, the people that created this term, these people came from European culture. So to them, religion looked like Christianity. Okay. So Christianity, what are the components of it? Well, you have like a God, and you have Jesus, right, this person."
},
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"text": " And you've got these sets of beliefs and practices, which by the way are very, very different from one another. There are over, I believe there are over 10,000 denominations of Christianity. So that's a lot. And they look very different from one another. So one of the exercises that I have in my class is I show students a video of an Ethiopian mass, which is like a service, a church service. And then I show them,"
},
{
"end_time": 1008.507,
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"start_time": 989.189,
"text": " But I don't tell them what it is. I say, look at this. And then I show them another service. It's a Southern Baptist service. And I say, are these two services similar? And they say, no, they're so different, right? One has like incense and chanting and the other has, you know, someone's talking and people kind of praying and"
},
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"end_time": 1032.875,
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"text": " And they look very different. And so I say these, these are both Christian denominations. This is Christianity right here. And it's hard for them to believe because they look so different. So if we're talking about religion, there are some religions like Buddhism that have no idea of a God, right? There's no God like a Christian God in Buddhism. And even certain denominations of Buddhism, they look very different from one another."
},
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"end_time": 1050.725,
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"text": " Zen or Chan Buddhism looks way different than Thai Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism. OK, so all right. So the question that you have is, again, let's talk about atheists, too, because atheists are different as well. So Dawkins has an idea, kind of what I would call a straw man idea of religion."
},
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"text": " in that it's easy to look at religion in that way and say, well, of course, the beliefs are incorrect. And, you know, there's contradictions all over the sacred texts and these kinds of things. But that's just, that's not even a definition that we would use of religion because that's a strong man representation of religion. So this, so the question you're asking me is,"
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"index": 46,
"start_time": 1075.077,
"text": " atheists are already assuming they're gonna like wake up the next day and be alive and they're already assuming these things that Christians would say God or some religious people religious traditions would say have been gifts to humans right like life and that kind of thing is that what you're asking me I guess instead of going back to the same question how about I just play the atheistic part and say well the atheists may just say well I'm not believing as an article of faith that I'm going to wake up tomorrow I have the evidence just like you mentioned the Sun"
},
{
"end_time": 1130.708,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1104.531,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, I think that's correct. I mean, I assume that I'm going to be living tomorrow as well. So I believe that. I think that's a correct assessment. But you have to understand that I'm also not in it. I'm not a person who's going to advocate belief in religion. I mean, I'm a scholar of religion. I'm not I'm not an advocate for religion. I am an advocate, though, for understanding what religion is and is not. Definitely."
},
{
"end_time": 1160.947,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1131.647,
"text": " You know, there are fiction, there are fiction based religions. So there are religions based on movies and things like that. Are those more satirical or are those more? I mean, there are satirical religions, but there are some serious religions that are based on Star Wars. I've met practitioners of Jedi. Yeah. And they don't believe what they're doing is a form of being facetious and mocking or having fun. Nope."
},
{
"end_time": 1180.162,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1161.817,
"text": " There are some that do, but there are a lot that don't. This started in the early 2000s, 2002, and I used this basically as a case to show my students that religion has a big definition. So we're talking about what's called a new religious movement."
},
{
"end_time": 1209.787,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1180.623,
"text": " And I used to actually think that it was going to go away. And I did think it was, you know, kind of the spaghetti monster religion, that it was satirical. And I think that it began that way or it began in separate places by different people. But it's definitely a religion. It's definitely a cultural development. And it did not go away. Is religion merely a mind virus? I'm sure you've heard that term. Can it be explained purely mimetically?"
},
{
"end_time": 1239.377,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1210.947,
"text": " It's hard to say. I promise you, I don't know, and I'm still trying to figure it out. So I'm still thinking through it. And I have spoken to some people who are basically colleagues, and it appears that religion might even predate humans, in the sense that proto-hominants,"
},
{
"end_time": 1265.623,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1239.821,
"text": " Neanderthals and things like that. When you look at how they buried each other, it appears that they have some ritualistic, like kind of there are some rituals that were involved that look to be, you know, religious when we take the big definition of religion, which I've kind of talked about. So I don't know. I mean, I still think that it's an adaptation that we just don't understand."
},
{
"end_time": 1288.166,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1266.271,
"text": " Because lots of people said it was going to go away, and that's called the rationalism thesis. As people get more rational, religion will just go away. But there are more religious people today than there ever have been in history. So that's obviously incorrect. So there's something that we need from religion that keeps it around."
},
{
"end_time": 1313.148,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1289.377,
"text": " Is that rationalism thesis also known as the secularization thesis or is that a separate phenomenon? No, it is. It's the same. Yeah, it's the same. So in that case, as far as I know, in the Western world, atheism is on the rise. It's just in other parts of the world where it's not. Is that correct? Yes, I believe that's correct. Yeah. So then in that case, would that not be a testament to the secularization thesis? Because it's saying that in these more"
},
{
"end_time": 1341.305,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1313.524,
"text": " I know that this is Eurocentric and I'm going to get cancelled, but I'm just strong manning for the sake of it. Maybe the rationalists are more likely to say this, but in these more enlightened societies, that's where atheism takes the foothold and it's more of something that's akin to a religious monarchy that the religions, it's mainly through dominance and so on. So why does the growth of global religion contradict the secularization thesis?"
},
{
"end_time": 1370.23,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1341.8,
"text": " because to me it sounds like well in this thesis is saying that in the spots where we hold the values of the enlightenment and so on is where atheism should take hold all right i think what you're talking about is a movement called um where where especially young people um they basically say that they're not religious but they might be spiritual but not religious and these people are called the nuns and they're called the nuns they're not n u n s they're n o n e s and they're called that because when they"
},
{
"end_time": 1383.097,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1370.555,
"text": " Okay, so this is definitely on the rise."
},
{
"end_time": 1402.432,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1383.422,
"text": " But the thing about this is that to us in religious studies, it actually does not look secular because those people engage in yoga. Okay. And they also believe in UFOs. Right. And so when you scratch the surface of belief in UFOs, you see like, you know, transcendent beliefs or beliefs in a transcendence of, you know, this, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 1432.5,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1402.961,
"text": " This advanced tech is somehow salvific, right? And things like that. Or on the other hand, it's very bad. You know, it's like kind of evil or something like that. So you do see a lot of themes there that appear to be religious like. So I would contest that the rise of the nuns is actually a secularization. The rise of atheism. I think that as you know, I mean, beliefs change. Atheism is something that"
},
{
"end_time": 1462.159,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1432.91,
"text": " You know, I wouldn't ascribe it. I wouldn't say atheists are de facto more rational than religious people. That's just not right. That's not true. So I wouldn't ascribe the rise of atheism to the rise of kind of rationality or something like that, because I know a lot of people who are not atheist. They're either agnostic or theists and are very rational."
},
{
"end_time": 1488.916,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1463.08,
"text": " What's this association between religion and belief in UFOs? So for example, you just said an atheist may believe in UFOs and there's a religious like quality because they believe in a transcendent or they believe in transcendence."
},
{
"end_time": 1504.292,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1489.172,
"text": " Okay, so I just see that as it's broadly similar, but I don't see it as being wholly similar. So there must be more analogies than simply that. So why don't you outline that for the audience and myself? Yeah, of course. Okay, so when you look at when you look at"
},
{
"end_time": 1532.824,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1505.128,
"text": " religion and you look at belief in UFOs. Okay. So what you see, first of all, let's get rid of this idea that religion has to be exactly like Christianity. Okay. And instead let's look at religion as a set of belief and practices directed toward that, which looks to be of transforming and transformative power. Okay. Cause that's, you know, that includes then Buddhism and you know, some Hinduism and things like that. So other religions other than"
},
{
"end_time": 1560.009,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1533.251,
"text": " Jewish Christian Islam. Okay, so then you look at people who actually report seeing or being in touch with inhabitants of UFOs, and a significant percentage of them have a transformative experience after they've seen one. Okay, they're like, wow, that really changed everything for me. I just now know, I mean, I've talked to so many now, thousands and thousands of people who have had experiences of either seeing a UFO,"
},
{
"end_time": 1578.541,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1560.009,
"text": " or believing somehow that they're in contact with UFOs. Now I'm not saying this is true or false because in my field we don't actually weigh in, very few of us weigh in on trying to say this exists or this doesn't exist. You can't prove it, right? Right now we just can't prove that."
},
{
"end_time": 1606.852,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1579.172,
"text": " You know, it's the same with religion. You can't prove God exists or doesn't exist. So we just don't do that. We just look at social effects, but we also identify patterns. So when people, so this is what I saw when I started my work in looking at people who've seen UFOs or believe that they're in touch with the inhabitants of UFOs, like extraterrestrials, it, I mean, we already have religions based on UFOs. Okay. So we have nation of Islam based on UFO sighting."
},
{
"end_time": 1634.957,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1607.244,
"text": " So a lot of times people will have transcendent experiences, either when they see a UFO or after they've seen a UFO. So the transcendent experience that changes their lives, that's like a religious conversion. Because that's, you know, if you look at the history of people who have been converted to religions, you'll see that that's the type of experience that they're having. And then a lot of times these people have intense"
},
{
"end_time": 1665.742,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1635.998,
"text": " long term behavior changes, okay, where their value system changes, like maybe they were really about making money, you know, and, you know, and all of a sudden, boom, they have this experience of a UFO. And that, you know, these people are called experiencers, by the way, people who are people who've seen or believe they're in conversation with inhabitants of UFOs, they're called experiencers. And they've been around for a long time."
},
{
"end_time": 1695.145,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1666.237,
"text": " Um, but that, you know, right now that because of media and entertainment media, uh, people are more inclined to look at these events, like when they see something like an aerial phenomena, you know, they're, they're more inclined now to say if they can't identify it as a drone or airplane or something like that, they'll say, Oh, it must be a UFO, you know, which is an unidentified flying object. Absolutely. But then there's a whole group of assumptions that they bring to that."
},
{
"end_time": 1711.613,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1695.52,
"text": " And that's why the UFO is now like a rising, what I would call not a religion, although we specifically have UFO religions, I would call it the rise of a religiosity."
},
{
"end_time": 1737.329,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1712.346,
"text": " What's the definition of religiosity? Yeah. So religion looks very distinct and it kind of mimics or looks very similar to say a traditional religion like Christianity in that you have a person who has seen a UFO and then brings that information to other people and those people become converted to that religion, let's say nation of Islam or something like that. And then that's a very discreet"
},
{
"end_time": 1766.681,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1737.688,
"text": " a set of beliefs and practices, all right? You're either a nation of Islam person or you're not, okay? But a religiosity is more like what we see with the spiritual but not religious community. It's a set of beliefs and practices that people have that they don't have to ascribe to. They don't say, I absolutely believe in this person's idea of what the UFO message is. It can be, it can"
},
{
"end_time": 1796.135,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1767.398,
"text": " It's basically, it's not discreet. It's a dissemination of the beliefs and practices is decentralized. There's no centralized belief structure or institution and people get their information through each other on social media or through media like Star Wars or something like that, right? Or through documentaries that are supposed to actually be"
},
{
"end_time": 1824.633,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1796.664,
"text": " And you also mentioned the phrase that there's a transformative experience where they"
},
{
"end_time": 1838.78,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1825.077,
"text": " Radically alter their beliefs or their outlook on life afterward. I believe you said that was an element. It's not a criteria, but it's a necessary one. I don't know if it's a necessary one, but it's it's a necessary. Well, okay. There are different."
},
{
"end_time": 1868.677,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1838.968,
"text": " You know, there are different varieties of belief in ETs and UFOs. So some people believe that they were here in the past and maybe seeded civilization. Actually, Dawkins has a video out there if you YouTube it, you know, Dawkins ET, where he basically suggests something like that, or that someday in the future, maybe, you know, we'll be in contact with them or something like that, or that they're out there, but you'll just never be in contact with them because the universe is just, you know, huge."
},
{
"end_time": 1898.66,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1869.07,
"text": " Are those people who believe in the transformative experience of psychedelics somehow religious even if they're let's say one of those types who would be on the more atheistic end because the psychedelics have this quality of you ingest it sometimes you encounter some other being but you don't have to necessarily ascribe that to an objective reality maybe that's the Jungian unconscious or just the unconscious without a Jungian flair showing up"
},
{
"end_time": 1926.084,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1899.206,
"text": " And it's certainly transformative. There's data about that. Does one who believes in the efficacy of psychedelics have some religiosity to them? Just because, like I mentioned, there's that criteria of transformative experience that radically alters. Yeah. So in the history of religious studies, we can say absolutely. Could we say that now of like European people, European white people, I guess, you know, Americans, Canadians,"
},
{
"end_time": 1942.278,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1926.305,
"text": " You go down to Brazil or Central America and do ayahuasca and then see beings and things like that and then come back transformed, but maybe don't believe in the objective reality of those beings. Okay, so I would say that's not religious. That's, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1961.578,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1942.858,
"text": " That's transformative, no doubt. But within Indigenous cultures, especially like with the Native American church, they use peyote in order to get in touch with what they believe to be presences that are sacred. And then that absolutely transforms them and informs them as well. And that's a religion."
},
{
"end_time": 1986.527,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1961.578,
"text": " Okay. And you can also see this within even different forms of Catholicism in Oaxaca, Mexico. So if you look at somebody like Maria Sabina, who you probably don't know, but everybody should know about her because she's fascinating. So she's one of the most famous, she is the most famous healer in Mexico. And I believe she died in the 1980s, but her whole life she was, she used psilocybin to heal people."
},
{
"end_time": 1998.08,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1986.92,
"text": " And people came from all over Mexico to be healed by her and she called the the beings that she believed she was in contact through eating psilocybin or drinking psilocybin tea."
},
{
"end_time": 2023.336,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1998.319,
"text": " She called these beings little saints. And that's absolutely a religion right there. And in fact, believe it or not, it's a it's a denomination. It's a form of Catholicism. OK. And so you can even see cathedrals down in Oaxaca that actually have mushrooms put into them because they were built by the indigenous people. And this was part of their religion. So when the Spanish came and said, you know, build this cathedral for us, they had no clue that they were actually in lane, all these like"
},
{
"end_time": 2053.575,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2023.695,
"text": " You know, mushrooms in the architecture and you can actually go down still and see that. So yeah, so this arises. I mean, it could be a religion, Kurt. Do you see what I'm saying? It just depends on whether or not you believe that is an objective reality. That's what a religion has. It has this idea that there's something that's not subjective. There's no subjective transformation. There's both an objective reality that transforms you subjectively and then you become transformed. But this thing is objective."
},
{
"end_time": 2082.415,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2053.848,
"text": " Now I know people who are people here in North America who do ayahuasca together have the same visions even though they don't talk to each other and that reinforces their belief that there's an objective reality to this ayahuasca and they form churches around this okay so yeah so there's a lot of religion going on in there whether or not you can discreetly say this is a discrete religion and this is why it's just much more vague than that I know you're scientists so this is kind of like"
},
{
"end_time": 2109.138,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2082.688,
"text": " It's just not as cut and dry as we like to say, you know, this is a religion and this is not a religion. I think it has to do with the objective reality of whether or not these people believe it's objectively true. And again, it could be or it could not be. I don't know. We don't actually weigh in on that. But I think it's fascinating. That's part of the reason I find UFOs fascinating is because at this moment in time, what do we have?"
},
{
"end_time": 2138.353,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2109.462,
"text": " We do have people who are coming out, scientists like Dr. Gary Nolan, who, by the way, was in American Cosmic. He's James in American Cosmic, my book. And I traveled around with him. He has a sports car? Yeah. I think he has a new one now. But he had one back then, too. And so, well, that kind of threw me off of what I was going to say. I'm so sorry."
},
{
"end_time": 2166.783,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2138.985,
"text": " You're saying so there's credible scientists. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you have people. Yeah. And you also have, you know, these big news outlets that people trust for good or bad, right? Like New York Times and things like that. And they're basically saying, yeah, this is real. You know, these things exist and they're real. So to me, as a person who studies religion, this is the first time in my life that I've actually seen something that's religious, like this religiosity that's hooking onto an objective reality."
},
{
"end_time": 2169.053,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2167.193,
"text": " And this is transforming people."
},
{
"end_time": 2198.302,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2169.394,
"text": " Right. As we speak. And so I think that, you know, Carl Jung back in the day, you know, a long time ago in the 1940s, he basically said, how lucky are we that we get to now see we get to now be at the very beginning of this new belief system. Little did he know how intense it was going to get. Right. And so that's I think that we're at a really fascinating point. And lucky for me, I feel like I caught the wave of it right before it happened. I caught it with American Cosmic."
},
{
"end_time": 2221.374,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2198.626,
"text": " And believe me, I took heat for it. So, you know, I'm here hanging out with Gary Nolan from Stanford. You know, we're going into the New Mexico desert with somebody somebody who is affiliated with our space program and basically using these medical metal detectors, looking for this debris from crash saucers. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 2250.759,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2221.63,
"text": " at a site that's not Roswell, but is one of the sites where a crash is supposed to have landed in the 1940s. Now, to me, this was all a myth, right? And I was going out there to understand how somebody as amazing as Gary and as amazing as Tyler, who I call him in my book, Gary's come out as himself, so I can talk about him, but the other person hasn't. I'm like, how do these people who are obviously rational, how are they believing this? That was my question, because this is truly strange."
},
{
"end_time": 2280.384,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2251.391,
"text": " And I was just, I felt like I was a walking question mark, like constantly just what, you know, what is, are you kidding? You really believe this? Yes, they really believe this. In fact, they, they put these, you know, things into different types of, uh, microscopes and, you know, they looked at these in different ways and they were like, yeah, this is a, these, these parts are anomalous and we believe that they're, they're not earthly and things like that. I mean, it was pretty crazy. So to me, this is now,"
},
{
"end_time": 2310.094,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2280.913,
"text": " becoming something that's being almost like mass marketed, like through media, because you know, now we don't have the same type of media that we had in the 1950s and 60s, where things were slow, things are almost instantaneous now. So when Dr. Gary Nolan say publishes a paper, boom, everybody reads it, right. And now everybody has this knowledge. And so we're seeing kind of like a bunch of changes happening at once. And I find it fascinating for religion for this kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 2335.623,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2310.845,
"text": " What I call a religiosity. It's definitely not a religion in the old time way. I believe it's a it's the formation of a new type of transcendent religion. A couple of questions. So one is you mentioned that you took some flack. I believe you said you took some heat. Oh, yes, of the release of the book. Where did you take the flack from? Who gave you this heat? Sure. Okay. So you have to understand that I am not the only professor who's delved into this and gotten"
},
{
"end_time": 2364.462,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2335.862,
"text": " Heat for it. So and I don't now because obviously there's a lot out there now. The government has said, yeah, we have some cases that we just don't can't explain and things like that. So thankfully my book got retro credibility. Right. So it came out before all of this happened and then it happened, you know, just within a couple of years. All right. So who did I get heat from? So I was a chair of my department and I was a full professor when I was doing this research."
},
{
"end_time": 2392.739,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2364.872,
"text": " And I'd won the research awards at my university, and I was a well-known professor in Catholic history. And I published with Oxford, right? So I was already pretty set that I didn't care if people were going to give me flack because I knew that my methodology was sound. So I was OK with it. But I'd go to a I would go to conferences and people would"
},
{
"end_time": 2416.664,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2392.91,
"text": " It's not that bad. No, I know. I mean, yeah, there's no like, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 2446.152,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2416.988,
"text": " funding that's taken away a lot of but I didn't tell a lot of people what I was doing and then the book comes out and honestly I thought maybe 10 people would read it like you know it's an academic book and I thought it was pretty obscure in terms of like talking about how technology is shifting the ways in which people think and I was taking the UFOs and the example of this but it just kind of went way beyond what I had thought so that's how I took the heat. I had a lot of"
},
{
"end_time": 2474.172,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2447.039,
"text": " people, um, I guess tell me that I'd gone, this is such a terrible term and I hate this term, but this was said, um, you've gone native, right? You know, in, in anthropology, this means that you now believe the people that you're studying, you know, are, are what they're saying is true. And this is something you just aren't, you're not supposed to do. And, you know, it's a completely horrible racist term."
},
{
"end_time": 2502.637,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2474.514,
"text": " And that was said of me, things like that. So that's the kind of heat that I took. So that's from the academic community or a subset of the academic community. What about from the public? So, for example, I imagine that there I know Gary gets this. I know many people get this plenty where there's there are the people who consider themselves to be the rational skeptics were the rational skeptics of the sort who only follow where the evidence leads them. And this is all woo."
},
{
"end_time": 2530.265,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2502.739,
"text": " because there's such a paucity of evidence and you're believing people based on testimony and that's not what one does in science and it's not replicable, et cetera. And partly that's true, but then the dismissal of it I don't agree with, the deriding and the snide remarks that come along with that. So were you on the receiving end of any of those? Oh, definitely. I think that a lot of people would say that it's, you know, I mean, let's take the rational"
},
{
"end_time": 2549.701,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2530.862,
"text": " You know, the approach that this is not rational. In my opinion, that's completely rational. Like if you're seeing things and you're getting results, let's take the space program, our United States space program and the Russian space program as an example of this. Okay. And when I say an example of this, what an example of"
},
{
"end_time": 2580.265,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2550.879,
"text": " Basically, people not following the evidence, okay? So the evidence is this, that the people who founded our space programs did a lot of weird science. Woo science, I would call it woo science. And they still continue to do that. Tyler is an example of somebody who's doing woo science. You can't replicate what he did. With Jack Parsons, who founded our space program, Werner von Braun founded, you know, he's German, but he came over to our space program."
},
{
"end_time": 2609.718,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2580.64,
"text": " And then, um, Konstantin Tchaikovsky, he founded the Russian space program. All of these people created the calculations that would get us off of earth, right? That would get us up into space. Okay. Well, that's big. Okay. And they did this through means that looked irrational. They had techniques they used. And as a person who studies religion, these are identifiable techniques. These are body techniques. So they're using a lot of,"
},
{
"end_time": 2635.572,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2610.06,
"text": " what we would call, you know, like eschesis, that's a Greek word for almost like becoming very, very disciplined with respect to your lifestyle and your mind and your thoughts. So they were going into some kind of almost like an altered state of consciousness, at least Jack Parsons was, and then creating these, you know, kind of downloading this information."
},
{
"end_time": 2663.234,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2635.93,
"text": " Well, what does that say? I just recently given a talk and I made this case. I said, that's where the data leads us. I mean, if we're rational, we're going to say, yeah, you can't replicate that. But that's where the data says that those things actually work. Like those kinds of, you know, I spoke to Kerry Mollis here. I'm going to I don't know if you can hear that. Can you hear that? No, no, no. OK, never mind then."
},
{
"end_time": 2669.582,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2664.258,
"text": " All right, Kerry Mullis, he is a Nobel Prize winning, winning chemist, right? So he is a"
},
{
"end_time": 2699.838,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2669.855,
"text": " He discovered the polymerase chain reaction. All right. Now, I suggest to your listeners that they go check out his webpage, Kerry Mullis, where he talks about, he died two years ago, but he basically talks about creativity and his means of being creative was exactly like Tyler's means of being creative and very similar to the space program, you know, the people in the space program and he's a genius. Okay. And so what I'm saying is this, I'm not a scientist, but I'm saying to scientists,"
},
{
"end_time": 2729.633,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2700.401,
"text": " The data looks weird, right? It looks weird, but I think, and it looks like, you know, these people are doing things that are not rational, but to a person in my field, these things are actually patterns. And why would you ignore those patterns if they're giving these amazing results? If you're actually, you know, if the results are something that you would, you know, you want, why discount then the body practices that they're engaged in? That's my point. And so I think that is actually rational."
},
{
"end_time": 2747.244,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2731.015,
"text": " There's rationality to the woo, let's put it that way. So what if someone says, okay, the fact that these practices exist and then instigate some creative or that spur some creative insight, it doesn't mean that what they think is occurring is necessarily occurring or is objective."
},
{
"end_time": 2777.654,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2747.671,
"text": " and many creative people have practices that are deviating and peculiar even Newton he engaged in alchemy and let's imagine that alchemy served as the inspiration for calculus it doesn't lend credence to the objective validity of alchemy it just means that just like Wim Hof can say that hey you may have a creative insight if you run for a while then jump into a cold bath maybe that's true and there's an extremely tight relationship between our body and our our minds and it doesn't necessarily mean that there"
},
{
"end_time": 2802.193,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2778.541,
"text": " Even if it's consistent, consistently when you jump in that bat, consistently when you perform alchemy, consistently when you meditate in this way and supposedly talk to beings and so on. Even if that's the case, it doesn't mean that the mechanisms that you think are working are the reasons. It just means the practice work. I totally agree with that. Yeah, I'm on board with that. In fact, I would suggest that that's what we that's the type you see to me, you're thinking like a person in religious studies."
},
{
"end_time": 2830.623,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2802.671,
"text": " You're saying there are patterns here and the patterns have to do with some body practices, right? Eschisis, body practices. But the body practices are different for each of those people and they're kind of strange. Like if you took Jack Parsons, he did a lot of really weird things. I would not want to have hung out with him, right? So, you know, he's part of some, you know, Aleister Crowley and people like that. I mean, frankly, very, very different than Konstantin Tchaikovsky."
},
{
"end_time": 2858.575,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2830.623,
"text": " who does very similar ritualistic things, but they are in no way does he view it as a new form of religion. You know, he thought of it as Christianity. So do you see what I'm saying? And then when Tyler's doing it here in the 2000s, he's doing very similar things, but he doesn't think of it as Aleister Crowley. He would probably be horrified to even think that it had anything to do with Jack Parsons, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2884.292,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2858.575,
"text": " So what I'm saying is I agree with you entirely. I think that what we need to do is we need to identify that these people do these things and what are these things and are there patterns? Yes, there are patterns, but what they specifically believe about them is based on their own interpretive framework. So Jack Parsons happened to be in LA in the early 20th century where there was a belief system in place for him to kind of hook into."
},
{
"end_time": 2910.913,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2884.292,
"text": " If you look at, do you know Ramanujan, the mathematician? Okay, he thought that the goddess Lakshmi was whispering those calculations, the math calculations, brilliant math genius into his ears. So that was his interpretive framework. You see what I'm saying? Also, when I was doing American Cosmic, I was reading up on creativity. And I forgot the name of the person whose work I had read, but she was really, she's really good."
},
{
"end_time": 2935.196,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2910.913,
"text": " And it's cited there in American Cosmic. But basically she said that if you look at the brains of people who are being extremely creative, we're talking about creative genius, what you see is that something is shut down. I think she said in the executive lope or something like that, the executive function is shut down. And the people that are being creative are attributing their creativity to something objective."
},
{
"end_time": 2959.667,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2936.067,
"text": " Yeah, so they're attributed to something objective. That doesn't mean that there's something objective there. It just means that that's what they're doing. Right. And so I that's the way I would like to do this research. And that's how we can avoid, you know, a lot of people are, are just they have knee jerk reactions to it, for some reason, like, that's who, you know, well, it's who that works. And I want to know why it works. That's basically my position."
},
{
"end_time": 2971.493,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2960.435,
"text": " I'm super interested in what constitutes a religion and what doesn't, which is why I have many questions about this. The people who label what you just outlined as Wu, the stigmatization,"
},
{
"end_time": 2994.548,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2972.056,
"text": " Is there something that is common among those people that makes the stigmatization itself a form of religion? So that is to say, when the people who are of the more atheistic type, not picking on them, it's just the easiest that come to mind. When the atheistic types make fun of religion and they say that I'm not religious, is there something religious about that? Oh, I hear what you're saying."
},
{
"end_time": 3019.206,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2994.974,
"text": " No, I don't necessarily think so. I know that a lot of people say that atheism is like a religion because, you know, people are, you know, either you are, you aren't atheist and, you know, you're in our community and it's kind of exclusionary, right? And some religions are like that, not all, but some are. And they're dogmatic, like they're dogmatic atheists. I think that's what they're trying to say is there's a dogmatism about some atheists"
},
{
"end_time": 3045.503,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3019.445,
"text": " who, like I said, like to put, like to make a strong man argument about religion and then like knock it down and say, see, there's nothing there, right? Yeah, I don't think so. I think that there's a variety of atheist beliefs anyway, right? So when I say I was atheist with respect to UFOs, I didn't believe in the objective reality of UFOs, okay? And I thought that people who did, I thought they were completely wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 3070.759,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3045.913,
"text": " So religion has the reputation of being shut up and listen to what I say and don't think for yourself and don't question. How much of that is true? I know that's a straw man, but how much of it is? How is it true? How is it not true?"
},
{
"end_time": 3100.247,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3071.305,
"text": " Yeah, that's great. So within different denominations of religions, also, let's take, I'm most familiar with Catholicism and Christianity. And I would say that within Christianity, a lot of believers within certain forms of Christianity denominations that are relatively new would be like that. You know, I'm here in the South, but I grew up in California, and I was raised, you know, pretty eclectic in California, but I'm mostly Catholic, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3122.193,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3100.503,
"text": " And so when I came here and I taught the students, a lot of the students in the South, in the United States, didn't even believe or know that Catholicism was Christianity. They would say, Dr. Pasulka, what religion are you? And a lot of times I wouldn't tell them. I say, well, you have to, I'll tell you at the end of the semester. But I would say, okay, I'm Catholic. And they'd say, oh, you should become a Christian."
},
{
"end_time": 3151.886,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3122.705,
"text": " Right. So they just didn't have an idea. They just didn't know their history. You know, Catholicism actually predates their religion, which is Baptist or something like that. So I would say that probably the more recent Christian denominations are like that. And obviously, there are some Muslim denominations that are like that as well. Or they're not at least they're not like you need to belong to us. But basically, you know, we have the true idea of what a religion is, but not all. OK, so a very small minority."
},
{
"end_time": 3158.592,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3152.193,
"text": " in those in each of those religions, you won't find it at all, at least"
},
{
"end_time": 3183.66,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3159.138,
"text": " Historically in Hinduism and Hinduism, you know, it's very regional and a lot of people who are Hindu would never say you there you can even convert because there are some religions that you just can't ever convert to because you actually have to be born into the culture, right? Why would you want to do that or all roads lead to Brahma, right? So they're all you know, so if you're Catholic be a really good Catholic and you can you can reach moksha"
},
{
"end_time": 3211.578,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3184.121,
"text": " That's the idea. Okay. So a lot of people in North America, Canada, United States, they don't understand the variety of religious belief. And that's what I'd like to convey to people. If people knew that more, and even religious people, they don't even know that. Like a lot of religious people, it depends on which type of religion they're from. But they have these own perceptions of what religion is as well."
},
{
"end_time": 3233.387,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3212.824,
"text": " I was speaking to Coleman Hughes, and he was telling me that, Kurt, look, these conversations that you and I are having right now, these are not the kind of conversations that you can have in a church. The church would just say, this is what you should believe, and they're dogmatic, and so on. And I told him that you'd be extremely surprised. And then he said, well, most of it is the case, or most religions are like that."
},
{
"end_time": 3262.654,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3233.643,
"text": " That's actually true. But even if that's true, then my question to him was, because I imagine it's 70% true, maybe 30% are extremely open-minded and allow inquiry like this, even questioning of God and so on. The history of philosophy is filled with people who consider themselves Christians who are even questioning in their work, does God exist? So it's not actually true that you can't question the foundational aspects of your religion and still be a member of that religion. Then the broader question to me comes, well, at what percentage, at what point do you say,"
},
{
"end_time": 3292.773,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3263.114,
"text": " Religion says so-and-so because a large enough percentage of people who are religious believe so-and-so. Well, it's more of a category question. So if 10% of people have deviating points of view, then do you... Okay, well forget about that. I don't know how to... Do you excommunicate them? Is that what you're asking? It's more like at what point do you generalize enough to say religion says so-and-so because 70% of people who consider themselves to be religious say it. You probably wouldn't say religion says so-and-so if 50% of people believed."
},
{
"end_time": 3317.602,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3293.029,
"text": " I wouldn't even say religion says so, you can't even say that, because which you have to specifically say, that's like saying, humans say so, right? Because well, which humans Americans, Canadians, you know, people from Europe or, you know, Saudi Arabia. So you have to identify which religion because if you went to Buddhist countries, even like say Japanese Buddhism, and you said, you know, they're not going to be telling you about"
},
{
"end_time": 3341.578,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3318.148,
"text": " believing in a God, they will be telling you to question everything to the point, you know what I'm saying? So those kind of, you know, so there are so many forms of religion that I think that you can't say religion says this. You can basically say religion at this point in time in 1980 in North Carolina, you know, in Wilmington,"
},
{
"end_time": 3366.34,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3342.449,
"text": " Baptists will say that if you don't believe this, you're going to go to hell or something like that. That's probably, you know, you can, you have to be really specific instead of general and you have to take it by case by case basis. But in my opinion, I would say that people who are religious, um, mostly are not going, they're going to allow for, I would say even 70%."
},
{
"end_time": 3396.049,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3366.766,
"text": " They're going to allow for you to question everything because that's how because in a lot of religions, if you go to the mystical traditions, almost in almost in every religion, there's a mystical tradition. If even in philosophy, there's a mystical tradition and that mystical tradition is generally questioning everything. OK, that's how one comes upon this mysticism like, whoa, like what, you know, this question. And I think that. That that's the goal."
},
{
"end_time": 3418.387,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3396.732,
"text": " Because once one does that, that's when one is open to these kinds of highly creative events. Earlier we mentioned dogma. Dogmatic has a reputation in our educated culture as being a net negative, has little redeeming qualities other than maybe to regulate the populace, and that's actually a negative anyway. So can you steel man dogma? Can you make the case for dogma?"
},
{
"end_time": 3448.114,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3420.213,
"text": " Do I advocate for dogma? Is that what you're saying? Can I advocate for it? I think the more rational types would say that so-and-so is dogmatic. That means it's a disgraceful quality. And I don't think that dogma itself is a negative. I think it can be out of balance. Yeah. Okay. So what is a dogma? So a dogma is a belief that becomes central to an institution. Okay. So in the United States, we have this constitution and, you know, all humans are created equal."
},
{
"end_time": 3471.527,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3448.643,
"text": " That may or may not be true, but that's absolutely a dogma. It's ingrained in Americans. So if you're born here, you grew up listening to that, and you believe that all human beings are created equal. And then when human beings are not created or not treated equally, you hold that up and you say, wait a minute, this is what we believe."
},
{
"end_time": 3498.592,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3471.527,
"text": " And therefore we must act this way. And if we're not acting that way, then there's a problem. Okay. So that would be a dogma. And a dogma isn't necessarily true or false. It's just basically something that all these people hold to be true. And then we must act. It's like a belief, right? We talked about the definition of belief earlier. And then we call it like self-evident truth. That's like a dogma, right? Self-evident, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3528.046,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3499.036,
"text": " But it doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually true. Now, to become dogmatic means that, say, let's take the Catholic Church as an example, since I've studied that. Within the Catholic Church, purgatory is a dogma, right? The belief in purgatory, you must believe, you must believe in this place called purgatory. Alice, you're not a Catholic or go to hell or what is it? What is the else there? Yeah. So basically you're not a, you're not a Catholic following Catholic"
},
{
"end_time": 3557.483,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3528.575,
"text": " doctrine. Okay, so you could you could feasibly be excommunicated or something like that. I doubt that would ever happen. Because now people don't even know what purgatory is Catholics or anyone, right? So but it's still there is still a dogma. So that's what my question was back in the day was like, wait a minute, people used to do this all the time, right? And even, you know, our grandparents are like, pray for the souls in purgatory. Like, we don't even know what that means. What does it even mean? Okay,"
},
{
"end_time": 3570.862,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3557.705,
"text": " So, so that dogma seemed to have disappeared, but it hasn't actually the church is a lot, it will probably never get rid of it. So it's still a dogma, but it's just not one that's practiced."
},
{
"end_time": 3590.299,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3571.527,
"text": " Does that shed light a little bit on dogma? Yeah, and what's the method that dogma changes? Like, what's the updating mechanisms for dogma? Because it sounds to me the word dogma would imply that it's set in stone. This is the way it is. So how can you ever change it? Yeah, I know. That's really a good question. And I think that this is how it works. Frankly, this is what I showed."
},
{
"end_time": 3610.009,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3590.299,
"text": " In my book about purgatory is I showed that when did purgatory become a dogma? Well, it wasn't there from the very beginning, believe it or not. Okay, so I think the Catholic Church, this is how it views purgatory, is that purgatory is an actual state that souls do go to. Okay, and it's objective of humans."
},
{
"end_time": 3635.486,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3610.282,
"text": " Therefore, Purgatory was like discovered or found in the 1200s, right? All right, so that's kind of the idea or let's put it like this is kind of the unwritten history of Purgatory. This is just how people think about it. That's really not what happened, Kurt. If you go back, you'll find that people actually went to specific places where they would go into caves underground"
},
{
"end_time": 3657.705,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3635.486,
"text": " If they were particularly bad people, okay, say like they've killed people, their bishop would send them to a place in Ireland, and there was also a place in Italy, where there was a cave, and it's still there, by the way, in Ireland, it's called Loch Durg, and it's a place called, it's on a lake, and it's an island on a lake, it's called St. Patrick's Purgatory."
},
{
"end_time": 3668.899,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3658.131,
"text": " This is in the 10s and 1100s, and bad people would have to go spend the night in that cave, and if they survived that cave, they would have been purged of their sins."
},
{
"end_time": 3694.616,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3669.548,
"text": " And so purgatory actually came from these weird these I wish I shouldn't say weird, because we still do things like this, you know, like, I'll be good, you know, I won't eat any bad food for 10 days. And then hopefully this good result will happen kind of thing. Right. So we kind of do those kinds of things. All right. So that's so purgatory actually came from some basic practices that people did, like physical practices. So it's actually a physical place."
},
{
"end_time": 3702.892,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3695.606,
"text": " Quick question about that. What was it about the cave that was so dangerous that made it unlikely or difficult for one to survive the night there?"
},
{
"end_time": 3730.35,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3703.285,
"text": " I think part of it was just the claustrophobia of going into this cave for 24 hours, you couldn't eat, you couldn't drink, it's probably pretty scary. But also people believed in spirits and demons, right? And that perhaps they would meet spirits and demons in that cave. And there was a very famous book called St. Patrick's Purgatory, written by a Chris, basically about a crusader knight who went into the cave and fought demons and things like that. It was actually a medieval bestseller."
},
{
"end_time": 3756.271,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3730.947,
"text": " And a lot of people read it. In fact, Dante read it and based Purgatorio on this, right? So this was pre Dante. And this is where the dogma of Purgatory derived. Now, how did it leave? Well, it dogma goes away through time when people just stop knowing where it came from in the first place and what it's about. I think it's just a natural thing. Things aren't written in stone. They come and go."
},
{
"end_time": 3785.657,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3756.578,
"text": " So a lot of people say, well, the doctrines and truths of the church never change. Well, they look like they change, at least how we believe in them changes. So, yeah. When I was researching you, I was so pleased to see you mentioned Heidegger because not many people do, especially not in the UFO scene. What the heck does Heidegger have to do with UFOs? Yeah, that's for sure. And you mentioned that there's something about technology and the and not viewing them instrumentally that Heidegger had."
},
{
"end_time": 3813.302,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3786.015,
"text": " And I would like you to expand on that, please. Yeah, sure. So Heidegger, I like Heidegger and a lot of colleagues of mine hate Heidegger. And Heidegger is kind of, you know, demonized in philosophy because this is what happened to him. He's really interesting. So he was, you know, he hung out with Wittgenstein and people like that in philosophy. And he was straight up like rationalist philosopher. OK. And then strangely enough, he actually hung out with Zen Buddhists."
},
{
"end_time": 3842.517,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3813.78,
"text": " So there's a school in Japan called the Kyoto School of Zen Buddhism and the people that were part of that school were also philosophers. So they and Heidegger would have conversations and Heidegger actually had a mystical experience. And after that, he started to do exactly what Socrates used to do. And that's why if you look at his work, you'll see that it was like straight up kind of boring philosophy until all of a sudden he started to name everything that he wrote. It was a question."
},
{
"end_time": 3870.674,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3842.961,
"text": " What is technology? What is an object? Okay. And so he went at it in a Socratic fashion of basically, you know, what Socratic dialogue is, right? So the process of, okay, so it's a process, but the process is basically to ask, and we're not going to find out, we're going to find out more about it. But there's going to be a point we're going to say, I don't know what the heck that is. Right? I don't know what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3896.049,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3871.152,
"text": " And that's what Socrates would say and that's why Socrates was supposed to be the man who was the most intelligent man in the world because he said he didn't know and he was honest and also really smart. I don't know. So I think dogma is knowing and that's why it has a bad name because I think at heart we all know because this is the question that that Heidegger wanted to revisit. Why is there something rather than nothing?"
},
{
"end_time": 3920.708,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3896.578,
"text": " Like, why are we here rather than why are we self-conscious? So he was basically coming at this question and questioning everything, right? Questioning what is art? I mean, he was one of the first philosophers to really get into this question of technology. And he actually, in my opinion, he was visionary because he basically saw technology as basically becoming our infrastructure."
},
{
"end_time": 3950.06,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3920.964,
"text": " and also more than that, right? So he went, I don't know if you've ever read the essay, what is technology, but he goes back and he, he talks about it with respect to the, um, the Greek temple. So for the Greek temple, you know, for the Greeks, the temple housed their gods and goddesses. It housed the sacred, right? Okay. And then he goes through the medieval time period, Heidegger, and he says for the Catholics, it was the cathedral that housed God."
},
{
"end_time": 3972.005,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3950.64,
"text": " He said, with technology, what's going to house technology? He was looking at technology as a new form of the sacred. And that's what I find fascinating. That's what led me to Jacques Vallee, actually. Meaning that it's an interface? What do you mean when you say that the technology houses the sacred? Okay, yeah, that it is going to determine"
},
{
"end_time": 3991.51,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3972.21,
"text": " How we live in the world and how we like our relationship with the world like is going to be so as a Catholic, a medieval Catholic, your relationship was with the world was basically the belief structure of the Catholic Church, which you know, you encountered God in the cathedral."
},
{
"end_time": 4019.616,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3991.903,
"text": " And then supposedly from that experience, your experience, like, you know, going to the Purgatory Cave or something like that, you it determined the way in which you lived in the world. So Heidegger was basically saying what that was for the Greeks being a temple and it was for the cathedral was for the Catholics. Technology is going to be for the people of the future. And he was basically saying, you know, his grandkids or something like that. It's common is what he was saying. But, you know, he also"
},
{
"end_time": 4046.271,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4020.384,
"text": " envisioned something really bad on the horizon. And I'm not quite sure what it was that he envisioned, but it wasn't good. Because I end my book with a quote from Heidegger, and he didn't actually want that quote. He didn't want that quote known until he died. And then when he died, that quote could be published. And the quote is, only a God can save us now. Hmm."
},
{
"end_time": 4074.957,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4046.698,
"text": " And when he said God, he wasn't meaning the kind of straw man God of Dawkins religion. No, he was meaning something entirely like a mutation or something that was, you know, something that was so far out of our own experience of humans that that, you know, it would be it would save us basically. It's like if this was a story, it would be like a Deus Ex Machina. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be it. Yeah. OK, you mentioned this was related to Jacques Valley."
},
{
"end_time": 4094.582,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4075.418,
"text": " Yeah, okay. So, all right. So, Heidegger has always been some, you know, his, his work was fascinating to me, just as Hannah Arendt's work, she and he were, she learned from him, he was her professor. And so these kind of these"
},
{
"end_time": 4123.865,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4096.237,
"text": " These philosophers formed a lot of how I looked at things because I grew up in California near, well, in the dot com. You know, this was like my milieu. I guess you could say my social milieu was on the nineties with, you know, the dot com stuff and everything like that. And I lived there. That's where I lived is in Northern California. So I got to see kind of technology take off. Right. And"
},
{
"end_time": 4154.019,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4125.265,
"text": " I also so so Heidegger was always on the back burner, right? And then I met and then when I was done with my book, oh, by the way, I think he had a Catholic burial. So he wasn't actually a practicing Catholic, but he made sure that he had a Catholic burial, which I always found fascinating. So OK, so what happens then after? OK, so Jacques. OK, I attend this first. I knew about Jacques work because he wrote a book Passport to Magonia."
},
{
"end_time": 4184.565,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4154.821,
"text": " Yeah, for some reason I thought John Mack wrote that. Oh no, John Mack wrote Passport to the Cosmos, a reference to Jacques' Passport to Magonia. So I read Passport to Magonia and to me it felt like I was reading my book on Purgatory. And so I reached out to him through hard mail, right, like snail mail. I wrote him a letter and I sent it to him and I said, I wonder if you'd talk to me because I'm in California a lot. And he said, yes. So"
},
{
"end_time": 4210.452,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4185.111,
"text": " So we started a correspondence. He was fascinated with my research because he wanted to see the primary sources for a lot of the Catholic, you know, because he's from a Catholic country and has that, you know, was able to read Latin and that kind of thing. So I shared a lot of my my work with him. And I went to a conference where I was it was a small conference in California and Jacques was there."
},
{
"end_time": 4233.387,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4210.947,
"text": " And it occurred to me, what I thought was really odd was that Jacques wasn't only a person who was interested in UFOs, but he was also a person who was pretty instrumental in the creation of technology in our country. And, you know, he had a PhD in information science from Northwestern in the 1960s. I mean, you know, so he's at the very beginning of two absolutely"
},
{
"end_time": 4258.404,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4233.899,
"text": " what I think are inexplicably related things, UFOs and technology. It's almost as if the belief in UFOs is almost the religious support of the infrastructure of technology. That's how I saw it. So to me, Jacques was like a walking Heideggerian essay to me. That's what he seemed to me to be."
},
{
"end_time": 4288.217,
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"start_time": 4258.746,
"text": " And so I couldn't stop like thinking that. And so I read everything. And this is before he put all of his stuff on academia, edu. So before that, I went to, you know, I searched everything out on microfiche, you know, in the library, and I read all of his 1970s stuff and everything. And I was like, wow, I'm right about him. He is like this hiding area. But he I don't even think he knows who Martin Heider he's never read him, I'm sure, you know. And so, yeah, so that's how then I"
},
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"end_time": 4306.203,
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"start_time": 4288.66,
"text": " understood his work. And to me, you couldn't take the technological work that he did away from the UFO studies that he did. To me, they went hand in hand."
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"text": " Okay, so what I was going to ask is, is there"
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"text": " a higher percentage of people who are Catholic who study the phenomenon more than the general population, let's say. Have you found that? OK, so I found that because I was at the Vatican and I spent time at the observatory there in Castle Gandolfo. And I know Brother Guy Consolomano, who is the observatory. He's a Jesuit monk who's the head of the observatory. He's an astronomer."
},
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"start_time": 4397.739,
"text": " And they have a meteorite collection there and stuff. It's pretty cool. So I got to stay there and I've known him now for, I don't know, a lot of years, I guess. And I also talked to lots of people at the Vatican, like Peter Gumpel. He's in his 90s and he was like a papal advisor. And so this is what I can say about Catholicism and"
},
{
"end_time": 4456.903,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4427.927,
"text": " the subject of UFOs, is that the people that I've talked to are very open-minded about it, and just as curious as you and I are. And some believe and some don't believe. So there's no, right at this point, there's no definite kind of dogma or doctrine about UFOs for the Vatican, right? So, okay. So that said, when I did get into this research"
},
{
"end_time": 4485.452,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4457.142,
"text": " some very odd things happened to me that never would have happened to me had I stayed in the study of normal Catholic history and stuff like that. Like, so I was, you know, people in my book, a lot of them, I became involved with the Invisible College. Do you know the people that, okay, so I became involved with the Invisible College. And after about a year and a half, I recognized that every single one of them"
},
{
"end_time": 4515.486,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4486.442,
"text": " either was a practicing Catholic or had been, you know, had come from a Catholic background. And the ones that were the most intense into the research were actually practicing Catholics. And I don't understand that actually. So I'm not quite sure why that is the case, but that's the case. Do you have any speculation as to why that may be the case? Like ideas you're toying with? I mean, it makes it's going to make it's going to sound very crazy."
},
{
"end_time": 4542.193,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4515.759,
"text": " And I'm just, if I tell you, okay, I will tell you what my, my speculation is, but there's no proof for it. Um, it's just what I think. So it has nothing to do with me being a professor and kind of, you know, weighing down. Okay. So basically I think that, um, well, every single one of them has a clearance. Um, most of them were involved in some way with the information about UFOs and the public. And we know about project blue book."
},
{
"end_time": 4570.367,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4542.585,
"text": " And we know that with project blue book, there was a disinformation campaign, right? And we know some of the people that were supposed to do that. Um, it could be that people feel guilty. I'm not sure. And so they go back to the religion of their youth in order to, you know, cause it's pretty intense studying UFOs and then maybe dis, you know, make, maybe engaged in disinformation and things like that. I mean, this is pretty heavy and, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 4594.565,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4570.998,
"text": " I didn't mean to find stuff out like that, you know, about the UFO phenomena. I just kind of happened upon it. And that the work that I do is historical work mainly. So I've done a lot of history in the campaigns and the stuff like that. So yeah, so perhaps that's the reason. I'm not quite sure."
},
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"end_time": 4603.114,
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"start_time": 4594.855,
"text": " Does the Vatican acknowledge or see any similarities between angelic encounters and alien encounters? Hear that sound?"
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"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
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"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Yes, some people do. Yeah, some people do. Definitely. I mean, one of the former directors of the Observatory definitely believed in ETs."
},
{
"end_time": 4804.548,
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"start_time": 4784.411,
"text": " And believe that ets were another kind of subset of God's creation. Okay, so that's another thing is that a lot of people think like atheists or people that I talked to like, you know, people in Congress or something like that they're like, if we, if people find out that UFOs are real or something is going to really, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4820.486,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4805.947,
"text": " You know, the religions are going to crash, they're going to implode and people are going to not believe in their religions. Well, that's not true at all, because people already who are religious have categories for anomalous phenomena and anomalous beings and non-human intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 4846.681,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4820.862,
"text": " So they already have these categories in place that say atheists don't have, or some atheists just don't have. And so I think that people who are religious are going to be actually very... In fact, I think they already are. They're completely okay with the idea that there are perhaps ETs or non-human entities, non-human intelligent entities, because they already believe it, you know?"
},
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"end_time": 4875.145,
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"start_time": 4847.278,
"text": " In terms of the Vatican or in terms of some of the other religious people that you've encountered who sorry that you have yes encountered that have that are devoted do they see aliens to be a modern interpretation of the of some ancient of what we placed into religious stories or do they see the aliens are now the interpretation of what was there before so hopefully you understand what i'm saying are the aliens primary and the angels secondary like the false interpretation or is it the"
},
{
"end_time": 4898.524,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4875.589,
"text": " the angels are being interpreted from our materialistic culture as aliens or demons. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. And I have a friend, Jeff Kripal, he's at Rice University. And he talks about this, actually, I forgot he has a word for it, but I forgot what it was. But basically, he says that, you know, we tend to think that the people of the past misinterpreted"
},
{
"end_time": 4918.609,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4898.831,
"text": " These kinds of things and they called them angels and demons when actually they're UFOs, right? They're unidentified, you know, advanced aircraft kind of things and that we have a much more accurate interpretation. He says that's baloney, you know, you know, because they're both interpretations and they're both based on what we know right now, you know, and so"
},
{
"end_time": 4949.121,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4919.377,
"text": " who's to say, you know, people 100 years from now are going to look back on us. Look what they believed. That was really funny, you know. And so that's what I think we have to do is we have to get back to the Heideggerian impulse of basically the Socrates impulse of basically saying, what, like, what's going on, you know, and maybe try to not conclude and just kind of observe. And I think that we'll get information if we do that. That's what I think we should do."
},
{
"end_time": 4973.183,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4950.06,
"text": " Instead of calling it something, why don't we just observe it and note patterns? Because there are patterns. Okay, so Fatima, right? So you know about the 1917 miracle, the sun, Fatima. Oh, that. Yeah, this is a Vatican kind of Virgin Mary apparition thing. Okay. Oh, then I don't know it. It's not the sun that moved in the sky. This is different. No, it is. It's the it's called the miracle of the sun."
},
{
"end_time": 4996.92,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4973.524,
"text": " But it was it was supposed to be from the Virgin Mary. It was based on an apparition of the Virgin Mary. So if you look at some of those documents and again, the primary sources were it wasn't is don't attribute it to me or Jacques Ballet or even Jeff Kripal because there were two people who did this research in"
},
{
"end_time": 5023.575,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4997.466,
"text": " I can send you the info, Kurt, please let me because these people deserve the credit, you know. Okay. I will, I'll make a note. So send info of. Yeah, they did some great research on the primary sources and what they found were that there were a lot of things that looks very, you know, what we would call UFOs because there was a man who had been with, I think there was 70,000 people there in Fatima and"
},
{
"end_time": 5036.647,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5023.831,
"text": " He was a doctor and an atheist and he looked up and what he saw was something that looked like a pearlized disk that was spinning around and around and around, you know, so, you know, if we could just get these kinds of descriptions."
},
{
"end_time": 5063.251,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5037.056,
"text": " and put them all together. I think that we would get, and without any kind of dogma associated with it, like, you know, oh, it has to be this or it has to be that, because there will be a lot of that and people will be upset. And I don't know why people are so upset about this. When I first did my research, by the way, I would get a lot of emails from people. In fact, I had to report it to my university in 2018. I was just getting hammered by pretty weird emails"
},
{
"end_time": 5088.66,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5063.626,
"text": " And so, you know, I just couldn't do my work. So I had, you know, I had to report it to, we have police at the university, we have tech experts like IT people. And so I reported that. And I remember, this is in 2018, Chris Padgett was our chief of police on the university campus at the time. And he looked at the emails and he said, this looks like religious extremism."
},
{
"end_time": 5117.244,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5089.224,
"text": " And I said, yeah, that's what it looks like, religious extremism. So someone who does, who has nothing to do with what I study, even identified it as looking like that. So if you just say, if you say what I just said, why don't we just observe the patterns? There will be a lot of pushback to that. For some reason, people would just be really upset about it that I don't have either a Catholic framework or religious framework. Or if I don't have the, you know, what's going right now is"
},
{
"end_time": 5142.363,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5117.619,
"text": " the U.S. governments, these are advanced technology framework. Like you have to have that framework now or else you're going to have pushback. Why can't we just look at it and just identify what we know about it using science and religious studies and sociology and all the things that we have, all the tools that we have. That's my suggestion. Just look at it. Have you found any connection between near death experiences and the phenomenon?"
},
{
"end_time": 5171.971,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5142.807,
"text": " or any other part of your studies and your death experiences? At some point in the summer plan on taking a deep dive into them, but starting with Dean Raiden, if you've heard of him, but I haven't done so yet. So I'm curious. Yes, I know, Dean. So, yes, I have actually. What's really interesting right now is that I'm doing some research into Japanese UFOs. And what I think is really interesting is that they're different. I would call them like different UFOs."
},
{
"end_time": 5200.282,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5172.381,
"text": " there's our, you know, the US military's UFO, right, which is, you know, these things that like Lou Elizondo talks about that kind of thing. Well, that looks a little bit different than the UFOs that the Japanese talk about. Okay. And then, you know, so, so near death experiences, what I found is this is that strangely, people who've had near death experiences seem to have a lot of these post UFO effects that people who see UFOs have."
},
{
"end_time": 5229.889,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5200.657,
"text": " Which is, I don't know if you, and again, I hate to do this, but I'm going to. The movie Arrival, I don't like to cite a movie as a framework for like, you know, talking about something. But in this movie Arrival, one of the gifts that the aliens give to humans is the knowledge of time. Like, you know, that time is actually, you know, they had foreknowledge and, you know, time is not linear. So you can know things. And so a lot of people who have near-death experiences and who have had"
},
{
"end_time": 5259.889,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5231.152,
"text": " experiences of a UFO, all of a sudden seem to know things that are going to happen. So not all of them, but a lot of them. And so this is something that I found. I also found that a lot of people who've had UFO experiences seem to associate those UFO experiences with where people died. So I know an experiencer, he's a very well known experiencer. And he said that he saw a UFO where his wife had died of a car accident years earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 5287.415,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5261.442,
"text": " Now in Japan, these orbs that, you know, here in the United States, we'd call them UFOs, but they see them in Japan, where they're, they're identified as souls, like souls that have that deceased people, like during the tsunami of 2011, there were so many of these, and people saw them. And they said, these are the souls, right, of the people who died during the tsunami. And so I think that's really interesting. So yeah, there's some correlations there."
},
{
"end_time": 5314.206,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5288.251,
"text": " In Japan, were they referring to the orbs or were they referring to the craft when they said the souls? The orbs. Okay, you mentioned one time that Valet told you about how these alphabet agencies work, and that you were able to see how they work up close and personal, I think in terms of the strategies that they use, though I wasn't sure exactly what you meant by the strategies. Like, you mean the disinformation strategies? Like, what are you referring the collection of?"
},
{
"end_time": 5344.616,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5315.299,
"text": " of data strategies, the silencing of people, I wasn't sure what you meant. So do you mind expounding on that? Yeah, some of the strategies that they use would be there were two specific ways in which they spread disinformation, at least when Project Blue Book was going on. And I believe they probably still do this. And I think probably, yeah, this is this is what I experienced up close. They cultivate two types of people as assets. And when I say assets, those people sometimes don't even know that they're being cultivated. In fact, they don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 5370.06,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5345.094,
"text": " Um, and that's why they're assets is because they're an asset to be, they're being used, right? Uh, to propagate misinformation. One of those persons is like the benefits, you know, have you heard of, uh, Paul benefits who I've heard. Yeah. So this was a person who was not mentally stable and, but was near an air force base and believed in UFOs and, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 5386.8,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5370.555,
"text": " Rick Doty, Richard Doty, who worked for the Air Force as a special agent, he targeted benefits and put stuff on his computer to make him think that a UFO invasion was imminent. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 5413.985,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5387.176,
"text": " And then, of course, benefits then looks crazy, right? Or crazier. So, you know, vulnerable people like that, they're targeted and they're used to kind of create a stigma associated with UFOs. If crazy people believe in UFOs, I don't want to believe in them. You see what I'm saying? So that happened. And then also Linda Moulton Howe, they went for people like her who was a legitimate journalist, right? She had some credentials from Stanford."
},
{
"end_time": 5443.951,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5414.428,
"text": " And they target her and they give her misinformation and they bring her on base or something like that. And they say, look, this is going to come out. So those are two ways that you get cultivated as an asset. You're not an asset to yourself or your life or your family, but you're their asset now where they're, you know, cultivating you. So there was a point in my research where I basically severed all ties with anybody in the invisible college, except for Jacques, who I do trust and Gary. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 5451.049,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5444.326,
"text": " And Gary, by the way, is not technically in the Invisible College. Do you hear that sound?"
},
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"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the"
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"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story?"
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"text": " Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories. Invisible one."
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{
"end_time": 5567.995,
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"text": " He's a visible one, right? But yeah, so I just didn't want that in my life at all because, you know, I wanted to do straight up research. I didn't want to, you know, because my research could easily be used to further some agenda because I'm doing historical research that's showing that these things are that these very strange aerophenomena have been around. If I didn't do that research, I didn't know this."
},
{
"end_time": 5598.148,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5568.302,
"text": " I would assume that there's some kind of a program like a weapons program going on. That's what I would think was happening at this point. Now there might be a weapons program growing on, in which case my research would be valuable to them. So how do I do my research and stop from being cultivated? So I guess at some point I recognize that that's a real thing. And I mean, I kind of recognize it already because I wasn't sure what was going on in American cosmic at the beginning, but I'm a researcher who's honest. And I said that."
},
{
"end_time": 5617.568,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5598.353,
"text": " In almost every chapter with Tyler, I basically said, you know, James and I and James is Gary, I'd say, we weren't quite sure if we were being set up for misinformation or not. But subsequently, James actually went, you know, Gary went along and, you know, checked out the debris and found that it was very strange. And so, you know, something's happening."
},
{
"end_time": 5650.282,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5624.019,
"text": " Yeah, he comes up a lot. I'm not super familiar with a lot of his work, but I have colleagues who are in the space program who, who read his work and like it. And yeah, so but I'm not a person who knows enough to authoritatively say something about it. Same. I'm going to be speaking with him soon, but I haven't had a chance to look into his research on the interview that you did with that UFO podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 5676.408,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5650.555,
"text": " You mentioned that you uncovered something that you weren't supposed to, and you don't have to mention exactly what that is. But frankly, I'm concerned about that as well. It's one of the reasons I don't like to take a look at data that's classified or that I can't share. Even if I'm extremely interested, I tend to not look at that in my inbox or take people up on their offers if they offer it to me. I don't want to be in a place where I have knowledge that I have to either lie about or obfuscate or hide, etc. I want to ask what was it that you uncovered, but perhaps you can speak around it."
},
{
"end_time": 5706.869,
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"start_time": 5678.166,
"text": " Okay, I'm trying to think if this was something. I have the exact timeline, the exact statement. Yeah, so let's see if I can bring it up here. Twenty, I'll just send you the link so that you can listen to it because I can't play it for you. Well, there's a lot I felt a lot more danger, frankly, when I was when the government hadn't admitted that this was happening. OK, because it was I think there was there was danger. No, there was danger."
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"index": 231,
"start_time": 5707.398,
"text": " And what if I uncovered something that people didn't want uncovered, which apparently I think I did. So you said apparently you think you did, but you're not sure. But anyway, so if you could recall what you're referring to. Yeah, OK, so. I mean, I think there were a lot of things that happened that maybe weren't supposed to happen, but did, and it was only because"
},
{
"end_time": 5761.254,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5736.732,
"text": " you know, I was looking into it and had the tools to help me figure it out. So I think, I mean, I think the fact that I tried to, I mean, look, it's dirty laundry for the Air Force, right? Looking into these programs and basically, you know, American Cosmic came out"
},
{
"end_time": 5788.319,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5761.92,
"text": " and all of a sudden people are admitting that these things have happened and that there were programs of study. And so, um, and I'm not, you know, I'm actually legitimate researcher, so I'm not actually out to make a bunch of money doing this or make, you know, a movie about UFOs or anything like that. Um, I, I just happened to find this stuff out and,"
},
{
"end_time": 5817.398,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5788.575,
"text": " You know, that's kind of weird. That's a weird position for me to be in. So I think that that's what was going on. And I'm not so I think that's what I was referring to. I mean, you know, they were doing stuff and no one knew about it. And well, some people know about it, but the American people didn't know about it. And now they do. Because the New York Times, from the people that you've spoken to, or there's what you've heard through the grapevine, is it the case that Roswell is"
},
{
"end_time": 5844.548,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5817.671,
"text": " not the recovery of balloon debris that it indeed is some UFO craft that it's either deliberately landed or, or accidentally landed. Okay, so that's the, that's the question, right? So that's, that's the mythology of Prometheus, this, this idea that somehow we were, you know, some people call that site the donation site, right, or the gifting site. And that's very Promethean. That's right along the lines of this myth."
},
{
"end_time": 5872.671,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5844.872,
"text": " And so that's how I felt very uncomfortable as a person who's rational going into basically what looked to be a living mythology. OK, a mythology that was actually people actually were living and believing it. OK, so I'm not going to take the bait and say that that's the fact. I don't know if it's the fact. And I know that a lot, you know, it used to be that thinking that or just saying that would would cause one to be called"
},
{
"end_time": 5901.118,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5873.319,
"text": " What are your thoughts on CE5?"
},
{
"end_time": 5926.22,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5901.408,
"text": " It's such an unknown with such a drastic consequence that it's worse than playing with fire. Yeah, I'm not going to do it."
},
{
"end_time": 5956.613,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5927.551,
"text": " Well, forget about whether or not you're going to do it. What have you heard about it? Is there efficacy to it? What occurs during it? Yeah. So I have heard a lot of people say that they have initiated contact through the methods of CE5. I've had people ask me to do it with them, right? And be in communities of people who do it. I stay away from that. No, I'm not going to do that. Now, why do I say that? Because"
},
{
"end_time": 5986.374,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5956.834,
"text": " Well, for one thing, a lot, you know, learning about religious traditions, you do learn that there's a lot of things that actually happen and you don't know why. OK. And so I already believe that certain things can happen. I don't really need to have a close knowledge of this, and nor do I think that we can predict the consequences. So I guess that's my point is that, yeah, I do believe that these kinds of things work. But just like we had, you know, just like we talked about with the Wu science, you know, that"
},
{
"end_time": 6010.282,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5987.261,
"text": " Just because people are doing it and getting these effects doesn't mean that the story they're telling themselves and each other about it is true. So I guess that's how I feel about it is we're not certain about it. Why do it? And plus I've had also another thing is that I've had so many people ask me to do it, and they were almost like,"
},
{
"end_time": 6036.561,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6010.759,
"text": " They wanted me to do it so badly that I thought, I don't really want to do this because they're asking me, you know, they really so much want me to do it. I surely don't want to do it now. Why is that the case? Cause you feel like it's peer pressure and there's something wrong about it like drugs or why is it the case that if they're putting so much pressure on you, you don't want to do it? Yeah, because I feel like, you know, if somebody's so invested in me doing it that"
},
{
"end_time": 6061.8,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6036.954,
"text": " You mentioned that in some of the circles that you've been in that the case of Bob Lazar, it isn't as dismissed as it is in the popular culture and what he says comports with"
},
{
"end_time": 6084.172,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6062.244,
"text": " Yeah, other reports in such a way that it makes much of his account true or likely to be true, even if certain specifics of the account isn't. Yeah, can you expound on that? Sure. So a lot of the people that I talked to in the you know, like who are like Tyler, basically, and believed Lazar, okay, which I thought was fascinating because like he's so dismissed, okay, for the most part."
},
{
"end_time": 6095.64,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6084.735,
"text": " But they didn't dismiss him at all. And so I thought that's fascinating. What did he see? Did he see actually extraterrestrials or did he see weapons or you know, what did he see saw something that caused"
},
{
"end_time": 6115.674,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6097.176,
"text": " You know, a huge reaction and pushback and discrediting of him and that kind of, you know, to the point where he said, I wish I had never said anything in the first place. Right. And basically that's what some of the people told me just before my book came out. They said, there might be a point where you wish that you didn't do this. And so I'm not like,"
},
{
"end_time": 6142.892,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6115.674,
"text": " Bob Lazar and then I'm not saying this was extraterrestrial, right? I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's a development at play and let's pay attention to it because it first it has to do with religion and belief systems. But there's something really strange about it going on and I think we have to give it, you know, look at it. But I'm not suggesting that any kind of hypothesis about it is true like he did. Like we, this is extraterrestrial. How did, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6160.913,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6143.404,
"text": " I don't think he said that. He's extremely careful with his words. He would say, I don't know, all I know is that I worked on a craft and that there were documents given to me that said they were extraterrestrial, but that could be misinformation. Here's what I do know, it operates in this manner or it seems to operate in this manner. But he was extremely careful."
},
{
"end_time": 6186.664,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6160.913,
"text": " Yeah, no, he should be definitely that would be the correct way to go about doing that kind of thing to be involved in that is to not conclude and also to basically because there's been precedent for misinformation, you have to assume that some of it's going to be at play, especially now. And in fact, we have better tools for disinformation today than we ever did."
},
{
"end_time": 6196.732,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6187.688,
"text": " Better tools for recognizing disinformation or for the dissemination of it? How do you defend yourself against disinformation?"
},
{
"end_time": 6221.084,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6197.995,
"text": " What are some of the tools? What are some of the people who are watching? Right, sure. OK, so in American Cosmic, I went through hoaxes of UFOs, right? And I said that hoaxes of UFOs have they we should credit them for the spread of belief about UFOs because a lot of people look at hoax UFOs. You know, if I let's put it this way, I've received so many videos of"
},
{
"end_time": 6244.172,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6221.084,
"text": " unidentified flying objects, okay, and some of them look pretty legit because now I have a lot of friends who I can say what is this you know and they'll say okay it's not a drone it's not a plane it's not okay it's unidentified and then I have hoaxed ones where you know you can generally see the outlines and it looks you know okay so I showed that to a person who's very well known in the UFO community household name"
},
{
"end_time": 6270.725,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6244.599,
"text": " who's written a book, bestseller, New York Times bestseller. And I showed this person both videos, or I showed the person one video and I said, look, check this out. And the person that did not to that person look like a UFO, because they had been so enculturated as to what a UFO is supposed to look like, even though it most likely doesn't look like that, right? But that was really a UFO in the sense that it was fully an unidentified flying object."
},
{
"end_time": 6294.445,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6270.93,
"text": " What is the other one was completely hoaxed and they thought that that one was legitimate video. So I don't think we have the tools to be able to adjudicate what's UFO and what's not. So I think that when we see things, especially in their video, you know, and that kind of thing, like Jacques, I had always said, believe nothing, you know, and use your discernment. Okay. So I think that, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6313.592,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6294.838,
"text": " In today's world of deep fakes and things like that, it's pretty impossible, I think, to figure that stuff out. So I think that the best default action is just to not believe. And if it seems crazy, it most likely is not real."
},
{
"end_time": 6342.602,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6314.65,
"text": " Something else I'd like you to elaborate on, if you don't mind, is the contrast between the academic world and then the government world with respect to how they operate openness versus closeness, because generally, the more skeptically minded people take the academic view, and they can't imagine that the reason for closeness would be anything other than falseness or beguiling or whitewashing. I have to admit that I myself am similar to this in the sense that while I'm not an academic,"
},
{
"end_time": 6366.834,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6342.824,
"text": " It's the place where I'm most comfortable in. It's my training in a sense. So I have a difficult time with concealment and non-disclosure. So why don't you justify or make the case for closeness? Okay, sure. So all right. And this can be applied by the way to the Vatican as well, not just to UFO insiders. Okay, so all right. A lot of"
},
{
"end_time": 6392.671,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6367.329,
"text": " I'll give you an example from my actual life. So something that was tangential to my UFO research, but happened during it was my Catholic research into the saints of the Catholic Church that by located and levitated. And I was going, I was, um, I had funding from a billionaire who was interested in this research, this Catholic research, he's Catholic. And so, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6419.053,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6394.326,
"text": " I went with Tyler, actually, I brought Tyler with me to the Vatican and we checked it out and I, you know, looked at the records and saw just, you know, so much information about St. Joseph of Copertino, who was known, you know, who was said to have levitated and things like that, some other things. Anyway, so the billionaire, who's an American, with some of the people who helped me"
},
{
"end_time": 6449.104,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6419.428,
"text": " establish the funding to get there to the Vatican to do this research, they wanted to purchase the manuscript, which was a Vatican document. Okay, they wanted to own it. Okay. And so they said, Diana, can you convince the Vatican to give this document to us? Now, this is a document from the 1700s, that is a sacred document to a country that's not a democracy."
},
{
"end_time": 6476.084,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6449.889,
"text": " right? This is a pre-modern country. And so the people in the United States who were, they were comprised of academics and then a billionaire, right? And so they basically said, surely they would do that. They would give it to us so that we could study it. And I said, I don't think they're going to do that. I think that you have to be a little bit, you know, we have to be nuanced in asking for this because this is their sacred tradition, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6494.326,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6476.493,
"text": " And we just can't do that. We just can't give it to them. It's like, if you ask the United States to give up the Liberty Belt, or, you know, the actual Constitution, right? I mean, we're talking about something so- And they were asking not simply to give it up, but to buy it, like offer the money for it? Yeah, you know, like we want to buy this."
},
{
"end_time": 6519.94,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6494.77,
"text": " and they didn't want a picture of it. That didn't suffice for some reason. No, no, they did. They wanted it digitized, but we're talking about a document of like almost a thousand pages, right? So it would take you long. And so, you know, I was kind of the middle person doing this and I, I tried to explain to them that the, you know, the assumptions that we have that things should be completely open-sourced aren't shared by other people in other places."
},
{
"end_time": 6550.043,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6520.213,
"text": " for various reasons. And we just, we are so arrogant that we don't see that, you know, we're like, we should have that because of humanity, right? Well, how do you know? Because, you know, things that we take, we're going to use for our own benefit, you know, so they're, they're not seeing it like we see it. So that's, that's my advocacy for, I mean, I'm not going to advocate for, you know, secrecy with respect to almost everything, but there are, if there's something secret, there are reasons that there's people want it to be secret."
},
{
"end_time": 6562.585,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6551.578,
"text": " I'm not saying that's a good thing for everything, but definitely. I mean, the Vatican has their sacred documents. These are not necessarily secret documents, but they're theirs and they're sacred to them."
},
{
"end_time": 6587.329,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6563.046,
"text": " So we did establish, we did get the document. But I kind of am the person who's the keeper of it. And I can decide who's you know, I vet who see who goes in and researches it and who doesn't. And you know what, it's a document that's written in Latin and 17th century Italian, and not a lot of people are able to look at it. Speaking of Latin, you mentioned that Tyler said,"
},
{
"end_time": 6616.049,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6588.063,
"text": " or sorry that you pointed out to Tyler that there was some Latin written and it couldn't the lecture you were giving but the audio was not let's say was another highest quality for whatever reason the person who was recording didn't have a mic on you so the cameras all the way at the back and anytime the audience claps oh my gosh my ears just almost broke every single time because I had to turn the volume up so loud to hear you oh that's too bad between that and the camera well anyway you mentioned that you were pointing out to Tyler there's some part of something"
},
{
"end_time": 6633.285,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6616.357,
"text": " written in Latin, he said, I didn't even know he also mentioned it's to tell them quote unquote, that they dominate. So I wasn't sure who the them and the they were referring to. So why don't you talk about that, please? Yeah, okay. So that was really interesting. So one thing that was kind of funny about my friendship with Tyler was that"
},
{
"end_time": 6660.333,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6633.865,
"text": " He was part of the space program. He's really integral into the space program and he launches, you know, these rockets and worked with SpaceX and that type of thing. And what I found out, which he actually did not know, and I pointed it out to him, was that the whole thing was a ritual. The whole thing was ritualized. So they identified certain time periods astronomically when it would be beneficial to launch. And they also had the rockets had"
},
{
"end_time": 6686.698,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6660.828,
"text": " I'm so sorry to interrupt. Are you referring to a SpaceX launch? I missed that."
},
{
"end_time": 6715.162,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6687.261,
"text": " Yeah, yeah. Well, not all SpaceX launches, just certain of them with Tyler involved. And so when he would be involved launching these satellites into space, a lot of times they'd be with SpaceX because that's who they used. I see. Yeah. So they would, they would go, you know, they've been doing this from, it looks like from the 1950s onward, they've been doing this ritual and they would even have like a chaplain there. And, you know, they would, it was very, very, listen, it was very ritualized."
},
{
"end_time": 6744.923,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6715.64,
"text": " And so I noticed that and I asked him about it. And I said, do you know that this is first century Latin that's written on these rockets? And he said, no, I didn't know that. He didn't even know it was Latin. And so we read them. I translate them all. And I said, this, wow, this says that. And I said, who up there in space is going to be reading this? Like, why would you put that on there? You know, that seems so strange. And he said, well, I imagine it's for them. And I said,"
},
{
"end_time": 6776.92,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6746.92,
"text": " So the two questions that occurred is, firstly, what did it say? And then also, does this mean that Elon Musk himself is putting those messages there? Like Elon is a believer in ETs and so on, or is it just one of the staff members?"
},
{
"end_time": 6801.834,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6777.159,
"text": " But he has nothing to do with creating the satellites or putting the Roman stuff on them. Nothing at all to do with that. That was definitely predates him. So what does it mean though? What was written on it? Yeah. So to me, it looks like what people have called like exotheology or astro theology. It's this kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 6829.07,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6802.176,
"text": " Well, I call it, it's not a specific religion, but it's a religiosity of people who are involved in the space program. And it's this, you know, it's Roman, you know, the United States kind of considers itself Roman. Look at our, you know, architecture and that type of thing. We're like the new Imperial place, right? And so I think that's what it has to do with. They're using the images of gods and goddesses from Rome."
},
{
"end_time": 6859.224,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6829.872,
"text": " And what does the Latin say? Here's something for you to check out. They're called patches. And have you seen those patches? Okay, so... Haha, we don't know, or haha, we know, but you don't? Yeah. And so a lot of those are in Latin, and that's where you see... And a lot of those would be on the actual satellites. The images would be on the satellites. And then people who were working the mission, they would get the patch."
},
{
"end_time": 6880.162,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6860.316,
"text": " Usually you just have the god or goddess and the image like the dragon or something like that on the satellite with the Latin phrase that accompanies it. And the Latin phrases are different for each launch."
},
{
"end_time": 6906.442,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6881.459,
"text": " You also mentioned there's a picture of that that you were going to send to the audience at that time, because remember, I'm listening to the lecture. And you said, Yeah, if anyone's interested, I'll email it to you. Can you email it to me so I can place it on screen right now for now right now? Sorry, when I'm editing this, I'll make a note to remind you of that. Is that okay? Yeah, I could get it right now if you want. The image is being displayed right now. So if you're listening to this on the audio platforms, then I recommend you click the YouTube link in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 6935.794,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6907.295,
"text": " What you're seeing is the high quality capture. Unfortunately, the source images are fairly low. You also refer or not you, someone referred to the president as a short timer. OK, what does that mean? Yeah, so and I heard I'd heard this from not just Tyler, but a lot of the people who are part of the program."
},
{
"end_time": 6965.469,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6936.032,
"text": " that presidents are short timers in the sense that there must be a program that's not a short time program, but a long time program. And therefore the presidents come and go and therefore they're not given the information. Think of Tyler. Tyler's been doing this since he was at least 20 years old. And now he's in his sixties. I mean that he's a long timer. And so he has a lot of information and the presidents don't have all that information. They're only given the information that they need to know."
},
{
"end_time": 6996.271,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6966.459,
"text": " I know that we've mentioned Tyler's pseudonym plenty. And I don't think everyone here knows who Tyler is or what the story is around Tyler. So do you mind quickly just outlining that so that people can rewatch say, okay, now that makes sense. I didn't give the context to sure. Sure. Okay. So I wrote this book, I called it American Cosmic in reference to the Russian Cosmists. Because to me, Russian Cosmists is a great book for any of our listeners. By I think it's Henry Young,"
},
{
"end_time": 7026.561,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6996.715,
"text": " And it's about the belief systems of the people who started their the Russian space program. And so when I started American Cosmic and I met Tyler, he had a very similar belief system. And Tyler was this person who actually reached out to me and he was part of a secret program. Now they're not they're known not to be secret. And he had clearances and that sort of thing. He worked for every almost every space shuttle launch. OK, he's a mission controller."
},
{
"end_time": 7055.06,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7027.09,
"text": " And he was a very fascinating person. I kind of kept him at a distance for about a year and a half before I actually met him in person. And then he took me and Gary Nolan to New Mexico to an alleged crash site for UFOs because he told me that UFOs from the 1940s, he told me that I didn't believe in UFOs. And he said, you only believe in them as kind of like imaginary things. He said, what if I showed you evidence that, and so this was where I was like,"
},
{
"end_time": 7080.418,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7055.384,
"text": " Do you believe that the government believes that they understand what's going on behind the UFO phenomenon? No."
},
{
"end_time": 7086.834,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7081.988,
"text": " So they realize that they don't know what's going on or you think that they think that they have a handle on it."
},
{
"end_time": 7117.125,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7087.654,
"text": " I think that there's probably a number of, you know, how in the United States, we have different, we have Democrats and Republicans and things like that. I think that the government is pretty much the space program is like that. There's different factions within it. And some of them are tasked with trying to figure this out. And some of them think they know what it is about. And some of them know where we don't know what this is about. So that's how I think it really is, is compartmentalized. And that's why I use a lot of, I use a lot of references to this movie and book called Fight Club."
},
{
"end_time": 7144.77,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7117.705,
"text": " And it's basically about this person. Well, probably your audience knows, but there, that's what it looks like. So before it was the invisible college where people worked together to a scientist and they were secret and they're trying to figure out the stuff on their cover of secrecy. But then it morphed into, I think in the late eighties and early nineties, it morphed into fight club where people didn't even tell each other what they knew in order to keep the secret secrets."
},
{
"end_time": 7175.93,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7146.527,
"text": " Do you believe that we're dealing with multiple phenomenon that have different explanations rather than a single one? Yes, definitely. So why do you think that? Because they look very different. So orbs look different than tic tacs, which I don't even know if they are extraterrestrial. And there are things that like I could see from Catholic history from like, you know, 1400, 1500,"
},
{
"end_time": 7203.114,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7176.271,
"text": " Have you seen this video, one video, I believe called biblically accurate angels? Yeah, that's it. I like that video."
},
{
"end_time": 7232.841,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7203.831,
"text": " Okay, I'll link it or display some of it here for people to watch. Now, does anything that you've learned about the phenomenon ring true with those depictions? Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you look, yeah, okay, so if you look at angels, even you have to say that even if you take this category of thing called angels, which we all think we know what they are, but if we go back to the biblical text, where they derive from, you'll see that none of those encounters look the same. So even angels don't even look the same."
},
{
"end_time": 7262.824,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7233.097,
"text": " to one another. So you have you have angels that take on the they look like humans and they fight with like Jacob and they almost they dislocate his hip and things like that. And then you have these angels that look very weird, you know, and scary. And then you look at St. Francis, you know, and his situation with and it looks like an angel, they call it a seraphim. Right. And it like it, it zaps him and he gets these these things which the Catholic Church calls stigmata, but they look like burns. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 7281.817,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7263.285,
"text": " And, you know, yeah, so I mean, once you start to get to the primary source materials of these things, they look very strange. And they don't look at all like what we have, you know, what has come down to us as what they're supposed to be like. Yeah, they're not puppies. No, they're not on the cloud with a"
},
{
"end_time": 7301.34,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7282.039,
"text": " And you know, even the people that had those experiences back in the day never said that either. Like St. Teresa of Avila, she's a person who hadn't experienced it. Now it's made popular in Rome. Bernini created a statue called the Ecstasy of St. Teresa and it's in Rome and you can see it."
},
{
"end_time": 7319.104,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7301.903,
"text": " And it's this beautiful statue of St. Teresa in ecstasy, it looks like, with this little cherub like angel next to her. But if you actually read it, if you read the account of it, which she wrote, she basically says, I don't know what thing this is. I don't know if it's an angel."
},
{
"end_time": 7343.968,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7319.667,
"text": " And then she said, all I know is that usually I see angels in my mind as an imagination. And this one is real. It's actually fleshy and it's about three feet tall and it's all in light. And it also has this long thing that has a dart at the end, like kind of like a, uh, an arrow and it like basically sticks her with this arrow. I mean, that's creepy. And, you know, that's exactly what she said about it."
},
{
"end_time": 7367.005,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7344.292,
"text": " And then you have this beautiful statue that doesn't look anything like the very strange, scary narratives. Remember I mentioned that lecture where I couldn't quite hear all of what was being said? I believe you mentioned that you were studying physical evidence of purgatory, a burnt hand, I believe. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Can you elaborate on that? And then also perhaps the physical evidence of heaven."
},
{
"end_time": 7396.715,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7367.705,
"text": " Okay, so the physical evidence of Purgatory, I'm not saying it's actually physical evidence of Purgatory. What I'm saying is that people have, this is what the belief structure is, is that, you know, in order to create belief in Purgatory, there was a priest in the 1800s in France who decided what he needed to do was collect as much evidence for Purgatory as he could. So he went around all of Europe and he gathered this and now it's in a museum called the Purgatory Museum in Rome."
},
{
"end_time": 7417.756,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7396.886,
"text": " And you could actually go online and check it out. Okay. And what this museum is, I mean, a lot of it doesn't look like, like good evidence to me. Let's put it that way. I'm not convinced, but it's what people believe to be evidence of burning souls in purgatory, like a hand on a Bible. And you see the kind of the burnt print handprint on the Bible."
},
{
"end_time": 7435.725,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7417.756,
"text": " And things like that. So I don't think that I mean, you know, so when we look at so let's take and let's use this as an example of doing religious studies. So you take that and you say, OK, the impetus to try to prove something that we cannot see. I've even said this before in a lecture."
},
{
"end_time": 7463.951,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7436.527,
"text": " It looks a lot like what's going on with UFO communities right now. So the UFO community in the United States is trying to prove that UFOs exist by taking this debris that, strangely enough, I was partially responsible for getting, and at least for some of it. And now they're doing analysis on it. When I say they, I'm talking about scientists affiliated with these programs. And they're saying, yes, we have this. Well, I would be really careful with readily believing that."
},
{
"end_time": 7492.995,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7464.326,
"text": " Because first, you really want to really, really believe it. I think a lot of people really want to believe it. And I don't know why. But there's that is very similar to what was going on in the 1800s, with trying to prove purgatory was real, right? I don't think it's going to age well. Right there, what you're doing with this book, too, is also is finding the similarities between religion and then the UFO phenomenon or you or ufology and so on. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 7512.978,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7493.695,
"text": " One of the advantages of calling some field by some other fields name is that you can use the old fields tools to investigate the new field. Essentially, what I'm asking is what does calling UFOs or ufology or whatever it may be, what does calling it religion quote unquote allow that wasn't there before? I can give you an example if you like."
},
{
"end_time": 7541.698,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7513.473,
"text": " No, you can give an example. Those are always okay. So let's say there's some class of objects or people or practices like veganism or architecture or car driving. Let's just take architecture. If I was to say architecture is mathematics that opens up that's maybe three aspects. So one would be you can now use mathematical tools to analyze architecture. And then the number two would be the vice versa. So you can now use architecture to help innovations in math. And then number three would be to"
},
{
"end_time": 7570.282,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7542.5,
"text": " This is more of a social effect. It would elevate or depreciate the field that's being compared. So in this case, it may be a neutral to positive result. So people would now view architecture either the same or a bit more positively because the general public has a neutral to positive view of mathematics. However, if I was to make a comparison to say architectures like garbage, well, then that would depreciate people's view of architecture. OK, so calling something by something else's name,"
},
{
"end_time": 7595.623,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7571.63,
"text": " It has certain advantages, it allows for something. So what does calling UFOs or UFOlogy religion allow for that wasn't there before? Okay, that's a great question. And I don't think I'm making that move, actually, what I'm doing, and I do this by calling the book, American Cosmic Religion, Technology and UFOs, right? And I hold those three things together."
},
{
"end_time": 7612.056,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7596.186,
"text": " in they simultaneously engage each other. Okay, so I'm doing I think I'm doing two things. I'm using religion, the tools of religion to study the development of belief in UFOs. And I think that that's a good thing to do because"
},
{
"end_time": 7641.357,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7612.432,
"text": " People in religious studies, we don't have to say UFOs exist or don't exist. We can study it as a belief system. Okay. But I'm also using UFOs as a way to push the method, methodological boundaries of religious studies, because religious studies likes to reduce things just to social effects. And what I'm saying here is we have a belief system that is now corroborating itself through science."
},
{
"end_time": 7663.916,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7641.578,
"text": " that is something we've never seen before. No other religion, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, no other religion has actually said we can corroborate ourselves through science. Ufology has or is doing it at this moment in time and that's what I'm saying to religious studies. I'm saying"
},
{
"end_time": 7690.179,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7664.241,
"text": " Maybe we should take a look at this because this is really interesting, you know, and I wish more people actually more people are now that, you know, the Pentagon report came out in 2021. And a lot of people in my field are looking at UFOs in a completely different way now. And so I feel pretty good about that. And also you're not trying to dismiss or make people disregard"
},
{
"end_time": 7702.875,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7690.538,
"text": " UFOs by labeling them as religion because you have a nuanced view of religion coming from religion studies. The reason I'm making that clear is that when some people say well AI will kill us and then someone else can say that's like religion because the AI is like the devil."
},
{
"end_time": 7730.077,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7703.148,
"text": " or vaccine hesitancy or acceptance is that's like religion, whatever, whichever route you want to take. That usually is a way of dismissing it saying, yeah, that's just another religion, but you're not the suggestion under the underneath by this is implicit that it's, it's, it's simply not true. Look, the AI is not like a devil. So I'm calling it a religion to dismiss people who are being a bit hysterical about that and, and so on. So you're not calling it religion in order to get people to dismiss it."
},
{
"end_time": 7759.036,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7730.742,
"text": " No, no, no, I would never do that. I wouldn't call religion that in order to get people to dismiss it because it's not. So I think people... It's the straw man. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, in my field, there's a lot of work to do, let's put it that way, because people have so many misconceptions about religion. You know, I'm constantly doing that work and it will never be done. It's like unending. Who is the modern day Heidegger? Who's furthering Heidegger's work?"
},
{
"end_time": 7787.995,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7760.128,
"text": " Gosh, let me think. Hmm. Um, I know there's object oriented ontology, but I don't know. Is that it? Um, I don't know if that is it. Um, like social ontology. Is that what you're talking about? No, it's Harman's work. I don't remember his name, but no people. I'm always wondering like, what are the modern, what are some examples of these modern philosophers like a Kant or Heidegger?"
},
{
"end_time": 7817.329,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7788.422,
"text": " I'm trying to think of some modern philosophers whose work has, I mean, she's not modern in the sense that her work was in the 70s, but Iris Murdoch's work, I think is really interesting from a Heideggerian perspective, because it seems to me that she's also going back to a Socratic like understanding of basically inputting mysticism within"
},
{
"end_time": 7846.323,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7817.807,
"text": " questioning and she's also talking about moral realism so there are things that are actually morally objective yeah that's that's that's an unpopular opinion yeah it is very unpopular but i'm attracted to it right now great well i happen to like the unpopular opinions personally i find them more interesting i think that i'm i just pretty much play the counter position which is not great because it means my views aren't mine mine are just counter of whatever exists but i"
},
{
"end_time": 7871.903,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7847.108,
"text": " I'm just so attracted to feeling like what's happening is not correct, especially the people who adamantly say that their belief is correct. I just think, how do you know? How do you know? And it, it, it, it nettles me, it bothers me inside. Me too. So what was Carl Jung's opinions on UFOs? I know he had a whole book on UFOs. He did. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7897.193,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7873.012,
"text": " I forgot the name of it, but it has flying saucers in the, it's called the modern flying saucers, the modern myth in the sky. Okay. And his views changed. So at first he viewed this as he viewed UFOs as an archetype, like this new archetype that he was figuring out. But then he met a lot of people in the government who actually had physical, they showed him radar,"
},
{
"end_time": 7921.015,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7897.466,
"text": " reports and things like that. And so then he was like, wow, and then he had friends who he found to be credible, tell him about their own experiences of seeing UFOs. So then he started to realize that this idea of an archetype actually had a physical component to it. And then the last thing he wrote about it was a letter where he basically said, I think he honestly didn't know, Kurt,"
},
{
"end_time": 7949.104,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7921.391,
"text": " Because I mean, if you read it, because I tried to read everything that I could possibly get when I was writing American Cosmic that Carl Jung said about UFOs. And what I came up with was that he changed his mind a couple of different times. But the last thing he thought was that, and I think you can see it in this letter, and I think I cite it somewhere in my book, is basically, yeah, he says, it's an archetype, but it's an archetype that has physical qualities to it, which I thought was really weird. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7960.998,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7949.514,
"text": " That makes it unexampled in the pantheon of archetypes. They are physical in so much as they interact with ourselves and we interact with the physical world but not themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 7988.063,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7961.834,
"text": " Yeah, so this is interesting. So let's talk about this for a second. Okay. So right now I'm looking at there's a person and again, I will have to send you because I like to give credit or credits to you. But unfortunately, I read so much stuff, I forget the names of people. But this is a person who calls himself a story technologist. So he does like he's a tech he says that he does the history of stories. And he looks he uses"
},
{
"end_time": 7998.609,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7988.541,
"text": " Basically, tons and tons of data just to break down different stories and to show how they actually like what they do to our brains."
},
{
"end_time": 8026.681,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7999.138,
"text": " And I'll send you a link to his work. But what I think is really interesting is I agree with him that there was a point in time when writing became a technology, right? And so with writing, stories were able to be written down. And so people like Plato and Socrates said, well, there's a new technology. And like Aristotle did an analysis of the technology of stories. And he said, these are, you know, in a sense, that's what Carl Jung was doing when he was talking about archetypes. So he's talking about kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 8049.804,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8026.681,
"text": " the elements that create these stories that get told from culture to culture again and again and again, like the hero's journey. Okay, so this kind of this myth theme, you know, levy, what do you call it a myth theme? Yeah, that's levy Strauss called it a myth theme. It wasn't a myth, because it was more than a myth. It was actually the very unit that created the different myths, right? Uh huh."
},
{
"end_time": 8072.602,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8050.145,
"text": " Okay, so all right. So if I'm looking at stories as technology, when I went back to American Cosmic, and in order to try to push the method in my field, I had to embody and inhabit what I called a myth, which was the myth of Prometheus. I had to actually live it. And I was super uncomfortable doing that. And then after that, what happened was,"
},
{
"end_time": 8086.886,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8072.995,
"text": " In my next book, I've morphed into a new myth, embodying inhabiting a new myth. And that myth is basically the allegory of the cave, which is by the way, not called an allegory that was a later imputation."
},
{
"end_time": 8116.578,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8087.108,
"text": " So this idea of the cave, which, by the way, we see it again and again and again with like the Truman Show or the Matrix, you know, it gets played out in so many different ways in our culture right now that we live in a simulation. The simulation hypothesis is basically another iteration of this myth theme. OK, yeah, so that's the that's the next that's what I it's almost as if I had to go through the Promethean myth in order to get to the allegory, the cave myth and inhabit that."
},
{
"end_time": 8145.862,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8116.886,
"text": " and understand it in order to write about it. Does this mean that you've managed to get out of the cave? What do you mean when you say you're living that myth? Yeah. Okay. So I feel like after I wrote American Cosmic, you know, in the myth, do you know the myth? So my understanding of the cave myth allegory, whatever one wants to call it, is that there are a set of people and they're tied up and they're looking at the wall and on the wall are images."
},
{
"end_time": 8172.875,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8146.084,
"text": " which are adumbrations because they're shadows from something else. Well, we don't know that. They don't know that. They mistaken the wall, the cave wall for quote unquote reality until one gets loose and then sees that these are mere projections of something else. And this outside world is the true quote unquote reality. And then people have forgotten about the third part, which is that the sun was too blinding and"
},
{
"end_time": 8200.503,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8173.37,
"text": " they have to retreat into the darkness, essentially that there exists such a thing as too much truth, and also that they tell people and many people consider them to be decerebrate and insensate, much like right now with people considering those who, well, if you have any belief that is borderline quote-unquote Wu, then that's what one is"
},
{
"end_time": 8230.435,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8202.227,
"text": " Yeah, so okay, so this is that's generally good. Good job. Okay. So there are two things though, that I think that we have to concentrate on. When I finished American Cosmic, I was like, kind of obsessed with the cake, the cave. And so I went back and I read different versions of it, you know, translations and everything, which then I realized, wait a minute, it's not actually an allegory. And wait a minute, it's in a book about politics. And so I thought this is strange. And I also thought this,"
},
{
"end_time": 8257.466,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8230.811,
"text": " I thought, who are the people that tie us up? You know, because, and I asked a lot of my friends who happen to be philosophers, they said, have you ever thought about the people who tied us up in the cave? And they said, Oh, no, no, no, it's just an allegory. And I was like, I don't think so. I think that people actually tied us off. And in fact, because of my experience with American cosmic, I believe that people tied us up. Right. And so I then wanted to tell people"
},
{
"end_time": 8272.227,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8257.944,
"text": " Yeah, I think that people tied us up. I mean, in the cave, people tied us up. I know what I'm saying is you believe now that people tied us up or are you indicating that the extraterrestrials or whatever? No, no, no, I think that we're doing it for each other."
},
{
"end_time": 8297.159,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8272.398,
"text": " where, you know, we're misinforming each other. Like, there's obviously this misinformation campaign that happens for UFOs. Let's just say that happened. We know it happened. Yeah. So people intentionally said, this is what's happening over here. What you see is real. But all of a sudden we're like, Whoa, what I saw wasn't real. And we and so okay, so I became kind of obsessed with that and trying to get my friends who are in philosophy to admit that people tied us up"
},
{
"end_time": 8327.108,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8297.585,
"text": " And then I read it so many times that I realized that I was that person who was basically trying to convince people and that what happens is you have to basically just leave the cave. But there's something at the end of the cave allegory. I'm just going to call it an allegory since people have called it that, but it's not. At the end, that person who escapes the cave and then goes back and tries to tell people that they're in the cave and then they don't believe that person. And then that person spends a lot of time"
},
{
"end_time": 8354.991,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8327.619,
"text": " You know, precious time, basically saying get out of the cave. Come on, I'll help you. But they don't and they think you're crazy. And I thought people think I'm crazy. And I said, I'm just going to stop because that's who I am in this right now in this in this myth. I am that crazy person. He's basically telling people. We got tied up, everyone, let's get out of the cave. Well, the next step is is what my book is going to be about. The next step is the step"
},
{
"end_time": 8384.872,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8355.503,
"text": " of where that person leaves the cave and then what they do because they don't just leave the cave Kurt they actually engage in something and Plato calls it a craft or Socrates does Plato is the one who's writing it but Socrates calls it a craft not a not a flying saucer craft a craft right like a a way of being that you engage in with another and I think that's what I think that's the heart of it"
},
{
"end_time": 8412.551,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8385.282,
"text": " And that's what we forgot. Like we've been kind of hypnotized by the, we are in a cave thing and we forgot really what he was trying to tell us. And so I'm going to go back and kind of do a reading of that. Let me recount it once more. So they see the shadows guy or girl comes out, notices quote unquote reality comes back, tries to tell people and they don't believe him or her. Then this person,"
},
{
"end_time": 8440.896,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8413.063,
"text": " leaves to do a craft. What is meant by that? In the book? I mean, sorry, not in your book necessarily, if you don't want to give it away. But in the allegory, quote unquote allegory. Yeah. So that's the question. What is meant by that? So that's, I think, the thing we need to ask. So what happens is, is that they go out of the cave. And then he's talking to, I think it's his brother, right? Or his brother-in-law or something. So"
},
{
"end_time": 8466.647,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8441.391,
"text": " In Plato recounts it, Socrates is talking to somebody and he basically says, and wouldn't it be the case that we engage in this dialogue or dialectic and that this is a craft and that this is what we need to do? It's almost like if you want to know the answer for how to stay out of the cave or the answer to help you"
},
{
"end_time": 8491.51,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8468.012,
"text": " to deal with the reality that we live in is to engage in this craft. And that's what he's trying to tell us. And this happens to be in a book about political philosophy. And I think that's really important. And I think that Iris Murdoch's book called, I think it's called The Good,"
},
{
"end_time": 8518.046,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8493.268,
"text": " something to do with the good. I just read it. But it's an excellent take on this. I think she gets it right. And the take is that the good is to be political? No, the good is to engage in this type of craft that Plato discusses. And it's an answer to the political."
},
{
"end_time": 8544.65,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8518.712,
"text": " Because, you know, in this talk, you and I have been talking about religion, democracy, secularism, you know, we've been talking about these different forms of government and stuff. And Plato is basically showing us something. And then Heidegger, believe it or not, goes back and he tries to recreate that through writing this philosophy where he questions everything. And so he's basically doing exactly the craft."
},
{
"end_time": 8575.077,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8546.203,
"text": " Although I don't think he actually gets it as much as Iris Murdoch does. So that's what's happening. And that's what our culture right now, we're stuck in the cave. And we just don't know how to get out. And I think that's it. Because it took me a while to figure it out myself. Like, what is he saying? And then I had to read it. You know how you can read something so many times, and then finally you're like, oh, that's what he's saying, right? Sometimes it takes a while to, because we've been"
},
{
"end_time": 8601.698,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8575.265,
"text": " so programmed to read it a certain way, but actually I don't think that's the way it's meant to be read at all, the way that we've been reading it. I was watching a talk of John Verveckis on Heidegger and John was saying, in his language, so I'm going to use, and this is a bit esoteric, but he was saying that Heidegger was stating that the whole process of metaphysics for the past 2,000 years is one of distancing. We distance ourselves as a subject from the object and"
},
{
"end_time": 8631.681,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8601.92,
"text": " This is perhaps a mis-framing and that we shouldn't be seeking propositional answers, but instead participatory answers. So that is that it's a difficult. I don't know how to. OK, let me think. So a dance is participatory. So there's a form of knowledge associated with dancing that's not propositional. It's not writing and then it's not logical per se. A hundred percent. Well, that's procedural as well. So there's another form. So are you suggesting that"
},
{
"end_time": 8661.954,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8632.619,
"text": " Perhaps what's happened is that we've gotten lost thinking that the by elevating the propositional knowledge and what we need to do is go back to the participatory. Yeah, and and that's exactly what I'm saying. I am exactly saying that the way that we've read the cave right has been a propositional framework. We've used a propositional framework to read it and we've neglected to see the most important point that is trying to tell us and that we have to go back"
},
{
"end_time": 8687.79,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8662.398,
"text": " and look at that and really engage with what it is that he told us back in the day. And I think that Heidegger tried to do that. I mean, he was successful, but I think that a lot of people just don't even understand what Heidegger was doing. And I think what you just said was correct. I think we have to be participatory in that way. Engage. Because the craft isn't engaging. It's a dialectic. It's a dialogue."
},
{
"end_time": 8711.101,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8688.183,
"text": " And you do it with a person. And you know what I find fascinating is that you also see this in Buddhism. So there are these things called the Three Jewels of Buddhism. One is the Buddha, not that you worship this guy named the Buddha, it's actually a title which means awake. And Buddhism, so you have Buddha as an example of what a human being can become, they can become awake."
},
{
"end_time": 8740.384,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8711.596,
"text": " And then you have the Dharma, which is the teaching. And it doesn't have to be a book. It's anything that's going to wake you up. That's the teaching. And then you have the most important point, the Sangha. And that's the community. Because human beings live together. We don't live as, you know, so we have to do this together. And I think that that's what Socrates was basically saying, saying, they're all in the cave. Like we, you know, okay, sad for them. You tried to get them out."
},
{
"end_time": 8768.148,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8740.93,
"text": " But now we have each other, and this is what we have to do to keep each other from being put back in the cave. I mean, he was saying that and he demonstrated it in the book. Is there an aspect of meaning associated with this or rediscovering meaning? Yeah, it's a it's a meaning that's intrinsic. Now, here's the reason I say that is because from my understanding of Heidegger and Heidegger is one of the hardest people to read."
},
{
"end_time": 8798.029,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8768.336,
"text": " Yeah, I agree. He makes up his own language. But he was saying, look, what a lover does is if you love your spouse, you give them flowers. You don't give them plants. You don't give them subjects of horticultural investigations. But they're the same. They're actually the same. The flower and the horticultural investigatory object is the same. However, it's wrong to give your spouse a plant for Valentine's Day."
},
{
"end_time": 8825.811,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8799.07,
"text": " And so it's because even though the literal is the same, the meaning isn't. And there's something about recapturing meaning or looking at something in the correct way that Heidegger was pointing to. One of the reasons I like Heidegger is that in some sense, remember I was giving you an outline of what theories of everything is? No way am I saying it's a continuation of Heidegger's project, but it's similarly themed in that he was suggesting that the"
},
{
"end_time": 8851.34,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8826.34,
"text": " that a project should be, that we should be understanding our being in order to understand our relationship to being, in order to understand being. And well, what is being? Well, being is... I don't know how to describe what Heidegger would say being is other than existence. And earlier you mentioned that Heidegger was interested in why something exists. I think that Wittgenstein was interested in why something exists and how something exists, where Heidegger was interested in existence. What is existence itself?"
},
{
"end_time": 8879.036,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8851.459,
"text": " I agree with you. I think so. I think also that Wittgenstein realized that language actually couldn't contain a lot of what existence is about. And then, you know, he kind of gave up on it. He said, I think his famous quote is of that which we cannot speak, we should remain silent, which I, of course, don't agree with, because then you have art, right, and music. So let's not remain silent. That would take away a good part of what living is about. So, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 8901.408,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8879.445,
"text": " Well, he also was an artist. I don't know if he meant language per se, rather than art. Maybe art was all right as a mode of expressing oneself to understand the world. It's strange because I was looking up Heidegger and Heidegger apparently was an atheist, but I see him as, in a sense, wrestling with God or trying to figure out what God is. And same with Wittgenstein."
},
{
"end_time": 8930.111,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8901.886,
"text": " Wittgenstein, I don't think he explicitly called himself an atheist, but either way, Norman Malcolm, I don't know if you know this, his friend Norman Malcolm said the religiosity that characterized Wittgenstein was greater than the average religious person. And Wittgenstein, he said he can't help but see every problem through religious point of view. So I see Heidegger similarly, or even though he may say he's an atheist, it seems like what he's doing is is trying to understand God. Well, I mean, there's a reason why I'm very attracted to his work. And, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 8959.718,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8930.486,
"text": " And I find it to be mystical. I think that his later work was he had a mystical experience and they tried to express that, that understanding through his. And I think that's why he went pre-socratic. He went back to, you know, Socrates and pre-socratic in order to, you know, to express what he thought we had lost as a culture. Have you heard from any of the people who are on the more Buddhist slash Eastern end that would say that you cannot discover God or"
},
{
"end_time": 8986.169,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8960.265,
"text": " reality or whatever synonym one wants to give it that has some dramatic flair to it. You cannot discover it via an analytical approach that you must experience. It has to be something that is beyond language. Do you have firstly, have you heard that? And then secondly, if you have, do you believe that to be the case? Yes. So I would say that, um, beyond Heidegger's writing and on a Hannah Arendt's writing,"
},
{
"end_time": 9015.589,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8986.527,
"text": " I was very influenced by the writings of the people involved in what's called the Kyoto school. So the Kyoto school was a Japanese school of Zen Buddhism philosophers. They didn't call themselves religious. Religion wasn't even a term for them, but they they were using Zen in order to explicate like philosophy. And that's how Heidegger kind of got involved with them. And one of my one of the books that I think is most fascinating, I think it's called"
},
{
"end_time": 9035.64,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9016.203,
"text": " I think it's called The Philosophy of Nothingness, and I forgot exactly who wrote it, but it's that person. He actually went back and read Nietzsche and kind of through the lens of Zen Buddhism, and I thought it was a fascinating book. So if you're interested, it's The Philosophy of Nothingness."
},
{
"end_time": 9066.766,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9037.363,
"text": " So yes, absolutely. That's what he's basically saying. I mean, I also think that Nietzsche was a mystic as well. You know, his, his, his flush is, is basically mysticism. Now, Nietzsche is someone that I feel horrible for not liking because everyone likes Nietzsche and everyone likes him. But I don't, I, I just can't, I'd rather read what other people have said about him than hear, than go to the primary source, which is anathema to, to scholars because it's, well, to me, the way that I view it, it's like wine. You, you,"
},
{
"end_time": 9088.746,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9067.329,
"text": " for me when i drank which i don't drink anymore but i was never partial to wine to wine i i i'll have some of it but then the same with the stronger drinks they don't taste good but i'm not going to torture myself by constantly drinking it in order to get the quote unquote acquired taste so i think that's what's necessary in order to understand each of properly"
},
{
"end_time": 9115.162,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9088.933,
"text": " No, it's not. Did you not read about my Nietzsche synchronicity? Because I hate Nietzsche. Yeah, well good for you in the sense that you're lucky that you have that. No, I know because I would have continued to hate Nietzsche as well just like you and good for you. I would be very suspicious of a person who naturally liked Nietzsche, frankly. I think you have to encounter Nietzsche. So yeah, I mean a lot of what he says is horrible."
},
{
"end_time": 9145.23,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9116.92,
"text": " So I'm much more of a Lovecraftian in the sense that you mentioned the cave allegory and I'm much more inclined to feel like that and I used to be of the type that give me the truth no matter what form it comes. But I've had some experiences where I feel like sometimes the truth is far too much for you to handle and you can you can damage yourself drastically from an encounter with the truth. And Lovecraft had this this quote which which to me I interpret as the case for ignorance."
},
{
"end_time": 9175.64,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9146.152,
"text": " and it's something like the greatest mercy in the world is the inability for the human mind to correlate its contents and that one day we'll see that this unfettered scientific investigation may bring about such a terrifying vista of reality that we'll see our fragile place in it and be so frightened that we'll either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and security of the Dark Ages."
},
{
"end_time": 9206.578,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9177.073,
"text": " So in the cave allegory, I see that as the person who runs back in the cave. Now you mentioned that there may be a solution to that. And while I'm praying and I'm hoping that your book provides some solution to that, because right now I'm fleeing from the light, let's say. You mean you're going back into the cave? Yes, I wish and I hope and I pray for the cave. I think that the more"
},
{
"end_time": 9235.265,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9206.852,
"text": " Yeah, that's where the Sangha comes in. That's where you have to have people that help you."
},
{
"end_time": 9266.032,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9237.159,
"text": " Because it's not easy to have an open mind, especially when everyone around us is like they are. And that's why it's necessary. It's not just something helpful, it's necessary. Well, I'm very much looking forward to reading that book. Do you have a title? Right now I'm calling it The Resurrected."
},
{
"end_time": 9293.404,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9267.329,
"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim, check out a pop-up art show,"
},
{
"end_time": 9323.507,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9295.094,
"text": " Or even try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes payday unexpectedly human. Yeah. Have you gone through? Well, what's the difference between epistemic shock and ontological shock?"
},
{
"end_time": 9355.145,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9325.213,
"text": " Okay, so I think that epistemic shock is when you realize that the world you thought you knew and the assumptions that you had about it were wrong. And that instigates probably ontological shock, where it's ontological in the sense that you can no longer live the same, like, you know, the ways in which you live now have to change. So I see them as happening at one right after the other. One is kind of theoretical, and the other is"
},
{
"end_time": 9385.691,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9356.015,
"text": " institutional. Well, OK, to make a play on words there, I feel like I have gone through somewhat of each of those shocks and have almost been to the point where I need to be institutionalized. And so it's it's actually extremely frightening to study consciousness and what reality is and to constantly have one's worldview shattered and and and some and even do so for a living, which is what this channel is."
},
{
"end_time": 9414.36,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9385.981,
"text": " It's not pleasant. And it's not pleasant. Luckily, I'm just getting out of it. It's only by the grace of God, just getting out of it. But it's not pleasant. I'm wondering, what was your epistemic and ontological shock specifically? Was there a moment? Yes. It happened in, I think it was 2012."
},
{
"end_time": 9442.961,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9415.009,
"text": " And it was during a whole weekend. And it was just after the, you know, the, I think it was in March that the tsunami happened in 2011. And that was shocking, of course. But after that, I had a very, very real sense of impending, you know, this could happen. And it's terrible. Like a whole civilization could like get washed out or, you know, something could happen and apocalyptic kind of feelings."
},
{
"end_time": 9467.534,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9443.319,
"text": " And that's when I was doing the research that I was doing into the UFO realities. And that's when I went back and I looked at some of the primary source material for Catholic history. And I realized what was happening was happening now. And that's when I met people who seemed to care that I knew. And those were the people we referred to earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 9495.811,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9468.097,
"text": " And I guess the reality of this shocked me on a level that that I call it pre UFO Diana and post UFO Diana. Right. Okay. And it definitely wasn't pleasant. So it was and it lasted. It was for the weekend. It was so destabilizing. Great word. Yeah. So I was destabilized. So but I had a lot to fall back on because I'd studied religion my whole life."
},
{
"end_time": 9525.52,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9496.34,
"text": " So I knew from Buddhism and from Catholicism that there were, you know, there are ways to get through this because I read it, you know, it's called St. John of the Cross calls it the dark night of the soul. Okay. Oh, you know, you want to, sorry, sorry, just as a quick side, I was being interviewed by someone telling them about my experience and they said, Kurt, it sounds like you're going through the dark night of the soul. Yeah, that's what you, that's what it is. It's the dark night of the soul. So, okay. So think about it now I've had,"
},
{
"end_time": 9553.131,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9525.845,
"text": " I've read all of this and knew all of these things. So I already had something to fall back on, which is why you don't. But, you know, Nietzsche comes in handy here because Nietzsche went through it too. It almost seems like he didn't survive it, frankly, because he was so, he didn't have a Sangha, it didn't seem like, and he didn't have, you know, he didn't have the, well, Heidegger had the Catholic tradition, which he was able to, you know, and he also had his friends at the Kyoto school."
},
{
"end_time": 9582.227,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9553.558,
"text": " you know, try going through Satori experiences and stay stable, right? So, you know, so he had like a lot of people. So I think that that's something that we have to take into consideration here is that I think, you know, stay away from like, gather around yourself some people who have been through it so that they can say, oh, yeah, been there, you know what I mean? So like, I get it, you know, so you need a sangha. So, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 9614.326,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9584.701,
"text": " So that's what I had. I had, um, I had, I have a woman named sister Rose, so she's a Catholic, uh, Ursuline sister. And this is how she put it. She said, Diana, she said, this is what's going on. She said, you've, and Jeff Kripal has a book called flipped in which he talks exactly about this. He says you flip Jeff Kripal. Yeah. He's at Rice university. You should have him on your show. He's great."
},
{
"end_time": 9641.561,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9615.094,
"text": " So he's a professor at Rice University. And basically he went through the same. He was he was in training to be a monk. And then he recognized that he couldn't be. So he became a professor of religion and he had it. He had some cool experiences. OK, so but he knows what this is about. And so this is arose. Sister Rose said, we tend to think that the world is like how we were brought up to believe."
},
{
"end_time": 9670.23,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9641.852,
"text": " And then all of a sudden we have experiences that show us that the world is actually not like that at all. And then we sometimes we never get over that. She says, but we're here, like, you know, her order, you know, and her and the Catholic, you know, the, the people of the church, you know, that had mystical experiences. She said, this tradition is here to tell you that we are in the world, but we are not of the world. And that actually makes sense now to me, because I was like,"
},
{
"end_time": 9696.527,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9670.674,
"text": " Ah, that's what that means. She said it's really like the way you see it now. That's really how the world looks, but it's not like how these other people see it. She said they just think that it's like that, but they're not actually, you know, it might happen to them too at some point. They might get flipped. She goes, but mostly probably won't because it doesn't happen to everyone. It only happens to a few. So does that make sense? So there are people to which this has happened"
},
{
"end_time": 9723.217,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9696.92,
"text": " And now they live in this reality. And that reality for them is is the normal reality. What do you mean when you say it is the world is actually how it looks? Well, when I say okay, so you know, when you've you've gone through a night of the soul of the dark night of the soul, and the next day or you know, when for me, it was that weekend. And then I was I said to myself, Okay,"
},
{
"end_time": 9747.176,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9725.401,
"text": " I have a new perspective on what life is about and now I'm going to have to live with this new perspective. I don't know what it's going to be like. And so that's what she's trying to explain to me. She's trying to explain that you don't have to go back to the perspectives and use those as tools for interpreting the world. She said,"
},
{
"end_time": 9771.476,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9747.5,
"text": " you're fresh, it's like you're born again, you're new in this new world, and now you have to use different tools. But thankfully, because I've been studying about religion and philosophy my whole life, I had all those tools. But I just didn't know that that's what I was doing my whole life. I was preparing myself to kind of do that by learning those tools. And now like I have a lot of people who come to me who are students or"
},
{
"end_time": 9790.52,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9771.92,
"text": " You know, who are grownups, you know, and this has happened to them and they're like, what do I do? And then I give them, you know, I say, okay, this is, you know, a lot of times in their own tradition, they'll have a book that they just, they read, but they forgot about. And then they'll go back and I'll say, Oh, so people have gone through this."
},
{
"end_time": 9808.933,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9792.807,
"text": " In Buddhism, the Sangha is the community of people who are waking up and helping each other stay awake. Buddhism is about waking up from the illusion."
},
{
"end_time": 9836.715,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9809.582,
"text": " Yeah, so they're waking up. Yeah, exactly. That's where I am. I want I used to envy people. I don't I don't want to be awake any longer. And and you know, there's great research that says sleep is helpful. Sleep is healthy. Sleep is we're not sleeping enough. I would like to go back to sleep personally. I hear you saying Yeah, I understand. But the song is there for you. When you go through the process of awakening. They're there to help you out."
},
{
"end_time": 9865.674,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9844.497,
"text": " Those are the three things that you need in Buddhism. Buddhism to me looks very similar to the thing that Socrates suggests we do at the end of the cave. It's this engaging kind of thing, like what you said, participatory. So it involves other people. You can't do it alone."
},
{
"end_time": 9895.196,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9866.22,
"text": " I also find that so that you mentioned the song is awakened people, but I find that the more I interact with people in general, the more I go out, the more it's not just my wife, because I pretty much only interact with her because, well, for the past couple of years because of COVID. And the more that I see family and, and talk to people at coffee shops and so on, and I'm friendly, the the more it well that drastically helps me, but they're not people who I would consider to be awakened per se, I just say they're people."
},
{
"end_time": 9916.749,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9895.708,
"text": " So am I not doing it correctly? No, no. I mean, I think you're doing it correctly because I think in Buddhism too, anything can be a teaching, like Dharma is the teaching, whatever kind of helps you. It could be circumstances. It could be events. It doesn't have to be a book. It doesn't have to be a song or movie or person talking to you."
},
{
"end_time": 9943.37,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9917.073,
"text": " I think that being around people though, I mean, we have been through a lot through COVID. And I think just getting out and talking to people, we're naturally, we're beings who like to be around people and then like to have our space, right? So I think that's natural. It's kind of like eating. We need to eat. So we definitely need to be around people. And I think that COVID has maybe caused a lot of us to be in the cave too long or something."
},
{
"end_time": 9973.183,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9943.933,
"text": " Are you an introvert? You would consider yourself to be an introvert? Definitely, I'm an introvert. Yeah, but um, but I'm a good I'm an introvert that's learned how to be an extrovert because of my job. Same, same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna tell you this and but I'm not gonna I'm gonna take this off the record. So what happened to me was I had it. It's at this point that I suggest you watch the Karl Friston episode. I consider that to be the most important of all the theories of everything"
},
{
"end_time": 9991.988,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9973.49,
"text": " Thank you, and if you've experienced something similar just know that you're not alone."
},
{
"end_time": 10021.442,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9992.773,
"text": " And that the more that people talk about this sort of issue, the less humiliation and disrepute will be thrown around. Because many, many, many more people have experiences like this than you think. It's just that most people don't talk about it at all because they're afraid. And being af- I understand what it's like to be afraid, trust me. Either way, you are not alone. Luckily I haven't had- like I'm saying luckily, because I don't want any more experiences like that. That shattered me."
},
{
"end_time": 10049.787,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 10021.817,
"text": " I encourage that you hang out with them, those people, because what I found in my life too, was that a lot of the people that seem to understand how being, like really being human and good, were people that weren't philosophers."
},
{
"end_time": 10079.804,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 10049.94,
"text": " You know, they were people who were, I was involved in a homeschool group with my kids. And these were just Catholics who believed pretty straight up, not complicated Catholicism, right? So I wouldn't and never talk to them about the stuff I'm talking to you about. And that was as that was good for me. And that was good for my kids. So I think I go to church and a lot of my friends who are intellectuals think I'm crazy, but I go."
},
{
"end_time": 10097.875,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 10080.606,
"text": " And I think that these things, these simple things, I think they're good. That's the aspect of religion that it's not valued enough in the irreligious circles. So they'll say, yeah, well, like if they're going to"
},
{
"end_time": 10128.08,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 10098.2,
"text": " Ascribe any salutary component to religion, they would say, well, it promotes community. Yeah, that's a huge, huge, huge yes. You have no clue. Yeah. And that's why I say the Sangha is one of the three things is called the Three Jewels of Buddhism. They definitely understand it. It's community. And did you know that in Catholicism is actually considered a sacrament community? What does sacrament mean? Oh, a sacrament means it's a it's imbued with the power of God."
},
{
"end_time": 10155.589,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 10128.49,
"text": " Mm hmm. So community like a church community is imbued with the power of God. So I feel like I found that in lots of different Christian communities. Okay, we'll end on just a couple audience questions. And that's it. Okay, sure. But I know they're like 3040 50100. But we'll just get to a couple that are interesting. So this one comes from Juliano Vargas, virtually all contactees say that aliens"
},
{
"end_time": 10184.241,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 10156.237,
"text": " that the aliens themselves believe in a supreme creator, God or being. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but regardless, that's the premise of this question. Should we try to reconcile our current religion with the new knowledge, with this new knowledge, or just seek to be spiritual by believing in God and doing good deeds? Yeah, so my personal opinion is that since we don't know the first part of this question, we don't know that to be factual"
},
{
"end_time": 10210.555,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 10184.718,
"text": " I think that doing good deeds and having a community of support is what, in my opinion, is what we should be doing. I think that's good. Okay, how do you reconcile your Catholic views with the phenomenon? And do you struggle to keep faith when dealing with something like this phenomenon, according to Jacques Lallet's theories, which acts like a quote-unquote control system? This question comes from number two."
},
{
"end_time": 10236.527,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 10211.015,
"text": " Sure. Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah, it's only strengthened my faith. So I am, I'm, you know, I study religion, but I am also religious. But I always have been. And this has only reinforced my faith. So the question is, I think the question that this person asks is,"
},
{
"end_time": 10265.725,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 10237.108,
"text": " And I've been asked this question by many people, by the way, also people who are part of Congress have asked me questions like this, like, and journalists, like, won't this shatter the belief systems of religious people? And my my answer is not at all. I talk on Catholic radio a lot, like on the Drew Mariani show and such. And it seems to me, and also being involved with people at the Vatican, that"
},
{
"end_time": 10286.698,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 10266.766,
"text": " Christianity already has within it, as well as Islam, and as well as Judaism, these at these three religions, and if you look at Hinduism as well, and Buddhism, you know, these are the traditional religions, you'll see that there's already categories, there are already categories for belief in extraterrestrial beings in that, you know, the"
},
{
"end_time": 10315.111,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 10286.698,
"text": " The creed of the Catholic Church basically says, you know, God is creator of all that is visible and invisible. And within that invisible category, John Paul II said angels exist and, you know, things like that. So I know a lot of Catholics like if you look at would you baptize an extraterrestrial by Brother Guy and Father Mueller, you'll see that they say they believe that if there are extraterrestrials that they're created by God."
},
{
"end_time": 10344.275,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 10315.503,
"text": " So it's not an either or position as I look at it. It's not a question of either this or that. I think it's a both and question. Why do you think the hitchhiker effect occurs? What have you heard? OK, so the hitchhiker effect, for those who don't know, is this idea that around people who have these experiences, say they see a lot of orbs and they have paranormal experiences and things like that,"
},
{
"end_time": 10374.241,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 10344.565,
"text": " that this is kind of a contagious experience in that it'll go on, it'll hitchhike onto a person and head home with them. Yeah, so I knew a lot of researchers who saw this happen. I've had friends who were researchers who wouldn't go to places considered hot places of UFO activity because they didn't want it to come home with them. What do I think about it? I mean, that's, I don't know. It's really strange."
},
{
"end_time": 10391.578,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 10374.531,
"text": " Do I believe that it's real? Definitely. I mean, I have no clue what it is. Do I think that it's mental or objective? I can't tell you. But do I believe that it actually happens? I know enough scientists who will stay away from hot places because of it. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 10414.735,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 10393.217,
"text": " So you mentioned that some of the people who would have the hardest time were the humanists. I think you mentioned that, well, you mentioned it here, but I'm using the word humanist right now. Christians believe, and you can see this in the comment section, I'm sure you're aware of considering the alien beings to be angels or demons. But I'm wondering, is there a third option? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. What else are there besides angels and demons?"
},
{
"end_time": 10444.053,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 10415.009,
"text": " Yeah, so I mean, we have exo. So people who are doing like looking at habitable planets, like exoplanets and things like that, you know, these are straight up scientists who are doing this work. And they're out there just finding out if there's habitable planets or life out there even. And I think that that's the way to look at it. I think that that has nothing to do with the idea of these are angels or demons. We're just looking for potential planets that have even moons."
},
{
"end_time": 10470.452,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 10444.326,
"text": " or even asteroids that have, you know, life on them. And I think that that's a scientific endeavor and that has really nothing to do with religion whatsoever. It just has to do with exploration, you know, and that's what we're doing. You know, we're kind of an exploratory species and we're now heading out into space and exploring that and that's the third option. Two religions that come up plenty when studying this phenomenon is Gnosticism. So I don't know why"
},
{
"end_time": 10499.326,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 10470.93,
"text": " that gets mentioned simultaneously with the phenomenon, but I want to know what your thoughts are. And then Rosicrucianism, if I'm even pronouncing that correctly. Yeah. Why? Yeah, I don't know what the second one is. Sure. Okay, Rosicrucianism. So Rosicrucianism is a mystical element, tradition within Christianity, that it's called the Holy Cross, the rosy cross, okay. And Rosicrucianism. And so a lot of the college people happen to be"
},
{
"end_time": 10529.48,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 10499.735,
"text": " And in fact, the term invisible college comes from the history of Rosicrucianism. And so this is a mystical tradition within European history where you can identify scientists who are also alchemists, who are also interested in non-human intelligences and things like that and getting in touch with angels and entities. So there's a whole history of this. And so that is one tradition that a lot of people identify"
},
{
"end_time": 10556.271,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 10529.821,
"text": " with people who are involved in UFO research. The other one is Gnosticism. And Gnosticism is kind of like pre-Rosicrucianism. So there were Jewish Gnostics, and then there were Christian Gnostics. So Gnosticism basically is a Greek word that means gnosis. It means knowledge. And it's knowledge of... I explained this to my students like this."
},
{
"end_time": 10572.517,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 10558.251,
"text": " So Michael Jordan is an awesome basketball player. He's gnostic with respect to basketball. I know about the history of basketball, but I'm a terrible basketball player."
},
{
"end_time": 10602.125,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 10572.654,
"text": " Therefore, I have information about basketball, but I'm not gnostic about it. I don't have gnosis. I don't have knowledge of it, like experiential knowledge, right? So it's an internally, it's not gnosticism is, is knowledge that you have intimately, right? So after baking an apple pie, um, a hundred times, you're going to be gnostic about it. Okay. Okay. So that sounds like the propositional versus the participatory that we referenced earlier, or is that different? That's exactly it. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 10630.845,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 10602.295,
"text": " So it's an internal intrinsic knowledge. But you develop it. You might start developing it propositionally, but then it becomes Gnostic. It becomes participatory. OK, so it's kind of like an ingredient, you know, an ingredient, not an ingredient, a recipe. So there's a recipe for apple pie. I'm not a great baker, so I need a recipe for apple pie. It's not Gnostic. I'm not a Gnostic baker. But after I've made it a hundred times, I can get rid of the recipe."
},
{
"end_time": 10652.039,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 10631.51,
"text": " See? It says propositional to participatory. That's Gnosticism. Gnosticism is also, there are different forms of Gnosticism. There was Christian Gnosticism, like I said, and Jewish Gnosticism, and the Christian Gnostics were like Mary Magdalene, and these were people who believed that they had a"
},
{
"end_time": 10682.637,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 10653.217,
"text": " an understanding of Jesus and of God that was intrinsic and that they would pass on to others. And they also had ideas of like other worldly beings and things like that. So Gnosticism was a tradition that and still around, by the way, there is a Gnostic Christian church today. And so there's only one. I believe that there are many, but I know I know of one. So. OK. But a lot of people call themselves Gnostic. And this relates to the phenomenon"
},
{
"end_time": 10711.459,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 10683.882,
"text": " I think that people, well, first of all, Rosicretionism is, relates to the phenomenon because a lot of the people in the Invisible College are in some ways Rosicretion, like some of them are overtly Rosicretion. So they're part of this tradition. The Invisible College itself, the name is Rosicretion. It's a Rosicretion term. So that's how it relates. It's also a mystic tradition, which I find interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 10742.824,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 10714.07,
"text": " Is there any relationship between Kurzweil's technological singularity and the Omega point and UAPs? Okay. Wow, that's a hard question. Okay. So Sherdon is, his Omega point is something that's also called the nuosphere. And the relationship is that both, okay, both Kurzweil and Sherdon are looking at"
},
{
"end_time": 10762.21,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 10743.575,
"text": " Another kind"
},
{
"end_time": 10780.196,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 10762.466,
"text": " It appears to me it's linked somewhat telepathically or it's like a neural network, but it doesn't have a digital platform. It's a different sort of platform that has formed on its own."
},
{
"end_time": 10802.039,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 10780.572,
"text": " biologically. So, but it's a fascinating thing. And if you look at Kurzweil's work, too, especially the intro to Singularity, that looks fairly spiritual. You know, he talks about it as if he also has this vision that's like a palpable vision that he has. So if any of your listeners are interested in that,"
},
{
"end_time": 10829.462,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 10802.039,
"text": " go back and reread that first part, the first the introduction and the first chapter of the singularity. And it looks to me similar to books about this that have happened in the past. I mean, it's very spiritual, let's put it that way. His the way he's writing looks it's fraught with kind of a spiritualism to it. And how does this relate to UFOs, if at all?"
},
{
"end_time": 10853.933,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 10831.22,
"text": " Okay, so does it relate to UFOs? I think that's no, not necessarily. I mean, if you could say that the kind of if you could look at this from an evolutionary standpoint, such as Carl Jung does, and also, in my opinion, so does Chardon. Okay, what you're looking at is you're looking at kind of like a"
},
{
"end_time": 10876.186,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 10854.411,
"text": " a spiritual progression of humanity. Okay, so this is what they're they're saying. They're basically saying that we're progressing into a new state of being human. And it includes this network. It includes a network in which we can communicate with each other on a different level than the way in which language is used. It's a different sort of language."
},
{
"end_time": 10896.476,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10876.578,
"text": " And how does that correspond to UFOs? It so happens to be simultaneous with what we call kind of in the 20th century, the flying saucer, right? So we see these kinds of things. And so you called this a new archetype, right? The image of the flying saucer, a new archetype."
},
{
"end_time": 10918.933,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10896.852,
"text": " You can say that these kind of happen at the same time and are they related? They're related in this way. They're related in the sense that there is a lot of people experience a spiritual transformation when they encounter or see UFOs, the singularity and the newest fear"
},
{
"end_time": 10941.903,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10919.309,
"text": " are also conceived of as being spiritual in nature as well. So part of the people that I'm talking with today are people who believe that there are different types of networks. There's the network that we call the internet, the digital infrastructure, the internet of things."
},
{
"end_time": 10957.944,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10942.415,
"text": " There's going to be a biological network now that we're, you know, the Internet of Things is actually somewhat of a biological network as well, because we interact with it physiologically. But then there's another network that's separate from that, and humans have been"
},
{
"end_time": 10986.578,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10958.387,
"text": " You use the words new when referring to Jung and the archetype that Jung considered UFOs to be a new archetype, but my understanding of archetypes is that there's a timeless nature to them and that the representations can be new"
},
{
"end_time": 11008.183,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 10987.227,
"text": " Like we could all be orbiting the same object and representing it differently, but the object itself that is trying to be represented isn't new. So did you actually say that there was a new object somehow? No, he didn't necessarily. What he said was that this was a new, he didn't even call it a religion. He called it a new myth, but not the myth, you know, not"
},
{
"end_time": 11035.009,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 11008.916,
"text": " The type of myth that we see when we say, oh, Greek myth or something like that, which basically are religions. You know, if you look at Greek myth, this was religion for right back in that time period. So yeah, so I think that is it new? It doesn't look to be new. But the ways in which humans engage with it, I think are new. Absolutely. I see. I see. OK. So what do you make of the recent UFO hearings?"
},
{
"end_time": 11063.319,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 11036.186,
"text": " Yeah, so I watched them and I found them to be interesting. I don't have a lot to say about them in the sense that, you know, the specifics, you know, do I think that's, you know, we've moved ahead with them with the topic of UFOs and things like that. I would look at it in the sense that here, give me some time because I have thought about this."
},
{
"end_time": 11092.824,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 11063.592,
"text": " But of course, now blanked out on it. I can't remember what I was going to say. OK, I'll give you some time. I'll give you some time. So do you want me to just be silent while you think? Yeah, just give me some silent time to like kind of OK. So. All right. OK, OK, this is it. All right. Me looking at this, OK, looking at these hearings and based on my experience of the last"
},
{
"end_time": 11118.985,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 11093.473,
"text": " few years, well more than a few years, maybe six or seven years, wherein I identified what I'd call like a fight club of people who are involved in the study of UAPs and UFOs. And what I mean by fight club is I mean that these people are compartmentalized and they don't talk to one another. I can't see how a congressional hearing is going to"
},
{
"end_time": 11145.708,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 11119.582,
"text": " Here's any of the information within that fight club. I think what's happening is that there's a recognition that there is this this group of people who do this kind of study. They probably you know, they're probably different factions. In fact, there are different factions and groups of them doing pretty high level study of this stuff, but they're not talking to each other. Okay, they're not talking to each other because that's how they've been trained."
},
{
"end_time": 11174.087,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 11146.049,
"text": " So whereas, you know, we've already talked to you and I about academics and this kind of academic ethos of sharing our sources to further and progress knowledge. OK, this is this is actually a method and we believe in it. And we even believe that this is right. OK, well, this is, you know, and for better or worse, it could be, you know, I now I was so surprised to hear that. Well, I shouldn't have been surprised that the Fight Club"
},
{
"end_time": 11201.63,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 11174.872,
"text": " um, and the compartmentalization of these groups is necessary for these groups to further their knowledge. Okay. But it doesn't work in the same way that we think democratic progression of knowledge works. Does that make sense? It works differently. It works almost the opposite. So when I see the hearings, I hear that it's a very, it's, I think I posted something on Twitter where I said, this isn't the valet"
},
{
"end_time": 11227.602,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 11201.852,
"text": " level of talking about the topic. It's not going to get that way. It won't get that way maybe ever. We can't expect it to. So for what it was, it was okay. For what it was, it was okay. It was something that recognizes at least and modifies the stigma that's been attached to UFOs for the past"
},
{
"end_time": 11256.271,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 11227.927,
"text": " 50 years. Okay. And that's a good thing. That's good for me because I wrote about it. And it's good for other academics who want to go in and study it. It's good for people who've seen UFOs and have felt like they couldn't tell anyone about it. So it's good in that way. Okay. But is it, you know, frankly, I think that the fight club of compartmentalized people who study this is going to continue, probably get more funding even now because of this. But that's what I see"
},
{
"end_time": 11282.927,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 11256.613,
"text": " as the consequence of this. I don't see these two groups talking. Yeah. So it's not disclosure per se. It's more the creation of the environment that allows disclosure slash research by removing the stigma. Well, remember research has already been happening. So I think it's removing the stigma. And I mean, honestly, I think that's a good"
},
{
"end_time": 11312.022,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 11284.599,
"text": " This one comes from Tupac Cabra who has a Twitter account that's, oh, link in the description. Does the Catholic church have their own term slash practice slash training for remote viewing? And if so, does it predate the U S governments and how put offs programmed? That's a good question. They actually do. And if you, it's not called remote viewing, but it's called discernment. And so, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 11332.944,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 11312.824,
"text": " We've talked about people in the Invisible College, a lot of them being Catholics. I don't know if all of them are, but most of them are. And so one of those people is Jacques, Jacques Vallee. And when I first met him and throughout my collegial friendship with him, he's"
},
{
"end_time": 11359.991,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 11334.667,
"text": " said to use your discernment and this is something that must be developed. Okay. And so that caused me to recognize the term as being from the Catholic tradition because that's, you know, obviously, but something that we use a lot, but we don't know what it means and what, you know, what's the context of this in Catholic history. So you go back and you look at where this develops and basically it's this recognition that"
},
{
"end_time": 11389.377,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 11360.247,
"text": " Humans have the ability to see things that you can't, you know, humans in general, some humans have more than other humans to be able to see or have information about people or events that you couldn't like get in a normal way through the five senses or something like that. And that's called discernment. And so, yeah, so I think that cultivating a spiritual practice is what helps one"
},
{
"end_time": 11418.575,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 11389.821,
"text": " discern. The remote viewing community gave specific instructions for how to cultivate the ability of remote viewing. In my opinion, though, they left out some of the ways in which you can not go crazy and do it at the same time, because I think there's a point where you're going to get a lot of information that you don't quite understand, don't know how to deal with. And I think that spiritual traditions"
},
{
"end_time": 11448.166,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 11418.933,
"text": " have things in place to help people with that. So, you know, the Catholic Church has its own, you know, internal group of, you know, if these things start to happen to you, think this way. In Buddhism, you have the same thing. If you start to see these things or if you start to have, you know, recognition of events that are going to happen, ignore them or something like that. You see what I'm saying? So to utilize these talents for gain, material gain, or"
},
{
"end_time": 11473.456,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 11448.456,
"text": " for selfish reasons. I think that this is this is something that when in my personal opinion, this is not me speaking as a professor, but in my personal opinion, I wouldn't really do that. But that's how remote viewing in these communities has been used, not necessarily for personal gain, but you know, for obviously"
},
{
"end_time": 11499.599,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 11474.087,
"text": " some corporations use it to assess what other corporations are doing. Obviously, if this was something that national security would want to, obviously Russians have been doing remote viewing, the Americans have been doing it as well. So yeah, I think that you see this within different religious traditions, but the contexts are different."
},
{
"end_time": 11526.305,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 11500.094,
"text": " When I was speaking to this guy named Thomas Campbell, not on UFOs, in fact I don't think he has an opinion on them as far as I can tell, but he has a theory called My Big Toe, quote unquote. He said that people have the ability to do remote viewing and I think you called it by location or the Catholic Church calls it by location, which is some form of astral projection."
},
{
"end_time": 11556.647,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 11526.647,
"text": " and he said but it can only be used for non-selfish purposes and that if you wanted to win the lottery or prove it to someone else which is a strange way of phrasing it because then it sounds like it's unfalsifiable if what you're doing is trying to bolster your ego in some sense then it doesn't work so you're saying that actually no there are cases Kurt where you're aware of or you believe to be the case that some corporations have used it for profit and perhaps some nefarious purpose on parts of some governments"
},
{
"end_time": 11585.435,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 11557.056,
"text": " Or no, you're not saying that. Well, no, not necessarily nefarious if it's for national security. I mean, they're doing it in order to gain, you know, information to protect Americans or Russians to protect Russians. I mean, you know, that's their job. So they saw that this actually works. So they tried to utilize it. Ed May, who I met at the Rice Conference, the Archives of the Impossible Conference had a great presentation on remote viewing and"
},
{
"end_time": 11609.94,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 11586.203,
"text": " He would be the person to talk to. But yeah, within the Catholic Church, there is something like that, but it's completely devoid of this use. And also, I've seen these kinds of practices in Buddhism as well. But again, totally devoid of this type of, let's do this for"
},
{
"end_time": 11639.582,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 11610.708,
"text": " To find out what our enemies think or let's do this to find out what our competitors think so we could get the upper hand. I see. Okay. So the last one was pretty much just like a personal question, a personal for myself. I've been lucky enough on Toe on the podcast to get some people who have said no to virtually every other place. And I'm unsure why. And Jim Semivan said that there's the sentiment behind the scenes that Toe is a quote unquote scientific podcast and if one wants to talk"
},
{
"end_time": 11661.869,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 11639.753,
"text": " That is cool."
},
{
"end_time": 11689.667,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 11662.568,
"text": " Is that something that could happen? I'm not saying that that has happened, but does that occur? Is there a behind the scenes kind of discourse about them and, you know, who's good to go on and who's good not to go on and that type of thing for people who talk about things that are like UFOs and things like that? Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Yeah. Right. I think so. And I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 11720.452,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 11691.271,
"text": " I mean, we talked about this when we talked about, you know, if we're talking about something like UFOs and, you know, if in fact UFOs are, say, extraterrestrial, or if in fact they are non-human intelligence, okay, that we just have not discovered yet because, you know, whales have non-human intelligence and such, we know about them. Okay, but if this is some kind of new form of non-human intelligence that is able to travel our skies and"
},
{
"end_time": 11734.531,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 11720.674,
"text": " this would be something that the military would absolutely want to know about. And so that makes discussion of it highly surveilled. Okay. And"
},
{
"end_time": 11761.578,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 11735.162,
"text": " up for potential management, therefore podcasts, you'd have to assess, use your discernment and assess and vet people or podcasters, what message are they putting out there and do you want your work to align with that message or not, that kind of thing. So there's no, I mean, there's no real kind of like non-biased media, even podcasters have their biases."
},
{
"end_time": 11786.988,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 11761.852,
"text": " So I think that a lot of people who are at least my colleagues who are working on the topic of UAPs and UFOs generally are academics or they're associated with programs that have to do with academia or government programs. And so they're going to be pretty careful about where they go to spread their information. If they're people who've been doing this for a very long period of time, say like Jacques Vallée,"
},
{
"end_time": 11815.333,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 11787.722,
"text": " I think that his message is pretty clear. He's been out there for a long time, so it can't be used or manipulated. And I think that he's safe to go on anybody's podcast, frankly. But other people whose work is maybe different than Valet's and whose work has not been out there for years, I think they have to be pretty careful. If you were me, what would you do to help safeguard against being used for disinformation?"
},
{
"end_time": 11844.667,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 11816.698,
"text": " Right. So that's actually hard to do. I think that you have to be pretty clear in your questions and you have to be pretty clear in your intentions. A lot of times you can't control the people who you have on as a guest. And a lot of times there are unintended consequences of what you put out there. Like that happens to me. So I'll have said something and then it will be used in a completely different way."
},
{
"end_time": 11874.684,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 11845.094,
"text": " And there's really nothing we can do about that group. So it's a public sphere that you're putting this message out in. And then what happens is that beyond your own intentions, those things then get completely changed and used. I've actually written about this, but not specifically for UFOs, but definitely for religion. You know, the rate, you know, the monk, the immolating monk, quang duke,"
},
{
"end_time": 11900.213,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 11874.974,
"text": " I can't remember his full name, but he's a Vietnamese monk who emulated himself during the Vietnam War or I believe maybe directly afterwards. Well, his image was then taken up by this band called Rage Against the Machine and put on a CD cover of theirs and then became the image kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 11929.991,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 11900.742,
"text": " came became decontextualized from the actual reason why this man actually did this was to protest suppression of Buddhism by the communist vietnamese government and so um so then people actually have tattoos of it and about i'd say it was like maybe 12 years ago when my students had a tattoo and i said you know i said the name of the monk and he said he didn't even know"
},
{
"end_time": 11958.166,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 11930.401,
"text": " He just thought it was a cool image, but he had it tattooed on his body. So I guess my point is this, is that, you know, that man did this important act for a very specific reason, but, but nobody knows about it now, but his image is out there. We all, we've all seen the image. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. It reminds me of teenagers who have the shirt that has the Nirvana logo and even says Nirvana. And then you play them teen spirit or smells like teen spirit. And you say, who sings this? I don't know. I've never heard this band before."
},
{
"end_time": 11990.247,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 11960.52,
"text": " That's pretty funny. So the way that I try to safeguard against this, firstly, I don't think I can. And secondly is with regard to intent. I hope that this is the case. I don't consider myself to be well, I'm a selfish person, but hopefully this is the case where I'm just an extremely curious person and much like yourself, much like researchers in general. And so I have many questions. And when it comes to a physics person, I'll just say I have a professor here and it's like office hours. And so I'm just saying, I don't understand this part. How did you get from here to here? How does this make sense with this?"
},
{
"end_time": 12019.514,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 11990.555,
"text": " and then they try and explain it to me and where I don't understand I ask questions and so I do something similar with the UFO guests where I'm simply asking questions but then I also feel like that's a cop-out if I was to say hey I ask questions and then it's up to the audience to quote-unquote decide I don't like that I think that when people say that they're abdicating their responsibility of putting out quality information so I don't know how to solve that yeah I don't know if we can solve that"
},
{
"end_time": 12047.722,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 12019.735,
"text": " Like I said, look what happened to the Vietnamese bunks image. I think that's it. I took up so much of your time. It's so generous. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for inviting me on your show. Professor, thank you so much for spending maybe three hours at least with me. It's a blessing. Absolutely. It was wonderful to talk with you. Thanks for inviting me."
},
{
"end_time": 12071.527,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 12052.346,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash c-u-r-t-j-a-i-m-u-n-g-a-l. That is Kurt Jaimungal. Its support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.