A Scholars Deep Dive Into The Metaphysics Of Religion Diana Pasulka

TITLE: A Scholar’s Deep Dive Into the Metaphysics of Religion | Diana Pasulka CHANNEL: Curt Jaimungal DATE: 2022-05-19 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Today’s guest is Diana Walsh Pulka. Diana Pulka 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-terrain 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 Jungle, and I’m a filmmaker slashpodcaster slashperson 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 Salvador Pius’s ideas on quantum gravity or extra dimensions or what it means when a physicist quote unquote sets C to equal 1 to equal H bar, 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 quoteunquote internal gauge symmetries are U1 cross SU2 cross 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/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 groing. 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. There’s also a link to the Patreon. That is patreon.com/kurtjongle. If you’d like to support this podcast as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason that I’m able to put out videos of this quality and this depth such as the crash course on theoretical physics as this is what I’m now able to do full-time thanks to your support. Thank you and enjoy. Professor, why don’t you go over what American Cosmic is? And I believe you said that you have changed 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 um 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 um different tools like ar basically archaeology, sociology, history, you know, whatever we can use to understand the impact and effects of religion on populations. And um I my field has been Catholic history and looking at basically Catholic history, right? Um 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. Um, I’ve been looking at extraordinary things within Catholic history. um in Catholic history there are saints who are said to have levitated and billocated and things like that. So I’ve been looking at that. I’ve been looking at dogmas in Catholic history, how 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 um certainly as a professor. So um 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 um they’re one with God. So this is a belief that a practice that was within Catholic history for a long time. So, I did a survey of this and um you’re right. I was an atheist with respect to UFOs. Um never thought of them, never believed in them. Um I was as many people were. Um I 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, um so, no, I never ever thought I would be doing this kind of study. Um but what happened was that in 2011 and 2012 I 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 um Catholics have always taken great notes and they have records and um 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 um making a a 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. um orbs that that penetrate walls, um you know, things that uh like move like houses in the air, you know, these kinds of reports. And the people that were making these reports today, we’d call them like reliable witnesses, you know, they were usually um part of the Catholic hierarchy. They were um nuns or brothers, you know, scholars, um people like this, mayors of towns. What was it about these reports in particular that stood out? Because I’m sure there are many reports by many religious people about extraordinary events. So, was there something in particular or are you studying any abnormal aberration from reality? No, at this at this point I was just focused on what happened to the practice the Catholic doctrine and practice of purgatory. You know, prior to the 1960s, uh 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, you know, hey, what about purgatory? They wouldn’t know what you were talking about. So I was looking at what why did this dogma disappear basically. And so when I was I was looking at these reports, I would come to reports of basically here’s 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 you know she lived and basically kind of hang out you know 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 at first. Then finally the uh mother superior came and stayed the night in her, you know, room and and she saw it also. So they interpreted this as a soul from purgatory and then they did a 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? And that’s a good question. Was it? It apparently was. So was successful or unsuccessful? It appears to be because there was no more report of it. Okay. 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 because 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 Stephen Spielberg movies, you know, like UFOs.” And I I thought, “That’s crazy.” Um, 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 the inhabitants of aerial phenomenon allegedly, right? 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 um that’s how I started. Now of course the book became completely different than I had intended. Um, 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 they actually invited me on, you know, excursions like to New Mexico uh to find debris from crashed saucers and things like that. I mean, it was pretty wacky. I I thought it was really strange. And I was still an atheist when I was writing the book. It wasn’t until the very end. This took me a few years, right? It took me years to get through. And we’re we’re now in 2022. Um 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. Uh but beliefs in our field are basically practices uh 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 belief 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 disbelievers in God because they act as if God exists. God implies an ethic which endows people with a inviable quality with respect to their life and so on. So what do you make of this claim about atheism about atheists are not ne even though they can proclaim atheism that they don’t necessarily believe it in the sense that their actions bely their words. Okay. So all right let’s let’s first figure out what we mean by religion okay and theism and things like that so okay for people who study religion when we think of somebody who is say a well-known atheist like Dawkins all right um 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 undergrad graduates what religion is. We start by saying what you think. First of all, religion is a madeup 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 um in order to identify something. Now, gener generally the people that created this term, these people came from um 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 um Jesus, right? This person um 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 um a video of an Ethiopian um 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 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 um 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 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, Terravada Buddhism. Okay. So um 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 a a definition that we would use of religion because that’s a straw man representation of religion. So this so the question you’re asking me is atheists are already assuming they’re going to 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 atheist 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 um assessment. But you have to understand that I’m also not an I’m not a person who’s going to advocate belief in religion. I mean I’m a scholar of religion. I’m not adv 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 facicious. Actually, no. They don’t having fun. Nope. Nope. There are some that do, but there are a lot that don’t. This this started in the um early 2000s, 2002. And I used this as a tea basically as a case to show my students that religion has a big definition. Right? So, we’re we’re talking about what’s called a new religious movement. Okay? And I used to actually um 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. Um but it’s definitely 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 and delletteriously? It’s like not one that’s hard to say. Um I’m I pro I promise you I don’t know and I’m still trying to figure it out. So I’m still thinking through it. And um I did I have spoken to some people who are basically colleagues and it appears that you know religion might even predate humans you know in the sense that um proto hominins like Neanderthalss and things like that. When you look at how they buried each other, it appears that they have some ritualistic like kind of uh 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 uh an adaptation that we just don’t understand because you know lots of people said it was going to go away and that’s called the rationalism thesis. You know, as people get more rational, religion will just as a 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 um that seems 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 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 enlightened I know that this is euroentric and and I’m going to get cancelled, but I’m just I’m straw manning for for the sake of Okay, 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 the 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 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 nu. They’re N O N E S. And they’re called that because when they tick off the census, they put we have no religion. So we have what’s your religion? None. Right? So that’s what makes them, you know, that’s why they’re called the nuns. 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. Um the rise of atheism I think that as you know I mean beliefs change atheism is something that um you know I wouldn’tcribe it I wouldn’t say atheists are de facto more rational than religious people. That’s just not right. That’s not true. Um, 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 atheists. They’re either agnostic or theists and are very rational. So, but I mean it’s just not who I know. But it’s also, you know, um these are generalizations that I think require a lot of we must we have to be really careful when we’re talking about that. But yeah, I don’t see that. 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 um 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? Because 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 um in touch with inhabitants of UFOs and a significant um 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. A very few of us weigh in on whe you know trying to say this is a this exists or this doesn’t exist. Who can prove it? Right? Right now we just can’t prove that. So um you know it’s the same with religion. You can’t prove God exists or doesn’t exist. Um 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 um 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. Uh realism based on a UFO sighting. Okay. 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 uh long-term behavior changes, okay? where their value system changes. Like maybe they were really about making money, you know, um and you know, and all of a sudden, boom, they have this experience of a UFO. And um that, you know, these people are called experiencers, by the way. People who are um 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 that there’s a whole group of assumptions that they bring to that um that interpretation. So we’re looking at interpretive structures that have changed 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 a 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 um 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 uh set of beliefs and practices. All right you’re either a Nation of Islam person or you’re not. Okay. Um but a religiosity is more like what we see with the uh 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 um it’s basically it’s not discreet. It’s a uh this dissemination of the beliefs and practices is decentralized. There’s no centralized belief structure or institution. And um people get their information through each other on social media or through media like Star Wars or something like that, right? Or through um documentaries that are supposed to actually be um non-fiction, right? even New York Times, you know, where you see the tic tacs and things like that. So, um, that’s what I call a religiosity. So, a lot of people are having their lives completely or their, let’s put it this way, they’re having their basic truths and assumptions about reality shifted because of belief in extraterrestrials. And that’s that’s what I see. 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, um there are different varieties of belief in ETSs and UFOs. So, some people believe that they were here in the past and maybe seated civilization. actually uh Dawkins has a video out there if you YouTube it you know Dawkins ET where he basically suggests something like that um 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 we’ll just never be in contact with them because the universe is just you know huge um or they’re in contact with us now okay so these are different ways that people believe in UFOs and ETSs are those people who believe in the transform formative 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 yian unconscious or just the unconscious without a a yian flare 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 absolutely yeah so um in the history of uh religious studies we could say absolutely um could we say that now uh of like European people European white people I guess you know Americans Canadians who go down to Brazil or Central America and do Iaska 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. Um, but within indigenous cultures, especially like with Native American, the Native American church, um, 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 um diff even different forms of Catholicism in Waka Mexico. So if you look at um somebody like Maria Sabina who you probably don’t know um but everybody should know about her because she’s fascinating. She’s one of the most fa she is the most famous healer in Mexico and I believe she died in the 1980s but um her whole life she was uh 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. Um 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. Okay? And so, you can even see cathedrals down in Waka 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 inlaying 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 curve. 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 at it’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 iawaska 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 iawaska 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 discreet religion and this is why it’s just much more vague than that. I know you’re a scientist, so this is kind of like, you know, it it’s just not as cut and dry as we like to say, you know, oh, this is a religion and this is not a religion. Um, there are, you know, it’s it’s um I think it has to do with the objective reality of the, you know, 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. And that’s part of the reason I find UFOs fascinating is because at this moment in time, what do we have? We do have like people who are coming out, scientists like Dr. Gary Nolan, who by the way was in American Cosmic. He’s James in American Cosmic. Um my book and I traveled around with him. And he has a sports car. Yeah, he’s got I think he has a new one now. Um but he had one back then, too. And um so well that kind of like threw me off of what I was going to say. Sorry. I’m so sorry. you were 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 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 uh 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 in and believe me, I took heat for it. So, you know, I’m here hanging out with Gary Nolan from Stamford. 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 med uh metal detectors looking for this debris from crash saucers, right? uh at a site that’s not Roswell but is one of the sites that’s a you know 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, he hasn’t come out as 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 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 uh 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 and60s 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 um a bunch of changes happening at once. And I find it fascinating for religion for this kind of what I call religiosity. It’s definitely not a religion in in the old time way. I believe it’s a it’s the formation of a new type of transcendent religion. A couple questions. So one is you mentioned that you took some flack. I believe you said you took some heat. Oh because of the release of the book. Where did you take the flack from? Who gave you this heat? Sure. Okay. So, um 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 years. All right. So who did I get heat from? So um 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 I didn’t care if people were going to give me flack because I knew that my methodology was sound. So, I was okay with it. But I’d go to a um I would go to conferences and people would would call the the work the you know the research they’d say that’s interesting. And if you’re in philosophy, you know what that means? That means wow totally weird. like not interesting at all kind of thing. And so um and I’d get this a lot, but I was still I still knew that that it was that’s not that bad. No, I know. I mean I mean yeah there’s no like you know uh funding that’s taken away a lot of but I would 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 UFOs as an example of this but um but it just kind of went way beyond what I had thought So that’s how I took the heat. Um, 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 are you’re not supposed to do. and you know it’s a completely horrible racist term and um that was said of me things like that. So there’s 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 where rational skeptics of the sort who only follow where the evidence leads them and this is all woo because there’s such a posity of evidence and you’re believing people based on testimony and that’s not what one does in in science and it’s not replicable etc and and and partly that’s true but then the dismissal of it I don’t agree with the deriding and the and the snide remarks that come along with that. So did you 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 this 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 um 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. Uh Verer von Braonn founded, you know, he’s German, but he came over to our space program. Um and then, um Constantine Chakosski, 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 that 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 eskeeis. That’s a Greek word for um almost like becoming um very very disciplined with respect to your lifestyle and your mind and your thoughts. So they were going into some kind of uh almost like an altered state of consciousness at least Jack Parsons was and then creating these you know kind of downloading this information. Um well what what does that say? Um 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 the data says that those things actually work. like those kinds of, you know, um I spoke to Carrie Mullis here. I’m gonna I don’t know if you can hear that. Can you hear that? No, no, no. Oh, okay. Never mind then. Um All right. Carrie Mullis, he is a Nobel Prize winning chemist, right? So, he is uh he discovered the polyure chain reaction. All right. Now, I suggest to your listeners that they go check out his web page, Carrie Mullis, where he talks about he died two years ago. Um, 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 it 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 the body practices that they’re engaged in that’s my point and so I think that is actually rational there’s 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 that instigates 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 Wimhof 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 bath, consistently when you perform alchemy, consistently when you meditate in this way and 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 I’m on board with that. In fact, I would suggest that that’s what we that’s the type you see to 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? Essis body practices, but there’s body 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, okay, he’s part of some, you know, Alistister Crowley and people like that. I mean, frankly, very, very different than Constantine Chicowski who does very similar ritualistic things, but they have they are in no way does he view it as a new form of religion. You know, he thought of his as Christianity. So, do you see what I’m saying? And then when Tyler’s doing it here in the, you know, 2000s, he’s doing very similar things, but he’s not he doesn’t think of it as Alistair Crowley. He he would he would be 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. Um, if you look at, do you know Raman 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? Um also I when I was doing American Cosmic I was reading up on creativity and um I forgot the name of the um the person whose work I had read but she was really she’s really good um and it’s it’s there is cited there in American Cosmic but basically she said that if you do if you look at the brains of people who are being extremely creative we’re talking about creative genius uh 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 attributing it 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 woo, you know, well, it’s woo that works and I want to know why it works. That’s basically my position. Yeah, I’m super interested in what constitutes a religion and what doesn’t, which is why I have many questions about this. And sure, the people who label what you just outlined as woo, 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. Um, 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 or you aren’t atheists 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 um they’re dogmatic. Like they’re dogmatic atheists. I think that’s what they’re trying to say is there’s a dogmatism about a some atheists who, like I said, like to put like to make a straw man argument about religion and then like knock it down and say, “See, there’s nothing there, right?” Um yeah, I don’t think so. I think that um 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 of UFOs. Okay. Um and I thought that people who did, I thought they were completely wrong. And I’m not that way anymore. So you can be atheist about some things and not atheist about other things with respect to God. Okay. Um some religions are are atheist. There are some atheistic religions. So, religion has the reputation of 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 um different denominations of religions also, let’s take I’m most familiar with Catholicism and Christianity. And I would say that within Christianity, um, 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. Basila, what religion are you?” And a lot of times I wouldn’t tell them. I say, “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 um 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. Okay? So, a very small minority in those in each of those religions. You won’t find it at all at least uh historically in Hinduism. In 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 a Catholic, be a really good Catholic and you can you can reach moia. That’s the idea. Okay. So, so a lot of people in um 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. You know, they if people knew that more and even religious people, they don’t even know that like a lot of religious people, they you know, it depends on which type of religion they’re from, but you know, they 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 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.” I don’t know if that’s that’s actually true, but even if that’s true, then my question to him was at what? Cuz I imagine it’s 70% true. 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 that’s 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 um people from Europe or you know uh Saudi Arabia. Uh 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 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 pro, 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 okay that’s how one comes upon this mysticism like whoa like what you know this question and I think that um 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 steal man dogma? Can you make the case for dogma? Do I advocate for dogma? Is that what you’re saying? Can I add? No, no, no. I’m saying 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. How does 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. um that that may or may not be true, but that’s absolutely a dogma. It’s it’s a you know it’s 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. Okay? And then when human beings are not created equal 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 it 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 and we we we call it like a self-evident truth. That’s like a dogma, right? Self-evident, right? Um but it doesn’t ne 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 I’ve studied that um within the Catholic church purgatory is a dogma right the belief in purgatory you must believe you must believe in this place called purgatory else you’re not a Catholic or else you go to hell or what is it what is else there yeah so basically you’re not a um you’re not a Catholic following Catholic uh doctrine okay 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. It’s 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, um, 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 mechanism 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 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 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 the idea or let’s put it like this is kind of the um 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? They say like they’ve killed people. Their bishop would send them to a place in in Ireland and there was also a place in Italy um where there was a cave and it’s still there by the way in uh Ireland. It’s called um Lock Durg and it’s a place called um it’s on a lake and it’s an island on a lake. It’s called St. Patrick’s purgatory and this was in the 10th 10 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 was 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. Um 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 um book called St. Patrick’s Purgatory written by a crus ba 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 Haidiger because not many people do, especially not in the UFO scene. What the heck does Hideiger 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 Haidiger had and I would like you to expand on that please. Yeah, sure. So, um, Haidiger’s I like Haidiger and um, a lot of colleagues of mine hate Haidiger and Haidiger’s kind of, you know, demonized in philosophy because this is what happened to him. He’s he’s really interesting. So he was, you know, he hung out with Vickinstein and people like that in philosophy and he was um straight up like rationalist philosopher. Okay. 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 Haidiger would have conversations and Haidiger actually had a mystical experience. And after that he started to do exactly what Socrates used to do. And that’s why though if you look at his work you’ll see 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, um, 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’s it has a bad name because I think at heart we all know because this is the question that that Haidiger 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 what you know 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 when 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 Haidiger 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 found fascinating. That’s what led me to Jacqu Valet actually. Meaning that it’s an interface. The what do you mean when you say that the technology house is the sacred? Okay. Yeah. that it is going to determine how we live in the world and how we um like our relationship with the world like is going to be. So as a Catholic, a medi medieval Catholic, your relationship was with the world was basically you 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 Haidiger 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 coming is what he was saying but you know he also envisioned something really bad on the horizon and um 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 Haidiger And he didn’t actually want that quote. He didn’t want that quote known until he died. And then when he died, he that quote could be published. And the uh the quote is um only a god can save us now. 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 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 a like a DSX Machina. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would be it. Yeah. Okay. You mentioned this was related to Jacqu Valet. Yeah. Okay. So, um All right. So Haidiger has always been some uh you know his his uh work was fascinating to me just as Hana Arent’s work she and he were she learned from him he was her professor and so um these kind of these these uh philosophers formed a lot of how I looked at things because I grew up in California near well in the dotcom you know this was like my millu I guess you could say my social media was um the ‘9s with you know the.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 um and I also so so Haidiger was always on the back burner right um 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 n’t actually a practicing Catholic, but he made sure that he had a Catholic burial, which I always found fascinating. So, okay. So, what happens then after Okay, so Jacques, okay, I attend this first. I I knew about Jacques’s work because he wrote um a book um Passport to Monia. Yeah, for some reason I thought John Mack wrote that. Oh, no. John Mack wrote Passport to the Cosmos, a reference to uh Jacques’s Passport to Magonia. So, I read Passport to Magonia and it to me it felt like I was reading my book on purgatory and so I reached out to him through um 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 um 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, um was able to read Latin and that kind of thing. So um 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 he 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. Like this belie 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, to me, Jacques was like a walking hideigerian 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 microfich, 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 high Gary, but he I don’t even think he knows who Martin Higer he’s. He’s never read him, I’m sure.” you know and so um yeah so that’s how then I I understood his work and and to me you couldn’t take the technological work that he did away from the the UFO studies that he did to me they went hand in hand 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? Okay. So, I found that um because I was at the Vatican and I spent time at the observatory there in Castle Gandalfo and um I know brother Guy Consulmano who is the observatory. He’s the 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 a lot of years, I guess. Um, and I also talked to lots of people at the Vatican. Um, like Peter Goompel, who’s a uh he’s he’s in his 90s and he is um he was like a papal adviser. 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 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 um about UFOs for the Vatican. Right. So um okay. So that said, there when I did get into this this um 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 um I was uh you know people in my book a lot of them I 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 and the ones that were the most intense into the research were actually practicing Catholics and um 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 in 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 because it’s pretty intense studying UFOs and and 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? Yes, some people do. Yeah, some people do. Definitely. I mean, one of the uh former directors of the observatory uh definitely believed in um ETSs and believed that ETSs 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 talk 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, it’s 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 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 ETSs um 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 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 angels are being interpreted from our materialistic culture as aliens? Yeah. Or demons. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a good way to put it. Um, and I have a friend, uh, Jeff Krile. 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. Um 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 today, you know, people a hundred years from now are going to look back on us and say, “Haha, 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 Haidigerian 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 of the sun. Fatima. Oh, thatical. 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 um from the Virgin Mary. it was based on an apparition of the Virgin Mary. So, um if you look at some of those documents uh and again the primary sources were it wasn’t it’s don’t attribute it to me or Jacques Valet or even Jeff Kriel because there were two people who did this research this um and I 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. to 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 looked very, you know, what we would call UFOs because there was a man who had been um with I think there was 70,000 people there um 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 disc 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. Um, and I don’t know why people are so upset about this. Um, 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 to, you know, I I had to report it to we have the we have police at the university. We have tech experts like it people. And so, I reported that and I remember um this is in 2018. Chris Padet 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’s 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 push back to that for some reason. people would just be really upset about it that I don’t have either a Catholic framework or a religious framework or if I don’t have the you know what’s going right now is the US government’s these are advanced technology framework like you have to have that framework now or else you’re going to have push back 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 question. Just just look at look at it. Have you found any connection between near-death experiences and the phenomenon or any other part of your studies and near-death experiences? I at some point in the summer plan on taking a deep dive into them, but was 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. Um, so yes, I have actually. Um what’s really interesting right now is that I’m um doing some research into Japanese UFOs and um what I think is really interesting is that there are 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 Alzando talks about and 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 as a as a framework for like you know talking about something but in this movie arrival um one of the gifts that the aliens give to humans is the the knowledge of time like you know that time is actually you know they had fornowledge 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. Um, some not all of them, but a lot of them. And, uh, 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 um, 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 were they’re they’re identified as souls, like souls that of 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 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 refer 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’ve experienced up close. Um, 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 Benovitz who I’ve heard. Yeah. So, this was a a person who was not mentally stable and but was near an Air Force base and believed in UFOs. And um Rick Dodie, Richard Dodie, who worked for the Air Force as a special agent, he um 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, um, Linda Molton How, they went for people like her who was a legitimate journalist, right? she has 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. Um 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, um, 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. Um, he’s an invisible one. He’s a visible one, right? But, um, 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 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 aerof phenomena 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 was happening at this point. Now there might be a weapons program going on in which case my research would be valuable to them. So how do I do my research and I and you know stop from being cultivated. So I guess at some point I recognized that that that’s a real thing and um I mean I kind of recognized 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 the debris and found that it was very strange. And so, you know, something’s happening. Yeah, he comes up a lot. Um I’m not super familiar with a lot of his work, but I have colleagues who are in the space program who um who read his work and like it and um yeah, so but I’m 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 the 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 obfiscate or hide and etc. I want to ask, what was it that you uncovered? But perhaps you can speak around it. Okay. I’m trying to think um if this was something I have the exact timeline, the exact statement of Yeah. So, let’s see if I can bring it up here. 28. 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. Okay. because it was I think it there was there was danger you know there was danger um and what if I uncovered something that people didn’t want uncovered which apparently I think I did um so you said apparently you think you did but you’re not sure but anyway so if if you could recall what you’re referring to yeah okay so um 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, um 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’m I just happen 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, um, 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 knew 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 has either deliberately landed or or accidentally landed? Okay, so that’s the that’s the question, right? So that’s um 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 Prometheian. 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. Okay? A mythology that was actually people actually were living and believing it. Okay? 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 a quack or something like that, right? Or, you know, conspiracy theorist or something like that. Believe it or not, the culture has changed so much that now if you don’t believe that, people think you’re bad or wrong or something, it seems. So, no, I’m not going to I’m not going to believe or disbelieve. I don’t know. But I was at one of those places. What are your thoughts on C5? So, it’s a method of producing some form of Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um Okay. So, I do know that people I know people who do it and I know that um people say, “Oh, I’ve had success with it, but I mean I wouldn’t be doing it. I don’t I feel the same.” You know, I feel like it’s playing with it’s such a it’s such an unknown with such a drastic consequence that it’s it’s worse than playing with fire. Yeah. I’m not going to do it. 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 I have heard a lot of people say that they have, you know, initiated contact through the methods of C5. Um, 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 gonna 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. Okay? And so, I already believe that certain things can happen. I don’t really need to have up 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 woo 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 if 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? Because 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 either they’re getting something from it or they’re, you know, I really don’t know. I’m suspicious. It just sets off alarms and I’m not quite sure what those alarms are, but no way. I wouldn’t do it anyway, but especially when people really want you to do it. 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 that what he says comports with 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. So 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 um 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. Um what did he see? Did he see actually extraterrestrials or did he see weapons or you know what did he he saw something that caused a you know a huge reaction and push back and discrediting of him and that kind of thing 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 that 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 um 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 yeah I don’t think he said that he actually was 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. As far as 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 mis disinformation. 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? Both. How do you defend yourself against disinformation? What are some of the tools? What are some of people who are watching? Sure. Okay. So, in American Cosmic, I went through hoaxes of UFOs, right? And I said that hoaxes of UFOs have um 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 um 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 that they had been so inculturated as to what a UFO is supposed to look like even though it most likely doesn’t look like that, right? So there so but that was really a UFO in the sense that it was fully an unidentified flying object whereas the other one was completely hoax 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 and they’re video you know and that kind of thing um like Jacqu fell always said believe nothing you know and use your discernment okay so I think that um in today’s world of you know uh deep fakes and things like that it’s pretty impossible I think to to figure that stuff out. So I think that the best uh default action is just to not believe and if it seems crazy it most likely is not real. Hm. 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 closedness would be anything other than falseness or beguiling or whitewashing. Mhm. 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 what’s it’s my 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 closedness? Okay. Sure. So all right. And this can be applied by by the way to the Vatican as well, not just to UFO. Great. Great. Insiders. Okay. So all right. A lot of I’ll give an example from my actual life. So something that was tangental to my UFO research but happened during it was my Catholic research into these saints of the Catholic Church that um billocated and levitated and I was going I was um I had funding from a billionaire who was interested in this research this Catholic research. She’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 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 um the billionaire who’s an American with with some of the people who helped me um 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 preodern 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 a, 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 Bell or, you know, or 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 a while. And um 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 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 those people want it to be secret. Now, I’m not saying that’s a good thing for everything, you know, but definitely I mean the 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 uh we did get the document. Um, 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 I couldn’t the lecture you were giving but the audio was not let’s say wasn’t of the highest quality for whatever reason the person who was recording didn’t have a mic on you. So the camera’s 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 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, “Oh, I didn’t even know.” You 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, uh, 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 works 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 got was ritualized. So they identified certain time periods astronomically when it would be beneficial to launch and they also had the rockets had um Roman gods on them and they also had um Latin, first century Latin, not medieval Latin. It wasn’t Catholic Latin. It was basically imperialistic Latin. And so and everybody had to stay in their own space. Like there was a place where they had to stay. They wore the same clothes for every mission. Um, and they ate the same food. I’m so sorry to interrupt. Are you referring to a SpaceX launch? I I missed that. Yeah. Yeah. We’re 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. That was 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 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. We I translate them all and I said this wow this says that and I said who up there in space is gonna 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 okay who’s who are they you know and so he did he just didn’t say anything but that’s that’s what it was 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 ETSs and and so on or is it just one of the staff members? No, no, this is beyond this is way before Elon so it has nothing to do with him. Um his company is just a company that puts those does the launches to get the satellites up but he has nothing to do with creating the satellites or of putting the um Roman stuff on them. Nothing at all to do with that. That that was definitely predates him. Um, so what does it mean though? Um, yeah. What was written on it? Yeah. So to me it looks like what I what people have called like exotheology or astroology. It’s this 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 um 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. Um, they’re using the images of gods and goddesses from Rome. Um, and what do the what does the Latin say? Um, here’s a here’s something for you to check out. Um, it’s the uh these that 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. Uhhuh. 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. Uhhuh. And so, the haha part, was that on the satellite or that was just on the patch? Um, 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. H, 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 not 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 referred or not you someone referred to the president as a short-timer. Okay. What does that mean? Yeah. So, um and I he I’d heard this from not just Tyler but a lot of the people who were part of the program um that presidents are short- timerrs in the sense that there must be a program that’s not a short-time program but a longtime 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 60s. I mean that he’s a longtimer 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 and say, “Okay, now that makes sense.” I didn’t give the context to what it was. Sure. Sure. Okay. So, I wrote this book. I called it American Cosmic in reference to um The Russian Cosmists because to me Russian Cosmist is a great book for any of our listeners um um 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 a secret program. Now they’re not they’re known not to be secret. And he had clearances and that sort of thing. And he worked for every almost every space shuttle launch. Okay. He’s a mission controller. And um he was a very fascinating person. Um, 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 automatically suspicious. I was like, “Wow, you know, this is crazy, but I’ll go.” Um, because, you know, it’s still evidence. It’s still data. Even if he’s it’s disinformation, it’s still data. So, um, anyway, so that’s who Tyler is. Tyler is this fascinating space program person. 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 well we don’t know what this is about. So that’s how I think it really is. comp compartmentalized and that’s why I use a lot of um 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 who were scientists and they were secret and they were trying to figure out the stuff on their cover of secrecy but then it morphed into I think in the late 80s and early 90s 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? Yeah, 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. Um, and there are things that like I could see from Catholic history from like, you know, 1400, 1500 that look like John Max’s abductions, you know, and you can say, “Wow, that looks exactly like, you know, it could become it could come out of John Max’s book, uh, I think it’s called Abduction, actually.” Um, human encounters with aliens. So, yeah, those are different. I mean, I think they’re different. I could be wrong, but they look different. Have you seen this video, one video I believe, called Biblically Accurate Angels? Yeah, that’s a I like that video. Okay, I’ll link it or I’ll even 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 so 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 uh situation with uh and it looks like an angel. They call it a seraraphim, 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. And they’re not the huggies babies on a cloud with a supple behind and smiling creepily at you from a distance. And you know, even the people that had those experiences back in the day never said that either. Like St. Teresa Vavala, she’s a person who had an experience and now it’s made popular in Rome. Um, Bernini created statue called the ecstasy of St. Teresa and it’s in Rome and you can see it and it’s a 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, um, 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 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 narrative. 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. I’m not sure. 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 can actually go online and check it out. Okay. And what this museum is, I mean, a lot of it doesn’t look like ev 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 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, okay, 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, you know, 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. It’s 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 or eupfology and so on. And so one of the advantages of calling some field by some other field’s 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 good. 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 have it would elevate or depreciate the 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 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 architecture is like garbage. Well then that would depreciate people’s view of architecture. Okay. So calling something by something else’s name, it has certain advantages. It allows for something. So what does calling UFOs or eupfology 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 s I do this by calling the book uh 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. Yeah. 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. And that is something we’ve never seen before. No other no other religion um Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, no other religion has actually said we are scient we can corroborate ourselves through science right but you euphology 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 the Pentagon report came out in 200 21 and a lot of people in my field are looking at UFOs in a completely different way now and um 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 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 AI is like the devil or vaccine hesitancy or acceptance is that’s like religion, what 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 underneath by 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 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 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, there’s a I’m constantly doing that work and it will never be done. It’s like unending. Who is the modernday Haidiger? Who’s furthering Haidiger’s work? Gosh, let me think. H um I know there’s object-oriented ontology. Mhm. 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 Harmon’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 KTO Haidiger? I’m trying to think of some modern philosophers whose work has um 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 um from a hidaggarian perspective because it seems to me that she’s also going back to a Socratic like understanding of basically inputting mysticism within questioning. And um 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 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 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. um I forgot the name of it but it has flying saucers in the oh it’s called the modern flying saucers the modern myth in the sky okay and um 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 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 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 could 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 is an archetype that has physical qualities to it which I thought was really weird. Yeah. That makes it unexampled in the pantheon of archetypes. Yeah. So have physical component in so much as well 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 right now I’m looking at um there’s a person and again I will have to send you because I like to give credit where credit’s due, but unfortunately I read so much stuff I forget the names of people but this is a person who calls himself a a story technologist. So he does like he’s a tech he says that um he does the history of stories and he looks he uses basically tons and tons of data to to break down different stories and to show how they actually like what they do to our brains. Okay? And um 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 was 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, you know, um, Levy Strauss, you call it a myth. Yeah, that’s Levy Strauss called it a myth. It wasn’t a myth because it was more than a myth. It was actually the the very unit that created the different myths, right? Okay. So, all right. So if I’m looking at stories as technology, when I went back to American Cosmic and in order to 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 it happened was in my next book, I’ve morphed into a new myth, embodying, inhabiting a new myth. And that myth is basically the 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, um that we live in a simulation. The simulation hypothesis is basically another iteration of this myth. Okay. Yeah. So that’s the that’s the next that’s what I it’s almost as if I had to go through the Prometheian myth in order to get to the allegory of 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 adambrations 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 disabensate much like right now with people considering those who well if you have any belief that is borderline quoteunquote woo then that’s what one is labeled as 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 ca 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. I 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 up.” 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, indicating people tied us up. I know. What I’m saying is you believe now that people tied us up or or are you indicating that the extraterrestrials or whatever it may be? No, no, no. I think that we’re doing it to each other where, you know, we’re misinforming each other. Like, there’s obviously this misinformation campaign that happened 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 were 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. And but there’s something at the end of the the uh the cave allegory. I’m just going to call it an allegory since people have called it that, but it’s not. Um, 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 me 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’s the one who’s writing it, but Socrates calls it a craft. not a not a 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’ve 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 and kind of um 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 the thing we need to ask. So what happens 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 the you know when Plato recounts it Socrates is talking to somebody and he basically says and wouldn’t it be the case that we engage in this this dialogue or dialectic and that this is a craft and that we 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, you know, 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 um I think it’s called the good um it’s something to do with the good. I just read it. But it’s a it’s a excellent um it’s an excellent take on this. I think she gets it right and the take is that the good is to be political. Uh no the good is to engage in this type of um craft that 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’s basically showing us something and then Haidiger believe it or not goes back and he tries to recreate that through writing this philosophy where he questions 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 that so that’s what’s happening and that’s what our that’s what our culture right now we’re stuck in the cave and we just don’t we just don’t know how to get out and I think that that’s it because it took me a I mean 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 s 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 Verve’s on Haidiger and John was saying in his language, so I’m going to use and this is a bit esoteric, but he was saying that Haidiger was stating that the whole process of metaphysics for the past 2,000 years is one of distancing. we distance ourselves from the as a subject from the object and this is perhaps a misframing 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 okay let me think so a 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 100% well that’s procedural as well. So there’s another format. So are you suggesting that perhaps what’s happened is that we’ve gotten lost thinking that the by elevating the propositional knowledge and that 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 it’s trying to tell us and that we have to go back and look at that and really engage with what it is that he that he told us back in the day. And I think that Haidiger tried to do that. I don’t I mean he he was successful but I think that a lot of people just don’t even know understand what Haidiger 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 what there are these 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 the 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 SA. 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 is saying they’re all in the cave. Like we, you know, okay, sad for them. He 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 Haidiger, and Haidiger 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 as a if you love your spouse, you give them flowers. You don’t give them plants. You don’t give them subjects of of of horicultural investigations.” But they’re the same. They’re actually the same. The plant and the flower and the horicultural investigatory object is the same. However, it’s wrong to give your spouse a 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 Haidiger was pointing to. One of the reasons I like Haidiger is that in some sense, remember I was giving you an outline of what theories of everything is. Mhm. Now, no way am I saying it’s a continuation of Haidiger’s project, but it’s 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 Haidiger would say being is other than existence. And earlier you mentioned that Haidiger was interested in why something exists. I think that Vickenstein was interested in why something exists and how something exists where Haidiger was interested in existence. What is existence itself? I agree with you. I think so. I think also that Vickinstein 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 and he said of 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. He I don’t know if he meant language per se rather than art. Maybe art was an was a was all right to as a mode of expressing oneself to understand the world. It’s strange because I was looking up Haidiger and Haidiger 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 Vickenstein. Vickenstein, 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 Vickinstein was greater than the average religious person. And Vickenstein, he said he can’t help but see every problem through religious point of view. So I see Haidiger 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 I find it to be mystical. I think that his later work was he he had a mystical experience and they tried to express that that understanding through his and I think that’s why he went prescratic. He went back to this you know Socrates and prescratics 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/eastern end that would say that you cannot discover God or reality or whatever synonym one wants to give it that has some dramatic flare to it. You cannot discover it via an analytical approach that you must experience. It has to be something and 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 H highaidiger’s writing and Anna Hana Arent’s writing um 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 a term for them, but they they were using Zen in order to explicate like philosophy and that’s how Haidiger kind of got involved with them. And um one of my one of the books that I think is most fascinating I think it’s called um I think it’s called the philosophy of nothingness and I forgot exactly who wrote it but it’s that person his he had that’s where he links he actually went back and read Nietze and kind of through the lens of Zen Buddhism and I thought it was a fascinating book. Um 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 Nietze was a mystic as well. You know, his his his philos is basically mysticism. Now, Nisha is someone that I feel horrible for not liking because everyone likes 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 I don’t drink anymore but I was never partial to wine to wine I I I’ll have some of it but then there and same with the stronger drinks they don’t taste good but and I’m not going to torture myself by constantly drinking it in order to get the quote unquote in acquired taste so I think that’s what’s necessary in order to understand niche properly no it’s not did did you not read about my niche synchronicity that caused because I hated na yeah Well, that well good for you in the sense that you’re lucky that you had that. No, I know because I would have continued to hate Nze as well, just like you. And good for you. I I would be very suspicious of a person who naturally liked NZ, frankly. I think you have to encounter Nze. 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 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 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 I well, I’m I’m praying and I’m hoping that your book provides some solution to that because right now, I’m fleeing from the from the from the light, let’s say. You mean you’re going back into the cave? I I in Yes. I I wish and I I hope and I pray for the for the cave. I think that the the more fish and cursed aspects of a quote unquote open mind haven’t been explicated by people or even recognized that it’s seen in this culture as something that one everyone should have more of and I think that my mind has been somewhat too open and I need to close it and it’s not pleasant to have such an open mind and no I’m not saying that as some yeah yeah that’s where the SA comes in that’s where you have to have people that help you. Why? Because it’s not it’s not easy to have an open mind, especially when everyone around us is, you know, like they are. And that’s why sup I mean that’s why it’s necessary. It’s not just something helpful. It’s necessary. Well, well, I I’m very much looking forward to reading that book. Do you have a title? Right now I’m calling it the resurrected because it’s it’s you know it’s people that have gone through death in a sense and are now alive again and so I thought that’s they’re resurrected. 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 onlogical 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 I see them as happening at one right after the other. One is kind of theoretical and the other is institutional. Mhm. Well, okay. To 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 world view shattered and and and some and even do so for a living which is what this channel is. It’s it’s not a it’s not pleasant and well it’s not pleasant. Luckily I’m like 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 I’m wondering what was your epistemic and ontological shock specifically? Was there a moment? Yes. Um 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 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 people and that and that’s when I met people who seem to care that I knew and that’s those were like, you know, 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 w it definitely wasn’t pleasant. So it was um and it lasted it was for the weekend. It was so destabilizing. That’s a great word. It 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, you know, it’s called uh St. John of the Cross calls it the dark night of the soul. Okay. Oh, you know, you want to Oh, sorry. Sorry. Just as a quick side, I was being interviewed by someone telling them about my experience and they said, “Curtis, it sounds like you’re going through the dark knight of the soul.” Yeah, that’s what you That’s what it is. It’s the dark knight 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, Nietze comes in handy here because Nichze went through it, too. I It almost seems like he didn’t survive it, frankly, because he was so he didn’t have a SA. It didn’t seem like and he didn’t have you know he didn’t have the well Haidiger 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 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 sa 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 Urseline 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 Karriel has a book called Flipped in which he talks exactly about this. He says you flipped Jeff Krile. 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 a 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 a he had some cool experiences. Okay. So um but he knows what this is about and so did sister Rose. 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 it 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 um 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 was trying to explain to me. She was trying to explain that you 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 or 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 use 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 grown-ups 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 they’ll say, “Oh, so people have gone through this.” And the SA, I imagine that’s a community where people have similar values. What is the definition? Yeah. So in the Buddhism um it’s the SA is the community of people who are waking up and helping each other stay awake because Buddhism is about waking up from the illusion. Yeah. So they’re waking up. So that’s that’s where I am. I want I 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 what you’re saying. Yeah, I understand. But the SA is there for you when you go through the process of awakening. They’re there to help you out. And those are those are those are the three things that you need in Buddhism. Okay. So that’s what I’m saying is like Buddhism to me looks very similar to the thing that Socrates suggests we do at the end of the cave. It’s this is an engaging kind of thing like what you said participatory. So it involves other people. You can’t do it alone. I also find that for so you mentioned the song as 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 cuz well for the past couple years because of co 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 is is is 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 a movie or a 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 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 has maybe caused a lot of us to be in the cave too long or something. Literally, 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 going to tell you this and but I’m not I’m going to take this off the record. So what happened to me was I I had it’s at this point that I suggest you watch the Carl Fristen episode. I consider that to be the most important of all the theories of everything videos. mainly because it serves as a cautionary tale like mentioned in the beginning and also because I don’t like talking about this experience and this may be the last time that I do so. So, if you would like more context then visit that link in the description. 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 tr 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 cuz I don’t want any more experiences like that. That that shattered me. I don’t have the strength to go through that or I think I don’t have the strength. But anyway, and and hanging around people and so on to help me. So that’s an aside like Jasper will take all of that out. But I just wanted you to know that that’s the context from where I’m coming from. 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 seemed 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 um that was as that was good for me and that was good for my kids. So um 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. Mhm. That’s the aspect of religion that that it’s 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 one. You have no clue. Yeah. And that’s why I say the SA, it’s one of the three things. It’s called the three jewels of Buddhism. They definitely understand it. It’s community. And did you know that in Catholicism it’s actually considered a sacrament? Community. What’s a sacrament mean? Oh, a sacrament means it’s a um it’s imbued with the power of God. 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. that I’ve written. Okay, sure. I know there are like 30, 40, 50, 100, but we’ll just get to a couple that are interesting. So, this one comes from Juliano Vargas. Virtually all contactes say that aliens that the aliens themselves believe in a supreme creator, God or being. Now, 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? Um yeah. So my personal opinion is that since we don’t know the first part of his question, we don’t know that to be factual. Um I think that um doing good deeds and having a community of support is what in 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 Jacqu Valet’s theories which acts like a quote unquote control system? This question comes from number two. Sure. Yeah, that’s a great question. So um yeah it’s only strengthened my faith. So I am um I’m a you know I study religion but I am also religious um but I always have been and this has only reinforced my faith. Um so the question is I think the question that this person asks is it 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 um 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 um like on the Drew Mariani show and such and it seems to me and also being involved with people at the Vatican um 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 um you’ll see that there’s already categories there are already categories for belief in extraterrestrial beings and 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 in within that invisible category John Paul II said angels exist and you know things like that. So, um I know a lot of Catholics like um if you look at um would you baptize an extraterrestrial by uh brother Guy and uh Father Mueller, you’ll see that they say they believe that if there are extraterrestrials that they’re created by God. So, it there’s it’s not an eitheror position as I look at it. There’s no 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? Okay, so the hitchhiker effect for those who don’t know is this idea that um there around people who have these experiences like a say they see a lot of orbs and they have paranormal experiences and things like that and that this is kind of a contagious experience in that it’ll it’ll go on it’ll hitchhike onto a person and head home with them. Um 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 um UFO activity because they didn’t want it to come home with them. Um what do I think about it? I mean that’s I don’t know. It’s really strange. Um do I believe that it it’s real? Definitely. I mean it does I have no clue what it is. um that do I think that is mental or objective? I can’t tell you. But do I believe that it actually happens? Uh I know enough scientists who will stay away from hot places because of it yet. So you mentioned that some of the people who would have the hardest time are the humanists. I think you mentioned that. Well, you mentioned it here, but I’m using the word humanist right now. Christians believe and they 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. Like 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 isnosticism. So I don’t know why that gets mentioned simultaneously with the phenomenon. But I want to know what your thoughts are. And then rascrianism if I’m even pronouncing that correctly. Yeah. Why? I don’t know what the second one is. Sure. Okay. Rosacrianism. So, Rosacrianism is a mystical element um tradition within Christianity that is it’s called the holy cross the rosy cross okay and rosierianism and so a lot of the visible college people happen to be um rosacrruian and in fact the term invisible college comes from the history of rosacrianism and so this is a mystical tradition within um European history where you can identify by scientists who were also alchemists who were 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 you you know people who are involved in UFO research. Um the other one isnosticism and nnosticism is kind of like pre pre-rocretionism. So there were um there were Jewish interesting. Yeah. So there were Jewish gnostics and then there were Christian gnostics. So Gnosticism basically is a Greek word that means nosis. It means knowledge and it’s knowledge of I always I explain this to my students like this. Um so uh Michael Jordan is an awesome basketball player. Okay he’s he’s gnostic with respect to basketball. Okay. 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 nosis. I don’t have knowledge of it, like experiential knowledge, right? So, it’s an internally it’s not narcissicism 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 in internal intrinsic knowledge. Um but you you develop it. You might start developing it propositionally but then it becomes Gnostic. It becomes participatory. Okay. So it’s kind of like an ingredient, you know, anre uh 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? So, it’s propositional to participatory. Um, that’s nasticism. Nostism is also there are different forms of nnosticism. Um, there was Christiannosticism, like I said, and Jewishnosticism. Um, and the Christian gnostics were like Mary Magdalene. And these were people who believed that they had a uh an understanding of Jesus and of God that was intrinsic and that they would pass on to others. And they also had ideas of um 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 okay I know I know of one. So okay but a lot of people call themselves gnostic and this relates to the phenomenon I think that people well first of all roianism is relates to the phenomenon because um a lot of the people in the invisible college are in in some ways rose secretion like some of them are overtly rose secretretion so they’re part of this this tradition the invisible college itself the name is rose secretion it’s a roseian term um so that’s how it relates. It’s also a mystic tradition which I find interesting. Is there any relationship between Kerszsw Wild’s technological singularity and the Omega point and UAPs? Okay. Um, wow, that’s a hard question. Okay, so Sheran is his omega point is something that’s also called the new sphere. And the relationship is that both okay both Kerszswhile and Shardon are looking at another kind of um atmosphere basically um that links actually all of us together but it’s a network and it’s a network that is not ne it’s he calls it the new sphere. It’s it’s a biosphere. It’s kind of like a biosphere, but it’s linked by it appears to me it’s linked somewhat telepathically or uh it’s like a neural network, but there’s there’s it’s not it doesn’t have a platform like you know like digital platform. It’s a different sort of platform that has formed on its own um biologically. So, but it’s it’s a fascinating thing. And if you look at Kurszv’s work too, especially the intro to singularity, uh 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 you’re if 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. Um, his the way he’s writing looks um 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 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, um, and also in my opinion, so does, uh, Shardon. Okay. What you’re looking at is you’re looking at kind of like a 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 um 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 does that how does that correspond to UFOs? It so happens to be at simultaneous with what we call kind of in the in the 20th century the flying saucer, right? So we see these these kinds of things and so Jung called this a new archetype right the the image of the fine saucer a new archetype. So you can say that these kind of happened at the same time and are they related? They’re related in this way. They’re related in the sense that there is a a lot of people experience a spiritual transformation when they they encounter or see UFOs. um the the singularity and the newest sphere are also conceived of as being spiritual in nature as well. Okay. So um part of the people that I’m talking with today um are people who believe that there is there are different types of networks. There’s the network that we call the internet right 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. Um, but then there’s another network that’s separate from that and humans have been on that network as well, but they don’t identify it as such. So part of what I’m doing now is I’m kind of like working out how people are looking at this thing they called they call a separate network than the network that we hook into physically and materially. 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 um 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, the this was religion for Greeks back in that time period. So, um, yeah. So, I think that is it new? Um, it doesn’t look to be new. Um, but the ways in which humans engage with it, I think are new. Absolutely. I see. I see. Okay. So, what do you make of the recent UFO hearings? Yeah. So, I I I watched them and um I found them to be interesting. Um 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 um with the topic of UFOs and things like that. Um I would look at it in the sense that um here give me some time because I have thought about this but of course now I’ve blanked out on it. I can’t remember what I was going to say. Okay I I’ll give you some I’ll give you some time. So, do you want me to just be silent while you think? Yeah, just give me some some silent time to like kind of um Okay. So, um All right. Okay. Okay. This is it. All right. Me looking at this. Okay. looking at these hearings um and based on my experience of the last few years, well more than a few years, maybe six or seven years where in I identified what I’d call like a fight club of people who were involved in, you know, the study of UAPs and UFOs. Um and what I mean by fight club is I mean that peop these people are compartmentalized and they don’t talk to one another. Um, I can’t see how a hearing, a congressional hearing is going to pierce 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, there are 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. um they’re not talking to each other because that’s how they’ve been trained. So there so whereas you know we’ve already talked you and I about academics and this kind of academic ethos of sharing our sources to further and progress knowledge okay this is this is actually a method and we believe in it and we even believe that this is right okay well this is you know and for better or worse it could be you know I don’t I now I I was so surprised to hear that well I shouldn’t have been surprised the 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 I think I posted something on Twitter where I said this isn’t the valet level of talking about the topic, right? It’s not going to get that way. It won’t get that way maybe ever. Okay? We can’t expect it to. So, for what it was, um, it was it was okay. You know, for what it was, it was okay. It was something that recognizes at least and 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 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. Um, 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 think I have I’ll 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/ress research by removing the stigma. Well, research re remember has already been happening. So, um I think it’s removing the stigma. And I mean honestly I think that’s 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/practice slashtraining for remote viewing? And if so does it predate the US government’s and how putoffs programmed? That’s a good question. They actually do. And if you it’s not called remote viewing um 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, um, one of those people is Jacques Jacques Valet. And when I first met him and throughout my, um, collegial friendship with him, um, he’s said to use your discernment and this is something that must be developed. Okay. And so that caused me um to recognize the term as being from the Catholic tradition because that’s you know obviously but something that we 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 of to see things that you can’t you know humans in general some humans have it more than other humans to be able to see or have information about people or events um 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. Um the remote viewing community gave specific instructions for how to cultivate uh the you know the ability of remote viewing. Um, in my opinion though, they left out some of the 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 you know, I think that spiritual traditions have things in place to help people with that. Um 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 uh recognition of events that are going to happen um 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. Um I think that this is this is something that one in my personal opinion, this is not me speaking as a professor, but in my personal opinion, I wouldn’t really do that. Um but that’s how remote viewing in these communities has been used. It’s not necessarily for personal gain, but um you know for obviously uh some corporations use it to assess what other corporations are doing. Um obviously if national sec if this was something that national security would want to obviously Russians have been doing remote viewing you know uh the Americans have been doing it as well. Um so yeah so yeah so I think that you see this within different religious traditions but the contexts are different and you know the the you know the desires for the consequences are different as well. 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 by location, right, 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 ne 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. Um Ed May um who I met at the Rice conference uh the archives of the impossible conference had a great presentation on remote viewing and um he would be the person to talk to but yeah within the Catholic church there is something like that but it’s it’s completely devoid of this this use right and also um I’ve seen kind these kinds of practices in Buddhism as well but again totally devoid void of this type of let’s do you know this 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 is pretty much just a like a personal question a personal for myself. I’ve been lucky enough on to on the podcast to get some people who have said no to virtually every other place and I’m not sure why. And Jim Semian said that there’s this sentiment behind the scenes that TOE is a quoteunquote scientific podcast and if one wants to talk about the phenomenon in some technical manner then perhaps it’s the place to go. I don’t know if I buy that because well for various reasons but some people for example on Reddit have called it dystocure like there’s disclosure like somehow Yeah. Right. Right. Maybe I’ll make a merge item of that. So 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 um discourse about them and um you know who’s good to go on and who’s good not to go on and that type of thing for people who um talk about things that are like UFOs and things like that. Is that what you’re asking? Yeah. Um yeah. Right. I think so. And um I think that um I mean we talked about this when we talked about you know if we’re talking about something like UFOs and the you know if in fact UFOs are say extraterrestrial um 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 um this would be something that the military would absolutely want to know about. And so that makes discussion of it highly um surveiled, okay, and up for potential management. Therefore, podcasts, um, you’d have to assess, use your discernment and assess and vet, you know, people’s who people or podcasters, um, you know, 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, um, non-biased media. Even podcasters have their biases. So we 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 um or government programs and so they’re going to be pretty careful about where they go to spread their information. Um, if there are people who’ve been doing this for a very long period of time, say like Jacques Valet, um, I think that his message is pretty clear, has been out there for a long time, so it can’t be used or manipulated, right? And I think that he’s safe to go on anybody’s podcast, frankly. Um, but other people whose work is maybe different than valet and whose work has not been out there for years, um, 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. Um, 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 you’re, you know, who you have on as a guest. And a lot of times you there are unintended consequences of what you put out there. um like that happens to me. So I’ll h I’ll have said something and then it will be used in in a completely different way and there’s really nothing we could do about that crew. 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 um not specifically for UFOs, but definitely for religion. Um you know the uh the ra you know the monk, the immad monk um Kang Duk, I can’t remember his full name. Um but he’s a Vietnamese monk who is or was was who emilated himself um you know during the Vietnam War or believe 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 um suppression of Buddhism by the communist Viet 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, one of 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 to I don’t know. I’ve never heard this band before. That’s pretty funny. So the way that I try to safeguard against it is 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 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 copout 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 uh the Vietnamese monk’s image. I think that’s it. I took up so much of your time. You’ve been so generous. I appreciate 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/cur t j a i mu n g- a l. That is kurtjongal. It’s support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full-time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.