Bernardo Kastrup On Uaps Ufos Aliens And High Strangeness

TITLE: Bernardo Kastrup - UAPs, UFOs, Aliens & High Strangeness | With Reality In Mind CHANNEL: Adventures in Awareness DATE: 2025-03-03 ---TRANSCRIPT--- [Music] we now run a weekly membership program with Berard castrop that you can join at with reality andm mind.com this includes weekly q&as special guests like Rupert spe Michael Levan federo fine there’s an international Vibrant Community of researchers academics meditators Mystics philosophers poets creatives musicians anyone that wants to deeply understand this philosophy and its potential implications for their lives I would like to help forment a community of ambassadors who will be equipped um to go out into their communities go into the world not reach analytic idealism but when the subject comes up they will be a sort of a source of light an informed source of clarifications of arguments of reason that start something that uh that grows um organically it would be nice to have more voices out there um so I could feel more comfortable myself knowing that there is a whole group of people out there who are carrying the torch obviously some people would be wondering this the course Berard is well known for your views on idealism what the hell of UAP the UFO has got to do with idealism if anything the relationship comes from the fact um and and by the way uh I don’t need to to quote anything confidential because this thing already leaked that’s the so-called slide nine that has already leaked long ago I’m quoting the leaked slide nine I’m not quoting anything confidential so if the leak is incorrect then I’m quoting something incorrect but what I’m quoting is the thing that is leaked from a public Source already that’s the so-called slide nine which is an intelligence intelligence assessment well it’s claimed to be an intelligence assessment from the as um about uh the phenomenon linked to the defense intelligence agency which basically says it says it in a more concrete and specific way but I will sort of paraphrase more generically the phenomenon of uaps seem to make no distinction between the physical and the mental it has direct Mental effects in the mind of the witnesses they often report inside understanding um they often report knowing um or or or directly knowing some message from the thing they are observing as if through telepathy um they relate a merely what should be a merely perceptual experience to Greater insight about life the world reality insights that they can’t really put in words um it’s a more a more ineffable thing so the phen phenomenon has concurrently a very clear mental aspect and a very clear objective physical aspect in the sense that it can be picked up by radar its speed can be measured it can be photographed it can be picked up by a variety of sensors it definitely has a more or less stable physical phase and it has a mental aspect concurrently and it doesn’t seem to make a distinction between the two it has these two aspects concurrently in a very natural spontaneous way it’s not like they need to turn on some piece of equipment to to have a a psychic effect it just happens it it comes together with it so it is that assessment that links to idealism here we have a well a exhaustively observed phenomenon that seems to make no such distinction between mind and matter uh the way we make um it seems to be as much mental as it is physical it doesn’t distinguish between the two um and that is a clear reference to some form of idealism because idealist philosophies is the only ontology that makes no such distinction um even under physicalism you could say well physicalism is is a mo ISM as well yes but it is so by dismissing the mental it is so by by saying that the mental is some form of Illusion even though illusion is already a mental thing um idealism honors both the physical and the mental it honors the perceptual experience that we call physicality the concreteness of this metal bottle the texture of its surface idealism honors all this these are experiences and they truly exist under idealism they are not EpiPen they are not Illusions they are true experiences the dashboard of the world and the Mento is of course the primary thing even physical experience or the experience we associate with physicality like what we see what we touch that too is mental it’s a category of mentation that we call perception and beyond that there are other categories of mentation that are not perceptual like thoughts insights fantasies emotions and so forth under idealist all of these things exist truly and that seems to Dove very well with the observations of the phenomenon because the phenomenon doesn’t make any distinction between the so-called physical and the mental it packs both of them together so that is the relationship now let’s let me clarify one thing here because even someone involved in this stuff has misunderstood me on this I am not saying that uaps argue for idealism I’m not taking uaps as evidence for idealism I can’t do that because the evidence that is available uh is either not public or if it is public there there is enough reason to cast the doubt on it it could be a disinformation campaign and even that that amount of data uh doubtful as it is it’s tiny it’s a tiny amount of data compared to data from the Neuroscience of Consciousness or from foundations of physics in in which we have a tsunami of data um that that underpins um idealism so I’m not justifying idealism on the basis of the UAP phenomena I’m not doing this and I will not be doing this today what can be done is the opposite is to use idealism as a way of thinking about reality that accommodates the phenomenon much more elegantly than the alternative now specifically about um the stability of the physical phase of the phenomenon if the phenomenon is so stable physically that you can take what are clear clearly technological artifacts in know craft and store them in a hanger for in a hanger for over 70 years that is not an ephemeral uh mental phenomenon that happens to have a physical phase temporarily that seems to be something very stable very robust it’s not a thought form that somebody projects on the sky and when that person then stops projecting it that thing do appears which is the yungan approach to the phenomenon which is there is a physical phe to it but what we see is a projection of ourselves that is received by that stable physical thing that can be picked up by Rader if it turns out that there is that there are craft in hangers for decades then the craft are not projected because whoever saw them at first is is no longer projecting them they are tucked away and hidden away somewhere and if they didn’t change in all that time um then they are not the projection they are either the projector in case there is technology that can project a perceptual experience directly into our minds in other words a technology that can make us see what it wants us to see or it is the receptacle of our projections in other words a technology made in such a way that it will be presenting itself to us dressed in the clothes of our own symbolism now this is not as imp plausible or it’s not as illogical as it may sound because if you’re talking about another intelligence that didn’t evolve on this planet and therefore an intelligence or at least didn’t evolve on the planet as we see it then that intelligence will intelligence will share No semantic references with us it will share No dictionary um it will inhabit a reality that is sufficiently different that communication will be impossible because you see you may not speak Chinese but the Chinese also see cars on the street and trees and buildings and other people other people eating other people running so we can immediately communicate because we have these shared references the world we live in is largely the same there are buildings in China and buildings in Europe and the us there are people in China and people in Europe and the US so the references are the same we just need to find the correspondences of words or the translation but when you do not share even the references what are you going to translate things into if this thing is from from a reality where there are no cars there are no buildings there are no trees there are there is no walking there is no drinking no eating then how are you going to communicate well there is one way to communicate um at least conceivably which is to create a technology that embodies some kind of archetypal meaning and the tech that technolog is made in such a way that it will capture our own projections onto it in such a way that those projections will reflect its archetypal meaning in other words it’s a technology that projects a scaffold an empty scaffold of meaning archetypal and we dress it up with the symbols we associate with those archetypes so if if an alien abductee so-called alien abductee is is an operating room then the operating room and the experiments that are being performed formed are the person’s projection onto a sort of an empty scaffolding of archetypal meanings which corresponds with the archetypal meaning that the non-human intelligence is trying to convey in other words we dress up an empty scaffold of meaning with our own symbols our own Concepts our own episodic memories in such a way that is consistent with the meaning that’s being projected let me give you a concrete example in one of jacqu Val’s books he narrates one of these absurd so-called alien encounters in which um um the so-called alien asks the person what time is it and the person says it’s 4:30 and it is 4:30 and then the alien says no it’s 2:00 you are wrong it’s like what the hell is this what is the meaning of this well if you try to understand this as the person’s projection on a sort of an empty scaffold of meaning the message may be what you think of as time is a misconception your understanding of time is wrong but if there isn’t a Common Language or even a common set of references where we can use Concepts such as your or understanding or even time itself then we can’t say your understanding of time is incorrect that cannot be communicated we lack a common set of references let alone a translation dictionary for one intelligence to communicate that to the other so the higher intelligence all it can do is to create a sort of a primed biased empty scaffolding of archetypal meaning that attracts a projection from us and that projection goes as it’s for :0 no you’re wrong it’s 2:00 that’s our projection but the underlying meaning is what is being tried to being to be convey conveyed which is your conception of time is wrong you see what I mean so that is one possibility um that this craft are a form of technology that either well disc crafted the phenomenon May either be a form of technology that is communicating meaning at a very archetypal level that operates at the level of symbols that we ourselves project so Yung may be right in that the other possibility and they may both be concurrently correct is that um if there are physically stable craft then instead of just being a kind of know archetypally mental scaffolding of meaning they may be technology that directly projects the projector in other words it may be projecting onto us as opposed to us projecting onto it both may be going on um it will it will look like I’m being evasive and ambiguous but the phenomenon is evasive and ambiguous so since you guys chose to talk about it that that’s going to set the tune um the tone for today um I take seriously the notion that um there are indeed uh crafting storage I do not think it is implausible I I am not privy to the most privileged uh information but I have on I have from people that I think have absolutely no reason to be lying about it in private that this is indeed the case that there are these things and they have been around for a long time and some of them are in the possession of governments um particularly the US government um in the Western Hemisphere now what does this say it doesn’t contradict idealism because under idealism the Moon is also there it’s you know it’s it’s a stable part of the world that presents itself to us as the moon the physical moon and the thing that presents itself on the dashboard as the physical Moon exists whether we are looking at it or not same thing for the alien craft if there is a mental process out there that when observed presents itself on the dashboard as a craft then for the same reason that the mental process behind the Moon is stable then the mental Pro process behind the craft is stable you see there is there is no contradiction here um the only thing that we have to revise is the notion that the physical phase of it is always projected by us but the the thing we project onto can very well be physically stable and it can also be a projector it may be projecting on us or into us and then that projector can also be physically stable because it’s a technology the key point however is the understanding that what the phenomenon is telling us is that there is a form of Technology out there that makes full use of the degrees of freedom of reality and doesn’t artificially constrain itself to the degrees of freedom of the dashboard in other words of the physical world this is or these are intelligences that are not confused as we seem to be about the nature of reality and the degrees of freedom available to it we constrain ourselves in our technology development to the degrees of freedom of the dashboard always and only in other words we constrain ourselves to physicality we only develop Technology based on our our understanding of physicality which is our which is our understanding of how the dials in the dashboard move together with one another that that is that that does work because the dial do reflect the actual reality that is being measured the reality behind the dashboard but of course the dashboard has its own Paradigm has its own set of constraints you know a dashboard is not as free to behave like this storm outside the airplane even though it captures relevant information about the storm but if you’re trying to develop Technology based only on the dials of the dashboard you’re constraining yourself too much you’re applying the degrees of freedom of the dashboard to what you do as opposed to the Natural degrees of freedom of nature so you cannot create another storm you can only create Dio movements you can’t create a storm that’s our technology that’s how we go about engineering they don’t clearly they don’t they are creating the storm outside they figured out that the degrees of freedom of their perceptual screen are just that the degrees of freedom of their perceptual screen not the degrees of freedom of Nature and they don’t give a damn about this distinction we make about the physical and the mental they walk all over it and piss all over it um because that’s not that’s not their Paradigm that’s what the the thing seems to be to be saying and the link to idealism again is that people in some circles have figured out that idealism is the most profitable way to try to wrap one’s head about it because make no mistake even if there are these craft in storage for 70 years and people have been trying to drill into them and do whatever they are doing with them nobody has figured out what it is and and that that is a great motivation to not disclose because when a when a government that wants to be respected and wants to be seen as being in control when it does not have a story to tell you about what it is that it’s disclosing to you when it can’t tell you yes yes uh this has been happening and we are sorry we didn’t tell it to you before but don’t worry about it we are on top of it we figured it figured it out uh we know what you’re doing they can’t say that because they don’t know they haven’t figured it out um to the point that they may be giving up on figuring it figuring it out how how will they disclose yes guys we set in it for seven years um and by the way we don’t have a clue what’s going on hey that’s more that’s a lot trickier for any government to do I’ll live it here so then would you think that um speculatively these entities are dissociated altars with a different sort of dashboard they see you know if they’re manipulating you know um unadorned archetypes in in an intentional way that that seems um like they would have a very different dashboard or maybe you were sort of intimating they can transcend their own dashboard um what’s your sort of tentative definition of what these entities might be there is a hypothesis that um the things inside the craft are are not the real non-human intelligence they are biological constructs avatars if you will like in the movie Avatar of 13 years ago they they are not the actual intelligence um they are part of the technology um but they do have stable physical forms sometimes they in in many instances they don’t in many instances what people report is a variety of physical forms that are clearly filled filling in an archetypal template but they are projections of ourselves but in the event that there are biological INF freezers well that’s that’s not that that’s that’s a real um um dissociated complex that has the stable physical form of of a biological de dead biological organism in a freezer just like we do just like our own altars have a stable physical form because we are stable Alters there are alars inside the craft that have a stable physical form stable enough that you can put them in a freezer um the question is are they naturally evolved or are they engineered the the preferred interpretation for reasons that I’m not prevy to is that um they are engineered they are avatars uh so they’re Alters too at least these engineered things are Alters whether the the true NIH is an alter I think it’s almost inevitable that it would be um because otherwise it it’s just nature so I I think they too are Alters look we have been running around this rock for maximum 300,000 years in this anatomical form and thinking in language thinking symbolically like we do for maximum 50,000 years 50,000 years in a universe that is 18 billion years old is it it it leaves in Imagine where we will be if we don’t kill ourselves imagine where we will be in a thousand years years now if if there are things out there with a head start of a billion year then it is impossible with our conceptual armor to distinguish them from divinities it’s it’s completely impossible we we we don’t have the references and the concepts to make that distinction so I do think they are Alters too but they have developed to an extent that is it is literally unimaginable uh to us um another thing to keep in mind even if we don’t talk about meta Alters there is a simple simpler way to to to approach this what we call the physical world is given by our cognitive apparatus it’s given by what evolution by natural selection on this planet uh has favored as Salient information about the world we we pick out from the world what is Salient for our survival whatever is going on out there that is not Salient for our survival we would never have evolved to pick out so it’s not part of the physical world because the physical world isn’t here it’s a construct of our own perceptual and cognitive apparatuses physical world is not out there but there is a world out there and it tends to have a lot more to it unimaginably more than what can be discerned in the physical world because again the physical world will have evolved to pick out only what is sent for our Survival on this little rock it will not pick anything else out it will not pick anything else that may have tremendous technological and scientific and philosophical importance uh but has no direct bearing on our survival we didn’t evoke for that we evoled to survive in the Savana we didn’t Evol to develop technology to have edifying philosophical thoughts or to figure out what is true we didn’t our cognitive apparatus did not evolve for that so even if the NIH the non-human intelligences are in the exact same universe where we are right now if they evolved differently they will pick out they stand they s the reason they will pick out completely different aspects of that world so from a perceptual perspective they will in practice live in a completely different Universe even though it’s not it’s the same universe it’s just that they picking out from it other stuff than we pick out from it and they may have evolved and everything suggests that they may have evolved to the extent that they are no longer limited by the Dashboard that Evolution has given them they may have evolved to understand that the Universe they perceive is a construct and they may have developed technology to hack things as they are in themselves as Ron Donald Hoffman puts it they may have evolved the technology to hack the headset and if you hack the headset then then then you know then what can you exclude uh um you hack SpaceTime you hack everything and you may hack know the archetypal scaffolding of meaning that constitutes the true Universe the mental Universe in which we live and put that to good use and if they do that then what we will see of that is exactly what we see a technology that makes absolutely no distinction between physicality and mentality it piss is all over that distinction he doesn’t care can you give a quick example Bernardo of um just for those not familiar haven’t follow been following these phenomena of something that pisses over physical mental no do you want to ask you does a c couple clarifying questions which we’ll do before I I I I can give you something um okay something has been licked that sc’s lied nine um it is a crime to pass on confidential information that has been leaked but there is something out there called Slide N that you can Google and then I didn’t pass it on to anybody you Google it yourself it’s news it has been talked about in the news a leak that’s called slide nine I personally take that leak seriously I think it’s an authentic slide it’s my opinion in terms of examples there’s lots of examples um that are not in Slide N if I like in Patrick Harper’s book or or just in any newspaper there’s um reports would that be the only example that clearly shows are there lots of stories for instance there was a a UFO flap in the 80s in Upstate New York um and one of the witnesses was called Denis I forgot his his family name it’s been decades and he describes his experience of seeing a gigantic UFO or UAP fly very slowly over his house very low altitude and and then so he Des first he describes the physicality of what he saw a delta-shaped Dark Wing like things with several light spots um with a shimmering appearance flying very slowly completely silently this is all physical stuff and then on the same phrase he continues that description and he starts saying in observing it was a life-changing experience it led me to a higher understanding of myself and my understanding of the world and you go like what is he talking about now he was talking about size color speed of movement and now suddenly a new understanding of the self and the world and and all the meanings unlocked by the presence of that very thing almost a Rel experience that’s an example of the thing pissing all over the distinction we make between physicality and mentality and the technology itself may have it embodied in itself um don’t expect to walk into one of these craft and see a dashboard full of buttons and levers and keyboards this it’s not hard work I just um want to understand better when you’re using the word scaffolding um why why are using that word and and that yeah thanks I use the word scaffolding because it’s not filled in um a scaffolding is just the sort the skeleton of the message it contains the the basic structure the basic geometry which specify the meaning of the message but you need to clothe that scaffolding with something in order to perceive something this is a yungan concept so maybe I go back to Yung Yung describes the pure archetype as a and it will sound completely contradictory as an empty image how can an image be empty well think of it like a crystalline structure diamonds diamonds have carbon atoms that arrange themselves in a very stable lce a crystaline lce and that lce is enforced by the laws of physics and the properties of carbon atoms now because carbon atoms are what they are and because physics is what it is they will inevitably arrange themselves according to that ltis structure so there is a way there is a sense in which you could speak of that Lattis structure as existing even when there are no diamonds even when no diamonds have formed yet you can say that the scaffolding exists because it is implied by the laws of physics you see what I mean and a diamond is just when you fill in that that scaffold you fill in that template with carbon atoms only then can you actually see the crystalline structure before you fill it in you can’t see it it exists because it’s a direct implication of the scaffolding of the laws of physics but it can’t be perceived uh in it is in that sense that I mean that the technology can be conceived of not realized by us but it can be conceived of in which a scaffolding like arrangement in the basic structure of mind of mind at large is instantiated that attracts a projection byas that fills it in and leads to a diamond that can be perceived and before we fill it in with our own projections then it does exist like the latest structure of a diamond exists even in the absence of diamonds it does exist but it can’t be perceived because it’s an empty scaffolding it exists cognitively at some level as an abstraction but it can only be perceived when we Cloe it when we fill it in with our own symbolic references that come from our own world like doctors operating and whatever else uh uh or or spaceships which is part of our own conceptual references if you go back to to to how the phenomenon interacted with humans before the technological age in the late 19th century uh it looked like um airships that’s how people would describe them airships uh if you go even further back in time um then it’s uh um elves and and and you know the little people um so we F that Scaffolding in but the scaffolding has a set of properties that differentiates it from other scaffoldings that scaffolding could be arranged in a different way and then it would have a different meaning and attract different projections from us it would mean something else so a technology can be conceived of in which you construct a scaffolding that is only going to attract certain meanings but it’s completely agnostic of this the symbolic carrier of that meaning because that is projected by the receiver of the message we clothe it in based on our uh cognitive references our symbolic references be them spaceships or airships or or elves we will clothe it in but we will always clothe it in according to the meaning that it has built into itself and that is what the technology does that’s the universal translator it’s the only way a universal translator can be built it’s like that okay cool would you say there’s a distinction between the the uh scaffolding of the diamond the laws of physics being the scaffolding and then like the scaffolding of the UAP that it’s not the laws of physics but it’s like a scaffolding of the mind or same scaffolding there may be two different different things here and they they may not even have the same origin or they may we we don’t know one is a communication attempt based on a technology of archetyp of scaffoldings that’s the only Star Trek Universal translator that’s the only possible implementation of such a translator is one that is based on universal archetypal scaffolders because everything else is not a matter of translation it’s a matter of not even sharing the same references so how can you translate so this is one thing it’s when the phenomenon uh seem to have no stable physical phase you can put in that category the so-called alien abduction phenomenon that was studied by John Mack um and and many so-called alien U Encounters in which um this the literal story is is completely absurd um it’s in the community it often goes under the name um high absurdity or is it I forgot they they have a way to refer to that in other words things that uh defeat themselves if if you interpret them literally they are internally contradictory High Strang I saw in the chat yeah High strangeness um so this is one category another category has a lot statistically has um much higher incidence around military stuff military inst ation military training exercises um and and that’s that’s not high strangeness that seems to be different instead of an attempt at communicating through archetypal scaffoldings that seems to have a very stable physical phase it may project as opposed to attracting projections um it seems to be more stable in the sense that you know people always describe them in in sort of consistent ways there isn’t any enormous variety of things that are described you know you’re always talking about spheres Tic Tacs and um cubes within circles you know there is a sort of stability uh in the description of that that seems to be a much more downto Earth thing it’s it doesn’t seem to be an attempt at communicating to with us like the the high strangeness stuff um it seems to to have a clear agenda uh my very high interest in military stuff especially nuclear related uh stuff so this is not an attempt at communicating this is serving some other agenda it may have the same origin or it may or it may not um personally I think it probably doesn’t it doesn’t have the same origin we may be talking about something else and if there are crafting hangers it’s probably of this latter type it’s not the high strangeness thing so the alien it’s a clarifying comment from earlier so the alien dashboard has a completely different set of dials than sorry so the alien dashboard has a completely different set of dials than ours but they’re able to map theirs onto us so that we can see them correct let’s let’s speak in terms of these two categories the high strangeness category is an attempt at communication and then there is the military stuff that has a very stable physical phase that’s not an attempt at communicating so when I said yes uh to what you just described which is can are they mapping their stuff onto our dashboard I said yes for the first category for an attempt at communication because they can only communicate if they map their stuff their their meaning world uh onto our dashboard otherwise there’s nothing you can see uh there there’s there’s it can’t be communicated and I and I and it may even go beyond the dashboard of physicality because there is enough anecdotal evidence that uh some form of telepathy is involved in other words meaning can be imparted directly to our altars without even the intermediation um of a dashboard so that’s that’s one possibility that’s what I said yes to on the other side of the other category uh the military related stuff um I don’t think um the fact that they can be perceived is uh intentional um or always intentional in other words I don’t think there is an effort to map their stuff onto our dashboard I think the agenda there is is is not necessarily communication there is another agenda at work U they have an interest in something uh related to our own military activity it may be an interest related to our own future or it may be an interest that is related to their future related to what they want related to their interests as opposed to our own in an alteristic way so there I don’t think there is an a deliberate attempt to map stuff onto our dashboard I think the fact that we can see them is because to do whatever it is that they are trying to do um implies that they will appear to us in some form they will be detectable in some form they will be picked up by sensors or they will be picked up by our eyes uh because without that they wouldn’t be able to do whatever it is that they’re trying to do notice that in the history of the phenomenon it is the high strangeness part that has been around forever the more military related part seems to be a 20th century thing um you know a second world war time scale um thing so we may be talking about different things here what’s your most optimistic or what would be the most exciting scenario of where this goes next of like what might be revealed and what it might mean for for humans if anything and it could be this question is nonsensical um no no uh I I haven’t been involved in this for a long time either um I I read the books of jacqu valet over the years um I wrote a book about high strangeness phenomena myself u meaning an absurdity almost 10 years ago now I think 2013 so I have always had an interest but I I I always also dismissed 95% of UFO literature and I don’t watch the the History Channel I think that’s a that’s a catastrophe um so I haven’t been involved in this at any serious level it my involvement it’s a more recent thing you know things started changing in 2017 and then 2021 stuff happened and and then then I see myself uh now involved in this because the phenomena seems to seems to suggest some form of idealism um so yeah people put one one and one together um so I I will not be speaking from long experience that’s that’s what I’m trying to say so you have to take everything I’m about to say with a grain of salt um I don’t even know how much of what I hear I can trust because misinformation has been a part of this game forever um and there is no doubt thisinformation has played an important role in in the UAP topic uh it’s very useful if you want to disguise you know uh Paradigm shifting new military technology it’s very useful to put out disinformation messaging about uaps so you don’t alert your opponents or you want to put out lots of contradictory messages about is it U is it military technology by the US you want to put a flood of those contradictory messages out there so their spies don’t know where even to begin looking should they go to Area 51 isn’t it alien stuff there do we need to spy on that should we steer our satellites to that Latitude it’s very useful this information territory um so I I can’t even tell you that I trust what I what I am told that I trust what I hear I take everything with a grain of salt that said uh disclosure has already begun um it began in 2017 when you know those videos were licked of the Tic Tac uh there were three videos released back then um then I think it was 2019 or 2021 I forgot when the US government acknowledged that those videos are authentic and they do not know what is in those videos that it does not seem to have a praic explanation so that was the first time in history that the US government flat out admitted that um uaps exist and there is no praic explanation for them and then this year there has been major official disclosure it it’s and I’m not talking about the UAP Hearing in Congress that that was a bit of a show a stage show but Dr Sean kpatrick from Arrow uh which is the agency in the Pentagon um tasked with studying the phenomenon at least from The public’s perspective that’s the agency tasked with it of course you know there are special access programs in which they are doing that and we we have no idea but Dr Sean kpatrick for in a in a 2 Hour 2 and a half hour long NASA uh press briefing in July for about four or five minutes max maybe even less um he disclosed something Earth shattering that um the media didn’t even report it was just incredible he basically said that um there are these seemingly metallic sphere that they see all over the world all the time it’s not uncommon it’s not U special occasion they see it all over the world they see it with the most sophisticated sensors um in the military so and he he actually made public a video of one of these fears filmed by an mq9 Reaper you know the probably the most n- dark uh intelligence gathering platform on the planet today so we it’s not something filmed with somebody’s cell phone that’s not what we are talking about here um and it’s a it is an amazing video it’s a metallic little sphere it’s not very big at all fits inside my study um it has no wings it has no aerodynamic control surfaces at all it has no exhaust in other words it doesn’t have means of proportion uh it’s not a drone it’s flying in a deliberate rectal linear tra trajectory at too high speed to be a balloon too rectilinear to be a balloon uh it obviously has proportion although no visible means of proportion no proportion we could identify it has Sean Kirkpatrick said and I will quote it performs interesting Maneuvers and what he means by that and you can see that in the rest of the documentation is that it performs Maneuvers that we wouldn’t know how to do we wouldn’t know how to develop technology that can perform Maneuvers like that without control surfaces without wings without jet exhausts without any means of proportion and it’s all over the world the this is coming from the mouth of somebody who has been seen for years as a UAP denier as the main figure in the attempt to cover up the reality of uaps that’s the mouth from which all of what I just told you uh came from um it is if this had happened in 2015 it would be news all over the world but somehow the don’t look up syndrome is now so prevailing so prevailing that we think everything is banal here comes the head of Arrow speaking the name of the Pentagon in an official NASA press briefing and he says all over the world there are these things that violate everything we understand about physics and they are not uncommon and by the way here is a video take taken from our most sophisticated intelligence gathering equipment and there was hardly a peep so I hesitate telling you what will be the big thing in the next years because I don’t even know where it will be whether it will be big so uh if Biden gives a press conference next year saying guys you know what there are non-human intelligences they have been in one way or or another interacting with us for decades now and we don’t know really what they are or what their agenda is or how the whole thing works but we know that this is going on I don’t know whether it will be a fantastic thing or not maybe the the don’t look up syndrome we will continue and we will go we will go like it’s just one of those things you know we have an amazing ability to banalize everything turn everything into banale stuff with all these disclaimers there are three perspectives on disclosure one by someone I respect it will happen in 10 years 10 years is the time we need to do it in a controlled way I personally think this is a very old-fashioned way of looking at it it comes from one of one of the Elders of all the people involved in this stuff the person in question is our Elder so to say so it’s no surprising he seems he seems to have to have an oldfashioned perspective on this so 10 years that’s one possibility 2033 a more realistic perspective is uh there will be full disclosure this decade and when I say full disclosure I don’t mean they will disclose the technology because I don’t think they understand it and whatever they do understand it will not be disclosed it will be a disclosure of the fact that this is happening this stuff exists it is intelligent it’s even biological and it has technology that does things we can’t do so 2030 the third perspective is it’s not under our control because the phenomen it’s on look there is reason to think the this the the military category of the phenomenon what I’m calling the military category is becoming more and more active to a point where you either disclose it even when you don’t want in order to maintain the semblance that you have some form of control or you would just look like an idiot if you don’t disclose because it will be so predominant it will be everywhere it will be messing up with everything all the geopolitics of the planet that if you don’t disclose you look like an idiot so this this view is one that says disclosure happens next year my own view is this decade I don’t think it can be and look it’s already already happening when I say this decade what I mean is the disclosure proc process ends comes to a conclusion this decade that’s what I mean it started in 2017 very slowly and it’s going very well because of the don’t lookup syndrome nobody’s up in arms no nobody’s making a fuss out of it Sean kirpatrick says there are spheres doing stuff that violate physics all over the world nobody nobody seems to be surprised is just amazing stuff Humanity never sees to surprise me have you seen The Truman Show oh yeah yeah the final scene where they’re like wow that was amazing yeah what’s on the next Channel yeah um and uh and just prob probing further and you may have no ideas you’re just like okay it’s clearly something amazing but do do you have a hope or a sense of like okay if these are well like in spiritual circles for example there’s this notion of ascended masters whatever and guides and like you know maybe someone might hope okay hopefully a species more intelligent than us will give us some guidance on how to evolve as a you know in a more you know to use um federo fagin his sense of what reality might be trying to do is yeah not just towards more harmonious ways of cooperating do do you have any semblance of hope that this is related to that or or it’s like indications are that it’s not like that it’s not going to be the second coming of Jesus to save us all look they have the technology to turn off nuclear missiles on the in their silos they didn’t stop what’s happening in Ukraine they didn’t stop what’s happening in Israel they surely are monitoring to the point of making all the parties involved very uncomfortable but they are not stopping anything they are they never stopped us they never saved us from ourselves they never stopped the Carnage so no I don’t think uh the ascended masters are coming to Earth to bring us to heaven and save us all and bring the light no I don’t think that’s what’s going on and there’s nothing in the limited and contradictory body of evidence that is we have access to that suggests that nothing whatsoever it may be a much more downto Earth pragmatic story than we would like to think it would definitely Force us to review our entire philosophy maybe even to review our science uh but it’s it is not the second coming no I don’t think so no it may even be hard to digest um just you know I’m Jewish and we’re still waiting for the first coming so Bernardo thank you so much this is um a topic that’s very dear to me that I’ve studied for about 20 20 odd years and um a couple of years ago when you spoke to it in this class I just lit up like a light bulb and it’s been such a wonderful and uh Illuminating experience to hear you come out more about it and elucidate more about it especially in relationship to idealism so thank you I The credibility of what you have to offer in the space is enormously helpful across the board um you know in a in a realm that has been a bit of a Kabuki theater for a a very long time um so on that note my curiosity or I have many Curiosities but one of my Curiosities is around the this Primacy that we’ve held or that physicalists have held around what they deem to be evidence and the importance of evidence and the implications of evidence on it it’s bearing on Truth or validity or reality and also what qualifies as evidence or or data and so I think my my curiosity for you I’d love to hear the implications either from through the lens of idealism or through the lens of uh the phenomenon on is evidence even a thing like is this is evidence even valid or relevant or or something that we can consider useful especially in the in the nature of like the Primacy of of evidence as it’s historically been kind of like utilized um and if not then how can our Explorations be meaningfully guided or meaningfully grounded without you know without evidence as a or the perceived evidence as a Cornerstone does that make sense yeah yeah I understand what you mean um keep in mind you have studied this a lot longer than I have so uh take what I’m going to say with a grain of salt you probably know more about it than I do I think it is useful at least epistemically to keep on separating the phenomenon into those two categories the high strangeness and the nuts and boats the nuts and boats seems to be a military inclined thing and the high strangeness it’s a communication thing it’s a way to communicate um through archetypal meaning um in the high strangeness category if you start looking for evidence you’re missing the point um the point is the message now stop looking for the alien implants behind the year I mean stop that nonsense know go with what the experience did to you what insights did it lead you to now how do you H how do you incorporate that into your life and your view of the world what John Mack called the the ontological shock which uh people are now uh re Reinventing and not quoting John Mack for it um so he came up with this notion of ontological shop shock back in the 90s so it’s a message if you experienced it it’s a message for you stay with it stop trying to figure out how to you know take the alen Imp plant from up your nose and show it to everybody look look they really abducted me it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter for the nut in both’s side however and it may be a completely different thing it may be a completely different phenomenon or or not we don’t know I don’t know anybody who knows I don’t know any anybody who dared even suggest that they might know um and and I know people who are plausibly in the position to know if it could be known okay um for the nuts and both category evidence is important because now now we we are talking about not only testimony we are talking about now radar traces films infrared uh uh uh Footprints um we are talking about uh material that has been left behind that can be put under scanning electron microscope and analyzed or an atomic Force microscope and analyzed for atomic structure spin Direction the whole thing um this is concrete stuff that you can investigate uh in a laboratory and it is very useful um evidence is important there is a big difference between not having a biological in a freezer and having a biological in a freezer allowing you to do physiological analysis and if these things have DNA DNA analysis is it it’s important when it comes to National Security U military implications the possible avoidance of a nuclear exchange because of of a misunderstanding or a possible advantage in the new nuclear arms race um because we are back to the Cold War in case know we haven’t noticed we are fullon back in a cold war with a more than two parties now which makes it a lot more complicated and dangerous for all this evidence has a bearing it is important um if there is technology to be understood I hope we understand it and not the Russians if you know what I mean and if there is an aircraft and a hanger I hope it’s in our hanger and not the Russians um and and evidence is important because on the basis of evidence we can one figure out what it might imply for us what does it mean for the security of this world and our security as a species um and and what does it mean for the geopolitical game if it has military applications so you see I think evidence is very important for the nuts and boats and utterly unimportant for the high strangeness because High strangeness is communication something is trying to teach us something or communicate to us something that’s the Jac Val uh uh View and what he studed and then there is a nuts and boats that’s not communication that’s an agenda they’re they’re doing something we don’t know what it is we we don’t know what for they are doing something it’s very concrete and they seem to have a surprising interest in our nuclear in our military capabilities so evidence is important for that so maybe my follow on or maybe a um maybe an upstream curiosity to that is our inherent limitation around our interpretation of evidence so this also is kind of contextualized by something that you have mentioned a couple times not today necessarily but in other places that you know it’s there is a possibility that we are in a shared multi-national or multi-dimensional or nested kind of um holarchy uh situation and my I don’t know it would seem then that maybe there’s like an ontological unknowability and so any implications that we draw from any evidence it’s inherently limited by our dashboard how how useful can that be if everything is you know may not be true at all that limitation is always there and it’s real it’s serious um the the Paradigm ladness of evidence is something that Thomas K already wrote about in the 60s in the early 60s we never appreciate evidence or data in a in a neutral way we always project our own Paradigm onto it and interpret it in a biased way so that’s a serious problem but it’s a perennial problem and it’s not restricted to uaps it’s a problem in science it’s a problem in philosophy um and it limits how far we can go or how reliable we can be in interpreting evidence but it doesn’t render evidence useless it’s uh otherwise we have we would have abandoned evidence in science and philosophy and we haven’t I certainly haven’t I I I I I always use evidence and data so the Insight you are expressing is important as a note of caution during the process of interpreting evidence we have to have in the back of our minds that we will always project our own Paradigm we will always be biased in how we interpret evidence but that doesn’t mean that evidence is useless it doesn’t mean that we can do nothing with it it only means that we have to be careful and we have to understand how far we can go in interpreting evidence and for the nuts and boats category of uaps these are things that are interacting with our world they are not they may be from a disjoint reality but if so are entering this one because they are picked up by Raider they are picked up on film um they they interact in a deliberate way with the maneuvers of our own a aircraft in other words they respond to what we are doing very clearly um that means that at least some of it is protruding into our world then to that extent the evidence that that come comes from Death protrusion is important because it is overlapping with our world even if it’s originating from another another world of I don’t mean a fundamentally other world what I mean is the aspects of this world that don’t don’t show up on our dashboard that’s what I mean by another world it’s not really another world it’s this world we are in but we don’t pick it up we we don’t pick it out because of the limitations of our dashboard so that evidence that comes out of this protrusion into our dashboard can be interpreted according to the Paradigm of our dashboard because it intruded into it know what I mean now we cannot now extrapolate that evidence into what these things really really really are because we don’t know where they are coming from but in so far as they protrude into the physical world the evidence that arises from that protrusion can be interpreted in our dashboard you see what I mean someone asking just if it’s too personal just feel free not to answer berado are you willing to relate this distinction you made with your previous answer to your own experience with a you when you were a boy um yeah yeah okay I I see where the the question is coming from well spotted congratulations uh you you were listening um my experience as a child seemed to blur the distinction between these two categories it was something on the one hand very concrete very in front of my eyes like three meters away from my eyes it’s right there I could I felt like I could stretch my arm and touch it very very close it was between me and a tree so it passed in front of the tree and in front of me so it was in between me and the tree and I knew how far the tree was which was 5 m um but at the same time is it was absur um it it it it was a metallic thing very much like the metallic spheres but it had the shape of a bullet a fired bullet you know only only the lead part um and it traveled at um a speed that was too fast to be a balloon floating the winds too rectilinear to deliberate it was not a ballistic trajectory at all um so it was controlled um but it also it was also not zipping fast I could contemplate it passing in front of my eyes at a speed of what 2 m/ second something like that uh wasn’t a balloon seemed to be very physical very concrete very right there very in my face um collar but it had this little strips fluttering strips at the back fluttering which was like it’s an absurd thing it’s something you would put you know as a party decoration I don’t know um but it wasn’t a communication attempt it didn’t have a message it evoked a psychological reaction in me I was angry at it I don’t know why and when I saw it my my thought was you shouldn’t be here what the hell are you doing here you you don’t belong here get a get a hell out get the effing out of here now to this day I don’t understand why a 10 n year old child would react that way against something that you know um it wasn’t for my child’s mind it wasn’t a UFO because from my child’s mind a UFO is something that happens at night and it has to do with blinking lights and that thing happened in a in broad daylight in a sunny afternoon and it was not illuminated it only reflected sunlight um why I was pissed off at it I don’t know but I I would tend despite this absurd detail of the fluttering tail end uh which was in Congress uh apart from that I would categorize that in the nuts and boats because it it wasn’t n attempt an attempt at communicating it didn’t express any archetypal meaning it was just something flying down in a non-ballistic controlled trajectory um that couldn’t be a balloon and this was I don’t know 1983 1984 no drones certainly not a drone no means of proportion no wings no control surfaces nothing it shouldn’t be doing what it was doing it could couldn’t be doing what it was doing and there it was and I was angry that it was there because it didn’t belong here I would put it in a nuts and boats not the high absurdity despite that one little absurd detail but for all I know that was some kind of sensor I don’t know it was absurd to me as a child did it feed into Life Choices later or was just a weird not at all at least not at a metacognitive level no it’s I I’m always surprised said how Blas have always been about that um because um the way the event ended uh I I don’t remember when it was coming in my direction it was coming from my right it was coming this way so my thoughts during that entrance into my field of view were get a hell out of here you don’t belong here what what what are you doing like a father annoyed with a child that did something wrong except that I was the child where did that come from I have no idea but the moment it passed and proceeded to my left so getting further away from me the last thought I had that I remember was uh because it was going down a controll trajectory so I could extrapolate the trajectory I knew where it was going to land and my last thought was oh I’m going to go there and have a conversation with it and then I don’t remember I don’t I it it hadn’t landed it seemed to be going to land I was sure it was going to land and I could extrapolate exactly where it was going to be and I formed the decision in my mind I’m going to run that way I know where it’s going to be I’m going to go there and we’re going to sort this out and then I remember nothing nothing total vacuum of memory and for some reason to this day this doesn’t surprise me maybe I am a victim of the don’t look up syndrome because that’s how I I that’s my relationship with this event it’s like yeah one of those things it happened but I don’t think it changed anything in my life I C certainly not at at a level of metacognitive awareness no it happened it was there strange but yeah we go on it you know for somebody who just criticized or don’t look up attitude I am a victim of it I I never looked up your phrase you’ve often used the the the head is a bouncer of the heart comes to mind maybe with a bouncer of our cognitive realm you kick the aliens backs you don’t belong I’m joking I it’s an it’s partly an emotional reaction as well it doesn’t mobilize my emotions that event the only emotion it mobilized was while it was happening I was annoyed that’s the only thing afterwards I I mean it’s only recently I started talking about it more publicly and most of my public life I think people and I never spoke of it um even to my partner um my partner Claudia even she didn’t know about it until recently um so seemingly emotionally unengaging this seems to be when when I regard it again on the mirror of memory it’s I shrug it off it’s like go okay I can’t explain it but it doesn’t matter it uh the the feeling I have about it is that it was an error of some some sort a little fault in the computer which is oh you can ignore it was a fault it happened and now everything’s okay again everything is running again you don’t need to stress about it no it’s a bug it was a bug and the bug corrected itself and fine doesn’t require any more reflection or emotional engagement which is absurd I’m at the same time that I’m saying this to you I know how absurd it is it’s like come on you’ve seen something that doesn’t fit into our understanding of physics um or our understanding of Nature and you know the meaning of it all and how come are aren’t you flabbergasted discombobulated by your own experience yeah I don’t know I don’t know but I’m not which is strange I can jump in I um I think this is all really interesting I think there’s clearly something happening with UAP we’ve been talking about it from the perspective of objective reality and motivation of non-human intelligence but I’m curious about uh is there in the in the cultural interest in this area and I’ll also bring in AI the kind of cult interest in Ai and the huge brewhaha around Sam Alman the other week and what’s going on with open AI uh I guess I’m wondering if there’s an element of uh of such disturbance uh in just our our kind of catian reality right now there’s a world that really feels uh you know the break of being out of control with uh what’s happening in Ukraine what’s happening in the Middle East you know broader problems the environment um the far right doing well in Argentina the far right doing well in the Netherlands um you know one thing I love about analytic idealism is I I I feel like it it opens uh up onto our our everyday reality so beautifully and offers us ways to just think about you know just every day getting up in the morning and you know trying to make your way in the world have good relationships be useful you know uh uh be a good person and uh I I I guess I wonder how much of the interest in the phenomenon uh could have to do with a flight a kind of a Need to Escape what is a very very disturbing moment it seems in our world um so there just some musings I would love you to respond to I think psychologically this is not what’s happening I think the danger is there I think you’re correct I think your line of reasoning is spot on we could be psychologically primed to deviate our attention from the horrible things happening in the world today and and and the directions in which we are going which don’t bold well for the future we could be psychologically tempted to sort of refocus our attention on something else some mystery in order to distract ourselves from the way the path we are in right now but that’s not what’s happening I think yes you your reasoning is correct but it’s not happening this way the people who are enthusiastically following the phenomenon today have been following the phenomenon for the past decades it’s the same social group is the same kind of people it that group did not expand uh to the mainstream the mainstream is incredibly blasé about the whole thing it’s the don’t look up uh phenomenon so yes I see the danger you are conveying but I think the opposite is what’s happening which is also worrisome in a way we may have desensitized us so incredibly much about the higher questions that we cannot take our eyes off the latest political event the latest political fight not even an acknowledgment an official acknowledgement from the Pentagon and naasa that these things are all over the world and they are seeing all the time and by the way they violate our physics and they are not from us and they are not from our enemies even that hardly resonated it was a Peep Peep and that’s it it died it it was uh um it was born dead that news um so I would be concerned with what you were you are describing um if the UAP thing had gathered a lot of popular interest to the detriment of the serious problems we have to solve and the dangerous path we are engaging in but it it didn’t happen it didn’t happen so maybe this is the Silver Lining um um yes we banalize everything yes we lost our ability to relate to the biggest questions but at least we are not distracted we didn’t take our eyes off the ball um and that’s important because if there is any there are very few things that can be said with certainty regarding the UAP phenomenon one of them is it has never even attempted to save us from ourselves it’s it has never tried to solve our problems never not once so it’s not going to do it now for all we know there’s no reason to think that the aliens who come here and save us from the ex from the extreme right or the extreme left that the aliens will come here and save us from our geopolitical conflicts that they will save us from our own weapons every single piece of evidence every indication points to the scenario in which they will not so we have to solve our problems ourselves and luckily we are not taking our eyes off the ball what’s happening is worse what’s important I think it was a few days ago I decided I wouldn’t comment on politics anymore because I realized it’s not a world in which reason counts it’s it’s not about reason people may even listen to you and agree with you and then they turn around and continue to do whatever it is that they were doing so okay it’s discourse is is rational discourse will not change anything so I decided to shut up U but um there is one political comment I will continue to make which is the key is not to pay attention to politics to pay attention to the news to be politically engaged that’s important but it’s not suff ient what we have to do is to spend less energy trying to win and more energy trying to understand this this is where it it it it goes wrong and and I choose these words very deliberately we have to spend more energy trying to understand as opposed to trying to listen it’s very easy to listen it’s very easy to hear it’s very easy even to understand conceptually in language what the other person is saying Beyond just hearing the mouth noises of another person understanding parsing the language it’s very easy to understand the semantic syntactical structure of what the other person said what is difficult is to understand the meaning that’s trying to be conveyed that we don’t do we don’t spend any time we don’t spend time trying to understand one another we spend all of our try time trying to win and that’s where it can go extraordinarily wrong uh speaking of my own country the Netherlands in which right-wing populist extreme right-wing populist politician has won the elections couple of days ago here Builders um this country had two decades to to vote ha Builders into power and it has consistently not done so why did it do it this time because a large segment of the population got fed up with not being understood got fed up with um a series of governments that pay lip service to what this segment of population has been saying for a long time paring it linguistically and then not doing much about it um and then people protest and they protest in one of two ways they can one protests on the streets like the farmers did in the Netherlands some time ago and and protest with their vote um a lot of support that extremes on both Sid sides get is an expression of anger not an endorsement of a political platform in other words that here Builders won the election doesn’t mean that the population of the Netherlands endorses his entire political program that’s not what it means that half the US votes for Maga uh and Trump um somebody who I think the vast majority of the US population recognizes as a pathological narcissist who only thinks about himself is winning to lie to get his way people know that I don’t people are not stupid but they are so angry with not being not only heard but not being actually understood by political Elites that they are very content with throwing a lit match in a barrel of gasoline because they’re Fed Up and people get fed up when they are ignored when they have the sense that they are not being taken seriously they are not being understood that people are paying lip service to their needs they understand their needs linguistically but then they don’t take it seriously enough at a deeper level to actually act on that when you have a part of the population that FS disregarded that FS that it takes second position [Music] to International political agendas U when they think that their own government is more preoccupied with some International geopolitical thing as opposed to the needs of their own citizens a segment of their own populace when that’s what they conclude um after ear try not to conclude that and they get angry they will vote in anger and they will vote to you know light up the gasoline or pour gasoline in the fire because there is a sense that the only way to be heard is to shake things up in such a dramatically destructive manner that when the pieces fall back in place they will fall back in a different configur configuration and then maybe they will be hurt then maybe they will be empathized with then maybe the political authorities will be able to see things through their eyes and understanding what it be what it is to be them how hard it is to have the life they have or how unfulfilling it is to have the life they have of course there is a segment of the population that is just going for the drama that just want the whole house to catch fire just watch the drama because it’s entertaining but I don’t think it’s a majority at all I think U that’s where we are failing and it has nothing to do with uaps uh we are not failing because we are distracted by uaps incredibly enough we are not despite everything that has already been acknowledged by all the official instances including the ones we consider to be the leaders of the cover up like Sean Kirk Patrick who lost his job on that account a couple of weeks ago um that’s not the problem the problem is that although we hear we listen we don’t try to understand we are too busy trying to win yeah yeah I think this is a great answer and I uh but I want to ask one clarifying question because when you were talking about Trump voters you’re saying you know they’re not stupid they know he’s a narcissist they you know but they’re trying to send a message but I think in your in your tweets saying you weren’t going to talk about politics anymore I think you wrote stupidity Reigns Supreme you seem to be saying people are stupid and that’s why you don’t want to talk about politics so I’m I’m this is something I struggle with are people stupid is this world just stupid I mean I’m putting in simple terms or no actually there’s all kinds of depths happening I just you know need to kind of filter out all the and and find these deeper things um so I just I’m curious about an apparent contradiction maybe in how stupid you think the culture is I think stupidity is our undoing I think stupidity is rampant widespread it’s all over the place but I mean it in a way that unifies rather than divides us what I meant by stupidity is rampant is it’s everywhere it’s in us it’s not only on the other side it’s not a Criterion for division it’s a Criterion for it’s an invitation for a higher level of self-awareness um um the most dangerous stupidity on the planet is suffixed by the Letter’s PhD so that’s what I meant I didn’t mean it to give an excuse to either side to not try to understand the other because the other is just stupid uh this the stupidity is much more rampant than that I I wish I could have just dismiss the people who vote for hilders as stupid it would make my life a lot easier oh they are just stupid you know and her Builders got 37 seats in the parliament with 150 it’s still a minority it’s just that there are the 16 parties but the other 16 are united in their disagreement with the most contentious aspects of the of the platform of her fielders silly stuff that is unconstitutional and he knows for well he can never Implement like forbid the Quran forbid mosques that’s not what democracies do we don’t forbid religions uh or or entirely idiotic things like the Netherlands is giving a few dozen F-16 fighter planes to Ukraine and it’s on his written platform we should not do that we should keep this aircraft to defend our national boundaries he knows what I’m going to tell you now which is those aircraft were on the secondhand Market they were being sold because the Netherlands bought f35s and we just don’t have enough bases airfields Pilots training facilities and maintenance facilities to keep all the new f-35s and the old f-16s so the f16s were going away anyway and her fers knows that for well but he puts that in his program just to sort of you know emotionally inflame his electorate which is what populists do they want to emotionally inflame people saying things that they know are not true or when the populistic question is just pathological I think Trump now is he actually believes what he said which makes him a lot more dangerous now than he was in 2016 when I think he didn’t believe that nonsense he was just playing the fiddle for for self-interest he wanted to be the most powerful man in the world there was an interview he gave 20 years ago in which he said uh um um if I got into politics one day it would be for the Republican party you know why because Republican voters are the stupidest people on the planet they’re the easiest to deceive he’s on record saying that no 15 years before he was a candidate or even less um he knew that I I I don’t think he knows the distinction anymore so now he’s much more dangerous uh because now he’s not just being untruthful and cynical and and manipulative now he believes the nonsense um I lost my thread um where was I going with it so yeah the the stupidity question uh it’s present in the most unlikely places um and it’s much more dangerous when it’s present in the places that we consider to be places of intellectual Authority um so that’s what I meant I didn’t mean stupidity as a a a divisive thing I meant stupidity as a notion of crap in which we are all stepping we all have our toes dirty with the feted crap of stupidity it’s all over all over rep place thanks Chris uh um a couple of comments from someone who wasn’t available to read them Martha um sorry there’ been so many chats now basically asking it goes back to when you were saying look the aliens or whatever these beings are uh they’re clearly not going to help and the objection was how do we know things wouldn’t be worse without their intervention um we could have blown ourselves up the planet at the end of World War II but we didn’t we’re still here uh it’s the same answer that can be given to a lot of questions that have this framing how do we know that the answer is we don’t know we don’t know for sure that we wouldn’t have blown up ourselves already if the aliens hadn’t intervened in some way um what we can say is that there is no clear evidence that they ever inter intervened to save us I cannot refute many possibilities about the world including that there is a teapot in the orbit of Saturn there may be um all we can say is that there is no compelling evidence whatsoever that the phenomenon has ever done anything to save us from ourselves do you relate the um do you or could you relate the UAP phenomena to the Dion it it could be but I don’t know whatever I say now it would be too much speculative I I don’t even have a a intuitive sense of whether there can be a relationship between the two diamond is just a word I use to refer to some motivations and directions that rise within me which I don’t identify as my own because they they are not related to my own own goals to my own safety my own Comfort on the contrary um almost invariably they don’t give a damn about that and yet these are things that rise within me so I gave them a name a diamond now the question is could the intelligence behind the UAP phenomenon have something to do with the diamond the reason I’m not going to dis dismiss this possibilities that we know now that the phenomenon doesn’t distinguish between the mental and the physical um it has a nuts and boats manifestation and it has a high strangeness manifestation and they seem to map you know between physical and non-physical U but fundamentally it doesn’t really make a an inherent distinction between the two so for all I know it could relate to what philosophers for Millennia have referred to as the diamond as as a um a will within oneself that is not one’s own will so it’s alien in that sense an alien will within us a will that is not oriented towards our own safety our own Comfort our own goals but to something more impersonal to something at a at a larger scale there could be a relationship but I I don’t see any direct positive evidence suggesting this so I’ll just leave it open Maybe um well first of all thank you for this um the UAP is a very dear to my heart phenomenon I have had many experiences but I’m especially interested in the crop circle one what would you say about that I don’t know if you’ve talked about that before maybe not no I I I I know nothing about that beyond the occasional news or the occasional photo on a website that that could could be in the categories that you’re talking about right that’s about and uh because you have some evidence physical evidence yeah I I I I don’t know about that my my gut tendency will be to dismiss it and not take it seriously but uh but I don’t know what I’m talking about because I never really studied it um I can tell you it is not a topic under serious discussion by the people who are plausibly in a position to have to discuss it not once did that come up so it’s not generally taken as a urgent issue um maybe it can for to the communication um side right I would might again I don’t know anything about the phenomen that particular phenomenon my tendency would be to Chuck that off to pranksters or artists um who are expressing their art on crop Fields as much as the graffiti artist expresses his art on a wall and the whole Aura of M around it plays right into the hands of the artist because that’s exactly what the artist wants to evoke so without knowing anything about it other than seeing the occasional photo my intuitive tendency would be to not spend time on it I may be wrong yeah so I’m wondering if you imagine that the um UAP altars have a different relationship to their disassociative boundary than the majority of Alters that we’re familiar with um and I would even extend that if you’re willing to um Damons and other Supernatural phenomenon that you think maybe are related uh the answer is yes clearly um because to induce a psychic effect on another alter you have to go across two dissociative boundaries one is the other altars and the other one is your own so that the phenomenon seems to so freely be able to cause a psychic effect inside another alar betrays that its own relationship with its own dissociative boundary is very different from our own it it um it has evolved to a level of understanding and self-mastery technologically technological or spiritual self-mastery or both that makes its relationship to its own boundary be one that isn’t a limiting one it probably is one related to survival but not to operational limitations um that that’s all we can speculate about it there there is enough evidence to to think that it is not limited by its own dissociative boundary the way we are uh where do you get your information about uaps from uh until some time ago just from the sources everybody can look for and then now we getting to a point where I cannot uh look oh this will come across extremely wrongly it’s not like I signed some NDA with some secret government agency that’s not it I’m not even an American citizen how privy can I be to military State secrets that’s not it it’s just that there is an effort that cuts across Society Society at large and and the intelligence Community there is an effort which you could call a half open source effort um it’s partly an Outreach from people who are involved uh but because of all the understandable and legitimate secrecy around it do not have the resources the human resources um that they would like to have because you know you dealing with one of the hardest questions in the history of humankind if not the hardest because it Bears down on the nature of reality the nature of the self you know the history of humanity all these big things come together in this one question what is an UAP and it’s the biggest question and it and it without a a sort of an Outreach effort it has to be addressed by a very very limited group of people because how many people can you do a thorough enough background check on and move them to some place in the middle of nowhere you can’t do that it can you can only do that for a very few people who are usually selected for technical skills engineering oriented skills that are very Paradigm Laden and it comes to a point in which the lack of success has going on for so long that you have to face that reality okay I either we either there is some form of Outreach and some kind of half open source collaboration involving other elements of society uh or we just give up on the whole thing because we just don’t have the human intellectual resources may have all the money of the world but we don’t have the human resources the the different perspectives the different experience es backgrounds that people Gather in other communities that can be brought to bear on this so so you do a kind of extremely limited form of Outreach um and you bring in some other people and you try to have a discussion so it’s not like uh I am privy to what’s happening in the secret hangers of L heid Martin I’ve never gone to to LED Martin I’ve never signed an NDA with the US government um I have been asked based on trust uh to be discreet because if you make certain discussions completely open uh it goes down very unproductive Avenues and it can be misused by large segments of the UFO so-called UFO community that makes it a hobby of misinterpreting and misrepresenting whatever is said or not said and creating all kinds of conspiracy perod So to avoid that a degree of discre discretion um is asked um and some minor technological precautions are taken like these are not discussion discussions happening on a WhatsApp group you know um but it’s also not a discussion encrypted by some quantum computer in Western Australia no it’s it’s also not that it’s also not that um so my my being discreet towards you is not that I am privy to all the secrets is just I’m honoring a request based on trust um that was considered a condition of of participating in in some discussions uh I wanted to share reflection on you were describing how whatever this phenomena is is able to influence our internal States in in ways that seem surprising um but at another level it’s not that surprising there’s a quote or maybe you you’ve said you haven’t been into this scene for that long but it’s longer than me because I’ve had almost zero exposure to it um but a quote comes to mind that Michael LaVine likes to quote from someone else um something like the words to the effect words have the same mechanism of action as drugs that words are changing your neurochemistry right now and certainly you know poet becomes a master of that or a dancer you know just by moving you’ll feel all these things and maybe not even know why um so to me it’s not surprising maybe using mechanisms that we’re not super familiar with but I’m kind of you know they’re not the same as mind reading um it doesn’t seem yeah do you have a comment on that I think you’re completely right and I think that’s why the phenomenon is so hard to understand from a traditional perspective and that’s the reason for all the frustration uh on the part of the people involved uh in trying to make sense of it because it pisses all over our own categories our own conceptual drawers it doesn’t fit into that conceptual scheme um um and why is that is it on purpose no it’s just being what it is and it so happens that we developed our conceptual categories to describe a certain aspect of reality that’s not the aspect of reality where these things are rooted so our categories don’t apply and if you are an engineer or a physicist you are a pragmatist I know because I am one um you’re a pragmatist in trying to to develop technology and pragmatism entails um leveraging your conceptual categories as building blocks in a very pragmatic way and and that doesn’t work you cannot when you if you’re involved in some effort to try to understand something that doesn’t fit our categories and you try to understand that based on the building blocks of our conceptual categories of course you’re going to fail so you cannot be pragmatic in that sense in that sense of I just use those building blocks that I already have in a very pragmatic way no you have to dig deeper you have to ask yourself deeper questions like at a deeper level what really is it that I’m looking at right now you know and and nothing stimulates openness more than systematic failure when you when you get exhausted of failing when your forefathers fail fail you fail and the guys coming after you you have nothing to tell them but what doesn’t work and what didn’t work at some point you go like especially if you are in a community like the military which doesn’t care about what is ultimately true they care what’s going to work um it comes to a point where you go like okay no I I I have to change my entire conceptual dictionary now and I have to learn how to look at this thing with different eyes and and stop projecting my own conceptual categories into this and amongst those categories is what you described is what Michael Le described which is this artificial separation this division into two drawers that we make between experiential inner life and its physical traces on the dashboard like our biochemistry or the words you hear um this whole thing is not divided fundamentally up into the categories of language biochemistry and experience this division into these three drawers is something we project onto it because of our own epistemology because of what has been useful for us in the past but when you start stretching the boundaries of knowledge so much to take into account mysterious things for instance like the placebo effect you have to abandon this artificial division in those three drawers and you start having to see things in a more holistic way to understand to understand all the pathways um along which they interface and influence one another and uaps are just an extreme form of that you know you it’s it’s the placebo effect to the power of 100 it’s everything requires an abandonment of old categories you know if you’re if you approach one of those things thinking um I need to find the cockpit I need to find the the control lever and the buttons uh you’re you’re not going to even start that’s not how it works or uh where is the power plant where is the fusion reactor that um what’s his name again that uh I forgot his name U so-called whistleblower from the late 90s who claimed that he worked in reverse engineering uaps and he mixes up the atomic nuclear force with um an antimatter reaction he sort of gets everything mixed up and conflated um if you’re going to look for the antimatter reactor you I think you’re going to have an issue um you know you have to think in in different categories um the UAP is just an extreme version of the problem that of of the kind of problem that require us requires us to think in different categories and therefore is the are the most difficult problems to be approached because you cannot just pragmatically reuse the existing conceptual building blocks you already have no you have to bake new building blocks new bricks there’s a story um think of where a solar powered radio gets dropped into a community that has no other technology and so it doesn’t ever run out because it gets powered by the Sun or it doesn’t work at night weird noises come out and they’ll develop a mythology to explain it but it’ll be they’ve got no hope in understanding you’re right you know if I would to drop a mobile phone and in the time of G in the late 18th century and ask G and the top scientists of the time who were at the University of Vienna who were in gut Circle please reverse engineer this for me yeah um you’re not going to go very far because it requires us to think in different categories it requires U um an understanding of different elements of reality than we even know exist like electromagnetic fields which we were not aware of in the late Century it would take Faraday a few decades later to figure that out but there is another metaphor that is a little more hopeful and that’s a metaphor by by jacqu by jacqu valet which is suppose you drop an airplane in the backyard of uh a tribe of the Australian Bushmen 500 years ago they would not be able to do anything with it or would they because if they find the landing gear they may come up with the concept of the wheel you see you don’t need to understand how the whole plane works the whole thing about it you don’t need even to be able to put it back together and fly it around you can get something out of it even when it’s removed from its contest context so the landing gear can lead a smart Bushmen to venting the wheel and that can be transformative what we are trying to do is find out what wheels are there to invent and it’s not completely hopeless yeah no I just had a quick question I um sometimes and again I’m coming from a particular perspective I’m coming from a non-u spiritual perspective sometimes I find that these conversations tend to reinforce the idea of separateness or if they’re alien that I’m real you know there’s a it’s it’s almost just another version of the the ucy separate self algorithm working like you had in um in your book more than algary the jesture you know this this this forgetting that needs to happen for if you’re going to speak in Mythic terms for the goddess to experience her own dream on a local level I think fundamentally there is no distinction uh between us and the NIH behind uh the phenomenon and I think the phenomenon itself speaks to it because by having a direct psychic effect on the witness it is betraying an ontological commonality between it and the witness because otherwise there would be no way to impart a direct psychic effect there would be no way no causal link that could cross an ontological Chasm between the two so the phenomenon itself um betrays this ontological commonality between um the alien and us uh a much more intimate commonality than we think of when we are relating to another person because another person is not putting thoughts and insight in our heads but these things do so in that sense it’s closer to us than the person next door so yes you spotted it this is not lost in the eyes of a lot of people uh working on this this has not been lost on them the familiarity is uh is much higher it’s much closer to us than we take even other people to be and at the same time it’s completely alien in its semantic references and and its operational aspects and and there is a word in English that captures that it’s The Uncanny um the the UAP sits in The Uncanny Valley The Uncanny Valley is a concept from AI um developed many years ago which says the following in the early stages of AI an AI will be obviously different from us so it’s not uncanny it’s just alien it’s different in the later stages AI will again be obvious different from us much more intelligent it it to be totally different from us not uncanny at all but there is The Uncanny Valley in between when the AI is close enough to us to evoke familiarity and yet so completely distinct to evoke the opposite feeling the feeling of alienness and and that’s the uncanny valley it’s the uncanniness of it and um the phenomenon the UAP phenomenon is right in that uncan Valley it can be surprisingly intimate and close to us and yet operationally so fantastically alien technologically so fantastically alien and um physically apparently physically physically less alien than we thought you know you can can actually touch the stuff and shove it under electr microscope um so um this is not something that is discussed enough probably because it you know priorities are such right now that we we we don’t have even the opportunity to discuss these deeper questions um a lot of the discussion go into goes into how to do disclosure responsibly which I think is a silly discussion now because the don’t lookup syndrome is clearly so widespread that no you don’t even need to be careful you know just just just put it out no nothing will happen nobody’s going to jump off a roof no but people would not even raise a metaphysical eyebrow from this um after what K KCK Patrick did and I’m sure he thought maybe going too far here and then not a PE you know it’s like there are conceivable scenarios not completely implausible in which disclosure can accidentally lead to conflict uh to a kind of misunderstanding or assumption by another party that accidentally accidentally then leads to to conflict so a lot of thought goes into not doing that very very very paranoid thought goes into eliminating any conable possibility that that might happen but of course it’s a always a catch 22 because to eliminate every conceivable possibility of error you need to have total control over the thing and here’s a thing in which we do not have control at all the thing do what it wants anywhere in the world it wants and it doesn’t ask in advance whether it can do that or whether it should do that it doesn’t even give notice oh it is going to do that no it’s happening all over the place and the same interest it shows in our military infrastructure it shows in everybody else’s military infrastructure which means it’s closed and therefore can easily lead to misunderstanding because the people who are observing it are by training paranoid people who sees everything in terms of us and them you know conflict in terms of opposition in terms of conflict because that’s their job it’s not wrong it’s how they should think so a lot of thought goes into all of these philosophically speaking less edifying more peripheral issues and very little dialogue and discourse goes into the question you raised which is the most glaringly philosophically significant part of the whole thing which is how familiar and close to us they are much closer than the next door neighbor they can do things so close to us that the next door next door neighbor can’t even dream of doing you know that guy somebody wrote Dennis sank was his name a witness of the U upper New York State UFO flap upper Hudson Hudson or redson Hudson River Valley flap in in the 80s he said yeah it’s it’s a it was triangular and it had this lights and it changed my understanding of the nature of life and myself my understanding of myself I mean that’s very close I wish I could be as close to all of you as that thing was to Denis Saint yeah that’s Oneness I I wish I could evoke that kind of insight and in your mind without using you know the internet and electronic circuits and words uh in between it’s very very very close and that gets missed out in all the discourse about the alienness of it and by the way there is no evidence it’s from another planet either so it’s it may be less alien than we tend to think because of all the cultural history of the so-called UFO phenomenon and the simplistic explanation that it it’s just somebody else from another star system coming here in some kind of brillium spaceship it’s a little probably most likely a little more complicated than that so closer closer to home my question is and that it’s possible that this has been addressed in I don’t know year one philosophy and I haven’t CAU up with but my question is about our conceptual categories actually because you said before that and correct me if I’m wrong H that we might have to transcend in a way our current conceptual categories to be able to discuss and now my question becomes what is I guess the upper bounds of our conceptual categories because it seems to me that our conceptual categories come from our dashboard in a way where uh even our words come from our uh physical interactions with the real world so it’s like I grasp the mean in the same way I grasp a cup right and it’s like some some sort of similar thing going on there so yes how when we are talking about transcending them how far can we transcend them you know what I mean so yes thank you very much um it’s probably impossible to transcend all of our conceptual categories that would require as being in again in a newborn State and building new conceptual categories from scratch um that is that is not operationally feasible or or practical um for starters it would preempt any possible communication between two human beings because the categories of language reflect our conceptual categories so we would have to preserve at least some some people are very pessimistic about it they think that we are biologically being capable of figuring the stuff out that we would need need to figure out in order to have an understanding of what’s going on um other people like me are more optimistic I think there are many conceptual categories we apply in an unexamined way to things that we don’t need to um we can M we can maintain a foundation of some very basic conceptual categories that we need in order to even begin thinking otherwise we are just a newborn again and all we can do is uh uh uh that that’s not going to help but I think there are conceptual categories that that categories that are foundational we can never drop them but they are not the whole there are many many more conceptual categories that are not intrinsic they are not in they are not inherent in human physiology in in the C cognitive architecture of human beings um and we can deliberately part with it would it would require a lot of disciplined thinking a lot of self-examination a constant self-examination to make sure that we don’t by by sort of a knee-jerk reaction apply those categories when we don’t need to I think progress can be made um I think there are many more conceptual categories that we unthinkingly unthinkingly apply um that are not really required that can be abandoned in in a way that remains coherent and remains operationally productive um a lot more than we than we think we think all of our conceptual categories are are axioms uh I I think that’s not the case a lot of them are mere inventions that have proven convenient in C certain contexts but can easily be discarded and reinvented and reworked redesigned in different contests contexts a lot more of our conceptual categories can be redesigned than we think of we tend to take everything to be fundamental when most of it is not so this is the optimistic view I I I am in that camp the optimistic Camp I to no I understand it’s so like the the boundary is definitely further than we we tend to think it is I understand and I found that in in many Sciences as well it’s like used to think animals were stupid or when the brain of a bird is smooth so it’s probably stupid and turns out that’s like super crows are super smart and all that so but um so the followup question would be where do you take inspiration H to kind of like push these boundaries is it like I don’t know like ancient peoples they used to have different conceptual categories for example and they didn’t used to have like I guess the boundaries that we have nowadays uh is it I don’t know meditation or is it like or or alternatively could you give an example of like a conceptual category that we consider fundamental but if we push the boundaries a little bit we see that it isn’t really that fundament sure I mean the whole history of analytic idealism speaks to that um I it came from my realization in my 20s um when I thought about you know how do I have to design a computer so not only is it intelligent its data processing is also accompanied by experience and then realizing that whatever I would think about as as far as designing the computer is concerned whatever I would think about changing or reconfiguring in the computer whatever I did it would only change structure and function and it would have nothing to do with experience in other words whatever I did would bring me no further but also no closer to creating artificial Consciousness so when you are faced with a problem that is impossible to solve that is the motivation to overcome conceptual categories I had unthinkingly adopted the conceptual category of physical configurations being primary everything else being derived from physical arrangements and that led me to a a an alley I had nowhere to go it kept them bum in my nose against a wall and it is this this situation when you cannot make progress using your current conceptual categories that motivates you to take a few steps back and reinvestigate which categories can you abandon because every category you abandon is one less brick you have one less to you have but it’s one more door that opens every conceptual category gives you an extra tool but it closes a door that’s an amazing way to describe the tradeoff actually every category you abandon make makes you poor poorer in equipment but opens more doors in front of you um and analytic ideal is more was one of those doors I’ve abandoned the category I was very attached to as a computer engineer I liked to think that I could design a computer to do anything including be conscious yeah well and that brought me to a an insoluble problem so I abandoned that category I had one last two but another door opened and then once you go through that door you develop new tools in the framework of those doors and the UAP is the same thing you know how how many decades does it take people to hit their nose against the wall and consistently fail until they realize okay you have to abandon some conceptual category uh in here it’s facing a problem that has no solution under certain conceptual assumptions that gives you the motivation to part with those assumptions you face yourself in a situation where you cannot make progress if you stay attached to certain conceptual categories and it’s an extremely uncomfortable state to be in and it’s probably the only thing that can move you to abandon conceptual categories because we are so incredibly attached to them we like to think of our life as a progression in which we build up on top of previous conceptual categories yeah yeah in fact every now and then you have to pull the rug from under your feet and allow that that staple that that that stack of conceptual categories to just fall apart you have to demolish it every now and then in optimization this is called avoiding the local Minima you don’t want to get stuck in the local Minima you have to allow things to get a little worse in order for them to get much better later and abandoning conceptual categories is like simulated and healing if you get stuck in a local minimum you have to allow things to get a little worse by abandoning some conceptual categories and maybe you will find the maximum the I mean the global minimum the the best of all situations but if you’re married to the things that have been useful so far to bring you to a local minimum you get stuck in it you never allow yourself to face a worse situation for a little while until it gets better again um even the most hardned pigheaded scientist engineer um given enough failure they will abandon certain conceptual categories if they failed long enough trying to do something yeah that can’t be done under certain conceptual categories and they fail and they fail and they fail and they fail eventually everybody gets tired of failing especially when it’s a very concrete problem philosophy is not very concrete so you you still have the Boos of materialism going on the air wve saying this nonsense of psychism and idealism we are going to solve the hard problem of Consciousness if you don’t really have a concrete problem that you need to solve if it’s only a kind of public relations or ay philosophical question you can insist on the nonsense for your whole life until you die uh and sure enough people have done that but the UAP thing is a different story because now it’s not a problem that is playing according to your timeline it plays according to its timeline so it’s not an option for you to insist on the wrong Avenue of trying to figure figure the thing out for your whole life there is somebody above you who will be saying no you either make progress sir or you’re going to have to going to have to do something else here um it is not unlike the heart problem of Consciousness the UAP problem does not follow our own timeline it is not a problem that we invented ourselves and therefore can live with as long as we want to live with the hard problem of conscious is not even a problem to be solved it’s an it’s an inner contradiction of our own thinking and because we invented it the problem is on our timeline not not we on the problems timeline but with the UAP it’s the opposite the problem is not on our timeline we are on its timeline it has its agenda it does its thing one second one second the problem is not in our timeline is in like we we don’t control the timeline of the phenomenon yeah yeah right right sure yeah yeah yeah okay we can detect it we can measure it we can take notice that things that used to happen once a year are now happening once a week we can take notice of that um but we cannot say oh now let’s make it go back to once a year yeah yeah yes yes yes yes it doesn’t work like that um yeah sure and and there are things in hangers chances are those hangers belong to the private sector and the private sector wants results you know it’s they are not storage facilities they want results they’re and if if they’re failing failing failing failing you know at some point you have to abandon some assumptions sure because the ones you are married too have proven ineffective so this is not a problem that is on our timeline unlike the so-called heart problem of Consciousness so you don’t get the option that the Boos on television have to keep saying one day you will solve the heart problem and materialism is right yeah know the Brian coxes and the the other the other idiots uh out there uh they can do that because the problem is on our timeline and because they are media people and they influence the culture they impose their timeline on the problem yeah yeah EX fortunately it doesn’t work in this case okay that’s very good that’s very good this means that the necessary pressure is applied to uh you know transcend oh you bet that’s C you bet yeah oh my God thank you Bernardo once again helping my thought can of become clearer and it’s really nice thank you you’re welcome thanks s certainly when I started to ask people I’ve never had an experience of this sort I just thought hardly anyone ever has but when I started to ask people kind of based on last year with Patrick Harper like oh just start asking people a lot more people in my life was like yeah there was that one time that weird thing and very often similar to ubon they didn’t know what to do with it it was just they didn’t tell anyone really until I asked them it was just those are the most reliable Witnesses the one that don’t tell anyone yeah the ones that don’t go to the media don’t make a fuzz out of it don’t even tell their families but a lot of so-called UAP sightings are trivially accounted for by the space station I don’t know whether you guys have seen the space station flying overhead it’s incredibly bright incredibly bright it’s much brighter than Venus When You See It flying overhead you think oh a UAP no it’s just a space station because it’s a very it’s in a very low orbit and when the sun is reflect on it at just the right angle you see a very bright thing so things in the sky if they are moving at constant speed in a straight Direction and they are dots of light like stars they are satellites or the space station it’s not a UAP at all satellites look like little stars moving at constant speeds in linear trajectory and any time of the night in a clear day if you sit in your garden and you look up for five minutes you will see two or three satellites two or three stars moving at constant speed in a rectilinear trajectory that’s no uaps that’s the satellite beaming your internet your your television um so 76% of us have voted 177% yes 9% not sure the rest no so probably more than I would have guessed in the past um are you okay for one more question today but yeah it’s slightly changing track but kind inspired by um what for was asking around um evidence and will lead into next week hopefully which is uh again we’re not not sure I mean the theme will most likely be nality spirituality game for the last week potentially with to be confirmed and still in discussion um with Chris Wallace uh and what’s interesting about him is he his perception is that your framework and I’m sure you heard this many times from many people your framework is almost identical from what he can tell to the Sanskrit tradition that he studies which is over a thousand years old oh I saw your email yeah yeah and obviously um there’s Traditions much older than that as well which you’ve written about what if what what would be the threshold speaking to you as a scientist and philosopher for information gained through meditation let’s say a bunch of meditators I don’t know let’s say 10 of them they do a specific protocol of meditation and they all report a similar phenomenal the same experience of some description is there a threshold do you think that either you or science in general would start to recognize that like okay well that’s the same as 10 people walk into a room and they see like a red box or whatever we have to now explain that I never gave this much thought I think there would be a threshold but I never worked it out um in my mind there are people who do this as as their working life as as as their profession um the problem they face is that even if they work it out to be a very unambiguous very clearly articulated very well-based thres showed um they still will not be taken seriously by the people who are not going to take them seriously anyway um and that has to do with a fundamental contradiction in science regarding regarding the use of statistics and the definition of Randomness I wrote about it years ago but it never really resonated much but uh it’s a very fundamental contradiction uh in in the definition of Randomness in science statistical Randomness and how we use statistics to to say that certain things scientifically are proven to exist like the Hig bosen um there is a one in three million chance that it was not true and we consider that to be sufficient three sigma deviation we consider that to be sufficient to say that the higs bosen has been discovered uh we had seen the HG bosen before all the way back in the 90s when the lap was running before the LHC we had seen it we had seen events we had events uh but we didn’t have enough statistics to say that um this is a reliable Discovery against Randomness against chance in other words that we don’t that we are not seeing this pattern just by chance just because it a random fluctuation that looks like the higs bosen we need to stretch that chance Beyond statistical three sigma deviation of more than one less than one in a million chance that it’s just random the problem is that um any the definition the operational definition of Randomness in science is such that it can accommodate any pattern in other words Anything Can Happen by chance alone the only distinction is is this this Sigma deviation I mean what is the chance that this is just random as opposed to being a real phenomenon a real effect in other words there is no fundamental boundary line between an observation that could be just random chance and an an observation of a real phenomenon there is no fundamental distinction between these two in the way we apply uh the ideas of statistics and Randomness a random signal can contain any pattern the question is just How likely or unlikely it is if you’re watching television without tuning to a channel I mean in the Netherlands we haven’t been able to do that for more than 10 years because we haven’t had free to a television for for a long time now but in the US they still have free to- a television so if you set your TV to a channel that’s not transmitting you see TV static black and white little dots on the screen there is a nonzero chance that for one frame that can come come together and show the face of a monkey it’s not zero the chance that that may happen is not zero all you can calculate is what are the odds that the monkey you saw is just by chance out of Randomness or the image of some real phenomenon some real monkey like thing going on in the airwaves there is no fundamental boundary line between these two things so why am I saying this I’m saying this because this is how scientists who are anchored in a paradigm can justify to themselves never abandoning that anchor despite evidence if an experiment is done with meditators in which a sound Criterion of objectivity is defined in advance in other words before the experiment so it’s not influenced by its results and it’s it’s a very very rigorous Criterium that doesn’t allow much to chance very specific and the meditators go and then they report their experiences and it fits that Criterium so so that you could then say well this was an objective experience they saw something that existed Beyond themselves it was not just a hallucination or a fantasy the people who do not want to believe in this possibility will tell you there can always be a monkey on TV static whatever it is that you observe and record could always be random you see the problem is that if they were to be consistent in the way they are applying these things then he BOS has never been proven because it could have been random it could have been just a random Quantum fluctuation in the way energy is deposited on the tiles of the Tio Colorimeter that measure the energy of the the decaying products of the higs bosen so this allows people now to apply criteria to evalu ating different pieces of evidence in a totally subjective way when they don’t want to acknowledge the evidence they say well it could be random there can always be a monkey on TV static but when it’s evidence that that fits with their Paradigm one in a million is good enough three sigma you don’t even need to go to Six Sigma you win a Nobel Prize in three sigma already but then you have projects like um the the random number generators uh project I forgot the name it was run from Princeton I think years ago in which they put random generators spread all across the world and they are they true quantum number generators they’re based on Quantum Randomness um not on SEO Quantum calculations and and then they noticed that there are correlations between deviations from the norm shown by this Quantum random number generators and major uh social events like 911 and other big events in other words when major events happen those number generators deviate from the average in a way that you can determine um the odds against chance and then they find orders against chance of 10 to the power of nine in other words a million times better than what allowed us to claim the of the hex bosen but oh no no no it’s just Randomness that’s the problem you see that’s the subjectivity that’s built right into the fabric of how we do science how we interpret statistics and how we Define randomness we can move that boundary at will depending on what fits the Paradigm or not um of course the the solution to this is obvious we acknowledge that there is some degree of subjectivity there that we can put this boundary in different places we acknowledge that we cannot overcome it it’s built into the system the boundary can can be in different places but we then decide based on the best effort we can make what is the point where we place that boundary that is still practical and still far away enough from Pure chance that allows us to have enough confidence and in other words we don’t put that boundary so high that nothing now can be proven that everything is a monkey on the on on TV static but also not so low that nonsense by mere chance can now be considered a scientific theory we decide where in between that will be and then and here’s the critical point then we remain consistent with that location of the boundary and we apply the same location regard less of whether the data fits with your Paradigm or not because that’s the only way to be consistent otherwise you you you’re hitting a moving Target you you’re changing the rules of the game uh in order to make the game more favorable to your favorite team can’t do that that’s that’s the most straightforward way to self-deception you will believe anything you wants to believe if you move that boundary at will depending on the circumstances no the way to go is to decide where it’s going to be science decided it’s three sigma now the Princeton experiment with the random number generators Global coherence project I forgot what the name of that thing was now you have to take it seriously because that’s now a million times beyond the three sigma threshold oh but it doesn’t fit materialism well then materialism has to be questioned now we have to start requestioning but that’s not what we do what we do is we move that threshold wherever it’s convenient for us so we make sure that our team always wins the game what you mentioned that makes me wonder you know where does someone start you know as the world viw informs everything how does one start developing a worldview well no maybe what’s like where would let’s say that someone has no idea about analytical idealism um but going back to amir’s question um and the reason why it’s not being um how kind of how it all has to do with the world view essentially that it informs our science and that it informs our knowledge and so I’m wondering you know to what extent can we say that ontology affects epistemology or epistemology affects ontology so both ways one of them is much less trivial than the other epistemology affects ontology directly because the only ontology we have is is a part of our knowledge and knowledge is epistemic it’s our model of the world it’s our view of the world not what the world is in and of itself which we have no access to um all we can have is a story in terms of which to to relate to the world and in order to relate to the world in a functional way we need to believe that story most people need to believe believe that story it’s very hard to keep in your mind at all times that your whole view of of reality may be wrong and you were adopting it merely for convenience it is possible but it’s very hard psychologically humans stand to need to truly believe in a story in order to live according to that story um it’s just an aspect of our psychology so epistemology is the foundation of our anology because our anology is always a model of the world is our belief about what the world is but the other way works too um and that’s less trivial the other way works in the form of what Thomas Kon called anomalies anomalies are observations that are as reliable as they force you to review your onology as they force you to review your worldview the narrative in terms of which you relate to self and world the story you believe about what the world is and your role in it um certain observations force a re-evaluation of our model of reality and when that happens when enough anomalies build up that contradict a culture’s mainstream view of reality then um a scientific revolution happens uh for instance um in the 13th century 14th century now let’s go let’s go let’s go prior to the Millennium so in the 10th Century it was mainstream even unquestioned that um the sun went around the earth and probably the Earth was flat uh we knew the Earth was not flat but since um one and a half thousand years before that uh um but that was only Scholars who knew that and it was polemical even then for the majority of the people for the population at large in the 10th Century our Narrative of reality was the World is Flat we were deliberately created by God out of Earth and the Sun goes around the earth now the idea that the Earth is what goes around the Sun and that the Earth is a is a oblate spheroid that was uh um uh Scientific Revolution it was a shift in Paradigm and that was forced by ontological observations in other words empirical observations reality was telling us that things were not as it seemed for instance when we built ships capable of crossing the Atlantic those ships would leave from the coast of the Iberian Peninsula the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula Portugal which was the most powerful Nation on Earth in the 15th century the ships would depart from Portugal Due West to go to the Americas and if you were on the shores in Portugal looking at the ships with a magnifying glass a Lunette um little telescope which existed they were brought they were invented and brought by the Arabs to the Iberian Peninsula centuries before that um if you were observing that ship through your little telescope you’d realize that at some point the ship is here above water and after a while half the ship is underwater what the hell and after a while two-thirds of the ship is underwater you only see the tops of the Mas but when the sailors come back they tell you we didn’t get wet we didn’t go under underwater so what was going on well what was going on that the Earth is round so the further the ship travels the the L of the ship you can see because it has gone down along the curvature of the earth that’s an anomaly that forces you to reconsider things other anomalies um the orbits of the inner planets like Mercury they didn’t fit with the notion that the planets and the sun went around the earth you couldn’t predict the trajectory of some planets uh they had retrograde uh trajectories uh W okay then it’s an anomaly when enough anomal is build you’re forced because of an onology because of what the world actually is as opposed to our model of it you are forced to revise your model of it but of course your next model is based on your epistemology on your lines of thinking of thinking on the structure of your cognitive apparatus because that’s all you have to create models so it goes both ways some anomalies can be ignored for a long time like we are right now we are very busy ignoring the fact that physical realism is not true that physical entities do not have Standalone existence um in the in the time of toomy we had the the the epicycles we wanted to still think that every orbit was a perfect circle even though empirical observation was telling us that that was not the case so they started in pres in epicycles so planets would go around a major Circle but along this major Circle there would be a small little circle and on the surface of that another smaller little circle so epicycles on top of epicycles that’s how you react to the anomalies at first you try to amend your model but still according to the lines and Paradigm of your model so if your model was everything should be circular then you add more circles and at some point of course the model becomes fantastically implausible it becomes self-evidently artificial something we we are trying to impose on nature as opposed to what nature is and then we understand that orbits are not circular they’re elliptical but some anomalies can be dismissed through epicycles and we are doing it now the epicycles today are called aesan many worlds interpretation and super determinism in other words f fantastic theoretical fantasies for which we have precisely zero evidence just like the epicycles but they somehow Safeguard physical realism which is an epistemic idea we are very attached to so epicycles keep on happening they are happening in our faces today 100 years from now people will be laughing at us so those idiots they they wrote about the ep the Toom epicos and still they fell for it they must have been complete idiot and guess what 500 years after that their epicycles epicycles will be L that there is a a feedback between onology and epistemology and what that means is that we never live in reality we are always living in what we make of reality it’s that which sets the tone for our emotional emotional inner life how we feel about being being alive uh whether we are happy or not depressed or not anxious or not frustrated or not all of these emotions are determined not by what is but our model of what is and that’s a shifting model an evolving model at play between epistemology and onology and the the high strangeness aspect of the UAP phenomenon to go back to that according to people who have dedicated their lives looking at it what the message seems to be above all else is what you think reality is is not true so if your model of reality is one in which um spectacles cannot exist then what the strangeness phenomena is doing is this oh you think spectacles don’t exist here look what do we make of it that’s what it’s doing it’s confronting us with things that defy our categories and our logic I wrote about it 10 years ago meaning in absurdity so that seems to be the main line the main arch of communication of the high stranger this phenomenon it’s trying to make us aware that um what we think is real is not necessarily what is real that our models have limitations not only our physics has limitations but our our logic and our very categories have limitations so the phenomenon is just putting these things in front of us that defy our categories in order to sort of shake us awake don’t don’t get lost in this hole you’re in because you stop making progress you think you you’ve sorted it out here look at this have a look what about this and that sort of shakes us out of the hole so we continue the process of interacting with nature to try to figure nature out which is may be the meaning of life the meaning of metacognitive life nature needs us to do that so if we get stuck something in nature that’s playing a role of supervising what we are doing comes in and shakes us awake through high strangeness through things that we are confronted with that that we cannot dismiss and yet which are completely contradictory with our with our own categories um so I think the high strangeness part of the UAP phenomenon um in in in in the general in general in a general sense is doing that it does it more specifically as well but then there is variation generally speaking that’s the main stay of what it’s trying to do now the nuts and boats part is something totally else it’s not trying to communicate it it’s trying to do or avoid something um that’s a different story it may not even be the same origin I don’t know know and nobody I now have access to uh tells me they know if they do they’re not telling me so just today someone was telling me about um in the transpersonal movement there’s well it’s an ancient debate but it was very alive in the transpersonal journal around perennialism this notion that all the different world religions and mystical Traditions were pointing towards the same kind of fundamental truth which tends to be a nonu understanding of reality um that okay the Christian Mystics and the Sufi Mystics and the Hindu Mystics they were using different languages to describe the same thing that’s the kind of perennial philosophy if I’ve understood it um and that was from Aldis Huxley onwards gaining some uh popularity um and then there were a bunch of critics my friend was explaining this and and asked oh and these critics were they Mystics and he’s like oh it’s funny you say that because there was a there was a famous panel or some and I’m going to get the details wrong but there was a famous panel or thing where you know on one side there were all the people saying no you know all these Traditions are pointing to different things and it’s culturally bound or whatever and on the other side we all the perennial philosophers and someone asked oh who amongst yous had a Oneness experience in other words like an experience of something you might call nity and everyone on The Perennial side put their hand up and no one on the other side put their hand up so it’s like once said had the experience it was clear that oh all these cultures are using well it was clear to them at least all these cultures using different words to describe the same underlying reality whereas if you just read the words and you’re an academic um that’s a very different different story yeah the people who are probably oppose the notion of The Perennial philosophy are um philosophers of religion or people doing religious studies because they are confronted with the enormous cacophony and variety of religious claims across the world throughout history um but what they fail to see is that behind and some somehow underneath that cacophony there is a sort of a a common line that you know below all the noise speaks with a single voice that’s they have difficulty to to to to grasp because their work is to study the cacophony so they get lost in that and and yes personal direct personal experience of the essence of reality which we can have because we are parts of reality whatever the root of reality is the nonlocal root of reality is we are planted right in it so it stands to reason that we can have access to that so an introspection is the only way to do that so introspection is the is a Royal Avenue to to Clarity the problem is that it doesn’t count when it comes to to the level of culture because uh um the mainstream view of a culture has to be mediated by language and you can’t mediate direct introspective Insight through language you can’t capture it so for culture at large if if the fight is to change the mainstream view of a culture you cannot base yourself on interspective Insight it’s not considered a valid argument point because people say well that was your experience or I know you’re mad it doesn’t count for me I haven’t seen it I haven’t been there I haven’t experienced it so the only way to mediate a discussion across subject is logic and and evidence reason and and evidence um then you have to exclude introspection uh but when it comes to your own personal certainty introspection is there while Avenue of course it’s all you have ultimately yeah and that’s why I was curious partly on like okay is there a threshold in which you or some scientists or science in general would be like okay everyone that does whatever three years meditation consistently reports a certain perception of reality maybe we should start to take it seriously but um I’ll this comment if that’s okay uh Ricky that there’s a book titled God is not one by Steven proo that opposes The Perennial philosophy it were it was used as the primary textbook for a comparative religion religion class I took I found it pretty persuasive until I had a mystical experience myself so oh the history of religion has been the history of variety so if you are willing to do do a mild amount of cherry picking you can argue for anything in religious philosophy you can make any point there will be enough to make any point um but what is demanded from one if if you want to understand what the perennial philosophy mean what is De means uh what is demanded from you is that you see past the variety of symbolisms you see past the particular figure and events used in in in the stories that you try to see through them into the archetypal meaning that they are all embodying together even though they express that archetypal meaning according to a pleora a cacophony of different imagery and narratives that’s what is demanded if one sticks to the imagery alone and the narratives alone you can make any point anything because it’s all over the place so it is this this subtlety of observation this nuanced observation in which you see past the particular images the particular narratives and you try to sort of smell the underlying common archetype of themes that’s what is required to to detect uh The Perennial philosophy otherwise it’s not there at all and religion is all over the place well thanks again for another comprehensive wide ranging paranormal highly speculative highly speculative week very different from ones we’ve had before thanks everybody thanks for being here [Music]