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Ep18 – Interview with Dick Khan author of “DMT and My Occult Mind”(part I)

Dane (00:37):

You are in London. Am I right about that? Yes. Cause that’s in the book you described being in London, so yeah, you guys doing okay with the coronavirus and everything?

DIck (00:47):

Me and my family go doing okay. I mean, we’re making the best of it where we’re quite positive about things and yeah. We’re okay. I mean, we kind of enjoyed ourselves dare I say, but my heart goes out to a lot of individuals and businesses that are going to the wall, so, you know, but we’re okay. Jumpsuit job seems quite secure. So but yeah, I mean, I don’t really know what to make of it. I don’t, I don’t buy into the politics and the, the sort of conspiracies too much. I just try and stay away from that. Cause it’s just, I’ve got all the rabbit holes I want to go down.

Dane (01:18):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand. Yeah. We’ve had a lot of trouble here in the U S obviously, but

Dane (01:26):

Could you turn the audio, down, just a little bit? I think you might be a little loud. Would that be on the microphone? I think, yeah, try turning the microphone down just a tad and then there’s no way to know how it’s going to come across on cast. So hopefully the audio engineer, Nick will deal fix it if there’s a little bit how’s that, that seems a little better. Okay. I can tell you down further. Okay. Yeah, let’s do that then. Just a little, just because on my end it’s almost clipping, but it could be, it could also be the microphones in my ear. Okay. That’s down a little bit more. Okay. That seems really good. And I sound okay.

DIck (02:08):

I’m really good. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. So where are you in the U S

Dane (02:12):

I’m right now in the Mississippi Valley region of Missouri. So I’m outside of St. Louis. I when the pandemic around like November,[…]. So it’s a paranormal hotspot, Missouri, Mississippi river Valley region. So yeah. But all right. You want to get started with the interview? Yeah. Sure. Okay. So my first question for you is that, how did you get started with DMT? And I was just wanting to know, you could talk about how you got interested in the chemical, how you first started taking it, those sorts of things.

DIck (03:01):

[…] I was browsing the internet and I’d heard about legally purchasable research chemicals, and that I’d looked into an alternative to what MDMA, which I could no longer secure for home use. And I came across it and then pathogenic psychoactive compound known as six APB, which was attracting rave reviews on the website. So I purchased a view and found the experience of swallowing one or two tablets comparable, if not sometimes superior to ecstasy,uthat would typically see me sleepless lit up all night feasting on wealth of information available on the internet. And it was through one of those such nights that I chanced upon DMT V but it molecule documentary. I’d never heard anything like it before in my life. Uthe significance of what was being stated was remarkable. And,uthe goosebumps dimple in my skin, no doubt, significantly aided by the six APB,uspoke of the,usignificance of my reaction to what I was seeing.

DIck (04:06):

And I knew upon seeing that I knew I simply have to try DMT. And I said about purchasing a quantity of, excuse me, memos are still this route back. I purchased that and it, it sat in a cupboard for months and months while I undertook online research into other people’s experiences. And eventually my curiosity reached the point where I really wanted to have this breakthrough into hyperspace experience. Yeah, all that online research and imbued me with cautious, respectful DMTs reputation as a psychedelic, unlike any other. And has it been many years since I’d last frolics with LSD magic mushrooms, I decided to test my psychedelic navigation skills. And so I purchased upon it of magic truffles ships from our good neighbors in the Netherlands. And I’ve been had, you know, an experience, an ego death on those magic truffles.

DIck (05:09):

I was satisfied I could progress to, to DMT. And it was after a couple of failed attempts or DIY extraction that I eventually managed to procure extract the crystals. Woke up one morning, delighted to find my glass dish sat in the freezer speckled with pure white crystals of mind manifesting treasure except I had no idea how to smoke them. I didn’t know. I had not researched that, that there’s an art to smoking DMT. So I was on successfully trained to smoke them, using test tubes and glass tubes all to no avail. And now, you know, chomping at the bit to finally experience the substance. I horridly fashioned a makeshift pipe from a redundant. The beer can piercing several pinhole, punctures into a small depression pressed into the side of the can. And with my wife overseeing me, I one Sunday noon time, I sat up on the bed and Greely and excitedly vacuum down my first lung full of potent DMT vapor. Now almost immediately my lifelong persistent tinnitus, which I’m completely comfortable with on expectedly increased significantly in both intensity and frequency, the air space throughout the room, exhibited extreme crystal clear clarity countless decorative dimples on the ceiling, spackled, spectral colors from the sunlight. And given that my tinnitus had been such a significant aspect of my early childhood is fair to say that I was not only overawed by the power of the substance, but completely enamored by that low dose experience. And it was without question from then on, I would pursue DMT.

Dane (07:01):

Hm that’s very interesting. And then was that, did you have an entity encounter on the first time that you used it or was it

DIck (07:10):

No, I, I don’t think so. I, I just amplified my own psycho-spiritual constitution. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what gives the room that unbelievable crystal clear clarity, this uncommonly dense medium, that, that emanated from me caused the sunlight streaming through that uncommonly dense medium to cause all the deep dimples on the ceiling, in this bedroom to radiate with spectral colors, it was remarkable, but no, there’s no sense of any entity contact. And you know, my wife was looking upon me and she said, okay, you’ve tried it, leave it alone now. And I was like, no way, this is, this is something else.

Dane (07:54):

So your sense is in that first time you used it there was an expansion of consciousness and you became more perceptive.

DIck (08:01):

Oh yeah. I mean, I, yes, but that wasn’t aware to me at that time that those, those arguments have become clear to me as I’ve progressed with it, but that’s, that’s why my argument happened. The effect of the DMT in increase in the intensity and frequency of my tinnitus audibly within perceptively without was the room became crystal clear with my own emanating. I dunno, you can call it mind stuff. Psycho-Spiritual substance astral fluid. I’m not really hung up on the nomenclature. I think I’m just interested in, this is the initial effect of smoking DMT and remarkable, you know, remarkable. And yeah, here we are.

Dane (08:46):

Yeah. Can I ask about that tinnutis?

DIck (08:49):

Yeah. The tinnitus. Yeah. I mean, I think I’ve tried to emphasize this in my written work, my books, but this was a, I mean, I have it, I thought it was it. I have it now, but when I was young, really young, it was, it was loud, especially alone in bed at night. And I would focus on this sound and it was just, you know, resulted in some really bizarre experiences out of body B classic outer body experiences where, you know, you leave your body and you can, will yourself fold and will yourself through closed wooden doors. I never actually left the house. I was very young, but I had several of those. So from a young age, it was evident that something within me that that can exist outside my body. And yet strangely perceive the environment just as my lateralized CVO environment of the experience as we’re feeling it in probably an infinitesimally small in comparison to the size of the bedroom.

DIck (09:57):

And then that would slowly transpose and I would feel expanded well beyond the bounds of the bedroom. Like I was in a huge dome space and this is me being very young and focusing on that tinnitus. And you know, I mean, I couldn’t understand why my parents never spoke about, you know, I assume they have that same sound in their head, but nobody ever spoke about it. I don’t know. No, it was years later when, you know, as an adult at work and I’d asked somebody, you know, at work, I said, listen to, I love that. Just that sound in your head, you know, when you’re in a quiet room and he couldn’t really hear it. And I explained what I meant and kind of looked at me as like, you’re hearing things in your head. And it was like, Oh, I just, the conversation bombed and made me look like, you know, dude’s got something in his head, but you know, I know, I know tinnitus can arise through industrial disease as a hearing loss.

DIck (10:55):

I know there’s a genuine there are medical symptoms that arise through a variety of things, but I’ve heard this all my life and, and, and Eastern philosophy it’s has a very different interpretation. It’s more considered, you know, for spiritual factor. I mean, I’ve come to assume. It’s, it’s evidence of an interface between my immaterial self and my physical self, but I mean, yeah, I mean, when DMT turned up the volume of that, I mean, this, this point I really want to drive, it was on Dow become enamored with it because that sound had been such a big part of my life. And especially my early childhood, that DMT increase that, Oh, wow, this is what is this magic substance.

Dane (11:47):

So I just wanted to make sure the audience knows that tinnitus in the United States, if we’re about the same thing, I understand that it’s it’s I, a persistent ringing sound that you hear and it’s usually, at least I’ve always heard it’s associated with hearing loss or damage, I think. Yeah.

DIck (12:04):

Yeah. That’s that points up. Yeah. I mean, it can be associated with industrial hearing loss, industrial diseases. But I I’ve had it all my life. I know other people who, since I’ve published have come to me and said, what you wrote is just fantastic because I’ve experienced the same thing. So it seems some individuals just seem to have that natural persistent tinnitus and, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m one of them.

Dane (12:33):

Absolutely. And I’ve also heard from reading on the DMT literature, that one of the most common things that happens when people smoke for the first time is they hear a ringing sound

DIck (12:42):

That’s right. Yeah. They, they hear a ringing sound. Whereas what happens with me because I’ve already got that sound there. I mean, all the time when I’m at work, w when I’m home watching TV, when I’m having a meal with my family, I mean, I can hear it now, even though when I’m in a conversation, I can hear it within my head. You know, my response upon smoking DMTs that, that the intensity and the frequency of that sound increases significantly in proportion to, you know, the number of installations and, and the dose of DMT that I’m taking.

Dane (13:18):

If you consider you, you might be already tuned into some frequency, maybe you’re sensitive to the DMT or aligned to it in some way.

DIck (13:25):

I mean, I don’t think of myself as anyone. I’m just a regular guide. I don’t think I’m special or anything like that, but I do find it interesting that, you know, I, I thought this was just common to everybody, but it seems not. So I don’t really know what to make of that. I mean, some people suggested, you know, maybe you have a well-developed or sensitive pineal gland. I don’t know. I mean, everybody’s different, you know, you get some humans that physically and physically strong, and some of that, you know, fantastic IQ, we’ve all got different you know outward features and mental different capabilities. And maybe this is just something that, that I’ve been blessed with. I don’t see it as hindrance. I’m completely comfortable with it.

Dane (14:11):

That’s very cool. That’s very interesting. I think that might be just an important thing to keep in mind, too, just that you might say I’m not different from other people. I don’t think of myself as different, but we don’t know.

DIck (14:21):

I, I, I, I’m dealing with psychedelics I’m I have to stay grounded, so I won’t, yeah. By kinder he’d say so, but yeah, I imperative of stay grounded.

Dane (14:32):

Very interesting. So could you describe how you first began to encounter entities while using DMT?

DIck (14:41):

Well, so from there, my, my second experience was 15 milligram and it was in, in the bedroom. You know, I smoked and, and laid back, and this is one of the hardest, I mean, I’ve since come to be able to distinguish and enter the experience, but this one was really unusual because I laid back and I could still see the bedroom, you know, as clear as I see it now. And yet on the ceiling, there was this oversized image, and it was like an old cinema graph movie, you know, two dimensional on sort of CPR, monotone coloring. And it was me and my family. And we were all holding hands you know, my, my boys were much smaller than, and we’re all walking. It’s really happy scene. And I’m laid on the floor, looking at the ceiling. Me and my family are up on the ceiling, looking down at me, all smiling, all happy, walking, you know, holding hands.

DIck (15:46):

And I just, I was like, you know, I’m giving you a thing with the MTS, ordinarily, you retain your rational senses. And I’m looking at me and my family looking at me and I’m thinking, how the hell is this happening? But, you know, I came from that experience. You know, if I was enthusiastic after the first experience, this experience just raise my enthusiasm even more, you know, it was like, this is unbelievable. I, I really got to pursue this. And what’s, what’s interesting about that is, you know I think there’s a book touches on schizophrenia. I think it’s called something on the origins of the influence of machine. There’s a Wikipedia entry about that. And something in there talks about this, of cinema graphic, hallucinatory imagery, and, and what I saw the style of wine, I saw really fits that mold. And I’m not, you know, I’m not here suggesting I’ve got any schizophrenia disposition, but the sort of commonality between what I’d seen on the experience and what I then come across more than months on end, that Wikipedia entry were really interesting.

DIck (17:05):

But yeah, it was, you know, from the note, so in Maura mom, in the next experience, then it was like, you know, the, the bedroom had gone or the room that I was in, you know, seemingly disappeared. And it looked like I had gone to another world and that world was people with Yuma, like entities who were absolutely delighted at my arrival and, and, you know, come out with that. And it’s like, shaking your head, you know, like Terence McKenna said, you know, you, you say you can’t believe it and you repeat that over and over and over again, because you genuinely in ontological shock.

Dane (17:40):

Yeah. Are you saying that the first time you used it, you just had perceptual experiences the second time you saw a hallucination of family and you together. Yeah.

DIck (17:52):

Yeah. So, yeah, so it was like, it was like, it was like I was on the floor and it’s almost like a projector was beaming onto the ceiling, this old cinema graphic style movie of me and my family, all oversized, I mean, appearing much larger, you know, the, my regular size, all walking in this lovely scenery and holding hands and smiling. And I think the point I’m trying to not make, but the point I’m th th the question I’m asking is the uncertainty I’m raising is, I don’t know if that was a product of my own mind or whether there was an entity present. I wasn’t aware of it because of my I was still a novice, you know you know, to two experiences in. So I don’t know if an entity was somehow, you know, putting that hallucinate risk senior scenery on the ceiling, but either way, the outcome was that I was, this is, this substance is so remarket. This is unbelievable. You know, EV I spent months and months reading lots of hundreds of reports from other people like that. They’d all gone out the window. I was no longer in interested. I’d forgot about why Rosa hack up, pursue this more and more. This is unbelievable.

Dane (19:10):

Did you have a sense that it was a very meaningful image then that you were seen

DIck (19:15):

In the sense of my reaction to it? Yeah. I mean, if it was put there by an entity or the entity, I suppose it did it in a manner that elicited the reaction, my reaction, which was, wow, this is beautiful. You know, I got to pursue this. There was absolutely no reason why you would not want to have another experience based on that. So I, I think I, I suspect there was an entity involved. It wasn’t clear to me. I just can’t buy that. My mind would somehow I can’t see how my mind would project. Well, I can, but I just don’t think it was my mind projecting that moving cinema graphic style imagery onto the ceiling in the bedroom, but you know, who knows?

Dane (20:08):

So in retrospect, do you think that it was too rich and detailed of an image of a hallucination for you to have generated internally? So you infer that it might’ve. Yeah,

DIck (20:19):

Yeah, of course it does. Because with, with all of the experience, the earth proceeded from the iPhone, I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that my mind could produce those kinds of effects. Not saying, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it never cooked, but on my DMT experiences, I’ve never seen my mind create something as beautiful as that,

Dane (20:41):

That seems to be another consistent theme of a DMT experiences that people talk about things being hyper real, or like more real than real. And you see so many people will insist like I know that this is real because like, it, it feels more real than anything I’ve ever seen in life. Well, I mean,

DIck (21:04):

When you, when you’re in that breakthrough experience, absolutely. It looks far, far, far, far more real than real life. I mean, the, the, the, the colors are rich. The, the, the, I say surfaces in inverted commerce appear without blemish, so smooth, you know, perfect without, without any, any dimples. And I think, you know, I do think there’s a science or the spiritual science behind, behind this, you know, that, that can say, well, you know, the reason it’s like that is because of this, this, and this and that. And what I’m proposing is that it’s the, the uncommon density of, of that substance, that, that gives it, that, you know, a real than real appearance. And when I say uncommon density, I mean, let’s just fast forward to me taking my research outside and smoking in the garden. And that same, you know, whether we call it astral fluid or psycho-spiritual substance, our consciousness, our mindset, you know, you can actually see it, you know, filling the local sky insignificantly.

DIck (22:13):

There’s a bountiful amount of you know, immaterial substance hidden within our physical frame and, and DMT can powerfully unleash that. And I’ve done that on a, you know, a windy day and the leaves are blowing and the trees are bending. And yet that substance is just sat there. And it’s just not yielding to the wind one little bit. It’s, you know, the wind triples it not. And I think that same kind of shows that this, that’s why I call it an uncommon substance. It’s something that we’re not readily familiar with until you see it. And even then see time and time again, as, as I have done. And I’m sure others have on, on, on DMT XBR through DMT experiences.

Dane (22:56):

Can we, can we talk about that part of it, the, you talk about psycho, spiritual mind stuff, literally bubbling out of you. You talk about it, filling the room, you talk about I guess what I’d like to ask Dick is you, when you earlier you described things being hyper real realer than real, but then when you describe the psycho-spiritual mind stuff that sort of bubbles out of you is that also relearn and real, like, do you, because it sounds very abstract.

DIck (23:28):

Yeah. Okay. So when I, when I first started smoking DMT the effects with a low dose where I will get this really sort of colorful sort of mindscapes, you know, he’s like in my mind XY, but you know, also in front of me and, and as I’ve progressed that that’s diminished. And even now, if I, you know, I smoke it, I don’t see that. I see this psycho-spiritual substance, this mind stuff, concept whatever rapidly expanding from me. The, the point I’m driving home in my research is that that initial effect of DMTs significantly alters one’s setting people talk about set your state of mind in New York, you know, you’re setting where you are and the initial effect of smoking DMT and, and, you know, expanding your, your main stuff, you know bubble, like you have significantly changed your setting. And it seems that that, that reaction is attractive to a certain classes of hidden entity, and they will respond to it.

DIck (24:44):

And you know, I say, respond respondent. This happens so quickly. You know, I mean, you can be smoking a pipe, three poles, you know what I know now, if I’m on my second poll, I consent, I can receive the arrival of the entity, palpably perceive it, because that expanded mind stuff. When you become familiar with the capacities, you realize it as it, you know, you can sense the arrival of something within the room, and even then you’re taking then your third and final hit. And, you know, this thing is there, you know, it’s watching you and it’s just waiting for you to solve, lay back and put the pipe side and exhale, and then it just imposes on you. So I don’t, if I deviated from your original question there, but I was trying to make the point about, you know, the, the metaphysical mechanics of, of what in effect is a breakthrough experience.

Dane (25:40):

Well, let’s talk about the entities that you’re describing, because you described a variety of them in the book. And some of them, you talk about being very high energy. You call those a cult masters,

DIck (25:52):

And then, yeah.

Dane (25:54):

I mean, you also described some that seem like less than sentience. There’s one really interesting experiment you describe in your garden where you said you had an entity that manifested as a dome over the garden, and you said it seemed intensely angry, but also to have very narrow consciousness. And so it made me think that you were describing the equivalent of like a paranormal guard dog. It was almost like it was barking down at you, anger, anger, anger, but you said it seemed to have a very limited unsophisticated mind. Am I repeating, am I interpreting that correct?

DIck (26:26):

But you, you, you are. I mean, I would say by far the, by far the majority of my experiences and certainly all of my experiences and AOS have been interactions with that class of entity that I can call a cult masters by far the majority. So any experiences that are not called masters, they really stand out from the main body of my research to me. So the one that created the dome, I can picture now myself in the garden. I can see this overarching, you know, psycho-spiritual dome formed off the entity. If I said that, I said that I must’ve intuited that, but equally I remember another experience smoking in the garden and I was wearing sunglasses and I was only wearing sunglasses to try and avoid any retinal stink from looking up at the sky, but I’d smoked. And I’d like back in and, you know, they sent it to your eyes and it’s, you know, it’s trying to interact with me, but the seconds are crucial.

DIck (27:33):

If it doesn’t secure the interaction within the first few seconds, it’s not going to happen. And I was, I was messing about with my sunglasses or not, I guess I have to be on, this is how it probably wasn’t taking that experience as seriously as I should. And they, this entity just, I, it just went, it just seemed to go, but mere moments later, this other entity came and this is going to sound unbelievable, but, you know, you know, in a car you get there the air bags that inflate rapidly when there’s a crash, the best way I can describe as this other entity, it kind of took something similar beneath my backside, which was, you know, I was laid on the garden on the grass, but there are these like three, like sudden minor explosion is the only way I can describe it beneath my backside.

DIck (28:30):

And it was like, I was getting smacked on the bottom. You know, it was like, I was, I was being reprimanded for my, I re my reaction, right. Response, you know, how I dealt with that, that first year attraction by messing about with my sunglasses. So yeah, yeah, that, that was something a new mentioned about the, the, the barking dog. I remember when experience in the house, in the small landing area at the top of the stairs and you know, smokes the area quickly, fill the volume, fills up with your own psychospiritual substance attract something I’m trying to, I think it was one or two entities and they were, I mean, they, they just seem like vicious dogs, you know, and I was like, looking away, I didn’t want to interact with these things. I think, I think this is the report I called psycho something about a psycho-spiritual police Constable because of another entity I say, clearly came, you know, it’s how you perceive things and seem to be admonishing this other entity or two entities.

DIck (29:40):

But yeah, and, and what you’d said reminded me, I remember one other experience and this entity come down and it’s in the garden. And it wasn’t like a breakthrough experience, but this like really beautiful crystal clear being, I mean, really remarkable. And, and I’ve only encountered this kind of entity once. And I, I thought that this entity, this particular entity was had a very narrowly defined intellect and a chance to just put my hand up and sweep my hand through it. And I didn’t know, really when you do that through your own psychospiritual substance or, or your own, and that of the incident, you get trace a trail, you know, like repeats a tracer. But when I swept my own throats and say, I have never experienced a trace of trail, like it, there was just like hundreds of, you know trails of, of my own hand.

DIck (30:39):

And I, I don’t know, I just felt this was it wasn’t a very narrow intellect. This was I dunno, I felt it was a an entity that was full of love. You know, it was really, it’s just on a very different level, maybe even to the occult entities, you know, maybe they’re sensitive what it lacked him, wisdom it made up for in love. I probably should qualify that by saying, you know, if it had that much love, it probably qualified our liver wisdom, but it was, you know, perceptibly and qualitatively different entity to the cold masters, I think. Do I have a quote about the must-haves? I think I might have you want to read one, that would be great to hear about that Nicole Colt masters. Yeah. I think I’ve managed to pull them from the book. Let me just jump on to that.

DIck (31:37):

All right. Okay. So, so my respect and admiration for the wisdom and capacity of this type of entity is unlimited. I suspect they have mastered an awful lot from the world of the mundane and the arcane, and they imagine they themselves are still advancing and progressing slowly and by degrees on their own evolutionary arc. I did not doubt for one moment, the entity got to see me and understand me and did both instances possibly better than I presently see and understand myself. I mean, I’ve had encounters with these beans where I have, I have cried afterwards. I have tried to rip my heart out from my chest and an offering. I mean, the reaction that these beans can elicit from you, if, if you are sincere in your, you know, sincere and open in your interactions with them, it’s yeah. I mean, it’s the stuff of reverence and stuff, you know devout dare I say, it’s often devotion, you know, you really feel love for these beings.

Dane (32:50):

And can you describe what is it that makes like an, a cult master come across to you as a master? And what was some entities you describe as being, like you said, that they’re more, they’re narrow intellect, they’re simpler. What, what makes them different in your experience?

DIck (33:12):

They seem to have complete working knowledge of Fuman physiology and human psyche. It’s like they are the instruction manual for how we’re made, how we operate and all the little switches and leave us within our psyche that may cause operator. And they, they can manipulate that, or they can just, just seems like there’s nothing that they cannot do. I mean, let’s give an outline. I’ve had, I had quite a few experiences, breakthrough experiences, and I thought within those experiences that my lips have been sealed up, these entities seem to be able to impose this cuase I physical substance within your physiology. And, you know, I feel it coating the, the cheeks and the roof of my mouth and slowly, internally sealing on my mouth. But because of the highly mesmeric state I’m in now, I never, I never thought to sort of test the integrity of that seal, but it fell on my lips.

DIck (34:21):

My mouth was closed and I wouldn’t be able to open it if I tried anyway, it happened once that the same thing, you know, breakthrough experience looks like I’m in another world, the entities invested throughout my oral physiology and it’s coated my mouth with this, you know super thin, but, you know, strange I physical seal. I know I try to open my mouth, could not open my mouth at all. And, you know, I mean, had I panicked that mouth would develop another entity would have gone so quick, but because, you know, I’m, I’m working on the basis of, of, of trust and submission, you know, just, just remarkable then to take that step further. I’d had an experience with an entity same as a breakthrough experiences, wonderful visuals, et cetera. It sealed up my mouth. I can’t open my mouth and I’ve got this lung full of air.

DIck (35:22):

Not only is it sealed, my mouth is sealed up my nostrils as well, basically. I can’t breathe and I’m, I’m not trying to, I’ve got this lung full of air within men. And this lung full of air is obviously diminishing, diminishing and diminishing. And I know at some point I’m going to have to breathe, even though my nostrils are sealed at the mouth sealed up in tandem with that, the high-frequency ringing sound, let’s call it the tinnitus that the entities imposed on me. It’s just going off the scale. I mean, a frequency just incredible, and it reaches this crescendo, the exact point I need to nail. And then my nostrils are free. My milestone taken this much need to breath, and that’s taking this much need to breath. I’m kind of manipulated into speaking. And my voice sounds qualitive, Tivoli, so different, you know, through the strange medium. And I feel obliged to speak again and again and again. And, you know, it’s very clear, I’m under some kind of, it’s like I’m being dealt with as though I’m a puppet and physical being is the puppet master. And it’s just playing with me. I mean, I’m, I’m not pretending I’m not enjoying myself. It’s just delightful, you know, it’s fantastic, but I can see why some people upon hearing this might think, you know, you know, it’s a taboo.

Dane (36:56):

Yeah. I mean, it sounds a little scary and that, that leads me to one of my questions in here. Let’s see, I believe it’s the question. Number nine, you sometimes describe unpleasant challenging, or even terrifying encounters with the entities. And then a question 10, some of the experiences you described are so frightening. Was there ever a time that you were so shaken up that you didn’t, you didn’t want to continue anymore? And then what, what made you continue to do this after having these things sort of, you know, they put themselves into you, they’re probing you, they’re cutting off your air supply.

DIck (37:34):

Yeah. I mean, let let’s, we’ll come to questions nine and 10, but I think, I think certainly for the benefit of, of, of listeners and I need to emphasize this, that by far the majority of experiences and, and, and I’ve been playful and wonderful and entertaining beyond belief. And within that category, I would put the entity ceiling of my mouth within that category. I would put the entities giving up my mouth and my nostrils, the occult masters, as I came to call them. And I say, if you show any sense of panic, I don’t doubt that they will Intuit that so quickly and they’ll be gone. And I know that because I’ve, I’ve had, I’ve had experiences where midway through I’ve, I’ve called a Holter. Maybe we’ll come back to those cars. Cause they were really interesting. But yeah, by far by far, by far by far, the majority of experiences, just wonderful, playful, entertaining beyond belief.

DIck (38:34):

Like, you know, like, you know, when you’re a child and you’re laughing with glee, you know, and you’re beside yourself, that kind of form that kind of laughter like more fun than you can imagine, but there are some that are qualitatively different. So let’s come back to your question Dane, which as you say, you know, I’ve often occasionally described unpleasant challenging, or even terrified encounters with the entities. What compelled me to keep going. So I would say I completely bought into the idea of having devised my very own unsanctioned research program that I was undertaking very serious, very important and cutting edge research. My commitment was based on determination. I, and consider the challenge and encounters almost as a test of my resolve, something that had to be overcoming to make progress in my research now. And I think this has significance a little story about me, but back in my school days, and occasionally as a young adult, I suffered the rough of a bully by virtue of fixing them square in the eye until they look away knowing that whilst I’m unlikely to win a physical fight, I just gained a longer-lasting and to my mind, far more meaningful victory.

DIck (39:50):

And it was on operating on something like that mindset fellow in a challenging DMT entity encounter something like I’m not going to allow you to get away with that. I will return. And you know what, every time that I did return after a challenging encounter, it seemed to work the reward of a really wonderful rewarding encounter. So I saw the challenging ones as a test of my resolve. So if you want to proceed beyond this and see more, you’re going to have to come back, we’re going to put the Frighteners on you in this experience. And it’s going to test your resolve and yeah. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m glad I did. I was very determined but also very respectful and I didn’t feel I was acting foolhardy. I was, you know, I made it very clear or as best I could to these entities that I was conducting and documenting research, you know, I mean, I didn’t express that verbally, but you know, thought transference or trying to project what I’m thinking.

DIck (40:58):

And yeah. Question 10 is about some experience described as so frightening and you’re asking them was a time I was really shaken up and didn’t want to continue. And where the people close to me shaken up and didn’t want me to continue. So it’s often the case that with the MC that one’s ego reacts vocally and vigorously in rejection, any suggestion of commitment to DMT and somehow the user has to find a strategy to overcome that. So dealing with internal appeals to proceed, it’s pretty commonplace. However, there was this one occasion when I was home alone and those appeals where they were furtherly beseeching me not to proceed and rather stupidly I ignored those appeals. So what follows now is a quote from DMT or my Michael mine to one done. Yeah. Okay. So I’ll start. I, okay. I’m in the bedroom of, I’ve smoked DMT, sorry.

DIck (42:01):

I’m in the landing and I smoked DMT and I’m not clear whether there’s an entity there or not, but I’ll start from the quote. Okay. I know I was doing, dealing with the most unwelcome and unsavory idea. That’d become fixed in my head. How could I know if the idea was born of, as a gesture made to my mind, I was one bond from the dark substance of my own mind. How could I be sure of one of the other, and now could I be sure the two are not working together in Legion or as a combined in short, I was dealing with a really terrible busted of an idea that was refusing to budge from inside my head. Some things seemed intent on making, making me seem red and acting in a remote manner. I questioned how would I ever deal with this awful nonsense?

DIck (42:54):

I came to the very difficult, but very honest conclusion that buckling this up would not be in any way helpful. And there was on that basis. I realized I would need to approach my wife and broach the matter with her on the sooner I did it the better, because unbeknownst to my wife, she was the focus of those ill motive, machinations that Dan will speak plainly. And I gotta be honest that that was one hell of an experience that scarred my mental health. I mean, the scenario seemingly spelled the end of my research, it certainly resulted in a period of cessation I on reflection. I don’t think I’d ever, I don’t think I’d ever had a true appreciation of a darker terrain of my psyche and the delicacy with which, you know, when the sanity holds this subtle balance. But that experience gave me a startling insight into that particular matter of my mind. And I now see the mild mental scarring that resulted from that as somewhat analogous to it.

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Ep17 – The Synchronicities of Chapel Perilous

In the last episode, we covered Robert Anton Wilson’s guerilla ontology, and his work towards breaking down the reality tunnels of the politically powerful with paranoia.

Well, to paraphrase the ancient seers say “Karma can be a bitch,” because that paranoia that Wilson put out into the world would come back and haunt him. In 1971, RAW retreated from the political scene of Chicago, first heading to Mexico, and then later to Northern California. There he attempted to foucs on the life of the writer, and to engage in occult experimentation synthesizing the works of John Lily, Timothy Leary, and Aleister Crowley, as part of an ongoing shamanic quest for positive “brain change”

As an apparent direct-result of these experiemnts, Wilson went through nearly a decade of terrifying experiences involving demonic phantasms, synchronicities, and telepathic messages. He called it “Chapel Perilious”

Today on the Spectral Skull Session, we continue our exploration of the life and works of Robert Anton Wilson, with a focus on Wilson’s peak paranormal experiences. What is Chapel Perilious? How did Wilson find himself there? How did Wilson get out? All this and more in the next hour of the Spectral Skull Session.

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To recap from our last episode, we walked through Robert Anton Wilson’s life, from his birth in Brooklyn, to his employment with Playboy Magazine in Chicago. Wilson and the larger Discordian movement mobilized a counter-intelligence operation called “Operation Mindfuck” to shield his friend, Kerry Thornley from a law enforcement witchhunt.

The idea behind Operation Mindfuck was to seed the public discourse with rumors, allegations, and hints, suggesting widespread conspiracies linking various groups to both the Illuminati and the Discordians. The immediate purpose here was to reverse gaslight New Orleans District Attorny Jim Garrison’s office.

Last episode, we leanred that Wilson saw himself as engaged in “guerilla ontology.” And I found a quote from Wilson that sheds some more light on what exactly guerilla ontology is:

I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map.

So, I interpret Wilson as saying that he hoped that people would see through the paranoia. The dead-panned satire would eventually get so over-the-top, that people would catch on to the joke. And in doing so, they might let go of some of their other paranoias. In this way some of the dark mindset of distrust so prevalent in the late 1960s and 70s would dissipate.

The path that Wilson was on took a turn after Wilson left Playboy. Moving his family first to Mexico, for an extended vacation, and then to Northern California, Wilson began studying, among other things, the works of occultist Aleister Crowley.

Now, Aleister Crowley played a significant role in the American counter-culture of the 1970s, even though he had died in 1947. various counter-cultural thought leaders rediscovered his works and began reading his works, such as The book of Lies, and Magick Without Tears. Crowley has a bad reputation in some circles as a satanist. That is what I thought myself, but based on my reading – it looks like he wasn’t a Satanist. He tended towards atheism or an agnosticism.

Crowley didn’t seem to really have much of a theology himself. That is, theology as in “theory of God.” Crowley once said it didn’t matter if the entitites he contacted through ritual magick were real or not. He was more interested in combining western esotericism with eastern practices like yoga, tantra, and meditation,  to conduct inner journeys of self-discovery. That doesn’t rule out that Crowley may have been under the influence of negative spirits, possibly demons. As we see from Wilson’s experience – you don’t neccesarily have to believe in these entitites in order for them to believe in you.

In any event, this was how Wilson read Crowley. Because Wilson offers a summary of his interpretation of what Crowley was about. He says:

The Crowleyan system, very briefly, is a synthesis of three elements:

1. Western occultism. The secret “illuminated” teaching out of 19th century Rosicrucianism, possibly going back through Renaissance magick societies, medieval witchcraft, the Knights Templar, European Sufis, etc., to Gnosticism,and thence back possibly to the Eleusinian Mysteries and Egyptian cults. Basically, as Crowley says, this method consists of dangerous “physiological experiments”—using ritual, sometimes drugs, sometimes sex, to jolt the nervous system into “higher” functioning (new neurological circuits).

2. Eastern yoga, including meditation plus physical exercises to make meditation easier and more natural. Another system of activating higher circuits.

3. Modern scientific method. Crowley taught total skepticism about all results obtained, the keeping of careful objec- tive records of each “experiment,” and detached philosophical analysis after each stage of increased awareness.

Before you, Dear listener gets any ideas about following in RAW following in Crowley’s magickal footsteps, let me remind the audience of Crowley’s admonitions against practicing Magick without proper preparation. This warning is repeated by RAW in Cosmic Trigger:

Crowley always insisted that nobody should try his more advanced techniques without (a) being in excellent health, (b) being competent in at least one athletic skill, (c) being able to conduct experiments accurately in at least one science, (d) having a general knowledge of several sciences, (e) being able to pass an examination in formal logic and (f) being able to pass an examination in the history of philosophy, including Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Spiritualism, Comparative Theology, etc.

In any event, all of this gives us a sense of what Wilson saw himself as doing when he started putting the works of Aleister Crowley into practice.

In 1973, in [  ] Wilson began performing Aleister Crowley’s “Borness Ritual” a magickal ceremony based on a Greco-Egyptian rite of exorcism. As a counter-culturalist following in the wake of Timothy Leary and John Lily, he conducted this ritual while on LSD. In fact, Wilson suggests this was one of a very small number of occasions in which he did LSD.

In his autobiography, Wilson describes himself experiencing a series of “deaths and rebirths” into other modes of being – animal, divine, stellar. Wilson recognized the various entitites he encounters as the figures of Shiva and Kali, Pan, and Aphrodite, and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

As the experience became more intense, Wilson reported “the Shaman achieved a rush of Jungian archetyptes, strongly influenced by the imagery of Crowley’s invocation, but nonetheless having that peculiar quality of external reality and alie intelligence emphasized by Jung in his discussion of the archtypes.”

On another occasion, Wilson had a much darker experience:

This is from his second volume of his biography “Cosmic Trigger II: Down To Earth”:

In 1972, on a farm in Mendocino, I was preparing for the Phoenix Mass, a ritual designed by Aleister Crowley in which the magician tries to activate his “True Will”. I had taken 250 micrograms of acid, played Beethoven and left when I was “

Felt ready to my improvised altar and began the invocation:

East of the Altar see me stand

With Light and Musick in mine hand! 40


I held up a sacred cake and recited the next lines:”

“This Bread I eat. This Oath I swear

As I enflame myself with prayer:

“There is no grace: there is no guilt:

This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!”41”

““Suddenly dog-faced demons invaded the room, forming a ring around me. They were black and pretty creepy, and they drooled or foamed a bit on their mouths, and they looked as solid as the bed and desk behind them.

Oh damn it, I thought. Crowley always warned us that something like that could happen, but I never took it seriously. I thought that was another of his jokes. What am I doing now?At one level I was really scared; but on another level I had confidence in my difficult learned ability to work in the infernal ” To navigate regions of psychedelic spaces – or in the qliphotic, astral areas, or whatever one should call these particularly ugly reality tunnels.

I remembered something from H. P. Lovecraft: “Don’t CALL something that you can’t PUT DOWN.” That was not helpful. But then I remembered practicing something from a book….

“If you feed them, they become allies instead of enemies. ” I was concentrating on party meals and the altar was suddenly full of shrimp cocktails with hot red sauce. I hadn’t planned this and it amused me. I had unconsciously evoked one of my favorite snacks. I started giving the prawn cocktails to the demons. They took them

And then they all turned into nuns I remembered from my school days. They also shrunk into rather weird dwarfs. They were taller than me in school, but now I was taller than them. They had lost the ability to scare me.

“I started to laugh and realized that the ritual was ruined in a sense. (In another sense it had been a huge success …) I broke the circle and “grounded” the energy as the nuns disbanded. Then I lay on the bed and laughed like a bloody idiot for half an hour. It was one of the many, many times during which I was fully convinced that all of the “entities” invoked in magic are part of our own mind.

Then the room started shaking. The bed bounced like a scene from the exorcist, and the whole house seemed to shake to its foundations.

Just another California earthquake. Coincidence. It would be better not to even call it a synchronicity.”

This experience may have upset him more than he let on, Wilson seems to have put the LSD use behind him after this.  

Only a few days later, he performed another ritual, this time without LSD it was a kind of tantric meditation, which he says he was able to undertake with the help of “the most beautiful woman in the galaxy” that would be his wife, Arlen.

He doesn’t go into detail about what it was that he and Arlen did. But, he does hint that the secret is contained in Aleister Crowley’s book of lies. Chapter 69.

Yes, the chapter number is all you really need to know.

In any event, the next day he woke up from a dream and wrote down three words “Sirius is important”

And thus began his passage into Chapel Perilious. For the next few years, Wilson would be troubled by telepathic messages, apparently sent from beings living on a planet orbiting the star Sirius. The period during which he channeled their messages would correspond with a general uptick in synchroniticies, clairyvoyance and general strangeness.

Wilson does not go into much detail about what the Sirians – that is my term for the beings representing themselves as being from Sirius. He did say that on one occasion the Sirians told him “he lives the happiest who forgives the most” at a time when he was angry at his publishers for being slow with a check. But generally, Wilson says they assailed him with gibberish about space, time and eternity. Wilson speculates that perhaps he wasn’t able to understand their messages because he wasn’t advanced enough. He would be a student of quantum mechanics and a pop scholar on the topic of Bell’s theorem, non-locality, and other aspects of QM throughout his subsequent books and articles.

Let’s talk about the star Sirius. Sirius it should be noted, is known as the “dog star” but it is actually two stars. A normal star called Sirius A, and then a white dwarf called Sirius B.  In comparison, our own star is a Yellow Dwarf. Yellow Dwarfs are only a little bit larger than white dwarfs, which means it is possible that Sirius has a solar system like ours. However, it is not very likely that ordinary biological life would have survived on Sirius B, because white dwarfs are usually the burnt out cores of older stars, which means that any system orbiting Sirius B is probably a dead solar system. Of course that opens up the possibility that the Sirians are ghosts!

They could be the telepathic ghosts of deceased aliens. Or they could be spirits that are bound to a dead world and trying to get off, maybe by forming telepathic communion with us, they are able to translocate themselves across the interstellar void and come here and live vicariously through us. Move over, Bassir Assad. These Syrians have full-spectrum dominance.

Ok. You might say: alien ghosts that poses our brightest minds in order to get a foothold on our planet that is TOO FAR OUT even for Spectral Skull Session.

Well, I have good news for you: I found on Wikipedia that astronomers have been watching Sirius and since 1894 they have been seeing irregular patterns of brightening and dimming. It is now widely believed, although not entirely accepted, that there is a THIRD star in the Sirius system.

A 1995 study concluded that such a companion likely exists, with a mass of roughly 0.05 solar masses- a small red dwarf or large brown dwarf

So, if alien ghosts are too much for you, we can still hold out hope that the Sirians are located around a hypothetical Sirius C.

Now, Wilson was deeply troubled by the Sirians, being from Sirius, because he found a weird book that seemed to confirm their backstory. In 1976, Robert K.G. Temple, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society published 


THE SIRIUS MYSTERY: CONCLUSIVE NEW EVIDENCE OF ALIEN INFLUENCE ON THE ORIGINS OF HUMANKIND IN THE TRADITIONS OF AN AFRICAN TRIBE

In the book Sir Robert argued that Earth had been visited by an advanced race from a planet in the system of the double star, Sirius, around 4500 B.C. Temple based this assertion on the fact that definite and specific knowledge of the Sirius system can be found in the mythology of the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and some sur- viving African tribes. As near as I can tell, that definite and specific knowledge is the knowledge that Sirius is a doube-star system. You see, you can’t tell that Sirius is a double-star just by looking. You have to be fairly equipped 

Becomign more and more freaked out, Wilson began keeping a list of people who claimed to be in contact with alien civilians. They included:

The psychic, Uri Geller.

R. Buckminster Fuller, the most renowned scientist- philosopher alive, was the next to state that he sometimes  thinks he receives messages from interstellar telepaths.

Dr. Jack Sarfatti, a physicist, described receiving telepathic communications from extra-terrestrials as well.

RAW found a newspaper clipping of Dr. Saul-Paul Sirag, a famous physicis professor, saying  that 100 scientists have been receving telepathic communications, allegedly from aliens. Dr. Paul Sirag says that so far most of these scientists are only willing to discuss the matter with trusted colleagues, but that more of them lately are consider- ing the possibility of coming out of the closet and talking about it in public.

I can affirm this particular story – Professor of Religion, Diana Pasulka in her 2019 book American Cosmic: UFOs Religion, Technology, talks about an “inivisible college” of physicists and engineers who either believe in UFOs or secretly describe being actively in contact with them.

The psychoanalyist turned dolphin scholar, John Lilly, autho of the counter-cultural classic text “Programing and Meta-Programming in the Human BioComputer”  – a kind of cyber shamanic handbook for self-programming, had his own synchronicitious encounter in the early 1970s.

 The story is that he was flying to L.A And what do you when you’re an American psychnoaut bored on a long plane ride in the 1970s?  You do ketamine, which is a powerful dissociative narcotic. John Lily went into the bathroom and did just that. There he received a message from an extraterrestrial being, that it would prove its validity by shutting down the energy field of Los Angeles.

As he headed back to his seat, Lily heard the captain announce over the intercom that they would be diverting because of a power outage over Los Angeles.

Fascinated by the suggestions that he was part of a larger community of adepts, 

Wilson  leaned into the escalating weirdness .Following the advice of Aleister Crowley, he tried a practice that involves cultivating an alter ego. He declared himself a psychic and began reading tarot cards. He found that he was uncannily accurate at doing tarot readings.

Next, he began testing his psychic powers. He would get a new magazine in the mail and go straight to page 23 – a number he personally connected with synchronicities. And there he would find a line of prose that seemed to reference something from a dream he had had the night before.

He meditated and had visions of LSD guru Timothy Leary flying over the walls of his prison. Four years later he would learn that Timothy Leary had been practicing a form of meditation that involved visualizing himself as flying at the same time that Wilson had been meditating.

The strangeness also began to spread from Wilson to his family. Wilson note that some years earlier, while the family had been living in New Jersey, this was around 1965 just prior to their moving to Chicago for Wilson’s job at Playboy, that he and the entire family, saw a flying saucer land in the hill near their home. They looked at it through binoculars and the neighbors came over and looked at it too, they couldn’t decide what it was, but Wilson said that privately he thought it was probably just a helicopter.

Later that day, their four-year old son insisted he had encountered a green-skinned alien woman outside the house. She had apparently told him that he should study physics when he grows up.

Wilson dismissed all this, until years later, when a friend of the family came over. And casually mentioned that SHE had seen a UFO, that same month in 1965. Apparently, she had also been living in the New Jersey area.

On another occasion, Wilson says his kids were meditating in one room and he was reading in another.  There was a loud thump from the room. When Wilson checked the situation out, the children were adamant that his oldest daughter Luna had levitated herself to the opposite side of the room. Wilson says that neither he nor Luna were able to confirm this story.

Later, while meditating Wilson had a vision of Egypian Goddess Nuit. This, he would learn is a goddess associated with Sirius. But, as a scholar, Wilson also recognized Nuit as belonging to the same archtype as the Blessed Virgin Mary, so he continued praying to Nuit / The Virgin Mary addressing her as Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe. And then he had another vision where she told him that she had healed his leg.

Wilson had suffered polio as a child, and had lost some of the functionality in his leg. He also suffered from recurring bouts of leg pain, even in adulthood. Checking back with his mother, Wilson discovered that indeed his mother had made special devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary at that time, asking for a cure.

As all this was happening, Wilson was also working full-time as a writer. And although he had finished Illumintus! It wouldn’t actually start to make him any money for many years. During the interval between Playboy Magazine and the success of Illuminatus, Wilson’s family struggled with money. Wilson began to struggle psychologically in more ways one. And so he turned to meditation yet again. He writes:

I was doing Sufi heart-chakra exercises every day, to open myself more and more to love for all beings. It was not that I really wanted, or hoped, to become a saint, but merely that, without such self-work, I could easily crumble into the bundle of paranoia and self-pity that many a 1960s idealist had become during the Nixon Counter-Revolution. The heart chakra opened, at times, and light poured out, just like it says in the textbooks, and the Mystic loved every living creature. The whole world was my body. It was gorgeous.

Related to this, Wilson writes that probably the greatest thing that came of all his experiments with occult philosophy and brain change, was that the experiences of strange phenomena helped him to listen to his children. His family didn’t share his philosophical worldview. He had to make an effort to be open-minded and understand where they were coming from.  He writes:

A “miracle” then happened. I know this will be harder for the average American parent to believe than any of my other weird yarns, but my horde of self-willed and self-di- rected adolescents began to listen to me. Real communica- tion was established. Even though I was in my 40s and grey- ing in the beard, I was able to talk intelligently with four adolescents about our philosophical disagreements, and our mutual respect for each other grew by leaps and bounds.

But it wasn’t over yet. The High Weirdness seemed to peak in the late 1970s. Wilson had been friends with LSD guru Timothy Leary for years. Once Leary became imprisoned in California, Wilson started writing him letters. Wilson held Leary in very high regard and seems to have looked on him as a kind of mentor. He was careful NOT to mention the telepathic messages and weird synchronicities in his communications with Dr. Leary. He seems to have worried that it would come across to Leary as unhinged, and possibly spook his beloved icon.

But then one day Wilson received a letter from Dr. Leary that scared HIM.

and I quote:  

Dear Bob …
Loved your letter …
Are you in touch with teachings, methods, teachers, etc. that transmit Higher Intelligence. That you are totally hooked into?

I believe that Higher Intelligence can be contacted and have described how to do it and what They transmit, etc. Have you contacted Joanna. Ask Her to send you a copy of Terra II.

Joana was Timothy Leary’s wife. And Terra II was a book that Leary wrote while he was in prison. Apparently Learly believed HE WAS ALSO in telepathic communication with beings in outer space. Of Course, Wilson could not have known about this, because Leary was still writing it at the time and was trapped in a maximum security prison and frequently held in solitary confinement.

Eventually, Wilson was able to get in to the Prison in Vacaville, California to see Timothy Leary. Leary seemed to be doing really well even though he was facing life in prison. In another weird synchronicity, he told Wilson that he considered himself to be a reincarnation of Aleister Crowley.He also told Wilson that Wilson himself was part of a network of enlightened beings.

So, Wilson leaves Leary in prison, his mind totally blown. He even says that he doubted Leary’s high praise of himself, rather he thought that Leary was being too generous. But then he begian receiving letters from people all over the world who claimed to be in contact with ascended beings of all kinds:

For instance, one chap who claimed to be a representative of the real Illuminati, and who struck the Skeptic as quite possibly a professional con-man, took Arlen and me out to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in Berkeley and spent $70 on it. He assured us that he was protecting us at all times, dropped a few hints that he might be God, and slipped me $200 before he left, assuring us that our poverty would not continue much longer.

Wilson figured the guy was probably a con man, but the other shoe never dropped because Wilson never heard from the man ever again in his life.

Wilson was definitely weirded out by the many strange happenings in his life, but a couple factors eventually started to put the brakes on the strangeness.

One happened at a party. On October 1974, the Wilsons threw a party they called “Crowlymas” it was a celebration of the birthday of Aleister Crowley. Who came to this party? None other than French computer scientist-turned-UFOlogist, Jacque Vallee.

Wilson had had enough, and he turned to Vallee for guidance, unburdening on him his whole story of being in contact with Sirians and receiving messages and synchroniticies from the stars.

Vallee listened closely. And then he told Wilson that the evidence emerging suggested to him that the UFOs weren’t extraterrestrial at all, but that they seemed to be intelligent systems intent on convincing us that they are extraterrestrial. Vallee explained that Historically, these beings have always presented themselves in a fashion that fits into the background beliefs of the culture. In Medieval Europe they presented as Angels and little people. In the 19th century they presented as airship pilots, often falling from blimps. In the early 1950s they claimed to be from Venus, then when Soviet researchers revealed Venus to be a superhot, toxic mess, the Entitites began maintaining they were from other planets.

This exchange with Dr. Vallee had a sobering effect on Wilson, he began to become more skeptical of the messages he was receiving from the Entities.       It was this French scientist, helped Wilson get over his own state of awe over the phantasms that were communicating with him. He was, in a sense, intellectually exorcised by a quiet conversation with a man of science.

In turning away from the Sirians, Wilson reaffirmed a running theme of his own philosophy and fiction. This is what I call “anti-gnosis” – a gnostic is someone who maintains that knowledge is necessary and sufficient for salvation. There were early Christians and people running around the Mediterean in late antiquity who today we call “gnostics” – these people did not call themselves that, but they were a variety of cults and sects that sought secret revelations from spiritual powers, as a way to ensure a positive experience in the afterlife. Ancient gnostics often believed that the material world was a prison created by degenerate angels, called “Archons.” They believed that escaping from prison required learned magickal passwords that would allow you to unlock the gates so that your soul could return to the eternal and uncreated.

         So many people in search of spiritual enlightemnet today are gnostics – seeking communion with something Other, in the naïve assumption that the thing on the other side is benevolent. There are plenty of examples from the doomed followers of Heaven’s Gate, to more recenty, pop superstar Demi Lovatto who has been hawking an app made by UFO enthusiast, Steven Greer. Lovatto says the app  “ will teach you the protocols to connect to life form beyond our planet!!,”

So many of us easily succumb to the gnostic mindset, and present ourselves naked to the Cosmos, hat in hand, saying “tell me the answers to life the universe and everything.” There is often an implicit assumption that some kind of visual or emotional SPECTRE could solve the hard problems of metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality.

         But Wilson emphasized in his fiction, you cannot always trust  SPECTRES.  For those of you who were with us in the last episode of Spectral Skull Session, you will recall that the villains of Wilson’s novel “Illumintus!” were the Illuminati, who transformed people into religious fanatics by getting them high on marijauana or an extract of marijuana. This was part of an illuminizing experience, the sum total of which would convince people of the sacred importance of the Illuminati’s cause. They would become secret agents willing to die to advance their new programing.

         One larger Wilsonian message here: You cannot simply trust the messages you get from the Other Side. Because these psychic, communiques, are just spectral transmissions. You don’t neccesarily know WHO or WHAT is trying to hack into your soul. You don’t the function of the programming that these Entitites are trying to install into YOU.  So you don’t HAVE to trust the spectres when they tell you that “technology is the enemy of mankind” or “you have to kill yourself to board a spaceship.” The Spectes might be real, but they might not be on your side.

This episode is wrapping up. But an important question remains: for those of us who are active students of the occult, and paranormal. What else can we learn from Wilson’s experiences? this merely a cautionary tale? Wilson himself presents it as one, since he warns the reader against replicating his journey, but is that all this is? A morbid story of one man’s sideways trip through fear and paranoia?

Maybe there’s a bit more. Here is a quote from Wilson on Chapel Perilious:

Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sym- pathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intui- tion, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigar- ettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way.

………….. That’s the end of the quote.

To conclude our show: wherever the audience is with respect to your own Chapel –   whether you are on the threshold or in over your head – remember that you may not be able to fight the demons off on your own – with just your own intuition or gut instincts. After all, Wilson needed the wit of a writer, the heart of the Sufi Chakras, the love of his family and the insight of his friends, in order pass safely through his own haunted headspace.   

For Spectral Skull Session, this is Dane.

Stay Strange and Stay Sane.

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Ep15 – Show Notes – Plato, Euhemerism, a Global Superflood?

Today on Spectral Skull Session Part II of our investigation into Atlantis.

In the last episode I summarized what Plato says about Atlantis in  the two dialogues where he mentions it: Timaeus and Critias. The main points that came out of that discussion were:

  • Atlantis was an island inhabited by 10 human families who were descended from Poseidon.
  • They mastered agricultural, irrigation, and plumbing, including hot and cold water plumbing, but were not otherwise technologically advanced.
  • They were initially a simple people. They had collective wealth but prefered to live plainly. And that changed later in Atlantis’ history as the divine blood became diluted.
  • Atlantis waged a kind of world war against Athens, but they were ultimately defeated. The Gods punished Atlantis by sinking it into the ocean.
  • After Atlantis sank into the sea, the place where it had been becoming impassable to ships.

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In this episode, I want to move beyond the details of Plato’s story to ask, “did Atlantis really exist?” And ultimately, the answer is going to be a qualified ‘yes.’ So, hold on to your butts because we are about to tunnel through lore and legend, straight through the aeons of time and back to the edge of the ice ageThis is Spectral Skull Session.

So, it’s fun to think about Plato’s story of Atlantis and ask yourself, “how would I prove this?” if you think it’s true, what do you do?

You can’t interrogate Plato – because he’s dead.  But you can scrutinize Plato’s writings closely. It’s worth taking a moment to consider the arguments made for and against taking Plato’s story of Atlantis seriously.

On the one hand, most people have historically regarded Plato’s story of Atlantis as a mere legend, created by Plato to bolster the argument in Republic. The Republic is Plato’s best-known work, and in it, he describes the ideal city and spells out the policies that would be required to preserve it, so that justice and happiness could endure. Near the end of Republic, Plato describes a cyclical way in which cities break down. He describes a process of moving from rule by philosophers to rule by military leaders, to democracy, to tyranny. Now, the story of Atlantis as a story of a divine people who live peacefully but eventually fall to ruin, sounds like another version of what he says in Republic. So, clearly Plato is using Atlantis to reinforce his agenda. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Plato is reinforcing his theory of cyclical civlizations. Rememeber in the last episode, I mentioned that we’re told the reason why the story of Atlantis was lost was because human civilization is routinely plowed under by super-floods and space fires. Now, in Republic we get a story about how civilizations fall to ruin as their political order naturally decays over time. A central theme of Plato’s works here, if we group Republic with Timaus, seems to be the transient and cyclical nature of civilization.  There’s definitely anther theme that harmonizes with Republic here too – the importance of biological purity. In the Republic, Plato tells us that in the ideal city the best quality children are moved into the ranks of the ruling class, and the winners of races and contests are bred together to improve the quality of the cities stock. In Critias, we hear that the dilution of Poseidon’s blood line played a causal role in the degeneration of Atlantean society. So, there are definitely some historical and political lessons being taught here.

So the argument that is raised by Plato scholars for rejecting Atlantis as a mere myth goes like this: The Atlantis story is a story Plato would have wanted his audience to believe, because it serves as an example that supports his political vision. Therefore, we should not trust it.

I think that this is a bad argument. If we accept it, then anytime someone offers us empirical evidence to support their view, we should doubt the evidence.

I would think it could just as easily be that Plato got his idea of cyclical civilizations from hearing ancient stories about catastrophes like this one. So, just because this story fits into Plato’s agenda doesn’t mean we should discredit it as a fictional story.

Now, here is a somewhat better argument for dismissing Atlantis as fiction: People rightly point out that Plato is a trickster. He writes in allegory, often telling stories such as the parable of the cave, the ladder of love, the ring of gyges, the city in speech, to make his points.

The Cave for example is a story about people deep underground who are chained to a wall underneath the mouth of the cave, while opposite from them they can see shadows cast from a fire. They think the shadows represent real things. Indeed, they think shadows are what reality is. But they’re just watching a puppet show. And when one of them escapes and gets out of the cave he is astonished to see what reality is really like – with colors and three-dimensions. He goes back and tries to tell the other prisoners what he’s seen and they laugh at him. They point out that he isn’t even very good at interpreting the shadows anymore – being up in the light has changed the way he perceives information and thinks – and they take this as evidence that he’s a demented fool.

This is Plato’s most famous allegory. Plato uses it to try to defend the life of the philosopher. He says that the philosophers can access a higher reality, and see things as they really are. But, the philosopher isn’t good at winning people over who haven’t gone where he has gone with his mind. If you haven’t visited the higher realm of reality yourself then you can’t even imagine what is up there, and you’ll take anyone with knowledge of that realm to be a fool. Plato’s agenda here is probably showing, remember he ran an Academy and we can see his texts as introductions to his work that would hint at a secret teaching which the Academy could reveal to you.

Besides being a thrilling story that reinforces the Occult orientation to reality – by suggesting that there are higher realms of reality and that this world is only a shadowy reflection of the deeper reality, I am telling you the Parable of the Cave to make a point: Not only does Plato uses a lot of parables, allegories, and other story-telling devices, to make his points, but the very subject matter he writes about – hidden realities inaccessible to the masses – reinforce this idea that he is a trickster who cannot always be taken at face value.

But, I want to step in here with a thought of my own now – when Plato tells a story, he tells us that it is just a story. He doesn’t present a story as being true, like he does with Atlantis. Yes, Plato makes extensive use of parable and allegory, but when he does he has Socrates or someone else explicitly warn us to be wary of the story.

I actually ran this thought by a Plato scholar at a local University just before working on this podcast. He reminded me that there is a dialogue where Plato talks about reincarnation that sort of breaks the pattern. In the story, Meno, the elderly Socrates is talking to a younger debater and aspiring military leader, Meno. In order to convince Meno to take his studies seriously, Socrates tries to convince him that we have all possible knowledge already inside of us and we just need to unlock it. How could this be? Well, Socrates says, he’s heard “many wise men” and also some “inspired poets” talk about how when we die our souls go to an underowlrd. The worst among us are thrown into Hell. The best are made immortal Gods. And most of us get sent back to be reborn.

So here is a story that Socrates tells to make a point, and he doesn’t preface it as a work of fiction. In fact, he flat out says he thinks it is both “true and beautiful” Although he does say later on that he isn’t completely confident about every detail of the story.

But, my Plato scholar pointed out: it’s not like this is a fictional story. Plato might well have believed in it himself. He may have believed in reincarnation. I would direct the listener to episode 11 of spectal skull session – Psychedelic Mystery Beer Cults – where Chris and I discuss how the ancient Greek world was held together by some kind of mysterious rite. It has been argued recently, that the ancients undertook some kind of very powerful ritual that gave them direct access to the reality of life after death, possibly including reincarnation.

So, the story of Meno is NOT an example of Plato trying to pass a BLATANTLY false story off as true.

Now, also consider that he does the same thing in Timaeus. We talked in the last episode about how in Timaeus, the astronomer, Timaeus gives his very trippy account of the origin of the cosmos, including that it was crafted by a demiurge or divine craftsman, and that the fundamental building blocks of reality are triangles. Plato’s figure Timaeus is very careful to point out that this is a “likely story” –  a story he says has as much likelihood as being true as any other story about the heavens.

So, here again, We see Plato when he uses a STORY to make a point, he also mentions that he isn’t committed to the literal truth of the story.

This, as far as I know dear listener, is how Plato uses myths. He warns us that they are myths. But in the texts on Atlantis, Plato has his characters tell us no less than 20 times that they are repeating a true story.  Critias repeats OVER and OVER that he is telling the truth.

So, of these two arguments for not taking Atlantis seriously – the argument that it fits an agenda and the argument that Plato often uses allegory – neither argument works in my opinion. The agenda-fitting argument doesn’t work, because Plato’s agenda may have been set by his exposure to stories of cyclical destruction. The allegory argument doesn’t work – because Plato warns us when he is using allegory.

And another thing that points to the veracity of the text, I got this thought from Sisrob, who is a Plato scholar on Reddit. Sisrob pointed out how weird it is that Plato goes into so much detail about Atlantis, if is just an parable. Why describe the shape of the island, the moats, the plumbing, the temple of Poseiden, why do all that if it’s just a fake story that illustrates a point?

So, those are some reasons why I think we should be OPEN to taking Plato as telling a true story. Here is why I think we should think this way: look, even if Plato is telling the truth, it’s still the case that he got this story from someone who got it from Solon who got it from the Ancient Egyptians who happened to have records going back 9,000 years. They may have fumbled a lot of the details in that time. So, just because we say “look, it’s possible that Plato is reporting something that he really heard, does not mean that the full story that Plato records is literally true.”

Ok, So that is all the time I think we have to interrogate Plato’s text itself.

What are other methods for finding out the truth about Atlantis? Well, you might look to see if the story of Atlantis or something similar to Atlantis appears anywhere else. Do other people have ancient stories about decadent civilizations being destroyed  by floods precipitated by angry Gods?

Well, it turns out that they do. Many of our listeners will be familiar with the Book of Gensis, which contains the story of Noah. Noah was a holy man who narrowly escaped a flood sent by Elohim who was angry at the wickedness of men.

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.  So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”  But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

This is the account of Noah and his family.

Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.

Elohim warns Noah – build an ark, I’m flooding this place. Noah buids the arc, he collects two of each kind of animal. And he, his wife and kids and their spouses all spend 40 days floating.

So there is another famous flood story.

And folks, as much as I would LOOOVE to take credit for noticing this parallel between Atlantis and Genesis. I cannot take responsibility.

There is a man Ignatius Donnelly. He wrote THE book on Atlantis way back in 1890. It is titled “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World,”  Ignatius Donnelly.This is supposed to be THE book for Atlantis scholars.

Donnley points out that many many civilizations have a flood story:

For example, the native Mexican historian, Ixtlilxochitl (X-T-CHOTIL),  describes the Toltec legend of the Flood:

It is found in the histories of the Toltecs that this age and ‘first world’, as they call it, lasted 1716 years; that men were destroyed by tremendous rains and lightning from the sky, and even all the land, without the exception of anything, and the highest mountains, were covered up and submerged in water ‘fifteen cubits’ (caxtolmolatli); and here they added other fables of how men came to multiply from the few who escaped from this destruction in a “toptlipetlocali;” that this word nearly signifies a close chest; and how, after men had multiplied, they erected a very high “zacuali,” which is to−day a tower of great height, in order to take refuge in it should the second world (age) be destroyed. Presently their languages were confused, and, not being able to understand each other, they went to different parts of the earth.

“The Toltecs, consisting of seven friends, with their wives, who understood the same language, came to these parts, having first passed great land and seas, having lived in caves, and having endured great hardships in order to reach this land…. they wandered 104 years through different parts of the world before they reached Hue Hue Tlapalan, which was in Ce Tecpatl, 520 years after the Flood.” (“Ixtlilxochitl Relaciones,” in Kingsborough’s “Mex. Ant.,” vol. ix., pp. 321, 322.)

Other indigenious people of Mexico have a story about a man named CoxCox or Texpi, who saved his wife from a terrible flood by making a raft out of bark.

Donnelly points out that the Ancient Sumeriam poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, ALSO has a flood story in it. And so did certain ancient Babylonians, Chinese, Norse, plus the Irish and Hawaiians, just to name a few.

In fact, Donnelly claims that everyone has a world destroying flood myth, EXCEPT the Egyptians. And he says, look, they probably didn’t need a world destroying flood myth because they had the actual story, the story of Atlantis.

The point of all this discussion being: why are all these different people talking about massive, in some cases, civilization destroying floods? Well, maybe a big civilization destroying flood actually happened.

Honestly, I don’t know what the other reasonable possibilities could be: I guess it could be that floods just happen a lot, and maybe the idea of a world destroying flood is easy for anyone to come up with. I do recall living in the Missisippi valley region during the great Flood of ’93 that was a 500 year flood – a flood so bad that it is only supposed to happen every 500 years. And I remember thinking “what if it just keeps coming?” I was a small person at that time. So maybe people just naturally glom onto this horrifying idea of a world destroying flood.

Another possibility is that there was one really bad flood somewhere, and this flood inspired all the flood stories around the world. Maybe it was a really good story so it circulated. But if that’s the case, then I would say that we’re close enough for Atlantis to be true – if some civilization somewhere got flooded, and this is the reason why Plato wrote the myth of Atlantis, then I would say boom, Atlantis is true.

Ok. So there is a lot in Ignatius Donnelly’s book. I won’t go into it all. It’s a very old book, so you can get it for free off the internet which is how I got it. It should be noted that Donnelly makes some very bold claims in this book. For example, he claims that Atlantis was a kind of universal progenitor civilization. He thinks that the reason why the Egyptians and the Mayans in central America both build pyraminds is because they were both colonies of Atlantis.

I will say one more thing. Donnelly thinks the pillars of Hercules had to be the straits of gibralter, and he thinks Atlantis was the Azores. The Azores are these islands controlled by Portugal in the middle of the Atlantis ocean. They are very beautiful, volcanic islands. And yes they do have hot springs! Donnelly says, this connects the Azores as they exist today with the story of Atlantis, becase the Atlantenas are specifically mentioned by Plato as having hot and cold water.

maybe Atlantis was in the Azores. But, Donnelly talks about nautical ocean floor measurements in his book as evidence – he says that there’s a lot of shallow water around the Azores and that could be where Atlantis was. That’s why it’s described as being muddy after Atlantis sinks.

However, dear listener. I looked this up on Google Earth. And I looked at the ocean depth around these islands. There is, indeed, shallow water in a very large triangular formation around the Aozres. Large enough to contain a very nice sized country – like a France or Germany type nation if it were dry land. However, even between the islands I came up with measurements like 1,000 foot deep. That struck me as pretty deep.

So, I think the Azores should be considered one possible location for Atlantis. But the depth of the water – 1,000 foot speaks against it. Looking at Google maps, I am more partial to the Bahamas as the likely locaton of Atlantis, because the water around the Bahamas tends to be only a couple hundred meters deep.

Why do I think 1,000 feet is likely too deep to be the location of Atlantis?Well that brings me to our last source we will be discussing today. He is the contemporary King of the Atlantis researchers – Graham Hancock.

Graham Hancock is alive today, he is a journalist who has published a number of books arguing for advanced prehistorical civilizations. Hancock’s central thesis is that the Atlanteans did exist, and they were an advanced super-civilization.

But his main argument is that Atlantis was in the Azores. And he thinks it was a big island. In his view, the Azores islands as they exist today are the tips of the Mountains of Atlantis.

Well here is the thing with that. I looked at a map of the Azores on Google Earth, and the water between the islands is between 1,000 and 2,000 meters deep. Now, Ignatius Donnelly claims that a volcano could have sunk the islands, but that seems implausible to me.

So, what I think we should be looking for when we look for Atlantis, is some place that is between 10 and 100 meters underwater. It should be a place that was only submerged in the past 15,000 years.

.

I need to give the audience some informational background in order to explain Graham Hancock’s argument.

First of all, it is important to note that the most recent Ice Age began 2 million years ago and persisted until about 11,000 years ago. Meanwhile, modern humans have existed for over 100,000 years. We are pretty sure about this – they’ve found cave paintings that are 70,000 years old. This suggests that intelligent humans, capable of tools, creativity, and abstract thought, were roaming around the planet. In fact, for most of the existence of the human race, we were ice age dwelling people.

And so, there is a broad consensus that the end of the ice age was the triggered for the development of civilization. Before that it was too cold and dry over too much of the planet and civilizations could not be initiated. And at the tail end of the ice age was a weird little period called the Younger Dryas old spell.  This was a series of cataclysms. The Younger Dryas cold spell began with a catastrophic global flood, that scientists call “Meltwater Pula 1A,” it was followed by wild fluctuations in temperature, then extreme cold, this lasted a couple thousand years. At the end of the Younger Dryas there was ANOTHER global flood – Meltwater pula 1B. And then the Earth began warming up to a state more of less like what it is today.

The Younger Dryas period was a mass extinction event – there were massive die-offs of flora and fauna around the globe. And between the two meltwater pulses, the ocean rose 28 meters. Hang on to that number – 28 meters.

And some researchers have been claiming that these floods – there were two of them and they came about 1,000-3,000 years apart.  They’re called meltwater pulse 1A and 1B. The first was somewhere around 14,200 years ago. The second was around 11,350 years ago. Each one involved a sudden and catastrophic increase in global sea levels due to the melting of glacial ice.

Meltwater Pulse 1A  happened between 13,500 and 14,700 years ago.

Meltwater Pulse 1B happened between 11,500 and 11,200 years ago

28 meters, for you Americans out there, that’s 91 feet. If the sea level rose 28 meters today. Miami, Manhatten, St. Petersburg  would be completely underwater

So the consensus about archeologists seems to be that – for most of the time humans have been on this planet things were too inhospitable for us to build cities. Things were too difficult during the Ice age, and they even worse at the very end – the Younger Dryas Cold Spell. So this is why civilization only emerges recently, despite the human race having been around for over a 100,000 years.

Everything I am telling you so far is not occult or esoteric, it is not alternative history. This is just the consensus picture.

Consistent with this idea that human civilization could not have come into existence until after the Ice Age ended, the bulk of the evidence has, until recently, suggested that civilizations are all less than 10,000 years old.

So our first records of the Ancient Egyptians go back to 3,150 BCE.

For reference, Stonehenge is supposed to have been built in 3,000 BCE.

Norte Chico in Peru is believed to have been built in 4,000 BCE, but we don’t have written records.

The Mesopotamians in Iraq started with agriculture 6,500 years ago. But we don’t really have any written records from those early days.

The Jiahu in China go back 7,000

The Ain Ghazal in Jordan got started around 7,200 years ago.
They found the ruins of a town in Turkey, 7,500 BCE. So that would put it about 10,500 years ago.

So the point here is that we have little evidence of civilization 10,000 years ago. When you go back 10,000, everything tapers off. Suggesting that is when civilization essentially “got started”

And some researchers have been claiming that these floods – there were two of them and they came about 1,000-3,000 years apart.  They’re called meltwater pulse 1A and 1B. The first was somewhere around 14,200 years ago. The second was around 11,350 years ago. Each one involved a sudden and catastrophic increase in global sea levels due to the melting of glacial ice.

Meltwater Pulse 1A 13,500 and 14,700 years ago

Meltwater Pulse 1B 11,500 and 11,200 years ago

28 meters, for you Americans out there, that’s 91 feet. If the sea level rose 28 meters today. Miami, Manhatten, St. Petersburg  would be completely underwater

There is one weird exception, there’s this site in Syria, Goebkli Teppe that is 12,000 years old.  And it seems to be an astrological site, possibly some kind of Temple. They’ve found 43 megaliths at this site. These are mainly T-shaped pillars of soft limestone up to around 16 feet in height. They were excavated and transported from a stone quarry on the lower southwestern slope of the hill

This site, Goebkli Teppe, is where Graham Hancock’s work inserts itself into the consensus story. Hancock points out that IF Goebki Teppe is 12,000 years old, then we have proof that human civilization could have gotten started DURING the ice age.

And if human civilization got started DURING the ice age, then it is almost a guarantee that some human city was destroyed by the catastrophes of the Younger Dryas- either meltwater pulse 1A or 1B.

So, Graham Hancock points to the geological record – this indisputed record of global superfloods – and then he points back to Plato’s story of Atlantis. Remember how we said that Plato got Atlantis from Solon who got it from Egtptians who recorded it 9,000 years prior? Well, if you add 2,021 that’s our current year, to 9,000, and then another 100 years for Solon, you end up with a dating for Atlantis that brings it right back to the end of the Ice Age and around Meltwater Pulse 1B.

So that is, in my judgement, Hancock’s best argument for Atlantis being a true story.

Now, he doesn’t stop there. Postulating the existence of a global super-civlization before the Younger Dryas, Hancock wrote a book “Underworld” where he cataloged some of the ruins around the world that are submerged at a depth of less than 50 meters. Recall the world’s oceans are believed to have risen about 28 meters during Younger Dyras.

One of these ruins that I find fascinating is Yonaguni Jima, located off the shore of Japan. This appears to be a massive zigguerat and Temple-complex, the highest platform of which is submerged about 10 meters underwater.

Now, Graham Hancock gets push back on all of this work. People dispute whether Yonaguni Jima is manmade or whether it is a natural formation. It’s also important to note that structures can sink for localized reasons – because the ground level in that area is changing.

So this is probably why in his various books arguing for a universal progenitor civilization, Graham Hancock brings in other sources of evidence. For example, he argues that various ancient structures around the world are oriented point towards the constellation Orion, or at least where Orion would have been tens of thousands of years ago. The widespread orientation of structures to an ancient location of Orion is supposed to be evidence that the same civilization built these structures.

Hancock also brings in astronomy – pointing to evidence that the younger Dryas was caused by a comet that hit Greenland, and trying to bring in orbial periods to make sense of the Younger Dryas cold spell – he makes the case this large comet was on a path that intersected with Earth, and it broke up due to Earth’s gravitational field. The pieces kept moving in orbit, and each successive time they swang around they rammed into Earth again, and this is why the Younger Dryas was thousands of years of cold and wet.

He also argues the Sphinx is older than recognized… it’s actually supposedly a relic from pre-Ice Age Civilization.

He has a wide variety of lines of argumentation. I won’t go into them here. The big criticisms Graham Hancock gets are that he’s not an academic researcher and his work reeks of pattern-seeking. So there’s so many ancient structures out there that you can form a hypothesis – like “Ancient Structures are oriented to Orion” and then if you only pay attention to a subset of the Ancient Structures, you can build your case.

So, I would like to give a quick tentative defense of Graham Hancock’s work. He’s a journalist, not a scientist or historical scholar. I think it’s perfectly fine to pursue novel truth outside of the Academy. And I think that investigative journalism like the work Hancock does fits into the journalistic tradition – journalists find interesting patterns that present themselves in a way that a literate person can perceive them with a single book’s worth of reading.  The journalist uses books and articles to point and say “hey look at this pattern here, look at this interesting important thing no one else is seeing.” And if other people see it too and feel compelled to do so, then they can bring their own methodologies to bear on the subject matter.

We’re nearing the end of this episode, so I want to give you my sense of what we can take from the Atlantis story.

I’ve presented you with Plato’s story, Donnelly’s story about a civilization located in the Azores, and Graham Hancock’s story about a universal progenitor civilization destroyed by the ice Age.

And my own view is that the basic evidence supplied by scientists, and put together by Graham Hancock, combined with Ignatiu Donnelly’s notes on the universal flood story, supports some version of Plato’s story.

Here’s what we know:

  1. Plato says Atlantis was flooded a little over 11,000 years ago.
  2. The Scientists agree that there was a cataclysmic flood 11,000 years ago.
  3. Ancient Civilizations around the world have stories about a cataclysmic flood.
  4. The ruin of Gobelki Teppe suggests that human beings could have built cities during the Ice Age.

These points together suggest to me that yes, probably there was at least one city built during the ice age. It was destroyed by a massive flood. And the survivors of that flood told tales that were passed around for the rest of human history.

If stories of an urban flood are what caused Plato to tell HIS story about Atlantis, then I say “good enough” I don’t care if they were really named Atlantis. I don’t care if they had plumbing or if they were descended from poseidein. I’m content to have my mind blown by the very plausible possibility of a prehistoric urban center that was drowned by glacial meltwater.

Thank you for listening to the Spectral Skull session.

Tune in next week. We will be talking about the novelist, alleged black magican, and counter-cultural icon Robert Anton Wilson, and his struggle with psychic messages, paranoia and conspiracy theories during the heady days of the early 1970s.

Until next time, I am Dane

Stay Strange and Stay Sane

Sources

Donnelly, Ignatius. Atlantis: The Antideluvian World

Hancock, Graham. Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

Joe Rogan Experience, episodes No. 551, No. 725, No. 872, No. 961, No. 1284.

Plato, Critias

Plato, Timaeus

City Archives, Atlantis 11,500 B.C.E. [accessed via Library of Alexandria website circa 48 B.C.E ] *???*

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Episode 12 – Show Notes

Episode 12 – Show Notes – UFO Disclosure

Fast Movers, Transmedium Vehicles, Psychological Operations, Alien Control Systems,  The Galatic Federation. All that and more to be discussed in the next hour on this, your only reliable source for investigations of the weird, wild, wet and esoteric, the Spectral Skull Session.

Main Ideas:

  1. News roundup. [Chris: add the Israeli Space Force Leader’s story]
    1. A story , French scientist  and UFO expert Jacques Vallee interview on Joe Rogan, and former Israeli space security chief revelations about a Galatic Federation.
    1. Something I want to say: we have an international cornucopia of sources today. We have the Pentagon, we have a French scientist with ties to silicon valley, and we have an Israeli government source, and they’re all saying that UFOs are real.  Building on our previous episode on UFOs or UAVs, where we brought you the top tier of sources in journalism – the New York Times and Washington Post – now we are bringing you multiple sources from different communities: civilian, military, silicon valley, foreign and domenstic.We even have a peer-reviewed research journal and a no hr A wide array of different sources with different methods affirming the reality of the UFO phenomena.

 Let’s introduce Vallee’s idea that there are multiple components to the phenomenon:

  • (1) Unexplained Encounters with (apparently) physical vehicles
    • (2) Abductions – involving seemingly non-physical experiences
      • ‘Stopped time’ seems physically impossible.
      • But cannot be discounted because they are widely reported, historical, and trans-cultural.
    • (3) Human manipulation – people creating manipulative narratives around the phenomenon.
  • Discussion: We discuss the Pentagon and Intelligence Community’s involvement in light of Vallee’s claim that the phenomena is cloaked and distorted by an element of human deception and manipulation.
    • Is this a government psyop to ‘out’ unreliable Pentagon workers?
    • Or is it a trans-national military/intelligence project to create a new social movement?
    • Chris’ hypothesis that the Pentagon wants to bring our divided society together.
    • Dane will say: but in doing so, they risk creating a new religion.

Source, Tim McMillian “Fast Movers and Transmedium Vehicles – The Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force,” 12/2/20, The Debrief.  https://thedebrief.org/fast-movers-and-transmedium-vehicles-the-pentagons-uap-task-force/(ACCESSED: 12/9/20)

About The Debrief: “The Debrief was launched to explore and report on developments in science, defense and intelligence, frontier technology, and knowledge that exists on the periphery of human understanding.” (from their website)

Summary:

  1. The Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has been briefing military intelligence ‘stakeholders’ (?), lawmakers, and military leadership about “mysterious airborne objects that defy conventional explanations. “
  2. The Secretary of Defense previously acknowledged (August, 2020) that “the UAPTF’s mission will be to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”  (link to SecDef statement)
  3. A classified intelligence report is being circulated that includes “clear photographic evidence”  and the task force is investigating whether the objects are operated by “intelligence of unknown origin” (
  4. Military contractor, Dr. Hal Puthoff, says he gave a presentation (briefing) to Senate Armed Service Committee Staffers  [note: what is the purpose of the SASC? Who are their staffers?]
  5. The Pentagon spokesperson  Susan Gough declined to talk about UAPs or UAPTF to The Debrief. saying, “To maintain operations security, which includes not disseminating information publicly that may be useful to our adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examination of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP – and that includes not discussing the UAPTF publicly, also”
  6. The report included a new photo of a “unidentified silver “cube-shaped” object” that was photographed on a cell phone by an F/A-18 pilot. The object was hovering motionless when encountered. It was 30,000 – 35,000 feet and aproxomiately 1,000 feet from the fighter jet. The photo “depicted an apparent aerospace vehicle described as a large equilateral triangle with rounded or “blunted” edges and large, perfectly spherical white “lights” in each corner.” It was taken 201 off the East Coast. It emerged from the ocean and flew up at a 90 degree angle. The report discussed it as an Underwater Submersible Object or Transmedium vehicle. 
  7. Various sources indicated the photograph of the object had been disseminated on DoD, CIA, and NSA intranets.
  8. They have video of a UAP popping in and out of the water.
  9. Some ex-military officers have said the stories of radar tracking of UAPs sound  suspiciously similar to a top-secret electronic warfare program they were involved with in the 1960s, codenamed PALLADIUM.”

Dane’s Thoughts: There is not a lot here that is new. It is more confirmation that the Pentagon and intelligence community is interested in UFOs. There is confirmation that these things can move under water and pop up from the water to fly through the air.

About the Source: The reporting here relies on a lot of anonymous sources. This is not as good as the New York Times articles we covered previously because we have to trust The Debrief not to be lying, and of course, the people who spoke to The Debrief have little incentive not to lie.

Source Jacques Vallée, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” 12/4/2020

About The Source: Vallée is an 81-year old computer scientist, venture capitalist. He has consulted for the Pentagon. He is a member of the Bigelow Aerospace Advisory Board. He has written a number of books on UFOs.

Summary:

  1. Vallée mentioned that UFO abductees report that time has stopped. This suggests highly advanced aliens.
  2. He says they recovered debris from a crashed UFO in Brasil and the silicon valley community has done research on it and found that it is composed of A matrix of silicdates with a a strange assortment of isotopes.
  3. He also discussed his view that the visitations are a “scheduled reinforcement” program or that “they are teaching us.” He invoked the irregular appearances as a necessary component of
  4. Jamie Fox, director of UFO documentary The Phenomenon, also appeared alongside Vallee and introduced the idea that the aliens are concerned about the danger we pose with our technological development.

SOURCE: Vallee, J.Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 4 No. 1.pp. 105 – 117. (1990) Peragon Press https://web.archive.org/web/20160303233102/http://www.jacquesvallee.net/bookdocs/arguments.pdf ACCESSED: 12/9/20

  1. Vallée published a scientific paper (1990) titled “Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Theory.”  He defines the ETH hypothesis as the view that intelligent extraterrestrial organisms are coming to earth and performing reconnaissance and sampling as part of scientific exploration.
  2.  Vallee says: (1) there are too many landing reports for it to be consistent with the scientific needs of an advanced species. Assuming that most close encounters go unreported, he infers 14 million alien landings in a 40 year period. He says this is excessive. (2) The aliens are reported as humanoid, but this is unlikely to have happened naturally, (3) There are too many alien abduction stories and the reports involve too much interest in tissue collection, especially blood, and sexual activity. An advanced race would not need to collect massive amounts of human biological material since it could clone from small samples. (4) The historical evidence suggests this has been going on forever, “It is difficult to find a culture that does not have an ancient tradition of little people who fly through the sky and abduct humans” (5) The alien ships do things that are physically impossible. They appear and disappear, change shape continuously, and merge with other objects”
  3.  So Vallee offers the alternative theories that the aliens could be “Earth Lights,” an “unrecognized terrestrial phenomenon which impresses the consciousness of the witness to take the form of an extended menta image, possibly a mythological figure.” He also suggests a “control system” that could be “training us towards a new type of behavior”. A collective unconscious project of mankind’s survival needs. Finally, inter-dimensional travel.

From Wikipedia: “Vallée also proposes that a secondary aspect of the UFO phenomenon involves human manipulation by humans. Witnesses of UFO phenomena undergo a manipulative and staged spectacle, meant to alter their belief system, and eventually, in fluence human society by suggesting alien intervention from outer space. The ultimate motivation for this deception is probably a projected major change of human society, the breaking down of old belief systems and the implementation of new ones. Vallée states that the evidence, if carefully analyzed, suggests an underlying plan for the deception of mankind by means of unknown, highly advanced methods.”

Also Note:

  1. Vallee has written multiple books warning that UFOs and Alien Abductions are NOT what they present / are presented as being, including “Messengers of Deception” and “Revelations: Human Contact and Alien Deception.”
  2. Vallee covered Heaven’s Gate in his book “Messengers of Deception” and warned about it, before they committed mass suicide.

OTHER IDEAS FOR DISCUSSION:

Chris: reiterate alien technology back engineered theory.

Dane: transitor could not have been back engineered from UFOs because transitor is from 1939. But could we have gotten it from the Nazis in operation paperclip?

Background on Operation Paperclip – Who, What, Why, When

Dane: Be sure to mention some of the weird Occult stuff around early NASA – Jack Parson’s connection to Aleister Crowley.

Could the Nazis have had captured UFO technology?

Die Glocke – Who, What, Why, Where, When

Final Thought: whatever is going on, it seems like UFOs are tied up with technology. Secrecy. And social control.


Chris’ Idea that the government is going to use UFOs as a way to bring us all together.

Dane: and maybe it is a way to get us oriented around cleaning up the environment.  Create a new religion around “aliens say we are destroying the world so we have to clean up”

END

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Episode 11 – Show Notes

The thematic questions of this episode:

  1. Did the ancient Greeks have a secret, psychedelic ritual that allowed them to merge with, or become one of, the gods?
  2. Has a close historical relationship between psychedelics and meaningful spiritual practice been lost, hidden, or suppressed?
  3. Will increased use of psychedelic drugs herald a revival of spirituality in America…or the unleashing of destabilizing psychic forces?

Deep questions to explore in Discussion:

  1. Could these rituals have played a role in the birth of philosophy and higher levels of abstract thinking? Could psychedelics have been the accelerant that drove classical civilization to the heights it achieved?
  2. Brian Muraresku describes the psychedelic kykian as a necessary component in a religious practice that “held the ancient world together” – suggesting that when psychedelics are integrated into communal spiritual practices, then they can unlock an incredible social power. He also contrasts the power of the Eluesian Mysteries with the Roman Catholic Church, which he describes as a stale, bureaucratic social force, that “invented the war on drugs” and perpetuated that war throughout millenia as a component of social control. Does this not imply that psychedelic religion has the potential to unleash radical social change?
  3. How important is it to have a communal and ritualistic practice around the psychedelic? Does this not invoke Timothy Leary’s (1961) warnings about the importance of “set and setting” in the use of LSD?  Should people maybe NOT be taking these drugs without first programming themselves ?
  4. Related to this question – could there be certain potions or substances that allow us to talk with beings from another dimension or a higher realm? And could it be that set and setting (in Leary’s language) or communal practice and ritual are essential to calibrating oneself for the experience that they’re going to have?
  5. Many scholars have suggested that the ancient Greeks saw themselves as “merging” with Gods or becoming Gods because of these drugs. Can we contemplate a theology in which there are secret processes for obtaining immortality? What would this imply for all the people who aren’t lucky enough – rich enough or connected enough – to gain access to these secret processes.

Content notes:

  1. Muraresku, a trained classicist intuited a connection between drugs and religion. He read about the studies being done on psychedelics as a treatment for end-of-life anxiety in the terminaly ill. He hypothesized that the immortality (or sense of immortality) conferred by initiates to the Elusian Mysteries was a healing psychedelic vision.
  2. As noted in Muraresku’s book, John Hopkins University researchers published results on a study of psilocybin’s effects on anxiety and depression in cancer patients. They found 87 % of the 29 volunteers reporting increased life-satisfaction or well-being for months afterward. 70% of participants reported that their single experience with psychedelics was in the top five of the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, comparing it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Psychadelic Research unit has said that the drug-induced ecstasy of psychadelics, is “virtually identical” to that reported by prophets and visionaries throughout recorded history.
  3. One of the people in the John Hopkins Study was Dinah a woman diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She laid on a couch with a sleep shade over her eyes and listening to classical music on headphones. Then she went on a six-hour psychedelic journey. She saw “a big black lump like coal under my rib cage, on the lefthand side, which was not where the cancer was.” She yelled at it and it vanished. She drifted away “living in the music like a river” when she felt the love of “God” enter her. She described a process of the “dissolution of the self” and the “melting away of barriers” including a moment where concepts like internal and external no longer held true. And then she realized that “birth and death don’t actually have any meaning” because she enjoys a state of always being she described as “always being. So being now and always. There’s no beginning and no end. Every moment is an eternity of its own.”
  4. So, Muraresku said, this reminds me of what people reported after they were initiated into the Eleusian Mysteries. L-OOOH-SIN-IAN
  5. Sources say “those who participated in the mysteries were forever changed for the better and that they no longer feared death.” (https://www.ancient.eu/article/32/the-eleusinian-mysteries-the-rites-of-demeter/)
  6. Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue on the immortality of the soul, takes place in the context of the mysteries. Plato alludes to a “blessed sight and vision” he witnessed “in a state of perfection”  And Plato writes: ” our mysteries had a very real meaning: he that has been purified and initiated shall dwell with the gods”
  7. Cicero, the Roman Statesman and philosopher wrote in a letter: 

    “For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has       produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by        means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope.”
  8. Greek philosopher and historian, Plutarch had this to say about the mysteries: “because of those sacred and faithful promises given in the mysteries…we hold it firmly for an undoubted truth that our soul is incorruptible and immortal. Let us behave ourselves accordingly”(Hamilton, 179). Further, he says, “When a man dies he is like those who are initiated into the mysteries. Our whole life is a journey by tortuous ways without outlet. At the moment of qutting it come terrors, shuddering fear, amazement. Then a light that moves to meet you, pure meadows that receive you, songs and dances and holy apparations” (Hamilton, 179)
  9. The playwrit, Aeschylus, was charged with revealing the mysteries by alluding to them in a play.
  10. So, how could all this have come about? It sounds very much like the experiences that people had in the John Hopkins psychedelic mushroom experiments. And that’s a major line of argument in Muraresku’s book: the experiences are so powerful and widely reported by highly reputed sources that they must have involved a psychedelic substance.
  11. Let’s give some background on the Eleusinian Mysteries: Eleusinian Mysteries (L-OOH-SINIAN) (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια, romanizedEleusínia Mustḗria) were initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at the Panhellenic Sanctuary of Eleusis in ancient Greece. They are the “most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece”.[1] They lasted from 600 BCE – 392.  [Wikipedia]
  12. All the elites of the ancient world, including Plato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, would travel to Elusis at some time in their life – a Greek town 14 miles west of Athens. There they had a “direct encounter with the goddess” and lost all fear of death. We know that the Elusian Mysteries involved a pilgrimage walk from Athens (only 14 miles), and they involved ritualistic ceremonies, certain portions of which had to be kept secret according to Greek law, on pain of death. There were both Minor and Greater Mysteries.  We know that the Minor Mysteries revolved around the story of Diameter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter Persephone, and the story of Persephone going down into the underworld. No one knows what the Elusian Mysteries consisted of, because the secret was kept for 2,000 years. But, they were said to have held the panhellenistic world together. The Roman emperor Theodosius ended the mysteries In 392 A.D. as part of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. In 396, Alaric The Visigoth invaded Greece and destroyed the Telesterion – which was the main hall at Elusis where the Greater Mysteries were celebrated. 
  13. Those who did write about Elusian Mysteries would talk: (1) a vision, (2) an initiation into a secret, and (3) a kykeon (mixed drink), and (4) becoming immortal.  [Muraresku]
  14. Because Demeter is an agrarian God. He thinks that the kykian must have involved wheat or barley. Some sources say that ingredients included barley and pennyroyal. Muraresku argues that the ancient Greeks were able to brew a psychedelic kykian by using ergot – a fungus that grows on wheat. This would be further consistent with the Elusian Mysteries being an agricultural ritual.
  15. But ergot produces about two dozen alkaloids. And none of them have ever been isolated and found to produce the same kinds of effects as mushrooms.
  16. Muraresku uses the story of Circe as evidence that psychedelic kykian or pharmakon were common.
  17. “Have a look at line 290 where Homer mentions the pharmaka. He even uses the noun kukeo for the ‘mixed potion’ that Circe uses to turn the men into pigs. Just like the kukeon from Eleusis.” The director knows exactly which passage I’m referring to and begins reading the ancient hexameter out loud. The music of the language transports me to younger days. In English, Hermes’s classic warning to Odysseus goes like this: “she [Circe] will mix thee a potion (kukeo), and cast drugs (pharmaka) into the food.” I ask the director to flip back another page, just to the right of my one-word note to self, “potion.”
  18. The word Kukeo used in the original Greek, is similar to the word for the drink consumed at Elusis, Kykeon. And the Pharmaka means drugs. (note: in my version of Homer’s Oddyssy, it describes Circe as Polypharmakos a potion-brewer – Dane.)
  19. Muraresku uses Euripdes Bacchae as evidence that ritualistic psychedelic use was a widespread element of Greek society. 
  20. Muraresku has only a teeny bit of forensic evidence: they found ergot in the jaw of a dead man in ancient Spain. They found evidence of psychedelic kykian in a jar in the same area of spain: Hellenic community of Emporion, in modern Catalonia. It was founded in 575 B.C., by pioneers from Ionia, which was another Greek city-state. There the Greeks were mixing with Phocaeans – another ancient people now extinct – and local Iberians. There was a multi-cultural mileu in that community. The claim is that these people were involved in a duplication of the Elusian Mysteries copied and transported to Iberia. They think that because the mixing vessels that they find in the ruins of Emporion have symbolism suggestive of the cult of Diameter and Peresphone.   This is seen as evidence of psychedelic use by the ancient Greeks.
  21. Patrick McGovern, the scientific director of biochemical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania has used chemical analysis to prove that many ancient beers contained psychoactive compounds other than alcohol.  The topic is discussed in his book Ancient Brews.
  22. So we can summarize the Muraresku’s argument:
    1. There’s the similarity between what psychedelic users report and what was reported about the mysteries.
    2. There’s the L-OOH-SINIAN mysteries being managed by a mystery cult dedicated to an agrarian God.
    3. There’s psychadelics found at other agrarian cults.
    4. There’s the textual evidence from Homer’s Oddyssy and Euripides’ plays indicating that psychoactive rituals may have been widespread in the ancient Hellenistic world.
    5. There is evidence of psychoactive beers in the ancient world.
  23.  Muraresku pushes the idea that religions throughout history were using drugs religiously. In fact, the second part of his book argues that the Ancient Greeks passed on a version of their kykian to the early Greek-speaking Christians. He thinks the original eucharist was a psychedelic ritual.  Some Christian groups used mind altering substances in their version of the Eucharist. They may have used toad venom. The Catholic Church suppressed these groups. Giordiano Bruno used a potion and had sci-fi-like visions of other planets. He was burned at the stake. The Cathars may have used a psychedelic potion. Medieval witches may have used psychedelics.
  24. Muraresku pushes the idea that psychadelics can offer real comfort, and meaning, while traditional religious practices are stale and their comforts ineffective. They succeeded because they destroyed their competition. If we use psychadelics we are returning to the religion that has no name, because it is the universal experience of transcendence shared by people using psychadelics throughout history.
  25. I want to talk about how gung-ho Muraresku is about the need for psychadelics to have widespread religious experiences. One critical book review complained that he is anti-religion and seems to think that only drugs can provide an authentic religious experience. But, I read Muraresku as saying that only the use of psychadelics (or some other physiological technique for inducing altered states) can make large swathes of society find religious practices deeply meaningful.
  26. END WITH ADOLOUS HUXLEY:

    In 1958, psychedelic pioneer, Adolous Huxley, wrote that psychadelics have the power to bring about a revolution in spirituality:

    “My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.31

Sources

Brian C. Muraresku. “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name.” Apple Books.

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Unidentified Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

This post elaborates on some of the themes from Episode Five: Pentagon UAV Investigations…..

As I see it, we Americans (and probably also other nationals) do not do a very good job of thinking critically about the UAV “phenomenon” (as it is called in the recent Jamie Fox documentary). We tend to limit ourselves to a couple possible stories:

  1. The people involved are lying, stupid or crazy.

    OR

  2. Aliens!

The dichotomization here is as strong as it is irrational. To borrow a line from Steve Martin, “at this point you are probably thinking I’m either a genius or an ax murderer – but why not both?” When it comes to UAVs we really ought to begin by asking ourselves why we feel compelled to force a binary one-dimensional frame onto a Phenomenon that so often presents itself as being literally from dimensions beyond the three to four we’re comfortable with. Hold onto your butts, because this where things start to get weird:

Let’s begin with old fashioned “low” or vulgar weirdness: could the New York Times, and possibly also many members of the U.S. Navy, have been duped by a Pentagon disinformation project? As Chris and I discussed in episode five, there are some reasons for doubting the bonafides of Luis Elizondo, who claims he used to be director of the Advanced Aerospace Identification Program. There is also this Eric W. Davis and his eclectic set of research interests. As discussed in the show, Dr. Davis has worked on psychic teleportation among other ‘far out’ research topics. Something does not quite sit right here. Is it so unlikely that the Pentagon may be totally flabberghasted by UAVs – clueless, spooked, and maybe a bit scared? Could the Pentagon be so scared that they think the best course of action is to strongly and falsely imply they know more than they’re letting on? I don’t see why this possibility is any crazier than “Aliens!”

 As I see it, here is a very non-comprehensive list of the possible ways the Pentagon situation could be a disinformation campaign of some kind:

 1.) The Pentagon could be smoking out those of their employees who cannot keep their big mouths shut. Perhaps they make everyone who gets to a certain level of access sit down and watch a fictional briefing about Area 51 and Roswell. The briefing would be presented as real. Pentagon officials in the know would say “and you can’t tell ANYBODY!”  They would do this knowing that some people can’t keep a secret. Those fools who blab would get their security clearance revoked. Or worse, they would end up  “shadow banned” by the Pentagon. That is, they might no longer have a job but they be the last ones to know it. They might show up day-after-day to an empty office. Their supervisor stops checking in. They receive endless, meaningless paperwork. When they go to the Pentagon archives and request classified files all they ever get back is gibberish. Gradually their work life degrades into a kind of kafkasque nightmare that gradually drives them further away from consensus reality. The more isolated and mistreated they are at work, the more their resentment and dysfunctionality grows. The more their dysfunctionality grows, the less plausible their stories are. This way any good intelligence they leak is already discredited. 

2.) The Pentagon could have just a smidgen of UFO info and be trying to smoke out or spook foreign adversaries. The growing drip of leaks about crashed UAVs and “metal alloys” is their way of hinting “oh we have crashed vehicles and we are studying them because whoever back-engineers this stuff first will have a big tactical advantage in combat.” The thought here is that they don’t want the Chinese or Russians to feel too confident about their secret crashed UFO projects. If you don’t have a secret alien super-weapon, and you think your adversary does, then your best move is to bluff.

3.) They are planning a massive UFO-related Psyop against China or Russia and they want to seed the world with this idea that UFOs are real. New York Times Journalist, Leslie Kean, has suggested in her prior book “UFOs” that the Roswell crash was a Sovier psyop. I wouldn’t put this past our governments.

4.) They are trying to cover-up a secret Pentagon research program by conflating true info about UAVs with total BS garbage data. I think this is probably the most plausible theory. Here the idea is: the government actually has some kind of next-generation drone and they’ve been testing it on their own naval forces. When aircrew leak stories about it, they obfuscate those stories by spinning massive balls of yarn around the topic. [note: an important dimension of this story. Why is Cmdr. David Fravor so prominent in news and podcast sources? And why does he always fail to note that the UAV we see in the declassified Pentagon photos is not behaving like the UAV he describes in his interviews? How many of us (myself included) have failed to notice that Cmdr. Fravor’s close-encounter with an UAV is not the same incident that ended up on video tape? (I want to thank David Beatty for making the gap between what Cmdr. Fravor reports and what ended up on video tape apparent to me) ]

So the Pentagon disinformation possibility, in the end, turns out to be less a singular possibility than a space of possibilities. There is a whole range of ways in which this story could be more complicated than mere “lying, stupid or crazy.”  And of course, nothing about any of the disinformation possibilities I’ve suggested about rules out the possibility that we are also being visited by aliens, ultra-terrestrials, extra-dimensional beings, or otherwise impinged upon by other realities.

This post is a survey of some of the rabbit holes you can go down once you throw off the shackles of the binary opposition: lying/stupid/crazy OR aliens. But what of it?  What is the relevance of confronting this laundry list of freaky possibilities?  

Just this: when we acquiesce to the way our civilization frames the possibility space, we surrender precious, sacred, ground in the space of possibilities. This mindset of either/or is the mindset that has given rise to the terrible divisiveness of the American polity – that two-dimensionalism that compels people to turn on each other (“he’s a Trump supporter! And therefore stupid” or “you sound like democrats! Get out of here.”).  You see, I don’t think it really matters if UAVs are aliens or demons or little green gremlins who hijacked predator drones – there are enough mysteries in our universe that I am confident that my mind will be continually blown on a regular basis so long as I keep paying attention. What I think matters about the UAV story and this Pentagon/UAV story in particular, is that it is a non-political example of how we fail to see the space of possibilities for what it is. It isn’t a constrained binary space. It’s a multi-dimensional vector. Once you realize that you can step out of this socially constructed bullshit, that tells us we have to be in one camp or the other. And once you start to do that – you become truly free. 

This is what I hope the Spectral Skull Podcast can do for you if you keep listening…

-D.S.

Sources Consulted for Spectral Skull Podcast Episode Five

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. “‘Wow What is that?’Navy pilots report unexplained flying objects.” NY Times (2019).

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. “Glowing auras and “black money”: The Pentagon’s mysterious UFO program.” The New York Times (2017)

Phelan, M. “Navy Pilot Who Filmed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO Speaks:‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics.’Retrieved April 23, 2020.” (2019).

Blumenthal R., Kean L., “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagonʼs U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” The New York Times (July 23rd, 2020) ACCESSED: 10/14/2020

Greenstreet S., “Bonus Episode | The Basement Office | Eric Davis on working for Pentagon UFO program” New York Post URL=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3CcaP3yAkc ACCESSED: 10/10/2020

Kloor K., “The Media Loves This Expert Who Says He Worked For An Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?” The Intercept ACCESSED: 10/10/2020

West, Mick, “Debunked: Debunked: Pentagon has Evidence of “Off-World Vehicles Not Made on this Earth.” Metabunk.org ACCESSED: 10/12/2020

Background:

Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, pilots, and government officials go on the record. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

Beatty, D., The Nimitz Encounters for  Tic Tac Witness CTO3 Interview Pt. 1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eYMebO5l-I Accessed: 10/16/2

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Mission Statement

We explore claims about the occult, supernatural, and paranormal from an analytic standpoint. We’re open to the existence of a world beyond the five senses, and we dismiss that dogmatic skepticism that insists that any story about the unexplained has to reduce to ‘hallucinations’ or ‘swamp gas,’ but we’re not committed to any particular theory or philosophy about what these phenomena are. And we realize that, whatever is out there, the answer is likely to be more complicated than any existing model or theory. What we bring to the table is small ‘s’ skepticism – a skepticism that we throw as much on the mainstream accounts, as we do on the supernatural story.