Dr. Jack Hunter | Paranthropology, Spirit Contact, & Charlie

01:56 Alright, Hiresight Chatters we have talked ad nauseum about the carefully crafted worldview that has descended upon academia and the wider culture which carefully filters out many important aspects of self-discovery creativity independence coming of age ritual alternative energy spirit contact paranormal experiences and anything that falls outside of the paradigm of rigid materialism or distracts the individual from getting some sad safe, mid-level job at one of the elite's well established corporate pipelines to mediocrity. But we have also discussed the impressive foresight of people like Charles Fort who saw this as just a phase and knew that on the other side of scientism we would have bright minds who no longer ignored the anomalous but engaged with it."

02:41 We've been lucky enough here to host a few of these academically accredited pioneers of the paranormal pushing up against the boundaries of their disciplines, from parapsychology with Dr. Dean Radin earlier in the year, to now paraanthropology with today's guest, Dr. Jack Hunter If you're unfamiliar, Dr. Hunter is an anthropologist exploring the borderlands of consciousness religion and the paranormal living in the hills of mid-Wales his doctoral research with the University of Bristol examines the experiences of spirit mediums and their influence on the development of self concepts and models of consciousness He is the founder and editor of Paranthropology, journal of anthropological approaches to the paranormal. He is the author of Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods & Magic as well as his recently released Engaging The Anomalous. He's also the editor of Damned Facts, Fortean essays on religion folklore and the paranormal as well as co-editor with Dr David Luke on Talking With The Spirits Ethnographies from Between The Worlds

03:41 But that is not all, folks. He's also the founding member of the Afterlife Research Center and Jack is currently working on the One School One Planet project to develop a mainstream permaculture curriculum for schools If he was doing any more I'd never get this introduction over with The freshly minted PhD advocate of the re-enchantment of the world and ally of the spirits Dr. Jack my man welcome to The Higher Side Thanks so much for having me You got it i'm psyched to have you here. I think this is gonna be a hell of a time, I think the work you've done is super impressive, you had great interviews on RuneSoup and Skeptica with two my favorite people and made some great points about what anthropology and religious studies could be saying that they have the potential to be the X-files of the humanities which i like alot

04:29 And maybe that's a good place to start tell us a bit more about your approach to anthropology or why it might be a good discipline to actually incorporate more of the weird things we like around here. Yeah my first time for college is being quite broad really so i basically tree and apology as the study human beings, Which is what it is if you break the word anthropology up into two parts you got and for post which means human beings and all ages study of human beings. And do you know all of this stuff that we associate with the paranormal in the strange and weird, all of it is no bound around human being so from the very get go anthropology is kind of uniquely placed as a study of human being to investigate paranormal

05:16 It's also uniquely placed to invest in the paranormal because of the things that anthropologists have investigated, going right back to the very beginnings of the discipline. They've always been interested in questions of belief, questions of religion engaging with the possibility of spirits or I say engage with the possibility of spirits existing but actually for the most part many anthropologist have tried to kind of reduce spirits away try to explain them away and different Reduce them down to like medical materialist models or cognitive models and things like that. But there's been a continuous stream throughout from the very beginning of anthropologists who have kind of pushed against that kind of reductionism, so what I'm doing really is a continuation of that line of research going right back to people like EB Tyler and his work on animism

06:09 the work of people like Andrew Lang, who's a famous folklorist. He proposed something way back in the 19th century called comparative psychical research which really is paranthropology as I understand it And then this whole long line of researchers who have engaged with ontological possibilities, particularly people like Edith Turner who I'm very fond of as an anthropologist and maybe we'll talk about her a bit later. But yeah that's what i've been doing, I've been tapping into that current of interest in pushing the boundaries of anthropology Yeah i think it's really interesting because to some degree the emphasis tends to be on consciousness is such a component of these experiences we need to be focused on parapsychology which is useful of course but there are communities that people experiencing paranormal and magical things all the time engaging with spirits all the time and anthropology instead of researching them from that condescending position of saying

07:07 Oh, well it's really fun to study what other people believe and their superstitions but we in the West have figured it all out and we know that there is really nothing there. It's arbitrary study at that point if you're really not gonna assume that what they're interacting with this real and we could learn a lot more if we just took them at their word Exactly and that's what i've tried to do with my research with spirit mediums in bristol is not to go in there with assumptions about what they do but the kind of experience it first hand, i'm just gonna take their understandings on board and see where it leads and not surprisingly its let down some interesting rabbit holes right cuz you have had some rather strange paranormal experiences or sighting over the years that seemed

07:55 pretty hard to put back in the box, right? Could you tell us about a couple of those. There's a few different things that come to mind I mean going back to my kind of involvement in anthropology and these kinds of questions there are a few experiences that have led me down this path one of them was a psychedelic experience that I had the very first time that I had magic mushrooms and I saw these small fairy-like creatures I called them fairies at the time but perhaps they look a little bit more like Goblins or gremlins or something that was a big experience for me and it was a big influence on the direction that my career is taking i suppose. Show we could talk about psychedelics and entertain counters in that kind of thing,

08:40 And then a few years later, when I first went to university. I started to realize that anthropology provided this like a really useful framework for investigating all of these fringe topics and strange extraordinary experiences because it's been dealing with other world views and things for a long time. And I became interested in the question, drawing on my experiences of seeing these fairy creatures and things like that of why is that people come to believe in these beings? So starting from position thinking about belief really but I've moved away from that over time. And I came across this group in Bristol called The Bristol Spirit Lodge that seemed to provide a really useful

09:26 It was useful because it was only about 10 minutes down the road from where I was living, which is kind of like a bit of weird synchronicity in itself. And it was like a small group of people who regularly gathered during the week to basically develop trance and physical mediumship and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to delve a little deeper into this question why do people come to believe in spirits? Ultimately, the conclusion that came through was that people come to believe in spirit because they have experiences with spirits I love you say when start to engage with experience then again it opens up lots of different avenues that you can start to explore and i need you into questions on technology and what really exists like a set that moves your way from thinking about.

10:12 the leaves to thinking more about experiences and ontological possibilities. And the bristol spirit lodge stuff is so interesting can you paint us a picture of what a typical session look like there at least procedurally what seem to be important for opening up these channels of communication yeah basically the understanding that i came through with, say on saturday attended Was everything in the science is good towards the induction of altered states of consciousness in both the medium and in the cities so. The usual protocol with the sciences was that festival you have kind of like an informal chat in the house and discuss what you been doing in a week to have a cup of tea and all those kinds of things i mean these are really

11:04 Normal people whatever normal is these the kind of like mainstream people with an interest in spirit medium shit. I'm so it was very interesting and that sense i need to go out into the lodge which was a wooden shed in the garden, literally is like a five foot by five foot shed is quite small intimate space inside the large they had circle of chairs laid out and then the very middle of the room there's a wooden platform I would like a wooden panel right on the floor which they put objects on for spirits to manipulate. The other reason that the panel was there with so that if, is any suspicion that the medium was sneaking around the room or anything you be able to hear them walking on this wouldn't panel so i was kind of like a safeguard and then in the very corner of the room they had. A curtain dot area called the cabinet which is it

12:01 you know, something that spiritualists have been using since way back when the spiritualist movement began in the 19th century. The medium sits in the cabinet, the circle leader will put on some music and they'll put on red lights usually the circle leader reads a prayer which invites spirits to come down into the lodge to make themselves known through the medium This prayer is also like a prayer of protection because obviously if you're inviting spirits down, you don't want to be inviting down negative entities. So they do try to cover their bases in that sense. They call themselves a non-denominational spiritualist group because they don't affiliate themselves with big organizations like the Spiritualist National Union and they don't consider themselves to be religious in any way

12:54 When are doing these prayers they do still kind of call out to a higher power or you could call it god or some kind of great spirit that will do the protecting so that was interesting as well the way the religion and paranormal kind of merge together in From the middle of them you get this whole other way of thinking about the nature of god so that was pretty interesting. It is interesting because it's the religious listeners i have that anytime i do a show focused on magic or figure and magical history, they get real nervous about it and almost like they've made their mind up that these are negative people in that no in the big conspiracy most of its all

13:35 occultists and that a cult equals bad and all that stuff. But in a previous interview, I heard you mention upbeat music as being helpful in the seance of spirits like a jovial atmosphere. I'd never heard that before but we have that religious residue that says if spirits are real then they're just demons and they're bad did you encounter anything more demonic or something? You felt was dangerous along the way that would jive with that sort of belief. I don't think I did actually to be honest. So didn't encounter any anything that we would think of as demonic or evil most of the spirits that come through are, well basically how it works is each medium has their own they call them spirit team which in my experience at the bristol spirit lodge could be you know anything from like two to sixteen different individuals who come through.

14:24 But the point is that they are regular communicators. So it's not like when you go to a spiritualist church and you want to make contact with the spirit of dead loved one or anything like that, You go to these seances because you want to communicate with a set group of spirits so they weren't actively inviting in new spirits every time you just going meet with this same group of spirits which was really interesting because you get to know the spirits over a long period of time And you get to notice quirks that they have you get to know just whether their vocal tonality changes over time and things like that. I was impressed to see the actually, individual spirit personalities in these spirit teams were quite consistent over weeks and months and even years i like that and it is sort of my general world view of course nothing is absolute but i just feel like its mostly residue from religious authorities that

15:22 What a paint this picture that it's all bad it's not people who have real experience and magic saying that is generally people who are just afraid to try me, isn't it coincidental that we don't teach meditation in our culture we say magic is evil or dumb. And then also psychedelics early go i mean these are the components at all get you there is all the roads that lead to learning that there's more than material world and yet they're all roadblocked i find that to be pretty convenient Yeah i think it also has something to do with the rise of priesthood and things like that we're dealing with the leftovers of where.

16:00 communication with the gods or with the spirits was a job just for one person. I mean, before the rise of monotheistic religions obviously there were priests but we might be able to speculate on whether the spiritual world was a little bit more democratic perhaps But over time and as a hangover of Christianity all these techniques that are available to human beings to make contact with that world have been demonized literally demonized So yes, pretty interesting stuff. Right and a certain kind of personal power comes from engaging with that so again convenient that someone else would want to say actually give me some money and I'll facilitate this stuff for you and i'll tell you what God wants you to do.

16:48 They're just not more curious about that motivation and what might actually be behind the proverbial door number three so this is a lot of fun, you know you talk about a lot of anthropologists in the book and. What's your life didn't like about their various approaches to studying this sort of stuff and you say that you are greatly influenced by the work of edith turner mentioned earlier to quote u right In the same way that if one follows the recipe for a chocolate cake in detail, a chocolate cake will result from the procedure. If one follows a ritual properly, the ritual outcome will be achieved." This is precisely what Edith Turner found when she participated in the Ihamba ceremony in Zambia. Can you tell us about what she witnessed in that ceremony? Yeah, I first heard about this during...I think it was in the final year of my undergraduate degree

17:40 I was taking a module on religion and cosmology with Fiona who would go on to be my PhD supervisor. When i heard this story of Edith Turner's, I was totally blown away because she is full-on talking about the experience as an ontological event or as you know as a real experience that she had that seemed to accord well with the beliefs of her informants so basically what happened was She'd been to participate in this Ihamba ceremony with her husband, Victor Turner who was a very influential anthropologist. And it's from Victor Turner that we get all of these concepts of liminality and things like that and communitas so he was a very big important anthropologist but they were relatively reserved anthropologists to begin with observing the rituals but not necessarily participating in them

18:34 And then a few years later after victor turned passed away you to turn it went back out into the field packout to zambia. With the end of people and she decided that she was gonna allow herself to kind of participate in this ritual fully bodily and emotionally for the first time really, The ritual basically takes place over a bunch of hours and the idea is that there is an afflicted person, a member of the community who's been afflicted by any hammer spirit. And this spirit enters into the body of the person and it kind of moves around in the form of human tooth that kinda moves around inside and causes all sorts of problems

19:18 So they do a bunch of ritual actions to have medicine man kind of thing that's probably not the best time to use but you know heila. Are shaman and over the period of this ritual dancing can chanting gun also the ritual actions at the very climax either turn felt that she was about, she said she felt as if something was about to be born And it was a kind of a palpable feeling amongst the whole group that something was about to happen and very climax she saw the medicine man scooping out the back of the afflicted patient what you described as a great. Ectoplasmic kinda blog thing yes is totally crazy stuff this with your hand spirit this is the entity itself on the medicine man help us be ready in his hands

20:12 Quickly put into a job and the captain over with a castor oil leaf of casterly and. When they went to have a look inside the jar after was it in there sure enough that was a human tooth in there, is a pretty crazy kind of experience to have and she said who's this experience that basically let her include fat In order to understand ritual, and we can extend that to religion or the paranormal or any of these kinds of things. In order to understand them, we have to learn to see them the way that the native sees them. And by native she doesn't mean primitive tribal people or anything like that. She means like the people who participate in creating those rituals and all those kinds of things so it was

20:59 Big influence on me anyway yeah that's a wild story sounds like something out of constantine but i do like that attitude studying the edges of reality and these most epic experiences is how we should map our world not by studying them mundane that's the obvious part you know we should know where the boundaries are if there even are any But i hear a story like that i think listeners here something like that and it's definitely fascinating but, doesn't jive with the experiences we have or anyone we know has generally and you hear about the ideas of possession or that entities can cause us. Almond sir be a contributing factor like maybe you have a headache or something her back pain and i just don't really know what is

21:49 A good way to think about that stuff do you have a model for the influence entities, how honest or how to draw those lines especially in the western world when people don't even believe they exist it's like will not believing exists doesn't really. Make them not exist so did i still affect people that sort of thing yeah that's interesting me i dont have any kind of formalized Model to think about it but i definitely think that is a possibility and if we take seriously the evidence that we have from your parapsychology, add the evidence that we have from mediumship research in all those kind of things is sending seems suggested at least the possibility that these entities are out there.

22:33 And if they are out there then they've always been out there and never was being interacting with human beings so you can take that as a starting point. Then no the fact that don't believe in them anymore doesn't mean that they're not still interacting with us in certain ways and they might be spiritual or metaphysical causes behind different kinds of elements and things we just. Don't think in those kinds of terms anymore, It's a hard thing to parse out because i've also heard people talk about maybe if you're just irritable or if your acting shitty to your spouse for a week, maybe you need a clearing in your house or protection spell yeah. Or it's like maybe it has been hot lately or maybe you're just pissed about your economic situation is really hard too isolate causes but i think spirits are in the mix somewhere i just don't wanna give them too much credit or not enough and its hard to really find where that dial should be calibrated to

23:29 Yeah it's true it makes me think of the weird relationship in the nineteenth century between spiritual ism and things like multiple personality disorders and hypnosis instead. The paranormal research david scott roger called this an infinite boundary is this constant. Crossing over of the boundary between spirit possession and multiple personality in all those kinds of things i'm actually when you start to think about it in those terms as well becomes very difficult to pull the threads are That's a great point i live here in san diego we have a real homelessness crisis and sometimes i will sit and just kinda from the distance like really observe someone who is screaming on the corner to no one unlike.

24:18 Is that is that person is that a speed what's going on there what really is that and you know there's a hundred people walking by just kinda crossing the street in clutching their purse but it is kind of fascinating to think about it no someone like well spirits are real well. Maybe you just walk past one who was possessing someone i mean i don't i just don't know yeah, it's really interesting stuff also brings to mind all of the That's kind of therapeutic potentials of mediumship development and all those kinds of things that's one thing i start to think about when i was doing my research with. I love the mediums i spoke to said that throughout their lives as they were growing up they had strange experiences one medium for example set you know it used to go into old houses and things she would get this horrible feeling she said it felt like something passing through her body,

25:12 Can she described as like trying to pull a jumper off inside out strange way of describing it but she felt some kind of like a pool and it used to really freak her out you know made a really scared cuz it's such a strange sensation. And then it was only in a few years down the line following a few other kinds of trajectories that they started develop mediumship can formally, I realized that all of these feelings and experiences that they had these anomalous experiences they've had where indications of the future mediumistic calling. And it was to developing mediumship that they were able to kind of domesticate those wild anomalous experiences in put them to some kind of use i just wonder about you know the possibilities

26:01 the therapeutic potentials of these different traditions that are being totally ignored by mainstream Western medicine. Hold the stuff that should be explored right and it is very very frustrating that this hasn't been done already with like all the years of the sciences have had and all this i am super grateful that you're deciding to do this work but it's also so frustrating it's like, what have you been doing this to me as like really where the rubber meets the road if u wanna study reality in human experience. Do maybe elaborate on a portion of your work tell the people what ontological flooding is this seems to be a big part of the jack hunter soup isn't it. My am on logical flooding is basically that i've developed for my approach to investigating anything really doesn't have to be paranormal but you know it works very well with the paranormal and basically the idea is,

27:02 We need to entertain multiple possibilities simultaneously. If we start to reduce ourselves down to a single explanation, then there's a whole load of other things that you're really missing out on the idea kind of came out my research on mediumship and i saw that especially in anthropology has been so many different explanatory frameworks applied to it for example I'm very popular explanation of spirit mediumship and possession the moment is that kind of cognitive explanation explain me in terms of like. Cognitive processes in the brain and it's just a way that we perceive the world and the way you think about things and there's no real, yes no logical basis to another explanation is the kinda social functional explanation where mediumship performs a function of

27:58 Providing an opportunity for social protest in societies where women particularly suppressed it gives them an opportunity to kind of speak out another explanation is the medical. Reductionist model weather basically say that spirit mediumship and spirit possession are form of a pathological condition, i'm so they might associate with multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia things like that I'm basically i was like wow there's so many different explanations here for spirit possession and i can see that lots of them kind of make sense but we take them. In themselves as a single complete explanation they don't seem to account for everything that's going on, set the example social functional explanations don't really take into account the experience of mediumship what medium ship feels like to the person who is undergoing it

28:55 or none of those kind of dominant anthropological approaches take seriously the possibility that genuine side phenomena are a possibility, or that spirits might actually be real. So you know I kinda came to the conclusion that when we're thinking about these things, we need to include all of these possibilities and more and thats what i mean by ontological flooding is We need to have a flood of cells with all of these possibilities if we're gonna get anywhere near close understanding. The true complexity of these issues right instead of any other or approach it's both and like let's throw all the ideas up there in whichever, are the most valid will stay around and the other ones will fall by the wayside and

29:41 It's like altered states of consciousness are so key these experiences you can almost empathize with those camps that feel like it is all in the head but that still so dismissive and maybe its about arbitrary categorization between real and all your head because. I mean to the person is experiencing it ask them and they'll tell you like this wasn't necessarily an illusion or a hallucination. This is very real thing to them and so it does get that kind of semantics of categorization to agree yeah definitely make me think of what you say in there, quote that i found from young where he was talking about

30:26 Psychological truth and he said that psychological truth just as real as any other kind of like physical biological trees so we can't really put these arbitrary brackets around. Experience is in the least some things about me can say that they don't have any, Ontological validity in themselves. Yeah good stuff yeah i like that so let me also ask you about charlie this was a specific entity that you seem to have ongoing communication with this is pretty provocative, yes charlie was spirit that i met at the crystal spirit lodge

31:06 I'm he came to a medium called john who is a regular sitter at the lodge so you would come to say on says you sit in with other mediums are developing but it was also quite an advanced. Transmedium himself and you done a lot of training in different mediumship techniques you done a lot of platform, mediumship in spiritualist churches where they if they say is there a j coming through can anyone except that you don't know about kind of stuff he done shamanic trance development and things like that. And eventually he moved on to developing his mediumship at the bristol spirit hodge and charlie was his main spirit guide, use this spirit that would kind of take control of his body during sound says i'm good actors are kinda big gatekeeper to let other spirits come through join the transition

32:01 I need was also very keen on telling us about his kind of philosophical views and his ideas about the nature reality in all those kinds of things, so people who are going to the lodge would really enjoy is conversations they'd love to sit with him and talk about philosophy asking questions instead. He was really impressive because he was pretty consistent over number weeks months and years his philosophy didn't really change The messages that you were giving work consistent and yeah so i spent a lot of time just after i finished my undergraduate. Degree spend a lot of time transcribing recordings of the sounds is that we had with him, adjust to capture these ideas that he was talking about it's pretty interesting really enjoyed it the funny thing about charlie was there. I can't remember his real name at the moment but he told us in previous life he'd been

33:00 Chinese monk which is pretty stereotypical spirit guides the chinese monk. He said he was called down in or something like that again sounds very stereotypical but you then took on this name of charlie to make himself more relatable to the people at the bristol spirit lodge and it kind of stuck, so he's like an ancient chinese philosopher really talking through the body of a suburban bristolian Yeah, I really found that to be super fascinating. To cite a paragraph from Engaging the Anomalous you have this contact with the spirit called Charlie through a medium who acted as a host and you say but rather than using him as an informant to examine the social makeup of The Lodge, I asked him questions about the spirit world and what exactly he was

33:46 His answers offered intriguing food for thought. Perhaps most revealing was his assertion that he was not the product of a single source, but rather a collective manifestation. There are three sides involved—the spirit, the conscious host and the subconscious host When in a trance state charlie explained all three components must be in a state of common trust without this blending. Charlie would not have been able to manifest that's what I'm talking about man that is interesting intel yeah, could you elaborate on what that says to you about the mechanisms between spirits and people as it little more clear post charlie

34:26 That's part of my desire to push anthropology a little bit further than it is usually willing to go. So, usually anthropologists just focus on the social group, the social facts if you like, the makeup of the group how they interact with each other and all those kinds of things but I wanted to find out more about spirit world and trying to do kind of anthropology of the spirit world so obviously the best people to talk about that are spirits. And yeah it was really interesting to hear that He was aware of the fact that he was the product of multiple influencing parts i think you could take a step further as well and say that he is also partly the product of. The influence of people who are sitting in this on some communicating,

35:10 In fact, that's one of the things I found most interesting about the spirits is how they are socially manifested if you like. They are the product of all these different influencing parts here. Different influences, different consciousnesses interacting with each other and then this personality of Charlie kind of emerges at the intersection Something that i noted during my research as well was There were similarities with other mediumistic traditions where they also see this kind of communal manifestation going on. So there was an anthropologist called Nuret Burt David who was studying this tribal Indian group in India

35:54 and they interact with these spirits called devara which are kind of like nature spirits. And she wrote about how the process of manifesting these spirits was one of social interactions through conversations and through dialogue, so they would do very similar things to the kind of things that I was seeing in the Bristol Spirit Lodge. They would start talking to the spirit, they were kinda coax it forward Spirit might be kind of sluggish to begin with and slow and then eventually it would come up speed. I need a dialogue that reinforce the presence of the spirit so obviously if no one was talking to the spirit during the seance, then this wouldn't able to manifest the dialogue seem to be important part in spirits are kinda product relationships between us in this world and between medium in this area

36:48 Basically the spirit seem to be quite complex in the way that they manifest lots of different influencing factors going on. So fast and you mentioned nature spirits that got me thinking lately i've had this impression that there is a connection as much as there is between altered states. And this contact there's also a connection between nature and entity contact i think maybe one reason why we have hundreds of millions of people who deny the existence of spirit world because the western world these concrete cities they kind of,

37:25 Here is the thinking that where they allow us the luxury of. Ignoring the spirit world but if you look at indigenous cultures obviously not without exception but a great deal of them kinda just take for granted there are spirits and i've had people talk to me about just think about the, The state of consciousness you would be in if you spent a night. In the wilderness alone we don't do that and we never do that we might go our whole lives without doing that and you can imagine, that that state of consciousness that's like a natural altering and you might start to see forms in the darkness or hear things aren't there and maybe thats the spirit world creeping back

38:09 into your life after you ignored it for so long i'm not so sure but is funny cuz u study people in the western world and generally people think of anthropologists like jane good all of people yet and i do think there might be a nature component what do you think about that. Yeah definitely ties in with something that i'm working on at the moment I just had a short article published about the possible role of things like permaculture and practical ecology, i'm actually hands on engagement with the natural world and how that leads to extraordinary experiences. I love the time these extraordinary experience are kind of like personified experiences so you might be working

38:55 Observing and interacting with the land which is kind of like a permaculture principle i'm through that observation interaction begin to realize that the trees and. Different kinds of plants in the soil underwater all these kinds of things have a kind of personal quality to them right, I do think that there is something going on here and it's something that i'm exploring at the moment but you know if you think about these. Traditional societies in the past and they have been fully interacting with natural world and their awareness of these spiritual beings, is much more mark than our own i think your right and pointing out the fact that we spend so much time indoors

39:38 not connected with the natural world and I don't think it's a coincidence that you know we don't believe in spirits as much. And, you know, we don't have these experiences often as other people do. And i don't wanna drag you down in the conspiratorial mark with me anymore than after your accomplished phd but, you know you mentioned the river spirits thing i did a previous episode with a guest michael wan who just as an example took this out on a river cuz he lives near it and look at all the points on the river the mouths of the river where they converge. And there's all kinds of monuments instructions and in some cases rituals like even the

40:18 Groundhog's Day ritual takes place right at where the rivers converge. And his premise overall is just that there are people hiding high up above us or older traditions are secret societies that carry on these offerings to river spirits or place their monuments uncertainly lines and. That there is high level magic going on engaging with the natural world it's just not on the radar of the regular person and of course that would suit the benefit, someone who was trying to engage with something for personal gain if no one else knows about it of course that can help you as well but

40:56 I'm just curious what you think about that nexus of conspiracy and ritual the idea that some of this stuff does go on in the western world just. Above our pay grade yeah i would be surprised if it does mean people who have money and power all these kinds of things can pretty much do what they want, And we know that you know through things like free masonry and all of these other kinds of secret societies that once you get up to. Hi levels and it does start to become very much like ritual magic, i'm all those ideas a kind of floating around so really really wouldn't be surprised if there were people who are continuing to practice these kinds of traditions in the upper echelons of your wanna call it up

41:42 But that's one side of thing but there is also the undercurrent of folk magic and all these kinds of things are still going on as well. Probably there are still people just like I've discovered people in the west to communicate with spirits you know on a daily basis, they're asking for people who practice natural magic and wicker and all this kind of things obviously. These movements that growing so it's coming from the bottom up as well i think tying all this stuff in with Climate change in the paris climate agreement and all that kind of stuff i'm the realization we're gonna have to have. Major social and cultural transformations ever gonna prevent our planet from going into a total collapse, but we're gonna have to re engage with these older traditions are gonna have to interact more with. The spirits send different entities that inhabit the world around us if you don't start to do not then whenever can i

42:39 Bring about that social and cultural change that we need i'm with you there cheers to that and i of course think that. I better educate ourselves we might better recognize rituals or monuments are things have been going on, no we haven't been able to recognize once we learn the context of how these spirit interactions work and how magic my work then we can say, oh that is something we should look at or that's not it. You know because in conspiracy shows people can get all crazy about all kinds of things and it's like well if you have real context a real education about magic you can kind of dial that in more appropriately so I just...I like the work you're doing and uh you know I have weird applications for it but um to go back to Charlie a minute you know we talked about The Gateway we talked about this

43:34 The channels of communication how they can be opened but you also asked him about his world about the spirit world itself can you give us any insight into how u conceptualize, the spirit world based on charlie's inside i think a lot of people just think it is like. A big cloud i don't know what does that look like to you well one other things the most struck me about charlie's explanations at this period will It's not like a physical landscape with fixed features for example it seems to be something that shifts and can change depending on. Basically what it seems to me is the realm of consciousness that makes sense it's something that is affected by our beliefs in our expectations and all those kinds of things the child talk about

44:23 This is pretty common knowledge in spiritual circles and those kind of places but the things that we believe when we die, they affect the kinda place that we go to after we're dead. We believe that were gonna go to Valhalla for example if thats what we firmly believed then the kinda spirit world that we enter into will be like a Valhalla norse kinda spirit world. So i mean it's fluctuating place I think perhaps one of the best ways to think about it is maybe as a kind of dream land. When I was teaching religious studies for A-level, a few years ago and came across this guy HH Price who is a philosopher interested in psychical research which is pretty cool and that was his idea basically was the afterlife is kinda like a dream world

45:18 It's a realm of pure consciousness and it can be negative depending on the way that we think about her can be positive depending on the way you think about it. I think that seems to be what its like based on what charlie told me anyway well i think that makes a lot of sense because some people talk about, That there's baked in mechanisms and life that prepare you for death if you engage with them one could be sleep just the fact that we dream at all that we go to this place every night we forget most of it but, we do it every twelve hours like and then when were on our death bed like oh my god what is gonna be like you know i'm so scared i'm so worried well even.

45:59 Practicing with training wheels everyday of your whole life you just haven't been thinking about in that context and there's probably other baked in mechanisms as well that help us to prepare for them if you look at secret societies not to bring it back to the head constantly but their whole philosophy is kind of about. Self determination and enlightenment and then they go back to the egyptian mystery schools where they seem to be really focused on, real engagement with that spirit world prolonged contact in journey and all that kind of stuff so you can even push it even further but even if you don't want to at least have your nightly journey to the dreamworld. And that could be relatively the same thing i mean maybe i'm thinking maybe making a way too complex net really is just that simple

46:47 I think it makes sense that we would be constantly without dream cycles and all these kinds of things dipping in and out of that world. Preparing ourselves for the transition it makes sense yeah well if its not that then you have a whole another world you need to explain cuz we need to explain the dreamworld so i would assume that hopefully they're probably the same just for simplicity. And you have an essay titled and anthropology of the spirit world in that's really provocative, I wish that was a field of study if it was a field of study or something you could get a phd and what would it look like to you i guess kinda like shamanism really right well yeah. When anthropology the spirit world would be very much like anthropology as a discipline as is now making use of these ideas about ontological flooding in this idea cognitive empathetic engagement which is an idea my supervisor

47:49 has been using to explore the spirit world and kind of trying to engage with that as an ethnographic field in itself, with the afterlife and the spirit world is something that we can study ethnographically. And it could be in any kind of way, it could be through studying shamans in the Amazon or shamanic traditions up in Siberia or whatever, it could be dealing with mediums in suburban Bristol Or it could be some other kind of like an anthropology of dreaming to know phenomenological approach trying to understand. Experience of dreams you have things like that that's how i imagine and apology for spirit world work engaging with all those different lines in inquiry, i'm trying to build up as clear a picture is we can

48:38 Where is the fact that this picture is probably gonna be quite complex yes well so many little case studies you have any exploring anomalous book, are engaging with the anomalous book their little clues the breadcrumbs to flashing out this map and your touch on a guy named patrick giesler and the results of his work that seem to show. culturally significant symbols are more potent than something like a random number generator when engaging with the paranormal and that's interesting. What does that say to you or how would you explain that to people who are trying to unpack that? Yeah, so Patrick Easter is really interesting anthropologist who has been fully engaged with parapsychology and not ashamed to say that he's been doing that for 30 years or so. So he's a real pioneer of this

49:27 Paranthropology apology the paranormal what is suggested that can i like what i've been saying already there our cultural beliefs and expectations. Are important that they facilitate our, how are you abilities so he found was that you would get negative results if he did Experiments with random number generators and symbols that we recognize from our culture cuz i don't mean anything to people down in the amazon is not relevant to them if you shift the symbols, do something that means something to them has relevance to their everyday lives and they understand culturally. Then the side effects seem too much stronger powerful

50:13 I ties in with the work of italian anthropologist called nsdl martino. And he basically came to the conclusion that parapsychological experiments reduce paranormal phenomena too, you know really small effects so when we think of the kinds of experiments they do in the lab defects that they get so small there any just statistically significant When we compare that to the experiences that people have been in real life or especially to the kinds of experience is that people like. The people in shamanic traditions have there's no comparison, the real life experiences are always much more kind of vivid dead more potent it's not just statistically significant events is like major synchronicities and major apparitions and crazy stuff like the really crazy stuff so it seems to be back

51:14 the paranormal or whatever we wanna call it thrives in its natural environment that makes sense i'm gonna try to bring into the laboratory we can kill it anyway. Yeah it's a difficult thing to do take out of the environment cuz it is kind of all in the soup that makes these experiences happen and not one example but i really liked Is some neuro imaging research conducted by julio fernando perez regarding automatic writing mediums claim to be taken over by entities, while going into these trans states and these entities are communicating messages from the human husks well let's see if we can test that turns out there is something measurable in that instance right. Yeah they found really interesting things like when these mediums were doing automatic writing

52:06 Which is where they can let the spirit do the writing for them if i'm in the areas of the brain that. I usually associated with doing complex activities like writing and speaking and things like that were actually, The activity in those areas was actually reduced which it kind of goes control to what we would expect from a common sense perspective. We'd expect to see if someone's doing your complex activity like writing that there is gonna be lit up and i link this up with some more research on psychedelics where they found, Under the influence of silence i been at the kind of peak experience when their experiences and most vivid in most extraordinary. The activity in the brain seem to be lower on the blood flow was decreased in all those kinds of things,

52:53 No that can i lend screen is the possibility that during these psychedelic states in june these trance state. We are actually surrendering control we are no longer in control and something else seems to be kind of coming through just goes to show you know when these medium say that they're having a chance date or some kind of anomalous psychological processes, play probably because it's demonstrated that something actually happens Yeah i love when we can actually get that recorded data mean it's harder to deny that it's harder to have presumptions about hard evidence and so.

53:35 What's up next for you man talk to us about the realms you plan to tackle going forward. Yeah well what i'm doing at the moment is working on a edited book called, i think im gonna call it greening the paranormal just about these connections between animalistics between parapsychology and parent apology no that's kind of stuff and ecology so thinking about different ways of conceiving of intelligence in nature and all the things that we've been talking about today so i think gathering a lot really interesting articles from different scholars working in these kinds of areas just trying to work out what this connection is between the paranormal land natural world.

54:21 Some of the things we've been talking about i like the role of culture in modulating the paranormal and then you're a physiological correlates are the paranormal and all that stuff was starting to build up a bigger. Picture how it fits in with all these different domains of life and i think that's the next step is to connect into the wider ecological context, All the networks between organisms and all that kind of stuff so that's where i'm at the moment exciting i think thats a perfect place to go. And man as we're closing this thing out do also remind people about your previous work, your journal all that good stuff course we probably want to give them your url info because when you just google jack hunter you might not be in the mood for everything that comes up. Yeah there is weird like

55:11 cheap rip off of indiana jones school jack hunter as well annoying anyway i'm yet there's my journal parents apology which has been on a bit of a hiatus for about a year but it hasn't died and i am planning to do. New issues of its just finding the time to fit in with everything if you're interested to look at all the back issues that which has been going for about eight years now, you can go to paranthropology.co.uk and you can access all of the journal there for free and download it, and if you want to find out more about all my work as a whole, you can check out my personal website which is jack-hunter.com

55:50 dot web start stockholm i'm sure we can put a link up on your site to link to that and then find all the news in different ideas i've been thinking about recently on the blog and. I collection of all my articles and books and everything it's so let's say, Awesome wow man well i am just really impressed with all the work you've done you are a great example of how a person can navigate the academic system and bring it around to how you wanted to be rather than just dismissing the whole process and then limiting your life's options to just what's on me outside edges like added so much respect keep doing what you do and keep fighting goodbyes thank you very much. You got it,

56:34 Happy ghost day halloween what an appropriate episode for halloween and i didn't even plan it that way. I usually don't but sometimes we have these happy accidents, speaking of happy accidents or synchronicities as some people like to call them, i had heard dr hunter on both skeptical and runesweeper thought yes jack is doing exactly the kind of thing that i'd like to highlight and literally as i was writing an email to him for an interview request. One came in from him about seeing if we could do a show together and that has never happened! We had never spoken before so that was about as unlikely as anything big thanks to the ethereal string pullers for putting us in contact, we're trying to find you a place in the western world spirits...we are trying but it all worked out clearly the universe knows what makes for a good fit on THC

57:32 But this just gets back to my whole thing about studying or testing the paranormal head-on. If it's real and it works, and it is and does then it should stand up to scrutiny And that means a PhD doing professional research Yeah I know some of these things don't translate to being tested in the lab but others do we talked about some of those things But as a side effect of propping up a guy like Dr. Hunter, I think we might put more cracks in that academia armor So I like this one for a lot of reasons and this magic paranormal nature nexus is probably going to get hit on a lot more going forward. And this connection, it might seem like a no-brainer on the hand but we spend so little time in the natural world that its hard even take the paranormal magical opinions of a person who's never engaged with nature seriously

58:25 I guess i'm saying that I think that association is so strong, it's kind of like a person who has only ever lived in the desert pontificating about penguins. Your opinion is of limited value to me if you've never been in the environment in which penguins thrive You can say you've read books about them, you can tell me that you bought a 5-star rated penguin call on Amazon and you can't get it to work but your using it in the wrong environment. Call penguins all you want in the desert they will not show up It doesn't mean the tools to call them don't work and it doesn't mean they don't exist I think you know what im saying But...I dont see that need to be vague or shy abou really going after these weird things if we do it right

59:09 I'm just sort of seeking that higher level conversation, no pun intended about these things and that's something we've sought out to do for a long time. It's not really new but when it comes to some of the more out there episodes i've done things that involve something like perhaps an Andromeda Council...I used to think that was fun or entertaining just for its boldness even if I couldn't verify it of course but some of those sorts of things are becoming less fun to me, or maybe I should just say i'm not as proud of releasing those episodes as I am one like today.

59:49 And I'm not alluding to any kind of sweeping change to THC, it's just how i'm feeling. To be honest, I was actually just approached by one of the biggest names in the conspiratorial underbelly who is associated with this sort of super wild can't really verify it pop conspiracy sagas and I don't know what to do with it! It actually feels like a well-timed challenge from the universe We will see. Every experience on this THC journey is new to me, and there is no manual so I really appreciate listeners who aren't too critical or too harsh on me over the small things or when I misstep because I really am just a regular guy doing the best I can

1:00:35 I kind of have a large audience that's always growing. Everyone has different opinions on me or what i should be doing and we've had some drama over the past few months over little things that I probably just gave too much attention to Lesson learned, I talked about some of that drama on Gramerica recently and for some people even that seemed to cause more problems than it solved And you just can't please everyone I'm also a guy who is dealing with this increased success for the first time and maybe not always with the grace and poise of a trained media personality. Ultimately, it doesn't matter and it's all good! And I think that shows have been pretty solid lately and guests on point. Although the last one was a bit unbalanced if thats the worst of our problems then we're doing pretty great

1:01:27 But getting back to Dr. Jack, I look at his career and think about what sort of things I could have done if I hadn't been so stubborn in school and only focused on where it was broken rather than what I could do with it. And I hope some listeners maybe younger ones than me reflect on that as well It reminds me one my favorite lines from Hamilton At one point Aaron Burr says Talk less Smile more Don't let them know What you're against or for And that's wise. You can be a rebel without wearing it on your sleeve, especially in such a polarized climate." Obviously Dr Jacks thesis was on spirit mediumship nothing subtle about that but he stated before that academia hasn't really been a huge problem for him and I think part of it is his attitude He's not abrasive to academia but he's actually jack sparrowing his way right into the best of both worlds

1:02:23 pushing the needle further for us fringy folks, and also maintaining a sort of credibility and professionalism accepted in the mainstream. One foot in and one foot out so to speak. And why is that important? Well if we don't bridge the gap between the two worlds then we just have two separate groups of people who have already made up their minds talking amongst themselves it doesn't seem like we get too far with that If we want to change the world, we have to learn how to communicate with the non-believers with a bit more nuance. And that burden is on us because we actually have the more accurate model but we have to cite better information and make better arguments whether we're talking about the paranormal or conspiracy or the esoteric just to stick with the paranormal cause that's what this show is about someone who doesn't believe in that stuff probably puts a lot of blind faith in science academia and official accreditation

1:03:18 So now instead of saying, you're wrong it is real I know it. We say to those people oh you might be interested in this guy Dr Jack Hunter he's got a PhD in anthropology and has written a pretty interesting book that contains some hard data and recorded results that you might find convincing And yes I know we can lead these man-horses to truth water but we can't make them drink sure but it is just a better approach I'm never going to be the Jack Hunter. I've come to terms with this, iIm never going to be the professional that's taken seriously it's just too late for me but I can connect people to that person and I think we should all sort of have that outlook

1:03:59 because we aren't wrong. And a lot of the time it's not really even about who is right or wrong, it's about who makes the most convincing arguments and sometimes a guest will be spot on in one area but if they use examples that are out of their lane like The Moon Landing or they cite some odd attachment to conventional politics I just let that go and bring them back to what they're good at, to their expertise So overall, I think Dr. Hunter checks a lot of those positive boxes and makes a killer ally in our mission to shape the world in our image with eyes open to the fringes and the Empire at our backs That said if you like The First Hour maybe it's time to join The Higher Side Chats Plus Maybe this is one that gets you jump on over? I will say we talked about a lot of interesting stuff We got into that old idea of cedar cultures versus spiritual teachers How did these ideas get around the world

1:04:55 Talked about alien channelers, floating green goat heads, animism the agency of rocks and rock mouths. Which I still stand by is probably the strangest thing in any episode And we threw a little more icing on that cake by talking about receiving signs from plants and animals, more wild stories from the field of anthropology, Dr. Hunter's possessed hand story and a deep dive into ectoplasm which was pretty damn fascinating too So if you're listening on a podcast player on your phone, just look at the show notes and click the text of the Plus Pitch and the form comes up right away. Username, password payment information and boom! You're in. You don't even have to go to your PC and type in the URL for the HiresideChatsPlus.com slash subscribe

1:05:49 I'm a lazy guy i know that we don't all wanna go through those steps well i've tried to make it easy for you its right there your hand is probably close to on it in this very moment sign up for plus would be a huge help to me but you really know me what do you care about helping me actually get to double your hire site experience and you obviously like it, you're here right now. Why not hear a full show? Or all the full shows! And then we can also as a nice little side effect sidestep all the deplatforming drama because were in a closed tight knit system that doesn't rely on any of that

1:06:28 But that's the show guys and that's the month of October. Another five in the can I know we got real close to down to the wire it is the 31st with a show yesterday and one today but we are going to be better for the rest of the year because i have a more open and simpler life ahead of me for the next two months Thanks for listening. Enjoy the holiday, give a hi there and hello to Dr Hunter if you liked hearing him on THC and I'll see you next time! Your move conventional paradigm proppers paranormal data deniers and people standing in the way of the coming wave of wider inclusion... You're fucking dead

1:07:07 Lucid dreams are so vivid, cause you go to bed at seven And your brain comes alive because you hate your nine-to-five You wake up with a dread and make sure your cats are fed Did your brain talk to a ghost who moved your coffee and toast As you listen to the higher side chats You get to your desk and your boss says it's a mess And your soul slowly goes To a place where nothing grows When you think he's not around, you insert a SETI sound The OM says turn it down and you say It's just the higher side chats Oh do you think you'd be invited? To Bohemia Grove. To a Bilderberg club. Do you think you'd be invited

1:07:57 by a Rothschild to a party on a submarine Diving down, to the center of the earth To the Marianas Trench Your teeth begin to clench from the sulphur-y estenche The mask you're given doesn't fit Cause your not one of them Starting today, you'll make plans to get away There's no one to hold you down And the what-ifs start to drown Then you wake To the glare Of a cofluorescent stare and The light winks at you Cause it's life is almost through But it's holding on to quit time just like You It's time for the high side chats

1:08:47 you