Laird Scranton | The Dogon Mystery, Culture Seeders, & Velikovsky

00:05 Puppet masters almost surely have a clearly maybe something there. And until you've thoroughly tested every last horse just to know the less you really do, That's true Dr. Seuss! Where would we be without THC? Cause' we know they're lying to us just don't without THC The Higher Side Jack show award and company

00:44 How's it going Hireside Chatters? Drinking a little drink, smoking a little smoke. From sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and today is a hell of a show because who doesn't love Laird Scranton he is the man when it comes to reconstructing cosmologies comparing them across cultures restoring ancient knowledge and piecing the puzzle that is our past back together Now I know the workday is long and traffic is slow, but I only interject before the show to say that the new THC website is live. And with it on the front page is a new offer for free week of THC+. If it works for Netflix, it's gonna work for me right? But you can go to thehiresidechats.com sign up and listen to any extended shows from the archives that you missed as well as anything that is current of course any other bonus content I've done and you can also check out the forums while your there too

01:34 But I wanted you to know up front just in case you wanted to do that and then listen to this show with Laird because it is a new thing, and he's really the perfect guest to dive into it with. We talked largely through the first hour about the Dogon tribe and their advanced seemingly multi-dimensional teachers, and the second hour about the work of Velikovsky and other out there theories about our solar system and space itself So again, a free week trial is there for you should you be interested and with that let's do the damn thing. Pack your glass and park your ass people because we're diving right into the deep end of the pool with the man himself Laird Scranton Play me in Charlie It's The Higher Side Jaxx Podcast but you can call it THC Always talking fringe ideas digging up conspiracies Stuff they don't want you to know which this stuff we wanna see

02:28 That's life here on the higher side It's the place for me, it's my favorite show Where the guests are great and my mind gets blown The higher side Love the higher side Raise your glass and toast to Carl Wood the host On The Higher Side Chat Show That's life here on the Higher Side Chaa- Alright, higher side chatters. We've seen enough from mainstream academia to know their interest lies not in the pursuit of knowledge wherever it leads but rather in the preservation of preapproved paradigms with a variety of so called experts in place to thoroughly shut down any wild theories healthy speculation or God forbid actual evidence that suggests these narrow views must be widened

03:31 And whether we're discussing the advanced cosmology of an African tribe that rivals modern science, or complex mythologies from the past about our solar system that defy everything NASA says it knows. We find that by the grace of great alternative researchers these official answers have more holes than a Dunkin Donuts! Well lucky for us today we have just such an alternative researcher here with the amazing Laird Scranton in our midst. Laird is an independent software engineer who has been studying ancient myth, language and cosmology for well over a decade and has written a plethora of great books including The Science Of The Dogon Decoding the African Mystery Tradition Point-Of-Origin Gobekli Tepe And the Spiritual Matrix of the World's Cosmologies and Velikovsky Heresies Worlds In Collision And Ancient Catastrophes Revisited. Much of which we plan to get into today so let's dive right into the deep end of the pool! Laird my man welcome to the higher side

04:24 Well, great. Greg thank you very much for inviting me on I really appreciate it You got it! This is a real pleasure man you do great work and we plan to largely talk about the advanced knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Africa that was made popular by Robert Temple and a radically different model of our solar system's history that comes from Immanuel Velikovsky examination of ancient myths In both cases, we're dealing with situations where if we look at the past seems like they knew far more than were led to believe and in some cases might be closer to the truth than our so-called cutting edge Western society. But let's start with the Dogon as mentioned they're an African tribe And in honor of No Child Left Behind tell us a little bit more about them for people who might be unfamiliar

05:05 Okay. The Dogon are a modern day African tribe, we would call them a modern day primitive tribe because they don't have access to high technology. They don't have telescopes, they don't have traditional equipment that we would consider necessary for Western type science. They're great entry point for the study of ancient cultures and ancient creation mysteries because their culture serves as kind of an umbrella or crossroads for several different ancient traditions. They have ritual practices that are a lot like Judaism, they have cultural civic practices that are a lot like Ancient Egypt and they have a symbolic system of cosmology, system of symbols and meanings and myths that is very similar to ancient Buddhism so

05:55 When I realized this, my entry point to the study of the Dogon was like a lot of people Robert Temple's book which is called The Sirius Mystery. And the first intriguing aspect of the tribe was that they seem to know some things about astronomy that they really shouldn't know without access to equipment. They understood that in the glare of the bright star of Sirius there is a second star that orbits with the first star. It's a tiny dwarf star and they knew not only of the existence of this star, which they shouldn't know without telescopes but they also knew the correct orbital period for the two stars. They also knew some other facts that are some of which are still being verified right now by our astronomers so that was sort of my entry point and the more I learned about The Tribe the more interesting they became

06:47 Rightfully so. You know, Robert Temple suggested the Dogon had visitors or teachers from the Sirius star system that gave them this advanced information is this an area of departure for you? Or do you consider that a possibility? I am in agreement and in a qualified way with that at the counterbalance to that as Carl Sagan whose response to Robert Temple was well clearly This African tribe has received information from a modern visitor who knew about science What Sagan didn't do was, if he had pursued it just a little bit further he would have realized that the information that Dogen has is given using ancient Egyptian words that went out of use about 750 BC.

07:29 The chances that a modern visitor would have brought this knowledge to the tribe using those words is pretty slim, at least from my estimation. The Dogon do claim that their information comes out of an instructed tradition that was given to them in ancient times by somebody who knew a lot more about science than we did. The Dogon system of symbology is a close match for our Buddhist system. The Buddhists flatly say they got theirs from a non-human source The Dogon say it was non-human, but go a step further and say not only that. It started out as a non material source which is an interesting point of view from the Dogan perspective. The Dogan tradition is based on an archaic philosophy that describes universes as forming in pairs they say that not every material universe has a nonmaterial twin so the dogan perspective was that in some complicated way

08:24 What started out on the non-material side of this pairing ended up being an instructional influence for us back in ancient times. Wow see that's pretty amazing to me because up until recently when I really dug into this stuff, i'd always heard the Dogon story presented from the perspective that physical space aliens navigated here from the Sirius star system and this non-physical element isn't really brought up but based on this description it seems like we might be dealing with something more multi-dimensional or perhaps contact from a parallel spirit world. Yes, again in a complicated way. The Dogans say that their teachers were concerned about the potential bad effects that could happen to us from having prolonged contact with them so that implies a physical presence you know in a way that is going to be bad for us. The solution that the teachers supposedly came up with was to sequester students—a group of eight tribes members at a remote location

09:23 teach those eight and send them back to teach everybody else, sort of put a limit on exposure. That goes along with... I mean there are reports in all sorts of other traditions even in discussions of God appears on the mountain to Moses and there are all sorts of cautions around that about the Israelites not approaching too close to the mountain for fear of their own safety So this is not like a really over-the-line perspective that the Dogon have necessarily. In trying to understand whether I should credit that point of view or not, as a researcher I'm trying to anchor points of view that spawn interpretations. The Dogon and the Buddhists have what in modern day are matching symbolic systems of creation

10:05 The Buddhist system was documented by about 400 BC and the Dogon system is given in words that went out of use by around 700 BC. So we know that they're both ancient, one's given in Sanskrit and the other's using what are essentially ancient Egyptian words which are very different languages so it's not likely that one learned it wholesale from the other So the fact that there are match in the modern day, that modern authorities on Buddhism are describing a system that's a match – or very close to what the Dogon are describing in the modern day means both groups somehow managed

10:43 all the details of their system straight for thousands of years. Now as a researcher I can look two ways at that question, I could say well...I take the point of view that while they kept all these other details straight but when it came down to the question who they got the system from? That they both somehow misremembered that point in matching ways with each other that they both imagined that they got it from a non-human source when they didn't. Or, I can take the point of view that they kept that detail straight also and as researcher have to give some credence to the possibility there was some non human involvement here. Right and i think the latter is probably the fairest approach to all this but it's a bit challenging for some people to get their heads around the idea of non physical entities

11:30 manifesting on the physical plane for whatever reason but ancient texts and mythologies and religions they are just full of various strange gods and visitations from angels another creatures in it seem to be a lot more normalized perhaps there was a period of time where beans from the non-physical flip side of our reality crossed over much more easily and maybe that connection is weakened somewhat I don't know but is that a possible explanation you entertain? Actually, that is one of the possibilities that I explore in some upcoming books. Critics of this point-of-view will say well look if there really had been nonhuman involvement with humanity why don't we have other ancient cultures talking about this? The response to that is they're all talking about it – every last one of them. The Egyptians flatly say they got their written language from gods who they didn't consider to be human.

12:25 Pretty much every culture all around the world when they talk about ancient times is describing things that don't fit into our paradigm of what you would expect from normal human contact. So, that really isn't an argument against the point for me. Also the material that is being presented in this system of creation is pretty advanced stuff. The Dogon priests say their symbols describe how their tribal god created matter And when I started researching the tribe and what they had to say, um, I could see that they had definitions of things like atoms and protons electrons neutrons correct. And they even had a drawing to go with the electrons that looks like a typical electron orbit. So if they have those top two components right? What were the chances that this descending structure that they were describing might also be correctly described

13:19 And so I started educating myself about structure of matter, reading Brian Green and Stephen Hawking and popularizers of science. And realized that you could set the Dogen descriptions in their drawings side by side with descriptions from Hawking and Green and their diagrams and it's all the same stuff. It's intuitively a match from really starting at waves, matter in the form of waves all the way up to matter in the form of atoms that they have a reasonable perspective on each of the stages between. But the Dogon talk about things that Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking don't talk about They talk about how is it that a simple act of perception seems to be able to transform a wave into a particle or what is it that preceded the Big Bang and the formation of the universe?

14:10 These are questions that because the Buddhists and the Dogon systems are talking about these things, there's some reason to think that someone who really knew what they were talking about was involved. Right those are big questions about the origin of everything and can you maybe go into I mean of course you gave us some details about the cosmology but maybe we get into it more and really how you reconstructed it a bit because it seems fairly complex to do? It's a pretty complicated thing to work with. I have certain advantages having been a software designer, well first of all having a degree in English which gave me some perspectives into language and I studied it at school coming up through the ranks sort of a couple of other foreign languages that said they studied Spanish, I studied German

14:55 I converted to Judaism when I met my wife and studied some Hebrew. And so, I had some perspectives that were linguistic and some perspectives that were symbolic from writing software. When I would write a program for business one of the things I came to consider was how is the guy who follows me five years from now going to figure out what this program is about? and there were certain techniques that I began to use so that whoever it was who followed me, maybe it was even going to be five years later looking at my own program. How was I going to make it as easy for them to figure out what I'm talking about? You know in math class when they talk about variables and algebra they train you to use x y z as variables which are not very informative

15:41 As a programmer, if you're writing a program that's supposed to process invoices for business. You want the invoice number to be named something that sounds like it reflects the concept of an invoice number or the invoice amount tab and that field name that reflects that meaning? Well I could see that in this system that Dogen were talking about that someone had used those same techniques That said to me that I'm looking at a design system. This is not an accidental system, so knowing that it was designed gives you – or at least coming out from the perspective that it was designed gives you sort of a head start on trying to figure things out as time went on.

16:21 My field of study is called comparative cosmology. What that means is that I compare how different cultures understand the same symbol or the same myth, or the same symbolic concept and so through these comparisons you gain ways of getting sort of three-dimensional information about a concept you don't necessarily know everything about right first in my case comparability of language between the Delgin language, the Delgian cosmological words and the Egyptian words. So if the Delgins say that a certain word means something I can go to an Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary and see that same meaning reflected with a similar pronunciation There's another advantage to the way this system is put together in that words don't carry just one meaning they carry multiple meanings To try to explain that

17:13 In the ancient mindset, when they talk about processes of creation they're really talking about three things simultaneously. They're talking about how the universe forms, how matter forms and how biological reproduction happens and they see those processes as being so fundamentally similar to each other that they use a single progression of symbols to simultaneously describe all three What that means is that when we ask about the meaning of a symbol, we can't just say what does a hemisphere represent. We have to say what does the hemisphere represent if we're talking about biological reproduction? Well in that case it represents a womb. If we're talking about matter forming it represents expansion of mass

17:58 There are parallel concepts here but enough different perspectives on it that you can now have a cluster of meanings to compare to another language and see if the other language hits the same sets of meanings. When they do that, you can argue that you have a firm correlation between two words that isn't a traditional linguistic correlation – it's a correlation based on cosmological symbolism So that's one way of sorting this out is through comparison of language. Another way is through the comparison of how specific symbols are understood in different cultures, the Dogon say this shape represents something I can go to Buddhism and see what they think that shape represents or my series of books has now touched on traditions in Africa, Egypt, India, Tibet

18:49 I have a book coming out in November that touches on Northern Scotland. With each of these groups, you have a language that applies and you have tradition of myths and symbols that apply so you have comparability back-and-forth. When you get three or four cultures agreeing on the meaning of a symbol, you're on pretty firm ground to say that's what the symbol means. There's another perspective that is really hugely beneficial, that it took me a while to catch on to. These concepts of creation precede written language historically. Written language doesn't appear until around 3000 BC and its traditionally understood that these symbolic concepts go back much much further than that they go back maybe as far as 12 000 years maybe before that so it looks as if

19:39 what was an oral tradition that the Dogon preserved, they don't have a written language. That this oral tradition aspects of it were adopted to create the written languages and so you have maybe 30 shapes that the Dogan described that are matched by Egyptian glyph shapes used to write words matched in shape and matched in meaning. And I started exploring those and realized that Egyptian words can be read a different way than is traditionally understood. To give you an easy example for that, there's an Egyptian word for week like days of the week that's written with two glyphs it's written with the sun glyph which is a circle with a dot that could represent the concept of a day or I could represent the concept of the Sun and then a second glyph that's an upside down U that's the Egyption number 10

20:30 I looked at that word written with those two glyphs and said, symbolically this says to me 10 days. And so I went and did some research, and discovered that the Egyptians had a 10-day week. Now I didn't know that before I saw the symbols of the word but the symbols would have been enough if i had had perspective on this The symbols alone were enough to tell me they had a ten day week To correctly tell me Turns out pretty much all of the ancient Egyptian words work that way That if you know the right concept to substitute for the glyph You create a little symbolic sentence out of the glyphs of the word that explains to you what the word means. Right on, man! Now if you go to ancient China and you can positively correlate their written language because they had an ancient word for week that was written with a sun glyph in number 10 and they also had a ten day week

21:23 Now this is really interesting because at the risk of jumping all over the place here, I have heard you also talk about the idea of old calendars and 360 days in a year instead of 365. And maybe something might have changed in our solar system within human history which is so far off from what the mainstream would accept that would account for these changes? Is that kind of your contention? Yeah, that will really apply more to when we talk about the Velikovsky book. But the truth is that around 700 BC you see cultures all over the world who supposedly they weren't having regular contact with each other all shift from a 360-day calendar that they had had for thousands of years to a 365 day calendar all at the same historical moment. Now, to my way of thinking

22:16 if you can't point to an influence that caused them all to make that choice at that same moment, the likeliest thing is they were responding to an actual physical change in a year. Wow man and the implications of that are pretty far out! Now I have talked to other researchers who recognize this change in the calendar systems that are more conspiratorially minded who talk about religious authorities and ancient power centers who made these changes to the calendar and official standards by force as a method disrupting our connection to the earth or our natural rhythm and cycles, thus making us easier to control. A lot less epic explanation than a drastic change in the solar system but I guess i should ask you if you entertain that to any degree? Or if the research does show that it was a physical change how can we be sure? I think... It looks to me like there was a physical change at the length of year at that point time and there are all sorts of other effects as 700 BC that argue that might be true for example

23:14 every total eclipse of the sun that happened since 709 BC, we have computer programs that can verify it to the place and the day. So we can calculate retrospectively when that eclipse should have happened. We should be able to do that if the motions of the moon and the sun on the earth are like clockwork, then we should be able to calculate backward and prove that an eclipse happened there that day. The problem is that we have all sorts of credible researchers reporting total eclipses of the sun prior to that time in all sorts of cultures not a single one of those reports can be verified mathematically.

23:54 Laird, I really love this kind of stuff and it does get a bit over my head and hard for me to reach conclusions about but to play devil's advocate for that conspiratorial position or invoke Occam's razor couldn't it be more likely there was some meddling with those records rather than huge disruption on the solar system on time altering scale just a few thousand years ago? Well we could say that but the problem is these same credible reporters who are saying there was an eclipse here Those are the endpoints that we have to hit when they establish historical timelines for things. The historians are routinely using those reports as validation for their historical perspectives, but when we try and use those as validation from an astronomic perspective, we can't do it.

24:42 Interesting. So they do check out to some degree then? Well, they do. I mean they get hedged and the person will say well it wasn't reported entirely accurately because it was cloudy that morning and we couldn't actually see it or it wasn't really at this city where they said happened but in a region of where this city was. There are ways of fudging the account to present it as being reasonable when it wasn't really. Now, across that same boundary of 709 BC we have a sudden unexplained change in the rate at which plants absorb ions and so radiometric dating which is another tool that the archaeologists try to use doesn't work properly across that 709 BC boundary

25:27 Right on. We have major climate change that happened at that same moment, so dramatic enough that food products that were grown agriculturally in China for thousands of years suddenly couldn't be grown there anymore. Wow! We have evidence in the ice core records of major volcanic eruptive effects at that moment in geological history and for reasons I can't explain So something really, really big happened around 700 BC and big enough to theoretically justify a change in the length of the year of planet. It wouldn't take a whole lot of movement or change in the motion of Earth's orbit around the Sun to extend the year.

26:11 by five days. Fair enough and thanks for breaking that down you do make a great case, and I'm more than open to that possibility but to hop back to the Dogon i've heard you discuss these ancient cosmologies and how they predate written language and a point I really find interesting is that Based on your research, it seems like the cultures who developed written language have lost the most from these teachers or have fallen furthest from the original meaning. And it does seem to be that way but that sounds almost backwards doesn't it? Yeah from our perspective my friend John Anthony West talks about The Church of Progress And the church of progress in his mind is the mindset that imagines that there has been this linear increase in human ability and knowledge, you know since ancient times. That just keeps getting better and better and better and better and better

26:59 But there's lots and lots of reasons to think that that is not true, it hasn't been a linear process at all. That in certain ways our abilities have been declining It is easy to imagine the ancient Egyptians were more connected spiritually than we are to things that we are not really aware of So a lot of it depends on perspective. But the truth is that in my experience, the cultures that did the best job of keeping all this information straight were the ones who didn't choose to write it down – they chose to pass it on through the symbolic system they had. Now you might imagine there's a long game of telephone being played and meanings ought to change over time but

27:41 That's not true either. This is a highly mnemonic system, to give you an example when my wife were raising our kids and they were very young we were considering going out to a county fair but we thought Now what happens if we get separated from one of our children at the county fair before they can read and write or before they really know their own address and phone number? How are they going to ever get reconnected with us if we got separated. So, we decided to teach them to sing their address and their phone number to the tune of children's songs. And so having done that even adult friends of ours who heard the song and hear our address sung to the song

28:21 always remember our address. From that point on, it's a very effective means of teaching information. To give you another example if I ask an average person what they feel the symbolism of an owl is many people will say they feel that an owl symbolizes knowledge. I point out to them that that symbolism is at least 5 000 years old and that symbolism is so tenacious Somebody living today 5,000 years later who has no knowledge whatsoever of the ancient culture that might have assigned that symbolism Still knows the symbolism. Hmm That's amazing man so to talk about the teachers a little bit What have you been able to put together about? The mission of these teachers or the lesson plan and the rollout I mean there seems to be a lot there There has to be some logistics to it right

29:15 Absolutely there are. You can put together certain pieces of what had to have happened, some of the constraints that were on them at the time. Okay it looks like there was an era of instruction that happened around 10,000 BC which is just after the end of the last ice age as an example one of the first things okay if you imagine that there are several goals to this instructional effort. From a practical level, what they were trying to do was help us take a step up in terms of civilization and to put that more practically they were trying to move us from the role of hunter-gatherers to the role of farmers and so one of the main things that we're being taught was agriculture but one of the prerequisites for agriculture is being able to tell time, being able to track seasons, being able to know...be able predict when to plant or when to harvest and things like

30:07 So, one of the first exercises that was taught and you see this in cultures all around the world is a set of geometry that was used to align shrines to the cardinal points. To north south east west what it involved was now imagine whoever's teaching this didn't have access to tools they were going to come in and teach a class with he can't tell them go down to your bookstore by measuring tools so The geometry rests on an empty field and a stick. And the stick is planted vertically in the field, and then a line is measured that's twice as long as the height of the stick. A circle drawn around the stick using that as a radius. Then the two longest shadows of the day cast by this stick—one at morning and one at night—are marked with the point where the shadow crosses that circle that surrounds the stick

31:02 And those two points end up being endpoints for a line that automatically takes an orientation of east and west because the sun rises in the east, sets in the west. Now if you were to track that line every day of the year, you would see it moves very slowly back-and-forth across the circle. At the equinoxes, it passes through the stick. And at the solstices, its moved as far away from the stick as it's going before it starts moving back So this figure, this geometry gives visualization to the concept of a calendar. It also gives visualization to hours in the day – it's a sundial basically. Okay so whoever was putting this system together realized that they had to have a unit of measure that people could measure out. The geometry works regardless of how big or how small you measure it

31:56 So all you really need is a relative unit of measure, not the precise one. You don't need a standardized ruler with yardstick with three feet on it. You need some method of measuring that everybody can do and so what they came up with was the concept of the cubit and one definition of a cubit is the distance from the point of your elbow to the tip of your middle finger Another definition is that's the average pace or step of a person using just the tools they had at hand, you know. The measurements that a person's body can measure or they can measure with their body and a stick in an empty field they were able to create this geometry that has purpose when it comes to agriculture

32:40 Damn, I love it man. But one criticism I have heard of this idea that a group of advanced beings or seeders of knowledge had this campaign to go around and bring up all these primitive groups of people is that the advancements and developments of these cultures are separated by hundreds or even thousands of years rather than being more in unison as you might expect from that suggestion? Is that not true? That's a complicated question because in a lot of cases we don't have a coherent set of records to be able to say that for certain. We don't know for certain what was happening at 10,000 BC and even in places like China events that happened at 3 000 bc in china we only know based on textual reports or written down around 300 B C and so consequently in China there's all sorts of academic dispute about

33:31 What did they mean when they said that and how can we demonstrate what they meant when they said that? Because you have this huge gap in knowledge between when the thing happened and when it was written down. So even though we only have reports in China from 300 BC of a system of agriculture called The Wellfield Plan, In China, it's considered to be a theoretic plan even though they have some examples of it actually being put to use. You go to the Dogon country in Africa and that exact same system of agriculture had been used for hundreds or thousands of years as the official basis of agriculture for the Dogon.

34:09 Well, is there a way to prove this idea maybe outside of what's been recorded? Maybe by looking at the environment or the soil to try and find a genesis point that's the same across these cultures. Or any other way to further this case? Well, there are ways to get at it. My book Point of Origin argues that there's a very ancient site called Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. It's about a 12,000-year old site and the only evidence we have there is multiple sets of stone pillars set in circles with carved images of animals and some symbols on them that nobody knows what the symbols mean. And so my book

34:49 point of origin, I use various facets of language to demonstrate what's likely to be true about this stuff. Now this is a fundamental problem in this field of study that for someone who comes out of a college environment where you're expected to be able to prove things to five decimal points... That's not the case in this field of study and this field of study the most you're likely to be able to do is demonstrate the likelihood that something is true It's very rare that you can actually prove that something is true. But what I try to do is, I try to bring it down as intuitive a statement or as intuitive of comparison as possible so the person who looks at that comparison and sees one thing compared with another understands simply by seeing it that there must be a match

35:42 That's what I did with the science. In arguing about real science, talking about structure of matter you have so many different stages of how it is created that when you lay that side by side with the science and see intuitive matches all the way up to scale it becomes unreasonable to say that it's not a match. And I thought that part was really fascinating, like you talk about four level codes or guidelines that help to unlock the answer kind of like the earth wind fire water being four stages of matter... That really was kind of mind-blowing to me! Well, that's really an interesting part of it. Now you understand that me being a software designer as I'm looking at this system and trying to understand it very often I would reach the stage where I'd say gee if I had been the person putting this together I would have thought to do this or that with everything like creating symbols that were intuitively related to the thing they symbolize every time I reached one of those stages I would discover sure enough

36:42 whoever put the system together actually did the thing that I had wished, that if i had been putting it together. I would have done for my own benefit almost to the point that it looks enough like my own work, that is sometimes confusing to me. Damn! To be looking at it but the symbols get so complicated and the meanings for those symbols gets complicated enough that its hard to track and so they give you these metaphors to be able to put things together The simplest one as you mentioned is the four stage metaphor of water fire wind and earth Now from the perspective of creation matter water represents a concept waves

37:18 Fire is an act of perception, wind represents vibration and earth represents mass or matter. So now as you're working with these systems if you come across a reference that's explaining things in terms of water You can automatically infer that they are talking about an effect that happens in the first quarter of this process There's another four-stage metaphor that is given in terms of the animal kingdom. It begins with insects, then it moves to fish and then to four legged animals and then birds. Well you look at Egyptian deities who have animal heads and you realize that Keper who is the Egyptian god represents from my perspective the concept of nonexistence coming into existence – that's a very early stage of creation – he has the head of a dung beetle which is an insect

38:10 When you talk about written language, which is a more sophisticated concept. It's something that metaphorically belongs at the last of the four stages of creation. The Egyptian god who is responsible for that has the head of a bird. So using these metaphors, you're provided with a method of interpreting without even knowing roughly where the symbolism of a particular Egyptian deity falls based on what kind of animal head he has. So this is super interesting because when we look at ancient cultures, you know the mainstream considers them so primitive and that they didn't really know things. And the reason they talk in these symbols and allegories is because they just didn't have the proper understanding but the flip side of that could be that if it advanced culture is trying to come around and teach a more primitive culture, these are the terms which you teach like like we've been talking about

39:02 So it's not about the limited understanding of people that are in these tribal situations, but it's more about how do you transmit these concepts to them in the best way for them to understand? Like you might talk to a kid about where babies come from. It might be accurate but you're probably not going to get into the nitty gritty details of sex so there is kind of a little bit of switch there when you think about why these cultures talk in such allegory That's right. Also, you imagine that if we went someplace trying to teach a different culture about things that we understood, we would start out trying to teach them in the way that was most natural for us

39:44 Now, in order to understand the point I'm trying to get around too is there are performance shows with dolphins that happen like in Florida at SeaWorld, OceanWorld and places like that. And it's some of these places the trainers will allow the dolphins during the show to have a period of sort of freestyling time where they decide for themselves what stunt they want to do or what you know – what the next thing is they want to do for the entertainment of the audience? Now what happens is that two dolphins performing together will leap into the air and then dive under the water, and in the time it takes them to flip around and come back out of the water again they're on the same page with each other as to what stunt they are going to perform. Now some kind of communication is happening between the dolphins in that short amount of time to get them on the same page about that so their next stunt happens at sync.

40:39 Now, what they're doing is they're using sound basically to create an image underwater. And that one of them uses sound to create the images and sees the image. Basically they are creating a symbol and using that symbol to communicate with each other as to what they are going to do next. There's a perspective from which symbolic language might actually be more sophisticated method of communication than our written languages, phonetic languages Yeah, I can see that. And if you look at these Egyptian words where there's a phonetic aspect to them but there is also conceptual symbolic aspects of them very quickly someone who works with this word realizes that the power lies with symbolism not with the phonetics So what we may be seeing in ancient times is not a progression from less sophisticated language to more sophisticated language but actually one from more sophisticated language to less sophisticated

41:38 And so the cultures that never developed written language, from our perspective were sustaining a more sophisticated system. Interesting it's so backwards to the way a lot of people think but it does make sense another thing I'm curious about is that I get why these teachers would school the Dogon on agriculture and the structure reality because these things are relevant to the Dogon situation but why teach this African tribe about serious A&B? This gets to be complicated. We have parallelism between three symbolic themes, at least three of them – how the universe forms, how matter forms and how biological reproduction happens. And so we know that biological reproduction happens when an egg forms. Something from a man comes together with something from a woman to create an egg. Well similarly, we have a symbolic system that describes the universe as forming from a cosmogonic egg

42:39 And in the Dogon mindset, matter begins with something called the egg and a ball. It's a figure that looks like an Egyptian sun glitter. So we have parallelism of this symbol of the egg up and down the scale. Well this parallelism means that any structure they're describing for matter they also are going to describe a correlate too where things happening in the microcosm and things happening at the macrocosm. To give you an example the first permanent structure of matter that gets created according to the Dogon, this is a structure that exists at every point in space and time can be thought of as a little spiral. A little vortex, like a whirlpool. The correlate to that in the macrocosm, the one that is in our region

43:29 universe that we have immediate access to if we want to know that it's there is a spiraling birthplace of stars. That so faint, it emits such a faint amount of light that then it's not obvious to us that it's even sitting there. It's called Barnard's Loop and it's a spiral that centers on the belt stars of Orion And that loop, that spiral is a macrocosmic correlate to this microcosmic spiral the Dogon says exists. Now there's a similar effect happening with Sirius that there is a structure that relates to matter and it's very important that is a conceptual correlate to something going on with the Sirius stars

44:10 And so Sirius becomes important in the tradition because of that relationship between those two things. Trying to get the details of what it is, as you know books length worth of material to try and explain what it is but thats the easy answer is its not... Sirius wasn't important to the Dogon because their teachers came from Sirius It's because there was a symbolic relationship with Sirius thats very urgent Okay, yeah. I mean that makes total sense and then I assume Robert Temple's interpretation he just might have uh...I mean in the book it just seems like a suggestion rather than a conclusion Well Robert Temple in fairness to him he was writing in 1975 and there was no English language translation yet for most of the anthropological study on the Dogon There was a section of it that had been translated that he includes his book

45:03 But most of the details here, which are really gold for me in terms of understanding what the Dogon are talking about He didn't have access to so he was to a certain extent Having to shoot at that arc a little bit in terms of figuring out what these things represented. It's also complicated because The way the esoteric tradition here there is a tradition of priests teaching students or initiates. And that process requires the student to continue to ask pertinent questions, to find out the actual truth of things And there's a deliberate obfuscation, deliberate misrepresentation that happens in the early phases of that to misrepresent what the real figure is or real meaning of symbol is and so forth. For example publicly the Dogon say their festival of Sirius happens every 60 years but in practice they make an excuse every 50 years to hold it again Now your average person doesn't live long enough to realize their deception happening here

46:08 But the purpose of the deception is to hide the fact that period of this celebration reflects the orbital period of stars. It's a 50-year orbital period. They're disguising an inner meaning of their tradition by misstating it. And so a lot of the stuff that even the anthropologists, the French anthropologist who studied the tribe you get more than about five years before the end of their studies and things they're writing in articles are not really right on money in terms of what the Dogon really think. It's only when they get down to the end of it when the lead anthropologist was actually initiated as Dogon tribes member that you start getting down to the actual meanings

46:53 Hmm, now that I love. And I wonder how they came up with such a system because that has serious parallels to the way esoteric groups and secret societies operate and preserve their knowledge with these levels of initiation and understanding That's right. That is true. Now, there are larger symbolic reasons for that. One of the things I am constantly astounded with is every time I finish a book, I think I finally got to the bottom of the information here – the symbolism or whatever – but there is no level deeper than this. The Dogans say it is like peeling back skins of an onion and every time you peel one back, there is another one there that you didn't know was going to be there.

47:34 I'm continually astounded that things that I had no clue whatsoever had symbolic importance actually do. Things that were so large, choices that were so broad, that I couldn't imagine like the esoteric tradition itself there is symbolic meaning to the way that esoteric tradition works it represents something. Yeah right on man Also, what can you tell us about serpent symbolism and its association with these teachers? Because that's a pretty interesting thread. Yes now as we talk about the concept of there being two universes, universes forming in pairs, the Dogon actually say that they know of seven pairs of universes or actually 14 universes and that is sort of a sibling relationship between a non-material and material universe in every case.

48:27 from the perspective of the archaic philosophies that describe this stuff, the non-material universe has perfect knowledge but an inability to act. The material universe has imperfect knowledge but full ability to act. Now one way of understanding why that might be true is we have to go back to Einstein. Einstein says if you had a team of astronauts who were traveling much closer than the speed of light then we're traveling that their time frame would change, their time frame will get slower. And the time it took them to say lift a cup of coffee and take a sip might be the same amount of time that is takes us to go through an entire day or week. That there's a difference in timeframe. Time slows down as acceleration increases whereas mass increases So when you're talking about non-material universe

49:22 a non-material universe that Einstein's outlook implies that the non material universe exists in the time frame, that is much more quick than ours. So quick that things essentially happen instantaneously. Things we think of as taking time happen instantaneously Imagine standing at the top of the Empire State Building with a camera and filming traffic going by. And then you bring your video back to your computer, and you speed up video. It'll reach a point where things that begin as individual vehicles traveling on the street look like waves."

50:01 And the reason they look like waves isn't because they're waves, it's because it seems to be moving so quickly that they look like waves for someone who is not moving that quickly. That sort of what happening here and if you imagine that non-material side exists in an infinitely quick time frame there's no opportunity to do something There's no moment to do something You don't have interval of time long enough to actually accomplish something Makes sense So that's the outlook. Now, one of the symbols on the non-material side because of that wave effect is a serpent. A serpent moves in waves in the form of waves. Compare to that. So the serpent becomes symbolic one level of energy of an unmaterial universe whereas the sun like the Egyptian sunglyphs represents the god Ra in Egypt becomes a symbol of material side there are other symbols too

50:57 But the serpent symbolism and the connection to knowledge, the Garden of Eden and so on is all symbolic of this non-material side. The idea is that if the non material side can see us we can't see them. The Dogon one of their well known practices is they carve wooden masks that they use for festivals and drink dances things like that. And then the symbolism of this mask is the idea that the person behind the mask could see you but you can't see the person behind the mask Now another aspect of this, the archaic philosophies that talk about these universes is that there are routine attempts being made from the non-material side to communicate to the material side. But they are so hard for us to detect at this stage of perception we're in that they are very subtle. They take the form of vivid images and dreams or synchronicities perhaps. Yes, what look like coincidences to us or the odd behavior of animals

51:57 or information is passed through clairvoyance, or through things like the I Ching where you're able to divine meaning from a system of divination. Okay, and so part of what's going on in the viewpoint of the archaic philosophy is sort of like what I look at as a game of charades where you have an opportunity to give one clue to somebody trying to entice them into saying a certain word or taking a certain action or whatever. That's kind of what I see going on between these two universes is ongoing routine attempts to induce an action that the non-materialist side can't take for itself based on a clue

52:37 Boom well said man I love that idea and it also seems like magical rituals and consciousness altering in general were both a much bigger part of society in the distant past. And maybe there's a sort of use it or lose it factor in this connection between the worlds which could explain why the link isn't as strong as at once was, But maybe those types of practices could relate to the source for all these teachers and cultures who had the magical rituals, and who had really perfected the altering of their consciousness. Maybe they all tapped into a place where some non-human intelligence gave them the same type of information? It's a bit out there but unseen forces do seem to have an effect in the world if you're paying attention!

53:21 Now, what happens – typically happens for people who are working in the field I'm working in. I talk to other researchers and other authors and so forth is that you very quickly come to learn that there are things going on that we have a hard time explaining them. Sometimes these are very subtle things and sometimes they're very overt things. When I was researching my first book, I didn't even know I was researching a book. I thought it would just keep notes for myself of what I was learning and try to keep them organized. But I was following Robert Temple's bibliography in his book, The Serious Mystery. And I reached a point where I realized there was a particular textbook that I needed but this is before you could go online and search for an out of print book. So I had exhausted all the sources that I knew about, all the local regional sources for used books and nobody had the book. And I had gone to new bookstores and they couldn't get the book. I'd even gone to the Vassar College Library

54:16 to their interlibrary loan service to see if they could borrow the book so that I could look at it. And they couldn't get it for me and I finally came back to my wife, Risa one day and said well looks like I'm not going be able to get that book I need. So a few days later a box turned up on our back doorstep My wife had an aging cousin who lived in Queens New York in this small apartment And every so often he would get it in his head to divest himself of a bunch of random crap just to make some space in the apartment. In this box you had things like flags of Europe, a book on flags of Europe or pamphlets from someplace he visited or hot mitts for an oven or just a random set of crap but among this random set of crap was my book. The book I wanted.

55:08 Then now, he had no idea I was interested in the subject and when she asked him about it he couldn't even remember actually having a copy of the book. Now, that's a very tangible outcome. You can say this is coincidence when I was being taught science in elementary school and had a teacher who presented very much like Michael Reddy in The Day the Earth Stood Still – this was the sort of guy he was, very inspirational sort of guy – and he said that at the point where you bump up against what looks like the third coincidence when you're studying something, that's the time where you need to consider whether there might be something else going on besides coincidence

55:49 So in the study of these mysteries, you're constantly bumping up against things that look like coincidences. And at some point you have to draw a line and say that's too many coincidences I'm sorry I don't believe that. It is not credible to have 15 coincidences in a row explaining why this is how it is No doubt, no doubt. That's amazing! I love that kind of stuff and seeing as how you have such an interest in these cosmologies and the mindset of these types of cultures and how they got their information... Have you considered going down a path of personal exploration with entheogens or ritual practices to try and maybe tap in a bit deeper? To understand where they were coming from or what they might have been experiencing

56:35 That's one way to go about it. There are like Kabbalist references that categorize different connections, different types of connections people seem to have for this esoteric information and how they get it. You know there is the person who goes into a fainting spell and has an epileptic seizure comes out of it with knowledge about things they didn't have before. Or there's, you know the people who are using the right psychotropic drug to get to it or there are people who seem to learn about things in their sleep or all sorts of different categories of mystics and how they seem to come across this information The category I seem to fall into is one that's referred to as a pure mystic This is a person who just through the course of everyday life

57:24 seems to come up with insights that relate to cosmological studies as needed. And that's sort of the way it happens for me is, in really interesting ways just before I wrote the book Point Of Origin, I thought I was researching a half-a-dozen different questions about language for different people I know and I thought they were unrelated questions One morning, I solved all six questions within about an hour's time And the resolution to those questions involved an Egyptian hieroglyphic word. All six words came from the same column of the same page in the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, and the seventh word is the word that opened up the door for me for that book Point Of Origin. Wow! Man, The Muse was helping you

58:14 Yeah, I mean when things like that happen you sort of have to look at the process as being at least a facilitated one if not whatever. Anybody who's in this field of work has stories. I was at a conference last summer, a year ago and there was a woman sitting in front of me listening to a presentation turned around during quiet moment and she asked if I would be willing to look at a symbol for her I told her, sure. I would be happy to. So during the break she and her husband find me and they bring me two photographs of the same symbolic shape one of them had appeared suddenly on their window without explanation and the second one had appeared on the windshield of their car same symbol And they were afraid that this was a bad sign or a bad omen They wanted basically reassure them that it wasn't

59:06 Well, I could see that the shape was a shape that I recognized from my Dogen studies but I wasn't aware of what the shape represented. And so I went back home after the conference and researched it and realized that the shape was pivotal. It was the entry point to a whole other half of a question I had been busy researching for a book that I had no idea even existed. And when I told her that, initially it upset her even more to think that was true. That how did she bring me a shape that I needed? It seemed pretty bizarre to her. I said, look you don't have to be upset by it. Imagine a friend of yours is going to a party and if you get a message from them then you might end up with the second friend who's going to the party. That really all that has happened here from my perspective. Sometimes a person will bring me information at a conference that I do not understand but when I research it I realize its an answer to a problem somebody else in the conference also brought me. So I ended up being sort of the conduit between two people whom I did not know

1:00:07 Whoa, man. That is pretty wild but I've heard so many people relay similar experiences... ...I think that's an area that mainstream materialists really are going to need to take a good hard look at and you're one of the greats man! You do some really deep work that i couldn't even begin to tackle wouldn't know where to start And it's really been a blast having here to talk about it Would you like to remind the good people about some your previous work or where to further scratch the scranton niche if they feel the need? Sure, my publisher is Inner Traditions and so they have a website www.innertraditions.com I have a page there, Laird Scranton author page where my books are listed. They have a relationship with Simon & Schuster and so I also have an author page on simonandschuster.com Those are the entry point places to try to find out about my books but the books are everywhere you can find them on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, a lot of bookstores will carry one or some combination of the other in stock

1:01:08 There's a lairdscranton.com website that is a fan site, but the contact form reaches me if someone wants to send me a message or I'm easily found on Facebook. I joke not to mistake me for all the other Laird Scrantons on Facebook – there aren't any others! I was just visited in Scotland and it was trying to convince them that Laird was a title not I like it. Very cool, so much respect for you man! Thanks again for entertaining my simple stoner questions. No, I appreciate that your interview was very interesting and you hit the high points of all this stuff. I really appreciate it. Right on right on mission accomplished then well keep doing what you do out there alright? Thank you very much You got it

1:01:55 Sweet Jesus and hallelujah people. I hope you liked that show, I actually love getting into the ancient stuff There's just so many mysteries And there's more than enough evidence to know the story doesn't fit with what we're taught in school with what the history books show There's a lot being covered up and we really just don't know a goddamn thing I had sort of forgotten about the Dogon tribe until i had read Gordon White's Starships where he uses the fact that the Dogon have this seemingly impossible information and some of it being quite random as an example of communication with non-human logic. It gives us some strange pieces sometimes

1:02:33 It was also him who urged me to make room for a question about the CIA stealing Robert Temple's research. But, based on what Laird said about the Dogon's own descriptions of their teachers they definitely didn't seem human or all that physical you know? And when Graham Hancock and I were talking about the Brotherhood of the Man Bag or this little bag symbol that is in the hands of figures in Sumerian art Mayan art it's pretty widespread Anyway, he talks about that being an allusion to these culture seeders which he considers to be advanced humans from after a cataclysm. And what struck a chord with me about that perspective was that he brought up the idea That we might be due for a cataclysm and what if such a thing happened today? What if a meteor hit caused tsunamis a mile high knocked out the grid

1:03:23 Imagine it gets pretty nuts and maybe the surface is completely inhospitable for even 100 years. It doesn't have to be forever, Rockefeller only had prohibition for 10 and that's all it took a whole country to forget alcohol was fuel but let's say 100 years or whatever just total devastation. Graham's point was who is this really going to affect? It would definitely destroy the western world as we know it but would it really affect a tribe like Dogon? Assuming they could find proper shelter, they're not going to miss the Xboxes and iPhones. These indigenous tribes aren't going to miss LA or New York or London or Japan... They don't even know these places exist now in a lot of cases! So imagine this devastation you know? Our shit is royally fucked up

1:04:10 And let's imagine a group of survivors from an area like New York City makes it to some tribe in the jungles of South America and starts trying to teach them about this advanced knowledge from their lost civilization. Could that have been what happened 12,800 years ago when the flood happened? Could remnants of Atlantis as a placeholder name have gone out to assess the damage of the world met indigenous people and brought them up to a new level with any information they had? It does seem possible, but with all the entheogen use and the emphasis on ritual spaces and just the widespread spirituality that they seem to have it's also just as likely that they could've all tapped into this spiritual plane in the same way and gotten this information.

1:04:57 and these ideas for their cosmologies. You know, when I talk to Gordon about this his big contention is that many of these cultures did not all rise up at the same time they didn't all develop agriculture at the same time so it's hard to say they were human beings from a previous round of civilization And the spirit world theory is more likely because cultures could have accessed it at different times. And the cultures that seem to have the strongest spiritual and magical practices seem to be most stable and complex, so there's that element I was also just reading about this argument that the moon was brought into place by whatever caused the flood. That's a far out idea too, but unlikely because i doubt they had projectors back then. But as confusing as really getting a beat on the past can be, really understanding how the environment has changed, how humans have changed, and why we built these amazing ritual spaces

1:05:52 It's almost impossible for me to get my head around really restoring the right context to the people of antiquity. It is amazing though, and it's so fun to get into! And another thing I would say is, I did go camping in the Grand Canyon a couple weeks ago and you know these pictures where you can see like an entire arm of the Milky Way? I was actually far enough out there. The sky was clear enough to actually see that for the first time! It's really nuts to think that ancient people saw the sky like that every night I don't even know how they would focus on specific constellations in a sky that full. Sure, we can point out the Big Dipper and Orion's Belt now because that is really all you can see if you are near a big city but it was an amazing sight whether i was looking at billions of suns millions of light years away or some glitter stuck on the roof of our prison planet...I cant say! But it was sick

1:06:45 I guess what i'm trying to get at is treat yourself, you know? Go camping at the Grand Canyon. Anybody can get three days away from the machine with a little planning right? But anyway big thanks to Laird he brought some amazing stuff to the table check out his books let him know You like the show and it was worth his time to be here Check out the new website at thehiresidechats.com Get yourself a free week's trial of THC+. It would mean a whole lot to me I'm trying to make this like, a real professional kind-of company show thing and the new website and graphics are a step in the right direction i think And I'm so fortunate to be doing well with this. I know so many of our own guests are really struggling, so I'm not complaining at all and I'm not going to pretend to be desperate but i do try to put together a solid product for your education and your entertainment and I keep that bar low at five dollars a month just to make sure I got enough to keep doing what I want to do without stressing out the wallets of the listeners. I think it's a fair compromise

1:07:49 and stability is important. But I hate this part of every show I listen to, I'm sure you feel the same so let's just knock it off and say... I've done my part! Your move Cosmology Crafters & Culture Seeders! Your fucking move. Oh no You see The world isn't random It's attached to puppet strings Control over The 9 to 5's try to steal ya Now don't that job seem silly? Hello, can you hear me Or should I play back recordings From some spying agency Wish we were younger and free

1:08:50 I'll be thankful when it's all exposed The vast conspiracy There is such a difference Between me now and the damn brother child Hello from the higher side They're calling out a thousand crimes. They'll tell you the story of everything that's been done, and they'll call out deception on the web that's been spawned

1:09:32 Hollow from the higher side The earth is hollow inside They'll tell you about something that no one else will Have you heard about Saturn? Have you heard about the real since so long ago? They're cartoons It's so typical of me to talk about the stuff I'm sorry that's good and well Did you ever hear the argument That nothing really happens? It's no secret And at the best is plus It's doubling your time

1:10:39 Hello from the higher side They're calling out a thousand crimes They'll tell you something The elite have done And they'll call out deception On the web that's been spawned Hello from the higher side Challenging your paradigm And I'll tell you something That the battle's begun But we can't fight it with violence The mind's where it's won At the war At the war

1:11:51 Follow from the higher side They're calling out a thousand crimes They'll tell you something the elite have done And they'll call it all deception Of the web that's been spun Follow from the higher side I'm challenging your paradigm And i'll tell you something That the battle's begun But we can't fight it with violence The mind where it's won, that's the problem

1:15:38 but I give you all I can for five bucks. And I hope you'll at least give it a shot if you've listened to a few free shows and you find them unique or valuable, I know there's a lot of podcasts out there and I'm just one of them But if you have any questions, concerns or comments about any of this please get in touch with us at thehiresideschatsteam.com I also wanted to plug the Hireside newsletter i'm going to be putting out totally free for anyone who wants to sign up at the main internet website for the show thehiresidechats.com You can also get on that email list through the Hireside Chats Facebook page there's a button there as well But the reason I'm doing this is because I get tons and tons of emails after a show goes up asking me about how I feel about a particular guest or topic, and the wrap-up isn't always the best place to do that. Especially if I have anything negative to say. Sometimes the dust needs to settle... sometimes I need to hear feedback from you guys first.... There are a lot of factors but usually have something to communicate to you and just don't get to it

1:16:35 So on the first of the month I plan to send out a little newsletter with my thoughts about the 5 shows this previous month and talk to you about anything else that's on my mind or going on. And what is probably most enticing, is that I'm gonna give some insight into at least one guest coming up in the month which people have been begging for some posted schedule for a long time and personally think I'd like the surprise! But signup for the Hireside Newsletter it comes out on the 1st of the month and I won't waste your time with any other emails And that's it. I appreciate you listening, and try to give alternative ideas and guests a fair shake on high quality podcasts, expose some deep level conspiracies without the yelling, and hope to offer some inspiration that even though the system relentlessly suggests you should follow their blueprint of mediocrity, you can do your own thing and live a much happier life despite all negativity in this world. So go ahead and treat yourself! Isn't it about time?