The Best Of Gordon White On THC: Remembering The Dark Prince of Chaos Magic

00:07 Well, hi there and hello, Hireside Chatters. Let me tell you right now, I strongly dislike clip shows. I skip pretty much everyone I come across, whether it's a podcast I like that doesn't want to do the usual work that week or one of the burnt episodes from the Seinfeld archive. I don't like them because it's just recycled stuff I've already seen. And if that's your sentiment too, I get it. And today my lofty goal is to overcome that. So I've never done a clip show. In fact, the closest has been the THC 100th episode special where I went and had fresh 15-minute rapid-fire interviews with my favorite 12 or so guests from that first 100 episodes rather than just pulling clips.

00:50 So anyone who really hasn't gone that far back in the archive, that is a good one. And I really don't know anyone else who's done it. And given how crowded podcasting is today, I actually think it would be harder to do now anyway. Regardless, I am not a fan of this format in general, but I know I have the best collection of Gordon White interviews that will ever exist. And he had such a uniquely diverse scope of knowledge as well as a highly charged quick wit. And even I listened back to a lot of these and felt like I was hearing them for the first time because he was so quick. And our interviews were so densely packed. It's not uncommon for me to miss a lot. When Gordon died, a lot of the people who held him in high regard did various forms of tribute.

01:33 And I did hop on a live stream with Miguel Connor and Chris Knowles the day after we got the news as a sort of form of tribute that was really just from my own mental health and personal desire to spend some time with other friends in our circle who actually could understand the weight of the loss. I would have done it unrecorded and enjoyed it just the same. Maybe more actually. But this is my proper tribute. And I'll spare you the step-by-step walkthrough of how Gordon made the leap in my life from show guest to genuine friend, which is a very rare thing to happen. But there is one event where the universe seemed to arrange our pieces together on the big game board of life despite the unlikeliness of it.

02:17 And that is when my wife and I were taking our first trip to Europe. And even though everyone recommends backpacking and taking trains, we decided we were going to rent a car and see Europe at our own pace and schedule the American way. And we had one route planned out from Amsterdam to Barcelona, I think, and we were going to fly home from there. And we were so unprepared and young and poor and naive that we had to call my dad from the car rental place in Amsterdam because we could afford to pay for the rental. But between us, we didn't have a credit card with a big enough unused balance to accommodate the deposit hold.

02:55 That's the point in my life that this took place. Luckily, my dad came through as he always did. We rented the car and we made it about halfway through France and we got a call from the rental car company telling us about a big fee for dropping the car off three countries away. I think it was like $1,500 or something. They hadn't told us that when we told them our plan, but nice of them to update us. And so that changed things and we circled back to Amsterdam and started brainstorming how we could see more of Europe with the week we had and what was left with it and what could even be a decent backup plan. And London being close to Amsterdam is one of the few last minute flights we could get and afford.

03:34 So I said, hey dear, there's this guy I interviewed who lives in London and he offered to show us some cool stuff around there if you're all right with that plan. And she was. We met Gordon at the timeout magazine offices where he was getting off work and he took us out with a big group of guys from his work. We went to an amazing Toppas bar. We went to a bar called The Plow where Aleister Crowley used to go. The next day, which was actually Halloween 2015, he said, you know, skip that plan of trying to go to Stonehenge. Let's go to Ave Berry Stone Circle. And we just had an awesome time. It definitely seemed less touristy, more authentic. And Gordon and my wife really hit it off too. And we all became good friends. He ended up coming to our wedding, which was more like a week-long party in these houses we rented.

04:18 So by the time we actually got married, everyone was pretty well acquainted. And another quick funny story that involves some found footage of Gordon from the Carlwood family archive. We had this video guy at our wedding and asked him to just let people talk because it's a lot more fun than random dancing montages over a music bed. But towards the end of the night, he had come to tell me about the guests that he'd gotten comments from. And I said, hey, man, you missed all the most important, funniest, charismatic people. So we did a bit of a speed run while everyone was at peak drunkenness because his battery was dying. So we started just grouping people together. And I have one with Gordon and a couple of good friends of mine.

04:58 I only have to cut out one. one part just so this one guy isn't at risk of losing his job, but the rest should be fine to put out there. I'd say they spent too much time giggling and roasting me for my long stringy hair and male pattern baldness, which is not right, but it is what it is. And that's what good friends do, I guess. All right, three, two, one. Go ahead. Greg and Teresa, we've had a wonderful day. Absolutely here at wherever this place is. Thank you. Thank you. It's been an amazing ceremony. You guys are an inspiration and incredible. And we look forward to see what you do next.

05:40 Go ahead, Romeo. Oh, shit. Okay. And Teresa. Teresa's intimate. In all honesty, Teresa, you look really, really pretty. Really beautiful. Greg, you might need to edge the tips a little bit, but you guys look great. The show of the shiner next time. No, don't touch the wasteland. Don't touch the wasteland. The wasteland was a very good point. Justin Price here with Gordon White and Romeo. Let's get it. This is the highest I chat. What show is that? Craig Carlwood and Company. This is and company. We are and company.

06:16 So, no, congratulations, guys. We love you. This is the most beautiful wedding I've ever been to in the state of California or anywhere for that matter because it's the only one in California. Yeah, right. Only one in California, so it's the best. But, you know, tough five little Jaya wedding this year. Hands down. Easily, easily. So, no, cheers to them. Romeo, you didn't, you know, you didn't bring a drink. Check the mic. We love you guys, man. Thanks for everything. And you guys are awesome. To the Carlwoods. Good times. Always a class act, but I can't say the same for the other two. And then we did live higher soup crossover shows in Austin and here in Florida.

06:56 But it all came down to that one bad trip planning decision. And separately from our friendship, he was on the show so much because he was always putting out new, diverse, super interesting work. So there was always something new to talk about. I never felt like our friendship was putting its thumb on the scale, so to speak, more than a little bit. And I was always excited as a host to have him as a guest, which is why a clip show is appropriate. We're not just going to hear 10 clips about one book or one person's thing, which might be like strictly Atlantis or the Genesis 6 conspiracy. No, those things might come up, but this is all over the map, as Gordon's knowledge base was.

07:38 I've always said for all the compliments I get about being good at making this show, all I really am is a conspiracy/slash counterculture talent scout. And there was no one more talented for this sort of thing to me than Gordon. He knew magic, conspiracy, ufology, the paranormal, and Fortean stuff, consciousness studies, psy research, and so many other things better than most people know anything. Now, one more thing to talk about before we dive into the clips is the story of his last adventure and departure from the big sandbox. Most people know he was in Central America researching his third book in the Dot trilogy, Starships, Animistic, and the third one was going to be about cunning folk traditions.

08:24 I wish I knew what he was going to call it. I'm sure it was very catchy and smart. So he had been on this trip for several weeks, maybe upwards of a month or two already. He had just done another ayahuasca journey the month before in April. The videos are still up on his YouTube page. And I will always find it poetic that his actual last video put up on May 1st is a tribute to Peter Carroll, the founder and main figure of Chaos Magic. And I think Gordon really was the one who carried the metaphysical torch further for the next generation. And for his last video to be a tribute to Peter, it really is like a bookend on the entire RuneSoup YouTube channel that just has a very symbolically potent feel to it.

09:11 But I really did not like how vague his initial death announcement was. It just came from James through RuneSoup and said, I write to share the heartbreaking news that Gordon has passed away. Gordon left this world while traveling in Peru, following his life's passion, learning and experiencing traditional magic and shamanic practices so he could continue to teach and help others successfully navigate life. RuneSoup and you, the community, were Gordon's proudest achievement. I know many of you will feel his loss greatly. I encourage you to find each other and your family and friends to help process his loss. I've set up a space on Mighty so you may share your thoughts on Gordon if you want.

09:50 At this stage, I cannot say what direction RuneSoup will take. Right now, my heart. heart is broken and I am spending time with the rest of Gordon's family to grieve. I will share more when I can. So, look, I'm a reasonable guy. I understand the sudden shock and personal loss and pain and the lack of enthusiasm to update the internet on what happened. So, I don't fault anyone, but the vagueness did cause a lot of speculation. Was he psychically attacked by a shaman who didn't like the gringo being around? Was it ayahuasca? Was it the Novavax? And what was the deal with the somewhat cryptic Grim Reaper that was his last post on Substack just a few days before he died?

10:31 All these sorts of things. And I'm sure people around him are not used to processing the grief of an internet personality. Few are, but it adds a whole layer to everything. And hundreds or thousands wanting more and speculating about what they think happened to a person they feel like they know. The long and short of it is, Gordon had just settled into his Airbnb in Peru. And when he missed checking in with James for a call to talk business that they planned to have, James eventually contacted the Airbnb host, who did a wellness check and found Gordon there alone, having passed. And after being checked out by professionals, he had all the hallmarks of a sudden heart attack.

11:12 James said Gordon's initial heart complaints were before the Novavax came into the mix, and I know several weeks had passed since his last ayahuasca ceremony, so don't think those were factors, though. Cusco, Peru is a high-elevation city and is known to exacerbate heart issues. Who knows? A lot of things could stack up to cause a heart attack in someone so young, I guess. You're not going to find one cause, most likely. He did say his shamanic healing work really took a lot of his energy out of himself, too. And I know he always did a few more than he probably should have. But that's sadly what happened. And I guess no amount of trying to work out a why is going to change the what.

11:55 He died, we think, May 6th or soon after. He missed the RuneSoup book club on May 9th, so that would be the window between May 6th and May 9th. And we got the email May 13th. Personally, our last back and forth was on May 6th. He was convinced the Panama Canal would be the next target in the big war and would be destroyed by the end of this year, or at least not a place you'd want to travel to. So he thought we should meet up there in Panama sooner rather than later because they have good hotels for families and it's a nice midpoint for us given where he was. But let me read you our last message in full and you'll understand why I was so motivated to dig a bit deeper.

12:39 In regards to Panama, I said, I like the sound of that. How much time do we have? And Gordon said, oh, it's definitely this year if it happens. So I have triggered a prophecy down here. I'm doing work with San La Muerte, which is a domestic version of the Death Saint, but male. I met with the 86-year-old keeper of the main temple, and San La Muerte told him 10 years ago, one day a powerful foreigner will come from a distant land and he will expand the cult. On that day, I will be done with you. So I might be in your hemisphere for a while longer because I want to head to regional Argentina when I'm done with Cusco so I can get a tiny San Lamuerte carved out of human bone embedded under my skin. But it means I'll be around, hopefully, for a cheeky little winter break.

13:24 Also, I feel like Chris is the number one guest if you measure in total minutes. Good show, by the way. Very curious and also sad because that last little PS he put on there truly did feel like a goodbye. And it was always a joke that he got the most time on THC, the most episodes. And that was sort of a bullet point on his resume and he would make comments about it all the time. A title he wore proudly, at least when talking to me, as part of, you know, our dynamic. And it was so weird to hear him say that. It's like to say that Chris is actually the reigning champion if you count in ours. It really felt like a subconscious way of saying, you'll be alright without me.

14:04 So we have this tribute to Peter J. Carroll as his last video upload, a passing of the torch to Chris as his last message to me. And then his last substack post was also pretty curious, especially considering all that other stuff he told me he was up to just before he was gone for good. It was a little rainbow Grim Reaper. So I wanted to know what this was about and if it related to his death. And I tried to reach out to all the San La Muerte groups that have any sort of internet presence and I didn't get a real response from anyone. But here are some of the basic facts about it. San Lamuerte is a skeletal folk saint venerated primarily in Paraguay and northeastern Argentina, often linked to a persecuted healer or monk.

14:49 who aided the poor and sick, depicted as a male skeleton, frequently holding a scythe, seen as a protector of the marginalized, outcasts, and prisoners. Strongly opposed and rejected by the Catholic Church. While many devotees maintain small private altars in their home, a few physical building sanctuaries do serve as major pilgrimage sites, but they're all a little bit under the radar. Now, of course, I was curious and tried to get a beat on who Gordon might have been talking about, and I think I might have found it, though. I'm going to butcher some of the pronunciations here. While his exact birth date is not widely publicized, Pi Nicolas Benetiste is approximately 77 years old.

15:31 Okay, that's pretty close. He remains the active founder and main guardian of the Capella de Santo Shrine. It is the main and most famous temple dedicated to San La Muerte in Paraguay. The site experiences a massive pilgrimage of crowds every year on August 13th to 15th, which are the traditional feast days celebrating San Lamuerte. The temple features heavy iconography of skeletons, skulls, and candles. This creates regular tension and rumors among local Roman Catholics who frequently associate the sanctuary with witchcraft or dark magic, though devotees identify as Christians.

16:10 Pi Nicolas Benetiste does not maintain an official website or email contact because he operates a local folk sanctuary within a traditional grassroots community framework. Digital communication channels like websites and email are not utilized. Now listen to this, that the spirit would leave the leader once a task is done is a common trope in Umbanda and spiritualism, which are heavily practiced by Pi Nicholas. In these traditions, the medium is often called a horse for the spirit to ride. Spiritual leaders in this region typically do not retire until death, but they may speak of their spiritual mission being completed. The altars are typically crowded with gifts left by followers in exchange for protection or favors.

16:54 Common offerings include whiskey, cash, cigarettes, flowers, and even cell phones. Well, pick up the phone, Pi Nicholas. Many sanctuaries feature artisans or caretakers who craft tiny figurines, often only 3 to 15 centimeters tall, made of bone, wood, or metal, and devotees bring these to the shrines to be blessed or spiritually charged. It is an acceptable ritual practice among certain radical devotees of San Lamuerte to insert small carved amulets under their skin. These extreme body modifications are specifically known as subdermal insertions.

17:32 Devotees who choose body insertion do so, believing it grants absolute permanent protection against physical harm, gunfire, stabs, and imprisonment. Because the amulet is inside the body, it can't be lost or confiscated. While these miniature carvings can be made of wood or metal, human bone is considered especially powerful. According to cult tradition, an amulet carved from the bone of a deceased Christian man possesses inherent spiritual power and requires fewer ritual blessings from a Catholic priest to be fully consecrated. Devotees traditionally believe a San Lamuerte amulet must be blessed by an unwitting Catholic priest to activate its powers.

18:12 Worshippers will hide the small bone carving underneath a standard image of a traditional Catholic saint during a mass, so the priest accidentally blesses both. It goes on to talk about how he's a powerful spirit in the prison system and often appealed to for protection, like I mentioned. And a couple people I inquired with on the side referred to this as narco-occultism, but I'm sure it's much more than that too. And it's kind of wild to think that Gordon was in the process of appealing to a protection spirit that many in the region consider the most powerful and going about a process that amps that protection power up to 11 and died so close to completing that process because he was going to go to that feast day festival and I think that's when he was going

18:58 to get the thing put under his skin and I know this because I was contacted by Bernhard Gunther's wife. I mentioned in my interview with him that this happened and she put me in touch with Petra Totchert who is another rune super and a very talented astrologer who did a reading for me and then read the charts of both my kids now. But she had posted about Gordon and she was contacted by a woman who runs a small San Lamuerte temple and we got connected and it didn't provide as much insight as I would have wanted but she did know Gordon. We had a back and forth via text and then also a call when she was near a person who could translate. But he was studying and somewhat practicing there talking to the spirit that she talks to.

19:42 She also said he was going to put the bone bone under his skin during the feast day celebration, which would have been in August, and he died in May. And I asked more about the bone, and she said that they usually use the bones of aborted babies. And who knows how far he was going to take that or how he would have explained it, or even if that's what he was going to do specifically. She just said that's how they do it often. And where they get those bones, I probably don't even want to know. I asked her about the rumors of a spiritual attack or ayahuasca, and she shot that down and seemed to be pretty sure it was natural.

20:21 She seemed to just not have that much information. He did die about a thousand miles from where she actually was, but she did talk about them spending time together. And he had made several trips there. And she shared these photos of her family with Gordon altogether, which did make the whole thing worth it for me. I told myself I was not going to talk about his critics in this, but one phrase I've heard used a couple of times was that he was a colonizer or a cultural appropriator. And I just hate that because he knew a lot of indigenous traditions deeply, more deeply than any critic, I'm sure. And he brought me and many other people to respect that more than we ever had previously.

21:05 Gordon was not a cultural appropriator, he was a cultural appreciator, a cultural participator. Do the people who say stuff like that think that they're better because they don't engage with the rest of the human family and stay in their bubble? Do they not eat Italian, Mexican, or Asian food? Is it bangers and mash for all eternity? We should all be lucky enough to be born into a culture we do take some pride in and one that the rest of the world is happy to respectfully share in with us. Gordon participated. The people he engaged with and did these deep, intense personal ceremonies with in their native spaces, from Peruvian shamans to Santa Maristas in Paraguay, they didn't feel appropriated.

21:49 And they don't need dumb, liberal virtue signalers to vouch for them. They were humans interacting with other humans in a respectful and serious manner. Try it sometime. Another time, Gordon and I were talking about these anthropologists that didn't want to disturb the tribe. And I think Gordon found that very condescending. They're not animals. I don't know if this was a debate that really happened or just an example that he was using, but the idea of should we give shoes to the barefoot tribes? Would they even want them? And Gordon was like, yes, they're just people. Give them the Nikes.

22:26 Their way of life will not collapse. And I just found it funny because these anthropologists think in the way that, like, you can't touch a baby rabbit because the scent means mom won't take care of that rabbit and it'll die. And they're applying this kind of condescending animal logic to people. And he's like, give them shoes. Let them decide. They'll wear shoes if they want or they won't. And it's just like an example of his mindset that we're all just people, no matter how different our cultures are, how separated we are from Western civilization. He could see through that stuff better than a lot of other people. I just found that example with the shoes funny, and I agree.

23:07 It's those who sometimes think they're being compassionate that overthink themselves into being sort of over-concerned with how to manage other people. And that gets into the white savior complex and all that. But Gordon just treated them like people and he met them on their ground in their culture and did the work to see how they saw things, not how they could be exploited or massaged into a Western perspective. Okay, so a few more things since this is my big Gordon White send-off. I did get two other funny synchronicities around his death that I want to throw out there before we get to the clips. One was when Miguel and Chris and I did that live stream the next day, Miguel made the post on Twitter, and right there in the comments, you see there is a randomly placed ad.

23:51 Now, that ad could have been for anything in the world, but it's a very gay ad for boxers in the style of like a jockstrap. I mean, you look at that, and if you know Gordon and his humor, that felt like a wink to me. The other was that shortly after finding out about his death, I decided to watch Project Hail Mary, which I didn't really find to be as good as the hype around it, but I had kind of stopped watching and was doing the phone scrolling thing. And there was a scene with a song, a karaoke scene, really. And it grabbed my attention and snapped me out of the scroll. And the first words of the song are, just stop your crying. It's a sign of the times.

24:29 Welcome to the final show. And it hit me pretty good. Again, Gordon was really insightful and wise when it came to death and loss and these things, but he could also be very practical. practical and matter of fact, and he very much could tell me to suck it up at certain times. And that also just felt right in the vein of what he would have said to me at that time if he could have said anything. And it really did grab my awareness. And I looked that song up because it's a karaoke scene. It's a Harry Styles song, clearly not obscure. It has 2 billion views on the video on YouTube, but I think only gay guys like Harry Styles, so I call that wink too.

25:09 And there is a third wink, this one much more epic and designed for everyone. But there was a meteor over Tasmania. This bright green meteor streaked across the night sky over Tasmania on May 10th. Now, if space is an altar, if lights in the cosmos are the campfires of our ancestors, well, the flame flickered that night. So I love that. And then one smaller thing that happened was I was wearing this goofy shirt that says content not available. A little joke about the prospect of being canceled with what I do. And I was wearing that shirt when I got the call that my dad died. And I was wearing that shirt the morning that I read the announcement that Gordon died. And so I threw that shirt away.

25:54 And now I think we're all safe. Obviously, a huge loss. And I remember telling my wife when it happened, I guess life just has 25% less laughs in it now and 100% fewer friends with any real depth of knowledge of what my job is actually like, who I can talk to and vent with regularly. It changed the whole course of my life and my kids' lives because Gordon would have encouraged much more travel out of me and he would have got it. We would have met up in places like Panama that I would never find myself planning a trip to on my own. It would just be to hang out with my friend. So that really is a lifetime of experience that will probably be reduced down to me killing time gaming or something else like that instead.

26:38 And it is quite sad. On a lighter note, I got this letter from someone who knew Gordon in high school. It's fun and I wanted to include it too. He says, I'm not sure if you monitor this mailbox, but I wanted to tell you a bit of a story. Read Gordon. It's a nice story. I knew Gordon from 16 into my early 20s. I met him on an IRC chat room. It would have been maybe 1995 or 96. We both mentioned an interest in the occult. We were in year nine, going into year 10 in high school. It turned out synchronistically, he was starting year 10 that year at my high school, Meriwether High School in Newcastle. It was an academically selective school for gifted and talented kids. We got along famously at school.

27:23 Listening to your memorial episode, it doesn't sound like he had changed one bit since high school. The thing I find very funny is that he was already at maybe 16 years old very acquainted with Chaos Magic, Aleister Crowley, Israel Rigardi, Peter Carroll, Robert Anton Wilson, Anton LeVay, etc. He must have been reading that stuff, I would guess, since at least 10 or 11 years old. We would go almost weekly to a local bookshop with a great occult section and he would just prescribe books I would just have to read. Gordon, I think, was treated as an adult from a very young age. He had a great relationship with his mother, who was lovely.

27:59 Gordon was one of the first to learn to drive and he would come around to pick me up for an evening and we would go on these late night tours listening to Brittany Spears, Aqua, and Courtney Love smoking cigarettes at lookouts near the beach. I didn't find out he was gay until much later on when my wife said, You're gay, right? And he was like, Yep. It was a bit funny. We all cracked up. There was still quite a bit of stigma around being gay back then. Okay, side note. You know, my wife jokes with me about something very similar because I would read all of Gordon's conspiratorial blog threads because he had them all separated out, but I didn't get much into personal ones in the beginning. And I didn't know he was gay either until we were walking through London and he said some comments about his partner James.

28:44 And I was so sheltered and naive that I just thought, well, James is a weird name for a female, but I think I've heard that before. And just making conversation, I said, so how's your girl? And my wife whacked me on the arm and says, Guy. And I was like, yeah, how's your guy? And so it's just funny because I also found out almost the same way. Thank God for wives, right? Where would we be without them? Okay, back to the email. Gordon would wear a smoking jacket and was rocking the magician look even at 18. We held seances at his place and he had a pair of Osiris sneakers that he loved. He was quite popular at school, but he always had the most time for the misfits and individuals.

29:24 We stayed friends after high school and I would visit him down in Chatswood for nights on his balcony drinking late into the evening. Towards the end of one night, he produced a human skull he had acquired. acquired from God knows where and impishly encouraged me to drink red wine from it, but I declined. Fast forward a few years, and I was going through a DMT phase. Silk Road was going. I was buying and mining crypto, and I heard him on your podcast. I could not believe it and was very happy to hear him. I was also surprised to hear he knew Chris Knowles, who was another person who had some great insight to reality. And I immediately listened to as much content as I could when I came across him. So for me, the universe is a truly wondrous place, and synchronicities are amazing.

30:08 Gordon was an expert in surfing those waves, not taking life too seriously, and really caring and having a lot of time for others. Best wishes to you and your young family. I am really pleased to hear how your life is unfolding and wish you all the best. So cool, right? I was very thankful to get that insight because we never know people at their life stages before we actually meet them. So that insight was fun. And again, Chris Knowles comes up. And funny thing, as I'm gathering these clips, which I'm just going to play through and not stop and comment on everyone, I thought it would be fun to use the very beginning of our very first interview as the first clip, the first time we talked to each other.

30:48 And when I went back to listen to it, synchronicity comes up yet again. Because if you had asked me where Chris came into play and came into the picture, I would have said that I think Gordon and I did two or three interviews and then Gordon recommended Chris to me. But no, in the first five minutes of our first interview, I quoted something I read on Gordon's blog and he says, Yeah, that's a quote from this guy, Chris Knowles. Unbelievable. So thankful for both of them. My worldview would not be nearly as well developed if not for the pair of them. Okay, stop the presses. The sinks just keep coming. Maybe this is what going insane feels like.

31:26 But lately, I've been talking to Heather Lynn a lot, and she recently was talking to me about how Zachariah Stitchin and his whole Anunnaki narrative was funded and promoted by the Rockefellers. And I lit up. I was like, wow, that's interesting. And again, I'm going back through the Gordon show archive and I go back to this very first show and I scroll down to the very first comment and it reads, Wow, Gordon actually got my brain spinning, which doesn't happen that much anymore. I've been looking into this same stuff since I was a lad. I thought the Rothschild backing the Stitchin stuff was very interesting. I for a long time enjoyed the ancient alien theory, but long ago I decided I didn't really care for the intent of the perpetrators of said theory.

32:09 To me, it's just a way of taking myths, important myths, and caging them into a materialistic view of the world. And then Gordon replied to this comment, that's very astute. The philosopher Patrick Harper, again, my God, one of my favorite people. The philosopher Patrick Harper says there's no way of talking about the myths without retelling them. So explaining the Anunnaki by calling them aliens is merely to retell the story in a different context. Thus, ancient aliens and similar programs get caught in an infinite loop with diminishing returns. Oh, and it was Rockefeller funding, not Rothschild. Stitch was even put up in 30 Rock for a while.

32:48 So bizarre. I kind of thought this was new information to me, but Gordon knew a lot about a lot, and I am known to forget important things like this. Lastly, of course, I am not qualified to be the promotional spearhead of Gordon's magical legacy. I'm not a magician, but it is kind of happening on its own because I have maybe the biggest audience who cares. But I only have to really be convincing enough to get people in the RuneSoup door, and the material speaks for itself. So it's pretty low pressure in that regard. But it is a strange catch-22 that I had this wizard friend, and now it sort of falls in my lap to advocate for the re-enchantment of the world and the self-development of the things within the magical toolbox.

33:32 But if you find value in Gordon's insights off the cuff in our interviews, imagine the care and attention he puts into his courses. I see a lot of this kind of stuff doing what I do, combing over the offerings of all my guests. And his were objectively the most fun and engaging with some really diverse offerings: grimoires, fairies, and UFOs, psy, prayer, the saints. Super robust. And I spoke to James earlier this week, and he said he was able to recover Gordon's things. And as he had hoped, Gordon did film enough of the material for his next course that James is going to be putting it together and it will be released. He said that some select RuneSoup members are fact-checking it and organizing it accordingly.

34:15 And Gordon's final course should come out very soon, next month in October. And the subject, almost a cosmic prank aimed at me directly, is Jesus. And he did have to die to drag me into caring about his Jesus. Jesus course, but I'm very excited to see how it comes out. I hope he hits on the alternative narratives and the Merovingian bloodline stuff, and maybe even why the Greys respond to invoking Jesus' name. I imagine it will all be there and more. So become a member at runesoup.com if you're interested. Sadly, as I said, I don't think as much progress has been made on the third book, but I find it cosmically funny that the dot trilogy

34:59 was destined to be an ellipses, an unfinished thought. I actually looked up the definition to be exactly sure, and it said, a form of punctuation that indicates missing words or the continuation of ideas that aren't written down. The perfect description. All right, enjoy these clips. I'll try to remember to include the shows themselves and the timestamps. So if any particular clip prompts you to want to know about the full show it came from, it should be easy to find. Thanks for listening. Never meant it more, but take care of you and yours. Don't put things off, assuming that everything will be the same later.

35:41 Enjoy these snippets of witty wisdom from a real wizard, starting with the beginning of our first introduction to each other way back in 2015. The Dark Prince of Chaos Magic, the headmaster of Digital Hogwarts, the Michelin starred magic chef of the ever-satisfying rune soup. Gordon White. Enjoy. We're making Russoup a healthy, tasty brew. We're making Rue Soup for all the things we wish we knew. Gordon is another guest suggestion from the fine folks over at THC Plus. And after I read some of his archanology series, I knew it would be a good fit.

36:21 So let's do the damn thing. Gordon, my man, welcome to THC. How the hell are you? I'm great. And it's a pleasure to be here. As you know, Greg, I'm a THC Plus member myself, and I love the show. Yes, and thanks so much for that. You might actually be the first Plus subscriber to also be a guest. I couldn't think of a better person for that. This should be a lot of fun. I do love your work too. Your writing is just full of little lines that perfectly summarize things that can never seem to get out very fluidly. And it covers a lot of ground too: magic, Gnosticism, Archons, Crimes of the Elite, and all sorts of high strangeness. It's definitely right up my alley, and I'm sure we're going to jump all over the place. But I did want to kind of try to start from this era of Gnosticism and this time when magic wasn't so weird.

37:02 The concept of the Archons has come up a lot. It's a popular idea, so we should know more about where it came from. But this era is very confusing to me. There's so much that's been lost, so much that's been twisted. And one of your great lines that talks about this is when you say that the story of the past changes with every present. And that's just so well said. And it really explains why it's so hard to get to the truth of anything, especially an era that's so old. But what would you say are the important things that people should know about the Gnostics? Well, the Gnostics have almost a double or triple dose of that changed past situation because we, for about one and a half thousand years, all we really knew about them was written by their detractors.

37:47 It was written by a guy called Irenaeus in sort of about 180. And he was actually the first person to ever mention the four canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So before that, the whole of Christianity was in this weird, confusing Mediterranean mess. Now, this is sort of like asking Fox News what's going on in Syria. Right? Because he is a competitor. He's not a fan of the Gnostics. And so even at the descriptor, we're talking about a very broad church of a lot of really weird, but good weird people and practices and groups that spread out across the Mediterranean that have combined Hellenism and Judaism and early Christianity and

38:30 Egyptian magic. And we're all putting it together in this sort of umbrella goal or umbrella belief that obviously Gnosticism comes from the word Gnosis, which means knowledge. And in this case, it means personal knowledge. It's the idea that you can have that direct, unmediated experience of the divine. And so we sort of only vaguely knew what these people were like from their detractors until maybe the mid-20th century and we discovered the Nag Hammadi library and start to see some of the texts and match it to some of the groups and very mean-spirited sayings of their detractors around the time. So there's a number of reasons why drawing a bead on Gnosticism is extremely difficult.

39:13 And in fact, many PhDs have tried and failed. Then I don't feel quite as dumb. So you might have been quoting someone else when you said this, but I've heard you say that the art. Archon story almost reads like Jesus' fan fiction. And I thought that was a great way to put it. And I see why someone would say that, but it is that interconnection between Christianity and Gnosticism that's sort of confusing to me because I almost feel like they're opposites. I guess, can you clarify that at all? Sure. I will tell you that was a quote from Chris Knowles of The Secret Sun, which is my favorite blog. He was referring to Gnosticism being, if you read the texts, and it's true, if you look at something like the Gospel of Mary, it looks like these groups are writing Jesus fanfiction.

39:57 And he meant that in a positive way because obviously his background and interest is in superheroes and their relationship to gods and the unconsciousness and all that kind of stuff. His book is called Our God's West Bandex, and it's excellent. What he meant by that is, well, I guess you have to back it up. We have this default view, and it's historically wrong, that there was a guy called Jesus. The default view, even if you're atheist, is all the stuff about walking on water and loaves and fishes is boulder dash. But there was obviously this guy wandering around Jerusalem. Now, that's not good history.

40:36 You're basically just removing the bits you don't like and leaving the bits that you find acceptable, even though they both have zero evidence. Now, what we're experiencing in, shall we say, Bible studies or biblical archaeology is the same thing that happened to Moses in the 70s. In the 70s, people started to realize Moses never really existed. Like you have Manu, you have Menes, you have all these lawgiver types that existed prior to Moses. And the story, I mean, there was no parting of the Red Sea, there was no great chunk of Jewish slaves in Egypt. There were plenty of Jews in Egypt, but none of these things happened. And so you had this kind of tentative put the head above the parapet and say, I don't think this happened.

41:20 And that was quite radical because obviously biblical archaeology was the sort of province of retired Church of England vicars and really quite Bible-thumping sort of southern American, well, southern state American Christian groups that would fly over to Israel and dig up stuff and say, look, I found the Palace of Solomon. So you're dealing with 150 years of academia that has a vested interest in a particular version of the story. Now, that version of the story is that Jesus existed. And there's like zero evidence at all that that ever happened. And every piece of his life is foreshadowed in previous myths. Now, this is fine because if you look at the groups, I mean, you get, this is really quite popular amongst atheist groups at the moment, like, hooray, Jesus didn't exist.

42:07 That equals there is no God. Now, that's a really bad cognitive jump because when I encountered this material, I thought the opposite. My problem with Jesus was always that the stories were not correct. Like, this is just garbage. These things physically happen. Now, what appears to be the case is that at the time you had people like Philo of Alexandria talking about the Logos, which is a Greek idea of this, the word or this animating force from the divine that kind of by encountering or experiencing that, you redeem yourself and you redeem the world. And you start to see all these pieces that fall into the kind of Jesus narrative later.

42:46 So these Gnostic groups were, I think they would have been quite alarmed when people came over from, let's say, Rome or Italy or the Roman North Mediterranean Roman province and said, so this Jesus guy, where did he live? And they'd be like, I'm sorry, what? Where did Superman live? You're talking about things that can't exist on the physical plane. And when you realize that, a lot of bizarre pieces of the Gospels make sense. The Gospel of Mary, which I mentioned before, is actually one of my favorite Gospel texts. And they're all sitting in this room, and I think it's Peter, it might have been Paul, but sort of says to Mary, why is Jesus talking to you? And she bursts into tears and it's basically like, do you think I made this up? Do you think I'm just inventing the Son of God talking to me in my head?

43:30 And you go, well, that's really weird. Why don't they just ask him? Is he in the room with him? Is he talking to Mary? And then you suddenly think, hang on, I'm reading the transcript of a seance. And when you hear Jesus say, whenever there are two and three gathered in my name, I am there. Seance. You know, not an actual seance like they're summoning a dead person, but what you're seeing here is the filtering through of the idea that Jesus has a concept. And I mean that they literally believed in him, but they didn't believe he existed in the physical world. You see it sort of accidentally filtering through these texts, and then you get the inevitable conflating down for imperial Roman political reasons of a definitive story that they can lock down and control.

44:11 And that's been the one that we've decided was actual history. And that's really spun us for Luke for quite some time, 50, 60 years. And that's the other reason why. why getting a bead on Gnosticism is like, well, so what is Jesus in some kind of spaceship in this one, and he's talking through a cave, and now he's in a shipwreck. And what's happening here? And it's because of that idea, particularly for the Gnostics, because the material realm was not, well, it was divine, but it wasn't perfect. Jesus physically couldn't exist in the physical realm because it's the production of the demiurge.

44:47 It's created by a false God. And if he's perfect, he can't be down here. So he exists in this realm that you need to contact him and you get that redemption or rebirth through the sun, the logos, this Jesus figure. And there you have the kind of, I would say, 80% of the reason why it's so confusing when you get when you encounter Gnosticism through parapolitics, where it's so confusing to get your head around, well, where are these terms that are coming at me from, like Archon and like demiurge, because I'm all at sea with it. And that's largely why you're talking about a really an exciting but very chaotic soup of different ideas encountering each other and mixing in a time of quite significant economic and social change.

45:29 You're right, man. It is super tough, but wow, you really got me with those seance examples. That really explains why we see this mixing of magic in early Christianity and why the gospels are so weird. At least it makes a lot of sense to me. So I did want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your experiences with magic yourself and your advice for people who may want to try to use it in their own life, because largely everything I've asked you about so far is speculation or at least a bit abstract to really improve one's life directly. And we have talked to people from several different branches of magic schools and orders, and then, of course, one other chaos magician like yourself. But I guess to start this portion off, why go the chaos route as opposed to a traditional practice?

46:13 Oh, if you feel like it. Let me put it this way. If you make the sovereign decision to kind of like take the reins of your consciousness out for a spin, I don't care what you do, then I consider us fraternal in some way. I am non-brand specific when it comes to magic. I would much rather people do something because there is no getting the toothpaste back in that tube once you've had an encounter or an experience or you've manifested something in your life that you know damn well that you did with either sigil magic or using the necronomicon or some kind of spirit or angel magic.

46:57 The next day and the next day after that, your life is permanently different and permanently different in a good way. I think magical initiation is binary. I think there's before and after. I think there's have an encounter or an experience that is so extreme. If you're abducted as a child, then like you had a Whitley Streeber experience, then you're off the hook because you know that the universe is weird. But if not, you have to go and do it. You have to go and do the DMT thing in the Amazon or you have to have a bash at it. I look at my first attempts at ritual and they were successful, but I was terrified and I did everything wrong. And it's the process. I tend not to. I get asked about four or five times a week if I can recommend books for beginners.

47:39 And I don't because the bad books I read were just as important as the good books. I don't want to say in the end because I'm still far from the end. But they were just as important. Finding and discarding the wrong ideas, for me, was just as important as finding the good ones. There's no uber for magical power. It won't just show up and pick you up from the couch. That experience of reality needs to be built in a way that you can't shortcut. Yeah. It seems like a lot of people are looking for some type of magical authority, either in the form of a book recommendation from you or in the form of the OTO or something like that.

48:23 And yeah, I just think for myself, I've had a lot of great things happen to me. And yeah, I've got some sigils on my monitor. I casually try to talk to spirits when I'm stuck in traffic. And I state my intention when I catch 11-11, I guess. But I'd hardly call myself a magician of any kind. But there does seem to be a lot of magic in my life, regardless. Maybe it's all luck, or maybe magic doesn't require these same old rites and rituals that traditionalists are pushing. Maybe it can happen anyway. I mean, you say you wouldn't characterize yourself as a magician. You've just described things that would have had you burned for centuries. You would have been burned for saying those things. So, sorry, welcome to the club. And that's kind of one of the other answers.

49:05 It's like, well, am I really a magician? I'm like, what did you do last night? I'm like, broke out the Ouija board and talked to some ancestors. I'm like, yeah, burn witch. I've been proceeding. facetious, but we underestimate, um, we underestimate how much we're doing it now as well, as awakened components of the culture. I don't want to say as a culture at large, but um, you can't really move into a parapolitical space without seeing that kind of intentionality or a worldview that is consciousness-based or anything, um, which is broadly good. I mean, it gives people the starting components. As for looking for an authority, that's human behavior.

49:46 True, that will never change, uh, it will never work and it will never change. I mean, if it did, my God, I would have found it. I'm not just telling people to go to the gym here. I mean, I'm like the fastest way is the slowest way. There's either the slowest way or you don't get there. Yeah, and I, but I have that chaos component of seriously, if you want, you could, this is a terrible suggestion, but it would work on Halloween, get some friends in a Ouija board and break into an abandoned mental hospital. I guarantee you will come out of that experience knowing that there is like what you thought of the universe going in is not the same as what's actually going on.

50:31 Okay, now, now, why is that a bad idea? So many people in magic tell me because it's criminal trespass. Oh, okay. I was talking about some other reason, some like spiritual reason why it might be dangerous. Because, you know, I see these things as relatively subtle. And sometimes when I talk about, I'm being facetious also, but say, oh, I'm going to go take a Ouija board and talk to Baphomet, or I'm going to go into the cemetery and do it. People are like, oh, you better be careful. You know, you don't want to be messing with these forces. I'm like, well, they all seem so subtle. I don't think I'm going to end up dead. So that's what I thought you might have been getting at.

51:07 Yeah, no. I will never tell. I wouldn't. Here's what happens. And it happened to, it happened to Crowley, as a matter of fact, when he was still in the Golden Dawn. And I'll remember in a sec, it wasn't, it might have been Bennett who went on to become a monk, but he showed up at a lodge or whatever. Bennett or whoever it was said, little brother, you've been messing with the Goisha, and you're not allowed to. You're not allowed to mess with the Lesser Key of Solomon under Golden Dawn rules until at a certain grade and you've achieved your knowledge and conversation. And Crowley's like, no, I haven't, I swear. And he probably had. And Bennett's like, well, then the Goisha has been messing with you.

51:49 So I wouldn't tell anyone that to do. Anyone who says, oh, don't be careful, we've got to be careful. Oh, that's dangerous. Or that's people trying to sell you, like, that's dangerous. What you should do is join my order. I will teach you all these safe things. It's, yeah, it's dangerous. But what will happen? Worst case scenario is you die. In the world of magic, that's not really a big deal. As Terence McKenna said, the goal or purpose of life is to familiarize yourself with the afterdeath form so that death doesn't come as a shock. That's what Egypt's built on. So, like, go and do it. Go and make these terrible mistakes. Yeah, really, like, magic will collapse your life when you

52:33 it's it's it seems to I don't have met anyone who was seriously on the magical path that it hasn't happened to it seems to do that by design and it might separate wheat from the chaff although I do meet a lot of chaff so maybe not but uh do whatever it is like um and that that tends to be the people who come to magic are because in that sort of morpheous red pill blue pill speech way it's like there is something wrong with the world not like I need to fix it but what I'm being told is happening is not what's happening and you need something to really underline that and it can I mean the nice ways to do it are in a proper shamanic

53:13 context in a culturally sensitive blah blah blah way with a skilled guide and five days of ayahuasca in the jungle you know something like that but you genuinely can do it with a little bit of criminal trespass and some friends you wish you knew we're making so how do we kind of reconcile that information i mean are we just to assume that we're the amalgamation of what's left of a bunch of inner breeding like we're a mud of all these different things that were once existed or are we something different and that everything else just didn't survive the ice

53:58 age okay so that's uh that's a couple of questions we're not actually that admixed with other hominins so uh but crucially and i think this is very important um we appear to to have received a big chunk of our immune system or the genes that correspond with it from Neanderthal. So, from basically, and wait for this, Neanderthal laying with the daughters of man gave us the immune system that probably enabled us to do things like cope with malaria and other things we would need for our kind of ongoing human journey. Now, whether that is specifically what is encoded in the kind of various giants and human-angel-ish hybrids or human-spirit hybrids around the world, whether that's what's encoded is a matter of interpretation.

54:47 It probably isn't, or at least not consciously. But if you're talking about what humans are, this is where I find the discussion of kind of the alternate history view of human origins very frustrating because we're sort of dealing with about five different things. So, it's almost as if you came to visit me in London, I cook you this five-course meal, this sort of Devonian crab to start with. We have Welsh salt marsh lamb and Norfolk asparagus, and then we finish off with like Scottish raspberry crannikin. And as you walk in the door, I put the whole thing in a blender, turn it to mush, and then make you eat that mush with your hand.

55:25 And that's what happens when people try to fold the origins of Sumeria and the origins of mankind and kind of memories of other hominins together into one thing. You're actually talking about three or four things over literally a million or so years. So, in terms of the origin of humans, don't for a second think that this is in any way solved, like even in a conventional scientific sense. It just isn't. And to the point where, if you go back a couple of million years, literally, the best description or hypothesis as to what we are that I found is from a

56:05 scientist called Dr. Eugene McCarthy, and he specializes in animal hybrids. I sort of wrote about this last year, but he's done 30 years of hybrid research on birds and mules. And our overfixation on looking for genetic evidence has kind of blinded scientists from looking at the obvious morphological evidence. And he basically says we're a pig-chimp hybrid. Right. And however weird that sounds, we have a whole bunch of morphological features that come from a pig. We're the only monkey without a penis bone, the carbohydrate makeup of our cells.

56:45 There's all kinds of pieces that are like we have extra nipples, the surface fat, the kidney structure. Like, he's right. So, we have a bunch of pig pieces hybridized with a chimp, which he thinks is a chimpanzee, but I think it's a bonobo. They're basically the same thing, except one of them is nice and the other one is a warmonger. And so, the kind of scientific reaction to his research was sort of like, well, how does that happen? And then they're in some kind of creepy animal farm situation of saying essentially it would have to be a female chimp who mated with a wild pig, male, and raised their hybrid, and that hybrid backcrossed with chimps. And that happened a bunch of times, and that's how we got there. Now,

57:30 that's weird. That seems weird and unlikely. And this is where we have to separate, and I don't think we're particularly good at it. This is where we have to separate the difference between data and interpretation. Dr. McCarthy's data are accurate. We have a pig problem we need to solve, which is that we're made partly of pig. Then it starts to get interesting because if there are people who are sort of sitchin fans out there, you go, wait a minute. So, you're telling me humans are hybrids, like we've been built. That's another interpretation. Until we can demonstrate that pigs have sex with chimps,

58:10 we're left with trying to solve this. So, that's my way of, that's my conciliatory concessionary card to the situation types. You can make a case for something building humans, not at 3500 BC, we're talking 2 million years ago. And if you make that case, to my mind, that is potentially as good as saying it's pigs having sex with chimps, which is, let me be clear, that's like, that's some science right now. That's really weird. And these are the pieces that we miss when we start talking about ginger nephelimes from South America are our overlords. All right, man, let's get real weird. If we haven't gotten weird yet, we're about to get weird.

58:55 Sex not weird enough? Yeah, we're about to step it up. So, as you know, we've been getting into some pretty radical ideas with some pretty radical guesses about our environment. the lunar wave, the idea that the moon is a projection, the controversial thoughts of the flat earth community. And you mentioned that you had some thoughts on how to rectify these things. And I wanted to read what you wrote to me in an email because it's too well put to just die in my inbox. You say, let's assume the Earth is an oblate spheroid, because it is. Why does it give the appearance to humans of being flat? Why does light refract over the curve of the Earth so that we can actually see what's there, but in a flat way?

59:33 Why does a combination of where our eyes are on our head, the spectrum of light we can perceive, the limitations of human eyesight, and all that stuff do everything possible to give off a flat Earth impression? The flat Earth isn't a NASA conspiracy, it's a perceptual one. But whoever built us may have also built a highly distracting play pen, which I like that term. Whatever is going on up there, they are perfectly happy to have us remain unaware of it. And they aren't NASA. Building for us a perceptual environment that gives off the appearance of flatness worked pretty well for about 70,000 years. Now it doesn't. Now we have radio telescopes and such things. That is quite a paragraph, man.

1:00:12 I mean, you got to elaborate on that a bit. Are you saying that it's likely that there are elements of this perception problem that could have been designed on purpose? Yeah, on a super, super long timeline, like somewhere in between Mimi and humans being emerged fully. Like, why is it, I mean, and this was the kind of reverse of what some of these guests have said about how space isn't there or space is evil. Why is it that the most successful initiatory or spiritual transformational systems that we have, at least in the West and frankly, in the East as well, involve an understanding of astronomy and our place on the Earth and the Earth's place in the solar system

1:01:00 and in some way an entanglement with the idea of the stars, be it like the queen of heaven in that kind of new sense or however you want to call it. Why is it that the way to freedom is related to the stars and yet our entire perceptual system isn't? And I just kind of think if we are in a like it's almost a thought experiment, if we are in some kind of arconic hologram, it would be built to, and we would be built to make it as difficult as possible to kind of have that stellar consciousness experience. Yeah. And that's sort of what I was getting to because there are weird things about how humans are built, which makes me think there's something spooky in the pig chimp thing, right?

1:01:49 Yeah. So that we, we, you can't see your nose. So if you stand up, you're actually just this sort of floating consciousness in space, which if you think of any other animals that have higher consciousness, that's not the case. They can see at least one part of them. Wow. So that and the fact that we're at the right height and the way that light reflects refracts around the earth makes the thing look flat and all this, you know, if you were to build a if you were to build a distracting hologram for whatever your demiurgical reasons are, these are the kind of things you'd expect to see. And as we look into space, and as we look into space with radio telescopes and even normal telescopes before that, a lot of what we see, just even in our near neighborhood, is really weird.

1:02:34 I mean, Arthur C. Clark himself was like, the moon makes no sense to me. He wanted to think of us as a twin planet system. It shouldn't be hanging exactly where it is. It's older than the Earth. It's hollow. It perfectly covers the sun. He goes, someone parked that there, right? And how does that work? And then you think, well, then Mars has Phobos, which is hollow and leaking gas and has a monument on it that you have Freemasonic Masons talking about on C-SPAN, or Freemasonic astronauts talking about on C-SPAN. And you know, as you start to look out there, the actual story of at least our corner of the galaxy and by implication us gets weirder and weirder and weirder and potentially closer to not truth, but improved accuracy.

1:03:24 Yeah, man. That's kind of the direction I was going with that paragraph, which is if you were to build the holographic prison, that would be it. And you would do whatever you could to kind of go look down. Look at that. We're making room soon. A healthy taste can for all the things we wish we knew. You mentioned that ancient aliens motif, and that is a great example of how that materialist lens kind of distorts what. what might really be some type of non-human interaction. It just puts it in that strictly physical context, and it probably wasn't.

1:04:09 No, and I'm not ruling out the possibility. In fact, I think it's extremely likely that physical extraterrestrials had some sort of interaction with mankind probably at the very beginning, a couple of million years ago. We spoke about the pimp theory last time I was on, I believe. Right, yeah. But also in recorded history, you will find examples that look, for all intents and purposes, like an account of a physical extraterrestrial experience. These ones, however, don't tend to change the mythology in which they occur. They're sort of incorporated into it. And two that I think are probably quite important.

1:04:49 Well, actually, where Dr. Jacques Verlet got the word Magonia from was considered this realm in the clouds. And there was a 13th century bishop, Bishop Agobard of Lyon, and he was sort of complaining about these sort of peasants around him with their primitive belief systems about these wizards who would come down from Magonia in flying ships to the ground. Except they caught a couple of them and kept them for several days. Wow. And that's a very Roswell-esque thing. And that was kind of the story that sort of triggered Dr. Valet to think: well, there's a lot going on here. And the other one, staying with Catholicism, is the Fatima miracle between the wars in Portugal.

1:05:29 Now, that is, you know, that's some sort of open and shut extraterrestrial account in one reading of it. But you'll notice it was incorporated into the Catholicism of the time and actually remains as a sort of collection of Fatima prophecies from the Blessed Virgin Mary, which Dr. Valet sometimes calls the BVM technology. So there are a few dozen of them that you can kind of look at and go, well, we can't rule out that, you know, physical aliens showed up. But that doesn't seem to be a suitable method for quote-unquote explaining or interpreting where the sort of sudden emergences of cultural complexity come from, especially when if you actually look at the texts that are associated with this emergence, they don't actually resemble that at all.

1:06:21 They're quite explicit that a lot of this technology came from the spirit world and spirits that descended from the stars or were the stars. That's clearly there. But the trouble is when you read that and you don't even want to put on the table the possibility that spirits are a real ontological category, then you immediately jump to aliens. And so that's sort of where people get caught in a loop. Yeah, man, the past seems big enough for both for sure, but the psychic or multi-dimensional aspect is grossly underrepresented. And I guess that's what we're doing: moving that needle back the other way a little bit. To quote the book, you say, science excels at generating facts, but magic has been generating meaning for perhaps 50,000 years.

1:07:05 We have been lax. To abandon interpretation to scientism is to shrink natural philosophy's most sacred duty. Your tribe deserves better. And I think that's a great way of saying it. But, you know, a lot of us don't have such a strong magical tradition for ourselves. Help us to see the ancients through your lens a little bit. How does it look different? Well, I guess we'd have to pick a time. I think when if you're looking at the sort of Paleolithic, the kind of cultures that were associated with the building of Gobekli Tepe, you have to picture groups of people who basically didn't even have houses. They probably had lead-to's. They were nomadic. They followed tribes. They had brains slightly larger than ours.

1:07:50 They had super abundant foods. They're sort of wandering across Eurasia during the Ice Age, which means the night sky lit up like nothing you can find on Earth as a result of pollution and water particulates and all that now. They could sing songs that lasted for hours. But when you're in that, we can kind of get a taste. And I don't mean to sort of reduce their experience, but we can kind of get a taste of that if you do go camping or trekking. The entire world becomes sort of 360 degrees or 720 degrees, where you're definitively part of the land and the air. You hear animal noises.

1:08:34 And it's this kind of experience of the physical that sort of bleeds into the non-physical, which means they didn't have the same sort of linguistic barriers we do when we talk about what is real and what isn't. If you think about what a Paleolithic hunter would consider dreams to be, it seems reasonable to suggest. suggest that they were otherworld journeys or visitations from spirits. And so you have that way of looking at and experiencing the world that we don't really have much of a model for. And from a magical perspective, when you kind of enter into that way of seeing the world, the universe has this sometimes alarming tendency to respond as if that were true.

1:09:21 So you can call spirits to the quarters, you can do all this stuff, and it responds and things happen. It's the same people would have that with dreams or telephone telepathy. You suddenly realize, oh, there is something to all this. They wouldn't have had the filter that made you think, oh, no, I'm probably just making it up, or it's just a coincidence. It doesn't appear that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had a particularly strong understanding of probability. So that's the piece that we miss in the modern world when we look at something that is clearly important, like on a psychological and probably spiritual level to these people.

1:09:59 We just don't have the sort of framework for it. And more than that, academia kind of forces you to describe them in very utilitarian ways. And that's probably the key to why Gobekli Tepe is so important, because it breaks the idea that spirituality is a story we told ourselves once we brought the grain in for the day and we had nothing else to do. The reality that is demonstrated by, well, this site in particular, but other sites that sort of extend back into the Ice Age, is that we were building star temples before we built houses. So this stuff is very important. Whether or not you want to go as far as saying the beings that sort of landed at Gobekli Tepe have a specific

1:10:44 separate existence, that's up to each person who looks into it to kind of come to their own conclusions. It is unavoidable to conclude that this was hugely important. This is more important than having a permanent structure to live in. And it was a, yeah, it's a star temple on a hill. No one could live there. There's no natural water source nearby. The obsidian evidence indicates that people were trading and thus coming from as far afield as, it's in southeast Turkey, from coming as far afield as Greece and Iran. So it was important across great swathes of the ancient world. And it wasn't fortified. It wasn't any of this stuff. It was just

1:11:28 significant in ways that we can kind of half understand and half not. And there's much to be gained by kind of taking that step into that level of understanding. Yeah. What do you think about the idea that the placement of Gobekli Tepe has anything to do with certain areas being known for heightened paranormal activity? It may very well be. I mean, this is an example. What we would call paranormal now would just be called normal and Paleolithic. So it would not surprise me. I mean, that is the case you find with any number of sacred sites, or in, say, Polynesia, you have the notion of tapu or tabu, where we get the word taboo from, where there are sites that are holy, in particularly animistic traditions, because they have a much more sophisticated

1:12:19 way of experiencing the physical and the non-physical. So it would not surprise me in the least, given the sort of subsequent history of that little corner of Turkey, that that may well have indeed happened. Yeah, you can almost say it's like a chicken or the egg thing because, you know, does a certain spot attract quote-unquote paranormal activity because it's just a node for that, or because humanity has paid conscious attention for centuries to this particular spot, and thus what we experience now could be residue from that or something. Exactly. Did you build a temple to star beings because there are star beings there, or did you build a temple to star beings to bring star beings there?

1:13:03 Exactly. Yeah. Better said than I. And another quote I really like from your book that relates to what you just said is: combing through the Bible for muddled Kabbalistic insights will only yield so much magical utility. To yield maximum insight and utility, the mythology of the Near East must be viewed as a holistic spectrum. I like that a lot. Help us get there, man. What light does that perspective shed on things? Okay, so there aren't that many incidents of monotheism around the world.

1:13:45 Right. But where we do find it, it's. it's sort of like a 2016 American election. There are several contenders for the sort of title of one true God. And you have a bunch of different people and politics and myths sort of spewing up. And eventually some of the detractors fade away and some of the wives fade away. And you kind of end up with one who becomes the one true God. And that's definitely the case. I mean, it's well and truly observed where Yahweh came from.

1:14:22 Yahweh was essentially, with different names, part of an earlier Babylonian pantheon of other gods. And because of the various politics and so on at the time, the other contenders to be president of the gods kind of faded away. Now, from a magical perspective, understanding that is quite good because it puts a lot of the magical practice that is associated with this particular monotheistic God in the context. So it's not a definitive description of this is how magic works. It's sort of a snapshot in the timeline.

1:15:04 And we can sort of look backwards from that to see where other ideas came from that subsequently influenced it. In particular, in the Near East, it is their attitude to the stars and the planets and the sort of mythology to do with, say, Venus as the morning star who's sort of Inanna and also becomes Lucifer and what have you. You start to be able to put it in a context which makes it doesn't invalidate the story of sort of a monotheistic god or using Kabbalistic magic or any of these things. It doesn't invalidate it. It does the opposite. It deepens it because it puts it in a continuum, which is sort of the whole point of starships.

1:15:45 It puts it in a continuum of mankind's interaction with the spirit world rather than as this kind of standalone, I think this. Yeah, and that's kind of the part that I've been able to wrap my head around a little bit better lately. But even talking about a body of like esoteric knowledge like Alexandria, you know, conspiracy theorists tend to, again, put that in a physical context, like there's just a box of goodies that gets passed along through secret societies from the Knights Templar to the Masons and this and that. But I mean, I guess I just never really fully got out of that mindset and put it in the context of extracting knowledge from the ether or from the spirits.

1:16:29 And we're going to get into a lot of good examples of that. And I guess the first one would be to tie it into a discussion of Egypt is Aleister Crowley. Can you talk to us about some of the threads that connect the two there? Sure. So funnily enough, when we talk about, speaking of Crowley, when we talk about the realization that these spirits have been interacting with mankind, and we need to think about it in that way, because as you were saying, when you look at the survival of esoteric knowledge through time, you essentially have two routes because it has survived, or at least it's recurred through time.

1:17:08 And you either have the physical route, which is very tenuous from an archaeological evidence perspective. Exactly. Or you have, well, this is in some sense true. And thus, each time the question is asked, or each time we respond or engage with the spirit world, this is what we get back. Now, Crowley was interesting because he had, and there's a whole chapter about it in the book, well, a subsection of it. But Crowley had several Egyptian experiences that he didn't have the archaeological context to interpret correctly that we do have today.

1:17:47 And that's particularly interesting because the effects that happened didn't match what we knew of Egypt at the time, but certainly match what they do today. But, you know, this kind of obsessed him. And we'll discuss the reception of the Book of the Law in a second. But funnily enough, this is an idea that sort of stuck with him his entire life. And he wrote about it in his old age a few times when he was in a retirement home near the south coast of England. And he would chat about it with Kenneth Grant, who is his secretary. But he actually wrote about it in his journals. And they've been published as confessions of Alastair Crowley. And I've got a quote, which I, because I was just working on a chapter for something else, which is absolutely on point, that I'm going to read now.

1:18:30 He was doing this thing. He didn't like the Society for Psychical Research. He would bitch about them throughout his entire life because they're essentially competitors. But he was very interested in their research. So this quote is kind of on point. And this is from, Crowley wrote this, this is from his journals. journals. I observe after a talk with Jules Cohtier yesterday that all their SPR work is proof of extra-human forces. We knew about them all along. The universe is full of obscure and subtle manifestations of energy. We are constantly advancing in our knowledge and control of them. Telekinesis is of the same order of nature as the Hertz rays or radium emanations. But what nobody before me has done is to prove the existence of extra-human intelligence, and my magical record does this.

1:19:12 I err in the interpretation, of course, but it is impossible to doubt that there is a somebody there, a somebody capable of combining events as a Napoleon forms his plan of campaign and possessed of powers unthinkably vast. So, what Crowley's talking about there is something that we were talking about before we had record on the show, Greg, which is that we can discern that there is sort of somebody else on the other end of the line by how odd the pattern of synchronicities that are associated with something is. Something like this is, because you don't have it doesn't obey the rules of human logic, it has non-human logic.

1:19:51 And this is something that Crowley sort of realized in his old age: that whatever these extra he used the word extraterrestrial, but he meant it in a magical sense, which is above the earth. So, a better word for that now is extra-dimensional. But we may discern that there is an extra-dimensional influence on mankind, or at least on the earth, by the weird odd alignments and the arranging of synchronicities. I mean, he used Napoleon planning a campaign as an example because he was the sort of super intelligent supervillain for the British, even a century later, because it shows a masterwork of these weird interactions.

1:20:29 Now, when it came to Egypt, he didn't have the archaeological evidence to hand because it's only been recent information comparatively. I mean, he died in 47 that demonstrates that the experiences he had by performing magic. He went to Egypt twice, sort of on his extended honeymoon, and the experiences he had whilst performing magic there, and in particular certain rites in the Great Pyramid, kind of had this cascade effect of weird synchronicities and the things that we would associate with UFO contactees. So, odd atmospheric events and coincidences and repeating names and strange dreams and all these things.

1:21:11 He had them as a result of sort of doing what turned out to be the precisely correct magical rite inside the Great Pyramid to kind of quote-unquote switch on the spaceship. Now, what I mean by that is that the rite that he performed subsequent to receiving the Book of the Law, he called the Bornless Rite. Now, it's a ritual actually called the Headless Rite or the Stella Jew as the short term for it. And it's a magical ritual in the Greek magical papyri, which means it was kind of kicking around Alexandria, although it was found in the kind of library of a wizard sort of further up the Nile in Thebes.

1:21:54 But the Victorian magicians didn't like the idea of a headless rite. So they used a Hebrew word, they kind of used their dodgy white boy Kabbalah to change the word headless to bornless, because a bornless one sounds like some sort of mystic god crab. However, it is definitively the headless rite, and it refers to Osiris. Like, I am Paphro Osaurinophorus as one of the lines, so I am the Pharaoh Osiris. Osiris was famously dismembered, is associated with Orion, which is the kind of headless hunter constellation.

1:22:30 And he performed this rite in what I think, and Robert Baval has made a very good case for a giant stone map of the Orion constellation, which is, or at least the belt stars of it, which is the three main stars of the Giza complex. So he didn't know any of this stuff. He certainly didn't know about Gobekli Tepe, which is a star temple on a hill pointed at Orion with two kind of headless heavenly beings in the middle of the sort of main enclosures. And actually, in Starships, we go through the story of just quite how old this hunting headless association with the Orion constellation really is.

1:23:08 Crowley knew none of this stuff. He accidentally, and this is metaphoric, obviously, he accidentally switched on the spaceship. Yeah, man, a lot of what you said in that response is so key to what I hope people understand in this episode, because I think it's the biggest revelation for me is just non-human logic and how to identify it, because it's kind of like any language, like the more you hear a language, the better you can identify it. Even if you can't speak it, you can still hear something and be like, oh, that sounds like German, you know, that sounds like French. And it's kind of the same with this non-human logic. The best way to really get it is by stacking up the examples of it, which is kind of what we probably are going to be doing for the rest of the show.

1:23:54 So the picture becomes more clear. But yeah, that really is, to me, the biggest and latest revelation from your book. And I guess, can you maybe talk a little more about non-human logic and maybe try to define it a little better for people who aren't going to have any experience with it? Because a lot of people, a lot of people, aren't. Well, I actually think everyone out there does have experience with non-human logic. I just don't think they're using the right words for it. Because this is my issue with synchronicity. And it can be as simple as the most common form of telepathy, which is obviously the telephone or email telepathy. And people go, oh, that's a bit of a sink. I was just thinking about you and you rang. You go, well, fucking stop and describe that.

1:24:37 Okay. You can't. You can't without recourse to something really weird. Now, when you push that a little bit further, I mean, I'm known for some popular posts on RuneSoup to do with sigil magic that have been read a few million times. And it's kind of a beginning and ending of, well, not ending, but it's a comprehensive beginning to a sigil magic. Now, if you do this, and bear in mind, as far as you're aware, all you're doing is drawing little squiggles and messing with your own unconscious. The way the results of something like this come through demonstrate quite clearly that you're not doing this, or at least not in a way that you currently perceive yourself, because you will end up with results that show up that couldn't work.

1:25:20 So you'll get a delivery that will happen that must have left before you sort of should the sigils, and then they show up the next day, and you go, well, what's happening there? And the components of non-the hallmark of non-the evidence of non-human intelligence is this almost a lack of understanding of linear time or the human perception of time. That's the key hallmark of it. So one of the ones that I like, Crowley spent his entire life because the book of the law told him that he was the prophet of the new eon. So he spent his entire life waiting to be kind of like a Krishnamurti figure, you know, literally some sort of world teacher. That didn't happen.

1:26:04 Nevertheless, if you look at the story of the 20th century, what you have is, and if you look at it from outside, so you're IWAS, you're the beings that are sort of beside time that are communicating with Crowley. He is the prophet of the New Eon as far as they're concerned. Because if it wasn't for Crowley, we wouldn't have the modern space age because it was, you know, his acolytes that invented solid state fuel. If you look at name anyone else in the 20th century that's had a sort of more impactful relationship with rock music and sort of 70s independent Hollywood and everything else. So the kind of cornerstones of things that we would consider the 20th century, which is essentially the space race and rock music, there's Uncle Al

1:26:49 sitting there in the background. And if you're looking at it from the side, it's kind of like viewing, I perceive it as sort of viewing a like a vortex underwater, so like a sideways kind of vortex. As far as Crowley's at the point at the narrowest part of the vortex, as far as the outside non-human intelligence is concerned, he is the prophet of the new eon because the next hundred years were about space and rock music. And there he is. It didn't work out quite so well for him, but that's an indication that you're dealing with something. And he knew this by the end of his life. He knew that he was dealing with something that didn't think like a human because it probably wasn't.

1:27:31 Yeah. Man, so well said. And that makes so much sense. Another question to kind of clarify the book of the law and these channelings. Would you consider this little saga to be a more recent incarnation of the Moses story or Hermes or the Thoth references? Does the book of the law have parallels to those situations and that material? Yeah, sure. And moving forward, it has parallels with Betty and Barney Hill's abduction and all that kind of channeling UFO stuff that happened in the 60s and 70s.

1:28:07 Moses is a difficult one. In theory, like the Moses story is a description of a type of event which is going up on a hill and having some kind of download. Now, I mean, since the 70s, we've kind of known Moses didn't physically exist as a human person. That's a motif, just going back to that sort of presidential election view of where we get monotheism from. That's a motif that has survived or tumbled down into. Judaism and Christianity from a much earlier time. Moses is the lawgiver type, and there's sort of a Manu and a Menez, and it doesn't matter, like there are a bunch of other cultures where you find a similar shape to the story.

1:28:48 So it didn't physically happen to a guy called Moses. But yes, there is a type. You find similar types of the sort of apocryphal beginnings of a number of grimoires as well, where people go up the hills and talk to a spirit or the devil. And you start to realize that it looks a lot like the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yeah. Yeah. And we got to talk about the Sirius Mystery at this point because I want to fit it into the free portion of the show because I think this is another great little saga and a great little loop of this type of non-human logic. But to help with the understanding, you mentioned the Sirius Mystery and its author, Robert Temple, as a good example.

1:29:32 Talk to us about this because I think a lot of people will have heard of this, that it's been like debunked or it was a hoax, and maybe we should revisit it. Why shouldn't it be dismissed? Yeah, so the thing about the Sirius Mystery is that it's actually had the pleasure of having an entire book attempting to debunk it, but it's not a very good book. You kind of know your argument is on shaky ground when it relies on the testimony of a convicted murderer, which is Ira Einhond. And its chief researcher, Phil Coppins, disavows it the second it comes out and writes on his own, which is still up. You can just Google Phil Coppens' The Stargate Conundrum and writes his own kind of actually, that's not what we're investigating.

1:30:14 And part of the reason for this is that the Picknets were trying to, I perceive, drum up further support for their largely spurious idea that we get the idea of the Holy Family exclusively from the Egyptian holy family of Isis, Osiris, and Horace. There's certainly an influence there, but it's not how it works. And if you read Starships, you'll realize that's the case. Now, the story of the Sirius Mysteries is quite interesting because Robert Temple was sort of like a student and friend of Arthur Young, who, I mean, you've had Peter Lavender on as well, which means you know that Arthur Young was at the seance that involved the Nine

1:30:53 and is kind of in that weird, very Levender-described matrix of, you know, Oswald and the Nine and elite families and so on. This doesn't appear to have had much of an impact on the Sirius Mystery other than that's where Robert Temple got the idea from, from a guy who's interested in, because he obviously believes in it, in the concept of extraterrestrial beings communicating with humans. And he used the example. He said there were these French anthropologists who went and studied the Dogon in the early 20th century. And the Dogon have descriptions of the Sirius star system, which at the time they couldn't have known.

1:31:35 And a lot of the things that we actually didn't know in the early 20th century about, it's actually not a binary, well, it's a binary star system, but there's a third one called Sirius C that we consider, and they knew the relative masses of it and all these other pieces, which you can't observe these things with the naked eye. So there's something going on there. And there's an additional layer to their, well, there's quite a few layers to their information. If you look at some of Laird Scranton's books, he points out that the nomo or some of the spirits of the Dogon pantheon look like cells. They actually look like cells. And he thinks they appear to be sort of visual descriptions of things like cell division and DNA and chromosomes and so on.

1:32:16 Now, this sort of information is not hugely useful to a West African agrarian culture. And so the interpretation that Little Green Man arrived from Sirius and said, hello, Dogon people, let me give you some dumb factoids, trivia, if you will, about the different masses of our stars. And also, this is what a cell is, goodbye, doesn't bear fruit. And that's actually not at all what Robert Temple was saying. He was, if you read the book, he kind of used that as the opening example of what extra-planetary contact might look like or what the evidence for that would be.

1:32:59 And it is what I call in Starships, I call it redundant complexity. And there's quite a bit of it in Africa. So at Nubtoplaya, it's not only the sort of Orion map that you would expect as a calendar, but the sort of different outlying stones from the sort of main clock, if you will, appear to have astronomical information to do with the velocity of the stars depending on their distance from the calendar circle. Now, again, that's information that cattle herders don't really need. And you kind of see, I view that as evidence of the non-human contact because

1:33:37 it's sort of information that we've proved with science to be compelling, but was useless to them. So they obviously got it. It means they got the download from someone and used the pieces that they could and the other pieces that they didn't. Now, why the serious mystery definitively hasn't been debunked? Well, at least nobody told the CIA it's been debunked. Yeah. If no one's read the serious mystery, you really need to get it. And specifically, you need to get the re-release that happened in the 90s. Because obviously the book came out in the 70s. So in the intro to the revised edition, he describes the persistent interest of the CIA in this manuscript, right up to the point that they, because he lives in the UK, he's American, but he's lived in the UK for, I think, 30, 40 years.

1:34:25 He was actually on the set of 2001 when it was being shown out here. So there's this weird kind of nexus of, again, coincidences that make you think there's a non-human intelligence kicking around. But the CIA stole his only copy of the English translation, which is called The Pale Fox, of that French anthropological study from the early 20th century that I was previously referred to. So the CIA came all the way to London to this nobody writer and stole a translation of, at that time, a 40-year-old anthropological study by the French in West Africa. That's odd. That's a very odd thing to do for something that's been debunked.

1:35:07 And he sort of mentions in the re-release that there was actually CIA pushback. He discerned from his publishers in his attempt to get the second edition published in the 90s. There were other people who didn't want to touch it and people who said yes and then vanished or wouldn't speak to him and so on. So there is something about this book that has had people in the shadow state particularly interested. Now, in the 70s, of course, you're in the dying days of the quote-unquote public MKUltra realm. The Stargate program is up and running, and they're encountering beings when they're doing the remote viewing exercises and so on.

1:35:46 So there's quite clearly there's a desk somewhere in the CIA in the 70s that is aware that these phenomena have a reality that probably has strategic implications. And I think they hoovered that up because the pale fox, there weren't that many English translations of it. And I think they were looking for stuff to kind of follow along that lead. So it's a worthwhile book. I think Robert Temple's books on Egypt are the best as well. I think when you're talking about the constellation of sort of alternative historians, and if you want like a, I think, the best alternative historian view of Egypt, Temple stuff, he's a very diligent researcher and he researches across multiple languages and so on.

1:36:32 It's all very readable things, but that's my go-to. And his kind of defining book is The Siri Mystery. Yeah, I love that section of your book about the serious mystery and the Dogon tribe, because as I'm starting to understand non-human logic better and starting to recognize the way it manifests, the way it shows up, it does seem like a great example. And when you're trying to discern what's a hoax and what isn't, I think the strength of its validity relies on the way that it fits that template. You know, it almost seems now to me more intuitively trustworthy. Does that make sense?

1:37:12 Absolutely. I completely agree. And what I use it for, I don't think the Dogon have had the secret of mankind's origins. But they are, because we have a reasonable kind of beginning and end point for their information or for the information they received, we can use that as a model to look at other myths. And it's important, and I go into this in the book, but it's important to realize just how much of the traditional societies and traditional cultures' wisdom and myths are gone. And that's a result of imperialism, but it's also a result of the inexorable march of time. There may have been dozens of Gobekli Tepe's across Eurasia, and it was just an accident of history that we ended up with it.

1:37:54 So this is the intertextual thing that we opened the discussion by talking about, which is we have this sort of information we can verify about what I think extra-dimensional contact looks like in a traditional society sense, which is with the Dogon. And so we can take that framework and use it and sort of line it up next to Australian Aboriginal myths or use it as an interpretive framework for Gobekli Tepe. And suddenly we have this key that can unlock interpretations of the distance. distant past and the nature of kind of mankind's corner of the sky without necessarily resorting to physical aliens and making shit up.

1:38:36 Yeah, yeah, man. And it's a weird thing because ayahuasca, you know, it's such a trendy topic now, but hearing about ayahuasca 101, you'll always hear that when you ask these Amazonian shamans how they arrived at mixing the root of one tree with the bark of another in this brew, they say that the spirits taught them or the plants taught them. And I always just accepted that as somehow accurate in that entheogenic context, but I guess I just hadn't widened that out to kind of think about what other pieces of information or bodies of knowledge might have been arrived at in a similar way. And now I think it's probably a lot broader than we realize. And that's kind of my revelation. Probably a good revelation to have. Yeah, I think that's the model.

1:39:20 And it isn't correct in all cases. Like sometimes humans make things up, but we need, as in we invent things ourselves, as Jason Miller says, humans are spirits too. But the reality is we have stories across the planet of receiving hunting skills or how to build a house or how to construct a pyramid or which plants to put together to go on spirit journeys from the spirits. And they say that. And they don't say from Little Green Men and a Flying Saucer. They don't say we made it up and we metaphorically use the word spirit. They don't say it came from our deep self or our imaginal self. They say it came from the spirits.

1:39:57 And we now have quite an not quite a number, we have a handful of what I consider to be verified incidents of that actually occurring for us to take that premise seriously. We don't necessarily have to believe them, but we shouldn't go and look at these stories from the idea that they're either using it metaphorically or they're too stupid to recognize the difference between a spirit and an alien. Right, right. It's so arrogant to take what they say and just twist it and be like, well, they had to have meant this because clearly. Yeah, it is arrogance. That's what it is. And to further this point, another quote from you is: you say, Any magician worth their salt has experienced the phenomenon of receiving more information than is required from the spirit world.

1:40:46 And I think that's compelling. That gets into why would the Dogon have this information they can't do much with. But can you give us any examples that maybe you or someone you know has experienced in their own contact that kind of jives with that idea of getting useless or too much information than is required? Yeah. Anyone who's done the ayahuasca thing will kind of know when you get past the snake bit and you encounter McKenna's machine elves, something goes on there which seems, and there's more of it going on than you actually realize is happening.

1:41:27 And so there's this whole like, like you're kind of aware of what's going on. You're kind of aware of what they're doing, but they're also doing other stuff. When it comes to a good example would be clairvoyance or kind of receiving visions from the spirit. So if you're scrying with a, you know, a crystal or whatever it is you're doing, you get the most absurd stuff. So your question may have something to do with should I take job X or job Y? You'll get an answer, but then it'll also be, and also there's like, there's a clown and he's holding, he's holding a golf club and he's pointing. And you go, what the shit is that going to be? And you'll see something like that on a billboard or whatever on the way to

1:42:09 the job interview. You'll be driving along and you'll see that happen. And you go, well, literally, you could have picked anything. You could have picked anything to point us in that direction. And this is the indication that you're dealing with a non-human intelligence because they kind of get, you're talking across languages. So they kind of get what you're saying. And they're like, all right, he wants to know this. But because they're potentially outside of time or view time and importance differently to us, they'll just give you these kind of pieces and go, there you go. And the Dogon one's quite a good example of that. Or Namtiplayer. It's like, why do we need the velocity of stars if we're just, you know, if we just run cattle in Northeast Africa? But they don't know that.

1:42:52 And this is the redundant complexity I've referred to. We need to pay more attention to them because they're an indication that if we're making it up, our unconscious is a fucked up place. And to go back to one other thing about the Yuri Geller saga, you mentioned that he also claimed to be in communication with an artificial intelligence communicating with him backwards through time. And whoa, man, I mean, that's got some crazy. crazy implications when you consider the time period we're in today and all the worry and speculation about birthing such a thing. Yeah, sure. That was kind of in the air at the time, but during his sort of Paharic day, so Paharich moved on from channeling the nine or being involved in the nine to

1:43:39 he kind of kept up his channeling and contact stuff or finding people who were good at it rather than himself. And Yuri was very good at it. And they were in contact with what they called spectra, which was a supercomputer giving them information backwards through time. And it would give them mathematical formulae, which these guys, I mean, they're intelligent men, but they didn't know this stuff. And funnily enough, the formulae didn't really describe anything, but they were internally consistent, which is a hallmark, I think, of spirit contact, because the same thing happens with, say, the Enochian language, which is internally consistent. It appears to have its own syntax and so on.

1:44:23 Yeah, I thought that was interesting, the John D. Edward Kelly saga and the Enochian alphabet, because apparently it comes back and shows up later in channeled UFO literature of the mid-20th century. Yeah, for people who definitely don't know Enochian, but certain words would recur, and that's an indication that we're dealing with. And I guess I want to underline that I'm not saying that UFOs are grimoire spirits or Enochian angels. I'm saying these are all kind of our words, their fingers pointing at the moon for what is probably a spectrum of phenomena which includes these things.

1:45:04 And that's one of the interesting pieces of it that you go, well, that's kind of a piece that magician, well, there are some very die-hard ceremonial magicians out there who kind of stick to the grimoires and handmake their own robes and do it just as it was written in the 1700s or 1600s because for whatever reason they think that's when magic reached its apogee and was perfected. I don't know. And they don't like to hear this stuff because the same way ufologists don't. This is something Jacques Valley encountered when he's like, well, it's not beings from, say, to reticuli, and it appears to have the same deep structure that we find in cases of the fairy folk and fairy abductions and so on.

1:45:49 So there's a continuum of experience here. They don't like that side of it. And the magicians don't like when Enochian words show up in UFO experiences channelings in the mid-20th century, but they do. You talk about the fact that both in magical practice and in life, we don't get it right because oftentimes we don't identify our targets correctly. Success magic is great, of course, but what is success really? People say they want money so they can have the most freedom, but what is most likely meant is optionality.

1:46:32 Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah, this is someone in Asim Taleb's words, but I'll kind of back it up. He talks about it when he talks about what's known as the teleological fallacy. The teleological fallacy is believing that you think you know the best way to get something done that's in the future, and also that you believe that everyone else kind of knows that as well. And if you look at anything, any kind of project or experience in any human's life, that is just fundamentally not correct. There is something about how humans are built that makes us succumb to the teleological fantasy. And everyone does it. So you just have to be aware that that fallacy is in play or not.

1:47:13 And the best way to be aware and the best way to manage the impact of a teleological fallacy is with what he considers optionality. Now, optionality is basically, and I'll give you Taleb's definition and then I'll kind of explain what that means. You're kind of in an anti-fragile state if you gain from disorder. So if you gain from an unanticipated event rather than negatively impact or no impact, optionality is an example of that. So the best example is the, I believe it's called fuck you money. So you don't actually necessarily need to spend that, but you get fired, that's a negative event, but like not in this case because you then have the time to do the other thing that you want.

1:47:57 Like I'm going to write a book, I'm going to cut an album or what have you, or find another job. So optionality is kind of rather than aiming for the end goal, which is I want a house in the Hamptons or whatever it happens to be, optionality is to kind of phase it step by step because of the teleological fantasy and maintain. maintain that ability to gain from what would have otherwise been considered a negative impact. And you do that a few times and you kind of start to build your way of thinking so that you become phased with each kind of step towards whatever your particular goal is.

1:48:33 The sort of probabilities for the step after that change. So if you're kind of putting your intention in whatever way, either just non-magically or magically towards the end goal, you're not really maximizing the sort of probability enhancement opportunities on the way, which means you're actually less likely. You can just do the maths on it. Like if you remember doing statistics, and if you go one in two times one in three times one in two, you get a one in a very, you get a very tiny fraction at the end of it, right? So if you do a one in two and via magic or just general intentionality, you can get that to a 55, 45 odds or 60, 40 odds, then you're winning and you get to the next one and that's another one in two.

1:49:18 By the way, you don't have to calculate these numbers beforehand. That's some kind of lunacy. But if you think about it that way, then you're basically only dealing with moving a higher probability a bit higher rather than the sort of one in 164 option of getting what you think you want, which is going to be wrong anyway, at the other side of it. Now, magicians aren't very good at this because humans aren't very good at it. But in Magic's case in particular, Western magic draws so much from the sort of Greco-Roman shape of how magic works and how spells are constructed and so on. And the Greeks were amazing at trigonometry and geometry, and they were shit at basic maths.

1:49:58 So the Greeks never invented the notion of probability. We really didn't get that until about the 17th century. There were sort of inklings of it beforehand. But it's actually a very new discipline because it's not a way, either evolutionary or otherwise. It's not a way humans are kind of built to think. So it's a muscle or it's a skill that you need to kind of learn by doing. And as it turns out, and this is kind of one of the things we talk about in the book, the universe is probabilistic. So it says something potentially quite important that we should potentially have a probabilistic understanding ourselves.

1:50:40 Right. And that is one of the revelations I had with this book. Because when it comes to actually trying to get into magic or magical targeting, this applies greatly because it seems like we should aim for smaller factors to success rather than just writing some sigil looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right? Yeah. And that emerged out of sort of years of getting sigils wrong before I got them right. But basically, yes, is the short answer. So there's a kind of complete way of, if you've never done this before, running through sigils and how you create them and their activation in the book.

1:51:22 And the particular method that I've been espousing for a few years matches, you're kind of forced to, and this is kind of like hiding the vegetables in the kids' food. You're kind of forced to think probabilistically just by constructing and activating sigils in the way that is described in the book. Yeah, I love that. And you did touch on this, but it is one of the great things about your writing and how you approach the mechanisms of magic is you take data from consciousness studies, near-death experiences, clues from the quantum world, and you take this knowledge and see how it can be used to fine-tune the magic, you know,

1:52:02 to get to what works and remove what doesn't. And that's kind of the thing I really love. It kind of, in a way, it normalizes magic. Seems like that back. In a good way, in the best of ways for someone like me, because when I'm looking at it and it just seems like a lot of drama and theatrics to some degree, you basically look at science and you say, no, look, there is something here. And I like those indications. Well, that's chaos magic to a T. It's very opportunistic. It looks for the things that works. It doesn't promise you some sort of grand vision of how the universe works.

1:52:40 It doesn't promise you a metaphysic that you might get with sort of whatever the golden dawn systems are today or theosophy or what have you. It doesn't promise you a vision or an explanation of the world. You have to build that yourself because the reality is, if you don't build it yourself, you're running off someone else's. But yes, I find it interesting. We basically have some very good data over the last 120 years that all these things that seem like they're quite important to magic have some reality. reality to them. So consciousness survives death. There is some form of after-death state of humans that we can be in contact with. And as we know from an improved understanding of the ufological phenomenon, that little green man is an insufficient answer.

1:53:24 So that we not only have spirits, we have spirits that, or a spirit world that is a spectrum that involves non-physical all the way to sort of full physical interaction. And you find in magic a way of not just kind of modeling that, but engaging with it with a few safety blankets around. And we also have this kind of improved understanding of things that the mind or consciousness can actually do. So you have telepathy and you have clairvoyance and you have this ability to alter, but not by much, to sort of slightly alter probabilities. And that's kind of the other key to it. So we have Dr. Dean Raden's famous research at Burning Man with a random number generator.

1:54:07 And people would sort of focus on it just like, you know, and this is Burning Man. So these aren't sort of sober, normal people. They're off their face and they can still do it. And you can get measurable changes in the kind of random number generator that show that this sort of group consciousness effect can impact the material world. So you pull all these together and you go, right, so that's magic. That's what it is. And these are data that support something that, I mean, I've always known, but I think to get people who are kind of on the magic fence, off the magic fence, it kind of helps to go, all right, so this book isn't going to have too much about ascended masters and dolphins.

1:54:50 And it's actually going to run through information that I can go, that doesn't sound right. Is that right? And then you can look it up and go, holy shit, that's right. Yeah, man, yeah. I love it. And I don't see it as often as I feel like I should in some of the books that I read. But let's talk about the life after death thing a little bit, because I personally have had an aversion to anything ghost-related because of the religious implications. So I never dug too much into things like the skull experiments, for example, which now seems pretty amazing as one of the clues into how reality really works. Can you talk to us a little bit about that as the smoking gun that consciousness does survive human death? Well, I have different guns that smoke, but the skull experiments are frankly astounding.

1:55:35 The Society for Psychical Research was set up in London 120 years ago. I went to its birthday recently. I don't think that's right. It's more than that. Anyway, this group emerged in that very high Victorian confident way. They could see electric lighting and we had all these new things like geology and what have you and the radio. And so people were kind of like, okay, so these things exist. And it was in that interesting sort of intertidal zone between the end of a sort of not really examined Anglicanism and the rise of science. And scientists were off, you know, toddling off with their materialism. And then everyone else is like, well, that's not right either, but we have all these things.

1:56:19 And it's kind of like, can we use these scientific processes to find out something about the afterlife or divinity or so on? This is one of those extremely confident and in retrospect hilarious projects. It still exists and they're actually quite diligent. You would think that they would err on the side of, oh, yeah, that's definitely a ghost or that was definitely telepathy. But the reality is most of their research is extremely boring because they will throw out the, I'm potentially more credulous than them. They'll throw out stuff that I think is almost open and shut. There is one that is the most incredible experiment in their more than 100-year history, which is the Skull Experiments, which is named for a town in the east of England.

1:56:59 And a group of SPR members spent about a year doing, you know, it's a sort of classic Victorian seance model down in the basement. They had a table and it was all, there was no light and they painted that out and they started to get kind of channeled messages and like mild poltergeist effects. And they would meet for at least once a week for a year. And after a year or so, on the spirits on the other side, they named the spirit team because they said, oh, we're going to, we've been looking for a group that we can kind of say, like, give the definitive proof to. And this is what the spirit team said. And then after a year, the most astounding things happened and said that they had

1:57:41 apported objects that included newspapers from the 1940s, which are impossible to fake because they were using an ink replacement because of the war, which you can't get anymore. Like it's not used as an ink. And so that just arrived from nowhere. And they had sealed, like factory-sealed canisters of Kodak film that they would unroll. And they had all these written messages. and sort of formulae and all this kind of stuff on, and just the most astounding sequence of things that cannot work in anything other than a spirit model. If people are interested in this, you'll find a couple of like full-length skull documentaries on YouTube,

1:58:22 Skull Experiment documentaries, and they're certainly worth your time. They're a few years old now, so if you kind of remember what Discovery Channel was like circa 2003, that's what you're in for. But the information behind it is very worth your time. And so if you kind of could hear all these data points and you could hear the NDE research, you do start to build a model that goes, okay, I can no longer, I can kind of logic my way to the realization of the reality of a spirit world. That's fine for most people. For magicians, there's something very different in, you know, or potentially broken, whatever, in our heads that makes you want to play with that a bit. Yeah. And Chaos Protocols is definitely for that sort of person. Yeah.

1:59:07 So to weigh us into some of the magic stuff in relation to our economic situation, you dedicate a chapter to what you call true initiation or becoming invincible. And its importance is summed up pretty well with this quote: There is no greater defense against the grim, uncompromising wasteland of the late capitalist world than the unshakable awareness that it will end and you will not. And that's beautiful, man. Talk to us about the importance of becoming invincible and just how the hell we actually do that. Sure. Well, it's a magic book. I mean, it's published by Llewellyn, and I do a lot of metaphysical kind of 101 books, which I wasn't sure I wanted to write. And mine's kind of a, I don't know, Heston Blumenthal deconstructed one of these things.

1:59:51 One of the things that is sort of fraught with challenge in the Western magical tradition is initiation and authenticity, because we haven't had initiatory traditions for one and a half thousand years. So since the mystery schools ended, there is no secret kind of group running down through that. So initiation has become fairly politicized in the last 130 years where when the Golden Dawn built their system, they kind of modeled it on Freemasonry and pretended they had all these secret documents, which is sort of very Resocrucian thing to do. The OTO, which is German when Crowley joined it, everyone's pretending they're a lot older than they are, and they're not, right? So we have kind of malformed discussions in the magical world about initiation.

2:00:33 Now, in the meantime, in the rest of the world, there is initiation. Initiation is a kind of triggering event that makes you realize reality is not advertised at all. And it can be, in the book, I kind of say, you can skip this chapter if Discovery Channel's done a ghost show in your house or if you've been abducted by aliens. Like it needs to be an extreme event after which there's no getting the toothpaste back into the tube. Like you cannot return to an official reality because it's incomplete. Now, initiation truly done, if you look at, say, New Guinean Highlanders, or if you look at people being initiated as Eurasian shaman or kind of similar roles in the Amazon, or even sort of the sort of classic First Nations vision quest kind of ideas, you

2:01:23 have to have an inciting incident that triggers this, that triggers this engagement with the universe in a way that is extremely profound. You kind of BCAD your life around it. So becoming invincible is what I call that, because once you've had that experience, once you know, and again, I emphasize it doesn't even need to be pleasant. I mean, I hope it is, but it doesn't need to be. Right. Once you know that it's not as advertised, you are invincible. Like if your boss has had a bad day and she's just being a cow to you, all these things become smaller. They become smaller because it's not real. It's not at all,

2:02:07 this isn't actually reality. And more importantly, you're invincible. Like death can't end you. That's kind of the prize that's about a third of the way through anyone's magical journey, that unshakable realization. And once you get it, the rest is gravy. And unfortunately, the other two-thirds, when it comes to sort of more traditional magical orders, they've kind of populated the remaining two-thirds with different aprons and different titles and colors and crossing the abyss and all this stuff, which is gilding the lily because there is a before and after. Once you know that you are invincible, and I mean that in the sense that please don't jump off a roof. I mean, when death comes for you, you don't end. That really

2:02:52 puts everything else in a perspective that you can never un-perspectize, if that makes sense. Yeah. Let's just invent words. that's kind of what becoming invincible means. Right. And that is an important part in the book. And you can't obviously induce a typical alien abduction scenario or a ghost in your house for Discovery Channel to cover. But psychedelics, they really are invincibility in the palm of your hand. Of course, you have to use them the right way. Yeah, you have to do them right. So again, it's a Terence McKenna thing, but he sort of said a shaman without psychedelics is like a pilot without a stunt plane.

2:03:34 Like you're not doing it correctly. And we do have this opportunity, and it's part of the sort of collapse of our current sort of, you know, totalitarian superstructure piece by piece. It doesn't all come down at once. It's like cake in a rain. Is that there are ways that you can legally do this now. And I get the other pushback I get is: it's too expensive to go to the Amazon or what have you to do it right. It's an opportunity cost error. Like it'll cost you a few grand, no question. But you're not going to, hopefully, you're not going to want your TV when you come back. How do you put a price on invincibility? Yeah, this is, yeah, put the book down.

2:04:16 Like, I'm not saying that's the only way to do it. And in fact, there are states in the US where you'll be able to find, you know, ethical magical groups or witches or so on. And there are legally available molecules. And you combine that in a ritual space and it might work. But this is what we have used for 30,000 years to become invincible. So it was kind of, it was a difficult part to write in that chapter because obviously it's a book published by a proper publisher in the US. So I can't be like, get some mushrooms, whoever you get them. Here's a prayer. Have a sitter. Go and do this because they can't have that book. And I mean, technically, we can't say it here either.

2:04:59 Technically, we can't, but I would. I mean, from my experience, I would say don't even let legalities get in the way of your immortality. No, well, yeah, I didn't. We're making roots soap, a healthy, tasty brew. We're making roots soap for all the things we wish we knew. A big part of Pieces of Eight to me is trying to find a worldview that is most accurate. As you say, once you kind of torch materialism, you got to have something to stand on.

2:05:35 And you describe idealism as well as animism and say that it is more useful for the magician to consider living systems not as some unaware little eddies in a universal consciousness field, but as outposts to the spirit world. Such a perspective has a pleasing side effect of making the experience of day-to-day life much richer. Well, who doesn't want life to be richer? But, you know, can you explain or elaborate on some of this for the uninitiated? Sure. So idealism is the idea, and I like idealism, let me be clear. There's something that Rudolf Steiner said at the end of the 1800s when there was kind of inside the Theosophical Society and those groups they were beefing because they thought one of them had found the world teacher and they're arguing over whether that was important.

2:06:21 The usual kind of stuff that happens with esoteric groups. And he sort of said, look, the actual enemy, such as it is, is materialism. Like we can kind of quibble over whether you think this guy you found in India is the world teacher or whether you think it isn't. But there is more of an alignment in our understanding that materialism is false, right? Yeah. And so that's kind of how I feel about idealism. And idealism is the idea that everything is consciousness rather than matter. And so the physical world is a kind of accretion out of this sort of single divine mind. And it's sort of a warmed-over Vedic idea as it's expressed in Western culture now.

2:07:06 And it's like that explains the universe better than materialism, because as I kind of go through in that chapter, materialism doesn't even explain material very well. Like it's embarrassing, and it obviously utterly fails with consciousness. So idealism kind of works from that perspective. But you're still left with what I now call Brahmansplaining, where you have to, much as Richard Dawkins will tell you, if you have a spirit experience where your deceased grandmother comes and speaks to you, Dawkins will tell you you're wrong. He will mansplain that that was an error of your brain chemicals, blah, blah, blah, by my book. Brahman splaining is kind of the same. If you have that experience, you will still get the same thing from a kind of Vedic teacher perspective, which is your

2:07:52 consciousness is in error because you've accreted. accreated this ego. And so your experience of the universe is mediated because of this kind of false ego that you need to destroy so that you kind of, you know, dissolve back into their one consciousness. And so you're still asserting to someone that their experience of the universe is incorrect. It's fundamentally an error. And I don't resonate with that. I think both of those things, much like the sort of original sin, are there implanted into spiritual systems for political and control reasons back in the day. Because you require a qualified priest to tell you what is and isn't reality. Like, we've been down this road. I don't care for it.

2:08:32 That being said, like, there's nothing necessarily wrong with idealism until it kind of breaks or bends a little bit and they get uncomfortable with things like sacred mountains or fetish objects in magic. So in sort of Hermetic magic as a survival of the Egyptian idea of drawing gods down into statues, you can empower, you know, a gemstone or something and draw down a spirit or intelligence into it so that it literally animates, right? You can kind of work that into idealism. It bends a bit because it's like, well, that's another fragment of a universal consciousness that we're pulling into another fragment of it, but your experience of it is in error.

2:09:12 And, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that same thing happens when you try to push the idealist model to explain the things I'm particularly interested in, like, you know, ufology and sci-fi. And contact with the dead and all that. Well, it's all right for some sci-fix, like telepathy. Like, here's the thing: it can model it. I would prefer everyone who's out there, if the choice is between materialism and idealism, for the love of God, go with idealism. But if you're interested in magic and you have had experiences of things like haunted objects or books that have their own journey, which I think is another thing that happens, that works better in an animus model, which is the quickest way to get there is to kind of replace the word consciousness with spirit world

2:09:58 rather than one spirit, spirit world. And so you're kind of in a situation where there's more going on than it just being one universal conscious field essentially vibrating the universe into existence. The reality is, I probably suspect that is in fact the case at like the very kind of beginning point or at a very high level. I think that's how everything runs, but I think what it vibrates first is the spirit world. So you're kind of stuck. I think experientially, animism works better. Now, when I'm talking about physical systems, well, living systems in particular, but sometimes other objects being an outpost of the spirit world.

2:10:36 So a good example would be ayahuasca. The difference between a Western kind of Neoplatonic or Platonic view of ayahuasca and an animus one is in a Neoplatonic view, the ayah spirit will be in the vine. In an animist view, the vine is the spirit, right? So, and it's kind of like an iceberg where it is the spirit, 2% of it is in the physical, 98% of it is in the spirit world. And that's what I mean by view them as outposts. Now, this, I actually have an interview earlier this year in my own podcast with a UK academic called Jack Hunter. And he's released a book about the impact of Charles Fort and the potential impact of Charles Fort on anthropology and cultural studies and comparative religion.

2:11:21 Great book, great guy. And Fort had this idea that everything in the universe kind of exists on a spectrum between the unreal and the real. And if you picture it like a slider, you have Frodo as further along the unreal spectrum to say Obama. But they're all made up of the one kind of everything is on that spectrum. Everything you can conceive is in some sense real, but then there is the sort of much more embodied parts of it at this end. And that is a very good way of thinking about how an outpost of the spirit world thing might work.

2:12:02 Yeah. And then you suddenly get, and again, what I'm looking for, it's a chaos magic book. What I am looking for here is a model that best describes reality for the purposes of like further enjoying and experiencing it, but also for kind of giving you a bit more mental space for the practice of magic. And the one you end up landing on, and I find very interesting, and this is sort of in the Campfire's Edge presentation, the one that you kind of Goldilocks your way to, and I Goldilocks through all of them. I went materialism, panpsychism, idealism, and landed here. So there's one of those dangerous things where there's like, what is it?

2:12:37 There's no zealot like a convert. Like I came to this late. I admit that. But I find it very interesting that the first religion or first spiritual experience we can see on the archaeological record. is this one that we Goldilocks our way to at the end of, like, you can literally think yourself to animism. You don't even have to experience your way there. That's interesting to me because there's so much of the kind of Western esoteric journey has been looking for the perennial philosophy or the Prisca Theologia or that kind of original spiritual system of mankind because there's that widespread and kind of not correct, but it's nevertheless culturally there belief that we are in a declined state from that original elevated experience of the world.

2:13:26 Now, I think maybe there's something to that. It's just that we've described it incorrectly, and you kind of get some of that in Starships. But there it is. Like, animism is the first thing we did. And here we are, two-thirds of the way through 2016. And I think it describes more coherently the most data points that we have available that we maybe didn't have available 15 years ago. Boom. I agree, man. And, you know, you've mentioned the animist model before, but I don't think we ever took the time to explain it. And I think it is a pretty powerful model. At least it seems like the most accurate one that I know of.

2:14:02 But to get back to. I just want to jump in there and because we spoke about thinking our way to it and just say, I think the majority of people on earth are animists, right? Yeah. Because it is actually how you're a pet owner. So if you get Richard Dawkins, will come in or a Victorian materialist, the guys who invented this premise of materialism, will come in and point at your cat and say, there is nothing in that. It is just atoms experiencing like the genetic drive to eat and breed. That is it. It is empty. It's a machine. And you look at this guy like, one, what are you doing in my house?

2:14:38 And two, that's the wrongest fucking thing I've ever heard. And that's where I think people don't realize that the day-to-day experience of the universe for most non-insane people is very animistic. We get feels of place. We know that, like, to assert that our pets don't have personhood is moronic. And that is interesting. It must count for something that the kind of natural state of feeling and being in the universe is this one. I don't know what it counts for, but I think it does. To hop back to magic, you mentioned that the data shows that magical phenomenon tend to manifest in cultures more open to them and that magical experiences are made less possible by materialist cultural filters.

2:15:21 I definitely recognize that. And as I said in the intro, if you're looking for a conspiratorial worldview, you might find it there because you point out in your writing that as much as the Vatican did to destroy the magical worldview with its brand of religion, the Big Bang theory was also first cooked up by a Catholic priest. So really, both sides of the magic-destroying coin come from the same mint. Is this a red flag to you, or am I going off the rails? So Catholicism bans magic rather than says it doesn't exist, right? So that's kind of its thing. And that was the politics of the church fathers and whatever at the time.

2:15:59 With the Big Bang, what happened there was that was kind of Catholicism or religion's rearguard move against kind of like the materialist Victorian version of science because it needed to reinsert itself or it was fucked basically. It needed to reinsert itself back in the kind of worldview. Because I don't think Catholicism, Catholicism doesn't suppress magic, because the example of a culture that's more open to magic, so it has more extreme magical and UFO events is somewhere like Mexico or Brazil, both very Catholic places.

2:16:35 So Catholicism bans it rather than says it doesn't exist. It's just that when we move to materialist cultures like Northwest Europe or, you know, the North American continent or so on, then there is something about there's a field of dreams thing going on with our heads, right? Which, if you live in a magical universe, more magical things will happen. If you don't, they won't. So it's unlikely Richard Dawkins would be abducted by aliens. And that's the benefit of kind of like really doubling down on this model. It is seriously field of dreams or you build your own spaceport. Science, and it's interesting, the conspiratorial angle here is in the 20th century, particularly immediately following World War II, where the public version of science is still doubling down on this materialist thing, even though it's just not been correct since the 30s from a physics perspective and from a philosophical perspective, not since the 70s.

2:17:27 So they know it's not correct. But you kind of double down on it while simultaneously, you know, the alphabet agencies employing witches and kind of working with, you know, radiotic mind control and psilocybin and all this. So it's they essentially had an evil Hogwarts going on at the same time that they're saying all of this is fake. And that's the conspiratorial angle. The reason, and probably by now, I think they know that the field of dreams method is in play. And I frankly think they're using that awareness in a highly manipulative sense

2:18:07 as a kind of mass mind control project that I think they're sort of, they have been experimentally working out if you can make people think this or be afraid of this and so on. And that is pure magic. And that's come from the evil Hogwarts. But at the same time, public science, you get former defense contractors in the bow tie playing a scientist on television and telling you this stuff doesn't exist. And that's the conspiratorial angle here. They fucking know, they know it works because they've spent millions and millions and millions of it on it over 60 years, and the public version isn't. And that's kind of make they're taking all the magic and making sure that the kind of Western world has a view that doesn't allow it to happen except for the bits that they want it to.

2:18:49 Right on, I like that. And another animal thing, you have a section on sacrifice in Pieces of Eight, and you say that the spirit world quickly becomes fascinated by sacrifice, probably because it is a rarely observed event. Almost no other creature does it, and those that do are alarmingly intelligent, approaching humans in their use of language and symbolic thinking, such as the Corvid, which I had to Google as birds in the crow family, octopi, or the elephant. Well, do we really see elements of the concept of sacrifice with these species? Yep. And all three of them we do. The crow is the most alarming one. Like the crow will give offerings and there's all those creepy and fascinating crow stories about my favorite one is the lady who would always feed the crows in her yard and she was off somewhere in another part of town 20, 30 miles away and her sunglasses fell out of a bag as she was getting out of the car

2:19:42 into the gutter and they were expensive and she liked them and whatever and lost them. And a few days later, a few days later, there's a crow in her yard with the sunglasses. Now, that's a different group, right? But they literally Corvid telegraphed across the city. Now, that's some animism right there. But they will give you offerings. They will attract shiny things if you feed them. And there's probably a very good reason why the crow is such a potent totem in spirit cultures because it can do shit like that. The octopus, the sort of the, what's it called, the Pacific octopus or the North Pacific octopus will sacrifice itself for its children.

2:20:24 It will construct things and have like a language where, kind of like close encounters, where it'll just sort of like change color and that's how it communicates with other octopi. But that one will do it. The elephants obviously have graveyards and willingness to self-sacrifice. And you'll notice that these creatures are all ones that are very potent totems in the cultures that have access to those animals. So sacrifice is predicated on what I call the getting their attention kind of model of spirit contact, which is or magic generally. Magic is all about getting their attention. And whoever they are kind of depends on it.

2:21:05 And again, I quite like the close encounters model for that. And if you look at how Sumerian cultures would get the attention of Inanna or so, and there'd be these sort of great civic parades and all this kind of stuff. And that strikes me as very good magic if this model holds. Sacrifice is a version of it because you're essentially a topological rearrangement to kind of use a sort of Dr. Farrell term. Because if you're looking at the physical from the point of view of the spirit world, if you fast, that is moving stuff kind of further up the timeline than wouldn't be there. And it's the same thing with creating lack by giving your spirit some of your food.

2:21:47 These things wobble on the kind of topology of the universe. And it's a thing that kind of God does. Like it's that sort of shaping and moving things further up the timeline or back down. And that's how this kind of whole thing was created. So there's something about when people, especially if you're listening to this show and have listened to less salubrious corners of the conspirisphere, when people hear the word sacrifice, they think some kind of Dick Cheney satanic ritual. Yes. But it's lighting a candle in a church. That's where that's where it begins. It may well scale up to a Dick Cheney satanic what have you. Like people are scared of the word. But sacrifice in Latin means to make sacred.

2:22:28 And it is the incorporation of spirit beings into your kind of personal life. That's what it is. It's lighting a candle. It's lighting a candle for the Virgin Mary. It's not. not killing and eating children in the Pentagon basement or something. Well, provocative as that is, you know, another question on sacrifice of the human variety. The conspiracy world, as you said, talks a lot about false flags and some chalk these events up to, or at least the real ones, up to ritual murder. And knowing what you know about magic, do these claims hold any water or is that bad magic? Do you mean 9-11? 9-11 or various shootings that that motivation gets attributed to?

2:23:12 Well, 9-11 was fairly clearly ritualized. So I don't have a problem with that at all. I think by the time that happened, and unfortunately, the error is in assuming that that means that George Bush is some kind of secret Thelemite or whatever. Like, he's not. What's happened is I kind of mentioned it earlier. Since the end of World War II, you have had the deep state weaponizing magic with unlimited money, and as Catherine Ostenfit says, the ability to kill with impunity. If I was given 60 years and unlimited money, I'd get pretty good at magic, right? Hell yeah.

2:23:50 And that's what has happened here. So I think you'll get the sort of P-NAC goal of like, we need a new Pearl Harbor. And the use of magic in 9-11 as an example is because magic is a non-specific probability enhancer. So you're doing something really intense with 9-11. You are trying to hijack the world, but in particular, you're trying to hijack the U.S. It's risky. You want it to go well. And so if you happen to have anything in the kind of underground base or deep state closet that can kind of like, well, this helps kind of tip probability in our direction. So yeah, fine, use it. And I think that's actually what the presence of magic within 9-11 was going to be.

2:24:32 I think they would have done something similar without it. Like if the magic stuff wasn't in there, they would have done something similar. But it's like, well, this magic stuff kind of, if we're sort of 70% confident we'll succeed, this kind of tips it up to 75. And if there's no additional cost to you, you're going to pick the 75. And so I think when you see in sort of large-scale ritual events like that, they're using magic to have the event more likely to succeed. But the results are magical, but they're not ritual. So it's a fear response. It's the same thing with the kind of shootings and fake shootings and what have you.

2:25:13 They are, that's not necessarily someone isn't there kind of like invoking Satan before they fake a school shooting. But they know as a result of this 60 years of essentially, as I said, evil Hogwarts, they know that the subsequent fear response will have predictable cultural outcomes. Now, I consider that magic. I think that satisfies the definition of magic, but it's not the lurid magic of, you know, yeah, it's not the lurid magic of Dick Cheney, the Satanist. It's the kind of even, it's the scarier magic of some, a lot of people have spent a lot of money and a lot of time trawling through something that is basically all of mankind's sacred birthright and weaponizing it.

2:26:03 And now some of those toys are coming out. And yeah, that's interesting and alarming. It is. Well, on the subject of making deals, what if, hypothetically, back in the day when George W is doing the skull and bones shit, some entity says, look, I'll give you hanging Chad's, but I'm going to want blood. You know, could 9-11 be part of some type of nefarious deal with the spirit? Yes, if it is, it wouldn't be at a Bush level. There's a bit in, I think, in Pieces of Eight where I sort of quote Crowley talking about how

2:26:41 you can kind of notice the impact of a particularly potent spirit by its insane complexity, like the complexity of the results that show up in the physical. And if I was a potent spirit, I wouldn't be dealing with anyone in the Bush clan. They're idiots. But yes, that could have potentially been in play, although if you kind of autopsy the ritual that is 9-11, it's not just the kind of Masonic pillar stuff. It's the fact that you are kind of repeating. So the September 11th breaking of ground for the Pentagon, I think, is very important.

2:27:21 So that happened in a prior September 11th. So what you're doing when you're smashing that definitely not a plane into the side of it and the ground is that you are ritually breaking new grounds on the Pentagon. So you're actually kind of resetting it and building it. So when you start to look from a magical perspective, when you start to look at the ritual components that are in there, the anniversary one is one they use very often. And I think that is, and that's good magic. It's objectively good magic. I'm not saying they're doing good things with it, like they're using magic well. Usually it's not good magic at all. But when you see pieces of it like that, typically the sort of discourse around these ritual events in the conspiracy here are from people who

2:28:09 really don't understand magic at a sufficient enough level to pass the results. And that's where some of it, like they are, like these things are designed to have the impact on your, because again, if you're, if you're like a, they wouldn't call them wizards, right? But if you're in the deep state using all this kind of MKOF and MKUltra and whatever it's called now, tech, you know that it's going to have a result in what we would call like people's consciousness or their spirit or so on. So it is a spirit attack, but they would probably call it something different in the briefings and they wouldn't be called deep state wizards. But that's in there and these things are things that are definitely going on. I think that's fairly open and sharp.

2:28:51 Fair, fair. So they do say that several of the big names of the early colonialists had expansive libraries of books on alchemy. And I recently did have a guest talk about ether theory. And I've been getting more into how those pieces might connect. Are these elements of that hidden side of physics we've talked about? Or do you not put much stock in ether theory? No, I love it. I think it's correct. I think whatever, and this comes back to the amount of investment that we have available in the alternative world versus the amount of investment, which is unlimited that you kind of have behind the curtain, so to speak. If you look at whatever, and let's just kind of tiptoe through or even just race through the 20th century.

2:29:34 If you look at whatever Tesla was talking about and whatever T. Townsend Brown was talking about, and whatever any of these kind of people, even Wilhelm Reich, if you look at these things, like Wilhelm Reich's organ accumulators look like T. Townsend Brown's, they just, they're not electrified. They look like the devices he was using to kind of create a gravity well at one end and a gravity hill at the other because it's an alternating natural artificial source. It's just that Townsend Brown ran electricity through it. So what we have here are individual geniuses with patchy access to funding. T. Townsend Brown, little bit rich family and very likely involved in whatever the Philadelphia experiment was.

2:30:14 Tesla got some money sporadically and so on. But this is a rounding error. This is money that's found down the couch compared to what the kind of hidden physics that's been going on behind the curtain is. And to kind of come back to it, and Electric Universe is a good example of this. Really intelligent people with no money kind of having a crack at solving the universe. Now, if you kind of Venn diagram all these things together, there is enough of an overlap to assert that you can call it ether, you can call it whatever you want. There's enough of an overlap to assert that there is a lot to that idea. And I would contend that behind the curtain, with more people and more money, they're further along with the idea.

2:30:57 But we can't sort of Goldilocks and say, oh, these guys are right or these guys are right, because it's just not how research is done. They don't have the money or the access to take it the whole way. But to come back to your point, yes, I think I like the ether model. I like the kind of T. Townsend Brown version of it, the sort of modified Tesla the best. It's kind of a personal preference, whatever. And I do think, and this is something Dr. Farrell mentions occasionally, although it wouldn't have been conceived of in this way in the classical age, magic is in some sense a declined technology. Because if you look at how ritual architecture, and this is very much in Starship, so if you look at how the layout of the Step Pyramid of Josh works so that it matches different astronomical and astrological events in an effort to kind of draw down what that is, well, we have an inklings of the kind of real

2:31:51 physics that suggests that that's possible, that there is in fact a medium in which these energies or influences can work, which is the ether. And that kind of ritual behavior is survived into the grimoires. And then as a result, it kind of pops up in Freemasonry and Renaissance Hermeticism. And from there, it goes on to influence people who are founding cities like Washington. So we can kind of tie it back and it overlaps and suggests that there is a decline in technology to it. It's messy, right? So you can't, it's not like the grimoires have a blueprint for a flying saucer.

2:32:29 saucer, but it looks to me like they work on the same principles that we see in the physics of the electric universe and T-Towns and Brown and so on, and also the physics principles that we see from some of the kind of flying sources with the Raytheon branding that we see kind of popping up from behind the proverbial curtain. Good summary. A healthy, tasty room, and making room so for all the things we wish we knew.

2:33:08 I also want to ask you about this post of yours, Black Pearl of Great Price: The Magical Significance of Captain Jack Sparrow, where you say that the Pirates of the Caribbean films in aggregate are the best depictions of Western magic ever committed to celluloid. And you talk about Jack Sparrow being one of the best pop culture examples of the trickster since Bugs Bunny and a good model for navigating chaotic times, which we seem to be in. Tell us a little bit about this model. Yeah, I just want to, if people haven't read Rune Soup before, I say things like that. And I say them because it, you know, it wakes people up as they're reading the post.

2:33:44 But there's been a Pirates of the Caribbean motif for years. And what I essentially mean by that, and I think if you look at Captain Jack's purpose, as in from a screenwriting perspective, and he says this in the first film when he says what a ship is, and he says it's not a sail and a keel and a hull and so on, that's what a ship needs. What a ship is, is freedom. If you look at this archetype, he is moving through the world towards increased freedom. Opposite that, and you kind of get this in particular in the sort of middle films, less so in the first one.

2:34:26 Opposing that, you have the East India Company, which is sort of the perfect villain because it is centralization and disenchantment, because it is a corporation that it's a state corporation. So it's the worst of the state, in this case, the crown, and the worst of corporate behavior. And it is this sort of totalizing sameness that is removing the freedom and taste and color. And it's represented by things like magic and, you know, funny pirates. And the pirates are interesting because they're different races, different genders, all this kind of stuff. So the pirates sort of represent the organic and the analog and the chaotic in the benign sense.

2:35:08 Like that's what they are. And it's, by the way, not an exact match of this is not a historical documentary. This is, you know, how these things work. So because what you're dealing with is a metaphysical discussion there. And what's interesting about Captain Jack is that he's, and why I use the Bugs Bunny example, is he navigates a world of increasing totalitarianism and decreasing enchantment in a very probabilistic way. So he has a goal at the end, which in the first film is getting his ship back, but he doesn't over-plan the steps.

2:35:43 The steps in between then and where he is are not known. So he kind of manages that on a probabilistic individual basis, pointing in one direction. And that's really very good. That's getting on for Nassim Taleb, right? Because in some sense, you will, or in most senses, you don't know what's going to happen. And a lot of the sort of psychological pain people experience is because they think they know what's going to happen and it doesn't. And so Captain Jack has this sort of freewheeling way of going on a heuristic or Boolean decision basis. Does this next step get me closer or further away from my goal?

2:36:20 And he takes that one. And the famous sort of beginning sequence in the first film where he shows up on a sinking little boat and then leaves on the second fastest ship in the Caribbean. And in the meantime, the town's been bombed and people have fallen off cliffs and he's been in and out of jail and so on. And it all starts with he shows up with absolutely nothing and leaves with what he wants because of that kind of thinking and decision making. And Bugs Bunny does that. Bugs Bunny's very much in the moment. That demonstrates the confidence or mastery of chaos that the trickster represents. And as a result, he's kind of like a really good metaphor for, or a really good way of thinking about, in the sense of having a bracelet that says, what would Jack Sparrow do?

2:37:06 He's a really good way of thinking about what you can do on an individual basis and how you navigate things like totalitarianism and disenchantment and so on to get to the goal you want, to get to your black pole. Well said. I mean, it is such a great attitude, this practicality. practicality moment by moment, this ultimate like flexibility and fluidity. And that's very appropriate for rapidly changing times. Yeah, it is because we don't know what the intervening, as I said, between now and 2030, the U.S. will not be the preeminent economic power in the world. That will change. We will have different applications of, well, we'll certainly have digital currency.

2:37:49 We will probably have a modified UBI, which will begin with like a bundling up of all kind of state wealth transfers into one thing and it'll build from there. And you kind of look at the steps between now and getting to a more multipolar world. There's the risk of multiple wars. You have to be honest with yourself. Is Washington the best people? Are they going to deliver all of these things without sticking the landing? And the answer is probably no. So you don't know in which way these things are going to happen. But in the meantime, you probably, most people listening to this plan to be alive in 2030. So what do you do? And how do you navigate an unknown terrain?

2:38:29 And there is something in the perpetual optimism of a kind of trickster way of thinking things, which is I will eventually win. And it's not in a malicious, villainous way. It's, I'll eventually win, but it's like, oh, now I'm in jail. Now I'm here. Now I'm here. Like, this is the thing that's happening now. Reset the decision. What gets me closer? What gets me further away? And it's just a fascinating thing to watch. And just if people are listening to this going, hmm, I haven't seen it in a number of years. And I recall the middle ones being shit. There's a trick, particularly as the new film's coming out, as to how to watch it. And you give yourself a weekend and you watch the first one on the Friday night because it's essentially standalone. The only way the middle two make sense is if you watch them back to back. So that's what you do on the Saturday.

2:39:14 And then you can watch the final one, which is almost its own standalone on the Sunday. But if you chunk them in the whole weekend, I guarantee you they will make sense. And I guarantee you I will make sense. We're making rune soup. A healthy, tasty brew. We're making room soup for all the things we wish we knew. And speaking of ringing the bell, let's talk about Omura Mura because in the context of a worldview phase change, this thing could be like the housewife who's ringing your doorbell with a fruitcake in hand coming to introduce you to your new reality.

2:39:58 On the other hand, we've shit on NASA so much, I'm not even sure what a real announcement is anymore. But what do you think? Is this important? Yeah, for me, you know, just to go back to the DeLong thing, everyone is talking about 2017 is the year of disclosure. And it was in a way. And for me, it was Omuumua rather than, yeah, rather than some military contractors and a singer. Because the thing about it is a structure. The thing about Omuumua is heads, it's aliens, tails, its aliens, which is what I said to Richard Hoagland on the weekend. Because there are two ways you can explain this. The first, given its trajectory and its bizarre shape and all this kind of stuff, and crucially where it came from, the corner of the sky.

2:40:39 So the same month as we had a kind of mass death, Vegas, Vega ritual, a la, according to Chris Knowles, in Las Vegas on NASA's birthday. And then later in that month, we get our first, you can call it an alien spaceship if you want, our first official alien spaceship. It doesn't have to be a spaceship with all the kind of cool Star Trek toys to satisfy that definition because it's either artificial based on its trajectory, in which case, alien by definition, or it's not, because when people were looking at it and why it got such coverage is maybe this is, in fact, an alien object, even in the mainstream press, it's because the other

2:41:16 options is what you have to solve is, is this an extremely unlikely event, or which suggests alien, or is this a very common event, which means we haven't understood the gaps between solar systems. If it's common, if these things happen all the time, then essentially in between solar systems, you have a sort of Walmart parking lot of billions and trillions of objects like this that sort of zip and bounce in between solar systems. And if that's the case, it's aliens because there is your panspermia vector par excellence. So there is the life was seeded on this planet by some kind of postal system of bizarre-shaped rocks bouncing in between solar systems.

2:41:57 So heads, it's aliens, tails, it's aliens. I think it is probably artificial and vastly ancient in, I don't think it's common. And something Tyler Cohen said, who's my favorite neoclassical economist, is like, from a Fermi paradox perspective, just running the numbers, we should expect it to be aliens because we've been looking for them. And the actual challenge with the Fermi paradox is why aren't they here? So. for me, that's it. Like, we saw it. There have been ones beforehand. I mean, we know there's stuff on Mars and all that kind of thing. But for me, 2017 in October, as to whether they knew it was coming or whether these two events co-incide in breaking the word coincidence apart, that bizarre ritual murder and the sort of arrival of this poop-shaped alien asteroid in the same month.

2:42:44 It just defy you need numbers that aren't used in a physical description of the entire universe to run those odds. So that was it for me. As to whether we can trust exactly what's going on, well, that is the eternal challenge. The information came out. Well, here's the dodgy bit, and it's kind of like the missile thing. The information came not initially from NASA, but via it. And then you get the NASA official statements at some stage. So we know things showed up, or at least we can be more confident that a thing showed up. But yeah, there's dodgy stuff. So there was 34 days of follow-up observation, which actually means there's 33 days between the discovery and the announcement of Omuomua.

2:43:26 So there is still some weird Earth-based signaling involved. They found it and then they said they had 34 days of observation and then the announcement. So it's 33 days until the announcement in that case. So I was looking for that kind of weird signaling. And the only one I found, as far as I can tell, is that, which, as I read that, when you see the 33 showing up, it is a wink that I don't want to say class of people or group of people, but that faction is involved. When you get your 33s, that's the wink. Yeah, I agree. And I guess I would also ask you about maybe its name or the proposed corner of the sky that it came from. Is there anything there that rings your ritual alarm bell?

2:44:08 Well, here's the thing with any of this analysis, and it's why I like, I mean, you know, I like Chris Nell's stuff at the best of times, but it's why I like that kind of synchronistic analysis of the universe. It's essentially a form of algebra because the universe responds to ritual, or not only we wouldn't do ritual, but the elites wouldn't do it. So when you're dealing with an event like Vegas, some of it is, you know, putting speech marks around it, us. Some of it is humans doing it, and some of it is the universe responding.

2:44:45 And what you can do with synchronisticism is it's literally like algebra, like you don't know what A and B is, but you know that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. So you've kind of gone humans and universe equals kind of weird shit that happens. And that way you can think with and think about without trying to play the guessing game of they did this or they arranged all of this and whatever. And it's just a cleaner way of doing it because yes, it's a Hawaiian named object based on its where it was discovered. We just had weird stuff in the sky over Hawaii again. So how much of that is the universe and how much of that is by design, I don't know.

2:45:27 We can still think with the fact that these overlap. And I do think that's significant. And it's probably, if it's the universe, quote unquote, it's, we'll use ringing the bell again, it's ringing the bell for that specific pivot. That's the universe responding to like, okay, this is where the focus is now, sort of west of Hawaii, if you will. It could be more than that in the case of like the Vegas thing astounds me, right? Because Omu Omua came from the general, well, actually, the very explicit Vegan direction, whatever it is, 18, 19 days later. Now, if you performed that mass murder ritual, which isn't quite what they did at all in Babylon or in, you know, in Sumer, you perform a ritual to attract the attention of the gods, and then you wait to see what the universe, like you, you wait for signs that the universe has heard you.

2:46:16 And that's rather a good one. And it's crazy. Like, I don't know if they were expecting it. But the weird thing is, from a magical universe perspective, we would be expecting it. If it's a Vega ritual, you would expect Vega to respond. And we got it 19 days later. So this is the algebra thing. Like, well, magic worked, so it may not have been intentional. It may have been a welcome gift. It may have been who knows. And we can think with it without kind of landing on it could be this or it could be that, because it's just, it boggles the mind again. Like, why Hawaii? I actually really like the name of it, but I think it's nice that it, you know, it gets a Polynesian name.

2:46:57 But all the other stuff around it, goodness, you think that's why I think the 2017 disclosure event was Omu Omua rather than, you know, Blink 182. Dude, I just love that. The Harvest Festival on NASA's birthday is. is like the picking up of the phone, and Amura Mura is like the answering. And, like, yeah, here we are. I just think that's a great, provocative, interesting way to think about it. Well, that's ritual magic. That's how it has been used. And I know that's kind of a real flashpoint topic for alternate media because, as you know, like a lot of them come from ecstatic Christian backgrounds, so they think it's all bad, and they're all somehow the Freemasons and the Vatican and colluding in a whatever ritual magic conspiracy with

2:47:46 Thelemites like Dick Cheney. And it's a mess. Nevertheless, magic works. And this is how it was done in Egypt and Babylon and so on. You have these large civic sacrifices, and you do that because the universe responds. And I just, my head still spins thinking about it. And because before Omuamua showed up, my assumption, and I think most people who look at it that way's assumption was it's kind of like 9-11 happening on the particularly whatever it was that hit the Pentagon happened on the anniversary of the dedication of the Pentagon. So whatever that was that obviously wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon is a rededication of the ground to the Pentagon for a new mission, for a new, like, that's good ritual magic, good speech marks again, right?

2:48:35 And I think that was, I assumed that was what was going on because there's very few places in America where you can have effectively a blood sacrifice in front of all the iconography that has been associated with the previous NASA missions. Like it's just there. You have to go to Egypt to do it otherwise, right? And yes, they're tacky and it's Earthats and doesn't matter. The images are there. So, and it was on NASA's birthday. And you think this is a rededication of NASA for whatever comes next. And then Omuamua comes next. And we're getting the first signalings from, you know, operatives and useful idiots that the toys are kind of being rolled out of the underground basis, which is what I think we should expect in the next two years.

2:49:24 So they all line up. The bit that is crazy is like maybe Omuamua is the universe responding. But yes, we can think with these ideas without kind of picking which one it is. And that's useful. I think it's the only way to do it without being crazy. And in many respects, synchromisticism is something we've had to invent because we used to talk like this. And by used to, I mean 1800 years ago, we were very okay with using language to mean something literally and symbolically at the same time because that was, we had, I would argue, a better understanding of reality, something closer to Charles Ford. And we kind of have to, it's almost like training wheels. This asynchronistic analysis is how we get used to

2:50:08 thinking with and about a living cosmos when we've just had 150 years of being told no such thing exists. So, and we're going to need those skills now because now everything is happening. Right. So I want to talk to you also about plagues and disease because you mentioned Amura Mura, I believe somewhere that it came from an area of the sky commonly associated with sickness. And we had this story that still sticks out in my head where NASA sent up a bacteria balloon during the solar eclipse last year. I also know more people than ever who have been sick in the last few months. And people say that, but I mean, I mean, seriously.

2:50:48 And on top of it, I think Martin Armstrong even has a cycle for disease. It's supposed to be ramping up. Are these signs that sickness might be increasing this year? Yeah, well, they already are. It's already been the worst flu season. And I follow this stuff really closely, and I have for a while. And the last few CDC warnings have been, dare we say, fake news. So the Ebola thing and whatever has been deliberate hysteria. Same thing with Psych, same thing with Orzika or whatever it's pronounced. Fake news. This one isn't. This is actually a very, so if you're sick, I said this in the podcast, I think, last week. If you're not running for Jesus, if you are sick, stay home.

2:51:33 And I mean, like, hmm, I might be getting sick because this one is real bad. Like, it's Spanish flu bad. And that happens. It goes in cycles. And yes, Martin Armstrong's model has an uptick in the plague cycle throughout this year. And I know Alabama had a state of emergency and a few thousand people in the US so far have died from this H3N2 or Australian flu or whatever it is. And it may well, there is some possibility that it came from space or at least parts of multiple flu viruses have. This is kind of one of the changes that comes along with thinking about the planet as an open system rather than a closed one.

2:52:10 And this is sort of like Charles Fort's boundaries again, right? So we sort of scientifically view the world as a terrarium because when we started doing quote-unquote science, we couldn't get into space. I was like, well, let's just be down here and you can kind of look at ice cores and so on. But in the 19th century, it was assumed that space was literally a vacuum and nothing came through and all the rest of it. Then we've had 120 years of going, well, there's cosmic rays and solar plasma ejector and obviously meteors and so on. But that kind of baseline model hasn't matched as well as it should the implications of that. Some of which are biological material, not just bacteria, can survive in space.

2:52:50 Mushroom spores can, which I think is highly significant. It wasn't just the most recent balloon. Like they sent up balloon fights in the 60s that brought bacteria from 40 kilometers up, which is above the tropopause. So it can't get there from Earth. That's the sort of whole point of it. And so we've sort of known this stuff for ages. And one of the suggestions as to how, for instance, we became pimps and why the octopus exists is as crazy as it sounds, it's not that crazy after Omuumua, space viruses, viruses from elsewhere that land on the planet and then enter the kind of great, enormous, uncountable number of viruses we have that we will never, it's like life in the soil. The amount of viruses on the earth, it boggles the mind. And so there's that possibility.

2:53:34 The octopus is the best example of this. There's 33,000 more protein-coding genes in a human, smarter than most people who vote. And what's weird about the octopus is that it emerged suddenly from the squid 400 million years ago. So there's nothing behind it. And all of a sudden, you have this kind of crazy looking squid that is the octopus. And it has a huge genetic divergence. And that sequence of genes that makes the octopus different from the squid is not found anywhere else on the planet, anywhere else. I mean, look at the stuff they can do. They communicate with colors. This is some, the octopus is an alien, as far as I'm concerned. And this is the point. That chunk of genetic material may well be the result of a retroviral transfer from a space virus.

2:54:18 So retroviruses could kind of swap out parts of your genetic code. And the octopus is probably an alien, but then so are we, because we've talked more about the morphology of us. And here we have a vector for thinking about these things. And you kind of trick people into it. Like you go, well, do you think the Earth is an open system or a closed system? And they say open, I guess, because cosmic rays and so on. You go, all right, well, and then you sort of, and then you go, Omuamua. And the thing that comets, when they pass into the inner, so anywhere near the smaller planets in our solar system, when comets come through, they are blowing out millions of tons of like material, so gases and bits of rock and so on, each day as they fly through.

2:55:02 And so we're bringing in from outside the solar system any number of biological agents and viruses and so on. And then it comes back to whether or not you're living it. Well, it doesn't, it isn't necessary. That's just kind of like, okay, everyone's probably correct about this. This is a factor that we don't know how to think with, but is probably an impact on how life works on the planet. And then, of course, if you live in a magical universe, you go, well, matter either is consciousness, has consciousness, it has some sort of interiority. All of a sudden, you have the opportunity for a lot of these myths we have to be, as I was saying before, about we're not that good at language, to be literally true on multiple levels about where we come from, where our ultimate origins are, the scientifically observed mechanisms,

2:55:51 which might be that viral transfer, all is the one thing. Like our ancestors are from the stars. Like that may be full-blown signs as well as full-blown magic to say at the same time. And that's kind of, for me, why Omuamua is the disclosure event, because that's it. That's an object that we now know. It looks artificial enough anyway, but it came in. And that's, yeah, space viruses. That's my update on the pimp. We're making room soon. A healthy, tasty group. We're making room soon for all the things we wish we knew.

2:56:35 We talked about the archetype of Jack Sparrow as a model for living in a chaotic world once upon a time. And I think movie characters are great templates for people because we're all pretty familiar with them. You did a recent solo show that really dug into Bilbo Baggins. And just like Jack Sparrow, probably not a place where a lot of people would expect to find any sort of model. But I think you do make some good points. What can we learn about the way to approach the world and maybe restore some hope? through looking at Mr. B? Yeah, I still have my 90s Chaos Magic DNA, which is that sort of interest in pop culture that tends to annoy the more serious, magically inclined people.

2:57:17 That's my favorite part. Same. I kind of delight in doing that. The Jack Sparrow stuff still holds from an economic advantage perspective. And for at least half the morality, maybe even more. What Bilbo has to offer, and this is, and by Bilbo, we're obviously talking about Tolkien in general and his conception of Middle-earth. And what's important about that is that he did go to war. And we have, well, the premium members and I definitely have a very Jungian understanding of what Middle-earth is and what Bilbo represents. And whilst Tolkien himself may not have articulated it in those terms, he asserted there was a certain kind of reality to this stuff.

2:57:59 So let's just say Bilbo is a certain archetype. But there is a tremendous wisdom in looking at his journey versus what you might get in a more recent, I don't even want to say action film. I don't even know if that's a term anymore. But a more recent film that's like an adventure where you have a hero. And what generally happens is, I use Star Wars as the example. So you pluck this little farm boy off his farm. And by the end of the trilogy, he fights and defeats the big bad guy. So either Darth Vader or the Emperor or whatever you want. And that is the hero's journey. So that is a sort of encapsulation of an individual process.

2:58:39 It doesn't describe reality very well. So it's useful to kind of think with the idea, and whoever you are, you are that hero in your life. But if you look at how you want to be in the world and what it is we can actually do, what Tolkien managed to describe, and whether this was intentional and based on the fact that he went to war and others didn't and he lost some friends and what it was people were fighting for and so on, is you look at Bilbo, and Bilbo is the main character of The Hobbit. He is the Hobbit of The Hobbit, obviously. And he gets swept up by the forces of history. So stuff is going on in the world. I noticed it more because I hadn't, after I finished the Q2 course with Premium Members, I gave myself a few days to decompress and I watched, I think for the first time ever, the extended Hobbit trilogy all through in a couple of days.

2:59:28 Like I'd seen them all before, but I hadn't done it as a single session situation. Wow. I don't recommend it if you're busy, but I otherwise do recommend it. And there's the pieces that Peter Jackson has gotten right that Tolkien, well, done better than Tolkien. Not many, but there are a few. And one of them, I think, in The Hobbit is to kind of build a bit more tension and importance to the story. Because one of the criticisms that was leveled at Tolkien after he wrote Lord of the Rings was, well, you've turned Gandalf into this amazing character and there's this huge cosmic battle going on for Middle-earth. So why in the hell was Gandalf going on effectively a treasure hunt or I heard it once described as an eating tour of Middle-earth in The Hobbit?

3:00:09 And why did he not recognize the ring? So it's because the first book is for kids and the follow-up book was once Tolkien had more deeply engaged with that imaginal realm, the whole thing comes roaring through. But Bilbo is not a loop Skywalker hero. He's swept up by the forces of history and moment by moment, wherever he is, he basically does the best he can in that small way of Hobbits. He does the best he can and he doesn't even end up fighting the main bad guy. He doesn't kill the dragon and he doesn't kill Azok or whatever the big orc guy that effectively Peter invented. So he's just sort of there. And this is the wisdom that you get from Bilbo and Middle-earth.

3:00:53 And it's articulated in a strange way by Galadriel in Fellowship of the Ring. Even the smallest of us can change the course of history because the events would not have unfolded if Bilbo hadn't effectively tried to do his best at every moment, winning or not. And he's not the hero. He's not the guys that kill the dragons and fight Sauron and all that kind of stuff. And that seemed to me a really good model of, or a potential source of inspiration for how it is, how you decide to do what you can do in the world, because you don't get to fight Sauron. So you don't single-handedly defeat Trump or whatever it is you consider to be Sauron.

3:01:36 Like that is not for you. That's not your fate. But nevertheless, there is stuff you can do. And it appears that history works like this. It's not just Middle-earth. History works in this non-linear, unpredictable way. Little moments of it. There's actually macro sweeps on a cycle basis. But not being rude to that waitress because you had a bad day. You don't actually know if that isn't the thing that changes the whole world. And that's the kind of Bilbo lesson. Like, you do your best in these situations and generally try not to be a dick. In that asserting sovereignty is a bit too strong a word.

3:02:13 In trying to make your sphere of influence better, you don't know if you're Bilbo. You don't know if you were the thing that rules the fate of many, which was the kind of really delightful twist in all the books, which is he decides not to kill Gollum in The Hobbit, in the book, as well as the movie, after he's got the ring and he's air invisible and he can kill Gollum, but doesn't. And it's the pity that stays Bilbo's hand is the line. And because of that, so Bilbo's pity ruled the fate of many, because obviously you jump all the way to Return of the King, and Gollum needs to be alive for the ring to be destroyed. And that's that kind of weird spiritual wisdom that you find in Tolkien that I think suggests,

3:02:58 I think suggests, a more effective way of, I guess, being an activist. If we know that the collective approach doesn't work, you don't know if whatever it is you're doing in your sphere is going to be the thing that ends up destroying the ring. And that's really encouraging. That's actually glass half full. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to get across to people: this isn't settling and this isn't inaction. It's the opposite. And it's, I hope, it has for me. I hope it provides a framework for people's really understandable sense of like, I need to do something because the world should be better. Yes. And if you have the options of protesting or going, you know what, I'm actually just going to try and be that little Rivendell.

3:03:44 See how far I can Rivendell my life. And that's why I think Bilbo is the hero for our times. I love it. I think it's a great response to the general doom and gloom. And I do think you're right as well. I've always kind of thought, no matter how the conversations were going on the show about how bad things are, that trends, yeah, you can pick out the trend and it might be a decades-long trend, but trends have counter-reactions when they reach a certain point, usually. And here we are talking about this giant pivot and all this kind of shit. But on an individual level, man, I mean, what kind of Bilbo-esque butterfly effect, as you put it, small things with outsized fate impacts can people do in our world?

3:04:31 I know we can be nice to the waitress, sure, but anything more activist-y? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you are, and I get it, your political leverage decreases every step you go up to the point where, I mean, even at a state level, it's zero. But like, let's just say you get up to the president and it's zero or negative. But if you are interested in, like, saying, actually, I need something meatier, my goodness, if you don't know your sheriff's name and your mayor's name and the rest of it, that's where you start. You actually start at a local level. And this is that thing, Catherine says this as well, like a mighty army arises when you do that.

3:05:11 Because think of the distribution of people listening to this show. You must have maybe one in every county in the U.S. There's not that many counties. So there's a leverage opportunity there of being active at a lower level. So it's not just trying to be Jesus in your day-to-day life and just being nice to people. You actually can get involved. But the trouble is, because of how dominant this macro narrative that you cannot impact is, people think that that's the battle and that's what they need to do. But you have never been able to influence a president or a monarch or something. You've never been able to. And you just think, can you imagine, like, what if you die tomorrow? Can you imagine being at the gates of St. Peter's Gates and he's going, so what did you do? How did you try to save the world?

3:05:56 I'm like, well, I yelled at the president on Twitter and I was just generally unbelievably toxic to people around me because I was so angry. And you think, do you try and explain your steps to St. Peter and see if you're heading in the right direction? So there's the local activism. There is also, broadly speaking, spiritual warfare. There's also the fact that you can use prayer and intention to make the world better. You can also use your economic clout, an individual economic clout, to buy with integrity. Now, that's very often a marketing scam, particularly if you're shopping in supermarkets and so on. But it need not be.

3:06:33 You just need to kind of set yourself up a policy of going, I'm going to spend the most amount possible, the closest distance possible to my house and extend out from there on everything. So if you can find, and obviously the people you deal with have to have integrity and so on. But there are a bunch of ways that you can start greening the desert. desert by getting involved politically, by engaging in spiritual warfare in the correct way, which is essentially trying to make things better around you and praying for sort of macro stuff. So not being toxic, but going for increased peace or increased tolerance or so on. These things have been proven to work. There are decades of research behind this kind of stuff.

3:07:15 So it's not inaction. It's the opposite. And then there's the economic clap. The thing is, it depends on your context. So you can really only say macro things because I don't know what your particular Bilbo experience would be. In the show you mentioned, I also kind of say like that actually scales up. So we were talking about the Joint Chiefs earlier. Like if you have a very senior job at the Pentagon and you are responsible for things like drone striking your many weddings and all the rest of it, in a funny way, that's still a Bilbo experience because you have to rely on your personal experience of the immediate surrounds, which is your workplace.

3:07:51 And you have to be conscious of the thoughts that you're bringing to it and consider the morality of either doing this or not doing it, even though you were told to and so on. So there's kind of the Bilbo experience of changing the stuff you can around you, in fact, scales up. So it's almost like the individual thing works at every scale. So again, where you are on your context will determine what it is you can actually do. And there is some good stuff as well. And this is a sense of sort of waiting for. There is some good stuff in the collective action. One of them, I think, you guys have way too many federal agencies, right? Way too many.

3:08:32 Way too many people with guns that can take you from your houses and either deport you or whatever it is. There's a buildup of them. So you look at what the centrist Democrats have decided to be a wedge issue. And this is the bit where you kind of have to say this bit and say it's not a pro-Trump statement because you've got to look at the glass half full, which is the whole ICE deportation thing, which is vile. It is looking like I don't care which federal agency you start with. If ICE ends up getting abolished, great. Now move on to ATF or DEA or any of these other dozen things that does the same stuff for you, which is tyranny, essentially. They're trying to use it as a wedge issue. And this is the bit that sounds pro-Trumpet, isn't it? It's like a wedge issue for a U.S.

3:09:17 policy that long predates the current administration. So that's the bit where you've got to be careful and seize the opportunity because you don't want to fall into the debate of being like, abolish ICE, but this is just a continuation of policy. That's getting caught in the partisan weeds. Watch that stuff and go, there might in fact be an opportunity to start unpicking various federal agencies. And if it starts with ICE, great. So that's the sort of weirder, higher mind thinking that allows you to combine local political action with you might be in a swing state that you might have someone who's promising some action that you agree with when it comes to ICE in particular.

3:09:56 Vote for them. Cross the aisle if you think this is, we're in that stage of being that kind of strategic. And there's so much stuff we could do. I know it's really bad out there. And I know you just kind of have to take a few deep breaths, realize that maybe you need to re-educate or reorganize your thoughts about how the world is being managed. And just there is so much humans can't die. I've had this conversation as well. You actually can't be killed by what's going on. Even if you are physically murdered, you're not dead. The thing that you really are can't be destroyed. So there's so much power. And people don't realize they're playing reality in God mode because you are God.

3:10:39 So it's an attitudinal adjustment that allows you to live your best Bilbo life, I guess. Yeah, well said. And you know I like a good video game reference. Something else from that episode that I really liked was the picture you painted of a future that I've never really heard described anywhere else because like you said on the last show, you expect anti-gravitic crafts and those sort of quarantine deep state toys to start getting rolled out possibly in the next two years, which seems incredibly soon given how political timelines work. But we also need to get back to living amongst natural systems.

3:11:21 So talk to us about this Hobbit hole flying saucer vision of the future because I thought it was quite creative. Right, right, right. If you look at how the kind of stuff that's in a proverbial underground basis probably works in a way that is the propulsion system, by definition, and I think Dr. La Viola is probably the closest in terms of it being electrogravitic. It's almost a development on Tesla in a sense. sense that you're dealing with using counter-rotation to create like a local gravity effect so that you have that quote-unquote free energy.

3:11:57 I think that's probably what it is. I think that's probably the best description. It's a more accurate way of saying it, because inevitably he's going to be wrong because he doesn't build these things, right? Now, the implication of that, as opposed to how we use hydrocarbons in a combustion engine to propel things around in gravity, is a quote-unquote flying saucer is essentially natural because it harmonizes with how the universe works, or else it wouldn't. Now, you can kind of make the case that hydrocarbons do because you are sort of releasing their stored energy in a series of small explosions that will then drive pistons that will then move your car around.

3:12:37 And you know, fine. But that's not actually what I mean. I mean, the fact that these things can work continuously and at high speeds in space sort of puts it in a different category and in this free energy category. Now, you mentioned the farm at the beginning of the episode. At the beginning of the year, I moved on to a small farm in southern Tasmania as a very green permaculture designer. The intention over the next few years is to fully permacult this place and have the house optimized from that kind of perspective. And one of the things that you will find in the Permaculture Designers Manual in a way, but also in more recently Retro Suburbia by David Holmgren, excellent book, is this idea of a cool cupboard. Now, a cool cupboard is pretty much just what it sounds: it's a fridge replacement. So it's a larder that you have in your house.

3:13:21 And how it works is that you dig a trench a meter deep, about 15 to 20 meters long, and you put a pipe in it, and it obviously sticks up. So it gets air in the middle of your yard or so on. But this is the equivalent of the flying saucer because people in permaculture will describe that as a low-energy solution, but it's free energy because it is how you are harmonizing with how the universe actually runs. So the air comes from outside through the pipe where it's deep enough and long enough that obviously the stored heat gets stripped out so that by the time it sticks up through your floor and into your cool cupboard or fridge replacement, the air is cool.

3:14:01 And the thing is, refrigerators haven't actually improved, even though they can now text you and say pick up milk or order it from Amazon and all this other ridiculous monitoring stuff that you don't need in your life. The actual science behind why we refrigerate food hasn't changed that much and is if anything gotten worse as our food supply chains have lengthened. So if you talk to, say, I did a documentary on Falun Gong or Falun Dafa a long time ago. So you have Chinese mystics and Chinese energy workers who will tell you that for some reason the Qi in Western stomachs is really cold and slow. And then they worked out, oh, you guys eat refrigerated food. This is not how it's supposed to work. But most of the stuff that we keep refrigerated doesn't need to be as cold as it is.

3:14:46 So cheese is a very good example. It needs to breathe and whatever. And you just put the kind of stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated towards the bottom of the cool cupboard and you stack it up towards things that need less of it. Again, at the top, you would have leafy greens and things that you're going to eat recently. So this flying saucer cool cupboard combination is how it's again one of those utopian things. How can you live in a way that the natural functioning of the universe helps you grow or improves your life rather than makes it worse? And there's just this amazing opportunity to start thinking. This is, I think, this is the point of utopias, rather than to have them fulfilled, which never works, it's to kind of dangle at the edge of our perception that star to follow and to always be hopeful and to have it improve.

3:15:36 So for me, there's a lot of things you can actually do just by changing your perception about the kind of cosmos you actually live in that invites, again, more optimism. Yeah, I just think that is a great kind of utopian vision for the future because it hasn't really been put on the big screen, you know, as much sci-fi, dystopian, utopian, future-driven stuff we've been given. I've never really seen a kind of back-to-nature paradigm with a flying saucer parked in the driveway in a little hobbit. I think it's very cool. Yeah. The closest you'll get is Ursula Le Guin, some of her work.

3:16:15 But yes, my perfect vision for the future. So my utopia, I think it would look like a perfected Polynesian society. So we're multi-planetary and you have local governments organized by bioregion and all river catchment, because if you did it this way, that's your soul for pollution around the world, literally. The same thing once we're on Mars. And so there's this kind of combination of high technology, us moving between multiple planets, and within those planets, we're actually harmonizing with. with the local biosphere and having that kind of local economy and food production systems that improve the soil and the planet rather than make them worse. And the thing is, as far as I can tell, we do have flying sources, we do have permaculture, whatever.

3:16:59 It's not going to happen, but my utopia could happen. Yeah, we're making more soupy, tasty boo. We're making more soup for all the things we wish me. This is a question I wanted to ask you about this thing. It's going to get really complicated already, but one of your best rune soup episodes this year for me was talking plant cognition and communication with Dr. Monica Gagliano. Really great. And she would refer to a plant like mimosa as a collective spirit, I guess, over the whole genius.

3:17:42 And of course, most ayahuasca reports refer to Mother Ayahuasca, the specific spirit, even though ayahuasca is a combination of things. But the point is that when we take some compounds and we have a breakthrough experience, for me, it's just been a transportation to, say, the spirit world, and then just a communication with whoever is there. The whole machine elves thing, you know. But then some people, when they take this specific compound, are talking to a specific spirit. And I guess I'm just trying to work out these tangled threads around plant spirits, entheogens, the mechanisms that get you over there versus consistently dialing up a specific number.

3:18:23 Any idea how to help me untangle this knot? Sure. So, yeah, frankly. So, as I said before, I'd smoked DMT, but I hadn't taken ayahuasca. And so, this is an oversimplification, but it's a useful one. If you want to just get there, if you want to get to the machine elf realm, smoke DMT. Most commonly, and this is where it's sort of, it's mostly right, but also not, based on not just my experience for the last couple of weeks, but the other people who are on Dieta with me. Ayahuasca, as you say, it's a combination of the copy vine and the chakruna leaves, right? So, it's not the spirit of a plant. But if you consume it in ceremony with an ayahuasca who has made it and sung the Icarus into it and called her into, you know, temple and ceremony and so on, you get ayahuasca as spirit.

3:19:09 And in kind of like the first journey, it was very much in the spirit world. In the second one, it was very much her being in ceremony and providing the healing that as a cosmic medicine she does. So, for me, that was the difference in those two explicitly. With mushrooms, it's a bit of both. You can interact with mushrooms. I tend to do it in an invocation sense, and then you're in mushroom space and you kind of encounter things that are in there, but also your memories. Ayahuasca was, in a funny way, close to that, you interacting with ayahuasca and where she would take you or what she would show you. With smoking DMT, it's much more like punching into that weird machine elf realm. Now, there were a couple of people on Dieta, one girl in particular, one woman, I guess, but she's young, who had an experience during one of the ones that the main theme was around healing of everyone who was there.

3:19:57 And most people had kind of like ayahuasca was healing me, the sort of cosmic nurse hospital sense. And she had it, she said it was like giant bugs. So, you can see giant bugs in the Moloka, like big ants, mantids, essentially, performing psychic surgery on people. And so, we had the discussion the next day, and I'm like, well, yes, it's almost like you tipped further into the ayahuasca realm because that has a motif match to what people who smoke DMT. It's not exact, although it also is like mantids are a good enough description of the stuff you encounter when you're in smoking DMT machine elf space. So, you can tell that there's almost maybe a spectrum, I don't know. But she was one of the only people who had experiences with motifs that were more commonly associated with, at least for me, smoking DMT, because I didn't get really any machine elves the entire two and a bit weeks we were in the jungle.

3:20:48 I got Traveling in Spirit, I got ayahuasca, I got all that kind of stuff, but not what I was kind of expecting was a bit more like having smoked DMT. So, that's what it is for me. I think if you approach ayahuasca in an almost analog, dare I say correct? I'm not sure if I want to use that word exactly, but in an analog and traditional sense, you will get ayahuasca as spirit. And if you do it in a, I'm going to, you know, extract or synthesize dimethyltryptamine 4 and freebase it, you're going to get something more extreme and almost maybe almost like maybe we're not supposed to be there. I don't know. But that's how I currently have it hanging in my head. Yeah, it is a weird thing to work out and just think about how these different compounds affect our interaction between the two worlds.

3:21:36 It's quite trippy. I mean, it's a huge difference. difference in an infinite spirit world to be able to talk to one entity directly as opposed to just wandering around and seeing who shows up. Like, I've never been able to visualize or see any of the things I've talked to. It's all just like a consciousness kind of. Well, that's not true. You've seen it. So, for instance, when you're interacting with the star out in the desert, you could see the star. It just, it looked like a star. And that's actually quite normal. So, because it took me so long to come up, I'd get bored. The night in particular took three hours. I'm like, oh, come on. Like, I'm lying down and everyone's purging around me.

3:22:15 And that's it. I'm getting up. So I got up and I left the Molokai and it's the middle of the night in the jungle. It's beautiful, clear sky. It's just perfect. We're by this river, stars. And I noticed, because it wasn't that I was completely sober, it's just that I was mildly altered. It was kind of like being a bit stoned, frankly. But with the difference that I could sense the intelligence of every single different plant, tree, vine, giant frogs like on the walk back one night and so on. And you kind of realize at that point that whether it was ayahuasca specifically or entheogens in general, if you took the dose correctly, had a tremendous advantage to hunting groups because I was aware and in some form of communication with the

3:23:05 more than human world around me in the jungle at the time. So, and I think that's an I didn't get that. You don't really get that kind of stuff if you smoke DMT, but I didn't get that to the same level of precision with any other entheogen. I get it a bit with mushrooms on the farm, but I got it like I swear I speak jungle when I'm on ayahuasca in the jungle. And that is sort of to your point that I didn't see them differently, but I was just completely confident and aware of the individual intelligences of each thing that was there. Now, when I ended up, when the medicine, you know, did actually get me properly high and I went back into the Moloka, then I was encountering the sort of riverside cap that we're on as this much more like classic paintings of ayahuasca journeys, all the sort of colors and what have you, in that really perspectivist sense.

3:23:55 Then I encountered it, but it was interesting almost like at a lower dose, you could just be in the jungle at night and be amongst friends, I guess is a weird way of saying it, but that's what it felt like. Well, that's awesome because that really was going to be my next question was just that a lot of starships is about restoring a magical context to anthropology and just the human story and what their ceremonies and these entheogen-fueled spirit contact traditions are all about. And I was just curious if this being in like a really embedded setting with one of the most intense entheogens, if it affected the starships hypothesis at all or how you looked at indigenous magic or these spirit contact traditions, it seemed like maybe it did a little bit.

3:24:44 Yeah, sure. And weirdly, it was your experience with the star that got me outside because I've interacted with stars without entheogens and with them from a magical perspective for years. And it suddenly occurred to me like, because honestly, once it got to two and a half hours and I was only a little bit stoned and everyone else is completely high, I'm like, well, I guess that's what's happening to me tonight. So I might as well go out because I can walk. I might as well go out and look at the sky and see what I can do, you know, interacting and magic-wise and so on. And so absolutely, I think we would have a very similar experience of being able to have some sort of telepathic communication with the night sky on these things because that certainly happened.

3:25:23 And in that sense, it was a further validation. But what I've noticed the most was the, which I hadn't done before or hadn't felt before. I just kind of intellectually knew it. I felt the hunting advantage of being good as a shaman or ayahuasca or wherever you are in the world where you have substances that can alter consciousness. I felt the hunting advantage because the jungle was talking to me and I was talking to it. And I was supposed to be there. Like everything fit and you would be able to see better in the dark and you kind of knew where animals and things were.

3:26:01 And that was really, really interesting that it was almost like I had the impression of some of these plant spirits being allies, which is what typically in magic you call them, right? Like plant allies and so on. But I had the impression of them being allies in the same way dogs are allies or have historically been allies as allies in a hunting group. So that was that's in there in the Starships thesis, but I hadn't personally experienced that before. And that was kind of fascinating. Wow. Yeah, I love it. Man, I am excited and terrified for next year, definitely. Oh, we'll get a bit high and go hunting. Oh, yeah, because hunting is just something I do all the time.

3:26:38 Yeah, me too. Better do it hunt. But to switch gears a bit, this is your 10th time here, and it all started with a show that was largely about Gnosticism 101 and the idea that you being a fan of both magic and conspiracy felt like conspiracy researchers tend to make incorrect assumptions and claims about the magic parts of their repertoire because they lack experience with it. Something that we're still talking about on the continued search for better models. But I thought it would be fun to circle back and close the loop here because I've had a lot of guests recently who think a Gnostic philosophy is what's driving the elite and their agendas.

3:27:18 The arrogant idea that we should transcend this prison planet and become our own gods, that it's driving the technologies of the Silicon Valley technocracy, that it's basically no different from Satanism. You know, we can zoom in on certain things in a minute, but broadly speaking, can you help us sort this out? Is Gnosticism a viewpoint that's helpful and empowering to the individual, or is it a driving force behind the elite's secret religion and a component to something they're hoping the masses will adopt as the one world state religion eventually? It's definitely not a driving force behind the elite religion, except in the sense that they maybe wouldn't use the word archons, but they're aware of powerful non-human entities with which maybe off-planet or not that they can interact with.

3:28:04 Here's the thing, particularly when you have people on the show who have a background in Orthodox Christianity, Eastern Orthodox in particular. Let me describe it to you in DC universe terms. To Orthodox Christianity, Gnosticism is the Joker. It is the original villain. Before witchcraft, before the invading Moors, before whoever, Orthodox Christianity emerged historically as a reaction to the many Gnosticisms around it. So it is the villain they are most afraid of. And in fact, the fixity, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're a Christian and you're looking for an internally coherent, which I'm not interested in, but if you're looking for an internally coherent philosophy or a metaphysics that works, Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christianity that is internally

3:28:54 consistent. Catholicism isn't because it sort of broke things for political reasons about 600 years after Christianity formed as a thing, right? It's still, most people are Catholic and then Protestant from Catholic. But as a result, when you get people who come from that kind of Christianity, they're already predisposed to Eastern Orthodoxy is built as essentially a refutation of a lot of stuff that you find in the multiple Gnosticism. So that kind of explains a lot of the antipathy if you're referring to a couple of guests you've had in particular. As for whether it is the right way of describing the elite belief system, I don't think it is.

3:29:36 I actually think that's an inversion because, and it's funny that this kind of, I know we're going to talk about postmodernism later, right? It's sort of weird to me that it's a lack of understanding that makes people who are in conspiracy land suspicious of postmodernism and Gnosticism, because at a really high level, what they're both saying is that people in power will tell you a fake story to keep themselves in power. And that's essentially Gnosticism. Essentially, Gnosticism is powerful things are giving you a false vision of reality. And if you don't work that out, you're fucked. And if you look at what postmodernism is, it's the same thing.

3:30:15 It's that power produces our understanding of gender and money and the things we can and can't do. Like at a macro level, postmodernism is looking at how power changed the rules and definitions of reality across time. There's a flow model understanding of time that is informed by that. And so is Gnosticism, really. And that's kind of why they don't like it, because it has this idea, especially if you come from an Eastern Orthodox point of view, what you're essentially saying is that sometime in the 300s, a bunch of men got the description of the universe perfectly accurate and everyone else is wrong. And I'm not there. And I don't think, actually, if most of the listeners to the show are Christian or not, if you phrase it that way, I don't think they're there either.

3:30:58 And it's just kind of funny, like libertarianism, which, you know, I'm a fan, but like, I know you've got a lot of libertarian types who listen to the show. Libertarianism has a high Venn overlap with something like postmodernism, if you actually understand what it is, because it's like, well, no, I reject the narratives and bars and restrictions that come from power. They're crap. It's always fascinated me, particularly in the last five or so years, that we've come back around to wailing on these things. And it's not that there are things within postmodernism that. are disappointing or subject to critique, because they certainly are. But it's weird that it gave

3:31:38 this. It gave modern discourse a whole bunch of tools to understand and critique power that we didn't have before. And what else are we doing here but that? There was also a woman you interviewed over the last year. I almost thought about trying to have her on, but it was just going to be a regurgitation of the same interview because what was so fascinating was her own experience of being struck by lightning and then what happened next.

3:32:30 It's just a near-death experience and that was the catalyst. But I've heard this before too: this idea that if you die suddenly, you're as shocked as anyone else. Like, you know, you look at the mangled meat of a body hit by a semi-truck and you're like, that had to hurt. And then you talk to someone who had a near-death experience and like, actually, I didn't feel a thing. I was as surprised as anyone. I looked down at my own dead body and I was like, well, what do I do now? And that's just interesting. That is so good, isn't it? Because you think about that. Everyone thinks about that. But yes, universally from the beginnings of spiritualism, when we started to kind of systematize, and not without its problems, but we started to systematize after-death communication again in the West.

3:33:13 And it was because the West had it was industrializing. So there were terrible railroad accidents and Hindenburgs and whatever, right? People are like, yeah, didn't feel a thing. I'm like, wow, that's really good. That's really good. Yes. But it does sort of speak to the point of you need to know what it feels like to be a spirit. So this comes back to ayahuasca and journeying and so on. I think the quotes in Chaos Protocols, but it's another Terence quote, which is like, the purpose of life is to familiarize yourself with the kind of like non-physical or after-death state so that the process of dying doesn't become a shock to the system.

3:33:49 And that is like New Kingdom Egyptian culture right there. That's like, get good at the process of dying or get okay with it because it will happen and you kind of want it to go well. Indeed. And it's weird because I do feel somewhat comfortable in altered states and I don't do a ton of journey. Obviously, there's more that could be done, but I've been there on the other side a time or two and I feel like obviously it's real, but would I know what to do when I die? Not so sure. And I guess I would ask you what you think the point is. I mean, the stakes are so high. Are we supposed to unite with the Godhead, reincarnate again, level up to another layer of reality?

3:34:31 I mean, what I've done a show in the past that was about the idea that maybe going towards the light is some archon trick and now you're trapped forever. So I don't know what to do, but what would your best guess be at when you die, assuming you even know how to move about without a body? What is your goal, do you think? The jump is the thing you want to focus on and you want to get that right. Afterwards, it's fine, right? So it's the tunnel to the garden component, which is essentially universally attested. This isn't just Judeo-Christian cultures or what have you. There's a whole bunch of university research on kind of doing comparison analysis of the death process and the afterdeath descriptions across ancient Egypt and South Asia and Egypt and so on, right?

3:35:21 You want to get that first bit right. You want to get yourself into the garden because at that point, it's fine. And to some extent, as happened with Elizabeth in the book you mentioned, changed in a flash. She co-wrote with Dr. Jeff Craigwell. It was in the garden she met her grandfather, who also wasn't her grandfather, but was, but was also God itself, saying, Well, you can stay. And she's like, No, I've got kids. It wasn't as bad. Like it was an amazing, amazing book and definitely worth people reading. But she went back for that reason. So you want to make sure that you get the tunnel to the garden bit right. And then after that, look, as far as I can tell from personal experience and personal discussions and having a reasonable knowledge of the world literature on it, I guess, incarnation is optional.

3:36:04 So our natural and eternal state is the spirit world or the imaginal. And in that space, it's kind of like that's most of God, because the universe is kind of like God experiencing himself. So it's cool once you're there. If you want to come back, also cool. It's a bit of a process and you get allocated like it's sort of. you fold into different people's timelines to do it, which is one of the reasons you kind of like forget it in some respects. But it isn't like you will find in most Buddhist descriptions that you're kind of stuck on this eternal ride of being a Tibetan peasant for thousands of years until you get enlightenment and then you just end. That just seems really grim to me. It's not that. It's

3:36:48 incarnation is optional and people do different things with it. So apparently, and I don't have personal experience of this in terms of spirit contact, but it was the case. It was fairly well attested in spiritualism up until more or less the modern day. So for instance, people who suffer the tragedy of like a stillborn baby or a baby that dies very soon after birth. These are kind of like elevated souls on a bounce mission to do things to people who are in that particular constellation. So there's a whole bunch of different ways we can come back. And it's fun to look at, but people do tend to fill their minds with too much information about how they think it works, which is not necessary.

3:37:28 It's the easiest thing in the world when it happens when you're there. It feels like this is just how everything is always supposed to be and always has been. You just got to get yourself there. Just tunnel and garden. Focus on those two and all is good. Well, that is definitely the vibe I've had of the most potent out-of-body experiences: is that, oh, this is completely natural. I've done this a million times. I'm not as freaked out by this as I would have thought I would be to be looking at my own body. And so that is to me a clue as to what it is going to be at the end game. But I'm also curious: do you think there are any false tunnels or spirit traps like the moon?

3:38:07 Oh, maybe not like the moon, although it's funny. Funny you use that as an example because of the moon's role as the governor of spirits and the intermediator of all the other kind of planetary influences sort of pouring down onto Earth. So the moon is sort of like Atlanta airport for a whole bunch of stuff in the non-physical, right? And actually to some extent, millions of years ago in the physical. But there always has been. And that's what I mean by like tunnel, be aware and call in if you're not seeing them your guides and don't name specific people, but like your ancestors and honored dead and so on.

3:38:45 They'll probably be there anyway to do the transition because yeah, there's there are spells. There are like PGM spells, publicly available stuff on the internet that you can kind of hijack departing souls and trap them in things. There are cultures around the world, not entire cultures, but within cultures around the world, you will have people who make a profession out of that. And that's kind of where you get the zombie or zombie idea in a lot of Afro-Caribbean black magics, right? That you capture souls of either the dead or the dying. Yeah, make your own little Frankenstein. I mean, you got to have something in there. Yeah, and it can happen with other entities and demons and all that other kind of stuff. Like it's a literal jungle, but it's a natural thing that humans do, right?

3:39:29 So it can go wrong, just like childbirth can go wrong or whatever. But it's not, if you take a few steps like this, if you kind of familiarize yourself with the evidence to a sufficient level of confidence that you know I'm right, and then a little bit of spiritual hygiene at the time. But if you can do anything, like I've got a journey in course, but if you have reliable access to a credible ayahuasca or ayahuasca, and you don't necessarily, although I do and I love it, need to go to the jungle for that. These are all really, really worthwhile things you can do. Right on. Good advice. We're making room soon. A healthy, tasty growth.

3:40:14 We're making room soon for all the things we wish we knew. And you also did, in terms of magic, a recent contract clearing session for your members with a guy named Chiron Armand. And as he said in it, he's trying to be as, quote, unhijacked as possible. And these years seem like they don't need to be made any tougher by any sticky stuff we could get rid of. How important is this in terms of not carrying baggage or negative energy that we don't need? Is this a practice you think we should all kind of look into or maybe even sage the house or something?

3:40:56 Well, we'll come back to the sage thing. So in an animist framework, thoughts are, some thoughts are people. Some thoughts are, and I don't mean humans because animism definitionally is the extension of personhood beyond the human so that trees and mountains and so on are people. Thoughts are people too. So that's speaking of the food pyramid. At a baseline, when you treat, which Jung did to tremendous success, he went a bit mad, but he also developed the Red Book and so on as a result of it. When you approach your thoughts as people, you

3:41:36 are immediately invited into a healing modality that is instant. It's fascinating, and I say this as a son of a psychiatrist, that the further Western mental health gets away from the idea that thoughts are somehow people and the imagination or the imaginal is some kind of reality, the worse we get at it. Especially now we're in this ludicrous self-diagnosing on Twitter your many anxiety disorders and the return of the SSI model as if serotonin hypothesis wasn't disputed in the 90s or disproved rather in the 90s. It's just getting worse. But at the same time, there is the opportunity to immediately return to a state of mental coherence.

3:42:21 And by immediately, I mean within a week or so. And there are practices like contract clearing, but they work on this sort of food pyramid sense of at the base, when you consider the imaginal as some kind of real and contained within it are thoughts that are persons, but also that can retain damage. So if you've said something, and I had a show just before Christmas called Recapitulation, if people want to learn this exercise, if you have had hostile encounters, if someone said something horrible to you or you said something horrible to them, because we don't understand time, this comes back to the time thing, the past is somehow still alive.

3:43:00 And that means you're kind of giving a whole bunch of energy that you need for your own coherence to stuff that is just not serving you. And so even without getting into the fact that you're an immortal spiritual being who's existed for millions of years across galaxies, means that you've kind of accumulated a lot of weird stuff, including in previous lives and so on. But this all comes back to we don't understand time. And when you do these sort of shamanic exercises like recapitulation or contract clearing, you are releasing stuff that has accumulated that doesn't serve you anymore and bringing yourself closer to a state of coherence.

3:43:39 You can Google either of them. I think Kai is still accepting clients. So you can search for Kyron Armand and do one-on-one sessions with him. But yeah, I think this is critically important. And one of the reasons that makes it more, this is a weird way of saying it, but it's real chaos magic, right? They work even better if before you do them, you actually sit with your theory of mind and go, well, what do I actually think the imagination is? And the imaginal. And what do I think thoughts are? And what happens, you know, in those dream instances when my grandfather has come and spoken to me? What do I think is going on there? Because the rest of the world for all time gives that not just a reality, but almost the preeminent reality.

3:44:19 And we've decided it's all fake talking about that archon thing, right? And if you sit with that first and go, gosh, this is not just real. It might even be more real than me sitting here thinking about it. And then you do those exercises, absolutely transformative. Yeah, really interesting. It's just my thought process was maybe there are some things you would know that would make us as unencumbered as possible, let's say, you know, prep work for us to do to be in the best position. Because if we see all this stuff coming and we want to respond rather than react, and it's not really time to talk to the people in our inner circle because we're waiting for them to maybe catch up a little bit and it might take 10 or 12 months.

3:45:01 What can we do privately to, you know, take a spiritual bath, so to speak? And I guess that's one of the things. Yeah, those would work. You also need some kind of energetic or energy hygiene practice that's like Reiki or chakras or something. And it doesn't in the end matter which one you use, but this is all coming back to that sort of state of coherence. And rather than sage, which is politically problematic, although you can if you want, taking seriously the field that you live in, which includes keeping it, you know, in that almost Jordan-Petersonian sense, clean, but clean extends into the invisible and, you know, just being aware of that, even doing visualization exercises, because again, it comes back to what do you think a thought is of surrounding your house and infusing it with light and that kind of stuff

3:45:55 done repeatedly shifts the field in the house. So there's plenty of stuff that you can do. And the point is they work better if you do that immediate or that initial sitting with, which people usually don't. It's funny. When they start in magic, it's sort of a luck. It's like, oh, I found this spell and I kind of want that girl to like. me and I'll see what happens. And then it kind of works. It might not work. Usually with love spells, they don't work correctly, but they do something. Something happened to make you realize, oh, shit, this is this works somehow, right? But these sort of coherence exercises, if you just give yourself a couple of minutes to go, like, thoughts are real in some way for every culture on earth except ours, and always have been.

3:46:39 So I'm going to approach this with a not sombreness, but I'm going to approach this with an extra level of seriousness, at least to begin with, that I didn't think. But there are other exercises which would be great if you can get at them. All these little, so in the jungle, when I was on Dieta, one of the nights, or one of my more impressive purge experiences on ayahuasca, involved the purging out of tens of thousands of little demonic bargains that I'd made since I was a kid. And you realize if the universe is alive and filled with spirits, when you do something like swear at or say, fuck you, I hope you die to someone who cuts you off in traffic, you suddenly realize those are hood, they go somewhere, and you get

3:47:27 bound up in a lot of these pacts with little entities, little demons that hear that and go, all right, I'll do that. And you end up feeding them. And it doesn't mean that that person dies, but I had that all purged out of me. These thousands of them, like the little agreements you make, if someone's mean to you as a four-year-old and you sort of commit to the universe to get revenge on someone or be better than them or what have you, they all stay in your field some way. So things like recapitulation and contract clearing in, you know, unless you can get to the Peruvian jungle, are very useful.

3:48:06 I love it. And I wanted to bring up these couple of lines from a blog you wrote about a virus punk dystopian future as a variant of cyberpunk or steampunk, where you said, it is interesting to pause and consider that the ultimate directive of the rule of the state in the widest possible sense is you must not die under any circumstance. Before, the sovereign had power over life and death. Now death delineates the edge of the state's power beyond which it cannot reach you. Little wonder then, its full force is on preventing it. Important thing to be reminded of, man.

3:48:46 I really like that. And it goes back to the need to explore the fringes of consciousness to become invincible. If I was being serious, I would say physical reality feels more like a sandbox than a prison, but it's certainly not all there is to a person, despite the overall messaging that you're addressing right there. Yeah, absolutely. When this sort of kicked off in earnest, I was very disappointed at how few people who, so in sort of magic land, and people who used to know this stuff failed to have a biopolitical critique of what was going on, because that is a redescription of Michel Foucault.

3:49:29 So he was, you know, an historian of ideas and one of those apparently dastardly postmodernists, but was a kind of genius. And the state didn't care about the, so the monarch didn't care about whether its subjects lived or died, particularly in a sort of pre-modern, is in pre-Enlightenment context where the state, or the monarch was also God's representative on earth. If we're talking about the Holy Roman Emperor or the Pope or the monarch in England, it didn't matter. And it's because the application of power happened in the context of a reality that included life after death and demons and angels and whatever.

3:50:06 But as the Enlightenment sort of tore on and we started making these ludicrous premises like materialism, as if the only things that are there are physical, the necessary state implications of that is to manage the human populace or the populace to keep it trapped really, you know, Gnostically in the physical because there is nothing beyond the physical. And it's the ultimate, in a materialist context, it is the ultimate final limit of state power. So they do everything they can to keep you in it. But that's just in the materialist context or the sort of European context, because if you look at, say, the rulers of the Maya, the classical Maya, or New Guinean chieftains, or Chinese emperors, that wasn't necessarily the case.

3:50:52 You were still the emperor's subject in the afterlife and so on. So there's this much more, and I'm not saying that's a better system. What I'm saying is that we have this biopolitical power structure that we were good at critiquing until it came time to urgently critique it. And then we all said, stay home, save. the NHS. And that was very disappointing to me because it's people who know this stuff because I've, you know, discussed it with them at length. But I like Michelle Foucault's read on biopolitics and colonialism is more relevant rather than less. So if you're a THC listener who has maybe, and there's some good reason for doing it, but has decided that postmodernism is the devil, give some Michelle Foucault a shot because his read on the biopolitics of colonial power is very illuminating for now.

3:52:05 All things will be free. But now that we're all breathing heavily into brown paper bags, let's get into that other stuff that, you know, helps people to cope by talking about things that are just fun. And that would be the latest course that you have for your RuneSoup Premium members, the one they voted on, Fairies, UFOs, and Psy. And I was thinking about this, and it's kind of funny because last year, one of the biggest movies was King Kong versus Godzilla. And it wasn't great, but the energy out there was saying, I'm so sick of heavy, depressing stuff.

3:52:43 Just let me watch the monkey fight the lizard in the hollow earth. And I see a similar energy saying, Give me the fairies and the UFOs, Gordon, because I need my mind someplace else. And I think that's got to be a part of it, right? Yeah, I assume so. It's always interesting what the members pick because how we do it, if you don't know, is we vote on each course that we do. And so I'm not really in charge of it. I'm a bit in charge of this one because there's such an overlap there. People would write in, I want to do UFOs and Psy, or let's do like fairies and UFOs. And I could see that it was all, in my head, that was all the one course. So I kind of did a little bit of election meddling of my own and put those three together.

3:53:25 But I absolutely think that. So if you consider what the fairies are, Chris Knowles used to call them elusive companions, but the sort of beings that are only sometimes physical that have a very high degree of overlap with what we call ufology or UFO phenomena. One of the hallmarks, particularly as fairies are encountered historically in Northwest Europe, is this kind of like joy and actually like a simple and authentic life. So they like seasonal festivals. They like to be included in harvests and fresh milk and all the rest of it.

3:54:03 So there's almost kind of like more dangerous hobbits. The fairies have a reminder and a call to joy. And also a kind of the other side of that is the risk of when you don't do it, when you actually aren't taking joy seriously. And that's what I think is powerful about them as beings and as an idea. I love the section where you talk about Elf Shot. You say it's one of the true universal beliefs. Spirits or things of the paranormal will attack humans with blow darts or arrows or something of that nature.

3:54:38 It does come up in the Campfire's Edge presentation that the shaman would protect from things that are right outside of the light of the fire and that there's all these things out there. I just like the visual of all that as well. But elaborate on that belief and a favorite story or two if you have them, because Elf Shot, it does have some overlaps with UFO phenomenon. And I'm just curious what you think it is. So, yeah, sure. I've long been fascinated by it. I think it's one of those, one is it's a universal belief. And there aren't that many of them. That's what Starships was about. But more importantly, and something Dr.

3:55:19 Sheldrake noticed was decades ago, looking at the phenomena that present when you're in ayahuasca, is even if you live in central London, you get jungle motifs. So the idea that it's some sort of chemical that's kind of like dementing and rearranging your mind so that it's going to show you stuff in your deep unconscious or whatever. People who've never been to the jungle get jungle experiences. And so Elf Shot is kind of like that. Or blow dots, where even if you've never seen one, and not that many people have in the 21st century, they are nevertheless universal.

3:55:57 So there's some kind of true thing. And when I say you've never seen them in their universal, any of the kind of energy healing modalities that you want to look for or look at, including the one I'm lineaged in now, you commonly find them. So I, especially with some heart issue stuff I had going on that I mentioned in the free hour, I had a whole bunch of them at sort of like the back of my heart chakra that had to be pulled out, but I've had to pull them out of clients myself where they get shot. So there's some kind of universal, this sort of blow dart or arrow thing, which is, I think, why you'll find them amongst like the people of the Kalahari, this idea of there are spirits who will cause illness and not just illness, but like misfortune by blowing darts at humans, little spirit darts, right?

3:56:44 And that's interesting because obviously the people of say Ireland and Brittany and so on who had this idea of elf shot, which is basically the same idea, basically that the elves will shoot you with tiny little arrows or blow darts and that will cause disease. That idea, there's kind of like two ways that that can show up in Northwest Europe in, let's just say, the 1300s. And that is, it is literally, this is the Starships analysis one way or the other. It's literally a survival from when we left Africa and traveled around the world and thus it's like 150,000 years old. Or it's true, which is to say spirits actually can shoot you with elf shot and that can cause illness and disease.

3:57:26 And that's why the sun, people of the Kalahari, can see it as can the people of County Cork in the 15th century, right? And it's both, I think. I think it's fair to say both of those scenarios are in play. But where the overlap with UFOs comes from is the, funnily enough, speaking of injections, is the preponderance of kind of like needle motifs during UFO experiences and their association with pain and misfortune and disease. Because that used to happen to me when I would have my whatever those early childhood screen memory possible UFO encounters were.

3:58:03 I would dream, in addition to all the other stuff of being immobilized and whatever, of like really, really big oversized needles. So elf shot is one of those things that probably happens to everyone. I would even say a bit under half the clients I've had so far have had them somewhere. It just appears to be how I don't necessarily say malicious, ambivalent spirit projections sort of kind of like show up in the human field. And I guess they can build up and you have to have them cleared out or something. But yeah, that's elf shot. It's a universal spirit phenomenon. Yeah, it is so interesting.

3:58:44 And some of the stories about it say that occasionally someone will say they seemed like possessed, led like the Pied Piper type situation. You even mentioned that Cupid is an archetypal match for that theme. And you get love struck and you're kind of possessed. It almost sounds like a weaponized spiritual acupuncture. Like the principles are there. Yeah. And so there's elf shot, which are the arrows, but as you say, like you can be love struck or the term used to be elf struck, where it would be like a falling sickness or some kind of temporary or whatever derangement or mania.

3:59:21 And what's weird about that is that, so you'd have so-called fairy doctors or cunning folk or what have you who could diagnose it and ultimately treat it. And there are scant examples, and I find this interesting because when I have clients that do multiple sessions, and I've only got a few of them at the moment because I haven't actually kind of moved permanently into practice yet, although that's happening hopefully by the end of the month. There are stories, and we go into one of them in the course, where one farmer, a couple of generations before, offends basically a fairy court by bulldozing their fairy mounds and planting it with barley. And he basically cuts a deal after all this misfortune happens. This is in Glamorgan in Wales.

4:00:03 After all this misfortune happens, he cuts a deal with the fairy court to say, just fucking leave me alone. And they're like, all right, but we'll like revisit our fairy vengeance on the farm in like 100 years' time. And he's like, that's fine. I'll be dead, whatever. And then that, in fact, did happen. And so a young family moved in and they ended up with all this calamity that a fairy doctor had to, or cunning person had to diagnose. And what's interesting is, depending on what energy healing system you're in, you find stuff like that. You find like ancestral curses and, oh, like five centuries ago, you were in a different life or one of your ancestors upset this being and that's what's flowing through. And it's just one of those weird, coming back to how susceptible we are to mind control, one of those weird glimpses into

4:00:47 how far we've come from a holistic understanding of the human role in the kind of like more than human world. And it's just, you just get these glimpses of like, whoa, we are. we're not in a good way when it comes to the rest of the world. Yes, I agree. And you say in one of the modules that the missing 411 stuff is probably the best overlap of UFOs and fairies. And I think this audience is pretty familiar with the missing 411 stuff. We've had other guests talk about it, but also David Pilitis has been here a couple of times.

4:01:25 But you say some interesting things when you're talking about that, that if you prey on nature, maybe nature prays back, and that it probably is happening in these national parks in America because of us being out of right relation. And it's just interesting. Talk to us about that overlap and what you think that is, just some kind of predator energy in general. I wrote about it years ago as kind of like teaching seagulls at the beach to eat potato chips because we sort of corral, like, and this is, I learned this from David Pilitis, but I mean, there are 330 million Americans, so it makes sense to me.

4:02:04 People think of national parks as isolated places, but actually they're quite crowded, particularly in peak season, and particularly at the moment when the great reset is fucked with travel, right? So American national parks aren't as isolated, with some exceptions, like middle of the desert kind of stuff, which means it's not the case that people just like get lost and are never found again. Like half the time, you're within a half a mile at worst of other people, right? Because you're all on trails and campsites and so on. So it's not that it's this vast trackless wilderness where you can just lose people. This was one of the things that he mentioned. So then why is it that so many people do go missing there? And like within 40 feet, like around the corner, some of the more famous ones of like, no, he was 40 feet behind me.

4:02:47 We went around the corner, heard a yelp, he's gone kind of stuff. That's something, this is why the missing 411 stuff is so good. And what I think we've done is kind of like seagulls and chips, it's quite easy to abduct people in those situations, right? It is still the wild in the sense that it's a more or less non-human world and we don't go with the usual protections. We don't ask permissions. We don't ask spirits of country. We don't do any of that kind of stuff. And we're out there. And so if I was whatever a Bigfoot is, right? I stole one kid. I'm like, that worked. I'm going to do it again, like a seagull and chips.

4:03:27 So I actually think we've trained a collection of spirits to do it. Again, it's another thing we used to have a language for. This is what people would be abducted by fairies before we had UFOs. It was just one of the risks of being out in the world was beings that weren't human would kind of take you. And why I like David Pilaites stuff so much is it's that ex-cop background that allows him to clean up the data as much as possible so that he does get rid of the probable suicides and all the other stuff, all the other like tragic deaths. I mean, they're all tragic, but all the other deaths that could be someone got lost in a blizzard or someone went to kill themselves or what have you, just to clean up the, or it could have been murder or so on.

4:04:07 I do think, particularly in the case of the US, there is probably some hidden military stuff in there somewhere, which would be very difficult to wash out of the data otherwise, right? But that's a really powerful data set to why it's included in the course is I would like people, and it's easy to do now that a couple of the documentaries are on Netflix, because actually the books are quite expensive. But you can get the documentaries on Netflix or wherever and just come to your own awareness or opinion, informed opinion of what's going on with that. Because when you look at a serious modern examination of mysterious abductions first, and then you turn around and look at the stories of people being abducted into Elfland or Elfhame or Fairy Kingdoms, you take it more seriously.

4:04:50 And that's kind of the point of the course. It's a sort of a your ancestors might have been dumb, but mine weren't. They weren't superstitious in that sense. They knew the difference between someone who fell down a ravine and someone who was abducted. And that's kind of why I think David Pilais, Pilates data is so valuable. Again, because if you look at the overlaps with UFO abductions, which of course Jacques Verlet is famous for, and there's certainly value in doing that. But the trouble with the UFO abductions is that just way too many of them are Cold War MK Project stuff.

4:05:27 So that data is almost like not as clean as David Pilates' data if you're trying to look at overlaps with fairy law. You still can, but you just kind of have to be aware, which I'm sure THC listeners are, of like, I would say, a majority, a slight majority of the physical objections, if not somewhere around 40% to half of the classic abduction experiences is like whether it's my labs or other MK projects or what have you. deep state hands in it. And in the way that there isn't if you're looking at fairy abductions in Scotland in the 1500s. Right. That's true. Great points. And module three is called Magonia.

4:06:09 And it's definitely been my favorite. These stories that actually get into fairyland, the voyage of St. Brendan. Argobond of Lyon's, Walter Evans Wentz. It is a lot of fun. And I also like this too. I think it came from Module 2, but some of the lore says walk nine times around a fairy ring under a full moon and you will enter fairyland. And fairyland is often described as inside the earth, which I like, but really it's probably closer to a parallel reality. I guess when you pull all the stories of the fairyland realm together, what do you think are the commonalities that you hear in the descriptions of what this place is?

4:06:55 So I struggle with the term dimension just because it comes with a sort of understanding of physics that I don't think is quite right. That being said, I think it's probably the easiest and closest one. And I know we've discussed this before because you like Hollow Earth stuff, but Hollow Earth stories or stories of beings under the earth is one of those things like Elf Shot that's deeply ancient. Like it comes from the, it's 150,000 years old if it's a day, this idea of an underworld and a kind of middle earth, which is where that term comes from, and an upper world, the kind of classic shamanic tripart system of creation. So when things are in the earth, it is another realm. Like that's, it's sort of like the interiority of experience.

4:07:37 So I think when we talk about fairy phenomena, a couple of things are in play. One, it's kind of a gloss for the totality of spirit activity for a particular culture, right? Because in the course we go into one of the things that sort of superseded fairyland was the notion of purgatory. So there's always like this third spirit realm for Western European Christians of there being like heaven and hell and this other place with other things in it. And there was fairy and then it became purgatory and what have you. So there's that, but there are in some cases, and I think it's both, right?

4:08:18 And I think Jacques is kind of right about this, but I think some of the things that we've historically called fairy encounters have actually been like literal alternate dimension stuff. The thing about a dimensional model is that there's not just one other dimension. So there are probably a bunch of them near ours that are kind of human-ish. And so I think that's in play and we might call it fairy, but I think fairy is a term we use to explain the fact that we live in a living cosmos that we're not, we don't have a good clean picture of and never will because it's just not how human minds kind of work.

4:08:56 I think fairy covers a bunch of stuff. And I do think in some cases it is very explicitly other dimensions. That makes sense to me. I mean, it is a difficult thing to wrap your head around. So that is a model that's probably the closest we can get to with the language we have. Yeah. Speaking of W. Evans Wentz, when he was writing The Fairy Faith in Celtic countries, he was sort of told in Brittany that there is a difference between astral fairies like sylphs and fairies of the earth and rocks. So even within a kind of like fairy cosmology of the time, and that was the early 20th, late 19th century,

4:09:37 there is this kind of language of that there are different things contained inside what we call fairy. So these kind of like floating sylph-like nature spirits are a thing. But also some of the other encounters like the Green Children of Woolpit, where these kids just show up from like another dimension, like actual physical children. Same thing with the classic story of Magonia, where these appear to be physical humans from elsewhere. And that again affords with like men in black and so on, where there's just something not quite right about these otherwise perfectly normal looking humans. Like where are they coming from? And so I think there's a bit of both going on there.

4:10:20 I agree. I agree. Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of overlap and it is a real strange world we're in. And to talk about the UFO side of things, you make an interesting point that the first astronauts to get outside of the gravity well of Earth reported that they were seeing angels and spirits of the dead and all sorts of stuff, which implies that low gravity might be a form of altered state. And you know, I like to lean into those people who consider a strange connection between gravity. gravity and electricity, or that it's all really just charge and magnetism. Because if gravity is a byproduct of electricity, it's not hard to believe that story because electricity and frequency and fields have always been in the mix of paranormal stuff and even hokey ghost hunting shows.

4:11:12 But I do think there's a core of truth there, but it all gets pretty interesting when you start thinking about that and what these effects could do to our consciousness or Earth as a container for body and mind and what might happen to our minds if we get outside of our environment on those rare occasions like these astronauts did. It's weird because I might have heard about it before and forgot, but it's definitely interesting and it felt new to me. Yeah. Well, you're hearing it now that you've kind of got a take I'm very sympathetic to about what gravity actually is. And if it is, let me put it this way: if it's related to electricity, so are we.

4:11:54 So, of course, it would be like you're actually just altering the electrical conditions of human consciousness. So it's actually those sort of cosmonaut phenomena are almost further evidence for the idea that we, which I think is true, that we haven't got gravity correct. But similarly, where do we put our gods? We put out, and this is an oversimplification, but we put them at the top of mountains. And at the top of mountains, you have lower oxygen and lower gravity. Not much and lower gravity, but also not. So if you kind of want to get to the top of a mountain, you're certainly having a chemical effect because there's lower oxygen. But are you having an electrochemical effect because you're also experiencing something like gravity differently?

4:12:36 Or just as pilots and flight attendants with long careers know, when you're up in the sky, you get more radiation. So there is an electrical story to what's going on there. Absolutely. And you made kind of an offhanded comment that, of course, I latched onto about Jeff Bezos and these elite-level low-orbit trips. I had the same weird thoughts about Bezos taking this kid up there with them. But for people who don't know, the gist from an article about it that I just copied down for this purpose is: an 18-year-old became the youngest person to fly to space when he joined Jeff Bezos on the first human flight by his space company on the 20th of

4:13:19 July. Oliver Damon will fly in place of an anonymous $28 million winning bidder of a public auction. Well, there's a lot of things there that don't make sense from the kid's name literally being Damon to some other $28 million winner just being like, eh, I don't want this that I signed up for. Yeah. So what do you think is going on with this kid? What the fuck? It's so weird. I don't know. It's definitely just when you think it's not quite like that, because I know that rich people have like weird and gross spiritual beliefs. Not all of them, but there is definitely some wacky cult crap. And I think the richer people get, the more they have to justify it.

4:14:03 And I think once you're at this sort of multi-multi-billionaire level, and you know that you are in some sense inexcusable in a world of such poverty, which is true, right? You're like, you are inexcusable. So the excuses you come up with, they have to be pretty fucking weird. It's like, well, in fact, I am an alien. It's got to be something. And I don't know if Jeff was always there. His family's had an interesting background and the original funding of Amazon and so on. But like it's not even like a golden ticket situation. It's sort of like, who is this kid? When it was announced that Jeff Bezos and his brother are taking some kid that they're unrelated to on their dick-shaped rocket.

4:14:47 I'm like, what the? Who is this? Is it even like a Charlie in the Chocolate Factory situation, which is like, which child would want to, you know, head into space on Jeff's space penis? It was, as you say, an anonymous bid of someone. They go, that doesn't sound right. And you think, well, was it the name? I don't know. I'm sure it's quite weird. I also, the Oliver thing is interesting. It's like, so it's the demon off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, is that even your real name, kid? And has he been in the news since? I don't think so. So what did you and Jeff and his brother get up to on the space dick? Like, yeah, where are all the interviews? Yeah, it's, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think it's on the level, whatever it is.

4:15:32 Right. And is the kid really 18? Or is that just the story for public consumption? Yeah, I don't. Maybe they're just getting more. I mean, they are getting more brazen. We have to live through it, but maybe they're getting more brazen about that kind of action. of activity. But I don't know what you just, this timeline just keeps on giving Epstein Island in space. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking. So you did mention fairy doctors, and that is another great theme in the course. It seems like a major overlap between fairy encounters and UFOs is when a person is taken, they sometimes return with some crazy X-Men powers, in particular, healing.

4:16:13 And people end up traveling to see these experiencers. Very similar themes in the Chris Bledsoe story because he saw this lady in white and he called her an angel and they had this experience and he was shown things about the potential future and also something related to kind of an astrological condition like when the astrology is this that will happen and it also might tie into that theme you mentioned of like a lot of times their star maps or some of the things they're shown are just off but regardless he seems to say he has some kind of healing abilities since this encounter but what

4:16:53 do you make of this relationship between healing and being taken by something from the other side i think that's what it's for and again if you look at say the yanamami in the amazon they're shaman it's often a lineage mostly a male lineage but not always what happens is the japiri which is these spirits these little dancing spirits basically sylphs and so on will start appearing to you in in childhood and you have to and then a kind of almost like a courtship goes on like a non-sexual one but you have to get them to dance for you and the more

4:17:32 they dance or whatever like the more they like you and so on but the spirits will pick from amongst humans people to well we say heal but what is healing healing is a restoration it is a restoration of right relation so that's how it's understood not just with the yanamami but other amazonian peoples is that the spirits will pick the personal peoples that are required and then it is their job and if you don't do it you will be in trouble to not just heal or maintain discourse between certain spirits and a tribe

4:18:10 but also allow the spirits who don't have human bodies to be able to impact the physical world in the form of like correcting imbalances and healings in humans and to a lesser extent the more than human world when it comes to like the forest and animals and so on because the shaman's kind of responsible for making sure that the beast masters are okay with humans taking animals but not too many of them and and the whole process is one of right relation so when you're in cultures that have fallen away from and i do think it is a falling away from that way of understanding that human populations will have people selected to be spirit

4:18:50 not necessarily conduits but that kind of like quote-unquote shamanic role that's what it's for and if we're in cultures that don't do it the spirit world for want of a better term is still trying to get that to happen and we just don't know what to do with it or how and it's very important when it comes to the kind of british understanding of witches so scottish and english in particular because as opposed to the continent where there was much more of the idea that witches were in league with the devil and the devil gave witches their power in britain in the early modern period it could be the devil it sort of was but not really it was actually a familiar and very often these spirits would

4:19:37 and the familiar might be like in league with the devil or take you to a coven gathering where you would do the kind of like devil's kiss and all the rest of it at least according to the witch trials the trouble with that is that the people who were conducting the witch trials where they would hear words like fairy coming out of the mouths of the people who have been accused they thought they knew better so they wrote it down as demon so we don't actually know how much of it was fairies how much of it was demons from the witch trials record but the contact event is sort of the same and it's often when it's a or sometimes at least noticeable that there will be people who are in distress or who've just lost their husband or their baby's very sick and then this spirit will show up and offer them

4:20:17 things they get them to do stuff and it's like renounce god or other things but it's not necessarily satanic it's more getting them to try other things but regardless they are often taken to visit the queen of elfame inside a hill which is circular like a ufo and so on and then they come back and they have these capacities and these spirits will talk to them and occasionally take them again randomly very often not at their own will. So you have like a framework that, from a motif perspective, that is the same between fairies and UFOs. And then you have cultures that I think are more sophisticated when it comes to spirit interaction, like the Yanomami, like various African tribes, different Aboriginal nations.

4:21:01 Again, they don't look the same. The Yanamami is the one that I know the best in this particular instance. And they kind of have a piece of the puzzle as far as I can tell, which is the sort of why of why does this happen? And why do people who get quote-unquote abducted by aliens come back and have clairvoyant or healing powers? And if you do a comparison across other cultures, you just sort of expand out to other ones. You go, okay, well, for the Yanomami, they know what to do with people who are contacted by spirits. And they begin this process of, they begin this relationship lifelong that also becomes a career. So I think that's what's going on there. Wow. I mean, I am so interested in this stuff.

4:21:42 But of course, I get into a course like yours. And my rational mind says, you know, fairy queens, dwarfs, kelpies, what are we really talking about here? Is this a bunch of silliness? And then I have to remind myself that I have seen one and that is how powerful conditioning can be. Or maybe it's like a good drug trip and that the experience and the insights fade. And I was such a little kid at the time. Of course, it's a story I've told before. I think I first said anything about it when I was on RuneSuit, but I've always said that what I saw didn't fit any of the conventional boxes I knew. It wasn't an alien. It wasn't a Bigfoot. I didn't think it was something that came from space.

4:22:22 It didn't seem like a spirit either, but it seemed primal. It seemed half human, half animal. And it seemed like it belonged there. It seemed embedded in that landscape that was freshly disturbed by a new subdivision being built. And I did have a serious childhood illness, which makes for an interesting overlap. Exactly. I've said Skinwalker is a decent match before, but maybe it actually was closer to a fairy or a forest being than anything else. But you've seen some things that are along those lines as well, right? I have, but it's not only you had a childhood illness. You're not a shaman, Greg, but your role has woken up thousands and thousands of people.

4:23:06 So there's a healing component to it. So you're archetypally in the same shape. And there's also, I will just say, it's not necessarily just the conditioning. It might be by design. So this is, of course, one of Jacques Valet's ideas that because the phenomena are absurd, they are absurd by design, so that you see stuff that the official reality won't allow to be real. So if you try to tell a priest, oh, I saw the Virgin Mary, except she was kind of like this glowing orb, like an official structure, whether it's the military or the church at the time or what have you, rejects it. So it stays at the level of low culture. And not just that, but it kind of just seeps into the collective imagination and the personal imaginal.

4:23:51 So it might be over conditioning, but it's actually, according to Jacques, like how the phenomena are supposed to present is that they're supposed to impact on the level of culture because you have gone on to impact culture. And it's not that the whole THC journey was as a result of seeing this spirit cryptid whatever, but it's also not not. Like that's a part of who you became so that the high-side chats could exist. So it's all in that kind of flow of like, this is what Jacques would say is that, I mean, he uses the thermostatus model, which is big 20th century energy. I don't think that's quite right. But that these phenomena are deliberately impacting culture rather than official reality.

4:24:34 We're making room soon. A healthy, tasty brew. We're making room soon for all the things we wish we knew. Coming back to the book, you also have a great section about the work of Dr. Artie Sixkiller Clark, who you've had on the podcast. She doesn't respond to me, but that's okay. She spent a lot of time talking to Native Americans and Indigenous people about UFO encounters. And in your book, you write, an elder in Honduras told her that the Maya possessed a star map that allowed them to travel the universe and that this was destroyed by the Spanish.

4:25:16 The star map was our guide. That is how we got here. This elder also said that our chants to the heavens allow us to speak to the star people even today. There are living Maya who can talk to the sky people. And then at Kiringua, she was told the same thing about the the chance of the elders in the villages being able to call down the sky gods and that these gods and aliens are one and the same. They came here and they liked it so much they stayed. These visitors built the now ruined structures and continue to visit the ruins in spaceships. When they come at night, the nearby people can hear chanting coming from the ruins. A Zapotec Indian told Dr.

4:25:58 Clark that they regarded the commonly observed luminous orbs as our ancestors and that there is no difference between orbs and UFOs. Sometimes the orbs become flying craft. Sometimes they take human form. He also said that when he was a child and the old people still knew the ceremonies, these orbs would descend and participate in their rituals. Well, I'm picking up on a theme here, man. It seems like other cultures have engaged with and accepted these realities a lot better than we have. Yeah, so in ufologies, I'm sure you're aware, we have the divide between the ETH, the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and like the non-ETH, which again, people kind of, and this is speaking of people who go on your show, but not mine, vice versa.

4:26:44 I'm glad I've got one that you don't have. Dr. Valley, he's kind of like the center of the non-ETH hypothesis, which is fine, except that as he will go to pains to mention, like, no, I believe this is a technology. Like, it doesn't necessarily just say, oh, this is what we call fairies now. It's like, no, that's not sufficiently nuanced. So this idea that it's Marvin the Martian or Galadriel isn't, we've made that split in a way that no one else has, right? And so you will actually find stories of implants and abductions. And funnily enough, another thing you mentioned to Richard, the sort of phantom vanishing of pregnancies being actually quite common.

4:27:27 And so there's a technological aspect to it. And very specifically, some of these beings are from off-planet. And during my shamanic training that I did last year, Alberto Violto said something. He was up in taking a group up in the High Andes on one of these trips and training things to visit the Kero. And while they were up there, they encountered some other tour group that was like a UFO spotting tour group, right? And so Alberto asked, like, expecting a kind of non-ETH answer from the Kero, like, so these people have got it wrong when it comes to the sky, the Shaskaruna, like the Star Nations. And the Kero guide is like, no, no, no, they exist. We're just not interested in the ones who come here in buses.

4:28:09 And I just think that's a sick burn for a culture that lives in the High Andes and doesn't exactly, isn't exactly known for its public transport. So even inside like high Andean shamanism, there's the idea of the star nations of which we are in relation and ancestral and lineage relation, these beings that are both from and in the stars. But they're also the ones who come here in buses, which is to say there's like an artificial craft aspect to just being on Earth. Like the cosmos is alive and we are occasionally visited by aliens seems like a reasonable statement to make, you know? Yeah, it does. And as for Jacques Valet, Gramerica got them.

4:28:48 Chail Sunnin of the UFC got them, but I haven't, just for people who might waste a lot of time looking for something that isn't there, although we have talked about it, you and I. And, you know, why are you going on the show of the UFC commentator who just asks you, so what do you think about aliens? When I would have much more nuanced questions. But, you know, neither here nor there. This is podcasting gripes. That's our three. That's true. That's true. People are getting a peek behind the curtain of our private conversations. Well, it's like we could do our own thank you for smoking or something. Like we could just sit around and complain about what is actually a life we're both very grateful to have. Yeah, you know, it would be great. We should do a show called like Podcasting Conspirate.

4:29:31 There we spill the tea. There we go. But another area where this book improved my thinking of things is in relation to fallen angels and spirits in the landscape. We tend to think of fallen angels as kind of evil and the rapers of earth women. But as you say during the London event, Peter Gray spoke of how, as far as he could tell, the difference between fallen angels and unfallen ones was that the fallen ones wanted to teach us, wanted specifically to interact and engage with mankind. And you also write about the book of Enoch. And again, it seems like these angels faced some kind of punishment for liking us and wanting to engage with us.

4:30:15 But that doesn't make them evil, but there seems to be some kind of higher order rule against it, wouldn't you say? Yeah, potentially. So this is something Dr. Jeff Christ. Krieper, when he was on my show, I don't think he's been on yours. This is a fun game. When he said, encounters with God can kill you, like in the Old Testament, right? Like just ask Lot's wife. And I know it's an extremely online meme to be talking about biblically accurate angels. But the reality is that's true, that the beings that you will encounter are generally terrifying. They're wrestling people. They're like abducting them against their will. And these are the good guys.

4:30:57 And with the Watchers, what you have to understand is the story, one of the stories of the Watchers, because it's really, really almost like proto-Judaic. In fact, it is proto-Judaic. It appears to be the previous way, and this is based on a lot of Peter Gray's work, an earlier way of explaining how evil got into the world. And then as kind of Judaism develops, as all kind of religions do, they sort of make how evil got into the world something that humans did. And they sort of build a punishment and law system around it, like all societies do, right? So that's where we get the shift to the garden story.

4:31:36 But before that, like way early, proto-Judaic stuff, we have these incomplete, literally, because they're animists. They're never, the stories don't have to fit together correctly. Incomplete stories of these beings who fell to earth, who taught us things, and maybe taught us some of the bad things. Because one of the challenges any kind of religion has is like, why does bad shit happen? So you have this really ancient idea that Judaism, little and Christianity, doesn't quite know what to do with this Enoch stuff, because this is what happens when you've been around for so long. You have like the relatives that you don't bring out. And that is the watches. And what you see there, and this is really challenging and problematic, but go with it.

4:32:16 What you see there is like a Judeo-shamanism, where there is an understanding of the spirit world as not falling into good and bad, but it just being what it is, the cosmos in which we are embedded, right? And so the falling into or the fall, particularly when it comes to angels, because there are stories once you get, obviously this is a thousand years later, but once you get to, say, the church fathers and the descriptions, and we started to build this idea of Satan, you have descriptions of the angels falling into stones and when they're cast from heaven and falling into rivers. So there's this idea of these beings being like the spirits of the cosmos.

4:33:00 So when an angel teaches a witch something, is this a rock? Is this a river? Do you see like it kind of looks like what we would find in Maori Dom where, and this is to, although I am loath to give New Zealand legal credit for anything at the moment, they were the first country in the world to legally recognize the personhood of rivers. So we have, once you know what you're reading and what you're seeing, this is at the level where you can kind of start to look across at other life ways and other cultures. And that's there, I think, in the story of the watches and the story of angels. And it says something that we, speaking of John Dee being given his scrying crystal, that actually it wasn't he that used because he was very good at it.

4:33:43 But what does it mean that angels fell into crystals, but also that when we scry, we're scrying in crystals? Like, are we talking to the spirit of the crystal? Is that what it looks like? Do you know what? Or is the spirit of the crystal itself bringing in other things? And I don't know if you need to form a take on that, like, yes, definitely, or no, not. But when you kind of realize that we used to think of angels falling into as a method or a mode of having an inspirated cosmos, it again, it just opens it up to like, well, what's happening here? Because you can, and there's some stuff in the book about this. And if people go on like a herb law course or something similar, and there's a guy, famous herbalist, Stephen Buner.

4:34:26 And when he would teach his courses, he'd give people plants with which they're unfamiliar with and just say, just sit with it. Just like, what comes up when you're sitting there? Allow the plant to just kind of like fill your awareness. Just notice it. Notice the shape of its leaves and its color and just notice it. And what comes up? And he'd say two-thirds of the time, which is about as accurate as remote viewing, people would describe the personality and the quote-unquote herbal use of the plant that they were given. So something happens in their mind in relation to these thoughts, in relation to this awareness filling of this other being, of this plant, that is accurate.

4:35:04 And this is that ensemble of or assembly of techniques for knowing. What is that? We have that when we squint at like quote-unquote Western magical traditions. We have this idea that these beings fell into plants and into rivers and into rocks that can be, you can kind of verify it. You can test it and it gets to that same two-thirds accuracy. that remote viewing does. And I think that is very important. Yeah, it is. And you write about all these travel experiences and conference presentations that have helped contribute to the book and fitting an animist mode of thought into places where it isn't usually considered. And of the experiences, it all sort of culminates in your ayahuasca journeying.

4:35:49 And we've talked about that before, but I'm curious: how did those experiences in the jungle alter or inform the way that you tend the farm now as opposed to before being in the jungle? I well, why not sound crazy? At the end of two hours in probably do. One of the things, so when you go on this particular Dieta process that I went on, at the beginning, you have a one-to-one with the shaman and the translator. And he's like, What are you here for? And so, and we used to joke, I'm like, I'm here to give Medingle this tingle.

4:36:27 And I just assumed everyone else who was with us was that. But one of the things I asked for, in addition to like some emotional trauma healing stuff, was I said, I have this new farm, which at the time it was kind of new. And I'm like, doing my best to understand what my apple trees and whatever needs before I can kind of tell. Like you sort of look at the leaf coloration and all the rest of it. I said, I would like to be able to walk past my plants and have them tell me a thing they need. So basically, I need like some Dr. Doolittle magic, please wizard. I need to be able to talk to my plants. And he's like, and there were some of the other plant medicines that I de-ettered at the same time as ayahuasca, because when you go in the Dieta, the shaman allocates you other Amazonian healing plants, depending on what you went there for.

4:37:15 And because whilst ayahuasca is a healer, it's there's sort of a split between healing and teaching plants. It doesn't matter for this conversation. And either through the mediation of some of these other plants or ayahuasca herself or just the experience of being with plants and, you know, having a month of kind of just by the time you left, it's the most amazing experience. By the time you leave, you were just in like full communication with the stuff you're walking by. And so a friend of mine, and she's still in New York, but she's actually kind of tough in the sense that she's like grew up in the south playing in the mud.

4:37:52 But then she became, and she still is like really quite glamorous and dare I say, feminine and girly and like has a fashion store and all this kind of stuff. And her little tumbo, the structure that we would stay in, had this giant tarantula that was sort of sleeping above her bed. And by the end of it, like we were just there, like that New York girl woman, if the tarantula had been visible at the beginning of the Dieta, she would have had them remove it. Obviously, we wouldn't have killed it. But like we were told, get the attendance if you need an organism removed, right? But it was normal and not scary. And there were like, I don't know if you know what a bushmaster is, but that is a not just a deadly snake, but a mean snake, right?

4:38:36 In the jungle and bushmasters and all this kind of stuff. And you're just like in it. You're just like in this world and you can hear them and understand them by the end of it. And so that's one of the things I went for. And it has happened. And I've been able to use that with and without entheogens in a farming capacity. So like, you know, I put in, whatever it was two years ago, a little heritage cider apple orchard, and the trees are still alive. We're at the end of a summer. We kept them alive for their second summer. You don't obviously get fruit off them until year five. We got like little baby apples. And that was a big deal because it was expensive. And I mean, you've just had a kid.

4:39:15 So I don't mean it in a disrespectful way, but I put these in a different way to the chickens, which we both harvest eggs from and eat. I needed to keep these things alive, like 70 heritage cider apple trees, especially as this is a former apple-growing region. And there's this one place that manages the different heritage cider strains, if you will. And because we put in our order early and it was big, we basically took 80% of the heritage cider sort of saplings that are available that year. So if we fucked them up, that's awkward, right? Like we took everyone's heritage cider apples and then these two new city gays killed them.

4:39:54 So far so. Bullgates of Tasmania. Exactly. So far, so good. And it would have been awkward in the last two years because we've been trapped here. We wouldn't have exactly been able to flee from the townsfolk. But we kept them alive and they're growing and they're happy and healthy. And there's a confidence and a capacity kind of coming back to that herb school idea of being with a plant being and allowing it to fill your awareness completely. And the trick, and I think I actually teach this in one of the courses, is to consider it the most beautiful being you've ever seen. In the same way, you kind of lie, but don't lie when you say that about a lover.

4:40:32 Like, you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. You simultaneously mean it and don't, right? Because like it's objectively not true, but it is also, it is actually true. Like, you're not lying when you say it. And that's the kind of final piece. There's a connection. So you hold this little lavender plant or whatever, but just allow the whole thing to fill your consciousness and just marvel at, and it helps if you're a plant nerd, but like just marvel at the beauty of this thing. And all of a sudden, that motherfucker will be talking. And I got that in particular from the jungle. And the shaman just nodded along. Like I literally asked for Dr. Doolittle powers. And he's like, and yeah, that was kind of amazing. Because what I didn't want and still don't, I didn't want the jungle experience to end.

4:41:13 And it actually doesn't. I had to go to the jungle to get this medicine. But the whole point of a living cosmos is the whole damn thing is alive. And so what I wanted to be able to take from that experience was that in my bones, it is alive and it is alive wherever you are listening to this. Maybe you're listening to this in the jungle. And that I'm really, I'm quite proud of myself that that was what I went in to get. And I still have that. I can still be that here on the farm. Another thing from that book, just because we have been such kindred spirits during the COVID era and been on the same page with so much of that, did you know Carrie Mullis had a high strangeness experience where he was walking on his land and he came across what he referred to as an electric raccoon who said, good

4:42:15 evening, doctor. And then he basically blacked out until morning when he woke up walking along his property. Did not. Isn't that interesting? That's very interesting. That's very interesting. So, yeah. I immediately want to interpret that or experience that as these things happen to people who end up being important. And there's something, even the video of Carrie, right? He looks sacrificial to me, even in the 80s when he's going off, rightly so, at the first Fauci scam, which like the HIV drugs and all the rest of it.

4:42:53 90s, really. But he looks sacrificial to me. Like even in those videos, he glows with the light of a human sacrifice victim. There's something about his journey through being in a body that felt sacrificial. Because him dying just before the scandemic started, whether Fauci killed him or not, obviously wouldn't put it past him, but that's not really the point. The point is, he became a different figure in the PCR viral biomedical discourse because he died just, it's like weird. And he has that strange energy that looks archetypally, and I don't want to say this about someone's life, but like his death is as important as his life to his work somehow.

4:43:39 And people like that get electric raccoons. That's been my experience anyway. Man, yeah, you articulated something that I definitely feel similarly about. I didn't know him back in the AIDS crisis, but I have watched videos of him describing his disdain for Fauci. And yeah, I had similar feelings about that. And I was just like, man, this guy, it's like he created this technology that is being used in the worst way. And he knows that. And he would have been the perfect voice to speak out. And he wasn't present. And the COVID story needed him out of the picture to unfold the way it did.

4:44:23 And it just does seem like a weird cosmic destiny, like a very important life. And well, if he was still alive, because here's what would have played out as they, and this is not the time because we're mostly on the same page for this as well, as to the existence of viruses and their efficacy, because I operate as if they don't, because you actually get better health doing it that way, whether they do or they don't. But regardless, the computer code that was used to pretend to be the COVID virus for the first PCR test from that Dr. Drosten or Professor Drosten in Germany, nothing to do with whatever happened in Wuhan, right? So at that point, Carrie Mullis would have come in, were he alive, and said, well, there's two problems here.

4:45:04 The PCR test is not diagnostic and you aren't using any material to diagnose it. As soon as that happens, because we know the Fauci emails, he would swing into like, oh, he's an AIDS denialist. Oh, he's this crazy. crazy old loon of an AIDS denialist risking lives. Again, lots of people are dying of AIDS. Lots of people are going to die. Like, if Kari Malis was alive, it actually would have gone worse for, let's say, our side. That's weird, right? But because he died, and not just that, died just before it, that's enough to twig in people's minds. Well, that's weird. So instead, we have an invitation to the historic arguments he'd had with Fauci, which is arguably better because it's like, oh shit, they're running the same story again.

4:45:44 So there's something about the arc of his life that looks sacred in a really strange way. So I'm not surprised that he gets electric raccoons. He just looks like a being there. Yeah. So, I mean, speaking of Lord of the Rings, because we mentioned the Yangma world beforehand, the Middle-earth legendarium is very important to me. And in the Einu Lindale, so like the creation myth at the beginning of the Silmarillion, the Satan character in it is called Morgoth eventually. And creation is made by the creator God and Navala, so the archangels, for want of a better word, singing creation into being. And Morgoth starts introducing discordant notes into the psalm of creation. And he does it one time and they stop and he does it a second time and it gets worse and so on.

4:46:28 And then Iluvatar, so God kind of record scratches and says, well, do you think that you could sing into creation something that would make this worse that I haven't foreseen and will use to make creation even better, ever more better. And that was Tolkien's understanding of evil coming through in the book, right? Because he was very Catholic. So his soul for how evil happens in the world is that God obviously sees it coming from second zero. And it is part of God's plan to make creation the best or to complete creation one way or the other. And I love that. I'm not sure if it's true. I like it. It's one of those kind of powerful ideas.

4:47:13 I think about things like that with the arc of Karry Malis's life. That had he not died, quote unquote, our side would have had an even worse time of it. It's strange to think of, but he would have been taken out of the game immediately as an AIDS denialist and a crazy old loon and putting people's lives at risk again and all this stuff. And it's just weird. It's one of those examples of, well, that was really, really bad. And it's the same thing with World War III. Like, that's going to suck. But there is a level of reality where everything is proceeding as it is supposed to. You can experience it with ayahuasca. You can get up to that kind of level where we experience it as bad, but nothing's going wrong, which is horrible to sit with when it's like, yeah, but I just saw dead babies on X.

4:48:00 It's like, there's going to be how do I do this? But there's myth and metaphor gives us the tools to frame that so that we can see around it, I guess. And let's fold in the health stuff. So obviously, there's a little bit of a section about who are the people who get health right. We did the top 10 health and healing books. People should check that out. But I did start looking more into Dr. Wright, Gerd Hammer, and German new medicine. And for people who've heard the term German new medicine but haven't had it described, on the website, they say it is not only a new paradigm of medicine, it is also a new consciousness.

4:48:43 It is the awareness that our organism possesses an inexhaustible creativity and remarkable self-healing capabilities. It is the recognition that each cell of our body is endowed with a biological wisdom we share with all living beings. And I copied that down because I knew I was talking to you. It's very animist to say that last part in particular, but there seems to be a lot of wisdom there. It goes deeper into not only our connection to the wider field and more than human world, but also emotions. Here's another quote from Dr. Hammer Hamer: If the patient has been made aware of all the facts, he will no longer need to get frightened by his symptoms.

4:49:27 He can now fully accept these as the healing symptoms they are, all of which had until now caused fear and panic. In the greatest number of cases, the whole episode will pass without any serious consequences. So this stuff is right in the realm of how we have both kind of approached health and healing since it was all thrown in our face in 2020. And I thought that was worth a mention. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I describe German new medicine as an over-described true thing because it's very German, right? Like this guy, he's dead now, obviously, but Dr. Hamer, to tell the story, his son was.

4:50:09 was shot in Italy at about the age of 20, I think. He was on vacation. And obviously, that was a terrible thing to have happened, died tragically. A couple of months later, he got testicular cancer, Dr. Hama. And he knew somehow that these two events were related. And you feel in your bones that that's right. That's like a father losing his son. And so, fortunately, because he was very Germanic and very organized, he and worked in pathology and oncology. He got thousands of different reports. And it's sort of like what Dr. Gabo-Mate did, but with more detail in Canada, where he went backwards from people who had breast cancer or for people who had lung cancer or people who had bone cancer through their lives and started to build a map of they had these trauma experiences.

4:50:54 And then he came to realize that cancer is a healing response. But more specifically, the psyche, if it can't process something, this is my description of how GNM works, it will kick it to the body to complete that process. So what you don't heal at the level of the psyche will get kicked to the body. And sometimes you can't avoid it. So it's like a materialist view of reality attempting to describe how shamanic healing works, which is the stuff begins in the field and expresses in the body. And so what GNM doesn't say that necessarily, although GMM practitioners today will say basically that that's it.

4:51:34 But he built this whole wacky, and it's not necessarily wrong because it's diagnostic, but it's also not true because it doesn't operate at the field. So that's the truth. I'll come back to that. Where it's different parts of the brain are associated with different tissue formation in the embryonic stage. And that gives you this big chart that you can use to work backwards to what kind of healing crisis you were working through. And when he says, like, once you know that, you are freed to let the process complete, that's very true. So Dr. Lindmc, or not Dr. LindmcTag, Lindmc Taggart talking to doctors and studying with them for decades and has what doctors don't tell you as a magazine and all the rest of it considers diagnoses curses.

4:52:19 And it's true in general because like, oh, you've got three months to live. Very often people will die on that exact day. That's a fucking curse, right? Speaking professionally. But more generally, the cancer model we have, this idea that the body, like autoimmunity is also fake. Like the idea that the body goes to war with itself with it. It's got like haywire systems, like it's some 19th century train, which is where we get the idea from, like barreling out of control, is idiotic. The body only heals and adapts. Body is trying to keep you here. So when we understand health journeys or healing crises like cancer in that way, it opens up new modalities.

4:52:55 And one of the things that's so good about GNM, and he gets this completely right, because I have this in my own practice, they have a death shock or death fright syndrome, where you get given this really iconic materialist view of like, oh, you have this cancer, you need to irradiate yourself and die basically within a year. People, when they get a diagnosis as a curse, it activates the description in GNM. It's like a death fright or a death shock biological system. So like it will actually frighten you to death, which by the way, is how much cursing works in the non-Western world.

4:53:31 So I'm really interested in GNM because it's an over-described true thing, which is you kind of, you fucking know when you had some kind of symptom or you go through a healing journey and you work backwards and go, see, the main ones, there's two of them. Dr. Gabo-Marty found that with breast cancer, it overwhelmingly hits women who are always on the PTA, always volunteering at the church, always doing the charity drive, always picking their kids up from school, doing everything and not taking care of themselves. It can also show up when you have kids leaving the home and you understand like, yeah, that tracks, like that's breasts, that's nourishing, that's taking care of people.

4:54:12 There's something to it where it's like, okay, cool. Well, if we heal at the level of the field of the psyche, we can support the body in completing that healing process. It's essentially what Dr. Hama means there. Now, the trouble is it keeps it at the level of the material because we recall from the book countdown, something Dr. Cowan said in a documentary that opened the documentary was: the human body is structured water interacting with fields. And if you don't start there, everything else is wrong. And it is, right? So when we talk about the psyche, I'm talking about the field. That's why Reiki and energy healing and shamanic healing and whatever works so well.

4:54:51 And it's why GNM is sort of right, because it's looking at how the field interactions have or are being processed through the body. So I like GNM. It's not true, but it's kind of useful. useful. It was part of my own heart healing journey when it came to matching the symptoms to what was going on in my life because it happened during the imprisonments and the symptoms matched to territory loss. So I was getting stuff that happens to people that retire because they lose their career or so. And I did lose my, like, I got trapped in my trapped at the edge of the fucking world for two years. It was like all my friends were international. I had to cancel further events at the Guggenheim, all this kind of stuff.

4:55:32 Like, I lost all my territory. And all of a sudden, it shows up as symptoms. So the diagnostic stuff was sort of right because the next steps weren't quite it and it didn't match. But if you squint, GNM can give you powerful insight into a particular healing journey. You look at it and go, yeah, it's kind of that. Like, it's not exactly you retired and you're freaking out, but like it's sort of there. I think Tom Cowan's right. Like, if you don't start at the level of the field, you're just going to be wrong. It doesn't matter what it is. You're just going to be wrong. That's where frontier science has been for the last couple of decades.

4:56:10 Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting. And now that you retell that tale of the testicular cancer, I have heard you say that before, probably on your show when we were doing the healing episode. But that is super fascinating. And I don't always want to bring it back whenever we're talking about health to my situation. But, you know, I had meningitis when I was three. I've been deaf in my right ear ever since. Like, what is that from this other context? Like, what is that? I was so young, I don't think I had any traumas that would trigger a really big illness. Maybe I'm blocking them out. That's a thing. But vaccines are a trauma.

4:56:49 So maybe it was just vaccines that did it to me. What do you think? The part that GNM doesn't get right. So, for instance, like when I had my GNM consult during the heart healing journey, it was coming into Christmas 2021. And he's like, oh, look, for GM, food doesn't matter. It's like, because it's all in the psyche. You just got to let it complete. And I'm like, well, that's wrong. But he nevertheless said, like, you know, it's Christmas, like, have some wine, eat whatever you want. Symptoms came back. Right? Like, just because we start at the level of the field doesn't mean that the body isn't what you're in at the moment, right? So that's what I mean. It's kind of wrong. In your case, my speculation would be, because this is what viruses, quote unquote, are in a terrain theory perspective, is yes, it was a detox situation, probably from injections.

4:57:35 But that's just the instigating thing, which we've done before. And it's funny because it's like a hearing thing that you won't hear. When we jump up to that shamanic or meaning level of reality, that's a shamanic word. You have Odin with his eye, you have with the ear hanging in the tree for nine days. You come back with the capacity to hear the other world. And that's what THC is. And so shamanically, it makes complete sense to me that you have Odin ears because you have THC. And that's a shamanic word. That's just what happened. I ended up doing the heart stuff.

4:58:13 What was that? Six months to a year before I started getting people with, you know, myocarditis, whatever, knocking on the door of the healing profession. It's just part of the job. It almost comes back to the beginning of the free hour. It almost comes back to what is yours to do and what you've been called to do. And I know it's annoying because there are serious inconveniences to being deaf in one ear. But if I look at it shamanically, it's like, would you get full hearing back and lose THC? Well, no, the trade-off definitely seems worth it. I'd be managing some gas station somewhere, miserable hearing and stereo. Yeah. We're making you lose you a healthy tasty brew.

4:58:58 We're making lose suit for all the things we wish we knew. If you think of cycle models as wave models instead, you can impact amplitude. So where we are in the cycle is where we are in the cycle. Now, what I mean by that is, I mean, you have a tropical homestead thing going on. I live somewhere colder than that. If I put tomatoes in in late autumn or late fall, nothing will happen. Actually, they have to go in basically just before midsummer because we still get frosts. But the point is we're two decades or more, actually more, but like where the Western civilization, in this case, the United States, is in the cycle is late fall, late autumn.

4:59:43 And we can be very excited about putting tomatoes in. It just is what it is. Now, he's saying a lot of good stuff. Very little of it is going to come off, not because he's, I mean, he's a narcissist who's lying. That's fine, but like not because of that. It's because like he's bringing someone who's had like half their family. family killed by the same people that he's now going up against. And it's like, come on now. Like, all this stuff sounds great. Let's get some of it across. Like, having Joel Salatin somewhere associated with the FDA, incredible. And if you get 5% of it before we end up in World War III and national divorce, it's better than no percent of it.

5:00:20 So, when we talk about where we're heading, it doesn't mean blackpill. It means we can't alter the cycle, but we can adjust its amplitude. We can make it less, to paraphrase Tina Turner, we can do this nice or rough. So, we could go through this part of the cycle nicer or rougher. And also, the other thing is, because when we're recording, it's almost mid-November, January 20 is a long way off. And so, there's 75% of astrologers who picked Harris. It's early days. But, regardless, that would still be an example of like, oh, yeah, well, of course, because we're heading into the civil unrest model.

5:00:57 Like, it's just going to be hectic chaos from a political perspective. The things that he wants to do, you would struggle to do in the mid-20th century when there was civility in politics and the corruption wasn't total. Now, they're calling each other Hitler, trying to kill each other. And this is when you want to demolish this demented system. Good luck, sir, definitely. But it's more like not so much, don't blackpill, but don't let the inevitable vicissitudes of what's coming impact your flow or your autonomic system too much. Hope for the best, manage your expectations, find which part of it is yours to do.

5:01:41 And it's really interesting straight after an election because I noticed it with the blue team last time. There is an upswell of confidence and energy and excitement. Like if you voted red and your red team got in, it's like, yeah, let's do all this kind of stuff. That's good. Like, enjoy that for the week or so. But when that high ends, which it inevitably will, make sure that you're sense making correctly for the direction that we're going. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And the thing is that, like, the excitement around those potential policy changes, those radical swings, I mean, the implications that people think, well, if we can just get these things done, we'll fix the system and we can go back to normal.

5:02:23 Like, that's the thinking that would be wrong. You can be excited about, like, oh, look at that interesting change, but it doesn't stop the technocracy from coming. It just kind of changes the way it's implemented. And we can talk about, you know, how it might be implemented now that there's a stake in the ground on this fork in the road and we know which direction it goes. But I kind of have been thinking about it. The amplitude example is good because I've been thinking about it like a breakup. It's like you are going to break up. Fate is determined you two are not meant to be together. But how bad is the breakup going to be? How much pain are you going to endure? How many times are you going to cry in the car saying, don't leave me before you eventually accept it and just like get through it?

5:03:06 Because like the predictable point would be that there's going to be a breakup. But it can be painful or painless, depending on, I guess, the amplitude can be different depending on how you approach it. And there's also relationships after that. So for people who are looking for the upside, right now we have in public discourse in a way that no one ever expected, oh, maybe we don't need income tax. Maybe our food should not give our children obesity at the age of two. Radical ideas that aren't going to fix this system. This system is going away, but the ideas won't. So if you're looking for what is yours to do at the moment, this is real shamanism, actually, because shamanism is that tangling with thought beings dimensionality.

5:03:50 It's like, okay, cool. Well, this is all ending. What are the things we want to bring with us to the next configuration? Because by the end of the 2030s, we have something that looks more like decentral direct democracy. We just have to get through the collapse of this bullshit that we're all laboring underneath at the moment. What do we take with us? Do we take direct democracy? Do we take robust local food systems? Do we take fuck income tax? Like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, right. So there are still things for you to align with and things for you to get behind and things for you to share and carry that energy and that relationship to those thought beings through this. So there's a real moment of opportunity here. Things absolutely do get better again.

5:04:33 That's the real medicine of a cycle: is like, yeah, we're just in like a shit part now, but the good part, it's still coming, right? What do you contribute to that? Like, what if I told you you do get to redesign society in the 2030s? Like, what kind of food system and political system do you want? Because guess what? I think that's going to happen. I think we literally do have to redesign. redesign how we relate to each other politically and economically in about eight years' time, a bit more. And so there's good news here. Just be sure that you're getting behind the right good news and not the news that will disappoint you. Yeah. And we've talked before about why Martin Armstrong is a forecaster to follow.

5:05:18 But he recently was saying that it seems like I guess Trump gets maybe two years. He said Q1 of 2025 does not look great. He talked about the war cycle, and you can attest that the war cycle lines up with other cycles, astrological cycles, cosmic cycles. And it seems like you and him say 2026, war in Europe, 2027, war everywhere. Pretty much. And by the end of 2025, that will be obvious. I mean, it's obvious now, but like by the end of 2025, as far as I can tell. So astrologically, what's happening, it's started happening, but over the next few months, is all the slower moving outer planets change sign.

5:06:01 Now, that's like essentially a big reality update. We also have when you look at the US Sibley chart, so the birth chart for the United States that's most commonly used, there's a bunch of very important returns, like a Uranus return and a Pluto return, which is where these outer planets are returning to the same place in the sky as stuff that revolutionary stuff and World War stuff that's happened in the US's history. Because we've been talking about it since forever, and I've been talking about it in my astrology episodes from the beginning of this decade. It's like mid to late 2020s is when we get the World War III stuff and the civil unrest stuff. And we're just here. That's where we are now. It's obvious to us from the end of 2024 that 2025 is not going to be an easy year politically.

5:06:44 We may get a cooling off of what appears to be looming World War III. But as far as I can tell, if Trump gets to become president, that means that the agitators inside the West for World War III will move their center of gravity from trying to control the presidency, which they got with the potato in America's wine mum, and they'll move that to Europe and to NATO because the need for war in Europe for Europeans is more acute because their debt problem is bigger and so on. So I would expect if it were me in charge of trying to start World War III by goading Russia, I would move my plans essentially to Europe and I would false flag in Poland or somewhere that would force NATO countries to come in.

5:07:27 So what that does is does give us a reprieve. Why that's important is from the beginning, well, it's from about the middle of this year, because the way Martin Armstrong works is not just he has his own forecasting model. He also knows everyone because he's been working in, you know, finance and currency and hedge funds and whatever for 50 years. So he knows all the central banks and politicians and whatever. And he was being told that from about May onwards of this year that the neocon faction was trying to start World War III in advance of a potential Trump presidency because they felt that their plans for that war would be at risk if he became

5:08:03 president. So they were trying desperately. But that was what like the incursions into Russia were, this desperate attempt to escalate it before they kind of like lose control of the White House. So we still have till January 20 for them to come up with something. But if they don't and he does get to be president, those plans will move to Europe, but it cools it off. And I thought that was very interesting because he'd been saying from the beginning of the decade, World War III is in that 26, 27 range. And that's where the astrology looks. But then this year he's saying they're trying to start it now. And that was, I publicly said in the prior geopolitics presentation for the members.

5:08:41 I'm like, this will be an interesting test of almost like a fate versus free will thing, where the model, astrology and all the rest of it, is saying we've still got a year and a bit, but there are people who are trying to start it now. And I mean, when I say, let's see who wins, it's not a great game, but we will at least watch and see what happens. We're making room soon. A healthy, tasty brew work. We're making room soon for all the things we wish we knew.

5:09:24 On the subject of personal development, the big thing you have going on is this intensive six-week guided course into shadow work that you're calling the shaman's devil. And I think listeners have enough context for your life that this will make sense. But I love this pitch. You write, all the trauma I've been trying to talk my way out of, the self-sabotage, the people pleasing and the nervous system overload. couldn't be solved with logic alone. All those years, keeping my magical practices separate from my trauma healing ones, the jungle blew that apart. The breakthrough came when I stopped treating my past like a file folder and started treating it like a haunted house because those memories they're alive, they're real, they're spirits.

5:10:08 In the shamanic sense, they are autonomous soul parts. And if you don't face them, they run the show. So I learned to face them, and everything changed. My relationship stopped draining me and started fueling me. My health rebooted in ways no supplement or seminar ever managed to. A new career emerged from what used to be my pain. Not because I chose between Western psychology and shamanism, but because I combined them. Shadow work, when rooted in a shamanic worldview, makes the underworld the absolutely real place magical folks already know it to be. The place may be dark and its denizens may first appear scary, but as the legendary mythologist Joseph Campbell said, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasures you seek.

5:10:53 The shaman's devil is the great initiator of adult life. All these years, he has kept safe in the underworld. Those aspects of yourself you hide from the world, those things you refuse to show to others or even admit in private. He acts autonomously in your life until the time comes to meet him, to confront him and to claim those lost soul parts. So, no, you don't need years of therapy. You don't need to live in the jungle. You just need a safe way to meet the devil and walk out with your treasure. That's the system I built, and now I teach it. Man, I just like that so much.

5:11:30 And I'm already signed up because through interviews with people like Dr. Tom Zinzer, who does soul-centered healing, I know that at least I've evolved from the idea of external spirit attachments being this kind of provocative thing, and maybe they're leeching my energy or something, like the Archons. Like, you know, a lot of that I just got into because it's provocative and interesting. But then you go a level deeper and you find out, no, these are parts of the self. And I think that, you know, the Tom Zinzer interview is kind of one of the first things that made me realize that and see how we create the stuck parts of ourself.

5:12:10 And I guess the first step is that recognition. But what would you say to people like me who just kind of brush that off and might be in denial that our own shadow projections and stuck parts are actually holding us back? What I would say is that the story that they aren't holding you back is still important enough for you. So the way Jung conceptualized the shadow was essentially the first half of life, really just the first, like until you reach adulthood. As you were building out your ego personality, the things that people rejected in you.

5:12:47 So if you're a boy and you might have wanted to play with your sister's dolls once and your dad sees it and is like, boys, don't play with dolls. That boom, straight into the shadow. Your interest in anything to do with, I don't, I'm not, you know, I'm not gay. I just, that was nice. It was pretty. Like, what the hell? That goes straight into the shadow. So your idea that you can enjoy feminine things is in the shadow. Now, do that a million fucking times, right? And you, and the thing is, this is why it's called the shaman's devil. Why is all that stuff, all those painful but transformative things are shoved away into the dark?

5:13:29 Down, down, down, down, down. Like, nope, nothing to see there. Shut up. I'm a boy. I like football and meat. This is great. Everything is awesome. And that's the, and you need that. You actually need to spend your childhood building an adult ego to go out into the world and do stuff. Like, that's the, that was the unlock for me. It was like, oh, the devil keeps these for us. Like, that's actually a service that he provides because you can't be dealing with that level of rejection in childhood as you're building your personality. Because for kids, they can't take care of themselves. Rejection is existential. If mommy and daddy don't love me, I will die. And that's true. Like, the thing is, that's probably not actually your experience, but that's how kids are in reality.

5:14:13 So they will do everything they can to hide that stuff and build their personality. But there's so much energy. So you want to think about like old-timey computers where you'd have to like defrag a hard drive or something. By the time you reach your mid-30s, you are powering like 70% of your soul processes are all this shit that's been hidden down there. And it occurred to me in shamanic work. So the underworld lord in my shamanic healing tradition is called Huascarinka. And so I've done a lot of work with him and there's a Wascarinka. Huaskarinka right involved with it. But we have this idea in European mythology as well, because as I'm sure most people, maybe not, most people listen to this know that there's no hell in the Bible.

5:14:56 Like the Satan is the opponent to God is like this 13th century, a little bit before idea where the Pope was in exile and Avignon, and there was a plague. Like things were going really, really bad in Europe. So they, they, the idea of this awesome, evil, powerful opponent to the creator of the universe kind of emerged around then. But beforehand, it wasn't that. And we had this idea. So why is the prince of shadows also a lord of light? Now, bearing in mind, these aren't real beings. This isn't like some sort of Luciferian LAP or anything like that. This is a psychological shamanic process. And I do need to describe it a little bit scary because this should be a scary process.

5:15:35 Not because you're dealing with demons. It's worse. You're dealing with the parts of yourself that are ready to be healed, but that's a jarring process. Why is the Prince of Shadows the Lord of Light? Because he keeps those things in the shadows until it comes time for you to see them. Like, what the hell is the morning star doing in the dark, if not illuminating at the right time? And you think, wow, we actually, so coming back to the idea that the imaginal and spirit world is the same thing, like European mythology retained this transformative archetype the whole way.

5:16:12 Like other parts of the world don't need it. They've kept their underworld. They don't even really have the same idea of shadow work because they build personalities in, we would say, maybe a healthier culture. But we are where we are. And the funny thing about healthy and unhealthy cultures is that they will develop their own medicine. And for us, it's this idea. It's this idea of shadow work and this idea of an underworld soul retrieval journey. So that's that's basically it changed my life. It truly did. And I wasn't kidding about the first trip to the jungle when I was going through, it had just been just after my farm had almost burned down. And I'm walking through the rooms of my almost burned down house with this snake spirit, ayahuasca.

5:16:53 And then, I mean, childhood experiences that I hadn't consciously recalled in decades, but I was in them. Like it's Proust and the Madeleine. They weren't memories. I was visiting them. And I'm like, wow, this stuff is like, because I mean, I think we all know that our experience of time is not really how time works. So what that implies is that with the right kind of ceremonial processes, you can widen out your experience of time. My shamanic healing teacher says that. He says, shamans work outside of time. That's actually how shamanism heals. And I can't, I don't have anything else to say other than like, it is exactly as described.

5:17:31 Your memories exist as autonomous soul parts, and you are a beautiful ecosystem of all these different parts doing their best to try to keep you here and have you thrive and so on. And there comes a point in your life where you want to bring that, elevate that process by bringing in healing and understanding and bringing in light to places where you had previously shoved things in the dark. Yeah, man, this is a big unlock for me too. I just like the framing of it a lot that, yes, it is necessary when you're young to have these protective mechanisms. And then the gatekeeper says, look, you're an adult now. Let's process this stuff so you can actually be an adult.

5:18:15 You don't need acceptance in the same way. You know, even we just had my dad's memorial and I had to write a big speech. And a big part of it is like, I think what was so great about my relationship with my dad is that he really trusted that I was going to figure it out. Like he never really blasted me for all the crazy stuff I was doing as a kid. It was kind of like he saw it, but there was like an acceptance and a trust. Like, well, he will grow out of that phase. And luckily I did. Some people don't. And, you know, that radical trust, you know, it's close to unconditional love, but it's also like, I don't need to meddle in his life because I think he'll get there.

5:18:58 And, you know, it's something I want to take forward with my own kids. But you would assume that that helps with the shadow stuff because my kids aren't experiencing, as I didn't, a lot of like a whipsaw of acceptance and this is okay and this is not okay. You know, don't try to over manage. Let the process take its course. Maybe that would help to create less shadow parts in a young child as obviously, you know, I'm thinking along these lines, but I think it helped me too. How do we find those things? Because if I go back to our conversations, you know, you give me a hard time about the fact that I don't really like travel.

5:19:36 I do like to be new different places, but I hate traveling. travel. I'd rather bring people to me so much so that I'll do an expensive pig roast in the backyard. I will do an RV party to bring people from all parts of the country to me and spend five grand to do it. I don't like to go out. I want to bring people to me. You say there's probably something in my shadow there. Well, what's the difference between a tendency or a preference and something that needs to be addressed in the shadow sense? Nothing except that they need to be alchemized. So our gifts live next door to our wounds. And so in the first half of life, we operate on wounds and coping mechanisms. And then we kind of look at those wounds and go, oh, this might have something to do with blah.

5:20:20 And that doesn't mean it's wrong. Like you're built of your experiences. It's like, well, that's actually why I think this way. So we had, and this is a good example, right? So we had kind of different, very different, almost polar experiences of parental acceptance where you had almost universal acceptance, like Golden Boy stuff. And as a result, I perceived when we were driving around on our Curvio Enthusiasm chores that there was something, my experience upset you. There was something in your shadow about the way I was describing my experience with my father. And I'm like, that's really interesting. And I've been sitting with that, right? So I had the opposite. I was, you know, ridiculed and psychologically terrorized and forced to do things that I didn't like, which meant I was bad at them, which meant I thought I was bad at things.

5:21:03 Like it's this cascading spiral, right? And you had this unlike essentially open boulevard of opportunities. Now, I perceived, because what you didn't like about what I was saying, I think, see how this goes for you, is I was, it's not blaming my father, because like I'm actually really good at shit now because of that horrible experience. Like I'm now very dedicated and I work really hard to do things. This is a good example of wounds being alchemized into gifts. But my experience took from you an excuse. My experience took from you an excuse of, because you could do anything and you did some things, but you never really stopped doing anything.

5:21:44 You're like, oh, you know, I tried to guitar for a little bit and what have you. And your version of why, why my story upset you was you have this is let me say how this goes for you there is a part of you that wanted your parents to be stricter so that you would have been better at the guitar or soccer or whatever it was that you were doing at the time now what that means is that you're offloading to your parents blame quote unquote for a shadow process like do you know what i mean like there's oh i i tried guitar and i either wasn't good at it or i regret that i didn't do that so it carries a little charge for you right yeah that's absolutely true yeah and mine's the opposite and that's that's when you say how do you notice and what do you do here it's like oh okay so when you were irritated by my story you weren't

5:22:31 actually irritated by what happened to me you were irritated because it it hit something in you that was still serving a need that thing is this story that if my parents had pushed me a little bit harder maybe i would be more successful or differently successful when the time comes to heal that that's when you're doing things like the shaman stuff and mine's in reverse because and i do a lot of work with this it's actually taken me years to actually describe publicly um how the level of unpleasantness that was involved in my childhood because i had shadow processes around the shame around hiding them because like i didn't want people i because it happened to me it's the same thing with any kind of like abuse right like i didn't want people to know that it happened because i

5:23:11 carried shame around it and it's not like oh my god my my childhood was the worst thing ever it's not everyone everyone puts stuff like the opposite of what goes on that goes in the shadow and and we're in a really interesting situation where we did have the opposite so my stuff looks like yours in the shadow and your stuff looks like mine in the shadow i absolutely see that and i have said that too is i i think that my parents should have forced me to finish things because i would get to the point that it got hard and then i'd be like i'm done i'm done with the guitar and in my adult life it's like oh well i really wish i would have used the years 12 through 15 when i wasn't doing a fucking thing to actually develop a skill that could be used in my adult life because it's too late to do now but no

5:23:51 it's not that's why that's why it's not that's why the story still has child like that story still has need or still serves a need in you because it's not too late part of you knows it and the other part is in resistance so the part that still doesn't want to do anything is in resistance and is holding onto that story it's not too late it's different it's not going to be the same as like being a little asian girl at the age of nine doing a hundred hours of piano a day like you're never going to be a master at it but that's the life you got this is this is what it is and it's not too late and that's the that is actually what i think the story is serving a need for uh in your in your head and it might still serve that need if not it's like okay well what is the right way well

5:24:31 if that's the wound what's the gift okay and and the gift is like like, oh, it's okay for it to be different. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, I won't be because I didn't spend, I didn't become a Spanish guitar virtuoso at 14. I'm gonna be a bit shit at it. I'm never, I'm gonna always be mint at guitar, even if I like it. And to allow that to be true is fine. Like, that's actually okay, cool. That's what it is. So, that's when it goes from a wound to a gift. And it's a really good example, actually. Fair enough. Yeah. And I can also just say that the tools have changed, and I don't need that to create artistic expressions anymore. True. And that's a thing as well. And another line you talk about in that presentation is from Beowulf. You say, Luck often spares a man not marked for death if his courage holds.

5:25:16 And I like that too, because it makes the caveat for: hey, if it's your time, it's your time. But if it's not your time, then as long as you face the situation, the universe might give you the latter boy and let you make it through okay. And I think, yeah, I agree completely. And I think that is so much more magically and metaphysically sophisticated than people realize. So if you think about Northern European cultures, they are extremely good at hero tales, hero legends, Vikings, Beowulf, and so on. To the point that they've plainly observed, and you kind of know this in your own life, if you're listening to this, there's an introduction to one of Terry Pratchett's books, I think, The Color of Magic, where he's describing his disc world universe, which is this flat disc on a turtle swimming through space.

5:26:03 And it says something like: Scientists have calculated that the odds of this universe existing are about a million to one. However, wizards have calculated that a million to one happens nine times out of ten. And you kind of know that in your own life, which is it's that fortune favors the bold idea. What Beowulf, with the poem, is saying there is: if it's not your time, give it a shot, leave it to it. Because it's like the conditions create the heroism. Like, cometh the hour, cometh the man. The conditions create the heroism. And if, like, because the worst thing that can happen is, oh, well, I guess it was my time. Like, I died, whatever. But if it's not, you know, the gods will often favor someone who's like, yeah, I'm going to do this now.

5:26:48 Fuck it. Let's get in. Get yourself a cast iron pot and a witch's wooden spoon. Write the strangest grocery list. Wait for the fullest moon. Put in a pinch of hobby nonsense. Some grimoire history. Pour in every stubborn question that never lets you sleep. We're making root soup.

5:27:30 We're making root soup for all the things we wish we knew. Tossing stories from the sky and cards that name your fate. Leave a little room for wonder. Let the saucers marinate. Draw some sigils by the bedside. Call the spirits down. Ring the dinner bell. Gather all your friends around. We're making root soup.

5:28:20 We're making root soup for all the things we wish we knew. If it boils over, let it run. We can mop it up together. The kitchen feels emptier now. But the burner's on forever. We're making root soup. A healthy, tasty brew. We're making root soup for all the things we wish we knew.