Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 17: An Interview with Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

In this episode, I’m bringing you an interview with one of my personal heroes, Dr. Diana Walsh Paslka. Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of religious studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She holds a bachelor’s from UC Davis, a master’s from Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. She is the author of Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture and American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, which we will be discussing in this interview.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowLISTEN TO THESE EPISODES FIRSTIf you aren’t already familiar with Diana’s work, you’ll definitely want to start with these two episodes before listening to this interview to get the full context of our conversation.Ep 11: Nazis & UFOs [Pt. 1]: The Emergence Of UFO LoreEp 16: The Sky Calls To Us: The Occult Origins Of The Space RaceGET DR. DIANA WALSH PASULKA’S BOOKSAmerican Cosmic: UFO’s, Religion TechnologyHeaven Can Wait: Purgatory In Catholic Devotional And Popular CultureMENTIONED IN THE EPISODEThe Question Concerning Technology by Martin HeideggerWhat Is Called Thinking? by Martin HeideggerDiscourse On Thinking by Martin HeideggerI, Product by Jacques ValleeSociety of the Spectacle by Guy DubordRepublic by PlatoDr. James MaddenMarie Mutsuki Mockett2001: A Space OdysseyNopeBECOME A PATRONGET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonTIMESTAMPS00:00:30 Intro00:05:03 How does a scholar of religion end up writing a book about UFOs? [Backstory of American Cosmic]00:10:57 Why the next big breakthrough in the space program will come from the field of religious studies.00:14:33 What can we learn from studying Tyler’s protocols?00:18:14 What should we make of the simplicity of Tyler’s protocols?00:22:43 What is Tyler communicating with?00:26:07 What’s going on in the space program?00:30:25 Civil religion & UFOs00:34:11 Having a front row seat to the birth of a myth/belief/religion00:38:15 Diana’s transition from UFO atheist to UFO agnostic00:43:39 “The Question Concerning Technology” by Martin Heidegger00:57:36 What does the Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey tell us about the relationship between media and technology?01:04:39 Jordan Peele’s Nope and the relationship between media and belief01:08:32 Society of the Spectacle01:13:17 Plato’s Cave01:24:21 Plato’s Republic & the impossibility of justice01:26:45 Ontological shock & re-entering the cave01:29:34 The danger of Technology01:34:48 What to expect from Diana’s new bookBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. In this episode, I'm bringing you something a little different, an interview. I've recently taken the plunge to making this my full-time gig, which means that I have more time to invest and getting more content to you all more quickly.

So going forward, interspersed between the regular scripted episodes will be interviews with experts whose work is referenced in the most recent episode so that we can dive deeper into their work and the themes we've explored there. And I'm thrilled to share that the very first of these interviews will be with one of my personal heroes, Dr. Diana Walsh Pesolka. If you're a regular listener of the podcast, you are already familiar with Dr. Pesolka's work, which we discussed in both episodes 11 on the emergence of UFO lore and in the most recent episode, episode 16,

on the occult origins of the space program. And for this interview, you'll at least want to have listened to episode 16 to get the full context of our conversation. But episode 11 would also be helpful. If you haven't listened to those, I highly recommend that you go back and do so before continuing on. Dr. Diana Walsh-Baselka is a professor of religious studies

and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She holds a bachelor's degree from UC Davis, a master's from Berkeley, and a PhD from Syracuse University. She is the author of Heaven Can Wait, Purgatory in Catholic devotional and popular culture, and American Cosmic, UFO's Religion Technology, which we'll be discussing in this interview. For me, American Cosmic is one of those rare books that changes and everything about how you see the world. And that process has been ongoing. I've gone back to it a few times over the last year while also absorbing all of Diana's other interviews and lectures that I could get my hands on. Each new reading builds upon itself and the closer I get to understanding what

she's really saying, the more astonished I become. To be clear, this book doesn't just bear rereading. I'd argue that if one truly wants to absorb its full impact, it requires it. On a its face, the narratives and concepts laid out by Diana and American Cosmic are as compelling as they are surprising. The first time, I read the whole thing in one breathless sitting and was struck by the thought that it would make a thrilling Hollywood blockbuster, although admittedly unlike any that I'd ever seen before. And I think it's easy to read American Cosmic once through, and in doing so, have your mind so sufficiently blown that you don't bother to go back and look for further revelations. But I'm a firm believer that taking that approach with this book is a mistake. There is a much deeper and more

challenging vision that Dr. Pesolka's work is putting forward. It's a vision that doesn't just illuminate the UFO phenomenon, but reframes it entirely within the context of our relationship to religion, media, and technology, revealing fundamental, profound, and at times disturbing questions about the very nature of our reality. In the late 1940s, astronomer Fred Hoyt, said, once a photograph of the earth taken from the outside is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. And I think that quote cuts to the heart of much of what will follow in my interview with Diana. Because we aren't just talking about humanity's journey to space, but what that monumental transition tells us about what humanity is and what it

might become. It's a transition that isn't just about crossing a physical boundary. It's about the change that occurs when a species is able to escape its homeworld and look back at it from a perspective once thought to be reserved only for the gods. And it's also about the mechanisms by which this transmission is spread, because although just a handful of people out of billions who have ever been born had seen that vision of the Earth from space with their own eyes, once that first picture was taken and sent back to Earth and made public, that image, changed everyone. It lives in all of us now. And if you listen closely to what Diana is saying, you can begin to unfold the vast implications of that seemingly simple idea and what it might mean for the future of humanity. Here is my interview with the inimitable Dr. Diana Walsh Pesolka. So for anyone listening who isn't familiar with the backstory of American Cosmic, could you briefly explain how it is that a scholar of religion ends up writing a book about UFOs?

Yeah, sure. So that's a great question. And this is how it happened. I'm a scholar of Catholic and Christian history. And the kinds of things that I've been looking at in my life have been miraculous events, including saints in the church, some who levitate and things that really look like angels appearing in the sky, aerial phenomena, things like this. I hadn't thought of UFOs at all. I had never thought of UFOs. They weren't on my radar. But these are the kinds of things I would study. And I'd look at them through the lens of my field, which is that when we study this phenomena, especially miraculous things, we look at them from their social effects standpoint. So we don't make judgments about the beliefs of the people who see these things or

experience them. We don't weigh in on whether or not these things are real or not real. We basically study their social effects. And the reason we do that is because most people in the world happen to be religious. So in the United States, we tend to forget. But a good portion of the world are religious and religions are very, very powerful forces. So this is what we do. And we teach about religion because a lot of people don't know, like they might even be religious, but then don't even know some of the tenets of their own faith. So we do a lot of, you know, I would call it re-education because they think they know what they actually don't. So we talk about religion. And so how did I come upon the study of UFOs?

I had been doing this work on a book about the Catholic and Orthodox Christian doctrine of Purgatory. And so this idea is an afterlife destination in Catholic thought where if you die and your soul is not good enough to go to heaven, it goes to this place called Purgatory. Now, this was codified in the 1200s. And so it wasn't something that was. codified in Christian belief until that time. And that's a long time. You know, think about the United States. You know, we're not that old. And that's 1,200 years after Christianity comes about that this belief

is codified. But then it seems to go away in the 20th century. And so I wanted to figure out, like, why. I mean, this was a major belief. What I found out was that it basically came about through people's practice of going into caves. There's a purgatory cave in Iraq. Ireland, actually, in an island called Lockdurg. It's still there. And the cave is no longer there, but the places, and people still go there. And they do a penance, okay? So the actual doctrine came from people's practice of going into these caves. And so what I do is I look at the ways in which these beliefs emerge. And so what happened was at the end of my time of writing this book about purgatory, this was in 2012. I had a huge document.

of reports because I look in archives and I go to libraries and I look at reports from like 800, 1,200, 1,400. And I came, I had a lot of reports of aerial phenomena and things like that. And a lot of times when, say, a Catholic in France and 1800s saw an aerial phenomenon, they would identify it as like a being from purgatory or a soul from purgatory and they would pray it back into purgatory or something like that, you know. So they had their ways of dealing with these things. And I had a lot of these reports and the patterns were really interesting to me, but I honestly didn't know what to do with it. And I really wasn't going to do anything with it. It just so happened that I was having coffee with a friend of mine. And we were talking about the next book I was

going to write, which was going to be about this bishop in the south. And so I showed him this document and he looked through it. And he said, you know, this is really cool. It looks like Steven Spielberg films. And I was like, Steven Spielberg for films, what do you mean? And he said, it looks like,

these look like UFOs. And I thought he was crazy. That week, there was a conference for people who are experiencers. And he suggested I go to that. And I thought it was a good idea. I was like,

okay, I'm going to give his child, go and see. And I met Chris Bledso there. You know, I met a lot of people who are experiencers. And when they talked,

it sounded exactly, like the document I had. It sounded like people who talked about the same things in 1400s. They talked about the same things in 800. So there was this historical narrative that seemed to still be happening. And so that's how I started to study UFOs. And I thought it would be pretty easy to do. I thought that once I got into the study of UFOs, that was like a cut and dry type thing, you know, that wow, we live in a new infrastructure. It's digital. I I grew up in, when I was doing graduate work in Silicon Valley during the 90s, the late 90s, I saw the shift in infrastructure to digital. And I thought, well, of course we're going to have a digital type of sacred.

You know, that's how I was looking at it. But I was, it was a lot more complicated than that. So that's how I segued into studying UFOs from studying Catholic and Christian history. It's amazing. I want to take a little time to talk about Tyler. His story art within American Cosmic is really remarkable, and in many ways it provides the perfect roadmap for discussing some of the more compelling

and provocative themes of the book. So when you first started talking with Tyler, you asked him why it was that he wanted to speak to you. He said that one of his mentors in the space program said that the next big breakthrough in his field will come from your field. What do you think he meant by that, and do you agree? Yes, I do agree.

In the beginning, when I started this project in 2012 and it ended in 2018 and then American, you know, Cosmic was published in 2019. So in the beginning, I met Tyler through experiencers who I knew and I was reticent to meet him because he, I knew is affiliated with probably intelligence groups. And I really didn't want that in my life. I thought I could do this research without doing that, but that's actually completely wrong. They've been involved in this, obviously, from the 1940s onwards. So you can't actually separate what they do from the study of UFOs, UAPs. Okay, you just can't. But it took me a while to get used to that idea.

So I didn't actually want to talk to him. But I did say, yes, we can start an email correspondence and text correspondents, which we did. And so I was really, he used to say I was blunt, which I guess I am, but I just wanted to know. So I said, you know, well, why would you want to talk to me? You know, I'm doing this type of study. I thought perhaps that he wanted to give me disinformation because I'm an academic. At that point, I'm a good academic. I'm successful, you know, I'm a full professor.

I'm the chair of my department and I'm publishing with Oxford. So I already have a record of decent, of good, scholarship, basically. So I didn't want to mess that up with getting involved with somebody who's planting disinfo on me. And so I voice all those concerns. And he explained. He said, no. He said, I, you know, you don't even have to, I don't care if you write a book or you don't write a book, you know, and he actually never, well, he's in the book. So he didn't care at some point. He had to read everything and, you know, take out some things that he didn't want in there. So what happened was that he said that it was consciousness.

And also the types of things, the types of data that I had were very important to him because he's looking at these contact events in real time. And he's also interfacing with this phenomena within, you know, his job. And so, of course, he wants to know what it is. And if there's somebody like me who does have access to, say, the Vatican Archives, which isn't an easy place to get into or the Space Archives, again, not easy to get into, and can also identify the cultural contexts, the languages and things like that that describe these events in history. This, of course, is good data. And so he really wanted

me to help him with that. So that's what he basically said. It made a lot of sense to me. Because if it's, if these things are real, which at the time I did not believe that they were, I recognized that he believed it. And if he believed it, then of course, absolutely. what I knew would help him. So that's what prompted me to begin my working relationship with him. You talked in the book about how Tyler's protocols that he uses to help enhance and enable his communication with whatever this intelligence might be. And you saw parallels between Tyler's practices and that of other types of highly effective and highly creative people. Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned from studying these types of protocols and what conclusions

we might be able to draw from them? Yes. So almost immediately, I recognized that he was engaged in what I would call monastic protocols. And from my training in religious studies and in, you know, if anybody who goes through religious studies

understands that within most of the world's religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Judaism, you know, take any one of them, Christianity, there are these monastic practices that people do. Like a lot of people engage in them with yoga. You know, yoga is a quote unquote religious practice within Hinduism. And these practices are body-mind practices.

And the goal of these practices is a mystical union with whatever deity that religion proposes. So when I say a mystical union, what I'm talking about is it's supposed to put you in a state of connection with something divine, okay, with some type of divinity. So these monastic practices are, if you were to take every religious tradition and take the monastic practices and put them side by side, you would see a pattern and they're very similar. So if a person who knows this sees somebody who is unaware that that's what they're doing, but they're doing it anyway. I mean, so it wasn't just Tyler. It was a lot of the people that I came. across who were doing the same kind of thing that Tyler was doing. Not all of them could be in the

book. Gary Nolan had his own, right? He's James in American Cosmic. All of these people were practicing these kinds of protocols and they were engaged in highly creative work, some which resulted in patents and, you know, wonderful kinds of technologies. And so I immediately identified them and noticed that he did that. It also made me want to be. to know the scholarship, the latest scholarship on creativity. There are people in like neuroscience and in psychology and people at my university as well who study brain states of people who are highly creative. What they found was that when people are in these very highly creative states,

a lot of times their frontal cortex shuts down. So there, I think it's called, excuse me, for not getting this right, it's out of my field, although I read a lot about it. the place where you identify with your ego. Okay, so that kind of gets shut down. I think it's called the frontal cortex. And what happens is that a lot of times people will associate what they created, not with them, but with some external agent.

They'll say, oh, yeah, that was just given to me by, you know, so I called it the download process, which is something that a lot of people had term that a lot of people use. I started calling it that in like 2015. I was like, these people are downloading. It sounds like, you know, it sounds like they're computer processors and they're just downloading info, you know, because they're not saying that it's theirs.

And they're usually ascribing it to an external agent. So these protocols were instrumental in getting Tyler and other people into these states, these highly creative states. I find it really fascinating. Something that really strikes me about the protocols is just like how mundane they are. It's stuff like drink water and get enough sleep and go outside. but also, you know, when you try to follow them, it's like really challenging to stick to for anyone who's like it all embedded in our culture.

And it almost feels like our modern life is designed in such a way as to cut us off from the things that give, like the most basic things that we need to kind of operate at our full potential. So what do you make of that is just the simplicity of the protocols? Yeah, it's subtle. Okay. So when you look at the protocols, you're like, oh, that seems just like common sense. right, but try it. And also not just that, but the ways that, okay, so let's take the protocol of hydration.

So Tyler would make sure that he was completely hydrated all the time. And he had protocols for doing this. Well, later I learned after I published my book, a lot of people contacted me who did download. And a lot of them are people that are just unbelievable downloaders, like brilliant people. And they corrected a lot of things that I said. And so one of the things that that was explained was like the science behind the protocol. So let's take hydration, like I said. Okay, so why then would hydration be something that would be important to the creative process?

It was explained to me that, you know, water conducts. And so a lot of the electrical activity that happens in our brain needs to have the best substrate. And so if you're dehydrated in any way, you're not going to be working at your full capacity. So that's why hydration is so important. So a lot of the things that we associate now with, you know, these monastic protocols are actually things that are really necessary. And you made a good point when you said that it seems like today our lives are designed to cut us off from being able to live like this.

and I can verify this. So when I met Tyler in 2012, by 2015, I was seriously thinking, I really need to do any protocols. But that's how long it took me to be able to implement them because I was a mom of young kids. Any parent of young kids knows that getting enough sleep, that's going to be almost impossible. Not only that, but I was the chair of my department at the time

which is a hard thing to be as a full professor. And I had a lot of students. I still do. So I have usually about 110 to 140 students every semester. And I do the best for them. You know, I try. And that takes a lot of time and energy as well as the other things that I had on my plate. So it was almost impossible for me to get into the state where I could do the protocols.

You have to really do, you have to really try hard. People like Tyler, though, he didn't have the kinds of life that I had, so it was easier for him. So, and I must point this out, that in the history of philosophy, philosophy, by the way, philosophers, like Greek philosophers in Athens, Plato, Socrates, this is, you know, 2,500 years ago, these people all practice protocols. But they did so in a very privileged environment. women were, you know, took care of making the food. There were slaves that took care of bringing the food. You know, so these guys, basically these men, had the ability to engage in these protocols. So I think this is something that we need to understand that, yes, it's not just modern life,

but I think it's been life forever, you know, human life forever. I've been learning a lot about indigenous societies, the indigenous societies in Australia, who actually do practice protocols, and they do it as a group. And it seems like, and they have highly effective ways of getting into these creative states together, not just as individuals. So there's a lot we can learn. We're at the very beginning of really understanding this type, you know, creative states, how they help us and, you know, how they help us as societies, not just as individuals,

not just as individuals. That's really interesting. I think that one of the most challenging parts of Tyler's story is that if we accept that what he experiences as a download is truly a communication with the non-local intelligence, then what is it that he is communicating with exactly? I know you don't have any way of answering that question definitively, but as an academic and as a scholar of religious studies,

can you maybe help us frame this? How do you approach trying to understand what it is that Tyler might be communicating with? Yeah, that's a great question. And from a person who's done historical research into religion, I would say that it's the channeling of an external agent, and I use the term external agents for these things that people believe they're in contact with.

It's nothing new. So as long as human history, as long as we've had written human history, people believe that they've been in contact with beings. And they've had different words for these beings. In American Cosmic, I compared Tyler's connection to what he believed. He called these off-planet, by the way. He called them off-planet entities. He didn't call them extraterrestrials.

But he made a distinction between angels and off-planet entities. Those were different in his mind. And so I compared him to Ramonajon, who is this brilliant Indian mathematician. And Ramonijan believed that, and by the way, his mathematical equations are so sophisticated that people are still working on them now today. There's a whole journal devoted just to his work. And he used to say that the goddess, he's Hindu, the goddess Lakshmi would whisper these equations in his ear. And that's how he got these equations. And so that seemed to me, you know, he used the term Lakshmi.

Tyler used the term off-planet entities. And you have to understand his context. So, you know, as I think, you know, as a kid, when I say a kid, you know, someone really young, you know, 18, 19, 20, he starts off with NASA. He starts working at NASA. And so his whole environment, his whole life is the space program. So if he's in contact with something, he's most likely going to associate it. with space and he's, he believes his interface helps the space program. So through all of that is tied into his study now.

Do we take him literally at his word? Okay. So that's a question that people ask, you know, is he literally in contact with, you know, these external things that are off planet? And I don't know. So in my field, we don't actually weigh in on the truth or falsity of a person's claims. That's like saying, you know, is Ramonajan actually in contact with Lakshmi? You know, I don't want to say yes and I don't want to say no. But I certainly think that it's a really good

question. And we need to, you know, we need to like, we should not discount these people who are game changers in our societies, right? We shouldn't because they're the game changers. So we should pay attention and not discount what they're saying. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. Another challenging aspect of Tyler's story is that the United States space program seems to be not just aware of, but perhaps actively leveraging Tyler's communications and downloads from this non-local intelligence. It seems almost reckless considering that they seem to like not necessarily know what that is that he's interfacing with. So like what do you what do you make of that?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And that takes us back to the history of the space program. So the two viable space programs until just recently have been our program, which is the United States Space Program and, of course, the Russian Space Program. And what happened in the very beginning of my study was that I went back and did a lot of historical research into Hugh it was who, you know, who created, who allowed us to, you know, who created, who allowed us to, leave Earth. And these are people like Jack Parsons and Constantine and Chikovsky in the Russia space program. They're the ones who came up with the equations that then allowed people to put together rockets and things like that. Now, they believed that they were each in communication with external agents. So in Constantine's case, he believed that he was in contact with angelic cosmic beings. Okay. And he said that these cosmic beings were always trying to talk to us. They're always talking to us, but only certain human beings are able to listen to them. They communicate through symbols, symbolic languages like math, music, or things like that.

And so this was his belief system. Parsings, on the other hand, his belief system was a non-Christian, esoteric kind of Alistair-Crowly belief system. He believed he was in contact with external beings, some of which he believed were extraterrestrial or what, you know, it'd be. similar to this off-planet idea. But it was infused with a crowly kind of like, I hate to say it, but, you know, weirdness that I can readily understand why our space program would want to distance themselves from that

because it's really weird. Space program, you know, it was weird too, but it was still kind of within this kind of Christian narrative, right? That Constantine called these things angels. So today, the reason why I think that these skills that Tyler has are utilized in a way in which, you know, think about it this way. In my field, we're going to, you know, it would only be in academia we're going to be super hung up on. Is this real or not? You know, is this?

But if you are actually involved in a space race, if it works, you're going to use it. So what happened was that astronauts and people who were interfacing with the rockets and things like that, there were psychological tests that the space program utilized in order to identify the best of the people, the people that fit the criteria that would be, then they would like be recruited and placed in these positions. That's really what happened. And so a lot of times what happened with Tyler in the beginning, I noticed that he was derangely lucky, right? If you looked at everything he did, it all worked, all of it. Like, it seemed like everything that he did was successful. And so you've got to wonder what, you know, this is beyond probability. And so I guess the conclusion I came to about this was that I'm not the only one who would have noticed this.

So people who are inordinately lucky probably have some kind of forecasting skill, right? Or else they wouldn't do what they're doing. So they're choosing those acts that allow them to be most effective and efficient prior to whatever circumstance they find themselves in. These are the people that you need in space. These are the people you need in these environments. I'm working right now with a person whose job is to assist and support. these people and identify them as well.

That's really interesting. In one of your emails, as we've prepared for this interview, you said something really interesting that I wanted to follow up on about moving forward the conversation on civil religion by bringing UFOs into the conversation. Can you say more about what you mean by that? Sure. So we are either, okay, so whatever religion we ascribe to

or even atheism or kind of an agnosticism, which is I just don't know kind of thing. In the United States, we at base have something called a civil religion. And the civil religion basically means this, is that regardless of our affiliations, when our president, you know, when we inaugurate our president,

he or she, you know, will swear in on a Bible, right? And that looks like it's not going to change. So what do we? make of these relics, these objects that we use, which are affiliated with religion, but then we say that we're a secular society. So this would be called civil religion. And what I found was that in the launches and the launches like at Cape Canaveral and places like that, it would like be ritualistic. And actually Jacques Valet told me that he participated

in a similar type of launch in Russia years ago. And he said that they did the the same things. They had their own rituals associated with the launch. Well, these rituals look to me to be very, you know, first century Roman, like Roman Empire type, which a lot of people would call a myth, but it was their religion. So, you know, they're using these patches, this iconography of first century Latin. And, you know, they're, you know, utilizing images of gods and goddesses, Roman gods and goddesses. And they also do rituals. They wear the same clothes.

These are special clothes that they wear. They have a meal that's the same. You know, they're involved in ritualistic activities at the launches. And so that's part of what I would call civil religion. It's in my field, we tend to want to keep the space program separate from religion, you know, because, you know, it's almost as if we wanted to be too sacred for religion, which is ironic, but it seems like it. And but there's a lot of religiosity within the, the procedures of the space program, particularly when we are launching things into space.

Hmm. It makes me think about like elite sports teams, like players and that sort of thing. Like they tend to have, especially once they get into the playoff season, like a lot of, rituals and things that they wear and certain things that they have to do or something that they did on the first day of the playoffs and they haven't lost a game yet so they have to keep doing it. You know, it seems like a lot of, you see a lot of that same kind of thinking as like what you're talking about with the rocket watches.

Yeah. And you know what I think it does? I think it gets them, this is, okay, so this is me speaking as, you know, a professor. There's a function and it seems that it gets them into a frame of light. I think it gets them into a creative. frame of mind that takes them out of their individualistic frame of mind and puts them into almost like a hive mentality. That's really interesting. And you probably need that when you need to be working as a unit. That makes sense. If you're going to be an excellent team, you absolutely need

to have that kind of mentality, not focused on yourself. You also need to be able to forecast what's going to happen next. Yeah, that's a great point. That's really interesting. Moving on to another topic, in American Cosmic, you talk about the rare opportunity that the modern UFO phenomenon presents to study in real time how myths, beliefs, and ultimately religions are born. Has having a front row seat to that process changed anything about how you approach your work

or how you view religion and religiosity as a whole? It does. So I believe Carl Jung was the first to say this, by the way. So I don't want to, you know, I want to give credit where creditors do. Well, when Carl Jung looked at UFOs and he wrote a book about it, Blind Saucers, Modern Myths Seen in the Sky, and he also actually, that wasn't his final word on UFOs or flying saucers. He also wrote a lot about it afterwards.

And so he's got some, though when I first started to do this, I really wanted to know what he thought. You know, was he thinking that this new religion or this new type of religiosity was something that was subjective? you know, purely subjective. There was no kind of objective reality to it. And I think that some, yeah, I do think that. And Flying Saucer's myth in the sky,

I think that is what he's saying. But afterwards, he has a letter that he writes where he basically says, it's almost as if he had the same thing happen to him that happened to me. We had a mind made up. And then we happened to meet people in the Air Force. Happen to meet people in the space program.

And then, wow, all of a sudden, Wait a minute. Something else is happening here. And that changed his view. I don't, I think that he was completely confused by it, of course. So he didn't have a conclusion. I think he had many different conclusions. And so people get confused when they read, they read that book and they think that was the last word, Carl Jung says on it. Well, it wasn't the last word. And he was working on it, you know, when he died. He was, this is the topic he was working on. So for me, yeah, I think that first I thought that it was a pretty, it was very uncontroversial for me to say that digital technologies are going to, you know, decentralize religion in many, many ways. And it's going to create a new form of

religion that's a global cosmism, which is a, so the cosmism is a movement that a lot of people associate with Eastern Europe and Russia, where, you know, this idea that humans are evolving into cosmic beings and that we're going to get help with this progression through these etheric beings in space, you know, off-planet entities and things like that. I do think that this is a huge movement that's happening right now and is global. It's happening everywhere. And it's linked to the instantaneous ability to share information, you know, that we have today. Okay, so with American cosmic, I had to shift the perspective of the normal ways of looking at, at, you know, belief systems. So the normal ways in my field tend to be that we don't talk about the reality

of these things. You know, we just kind of talk about social effects, things like that. But I felt as if I was also part of this, this living this. It's not even a myth in the sense that it's this not real fee. I felt like I was living it. And, And I felt like I was a part of the myth. I felt like I was meeting people who were also, you know, people who were also living it. And in many ways, I think we're all living it, right? And so how then could I write a book where, you know, from the old perspective, I would just say, yes, people believe this. You know, I keep myself out of it.

I had to put myself into it. So putting myself into it then meant that I had to write it in a different way. than a normal academic book. And I really won't go back to writing in that old way. Again, I don't think it's helpful. No, that makes a lot of sense. It's something I love about the book is it basically opens with you standing in the desert in New Mexico and an alleged UFO crash site with Tyler and James slash Gary,

looking for materials from his crash and like, you're just in the middle of this myth all of a sudden, but you're also like very highly skeptical about the whole thing. and but by the end of the book, you've come to a place where you're more agnostic about UFOs. So can you talk about like? What was that, what was that process like? I mean, I know you wrote this book over a series of years. So what was that process like for you personally?

And what was the evidence or information that most informed your shift kind of away from a UFO atheism to a UFO agnosticism? Yes. So throughout American Cosmic, I'm an atheist with respect to UFOs. And, you know, but I'm, I'm really within these communities of scientists who are studying and they're believers. And every time I push against that belief and say, are you sure it's not Russian or Chinese or something like that, you could just see the disdain on their faces like, like I'm, you know,

diet is stop being an idiot kind of thing, you know, like this is the science. This is, these are the products who created from this kind of thing, right? So it's not like I had an either or. It's just that I thought that the story was a lot more complicated. And I still do think that. And this is how I think about it. And a lot of people, you know, will say, oh, please, you know, don't talk about these things. They're woo.

But, you know, they're actually not woo. So when we talk about other dimensions, we have to recognize that there are, you know, time is in a dimension that's not three dimensional. But we experience it. So the people that were first, at least in the Western tradition, because indigenous cultures have identified stuff that Westerners just figured out. And then, of course, say they discovered it. Okay.

So it happens a lot as a tree of the West. You know, some of the Westerners who bumped up into other dimensional things, you know, we're talking about platonic solids and, you know, mathematical things that appear to be what people today would call hyper objects. Those were people who practice protocols. So those were the philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato and Socrates. You know, they had their own philosophical schools. These were monastic communities.

Like I identify these as monastic communities. You have special diets. They practice physical protocols. They engage in mathematics as a symbolic language to try. to figure out the basis for their reality. And so they were some of the first in the Western tradition to identify other dimensions, right? These objects and other dimensions. And I think that now with the proliferation of computer languages and, you know, the ability

to go into space and to see massive objects and even see space, you know, there's this thing called the overview effect. I don't know if you know what that is, but it happens to astronauts or just people who go into space and recognize, they see Earth from space and something happens to them, their consciousness changes. Well, a lot of times what happens to them, and this actually was revealed by the William Shatner, Captain Kirk, going into space, right? So, you know, we have all these assumptions of how cool it would be and how wonderful it would be. But when he came back, he was destroyed. You know, he cried. It was horrible. And he's not the only one. So, I,

I've talked to a lot of people who have been in space, and then people who are psychologists who support people who go into space. There are apparently, when you go into space, and say you're there with some other colleagues, you know, your crew, there are other rules that get created in space that are different than the rules that we live by on Earth. And this is a recognized thing. So I guess the answer to your question is,

that, you know, I think that we're at a point where we're shifting the ways in which we are looking at belief in something that we used to think was not real, but now appears to be real, but not real in the sense that if after questions have to change, like even the structure of the question, is it real or is it not real? That actually has to change because once you get into questions about even matter, you know, matter doesn't look like it's real, right? If we get into the quantum, if we get into quantum matter, you see that it doesn't function like what we would assume some kind of like, you know, figure of reality would be, like, you know, the smallest part of reality. It looks like it vibrates. And it's, you know, we say it's here,

but it's not there. It's over there. Every time we try to identify it, it moves. away, we actually are part of that equation. So I think that the research has shifted our questions. And so the questions that I asked in American Cosmic are, I can't even ask those kinds of questions anymore. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Pitching gears again, American Cosmic isn't just about UFOs and religion, but also about technology. And what's become clear to me through your work is that if we're going to understand the UFO phenomenon, we also need to understand technology and that in general, most people and I would include myself in this until very recently and probably still now I'm still grappling with it, tend to have a really limited understanding of what technology is.

So I wanted to take a minute to talk about that. Last spring, I read American Cosmic for the first time and I loved it, but it wasn't until I saw your interview on series of everything with Kurtzimungle that I felt like your work really opened up to me and I started to understand it on a deeper level. One of the things that you talked about in that interview was an essay by philosopher Martin Heidegger. called the question concerning technology. Heidegger is notoriously tough to read, but the more I understand about what he's saying,

the more applicable it seems to be to understanding not just the UFO phenomenon, but our modern world. So if you would indulge me, what I'd like to do is take a few minutes and kind of get your thoughts and response to the core claims that Heidegger is making in that essay. And also, please let me know if I'm misrepresenting these in any way, because I will confess that Heidegger is tough

if there is an easier way to say something he is committed to not finding it, has been my experience. That is very true. Amen. Okay, so the first claim in this essay is that technology is not an instrument. It's a way of seeing the world.

So what do you think that he means by that? Okay, all right. So in order to understand, and by the way, kudos to you for taking on Heidegger. Okay, so I tried. Yeah. So what's really interesting about Heidegger and not just Heidegger, but the people who were trying at that time in that time period,

you know, early 20th century, where they're getting, a lot of very intelligent people are getting the width that the world is just about to completely change. And it's just about to completely change because of technology. Okay. So he's not the only one. There's also Tellier de Chardon, who is a French Jesuit Anthropos, apologist, paleontologists, actually. And he's also, and by the way, he was in World War I.

And so, you know, he also is a person who recognizes that technology is, he links it with our evolution, human evolution. Heidegger does too, it seems. So in the question concerning technology, I also want to suggest there's a small book called What is Thinking by Heidegger, that might actually help. also for any of our listeners who want to take this one on. Okay, so that would be probably the best one to start with.

So Heidegger is looking at the way in which, and this is how I put it, the ways, and actually I write about Heidegger too with respect to Jacques Valet. So because I, and this is the original preface to American Cosmic, which is not in the book. So the original preface actually is on my academia page. It's free. You can download it. And it's here where I basically try to answer the question you just ask, which is what is Heidegger talking about when he says that it's a way of looking at the world?

Well, you have to go back and understand that Heidegger is looking at the human history with respect to what he calls these epics, okay, or these epochs, okay, of eras of human history. where he's looking at like the medieval time period where we have the cathedral. Okay. And the cathedral houses God. So God is, you know, the world is, the Western world is Catholic. And all things, all the ways in which we think are all tinged by this worldview. Okay. So he's basically saying that.

And he also goes back to the Greek temple. And he says during that time period, all things. things were with respect to the Greek temple. Like everybody had recourse to what we now call a myth, but for them was a religion, was this worldview. So a lot of times we have worldviews, but we can't see them, right? We can't see the worldviews with which we are looking from because they're all assumptions. So we're completely within these assumptions. So what Heidegger is basically saying is that the new epoch, the new, you know, epoch, right? The new era. Everything is going to come back to look you through the world through the lens of technology.

Absolutely true. And now he said this in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Okay. So I'm a professor. I've been a professor for 21 years. I literally have seen the shift from kids who experienced the shift from no cell phone to constant cell phone. You know, we live with we, everybody does, right? But there was a time period when students, I would walk the halls of my university and students would not have, they didn't have cell phones. No one did, right? We had these little tiny things, right, that were flip phones. No one used those. They just kind of like, you know, they'd use them every one.

once in a while, like, you know, like a, all right. So now we're completely networked. We're in the net, okay? And no one's out of it. We're all in it. So this is what Heidegger's identifying and he knows this happening. And what he's trying to do is he's trying to warn us about it, basically. And we also have to take Heidegger.

We also put Heidegger in perspective in terms of what happened to him. So he had what I would call a Satori experience. So a Satori is a Japanese Zen word for an enlightenment. He had an enlightenment experience. Now, you know, a lot of times people assume in the West that if you have an enlightenment experience, it then lasts, right? And then you're enlightened. That's not how it works.

So you have these experiences, their peak experiences of feeling one with everything or, you know, they're enlightenment, basically. But it goes away, right? And then you try to get it back, right? Okay, so Heidegger had been a normal kind of analytic philosopher. He had done a lot of analytic philosophy. He was friends with people like Wittgenstein. You know, these are all some of the major figures in Western philosophy.

And then what happened was he started to talk to philosophers from Japan. And philosophers from Japan didn't, didn't decorate philosophy from religion because it was, because they were practicing Zen Buddhism. Okay. And, you know, so their idea, it wasn't, it didn't, and they also don't, and this is why I'm very interested in Japan and Japanese UFOs and ideas of UFOs. They don't really separate technology from nature.

My friend Marie, I had her in my class. I'll link her stuff up in the episode description. I forget her last name, but I know who you're talking about. I'll link it up for Google. So she, so her work is really excellent in this and that she kind of goes back and finds where in Japanese history they start to adopt this Western separation. But it's still not the case there. So, so anyway, so Hyukar has this, this collaboration with the Kyoto school philosophers. And he, he begins to practice. And he gives into a. spontaneous enlightenment and recognizes that it has to do with thinking.

And so he calls it meditative thinking. And he identifies it as separate from the type of rational thinking that we are normally engaged in. And then once he begins to have these experiences, Kelly, his classes take up, standing room only. Like people attend his classes because it's a, society. And this is just before World War II. And so people are just like, you know, something's happening to this philosopher. And it's actually something living. It's alive. So they attend this

philosophy. And, you know, he, he has a lot of people who are students of his who then go on to become very, very important philosophers like Hannah Arendt. And what they, they're all trying to do is trying to answer this question, you know, what the, what is coming, you know, it's going to be after World War II and it's going to determine a lot of things. He predicts so accurately that in one instant we'll be able to know the score of the World Cup while also I like watching a war. And he says, and do you think this will be progress? He says, so it's, progress. He goes, then what? So what he's trying to do is he's trying to make us, he's trying to hook us into

already what's already there pre-internet, which is an organic network, right, that allows for this kind of enlightenment experience. He's trying to hook as many people into that as possible before the internet comes. Because when the internet comes, we'll be so distracted by watching the war in Ukraine and watching the World Cup that we won't even care. That's what he's trying to show us. And so that's why I think that his work is really interesting. And yeah, I mean, and troubling.

Like, it's troubling. You know, the second major claim that he makes is that technology is not a human activity, but that it develops beyond human control. And, you know, I find that really interesting, especially at the time where he was in, I think it would be really hard to conceive of technology as not being the result of human activity when we're used to thinking of it as an instrument. Yeah. But when you look at how it interacts with our lives today, you can start to begin to see how technology can develop beyond human control. But what do you think he was pointing to with that and how can we kind of use that to help understand our world today?

Yeah. So I don't know if you notice, but I end American Cosmic with a quote from him. And he did not want that quote out there while he was alive. He basically made a condition of the periodical that published it. He must die first. So I think that's actually kind of interesting. So, okay, and yeah, it's basically his quote is, only a God can save us out. And of course, he's not talking about kind of the old ideas of God, right?

So he's talking about whatever's going to help us out of this crisis is it's going to be beyond us. It's going to be something divine. Okay. So I didn't. I also had a very, I guess you could call it, if one understands that he's projecting, he's forecasting, you know, and he's identifying something that could be true. And now that I've talked to a lot more people engaged in the creation of technology, especially AI at the moment, people who've been doing this now for, you know, since the 90s. So right now, they're incredibly ecstatic with the situation that every single day,

there's some new explosion of AI that completely changes the game for humans. Okay, so Heidegger seems to have seen this happen, right? And so we have to then go back and look at those people who predicted well the things that are happening to us today and figure out what the heck else did they say, right? What else do we need to know, right? And so that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to basically say, okay, we already have people who have forecasted this time, this era. What more do they have to say? And I placed Jacques Valetian in there because to me he was like he'd not read Heidegger. He wasn't aware of Heinkerer's. and philosophy, but he seemed like the livy representation of that essay. You know, if you were to take that essay and make a human out of it, that would be Jacques N.A. right there. And so I was really amazed when I met Jacques. I was like, okay, I can really learn from him because he's the embodiment of what Heidegger was talking about, even though he does,

he's not read the essay. So, okay, so the question is, you know, what do we make out of this idea that's something that we think we create precedes us and then, you know, secedes us. Yeah. Okay. That's a really interesting idea that can be like, you know, that looks pretty sci-fi, right? That this looks like a science fiction that we don't want to be a part of. But we are a part of it. And some people actually have a very, um, a great.

call it, it's a momentous interpretation of it, but also they are, what's the right word for it? They're optimistic. So those are the people who I've been engaged in conversations with lately, is these people who are optimistic about it. That's interesting. Maybe it's just my own perspective. It's hard to be, it can be a little hard to be optimistic about it. I mean, the third claim that he makes in the essay is that technology is the greatest danger, which I think we've kind of touched on in some of these, you know, other responses just in terms of the danger of, we've almost like been colonized by technology. And now we see the world through the eyes of technology in a way. And so, and that that sort of technological thinking is a danger to us. But what I also found really interesting, you know, through your work is that it kind of gives this other perspective of how technology can be potentially dangerous, which is that how it influences our belief system.

Like in American Cosmic, you talk very specifically about how technology influences belief. And you use the example of the monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001, a space Odyssey, to explore how that happens. Could you talk a little bit about that for the listeners and kind of what the monolith represents in this kind of new paradigm? Yeah. So the idea is that, so with the monolith, so a lot of American Cosmic, what I try to to tell people is this is that in the beginning, I say, the people who believe in this are not fringe. They're actually creating the technologies that we all use without consciousness, unreflective, right? We're using these technologies. Wow, I wonder who made them. Well, these people believe in UFOs, okay? And they believe they're in contact and they're creating

these technologies through inspiration of this contact, right? Through these protocols and such. And I also wanted to say this, because again, this gets back to this idea of when I didn't want to meet Tyler at first. Because I had a feeling that when I met him, I was going to have to revise what I thought about reality on so many different levels. And, you know, sometimes you just don't want to do that, but because it's hard and it could be depressing. And so one of the things that I had to revise was that my government was involved in programs of disinformation. about UFOs. Okay. And how did they do this? So what I did was I went back to processes that they not only used, but even, you know, commercial media uses in order to trick our minds into certain beliefs and addict us to technologies that make them money.

And Jacques Valet points this out in, I actually, I often, put publications on my Twitter account that I think are helpful for people if they want to look at them. And one of them is an essay, I think it's called by product that Jacques wrote. And, you know, he wrote it a long time ago, but he republished it in 2013 where he basically says, you know, we buy these things that we believe are products, but we are the products, right? We are the products. And so in very specific ways in American Cosmic, what I did was I showed the ways in which this potentially revolutionary idea that we are in contact with non-human intelligence, off-planet intelligence is misrepresented in the media, okay, and made to either sell products,

still media, or basically misinform us. And I use specific examples. And I use specific exam. I had the example of Ray Hernandez. You know, so back in that time period, I don't know if they still do this. And by the way, I have friends who work at like Mufon, okay, have friends that work, their field research, good people. But Mufon was engaged in some activities that I wanted to share. And one of those was that, you know, Ray Hernandez and his wife, Dulce, and they had an experience of, you know, Ray was an atheist and his wife is Catholic. They had the same experience of something that was that he, I'd, identified as non-human intelligence.

And so he had his own idea of what it was, and she had her own idea of what it was. And I thought it was really good for people to see that people could have the same experience of what is called a UFO and have completely different interpretations of it. And so that was one. But then what happened was that they, as good citizens, put it into the database of Mufon, and that then was taken and sold to, I think it was like Kangar 1 or something. and it was completely made to be exactly the opposite of the experience that they had. And that's what happens in, that's called redaction, processes of redaction.

That happens in religions. So a lot of times religions are these very powerful forces where people want to, like Heidegger's force of thinking, right? You had this amazing experience and it was, you know, shared with people, students and other faculty and things like that. But that experience then can be redacted and used. for money, used for media and things like that, and also just disinformation. So I think Stanley Kubrick was getting at that point in 2001 Space Odyssey when he was, you know, basically the monolith appears, you know, what is this thing, the monolith? Okay, so is it extraterrestrial technology or something like that?

I think what he's basically saying was with respect to this belief in space and extraterrestrial, you know, belief, it's going to be mediated through this screen. green. And by the way, the model looks like our phone. It does. It does. To pass up, I was like, okay, this needs to be explained. And Kelly, can I also say something about Martin Heidegger and that I promised not to go back? Oh, no, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Heidegger knew that he would, like I said, now, Heide with Nazis. He had a lot of students and friends who were Jewish that were like, what are you doing?

You know, and so I don't want to say that a lot of the people that identify stuff and they're not necessarily good people. Like if I met Heidegger, I don't think I'd like him, okay? But that doesn't mean that he didn't have, he wasn't accurate in what he forecasted. He also wrote a book. I'm proposing that you're, and you know, the people who listen to you read this book. It's called Meditative Thinking, where she basically identifies the organic network and how to hook into it, and then he's going to be talking about the internet network and how

that's how we're going to be hooking into that. And these are going to create two ways of thinking. One, he espouses, which is the meditative thinking, okay? And the other, he says it's going to be fairly detrimental. And it's called instrumental thinking. And that is the kind of internet thinking that everybody's now hooked up to you. Amazing. I'll make sure that's all linked up in the episode description so people can check it out. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. We'll be right back after this quick break. Talking a little bit more about technology and the media. I know an example that you used in one of your lectures that I attended was you referenced Jordan Peel's UFO film, Nope. Can you talk a little bit? I think Peel's vision of the UFO phenomenon, I think a lot of us in the community, maybe the public felt,

like, what is this movie about? But I think a lot of us in the community were like, who is Jordan Field been talking to? But as bizarre as it was, can you talk a little bit about how it speaks to the relationship between belief in the media? Yeah. So I think that he did,

he obviously did a lot of research, right? And knew a lot about what actually happens. You know, like the, you know, I just finished some work on Australia and, and a lot of stuff that, happened there in the 90s in New South Wales. And you know, what it and this, you can see this anywhere, you've here in the United States, but specifically there because there's a lot of water. So I liked Nope. I thought it was excellent. I loved it. And I know I did see how people received

it in the community. A lot of people were upset about it. You know, like I don't know why they'd be upset about it. It had everything. You know, it had the UFO, you know, and it had danger. And I think that's pretty accurate. You know, for us to think that these are just benign things that are in our environment, a lot of that's not true. So people, now I would count into thousands, the people who I've talked to who have had these experiences all over the world. And I would say half of them are not happy, benign experiences. Half of them are scary experiences like you see in Oak, you know. A lot of people have burns and get, you know, their eyes are either burn or they suffer from burns. So, you know, we've, you know, Gary Nolan's research talks about that, speaks to that. So I think what,

what he got right in Nob and what I really, really appreciated was this idea of the spectacle of it, right? And people making money on the spectacle of it. And I've actually written about this too. So on the one hand, you have the actual people who are experiencing this and they're traumatized a lot of times. So even if it's a good experience. It's still fairly traumatic, okay? Changes your worldview. And then on the other hand, you have a whole industry. You know, you have an industry where none of the people who are actually creating the content

are actually doing any field research. They're not actually talking to people who are having these experiences. Most of the time, they have not had their own experiences. They just think it's interesting. You know, they grew up with Star Wars or, you know, Spielberg or something like that. So you have an industry that feeds on itself. And I think that was also portrayed in note, you know, the whole spectacle of it. And that's always going to be the case.

It's always going to be the case. You know, it happens, by the way, in all religions as well. So, you know, if you go to Mords, right, where, you know, there's an apparition said to have happened to a girl with the Virgin Mary. There's a lot of kitchy stuff that's being sold there. There's like an industry. You know, you can go to shops and get, you know, all these objects and things like that. which, by the way, I think they're cool.

You know, I own them also. But it's part of the industry. There's an industry of religiosity. There's an industry of UFOs. Huge. It's getting big. But I think it's really important to kind of separate the industry from, you know, from people actually have experiences that they didn't even want these experiences to happen to them.

And then, you know, they have them happen. And boom, their whole life changes, you know, like Chris Bledsoat. Again, you know, he didn't, he wasn't. he wasn't looking for this. Absolutely. I love that you brought up the spectacle because you actually introduced me to the book, Society of the Spectacle,

and that book really helped me sort of marry Heidegger's ideas about technology to what you were saying about technology and media influence. And I actually, for the listeners, I wanted to read just a couple of lines excerpted from like the first couple of pages of the book that I think might be helpful

and then I have some questions because it's a complicated a book. This is not an easy read either. But I loved it. That I'm really like so impressed with you. Like you get an A in any class that I taught. Like you follow up, you read the readies, which are very hard to read and know them and understand them well and have great questions. So good job. Oh, thank you. I've been obsessed. So here's just a couple of lines that I've pulled out that I think might be helpful. So in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.

Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society, it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.

And this last part, the spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of an existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. So can you talk a little bit about like what this means and what it looks like in our everyday lives? Yes. So this is Gine to Borg and he is looking at the, again, there's no internet yet, right, when he's writing this. And so he's basically identifying the what's going to happen in the future. And he's looking at it as kind of a love.

lifeway that we're just about to get into and live like heat correct. This is another thing that Heidegger says is that we tend to think that we can pick up and put down our technologies, but that's not true. We're embedded within a technological world, and we're not going to be able to escape it, even if we try to get off the grid. The frequencies of the satellites, I mean, we're just in it, right? And everybody we meet is in it. as well. It's not like we can separate ourselves out. And I think that's what he basically saying

is that it used to be that we could turn the spectacle on. So, you know, television back in the day, the radio back in the day day, you know, way back in the day. These were forms of the spectacle that you, that gave us a feeling that we were united with people because we could turn on the radio and listen to what's happening. Say we live in Iowa and we can listen to what's happening. Say we live in Iowa. and we could listen to what's happening in New York, right? And that gave us a sense that we were together. Now we have, you know, the radio supercharged, right? So what does this mean?

Basically, he's saying he's talking a lot about how this is the basis of the economy and how because money is so intricately involved with representation. I don't even know. See, this is why I think reading Heidegger's book called What is Thinking is probably so important because most of my students have no idea now because of their age. They're not aware of like they don't make a connection between what Gieda Board is talking about. Like, you know, there's this lived reality and then there's representation of reality. It's all, it all runs in the same spectacle.

But that doesn't mean we can use our intelligence to understand that we're living within this spectacle. I mean, like most people can differentiate different avatars, right, in their social media communities. You know, in this community, I have this avatar. They are kind of different personas and things like that, right? So in a sense, we live within these representations. Hmm. No, that makes sense. And it's actually a great transition to one of our final topics, which is Plato's Republic and specifically the narrative of the cave. So for those listening who may not have read the cave since college or maybe haven't read it at all, Plato's Cave involves a scenario where people are tied up in a cave looking at a wall. Behind them, there is a roaring fire and people walking around carrying objects that are casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. To the prisoners, they think that the shadows are real. It's all they've ever known. So, so someone were to untie them and tap them on the shoulder and make them turn around, they wouldn't even necessarily know what they were looking at, and it would look less real to them than what was on

the wall. So my question for you is, are the shadows on the wall the phenomenon that's being explained in society of the spectacle? Like, were they dealing with the same issue in ancient Rome, or is Plato referring to something else? Yeah, this is a great question. It depends on who you asked. So I'm going to tell you that there are different interpretations. There's kind of a canonical interpretation of the allegory of the cave. And then there's other interpretations. And so the allegory of the cave is in, so Plato's a philosopher, you know, a very well-known philosopher within Western society, almost everybody's heard of Plato. He was the student of Socrates, who never wrote anything. And they were just at the cusp of a new technology called writing.

Okay. So they were, you know, it was writing. And Plato was actually, barely resistant to it. And he tended to write, he did. He wrote everything in dialogue form, okay? And that was kind of a way to resist what he thought was a separation of knowledge from its source,

which is what he thought writing was doing. So he was critical of that. And he wanted writing to, you know, to be basically like meditative thinking, like in Heidegger's sense. Okay. So let's set this statement. for, you know, who wrote this, the allegory of the cave.

Let's talk about then the ways in which the allegory of the cave, first, it's included in a book about politics called The Republic. And the Republic is a book about the question, can there be a just society? Okay, super simple question. Can there be a just society? these men are living in Athens and Socrates who's not actually doing anything wrong

except for teaching young people is sentenced to death by his government, by the Athens government and Plato and all of those who are Socrates's students beg him not to take Hemlock and die, right? He has an out if he wants. He does not have to.

to do that, but he does. He takes it. And it's called, that's the dialogue called the apology, where he's basically talking about why he's going to do this. Well, think of what kind of mindset that puts Plato in. This is traumatizing. He's traumatized because he's witnessing, he's witnessing a terrorist act by his government. So, okay, so let's just get that straight. So he's writing the republic, not as an act of, hey, I wonder if we could ever have a just society, but as a lived reality. Like, really, and this is 2,500 years ago. And he asks, can we ever have a reality of justice, you know, of a political system that doesn't do this kind of thing to those people who contributed the most to it? So this is the question that he's asking. And

What I tell, like my own kids even and my students is that the allegory of the cave is the first red pill. It's the first document. And it's the most important one too. Okay. What's happening here? When I learned about it, I was in high school, then I was in college and it never changed. It was always this. that it's basically a story about Plato's,

about Socrates's idea of the good. Because when the person who gets free from the cave, you know, there's a guy who, or, you know, a person who actually gets free from the cave, goes outside the cave and sees that there's the sun, doesn't look at the sun or maybe does, but his eyes hurt. And he begins to see stuff. And he's like, wow, what's in the cave?

is just a shadow of what's real. And so this is how if you take a philosophy class, you're going to be taught about that, that this is the interpretation of the allegory of the cave. And I never questioned it. Okay, so that was the interpretation, was it was the epistemology of the good in Plato's philosophy,

that, you know, once we start to recognize that there are things behind the representation, kind of going back to the spectacle, that there are these real things behind these representations of love or justice. There are these themes and that if we can focus on those, we'll get a better sense of them. Okay? And that this is his epistemology. All right.

All right. No problem. I've been, you know, I was a good philosophy student, you know, got my good grades. Okay. All right. Fast forward learning about UFOs. And I also, you know, taken two. consideration that a lot of the kinds of movies that we like today use the allegory of the

cave as a template. So like the Matrix, the Truman Show, this Netflix series 1829, you know, that got canceled and everybody got upset about it. Okay. So the idea is that we live in a simulation, okay, and that we don't know that we do because it's such a good simulation. Okay, say it has haptic technology, right? So we're like, we're in this. simulation, we can't get out of it. That's the other interpretation of the allegory of the cave. So you've got those two interpretations. One's kind of like a scholarly idea and the other is a more popular cultural idea that the Allegory of the Cave means this. Okay, I never questioned those. After American Cosmic, I became, well, let's put it this way, sometimes certain things you read

when you're younger come back to you and they don't let you go. So I became, I wouldn't say that. I was obsessed with Allegory of the Cape. I would say that Allegory of the Cape was coming back to me like a bad song that you try to get out of your head, but it keeps coming back and you're like, I wish that would just go away. If I sing it, will it go away? No, it's stuck in my head. And you won't, you know, you don't want to tell your friends because then it'll get stuck in their head.

But of course, I had to tell my friends, oh, how good at the Cape. What do you think that means? And so they would tell me, you know, either one or the other of those interpretations. And then I would say, but what about those people that tied up the people in the cave? What do you think about them? And they're like, ah, come on, it's just an allegory. It's not a reality. It's not made to be literal.

Basically, I was thinking about it all the time. I asked everyone I knew about it. I said, tell me about this. Tell me about the allegory of the cave, you know? And so they would all say, Diana, you're thinking way too hard about allegory of the cave. And I was like, no, I don't think I am. I think we're actually just trying to understand it better. And here's where it gets, the allegory of the cave

becomes something completely different than those two interpretations that I just suggested. And I think that it's an accurate. I think that what I think about it is actually probably what was going on in Plato's mind. Now, a lot of philosophers will be mad at me for thinking this. But I do know some philosophers who agree with me. So in my search for other people who thought about it

in the same way that I'm going to tell you about what I think about it, I came upon James Baden. He's a professor of philosophy, and he had what he called a spooky interpretation of the allegory of the cave. And I thought, that kind of sounds like what, you know, I think my interpretation is somewhat spooky. Let's see what he had to say. Well, we were exactly right on in terms of having an agreement about what it meant.

Okay, so, and this is what we say, is that in the Republic, there is a conversation between Socrates and Glacone, and they're basically, you know, they're banding about this idea of, can we have a just society? And they present this society, and each time they present it,

they're like, nah, that doesn't sound good, no, that doesn't sound good, until they get to the very end. And then Socrates says, you know what, let's talk about this allegory of the key. And so he basically talks about it. And then he says, don't you think that we need to create a craft that it's a craft that engages

each other in helping each other identify this thing, the spectacle, the shadows. And Gloucahn says, yeah, I think we do. I think we need to do that. And I think that that's what the point of the Republic is, is that it's exactly the point that Heidegger came to in meditative thinking, there's no just society, but what there is is there's the ability, there's the Songa. And that's what I was trying to get with theories of everything and Kerr. And he's so sweet to go with me there, you know, is that it's the Songa, which is a Buddhist term for the community of people who are with you, who see that there's

the spectacle, who see that there's the treasonous, you know, ways of which. people hurt each other and even governments killing Socrates and things like that, you know, Martin Luther King and, you know, people like that. And you start to say to each other, let's help each other. And that's what Heidegger was trying to do. And that's why his, you know, classrooms were standing room only. And that's why he became famous was because he presented a way out and the way that it's that reading of the, of the Republic of Plato's Allegory the Cape, which is not about we are in a simulation. Yeah, we're in a simulation,

but that doesn't mean we're trapped. We can talk about it. We can talk about what we see and, you know, and the truth or falsity of it and, you know, what it means to us. And we can do this together. What I like about the allegory of the cave is it presents something that's not individualistic.

It's a philosophy of togetherness. There's a sense of community within it. I love that. I read Republic a couple times over the last year after, and I feel like I've understood it a little better each time. And I know that you said to me at one point one of our emails over the summer that like, these are dangerous ideas. And I think at the time, I was like, not quite sure what you meant by that. And I had to go back and try again, you know, to be like, what is dangerous about this? And why did, why were they killed by their government for, you know, like, why were

these people targeted, right? And to be honest, I don't know if. it's something I've been ready to talk about publicly yet because I think that like when you really start to get there, like it's kind of, it is radical stuff. And there's people who it might not like what I have to say. But it does remind me of I, my best friend, my oldest and dearest friend is an attorney. And she's a very, very smart woman. And she said to me a few years ago after becoming an attorney that like she thought that she was getting into the law because she believed in justice. Like that's why she started. But that what she realized by being an attorney is that there is no such thing as justice and that people come to her wanting justice, but that she can't give them

justice. She can give them like money maybe and like maybe some revenge of some kind, some sort of like punitive measures, but she can't, you know, she can't. Once something, once an injustice has been done, there's nothing you can really do to like restore justice to that situation. And I think that idea and of itself is really challenging because on your left with the question of like, how do you be, okay, so how do I be a good person? How do I, what is the point of all of this? If justice is something that we can't attain. And so I find it really, that book really challenged me on that level.

And I'm really glad that like you pushed that a little further with me because it made a big difference. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I still have this conversation with people who, you know, we still, you know, they know the same. They were educating the same way and they read the same book. and we still ask, why, you know, why, why is it like this? Well, I don't know, but I do know that it is. And I do know that, you know, the Allegory the Cave is one of those texts that show the structure of it and also present a way out.

But you have to be attentive to that way out, you know, because it's not taught that way at the university. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. I think it's also just like in some ways comforting maybe for people who are coming to this topic or similar topics where like you're undergoing a lot of ontological shock because I just felt like, you know, for me in the zeitgeist, you kind of just have that first part of the allegory where like they turn around. But you know, the part where they actually ascend the tunnel and they go outside and they try to, and then they go back in and they try to tell people about it and people don't like that. And it gave me some comfort to be like, okay, this is an experience that other people. are also having this sort of ontological shock, but also how people respond to you.

You know, in some ways this podcast is an exercise in trying to like go back into the cave. I don't think I've gotten out of the cave. But like to be like, guys, I think there's something else this way. And not everyone responds to that well. I'm sure that you had to deal with that a lot, especially as an academic. Yeah. So no, no one, no.

Plato's correct. There's one part of the allegory where, you know, he tells Glocon, okay, but you know that if you go back, they might even try to kill you. They'll tell you that your eyes have been ruined and they might kill you. And so I think that we have to listen to Plato. You know, he didn't write that just because, like he wrote that on purpose. By the time he wrote that a good portion of all of Socrates's students were killed, you know? So he was in a situation. And I think we have to really put that in place to understand that he was writing from blood. Like he was writing from experience. It wasn't just a philosophy. You know, they were just like hanging out, eating grapes and drinking wine, like they were in a symposium, by the way,

when they were talking about love, right? Here he's actually really. serious and saying, no, if you try to get them out and free them, they will kill you. So you would better be careful. So, you know, I think that, you know, you find that in religious traditions as well, especially if you look at Christianity where, you know, Jesus basically says, they hate me, they killed me, they're going to do the same to you, you know, and that's kind of a lot of Christians don't seem to recognize that he said that, but he did. So I think that we have to accept, I mean, I hate to say this, but we have to accept that the world is. is what from the 90s, the smashing pumpkins,

the world is a vampire, you know? It's like, and just deal with it. And then do our best for our friends and our own family and for us, you know, and hopefully that's a chain reaction. But I mean, there's no way we're going to save the world, Kelly. Yes. No, that's true. Okay, so based on all of the stuff that we just talked about,

specifically the nature of technology and how media and technology shape our beliefs. There's this question that I keep asking myself, which is, if we accept the people like Tyler are truly in touch with a higher non-local intelligence that seems to be beaming images and information to them, and that seems particularly interested in aiding our technological development. Like, is that a call that we should be answering? We, like, we tend to equate technological progress with positive progress in the absolute sense. But like, what if this is a false assumption?

And I would just love to hear your your kind of thoughts on that. Yeah. So exactly. I think that that's the high, that's the high degree of warning right there where he says, so you can at the very same time see the results of the World Cup and watch a war happening in Europe. Okay. And he's like, so you think that's progress, you know, really, I think he's asking the question. And I think that that is, and some people have this idea that.

that, you know, when we take the non-linearity of time as an assumption, we can think then that, you know, technology is a new life form that is, you know, using us to kind of create itself type of thing. You know, I have a lot of people that I talk to now who have that belief. So, you know, do we really want to be doing that? I think that there's, there's, you know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, right? or, you know, the gin back in the bottle. What we do have to do is we have to be conscious of how we code and our intentions. And I think that that needs to, of course, obviously,

but I think only that can guide us now is our intention. And if our intention is just for profit, because we are going to be continuing to do this, right? But your question had more to do with this assumption of progress, right? Yeah, I just, I mean, just in general, it feels like, like, you know, some of the things that Tyler was downloading, you know, that you describe in the book, like really, you know, intricate pieces of technology like biotechnology that can help, you know, cure diseases and fix bones and, you know, that sort of thing. It all sounds so great, but I, you have to, I guess I just wonder about the source, you know, and what something that is really interested in turning us into a more technological society. what its motivations might be, which, you know, might not be the right way to think about it, because this might not be like a separate entity and it with a separate set of motivations. We're not super clear on that. But it does make me, it just makes me wary a little. It makes me

look at it a little differently than just like, oh, how cool, you know? Yeah. I think that those are good, you know, you're having feelings of caution. And I think that those feelings we need to take into consideration. And the idea of progress is something that we just assume, right? We just assume progress is good. I think that a lot of us, our traditional school system needs a lot of help. I think we know that. But I always have students read, you know, indigenous ontologies, like indigenous worldviews where there isn't this idea of, you know, the kinds of assumptions that we are just programmed to go with, which is like this idea of progress, they don't actually have that,

but yet they have very sophisticated ideas that we're just coming to. Like, you know, the world is, you know, there's sentience and we're just becoming, we're just now learning to communicate with it. Those have already been there. So I think that we're, you know, it's just a process of re-education and, in remembering. And I think that that's,

we've got to do that. But in terms of your inclinations, I think that those are so important. Yeah, it's an interesting balance. I think about technology a lot, especially like as a result of reading all this stuff. And I think that,

I mean, on the one hand, I'm very skeptical of technology and cynical about it. On the other hand, I hate camping. And I think, you know, I you know and and my entire my world my community my livelihood everything is is in technology if the grid went down I have zero skills like no one wants me on their apocalypse team so it's like this weird kind of back and forth where I'm I don't know it's a it's a weird place to be

there's a lot of cognitive dissonance and yeah yeah I think that that's that's I agree with you I really like how you put it too. Like, if the grid went down, nobody would want me on their apocalypse team. Yeah. No, like, I'm useless. I can't do anything. I guess technology's got me either way.

So, and final question. I know you're in the process of wrapping of your new book. When will that be out? And what can you tell us about it? Sure. So it's, it's the book is about then, I mean, it's a deeper dive into,

technology really and UFO ideas and belief systems and things like that. And it's also looking at how if we took as, if we took as an assumption that people have always had these experiences and they just didn't start happening in the 1940s like, you know, the narrative says, what does that look like? And so what I do is, like I said, my community of people that I know now is huge in the thousands of people who, even like probably more than 10,000 people who have these experiences. And I have, so I've chosen the people that, that to me, exemplify some of the questions that are now kind of left off the table because we have the UFO phenomena, right, that has then

morphed into the UAP phenomena. And a lot of the UAP phenomena in my estimation looks like the same phenomena, but trying to rebrand it, I guess, you know? And it's part of this spectacle. But if we go back to the actual people who are having the experiences, giving the downloads,

and, you know, it's a more diverse group. So it starts with a woman, and we have women, and we also have, you know, people from diverse communities talking about their experiences. So I think that this just kind of evens it out. So I feel like I did a really heavily space field-oriented book with American Cosmic. And this starts off with space. I mean, I am talking to a space researcher, but she's a woman.

And it goes into people who are engaged in different types of technologies. And then it goes into just, you know, people who are kind of, normal people who are having these experiences and what happens to them. And so what I'm doing is I'm just identifying the patterns of what they're doing, adding more information to the database of the internet, I suppose, you know? That's amazing. Well, I can't wait to read it. I know it's going to be amazing.

Thank you so much for your time today. I absolutely love talking with you. And I'm sure I will make sure that everything that we talked about, anything you referenced for everybody is linked up in the episode. description so that you can follow up, which I think would be very worthwhile. But thank you, again, it's been wonderful. Thank you so much, Kelly. It is a great interview. I really appreciate your questions.