Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 26: An Interview with Jeffrey Kripal: The Flip & How To Think Impossibly

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Today, we have a very special guest on the show, Dr. Jeffrey Kripal. Dr. Kripal is an esteemed scholar and author in the study of religion, focusing particularly on the esoteric, mystical, and paranormal dimensions of human experience. He serves as the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of several phenomenal books including The Superhumanities, Mutants & Mystics, Super Natural (which he co-authored with Whitley Strieber), and The Flip.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 NowEPISODE BRIEFBECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase. Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonBecome 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

I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I tooked up on the knife and I tacked to a circle around his heart. Lasting circle. And that was a very intimate act. He said, here's a list of all Aaron Brotherhood dropouts. Go through this list, sent a letter to each one of these M-Fing rats, and ask them if you could come and interview them for me. He has created this illusion of who he is.

If you believe anything he tells you, you're screwing up. You want to send me to Michael Thompson, who bucked the whole AB, dropped out, and testified against them, and you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? My mom told me, Eric, he's kind of a borderline con person most of your life too, but you got conned by a con man. Blood memory, a new podcast series from love and read wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today we have a very special guest on the show, Dr. Jeffrey Criple. Dr. Criple is an esteemed scholar and author in the study of religion, focusing particularly on the esoteric, mystical, and paranormal dimensions of human experience. He serves as the J. Newton Razor chair in philosophy and religious thought at Bryce University, and he is the author of several phenomenal.

nominal books, including The Superhumanities, Mutants and Mystics, Supernatural, which he co-authored with Whitley Streber, and The Flip. I'll have links to all of these and more in the episode brief if you want to check them out. I really can't recommend his work highly enough. As you'll recall, we talked about Dr. Criple's book, The Flip, in part three of the waking up inside the cave series. The Flip is of particular significance to me because it was as a result of my own Flip that I embarked upon the project that would become this podcast. Discovering Jeff's work soon after that experience gave me the reassurance that my radical shift in perspective wasn't some kind of a mental break, something that I frankly feared at the time, but rather a somewhat common occurrence among people

who have dealt intentionally or otherwise with the anomalous. Beyond simple reassurance that I'm not crazy, or at the very least that if I'm crazy I'm in good company, Jeff's work has also given me a essential frameworks for venturing into the more challenging aspects of the phenomenon. Much of his work deals with what we generally refer to as the impossible, or the places where human experience both exceeds and obliterates our traditional models. I was lucky enough to read a few chapters of his new book coming out this spring on exactly this topic entitled How to Think Impossible About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Also of note, Dr. Criple recently led the creation of the Archives of the Impossible at Bryce University

to house the writings and artifacts of such impossible events. Within this incredible archive, you'll find such treasures as the Anne and Whitley-Strieber collection containing thousands of letters and correspondences sent to them after the publishing of communion, the John E. Mac archives containing the notes and records from the famed Harvard psychiatrist in his work with abductees, interviews, notes and papers, belonging to famed euthologist Jacques Valet and much, much more. The Archives of the Impossible has also given birth to a conference series of the same name, the second of which I was lucky enough to attend this last spring.

This conference brings together top thinkers in the humanities to discuss impossible events and phenomena of all kinds. It was honestly a magical experience. I met so many amazing people there, and when it was over, I didn't want to leave. Jeff's work has created, a sort of center of gravity in the world of the impossible and anomalous, which draws to it all kinds of top-tier mutants and weirdos from across disciplines who are invested in exploring the outer reaches of human experience and potential. So perhaps it's not surprising that many refer to him as

the real-life Professor X. I really think that you guys are going to enjoy this one, so let's just dive into it. Here's my interview with Dr. Jeffrey Kriple. So let's start with the flip. What is the flip? Well, the flip is a lot of things. I mean, it's a book I wrote, of course, and it refers to people who are trained in various forms of materialism, particularly scientists and engineers and medical professionals. And then they have some kind of life-changing experience that might be a car accident, it might be a psychedelic experience, it might be a spontaneous mystical event. And they flip, and they realize that the world is actually not made of matter, and that it's more mind-related. There's something about consciousness that's fundamental. And they realize also that their engineering or their medicine or their science works just fine in this new metaphysical world. And so they realized that the science and the materialism were never the same thing. That materialism was an interpretation of their practice, their scientific.

or medical practice. And that's essentially the flip. And what I do in the book is I go through modern philosophy of mind and physics and modern medicine and these sorts of things. And show that there's a kind of renaissance going on today. And that people are moving pretty dramatically away from previous models of the relationship between mind and brain because the older ones simply don't work. And there's not even a hint on the horizon that they'll ever work. It's not just, they sort of work, but not really, no, it's a, no, they don't work. They don't work at all. And so people who spend their lives thinking about these issues are concluding that the older materialists or mechanical or reductive models simply aren't viable anymore. And it's not that

there's one interpretation, Kelly. It's not that we're suddenly all become idealists or dual aspect Monis or whatever the option is, it's that there are actually multiple ontological options or interpretations of the data and that materialism was only one of them. And it just doesn't work anymore. I love so much about this framework that it really does allow people to hold on to the parts about materialism that are useful and that are helpful and that, you know, it put us on the moon. We can do stuff with it, right? But what does change for people? So if they don't have to let go of that? What does change in their lives as a result of this reframing? I think what people see is that the science and technology are pragmatic. They do allow us to do

things, but they actually don't say anything about what things are. These ontological questions are not the pragmatic or technological questions. And it just helps people to separate those two and to see that they're two very different approaches to reality. And of course, human beings do care what reality is. Not all of us. You know, a lot of us walk around and I think we're pretty happy leading essentially schizophrenic lives. We rely on the medicine and the science and the technology every time we go to the refrigerator, but we actually don't worry about it and don't think about it. We live in some other kind of psychological or religious or cultural world. And we never put those two things together. And what the flip sort of forces is that question. Okay, let's put them

together. Let's not live in two separate worlds. Let's think about the world as one world. Something that's really special to me about the podcast is that I end up talking to so many people just after they've gone through this process or as they're going through this process. And it seems like the thing, and I saw this in myself as well, that's the hardest to give up is kind of this certainty that you know what life is and what the universe is and what you are. and I'm very aware of the vulnerable place that that puts people in because a lot of people, once they've gone through this, are looking for a kind of certainty that they no longer have. So what advice do you have for people who are in that place and how do they approach that? Let it go.

My advice really is just let it go. I mean, so much of higher education, certainly in the humanities, is about what we call ambiguity or uncertainty or, you know, holding the question. and not landing, essentially. And if you want to land, if you need certain answers, just don't do this. Don't go here. Don't ask these questions because you're going to land in uncertainty and ambiguity and paradox. And that's just not comfortable for some people. And I understand that.

You know, I've tried to make the argument over the years, Kelly, that this is not actually for everyone. I sometimes use the word elitist because I think it's accurate. I don't mean it to be elitist. I'm just like, it's an observation, really, that some people can do this, and a lot of people can do this, frankly. And I see that every day in the classroom, I see that in the public. And I think it does as well to understand that and to accept that. And then, you know, when people who have flipped look around and other people aren't flipped,

they don't get frustrated. They're like, oh, that's just the way the world works. And that's the way human beings are. and there's a kind of compassion there. There's a kind of acceptance of the situation, I think. So that's a long answer to your short question. I don't know if it's good news or bad news or neutral news, but you do have to work through it,

and you do have to come to some degree of acceptance. And I think, again, education allows us to do that in the classroom with young people, but we don't have as many social spaces in our culture for doing that, you know, after we leave education and we become adults. We really do think about these questions. Young people, by the way, don't always think about these. They're at a different place in life, and they have different interests,

and they should have different interests. I don't, again, hold them. They're not bad people for worrying about careers and whom they have sex with and who to marry or not to marry or whatever they're going to do or not to. That's just a different place in life. And I think these deeper questions, these ultimate questions, often come to us later.

That makes a lot of sense. This work has put me in touch with what I see to be a very rare breed of person and a type of person that I actually have a lot of respect for, which is people who have not had any kind of anomalous experience, but are really attempting to grapple with this stuff from an intellectual place. And I often get the question from people, how do you trigger a flip in yourself? How do you get there? So do you think there are things that people can do or ways that they can think that would make them more susceptible to having this kind of a transformation? information. So I get asked that question a lot. Yeah, my quick answer is silocybin helps actually a lot. DMT will do it. I don't recommend them. I actually don't know if I even recommend the flip. I am of the strong persuasion that if you look at flips in people's lives, they usually happen in

traumatic context. A near-death experience by definition is traumatic. I mean, someone almost freaking died. You don't get a near-death experience without coming really close to death. So I think a lot of situations are like that. I think actually psychedelic states are extremely traumatic to the brain and the social person. I think a lot of meditative disciplines are essentially designed to be traumatic to the social ego. So, you know, that's just a long way of saying. I think any model we develop with a flip has to explain or understand why people don't flip,

as well as why people do flip. And I do that through something called the filter thesis. I think the relationship between the mind and the brain is complicated, and that the brain and the body are essentially filters or translators of mind or consciousness that exists way beyond us as individuals. But that we only access that mind or greater consciousness in moments of trauma or when the brain and body begin to break down. And that fits beautifully, actually, this model that I'm trying to articulate.

But it also is a kind of warning that, you know, maybe we don't want to be flipped. Maybe you're just okay the way you are. Maybe the space suit is working just fine, keeping the weird creatures out of the suit, as it were. Maybe you don't want your suit punctured or ripped or torn. And some people who experiences these things don't do well with them. It can destroy and destruct as well as it can be benevolent or redemptive. And a lot of these experiences, frankly, are very negative. And the reason for that is, is again, this filter thesis,

you don't actually experience these things until something starts not to work so well. And so there's a lot of emotional and sexual. and physical conflict and dysfunction around these things as well that I think we have to like really be honest about and thoughtful about and not just sweep it under the rug. Absolutely. So UFOs can often serve as that thing that kind of punctures the suit. Yes, they can. Yeah.

And as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about religion and UFOs and spiritual encounters and these sorts of things. I know that there are a lot of people in the community who are very resistant to any kind of comparison between religion and UFOs or any kind of spirituality seeping into that space. And I'd love to just hear your thoughts on that. I think that's nonsense, Kelly.

I think it's obvious that the two are very much related. I mean, one of my jokes is that, you know, weird beings coming out of the sky and screwing with people, that's essentially religion. And that's also the UFO phenomenon, whether people want to recognize that or not. I think there are lots of aspects of the UFO phenomenon, of course, that aren't necessarily religious or spiritual. But once you start scratching the surface here and you get into the guts of things, you realize very quickly that, or you realize very slowly, I guess, sometimes, that the UFO experience often involves consciousness or mind and subject. objectivity. It's not just an object or craft out there. It's also something in here.

So I think that they're not just comparisons. I think it's just obvious that they're related. I think what we call the UFO today is our very science fictiony, technologically soaked language, and that our ancestors would have certainly spoken of demons and gods and angels and other sorts of things. Because that's how they talked about these things. And I'm not presuming Kelly that our ancestors were correct, but neither am I presuming that we are correct. I want to throw both frameworks into question, and that's why I love the UFO phenomenon. It's not, again, it's not because I understand it. It's because I don't understand it. And I don't think anybody else does either.

I think people who say they know what it is, they're just bullshitting, either themselves or other people. So that's essentially a quick answer to your question. No, I absolutely agree. Something really interesting that you see on the flip side of the people who are just really resistant to the religious or spiritual side of things, is that people will see that connection and then they go to this place where they're drawing really hard conclusions, that either UFOs are literally angels and demons or that angels and demons are literally UFOs. And I was wondering, can you talk a little bit about like better ways? forward. Yeah, so that's precisely what I'm criticizing here. That's where comparison, I think,

takes one is in this third space that is neither religious nor scientific. I think, look, when people, and there's a very well-known television show here, which I won't name, but when people take this sort of ancient astronaut or alien hypothesis and they jam it back into everything that happened in prehistory, I think that's just mistaken. I think it's, just presuming that our own present mythology is somehow ultimate or correct. And now we can understand all of the primitive mistakes that are silly, stupid ancestors made, right? That's essentially the argument. I'm exaggerating it, but not too much. The other direction is equally, I think, mistaken. It's to presume some kind of past religious worldview, say the Bible or whatever

your religious worldview is, and then reading it into the present UFO encounters and abduction experiences, I think that's equally mistaken and equally dangerous, frankly. And so the question is, well, what do you think, Jeff? What the heck's going on? Again, I don't know what's going on, and neither do you. And so let's sit with the phenomenon. Let's begin with the phenomena of themselves and not presume some kind of interpretation that our ancestors had or that we have in 2023. I mean, what we know from the history of science, and we know a lot about the history of science, by the way, is that it's never right. You know, the science changes dramatically every 20 or 30 years. And the idea that we just happen to have it right today is what we call

presentism in history of science. And it's just a always wrong. It's always wrong, Kelly. And, you know, so don't, let's not do that. Let's just stop doing that. And let's be humble and let's be more honest about these things. And I think we are, I don't think we're being honest as a culture. I think we're being very dishonest about the phenomenon. Yes, that strikes me as very true. Well, that dishonesty, it's not necessarily intentional or conscious either. I guess I got to qualify that. But I think the culture or the public media representation of the UFO phenomenon is profoundly dishonest and profoundly disinforming and misinforming. But I think a lot of that is quite honest and conscious, but it's just

misinformed. Right. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. We've been talking a lot about Whitley Streber in the last couple episodes of the podcast, someone that I know you know well and have worked with. And an idea that I continue to struggle with, and I would love to hear your thoughts. I know you've written about it yourself, is his late wife, Anne, after she spent all those years reading and curating those letters, the conclusion that she had come to was that this all has something to do with what we refer to as the dead. And I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Well, again, that's one of the things she said. Anne said a lot of things, right? And Whitley says a lot of things, and he means a lot of things.

And I find Whitley Streber a constant kind of fountain of insight and thoughtfulness on these issues. And I think one of Whitley's great sins is that he's just too darn honest. And he tells it like it is and like he's experienced it. And I think that's what sometimes gets Whitley into trouble, but it's good trouble to be in. And he's taken a lot of hits for us. And I just want to honor that. I think Anne's comment is probably one of the hits that he has taken on himself. I think the alien phenomena does, in fact, have to do with the dead very often.

This goes back to my earlier observation that the UFO phenomena and religion are very, very close. I think a lot of people, including a lot of very wealthy people who get into the UFO, phenomena and fund the research also end up funding parapsychological or psychical research. And I think the reason they do that is that they too understand or see on some level that these two things are related. You know, my joke that I, I like jokes because I actually, I like bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets. Whoever writes refrigerator magnets or bumper speakers, they're freaking geniuses, Kelly. They encapsulate entire schools of thought into like four words. And I don't know how they do it, but they do it.

So I like to think about, okay, how do we put this on a t-shirt or a bumper stick or a refrigerator? And one of the things I'll often say is that a lot of the discussion of the UFO and Congress and the military is they're essentially trying to shoot down souls. And I think that's not going to happen. You know, good luck with that. You know, I think there's a mass. massive, massive category mistake being made. I don't think these are about, these are not security issues. These are not about national boundaries. These are about what we call the spiritual nature of human beings that is manifesting physically on the radar.

And so that's a paradoxical statement. It makes no sense, Kelly. It just shatters every category we have about science and spirituality. But that's why I think it's important. And so this idea that UFOs and souls are related, you know, it's an ancient one. And I think it's a correct one. And I think Anne was correct to say that. People have pursued that.

And Joshua Cutchin, you know, wrote two volumes or three volumes, if you want to count them, on this notion called ecology of souls. And he quotes Anne a lot along these lines. I think it explains a lot. I think once you recognize that flying saucers and souls are somehow related, you can explain a lot of things about the abduction and contact phenomena that you otherwise couldn't explain before. Like why there is so much apocalypticism around it? Why are the entities so concerned about things like the end of the world and nuclear disaster and climate change? And why did dead people show up in abduction experience as well? They do because that's what the

induction experience is about. It's about the world of the dead for God's saying, come on, get over it. And I think we lack that kind of folklore or worldview in the West because we have moved out of the world of the ancestors. But, you know, a lot of other cultures are still embedded in that. And I think rightfully so. I think they understand things about the world that we have lost. And so things that puzzle us, don't puzzle them. It's into their worldview just fine. Thank you very much.

And that's the kind of comparison I think we need desperately. Something that I know I'm struggling with, and I think a lot of other people are struggling with, is just in light of everything that's happened this summer with David Grush coming forward. And as much as I'm knee-deep in this stuff and in the lore of it all day, every day, the idea that there's actually a crashed UFO somewhere in a lab underground

is very ontologically challenging. to me. I feel like I created this like much more complex framework to deal with this. And they're like, no, we have one. And I wonder how you're feeling about that and if it's changed at all, how you approach this subject. Well, I think the claim is we have many, right? I mean, I don't think it's the point. Yeah. So no, it hasn't changed anything certainly about when I think about this. My argument is not that there's not a scientific or technological or physical component of this. My argument is that there's also a spiritual, mental, or psychic component to it and that you need both of those poles to really understand what's going on. So if, you know, we had the smoking gun and there's the craft or

there's the body, it actually would not change my views of the double nature of the phenomenon. But again, there's that if. What's so frustrating about the events this summer, and I've said this so many times, is that we actually don't have any access to the evidence. We have stories. We don't have the resurrected body to speak in Diana Posilko's terms. There are relics, but they are ambiguous, and researchers like yourself or myself are not actually allowed to get to these files or these craft or these bodies. And as a researcher, I can tell you that makes me very suspicious. You know, when I read a book, I want to see the footnotes or the end notes, and I want to be able to go to the same sources that the person went to, and I want to come to my own conclusion. And you just can't do any of that here.

All of these walls of secrecy and confidentiality are designed to misdirect and misinformed. And so I'm extremely suspicious of all of the claims, really. until somebody comes forward and shows us, you know, shows us the stuff, as it were. Show me the smoking gun. And so I always come back to, you know, the image I always say, if you're watching a card player, he's showing you some kind of card trick, or he's got some peanut or pee in three shells, look at his table.

If the table's designed to collapse quickly and so he can run away, be very suspicious. what that person is doing because it's the whole thing's designed to collapse and run away. And that's kind of how I feel about this is that, come on, you're on a card table and you're about to run away. And if you really want to solve this thing, let's be serious about it. And let's integrate it into our forms of knowledge. Let's do the science. Let's do the history. Let's do the literature review. Let's do the archival work, Kelly. Let's put these in some archives in a university, and let's get dozens, if not hundreds of people looking at this over many,

many generations and asking questions and coming up with hypotheses and then having people challenge those hypotheses. None of that exists. None of it were reduced to podcasts and talking to weird professors of religion. You know, I mean, come on, let's be serious about this, but they're not serious about understanding it, they want apparently to misinform or misdirect for security or intelligence reasons. Or some corporation wants to keep the goods so that they can make a lot of money out of it. I don't know, Kelly. I don't know. And I don't see how anybody can know until the goods are shared,

as it were. And maybe that will happen. And then I'll say, okay, great. Let's start. Let's go. Let's go. Come on. No, I agree. I don't think that we'll probably get to know. And I don't know that I don't know that I'm even interested in knowing, at least not being the first to know, that seems to be bad for one's general health and mental wellbeing. But it does seem like there are other ways to approach it, which we've been kind of tackling in the podcast in terms of talking about what technology is, because, you know, this kind of ontological shock that I'm having and I'm grappling with between how can there be this thing in a lab somewhere, they actually have these things, that maybe I'm not understanding fully what technology is. And so we've been talking a

lot about Heidegger and Nietzsche and kind of going down that road. And it seems like philosophy might actually provide us more of a window into this than we could have if we had one right in front of us. I just wonder if you could actually recommend any other things that I should read in that vein that I could share with the audience as we move forward. Well, I agree with you. I mean, again, this has been my soapbox, is that you actually need humanists in the mix here and quit hiring all these astrophysicists and talking to all these fighter pilots. I mean, keep doing that. Keep hiring the astrophysicists, talk to the fighter.

But for goodness sake, get some historians and get some anthropologists and get some scholars of religion and get some people in there who actually know something about these deeper issues. because whatever this thing or things are, they are going to force a lot of really profound questions about who we are and what our place in the universe is. And so I do think there's a there there, Kelly. Again, I hope I'm not being heard as saying that there's nothing there. I do think there's a there there.

But I think it's so ontologically shocking to use John Maxx. term. We can come back to that, by the way. It's so shocking to our sense of reality that I think we need the philosophers and we need the historians to come in and help us. And it's not that they have the answers either, Kelly. I'm not suggesting they do either, but they can help us to ask better questions. And I think that's what we need so desperately to do right now. We need better questions. We do not need answers because we don't have any. And people who say they have answers, again, they're just lying either to themselves or to the people they're saying that to. Now, in terms of people thinking about this, yeah, there's a lot of people thinking about these things. I mean, you know,

we did two conferences at Rice here called Archives of the Impossible and 1,700 people registered for the first one. And we had over a... a quarter of a million views of our plenaries. And for each of these events in 2022 and 23, I personally invited about 25 people who I thought had something to say from the Academy, mostly on this. And they did. And that came from everything from philosophy to physical anthropology, to black critical theory, to Tibetan Buddhism, to the history of Christianity, to medieval mysticism, you name it. These people all had something to say about the phenomena. So I'm of the opinion, the riches are already there, but you're not using them. And by you, I don't mean you,

Kelly. I mean, NASA should be hiring these people along with the cosmologists and the physicists, and they're not. And the reason they're not is we are fetishizing or worshiping, this kind of scientism or this kind of technology. And I think that's just a profound mistake. And I think questions like, what is technology? What is science, by the way?

What makes science possible? How do we know anything? These are questions philosophers ask and they're not being asked. The person really, if you haven't talked to, is Mike Schiafone. Have you talked to Mike? No, no.

Yeah, you need to talk to Mike. And he's a trained philosopher and he really thinks about all of these things in a very rigorous way. And he started a journal called UAP Studies, I think. I guess it's called. I can't think of the name right now. And he has a society. And he's really trying to push this philosophical edge into the phenomenon.

And I think he's right to do so. I think it needs to be done. In the study of religion, you probably know the people. I mean, Diana Posilko is ahead of the game here on this. She's sort of with the forefront of it. again, asking questions about technology and religion and the phenomena itself and interviewing scientists and experiencers who are kind of on the inside of this. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

Absolutely. I love that approach. The UFO Rabbit Hole is actually moving into doing some publishing. And the first book we're going to do is with a philosopher, Dr. James Madden from Benedictine, who's writing a book on the UFO from a philosophical perspective. So that's my... He's from Benedictine College? Or where's he from?

From Benedictine? Yeah, in Kansas. Oh, really? Oh, my gosh. That's close to where I grew up, by the way. That's why I'm asking. I have a cousin who went there to, two cousins who went there. He's writing about the UFO finale from a Christian theological perspective or from just?

No, from a more purely philosophical perspective. I think he's a little heretical within his particular university. I'll bet he is. Yes, I'll bet he's good for him. Good for him. Yeah. I'll send you some chapters. I think you might really enjoy it.

It's really good. Yeah, I should talk to him. I mean, again, that's what I do here at the university. I'm at a place called Rice University in Houston, Texas. And the archives of the impossible are some physical archives. They're actually right over here, about 100 feet away. And there's well over a million documents in there now. And this is what one thing I think we should be doing is studying.

archival material, historical material, and trying to figure out what has actually happened over the last 50, 60, 70 years and what is going on here? And again, I don't think we have those answers, but I think we could still apply historical and philosophical methods to those questions. Absolutely. Well, let's get out of the nuts and bolts, because that's boring. Let's talk about experiencers a little bit. Something that we've been grappling with a lot on the podcast, And it's something I've grappled with a lot in my own journey is that there's this sort of propensity that I see a lot in the community, which is that this sort of willingness to believe in UFOs and to believe in non-human intelligence right up until the point that someone actually interacts with one, generally because those experiences are so weird and absurd and you don't know what to do with them. So I was so honored to get to read a couple chapters from your new book coming out this spring. and I thought you had a really wonderful approach to that.

And I wonder if you could talk through a little bit for people who might be struggling with experience or narratives, like how to deal with them. So, again, my own view, as you know, I'm a source of endless opinions, Kelly. And I'm happy to impose my opinions on you. I think the will, and I say this a lot, the willingness to think about UFOs as extraterrestrial visits or invasions is, part of the scientific, cosmological, science fiction worldview. And when you move into what actually happens in an abduction or a contact experience, it gets very weird, very quickly.

And it also gets very religious and very folklorish. And I think that's where we say no, because we're trained, and by we, I mean, modern people, are trained to dismiss the subjective and the experience. and we're taught to essentially honor and respect the objective and the physical. If something's real, it's physical. It can be measured. Its behavior can be predicted. It can have a science wrapped around it.

If it's experiential, it cannot be measured, and it certainly can't be predicted, and therefore, it must not be real. So we have defined reality in a very scientific kind of technological way. And this is why we reject these. experiential accounts. Again, I think that you cannot reject these experience. I think the experiences are at least half of the phenomena, if not more. And I think you have to begin with the study of human experience. And that's what we call phenomenology, by the way, in the history of philosophy. And so there's a whole field wrapped around it, which we're, again, not using because nobody,

nobody, I shouldn't say nobody, but very few people take human experience as veritical. And by vertical I mean as really pertaining to what reality is. I do. I think human experiences are often veritable, not always, and that some of the most extreme and anomalous and acute religious experiences are super veritable. They're telling us something about the ultimate nature of reality.

And the public culture is simply not listening. Because maybe it can't, you know? Maybe that's, again, maybe to go back to an earlier conversation, maybe that's designed, it's designed to be esoteric or elitist. I don't know. But I agree with you. We don't take experiences seriously because we can't. We're constructed and conditioned not to.

Right. Do you think, if you can accept that these subjective experiences have happened to people, which I've gotten there, which is strange, it took me so long, because very strange things have happened to me, and yet accepting my own experiences has been enough of a challenge but then learning to integrate the experiences of others was a whole other one and that's been kind of a process for me over the last few years. I feel like where I'm struggling now is in terms of looking at the contents

of these experiences and what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from them. Like we talked in recent episodes about semiotics and that sort of thing we're exploring valet and Davis's six-layer model of high strangeness in the UAP. And I'm wondering, is it a fool's errand, do you think, to try to kind of decode in some way the contents of these experiences? Or is it so particular to that person that it may be in some ways a fool's errand? Well, if you want to preserve your worldview, it's a fool's errand. Don't do it.

And I mean that seriously, just don't do it. But if you're willing to let go of your worldview, it's not a fool's errand at all. And we have all kinds of resources for doing that. But I think, let me say a couple things. And I say these in the book. The book's called How to Think Impossibly. And there's a couple basic principles on how to think impossibly. One is that your suspicion is that reality is non-dual.

It's actually not subjective. But neither is it objective. or it's both at the same time, if you will. And I'll give you an example of this, a simple example. I have a dream of a set of very banal circumstances that play out in perfect order and perfect detail the next day. Okay? That's a very common experience.

Is that subjective or is it objective? Well, of course it's both, you know, because it's subjective because it's a dream, function of my imagination, but it's objective in the sense that's about a series of objective historical, physical events that play out in the real world. So there's no way to separate a subjective dimension from an objective dimension there. They're the same piece. And it gets weirder. The example I like to give the most is human levitation. You know, bodies do come off the ground. They float. People see them. People report these.

and the people who are being lifted off the ground are having really extreme, often altered states of consciousness. They often are not aware what's happening. So is that a subjective event? Of course it is. Is that an objective event? Of course it is. There's a physics involved for God's sake. So, again, I think this whole notion of separating the subjective and the objective is a complete error.

And I think it's exactly what we are trained to do in this culture. It's exactly how science works, by the way. You separate out this subjective and you focus only on the objective. And you can do all kinds of things, including making this computer. But what you cannot do with that separation is understand who we are or understand these events. It won't work, Kelly. It just won't work. So then the question is the high strangeness, the weirdness, the complete oddity of the experiences.

As a historian of religions, I can tell you what's happening there is the imagination is kicking in, and it's functioning probably as a mediator or as a translator of whatever is in, whatever is happening. and it's a mistake to take what is seen as purely imaginary, but it is also a mistake to interpret it literally. Can you hold the event or the experience as something that's imaginable but not imaginary? Can you think in a both and way and not in an either or way? That's to think impossibly. And again, I don't think our public helps us here.

I think we are trained to think of things as imaginary and therefore not real, or we're trained to think of things as objective and physical and therefore it's real. And that is simply not what is happening. And so we're at a loss. We're at a total loss because our culture and our ways of knowing have completely failed us. Only in these extraordinary moments, Kelly, I can go to the refreferential. now and the food's still in there and it's cold and the refrigerator works fine. The technology works fine. This computer works fine. So generally in our day-to-day kind of most of our experience,

the objective kind of scientific technological stuff works just fine. But it completely breaks down in these extraordinary moments that we're talking about. And if we want to understand them, I'm not saying we do. We have to abandon this split between the subjective and the objective. And that's a tough call. And that's a philosophical project, by the way. That's not a vague project. We know what to do and we know how to do it.

We just don't think the culture has the will to do that. Right. It strikes me, as you're speaking, that we do tend to think of imagination as being something that is just imaginary, that it's this nothing. And yet there are these really strong ties between all of these things we're talking about and, you know, UFOs and like the occult, for instance. And Mitch Horowitz, I think, speaks really beautifully and writes really beautifully about the power of the imagination and of thought and its role in the occult and those sorts of practices. And it seems as though there is something very powerful about imagination in itself. And we've kind of decided that imagination is just a nothing.

And I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about that tension and about what imagination might be. Well, again, I think often imagination is just imaginary, right? I'm not suggesting that everything we imagined is real or physically real. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying there are moments in human life in which there's some kind of intrusion or the human being becomes passive and some kind of agency kicks in. And suddenly there's a sci-fi-like apparitional landscape that the person is not making up. The person's not imagining this. On the other hand, it is being imagined by some greater mind or some greater force.

And it's also real. So what I'm trying to argue is that there are different forms of the imagination, and we might want to call this greater one. We might want to give it a capital I and refer to it as the imagination with a big eye and see it as the source of a lot of these high strangeness experiences. I mean, clearly it's involved. Clearly, people are not seeing random things. They're seeing things that are trying to communicate with them. Maybe not very well.

But they're trying to do it. The other example I give is always a poltergeist event. When a poltergeist event happens, pots and pans are flying around. bodies are scratched, curtains are caught on fire. But kittens and unicorns and rainbows aren't showing up. So something is being expressed symbolically or through the activity, but it's not anything. It's not random.

It's actually quite consistent. And if you look at poltergeist events, again, the consistency is these are not happy thoughts and emotions being expressed. This is somebody in deep distress and deep conflict that is expressing herself or himself or themselves in very traumatic, troubled ways. So that's what I'm trying to say. And the high strangeness of a UFO event is not just any high strangest. It's just not random stuff going on. It's trying to speak to us, but it's trying to speak to us in a language that isn't a language.

and it's certainly not a mathematics and it's certainly not a technology. And so we fail. We don't hear it because we don't have ears to hear to quote the first century rabbi. It just goes by and we say, oh, that wasn't real.

You know, that didn't happen. Well, it did. It did happen. Sorry. Absolutely. Speaking of, we're getting ready to move into a series, on Skinwalker Ranch.

And obviously that's a place where there's this kind of convergence of high strangeness events. And in many ways, the investigations that happen there kind of ceded this current disclosure movement. And so, you know, speaking of something's happening, right? What do you make of Skinwalker Ranch

and the idea that there can be a place where all of these things happen so concurrently and so often? Well, the notion of place is central of the history of religions again. You know, there are some sites that are sacred and where the spirits speak and certainly in this country,

a lot of places with devil in their names, you know, well, there's a reason for that. And the indigenous cultures knew this and stayed away from these places. And so it doesn't surprise me at all that there are places where the barrier is thin, as it were. The Skinwalker stuff, you know, I know some of the people,

of those people really well. And one of my feelings about it today, just having watched the more recent shows, is that the wrong people are studying it. And I don't mean that quickly or negative or if you take guns and security people and technology into a place like that, you're going to get a very negative response. But if you took mediums and spiritual experts and anthropologists and historians and, again, people who care about, frankly, the dead, I think you're going to get a very different response. So I think the phenomena responds to how it's interacted with. And if you interact with some things suspiciously or technologically or, you know, military, fashion for God's sake, guess what? You're going to get a scary response back because the intelligence

is mirroring you and responding to your own approach to it. So that's my feeling about it. And it's not that, again, it's not that there's nothing negative there or it's, or that the presences are friendly or this isn't Casper the ghost. I'm not suggesting that. But you know, Kelly, I'm not personally particularly nice to animals. I mean, geez, I eat animals, and I participate in the slaughtering of lots of sentient creatures every day. So there's something about interspecies relationships that I think is really useful with the Skinwalker case.

And I think we have to look long and hard at our own approach. to this and our own attitudes to it and not just the, I don't think the phenomena itself is accessible. I think we can only access it through our own experience of it and we're going to bring our own attitudes and our own beliefs and values to it. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. So I'm not, I'm certainly not dismissive of the Skin Walker Ranch phenomena at all, but I am suspicious of some of the approaches. That makes sense. Something that really kind of brought home the importance of place to me and all of this was so i live in ohio and learning about the history of right patterson air force base you know it was literally built on right field where they were doing

early experimentations with flight and then you've got project blue book and then you've got early space program stuff and obviously the whole roswell mythology and all of that and so much of it is built underground like if you go to right pat you have kind of this one or two three stories tops maybe a but there's so much more below. And I had this moment where it made me think of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, how you have these things that are all built on top of each other in the same place. And there's this kind of folly of follies and only certain people are permitted. And it strikes me as the same behavior, both of the kind of logic behind both of those places and this idea that like certain places become significant to us in that way. And yeah, I just, I don't know if there's a question in there.

just something that I've been thinking about. Yeah, well, there's a question about access. Who has access to the secrets? And again, the religions are not innocent there. The religions have their own elitism and their own hierarchy. So I would be surprised if human beings didn't just reproduce the hierarchies and the elitism. They've always been enacting. Pretty much every culture I know of, there's always some hierarchy.

Absolutely. And you see that now. Something we've been talking about a lot on the podcast, too, with disclosure, is just that, you know, I was on the news yesterday talking about disclosure and I'm very passionate about it, but I also have this deep belief that we're not going to get the answer by this method. Well, again, you know, so disclosure presumes that somebody knows. Right. And that this person or this committee or whatever it is is going to disclose the secret.

So I don't think that's true. And it's not, again, that there's not a there there. It's not that there's not something to disclose. Of course, there probably is, but the idea that we understand what it is, I think, is a presumption. And I don't actually believe that. And here's why, I mean, when I was young, when I was your age, Kelly, I thought somebody somewhere in the world actually knew the truth of things. And it was my job as a young intellectual to just read enough books and figure out who that was. and I would eventually have the answer.

Okay, I don't think that anymore. And it's not because I haven't read enough books or I haven't looked hard enough. That is not the reason. I just don't think for a second that anybody anywhere has this thing to disclose or that they understand what it is that they're disclosing. Again, maybe there is something to disclose

and there is a there. I have no problem with that. I suspect that's true. But I don't think we know what it is. And so that's what I would say about disclosure. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll roll out the craft in the body and I'm like, oh, shit. You know, I'll take that back, you know.

But I'll be the first to say I'm wrong, you know, or maybe the second. I don't know. But that's how the conversation continues. That's how we understand these things is by challenging one another and respecting one another and moving on with, okay, it's not this, it's not that. Maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. Let's do it.

Well, that's really affirming because I feel like the further I get into this, the more I have just found myself in the middle of just a radical, I don't know. And I've actually found that to be really a positive thing in my life. And I think that it's been, you know, like you said, it's not for everyone. And it can be corrosive in some ways and in certain respects. But for me, it's been really positive. And I think I'm grateful to have found myself here, to be honest. Well, your show's called the UFO rabbit hole, Kelly.

So clearly, clearly you come to some measure of peace with the idea that we're not going to figure this one out. It is a rabbit hole, you know. And there's probably a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole here. Absolutely. Well, that feels like a really good place to leave it. Jeff, thank you so, so much for coming on the show. It was an absolute pleasure and an honor, and I'm just so grateful to you for making the time. Well, Kelly, thanks for having me.

It's good to see you again, by the way. Yes, this is wonderful. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to stay here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up?

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