Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 38: Through The Looking Glass [Pt 2]: The Strange Tale of Tom Matte & Upsight

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

In the long-awaited part two of the Through the Looking Glass series, host Kelly Chase is back to tell the bizarre story of the events following her anomalous experience from part one, and how a string of unlikely events brought her to the story of an experiencer with strange psi abilities named Tom Matte. Tom developed what he describes as an interactive holographic overlay on his reality which he calls Upsight in the aftermath of dramatic mental breakdown. More than a decade later, he is still seeking answers about Upsight which he says allows him to access non-local information in fascinating ways and even communicate with NHIs. After a string of unbelievable synchronicities, Kelly found that her story had become inextricably tied to Tom’s, leading her on a journey of inquiry about the nature of anomalous experiences, mental illness, addiction, and more. In this episode she dives deep into this strange tale and the insights and revelations that it spurred. ***************************** Cosmosis: UFOs & A New Reality Drops on Apple TV on December 30, 2024.Watch the Cosmosis Trailer ***************************** The Institute of Noetic SciencesLearn MoreDonate Follow Tom MatteJesus Goes To Hollywood: A Memoir of MadnessX/TwitterWebsiteMedium Mentioned in this EpisodeOlof RocknerIllustrations of Upsight by Olof Rockner Jaws Poster Greys Remote Viewing a Town Other Example Other Example Other Example Other Example Other Example Tom’s Paper About Dark Matter & Dark Energy Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis   BECOME 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 AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebook  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brought to you by Spectre Vision Radio. I'm Ryan Singer. I've been a paranormal experiencer, investigator, and stand-up comedian for over 20 years. My new show, Late Night on the Astral Plain, combines my love of comedy and my obsession with the paranormal. My previous show, Me and Paranormal You, ran for nearly 13 years with almost 850 episodes. This new iteration will feature, interviews with stand-up comedians, scientists, and everyday people sharing their extraordinary tales. This show is a safe place for the strange and the silly. So sit back, relax, get a milkshake, and take a voyage late night on the astral plane because it's more fun to believe.

Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we're diving. into the very long-awaited part two of the Through the Looking Glass series. I released part one of this series almost 10 months ago, promising you the rest of the story, and then I got in over my head with other projects. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, or you don't remember what it was all about, you're definitely going to want to start there. Before we begin, I have an exciting update on the main project that pulled me away from the podcast, the docu-series that I've been working on with OnTacalyps Productions, the new media company that I started with my friends Jay Christopher King and Jordan Flowers. I can't believe I'm finally saying this, but it's done,

and it's due to come out in just a few days. The show is called Cosmosis, UFOs, and a new reality. It will be available on Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube on December 30th. It will also be coming out on Amazon Prime, but we're still waiting on official dates for the show. that. I'll share that with you guys as soon as we know. In the meantime, our trailer is out. I have it linked up in the episode description. It would mean the absolute world to me if you would watch it and if you like what you see, please share it far and wide. What I saw that night, I can never forget it. There was a connected feeling as if it could read my mind. So I waved up I just remember after that experience, I felt like my life was supposed to be lived a certain way,

that effectively I was given a second chance. People don't just experience it in flight. There are other experiences that they're not even reporting. There is an extraordinary conversation going on about UFOs and technology and weapons, but not the experience, not the actual experience. not the actual experience of being face to face with this. I think when somebody sees a UFO or has an experience of one, it kind of forces you to confront what your belief systems are,

how you feel about things, how you feel about other people, your place in the world, and how big or small it is. A lot of the stigma that surrounds the subject has to do with the manufactured campaign, an institutionalized campaign, to keep people from talking about it, especially scientists. If you're confused and you're lost, it's because the people who do this are great at their jobs. They've been perfecting this for decades.

They're not craftsmen of disinformation. They're artists. The fact that we're not alone in the universe, it's paradigm shifting. It's huge. It could be the biggest story in human history. So why aren't more people talking? talking about this.

To wait around for the government to give us the answers. The UFO phenomenon is part of our reality. It's not something that the government can lock up in an underground bunker somewhere and keep from us. It's everywhere. And it's happening all the time. If you look at the history of humans, you're going to see that it's a history of engagement with non-human intelligence. Because a lot of people believe in non-human intelligence. I think it's very difficult to talk about the strange stuff.

precisely because it's so strange. We're living in a little quarter of the world. Just a little quarter of it that we call reality. We need to turn off the lights, open the door, and walk out of this little house we live in, and then we're going to start to see something real. This was an independently funded project, something that was extremely important to us so that we could maintain the creative control necessary to go deep with the information and also to be as faithful and unflinching as possible in sharing experience or stories.

Our marketing budget is exactly zero dollars, so we need all the help that we can get with getting the word out. Thank you in advance for all of your support. All right, you've waited almost a year for this episode, so I won't make you wait any longer. Let's do this. In part one of this series, I told you about the anomalous experience that I had in August of 2020. that changed my life and led to me starting this podcast. And as strange and inexplicable as that experience was, it was only the tip of the iceberg of what has become a much larger and infinitely more baffling story.

It's a story that connected me intimately to the story of someone who'd been a stranger to me at the time, an experiencer by the name of Tom Matt. And that ultimately led to me collaborating with the Institute of Noetic Sciences on this series. I want to thank the Institute of Noetic Sciences for their collaboration, generosity, and patience with me as I've worked on this story. You'll see as we progress how exactly they became involved in the strange tale I'm about to tell. In my opinion, the work that they're doing is some of the most important work being done in the world and is helping to lay the scaffolding for a new and emerging understanding of the nature of our reality and what it

truly means to be human. I hope that if you aren't already familiar with ions, that you'll take some time to explore their mission and their work. And if anything in this series speaks to you and you have a little extra to give, please consider making a donation to help support ions into the future. I've linked to their website in the episode description. With that out of the way, here's the strange tale of how I came to know Tom Matt. Tom was someone that I knew casually from UFO Twitter. I didn't know much about him except that he was an experiencer who also claimed to have some rather interesting sci abilities. We ended up connecting in Diana Posulka's UFO class, the one I talked about in the last episode, and set up a time to chat on Zoom. I liked Tom

immediately. He's warm and earnest and has a mind that moves quickly, darting rapidly from one idea to the next. And although he told me some pretty fantastical things that were, frankly, hard to believe, I found that I did believe him. I couldn't really explain or justify that belief. And honestly, belief is probably a strong word. But I didn't ever get the sense that he was lying. And most of these fantastical things had to do with a strange sort of sighability that Tom claimed to have, something that he calls upsight. Upside is so unusual and difficult to explain that Tom commissioned some illustrations from a really talented artist named Olaf Rob.

So he could show people what it was that he was seeing. I've posted links to those illustrations in the episode description so you can check them out if you're having trouble visualizing it. But essentially, upside manifests for Tom as a sort of a holographic overlay on his perceived reality. Now, to be clear, I'm not necessarily saying that it is a hologram, because that would assume a lot about how these images are constructed. but rather what Tom is seeing looks like a hologram. One of the illustrations of Upsight has three different panels that compare Upsight to Tom's other ways of perceiving the world in a way that I've found to be particularly helpful in understanding what Tom is seeing.

In the first panel, Tom is looking at a poster for the movie Jaws on a wall. It looks the way any poster on a wall would look. In the second panel, he's remembering the Jaws poster in his book, mind's eye, and the image is slightly distorted in the way that things can be when you're trying to visualize them. In the third panel, which shows upsight, Tom is looking at a crisp, translucent, three-dimensional version of the poster hanging in space in front of him. So this isn't just something that Tom sees in his mind. His experience is of something detailed and three-dimensional, something that appears to occupy space and seems to have a very high level of detail.

Tom says that he sees these sorts of three-dimensional objects around him all the time. Often, they appear out of nowhere. Sometimes they seem to be trying to communicate or emphasize certain ideas to him, which can either be helpful or distracting depending on the situation. And Tom also says that he has the ability to conjure these images himself. So if he thinks of the Eiffel Tower, he's able to use Upsight to make a seemingly holographic image of the Eiffel Tower appear in front of him. him, and he's able to move and manipulate that image as well.

Here's Tom describing a little more about Upsight. I'm going to give you two examples because you may not see it, and they're both from pop culture. There's an example in the Ironman movies where Tony Stark is in his office, and he can project this holographic image of the universe, and he interacts with this in his office. That is exactly what it looks like. That has a tint. I think it's a purple tint. Sometimes it's purple, sometimes it's red. but it has a tint to. It's one color. It is not full color.

But they are, in fact, that detailed and that multidimensional. In fact, if I see, let's say a motorcycle, it will split the motorcycle in half, and I will see in half almost like a cutaway from illustrations when we were kids. It's that detail. Now, if you haven't seen that, there's a movie called The Queen's Gambit that hopefully you've seen that where the protagonist is laying on her bed and she's looking up at the ceiling and she can see all the moves. and she plans the moves, the chest moves ahead. That's another way. It's a perfect. It's also one

color. They kind of do it with smoky, smokiness, but that's really what it looks like. And so the question is then, okay, if that's always there, does it interfere with your day? And the answer is no. And let me tell you why. I have to turn my attention and pay attention to it. And let me tell you how it is different than the mind's eye and memory. And this is very important because everyone seems to get stuck here. If I'm driving a car and you're the passenger and you and I decide to have a discussion about the posters we saw the Jaws poster as a kid, I can drive the car and I'll use my brain and I'll, you know, I'll like, I'll picture it in my mind and I'm still focusing on the road, right? If you were to ask me to do upsite when I'm driving, it's impossible. I would get in an accident

because I have to focus on this image. The reason is is because the image is not inside of me. It is actually outside of me somewhere. So I can be in the back seat of a car or I can be a passenger, but I cannot drive a car and do upside. Okay, so this is strange, right? I had no idea what to do with any of this because I didn't have any context or framework for it,

but I was very curious to learn more. So I asked Tom what it was that he thought he was engaging with. I wanted to understand whether he felt like this was something that could be happening primarily in his mind, which was honestly easier for me to wrap my head around. And if he really thought that this was some sort of external reality that he was interacting with, what evidence did he have to support that? His answer was very interesting. What I think I'm engaging with, I call it an invisible, a hidden biosphere, an invisible biosphere, maybe it's for the Akashik. records are a new sphere. I call it when I write about it, the organic metaverse. So I do think to the answer, it's a hidden biosphere, invisible. Now, with that said, though, I can still participate in this

biosphere the same way, you know, I walk through our three-dimensional world. And this hidden biosphere, everything that I see is not true. It is, that's one of the most important things to talk about. There is a trickster element. There is a lies to it. Maybe it's just something from my mind or something that's pick up like a radio, another kind of wave, that's not in fact true. And I've learned the things that are true are the things that repeat and keep coming back again and again and again. Like I can't win the Kentucky Derby. I've seen the race. It's played the whole thing for me. And then I picked that horse and it doesn't do it. So obviously it doesn't care. Whatever it is, it doesn't care about that kind of stuff. So I don't even try that anymore. It was fun at the

beginning, but it's like, okay, you know, it just takes a couple of fails to realize that's not what's important here. Now, it's important to talk about this too. My eye gets tired when I use, when I see these upside images, right? Just like your eyes get tired from watching a movie or if you're watching a game or something like that, your eyes get tired. And my eyes dilate when something is arousing or exciting. And you cannot willful. dilate the pupil. It is impossible, which means it comes from an external stimuli. So that's two ways to know that my eyes get tired. It's coming externally because of that. And the third way is if you track my eyes, if let's say you're following a lion running across the savannah or an

upside image running across the wall, my eyes track smooth. It's called smooth pursuit. And there's no stochatic jumps. If you're faking it, you get jumps. So the reason I'm saying this is because it is outside of me. But once I engage with it, I can pull it internally. So now that I've got this image, let's say it is in fact a line running across the savannah, I can think, come towards me. Now the line will turn and, you know, come towards me and I'll think chase a gazelle, a gazelle appears and it chased it. Obviously, that is an internal response. I liken it to a physiological mechanism we don't yet understand, kind of like we hear with our ears, right? This sound is coming from externally, but my response is coming from the voice.

It's coming from an internal response. So I think that helps people understand that it is not a vivid imagination. It's not a monseye. It's something else. I wasn't sure what to make of all this, but I was definitely intrigued, especially because there was an even stranger aspect of Upsight. According to Tom, upsite was seemingly a medium for contact with non-human entities. Over time, I've accepted that this ability, upside vision is, let's call it a psychic ability, right? No other word for it. Right now, it's a sci ability. People are still going to have to figure it out. And it relates to remote viewing, precognition, telepathy, and lucid dreaming. But I'm not an expert in any of those things. There's people that have studied,

that do it much better than I, but it is in fact tied to it. And I do have certain abilities as it relates to that. When I was first doing this, and by the way, when I was first doing it, I didn't know I was remote viewing. I was just using upsight, right? I'm sitting there watching one night, and this may be considered astral projection. Remote viewing, it really doesn't matter. I see this ship. Remember, this is hologram. This is not in the room with me. This is a hologram. I stumbled upon a dozen grays on a ship standing around this table. It looks to me like the table is blank at first, but I get closer. I realize they're all looking down and they're remote viewing a town, right?

And they're looking at the people in the building and their eyes as the person would walk. The gray alien's eyes picked up that person, right? And it would pick up the person next to it. So it was almost like they were working as a chorus. They needed the person next to it to get a 360-degree view of what they were looking at. For what purpose, I don't know, but I knew they needed to be there as a team, and I knew they were working together. So I was actually watching them remote view or astrojecture, whatever you want to call it, a town in the U.S. Now, while this happened, these two gray aliens turned and they looked at me and they started coming towards me and I jumped out.

I was like, what, this is not okay. This is absolutely not okay. That was almost the first time I could tell when I'm engaged with this, these beings can see you. Once they know that you can see them in their environment and they know because it's like if you walk into a forest, I've described it like this. If you walk into a forest, you're going to see all these animals. Half of them are going to pay attention to you and half of them are not.

But if like a leopard or something sees you and he starts coming towards you, you're going to notice each other. This is kind of like that. This hidden biosphere, this is where they live or have access to or whatever. So that was one of the coolest things that ever happened. Now, it's funny because the grays, in the beginning, they were the biggest nuisance. I would be working on math and they would literally jump in and distract me. I mean, I still don't, to this day, I don't know why.

So they were kind of a nuisance. I don't know what the purpose of a gray is. I've seen those guys almost cut sideways. you know, or again, when I say I see it cut sideways, this is a holographic image. I still know if it's true, but I see it. They're half organic and half nanotechnology. I don't know which one. And I don't know if some of them are all organic and some of them are all technology.

And all this is some kind of sci-op created by somebody else to get us off track. All I do know is that they're definitely there in the organic metaverse. And when you're there, they see you and can interact with you without a doubt. To say that I was challenged by this, and more than a little skeptical would be an understatement. Despite my gut instinct that Tom was being honest about his experience, how could something like this be real? Tom had been posting about Upsight on Twitter for a few months,

and so I asked him if he had found anyone else who reported having this same experience. My reasoning was that if what he was saying was true, and if Upsight was an experience of some kind of an objective reality, then surely there must be other people who could see it too, right? Tom told me he hadn't found anyone yet, but he was confident that he would. He just needed to get the story out there. And hopefully, that would help him to find an open-minded scientist that would be willing to do the controlled testing to prove that what he was seeing was something distinct from simply some kind of imagination or hallucination. And he believed that I was the person who was supposed to help him tell this story.

And let me tell you, as much as I really liked Tom, and as empathetic as I was to his cause, and as much as I, despite my many questions, felt in my bones that he was being honest, I initially didn't feel like there was any way that I could possibly tell this story, for a few different reasons. The first was that, at this point, less than a year into the podcast, I still wasn't really dealing with experience or stories at all. I'd started the podcast with the intention of creating a rational and science-based on-ramp to the UFO phenomenon. I built my initial audience on that premise, and people were really responding to it.

And at that point in my own journey, I just didn't know how to make experiencer stories work within that framework. I didn't have any rational way to explain what he was telling me. I didn't feel like I had a solid foothold to start from. I was still in the very early stages of coming to terms with being an experiencer myself. I was in way over my head in terms of making sense of anything this strange. I didn't even know where to start. And I'd be lying if I didn't admit to being concerned about the stigma and the potential hit to my own credibility if I suddenly started talking about things like Upsight, especially since I had no way to explain how this could be possible. And it wasn't just the strangeness of Upsight that made Tom's story difficult to tell.

It was how Tom came to have this ability in the first place. Here's Tom reading the opening passages of his book, which describes the inciting events that led up to him developing upsite. December 2011, I'm about to set my house on fire. A wooden deck seems the most logical place to start. I've got a container filled with a few gallons of gas stored in the garage somewhere. We purchased it the same day we bought an emergency portable generator for our home. It's been sitting in the garage for the past two years waiting, waiting for its chance to fuel the generators. I've got bigger plans for it, much bigger.

I'm going to use it as a catalyst to burn my entire house to the ground. The family has left me alone for a few days. They say I'm acting strange. I little bit ruined Christmas. They left the day after to go see my wife's father in Virginia. It's good no one is here. I don't want anyone to get hurt. I just want the house to burn to the grounds and take all the lies with it.

I've had enough. A person can only take so much before they snap, and I've taken all I can take. When you think about how crazy the holidays can get, you don't typically think about burning down the house. That's mobness. Crazy for the holidays means hectic shopping malls and impatient drivers looking for parking spaces. Usually isn't involved setting the house on fire to get the bottom of a government conspiracy

see that your wife is somehow involved with. If everything goes as planned, my home will be in a full blaze in less than an hour. There'll be local news, helicopters overhead, fire trucks will be lined up and down both sides of the streets, and it will get primetime coverage on all the major news that works. And the rest of the media finds out what's going on. Inside, the coverage will go from coast to coast. I find the gasoline container next to the generator. It's heavier than I expected.

We have to lug it upstairs through the house. I finally get to the upstairs kitchen. There's a door that opens onto the deck. I pour the gas onto the wooden deck and step back. The gas spills across the deck covering the wood. Some gas falls between the wooden slats onto the wicker patio furniture below. I don't have a lighter, but I do have one of those long wooden matches that are typically used for lighting fires in the fireplace.

With a flick of my wrist, I light the match and toss it on the deck. The fire spreads fast. Within a minute, half the deck is ablaze, along with much of the patio furniture below. I'm mesmerized for a moment, thinking about what I've just done, not trying to burn down the house, but altering the course of my life forever. Tom's book is called Jesus Goes to Hollywood, a memoir of madness. It recounts the story of how a cocaine addiction eventually led to a severe drug-induced psychosis that ravaged Tom's life. Burning down his house was just the beginning of Tom's harrowing journey through addiction and mental illness, a journey which he recounts in unflinching detail. It paints the picture of what it's

like when someone truly loses touch with reality and the toll that it takes on them and everyone who loves them. I think that Tom is incredibly brave and courageous for sharing his story in the way that he has. He tells the ugly truth about what happened to him and he pulls no punches. The book moves like a freight train as Tom careens from one city to the next in the grips of psychosis. It's a fun and fascinating read, but a sobering one as well, especially knowing that this has happened to a real person that I actually know. The book is linked in the episode description if you want to check it out.

In the book and in real life, Tom did eventually get half. help. He got sober and reunited with his family. Against the odds, he found his way back home, back to himself, and back to a relatively normal life. Except for one thing, he suddenly found that he had abilities and capacities that he didn't have before. Upsight is perhaps the most profound and remarkable, but he also found that he suddenly had a brand new interest and propensity for math. But as I'm sure you can imagine, the book only made it harder for me to consider. how I could tell this story. I knew that to most people, it probably wouldn't sound like Tom had gotten better and then somehow developed these strange new abilities, but rather that his psychosis was just

manifesting in a new way. And as much as I liked Tom, I had to admit to myself that that was a possibility. It was, at the very least, a story that made sense. And yet, despite my misgivings, I felt drawn in by Tom's story in a way that's hard to explain. The podcast had started to take off at that point, and I had no shortage of people reaching out to me to share their own experiences. My inbox is constantly filled with stories that are every bit as fascinating as Tom's. But for some reason, it was Tom's story that stuck with me the most. Despite my doubts about being the right person to share this story with the world, I couldn't seem to put it down. This was the heart of my dilemma.

And all of this was further complicated by the fact that, At the time, I was deeply mired in doubts about my own sanity following my anomalous experience. As I discussed in the last episode, I found myself in a place where I didn't know if I could trust myself. There were many days where I literally felt like I was losing my mind, which was hard. But strangely, what was even harder were the days when I was able to face what had happened to me as a reality. The idea of losing my mind was scary, but at least I could wrap my mind. mind around that. I mean, that happens, right? But if what had happened to me was real, then everything that I thought I knew about the world was wrong in some fundamental way. And worse,

I feared that I was going to have to deal with that alone. All of this should have been enough for me to walk away from this story, and it almost certainly would have been, if it weren't for what happened next. Throughout our first several months of talking, Tom had been trying to get me to read a paper that he wrote on dark matter and dark energy with insights that he said were communicated to him through upsite. At that point, I was still working a full-time corporate job while working on the podcast on evenings and weekends. And so, like the basket of clean laundry that still needed to be put away, I just hadn't gotten around to it. That is, until one morning when I woke up and looked at my calendar and saw that I had a call with Tom scheduled for later in the day. I didn't want to have to

tell him again that I still hadn't read it. So I quickly pulled it up on my laptop, pressed print, and then went to the kitchen to grab some coffee. When I went back to pull the article out of my printer and looked at what was on the front page, I gasped. The image printed at the very top hit me like a bolt of lightning. It's hard to even describe the shock and confusion and the desperate sensation of being swept out to see that came over me. Because the thing that I was looking at was impossible, or at least it should have been. I mentioned in the last episode that the anomalous experience that I had in August of 2021 had shown me all kinds of things, some of which I remembered in fractured pieces, but most of which had slipped away like a dream. I knew the broad strokes of some of what I had seen.

There were insights about the nature of light and gravity and time that I could only half remember. But there were a small handful of things that, for whatever reason, I remembered with crystal clarity. And one of them was something that I had seen involving DNA. During my experience, I'd seen a strand of DNA that looked very much like the diagrams from textbooks and school, with two key differences. The first was that there was this luminous pulsing beam of what looked like pure energy that was flowing right through the center of the double helix. And the second was that, in between the chains of amino acids, there were these ring-like structures wrapped around the inside of the double helix. helix, and on these rings, there were hanging structures that looked like candy canes. In the aftermath of my experience, as I was trying to make any kind of sense of the fragments of

what I could remember, I kept thinking about that strand of DNA. It had been years since I took a biology class, and so I looked up some diagrams of DNA to see what those structures might have been. I thought that maybe this was just a memory from something I'd learned in school. But no matter where I looked, I didn't find anything that looked like what I had seen. No pulsing stream of energy up the middle, no rings with hanging candy canes. That alone made me begin to doubt the veracity of anything that I'd seen. What did it say about my experience if one of the few things that I could clearly remember seemed to be so inaccurate? And to be honest, I found a lot of relief in that thought. A very real part of me didn't actually want for my experience to have meant much of anything at all.

If it was just some kind of a waking dream or a mini seizure or any of the other things I tried to use to explain away what had happened to me, then I didn't have to deal with it. The walls of my world were still intact. And so maybe that's why the most overwhelming feeling that I felt when I saw the image at the top of the article that Tom had written was seething anger. Because there, in full detail, exactly the way I remembered it, was the DNA strand that I had seen during my anomalous experience. I was instantly furious in a way that I have been very few times in my life, in a way that even now is a little hard to square with the situation. But the reaction was instantaneous and all-consuming. At least part of that anger came from a deep sense of violation.

I had wanted to explain away what had happened to me because the alternative was something that I simply didn't want to face. Because if what had happened to me was real, if the entity that I'd encountered there was real, then something had essentially reached into my brain on a random August morning and turned me into someone else without my consent. And even the happiness and growing sense of fulfillment that I was getting from those changes couldn't be trusted. I couldn't trust myself because in a very real sense, I no longer belonged to myself. And then, there was the issue of the DNA. I wasn't, and frankly still am not, willing to conclude that the fact that someone else had apparently seen the same very specific structures related to DNA

meant that what either of us had seen had any objective reality. But surely it must mean something, right? But what? Was this important somehow? Was I supposed to learn about DNA? was this some kind of a scientific breakthrough that I was supposed to do what with exactly? I don't know any more about DNA than is taught in a high school biology class, and I've probably forgotten most of that. So if there was something important about DNA, why would I, of all people, be shown this? Everything within me rebelled against that idea.

It was preposterous on every conceivable level, and yet it had to mean something, right? And then there was the issue of Tom. Suddenly our stories were connected, and to be honest, I didn't know how I felt about that. I liked Tom. I believed him, and I wanted to help him. But like I said, his story was challenging to tell. And now suddenly, his story was my story. Somehow, this person who had been a complete stranger to me at the time that I'd had my experience had appeared out of nowhere in my life, and now what? It was clear to me that we were now in this together, but in what, and toward what end?

How had any of this happened? I tried to pull myself together to read the paper, but that first time through, my thoughts were too chaotic to do much more than skimit. My eyes were flying over the words, but I wasn't absorbing them. And then, about halfway through the paper, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. With a horrified gasp, I threw the paper across the room. This simply could not be. happening. Okay, so when I was in my early 20s, my best friend and I were up late on a weekend, drinking wine, and talking when we had this strange sort of shared epiphany. If I'd had the language

then that I have now, I might have called it a download. That word is admittedly a bit loaded for me still, but it feels apt in terms of what we experienced. It was like we both had the same complex, fully formed idea pop into our heads at the exact same second. I remember talking over each other and finishing each other's sentences, trying to explain the thing that we just understood. We were immediately scrambling for paper and something to write with so we could get it all down. It felt monumental and important. And even in the moment, I remember asking each other, wait, is this my idea or your idea? Did we just come up with this at the exact same second? The thing that we were both rushing to explain centered on the idea that the number line is wrong.

In school, we're taught to draw a number line with zero in the middle and then positive numbers go off to infinity on the right and negative numbers go off to infinity on the left. Suddenly, it seemed so ridiculous that I'd ever bought that because it was so obviously full of flaws. Negative numbers, I suddenly realized, weren't real in the way that I'd been taught. If you have three apples and you take away five apples, you don't have negative two apples, because I can't take apples that you don't have. If we're talking about negative apples or dollars or anything else, we aren't counting that thing. We're expressing an expectation of apples or dollars. We're saying that apples or dollars are owed, and that is a very different thing than saying that those apples or dollars exist and can be counted. And zero, well, zero suddenly

felt like the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. It was so clear in that moment that zero wasn't a number at all. It was a placeholder. We used it in a place where numbers and things are not, but it had no meaning on its own. If you have three apples and I take away three apples, you don't have zero apples because why are we even talking about apples? And if zero isn't a number, it means that nothing doesn't exist. The very idea of nothingness was a rather elementary misunderstanding based on some bad assumptions. Of course nothingness wasn't real. Non-existence wasn't possible. The answer to why there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is a fairy tale. Existence is the only thing that is and it exists because being is the only option.

And if all of that sounds like the ramblings of someone ignorant enough to think her drunk thoughts are deep, just know that it sounds that way to me too. While I've been assured, by my friend and philosopher, Dr. James Madden, that somewhere in that mess of a thought process, there are the seeds of ideas that have motivated some of the deepest conversations and theories about existence and mathematics. Nothing we thought that night rose to that level by any stretch of the imagination. We were two drunk college girls scribbling down half-baked ideas that we thought would change the world. I honestly can't even think about that night without cringing. Because, to be clear, we really did think that this was going to change the world. Somehow, we got it in our heads

that we needed to be able to prove that these ideas were ours and that we were the first to have them. And so we decided to get an envelope and a stamp and we mailed it to my friend's mom's house and then left her what I'm sure was a very messy voicemail asking her not to open it and to put it directly into the safe. Sorry, Cindy. By the next day, as you can imagine, we felt pretty silly. Ideas that seemed so brilliant the night before seemed less so in the light of day. And if it weren't for the fact that we'd mailed it to her mom, who eventually called to say that she'd gotten the letter and put it in the safe, we probably wouldn't have ever thought about that night again. It became an inside joke between us, and every once in a while we'd bring it up and have a good laugh about the night we'd solved mathematics and revealed the secrets of the universe. But here's the thing.

right smack dab in the middle of Tom's paper was a number line. And Tom seemed to be arguing that the number line was flawed, that zero was not the origin point. What he was proposing was a coordinate system with no point of origin and no negative numbers. Maybe this doesn't sound like much of anything to you. But to me, this was the most astounding synchronicity of my life. Between his arguments about the number line and currently unknown structures of DNA, this paper provided two deeply personal and incredibly pointed connection points between my story and Tom's. It would be difficult for me to even come up with two things that could have been in that paper

that would have been more profoundly startling or more deeply meaningful to me and only to me. And there was no way that Tom could have known these things. My husband didn't even know these things. And the DNA thing in particular was something that I'd never breathe. a word about to anyone, I'd never even doodled it. It felt like a giant flashing sign telling me to pay attention. And perhaps for the first time since this whole strange journey began, I really was paying attention. I'd spent over a year at this point trying to outrun the reality of what had happened to me in my own anomalous experience, even as it spilled over into every other corner of my life,

reshaping the topography of who I had been in profound and irrevocable ways. And now this whole thing seemed to involve Tom somehow, something that was as impossible to believe as it was to deny. Wherever this was going, I had the deep sense that I would be along for the ride, whether I wanted to be or not. I hopped on the call with Tom that morning still more than a little shaken. He was jubilant when I told him about the candy canes. He had been searching for a decade for a way to prove that there was some level of objective reality to what he was experiencing, and the fact that I was. I had somehow seen the same thing that he had seen, I'm sure felt like some kind of a foothold from which he could begin to make progress. And in a very real way, it was.

Despite all of my misgivings, I told Tom that if he could find a lab or a university somewhere that was willing to do a legit study on upside, and if they could find evidence that it was real, that I would tell this story. I'll admit that there was a part of me that felt like this might be my way out. my excuse to walk away from all of this once and for all. Tom had already spent years looking for a scientist who would be willing to take on his case. What were the chances that he would find someone? And beyond that, what were the chances that they would be able to actually show anything definitive about his abilities? But even then, as improbable as it seemed, I knew that he would.

And sure enough, a few short weeks later, Tom reached out to let me know that he had factored, a team of scientists that was willing to do the study. And that team was headed up by none other than the godfather of Paras Psychological Research himself, Dr. Dean Radin. As I'm sure you can guess since you're listening to this episode, that study was completed and the results were compelling enough for me to be making good on my word. And we'll get to that part. But first, I want to pause to add a little context and dive into some frameworks that can help to make a little more sense of everything that I've told you about so far. I am the daughter of a psychiatrist, well, two of them actually, if you count my stepmom, which I do. So, as you can imagine, I grew up

with a very particular perspective on mental illness. And while not anything close to being an expert on the topic, I've definitely had more exposure than your average person to the prevailing models used by those in the mental health field. Basically, I knew enough to know that everything thing that I've described so far wasn't just a series of strange events, but also very specific diagnostic criteria for mental illness. So for me to be able to meaningfully dispense with the idea that I was losing my mind, I needed to have some kind of a way to explain what exactly it was that was going on with me, and with Tom, and with me and Tom, and with so many other similarly impossible-seeming stories that I came across as I opened myself up to the world of anomalous experience.

And before we dive into this conversation, I just want to repeat again that I am not an expert on mental health. I'm relaying ideas and frameworks that I've found valuable in navigating my own personal experience, and I'm likely doing so imperfectly. Nothing that follows should be used by anyone to self-diagnose, to alter treatment plans, or to undermine the advice of your doctor. They went to school for well over a decade to learn this stuff. I am a lady with a UFO podcast who's read a few books. If there's a question about whether you should listen to me or listen to your doctor, there is no contest. Listen to your doctor. I just wanted to make sure that we're all clear on that before we proceed.

One of the most valuable resources that I found in trying to make sense of all of this is the book, Spiritual Emergency, When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, by Stanislav and Christine Groff. This book argues that a subset of intense, personal crises that are usually diagnosed within the modern psychiatric paradigm as being psychoses or a mental illness of some kind are actually profound transformative processes that hold the potential for personal growth and spiritual awakening. So what does that mean exactly? To understand that, we need to look a little more deeply into what psychosis is.

Psychosis presents in a lot of different ways, but in essence, these conditions are characterized by a deep inability to perceive the world in normal terms, and to think and respond emotionally in a way that is culturally and socially acceptable. So when someone claims to see things that no one else can see, to hear voices that no one else can hear, or to be involved in some kind of a grand conspiracy that doesn't seem to make sense, we generally assume that this person was suffering from psychosis. And as the authors argue, this is very often the case.

Modern psychiatry has identified underlying anatomical, physiological, and biochemical changes in the brain that can cause psychosis, and they have developed medicine and treatments that are very effective in helping people to mitigate and manage those symptoms. This kind of psychosis is what's referred to as an organic psychosis, and it unquestionably lies in the domain of medicine and science to treat. But there is another kind of psychosis that's a little trickier to pin down. This is a functional psychosis that can present with very similar and very distressing symptoms, but for which the cause is unknown. The authors argue that within this subset, we are largely making the assumption that this psychosis is caused by some kind of a mental illness, mostly because we don't have any other

way to define the cause. But that this isn't always the case. For example, in depth psychology, which was pioneered by psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, there's a strong argument to be made for a biographical model of psychosis. Basically, that trauma that happens to you throughout your life can cause psychological disturbances that can sometimes present a psychosis. And if psychosis is caused by something like unresolved childhood trauma, then it's going to take more than just a strictly medical treatment to help that person heal. The psychiatrist Carl Young vastly expanded upon this biographical

model by introducing the idea of the collective unconscious. Young believed that the human psyche has access to images and motifs that are universal in nature. They can be found in the mythology, religions, folklore, and art of cultures worldwide and across human history. These archetypes, as Young called them, can manifest in a person's life even if they have no previous knowledge of or exposure to them. This led him to believe that beyond the individual unconscious mind, there is a collective unconscious that all of humanity shares. And the authors argue that psychosis that comes from this unconscious realm of archetypes and myths are what they call a spiritual emergency. A spiritual emergency is a transformative psychological crisis triggered by a profound spiritual

experience or awakening, which is often overwhelming and disorienting, but which holds the potential for personal growth and healing when navigated with care. Spiritual emergencies can present in a wide spectrum of ways, but usually involve things like intense emotions often well beyond the range of what people experience in their day-to-day lives, visions and other changes of perception, as well as other physical symptoms that can range from tremors to feelings of suffocation. There are three categories of spiritual emergency, biographical, perinatal, and transpersonal. It's this last category, transpersonal, which is the most relevant here, so that's where we'll focus for the sake of this conversation. A transpersonal spiritual emergency involves images, ideas, and motifs that seem to have a source outside of the individual's personal history or current bank of knowledge.

The word transpersonal refers to transcendence of the ordinary boundaries of the self and includes the types of experiences that are often referred to as spiritual, mystical. religious, occult, magical, or paranormal. The authors describe it in the following way, quote, transpersonal experiences cannot be explained as products of neurophysiological processes within the traditional scientific framework, which holds that consciousness resides solely in the organ within our skulls. The main reason for this conclusion is the frequent observation that in experiences of this kind, we can, without the mediation of the senses, directly tap sources of information about the universe that lie outside the conventionally defined range of the individual psyche, end quote. Basically, this kind of experience falls outside the typical materialist paradigm,

which assumes that everything that exists is physical or can be fully explained in terms of physical processes, including mental states, consciousness, and abstract phenomena. I'm not going to make an argument against materialism here, But I did make it in the waking up inside the Cave series. So if you're struggling with this idea, I'll point you back to those episodes. 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. A transpersonal spiritual emergency is highly individual. and no two spiritual emergencies are alike. And yet, they do follow certain patterns in terms of their structure and content.

This allows them to be broken down into the following types. The shamanic crisis, the awakening of kundalini, episodes of unitive consciousness, psychological renewal through the return to center, the crisis of psychic opening, past life experiences, communications with spirit guides and channeling, near-death experiences, experiences of close encounters with UFOs, and possession states. I wish that we had time to go into all of these today, but we don't, so I'll just focus on the ones that relate directly to this story, starting with my own.

My anomalous experience that I described in the last episode pretty cleanly falls into the category of episodes of unit of consciousness. Here's how it's described in the book. Quote, in the states belonging to this group, one experiences dissolution of personal boundaries and has a sense of becoming one with other people, with nature, or with the entire universe. This process has a very sacred quality and feels like one is merging with the creative cosmic energy or God. The usual categories of time and space seem to be transcended, and one can have a sense of infinity and eternity. The emotions associated with this state ranged from profound peace and serenity to ecstatic rapture. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied these experiences in many hundreds of people, gave them the name, peak experiences.

While writing about them, he expressed sharp criticism toward Western psychiatry for its tendency to confuse such states with mental disease. According to Maslow, they should be considered supernormal. rather than abnormal phenomena. If they're not interfered with or discouraged, they typically lead to better functioning in the world and to self-actualization, a capacity to express one's potential more fully. Because of the vast available literature on unitive experiences,

we have not included an essay on this subject in the present work. We highly recommend Maslow's work for further study, end quote. And that's it. From there they move on to more interesting fare. It turns out that the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me, the thing that seemingly rewired my brain and set my life on a completely different path, the thing that made me fear that I was losing my mind and that I was definitely too weird to ever be understood by anyone ever again was actually so common and so well documented that the authors of spiritual emergency

didn't even feel the need to do more than mention it. And as unbelievable as that was to me at the time, I have since come to recognize that this is absolutely the case. After releasing the first episode in this series, I got hundreds, if not thousands, of messages from people telling me that they had experienced something very similar. And most of them had also been living under the assumption that they were alone in it. Despite how common this type of thing is, our culture largely doesn't recognize or acknowledge these kinds of experiences. And so when it happens to people, Most of them simply don't talk about it. And that's not just unfortunate and lonely, but it can be dangerous as well.

Based on my own experience, it's not hard for me to imagine how this all could have gone very differently, how the increasing sense of isolation, paranoia, and fear that I was losing my mind could have spiraled out of control into a genuine mental health crisis. I had a series of extremely lucky breaks that allowed me to process and integrate my experience in a way that ended up being really positive for me. First of all, my husband, friends, and family, despite not really understanding what had happened to me, were admirably open-minded and supportive. Despite my fears, they did not reject me.

And I was allowed the space in my life to work through it all on my own time, mostly through working on this podcast. I also just so happened to run into exactly the right people at the right time to help me make sense of things. most notably my now dear friend and collaborator Jay Christopher King. As most of you know, Jay is the director of the experiencer group, which is a private community that he co-founded to help people integrate their anomalous experiences. When I became friends with Jay, I still didn't think of myself as an experiencer

or even know much about that side of things. And I didn't have any idea about his extensive background with the anomalous. I just thought he was funny and I liked his vibe. but he just so happened to be literally one of the best people in the world that I could have in my corner when I was ready to go down that path. Like I said, lucky break after lucky break. Finding frameworks to help me understand what had happened to me, and most importantly, finding a community who had been through something similar was absolutely critical for me in making peace with it and in turning it into something positive. But not everyone is that lucky. There are so many people out there who are genuinely suffering and who think that they're alone.

And that's why it's so important that we talk about this stuff. And here's the thing. It would have been so easy for me to just stop there. I could have tied up my question about the nature of my anomalous experience with a nice, neat little bow, and walked away satisfied that I wasn't crazy. That would have felt good. It would have felt right. Sure.

the fact that so many people seem to have this very similar sort of spiritual experience that often changes their personalities, their values, and their lives only begs the further question of what exactly is going on such that that is the case. But just knowing that I wasn't alone and that what happened to me wasn't necessarily a sign of psychosis, or at the very least was a temporary psychosis that would pass, would have been enough for me to leave well enough alone. But Tom's story, and its inexplicable connection to my own, made that impossible. It may not mean anything to anyone else, and it's not something that I could ever prove to anyone, nor would I ever really care to. But I know what happened.

I know that I experienced some kind of profoundly different state of consciousness, and in that state I saw that strand of DNA with the weird candy cane structures. And I know that 18 months later, I saw that exact same thing in an artist. written by someone who had been a complete stranger. I could explain away every single other part of the story, but that detail haunted me. It was too odd and too specific to possibly be random. But what could that possibly mean? Were Tom and I both tapping into some kind of objective reality about DNA that has yet to be discovered?

Tom seemed to think that that could be the case. I'm much less inclined to believe that, but given the strength, of everything that has happened so far, I will begrudgingly allow that it can't be entirely ruled out. Phenomena like remote viewing seem to suggest that it is possible for people to access non-local information about things they've never seen. So I don't know, maybe. An idea that is somewhat easier for me to swallow is that it was some kind of a precognitive event, a glimpse of the future where I saw the things that I would eventually see in Tom's paper. That would also be very strange, but it's easier for me to accept that explanation because precognition is something that I've experienced before.

On New Year's Eve 2020, right after midnight, I was watching some fireworks the neighbors were setting off outside my window with my brother. Suddenly, completely out of nowhere, I had this deep and certain knowledge that my mom was sick. I barely had time to think about what I was saying, but I was just so sure that it was true, that I immediately turned to my brother and I told him that our mom was sick. that the sickness was in a particular part of her body and that the next year would be very dangerous for her. I had the sense that if she got sick, that her health would collapse like a house of cards and she could die.

Two days later, my mom told us that she had cancer in that exact part of her body that I had described. The next year was spent with her undergoing chemotherapy treatments during the height of the pandemic. And we lived every day with the fear that if she got sick while she was so immunocompromised, that could be the end for her. Thank God that didn't happen. But while the idea of precognition is slightly more palatable to me because I've experienced it for myself,

that doesn't make it a better answer than any other. The bounds of reality aren't defined by what is familiar to any one individual, and it certainly doesn't account for all the other strange aspects of the story. In fact, the idea of precognition doesn't even really account for its own. self. I'm still left with more questions than answers about what causes it, how it works, or why it was that I saw that thing in particular. When it comes to the truly anomalous, any explanation that we can give is never really an explanation, only an infinite regression of more questions. The more we reach for the truth, the more it recedes from our grasp.

And if I'm being honest, this is probably the real reason that this episode has been 10 months in the making, because I haven't known how to tell this story. I started this podcast as a rational science-based on-ramp to understanding the UFO phenomenon, but over the last three years, I've increasingly strayed deep into the dark forest. I led you all here, and now it feels like some kind of a betrayal to admit that I'm lost. But as hard as that is to admit, I think that it was also inevitable, that any truly rigorous and honest inquiry into the UFO phenomenon will bring you to this place where you have to admit, not just that you don't have any answers about the nature of the phenomenon, but that any other answers you thought you had about the nature of our reality,

and in fact the very foundation of human knowledge, is built upon continually shifting sands. So I want to talk about what I see in Tom's story and what I think it all could mean, but I also want to be transparent about the fact that my ideas on this have changed and evolved a lot over the last couple of years, and I fully anticipate that they will continue to do so. These are just my best thoughts at the moment. I offer them in the hopes that they can be useful and that they can serve as a starting point for further conversation. But what I do not have are answers. So let's dive into it.

What exactly happened to Tom? First of all, I think it's important. to acknowledge that his experience of psychosis began as what was undoubtedly an organic psychosis. Basically, as Tom himself describes it, he did too many drugs and broke his brain. And indeed, prolonged cocaine use can cause cocaine-induced psychosis. This can happen when a combination of factors such as dopamine dysregulation and sleep deprivation cause a person to develop paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions. And further, prolonged cocaine use, can also trigger or exacerbate those kinds of symptoms in individuals who have a genetic predisposition

to certain mental disorders like schizophrenia. To be clear, Tom has never been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I only bring it up because in his book he draws parallels between his own thought processes and delusions at the height of his psychosis with those of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician from a beautiful mind, John Nash, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Tom's psychosis was profound and lasted a couple of years. During that time, he jumped from city to city, at times believing that he was being tracked by satellites as the result of a vast government conspiracy that somehow involved his wife. At other times, he believed that he was being communicated with by an unknown intelligence through the music he was listening to. At another point, he believed that he was

literally Jesus and was being pursued by demons. Once again, I'm not a doctor, but it seems entirely possible given the severity of what Tom experienced during those years that perhaps he has a certain neurochemical profile that made him more vulnerable to experiencing psychosis, and the drug use triggered and exacerbated that. But whatever the case, I think it's safe to say that his psychosis had a pretty clear physiological and biochemical cause, and it required medical intervention and a commitment to sobriety for him to be able to get that under control, which he has. But there's so much more going on in Tom's story than just that. One of the complicating factors in telling this story is how closely some common manifestations

of what authors Stanislav and Christina Groff describe as spiritual emergencies mirror some of the most typical aspects of psychosis. For example, in the type called psychological renewal through the return to center, people can believe that they are at the center of events that have cosmic significance, that they are engaged in a battle between the forces of good and evil, and sometimes that they are literally God or Jesus or some other deity. In the type it is classified as experiences of close encounters with UFOs, a person's confrontation with something that they experience as a higher or more advanced intelligence can cause people to develop certain beliefs about their own uniqueness or special

purpose because of their seeming ability to draw the attention of these superior beings. The authors allow that such encounters likely do happen, but the spiritual emergency arises from the way that these interactions can disrupt someone's psyche, inflate their ego, and cause them to believe that they are on a mission of cosmic importance. These things aren't just manifest in Tom's story. There are aspects of them in mind as well. And having grown up around the mental health field, I've heard plenty of stories about the run-ins between multiple residents in a mental health facility who all believe that they are Jesus. So these types of delusions aren't at all unusual. Many instances of psychosis have these features in common. So that begs the uncomfortable question of whether or not we can really tell the difference between spiritual emergency and psychosis.

Is it just a distinction without a difference? Around this time last year, I was deeply involved in asking myself these hard questions. I had the opportunity at that time to interview Dr. Dean Radin, chief scientist at ions, which had taken on Tom's case. So I asked them what he thought. Here's what he had to say. Well, so my riff on that is that I think what we currently diagnose people as being mentally ill is if they're not able to work in society, they're not able to do things productively in society. That's where some of the diagnosis comes from. And they're disturbed by their experiences. So if you hear voices and could care less and say, oh, that's Joe, he's an invisible whatever, but it doesn't bother you.

You know, he's still grounded and able to take a job and all that stuff. But just when it becomes disturbing, the voice told me to do this. It's, you know, voices are constantly in my head all the time. I can't do anything. That's when you need to have an intervention for that person's own sake, because they're going to be dangerous to themselves or others. So that's definitely something that's worthwhile. The other question, though, is in another kind of society, you'd have shaman's,

in tribes. The shamans had to be taken care of because they were not quite on the beam. They were on some other beam. But the beam that they were on where they would talk to spirits and get information about things at a distance and all that were extremely important for the tribe. And the tribe knew that. And the tribe would take care of that person. So that when the shaman got some message about something, they would pay really close attention to it. We don't have any room for shaman's anymore. So some of them end up being diagnosed as crazy, essentially, and been suppressed, or they don't want to take the drugs and they end up on the streets. So as differently structured society, some of those people, not all, some of them would

probably be identified as being a natural shaman. They don't act and look the same way as other people do because they're not on the same beam, but the information that they can convey is, in many cases, important for the survival of the tribe. So how many shaman do we have out there living on the streets who would be extremely valuable as like canaries in the coal mine for no other reason saying, well, we have better do something about fill in the blank. Otherwise, we're going to be in serious trouble.

Well, we don't pay attention to those people because we're modern and sophisticated and we have a different worldview, which doesn't allow that. that kind of phenomenon to exist. But I think it does. The historical evidence makes it very clear that it exists. What Dr. Raiden said makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know exactly how we should address the complexities of psychosis and mental illness and spiritual emergencies and everything in between. That's way above my pay grade. But it does seem like we would be best served by evolving our understanding of these things in a way that allows for more nuance. After all, we're talking about people here, and people are complex.

Once again, I'm not going to spend time in this episode arguing against our materialist paradigm, but suffice it to say that we know that it's flawed. We know empirically and unambiguously that there is more to our reality that could be reduced down to physical processes. Things like ESP, remote viewing, and other sci abilities have been proven again and again in a lab. If you want to hear more about that, I really recommend the new podcast from Mitch Horowitz called Extraordinary Evidence ESP is Real. But the TLDR version of that is that despite the stigma, we know that these things are real and we've known for a long time. We have more than enough evidence to conclude that a human being is more than just chemical reactions

in the brain. And so we need an approach that treats people as more than just that. We also have plenty of evidence that there is an aspect of human consciousness that seems to be connected to the consciousness of other humans in a manner that seems to closely align with Young's collective unconscious. And so we need an approach that acknowledges that too. Applying a strict binary of crazy, not crazy, or healthy, not healthy, to the complex inner world of human being, based entirely on the extent to which their thinking and behavior conforms to social norms isn't working. Consensus reality isn't the measure of all that is. Other cultures have managed to find a way to both care for and make room for people who have experiences that fall outside of that and to find

value in what they have to say. It seems like we should find a way to do the same. I also want to say something about synchronicities, though like with so much of this story, it's hard to know exactly what to say. But given how central synchronicities are to everything that happened, I'm going to try anyway. First of all, I think it's important to note that synchronicities are one of the most common threads within spiritual emergency, and not just spiritual emergency, but spiritual and mystical experiences of all kinds, as well as encounters with UFOs and non-human intelligences. Having spent the last three years deeply entrenched in the world of uphology, I can tell you that whether they had admit it publicly or not, just about everyone who is working in this field finds that their lives

are suddenly overrun with profound synchronicities that are as startling as they are seemingly meaningful. But it's not just in the world of the weird that synchronicities are experienced. If you ask people if they've ever had a coincidence that was so seemingly impossible and meaningful that they couldn't explain it, most people will admit that they have. Synchronicities are something that appear in most people's lives at some point or another, often at a pivotal moment where there is a big decision that needs to be made. And these synchronicities can be so personal and so startling that they change the direction of a person's life, often leading them to better outcomes and deeper levels of personal fulfillment. It's hard to know exactly what that means or what causes synchronities,

but it does suggest a deeper level of meaning and connection in our reality than can be explained by the materialist paradigm. But as with everything else involved in this conversation, it's not as simple as that, because there can be a dark side to synchronicities. People who start to see connections in everything, or who start to believe that every coincidence, no matter how small or mundane, contain some deep meaning, can quickly start to lose touch with reality. Following synchronicities can become a destructive and dangerous cycle. In his book, Tom describes his thinking during his psychosis very much in this way. He explains that when he was deep in it, he believed all of his ideas. If he had a thought or saw a connection between something, he simply believed

that it was true, no matter how absurd or unlikely. And those beliefs caused him to do some pretty dangerous and self-destructive things. So there is obviously a need for a level of balance and discernment when approaching seemingly meaningful synchronities in our lives. But where should we draw that line. Once again, that's hard to say, but I had a really fantastic and enlightening conversation with Sharon Hewitt-Rollett last year on exactly this topic, and she has some great suggestions for how to frame the significance of synchronicities. I'll have that episode linked up in the episode description so that you can check it out if you want to learn more. But for the sake of argument, let's take it as a given for a moment that synchronicities occur, that they emerge from some

deeper layer of meaning in our reality and that they can provide meaningful guidance to people in their lives. If that's the case, then what was my synchronicity with Tom trying to tell me? What was the point of all this? My thoughts on that have changed over time and continue to evolve. But right now, I tend to think that the purpose wasn't about the DNA or the number line or any of that, but that rather it was to get my attention and to keep it on something that I otherwise would have shied away from. Nothing about dealing with the events I've shared in this episode was easy for me. It took me to dark places in my own mind. It challenged everything about my worldview and my self-concept.

It shook me to my core. And even after grappling with it for a few years now, I still don't feel like I have any real answers. In short, it humbled me. And I think that's a good thing. I think that to do this work and to do it in a way that is useful and that has integrity, that I needed to be humbled. I needed to be less sure of myself. I needed to be able to sustain a state of mind where I question my own thoughts even as I'm having them.

I wouldn't have gotten there on my own, and I'm so grateful to whatever unknown forces put this story in my path in such a way that I couldn't shut it out. And I also think that I was supposed to tell this story, although I still don't have a real handle on why. Time will tell if I'm right about that and what the purpose might be if there is one at all. All I can do is show up in this moment and do the things that I feel I'm supposed to do while bringing my best efforts and intention to it. That's the best that anyone can do. And finally, if we're going to talk about what happened to Tom, we have to talk about upside. Because as I hinted earlier, Tom spent a week in a lab at ions where they ran tests trying to determine what they could

about the reality of the strange new ability that he claimed to have developed in the aftermath of his mental breakdown. And almost unbelievably, they did find evidence of a distinct and anomalous brain state that Tom exhibits when he's using upsight. It's not just his imagination. Something is going on there. That paper has not been published yet, but I have interviewed the scientists who worked with Tom and reviewed an early version of that paper, and the findings are fascinating. Once that paper is published, I'll do an update on this story with part three in this series to dive into exactly what they found, and how Tom's life has changed since getting these results. But suffice it to say, if we're going to grapple with what happened to Tom,

we have to grapple with upside. But how do we do that? How are we supposed to make sense of the fact that everything that Tom went through seemingly gave him a strange new sciability? The best model that I found was introduced to me by Dr. Jeffrey Kriple in the first interview that I did with him last year. Dr. Kriple is the J. Newton-Raser-Charen philosophy, and religious thought at Rice University, and the author of books such as The Superhumanities,

The Flip, and How to Think Impossibly. I'm going to play a part of that conversation in which Jeff is laying out an idea that is referred to as the filter thesis. He's speaking about the filter thesis here, specifically in the context of what he calls the flip, which is something that happens to people when their worldview shifts radically from the typical materialist paradigm to one that recognizes a larger and more complex reality. But the filter thesis can also be applied

to help explain why it is that some people have anomalous experiences and or suddenly develop siabilities that they never had before. And what all of these things have in common is that they very often

happen in the wake of significant trauma. Here's what Jeff had to say. 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 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. So basically, if the filter thesis is correct, it would explain how something like a drug-induced mental breakdown could cause a person to develop a new sciability. If upsight is, as Tom believes, giving him access to. to parts of reality that our brains usually filter out, then the physical and emotional trauma that Tom went through could have punctured his space suit, as Jeff puts it,

allowing things to come in that he hadn't been able to see before. It would be impossible to know for sure if that's what happened to Tom, but it's a possible explanation that I find to be particularly compelling. As I spent the last year working on Cosmosis, this was an idea that came back again and again through that work. In talking directly to experience, and endeavoring to tell their stories in as unflinching away as possible, the relationship that trauma and even addiction have with anomalous experiences and anomalous abilities

became impossible for me to deny. These things are all connected in some real way. And I think that's probably one of the many reasons why these things are so hard to talk about. The stigma around any kind of anomalous experience causes people's sanity and integrity to be called into question. And when you mix that all up with the fact that these things very often do coincide with significant trauma and substance use or abuse, that only makes it harder for people to be taken seriously when these things do happen. But to be clear, these things do happen. Our consensus reality and our popular scientific paradigms are struggling to keep up. But we know that these things happen, and they happen all the time. And if we're going to find a way to integrate

the full spectrum of human experience, to have care and compassion for people who are struggling in isolation with things that they can't explain, and make real progress in understanding who we are and what our place is in this magnificently complex cosmos in which we find ourselves.

We're going to have to get comfortable with the messy details. Until next time. We've made a tremendous number of mistakes. Perhaps the first and most crucial error we made was the agricultural revolution. The agricultural revolution doomed us to a life of subservience to crops.

It made us sedentary, which was not only bad for us, but bad for the earth. It encouraged exponential and largely unsustainable population growth, and it set us up for a system of classes and subjugation because now we had a way to store

and control the distribution of food. I think another catastrophic mistake we've made is in the creation and spread of AI. I think AI poses a serious existential threat, and if we don't put some serious guardrails around it soon, we're going to be in trouble. It's human to err. How we learn and grow from our mistakes is important.