Mysterious Universe - 35.19 - MU Podcast - The Inner Signal

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Welcome back! This week we continue from last week's extension with Colin Wilson's The Occult, and his interesting perspective on what these heightened states are, how they are achieved and maintained, as well as some notable characters associated with the topic. We also question why this area of research is so rife with charlatans and fakes? As always, make of this what you will, but Wilson really makes a great case for all of it. Welcome to your Plus+ Extension, and thank you for joining us on Plus+! This is a weird, wild realm we have here, riddled with strange happenings in the sky. High strangeness is intimately interwoven with everyday-ness. Today, we examine a smattering of seemingly unconnected events, accounts, and perspectives of some of the most bizarre encounters by some day-to-day dwelling, normal folks just living out their lives and then, suddenly…Whammmy, they are visited by the freaky, and it woos them into further investigation. The Occult: A History Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus: History. Magick. Psychedelia. Ufology The Temple of High Witchcraft: Ceremonies, Spheres and The Witches' Qabalah Éliphas LéviPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click HERE. A small compilation of oddly shaped UFOs The Varied Shapes of UFOs: A Review of Reported Phenomena The What's What of UFOs: The Five Most Common Shapes Silver Screen Saucers: Sorting Fact from Fantasy in Hollywood's UFO Movies The 1973 UFO Chronology - A World-Wide Wave LinksLinks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Oh, fuck, I fucked that up. Wow. No, that's okay. 15. That's okay. 3519, right? I'm making sure I'm right. 3519.

Okay. Okay. Go ahead. Welcome to Mysterious Universe season 35 episode 19. Now that we got that right. I am Joe Hodgson. Joining me as always is Brandon Thomas. How do?

It feels like it's been a minute, so we're rusted. on the intro, but we'll get it. That's what the magic of post-editing is. It's beautiful. I'll make you sound great. Or I can leave this in. You know, either way, whatever you want. So if you're hearing it, it's because Joe decided to leave it in.

If not, you didn't. So welcome. And welcome to all the new listeners and the new plus subscribers. Always glad to have everybody here. And also, of course, the YouTube listeners, I would say viewers, but not so much yet. But you can stare at it. In time. in time.

Yeah. You can stare at our great artwork that we prompt. Yeah, it's a cool graphic. We told AI to make. Yeah. On this episode, we're going to be going back into the occult by Colin Wilson. And if you're on Plus, you will be familiar with the groundwork we laid for that last Tuesday. And, or was it the last extension?

Something like that. I think it. I think it was that Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? I honestly can't remember. Go ahead. I don't know. But this, as I told the plus subscribers, this is a huge book.

And it's taken over a week and a half, actually, to kind of wrap my brain around it and try to understand what he's talking about in here. But he actually does a really good job. And if you've never heard of this dude before, he has so many books out there. And also, as I explained on the last show, I'll be going into his follow up to the occult, which is mysteries. Another huge book. It is thick. It is dense. It is girthy.

And that's more like story driven, but I wanted to get a good foundation for what he thinks about, you know, esoterica and the occult in general. And just to kind of recap the last show, because you know how I do that, he kind of went into not medieval, but like ancient people and like what magic or the occult kind of looked like back then and where it came from. And he just keeps going back to this idea that it's way more based on consciousness. and your intention than magic words or spells or rituals or anything like that. So we're going to be going a little bit more into that and also probably end up on some Crowley. But before we get into that, what do you have coming up in plus? Oh, this all sounds great, by the way. I'm going through Colin Wilson's repertoire here, philosopher and novelist.

The one you're doing now is the occult of history from 1971? Yep. Okay, he has so many, I mean, beyond the occult, the space vampires. How cool is that? Yeah, he does a lot of novels in fiction, too. Beyond the occult. He's got some unsolved mystery stuff. He's got Spider World Tower, sort of about the 9-11.

How you doing there? Just really cool. Now, for the extension, I've got two words for you. Hot ass chaff. Nice. That's what we are doing. And we're just going to go full bore for some unusual humanoid, some unusual shape-shifting UFOs.

I'm very interested as of yet in the ideal of these craft, whatever folks are seeing. Again, we know that there's probably a separation between the military and the what's going, if there is something else going on. And we're just going to kind of talk about that a little bit, as well as just some bizarre cases. It'll make you go, huh? And like, what? Nice. And we're just going to have fun with it, man.

That's it. It's going to have nothing to do with politics. How about that? I can tell you that. That sounds fantastic. Come on. That's why we're here. Get your mind off the, uh,

the mundaneness of stupid shit like that. Yeah. But it does have to do with apparent real life, or at least people who, you know, say that they have abilities or whatever, but we'll be getting into that. That's what's great is if you, I mean, it's all real life if you pay enough attention to it.

And so if something's got your attention, then it's real life for you. But let's say that you then just suddenly figure out that you've got a choice that you can allocate your attention to something else and come hang out with us for a little bit. Exactly. And just know that, you know, jangling keys that are loud and noisy with obnoxious talking heads are simply that. Yep.

It's more annoying than anything. Just pictures on a screen. Yeah. If you separate yourself out from it far enough, it's just annoyance. It's like, it gets boring, doesn't it? It's like the dark, man. I just got bored with it. So I'm excited to hear about the continuation of Colin Wilson's work here.

This is great. Yeah. So I kind of had to separate this whole toome out into about, I think I have about 12, of different sections that I categorized it in. And so just to, if you listen to the last show, you'll know kind of where we came from at the first part, but we just kind of, he established the existence of these heightened states, as he calls them, and some of the dangers or distortions of it. And a couple real world examples of artists in the flow state or this altered state

that people get in. And then, so then he moves into like shamans and, um, magicians. and magicians, Kabbalists, that kind of thing, and eventually to yeah, Scrowle.

Ooh-hoo. So, what a gober, man. Can we just, what a fucking goober? Why? Why are folks?

Such a goober. It's like, God damn it, what was his name? The dude who was freaking in hanging out with the Romanos, it took forever to kill him, real tall,

Russian, somebody's yelling it right now. I'm sure. Damn it. I'll look it up, but it's like that dickhead because he's just a dickhead. And people were just like, oh my God, it's so sexy mysterious and he's not. He's just a dickhead, probably.

Anyway, but please, sir. Is this from the 1800s or? Yeah, it was like late 1800s. He hung out with the Romanoff's, Rasputin, Jesus, why was that so difficult? Somebody's yelling it. It's a weird name. It's a weird name.

But this dude, freaking weird, banged everyone. And like, what is that? What's the sex appeal? Like, what is this? Why do you go into a pyramid with this dude and let him pop you in a pooper. He's so hot. Because of the hat.

Is it the hat, Joe? Probably. Okay. Did you see how he held his thumbs? Man, it's just so fucking appealing. Get out of here. These are the people who write into folks who are on death row, by the way. That's who I think is proud of this for.

The lady, I can change him. He's so committed. Look how passionate he is. He killed like three people and all, like, his family and kids. But look how passionate. I can change him. He's got a twinkle in his eye.

Or like that guy. a couple years ago that went famous for his mugshot because he's like a half black dude that had blue eyes and they're like, oh my God, it's so hot. Holy shit. What is? That's a different level of crazy. Or the crazy white chicks that are still drooling over Luigi Mangione,

like, I don't understand it. I love it, the confusion, right? It's, yeah, he did horrible things, but look, he's got a cute butt. You know, it's that kind of shit. It's come on, man. Yeah, Bill Hicks had a thing on this where he was talking. talking about some lady talking about dating Satan. He's like, but he's Satan. He's the prince of darkness. She's like, he's mysterious. You don't know him like I do? I can change him.

Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we do have comments about people saying we get off topic, but that's how we do it. So, sorry about that. There is no such thing, my friend. There is no such thing. So yeah, Colin Wilson here. So instead of jumping just straight into these medieval magicians or secret societies, he goes back way further than that to early humans and tribal and basically pre-civilization. And he kind of does that because these people weren't living inside the same narrow mental box that we do now, that we are now. They didn't have these rigid scientific frameworks or a strict separation between inner and outer reality that,

or especially important, the constant background noise that we have in modern life and all this distraction and all that. And we'll get into some of that too. but for these early humans, their world was way more raw and just dangerous and immediate. And according to Wilson, probably way more alive, depending on how you want to,

you know, define that. But one of the big things he goes to in this next section here is how he reframes these primitive belief system. So modern thinking tends to go, oh, these people believed in spirits because they were ignorant.

But he kind of flips that around and says, well, what if they experience the world as alive and their beliefs are just a way of explaining it. Yes. Because if your perception is a little more open and less filtered than it is now, then you would probably naturally experience things like, you know, nature and the forces behind events and maybe meanings and coincidence or what we call synchronicities now. And instead of saying, oh, this is all in my head back then, you'd say, oh, there's spirits here.

a different explanation, maybe the same, you know, basic experience. But, and this is where the, the idea of the shaman first comes in, and he talks about them as kind of the first real attempt at working with these deeper states intentionally. So the shaman isn't just, you know, a storyteller or a priest or something like that. He's, he's somebody who enters these altered states and interacts with what he perceives as other realms and then brings back information or maybe, you know, some kind of he, you know, some kind of he. healing or a shaman medicine man, whatever, they go into these altered states and then say, oh, they took, what I learned was you learn that you use this plant to cure this ailment or you combine these two plants and you get ayahuasca. I mean, that's the story of ayahuasca is that the plants themselves told them how to make it.

Yes, I love that. But more importantly with shamans, a shaman isn't usually a stable or average person. And a lot of shamans go through this kind of a breakdown or a crisis or, you know, they experience visions or maybe a severe psychological upheaval of sorts. And they come out of it changed. And that kind of goes back to what we talked about in the first episode on this book is that it's that same pattern again. You have this breakdown, this altered perception, and then new abilities or maybe at least new interpretations or, you know, something to that effect. But in tribal societies, instead of being labeled insane or isolated, that person gets a role and they become useful. Wear this feathered hat.

You get up there to start lopping people's heads off. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And he, yeah, Wilson does go into talking about how shamans in early cultures used different methods to shift consciousness between drumming was a big one. Drumming, dancing, chanting, all that kind of thing, even fasting. and importantly, sometimes substances, and all of it was aimed at one thing,

which is changing your normal state of awareness. And once you change that state, you might feel separated from your body or experience visions or even encounter maybe symbolic figures or entities, whatever you want to call them, or get this access to information that you couldn't normally explain. And again, he's not really saying that all of the experiences are literally what they appear to be.

He's just saying that there's a consistent pattern of humans experiencing these things when consciousness is pushed past its normal limits. And this is where he kind of dials in his definition of magic, too, which for primitive man, magic wasn't like stage tricks or fantasy nonsense. It was more of an attempt to influence reality through will and consciousness. And maybe that brings to mind things like rain dances or. you know, putting a feather and some incense over somebody to heal or, you know, protection from danger, sigils, that kind of thing.

And from a modern perspective, it's pretty easy to say, yeah, that didn't work, duh. But he's not really convinced it's that simple. Greg Braden has a story of a shaman that told him a story of the time that he was called out to a village to make it rain for the village. Okay, it had been drought for months and all this stuff. Guy comes out, does his thing, stands barefoot in the ground, just took his shoes off, closed his eyes for a few moments, held his hands out, just slightly by his side, barefoot and the dry dirt, and then walked off. It rained right after this dude left, it starts raining for weeks. They asked him what he did.

He said, I just felt the rain between my toes and the mud in my feet, and I felt the rain falling on my hands and the smell of the rain in the air, and I just focused on that. And then it rate, they had to call him back out to turn it off because it worked too well. Sort of the silver nitrate guy. The government ended up suing the guy. They told to quietly make weather. and then it did too well flooded out town so they had to sue him to get remedy for the property destruction anyway i think that just happened in dubai recently did it amazing amazing these what a great time to be alive but this ideal came from um the presupposition of going

ahead and thanking in in in advance of its occurrence so this is where it leads to the practical application where you don't say be safe to your child or your spouse whenever they run off or somebody you give a shit about you say thank you for being safe sort of like the shaman came up there and he just said thank you for the rain it starts raining yeah it's the uh it's the idea of manifestation or the you know the secret which is just cringe at this point but it's yes the idea is actually sound as far as these practices go because you're you're focusing on something already having happened that's what you're getting at so yeah it every book i've ever read on this says the same thing it's it's not wishing for something or just focusing on it you're living as if that's

of the case. And then that's what makes it happen because you're you're creating the conditions for it to be like that, something like that. Exactly. And most of that is surrender. It's letting go that old self as it goes and it's surrender. It's just going, okay, well, I'm going to trade this out for that. So he does say that some of these practices that they might have had real effects, but maybe just not in the way they were explained. And that's, so the environment matters too. he touches on that and that's kind of subtle but it's important because primitive humans lived in these environments where their very survival depended on their attention. There was constant danger. Their awareness had to be razor sharp.

So their nervous systems were probably tuned a bit differently than modern man. They couldn't afford to be distracted and numb and dulled the way we are now with doom scrolling and bed rotting and all these Gen Z phrases. But all this constant noise in the background, you know. Let alone, like, so you think of the people, have you seen the montage of people walking out into traffic on their phones or just getting fucking plowed into or walking into fountains or something? The fountains are my favorite because they're just a pool of water. Not only that, it's like making noise in front of you.

Can you imagine these folks out in the jungle trying to survive, like looking for a GPS signal and then falling into a dim river into the mouth of a gator or something like that? They'd laugh at us. Oh my God. It's so great. Yeah, so you have this constant background noise and information overload and just distraction in general.

And we've kind of traded that depth of awareness for convenience and what we call safety now, right? And his suggestion is that in doing that in modern times, we may have blunted certain faculties that were once a lot stronger. And not really because we evolved past them, but more because we just kind of stop needing them. Yeah, you ignore them. You consider them vestigial organs and you stop paying attention to them. Yeah, like your appendix. Who needs that? Yeah, something else.

Yes, exactly. Man. And this does overlap with the animals, too. And that ties back to what we covered a little bit of in the first episode is animals navigate these huge distances and they can sense danger and they respond to these subtle environmental cues. And they do it without conscious reasoning. And he's saying that primitive humans were probably closer to that level of sensitivity, but with the added twist that we had self-awareness, which means we could experience these things and also reflect. on them. And I've heard that a lot with the difference between, you know, animal and human cognition is that we have the ability to perceive past and think about the future. And really, animals just

kind of live in the moment. And they're constantly responding to the present, not being depressed about the past or anxious about the future. Which is advantageous for somebody living on the Serengeti. The example I've heard used in this exact same scenario is that an animal's nervous system whenever they're being chased by a lion or something like say you're a gazelle you're being chased by the line oh no once the chase is over okay you got away all right they got your slower buddy good he was a dickhead anyway they you get away now you don't think about that lion for the rest of the day your heart rate goes down and you go right back to eating there's no sort of like oh god i got to think about that or man i miss gary there may be some emotional connection to losses in the herd

and things like that mostly probably survival based i would say but also yeah i'd say animals probably fucking dig on each other like that. But it's just interesting to think about that animals don't, yeah, like you said, lament and sit there and create cancer within themselves worrying about shit or thinking about past stuff. Right. They're free in a certain sense. And anybody who owns a cat knows that. It's like, oh, man, I hope I reincarnate it as a cat. They sleep two thirds of their lives, take a shit, eat, and then go back to sleep.

It's like, oh, I would. Yeah, sure. Maybe they can't do the things humans can do. but I also don't think they give a shit. Yeah, but then you reincarnate as a cat. And really your job to sleep all that time is to you've got to find a home to where your body can be safe enough for you to astral project and go in the spirit realm. And you're exhausted all the time. So really your body is just sort of this bullshit vehicle that you anchor into every now and then.

So you really need to cuddle up to a good home to kind of lay in the sun. That's why they're so tired all the time. Yes. And it's interesting what you said about animals aligning to magnetic fields. You know that dogs often turn circles to align themselves with Earth magnetic fields before pooping. And do you know what access they prefer? South? You set your clock to it.

North and South. Yeah, they'll face north and south most times. Whenever they're spinning around, that's what they're looking for. And here I thought every time I take my dog out to take a dump, she was just pointing her ass at me because she wanted me to see it. But no, it's because I'm at the North Pole, actually, from where she poops. We can't rule that out because she could poop face in South too. And usually the reason they face the other direction so you have their back.

It's like a safety thing. So they'll poop the other way. It's very sweet kind of. They're like, look at my but hole and keep me safe. You're like, okay, but north and south, dude. And also, did I do good, dad? Look at that log. Check it.

So, yeah, according to Wilson, though, that's where magic begins. It's not just the basic sensing of things, but trying to understand and use it. And then we get into the problem of interpretation. And this is where it gets a bit messy, because once you have these experiences, you kind of need to explain them. And primitive explanations usually were symbolic or mythological and maybe literal, but in ways that don't really cleanly jive with reality as we know it. So instead of saying, oh, I entered an altered neurological state and accessed subconscious processing, they would say, I traveled to the spirit world and spoke to beings. Yeah. And he's not even making fun of that. He's just saying the experience

might be real, but the explanation might be off or off as far as, you know, we would talk about it now. Yeah, a lot of it's ineffable. Ineffable. How do you articulate it? And people have different ways of doing that. You do the best you can with the references you've got, you know. Kenneth Arnold says, skipped like a saucer over water.

It was the newspaper guy that quoted him as saying flying saucers. So it's just the way you can describe it. Yeah. And it's like the telephone game. It gets distorted over time. Sure. And this is where magic as a system

kind of starts forming and, well, kind of early attempts to categorize the experiences and maybe create a repeatable way of doing this or even just to pass knowledge down. but these rituals and symbols and, you know, what we would call now taboos, they're all just ways of trying to stabilize something that is naturally unstable, kind of like early science, but, you know, aimed inward instead of outward. And so kind of by the end of this whole portion of the book, he's kind of arguing that primitive man wasn't stupid.

He was just tuned differently, kind of, you know, more open to these subtle perceptions and emotional intensity. that kind of thing, but at that same time, kind of less capable of analysis in a systematic understanding of what was actually happening. And then modern man comes along and flips out on its head, and we got more control and precision in science, but we lost the openness to it. So now the real question is, so primitive man had access without control and modern man has control without the access. So what would it look like to have both? Yeah. I mean, because now he's going into more of what I mentioned at the beginning adepts, as they called themselves, and initiates and people who claim to train these abilities in even early systems like Kabala or Kabbalah, whatever. And he gets into the real fine line between what we would call genuine mastery and just complete fraud.

And this is where it gets pretty fun because now we start meeting the actual characters who said, oh yeah, no. how he's this real, but I know how to do it. Flim flam. Some of them might have been onto something, and some of them absolutely weren't, but the best thing is that he takes them seriously either way, which is what makes this whole book worth reading is because he's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He's like, let's look at every case. And again, this is what we do on MU.

We're not throwing anything out. We're looking at the claims and what people say and then going, does this make sense with all these other things. And this book would not be complete without looking at the total frauds because then you have kind of a control where you can put it next to somebody who maybe actually did

gain some kind of mastery, if you can call it that. Well, it's interesting. It's very telling. It's sort of like this, and I don't know why I was ignorant to it, but now it just suddenly not. Thank you, Colin Wilson.

Thank you, Joe. This ideal of that, yeah, there would be some flam-flam dudes that came in there, snake old salesman, and all kinds of shit, like the Edison Tesla thing, they had to come in with a powerhouse as equal

to give an opposite lane of direction for the movement, for any of this shit. They all branch off. Think of what we've talked about this, this influence of, you know, you had infiltrations of priests into these early mystery schools and then they just tank things and ship things over.

Allegedly this is what the masons are. Like there's all these infiltrations of ideas that then bifurcate. And of course you'd have a flim, flam do with a sweet hat. with these crazy stories, opening portals that don't close. Like, you'd have that in the movement to scare people away from it. Of course you would. Alongside dope shit that was really going on or because there's really dope shit going on there

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Visit Wayfair.cair, every style, every home. So he threw this whole cluster fuck of notes that I have. Up until now, he's basically put primitive man as open and intuitive but not in control. Then you go to the poets and mystics and we got into a little bit of that on the last show. and they get these flashes or this, you know, a quick vision or whatever, but they can't really hold them or sustain them for any period of time. And then you get to a different type, the adept. It's somebody who says, oh, this isn't random. This can, you know, we can train this or be trained in it.

And he starts talking about this because it shows up everywhere across history. An initiate is basically somebody who has, you know, gone through a process of some sort and been taught certain knowledge, maybe gain access to a deep. level of understanding, if you can believe them. And usually that involves a lot of discipline, symbolic instruction, these altered states that we've talked about, and a lot of times secrecy. And I mean, you think mystery schools or early religious orders, these kind of things. And the basic idea here is that, or the key idea, really, is that knowledge isn't just this intellectual thing.

It's experiential. You don't, you're not, it's just not something you learn. it's you become capable of perceiving it and you know knowing what you're doing by experiencing it not just by having the knowledge in your head and uh all these traditions whether you're talking about the egyptian mystery schools or the greek initiations um what was that one should have written it down the uh no i'm talking about the mystery school it was called the in egypt under it might have been Egyptian um it's Somebody's yelling it out.

I love those moments too. And someone's sitting there going, Ah! You can hear my brain fart in real time. In real time. It's amazing. It's the seven mystery schools. Okay, let's see here.

You got Illusionian, Egyptian. That's the one I was thinking of. Elysian or Elysian or Elusian, whatever it is. Elysian. Elysian. And that's Greece. Elysian mysteries dedicated to Determer Persepani, focus on initiation and the afterlife.

These are very important, the whole ideal of taking someone into death and then bringing them through that process. Right. And yeah, the Egyptians had a lot of that type of stuff too. Yeah, all of these, all these traditions or mystery schools are all built on kind of the same foundational claim that human consciousness can be expanded in a controlled and repeatable way, not just these random flashes of inspiration or accidental visions, but that an actual method.

And again, this ties it back to attention because of the core problem is that normal consciousness is narrow and dull, especially now, then the solution would be, oh, let's learn how to intensify it. And that's what these systems we're trying to do, you know, through meditation and ritual and all these things. They're trying to train the mind to hold more awareness and sustain the intensity of these emotional states a lot of the times and kind of try to read. resist slipping back into that half a sleep state. And I will be the first to admit I am

a terrible at meditation. I've tried it. It works, but I'm not getting any special knowledge or anything. It's basically a 10 minute break for my brain. And it does work, especially the guided ones, that does work for me. But there's no way I could hold that because all of a sudden you're, did I leave the stove on? You know, that shit slips through. And I know that's normal and you're supposed to swipe left and just be like, yeah, it's a thought, whatever. But it, it, it's a, It's rough for the modern man. I do not disagree. You know, I've started picturing them because I don't disagree with you.

I've for years swore that it was just, I was incapable. You know, we got this ADD. Our minds are talking all the time. There's all kinds of stuff, man. And our radio is just wide and tuned. And that's the secret there, I think, is the being able to tune it into where it's not so overwhelming. And you can just listen to, have you ever gone through like a song and just listen for the bass in the song the entire time? Oh yeah, or drums or yeah.

So you turn that up in volume a little bit. It's kind of like that, where you're learning how to do that with an abundance of frequencies. But what you have to do is be bombarded by them shit so that you can pick which one you want out of the noise and make music out of that noise. So wild, dude, but I don't disagree that it's uncomfortable. In my previous life, I actually had a decent practice for about six months where every single day I would pull over in my delivery van for 10 minutes, set the timer and just mental break. you know and do that but i i've never gotten to the point where i can meditate for two hours and like leave my body or anything that's i don't want to say it's impossible but it's a it's a tall order well and that's the question is is it a priority like i feel like you've got a lot of grounded

things to do here and even though you and i would love to friggin to have a mundane to take this mundane to the magnificent there and and have some rafael scoop us up and i've said out loud man i've screamed it where the fuck is my god where are you piece of shit and i mean that's not going to get any guys running to you know they're not going to come over going to say hey hey, buddy, it's okay. Nobody's going to want to come talk to you. But I agree with you that it would be cool to kind of jet set like that. I think that I kind of just tell myself that we're just not meant to do it right now.

Like some people are meant to be basketball players and we're just not, you know, and that's okay. Yeah, I'm cool with it. Yeah, we're cool with it. It's not that I've given up. I meditated like two months ago. That was the last time I did. And it was great. Don't get me wrong.

It was fantastic. It was like taking a nap. Yeah. And really this is the gift though, right? That's really the practice. If you're doing that, then that's the practice. I think that this ideal of meditating in a cave forever, that, I mean, that rots your butthole. You know, you're just going to sit there on it the whole time. Like you got shit to do. There's waterfalls out here. There's cool stuff going on. So I agree with you that meditation is challenging. I'll walk and meditate. You can count, again, being in the moment. Like each, you can count, take your fingers and touch each finger to the thumb as you're walking. Again, counting your steps. That's another thing that monks used to do. So you don't have to be sitting still with your eyes close. There's many ways to just. Yeah. It's basically just knowing what's up there. And one thing that really, really helped me was just picturing them on like clouds going by. There's nothing you can do about it.

You can bitch about it. But the thing that you're yelling at is just going to move on unless you grab hold of it and hang on to it. Well, that gets into a whole different rabbit hole of where thoughts come from and are they yours and all that type of stuff. Doesn't it more represent what frequency you're tuned to? Basically just where you're at. It's just a check in with you. It's like, well, if that stuff's bombarding your mind, that's where your frequency is. And can you, do you have the ability to transcend that? Not fight it, but transcend it. And what is flexing that muscle like? Like, that's really what meditation is, right? A mental notification of like, where you at, buddy?

What are you doing? Where's your brain going? Yeah, it's like you break a mental sweat, too. So then he kind of talks about the difference between primitive magic. And he draws a pretty clean line here because he says that primitive magic is, was more based on like reactivity and emotional, you know, tied to environment and survival, that type of thing. But the initiatory systems, like the mystery schools, were way more rigid and structured

and focused on inner development. So basically instead of, oh, something happened to me, it becomes more like, oh, I'm learning how to make something happen. So it's, again, this intention, intentionality, if that's a word. If it's not, I just made it up. Intentionality. I like it. Book it.

And again, this is where things get a little bit sketchy because of the danger of imitation, because once you have all these systems and symbols and rituals, you also get people copying them without understanding really the underlying purpose of them. And he points out that a lot of occult traditions become way too rigid and theatrical and really kind of dogmatic. Yeah. And they're more obsessed with form over functions. So, you know, you have people memorizing these rituals, repeating words, blah, blah,

but nothing actually happens. And why? Because their inner state isn't there. It's like someone going through, you know, the motions of meditation while thinking about groceries. The idea is there, but the consciousness. hasn't really changed and yeah that's me i don't think about groceries because i'm not a woman but you know just life right you know just whatever whatever pulls you away from that moment that you're in right now which like you like let's say a beautiful landscape in front of you and all you can think

about is that your back tires low on your car something like right it's like dude just come on you're in the moment but you're not in the moment like come back it's really hard to it's it's very challenging yeah uh and so then then you get into another split here of the genuine practitioners that are trying to develop their consciousness and then you have the imitator is going through these empty motions and from the outside they can look pretty much the same i mean same basic language and symbols and all that but totally different results and he's definitely uh wilson's definitely not naive about this he totally acknowledges that a lot of what gets labeled occult tradition is probably just accumulated nonsense but he's saying that the existence of bad copies doesn't mean the

original idea is false. And this is where the secrecy comes in, too, because a lot of these traditions are deliberately hidden or restricted, and you could argue why, but, uh, and he also says that it might not just be elitism. It might just be practical, because if you hand this kind of knowledge to someone who doesn't understand it or hasn't developed the, the necessary discipline or, importantly, has a big ego problem. It can go sideways pretty fast. This is what I've honestly heard about the realm is that we are all like super capable of all kinds of crazy shit and really UFOs and time travel and all that you can do it with leaves and bug wings in your backyard like it's very very simple and so one of the biggest challenges of the realm is to keep folks with training wheels

going until they're ready to fly and it's just really interesting that you see it from that point to where you're like basically babysitting from the realm's perspective all the lizard turds whatever they're basically babysitting a bunch of infant gods with these powers that they've got to make sure that they keep quiet and don't wake up yet you gotta and then when they are able though to get through the levels of it that means that they've gone through the discipline and devotion needed to be able to use it responsibly perhaps right and that's the the secrecy or the you know uh the low key nature of a lot of these i i get the idea of that because it would be like handing a chainsaw to a toddler like the chainsaw isn't bad and it can do a lot of good things but until the toddler has the

appropriate muscles in neurological control, you're going to have a mess, literally. So you've got to keep it away from them. Understanding of consequences, really, is a big one on that too. That too. Is just to be able to know the implications of decision. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the most important things that he brings up is consciousness as a skill. So, I mean, you treat intelligence like a skill. Physical strength is like a skill. But we don't really treat consciousness itself as a skill.

skill, especially in the modern times we live in here. All these initiatory traditions were early attempts to do exactly that, to train the focus and awareness in this inner control of the initiates, not just thinking better, but being more awake. And I don't mean awake as in a woke. No? Another hole to go down. They were in the cum coffin going, it's they, them, excuse me. And if he's right here, then these adeps weren't magicians in, you know, the wave of a wand fantasy sense or frauds, at least not all of them, but they were just early experimenters in human consciousness. And some of them probably misunderstood what they were doing and some of them probably mixed in superstition or, you know, exaggerated their results maybe. But some of them might actually have figured out, you know, at least a few pieces of the puzzle.

and so then so by the end of this section of my notes at least you're you're kind of sitting there with this interesting possibility that what if there really were people in history who could control their mental state or you know enter these heightened awareness states and maybe access deeper layers of perception and that's that's really the only words we have for because we still don't really know what that even is and it's not like they were perfect at it or that they're magical or something just better than the average Joe. Hey. No pun intended.

Oh, pun intended. And if that's true, then why did that knowledge get lost or distorted or, you know, even purposely buried? And that's where he gets into the world of the Kabbalis. And so at this point, he's not just asking,

is there something there? He's going, did anyone actually build a working model of it? And the Kabbalist came closer than most, at least to Wilson here. And Kabbala comes out of Jewish mysticism, oddly enough, but he wasn't really interested in it as a religion. He was looking at it like a system for understanding consciousness and reality, and not in a belief or worship type of sense, but kind of more like, oh, here's a map of how existence and perception are laid out. And basically, reality isn't just physical.

It is layered. Uh, turtles all the way down again. All of them. All the way. I don't know if you've ever looked into Kabala, but I had a monster of a book. I still remember the, I think the title was the Temple of High Witchcraft. This is back in my goth, 19-year-old days, early 2000s, but I had a library of all kinds of occult books and stuff. And I had no idea what I was reading or what the fuck any of it was.

I just knew it was interesting. And this, I think it's called the Temple of High Witchcraft, but it's like ceremonial magic, like Crowley. type shit. And it's a big ass book, but he goes through the whole cobblistic tree of life and what every Sephiroth or whatever means. And it's really fucking interesting. I still don't quite understand it, but it is kind of a, it's a, from what I gathered from it, it's a cyclic thing. So the bottom, Sephiroth is also the top one. And it's like a cycle that repeats it. And that's, that's my understanding of it. This, I could be totally off. But Christopher Penzek.

Yeah, I think that is it. How cool. I'm going to go ahead and link it for everybody. We found it here. So we'll go ahead and have it in the show description. How cool? If that's the one I was thinking, yeah. How many pages does it say it is?

576. Yeah, a pretty big book. Not as big as this one, but yeah. Yeah, it's got the Kabbalah, Triali, symbol and sigil magic, elemental constructions, Kabbalistic Cross, the four worlds and their correspondences, of course, the middle pillar, pathwork, the ritual of the rosy cross or rosicrucians, right?

Invoking the and banishing rituals, that's fun. Fluid condensers, huh? Anything about minerals on that? Natrium probably in that. And barbarous words of power. So yeah, that'll be length. That's fun. Yeah, it's just interesting of nothing else. But I don't remember if it was in that book or a different one,

but they actually link up the tree of life to the tarot and also to Joseph Campbell's work on the hero's journey and how all of it kind of has a, I don't know, a corresponding aspect, but it's really interesting. And it makes you look at life a little different, but love those. So yeah, when he's talking about this, though, the Kabbalah and the, you know, the structure called the tree of life, and instead of getting lost in the diagram of it all, he just, he is more intellectual, I guess. He says that the tree of life is basically an attempt to chart how reality unfold. and how, you know, consciousness operates and how the human mind connects to the larger universe.

But he says it's not meant to be taken as a literal picture. It's more like an analogy or a psychological model and in a cosmological model. And all of these things kind of all at once, which is crazy because it's trying to do what modern science and psychology separately try to do, but in one unified system, which is probably why it survives to this day. Yeah, probably because that's the thing. It's like breaking up a map and only giving pieces of it to parties and then them saying this is the territory. It's not. It's just a piece of it. So, I mean, the Kabbalist, Kabbalis, whatever, they believed in, or they believed reality exists in different levels or layers.

And they describe them as worlds or spheres. And you can think of it like dense physical experience at the bottom and more subtle abstract or, you know, meaning rich levels as you go up. and the human mind can operate across those levels, but normally it's stuck near the bottom. Does that sound familiar? That's basically his entire argument from the beginning of the book. It's just dressed in ancient symbolic language. But it also corresponds to the chakras too.

And normally you're stuck at the root chakra, the, you know, base 3D world, bills, groceries, sacks. Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, no, that's the thing is to rise. that up, yeah, to transcend that nature. There's also, I've seen diagrams of the tree of life on a human body and it matches up pretty well to the chakra system too.

It's pretty great. Yeah. And then he says the real goal isn't knowledge, it's perception. And this is where Cabo aligns up perfectly with his whole thesis in this book, that it's not about memorizing symbols or learning some doctrine

or, you know, oh, I'm believing the right things or something like that. It's about changing. how you perceive reality because once your perception shifts, everything else follows. So these practices of meditation and symbolic work, all the stuff, they're all aimed at expanding awareness beyond its normal limits. And not really randomly either, but kind of a step by step, you know, and like you said, in a disciplined way. And that's probably the thing most people struggle with the most. I know it's me. Oh, nice. You just pulled it up. I heard recently, because you know how big of a fan I am of words and spellcasting and all that. And,

Of course, then that's another answer to your flim-flam man, uh, men around the time of why you would have fuckery in the, in the movement is to keep folks away from the fact that they could just speak themselves out of the prisons they find themselves in with words, like change certain words, speak others. And one that I,

uh, swap out lately was we have, uh, busy for productive, which is great. You also have not failure, but feedback. And damn it,

what was the one we just talked about? You just said it. Uh, oh, thank you for being safe instead of be safe. That was not it. Oh, well. Anyway, yeah, this is cool.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, we don't have to link to all this. You can do a quick Google search if you want to see what I'm talking about. Well, it's interesting to look at it this way because, again, when you start to see this kind of stuff, it's foundational. You're sitting here going, oh, it is this stuckness. And then the temples around the place sort of mimic this art. architecture as well, Vitruvian man's thoughts. This is fascinating, man. This connection is really

Oh, Vitruvian, yes. That's a great example. Yeah. So yeah, then he really kind of digs into the whole discipline thing. And this is where Kabbalists differ from the primitive shamans who had the access but no structure. What would you say that? That was the word discipline over devotion is, I've swapped those words lately. So instead of being discipline, which is like this rigid, again, that follows in line with balance. And instead of balance, I like to use the word harmony instead, because again, there's a musical component there. But this ideal of that rigid structure,

you just kind of abandon that ideal and go with the flowier word for it. Again, that's the spellcasting part of it. Yeah. And it just changes the way you think about it, if nothing else. Yeah, because then devotion is devotion to yourself for making yourself healthier or to making sure that you're tuning your radio

or doing the best you can. So it's not about how the message is being sent out because you can't you can't help that but you can help how it's being received and so you just make it as best as you can and you just have a devotion to that rather than a discipline to the arduous nature of something like change you know yeah it's interesting it's it's semantics but it's impactful yeah for sure so yeah he goes from you know the primitive shamans who had this access but no real structure and then poets who had the insight but no control over it and these guys were trying to build a repeatable path.

The cobblists were in, Wilson respects that a lot because they weren't just saying, oh, I had a vision, trust me, bro. They were saying, here's how you get there. And this is important. It wasn't easy. This wasn't, you know, light a candle, say a chant. Boom, cosmic powers.

It was this long-term commitment and discipline, mental training, deep concentration, and a lot of internal work. And another thing that he emphasized is that Kabbalistic symbols weren't meant to be mysterious just for the sake of it. They were tools. They were ways of focusing your attention and hopefully triggering inside or, you know, organizing these complex experiences into something you could understand better.

But when you're dealing with these subtle states of consciousness, language alone doesn't really cut it. So the symbols act like shortcuts. They compress all this meaning into something the mind can work with, maybe at least at the subconscious level. I mean, that's what sigils are. Well, it's what logos are. That's what brand logos are.

You see the MU logo pop up on your feed. You know it's a great day. I mean, how cool. You just associated instantly with awesomeness. And, yeah, exactly. Or, you know, the golden arches or whatever, symbols are very powerful. I got a craving for human meat today.

Let's get the drive-through. Let's go. A royale with cheese. Oh, is that one of the Royale family? Is that why it's a limited edition thing? No, that's what they call it in France. Remember from Pulp Fiction? Yeah, I know.

But I mean the meat product is it, they call it that because of the, maybe it's because those are the people the royals hunted so that they could be in that burger. That's what it was. So, yeah, then, of course, this goes wrong too because just like everything else we've seen, nothing ever stays clean. And over time, Kabbala, like other systems,

they get this overcomplicated, ritualized, dogmatic, fucking mixed with superstition thing. And then people start focusing more on memorizing and repeating these formulas or chasing powers instead of actually developing their inner self. So again, we get that split of original insight versus later distortion. And he keeps coming back to that over and over in this book because it's just something that seems to keep popping up. But for him, the value of Kabla isn't whether every detail is correct. it's more that it represents this serious attempt to understand and expand consciousness. And it treats awareness and all these things as things that can be studied and developed,

which is exactly what modern culture kind of ignores. And yeah, so to kind of wrap up that whole section, he's gone from primitive man being open but uncontrolled to the poet mystic types, having these glimpses but being unstable, to the adepts and initiates trying to train it, and then the Kabbalist building a full, full-ass system around it. And then, so the pattern is pretty obvious that humans keep rediscovering the same thing,

but we really struggle to stabilize or really fully understand it. And so if systems like Kabbala exist, if they almost work, then why don't we have a clean, reliable method today? Why is everything so fragmented and inconsistent and mixed with bullshit? do you think it's because the mysteries themselves are meant to be evolved and that there's no real set way of doing it like you said there's no pattern to memorize really you just we're all on the flow with it and we do our best with the glimpses as we go more of it and but really its job is to be more elusive and and make you curious because that seeking the knowledge is where the real training is that's where the real muscle flexing comes in you know

yeah something like that it seems like the more that it's chased or uh and we'll get into a little bit of the ego thing, but it seems like the more that gets involved, the more it's unobtainium. Like, it's, it's like the phenomenon itself is like, ha, not for you, buddy. It's like the cat running away from you when you want to pet it and it'll stay just out of your reach. But the second you're like, all right, fuck you cat. I'm going inside. It'll be tripping you to get into your arms. It's very interesting.

So then the question is we stop asking questions about all this shit. Do we get answers? Right. Like if you ignore it, does it come to you? Yeah, it's like a female or something? Right. Damn it. We are in Sophia's Demiourgesse world. Fack. So, yeah, he's basically come down to the, like, if this stuff is real, then why is it surrounded by so much nonsense?

And because obviously you can't talk about the occult without running into these fake mediums and basically stage magicians that are saying, oh, I'm mystical or, you know, self-proclaimed prophets or whatever. Or, you know, people making these wild claims with zero substance or evidence to any of it. And that's what's so cool about that is that he doesn't dodge any of that in this book. He goes right into it and says, yeah, a lot of it is garbage. But he's not saying, therefore, all of it is garbage.

He's trying to find this middle ground. There sticks of dynamite. They turn your head in the direction. And if you fuck it up, it's a shoots and ladders kind of a fail safe. Where if you fuck it up, you'll just shoot your ladder right back down to the, back down to the start there and do it again if you want.

Or be completely scared away, completely by it. But it is an interesting thing to think that, again, this has been going on forever in all things, is that you have things that will turn your attention, but scare the people that aren't ready for it off and really thin the herd for the initiates, I guess, like rise the cream to the surface, as it were. Yeah. Wheat from the tears. There it is. Wait from tears. So, yeah, he's basically why, so it's not all garbage, but why is there so much garbage, and why does this attract impostors like this? And it's a pretty simple answer.

It's because the occult deals with these invisible forces, internal experiences and things that are hard to measure or verify. So it's the perfect environment for fraud. Because I don't think about this way. If you say, oh, I can lift this weight. What is that? That's easy to test. You either can or you can't.

Oh, I can solve this equation. Easy to check. You get enough mathematicians. No, you did not solve that. But if you just say, oh, I have access to higher planes of consciousness, well, now we're kind of in a gray area. So obviously, people are going to step in and exploit that. They are because folks are very influential as well, and they know that, that they can just kind of tell you what you want to hear. It's like the perfect breeding ground for charlatans because it's not anything that you can really definitively prove or disprove.

So it's like, oh, yes, snake oil salesman, right? sensees man they're great allies in your discernment sharpening unfortunately that's just the way in which the lesson is learned yeah you get a lot of feedback that way yeah if someone has uh even even if they have a genuine unusual experience you know even if it's intense or meaningful it's usually just to them and it's even if it is just to them it's very easy for the ego to jump in and go oh i'm special i have power i'm different from other people and once that happens shit starts getting warped because even someone who started with something real

can really quickly drift away into exaggeration or delusion or even like a performative type of thing and they stop exploring and just start performing this role as an occult figure and he does point out something that still feels insanely relevant that a lot of occult figures don't just

have experiences they build a whole persona around them you know, this dramatic language and, you know, the clothing or whatever. Bajar. Bajar, that's exactly what I was thinking of. His fucking greetings and his hands thing. Good old buddy Bishar. Like, yeah.

Yeah, and so over time, the performance becomes the thing. Instead of I'm trying to understand something, it's more of, I need to maintain the image of somebody who understands whatever. But even with all that, he's still insisting that some of these people were onto something. and that's what makes this whole next section interesting instead of just an exercise in debunking. He's not just sorting people into like real or fake. He's looking at the whole spectrum of,

you have all the way from genuine ability to outright fraud and everything in between there. And most people fall somewhere in the middle of that. And it's really difficult to judge from the outside. And this is kind of a big point because from the outside, it's hard to tell who's who. because real experiences can sound insane. Yes.

And insane claims can sound convincing. And genuine insight can be wrapped in nonsense, but nonsense can also be delivered with confidence. And that's kind of where we're at nowadays. Nonsense can be delivered with confidence. So your usual toolbox of logic and skepticism and all this stuff don't always work real well here. Because, and I think that's why part of, well, part of why. why science kind of historically just all went, yeah, we're out.

We're not touching this because it's like we can't measure or quantify it. So we're just, we're out. It's up to you. Yeah. It's the cul-de-sac of intelligence. And there is so much paradox on that, on that street, man. You just, that's it. One side's exactly this.

The other side's exactly that. And you can see it one way or another. Your choice is just simply to choose. That's it. There's no right or wrong. So he does, he does talk about the, the danger of that of science just throwing everything out. because it's like earlier scientific mistakes all over again. Like fossils were dismissed originally.

Evolution was mocked, which it should be because it's still a theory. And, you know, in general, new ideas were rejected because they didn't fit into the mold or whatever. So there's a risk of doing the same thing with the occult because they see the frauds and they just assume the entire thing is invalid. But he's saying the smarter approach here is instead of blindly believing everything, or, just dismissing everything, take it seriously, but critically. Yes, truth is always somewhere in the middle, right? He's saying instead look for consistency across different cases, you know, patterns of experience or people who demonstrate control, not just make these claims, but just basically treat it like a messy field of early science. It's not clean or reliable yet, but it's also not empty. There's there is something to it. But that's, that is the extremes that we find ourselves in. is that people either say, oh, it's all garbage or they go full bore and believe everything. And it's never like that.

That's always somewhere in between. That's the biggest lesson here is like the lack of duality. There was something I saw the other day that someone talked about colors and reality and things like this. They said there's no such thing as dualities. It's only shades. And it's interesting to sort of whenever we do get the selection of extremes, where camps find themselves. And I think, though, that camps need to set up. in extreme so that we can see what that's like, not only for the folks interacting with it,

but the folks viewing it from afar if they want to take that on. Because again, like you said, a lot of it's flam, flamming and charlatans, but there's magic there if you can get beyond that in many ways, not just logically, but again, emotionally, mentally, there's many layers once you approach that sense, that you're going to be offered the opportunity to transcend there. And sometimes it is just physical and maybe you pass that one, but then you bail out on the spiritual one you shoot yourself back down to that level physically able to do it and then now spiritually coming up you get there and you're like fuck yeah i'm ready and then the atheric or something whatever next layer you're being either tested or given the opportunity to shrink in either way it's an

interesting method of loop breaking and it does have a lot of fucking sticks of dynamite that are that are that are here to make sure that you get your ass handed to you in that way sometimes it's a great it makes me think that it is true that the the monks that are in their caves in the himalayas or whatever are probably the ones with actual, I don't want to say powers, but like experiences that have changed the way that they think or can do things. But you're probably also never hear about it because to get to that stage, their ego had to be bashed so much that they're not about to go show the world because they don't need to. I think if you get to that level, you really don't need to tell anybody about it because it's so transformative for yourself that you're like,

I don't need to go post on Instagram about this. No. What a great way to put it. And that's the thing is you sit here and say, oh, I couldn't sit in a cave all day and meditate. We got podcasting to do. But ultimately, what if, again, it's sort of this ideal of cathars Gnostics to deny everything physical, to just have no attachments here. And to be honest with you, if you took a vow of celibacy and sat in a cave and just meditated your time through, that'd probably be the fast track out of here, honestly, because then there's no distractions to work through. There's no blah, blah, blah, blah. And maybe that's the final ascension is that you just get a little vacay in a nice cave here. You get to do some paintings. like that sand art's pretty cool. Have you seen them do that? Yeah. They pour sand, intricate. Oh, yeah.

Very cool. Yeah, it's nuts. I could do that. So, yeah, his basic, not conclusion, but his general feel about all this stuff is that he's not saying these people are real, these people are fake. It's, the field is so full of noise and there's so many real signals mixed in that it's hard to separate them, which is really annoying, but it's the honest way to look at it. Yeah, it is.

If he didn't deal with all the impostors, the whole book would just fall apart because you'd be sitting there the whole time thinking, oh, yeah, but what about all the obvious BS? Right. Now he's acknowledged it. So moving forward, when he starts talking about specific figures and some of them pretty extreme, obviously, you're not just blindly buying in. You're, you know, carefully evaluating each one of them. So he does go into the 1800s, this romanticism period and the rise of, you know, modern occultus. And because before this, he was basically focused on primitive cultures and ancient systems and kind of scattered traditions. But in the 1800s, something weird happens where the occult comes back into fashion.

And why? Mostly, he sees it as kind of like a pressure point because you have this rapid industrialization and a lot of scientific progress and, you know, expansion of cities and really kind of traditional religion, you know, fading a little bit. And at the same time, you get people feeling disconnected and mechanized like the world has lost its meaning. Does that sound familiar? Because it's basically the same problem he opened the book with, but just on a cultural scale now. So naturally, people are starting to look for something deeper again. And then, of course, in the 1920s, you get the spiritualist movement and seances and all that stuff. Yeah.

A lot of actoplasm in that time period, huh? Yeah. So, yeah, I'm skipping through a bunch of stuff here because I wanted to get to. a little bit of yeah, Scrawling. What a cool way to put this

together though, dude, honestly. How fucking cool. And like his breakdown on this awareness, you know, unlimited access

without control and then you have control with no access. Like all of the breakdown on this is so interesting and I would not have thought about that that way. I know.

That's why it's accurate. That's why it's such a thick book because he has to break it all down like this and most people just don't have the patience to sit through it all. You know, whatever. Well done,

sir. Thank you. So he does go into Elephus Levi. and he was kind of important because he was basically a translator between worlds. He took older magical traditions and these scattered occult ideas and turned them into something a little more coherent, but not necessarily more accurate,

but at least a little more, you know, I don't know, organized. And he, so Elephus, great name, by the way. He looked at magic as something less like superstition and more like, a system of mental and symbolic control. So he talked about willpower and imagination and a lot of the same things that these cult traditions talked about. But he talked about them as the core tools of magic, which lines up almost perfectly with Wilson's whole angle that magic isn't about waving a wand. It's about directing consciousness. And Elephus was real heavy into the idea that imagination isn't just fantasy, that they actually shape,

perception and potentially influence reality, at least in, you know, subtle ways. But, and again, Wilson isn't saying, oh, he proved magic works. It's more like Elphus is one of the first modern thinkers to treat the occult as something psychological and experiential, not just as, you know, mystical or religious. But again, the same problem creeps back in because once you've got all these organized systems and all that, you start attracting imitators and ego-driven people. and then you have the rise of the occult culture. And this is where the occult becomes a little more, I don't know, social,

because instead of these lone practitioners or, you know, a hidden monk in a cave, you have these lodges and like circles of people and public figures even and people that were discussing and teaching and debating all these ideas. And obviously there's pros and cons to that. You have knowledge spreading and the evolution of these ideas, but then you also get a dilution of the ideas in performative theatrics and group think and all these things. Yeah.

Do you want to see a picture of this guy? Of Elephus? Yes. Elephus. Boom, look at that. I'm going to link a picture so that you guys can see it as well because I don't believe in showing you all something you can't see here necessarily.

But we're going to go ahead and link this so you can see it. Save some pussy for the rest of us. Look at this guy. I know. Cain? he's a girthy man yep he needed that to carry his large massive wiener around

drag that around what a cool thing but he has all these back problems I know for sure he's got all these very interesting images that are associated with his Wikipedia as well these really cool

I love these old what would you call this like an alchemical imaging yeah something like that very fucking cool anyway it'll be link guys so you can enjoy that as well so I'm gonna I'm gonna wrap it up here on this

There's so much more, but I'm basically at the end of my notes for it. But again, there's a lot more if you want to dive into this crazy-ass book. But I did want to do this as a precursor to his second book, which was actually the one I was interested in. And it's going to have way more like stories and shit. But I wanted to do that as a lens for how he views these crazy topics. But he does, of course, get into the beast himself, Alistair Crowley. and he doesn't talk about him like he's this cartoon villain or some edgy occult mascot or something. Wilson actually looks at Crowley as a problem you have to solve because Crowley's not exactly the kind of figure that makes people say, oh yeah, this is why I don't take any of this seriously.

Or he's exactly the kind of figure that does that. I like, I like that he gets results. And so you're like, guys, look, if you just take this slave boy, let him pop you in the pooper and eat crackers. Come on. I'm in a pyramid here under the fireman here under the. full moon. You can open a portal and this dude with the big head comes out and talks to you. And everybody's sitting around just going, uh, yeah, you can, man. That is, yes, you can do it that way. Uh-huh. Right. There's probably other ways. Perhaps we look in another direction, you know, you went straight there, did you? Okay.

Yeah. And obviously, I mean, if you've listened to M.U. long enough, if you've heard plenty about Crowley and his antics, but he just looked like a mess. He just total wanker. Like, I always just thought he was just a goofball, rich kid. wanker, but I get out of here. I mean, just drugs and sex rituals and I'm the B six, six, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't exactly help his credibility situation. Uh, I mean, from anybody who doesn't look into these topics, he just looks like an attention seeker, uh, uh, modern terms, a rage baiter. Yeah. Or just totally unhinged and a lot of people stop there with it. And, but instead of just dismissing Crowley completely, uh, he, Wilson does something a little more interesting. He's like, what if Crowley actually did tap into something real but just handled it super badly?

Yes, that's what I'm saying. So now we're back in that same spectrum from earlier of not purely fake or purely genuine, but kind of a mix of the two. And that's what I always got from Crowley too. I'm like, yeah, he might have been onto something just also a wanker. Like, I don't. Yeah, we got to do it that way or this is the representative or this guy figured it out. Come on.

You know, I get separating art from artist. But even that, like his art wasn't that cool. He fucked up a portal and left it open or didn't or left it open on port. whatever, you know, but what a goober kind of in a way. Yeah, what a goober. Now, so I have this other book here that came from the library of Aaron and Ben here. It's called Alistaira in the Aon of Horace by Paul Weston. And thanks Aaron, motherfucking right, for putting all these notes and like-

Oh, don't you love that? Highlights and shit in this book because I fell on this. I'll just read this short paragraph out of this. So if you know Crowley, you know about his. lamb thing and how it looked like a gray alien. Or a melanet. This says, yeah, it says the basic method of lamb meditation consisted of creating a magical space by the usual banishings and then sitting

silently in front of a copy of the Crowley picture staring into its eyes. The name was then repeated internally in the manner of a mantra. This process was considered sufficient to potentially stimulate an altered state of consciousness. As mood shifted, an imaginative attempt would be made to enter into lamb's head, the egg of spirit, and then look out from his eyes. Profoundly alien zones might be thus encountered or general mutations of consciousness, allowing download access to previously unknown realms of being.

So the reason I wanted to bring that up is because it's a bit similar to Dr. Stephen Greer's CE5 protocols. Yes, yes it is. Is it not? It is, it is, which is not. dissimilar from a giant stick of dynamite saying look over here do this guys you could do this so weird oh wow the lamb stuff is so interesting man it's and i just can't not see this dude with hydrocephaly maybe it is just they tapped into the hydrocephaly kids over there in michigan and they're underground and that's what talked to crelly and they can do that yeah again my my general opinion on this

douchebag is he's just a douchebag wanker that was rich and thought he could do stuff and just wanted to get his rocks off. That's my basic analysis of Crowley. Yeah, a bit of a cum-guzzling wanker, eh? A bit and hey, to each their own. But did he ever actually accomplish anything of value? I guess that's up for debate, right?

In that's subjective. I mean, yeah, values, where value is found. And if it's for spectacle, entertainment to either lead people astray or to turn people off altogether, then it was one of the most valuable things since Thomas Edison. Yeah. It's just, it seems that these characters

are within the realm in plethora. And yes, maybe they are dicking with some really interesting stuff. Again, like the Stephen Greer stuff, but there's stories as well with that guy saying that he has some advanced knowledge of when they're going to be doing some testing and he can go out sort of a wink-wing deal.

Look, he'll give you 50 bucks. You know, or 10% of the door. You guys fly over. I'll make sure we all get taken care of kind of a thing. And if that's the case, then it's all horseshit either way. But what it does at its core and you and I can at least appreciate

because there's good in all this, is that it gets people to ask questions. It gets folks to just kind of look in that direction. Rather, to the letter, what they say, the hats they wear, the sitting outside holding hands comba, if that's the protocol to go, it at least gets you out of the house and it gets you asking questions. And that's fun. Yeah, it gets your steps in. So good for you. There you go.

So that was, yeah, the occult by Colin Wilson. And hopefully next time I will have a couple stories pulled from his next book. Again, if you haven't heard of this dude before, read any of the stuff. Real interesting. again, dense and thick and girthy, but it's worth it if you're interested in these topics, which you are because you're listening right now.

That's right. But yeah, that'll wrap it up for this one, I guess. There's so much more. Again, I think I got about two-thirds of the way into my notes, but I want to jump back into the mysteries book. Very cool. Well done, once again, what is coming up in Plus?

We are just going to have a blanche. We are just going to have a blast talking about all kinds of crazy strange shit that folks have reported in the realm experiences people have had. We don't care if they're subjective or not. They're bizarre. And we're just going to have some fun with some sexy hot chaff. Nice. And yes,

get your favorite cup of Joe, cup of macha, fucking decaf, whatever. Come hang out with this, man. It's going to be a lot of fun. Down in the show description, though, check out for this bit. We are going to link, of course, the work that Joe's working on here. Amazing job, dude. Outstanding job breaking that epitome down, because, yeah, that's a thick

bitch and to summarize it like that well done the also link there is the temple of the high of high witchcraft that you mentioned there and then eliphis levi we're going to throw his sexy ass in there so you can do a little deeper dive on that dude well done hell yeah yeah but stick around for the um stuff after the break here we're definitely going to go into some bizarre freaky woo-woo's some really cool shit i'm looking forward to it it's gonna be fun awesome and of course you can get access to that in the mysterious universe dot org forward slash this and of course you have a forward slash plus and of course There's a link to that in the show notes as well. If you're not a member, consider supporting your favorite show.

Yay, I did that. And if you are on Plus, stick around after the break. If you're not, we will see you all next week. Bye-bye. Welcome to your Plus extension. And thank you for joining us on Plus. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes?

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