UFOs, Consciousness, Near-death Experiences & the Esoteric | Anthony Peake

A group of people were observing at the back of the resort. They actually turned around and said that a UFO flew over them at low level, and then flew over them and flew off into the distance towards the mountains. And then 10 or 15 minutes later, it came back. Whatever this machine was, it manifested, and their anticipation of it brought it into this reality.

We do not know what Consciousness is. We do not know where Consciousness comes from. We have no idea, even first base, of how Consciousness creates or how Consciousness is created by the brain. Is it just an epiphenomenon? In terms of my years of reading around the subject, both from esoterica to science, Consciousness, I argue, is a field. There's a field of Consciousness. I think it's probably something to do with the holographic nature of the universe and the holographic argument.

Welcome back to the transmission, my friends. If there's one thing that I've learned over the years, and maybe this is cliché, but it's the more that we learn, the more we realize we don't know. Every breakthrough leads to new questions; every insight leads to more mysteries. And maybe this is where that whole trope of the esoteric, uh, potentially driving you bonkers comes from. But it's not just the esoteric; this seems to be true regardless of what type of wisdom you're pursuing. It definitely seems to be true, uh, in the case of Science and Mathematics, spirituality too, of course. I can confidently say that it's true when it comes to the fair we've been covering on the channel, as of late—you know, the NHI UFO UAP phenomena and Consciousness. The mystery never really ends. And I should be clear on this too, um, I'm just talking about those topics respectively, not even the link between Consciousness and the UAP phenomena, which I shall resist the urge to do with every fiber of my being, at least for now.

As endless as the mystery may be, I do think we can up the resolution on it. We can begin to see it more clearly if we use all of the multidisciplinary, uh, sense-making lenses and philosophical lenses at our disposal. And Anthony Peak is really an exemplar of that method. He's the author of a dozen books on numerous topics: you know, Consciousness, non-human intelligence, near-death experiences, uh, Altered States. I just read his book on the personal Dion, which was really intriguing. So not only do I respect his approach—this man is a true Seeker, truly brilliant—he's kind of the perfect guest for this show in a lot of ways, and you're about to see why. I can say with high confidence that he will be back in future episodes. I can also say with a fairly high degree of confidence that if you make it to Contact in the Desert this year, you may have a chance to see both Anthony and myself, as we're both planning to attend. Anyway, all the links that you will need for Anthony Peak and the show are in the description. Please do me a favor: like, subscribe, comment, share. The algorithm must be fed. We've got hundreds of audio-only podcasts that will never be up on YouTube with really brilliant beings, so do subscribe to Third Eye Drops wherever you listen to podcasts and come initiate yourself into our, uh, digital Wonder Lodge at patreon.com/sl3rd eyedrops. Yes, it is a fantastic way to support the show, but also get rewards like stickers, pins, shirts, and more. We have a patron-only Discord server; we do Zoom hangs; we also just did a book club earlier today on the really fantastic book by Annie Jacobson, *Phenomena*. Would love to see you there, my friends, but for now, let's meld minds with Anthony Peak.

So much to talk about, um, like everything I wrote down from your book. I feel like it's just one of the central interests that I often innately find myself in on this show, so I'm really excited to explore it all with you.

Absolutely, and I've been checking out your previous shows and everything else as well, and yeah, we're kindred spirits. We both seem to—this—the same thing seems to stimulate us, which is really interesting. So I think this conversation could go absolutely anywhere.

And that's exactly what we allow it to do.

Me too, um, yeah, and and on that note, it's always like an embarrassment of riches on where to start in that regard, um, but I guess I'm just going to ask you something that's sort of in the Zeitgeist as of late that I find myself continuously, uh, being drawn into: is everything going around right now about non-human intelligence disclosure, um, how closely do you follow that?

Oh, totally. I mean, I'm not sure if you're aware, but I'm a regular speaker at Contact in the Desert in Southern California. I just got invited to that, actually.

Are you going this year?

Yeah, yeah, I'm speaking this year.

Yeah, I'll be there this year.

Cool. Well, may see you.

I may see you.

Oh, absolutely. We will, absolutely. Because, funnily enough, I was at a Contact in the Desert two years ago when the news on disclosure broke, and I was having lunch with Linda Moulton Howe when it took place, and Richard Dolan was also in our little group. So they all got excited and all rushed off, you know, and it it was it was quite amazing to be in that group when that happened, um, but Contact in the Desert is extraordinary. And of course, um, my book, *The Hidden Universe*, effectively, I have a concept I called egregor, which is—which is aliens—which is effectively aliens. In fact, when I first started my whole exercise of becoming a writer, I mean, it was UFOs; that was my first entrée into the world of esoterica and unusual phenomena. So, no, it's very much my area of interest.

Perfect. Beautiful. I had no idea, to be honest. Like, I was a little bit reluctant to even ask that question because I was like, I just said I just finished the Dion book; that is a subject that I'm hugely interested in, and I and I thought that this would get us to that topic in a way that would be interesting for the audience, but it sounds like you have a whole separate and deep interest in that subject. So yes, this concept of egregor—this is something that you find in, um, modern Western esotericism. I'm not sure who coined that term; who the background to the word egregor is really quite fascinating in that it is from the Greek, *egregorius*, which you will find in the Gnostic Gospels, and it effectively is the concept of the Watchers, because egregor literally means Watchers. And now I remember when I was a kid, when I first came across the concept of Watchers—I'm much older than you—and I remember in the mid-1960s being fascinated—I think it was *The Fantastic Four*, the Marvel comic, *The Fantastic Four*. Marvel, I think they were—they might have been DC—they were—and, um, one of the characters, one of the recurring characters in *The Fantastic Four* was The Watcher, who recurred in many, many times, but he hasn't actually appeared, I don't think, in the Marvel movie world, which I think is quite sad because it's a very interesting concept. Yeah, but and also there was a fascinating song—again, I go off on tangents here—but on the album, *Nursery Crime*, by the band Genesis, way back in 1972, I think it was released, they have a track there called "Watcher of the Skies," and it's a really intriguing song because it takes a lot of the ideas of The Watcher from, uh, *The Fantastic Four*, but also brings in the esoteric elements as well. So the watchword, Watcher, egregors, and the concept of the egregor is something I explore in my book, *The Hidden Universe*, because I argue that we we can co-create entities by our anticipation of them; we can manifest them. And of course, we know from esoteric tradition—in my book, I review the work of going right back in history—the concept of egregor right through to the work of people like, um, uh, who was the the the es—well, I said Crowley or Crow—to Aleister Crowley, and of course Aleister Crowley, and um, John Dee, for example. Okay. And of course, John Dee was trying to, um, create egregors, and of course the word egregor and Watcher is really associated with the, um, the the Book of Enoch, M.H. Okay, in in the in the the New Testament—is it the Old Testament, New Testament? I never remember that either—but the Book of Enoch is the idea because Enoch, if you read *The Book of Enoch*, it's really quite strange, and they have these entities that appear in *The Book of Enoch*, and this is what John Dee and esotericists were trying to do for years was to bring these these beings forth from somewhere else, then use them to control them in one way or another. So it was a kind of a role of trying to to control these thought forms, but of course if we go back over into into modern times, we have an awful lot of ideas about egregor because sociologically, an egregor is something like Coca-Cola; it's like a brand; it's something that we all recognize subliminally as being something external to ourselves that has reality, like socialism and communism; they're all egregors in one way or another. Yeah, but the idea is, I argue that we can create these. Now there's a lady called—called Alexandra David-Néel, who was a a Belgian-French explorer in the 1920s, and she went to Tibet to travel, and while they were there, her and her little group of Buddhist friends, they created a thought form; they created what's called a tulpa. Yes, and I don't know if you know the story, because it's intriguing because they create this friendly little—little Monk, and initially he does their bidding, and he's really friendly, and then suddenly he turns malevolent, and they have to ostracize him; they have to destroy him because he's become independent of them. And I've argued long and indeed in my talks last year in in Contact in the Desert, um, I argued that the entities that people experience during, um, abductions and everything else, they're the same entities; they they are—they are part of us, um, using the example, for instance, of the the Islamic concept of the jinn. You know, in the Quran it said that I think man was made of Earth, the Angels were made of of of light, and the jinn were made of smokeless fire. Now I always—in—I was always intrigued by what do they mean by smokeless fire, and then you think about it and you think, do you know what smokeless fire is? It's plasma. Ah, okay. So, and again it's it's unfortunate actually, because a future guest on your show would have been an interesting guy called Paul Eno—Paul sadly died last year—he's an ex-Catholic priest who used to be—used to travel around the, um, New England countryside doing ghost hunting, and I've just got this vision of all these black-cassocked priests running around chasing ghosts, um, and he wrote a wonderful book called *Dancing Past the Graveyard*, I think it was, and in this book he tells a series of stories of events he investigated when he was doing his his investigation work, and he came to the conclusion that egregors are a form of plasma, and they need sort of electromagnetic energy to kind of manifest; you'll find them around electric substations and things like this, as if this is where they're drawing in the energy, um, so very, very intriguing, but I think there's a link between them all, and maybe we can expand on this a little bit later if you're interested.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so just to—just to underscore this concept of egregor, so this is an idea that you'll find largely in the Western esoteric tradition, and usually it's defined as something like a a mind or collective intelligence or being that manifests over the top of a of a community. Like you said, it could be a brand; it could be a group. Like we we joke around in my Discord sometimes that there would be an egregor for this community, and like the whole—yeah, like we're creating an egregor now.

Right, right. Yeah, sure. Like, yeah, like a tertiary spirit or like a Dion for the, um, for whatever the organization or group is. Um, there there's an interesting idea from—so I've really gone down the rabbit hole of the, uh, Monroe Institute, Robert Monroe.

Oh, cool. Cool. Uh, so I did a Gateway Retreat recently. I've been—I've been reading the whole, uh, Gateway report on the, um, on the channel. I did a, uh, a sort of story that goes through the background of all the psychic spy programs as well as my experience there. And there's a very—as you know, if you've read Monroe's books—there's a very similar idea in Monroe's books that even—I mean, this extends all the way to like life after death—that essentially like the world's popular religions create these nonphysical, uh, you know, like mental manifestations of expectation that people will get pulled into after death. So this is an idea that seems to be—it's—I think it has one of the great litmus tests, I think, for these esoteric ideas is how many different lenses do they work under? And it seems like, you know, as we're alluding to and we'll get to shortly, it seems like this ties into the UFO phenomenon; it seems like this may tie into near-death experiences; it seems clearly it's very prominent in Western esotericism. So whenever very equivalent ideas are popping up in in, uh, multiple different, sort of, schools of thought independently, I pay a lot of attention.

Well, it's funny enough, my latest book is on near-death experiences.

Great, because the other great thread in my writing, right the way through, is the near-death experience, and in my latest book I discuss exactly this. I I mix in the elements of the egregor together with something I call the, um, the, uh, the Huxleyan Spectrum, which is what I call the scale of transcendence, which is an idea that certain individuals—the doors of perception are more open—and I wrote a book on this a few years ago called *Opening the Doors of Perception*, and the idea that, you know, depending upon our neurological correlates is whether we can dampen down the brain's ability to act as an attenuator to actually take out information within the greater information field. Yeah, and I I argue that, you know, when we have—when people experience near-death experiences, for example, you know, there does seem to be—I do the anthropology of it; I'm really fascinated by the anthropological aspects as well—and I came across a couple of fascinating cases which I cite in the book which may have be of interest to you, whereby—and I'll be citing this in Contact in the Desert—is that I came across a number of cases of, um, near-death experiences that took place in the 1960s, um, in New Guinea. And if you look at these near-death experiences, they're alien abductions. Not only are they alien abductions, but there are so many parallels—and I think I'm—I think I'm genuine in saying I think I'm the only writer that's made this link in this way—is that two or three of the cases, for instance, there—one case where a guy has a near-death experience, finds himself somewhere else, and he finds a house in the middle of the jungle, and the house is on stilts, and he feels himself being drawn up into the house, and then he realizes that the house is not actually on stilts; it's hovering, and it's going round. Now that's a classic UFO case, and indeed when I was at Contact in the Desert last year, I had the opportunity to discuss this with Whitley Strieber and also with Travis Walton, because if you look at Travis Walton's case, you know, he's actually sucked up into the UFO, and this is exactly what this—this person described in New Guinea. Now we can draw parallels here with the New Guinea cargo cults, because, you know, in the cargo cults, you know, they believed that after the—during the Second World War, when the Americans arrived, you know, that all these goods came out the sky, and the planes arrived, and they realized that by doing certain rituals, you could you could get these benefits coming down. So clearly within the near-death experience within that community, not only are there UFO encounters, but there are also elements of the near-death experience that can parallel directly the cargo cults' idea, because when they have near-death experiences, they go to this place where things are being manufactured; they go into places where things are being built, which is exactly what you'd expect that a near-death experience from somebody from a cargo cult would believe them to be. So I argue that the near-death experience is completely created by our expectations of it, and it's facilitated by dimethyltryptamine, or endogenous dimethyltryptamine, is my argument as well, which we can come on to, but what is more interesting is that it doesn't mean they're not real, you know. This is the question, and my central question in all my books is: what is reality? What is real? Because we make this assumption that there's a solidity in the external world out there, that it exists when we're not looking at it, that it is just—we are just observers of an external reality, but of course anybody that's studied Consciousness studies or is con—studied the brain and neurology and how the brain inwardly constructs an image of the external world, for instance, you're probably aware of the fact that neurologists and Consciousness studies people—when somebody turns around and believes there's a one-to-one relationship between what I experience inside my head—yeah, in terms of the visual field and what is out there—they're called naive realists.

I was just going to say that—it's called naive realism.

For realism. Yeah, great. That's good. So we're we're really attuned here. So, you know, the concept then of naive realism, and it's the idea that, you know, there is nothing out there, you know, effectively. We think everything is solid; solidity is an illusion; solidity is only there—you only feel something because of electrostatic repulsion, which is effectively the—the—as you probably know—the within each atom, the outer ring of each atom has an electron, and the electron is negatively charged, which means the atoms and the electrons in your backside or in your fingers is similarly negatively charged, so when you feel you are touching something, what you're act—the sensations you are receiving is actually the electrostatic repulsion; you never touch anything. But indeed, what you think is solid matter is actually 99.99999999996 empty space within—within the nucleus—within within the, um, the atom itself, and I'm using here the hydrogen atom as an example, but effectively that's the level of empty space. And of course, you have the nucleus in the middle, which is made up of the, um, uh, the neutron and the proton, but effectively they in themselves are point particles and are made up themselves of quarks, and you know they're just configurations of different types of quarks that create—so you have an up up quark and a down quark and whatever, and they make a positive, for example, but the point of the matter is that the quarks themselves are point particles, so they have no extension in space, so they're not physically existing in the way we understand it, similarly with the electrons. So effectively, the atoms which come together to make molecules, which come together to make compounds and everything else that makes the world around us is mostly empty space. 96% of the universe is missing; we know that from the calculations that have been done because of the way in which galaxies revolve; there's more matter around the galaxy than we can see, and it's called Dark Matter, and within Dark Matter there's Dark Energy. Again, they are things we do not know, nor do we understand. So then we come down to the point of, well, what is actually—what is actually processing the qualia, the the stimuli, the sensory stimuli that's coming in? What is processing inside my head? What is processing and changing effectively electrochemical signals that are stimulated by my retina? When a photon hits my retina, it's converted into an electro—electrochemical signal, which is then processed in the darkest part of my brain, the visual cortex, the back here, and it's reconstituted—reconstituted, you know, from a—a literally postage-stamp image that is is inverted, is changed into this sensory, round, visionary, colorful field that I consider to be the visual world. So even there, there's something magical taking place, but then we go back one step further, and then we think, well, hold on a minute, what's doing the perceiving? So there is a kind of—people work on this idea of the homunculus, the idea that inside your head is a little version of you in a little room, and there's big speakers that are attached to your ears, and there's big TV screens that are attached to the outside world. But of course, that suggests an infinite regress, because it would argue that the homunculus itself will have a little person in its head. Yeah, that doesn't work. So we we have to come to something more conclusive about this, and the question is, we don't know, and this is the thing I delight in—in engaging with scientists, which I do all the time—because my—the way they find dealing with me difficult is that I'm interested in these subjects, but I dig far deeper than they expect somebody to dig; they don't expect somebody to throw at them qualia; they don't expect somebody to throw at them David Chalmers' hard problem of Consciousness.

Yeah, yeah. They don't expect that; they expect you to be some kind of woo-woo nut job who just believes in I don't know, vibrations and everything like that, and you—and when you get talking to them, you realize that they they feel the same way. As they say with quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics is as damn near a magic as you can imagine anything being.

Totally. Pardon the interruption, my friends. Obviously, we throw a lot of esoteric ideas around on the channel, and to be sure, the history of Western esotericism can be a twisty, turny, labyrinthian rabbit hole. There's so much mystery; so much we'll never know. But one thing I do know is that if you want to look to some of the most foundational and influential works in Western esotericism, you cannot look past the Platonic tradition and the Hermetic tradition. And that's why I am so excited about what Gallowglass Books is doing. They've got two incredible, very limited offerings that are absolute jewels for any esoteric nerd's bookshelf. They've got *Manad*, which is a collection of writings by Neoplatonic sages—Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus—which, by the way, I'm told there are only about a hundred or so remaining copies of, so move on that one quickly. And I cannot wait to secure a copy of their latest offering, *Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition*, which you can pre-order now at a special price, which I do recommend doing because, again, this is an extremely limited piece; there will only ever be 2500 copies made. And I want to emphasize these are not just reissues of classics, my friends; the whole aesthetic is absolutely on point; the quality is super high; you can tell they're giving the utmost respect to these works; they really want to do something special. Grab them before they're gone, and do be sure to use the link in the description to let them know that your friend Michael P sent you. Much love, and back to the episode.

Yeah, what—as soon as non-locality becomes a core part of the entire theory in and of itself, suddenly you have to throw a lot of your assumptions about reality, especially naive realism-style reality, completely out the window and start asking new questions. So much so that, as as I'm sure you know, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, you know, they write that famous paper for talking about—come on, like, look at—look at this—if quantum physics is real, we've got to assume all this is not real, so clearly it can't be real. And now, as anybody who remotely follows this knows, Nobel prizes have been awarded—I think it was in 2022—to three different scientists, essentially stamping, um, quantum theory with as real as replicable as demonstrated a science as there can be, and quantum non-locality is a core feature of that reality. And you know this is the example with, you know, entanglement. I won't get in all the—because I want to go back to the initial question—but very quickly, just jumping in there, you know, the whole thing of entanglement, as you rightly say, you know, when Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen came up with a 1937 thought experiment, Einstein was trying to prove, in effect, as he said to Max Born—Neil Bohr—when he turned around, he said, "I do not believe that the the Moon is not there when I'm not looking at it." So they come up with this thought experiment which was to counter—and it was like Schrödinger with Schrödinger's cat—trying to disprove it; people think Schrödinger was trying to prove it, but he was doing the opposite. And of course, what happens then—John Bell in 1964 comes up with Bell's inequality—the CERN scientist—and then in 1980, 81, Alain Aspect and Dalibard and, uh, Roger, the Paris Institute of Optics, did it experimentally, proving that if you put two particles—subatomic particles—into the same—quantum state—and you put them in different—in different places—they could be thousands of miles apart—you do one to the other, they instantaneously communicate, which means at a lower level of reality, everything is a unity, right? Doesn't it?

Yeah, it certainly implies that. It certainly implies that. So so back to the—so we we definitely implied the relationship between this idea of Consciousness, egregor, and, um, the UAP UFO phenomenon, but we never really like fully connected the dots there. So so again, just to refresh the audience's memory, um, because we've taken a nice fun, uh, digression here, is—um—so I I asked you about non-human intelligence, your your thoughts on this phenomena, how much you follow it, and you liken the phenomena to egregor, and you know that—so again to—if in case that term is still foggy—that there are these manifestations of Consciousness, um, that can either mentally or non-physically form, or perhaps even physically form, and I'm going to jump to the conclusion that you're implying that that is what UAPs are: these orbs of light often that appear, or what seem to be craft that appear, may at least partially be constituted of the consciousness of the experiencer or the group.

Very much so. In fact, there was an incident that took place at Contact in the Desert last year which I thought was very intriguing, whereby a group of people were were were, um, observing at the back of the the the the the resort that the event takes place in, in Indian Wells, and they came back and they they actually turned around and said that a UFO flew over them at low level, and then flew over them and flew off into the distance towards the mountains. And then 10 or 15 minutes later it came back. Now to me that was extraordinary because it was a collective, um, hallucination, for one of a better terms. And of course, we know that the whole idea of collective hallucinations is a scientific explanation for group hallucinations, but there's no explanation as to how people subliminally and consciously see the same thing unless there's telepathy. So I've always argued, you know, that the scientists are using one thing they don't like to explain something they don't like even more, you know. So there's the argument—there's—there's these nebulous terms like *folie à deux*. If two people share something, it's a *folie à deux*; it's just a technical term. I called it the labeling explanatory theory, you know, the idea—give it a nice label, give it a nice Latin phrase or a Greek phrase, and people will think you understand, you know, effectively it's—um—I call it idiomatic science—idiopathic science I should say—because the word idiopathy in in in technical terms means we we haven't got a clue. If you've got idiopathic epilepsy, it means that you don't—you know, we don't know what's causing it. But what was fascinating about this was I came to the conclusion that the group's anticipation was so strong—whatever this machine was—it manifested, and their anticipation of it brought it into this reality. Now one of the things that was fascinatingly curious was that a few months afterwards, I was doing a a talk at Southend-on-Sea, which in Essex—near—it's in the southeast of England—and I was doing a talk, and I did my talk, and then afterwards this lady came over to me, and she had, um, uh, a film on her phone—on her iPhone—and she said, "I want you to explain this because I find it quite intriguing." So she showed it me, and on the film she's looking out of a window overlooking the English Channel, overlooking the Thames Estuary from her flat in Southend, and she's obviously—there's somebody next to her—and she's going, "Look at that," she said, "Look, I'm filming; can you see that?" And you see a line of white UFOs—white lights—almost like SkyLink, but it's not—but it looked like that—going across literally the other side of the river, and one of the lights goes—goes to the forward, and then the other one flicks to the forward, and then the one at the back comes forward, and she's filming this, and she said, "It's absolutely extraordinary," and she says, "I wonder if it's a mark on the window." So she opens the window, and it's still there, which was intriguing, but what was even more intriguing was when she finishes the filming and starts the camera, she speaks to her friend, and her friend couldn't see anything, and her friend said, "I can't see." And as this lady said to me, she said, "How can that be? The phenomenon I was witnessing through my eyes, through the lens of the—through the lens of the phone, was in three-dimensional reality in my world, but in my friend who was standing right next to me, it didn't exist, even though it registered on the on the filming device in the phone." Yeah, now that is incredible. So that means we—not only can we manifest an anticipation of an external object—object—but that external object can actually do something on a charge-coupled device inside a phone in a video film and create it, which means effectively—coming back to the idea that we draw from somewhere—this energy form which is brain-created, because of course you're clearly very knowledgeable on the on the phenomenon, you'll know about the Philip experiment from 1970.

I don't think I do, actually.

Okay, it's the Toronto experiment; it took place in 1971, and there were a group of spouses of, uh, academics at the University of Toronto, and they got interested—as a lot of people do—they got interested in Ouija, and they were doing Ouija games and everything else, and being—being scientists and being psychologists, they were—they wanted to know what was actually causing the the motive force that was moving the glass around, and they were saying, "Is it our anticipation? Are we subliminally moving it? Subconsciously moving it?" So they decided to do a very interesting test, and what they did was they got one of the group to go away and make up a total fictional character called Philip Aykroyd. And this lady, being a historian, she created a fictional story about a lord called Philip Aykroyd who lived in the 1670s or 1680s in Warwickshire after the English Civil War. She said—she said in her storyline that this guy, uh, was a Catholic, therefore, within the period after the Civil War, he was an outsider; he was also in a loveless marriage, and one day he meets a gypsy woman; he falls in love; his wife finds out; leaves him; and he commits suicide by jumping off the battlements of the castle—total fiction—but they then decided to see if they could communicate with Philip Aykroyd using Ouija, and lo and behold, they could. And not only that, but Philip started to communicate information that wasn't part of the story but added to the story. But then things started to get strange because they started to have the table started to turn, and it started to move and vibrate and jump up and down, and they created Poltergeist activity, and they actually asked Philip, you know, "Are you creating this?" And Philip said yes, he was. So there is then a wonderful caveat to this because they did a live TV performance on Canadian television in 1970 or 71, which you can find on YouTube, and when they're do it, the table starts to rock; the physical manifestations took place live in a studio. Now to me this—this parallels—in many ways—have you come across the Skull experiment at all?

I'm not sure.

Okay, the Skull experiment was an experiment that took place in the early 1990s, I think, in a small village called Skull in Norfolk in the UK, in East Anglia. Okay. And again, what was happening was they were communicating with entities—

Sorry, sorry to interrupt—is is this town famous for, um, spiritualism and psychics? Because there's some town in the Northeast—I'm forgetting what it's called—but apparently it's like a whole bunch of mediums live there, and it's like a town of weird phenomena that's constantly going on, but I don't know if it's the same place or not.

Um, I don't think it was Skull; I don't think it was, but it doesn't mean it wasn't. But Skull in Norfolk is is is not the Northeast as such. Anyway, so it's kind of—it's still the south of England, sort of, but—

Oh, you're—you're talking about England; I was thinking—I was thinking the US.

Oh, right. Oh, right. Yes, there's Norfolk, Virginia, too.

Oh, right. Okay. Okay. I can quite see—see now—now it's Norfolk, England, um, and they they they they started to communicate; they get communications from these beings who are claiming they're trying to communicate from wherever they are. Now it was—it was a fascinating book called *The Skull Experiment*, which is written about it. Now I've interviewed and met up with a number of people who witnessed the phenomenon taking place; they had Poltergeist activity; they had apports appearing—newspapers from the Second World War appeared—but one of the weirdest things was one day they had an apparition appear on the TV screen in the in the in the house.

Wow.

And they call the being Blue. Now if you look at Blue, it's a Gray; it's definitely a Gray. So though we have this—this—Mach—you know, if you've taken Whitley Strieber's cover to *Communion*, it's that—so clearly whatever these beings were, they were either aware of our anticipations—sort of—because these people were spiritualists; they were not UFO buffs; they were spiritualists—but they were manifesting entities that clearly were alien and were clearly trying to manipulate them in one way or another. And this parallels—I wrote a book a few—few years ago with Professor Irving Hallowell, and in this we discussed about evidence of life after death, and I came across a series of fascinating experiments that took place in the 1890s by the Society for Psychical Research, and it was called Imperator and Rector, and again they—

Every time I think the, the um, we need to take a step back in terms of this when we, we're using the word Consciousness. And as I hinted earlier on when I was talking about David Chalmers and his hard problem, is that we do not know what Consciousness is. We do not know where Consciousness comes from. We have no idea even first base of how Consciousness creates or how Consciousness is created by the brain. Is it just an epiphenomenon of brain behaviors? Does it just, how spontaneously appear, you know, as I've argued in one of my books, is it just the addition of one molecule, one quark, and then suddenly Consciousness downloads? Or is it more interesting, and I'm not unique in this, and I'm not even claiming that I am, but Consciousness, I argue, is a field. There's a field of Consciousness. I think it's probably something to do with the holographic nature of the universe and the, the holographic argument and the holographic nature. So it's the idea that Consciousness, for me, in terms of how my years of reading around the subject, both from esoterica to science, is that there are levels of consciousness and levels of awareness. And that effectively, and you will not be aware of this from reading the book *The Damon*, but in my latest book, no, the second to last book, um, *Cheating the Ferryman*, I come up with this idea that there is um, everything, everything is Consciousness. Consciousness is prime. Consciousness is the backdrop of everything.

Now your reference there to the Presocratics and the Platonics is very, very interesting because I've long been interested in the concept of the Jungian Zeitgeist, the idea of archetypes, the idea, as you say, there's, you've got a picture in your background there, a filow man, yeah, which, which was Young's, uh, Young's Damon. And the idea that we, we are reducing, we are reduced down Consciousness from a greater Consciousness field. Now what I argue in my overall hypothesis, which I call *Cheating the Ferryman*, is that we are individuated egos existing within a simulation. Each ego has above it its spirit guide, its Amis, its Damon. I call it the Damon, but you can call it your spirit guide or whatever you want, which exists outside of this time frame. It exists outside of linear time, could exist in orthogonal time, as Philip K. Dick called it, the idea that there's a Time behind time. And I'd argue, for instance, if anybody's seen the movie *Interstellar*, in the Tesseract sequence in *Interstellar*, the Christopher Nolan, uh, movie, you have this situation whereby, uh, the main character is looking into the life of his daughter, into what they call the Tesseract, which is this three, it's four dimensions, it's seeing a square from four dimensions, and he sees all the elements of her life taking place in, in one moment. Now from the viewpoint of the Damon, that is what is taking place. The Damon has lived your life, this time and many times before. Using a modern analogy, he's your D, the Damon is your game player, you know, you're existing in a three-dimensional virtual reality version of your life, which inside the program, with inside the holographic program, is the outcome of every decision you can possibly ever make and every decision that any other human being can make, um, and the Damon plays the game for you, guides you through. If the doors of perception are open enough, it's getting a bit complex now, but I'm hoping we can add more material to this for sure, for just because, to answer your questions, to move on.

So then I argue that above the Damon is something I call the Uber-Damon, and the Uber-Damon is my equivalent of the Jungian collective unconscious. But because, unlike Jung, I do the science of this, I do the neurology, I do the neurochemistry of how this is manifested, how it's manifested physiologically, how it's manifested using quantum mechanics, how it's manifested using applications of Hameroff and Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction argument and the way in which the microtubules in the brain are receivers of information, and they reduce and they effectively collapse the wave function of that anticipatory universe, which exists in potential, but the point of observation by a sentience, it turns it into a point particle in a point location, which then embroiders a whole new reality. But we'll go back to that later. And then I argue that above, and each one of these levels, so the edolon is a single conscious, the edolon is a single cons, these are all terms from, um, Platonic thought and, and the Mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries. So it's all from that. The Damon and the adelon, they're all terms that Socrates used, that Plato used, and of course the concept of anamnesis and everything else, it's all central to this. And indeed, we, I was, I'm planning, and I'm still thinking of doing this, we're planning to recreate Plato's Cave in Plato's Cave in Greece. I found, I just researched and I found from a paper written in 1905 the location of where Plato's Cave, yeah, it's called, it's the Cave of Vari, and it's around, it's along the coast around about 20 miles east of Athens. Wow. And my one of my books is out in Greek, and my Greek publisher is very interested in working with me on this, but that's another aside, because that's a whole new interesting area I'm going into.

Another, another quick aside, my most popular thing that I've ever published is a piece I did on Plato's Cave and the sort of deeper hidden esoteric layers of that allegory and how it sort of mushrooms out in a fractal way where it can take on, you know, I was talking about these ideas that transcend lenses, and the Plato's Cave allegory is one of my favorite examples of that. Funny enough, with your Mandelbrot set behind you, know it's, um, something that fascinates you. Well, funnily enough, again, as an aside, on an aside, on an aside, myself and a group of friends, we recreated Plato's Cave in an experiment which we did six years ago, almost now, six years ago in a, a group of caves or, um, tunnels in the Midlands in the UK, where we literally recreated Plato's Cave, and I was the hero, Fant, I was actually wearing purple robes and everything. Oh wow. And I spoke to the, we, you had a group of volunteers who were there who didn't know it was going to happen, and I turn up speaking to them in Greek, and we literally recreated Plato's Cave in the darkest part of these heavily, heavily haunted tunnels. It was a really weird event. And we had with us, we had a group of friends of mine, uh, Dr. Winkler and Dr. Procal. Winkler and Proa, one is a consultant urologist and the other guy's a consultant, um, consultant psychologist, and indeed they were with me at Conscious Contact in the Desert two years ago, and they've invented something called the Lucid Light device, which actually can create out-of-body experiences, al, you know, sort of like, um, out-of-body experiences and Altered States of Consciousness. So we put people into a light trance, we had hypnotists there, we had psychologists, uh, research psychologist, and we put people into a like trance, and then we took them into the caves, and it was, it was extraordinary. There's, um, I'm hoping that one day the video will be released because there was a film crew came over from Denmark for it. And our intention now is that we will take that together with the academics who I was working with over to Greece, and we will do it in the real cave. That is very cool. And funny enough, yeah, you'll love this, um, one of my guys that, a couple of guys that have interviewed me in the past are a group called the, um, Dreaming Jaguars, and one of the guys is one of the guys responsible for the, the filming in a lot of the, um, filming using drones that's used in, um, the David Icke programs. Okay, okay. And he's one of the guys that does the drone filming, and when he interviewed me, he used a drone, so I'm walking through a forest, and you can see the drone comes down as I'm walking through it. Really, really good. Again, I can send you the link to this, but he, he and I decided we could do something extraordinary at the start of the, um, the Plato's Cave experiment, and Plato's Cave. And what we plan to do, if we can get the go-ahead for this, we're going to have a drone on the top of the Acropolis, and the drone will take off and it will fly out over Aegina and the, in the islands near in, because I'm a total Grecofile, I go to Greece twice a year, and it will fly over the islands and it will come in over Cape Sounion, which is this beautiful Doric temple that sits on a cape. It will then zoom out into the ocean, into the sea again, and it will come in and it will literally fly into the cave, and as it flies into the cave, I'm going to be standing there in my purple robes going, "Welcome to Plato's Cave." Wow. And we think that's going to be a mind-blowing opening to the experiment, but that's an aside. So going back again then, so we're doing the levels, so we've got, we've got to the point of the individuated ego Consciousness, which is the edolon, one life, then you have the Damon that lives many lives, but is literally you, it's your higher self that lives many lives, but it's still you. Then you have above that, you have what I call the Uber-Damon, and which is the Jungian collective unconscious. And I believe that when people have like past life memories of being other people, when they're hypnotized, they are tuned into the, the, um, the collective unconscious, and that's why they can become a 14th-century peasant in, in France, because this is what's happening, because all of these are all you, you're, you're all, you're reducing down from a greater consciousness. The Damon is one greater Consciousness, the Uber-Damon is another greater Consciousness, which is all humanity. And then above that, I have what I call the Godmon, which is literally the source. It is, it is the Consciousness that the whole universe is created upon. And I argue, using esoteric terms, that this is the equivalent of the Cabalistic concept of the Ein Sof, the idea of the singular Consciousness. Yeah, uh, and as Bill Hicks famously said in his monologue, you know, that we are but one Consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, and this is exactly what the ancient Greeks believed, it's exactly what the, the, the, uh, the Vedantists believe, you know, when we have the concept of Brahman, the idea of a singular Consciousness. So Consciousness is prime. So the Consciousness field we attune into, and depending on how much our doors of perceptions open is how wide our perceptual field works.

Now, again, people would turn around and say, okay, yes, this guy's suddenly gone off onto this really weird unscientific tangent. It's not unscientific, um, my associate to my new book, the guy that's written the foreword for it is a guy called Dr., Dr., um, Pascal Michel, who's one of the world's new leading neuropsychologists, uh, neuroscientists, and he wrote the foreword. In fact, again, last year, I had, I got managed to get him an invite to Contact in the Desert. He went down really, really well. Cool. So the experiments are proving that, and it's been long suspected, but it's now scientifically proven the brain acts as an attenuator. The brain is there to take information out in order for us to function correctly within the simulation, but under some circumstances we can attune into the broader information field, as I mentioned before, but it's never been proven before. But around about 18 months ago, two years ago, an extraordinary experiment took place at the University of Sussex. I think it was a guy called Anil Seth did it. I, I think I'm right in saying it was Anil that did this, and what they did was they had volunteers taking psilocybin, magic mushrooms, the logic being that they would then scan their brains using fMRI scans or whatever, you know, super-duper scanning machines, find out what happens within the brain when somebody starts hallucinating. Now the general belief was that the hallucinatory substances link parts of the brain together in such a way that we start to hallucinate and creating an alternate reality. Much to their astonishment, they discovered the opposite happens. The psilocybin switches off the brain's ability to communicate with other parts of the brain. So in other words, by taking something away from the brain is what allows us to perceive the greater reality. So in which case, when Aldous Huxley argued in 1954 that the brain was an attenuator, he was right. In *The Doors of Perception*, as was C. G. Jung, as was Henri Bergson. So this whole idea that Consciousness, you know, that we, the reality is just there, it's not, it's there's a much broader reality that we are denied, but under certain, if you have, you have, uh, migraine, classic migraine, you have temporal lobe epilepsy, autism, uh, Alzheimer's disease, all of these open up the doors of perception. Alzheimer's, for instance, it's because the microtubules in the brain are destroyed by the amyloid plaques within the brain that actually stops the brain's ability to act as an attenuator. I even go down to that kind of level of description as to why this happens.

Um, I do quite get frustrated sometimes, the lot of the world are not aware of what I'm doing, and I feel I'm this little guy beavering away with all these ideas, and I keep seeing books being written by other people, and I keep going, "I've already done this. I wrote this 10 years ago." Yeah, but it's the way of the world. It's the way of the… Well, I appreciate it, and I feel like I'm in the unique position to understand all of these references because I've, you know, I've been doing this about a decade at this point, so I've talked to just hundreds and hundreds of people who are either the people or exactly adjacent to the people that are core to a lot of these concepts you're talking about. So, so at least, uh, you can, you can have the pleasure of knowing that, that I'm, I'm loving it, and I'm, I'm enjoying this, this multidisciplinary, uh, approach. But, but yeah, so that, that I don't know if this is the same study, but there are those images going around the internet a few years ago of fMRI of the brain on psilocybin, and, and it's kind of paradoxical because if it's the same study, I'm not sure if it is, but, um, you know, it's got all these, you know, imagine, I, I'll find the image and put it up here, but, um, essentially, in some ways it looks like the brain is hyperconnected, but what's actually happening is that most of our Consciousness takes place on one of a few networks, like the most famous one is like the default mode network. Yeah, but then what you get when you ingest psilocybin or, uh, probably any other trip to mean is you get an entropy of those brain networks such that you're, you're no longer in any of these familiar brain networks. It, it, it's this entropic, lower-level interconnectivity that is holistic, but like you're saying, greatly dampened from, from our normal way of perceiving things. So such that, you know, to again, to just underscore your point that it, it isn't like the brain is going crazy manifesting all of these illusions in reality, it's, it's humming at a much lower frequency. And I don't know, I, I'm, I'm curious now because I've been so deep down the rabbit hole of this whole, uh, Gateway paper, which is, you know, it's funny because this thing is written in 1983, but a lot of the science, science that's talked about in this, I mean, it, it's very similar to a lot of the, the stuff that you talk about. I mean, they talk about bone, they talk about PRBR, they talk about, um, holographic universe theory, they talk about the idea that there is this one underlying, uh, reality which they call the Absolute, and that we're all holograms of the Absolute, you know, manifested, um, as these little individuated, uh, sort of, I don't know, atoms of Consciousness, but that we are able to, um, under the right circumstances, go all the way back to the Absolute through all the intermediary, uh, states or, uh, energy systems of Consciousness. And me, as someone who's a deeply, I think the, the philosophical lineage that I'm the closest to is Platonism for sure, um, and these ideas map one to one on Platonism, like, for instance, this idea that you were talking about of, um, Consciousness being primary, this is the Nous, right, the, the, the noetic realm, um, and for, for Platonists, that is the primary reality, and this physical world that we live in is like a shadow of that reality. The Pleroma and the Kenoma within Gnosticism as well.

Right, right. Yes, yes. And you know what's interesting too is, um, Plotinus, the, you know, often considered to be the father of Neoplatonism, he actually, and so, and again, Iamblichus talks about this too, the idea that the Daimon, this, this kind of comports with your idea that there's like a daimonic hierarchy, right? So, so you, and this is really interesting, um, I, I won't go all the way into this aside, but there, you know, we have in Greek terms, ho Daimon, like the Daimon that presides over us and our souls and our fate collectively, but then there are all of these like little spirits and Daimons within the too that has all of these like sub-jobs, um, and both Iamblichus and Plotinus talk about the idea that there can be a daimonic change, so that if you somehow satisfy the mission or capacity of your Daimon, you actually sort of level up to having a new Daimon, um, so yeah, there, there is this idea. So I think you're definitely onto something. You're in good company if you're, if you're arriving at similar conclusions to, uh… Just very, very quickly, one of the points you made earlier on was a very, very interesting and a very good one was the idea about the brain channels that facilitate these things. And in one of my latest books, I, I argue that we're missing the point with the neuronal model, the neurons being the communication facilities within the brain, and I argue that we're getting this wrong. Cajal and people like that, we became preoccupied with the neurons, but of course the neurons communicate very slowly, relatively, you know, the kind of the synapse and the communications across the synapse during using neurochemicals and neuromodulators is, is not very fast, whereas we touched upon, didn't we, non-locality before? Yeah, and I'd like to argue that the reason we don't understand the workings of the brain when it comes to accessing greater realities is we're looking at the neuronal brain when we should be looking at the astroglial network. By this, I mean that you hear people use the phrase, "We only use one-tenth of our brain," but people don't actually fully understand what they mean by that. What is meant by this is one-tenth of the, the, the cells in the brain are neurons, but the, the, the rest of the cells in the brain are called glial cells, and they're called glial from the Greek for "glue," because when Cajal and people noticed it when they were doing the staining to see where the neurons were, they came to the conclusion that they, these things were here to just hold the neurons in place. But recent research has shown that, and of course it is the, the, the nature doesn't waste things, you know, it's not going to have wasting all those, those cells. And it's work is now suggesting that the, the astroglial network itself, the glial cells communicate in a completely different way, and they communicate non-locally. They use quantum physics to communicate, so they can effectively communicate virtually instantaneously across the brain, which means that one glial cell can communicate with another specific glial cell in a specific location, which means that much more information can be processed. And I argue that that is, that is daimonic Consciousness, that is the Consciousness that's looking outwards and upwards, outside of what we, what I would call Kenoma. Well, what the, the, the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics called the Kenoma, the, the, the work of the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, the world of, you know, the Gnostics believe, of matter. And the astroglial network, I argue, and I really want to work with neurologists on this as to whether I'm right, because I'm not saying I'm not a neurologist, I'm just a very enthusiastic amateur, but if you apply the, um, orchestrated objective reduction model of Hameroff and Penrose, and you then take that away from the neurons and put it inside the astroglial network, and you work on non-locality, it suggests that the brain, the brain is much more interesting and much more powerful. And this would explain there are a number of issues that neurologists have with the workings of the brain, and one is called the Binding Problem. And the Binding Problem is how we have a feeling of simultaneity, because as I said before, you know, the actual transmission speed of neuronal information is quite slow, but if I see a red bouncing ball going down the road, the red is being processed in different parts of the brain to where the bouncing and the background, they're all in different parts of the brain, yet I have a feeling of seeing a red bouncing ball, which is impossible. As I always say to people, if you ever want neurology to start getting embarrassed when they start, you know, when they, they're getting hubristic, just say the Binding Problem and watch them suddenly change and get twitchy, and they're not sure what they're talking about. And that is because they don't understand how this works. So I argue that the Binding Problem can be cured if the brain communicates instantaneously.

Now I also think that the other point we're missing here is, even with neurotransmitters, for instance, there is strong arguments now to believe that dimethyltryptamine is not only in the body, which we know it is, but it's also been found in the brain and in the pineal gland of live rats. Yeah. Now then the question has to be asked, where is it coming from? And I'd argue that what is taking place, and again there might be neurologists out there or neurochemists out there saying I'm talking alone a nonsense, and if I am, please tell me, but my hypothesis here is that the pineal gland exists to process melatonin. Yeah, and if you look at the molecular structure of melatonin, I think I'm right in saying that you either take away or add two hydrogen atoms to the structure to change melatonin into another substance, dimethyltryptamine. Yeah. So in which case, it's quite simple that the pineal gland can synthesize from melatonin, um, DMT. Yeah. And, Doug, I would imagine you, you must have talked to Strassman at some point. Strassman and I know of each other's work and we've written to each other, but we've never actually spoken, but yet very aware of Strassman's work. I, I spoke with him recently, and, um, that, you know, the question of endogenous DMT featured fairly heavily in the conversation, and you know, for whatever reason, I had slowly worn down my general idea that DMT was really, you know, secreted by the pineal gland, but when I, I don't know why, I feel like there've been, you know, certain studies, other, other big neurologists that came out and publicly were like, "No, there's not, this is, this is a misnomer, this is a myth," but when I talked to Strassman, he is still pretty sure that that is the case, and he cited a lot of studies to that effect, not just personal feelings. So, um, and actually, before early in his career, something I did not know before, he got interested in DMT, there were reasons to believe that perhaps melatonin could be psychedelic, and he looked into melatonin early on in his career, you know, determined, "Okay, there's nothing particularly psychedelic about melatonin." So I just wanted to, to throw that in there because he's, he's definitely an expert in both melatonin and DMT, so he could probably, it might be worth reaching out to him about that. And interestingly enough, you know, he, he is one of the, the, the, uh, contributors, one of the, the sub, um, researchers in the Jimo Borjigin paper where they discovered the, uh, melatonin, the DMT in the pineal gland of live rats. You know, Jimo Borjigin and her team at the University of, I always, always remember, I've got and forgotten, I'm getting old, but effectively, you know, what she discovered was quite extraordinary. And of course, interestingly enough, Borjigin's other discovery was of the brain activity around about 9 or 10 seconds after the death of, of a rat, you know, where suddenly they discovered that there's brain activity after the brain is dead. And of course, this was proved in 19, 2022, and I think I'm the first writer that's gone to press on this particular incident, uh, in my latest book on near-death experiences. But in, in Munich, I, I think it was in Germany, in 2022, there was a guy, an 87-year-old guy who fell off a ladder, I think he was American living in Germany, and he fell off a ladder, he was rushed to hospital, uh, and he went into status epilepticus where he went into a series of seizures and everything, and they placed him inside, they were scanning his brain, I think, um, not sure what kind of scanner they were using, but they were scanning his brain, and when they were scanning his brain, he died. So for the first time, they had, uh, they were able to measure what happens in the brain at the point of death. And much to their astonishment, but not to mine, because it is absolutely central to my own hypothesis, because I argue that this is when the brain, the brain activity really takes place, which is the near-death experience, again, around about six to seven seconds after he had died, the brain went into massive communication where all the areas of the brain were communicating with each other. Now this is the first, first time that the near-death experience, the panoramic life review, for want of a better term, the out-of-body experience was actually being shown to be taking place within the brain, or the brain was creating the, the hallucination in, in commas, of the near-death experience. And I'm using the word hallucination in the same argument that everything we perceive is a brain-generated hallucination. So I use the term hallucination, but I'm not being derogatory there in any shape or form, nor being pejorative. I am being stating a fact, everything is a hallucination, um, and this is really interesting. So this suggests something, we're at the edge of some very interesting discoveries here in terms of what's happening in the brain. And I'd like to believe I'm one of the few writers that's trying, attempting to pull this together. If I can, definitely…

Are you familiar with, uh, Donald Hoffman's work? I am. It's excellent. Superb. I, I quote Hoffman a number of times in two of my books. I'm very… His work, him and I, we've got a very similar approach to it. I saw you interview Donald, didn't you? I think yes, yeah, actually, great guests. You have some fantastic guests on here, by the way. Thank you, thank you so much. Yeah, and, and actually, even before I was on YouTube, I think I have three or four other interviews with him too, so I've talked to him more than most podcasters, and I've really tried to throw a lot of different things his way and like take him off his, his usual script to see where he lands on things, and you know, he, he really is a scientist first, and he entertains a lot of different things, but he really tries to keep things to what, can I say, mathematically, what can I propose, what experiments can I do? And his, his create, like he and a very small other handful of scientists, I think are the ones pushing us forward in, in a lot of these ways that you're talking about where they're, where they're willing to take ideas that are seemingly way beyond the standard scientific interpretation, but doing just some very creative, um, inversions of ideas, because like for Hoffman, um, you know, natural selection is, is one of the, the core points of the way that he works his theory, yet he jumps to almost a completely inside, inside-out, um, you know, Consciousness-first sort of conclusion from using evolution by natural selection. And we don't have to get into his whole argument, but it has precisely to do with what you're talking about that, um, we do not perceive reality as it is whatsoever, and not only is that naive realism, it's 0% of reality as he calls it, and he uses that example all the time of, uh, reality being like an evolutionarily convenient computer desktop that we're interacting with, that there is no reality behind it, it's just the way that we have to perceive reality in order to survive, in order to reproduce, et cetera. Um, so yeah, you guys seem to be on a very… I would, I would be delighted to be put in contact with him because I've been laboring, I sometimes feel almost alone for over two decades on this subject matter, and because I, although I'm university educated and I did postgrad and everything else, I am not an academic. I, I literally read extensively and use my training as a sociologist to apply these ideas and try to learn as much as I possibly can about the science, um, but I feel sometimes I've been following a very lonely route as an, as an academic outsider, whereas I feel that there is a degree of credibility in the, the stuff I'm presenting because first and foremost, I do the science, and you know, if you read my books that, you know, I reference everything I say back to science. And if, if, if in some way, as in my idiotic way, I've got the wrong end of the stick, I'm more than happy for people to point this out to me, because I noticed is it Fed, Fred, Federico Faggin? I think yeah, you know, he again is somebody I'm an admirer of, but I'm reading what they write, and I'm going, "God, I wrote that in 2001." Yeah, um, and, and again, it's not, I'm not upset, I'm not annoyed, you know, in, in any shape or form. I'm delighted that people are now, we're all singing from the same hymn sheet, but just occasionally, I just feel, you know, I did get there first.

Well, well, yeah, and in some ways, you know, like, like we've been alluding to, like, I mean, Anaximander, the Presocratic philosopher, you know, had this idea of Nous, of Consciousness being primary, you know, before Socrates was alive. But I feel like as we are, you know, upping the resolution on the ways that we understand and interact with reality, we have to keep having an anamnesis or a re-arrival, re-ideation, many of them seem to be, ever before. I feel like it's one of the things we're, we're circling around, um, because I get so excited, you know, when I, I read about the ancient Greek philosophers and I read some of their work, and I think, you know, if you look at this as a coding, they, they hit the nail right on the head. Like, for instance, the reason I call my concept *Cheating the Ferryman* is again a reference to Charon, the Boatman. Yeah, and again, the idea, you know, that, you know, you, you, you get taken, you cheat the ferryman, you don't pay his obol as you cross the Styx, but also the idea that when you got to the other side, you had the opportunity to either drink of the Waters of Lethe, so that you would forget who you were and you'd be allowed to go back to live your life again, or you would remain, or you would have Anamnesis, the loss of forgetting, um, and to me, these, these are all incredibly complex, interesting ideas, and I'm just delighted to be able to be speaking to somebody that gets everything I'm coming from, you know, which is brilliant, which is really, really wonderful to have that happen. Likewise, likewise. So, so okay, let's, let's, uh, let's zoom out into some irresponsible, uh, but very, for me, centrally interesting philosophical, spiritual territory, which is the question of… So, so I, I understand your thesis that you're putting forward around Consciousness, around the human being, but then I'm curious, what do you think the sort of meta-mission of an individual soul is? What, what is on the line? Is there a failure? Is there a success, um, you know, because, so for, there's a, there's a big difference between, um, for instance, the Platonist idea and the, the Gnostic idea, at the end of the day, which is that, um, well, first of all, you know, I guess, I guess we should, from before, we should put a bullet point on the fact that for the Platonist, the Demiurge is not evil, the Demiurge is, is simply the Consciousness that essentially, like, worked with, um, the, uh, the Forms and instantiated all the sort of laws of reality and, you know, uh, gave human beings individual souls that were sort of mirrors of the Demiurge itself, therefore giving humans the capacity to create, to have free will, all of these things, but with, you know, within the construct of physical nature. And then, instead of the problem of evil becoming this kind of malevolent construct, it's just sort of the, the natural manifestation of living in physical reality where you have these, um, mortal, uh, you know, things running around with free will that can do whatever they want, and some of those things are, are, uh, you know, manifest in the world as evil. But anyway, before I go further on that note, um, one of the most interesting ideas to me comes from Jung's Red Book, where he mirrors this Platonic idea with the concept of, of principium individuation or the principle of individuation, where in that, actually in that picture right there in the Red Book, it's Phil addressing the throngs of the dead, and he's sort of explaining the whole existential situation of the human, right? And he says, basically, if you fail to individuate, you sort of disappear back into the, into the Pleroma, and you become this kind of, you just dissolve back into the ocean. But those who individuate become as distant stars, is what he says. And then, you know, as I've gone deeper into Platonism, I come across this idea of the aethereal soma, and I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but that's this idea of the star body. And as soon as I read that, I was like, okay, this is where Jung got this idea of becoming this like immortal star version of the self. So, so one, this is one

Has, and what I would argue in the movie *Conis*, is effectively what I call a diad. A diad is when a Damon and an adelon share the same Consciousness. So, in other words, the Damon remembers what you did in your life, last life, or your last day, or whatever, and the adelon does not. But Connors is both. So he amends his behavior, which means he amends what other people do and can influence other people's lives. And, of course, initially he wants to bed the girl, and he finds the best way to bed the girl is to take her out a few times because he realizes he's living the same day over and over again. No, he doesn't, does he? First, he tries to commit suicide and fails and does all kinds of weird things like driving on railway tracks and everything, committing suicide, and he still fails because he still keeps coming back. So he realizes he can use the knowledge he GS from the previous day when he dated her, took her out for a meal, and asked her what her favorite movie was or her favorite novel, and she turns around and tells him. So the next day he goes, "You know, do you know my favorite novel is Dosy," or whatever, and she goes, "Wow, you know, I love Doski as well." So, over a period of time, he uses that to try for personal gain; he's doing it for completely selfish reasons. But then he wants to impress us, so he learns how to play the piano, learns how to sing, and he reads all the books he can read, and suddenly he starts to change, and knowledge starts to change him. After many iterations, he realizes that it's not being selfish; it's altruism that's important. And he realizes he can use that knowledge to run around the town, catch the little boy falling out of the tree, and also try and save the—which he fails to do—but effectively he's learning; he's developing over each life. He learns, and I argue that what takes place is over those myriad of lives. Danny told me he calculated that probably Conas would have had five or six thousand days, you know, and he starts to become a better human being; he starts to become effectively a bodh AA, he becomes a Buddha. He, he, he uses his power to do good, and at that point, whatever is the thing that has caused the time warp allows him to move on to the next day.

I genuinely believe this is what life is. I believe that we live in a virtual reality, for want of a better analogy, version of our lives where every outcome is already programmed in there, and us, with the guidance of our Damon, live that life a myriad of times, and each time we either get better or we get worse, but what we're doing is we're striving to become a bodhisattva; we're striving to become a complete human being. Now I also argue that all Damons aren't necessarily good. Damons are motivated in exactly the same way. For instance, I use the analogy—you may recall, I think I mentioned it in *The Damon* the book—that the Damon that Hitler's Damon allowed him to kick the bomb behind the storin during the staenberg plot. So effectively, his Damon saved Hitler's life, sure, which allowed Hitler to continue with his atrocities for, for a year or two. So, but the Damon's interest is literally the survival of its edolon within the game.

Now this means that at the end of all these myriad of lives, which are experienced in, in hyper-time, in orthogonal time, all in the pro-the-fi-final milliseconds of your life, you live an infinite number of lives, all different. And, by the way, I also argue that your life is not, not just laid out on what you've lived this life now because, of course, where you're located now is dependent upon your parents; your parents could have chosen to live somewhere else, and that's encoded in your grandparents, your great-grandparents. So all these things mean that effectively anything that can happen will happen, and this is exactly what quantum mechanics says. You know, if you look at the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the more subtle versions that are now bandying around—I mean the work of people like, um, uh, uh, the Swedish guy that did the—Max Tegmark, for instance, you know—and Tegmark's work, you know, you can see that quantum physics is moving this way. And, of course, there was a very famous book in the UK written by a very popular scientist in the UK called, um, Brian Cox, with a guy called Jeff Forshaw, and the subtitle of that book was *Everything That Can Happen Will Happen*. I did an event with Jeff Forshaw a few years ago at the National Theatre in London; really, really nice guy. In fact, I met him at the University of Manchester where he's professor of quantum mechanics there, and over coffee he just dropped into the conversation, he said to me, "Of course, we now know that every electron in the universe knows the location of every other electron." You know, that's one of the top scientists in the world. This is how different the world is from science from what the average man in the street thinks is really happening.

Um, so I argue that after many, many lives we then move on. Now, when we become that kind of advanced human being, we have a choice, I think, and what we then do is we then move into the, dissipate into the, uh, Uber Damon state where we become part of the collective consciousness of mankind, or we move further up into being, into the godmon where we just become the greater Consciousness, or we choose to individuate again, but we could individuate in a different way. And a few years ago I wrote a book on a fairly obscure—for the United States, but for the UK quite well-known—playwright, novelist called J.B. Priestley. And Priestley wrote a fascinating play in 1937 called *I Have Been Here Before*, which was directly influenced by the writings of Peter Ensky, and in it he has a character who's lived his life many times who goes back into the simulation to help a young couple not make a terrible error that they made. And again, that is interesting, the idea of that. And, of course, interestingly enough, Priestley was also influenced in terms of his concepts of time by, um, a guy called J.W. Dunne, whose work you may have come across. I don't think so. He wrote *An Experiment with Time* in 1927-28. Dunne was a fascinating man; he had a series of amazing precognitions, precognitive dreams in 1904, I think, when he was down in, um, down in South Africa after the Boer War. And it was really weird; he had this dream, and in the dream he's living on a French-speaking Caribbean island, and the people come to him in the town, outside the town, and they say, "There's been a terrible explosion; the volcano in the town has exploded, and, um, 4,000 people have been killed; can you help us?" And he wakes up, and he thinks, "God, that was such a weird dream, so vivid." And then three days later the newspapers come down from London, and on that night, um, on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies, Mount Pelee, which was the dormant volcano, exploded, and it killed everybody in this, the main town of St. Pierre, even people in boats around the bay. In fact, the only one person who survived was a guy that was on death row who was below ground level, and when the nuée ardente cloud, the poisonous cloud, rolled down, it went over his head, so he, he survived, which is quite an irony. Wow. But the, but the interesting story here is that he thought, "Wow, he was precognitive," and he said, "But how did I know about that? How is my dream created?" He discovered why a few years later when he was talking about it to somebody else, and he'd mentioned it many times in his writings, and somebody turned around and said, "Do you know you were wrong about the figures?" And he said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You said that 4,000 people had been killed, didn't you?" And he said, "Yes." And he said, "It wasn't 4,000; it was 40,000." So he went back to the newspaper report in the *Daily Telegraph*, and he realized he'd misread it, and he suddenly made the incredible conclusion that our dreams are created; our dreams are not precognitive, they are, but not how we think they are. In other words, he was creating a dream based upon seeing the newspaper headline rather than the event itself, and he suddenly thought, "This means that we can, we can have an ability to see our immediate future." So he decided to keep notes of his dreams, and he had a notebook, and he wrote this book, *An Experiment with Time*, and people were fascinated by this. And, in fact, J.B. Priestley wrote a play called, a, um, *Time and the Conways* about this very concept, and it's a concept I've applied in my book *The Labyrinth of Time*, and in my other books as well, because I think it's such a powerful idea that we monitor the immediate future. And experiments have proven this; again, called a guy called Dean Radin.

Yeah, yeah. And Dick Bierman did a series of experiments in 1999, do you know, with the skin conductance—I know Dean, I don't know that particular one. Okay. What they did was they, your skin conductance, the electricity in your skin, or something happens in your skin when you're frightened, when you're scared of something. And what they decided to do was to actually measure the skin conductance of people and then show them a series of photographs on a screen, and you'd have kittens and snow scenes and everything else, and then suddenly you get an awful picture of a car crash or something horrific, and they were fascinated to note that in the vast majority of cases the skin conductance increased immediately before the awful photograph took place. Ah, and they concluded that the only conclusion from this can be that can monitor our immediate future. And in this, when they wrote the reports, it was quite fascinating because they said, "And it's rather similar to the movie *Minority Report* that is recently being, has recently come out with Tom Cruise." And *Minority Report* was based upon, um, a short story by Philip K. Dick, who I wrote the book on as well. But there's a counterargument to this, and we have to be careful because there is a counterargument called the gambler's fallacy. And the gambler's fallacy is that you know, if you're playing red or black on a roulette wheel, every time the ball, if you're betting on black and every time the ball comes red, you calculate that the next time it's going to have to be red because it's been black for so many times, so you anticipate. So the longer you don't, so the, what the argument is is the more times that you see nice pictures, the more you're anticipating a bad one. So that's what was taking place. I don't necessarily agree, agree with that, but that's one of the arguments that we used against it, and we have to balance arguments; you know, we can't just take things at face value. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Returning to this, uh, to this, this meta-question about the condition of the human, what the human is trying to do, what its ultimate fate is, I, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I, I, I'm not trying to get to any specific, um, theory in particular. I feel like there are, there are features of all the different ways that people in these lineages that you and I are both interested in—you know, the Platonic, the, the Gnostic, the mystical—I try to really focus on what people seem to agree on. And you know, there's, there's various, um, ideas from various Platonists, even like you don't even have to go outside of the Platonic tradition to find tremendous disagreement on, like, you know, Ken Aou, for instance, um, I believe it is—oh, which Platonist is it? One of them specifically talks about that you essentially do, you can, like, graduate from being a human soul to being a daemon yourself, and then, you know, very similar to, to what you're talking about. Icus is of the opinion, like, "Nope, a human soul is a human soul is a human soul," and interestingly the best thing for him is to become like a Platonic bodhisattva, so that you become more and more aware of what you are in a way that transcends lifetimes. And then, similarly to the allegory of the cave, now that you've gotten out of the cave and that you are directly connected to the Nous, you can go back down into the cave and help other people, but that's the limit of a human soul. For Iamus—sorry, for, um, Plotinus—you're already, uh, you already have an undescended self akin to sort of Jung's, uh, Immortal star body, and it's just that a, a part of you or a piece of that Soul or awareness has become enamored with itself in such a way that it has projected itself down into the physical world and forgotten about what it really is, that it's coexisting as already. And then the mission of the philosopher Sage is to, in this lifetime, reascend that thing that is one and Immortal and whatever, and that's my true state. So even within all these Traditions, you get so many different, uh, ideas or emphasises that are placed differently, but they all do seem to agree that you reincarnate, and they all do seem to agree that the soul can become more or less aware of its true nature, and that's one of those ideas that seems to be completely unshakable through almost all of these, um, traditions, no matter what they disagree on; that seems to be something that they agree on.

I, I totally agree, and it's one of the things that I find extraordinary is that over the, what, nearly 30 years now that I've been involved in this research, this life—well, 50, 50, 60 years if you take it to its logical conclusion—but there, there is nothing I've come across that doesn't reinforce my hypothesis; there's no discoveries I've come across that doesn't reinforce my Uber hypothesis about the nature of reality. And then I, I jump to the conclusion, I say, "Well, this is interesting; it's almost a Vindication of, of my egregor theory," because if, in some way, I'm co-creating the external reality around me by my anticipations, it is not at all surprising that the world around me and the things I read and the things I write and discover reinforce my own particular beliefs, because everything, if everything is an extension of my ego in some way, that would be exactly how it would happen. Um, and that then begs certain questions because it means, as, um, was it Pius, the American philosopher who came up with the concept of the phron, the idea that we all, we all exist within our own internally created version of reality, like an Umwelt, like the Umwelt, exactly like the Umwelt, you know. And again, Philip K. Dick was fascinated by the concept of the Umwelt; if you read his *Exegesis*, um, I do—have you read the *Exegesis*? Have you? I'm somewhat familiar with it. Um, I spoke with a man, I cannot think of his name, Professor from Pennsylvania who's written about his *Exegesis*, and I can't think of his name now, but I haven't read it personally. Okay. It's, it's a hard read; you can't, you can't read it because it's just notes, but if you dip in and out of it, you know, the things we've been discussing absolutely preoccupied Phil unbelievably, you know. He, he was fascinated by the Greek philosophers; he was fascinated by the concept of Sophia; he, you know, he wrote into his books, and one of his stories he has, um, it's called *The Divine Invasion*, and it actually has a character in that called Manny, and Manny is, is God who has forgotten he's God. And, of course, this is one of the major Concepts that I argue as well is that effectively we are all embodiment of the godmon, and the godmon has placed itself within its own soap opera, you know; it's, it's living there all eternally. So what's it going to do? Well, it's going to, it's going to create its own environment, its own story lines, and then, then go into the story lines and, and see them from the first-person perspective and exist in them. And, of course, that's what Phil argues, that that Manny is suffering from amnesia, and we are all suffering from amnesia, and we need to acquire anamnesis, which is the loss of forgetting. And by forgetting, realizing who we really are is when we can expand and move forward, and it's beautiful. I mean, it makes so much rational sense to me; it, it, it, it gets around, doesn't it, the state of anomie, the state of chaos, and it's the only other alternative: either the universe is just cold, indifferent nothing, and we are just, you know, as I said in one of my books, if you just take the cold materialist viewpoint, all it means is, as far as you're concerned, is for billions of years there was nothing, then something became sentient for an incredibly tiny, small amount of time, and then disappeared again. And I saw something recently which I thought was very intriguing was the idea of how the universe is going to end, and they argue that when all the stars burn out and all the energy disappears, that will be 1/1000th of the lifetime of the universe. So the universe will exist for 999 times longer than it had done as nothing, just dead, and you think, "What the hell is the point of that?" But, of course, that is being human; that is trying to define things by what I think, and, of course, that's incredibly egoistic and naive. The universe could, may not care, but I'd like to believe that if Consciousness is prime, there is a purpose; there is a teleological reason as to why we are.

Yeah, yeah. That's certainly the Platonic viewpoint, but I think there's a, I mean, there's a lot of contemporary thinkers who, um, believe that as well, at least in, in some sense. Did, did you, you must have read, um, Umberto Eco's work at some point? Oh, I love him. He was unbelievably influential. *Foucault's Pendulum* influenced me unbelievably. Fantastic book. He died tragically, didn't he? He was killed in a terrorist attack. Yeah. Yes. So, so I don't know, have you read the *Declassified Gateway* paper? No, no. Okay. So, so this is the formerly classified, um, paper written by this guy, Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell, and he, um, was the, the vessel basically that the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency—basically like the Army's intelligence wing—um, he was the one that they had go study with Robert Monroe, go through the whole Gateway process, um, and write a whole multidisciplinary treatise on the practical, philosophical, and scientific sort of argument for how and why this works. And he, you know, he draws very largely on Bentoff and *Foucault's Pendulum*, but he also brings up, uh, Preum; he brings up a number of the same scientists that you, uh, reference. So it's kind of a funny synchronicity listening to your *Dion* book because you keep bringing up every scientist that I'm like, "Oh, well, this is exactly talked about in the, in the Gateway, um, paper as well." But the reason I bring that up is because Eco's idea is that the universe itself is in this sort of cyclical process where it oscillates between being birthed from a white hole and dying, uh, in a black hole, and then reemerging outside of another white hole. Um, and I have no idea if contemporary, any contemporary astrophysicists would agree with this idea, but I know Penrose believes that the Universe, um, goes in, in like waves of big bangs, and it's not just one big bang, but it's a, it's some kind of also recurrence. So yeah, I, I don't think that you're alone in this idea that there's this—not, I mean, maybe, uh, maybe I'm just reaching with this implication—but I think I, I don't think we're the only ones who are in this state of forever coming and going. It seems like the universe itself is probably a macro version of—well, as Eco, as I've long argued, you know, the, the, the, the ISS, the major issue that people miss when they start discussing about cyclical time and they discuss the mystery of the universe and everything else is time itself, you know. In my book *The Labyrinth of Time*, I'm very much of the same opinion as, um, uh, St. Augustine, you know, and he said that if I think about time, I, if I don't think about time, I can understand it completely, but the moment I start to reflect on time, I suddenly realize I don't understand it at all. And then, of course, you know, taking, if you go into cosmology and you go into Einsteinian physics, we know that time and space are the same thing, you know. So suddenly the, what is that really means in genuine terms is the receptacle that every, that contains everything that there is is also the, the, the time flow within that receptacle. So suddenly you've got this kind of really weird, brain-hurting idea. Yeah, with time itself is not what we think it is at all. Time is, as somebody once jokingly said, "It's to make sure that everything doesn't happen all at the same time," but the reality is that it, it is very, very strange. And, of course, we have our own subjective time experiences. Yeah, time can dilate; time can do lots of things. So what really are we talking about here? You know, people turn around and say, "Well, time is, is, is just the third second law of Thermodynamics; it's just entropy," but that's not explaining it; it's explaining an effect of time; it's not explaining what time is, you know. It's like the idea, you know, people say, "Well, you can measure time on a clock," well, the clock isn't measuring time; the clock is measuring distance as it moves round; it's not measuring time. And it's the only thing I know that's measured by itself; you can have a pound of apples, but you can only ever have a minute of a minute. And is my minute the same as your minute? And this is where J.W. Dunne came up with a wonderful analogy because he argued—the guy that wrote *An Experiment with Time*—he came up with a, he's interesting; he was an engineer, so he thought very practically, and he said, "Let's think about this for a second; if time flows, what's it flowing against?" He said, "For instance, if I look at a river and I see a river flowing, I know the river is flowing because I see the river banks, and I, I can gauge the movement of the river by the river banks, but time is different; there isn't a kind of a gauge that the flow of time is measured against." So when we say time flows, it's not; it could be static. So what he then came to the conclusion quite cleverly is that there's another form of time which he called Time Two, and he said the river of time in Time One is measured against Time Two, and Time Two is measured against Time Three, and in each of these times there is a Consciousness, an awareness. So what I'd call the edolon lives in this time flow, but our Damon lives in Time Two. Yeah, and then there's another, and of course, there's an infinite regress here and everything else, but nevertheless he then, ar, argues that this means how precognition can work is that the, the person, Observer Two, is like a man observing the one; the edolon is like somebody in a train carriage looking out of a window straight away as the train is leaving a station, and as the station disappears that goes into the past, and where the train is going is the future, but the Damon, or what he called Observer Two, is like somebody sitting on the roof of the train, and he can therefore see the station still within his specious moment, as it's known, you know, the idea of what is the moment, what is the constitute of time, which, which, um, I can't remember which philosopher came up with the specious present, um, oh, I should know; I should know. I don't know either. But the idea isn't that, you know, when you start to think, well, what is the moment, and when a moment, as soon as you focus in on a moment, it's gone. And as I said in one of my books, think about existence: the future hasn't, hasn't occurred, and the past has gone, so therefore we live in an exis, in a Nexus point between two nothings, don't we? And we just move along. Something, I'm, I'm having a meeting in the next few weeks with, um, uh, a British mathematician called Julian Barbour, and Julian Barbour in the late 1990s wrote an amazing book called *The End of Time*, and it's very Platonic; he actually calls the world we live in Platonia, and he applies Minkowski's block time to the idea of time, and he argues it's a series of images; we exist in a series of still images, like a cartoon, and all we do is our perception is what calls the illusion of movement and what causes the illusion of time passing. Really interesting stuff.

Yeah, do you think Time Two maps onto the idea of Kairos? Tell me what that is. I don't know; it's a term, I know the term, but I don't know what it means. So the Greeks said two concepts of time, essentially: Kronos, you know, chronological time as we think about it, cause and effect, etc., um, and then there was Kairos, which is, it's more like a subjective time or the right time for something to happen. So it's, um, you know, I mean, the easiest way—I have no idea what your thoughts on astrology are—but the easiest example would be like, um, you know, an alignment of planets creates a certain Kairos, or this is, this is central to Jung because it's like the idea of, um, like, let's just say there's an archetypal energy active in the Zeitgeist, right? Like we, we see certain, like, like you and I could make, uh, certain Kairos proclamations about the state of the world based on, like, political demagoguery and the rising of, uh, nationalism and conservatism, and all of that would be emblematic of a certain kind of Kairos or a certain kind of archetypal, and that sort of, in a way, creates a context, right? That sort of creates a river bank for time to flow against. And I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's exactly the best way to put it because it's more like it imbues time with equality more than it, uh, contextualizes its flow chronologically, but I do think that it's one of those missing ideas that one has to account for, in the same way that one has to account for, um, subjective experience in consciousness; we also have to account for what are these odd collective roils of energy that seem to be happening. Um, and, of course, Jung again would say, like, these are like archetypes constating from the collective unconscious, but there is also activity occurring in the collective unconscious past the horizon of the individual human's perception, but then those things will constellate or manifest in reality in concrete ways. Um, you know, I mean, like, for instance, you use the example of Hitler before; like, that's a, he was like a huge conduit for some kind of, uh, archetypal—in Jung's terminology—like, Won energy. Yeah. But, um, but that's just one example that is very interesting. Thank you for that. It's a concept; I know the term Kairos, but I'd never investigated what it means. So that does work very, very well as the, is the, the monitor or the gauge by which time moves. So thank you for that; that's good. I like that, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, you brought, you brought before we wrap up, you brought up egregor again, and why don't we, why don't we have the snake eat its own tail here and, and, and, and where we began. What one avenue of the UAP, UFO phenomenon we haven't explored is like, okay, so, so what about the apparent physical nuts and bolts dimension of that phenomenon? This is something that I've wrestled with for so long because I'm very much an advocate of Jacques Vallee. Yeah, uh, and John Keel, you know, the idea of the, the, the cosmic Joker, the, the great game, the, the fooling with us, you know. Herm—yes, Hermes—yeah, the idea of, you know, the poor guy that ended up with the, um, the celestial pancake, you know, this kind of thing, you know. It seems that there's a big joke to—yeah, I love that story; I love that story; it's great. And do you know what I remember as well when I was reading it all those years ago was what I'd forgotten was that, um, I think his dog came with him when he went on the trip, and the aliens didn't like the smell of the dog, so they stuck the dog on the outside of the spaceship; they just let the dog outside on the lead. And I thought, "Poor dog," you know. Those cosmic RS would certainly have friz that little animal. But for people that don't know, there's a famous story about, um, an—this is when the airship UFO phenomenon was in full swing, right—where this guy saw an airship UFO, and then being came off, or did they bring him on? Either way, he wound up with some pancakes for them, and his proof was he had these pancakes, but he clearly wasn't making it up. And the same goes for all the people I meet at Contact in the Desert, you know. I spend hours talking to people; Contact in the Desert—I'm not one of the talent, as they call us, that just goes into his room and stays there; I mingle and I talk to people all the time because that's my nature. And you know, some of the feedback I was getting from people who'd had the most extraordinary experiences, which they genuinely believed had happened to them, but there was physical evidence of the objects, you know. We can't just, you know, Mantell was chasing something when he was blown out the sky, you know. So clearly there is physicality to it, but if we use the argument that we are, they are egregors, there's no reason why an egregor can't have physical presence because, as we've discussed, what is a physical presence? What do we mean by physical? What do we mean by material? So therefore, you know, it's, it, it can be explained or it can be magied away, maybe, with the problem. So I think the, the antagonism that is general between the, the Mystic, Mystic, the mystical argument of Keel and, and, and the Europeans and the, the physical nuts and bolts argument of the more, the American school, I, I think they can be, they can be explained by looking at the phenomenon in a greater, broader variety. And I'll give an example here of how I feel that the phenomenon is more than we think it is from personal experience, um, around about 15 years ago, my mother phoned me up, um, and she said something strange happened today. And she said she was, she was in her early, late 80s at the time, and she was walking onto the village I was brought up and near Liverpool, and she said that her, her, my aunt had stopped to tie her shoelace, and my mother looked over my aunt, and she saw hovering over the local area what she considered was to be a smoke ball, and she said it was moving around and it was like smoke, and then it went into a solid object, and suddenly it shot off towards North Wales at massive speed. Now this is why I know it was a physical object because when I told this story to a group of friends of mine, one of them contacted me and she said, "I saw that object; I was on a bus on the A41 road, and I saw it fly over the bus, and everybody on the bus saw it and went, 'What the hell was that?'" So my mother saw something in three-dimensional space that other people saw. So she tells me about this and said, "What did I see?" And I said, "I really don't know; don't worry about it." Anyway, she phones me up about a week later in a state of hysteria one morning, and I said, "Mom, calm down; what's happened?" And she said, "Well, you know, I live alone." And I said, "Yes." And she said, "I always close my bedroom door," and she, she said, "I woke up in the middle of the night, and I couldn't move." She was in a state of sleep paralysis, and we all know about sleep paralysis and the thing on your chest and everything and what causes it and what causes it physiologically and neurologically, but she said she was looking at the door, and the door was open, and she thought, "Why is the door open?" And then she described, and what she said to me still sends shivers down my spine; she said she saw three spindly fingers come around the door, and this little creature pop its head round, blink at her, and dodge back. Her description of it was it had huge black armored eyes; it had two holes for a nose and a slit for a mouth, but it blinked, and it said—its face came to a point—she saw a Gray. Now my mother wouldn't know a Gray if it bit her on the bottom; it's not something she was ever interested in. Now what then happened—so I think—was there a link between her seeing the UFO and that? But then things got very strange because I go around to see her a few weeks later, and she said, "The children have stopped singing to me." And I said, "What children?" She said, "The children that follow me round; there's little children when I'm shopping," well, they're not children; they're kind of little spindly creatures, and they look up at me, and they sing—well, they have this high-pitched noise with them—and she said the high-pitched noise has stopped, but the children are still here. And then she said, and then she goes, "But they're not as friendly as the old man in the kitchen." And I said, "What old man?" And she said, "Oh, there's an old man in the kitchen, and he, he, he nods at me, but he never speaks." Now I knew enough about neurology that I realized because my mother lost an eye with malignant melanoma when she was younger, and she was partially sighted, so I knew what she was developing; it's called Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it's known when your eyesight starts to fade, the brain starts to confabulate imagery to populate your visual field; it's a known phenomenon. Okay, okay. But it's also a precursor for Alzheimer's. So I had my mother tested for Alzheimer's and discovered, yes, that she had Alzheimer's, and eventually she died of Alzheimer's; she died of the amyloid plaques in her brain destroyed her brain. But the point I'm making here, and this is quite important, it's going back to what we were talking about neurologically, and again, if there's any neurologists out there that want to talk to me about this, I'm keen to

Edge of the universe, and we exist. We live in a two-dimensional hologram that we believe is three-dimensional. And again, there was a fascinating article, a series of articles in Scientific American, around about 25 years ago. And the front of Scientific American was: Is our universe a hologram? You know, so this is serious stuff; this is not non—it's just that the vast majority of people are not aware of this information.

And I would suggest that the powers that be are probably rather worried about this information really being understood by the man in the street, because if they did, it would question everything. So they'd rather keep going on about the science of 122 years ago, 124 years ago, you know, before Max Planck did his famous statement on December 19, 1900, in Berlin. When he was trying to explain why it was the black body radiation didn't do what he was supposed to do, and he decided it was quantized, and energy was quantized, and everything changed. But man, the man in the street and most people you talk to still think that that's the science, and it's not.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I would love to know how Penrose's Platonism fits into this too, because I'm sure you've heard him talk about that. There must, you know, the um, *Shadows of the Mind*, one of his books. I think he might talk about it in the previous book as well, but he talks about how the platonic realm of forms is a logical inevitability. And he even goes beyond Tegmark in that he's not just like a mathematical realist; like he doesn't just think the realm of forms is, you know, the realm of what gives math its ontological weight. I mean, he thinks there's more going—he seems to think there's more going on than the math. And I mean, he kind of tempers that, but it absolutely must play a role in his understanding and interest in consciousness. You know, if he, if he's going as far as to be involved in Hameroff's theory, he must have some deep interest in the interplay between those concepts. But I don't know how he makes sense of it, or what the limits of his Platonism are. But um, but yeah, the fact that he openly uses that in his sort of triune—have you seen his triangular model of reality?

I have. Yes. Yeah. You know, I'm curious about that. I mean, he is such an incredible writer; he's so interesting in so many ways. And you know, Stuart, Stuart is interesting in himself because of course, and he, the theologian, he's wanting to know where does consciousness go when we take anesthetics? You know, why does that happen? We, as he argues, we know why an—we know that anesthetics work, but we don't know why and how consciousness is literally switched off. And of course, this is where he's arguing this is because consciousness at its basic level is is quantum, as is—I mean, there's there's an assoc—assoc—well, I say he's an associate, I've met him twice—um—called Johon Joe McFadden, Professor Johon Joe McFadden, who's writing about the quantum mechanics of biology. And some of the things they are discovering now, photosynthesis works on non-local principles. You know, we are—we think we are at the end of scientific history, whereas in fact we're at the start. You know, we do not know—we're at the edge of another paradigm change. You know, the Thomas Kuhn argument—we are another paradigm change, and all the seeds are here for a paradigm change because we—I call it Heath Robinson science. You know, for example, that if you use the maths they use for Einsteinian physics, the very, very large, and you plug the same um formula into quantum mechanics, they get infinities. So we have two aspects of the same reality, both of which mathematically don't match. So there has to be, as Einstein says, there has to be hidden variables; there has to be something at a deeper level, which is, of course, what David Bohm would argue. You know, the idea with his implicate and explicate orders, and the idea that we are—this universe is a projection of a lower reality that we perceive.

Yeah. Great notes to wrap this up on, my friend. Leaving it with the—the open mystery of—I, I mean, I completely agree; it seems like we are looking over the precipice of one understanding reality into these emerging, uh, new understandings in trying to connect those dots and make sense of it all. And you're right on the—of it, to my—we, we are—we are—we are in—being—Daran experiences. All right, well, let's let's wrap this one. I'm sure we can do many, many more. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Absolutely. It's been great. I've really enjoyed it.