I haven’t heard it back but it sure felt like the best. Great questions, great conversation. Great host. Check out Bernardo Kastrup’s website and start following his show. I think he’s got a good thing going here. http://www.inceptiondialogues.com/
(For an .m4a version, click HERE and “save link as.” Check out the Inception Dialogues website for iTunes feed and further info.)
Or, for those of you who want the bullet points, here is a ten minute “digest” version….
That’s right, I’ll be live with Bill & Nancy Birnes Saturday at 6pm here: http://www.futuretheater.com/
Just last night a little lightbulb went off in my head pertaining to the high strangeness associated with “alien abductions” that I think is a tangible clue neurologists might be able to work with. We’ll explore that and much more. Be sure to tune in!
Don’t look now but I just launched another blog. Okay, do look now. It’s called The Center For Bad Ideas. Originally, I was going to limit it to exposing and poking fun at hoaxes and nonsense in the paranormal fields. But then I thought, Why limit myself? There’s bad ideas all around.
Maybe you have some of your own. Stupid things you’ve done in your life that you once thought brilliant. Or perhaps you have a scam/hoax/bit of ridiculousness you would like to see exposed. Well, this is the place for you.
For you and all your bad ideas–including awful recipes you’ve actually made and eaten. Yeah, everything. Everything bad is stored here so that you can live the good life.
http://www.centerforbadideas.com
Snorkeling. Me. Yesterday. Out in the depths beyond the tourists and the reef holding them and the fish in. I saw a moray eel, finally. I’d been wanting to see one for a few weeks after I heard some people talking about spotting one. I saw a couple of types of fish I hadn’t before out there in the blue floating in schools above scattered monolithic boulders. You’d swear there was a city out there swallowed by Pele and time.
But I also saw the usual scenery and heard the usual, too. Part of what I normally hear alone in the water is voices. Human voices. Scattered bits of conversation. Edgar Mitchell talks about this type of thing in the deep of space so perhaps it’s related to sensory deprivation or an inner journey that spills out when the outer one is a blank canvass. Or perhaps I am hearing conversations of tourists rippling through tide and reef. I don’t know but I’m satisfied with a mundane answer and suspect that there is one. What I find curious, however, is that I emailed free dive instructor Ted Roe that evening to ask him his thoughts and the next morning I had the most baffling audio hallucination I’ve ever heard of sans ‘shrooms!
It’s about 5:00AM. Yes, followers of this blog, that pattern continues. I didn’t check the time but my favorite two roosters were working together to alert the ‘hood about the rising sun. Shout the new position or all is lost!
I made the error of leaving my window open. Naturally Big Red and Sir Cockington took that as their cue to Rrr-r-rrr-r-rrrrrrr! directly into my ear. Picture two of the Three Tenors belting a high A-flat in your face at five in the morning and you get what’s going on here: torture. Torture enough to create that perfect chemical stew of dream brain, DMT, and probably the energy that moves me around, within being awake.
I recall a smattering of nifty visuals flittering through my mind’s eye as I struggled to remain asleep. Patterns and things. At one fleeting point seeing through the eyes of another man seated somewhere outdoors. All of this is old hat by now. What was new to me was the sequence of audio hallucinations. They started with an amazing song. The song built itself out of nothing. It sounded like a typical New Age instrumental piece made from a synthesizer and Peter Gabriel leftovers. Naturally, I was staring at a cosmos behind my eyes as this song came. As it got going more and more elements added themselves. In the end, there was a rock guitar lead whaling over it and a male reggae vocalist. This song went on for a while. I should have written the lyrics down but they are lost to me now.
As this is playing I’m lucid enough to pay attention to my physicality. My head feels like it’s swelling with energy and I wonder if this is what it means to have the energy center at the top of your head opened and linked to universal consciousness. Are ya turning on a radio?
I decide to risk breaking the spell by opening my eyes. Now here’s where the holy crap moment comes in…. I open them both a hair and the song shuts off. I close them and it fades back in. I open my right eye and the guitar solo shuts off. Shut my right eye, guitar solo fades back in. Open my left eye, everything but the guitar solo shuts off. Close my left eye, the song fades back in.
Anyone ever heard of this?! What would be the scientific answer to this? What would be the crown chakra answer? What about the shamanic answer? Anyone got an answer or is it just one of those mysteries that lets us know we have not a clue what we are and what this body so many spiritual seekers condemn is capable of?
Shortly thereafter, the song fades out and another builds itself. Then another. Then another. In fact one of them features Sheryl Crow singing. I wish I’d written those lyrics to see if they exist… yet.
I didn’t try the eye trick on any of the other songs but I did notice that the skin on the back of my scalp felt like it was pulling in tight and releasing with each new song introduced.
I also didn’t jump up and write down any lyrics because I wanted to see what this was leading to. As usual, it lead nowhere. It was its own thing I guess and so there is no moral to the story and no ending wrapped in a bow.
Perfect for a blog post.
1 hour. That’s the countdown to Jeff Ritzmann and I taping our final weekly installment of Paratopia. Of course we’ll carry on as a monthly free show but it won’t be the same. In some ways it may end up better, but man, this was fun. So was the live show. I’ll miss both.
We’re going out with a bang. I have a feeling it will be one of our deepest episodes coated in sweet, sweet comedy. (Because… you know… we’ve got to tie up all those running gag loose ends. Priorities, people, priorities.)
Jeff told me not too long ago that he felt like we were going in different directions in terms of investigating high strangeness. I thought, if that’s true, it would make for a great premise to the 3-hour monthly. Maybe hour one we explore it his way, hour two we explore my way, and hour three we come together to discuss what we’ve found.
Still, I found it hard to believe because… well… I didn’t feel like I had a direction, really. I, like he and like many of you, just had an above-average understanding of where not to look–but that’s not saying much. Most people aren’t looking at all and many of those who are have gotten stuck and built a home in the quicksand. But, since he said it, I was curious where he thought he was going.
I didn’t have to ask about me. Clearly, I’m the oneness spirituality guy, right? So that’s my angle if I’ve got one. But it’s not exactly an angle. It’s a destination I see all authentic roads leading to but that doesn’t tell us anything about the roads or about what authenticity means. And those roads are the ones we travel and that authenticity is the mystery that consumes us. Oneness as a destination is just a word. It is meaningless until you “get” there and the odds of you getting there are, let’s face it, slim at best.
To my mind, we’ve got reality inverted. The thing we most fundamentally are is fictitious to us and the thing we call “illusion” (or fiction) is what we perceive as nonfiction, as reality. All along the way of the story of us, some of us encounter beings that we are told by rationalists, debunkers, humanists, and the like must be fictitious. They’re right a lot of the time and they have explored reality in such a cowardly–yet sensical–way as to only include that which is repeatable in their worldview of what is. The obvious, in other words. It’s an intellectual move but it’s not realistic and we’re paying for it now on many levels.
Since we are living the backwards reflection of the real, I’m not willing to take the illusion’s explanations for these beings no matter how sharply dressed, impeccably thoughtful, or empirically cloaked their presentation. I’ve seen different. If that doesn’t agree with you, tough shit. If tough shit bothers you, might I suggest you’ve boxed yourself in and now have to defend your walls like any common zealot?
See, I’ve got a mindset that is experience, an outlook based on psychological and cultural pressures–but no direction, really, where the allegedly paranormal is concerned. This functioning can be mistaken for a direction if you don’t look for the difference.
Yet Jeff does have a direction? That’s news. So I asked him what it was and he told me and we riffed on it. For hours we riffed because I can get behind where he’s going next. It sounds suspiciously like a perfect storm of Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Jeff, and me–and I think there are elements we can find bleeding over into other areas of study and of life. Or not. Maybe it will fall flat somewhere along the way–but at least it’s testable. Not testable in a repeatability sort of way but testable in a “Could this apply here” sort of way. Like the crossover between ufology, magick, and hallucinogens. Whereas before we were looking for crossover phenomena, now we’ve got a theory that makes sense of what we’ve found.
But then making sense doesn’t equal truth. Lot’s of fiction stories make sense, but you’ve got to share them to find out, right? And even then….
This Friday, on our final weekly episode, we will serve up our latest ponder-food in the hopes that you’re satiated until we start the monthly show. Naturally, what we talk about here will double as the launch pad for the monthly where we will explore it with Tiokasin, with guests, and with listeners.
Speaking of listeners, it’s time to evolve that notion a step further. But we’ll talk about that in 10 minutes and you’ll hear it on Friday.
Crap. Ten minutes. Really?
Gotta go!
Can’t recall if I said any of this on Paratopia, but I’m skimming through a notebook and found these observations regarding my experimental shroom trip and Jeff’s shrouded visitor. It is an unrefined collection of thoughts but I think it’s enough to get the gears of imagination grinding….
When I took shrooms an animalistic clown character superimposed over me physically and mentally. Similarly, a thorny, organic environment superimposed over my apartment. That is how I experienced the trip when walking around the place.
I wonder, if the thorny visage was an actual world blending with mine would a being from there have witnessed that animalistic clown acting funny in an obscure, blocky environment–namely my apartment? Did all of that superimpose over me and my living space or did I superimpose over him and his living space? After all, I’m the one altering my perception, not the clown person.
… Alternatives …
Would a creature from that realm not have seen anything but the apartment growing out of the jungle?
Would my apartment look like a UFO or a portal?
Would I look like an alien or a possessive spirit?
Shrooms or no shrooms, does contact with a parallel world necessarily alter you to fit in with that world? Does the parallel world contain a warped mirror image of you? If so, does contact immediately attract you to the mirror version of yourself in that world so that you cannot meet your mirror, you have to become him, her, or it?
If there is a way to remain distinct in a parallel world does it take discipline? In this scenario, if Jeff and his “visitor” are really mirrors of one entity then it would be easier for the shrouded man to superimpose himself over Jeff. However, it seems from what he’s told Jeff that meditation is a key to contact. So, is this being meditating in a way that brings him here and keeps him distinct from Jeff? If so, one can see how this would be difficult to maintain over an extended period, hence his being in a hurry due to time constraints and hence the vocal fluctuations.*
Let’s say Jeff lives in universe 1 and this guy lives in universe 9. Does he have to shoot through his mirror selves in the intervening universes to reach Jeff? In so doing, would he pick up residuals from selves along the line? When Jeff hears vocal fluctuations or sees physical fluctuations, perhaps the message isn’t, “I’m a shapeshifting alien.” The message could be, “I am transmitting through a line of selves in other worlds to reach you and that’s the resulting static.”
In fact, could that not also account for the persistent haunting-like activity in Jeff’s home? It’s all residual information of phenomena picked up through worlds along the way.
In addition to projecting through meditation there could be windows of opportunity to walk between worlds–or more likely be seen as if walking between–when events in parallel worlds line up in exact agreement.
I dunno. Just some thoughts.
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* Jeff recalled the shrouded man’s voice veering in and out of several different voices. They weren’t overlapping like a Hollywood version of demonic vocalization. They were blending one to the next to the next.
