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….
Thursday, March 21st
11pm (EST)/8pm(PST)
It’s The Jeff. It’s The Jer. It’s Jeff’s new show, Paranormal Waypoint. It’s finally happening.
Please listen in, chat in the chat room–and call in ya sissies. Ask that question you’ve always wanted answered.
The influence of “Porky’s” has never been clearer.
Hi, TAPS. Longtime viewer, first-time whiner. After watching the USS Yorktown episode of Ghost Hunters, I have a few constructive complaints. These are they….
1.) So you’ve found a paranormal hotspot that is one in a million, as you say. You took some amazing video of apparitions. Some great audio of human voices and footsteps and had some amazing personal experiences. My question is, why is there a next week’s episode someplace else? Why can’t you put on the breaks, set up shop for a month at the amazing location, and win the Nobel, as Tyler Kokjohn is fond of saying. In short, why go anywhere else?
And why not bring skeptics there? Scientists? Shaman? Anyone who might have something to contribute besides your patented, “Yup, there’s something here but you have nothing to fear from it. Hope this helps!”
2.) At what point do you start to see patterns and draw connections for your audience besides explaining what your tech gizmos read? For instance, is it a coincidence that at every location you’ve ever been to where there are stories of people standing face-to-face with full-bodied apparitions, by the time you get there and whip out the camera, the only thing you’ll pick up is a fleeting image, a distant image, or something at the periphery of your vision? Assuming the world is filled with ghosts and you are honestly picking them up with your equipment, don’t you find it just a bit odd that what you get is never as direct or as long an encounter as what the people who brought you there saw? Doesn’t that speak to the nature of the phenomena in some way?
3.) When you speak to the air and ask it questions and then something in the next room tips over and you run in there, ask another question, and hear a noise somewhere else–why is your inclination to believe that there’s a dead person trying to communicate with you? Wouldn’t they better communicate with you by staying in the same room–by being more direct in as much as that’s possible given the veil between worlds?
Doesn’t it sound more like something toying with you, if we are to ascribe motive? And if it’s the same at every location around the globe then what does that say about these being individual cases? Maybe there are innumerable entities, but maybe there aren’t. I don’t know, but I think it should be stated as equally probable that you’re “communicating” with a singular intelligence (perhaps even the collect human intelligence), which only appears like dead people if you don’t think about it too deeply.
That’s all I’ve got. It strikes me that if your group does not exist to further our understanding of hauntings or to bring science onboard with undeniable evidence, then you’re here to strengthen belief in the reality of hauntings. This is true whether your motive is to entertain, to draw advertisement dollars, or to actually seek the truth. All of those roads lead to strengthening the belief of the audience. I think it’s only right that you examine the definition of the thing you’re asking us to believe.
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
December 21, 2012 did have an extinction event: the extinction of prophesy. What happens when a species that sets up hope outside of itself recognizes hopelessness at the same time as its environment grows unstable and unsupportive? We discuss it because no one else is.
Well, okay, technically it will be Saturday according to Eastern Standard Time at 1:00a.m. So, if you’re awake, let’s talk. I’ve only got a half hour to say what needs to be said and take calls but I promise to make time for everything. Listen in and call in here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/paratopia/2012/12/21/were-all-still-here
If you can’t make it I’ll release it through youtube and have it posted here the next day.
Finally caught up with my friend Melissa. She lives on the other side of the island. She’s depressed, trying to find her way, wanting to make good sense of the bad crazy blowing up around us. The usual. I’m sitting outside of Donkey Balls drinking coffee. The usual. She tells me that at 12:12p.m. on this day of 12/12/12, Kahunas will be doing a group mediation all around the island and holding ceremony on the volcano.
As I commiserate with her about the end of an age, whatever that ultimately means, and the idiocracy we’ve become, trying to find band-aid words to make her feel better, knowing that the real dilemma is the difference between what she wants to hear from me and what she needs to hear in herself, the manager comes bustling out of the store.
“The lights just went out. Did you do that,” he jokes.
Power outage. Not just the store, but the whole town. I tell Melissa this and we laugh nervously at the timing and wonder if the Kahunas are behind it. Then, the line goes dead. I try to call her back but my cell service is out. The manager’s, too–and he’s on a different phone plan.
Now that the power is out and cell towers are down I think, ‘I need to get home and be a part of this group meditation.’
I have about fifteen minutes and I live up the street so it’s no problem making the deadline, if there is one. I don’t know–I’ve never done a group meditation long distance, up close, or at all.
I strip down and stand in the middle of my bedroom. Fat, naked haole anticipating that magical energy that is more me than me taking over. Haven’t done this in far too long. In a snap it moves me around in poses and gestures and exercises that are mostly familiar. Some not. I am like this for about 2 hours.
Somewhere in there I start dancing hula. Hula dancing holds great and many meanings to the Hawaiian people but I am uneducated in those meanings. That doesn’t stop the body from dancing and expressing hula.
By the end of the 2 hours I’m resting on my side on my bed in a “lying Buddha” pose recognizable from statues. The body is wafting in a current of energy. This is typical more me than me behavior. The energy sits me up, stands me up. I’m sort of a half-and-half being: half me and still half more me than me. The normal me gets dressed and pours a glass of water. The more me than me observes every facet of those dull actions with great delight. Every movement of every joint; every scent with each step from room to room to out of the house… They’re all colors of one beautiful, joyous tapestry to more me than me.
I’m exhausted and exhilarated by an experience that does not exist in these descriptions. It exists between words, between sounds, like jazz. There is something about this energy and these movements that get me high, is the only way I can think to put it. But now I’m high and walking down the highway (no pun intended; just caught it in the reread.) Walking with purpose. Walking to the edge of town. Where am I walking to? I don’t know and I decide not to find out because, frankly, less me than me is like, “Fuck this. I’m not walking to the middle of nowhere and getting stranded.”
Where would I have ended up? I’ll never know.
As I sit and write this, not giving a shit that I sound like a crazy man, I can’t help but wonder if the Kahunas knew I was meditating with them. Do they all get in that zone, too? If so, I’m sure they know more about it than I. Perhaps they can use it in some way. Perhaps they phoned in the hula to this body and I served a function, holding it down in South Kona.
But then I think, ‘Wait a sec. Why would Hawaiian spiritual folks be doing anything at 12:12 on 12/12/12? Do they go by the Gregorian calendar? They’re holding ceremony on the 21st, too–How can they just switch to the Maya calendar like that?’
Now I wonder if what’s important aren’t dates so much as a vast quantity of human consciousness focused at once. People are focused on these two days. So maybe, if you know how, you can influence human consciousness by tapping it while it’s concentrating on a singular point. And maybe such concentration has its own influence, which is why holidays create an uptick in celebration as well as tragedy. Maybe these special days are when everything goes to eleven and so if you’re mentally deranged you’re more liable to succumb to your lesser impulses around the magical times of year.
I don’t know. All I know is that at 12:21a.m. on 12/21 I’ll be fat and naked again.
Ah… but will I dance the hula?
Peter Kingsley, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Ken Wilber makes three. Three men from three different backgrounds who have come to understand the universal. I’m drawing attention to these folks for those of us who know there are deeper conversations about spirituality to be had than in church or in a New Age book.
It’s been said that cream rises to the top, but in the world(s) of mysticism and paranormal, it’s shit that floats. So, if you’re looking for something deeper than what you’ve had shot at you through the guns of pop gurus, check these guys out. And compare what Wilber says here about earth not needing our saving with what Tiokasin Ghosthorse said on Paratopia about the arrogance of thinking we need to save Mother Earth. These are not popular ideas. Truth never is. What we warp it into is what becomes the popular idea because the alternative to that is being Truth.
To speak it is to kill it. To be it is to be fully alive. Highfalutin words… until they aren’t.
