Thanks J. and S for your generous donations. (I don’t know if people want to be identified, but you’ll know who you are.)
J – you also bought 2 episodes but didn’t specify which 2. For some reason emails to you get bounced back. I’ve tried from two separate addresses. So, if you end up reading this, please respond to: paratopiapodcast@gmail.com.
Thanks again!
–the jer
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!
Hey, thanks for checking out my blog everyone. I can’t believe how much interest there was in just nine months. (Ze baby… she is born, no?)
__________
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals
As a (former?) professional podcaster–you know, one who gets paid for their work regularly?–I’m often not at all asked, “Jer? How does one achieve that level of success in a medium most people expect to receive for free?”
That is a great question. The simple answer is, “Get Jeff Ritzmann to do all the work while you phone it in.”
But say you don’t have access to Jeff Ritzmann. What then? Well, for assholes like you, there’s….
10 Steps To Achieving Paranormal Podcasting Greatness!
1.) Have Something To Say. It sounds self-explanatory but you’d be surprised how many people skip over this vital first step and dive right into purchasing a microphone and building a website to showcase the importance of the words flooding out of their mouth holes. How can you showcase what you don’t have? Unless you’ve got an alien in the basement or Casper on line two, you don’t have importance, that is for sure. But do you have a compelling point of view? Is there a need for the words coming out of your mouth other than low self esteem or narcissism?
Look, there are loads and loads of LOADS podcasting paranormal nonsense even as I type. You’ve heard them; some of you reading this are them. Do we really need more of the same? If you want to be famous in your head, get a youtube channel. Or do what I do: point your webcam out the window and record feral chickens meandering the yard for friends on Facebook. But don’t start a weekly paranormal podcast because in the end you’ll only be hurting yourself.
How, you ask? — In short order you will find that paranormal research/ufology’s dirty little secret (besides David Jacobs) is that practically anyone will agree to be a guest on your show. All those folks you look up to? Not hard to book. And we’ve heard them all a thousand times–so what will you, the host, bring out of them that is new and serves the betterment of all who listen? If the answer is nothing then just know that you will build an audience whether or not you suck because there’s an audience for everything and there are those who will listen to any show their favorite speaker graces. This will give you the false sense of security that your words are important, that you’re doing a great job, and eventually, as with all deceits, you will be exposed to the truth somewhere down the line and crumble inside as the shell of a human being you are. Hopefully.
You’ll hit bottom. Therapeutic for you, sure, but what about the rest of us listening? What do we get out of your personal epiphany? When you proliferate nonsense simply because a nonsense whore will do your show, the bottom feeders who comprise your listenership will spread it far and wide, which is good for business, bad for anyone who actually gives a shit.
So your first task is to find out who you are that asks the questions. Why are you asking them? Why are you asking them publicly?
2.) Obtain Decent Equipment. Notice I didn’t say buy decent equipment….
3.) Introduce Yourself. You’ve figured out why you’re here. You’ve obtained the vital equipment to do a proper interview show. Now all you need are guests…. Or do you? It’s not a bad idea to do the first show solo. Not only will you be introducing yourself to the world of five listening to you (family, best friend, that cat lady you met at that thing, Robbie Williams) but you will also be acclimating yourself to sitting in front of your computer talking to yourself. The only thing more embarrassing than hearing your own voice is speaking it like it matters in relation to no one.
4.) Learn How To Solicit Guests Properly. No one wants to do the show of a maniac or an idiot, so when you’re emailing potential guests, lay off the “personal charm” and lay on the spell check. Also, don’t go overboard in the butt-kissing either. You don’t want to look like a desperate fanboy and you don’t want to look like an illiterate attention-whoring vampire wannabe who will do anything to not feel the meaninglessness of his own existence or be in his daughter’s life. You want to look human. ACT!
5.) Book Stanton Friedman. I’m sure every field has their version of Stanton Friedman. He’s the lovable grandfather who has done so many TV and radio appearances that he speaks catch phrases the way Sinatra sang standards. Because you’ve seen him everywhere you imagine he’ll never do your show.
Wrong! He’ll do any show! That’s why you’ve seen him everywhere!
The curse of Stanton Friedman is also his gift: he will talk without pause and before you know it, show’s over. So while it is anti-intuitive to start at the top, really it’s for the best because 1.) If you’re nervous, it won’t show. You won’t be getting a word in edgewise. You can fake it like a champ. Just let Stan do all the work. 2.) He’s hugely popular, so that will put your podcast on the map. 3.) Because you won’t get a word in and because he’s hugely popular, you have a real opportunity to turn this lazy, nervous interview into friggen gold. All you have to do is write down two relevant questions you’ve never heard anyone ask him before. That’s it! Just two!
You’re only going to get in two questions, if you’re lucky and if you’re scheduled for an hour, after the requisite, “So Stan, tell us about your book.” Make them brilliant and it won’t even matter that he doesn’t answer them, preferring to swerve you back to whatever MJ12 topic he was just defending against nasty noisy negativists. Listeners will remember that you were the person who asked those amazing questions they’d never heard before.
6.) Beware The Ones Who Want On The Show Part 1. The people who solicit to be guests on your show are usually awful. Not always–sometimes there’s a gem in the pot of fool’s gold. But more times than not, if someone you’ve never heard of is not just writing you about their accomplishments, but telling you what versatile speakers they are, it means the opposite of that.
7.) Beware The Ones Who Want On The Show Part 2. At some point in your podcasting life you will read a version of these words from a listener in an email, PM, or blatantly on a message board: “I want/need to talk to you. Can I get your Skype or phone number?”
DON’T. FUCKING. DO IT.
It’s a trap. Even if it’s prefaced with compliments or a list of all the things you have in common, this never bodes well for you. There’s a reason famous people are aloof, have handlers, and all that. While podcasting isn’t in the same room as fame, you’re still creating a bond with people who want to be in the same room as you. A bond that needs boundaries. I’m not saying you’re inviting psychos who mean to physically harm you, no. But what you will end up with AT LEAST is a long one-way conversation wherein a narcissist who thinks s/he knows you prattles on about his/her theories. You’ll be looking for an out the whole time. It’s awkward. AT MOST you’ll end up in a blog rant against you if you’re anything other than yessing these assholes who really don’t care what you have to say.
I cannot stress that enough. They don’t want to talk with you, they want to talk at you, like you haven’t given enough already.
8.) Internet Warring. Don’t Do It. People attack when they are threatened. Sometimes that threat is no more than jealousy. If they perceive you to have more of something than they do, they hit you to take it. Basic preadolescent behavior. Welcome to adulthood. Of course it hurts to get hit–and if your audience is full of decent people they’ll tell you over and over to ignore it because it doesn’t matter, they don’t pay attention to hit men, and so on. The problem is, they’re not the ones getting hit. Not only that, but even if they say they don’t care what is being written/said about you, they’ll often ask you, “But is it true…?”
When a question is being raised about you and you don’t respond, of course folks will want to know if it’s true, or assume it is by your silence–even if they’re the ones telling you to remain silent. We still want to know if the cat’s alive inside that box, right?
What to do, what to do.
Well, as it turns out, even if they’re disingenuous in their disinterest, they are correct: it’s not worth responding to. This is because bloggers and other podcasters don’t lie for any other reason than they want attention. They want to pull focus. And you can’t pull focus back by responding, you can only give them power. You think you’re clearing your name but you’re not. If it’s a lie, there was never anything to clear in the first place. Ya get my point?
There’s a difference between raising valid concerns that you can gleefully answer and just plain lying to get your attention so they can leech off your perceived “fame” for as long as you struggle to clear your name. Clearing your name isn’t the game–the game is making you struggle. It’s their game, not yours, so don’t own it. Don’t try to rewrite the rules–that is also included in their game.
In the case of disgruntled listeners, the game is to regain your attention. If it’s one thing I’ve learned about disgruntled listeners, it’s that they don’t go away. They keep listening for anything they can attack you with later. They’ll do it in comments on blogs, message board, in reviews for whatever it is you’ve created. Oh, man, they’ll write any dishonest thing to get you to notice them.
I think when one listens to an interactive show long enough it becomes routine. If one gets kicked out of the club, one is getting kicked out of routine, out of pattern–and one can’t have that so one maintains the pattern in this new destructive way. Whatever the case, just ignore one to the best of two’s ability… er… your ability. I was terrible at that, for the most part. You don’t have to be. Learn from me, damn it!
Finally, don’t let the nonsense keep you down. Statistically speaking, the loud ones are the negative minority. The silent majority are thoughtful people you’ll never hear from, hence the silence. It takes a lot for one of them to come out of hiding and drop you a line or interact on a message board and they’ll let you know it. They are your audience, not the vermin who want to steal your show. You’re not here to bully, be bullied, or babysit the ego of a stranger. You’re here to ask the fundamental questions we are born into and their tangential counterparts.
Keep in mind, most listeners are just that: listeners. They don’t want any part of the dysfunctional circus. It’s difficult not exposing the creeps coming after you when you’ve got a pulpit but your flock don’t care unless you failed step one and cultivated an audience of hardcore shitheads. (For more on that, please see Paracast, The.)
9.) Be Grateful For The Ones Who Care. Congratulations! You now have a successful podcast and you don’t suck! But don’t let it go to your head. You weren’t destined for greatness; thoughtful people clicked with your voice and brought you here. Where is here? Nowhere. You’re still in front of your computer talking to inanimate objects, stupid. Get real! And be grateful. Your listeners could be doing something else right now. Like writing me hate mail.
10.) Know When To Get Out. One day you will know it’s over. That is the day your guest is speaking and you’re checking email or writing a tweet. There’s no law that says you have to do this forever. If it’s over, it’s over. Go out on top. Yes, even if you’re making money. You deserve to take a bow, not slither away into irrelevancy. And the questions deserve deeper attention than a fifth interview with David Icke can provide.
They are reflections of us, after all.
Hey, Gang:
I’ve started blogging Paratopia-specific stuff at www.paratopia.org. I’m reproducing my first post here along with some follow-up insights I wrote in the posts’ thread on our forum: http://www.the-bunker.net/paratopia. You have to join to partake but man alive is it worth it.
We had the richest forum on the planet until the big move. That’s when a bunch of folks migrated to the Paratopia Facebook page until we constructed a new forum. Now it’s all crickets because people have found a happy home on Facebook. As nice as the Facebook group is for somethings you can’t have as deep a back-and-forth as you can a message board. Plus, posts just keep scrolling down into an abyss, never to be read again.
This, then, is my bid to get you back to the message board. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But it would be nice not to have one series of conversations in a vacuum while the more popular venue ultimately is a vacuum by design.
Dream Within Dream about Worlds Within Worlds
Aloha, Paratopia. How apropos that my first blog post since the island blew up is a dream involving Tyler Kokjohn and The Jeff. Not just any old dream, though. One in which we learn something. Maybe. That is, if it accurately reflects reality in some way we have yet to prove. Of course if we can’t prove it we can’t know if it reflects reality. And here we are, together again, exploring Mystery….
Early this morning I’m having a dream the content of which I’ve forgotten. But I don’t think it was related to what came next, which I do remember quite well. A straightforward, matter-of-fact male voice brought the dream to a halt when he injected himself into my mind scape telling me that reality is comprised of worlds within worlds. I see a visual of a bubble or perhaps a particle and we zoom out from that into Earth. Zoom out from Earth into another Earth, the former becoming a particle. On and on.
The man tells me that these worlds are linked by universal constants, some of which are equations (and I take him to mean equations in physics) that do not have a solution. In other words there are some equations we have not figured out but there are others that will not have a solution anywhere. This is the mathematical equivalent of Mystery and it’s what keeps us going. We think these are throwaway erroneous formulas but if we could distinguish between error and Mystery we’d actually have a better handle on the architecture of reality.
Finally, he asks me if I know the Golden Rule. I say I remember the name but not really. I figured we were still on math and he was asking about the Golden Ratio. I Google Search “Golden Rule” and the “Do unto others….” biblical quote pops up. Now I feel stupid, because I did know that. In fact, now I’ve got the Pearl Jam song Not For You playing in the background of my mind: “Can’t escape from the Golden Rule/If you hate something don’t you do it to/This is not for you.”
He says that is an example of universal Truth. These truths aren’t just true on this earth now, they are true everywhere through all time. Universal truths are just as important to defining the architecture of reality as universally unsolvable mathematical riddles.
And with that bit of knowledge imparted, the dream ends and I wake up into another dream where I’ve leapt out of bed to blog this on JayVay.com. I start off with the time: 5:06 AM and take it from there, but I get too bogged down in the details and struggle to remember what was said. The details are of something that wasn’t in the original dream. They are of a large sketch pad. On one side is written what the man said. On the other is a pencil sketch of a bald young adult who looks like Charlie Brown by way of Ken Wilber. I understand that Tyler Kokjohn drew this as a self-portrait. It looks nothing like him. He left out the details because either he doesn’t know who he is or he has low self-esteem and doesn’t want to know–I can’t tell which. I think, ‘Oh, that’s sad,’ and begin penciling in thicker definition to the eyes. It looks like he started to do that then stopped. I hoped it wouldn’t look like eyeliner. I stopped touching up the piece because I thought that if any of you reading right now saw it you’d say I was remaking his self-portrait into my image and I didn’t even want the hassle of trying to explain it.
I woke up again into my old apartment with my mom and sister. I’m excited about this communication. This dude was obviously reflecting the same concepts Jeff’s shrouded man showed him. I joked that maybe since Jeff is ignoring him he’s decided to attach himself to me. Ah, sloppy seconds. However, this voice was different than he who said in a dream “I can be strength” over and over that time I stayed at Jeff’s house. This guy sounded clean cut and young, not gravely-voiced and world weary, so I don’t think it’s the shrouded man.
My sister is trying on a new dress and can’t be bothered with the dream, so I tell my mom. Sister comes out of my bedroom, which she’s using as a changing room, into the living room and asks me to help her with the zipper at her neck. I’m talking to my mom and zipping her up. Her neck hurts so I rub it but I’m causing her worse pain because I can’t tell the story and massage her neck at the same time.
That dream ends and I wake up for real. Just for shits and giggles I check the time. It is 4:59 AM. It’s not too much of a leap to think that if I decided to boot up the computer and log onto JayVay to write this out, it would be 5:06 AM like in the dream. Maybe in some other world I do that. In this one I go back to sleep and write it for Paratopia.
Make of it what you will.
Further Musings From The Message Board
POST #1
There’s something that rings true about the physics of reality being comprised of unsolvable equations. My vision of this is that the physics we can solve is what comes to define this world and so on for other realities–but the glue holding them all together isn’t solvable. Presumably to do that would be to create another world, another “box” so to speak.
Localized physics have full formulas… nonlocal do not?
I wonder if dreams are where we experience the nonlocal formulas in action. Looking back when you wake up, everything is vague and unreal or hyperreal depending on the dream. And yet no matter what the dream is there are times when it seems as if other beings communicate, right? Dreams that are more than “just dreams.”
So, is this the meeting ground of all minds from all realities? Is this what unsolvable physics looks like from the inside?
Could this be the answer to the need for an “altered state of mind” during high strangeness encounters? It’s not actually the mind’s state that’s altered but the perception of physics that are shifted. The person is shifted into a “state” where localized this-universe physics do not apply, or perhaps only apply to the physical body. But the nonlocal mind–that aspect of us not chained to the local laws of physics–is taken to the meeting ground transcendent and inclusive of all worlds.
We meet on the bridge, so to speak. In dreams, 9 times out of 10 who we meet is ourselves in fluid landscapes concocted by our mind. But every now and then someone else or Earth herself pops in to communicate something extraordinary. And every now and then some intelligence brings some of us there during a wake-state experience.
Jeff has wondered on the program who or what is roaming around the outskirts of the fractal. Maybe the answer is, everyone from everywhere when we need to meet.
POST #2
Joe Gooch just corrected me privately that the Pearl Jam lyric is “common rule” not “Golden Rule.” What played in my head during the dream was “Golden Rule.” I always thought the lyric was Golden Rule and so my brain delivered.
I wonder now if he didn’t just stumble upon something significant. On the one hand you could argue that this is evidence the whole thing is a dream. My problem with that is the voice felt foreign to me. It felt like dream intrusion, if you pardon the negative connotation. And what he said was certainly not something that felt like it came from my imagination, but who knows?
Still, I think a more interesting answer, and perhaps more honest, is that what Joe just figured out is how un-mystical entering a dream needs to be. I mean you think it’s got to entail quite a bit of work to somehow create a landscape in the mind put me there, talk to me, make it all work for me, the receiver. What technology–what magic–is capable of that?
What if you don’t need to do anything other than speak or show an image or two? What if it’s the internal version of the alarm clock going off or the rooster crowing or the person shaking you, telling you to wake up? At first you often incorporate the stimulus into the dream, then you wake up. What if an intelligence injects itself into the dream and then your mind wraps itself around it, trying to make it make sense by farting out applicable sounds and images from your personal data base of thoughts and experiences?
You aid and abet the “intruder” in your dream as a means to blend this stand-out communication back into the tapestry of the dreaming mind. This actually makes sense because as I said, we do it all the time with external stimuli.
It doesn’t matter if Golden Rule was the correct lyric. It matters how I sang it all these years and what it meant to me. The dreaming mind takes that from the closet, dusts it off, and makes me wear it to better illuminate what this guy was saying in a way that makes sense to me.
Perhaps this is how a rigid, rational seed is planted in the fertile soil of dreamtime metaphor land. And what grows is my retelling of it. The retelling will be neither incomplete nor complete. It will be a mutation to which you, the reader, will add or subtract in your retelling and on it goes. It’s not “the telephone game,” it’s “fractal knowledge gestation.” The idea gestates in all who read and ponder and contribute to it until it dies or some version holds as common wisdom.
Joe! You’re a genius! (Accidentally.)
Hey, Gang:
I’ve decided to stop selling my first book, I Know Why The Aliens Don’t Land! as well as my first DVD, No One’s Watching: An Alien Abductee’s Story through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It’s simply not cost-effective anymore. I’ll still be selling Urgency. through any and all outlets who will have it, so no worries there.
The upside is, every copy I sell through here will be autographed with a personalized message just for you! (Warning: personalized message may include hand turkeys. Do not take personalized message too seriously.)
The cost of the glorious autographed softcover book is a paltry $15.00 plus shipping. The movie is $10.00 plus shipping. If you live in the U.S. shipping is, like, 3 or 4 dollars. If you live anywhere else it’s more. Too much more, if you ask me.
Thanks for considering. I know you’ll enjoy them provided you have a sense of wonder and a sense of humor. Specifically, mine. So I’ll enjoy them for sure but I’m not so sure about you. Give ‘em a chance anyway. They can’t be any worse than the “normal” ufologogical shitfest you’ve probably dropped a few bucks on in the past.
And with an ad like that how can you say no? Don’t say no. Say Paypal or P.O. Box.
