4 Geniuses Decode the UFO and Consciousness Mystery | Hoffman, Kripal, Kastrup & Gallimore
Michael Phillip stitches four long conversations into one argument: the UFO phenomenon and the consciousness question are the same question. Religious historian Jeffrey Kripal reads the flying saucer as a two thousand year old motif tied to the soul and the world of the dead, arguing the phenomenon is deceptive because deception is how intelligence speaks across a gap. Bernardo Kastrup describes freestanding mental realms outside our dissociative boundary and the one recurring agency that kept trying to give him a gift, then explains why the current nuts and bolts UAP discourse now disgusts him. Donald Hoffman treats spacetime as a VR headset, shows how a being with a larger Markov trace would look like it was accelerating at Mach 40 to us, and warns that the first country to program outside the headset wins everything. Andrew Gallimore brings the neuroscience: the DMT state is not entropic but a second, highly ordered world model, which he argues means some intelligence is commandeering the brain's world building machine.
Published Jul 24, 20262:19:00 video104 min readAdded Aug 8, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
Michael Phillip does not usually stop and give his own opinion, and he does not do it here either. Instead he cuts four separate long form conversations into a single two hour argument, and the argument is this: the UFO question and the consciousness question are not two questions. They are one question that our culture keeps insisting on splitting in half.
The four people making that case come at it from four incompatible professions. Jeffrey Kripal, a historian of religions at Rice, reads the flying saucer as a motif that is continuous with the soul and the world of the dead going back at least to Ezekiel, and argues that the phenomenon is deceptive precisely because deception is what intelligence does when it has to speak across an unbridgeable gap. Bernardo Kastrup, the analytic idealist, allows that freestanding mental realms outside our dissociative boundary are conceivable, describes the one recurring agency that spent years trying to hand him a gift, and then says flatly that the current nuts and bolts UAP discourse has disgusted him to the point that he closed accounts over it. Donald Hoffman treats spacetime as a VR headset, works out what a being with a bigger Markov trace than yours would look like from inside your headset, and lands on Mach 40 maneuvers and a Pandora's box. Andrew Gallimore, the neuropharmacologist, supplies the hard data: the DMT state is not the disordered brain everyone assumes it is, it is a second highly ordered world model, and that is exactly the anomaly that needs explaining.
They do not agree. Kastrup would put a leash on the psychonaut testimony that Gallimore builds on. Gallimore dismantles the Jungian archetype explanation that Kripal is most at home with. Hoffman wants theorem and proof where Kripal wants myth and narrative. What they share is a refusal to accept the two options the culture keeps offering, which are "it is a foreign aircraft" and "these people are hallucinating."
Jeffrey Kripal
Bernardo Kastrup
Donald Hoffman
Andrew Gallimore
Discipline
History of religions
Analytic idealism, computer engineering
Cognitive science, mathematics
Neurobiology, chemistry
What is fundamental
Declines to say. Both the object and the subject are human artifacts of splitting
One consciousness. Everything else is a dissociation of it
Conscious agents. Spacetime is a data structure they project
Stays inside neuroscience. Brackets the metaphysics deliberately
What the phenomenon is
A two thousand year old motif tied to the soul and the dead, weaponized in every era
High strangeness is real. The nuts and bolts layer is currently misinformation
Plausible technology built from outside the headset, made credible by sworn testimony
An intelligence commandeering the brain's world building machine
What the images are
Symbols served up by something that cannot speak to us any other way
Mostly your own repressed complexes. Occasionally not
The limit of your headset, not an insight into reality
A mask. The entities say so themselves
Stance on psychedelic testimony
Takes it seriously as data about experience, not about content
Very cautious. Nobody can steer a trip, so nobody can test it
Open but hard nosed. Wants a mathematician who saw a tesseract
Central evidence. Reads trip reports as reports
What would change their mind
Bodies and craft actually produced: "I think I'll change my tune"
Controlled studies with trained subjects who can steer the state
A proof that general relativity cannot come out of the trace logic
Neuroimaging that shows the DMT world is just cortical noise after all
Figure 1. The four frameworks side by side, as each speaker states them in this conversation. The disagreements are as load bearing as the agreements: Kastrup's caution about psychonaut reports cuts directly against the evidence base Gallimore relies on, and Hoffman's theorem and proof standard is not a standard Kripal's discipline could ever meet.
The cold open: four voices, one problem
The video opens with the four of them cut against each other before anyone is introduced. Kripal: "Certainly the intelligence community is using the UFO and using the phenomena to hide whatever it's hiding. That's part of the literature, that this flying saucer and the soul are related. We see that over and over again in the history of religions. And for some reason, our cultural mythos wants them to be threats. It's actually much more complicated than that." Kastrup, clipped in over him: "I have been very disappointed with what's going on in the UAP world. And if I have to give you a word, I would give you the word misinformation. So right now as far as the nuts and bolts part of the thing is concerned I don't know what to think, but the high strangeness part, that is real."
Then Gallimore on John Mack: "he assumed at first that it was this nuts and bolts phenomenon, that beings were landing in the garden or whatever and sneaking into the bedroom and plucking them from their beds. Actually it started to look like something very very different. These experiences, as he called them, seemed to be entering some kind of alternate state of consciousness." And Hoffman closing the montage: "I hadn't paid much attention to the UAP thing until there was the congressional hearing, in which people under oath said, I have been part of this. I've seen the technology. It's very very clear from the work that I've been doing independently that this kind of technology is easily possible from this framework. Switch frameworks. Spacetime is just a VR headset. Consciousness is the creator of this headset. And we can start to describe a layer of software outside the headset."
Phillip's own introduction is short and deliberately refuses the host's usual privilege. "What is going on, my friends? And I mean that not just as a mundane turn of phrase but in the most philosophically gargantuan sense possible, with respect particularly to the UFO topic, the phenomenon, and I would say its relationship to consciousness." He says he has had many a mind meld on these topics and explored nooks and crannies where he found himself asking how he got there, and that this is part of the point. He is not going to sit and talk at you and give his own nuanced opinion today. He is going to hand over the microphone to four people at the bleeding edge of their fields and get out of the way. He notes that the full unedited conversations with each of them are linked in the comments, and that he is slowly assembling a documentary shot at Contact in the Desert this year on exactly this subject, UFOs and consciousness, with the unedited interviews going to the members channel and Patreon first.
Part one: Jeffrey Kripal and the saucer that is also a soul
The connection nobody in the UAP press wants
Phillip opens on the thing he says he had to bring up, because Kripal says something about it that nobody else does. In another conversation Kripal had drawn a comparison between the subtle body, the out of body experience, the soul flight experience, and the UFO phenomenon.
Kripal does not treat this as his own clever idea. "That's just part of the literature, that this flying saucer and the soul are related. We see that over and over again in the history of religions. And that's something that gets elided or not talked about today, because for some reason our cultural mythos wants them to be threats and wants it to be about national security. But it's actually much more complicated than that. And it definitely involves the world of the dead and the soul. If you scratch the surface and get into it in a broader cultural or historical way."
Phillip pushes on why the topic grips people. He offers two poles. There is the dark appeal, the sense that we finally have evidence of a malevolent, threatening other and that it is not made up, it is really out there. And there is the exact opposite, a paranoid inversion he calls pronoic: they are here to save us, it is angels, it is higher life forms, it is Pleiadians or whatever. Whatever it is, he says, we are past the point where these can be dismissed as things crazy people think they saw.
Elizondo, and the word that can be followed by "threat"
The obvious tension is Lue Elizondo, who had just published a book arguing this is a national security matter, that there are hard objects flying around and crashing and being recovered. How does Kripal balance that against a history of religions reading?
He starts with a laugh and then a close reading. "First of all, Lue's book is complex. If you read the first page he talks about the title, Imminent, and how that can be followed by the word threat, but it also can be followed by some kind of eschaton, or some kind of theological meaning, or transformation of our worldview. So I don't read Lue as just saying one thing. I think he himself questions that physicalist or national security paradigm."
Then the diagnosis of why the UFO in particular dominates. "I think the UFO is so popular and so in the news because it's so empirical. You can get the thing on radar, you can study landing tracks. It has a very physical presence. And I think because we live in an age of science and technology, we equate physical with real." But the same phenomenon has paranormal aspects, and anyone who digs into the research hits them almost immediately. Those aspects do not make it into the media, and Kripal is explicit about why: "it just messes up the threat, the security and science paradigm. It just throws it into disarray immediately. But I want it to be thrown into disarray. I think it should be thrown into disarray."
The human being as a splitter of reality
This is Kripal's central move in the whole segment, and it is the thing that makes his position something other than fence sitting.
"The way I put it is, a human being is essentially a splitter of reality. We perceive the external world as a set of objects and we perceive ourselves as some kind of interior subject. So we have a subjective and an objective dimension by our very nature. And that is fundamentally wrong. That is not what reality is. And the UFO is fundamentally objective, but it's also fundamentally subjective. So it violates this cognitive and sensory system that we are, in ways I find very familiar, but also very helpful and useful."
That is why he can hold both paradigms without picking. The split between the empirical physical UFO and the interior visionary UFO is not a feature of the phenomenon, it is a feature of the perceiver. "That's us. That's the human being who's splitting this into an empirical, physical, objective reality and a subjective interior unreal reality. That's the human being. That's not what's actually going on."
On Elizondo and the retired military professionals generally, he is careful and generous. "I love these are good people, these retired military professionals. They're using their skill set to understand what they can understand, and I'm trying to use my skill set to understand what I can understand, and it's not theirs. And it's not that I think they're wrong. It's that I think what they're saying is inadequate. That's part of the puzzle."
The psyop question, and why there is no "they"
Phillip asks how much room Kripal reserves for the psyop hypothesis, meaning a concerted effort to misdirect, obfuscate, or use the phenomenon as cover.
Kripal laughs again and concedes the obvious half. "Certainly the intelligence community is using the UFO and using the phenomena to hide whatever it's hiding. I can't speak to that because I don't have any classified knowledge. And if that's what you mean by psyops, I just don't know. So I try to stay in my lane and I try to say what I can say historically and comparatively."
Phillip lays out the specific confusion: Elizondo says he has permission to say some things and not others, and yet the Pentagon has issued a counter statement saying some of his claims are not true. Who is throwing mud on the lens?
Kripal answers from institutional experience rather than from the file. "What I know from my own institutional experience is there's no they there. There are multiple people involved, as in thousands if not ten thousand. And different agencies and different individuals are going to have different motivations and different claims." He does not try to parse them, because he has no access to that material. "What I have access to is the historical religious material. And it far transcends and predates any of this stuff."
Two models: 1947, or as far back as we can see
Kripal names the fork in the field. "There are two models of the UFO. One is that it all begins post World War Two, the late 1940s. The other model is it's been around as far as we can see back. I'm definitely of the latter camp."
Which gives him a clean rebuttal to the everything is intelligence community position: "when people tell me it's all about the CIA or the intelligence, I'm like, well, what do you do with all these where there was no CIA? What do you do with that? And of course they don't do anything with it. They deny it or whatever they do." His conclusion is not that the religious interpretations are correct. It is that the thing goes back through human history and is global, which is a different claim from any interpretation of it.
The paranormal has always been weaponized
One of his recurring lines, and he offers it unprompted. "The paranormal has always been weaponized. This is not unique to the US. If you look at the history of what we might call magic or clairvoyance, it's always been used to hunt and kill animals, or to go to war, or to seduce someone else. It's always been weaponized."
He thinks this is the actual root of the fear of psi, and he attributes the argument to Stephen Braude: if psi can be used for positive ends, and it can, then it can also be used for negative ends. "So there's this natural human fear of it that I think is well grounded, but also kind of naive, because people have these abilities. Sorry, they just do. You can moralize it all you want, but it's still the case."
"Sorry, levitation's real"
Phillip presses on the bluntness itself, which he says is what he loves about Kripal. Was there a moment where the preponderance of evidence tipped?
Kripal cannot locate one. He has talked to too many people who work on this. He first dealt with the UFO through the Esalen book, which surprises people. "Believe it or not, the counterculture is filled with this stuff. There are novels and conferences. It's just everywhere. You cannot talk about the 1970s and 80s without talking about this if you're talking about religious undercurrents." At that stage it was obvious to him that people were having these experiences. He says he did not then think about the empirical reality of it to the extent he does now.
Along the way he endorses a formulation he attributes to Colm Kelleher and James Lacatski more strongly than to Elizondo: "Not only is it real, it's entirely physical and it's entirely paranormal. And if you take either of those things off the table, you are not talking about the phenomenon. You're talking about whatever you want to talk about, but you are not dealing with the reality of the situation."
Ezekiel, Fatima, and 2500 years of the same motifs
Asked for his favorite well attested historical instances, Kripal names the two most developed in the literature: the Fatima apparitions of 1917 in Portugal, and Ezekiel, which he dates to the fifth or sixth century BCE.
On Ezekiel he is blunt. "If you read Ezekiel chapter one and two, it's so clear this is a UFO event in ancient Israel. And he's even abducted. It's all there, and it's really weird. But you see the same kinds of motifs, the wheels within wheels and the abduction and the visionary and the cosmic human being. You see all this again in the modern accounts. And so there, it's 2500 years."
On Fatima he does the historian's work of watching an event get shaped. Six apparitions, on the same day of the month for six consecutive months, May through October, witnessed by three very small children. "They didn't even say it was the blessed virgin early on. It was a woman in a ball of light landing on a tree, and it was weird. It was super weird. And as the months go on, it gets disciplined or shaped into a Marian apparition, because that's what Catholics did." Even as a Marian apparition it does not fit the Marian Catholic worldview.
That misfit is the whole point for him. "That's what I love about this stuff. It kind of fits, but it really doesn't. And when you look at that tension, to me that makes it more real and more legitimate." He will not say the Marian apparition is a UFO event, and he will not say modern UFO events are ancient astronauts. "These are all interpretations and they really don't work at the end of the day." The extraterrestrial hypothesis, he agrees, works for some things and not for others.
c. 570 BCEEzekiel 1 and 2. Wheels within wheels, the cosmic human being, the prophet lifted away. Kripal's example of a full abduction and vision motif set 2500 years before the term existed.
1917Fatima, Portugal. Six apparitions on the same day each month, May to October, to three young children. Begins as a woman in a ball of light landing on a tree and is progressively disciplined into a Marian apparition.
1947The post war origin story. The model Kripal rejects as the whole account: that the phenomenon begins with the late 1940s flying saucer wave.
c. 1960 to 1970Resuscitation medicine matures. For the first time people can be taken deep into the death process and brought back, so they survive to tell the story.
1975The near death experience is named. Enough accounts accumulate and a book fixes them into a category. Kripal's model case for how technology plus publication creates an apparently new phenomenon.
1970s to 1980sThe counterculture layer. Esalen, conferences, novels. Where Kripal first encountered UFO material, embedded in religious undercurrents rather than in defense reporting.
1980s to 1990sJohn Mack's abduction work. Subjects describe bounding beings and worlds with more dimensions, well before the DMT literature made those descriptions familiar.
2023Sworn congressional testimony. The event Hoffman names as the moment he gave himself permission to take the technology claim seriously.
Figure 2. Kripal's long chronology, assembled from the anchors he cites in this conversation. The pattern he is pointing at is not that the events are identical, it is that the same motif set keeps recurring while the interpretive frame around it changes completely.
Jung's emerging mythology, and the rule about citing your sources
Phillip says the thing that vexes him is Jung's take, that this is an emerging mythology. Kripal interjects to correct the record before the sentence finishes: "he didn't know what it was. Completely puzzled."
Phillip's version of Jung's position is that it is something ontologically, not a projection, but we are collectively projecting an emerging mythology onto it. Kripal's response is one word short of an endorsement: "when I read that, I'm like, that is it."
And then the counterweight. You hear the Elizondo stories about material in hangars, and it complicates things. Kripal's answer is the cleanest statement of his epistemic position in the whole segment. "If they hauled the bodies out and the craft, I think I'll change my tune. But the point is that they have not. And we always hear about people who heard, or people that saw something have told someone else this. And I know, as a historical researcher, the number one rule is I have to cite my sources. And you have to be able to go to the same sources that I'm citing. And if you can't, why would you believe me?"
He does not use that as a weapon against the whistleblowers. He thinks what they are doing is entirely legitimate and that they are telling the truth as far as they can, and that they simply cannot cite their sources for classified reasons. As a historian of religions he says he is deeply familiar with that structure of secrecy and esotericism, and deeply suspicious of it, and he suspects they are too. "I've sat with these people. I've talked to them. They're good people. I'm not questioning their integrity or their honesty in the least. I just think it's more complicated."
Why now: institutions leak, and technology creates phenomena
Phillip asks the question he says he always asks people who have thought hard about this. Why now, after decades of demonization, are all these people being allowed to say this?
Kripal's first answer is institutional and unglamorous. "I belong to big institutions. You can't keep a secret long. You can keep it for a while, you can keep it for a few decades, but you can't permanently keep secrets like this."
His second answer is more interesting, and it reframes the question. He does not think the phenomenon has increased or decreased. He thinks the cultural uptake has. "These experiences happen as much in the Amazonian basin as they do in New Mexico. But what gets reported and what gets picked up in the culture is very different than what actually happens."
Then he gives the case study, and it is the strongest analogy in his segment. Take the near death experience. Human beings have almost certainly been having them for as long as we can see back. "But guess what? They died. And they didn't come back and tell their story." Once biomedical technology reached a certain point, roughly 1960 or 1970, people could go far into the death process and be pulled back. They told what they had seen, enough of those accounts accumulated, and in 1975 the near death experience became a category, because of a book. "So I think it's publication, it's tech, it's bio, it's technology, it's the culture is ready for this, but the culture is not ready for it."
The last clause is not a slip. He immediately supplies the evidence. What most people do not know about the near death literature is that it was heavily rejected by fundamentalist Christians, and the reason is simple: nobody goes to hell. "That's a problem. That's a big problem."
"Do you baptize an alien?"
The flying saucer is a theological problem in exactly the same way, and Kripal says he does not even wait to be asked this one, he invokes it himself. Do you baptize an alien?
"And my answer is no. And there's two reasons. One is, first of all, it won't let you." The second reason is the serious one, and it is the closest thing to a methodological commandment in his whole segment. "Do not reduce the phenomena to your own worldview. Do not do that. And baptism is a great way of just saying, oh, you're a creature of God, Jesus died for you, let's baptize you into my worldview, let's make you a good whatever. And I'm like, no, that is actually not what's going on here. This phenomena is here to challenge your worldview, not to have you return to it."
Phillip immediately writes the satirical sci fi premise out loud: two aliens baptized into competing religions that hate each other, so now it is exactly as bad as before except the combatants are super powerful and both certain they are saved.
The symbol keeper: something is choosing the image
After the mid roll, Phillip raises the idea from Kripal's work that he says was a personal epiphany. It seems as though whatever is responsible for putting the image in front of the experiencer is a thing in its own right. Some unseen symbolic software that selects familiar images and places them in front of the experiencer's mind's eye. He calls it, groping, an almost daimonic symbol keeper. Software underneath the software but above the hardware.
Kripal's reply is one word and a laugh: "Fine. You invoke Neoplatonism. I mean, come on."
He gets there through his own biography. A kid from a small town in Nebraska, arriving at seminary and learning about what they were calling the unconscious. "And that blew my mind. It just blew up everything, because what it implied was that human beings are driven by forces of which they are not aware." That was obviously the case with male sexual orientation, with religious vocation, and with ecstatic religious experience, and it is why he pursued that material for so many years.
Deception is a sign of intelligence
Applied to the phenomenon, the conclusion is that it is obviously deceptive. It is not what is there. And Kripal is emphatic that people hear deceptive and immediately hear sinister, which is a category error.
"Deception is a sign of intelligence. It's not a sign of ill intent. It can have ill intent, but deception is used in biology to reproduce, to hide from predators, to prey on other things. Deception is used for all kinds of reasons in the natural world, and I suspect it's being used here as well."
He then draws the distinction he keeps returning to. "I don't believe that what's appearing is what's really there, but I believe that that's what's appearing." Taking the appearances seriously without buying the appearances.
The knee jerk reaction, he says, is to assume all the deception is human based, people creating fraud and disinformation, and of course that happens. But something deeper is going on, and it may not be deceiving us intentionally. "I think it's speaking to us in the only way it can. I don't think it can speak rationally or cognitively, because that's not what it is. It's some form of consciousness or awareness that is so beyond any kind of cognition or sensory capacity that, how is it going to talk? How is the fisherman going to talk to the fish?"
So it speaks in symbols, in myths, in narratives. And his prescription follows directly: use methods and theories that acknowledge a narrative approach to things, rather than always looking for material mechanisms.
"I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs"
Phillip asks him to state his position precisely: you do not disbelieve the experiences, you disbelieve the images, and you believe the ontological reality behind them.
Kripal accepts and sharpens it. "The content is what I'm not signing my name to." Near death experiencers tell him what they saw in the afterlife and what heaven is like. "I can't believe any one of those stories, because if I believe that story, I can't believe all these other stories. I have to dismiss all these other human beings. So for me, the argument from compassion and from a kind of capaciousness is to acknowledge what this person saw or believes, but not myself believe those beliefs. I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs, if I can put it that way. I'm not dismissive. I'm not the skeptic. But I'm also not the believer."
This is the single most transferable idea in his segment, and it is worth noting how much work it does. It lets him treat a hundred mutually contradictory testimonies as a hundred real events without having to declare ninety nine of them liars, and without having to adopt any one of their cosmologies.
Hermes, Mercurius, and the many faced guide
Phillip's association for the symbol keeper is the Hermes archetype, and specifically a passage in Jung's Psychology and Alchemy where Jung runs through the multiplicity of ways Mercurius presents himself. It is God, it is the devil, it is the redeeming psychopomp, it is the wise old man. Phillip's point is that Jung does not do this arbitrarily or as a convenient mythopoetic device. And when you consider how that god was described through the ages, closest to man, friendliest to man, the guide, the keeper of boundaries, it sounds exactly like whatever nebulous thing is serving up just the right piece of imagery.
Kripal answers with a scene. He was at Harvard in May for a conference on Platonism, surrounded by Platonists talking about the daimon. "And it was so refreshing to me, because the daimon's not the demon." As a comparativist he is acutely aware of the difference, and he is direct about which one is more useful. "The daimon in a Neoplatonic sense is way more helpful to explain what's going on in the UFO phenomena than the Christian. The Christian demon is frankly silly and not helpful at all. And it's exactly what gets invoked over and over again."
He grants a narrow sense in which these things are demonic: they question the relevancy of the worldview at stake. They are not demonic in the sinister or evil sense.
And then the caveat that keeps him honest, and which he applies to himself as rigorously as to anyone else. "It's not that I want to sign my name to the daimon either. It's not that the Neoplatonists had it all right and now all we have to do is become Neoplatonists and we'll be fine. That is not what I'm trying to say. There are different moments in human history and they have their different interpretations of this, and we need to take it all in, but we need to come up with our own reading of it."
Jung, trying to get off the game board
Which, he says, is exactly what Jung was doing. "He was definitely not a Neoplatonist, but he definitely wasn't a good Lutheran either. He was trying to lift off the game board, as it were, and figure out what the whole game is. He was trying to figure out that software or hardware behind the display."
Kripal's verdict on Jung is warm and unsentimental at once. He has spent his whole life lecturing at Jung centers and talking to Jungians and has read tons of Jung. "I think he was great for the time. I think we just know a lot more now and we have to think different thoughts and say different things. And it's not that we're better, it's just that we're at a different place."
Part two: Bernardo Kastrup and the ocean of dissociations
Are DMT entities inside your boundary or outside it?
The cut into Kastrup lands on the sharpest version of the question. Under analytic idealism, there is one consciousness and we are dissociations of it, alters of a single mind at large. So when something appears to be autonomous, a DMT entity, an entire freestanding hyperdimensional ecosystem, is that outside the dissociative boundary or is it a product of your own psyche?
Kastrup grants the possibility in principle and then immediately fences it. "I think it is conceivable that there are freestanding mental realms that we don't pick out under ordinary circumstances, because they don't have a bearing on our ability to survive and reproduce. So we didn't evolve cognitively to pick out those realms in mental space. It would only cognitively overload us. So it is conceivable that there are mental ecosystems beyond our dissociative boundaries where there are semi autonomous or maybe autonomous mental complexes, also partly dissociated themselves, where they live out their experience. That is conceivable."
Notice the structure of the argument. It is Hoffman's evolutionary logic applied to mental space rather than to physical space: we do not perceive what does not pay for itself in fitness. Kastrup gets to the same conclusion from idealism that Hoffman gets to from interface theory, which is one of the quiet convergences in this video.
The steering problem
Then comes the fence. "I would be very cautious of any psychonaut coming back and making that affirmation as a fact. For us to be able to say that, we would need to have a study under controlled conditions and many volunteers, a lot of prior training, which would be required for anybody to even have a hope to steer their psychedelic experience in a given direction."
He then discloses his own failure at exactly this. He used psychedelics for a two year period several years ago as a research exercise, and he never once managed to steer the experience. "It chose what I would experience, never the other way around."
So the evidential bar he sets is concrete and currently unmet. "If it is to be possible at all to make an evidence based inference that there are such realms, we would have to find ways to steer psychedelic trips, which right now we haven't. So I would be very cautious against these claims for the time being, even though I think it is conceivable. There is nothing a priori impossible about it under analytic idealism."
It is worth pausing on how much of this video's evidence base that single caution puts under review. Gallimore's entire case in part four rests on trip reports read as reports. Kastrup is not calling them false. He is saying they cannot yet be made to carry the weight.
We are collectives, so most entities are us
Kastrup's default explanation for entity encounters is internal, and it is not deflationary in the dismissive sense. "Psychedelic gnosis, when it's brought back as literal, is very suspicious. The mind manifests itself symbolically."
"Most of the figures that appear in our reveries are part of our own mind talking to itself, and we have internal dissociations as well. We are not a unity. Any therapist with a lot of clinical experience would tell you that we are collectives, and there's still a child in us, there's still a teenager in us. There are still those Bernardos who have been repressed and not heard, not listened to. They're still there. They all still have their feelings, they all still have their emotions. So maybe some of that appears as entities, but they are not really objective entities outside us."
Except when the alienness is total
And then he refuses to close the door, because his own experience will not let him.
"There are realms in psychedelic space where the agencies that seem to appear are so alien. And yet so agential, they really seem to have their own agency. And they seem to find us just as strange as we find them. So I wouldn't pooh pooh that entirely. Sometimes you come back with an experience where it's like you just happened into a place where you were not expected, and everybody who was there looks at you funny, like, what the hell? Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?"
The alienness, he says, is not only at the seemingly physical level. It is at the level of logic and of emotion. "The alienness is so profound that I can understand that some people find it hard to think that it is a part of themselves, because it's profoundly nonhuman, profoundly not anything that we can speak of in language."
He distinguishes this carefully from the ordinary content of a trip. Usually you confront your own shadow: everything you repressed, your dark side, your hidden desires, your depravity, your guilt, your anxiety. You get used to that. You learn to recognize your own material. "But then occasionally, very rarely, you happen upon a space that is totally different, and then you go, whoa, what is this now? This is something."
Phillip brings up the extended state DMT work at Imperial College London, and mentions that his friend Alexander Beiner, formerly of Rebel Wisdom, was a participant in the pilot study. Beiner, he says carefully, finds it very difficult to swallow that you are not entering a freestanding ecosystem. Beiner describes it like walking into a rainforest. Some things are interested in you and want to run around you and show you things. Some things do not care. Some things are not particularly friendly. It feels incredibly vast and teeming with life. Phillip adds that a study has either been done or is planned aimed at exactly the question at hand: put multiple people into the state simultaneously and check for agreement or replicability on what is being seen and when. He says he is eager for the results, because there are so many anecdotal cases of people in psychedelic states together reporting some kind of boundary breaking mental connection.
The gift
Kastrup says the shared entity thing happened to him maybe twice, probably only once. Most of his journeys were either about the hidden parts of himself, or about the whole, "not any particular ecosystem but the whole, the cosmic itch that drives the endogenous excitations of mind at large, the unasked questions that drive the universe forward."
And then he tells the story he says he has never written about, and this is the passage that justifies the whole segment.
"There is only one consistent entity, if you will, or agency, I prefer the word agency, that I have encountered many times, and I can't tell you whether it's me or not. But it was always an agency that, I'll describe it symbolically now, always was very interested in giving me a gift. And that gift was not a thing. It was a way of seeing. It was a realization."
The obstacle to receiving it is you. "It's very difficult to get a human to achieve that realization because of how our cognitive system is wired and what it's optimized for, what it has evolved to do. So you sort of have to unwind all that stuff. You have to undo all of those clampings, all of those foldings that we have evolved to have, in order to be able to see the gift. And this agency was always trying to help me do that."
Which produces the most striking idea in his section, and it lands within minutes of Kripal saying almost exactly the same thing from an entirely different discipline. "To do that, you have to undergo a benign form of deception, because what prevents you from seeing it is yourself. Your patterns of thinking and feeling prevent you from seeing that. So you have to be unwound. And this thing is trying to deceive you into unwinding yourself. It's a benign form of deception."
When it works, the object resolves. "It starts as a spherical object with glowing lights. But if you can actually see it, then it's not an object. It's thought, it's emotion, it's you and other, it's self and world. It's the panacea, it's the template, the pattern underlying everything. It is everything."
He is explicit that it is not describable and not portable. "It is a beyond orgasmic experience. Throughout most of my trips I always sensed the presence of this agency, and in a few I could see it. And it is mind blowing. It's a level of delight and clarity that is unfathomable. You cannot bring that back. It's an experience of the moment and it belongs in that realm and in that realm alone. You don't get to bring it back. The only thing you bring back is a profound gratitude that such a thing exists in nature."
He preempts the obvious objection himself. Even if you call it a form of illusion, fine. "Under idealism everything is mental. So there is a sense in which you could say everything is an illusion. But if it is so, it's as real an illusion as this right now, because it's experienced as real, and at the end of the day that's all we have. There's no reality outside mind."
Phillip observes that Jung would have a field day with this: a spherical agency that feels like boundary transcending completion, which sounds soul like or daimon like or Hermes like, transcending boundaries that normally cannot be transcended.
Kastrup's answer dissolves the question. "It is not a product of me. It is not a product of Bernardo Kastrup. Now whether it's outside my dissociative boundary or immanent in it, I would tend to say it exists in a form in which this distinction does not hold. We cannot think of reality in these spatial terms anymore at the level of that gift. It's a singularity. It's a self recursive singularity. It's like a key to existence. The key to all complexity. It is that out of which everything unfolds. It's the folded form of all of existence, with the inherent templates, the inherent dispositions of existence that generate everything if you allow it to unfold." Because it is a singularity, asking whether it is inside or outside his dissociative boundary makes no sense. "So that's why I never wrote about it. It's impossible to write about it."
Finally, the ethics of the thing. He is dismissive of recreational use in passing: "if you did psychedelics like I did as a research enterprise, I find it preposterous to do psychedelics for fun. They're not fun. They're very hard." There was plenty in his trips that fit Terence McKenna's formula about fish you can bring back to the tribe. But not this. "The gift was never that. It doesn't have that ethos of being part of your curriculum. It's grace. Every now and then you're granted grace for the sake of it. It doesn't have the higher purpose of you writing about it or how it's going to change your life. No, it's just grace. That's all. There's nothing more to it." Phillip supplies the phrase: a numinous gift. Kastrup takes it.
Why the current UAP discourse disgusts him
Phillip notes that Kastrup published an article on the UAP topic since they last spoke, and asks whether it covered mental agencies as a possible source of the phenomena. Kastrup says yes, and that he had done it much earlier, explicitly, in an older book called Meaning in Absurdity.
And then, unprompted, the part that made the cold open. "Look, I have been very disappointed with what's going on in the UAP world this year. Disappointed to the point of disgust, of just closing certain accounts that were, well, I don't want to talk about it. I'll leave it at that. I'm disappointed to the point of disgust."
He splits the topic cleanly in two. On high strangeness he has not moved. "It's the high strangeness part that I think holds water, that I think is doubtless. You cannot just ignore the reports of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, and those reports carry the hallmarks of truth."
He will not say what the hallmarks are, and he explains why in one sentence: "otherwise, next week every report will have those hallmarks." He keeps a private set of criteria and applies them. Beiner has the hallmarks. Anita Moorjani has the hallmarks. Certain people in the UAP and alien abduction discourse have the hallmarks. A bunch of others do not.
On the nuts and bolts side he has actively withdrawn. "The recent nuts and bolts hoopla, I did take seriously until last year. Until some point this year I take less seriously now. There are, in my mind, very concerning developments, very concerning material, very concerning actions, and man, it frankly disgusts me. So I checked out from that."
Phillip asks whether he means a psyop, something co-opted for propaganda, an agenda beyond the truth. Kastrup declines the word and gives his own. "I question the motivations behind a lot of what's happening, and if I have to give you a word I would give you the word misinformation. So right now, as far as the nuts and bolts part of the thing is concerned, I don't know what to think. And I realized that I cannot know what to think. So I dropped that ball. I don't want to be part of that. I literally closed very special high security accounts that I had, which shows you the extent of my concern. But the high strangeness part, that is real."
Where he stops Phillip: no hierarchy of dissociations
Phillip proposes a synthesis: analytic idealism says everything is one consciousness and we are dissociations of it, but between our dissociation and fundamental reality you must entertain many other dissociations, hierarchies, an absolute ocean of beings presenting in all kinds of ways.
Kastrup agrees with the spirit and rejects one specific part, and his reason is a nice piece of consistency policing. "You said between us and this world there must be other levels, hierarchy of dissociations. I don't know that, because we have a physical appearance. So does the rest of this universe. So if there is anything in between, I would expect it too to have a physical appearance, and we don't find it. It's not at hand."
What he does allow is lateral rather than vertical. "It is entirely conceivable that this universe is just one segment of mind at large. It's the segment in which we exist. And then there are parallel universes."
Parallel universes, but emphatically not the Many Worlds kind
He is immediately at pains to say which parallel universes he means, and the distinction is worth getting right, because it is one of the more technically precise moments in the video.
He rejects the Many Worlds style multiverse outright. "The motivation to postulate that is nonsensical. It lacks all empirical grounding. It's a theoretical fantasy." He is not talking about universes that arise because both outcomes of a measurement are true in different branches. "I'm not talking about exploding gazillions of parallel universes that pop into existence out of nothing every time two quantum systems interact. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about mushrooming parallel physical universes."
What he means instead: "parallel universes that may exist at all times. We don't have the power to create or destroy them by an observation, and they will not look physical to us because other rules apply, maybe even other rules of logic, because logic is axiomatic." Some universal level of dissociation splits these bubble universes from one another, which is why we have no access.
And then the conjecture, carefully labeled as conjecture. "It is conceivable that during a very high dose psychedelic trip, in which most of the dynamic structure of mind is just dissolved, because that's what psychedelics do, one could catch a glimpse of what's happening in the next room in the palace of the universal mind." The reasoning: what confines us here are cognitive structures, and the only way you can create structure in a mind is structures of cognition, association, dissociation, representation, re-representation. "So if you dismantle those structures that create this universe in which we are rooted, it stands to reason that you go to a level of mentation which is so raw that you can catch a glimpse of whatever else is going on in the palace of mind."
The logic test for a genuinely other realm
This is where he gives an actual criterion, which is more than most people manage on this subject.
"The telltale sign of that would be that not only is the physics different but the logic is different, that Aristotelian axioms don't apply."
He then situates himself. At least four of the Aristotelian axioms apply to this universe, so in an analytic philosophy discussion he will largely behave as an Aristotelian. But strictly he is an intuitionist: intuitionism accepts four of the Aristotelian axioms and rejects one, the law of the excluded middle, which says things are either true or false, not both and not neither. "Well, I reject that. I see truth as a construct. You have to have an example of it to prove that it exists, as opposed to proving that it cannot be false. That's just abstraction."
So: an intuitionist in this universe, and keenly aware that if we are not talking about this universe then we are not having an analytic discussion. The signature of another realm in the palace of mind would be that logic itself does not apply there, that the expectations about what makes sense and what does not would be very different. "In other words, absurd."
Phillip supplies the field's own term for it: high strangeness. Kastrup accepts it. "Or at the very least not linear and not subject to the way that things work in everyday consensus reality."
Part three: Donald Hoffman and the software outside the headset
Gradations of power, and the wizard versus the geek
Phillip opens the Hoffman segment by carrying Kastrup's conclusion across: you eventually reach a metaphysical picture of gradations of agency and ontological power, which is roughly what the word hypostasis points at. Higher things on the chain have more of it, and things below have less. Which puts us inside the constraint Hoffman calls the headset, or which we could think of as being inside Grand Theft Auto with hard limits on what we can do. His question: are the insights Hoffman is describing ways to increase the scope of what the headset can do?
Hoffman's answer is yes, with an immediate hedge about scale. "First I'll start off with a statement to put some modesty on the whole thing. This is just the first layer of software outside of spacetime. So I'm not claiming anywhere close to a theory of everything." With that proviso in place, he goes all the way.
"Think about it this way. If you are a wizard inside Grand Theft Auto you can do all sorts of amazing things and people are impressed. But if you're the geek that wrote the software, you can do things that the wizard doesn't understand. You can make their car disappear, you can take the tires off their car. You can just do magic."
The time dilation argument, worked out longhand
Then he gives a concrete example of the kind of magic that would follow, and it is the technical heart of his segment. It runs on trace size, which is the number of experiences in the Markov structure that constitutes a conscious agent.
Suppose two agents have matrices of very different size. Hoffman initially casts himself as the large one, then reverses it in mid sentence out of politeness. "So you've got a big matrix and Hoffman only sees one tenth of Michael's. So Hoffman has only ten percent of Michael's experiences. And what happens then is, for every click of time that I see, Michael could do ten times many other things. He could do lots of other things where I think nothing's happened. For Michael it could be a thousand years or a million years depending on how much bigger your matrix is. You could have a thousand years to do whatever you want, and for me it's instantaneous."
The consequence he draws is unnerving and he does not soften it. "That means effectively that I'm a sitting duck. Compared to you I'm a sitting duck. You can do whatever you want while I'm just sitting there inert, unable to do anything."
Phillip's response is to ask what kind of being that would be, and to note that this gives real insight into what a higher being might be, whether you call it an alien or an angel. It might explain why in altered states and numinous experiences people see things that completely stretch their ability to conceive, and why in the biblical examples the angel always opens with "be not afraid." As Phillip puts it, "I know whatever I'm looking like to you, it's looking real crazy, but try not to freak out."
Hoffman extends the same logic from time to space. "I've only talked about the time, there's also the space. If you're the bigger trace than mine, then my distances are different from yours. You're working in a much bigger space than me as well as you've got more time. So you can do stuff outside where I can't see. You could do something inside my trace. I see an object inside the trace, you've let me see it, and then you do something so that all of a sudden it looks like the thing I see in my trace moved at Mach 40. Accelerated at impossible speeds, or faster than the speed of light. But inside your big matrix you're all within your own laws of physics. Because I'm at a much smaller matrix, it looks like magic to me and it looks like it's impossible to me."
Figure 3. Hoffman's trace size argument, rebuilt from his own worked example. Nothing exotic happens in the larger trace. The impossibility is entirely an artifact of the observer's sampling rate, which is why he says a small trace agent is "a sitting duck" and why the same argument makes anomalous flight performance cheap rather than expensive to explain.
The congressional hearing gave him permission
Phillip points out that what Hoffman has just described sounds exactly like what people report seeing: objects going from sea level to forty thousand feet and back within a second or two, captured by instruments that work well enough that we trust them to fight wars.
Hoffman explains how he got here, and it is a specific date rather than a lifelong interest. "I hadn't paid much attention to the UAP thing until there was the congressional hearing, in which people under oath said, I have been part of this. I've seen the technology. I've seen nonhuman biologics. And so at that point I gave myself permission to think about, okay, there is now some credible testimony here that these things may actually exist."
Then the framework claim. "It's very clear from the work that I've been doing independently that this kind of technology is easily possible from this framework. If you take spacetime as fundamental, then it's hard to explain this technology. The laws of physics simply don't allow this stuff, and there's no way that we can see in a spacetime framework." He acknowledges we still do not have a theory of everything inside spacetime, that the standard model goes only so far, but says that even so it is hard to imagine this kind of magic happening from the inside. "But if you switch frameworks, spacetime is just a VR headset, and consciousness is the creator of this headset, and we can start to describe a layer of software outside the headset, then it's a no brainer that if you are the VR designer, you know how it's designed, then you can do magic inside the headset."
The Pandora's box, and the moral corollary
Hoffman does not present this as good news, and this is the most consequential thing he says.
"It's almost scary, the technologies that can come out of this. The trace logic is also quite dangerous. Understanding the trace logic and perhaps this notion of agency is opening up a Pandora's box, because this is a way of thinking about technologies that we simply have never had before."
The strategic framing is stark. "All of our military systems are designed with physics inside spacetime. We've only used what we know about the inside of the headset. So our best military equipment is because we are the really great player of Grand Theft Auto. We know how to do stuff inside the headset. But as soon as you get outside the headset and start playing with the software itself, the first country to do that is the winner in terms of technology. There's nothing that you could do to stop it."
Which is where he reaches for the counterweight, and it is not a policy proposal, it is an ontological one. Where did the trace logic come from? From the idea that consciousness is fundamental and each of us is an avatar expression of a deep unified consciousness. "And so what comes out of the trace logic is what spiritual traditions have been saying for a long time. And Jesus said it very clearly. Love your neighbor as yourself." Phillip finishes it: the implication being your neighbor is yourself.
"That's really the point. The trace logic does say all of us are in fact the one consciousness looking at itself through different headsets. So someone who is smart enough to begin to use the trace logic outside of spacetime to build technologies, hopefully is also smart enough to understand what this is saying. That is, that the person that you're going to use this technology on is you. That person is you. So be careful how you use this technology, because any harm that you choose to do is harm that you're doing to an avatar of yourself. You aren't your avatar, you transcend it. But to the extent that you don't want something to happen to your avatar, you should not want something to happen to the avatar of another person. So I'm hoping that at the same time that we get a technological boost, we also get in some sense a moral boost from the same place."
Consciousness all the way down
Phillip offers a synthesis: maybe what is unlocked is not just new physics but something that makes the recurring claim that consciousness is core to the UAP technology finally make sense. Not a conversation but a knowing, a new sense, which he says he obviously cannot describe because how do you describe what you do not know.
Hoffman agrees, and states the ontology plainly. "What is beyond spacetime is entirely consciousness. It is entirely in some sense psychological. So to the extent that the UAPs have been associated with all sorts of psychological phenomena, that also follows immediately from the ontology of this whole approach. It's consciousness all the way down. In fact all the technologies that look physical, everything that looks to us physical, is ultimately from this point of view psychological. The very spacetime itself is entirely a psychological construct. Everything inside spacetime is a psychological construct. Once you understand that, then that opens up the technologies that would seem impossible in a physicalist ontology." His expectation for what follows: "the technologies that we have right now are going to seem pre-industrial compared to what we're going to have."
The dimension parameter, and what a drug might be tuning
Hoffman then turns to the psychedelic material and makes a specific, testable sounding proposal.
He notes that some people on drug experiences like DMT appear to be having experiences in higher dimensional spaces, seeing hyperdimensional objects. And he lays out why the ontology decides how you must read that. "If Einstein's curved spacetime is the fundamental nature of reality, then clearly seeing into a thirty dimensional space is only a psychological hallucination. It's not the truth." He notes in passing that string theory would give you eleven dimensions to work with, but that "right now string theory is not, it seems to be on the ropes among the physicists themselves. It's giving us a lot of beautiful insights mathematically and beautiful insights physically, but as a fundamental theory of everything I don't see physicists rallying around it like they used to."
In his framework there is a third option. He is careful to give the deflationary reading its full due first. "Of course we have to be open all the time to the possibility that the psychedelic drug is simply addling your brain and there's nothing deep to see here. I'm perfectly open to saying some drugs just screw your brain up and it's hallucination and there's no insight into a deeper reality, period."
But: "it is at least in principle possible in the framework I'm working on to have a drug molecule that is already in the brain, for example, and we're tweaking it, and that's tweaking a dimension parameter. Right now the dimension parameter for space is D equals three. So the parameter D has a value three in our headset. And we tweak this chemical, now it goes to five or ten, and all of a sudden we have the same kind of architecture but this one parameter in how we build the headset gets manipulated."
That is not a loose metaphor in his mouth, because the parameter is a real object in the mathematics he is doing. "When I'm actually looking at how am I going to build spacetime from Markov matrices, when we do these theorems, we're trying to prove this theorem of how do we get Minkowski space from the theory of conscious agents. What are we doing? It's not just a theorem. This is the first step in building the headset. That's just a headset projection of the software outside of spacetime, which is far more complicated."
The fractal that keeps showing up
Phillip notes that every level of the headset seems to hint at the same structure. Galactic superclusters look brain like, and there is peer reviewed analysis of the similarities between galactic filaments and brain architecture that is precise rather than hand wavy. And it repeats downward: the mycelial mat at the root level of the planet looks the same. Every level of intelligence inside spacetime shows the same fractal layered structure. His question: what does that tell us about the level of intelligence above this one?
The ant, the ladybug, and the cheapest headset
Hoffman's answer is the most quotable stretch in the video, and it is an argument, not a mood.
"My understanding from the trace logic is our headset is one of the cheaper ones, one of the more trivial ones. And this is a really important point and it's one that's hard to come to grips with emotionally. It's very easy for us to think that we're sort of at the top of the intelligence chain."
The setup: "I look down and I see an ant crawling around on the ground, and the ant can't see what I'm doing. It doesn't know much about me. I live in a whole world that the ant could never conceive. And so it probably knows very little about my world, and my world is far superior and far richer than that of the ant."
The turn: "But now, how much do I know about the ant? I can do some studies on it. I know that I'm very rich in my experience and my complexity, and my guess is that the ant's headset isn't telling it very much about me. I'm guessing that the ant's headset just doesn't grok Hoffman at all. But given that logic, there's a chance that my headset isn't grokking what I'm interacting with when I see all I see is an ant. Maybe all the ant sees of Hoffman is an ant. And it's not because Hoffman is just an ant. It's just because the ant headset can't see Hoffman very well. Well, turnabout is fair play."
And the conclusion, which he calls the key point. "It's very easy for us to mistake the limits of our headset for an insight into reality. What you see inside your spacetime is entirely a function of the limits of your headset. It is not an insight into the ultimate nature of reality. When I'm seeing a ladybug, that's the limit of my headset. What am I interacting with? If I actually knew what I was interacting with, I might fall down and worship it. But all I can see is a ladybug."
He then turns the standard into a self diagnostic, which is the part most people quoting him leave out. "The very fact that we think of ourselves as at the top of the food chain shows how benighted we are. To the extent that I feel that I am really smarter than everything I see, that is the key evidence that I know next to nothing."
Formally: "our headset is one of the cheapest headsets that I could imagine in the theory. It's only got a D parameter of three. There's no reason why the D parameter couldn't go to a billion."
The tesseract, and the data he actually wants
Hoffman uses his own cognitive limits as the demonstration. He can imagine a three dimensional cube, and imagining things helps him solve problems. "Try to imagine a four dimensional cube, a tesseract. I can't do it. And nobody can. Even a brilliant mathematician has to work around this limitation of our imagination. They have to use mathematics and tricks and theorem and proof to get to the properties of these higher dimensional objects."
Which sets up the single most concrete experimental ask in the video. "I hope that someone can, and maybe on the right psychedelic perhaps someone can actually go to a four dimensional space and really see a tesseract. I would love to get data. If we get someone who's a credible mathematician that says yeah, I saw a tesseract, now we're talking about something really interesting. So if psilocybin can do that or whatever, that would be very very interesting."
Phillip volunteers a partial precedent: an animation containing hidden information that you cannot see unless you are on a tryptamine. On the surface it is just tracers moving and you see only their color, but under the right compound the hidden information reveals itself. He suspects that is exactly what a certain class of substances does, tweaking and expanding the headset. But he adds an honest qualifier that Kastrup would endorse. "I would love to say that I think it's just a pure flow of more real information, but I also think there's probably interference from your own mind and your own preconceived notions about reality and your own programming and your own fears getting all mixed in there. So you are getting more, but you're also turning up the volume on your own psyche at the same time. It's just like more of everything."
Theorem, proof, or game over
Hoffman closes on method, and this is the discipline that separates his speculation from the rest of the field.
"We should be open with rigorous experiments, no hand waves, with credible subjects. The mathematics I'm working on says there's a good possibility that we might be able to find that kind of thing, and if so we should study it. But it's not enough to have informal descriptions of psychonauts. We have to have more systematic, hard nosed, rigorous experiments."
He specifies what would count for entity claims, and the bar is high. "If there are claims of interacting with entities beyond spacetime, then we need to substantiate those claims with hard nosed experiments where information is exchanged from one person to the entities to some other person in a way that could not possibly have happened any other way."
Then the balance he says the work requires. "You have to be completely open to all these possibilities that might seem bizarre, and then you have to be completely hard nosed about testing them. Completely open, but no BS at all in the experiments, and you have to be your own harshest critic."
Which is why he says he is doing this with mathematicians, and why the program is stated as a sequence of falsifiable steps: the big bang, getting quantum probabilities out of it, showing how the positive geometries come exactly out of it. "It's got to be theorem proof, theorem proof. And if at any point we can't do it, it's game over. If we can't get general relativity from the trace logic and this theory of agency that I talked about, if we can prove we can't do it, then I will have to say, nice try, but this wasn't it. Back to the drawing board. So this is all fun, I'm excited about it, but we've been disappointed many times before. So we will see."
Phillip's send off names what he values in it: rigor plus epistemic humility held at the same time. Hoffman's own summary of the difficulty is the better line. "You do have to be willing to think big, think out of the box. It's hard to think out of spacetime. And to be rigorous at the same time. That's the tightrope that you have to walk."
Part four: Andrew Gallimore and the world that is directed into you
John Mack, and the man who actually knew what a hallucination was
Phillip introduces Gallimore's segment through John Mack, whom he says he did not expect to find in this context. Mack was a person who could not accept that people's UFO experiences were anything but genuine in most cases, and what Phillip admits he did not know is that Mack eventually flipped away entirely from the nuts and bolts explanation and became deeply interested in psychedelics, shamanism, psi, and consciousness.
Gallimore explains why Mack mattered structurally. "Mack was very important not just in the alien abduction phenomenon but in how we think about it. He was a huge problem for those who wanted to dismiss the abduction experience as a hallucination, because Mack knows all about hallucinations. Mack was the head of the Harvard school of psychiatry. This guy was no little league psychiatrist working in some small village. This guy was the top dog, basically."
And he tells the anecdote that makes the point better than any credential. In an interview before Mack's death, an interviewer quoted Carl Sagan, "because everyone likes to bring in Carl Sagan, because he's the epitome of rationality and whatever he says is the absolute truth." The interviewer said that Sagan says these abductees are just hallucinating. "And Mack simply replied, what the [expletive] does he know about hallucinations?"
Gallimore's gloss is the real argument. "It's easy for people to just pluck this word, hallucinations. I've heard that, kind of understand basically what they are. Well, Mack really understood what hallucinations were and what they looked like. He'd seen countless patients having hallucinations. He knew what was a hallucination and what seemed to be not a hallucination, when people were lying or when people were dreaming. And this clearly didn't look like that to him."
So Mack moved slowly, gradually, cautiously. His subjects were not insane. They did not exhibit the symptoms of any serious psychological abnormality. "They were perfectly rational, just very very traumatized people who were having these inexplicable experiences."
Mack's turn: not craft in the garden, but a change of state
Mack assumed at first that this was the nuts and bolts phenomenon, beings landing in the garden and sneaking into the bedroom and plucking people from their beds. Then he realized something very different was happening. "These experiences, as he called them, seemed to be entering some kind of alternate state of consciousness, or being induced into some alternate state of consciousness."
The descriptions his subjects gave are the tell. Many described entering some other kind of world that was parallel to, or just behind, or somehow within, or just outside our world, and that had more dimensions than the normal waking world. And crucially it was not a smaller world hidden inside ours: "our normal waking world was in some way subsumed by this other world, which was always there but we couldn't see."
Gallimore flags a detail from Mack's first book, Abduction, that he also quotes in his own book: a subject describing small beings that "bound" around. "Now that phrase, if anyone's familiar with Terence McKenna, will know about these beings that bound from the walls. They come bounding in." And these accounts were from the 1980s, long before the DMT literature made that vocabulary available.
The structural parallels run further than the vocabulary. In both cases people enter a highly technological environment, are greeted by or experimented upon by incredibly intelligent nonhuman beings, and are brought safely back at the end of it. Which pushed Mack toward seeing it as a spiritual, or at least metaphysical, phenomenon that could not be explained in its entirety in purely materialist terms.
Bernardo Peixoto and the people from the stars
What Gallimore thinks cemented Mack's turn was his meeting with a shaman named Bernardo Peixoto, of the Uru-eu-wau-wau people of northern Brazil. Gallimore notes that the name literally means people from the stars, and that they hold that long ago beings arrived in spaceships and taught their people how to plant corn and do other very practical things.
Peixoto's view of these beings was decidedly non-physical. He had seen one across a lake at night, staring at him, and he was scared, as you would be. He asked them where they were from. "And they simply replied, we came from nowhere. Which to him meant they must be everywhere." Gallimore's read: "these beings that are both nowhere and everywhere at the same time. To me, that sounds like some kind of intelligence that doesn't exist physically in a normal way."
Mack, he says, began to think the abduction phenomenon might be an interaction with a non-physical intelligence that was both everywhere and nowhere. Mack was interviewed on precisely this by David Jay Brown, who asked him directly about the DMT connection, and Mack acknowledged the parallels between the altered state that takes you to another world under DMT and the apparent altered state that takes you behind what he called the theater screen of reality, into an alternate world occupied by these beings. Gallimore's conclusion: "there's a lot we can learn from the abduction phenomenon without having to assume that we're talking about these physical wet bodied beings, but rather something else."
The phenomenology that harmonizes too well
Phillip, who has taken large amounts of tryptamines and has never had an encounter with an alien being, says the overlap is what he cannot dismiss. Reading Jacques Vallée, reading Gallimore's chapter, the entities encountered in both states are frequently described the same way: bounding small creatures, the mantids, the reptilians.
He offers a first hand data point. Rick Strassman told him that the first time he broke through on DMT, when McKenna gave it to him, he saw grays. "It was like reality ripped open and there were gray aliens on the other side of this rip in reality, just looking at him." And they were saying, "now do you see?" Strassman looking back at these glistening cosmic eyes thinking, I see something, I don't know what I'm supposed to see.
Beneath the surface imagery, Phillip says, the deeper tell is that it immediately snaps into a mode of communication that does not require words. Transmission of thoughts, and you just know how to do it and how to receive it and how to give it back. "It's almost as if a veil is taken off of a faculty that we already have."
He connects this to Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body, where a chapter turns speculative and existential and posits that something is unique about how sentient life evolved on Earth. We have the psi capacity that other intelligent entities have, but in us it is vestigial, or we do not know we have it, or we somehow evolved away from it. Phillip finds it plausible precisely because it can apparently be snapped back on with the right molecular massaging or meditation.
The entity taxonomy, and the archetype explanation taken apart
Gallimore starts with the classes of being reported, since the consistency is the thing that demands explanation. There are the small giggling mischievous elf like beings, which are not elves in the Christmas card sense but have that jovial quality, and are clearly non-human and clearly non-animal. There are insectoid beings, generally highly technologically advanced, intelligent, and seeming more senior. There are reptilians. And there are beings that simply defy description.
The most common explanation offered now, he says, is that these are archetypes. In a chapter of his book called the anatomy of a machine elf, he takes that explanation apart, and this is the most rigorous single argument in his segment.
The archetypes, he says, are quintessentially human structures. "These are embedded inherited patterns that come from our evolutionary past that allow us to respond to and interact with living creatures in the environment in an instinctive way. They provide us with these very stereotyped ways of detecting certain types of humans in the environment and certain types of animals such as snakes, but also all the different types of humans as well. The way you respond to your mother is different to the way you respond to a stranger, or to a baby, or to an elder within the group with a lot of experience and knowledge. What you might call a wise old man."
So far this is entirely tractable neurologically. "Assuming we try and keep our foundation within neuroscience and evolutionary neurobiology, then the archetypes kind of fall out of the evolution of humans."
Then comes the load bearing correction, and it is a correction most people who invoke Jung get wrong. "They don't provide imagery. It's one of the great misconceptions that the archetypes are images. They're not images. Even Jung never said that the archetypes were images and he often denied that they were images, as did many of his contemporary commentators."
What an archetype does is generate a disposition, and the cortex supplies the picture from what it already knows how to build. "If my mother archetype is activated, which is my inherited way of responding to my mother, wanting to be close to my mother, being distressed in the absence of my mother, if these subcortical inherited neural patterns of connectivity are activated, then I might see an image of my mother, because it becomes intimately connected to the kind of world that my brain has learned to construct."
That is fatal to the archetype explanation of entity encounters, because the images in question are of things the brain has never learned to construct. "The archetypes are not an explanation for machine elves. They're not even an explanation for insectoid beings, although we probably do carry insect archetypes that allow us to detect and respond to insects in the environment."
His summary of the failure mode is the best line of the section. "In the book I describe the collective unconscious like a magician's hat, from which you can pull any type of otherwise inexplicable experiential or psychological phenomena. You can say, oh, that's the collective unconscious, those are the archetypes. But when you actually dig down and analyze it and deconstruct exactly what the archetypes are, you find that they are very limited in what they can explain. They can explain some types of phenomena, but they can't explain, in my opinion, these highly super intelligent, highly technologically advanced, nonhuman non-animal beings that have no relationship to humanity at all, either now or any time in our history. So the archetypes really can't help us here."
The two questions the brain cannot answer
Which leaves the open question stated precisely, in two parts.
First, the content. Certain types of imagery you might be able to explain. You might even explain the induction of a dreamlike state and the appearance of other humans and animals, because that is what the brain naturally does. It likes to construct models of humans and animals, as it does in the dream state. "People dream about dogs and cats if they live in the West. If they live in the Amazon, they dream about snakes, they dream about jaguars and fish and piranhas. The beings your brain wants to construct tend to be the kind of beings your brain interacts with during normal waking life. So why, when you perturb it with DMT, does it suddenly start constructing these entirely nonhuman non-animal beings?"
Second, and Gallimore treats this as the sharper of the two, the mode. "Beings that don't communicate with the normal mode of communication that humans have had for a long time, which is speech. Why does it suddenly start constructing beings that only communicate via telepathy? This is an entirely nonhuman apparently way of communication. So why would it default to that rather than defaulting to simply speaking, as you do in dreams? You speak to people in dreams, generally."
The four dimensional animation, and the tight shoe
Emilsson showed him an animation that projects a rotating four dimensional object onto a two dimensional screen. It contains all the points of the 4D object, so all the information is present. "When you look at it it's completely inexplicable. It doesn't make any sense, it just looks like dots moving around. Your brain can't make sense of it. But apparently when you smoke DMT and you look at this object, your brain suddenly recognizes that this is a 4D object and you start seeing it in 4D."
Gallimore has not tried the experiment and says he would like to. What Emilsson reported is the detail that matters. When it snaps into 4D it feels like the Ram Dass line about dying being like taking off a tight shoe. "You're relaxing into the 4D space. It's like, ah, I'm back. It feels perfectly natural, as if in normal waking life we're kind of folded, compressed into this three dimensional form. Our world is compressed into this three dimensional form, and with DMT it kind of relaxes out."
That maps onto one of the most consistently reported and least explained features of the state. "There is a sense certainly of familiarity and of returning home, as if DMT feels like a homecoming. Even though it's bizarre beyond description, there's this sense of ah, I'm back. And they often welcome you back. There's often a party and there's bells ringing and lights flashing. The DMT space is intimately connected to us in a way that we simply don't understand."
It is worth noting how neatly that lines up with Hoffman's dimension parameter, without either of them having spoken to the other in this recording. Hoffman proposes that a molecule might tune D from three to five or ten. Emilsson's report is what that would feel like from the inside.
The question about abductees who are not on anything
Phillip asks the obvious follow up. If dreaming is more explainable and more reducible to the brain, what is going on with abductees who are stone sober? Could it be an endogenous DMT thing? Could it still be an external agency interacting with the brain in a way that makes it feel alien?
Before Gallimore answers, Phillip inserts his own reading of Jung, and it is a genuine correction to the way Jung is usually deployed in these conversations. He thinks Jung cloaked his true feelings to a degree, to seem more academically square, for much of his career. "And then when you read the Red Book and you get into his later writings, it's clear he was extremely esoteric, very gnostic adjacent. Somewhere in his collected works, he says the archetypes are the Platonic idols. They are the Platonic forms." Not reducible to instincts and inherited evolutionary images that stained the psyche from time immemorial, which is what Jung would often say in the daylight. "I think on some level he was transposing that idea into a realm that he could feel okay about in the daylight, but deeper down he was more of an idealist, gnostic, Platonic, alchemical, hermetic thinker."
Which sets up his real question: is part of the reason the phenomenon is so mercurial that it uses archetypes as masks, so the way it presents itself can change? This is what people like Vallée think.
The directed world
Gallimore's answer is the central construct of his whole framework, and it is the most useful thing in his segment.
He speculates openly that the intelligences may be using DMT, interfering with our neural machinery. "I think that's what's happening here, both with DMT and with the abduction phenomenon. They're accessing our neural machinery in some way and inducing our brain to construct these models. Because I think when you enter the DMT state, the world you're experiencing is still one that's being represented in the brain. But I just don't think it's being generated spontaneously."
He calls it a directed world, and he defines it by contrast against the only two categories neuroscience currently has.
Figure 4. Gallimore's three cases. The whole argument turns on the middle column being insufficient: a dreamt world is built from what the brain already knows how to build, which is why dream companions are dogs, cats and people who talk. The DMT world is populated by beings the brain has no template for, communicating in a mode humans do not use, which is what pushes him to propose a third case rather than stretch the second.
In his words: "It's not a sensed world, in that you're receiving information through the sensory organs and using that to inform and modulate and constrain and test this model being constructed by your brain. Nor is it a dreamt world that's completely disconnected from sensory inputs. But more of a directed world, in that the information is being directed into the brain. Some intelligent agent, the nature and origin of which I don't know, is somehow gaining access, and DMT is somehow allowing that intelligence to gain access to your neural machinery and basically to seize control, to commandeer your brain's world building apparatus to construct these visions. That's how they communicate with us."
The mask, stated by the entities themselves
Which resolves the mantis and insectoid question in a way that does not require the beings to be anywhere. "I don't think that when you see an insectoid alien, it actually has an insectoid form. It doesn't really make any sense to me that a discarnate being of some sort, assuming that's what it is, I don't think that these insectoids are on another planet and it's simply a communication technology in that way. I don't think you're a portal to another planet. I think what's happening is that they are taking on a form, or as you say a mask. They are giving themselves a form so that you can recognize them as a being."
His evidence is that they say so. He quotes a trip report in his book where a person smoking DMT was surrounded by mantis like beings and asked whether they were really mantises. "And they said, no no, we're not actually mantises, but we appear like this. This is just a form we use."
Peixoto said the same thing from an entirely different worldview: the beings use form because form is what we understand. "We are a creature of visual form. That's how we make sense of the world. So for us to understand their presence and note their presence that these intelligences are there, they use these forms."
And John Lilly, taking large doses of ketamine and entering what he called the extraterrestrial reality, was told by the intelligences within that space in no uncertain terms that he was constructing the space and constructing their form, so that they could interact with each other.
"So that's what I think links all of these things together. You've got this machine in our heads, this world building machine, and sometimes it can be hacked under certain circumstances. I don't think that always requires DMT at all. But I think DMT is the most efficient tool that we have to instantaneously generate this very fluid and malleable and perturbable neural state that allows these intelligences to gain access and take control and use our brain to construct their world."
The paper that arrived two months too late
Gallimore then reports a result that landed after his book had gone to press, which he treats as a partial vindication of the mechanism.
"There was a paper published by the Imperial College research team just in the last few weeks that actually demonstrated this neurological state in DMT. I forget what the title of the paper was, but it basically showed that in the presence of DMT the brain enters this state where it becomes much more sensitive to external perturbations. So you stimulate the brain in some way, whether it's through visual sensory information or other means or electrically or whatever, and it reacts, it responds much more strongly. The neural activity can be manipulated much more easily in the DMT state."
Which is precisely the state he had proposed in the book. "It's nice to see that what to many would seem like wild speculations on my part seem to be borne out to some extent at least by the neuroscience, which is showing this kind of highly sensitive malleable state of the brain that these beings can access, whether using DMT or through other means. Maybe even during the dream state, when the brain isn't being polluted so to speak by sensory inputs, or in the deep ketamine state in a sensory isolation chamber, or many other states potentially."
Phillip's aside at this point: "it's fascinating that this is about the time in the podcast that all the evangelical Christians start writing demons in the comments."
The entropic brain, and exactly where DMT breaks it
Phillip asks the question he says he has struggled with as a layperson. From the articles he has read, the brain under tryptamines goes into a more entropic state where a lot of the usual network clusters stop firing the way they normally do. That has led many people to reason that if the brain were hallucinating you would see it going crazy with activity, and that is not what we see. So: is DMT the same as other tryptamines in that respect, or is something different happening?
Gallimore says similar in some ways, very different in others, and then gives the clearest available explanation of the standard picture before showing where it fails.
The standard picture first. When a tryptamine psychedelic enters the brain it stimulates certain populations of neurons by binding to particular receptors. It makes the neurons more sensitive, more excitable, and allows information to flow between certain areas much more easily. Overall the brain enters a more fluid and dynamic state. "When you observe that in an MRI machine, you will see these highly structured and highly ordered patterns of neural activity start to break down, and the whole neural activity becomes more fluid and dynamic and effectively more apparently random. And this is where the whole entropic brain hypothesis, Robin Carhart-Harris's entropic brain hypothesis, came from."
And it works. It explains a great deal about psychedelics. "This loosening up of the world. The world itself that you experience often becomes more fluid and dynamic, less stable, less predictable. Objects seem to lose their identity or morph. The brain is basically losing control over its world model."
Gallimore then explains why the brain sits where it sits, and this is the part worth keeping. Carhart-Harris describes the psychedelic effect as a nudge toward criticality. The brain is always striking a balance between order and disorder, at what is called the edge of chaos, which is where complexity arises. Too ordered and information simply cannot be processed: the world becomes perfectly stable and crystallized, which is useless if you need a model that keeps up with the dynamic processes unfolding in the environment. Too unstable and the world becomes completely fluid and stops functioning as a model of the environment at all. The brain manages that balance by tuning the strength of connections between neurons and the excitability of individual neurons. "What psychedelics do is nudge the brain toward the chaotic realm, but not into the chaotic realm."
Then the anomaly, and it is stated as cleanly as anything in this video. "But with DMT, something stranger seems to happen. It seems to transcend that. You go from order to disorder, but then you collapse into an entirely new order, which is this alternate world model. The DMT world is not disordered. It's not entropic. It is highly ordered. It is highly coherent. It has massive structural, dynamic and narrative complexity that is bewildering and baffling and confounding and awe inspiring all at the same time."
His metaphor for the difference is the best single image in the segment. "Other psychedelics at normal doses tend to nudge the dial out of tune. But with DMT, it's like finding a new channel on the TV set, but then discovering that the antenna has been disconnected. You're like, where did this channel come from? Why does the brain know how to construct these entirely nonhuman alien realities filled with these intelligent beings that have no relationship to the normal waking world that you've left behind?"
Figure 5. Gallimore's central anomaly, drawn from his own description. Carhart-Harris's entropic brain hypothesis accounts for the blue trajectory: a nudge toward criticality that loosens the world model without destroying it. DMT does something the hypothesis does not predict. Coherence falls further and then climbs into a second plateau that is highly ordered, highly structured, and populated by content the brain has no template for. That second plateau is the thing Gallimore says requires an explanation nobody currently has.
Traveling waves, and information arriving with the eyes shut
The neuroimaging evidence Gallimore finds most tantalizing is about the direction electrical activity flows through the cortex.
He sets up the normal case. When sensory information enters through the eyes it enters the brain at the back, and you get forward flowing waves which in predictive processing terms represent error signals climbing the cortex from the lowest levels at the back toward the higher levels. You can also measure waves flowing in the opposite direction. With your eyes open the signal is dominated by waves flowing from back to front, which is just the flow of sensory information into the brain.
Then the ayahuasca result from the 1990s. Jordi Riba, one of the most prominent ayahuasca researchers, who has since died, put EEG headsets on subjects and gave them ayahuasca. "Even when their eyes were closed, he noticed there was a stronger influence of the electrodes at the back of the brain over those at the front. Again suggesting that information was flowing, even though they had their eyes closed, from the lower sensory cortices, in the normal way, as if they were viewing some other world."
And the modern confirmation. "The Imperial College team quite a few years later did much more sophisticated EEG experiments and actually showed that the closed eye DMT state was effectively indistinguishable from the normal open eyes waking state."
The standard interpretation, in Riba's paper and others, is that this is noise, spontaneous activity emerging from the lower sensory cortices. Gallimore's rebuttal is where the argument bites. "Wait a minute. This clearly isn't spontaneous activity of the lower sensory cortices. We can use that to explain form constants, going back to Heinrich Klüver, cobwebs or geometric patterns, that kind of thing can be explained by spontaneous activity of the lower sensory cortices. But not complex alien realities filled with strange beings. So that doesn't make any sense. Cortical noise just seemed like a silly explanation, but of course that's the best they had. They couldn't say, or maybe this is sensory information from some intelligent alien intelligence."
He then closes off the remaining conventional explanations one at a time. It is not dreams. It is not hallucinations. And it is not memories, which he takes seriously as a candidate because there is a real mechanism for it: when the cortex becomes more fluid and dynamic it starts to lose control over information flowing from the temporal lobes, and you get a flood of memories, the reliving of past experiences going back to childhood that people have described for decades under high doses of LSD. "That can be explained. It's simply the brain losing control of the flow of information from these hippocampal temporal lobe memory systems. But that doesn't explain the DMT state either. So again, the question is, where is this information coming from to construct these entirely alien worlds?"
The third eye, said without irony for once
Phillip closes the segment with a personal account he prefaces by saying it is one of the few times he will say third eye in a non tongue in cheek way, and Gallimore points out, dryly, that it is the name of his podcast. Phillip admits he has a love and a major hate with it.
He had never had a majorly impactful literal third eye experience until he went to Peru and did ayahuasca. Across five sessions, most nights were extremely challenging, spent in what he describes as a lower astral hell realm of deep torment. On the third night he broke through to something much more luminous and intelligent, a presence that felt like it was giving him the teaching, a guru presence.
And during that period, for the only time in his life, "I kept feeling like there was something on my head, like right in the center of my head. And I kept brushing it away, like, what is on my head? And then I started laughing to myself. I'm like, is this the third eye?" Which is why Riba's ayahuasca neuroimaging result, showing what he calls sight like behaviors in the brain, struck him as more than a curiosity.
He asks whether the same would hold for any tryptamine at a significant dose. Gallimore is careful. For other tryptamines he does not think we know. The traveling wave work has been done with DMT, and he would like to see it done with others. Then he says something revealing about how he would want the result to come out. "I'd hope that you don't see it. That would be really cool." Because that would be incontrovertible evidence that DMT was doing something very different, if you did not see this flow of activity from the lower sensory cortices under psilocybin at a normal dose or under LSD.
But he expects you might see it, because he does expect spontaneous activity in the lower sensory cortices. Klüver developed the form constants in the early twentieth century using mescaline, and we know that when you stimulate the cortex or release the lower sensory cortices you get spontaneous patterns emerging. Whether the effect is much stronger with DMT he says he does not know. "But clearly this isn't just form constants."
The video's last words are Gallimore describing what the state is actually like, and they are the tidiest statement of his whole position. "It clearly is like seeing with your eyes shut. You're observing. It's often described with DMT that it's not like a drug, it's more like an observation. It feels more like a technology. Your reality channel has been switched to another channel, and you're observing this world that's been going on before you arrived and will continue to do so long after you've left, and may well have been going on for trillions of years before our universe popped into existence."
Where the four converge, and where they do not
The edit is doing real work here, because the four never speak to each other. Read across the four segments and the same structures keep reappearing in different vocabularies.
The image is not the thing. All four say it, and none of them are saying it to dismiss the experience. Kripal: "I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs." Kastrup: "the mind manifests itself symbolically," and most figures in our reveries are our own mind talking to itself. Hoffman: "it's very easy for us to mistake the limits of our headset for an insight into reality." Gallimore: they are wearing a mask, and in at least one trip report they said so out loud. Four disciplines, one conclusion, arrived at four different ways.
Deception is a mechanism, not a motive. Kripal argues that deception is a sign of intelligence rather than of ill intent, and that the phenomenon is speaking to us in the only way it can. Kastrup, describing a specific agency he encountered repeatedly, says receiving the gift requires "a benign form of deception, because what prevents you from seeing it is yourself." Neither cites the other. They arrive at benign deception from religious history and from psychonautic experience respectively.
We are not near the top. Hoffman's ant and ladybug argument is the explicit version. Kripal's fisherman and fish is the same argument with a different animal. Kastrup's mental ecosystems outside our dissociative boundary that we never evolved to perceive is the same argument in the idealist register. Gallimore's beings that have no relationship to humanity at any point in our history is the empirical version.
And the real disagreement is about evidence. Kastrup will not let psychonaut testimony carry weight until someone can steer a trip, which is a standard nobody currently meets. Gallimore builds substantially on that same testimony. Hoffman wants an information transfer experiment that could not possibly have happened another way, and would accept a credible mathematician reporting a tesseract as a real datum. Kripal's discipline could never satisfy Hoffman's standard and he does not try, offering instead a comparative method that treats symbol and narrative as the appropriate instruments. Nobody in this video resolves that, and the honest reading is that it is unresolved.
Key takeaways
The split between the physical UFO and the visionary UFO is in us, not in the phenomenon. Kripal's "human being as a splitter of reality" is the load bearing idea of the first hour, and it is what lets him take both the radar returns and the apparitions seriously without picking a side.
Deception is what intelligence does across a gap in kind. Not evidence of malice. Kripal gets there from biology and comparative religion, Kastrup from his own trips.
"I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs." The single most portable methodological rule in the video. It lets a hundred contradictory testimonies all be real events without any of them being authoritative.
A larger trace makes ordinary motion look impossible. Hoffman's worked example turns anomalous flight performance from an exotic engineering problem into a sampling rate artifact, and simultaneously makes the smaller agent, in his words, "a sitting duck."
Hoffman's framework carries a warning attached. If you can program outside the headset, "the first country to do that is the winner," and there is nothing that could be done to stop it. He offers the trace logic's own ethics as the counterweight: the person you would use it on is you.
The measure of how little you know is how much you feel like the smartest thing in the room. "To the extent that I feel that I am really smarter than everything I see, that is the key evidence that I know next to nothing."
Archetypes cannot explain machine elves, and Jung never said they could. Gallimore's correction, that archetypes are inherited dispositions rather than images, quietly removes the most commonly offered explanation for entity encounters.
The DMT state is not entropic, and that is the whole anomaly. Other psychedelics nudge the brain toward criticality. DMT passes through disorder into a second highly ordered world model, which the entropic brain hypothesis does not predict.
The directed world is the useful new category. Not sensed, not dreamt, but information routed into the brain's world building apparatus by something else. It is the frame that unifies the abduction reports, the DMT reports, and Lilly's ketamine reports without requiring anyone to be anywhere.
Kastrup's split verdict is the most concrete news in the video. High strangeness holds. The nuts and bolts UAP discourse of the past year gets one word, misinformation, and he closed accounts over it.
Everyone here names a condition that would change their mind. Bodies and craft for Kripal, steerable trips for Kastrup, a failed derivation of general relativity for Hoffman, cortical noise that actually accounts for the content for Gallimore. That is more than the genre usually offers.
Where it stands
Now the honest ledger, kept out of the reconstruction on purpose.
The four positions here are not equally established, and they do not fail in the same way. Gallimore's neuroscience is the most conventional material in the video: the entropic brain hypothesis, criticality, the traveling wave EEG work, and the Imperial College perturbation result are all real, published, mainstream psychedelic neuroscience. What is not mainstream is his inference from the anomaly. That the DMT world model is highly ordered rather than entropic is a fair reading of the phenomenology and is genuinely underexplained. That an external intelligent agent is directing information into the cortex is one hypothesis among several, and the competing ones, including hyperactivity of higher order predictive machinery released from sensory constraint, have not been ruled out. He says as much himself when he calls the origin of the agent something he does not know.
Hoffman's program is unusual in that it is explicitly falsifiable and he says so: if general relativity cannot be derived from the trace logic, "nice try, but this wasn't it." As of this conversation that derivation is not complete, and the theory of conscious agents remains a minority research program rather than an accepted result. The evolutionary argument underneath it, that natural selection favors fitness over veridical perception, is a serious published result. The leap from there to a layer of software outside spacetime that can be engineered is the speculative part, and Hoffman labels it as such more consistently than most of his popularizers do.
Kastrup is doing analytic philosophy, and analytic idealism stands or falls on argument rather than experiment. His most useful contribution here may be the caution rather than the metaphysics: nobody has demonstrated the ability to steer a psychedelic experience, so the multi person replication studies that would turn trip reports into evidence do not yet exist. That caution applies to a good deal of what the other three build on, including some of the material in this very video.
Kripal is doing comparative religion and is admirably clear that this is what he is doing. His claim is about the continuity of motifs across cultures and millennia, which is a historical claim and a defensible one. It is not a claim that anything ontological has been established, and he repeatedly declines to make that claim, including about the Neoplatonic daimon he finds most useful.
Two factual notes. Mack was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and head of the department of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, which is close to but not identical with Gallimore's "head of the Harvard school of psychiatry." And the 2023 congressional testimony that Hoffman cites as the thing that gave him permission to think about this was testimony under oath, which is a real evidentiary category, but the specific claims about recovered technology and nonhuman biologics were made secondhand by a witness reporting what others told him, and remain unverified. Hoffman treats it as grounds for taking the possibility seriously rather than as proof, which is the right weight to put on it.
None of that touches the value of the conversation. Four people with incompatible methods converging on the same structural claims, and disagreeing openly about evidence, is a more interesting artifact than four people agreeing would have been.
Chapters
The video ships without creator chapters, so these are estimated from position in the transcript. They land close, and every timestamp is click to seek.
0:00 Cold open: four voices on the same problem
1:55 Michael Phillip introduces the four, and declines to give his own opinion
3:17 Kripal: the flying saucer and the soul are related in the literature
4:40 Why the topic grips people: the dark appeal and its pronoic mirror
5:57 Lue Elizondo and the word imminent
6:35 Why the UFO dominates: it is empirical, and we equate physical with real
7:19 The human being as a splitter of reality
8:54 The psyop question, and what Kripal will not speak to
9:29 Two models: 1947, or as far back as we can see
12:16 The paranormal has always been weaponized
13:14 Was there a moment? Esalen, the counterculture, and levitation
14:20 Kelleher and Lacatski: entirely physical and entirely paranormal
15:38 Ezekiel 1 and 2, and 2500 years of the same motifs
16:40 Fatima 1917, and watching an event get disciplined into a Marian apparition
18:26 Jung's emerging mythology, and the correction that he did not know what it was
19:33 The historian's rule: cite your sources
20:53 Why now: big institutions cannot keep a secret
22:15 The near death experience as a model case for technology creating a phenomenon
23:33 Nobody goes to hell, and why that was a problem
24:00 Do you baptize an alien? Do not reduce the phenomena to your worldview
24:55 Members and Patreon break, and the Contact in the Desert documentary
26:08 The symbolic software: something is choosing which image you see
27:17 Nebraska to seminary, and discovering the unconscious
28:02 Deception is a sign of intelligence, not of ill intent
29:42 How is the fisherman going to talk to the fish?
30:35 I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs
31:52 Hermes, Mercurius, and the many faced guide
34:34 The Harvard Platonism conference: the daimon is not the demon
36:09 Jung trying to lift off the game board
37:12 Kastrup: are DMT entities inside the dissociative boundary or outside it?
38:54 The steering problem, and why he is cautious about psychonaut claims
41:59 Psychedelic gnosis brought back as literal is very suspicious
42:16 We are collectives: the child, the teenager, the repressed Bernardos
43:01 Except when the alienness is total, in logic and in emotion
45:08 Imperial College extended state DMT, Alexander Beiner, and the rainforest
47:28 The gift: an agency that kept trying to hand him a way of seeing
48:50 A benign form of deception, because what prevents you is yourself
49:35 Beyond orgasmic, and impossible to bring back
51:32 The self recursive singularity, and why inside and outside stop meaning anything
53:12 It is not curriculum, it is grace
54:57 Meaning in Absurdity, and the article on UAPs
55:05 Disappointed to the point of disgust
55:23 The hallmarks of truth, and why he will not name them
56:23 The word he gives the nuts and bolts discourse: misinformation
59:25 An ocean of dissociations
1:00:24 Where Kastrup stops Phillip: no hierarchy of dissociations
1:00:52 Parallel universes, and an explicit rejection of Many Worlds
1:02:27 A glimpse of the next room in the palace of mind
1:03:29 The logic test: intuitionism and the law of the excluded middle
1:04:51 Absurdity as the signature of another realm
1:04:59 Hoffman: hypostasis, gradations of agency, and the limits of the headset
1:06:29 The wizard inside Grand Theft Auto versus the geek who wrote it
1:07:26 Time dilation by trace size, worked out longhand
1:08:51 What kind of being would that be? Be not afraid
1:10:21 Space too: why an object looks like it moved at Mach 40
1:12:38 The congressional hearing, and giving himself permission
1:14:06 Switch frameworks: spacetime is a VR headset
1:14:33 The Pandora's box in the trace logic
1:15:21 The first country outside the headset wins
1:15:48 Love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself
1:17:26 Hoping for a moral boost alongside the technological one
1:19:33 Consciousness all the way down, and spacetime as psychological construct
1:20:50 Hyperdimensional experiences, and string theory on the ropes
1:22:28 Tuning the dimension parameter D from three to ten
1:23:32 Getting Minkowski space out of the theory of conscious agents
1:24:04 The fractal that keeps showing up: filaments, brains, mycelium
1:25:29 Our headset is one of the cheapest ones
1:25:47 The ant argument, and turnabout is fair play
1:27:31 The ladybug: if I knew what I was interacting with I might worship it
1:28:39 The tesseract nobody can imagine
1:29:39 The data he wants: a credible mathematician who saw one
1:30:19 The animation with hidden information, and turning up the volume on your own psyche
1:31:54 Completely open, completely hard nosed
1:33:31 Theorem, proof, or game over
1:34:46 Gallimore: John Mack, and who actually knew what a hallucination was
1:36:53 Mack's reply to the Carl Sagan quote
1:38:11 Mack's turn: not craft in the garden but a change of state
1:39:28 Beings that bound, described in the 1980s
1:40:48 Bernardo Peixoto and the Uru-eu-wau-wau, the people from the stars
1:42:18 We came from nowhere, which meant they must be everywhere
1:42:55 David Jay Brown, and the theater screen of reality
1:43:43 Strassman's grays, and now do you see
1:45:00 Telepathy as a veil lifted off a faculty we already have
1:45:37 Robert Monroe and the vestigial psi hypothesis
1:46:37 The entity taxonomy: elf like, insectoid, reptilian, indescribable
1:47:25 The anatomy of a machine elf: taking the archetype explanation apart
1:48:52 Archetypes are not images, and Jung said so
1:50:42 The collective unconscious as a magician's hat
1:51:34 The two questions: why these beings, and why telepathy
1:53:17 Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the hyperbolic geometry of DMT space
1:53:57 The 4D animation, the tight shoe, and DMT as homecoming
1:55:57 What about abductees who are not on anything?
1:56:29 Phillip on the Red Book, and archetypes as Platonic forms
1:58:09 They may be using DMT to access our neural machinery
1:59:06 The directed world: not sensed, not dreamt
2:00:11 The mask: we're not actually mantises
2:01:41 John Lilly, ketamine, and the extraterrestrial reality
2:02:43 The Imperial College paper that arrived two months too late
2:04:25 The evangelical comment section, on schedule
2:04:48 The entropic brain question
2:06:38 Criticality and the edge of chaos, explained properly
2:08:53 Where DMT breaks the hypothesis: order, disorder, then a new order
2:09:30 A new channel on the TV, with the antenna disconnected
2:10:05 Traveling waves, and information flowing with the eyes shut
2:11:10 Jordi Riba's ayahuasca EEG work in the 1990s
2:11:55 Closed eye DMT, indistinguishable from open eye waking
2:12:27 Why cortical noise cannot account for complex alien realities
2:13:32 Not dreams, not hallucinations, not memories
2:14:32 Phillip's ayahuasca nights in Peru, and something on his head
2:16:57 Klüver's form constants, and what he hopes the next experiment shows
2:18:22 More like an observation than a drug: your reality channel has been switched
Notable quotes
"A human being is essentially a splitter of reality. We perceive the external world as a set of objects and we perceive ourselves as some kind of interior subject. And that is fundamentally wrong. That is not what reality is."
Jeffrey Kripal, 7:19
"The UFO is fundamentally objective, but it's also fundamentally subjective. So it violates this cognitive and sensory system that we are."
Jeffrey Kripal, 7:55
"What I know from my own institutional experience is there's no they there."
Jeffrey Kripal, 9:00
"The paranormal has always been weaponized. This is not unique to the US. It's always been used to hunt and kill animals, or to go to war, or to seduce someone else."
Jeffrey Kripal, 12:16
"Not only is it real, it's entirely physical and it's entirely paranormal. And if you take either of those things off the table, you are not talking about the phenomenon."
Jeffrey Kripal, relaying Colm Kelleher and James Lacatski, 14:20
"If they hauled the bodies out and the craft, I think I'll change my tune. But the point is that they have not."
Jeffrey Kripal, 19:20
"Do not reduce the phenomena to your own worldview. This phenomena is here to challenge your worldview, not to have you return to it."
Jeffrey Kripal, 24:00
"Deception is a sign of intelligence. It's not a sign of ill intent."
Jeffrey Kripal, 28:02
"How is the fisherman going to talk to the fish?"
Jeffrey Kripal, 29:42
"I believe the experience but I don't believe the beliefs. I'm not dismissive. I'm not the skeptic. But I'm also not the believer."
Jeffrey Kripal, 30:35
"The Christian demon is frankly silly and not helpful at all. And it's exactly what gets invoked over and over again."
Jeffrey Kripal, 34:50
"He was trying to lift off the game board, as it were, and figure out what the whole game is."
Jeffrey Kripal on Jung, 36:09
"I never could steer it. It chose what I would experience, never the other way around."
Bernardo Kastrup, 39:20
"We are not a unity. We are collectives, and there's still a child in us. There's still a teenager in us. There are still those Bernardos who have been repressed and not heard."
Bernardo Kastrup, 42:16
"You have to undergo a benign form of deception, because what prevents you from seeing it is yourself."
Bernardo Kastrup, 48:50
"It's a self recursive singularity. It's like a key to existence. The key to all complexity. It's the folded form of all of existence."
Bernardo Kastrup, 51:32
"It's grace. Every now and then you're granted grace for the sake of it. It doesn't have the higher purpose of you writing about it or how it's going to change your life. No, it's just grace."
Bernardo Kastrup, 53:12
"I find it preposterous to do psychedelics for fun. They're not fun. They're very hard."
Bernardo Kastrup, 53:00
"If I have to give you a word I would give you the word misinformation. So right now, as far as the nuts and bolts part of the thing is concerned, I don't know what to think. But the high strangeness part, that is real."
Bernardo Kastrup, 56:23
"I'm not talking about mushrooming parallel physical universes."
Bernardo Kastrup, 1:01:20
"The telltale sign of these other realms would be that also logic does not apply. In other words, absurd."
Bernardo Kastrup, 1:04:30
"If you are a wizard inside Grand Theft Auto you can do all sorts of amazing things and people are impressed. But if you're the geek that wrote the software, you can do things that the wizard doesn't understand."
Donald Hoffman, 1:06:29
"That means effectively that I'm a sitting duck. You can do whatever you want while I'm just sitting there inert, unable to do anything."
Donald Hoffman, 1:08:00
"Switch frameworks. Spacetime is just a VR headset, and consciousness is the creator of this headset."
Donald Hoffman, 1:14:06
"The first country to do that is the winner in terms of technology. There's nothing that you could do to stop it."
Donald Hoffman, 1:15:21
"The person that you're going to use this technology on is you. That person is you."
Donald Hoffman, 1:16:48
"It's very easy for us to mistake the limits of our headset for an insight into reality."
Donald Hoffman, 1:27:31
"When I'm seeing a ladybug, that's the limit of my headset. What am I interacting with? If I actually knew what I was interacting with, I might fall down and worship it. But all I can see is a ladybug."
Donald Hoffman, 1:27:50
"To the extent that I feel that I am really smarter than everything I see, that is the key evidence that I know next to nothing."
Donald Hoffman, 1:28:20
"It's got to be theorem proof, theorem proof. If we can't get general relativity from the trace logic, I will have to say, nice try, but this wasn't it."
Donald Hoffman, 1:33:31
"What the [expletive] does he know about hallucinations?"
John Mack on Carl Sagan, relayed by Andrew Gallimore, 1:36:53
"They simply replied, we came from nowhere. Which to him meant they must be everywhere."
Andrew Gallimore on Bernardo Peixoto, 1:42:18
"It's one of the great misconceptions that the archetypes are images. They're not images. Even Jung never said that the archetypes were images and he often denied that they were."
Andrew Gallimore, 1:48:52
"In the book I describe the collective unconscious like a magician's hat, from which you can pull any type of otherwise inexplicable phenomena."
Andrew Gallimore, 1:50:42
"No no, we're not actually mantises, but we appear like this. This is just a form we use."
A trip report quoted by Andrew Gallimore, 2:00:40
"The DMT world is not disordered. It's not entropic. It is highly ordered. It is highly coherent."
Andrew Gallimore, 2:08:53
"It's like finding a new channel on the TV set, but then discovering that the antenna has been disconnected. You're like, where did this channel come from?"
Andrew Gallimore, 2:09:30
"Your reality channel has been switched to another channel, and you're observing this world that's been going on before you arrived and will continue to do so long after you've left."
Andrew Gallimore, 2:18:30
========================================
Certainly the intelligence community is
using the UFO and using the phenomena to
hide whatever it's hiding. That's part
of the literature that this flying
saucer and the soul are related. We see
that over and over again in the history
of religions. And for some reason, our
cultural mythos wants them to be
threats. It's actually much more
complicated than that. I have been very
disappointed with what's going on in the
UAP world. And if I have to give you a
word, I would give you the [music] word
misinformation. So right now as far as
the nuts and bolts part of the thing is
concerned I don't know what to think but
the the high stranges part that is real
right
>> and he assumed at first as you were
saying that [music] it was this nuts and
bolts phenomenon that beings that were
landing on the in the garden or whatever
and sneaking into the bedroom and
plucking them from their beds. Um
actually it started to looks like
something very very different. these
experiences, as he called them, seemed
to be entering some kind of alternate
state of consciousness.
>> Well, I I hadn't paid much attention to
the UAP thing until there there was the
congressional hearing
>> in which people under oath said, I have
been part of this. [music] I've seen the
technology. It's very very clear from
the work that I've been doing
independently that this kind of
technology is easily possible from from
this framework. Switch frameworks.
Spacetime is just a VR headset. You
know, consciousness [music]
is the creator of this headset. So, and
we can start to describe a layer of
software outside the headset.
What is going on, my friends? And I mean
that not just as a mundane turn of
phrase but in the most uh
philosophically gargantuan sense
possible with respect particularly to
the UFO topic the phenomenon and I would
say its relationship to consciousness.
And at this point I have had many a mind
meld on these topics. I've explored many
nooks and crannies sometimes uh crannies
where I'm just like how did I get here?
Uh, and that's part of the point. I
don't often stop and check in and give
nuance, give my own opinion, and worry
not. I'm not going to sit here and talk
at you and do that today. But what I do
want to do is share some conversations
that I really do deeply value on these
topics. Conversations with luminaries
that are at the absolute bleeding edge
of their respective fields. Cognitive
scientist and idealist philosopher Dr.
Donald Hoffman, scholar of high
strangeness and spirituality Dr. Jeff
Kriel, idealist philosopher and author
Bernardo Castro, and neuroscientist and
altered state afficionado Dr. Andrew
Gallamore. Links to the full
transmissions with each of these
geniuses are down in the comments. Much
love to all of you and let us commence.
I mean, how I I have I absolutely have
to bring up the UFO UAP phenomenon to
you because you just have such
interesting unique things to say about
it. And one of the interesting unique
things that you said, I think this was
in another podcast, I don't recall for
sure, is you were actually drawing
comparisons between the subtle body or
out-of body experiences or soulflight
experiences and the UFO phenomenon.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, please. Well, it's
that's just that's part of the
literature that this flying saucer and
the soul are related. I mean, we see
of religions. And that's something that
gets ellighted or or or not talked about
today because we for some reason our
cultural mythos wants them to be threats
and wants it to be about national
security. But it's actually much more
complicated than that. And it definitely
involves the world of the dead and and
the soul. If you get if you scratch the
surface and kind of get into it in a
broader cultural or historical way,
>> let let's scratch the surface. Let let's
let's perhaps go even deeper than than
scratching. I don't know for sure what
it is that captures people's curiosity
so much about that phenomenon. But but I
think that it's well I I think it's a
few different things. I think there's
the sort of
dark appeal that look, we really have
evidence of this malevolent, threatening
other. It's not just made up there. It
It's really out there. But then it's
also a path to just the opposite, like a
pro-noic kind of, oh, they're here to
save us. It's it's angels. It's it's
higher life forms. It's uh I don't know,
pleadians or whatever.
But whatever it is,
it's it's something like I think we're
past the point where you can I think we
can just dispose with the idea that
these things can be easily dismissed as
uh you know, things that crazy people
think they saw or whatever. You know,
we're we're far beyond that at this
point. But that but still there are so
many questions you know and I wonder how
you parse all of that because I'm very
interested and open to what you just
said yet you also have the Lou Alzandos
of the world who just p published a new
book who is going down this road of it
is a national security threat there are
hard things out there flying around
crashing that we've recovered like how
do you how do you balance all of that
personally? So I don't [laughter]
um first of all Lou's book is complex.
If you read the first page he talks
about the title imminent
>> and how you know that can be followed by
the word threat but it also can be
followed by some kind of escaton or some
kind of theological meaning or kind of
>> transformation of our worldview. So I
don't I don't read Lou as just saying
one thing. Um
I think I think he himself questions
that that physicalist or or national
security paradigm.
I think um the UFO is so popular and so
in the news because it's so empirical. I
mean you can get the thing on radar, you
can study landing tracks, you can you
know um it it has a very physical um
presence. And I think because we live in
an age of science and technology, we
equate physical with real.
>> Okay. But it also has this these
paranormal aspects and and people who
dig very far into the research realize
this very quickly. Um but that doesn't
make it into the media, Michael, because
it just messes up the threat, the
security and science paradigm. It just
throws it into disarray immediately. But
I I want it to be thrown into disarray.
I think it should be thrown into
disarray. I think it's really confusing
and it's [cough]
the way I put it is
a human being is essentially a splitter
of reality. We perceive the external
world as a set of objects and we
perceive ourselves as some kind of
interior subject. So we have a
subjective and an objective um dimension
by our very nature. And that is
fundamentally wrong. That is not what
reality is. And the UFO is fundamentally
objective, but it's also fundamentally
subjective. So it violates this
cognitive and sensory system that we are
in ways I find very familiar
>> um but also very helpful and useful. Um
so I h I happen to love the topic. Um,
and the way I balance those two
paradigms is I say, well, that's us.
That's the human being who's splitting
this into uh an empirical, physical,
objective reality and a subjective uh
interior um um unreal reality. That's
that's the human being. That's not
what's actually going on. So, that's
that's what I do with it. And somebody
like Lou Alzando, um I love Lu Alzando.
I love these are good people. these
these retired military professionals and
these science they're good people
they're they're using their skill set
to understand what they can understand
and I'm trying to use my skill set to
understand what I can understand and
it's not theirs you know and it's not
that I think they're wrong and it's it's
that I think that they're what they're
saying is inadequate that's part of the
puzzle
>> how much space do you reserve for the
scop hypothes Is this
>> Well,
certainly the intelligence community
[laughter]
is using the UFO
and using the phenomena to hide whatever
it's hiding. I can't speak to that
because I don't have any classified
knowledge, Michael. Um, and and if
that's what you mean by scops, I just
don't know. And so I again, I try to
stay in my lane and I try to say what I
can say historically and comparatively.
As you probably know, there are two
models of the UFO. One is that it all
begins post World War II, you know, late
1940s. But the other model is it's been
around as far as we can see back. I'm
definitely of the latter camp.
>> And so when people tell me it's all
about the CIA or the intelligence, I'm
like, well, what do you do with all
these where there was no CIA or there
was no I mean, what do what do you do
with that? And and of course, they don't
do anything with it. they they don't
they deny it or they whatever they do. I
don't know what they do. So, I just
think it's obvious that it goes back in
human history and is a global phenomena.
And it's not that I
I again it's not that I think that the
religious interpretations are correct.
Um but there's certainly different ways
of engaging with the phenomena.
>> For sure. For sure. Yeah. And and by
scop I I mean some kind of concerted
effort to misdirect
or obfuscate or like like to to what you
were saying like use the phenomenon as a
cover for something that they're
actually doing or that they actually
know or that in a way where they're
pretending because there there's still
this really weird push and pull like
with Lou Alzando for instance there was
I just saw on YouTube I didn't watch it
But apparently the Pentagon has made has
made a counter statement saying like
some of these claims that he's making
are not true. So it's like what like
it's like on one hand he seems to have
because I I've seen him say I have
permission to say this, I don't have
permission to say that. Yet there's also
the Pentagon who he apparently had
permission from saying no, it's not
true. So is that you know it's like who
who's being
who who's not being forthright here? Who
who's the one that's throwing mud on the
lens? You know
>> what I know from my own institutional
experience is there's no they there. You
know, there there are multiple people
involved in I mean as in thousands if
not 10 thousand.
>> Yeah.
>> And they're going to and different
agencies and different individuals are
going to have different motivations and
different claims.
>> And so again, I don't try to
I don't try to parse those out. Michael,
because I do not have access to that
material. What I have access to is the
historical religious material. So, I can
speak to that. Um, and it it far
transcends and predates any of this
stuff.
>> I'm like, and you know, one of the
things I often say is that the
paranormal has always been weaponized.
This is not unique to the US.
Uh, if you look at the history of of
what we might call magic or or
clairvoyance, it's always been used to
hunt and kill animals or to go to war or
to, you know, seduce someone else. It's
it's always been used. It's always been
weaponized.
>> I think this is behind the fear of sigh,
frankly. You know if this is a Steven
Browy argument if sigh can be used for
positive ends and it can be it can also
be used for negative ends.
>> And so there's this natural human fear
of it that I think is well grounded
um but also kind of naive because people
have these abilities. Sorry, they just
do. You can you can moralize it all you
want, but it's still the case, you know.
So, that's that's kind of my response to
it. Was there a moment or series of
moments where you felt like
the preponderance of evidence really
suggests that these things are real?
Because I love that you're just blunt
about it. Like, sorry, this is real.
I've seen you say, "Sorry, levitation's
real." Like, you know, these other
things. That's what I love about it,
too. I I mean, it's like, sorry, it's
the case. And I even like I mean, Lou
says this a bit, but somebody like Colum
Keller or James Latsky says it more. Not
only is it real, it's entirely physical
and it's entirely paranormal. And if you
take either of those things off the
table, you are not talking about the
phenomenon, you're talking about
whatever you want to talk about, but you
are not dealing with the reality of the
situation.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So when I hear that,
I'm like, you go you go get them, you
know.
>> Yeah,
>> that's right.
>> But but in your own case, was there was
there something that made you that
flipped you, so to speak?
>> Oh, that's
Well, I've talked to tons of people um
who who work on this, and
I don't know. I don't I I can't locate
one place, Michael.
>> Yeah. I first dealt with the UFO
phenomena with the Eslin book by the way
because believe it or not the
counterculture is filled with this stuff
and there are novels and conferences and
I mean it's just everywhere. You cannot
talk about the 1970s and 80s without
talking about this if you're talking
about religious undercurrents.
Um so I first dealt with it then and it
was obvious to me that people were
having these experiences. I guess I
didn't think about the empirical reality
of it, you know, to the same extent I do
now.
What are some of your favorite stories
from, you know, you said you're in the
you're in that latter camp of really
believing that this phenomenon we're
seeing today, or at least a subset of
this phenomenon we're seeing today, goes
back way into history. What are some of
your favorite well attested historical
instances of of high weirdness?
Well, the ones that are
most developed in the literature is the
the Fatima apparitions of 1917
>> in Portugal
>> and Ezekiel, you know, which is what
fifth sixth century BCE. I mean I mean
and these show up again and again and if
you read [clears throat]
if you read Ezekiel chapter 1 and two I
mean it's it's so clear this is a UFO
event you know in ancient ancient uh
Israel and I mean he's even abducted I
mean it it's all there you know and it's
really weird and but you see the same
kinds of motifs the wheels within wheels
and the abduction and the visionary and
the the cosmic
human being. You see all this again in
the modern accounts. And so there it's
2500 years.
>> You know, um the Fatima uh apparitions,
if you if you're not familiar with them,
were six apparitions that happened on a
single on the same day every month for
six months, starting in May and ending
in October.
And if you look at that those events
carefully,
the children, there's three children,
very small young children who had these
apparitions or these visions. They
didn't even say it was the blessed
virgin early on. You know, it was a
woman in a ball of light landing on a
tree and and it was weird. It was super
weird. And as the months go on, it gets
disciplined or shaped into a Marian
apparition because that's what Catholics
did. Um,
but even as a Marian apparition, it's
it's an extremely strange set of events
that don't really fit in to the Marian
Catholic worldview. Um, and so that's
what I mean. That's what I love about
this stuff. it it kind of fits, but it
really doesn't. And and when you look at
that that tension, to me, that makes it
more real and and more legitimate. And
um I would never say that the Marian
apparition is a UFO event, but I also
wouldn't say that the modern UFO events
are, you know, ancient aliens or or
ancient astron,
you know, because they're all these are
all interpretations and they really
don't work at the end of the day. Yeah.
>> The the extraterrestrial hypothesis
works for some things but not other
things,
>> right? Yeah.
>> And um so I I want to, as I I keep
saying, I want to keep it all on the
table and understand these different
mythologies that that wrap around it,
but I also again I don't believe the
particular mythologies or the particular
belief systems.
>> Yeah, for sure. Yeah. The thing that is
just so
I don't know ve vexing to me is that you
know you read something like Yung's take
on it that that that it's sort of this
emerging
>> well he he didn't know what it was.
>> Right. Right.
>> Completely puzzled. Right.
>> Right. Yeah. He like an emerging
mythology. And in a lot of ways he was
saying exactly what we're saying. Right.
It is something. I'm not saying it's a
projection. Ontologically speaking it's
something. But we're projecting an an
emerging mythology. Yeah.
>> Onto this thing collectively.
>> And when I read that, I'm like, that
that is it.
>> But you but at the same time, you hear
the Lazando stories about stuff in
hangers or whatever version of that. And
it's it just it it complicates things in
a way that Yeah.
>> Yeah. So, if they hauled the bodies out
and the craft,
I think I'll change my tune.
>> Yeah. I mean, come on. But the point is
is that they have not. And we always
hear about people who heard or people
that saw something have told someone
else this. And I know as a historical
researcher, the number one rule is I
have to site my sources,
>> right?
>> And you, Michael, have to be able to go
to the same sources that I'm citing. And
if you can't, I can't
why would you believe me,
>> right? you know, and so I so I think
again I think what someone like Louis
Alzando is doing or these these retired
military people are doing is entirely
legitimate and they're just telling us
the truth that they can't site their
sources for various classified reasons.
Um, but as a historian of religions, I'm
very familiar with that. I'm very
familiar with that that that need of
secrecy or or or esotericism.
And um I'm very suspicious of it, but so
are I think so are they at the end of
the day is what I'm trying to say. I
don't again I've sat with these people.
I've talked to them. They're good
people. I'm I'm not questioning their
integrity or their honesty in the least.
Um
I just think it's more complicated.
>> it's way more complicated than that. Le
last question on this on this bit, but
I'm I'm always curious to to see how
people who have thought deeply about
this topic think about this question.
What is your sense on why now? Why why
now after so much demonization
have all of these people who are
extensions of the the government though
they have severed their
direct ties or whatever.
You know wh why why are they being
allowed to say this? I think again I I
belong to I belong to big institutions.
You can't keep a secret long.
You you you can keep it for a while. You
can keep it for a few decades, but you
can't
>> you can't permanently
>> keep secrets like this.
>> And and my my other thing, you know, why
now?
I get asked this a lot, by the way. I
actually don't think the phenomena has
increased or or decreased. I think the
cultural uptake has increased or
decreased. So I I think these
experiences happen as much in the
Amazonian basin as they do in New
Mexico. Um but what gets reported and
what gets picked up in in the culture is
is very different than what actually
happens. And I I'll give you I'll give
you an example. Take the near-death
experience.
Uh and by the way, the other answer to
your question is technology.
>> Okay. And the near-death experience is a
really good example. So I think people,
human beings have been having near-death
experiences for as far as we can see
back. But guess what? They died,
you know, and they and they didn't come
back and tell their story. After after
the development of biomedical technology
got to a certain point, say in about
1960 or 70, people could
go pretty far into the death process
and we could pull them back. And guess
what they did? They told stories of what
they were seeing and experiencing. And
enough of those stories collected and it
became the near-death experience in 1975
because of a book, by the way. Um, and
so I think it's publication, it's tech,
it's it's bio, it's technology, it's the
culture is ready for this, but the
culture is not ready for it. You know
what most people don't know about the
near-death literature is that it was
heavily
uh rejected
by fundamentalist Christians.
And the reason is nobody goes to hell.
>> Okay. That's a problem. That's a big
problem. And this this flying saucer or
UFO thing is also a big problem
theologically
you know and so the question I get asked
a lot is or I I actually invoke it. I
don't even get asked is do you baptize
an alien?
And my answer is no.
And there's two reasons. One is first of
all it won't let you [laughter]
sec the sec but the second reason is do
not reduce the phenomena to your own
worldview
do not do that
and baptism is a great way of just
saying oh you're a creature of God you
know Jesus died for you let's baptize
you into my worldview let's make you a
good whatever you know I'm like no that
is actually not what's going on here
that this phenomena is here to challenge
your worldview, not to have you return
to it. That that sounds like the
beginning of a good satirical piece of
sci-fi where there's like two aliens
that get baptized into competing
religions that hate one another and then
now it's just as bad as it was before
except we have super powerful aliens who
both equally believe that they're that
they're saved under the umbrella of some
Yeah, that that's that's a funny idea.
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Spotify. And one of the things I think
you call this out pretty specifically in
a way that was a a little bit of an
epiphany for me personally that I'd
never quite thought about it is that it
it almost seems like
whatever is responsible for putting the
image in front of the experiencer
is like a thing in and of itself. like
that there's this almost this this
unseen
symbolic software that places familiar
images in front of the experiencers
I don't know what you call it mind's eye
and and that is such a fascinating idea
that that that there could be this
almost like dmonic
symbol keeper or something that's that's
showing just the thing to make sense to
the experiencer as they're experiencing
it. And and that's an idea that's like I
don't know. It's like the software
underneath the software
but above the heart but above the
hardware um or something. I I don't know
what how do you how do you think about
that idea with more sophisticated
language than what I just used?
>> Fine. [laughter] You you invoke
neoplatinism. I mean come on.
>> Oh yeah. Let's let's go there.
>> Yeah. I mean, so
I was just a kid who grew up in
Nebraska. I grew up in a small town and
I got to the seminary and I started to
learn about what they were calling the
unconscious.
And that blew my mind. It just blew up
everything because what it implied was
that that human beings are driven by
forces of which they are not aware.
And um that was obviously the case with
sexual male sexual orientation and
religious vocation and ecstatic
religious experience. And that's why I
pursued that for so many years. Um when
you get to what what they call the
phenomenon today, it's obviously
deceptive. It's it's not what is there.
But people hear the word deceptive and
they immediately go to sinister. And I'm
like, no, that's not true. Actually
deception is a sign of intelligence.
It's not a sign of of ill intent. It can
be can have ill intent but deception is
used in biology to reproduce to hide
from predators to prey on other things.
I mean deception is used for all kinds
of reasons in the in the natural world
and I suspect it's being used here as
well. And I also, you know, I work I
work with religious phenomena and I
don't believe these things, Michael. I
don't believe that what's appearing is
what's really there, but I believe that
that's what's appearing.
>> You know, and so there's there's just
kind of this paradox where you're taking
the appearances seriously, but you're
not essentially buying into the the the
appearances. And I think that's what's
going on. And I think if you look at
paranormal phenomena or or or the UFO
today, you're just going to run into
this deception all the time. And the
knee-jerk reaction is to think that it's
all human-based. It's just people, you
know, screwing with other people and and
creating fraud or disinformation or
whatever they're doing. And that of
course happens. But there's something
deeper going on that the phenomena
itself is and it may not be deceiving us
in the in in the in the way in the
intentional way, but I think it's
speaking to us in the only way it can.
>> I don't think it can speak rationally or
or cognitively.
Uh because that's not what it is. It's
it's it's something some form of
consciousness or awareness that is so
beyond any kind of cognition or sensory
capacity that how is this how is it
going to talk how is the fisherman going
to talk to the fish
>> right yes yeah
>> um how is the phenomena going to talk to
us and and of course it speaks in
symbols and speaks in myths and
narratives and so I I just think that's
how it that's how it works that's what
it is and so let's do that Let's let's
use methods and theories that
acknowledge this narrative kind of
approach to things and aren't always
looking for, you know, material
mechanisms.
>> Yeah. And and I think it's I just want
to clarify and correct me if I'm wrong
on this, but this is my understanding of
your position. Um you were saying that
you don't believe in these experiences,
but from from my understanding of your
your stance, it's that you don't believe
the images. you believe the onlogical.
>> Yeah. The content is what I'm not
signing my name to. It's like I'll give
you a really simple example that talked
about before. So, near-death
experiencers will often talk to me and
they'll tell me what they saw in the
afterlife and what heaven's like and all
this. And
I can't believe any one of those stories
because if I believe that story, I can't
believe all these other stories. I have
to dismiss all these other human beings.
So for me the the the argument from
compassion and from a kind of
capaciousness is is to acknowledge what
this person saw or believes but not
myself believe those beliefs.
>> I I believe the experience but I don't
believe the beliefs if I can put it that
way. And um so I'm not I'm not
dismissive. I'm not the skeptic. That's
not what I'm saying. But I'm also not
the believer.
>> Yeah, that that totally makes sense. And
you know, one of the things I can't help
but think of when when we're talking
about this invisible piece of software
or or to use my term, don serves you up
just the right image so that you can
interact with it and understand it is
the Hermes archetype. Like um I know
there's a passage and at some point I I
captured the whole thing because it was
just one of the most mind-blowing
passages that you even amongst
Jung's other mind-blowing passages. He
talks about the Hermes archetype or I
think he calls it the you know the
Mercurious or whatever um in psychology
and alchemy and he talks about the
multiplicity of ways that this archetype
presents itself like this like
multifaced
you know you use the word deceptive and
that that's another word that you could
ascribe to this archetype right and and
I mean he goes down this list of it's
God it's the devil it's the redeeming
psychop it's the wise old man senx
archetype type. It's, you know, and and
he but he does it in a way where it
doesn't just seem like it's arbitrary
and he's using a convenient uh
mythopoetic hermeneutical device there
and just lumping it all under Hermes.
Like it just it makes so much sense. And
then if you just think about throughout
the the ages the way that that god or
archetype was talked about is like the
closest to man. He he's the friendliest
to man. He he's the guide. He's the
keeper of boundaries. It sounds exactly
like
whatever this nebulous thing that would
serve you up just the right piece of
imagery is um and speak and let I would
love to talk more about near-death
experiences because that's something
you're so um you have so much experience
with and that that like this underlying
the difference of the particular images
yet the consistency of the underlying
grammar. It it seems to be just a really
good example of this thing that we're
talking about in general. How there
there is this, you know, this outof body
thing that happens and then this sort of
ascent motif that happens and then uh
meetings with various figures that
happen and then you seem to
hit [clears throat] this point where you
almost go into this
non-dual unitive type of place, but then
you're told, "Nope, you're not allowed
to go here yet." and then back in you
go. Um I I think that that might be one
of the best examples of this of this
whole thing.
>> I was at Harvard in May for a conference
on platonism and there were all these
platonists there and um they were
talking about the daimone, you know, the
don this and the don that. And it was
[clears throat] so refreshing to me
because the don's not the demon,
>> right? And as a historian of religions,
um, someone who compares religious
systems, I'm just so aware of that. And
frankly, the daimon in a neoplatonic
sense is way more helpful to to explain
what's going on in the UFO phenomena
than the Christian.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> I mean, the Christian demon is frankly
silly and not helpful at all. And and
it's exactly what gets invoked over and
over again. And
there's a part of me that that
acknowledges that these are demonic in
the sense that they question the
relevancy of the worldview that's that's
at stake, but they're not demonic in the
sinister or or evil sense. And um that's
where I just have a huge problem with
this. Um so I think I think the Don is
is but but it's not that I want to sign
my name to the Don either. It's not that
the neoplatanist had it all right and
now all we have to do is become
neoplatanists and we'll be fine. That is
not what I'm trying to say. I'm trying
to say look there are different moments
in in human history and they have their
different interpretations of this and we
need to take it all in but we need to
come up with our own reading of it. And
I think this is what Jung was doing by
the way.
>> Yes.
>> He was definitely
not a neoplatonist but he definitely
wasn't a good Lutheran either. He was
trying to lift off the off the game the
game board as it were and figure out
what the whole game is. He was trying to
figure out that that software or
hardware behind the the display. And um
I like Yung. I mean I've I've spent my
whole life lecturing at Yung centers and
talking to Yians and I I've read tons
and tons of Yung. I think he was great
for for the time. I think we just know a
lot more now and we have to think
different thoughts and say different
things and it's not that we're better,
it's just that we're at a different
place. I I do the the third thing and
we've gotten kind of far away from it
now, but there were more questions I had
and plus this is fertile territory for
uh another subject that you and I are
fascinated by.
Um, returning to that subject of
what are we capable of with our
consciousness in terms of reaching out
and what is it possible to reach out to
and communicate with via that latent
capability that we seem to have. Um
so you know wrapped up in this is still
there's still questions about like what
is within that disassociated boundary
and what is outside of it or you know
what is a product of your own personal
psyche versus the collective but
how do you view things like for instance
like a a DMT entity or something that
appears to be autonomous
whole ecosystems that appear to be like
freestanding hyperdimensional very very
unlike our everyday reality. Do you take
seriously the idea that these really
could be freestanding predominantly like
mental ecosystems or do you think this
is probably within the dissociated
boundary the individual psyche?
>> I think it is conceivable that that
there are freestanding
mental realms that we don't pick out
under no ordin ordinary circumstances
because they don't have a bearing on our
ability to survive and reproduce. So we
didn't evolve cognitively to pick out
those realms in mental space. So to say
it's useless for us. It would only
cognitively overload us. Um so it is
conceivable that there are mental
ecosystems beyond our dissociative
boundaries where there are
semiautonomous or maybe autonomous
complexes mental complexes also partly
dissociated themselves and uh where they
live out their experience that is
conceivable. Um I would be very cautious
though of any psychonaut coming back and
saying
>> right
>> making that affirmation as uh a fact. Um
I think for us to be able to say that we
would need to have you know a a study
under controlled conditions and many
volunteers
um a lot of prior training um which
would be required for anybody to even
have a hope to steer their psychedelic
experience in a given direction which
for me was impossible. I never managed
to do that when I when I used
psychedelics until several years ago.
did that for a period of two years as a
kind of research exercise. I never could
steer it. It it it chose
>> what I would experience never the other
way around. So if if it is to be
possible at all to make a evidence-based
inference that there are such realms uh
we would have to find ways to steer
psychedelic trips which right now we
haven't.
>> So I I would be very cautious against
these claims for the time being even
though I think it is conceivable. There
is nothing appriori impossible about it
under analytic idealism.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Talk about stretching your
metacognitive horizon. That's a big
stretch. That's like some advanced yoga
for sure. Trying to bring bring back
anything approaching
coherent that is so alien to the way
that you typically view reality and
associate with reality. Yet you're just
left with this indelible,
you know, just lifelong imprint that the
the mystery is real. It's out there. You
can experience it. It absolutely can
overwhelm you. And beyond that, I agree.
You have to use a lot of caution as to
what it is, what it isn't, what it
wants, what what it really consists of,
how it presents itself even. And to to
to put more resolution in what I was
saying that I was talking about with
Jeff Krile
is, you know, he, as you know, is deeply
obsessed with all of the frontiers of
consciousness and takes them very
seriously. But he also, like you and
like me, is very cautious about placing
too much weight on the image as it's
presented or remembered by the
experiencer because that that image like
we don't even understand.
what it is. We understand it can be
colored by psychology, by culture, by uh
whatever bias and predispositions that
we have. And that leads to all kinds of
really other really interesting
questions as to like why that image?
What what is presenting the image? Why
does it show up in that way? Could it is
that an artifact of some part of your
own dissociative boundary? Is that a
mask it consciously chose to present in?
Like there's so many interesting
questions again when you get to these
frontiers of consciousness that
>> Yeah. I think psychedelic nosis when
it's brought back as literal is very
suspicious. Yeah. The mind manifests
itself psychedelic in the mind
manifesting.
>> It manifests itself symbolically. Um I
at the same time
I mean mo I think most of the figures
that appear in our rearies are part of
our own collective our own mind talking
to itself and we have internal
dissociations as well. We are not a
unity. Any
>> any therapist with a lot of clinical
experience would tell you that that we
are collectives and there's still a
child in us. There's still a teenager in
us. There are still those Bernardos who
have been repressed and not heard, not
listened to. They're still there. They
all still have their feelings. They all
still have their emotions. Um so maybe
some of that appears as entities. uh but
they are not really objective entities
outside us. But um
there are
realms in psychedelic space where the
agencies that seem to appear
are so alien.
>> And um
and and yet so aential they they seem
really have their own agency.
>> Yeah. Um, and they seem to find us just
as strange as we find them.
>> And
>> totally.
>> So I I wouldn't poo poo that entirely.
>> No,
>> sometimes you come back with an
experience that you think, wow, it's
like you just happened into a place
where you were not expected and
everybody who was there looks at you
funny like, what the hell? Who the hell
are you? What are you doing here?
>> And and the alieness is so profound. Um,
it's not only at the seemingly physical
level, but also at the level the level
of logic and emotion. The alieness is so
profound that I can understand that some
people find it hard to think that um, it
is a part of themselves because it's
profoundly nonhuman, profoundly non
anything that we can speak of in
language. Um then I've been maybe once
or twice very few times um to to space
in the psychedelic realm in which I had
this this feeling that wow this is
really something now
>> and it was very different from all my
personal because usually you
confront your personal shift in a
psychedelic trip everything you
repressed all of your you know your dark
side that you don't want to acknowledge
your hidden desires you know your
depravity and your guilt and your
anxiety and all that stuff. Um, but so
you get used to that. You get used to
identifying your own after a while.
>> But then occasionally, very
occasionally, occasionally, very rarely,
you happen upon a space that is totally
different and then you go like, whoa,
what is this now? This this is
something.
>> Yeah. So I assume you're aware of the
extended state DMT experiments that have
been that are being done at Imperial
College London now. And I have one of my
friends actually Alexander Biner was a
participant in that pilot study. And I
mean this is a guy with a lot of
experience in altered states but um you
know very considerable philosophical
grounding. Um were you ever on the
channel um Rebel Wisdom?
Yes, I talked to him once or twice.
Twice I think.
>> So, you know him? Yeah. And I mean, he
is
pretty convinced after being you I don't
want to put words in his mouth, but
after a few um many conversations with
him and a few of them recorded,
it's pretty difficult for him to swallow
that it's not like that you're not
entering a freestanding ecosystem. I
mean, just just like you said, you know,
it's almost like and the way he talks
about it, it's like going into a
rainforest or something. You know, some
stuff is interested in you and wants to
run around you and be like, "Hey, look
at this. Some stuff doesn't give a
Some stuff is uh not particularly
friendly, but it's feels incredibly vast
and teeming with life." and he told me
that they've now either done a study or
are going to do a study
that's aimed at what we're talking
about. Trying to put multiple people in
the state at the same time and see if
there's if there's agreeance or
replicability on what's being seen when.
And I'm just so eager to hear the
results of that because there's just so
many anecdotal cases of people being in
psychedelic states together having what
seems like some kind of boundary
breaking mental connection. Um
>> yeah, for me this happened really maybe
maybe twice, probably only once. Um most
of my psychedelic journeys were either
about the hidden parts of me.
>> Mhm.
>> Uh or about the whole. So not any
particular ecosystem
but the whole the cosmic itch that
drives the endogenous excitations of
mind at large. Um the the unasked
questions that drive the universe
forward. Um there is only one consistent
entity if you will or agency I prefer
the word agency that I have encountered
many times and I can't tell you whether
it's me or not um but it was always an
agency that um I'll describe it
symbolically now that always was very
interested in giving me a gift
>> and that gift was not a thing was a way
of seeing
was a realization and it's very
difficult to get a human to
>> wow
>> achieve that realization because of how
our cognitive system is wired and what
it's optimized for what it has evolved
to do. So you sort of have to unwind all
that stuff. You have to undo all of
those clampings, you know, all of those
foldings that we have evolved to have in
order to be able to see the gift. Um,
and I succeed and and and this thing,
this agency was always trying to help me
do that. And it and to do that, you have
to undergo a benign form of deception
because what prevents you from seeing it
is yourself.
>> Your patterns of thinking and feeling
prevent you from seeing that. So, you
have to be unwound. And this thing is
trying to deceive you into unwinding
yourself. It's a benign form of
deception. And uh once that happens then
you see the thing and it starts as a cir
a spherical object with glowing lights.
But um if you can actually see it then
it's not an object. It's thought it's
emotion. It's you and other itself and
world. It's the panacea. It's the
template the pattern underlying
everything. It it is it is everything.
This sounds very
>> this sounds very Hermes like like the
thing
>> this is a it is a beyond orgasmic
experience. Um so the throughout most of
my trips I I always sensed the present
presence of this agency. Um and in a few
I I I could see it. I I could see the
thing.
>> Wow.
>> And it is mindblowing. It's a it's a
level of
delight and
and clarity that uh is unfathomable. You
cannot bring that back. It's it's an
experience of the moment and it and it
belongs in that realm and in that realm
alone. You don't get to bring it back.
The only thing you bring it back is a
profound gratitude
um that such a thing exists in nature.
Now even if you say it's a form of
illusion fine under idealism everything
is mental. So there is a sense in which
you could say everything is an illusion.
But if it is so it's as real as an
illusion as as real an illusion as this
right now because it's experienced as
real and at the end of the day that's
that's all that's all we have right
there's no reality outside mind. Um so
it it to me it has been comforting many
times to come back and know that such a
thing whatever it is exists in nature.
Uh it's very reassuring and and it's
delightful. It's a it's a form of art
beyond anything conceivable.
>> That's incredible. And I mean you know
from like a Yung would have a field day
with this. I mean a vision of a this
like spherical agency that feels like
this boundary transcending
completion. You know, it sounds very
soul like or donlike or like I said,
Hermes like this thing that sort of
transcends boundaries that are normally
not able to be transcended. But it, you
know, it's like
beyond whatever that personal
dissociative boundary is, but it's also
within it at the same time. And you
normally do not have the ability to wrap
your mind around that in any way or even
witness it in any way. But under the
right circumstances, it's possible to
have a sort of like absolutely mercurial
encounter with this thing. Um
>> yeah, it is um
it is not a product of me.
Um is not a product of Bernardo Castro.
Now whether it's outside my dissociative
boundary or imminent in it
>> I I would tend to say it exists in a
form in which this distinction does not
hold.
We cannot think of reality in this
spatial terms anymore. Um at the level
of that that gift that thing. Uh it's a
kind of um it's a singularity. It's a
self-recursive singularity. It's like a
key to existence. The key to all
complexity. It is that out of which
everything unfolds. It's the folded form
of all of existence. Um the folded form
with the inherent templates, the
inherent dispositions uh of existence
that generate everything if you allow it
to unfold. So it's a self self recursive
singularity that creates everything out
of itself. And
at that level because it's a singularity
you know it makes no sense to say is it
inside my dissociative body or is it
outside is it imminent in everything or
is it geographically located in mental
space all of this stuff collapses. So
that's why I never wrote about it. It's
impossible to write about it.
>> Yeah. Uh it's like it's like an
encounter with noose or logos or
anything that is just so beyond
language that any language you try to
forced onto it is actually sort of
damaging the the purity of of whatever
you experienced. Yeah. Those experiences
are just so
valuable that it is
>> it's not something to bring back from a
psychedelic trip. I mean, if you did
psychedelics like I did as a research
enterprise, I find it preposterous to do
psychedelics for fun. They're not fun.
They're very hard.
>> Uh so you do it as a kind of, you know,
study. Um
>> um so there is a lot in my trips that um
I had this sense, you know, this is fish
I can bring back to the tribe like
McKenna used to say,
>> you know, stuff that you can bring back.
But the gift
>> was never that. It doesn't have that
ethos of part being part of your
curriculum. It's grace. Every now and
then you're granted grace for the sake
of it. It doesn't have the higher
purpose of you writing about it or how
it's going to change your life. No, it's
just grace.
>> That's all.
>> There's nothing more to it.
>> It's a numinous gift.
>> A numinous gift. Yeah, I love that.
Um, since we talked last, we we did riff
on this topic in our last conversation,
but it was just before you released your
article on the UFO UAP topic, so I
didn't get to ask you this, but and you,
from my memory, you do bring up high
weirdness as a unavoidable part of this
conversation, but and you kind of
distinguish it from the nuts and bolts
phenomena,
but I don't recall if you brought up
this sort of idea of mental agencies as
potentially being the source of some of
this phenomena.
>> I did.
>> Did you? Okay.
>> In in an older book called Meaning in
Absurdity,
>> I explicitly did just that. So, look, I
I have been very disappointed with
what's going on in the UAP world this
year. um disappointed to the point of
disgust of just closing certain accounts
that were
well I don't want to talk about it. I'll
leave it at that. Uh I'm disappointed to
the point of disgust. So um if I were to
maintain anything about my views on high
strangeness phenomenon I would say it's
the high strangeness part that I think
holds water that I think is um doubtless
you cannot just ignore the reports of
tens of thousands hundreds of thousands
um of people and those reports carry the
hallmarks of truth. And I'm not going to
share publicly what I consider those
hallmarks to be. Otherwise, next week
everybody, every report will will have
that uh those hallmarks, but I have my
private understanding of what the
hallmarks are. Um and and I apply them.
For instance,
Alexander has the hallmarks. Anita
Mojani has the hallmarks.
>> Yeah. Um certain people in the UA UAP
and alien abduction so-called layer
alien abduction discourse have the
hallmarks. A bunch of others don't. Um
so I take high strangeness seriously.
Now
the recent nuts and bolts hoopla I did
take seriously until last year
>> until some point this year I take less
seriously now. There are some
in my vi in my mind very concerning
um developments,
very concerning material, very
concerning
actions and uh man it frankly disgusts
me. So I I I checked out from that.
Like are you are you
>> sorry just to clarify are you leaning to
more toward that feeling
>> like for lack of a better term a scop or
something that's being co-opted for
propaganda purposes or uh an agenda
beyond the truth or what is disgusting
you
>> well I wouldn't go religious about it I
don't think it it's appropriate but um
I question
Now the motivations behind a lot of
what's happening and if I have to give
you a word I would give you the word
misinformation.
>> So right now as far as the nuts and
bolts part of the thing is concerned I
don't know what to think.
>> And um and I realized that um I cannot
know what to think.
>> Right.
>> And uh so I I dropped that ball. I don't
want to be part of that. Um, you know, I
I literally closed very special high
security accounts that that I had and
and
shows you to the the extent of my
concern.
>> Um,
but the the high strangeness part
>> that is real, right?
>> Yeah. And it's interesting that you
brought up, you know, with the
hallmarks, you brought up people who are
famous for being near-death
experiencers, people who they didn't
have a, you know, ET experience per se.
They had a dying experience. It via
which they went through all kinds of
archetypal um encounters with with other
and or or with the the extra beyond the
physical. And I also I mean I know of
cases that are more aligned with a UAP
UFO community where people's experiences
are closer to that for sure. Um and I
don't know if you want to get into
specific examples of people that you
think
have gotten
a similar message, but it's interesting
to me in and of itself that you equated
it with near-death experiences. I think
that that says a lot. And one thing I'm
I'm not personally sure about, I
obviously haven't had a near-death
experience, but one thing that I'm not
sure about is what I think about the
overlap between my kind of like heroic
dose experiences with potentially other
agencies or consciousness systems or
whatever you want to call it. And what I
think that says about this phenomenon,
like I would love to have some sort of
overarching cohesive narrative that it
is all a product of the same which
ultimately I guess in in idealism it is
a product of the same thing. But the
foundation of analytic idealism is that
everything is one. There is one
consciousness. We are disassociations of
that one consciousness. But beyond that,
between our disassociation and the
fundamental reality,
you must entertain the idea that there
are many other dissociations or or like
hierarchies or something, right? Like
and and maybe that maybe we're just
peering into an absolute ocean of
disassociations or what you could call
beings
and they're just going to present in all
kinds of ways. And [snorts] that's what
the tr the truth beyond our boundary is
is that there's just this paniply of
other ways that consciousness presents
itself and that we're beginning to
scratch the surface of whatever that is.
>> I I am with the spirit of of what you
said. I I would only not agree with one
specific part which you said which was
between us and this world there must be
other levels hierarchy of dissociations.
I don't know that because we have a
physical appearance. So the rest of this
universe. So if there is anything in
between, I would expect it too to have a
physical appearance and we don't find
it. It's it's not, you know, at hand. Um
but um it is entirely conceivable that
this universe
is just one segment of mind at large.
And um it's the segment in which we
exist. And and then there are parallel
universes, not ever parallel universes.
I think that's because the
motivation to postulate that is
nonsensical. It lacks all empirical
grounding. It's a theoretical fantasy.
Now the even though multiveres I think
is ungrounded and therefore should be
discarded. Um that doesn't mean that all
the the entire notion of parallel
universes in general, not parallel
universes that arise because both
possibilities of a measurement are
actually true in a different parallel
universe. No, I'm not talking about
exploding cazillions of parallel
universes that pop into existence out of
nothing every time two quantum systems
interact. That's not what I'm talking
about. I'm not talking about mushrooming
parallel physical universes. I'm talking
about parallel universes that may exist
at all times. We don't have the power to
create or destroy them by an observation
and they will not look physical to us
because other rules uh apply maybe even
other rules of logic because logic is
axiomatic, right? Um so it is
conceivable that there are parallel
universes of this latter kind um which
we have no access to because there is
some kind of universal level of
dissociation splitting this bubble
universes from each other
>> and it is conceivable that during a very
high dose psychedelic trip it is
conceivable I'm not saying that I have
reasons to believe that but it is
conceivable that in a highdose
psychedelic trip in which most of the
dynamic structure of mind is just
dissolved because that's what
psychedelics do that um that one could
catch a glimpse of what's happening
happening in the next room in the palace
of the universal mind so to say because
what confines us here are certain
cognitive structures that that's the
only way you can create structure in a
mind is structures of cognition
structures of association dissociation
representation and re-representation and
so forth so if you dismantle those
structures that create this universe uh
in which we are rooted. Uh it stands to
reason that you go to a a level of
mentation which is so raw in which you
can get a catch a glimpse of whatever
else is going on in the palace of mind.
>> So that is conceivable. Yes. And the the
the telltale sign of that would be that
not only is the physics different but
the logic is different that um
>> Aristotleian axioms don't apply. I think
Aristotleian at least four of them apply
to this universe. So if I'm having a
discussion on analytic philosophy I will
be largely an Arisotellian. I'm actually
an intuitionist. Intuitionism accepts
four of Arisotalian of the Arisotellian
axioms and rejects one which is the law
of the excluded middle which says that
things are either true or false not both
and not neither. Well, I reject that. I
I think I see truth as a as a construct.
You have to have an example of it to
prove that it exists as opposed to
proving that it cannot be false. That's
just abstraction. You see? So I'm an
intuitionist in this universe but I'm
keenly aware that if we are not talking
about this universe we are not having an
analytic discussion or you're having a
loser you know frontiers uh discussion
>> um then I would say the telltale sign of
these other realms in the overall palace
of mind would be that also logic does
not apply that the the expectations
about what makes sense and what doesn't
would be very different. In other words,
absurd.
>> My strangess.
>> Yeah. Or at the very least not linear
and not subject to the way that things
work in everyday consensus reality. And
eventually you get you get to to this
metaphysical notion
of there being something very similar to
what you're describing in a more
technical way which is that you have
these like gradations of uh a agency and
ontological power. And that's like kind
of what this word hypoxis means is you
higher things on the chain have more
hypoxis and then there's other things
underneath those things that have less
and less as it goes down.
>> So so it puts us in this
>> constraint that you've been describing
as the headset, right? Or that we again
we could think about as being within a
game as within Grand Theft Auto. But
then there's like limitations. there's
there's still these limitations as to
what we can do. But then the interesting
question is is are these insights that
you're talking about are these potential
ways to increase the scope of what the
headset can do? Like are are these ways
to expand what a human maybe even can
do? Or are we always going to be
limited? I mean, we're going to be
limited to some degree, of course. It's
like I don't think it's possible for us
to dissolve back into the one as a human
being and like continue to exist. But um
but do do you see that as a real
possibility that we're going to unlock
new faculties, new modes of perception,
you know, things we can't even imagine
right now?
>> Absolutely. And so I'll first start off
with a statement that's you know to put
some modesty on the whole thing. that is
this is just the first layer outside of
soft of of software outside of
spacetime. So it's
>> so so I'm not claiming anywhere close to
a theory of everything or anything like
that but but I think with that proviso I
think that there's magic here that you
know this think about it this way if you
are a wizard inside Grand Theft Auto you
can do all sorts of amazing things and
people are impressed but if you're the
geek that wrote the software uh you can
do things that the wizard doesn't
understand you can make their car
disappear you can take the tires off
their car you you can just do magic,
right?
>> Basically,
if what we're saying is correct, um
we're going to be unlocking incredible
magic. And so, I I'll just give you one
example of the kind of magic that goes
on. This time dilation stuff. Suppose
I'm I'm
able to use this big matrix. That's
that's me. I'm able I'm I've got this
big matrix. My time counter is going for
every one of those experiences. Suppose
that your matrix um is only you know
onetenth of mine, right? So you only see
>> probably is Don to be honest.
>> Well, I should have turned it the other
[laughter] way. So I'll turn it around.
So you got a big matrix and and Hoffman
only sees onetenth of Michael's. Who who
knows what it is? But so so so I'll I'll
do it I'll do it that way. So Hoffman
has only 10% of Michael's experiences.
And um what happens then is
for every click of time that I see,
Michael has could do 10 times many many
other things. He could do lots of other
things where I think nothing's happened.
For for Michael, it could be a thousand
years or a million years depending on
how how much bigger your matrix is. You
you could you could have a thousand
years to do whatever you want. And for
me, it's instantaneous. That that means
effectively that I'm a sitting duck,
>> Compared to you. I'm a sitting duck. I
mean, you can do whatever you want while
I'm just sitting there inert unable to
to do anything.
>> Well, where this gets really trippy is
if you ask yourself what kind of a being
would that be? like like like you know
obviously this is a fun example you and
me but if we really try like this really
gives you some insight as to what it
might be to be a higher being like a an
alien an angel what whatever like
whatever word you want to put on it
might be something like this and maybe
that's why when people have you know
altered states experiences or numinous
experiences they see these things that
just completely stretch their ability to
conceive you know like in in like going
back to biblical examples
angels always be not afraid. Like I know
whatever I'm looking like to you, it's
looking real crazy, but like try not to
freak out, you know? And and that's been
my experience too with altered states is
is it is absolutely
that um belvelt I was talking about
where I can easily make sense of
reality. It is shaking, man. It is it is
like, you know, trying as hard as it can
to maintain homeostasis and it can't
happen. So maybe that's what it's like
for for for us
>> in our trace
gaining a very low pixel resolution of
like what what that adding another
integer adding another possibility to
that space might be like it might be
this overwhelming
numinous uh mysterium tremendum kind of
experience absolutely and and I've only
talked about the time there's also the
space as you were saying
>> like So when you
you have much more dimensions of space.
If you have the big if you're the bigger
trace than mine, I'm just a small trace
than you. Then my distances are
different from yours. I I've I've got a
limited set of time. I've got a limited
set. You're working in a much bigger
space than me as well as you got more
time. So you can do stuff outside where
I can't see. I You could do something
inside my trace. I see. So I see an
object inside the trace. you've let me
see it and then um you then do something
so that all of a sudden it looks like
the thing that I see in my trace moved
at Mach 40,
>> Accelerated at impossible or or faster
than the speed of light. And
but inside your big matrix, you're
you're all within your own laws quote
unquote laws of physics in your in your
matrix. But because I'm at a much
smaller matrix, it looks like magic to
me and it looks like it's impossible to
me. So, literally, you could be doing
all sorts of stuff and I'm a sitting
duck. Um, you can So, there's going to
be uh the technologies that would come
out of this are you you can't think big
enough.
>> And Yeah. Right.
Well, what you just described, I don't
know if you want to go here, but what
you just described really sounds like
most people's UFO experiences when they
when they see one or they try to sense
one is these things are doing things
that from our vantage point seem like it
shouldn't be possible. It shouldn't be
possible to go from sea level to 40,000
ft and then back to sea level again all
within a second or two. But these are
supposedly things that uh fighter pilots
have captured on, you know, things that
that work well enough that we're using
them to like protect our our country and
our interests and fight wars. And those
instruments work well for those
purposes. So, it seems to be telling us
something about something as impossible
as it sounds, right?
>> Um, so maybe that's one of the only
explanations. I well, you know, I I
hadn't paid much attention to the UAP
thing until there there was the
um congressional hearing
>> in which
>> people under oath
>> said, "I have been part of this. I've
seen the technology. I've seen nonhuman
biologics."
And
so at that point then I gave myself
permission to think about okay.
Um there is now some
credible testimony here that these
things may actually exist. And it's very
very clear from the work that I've been
doing independently that this kind of
technology
is easily possible from from this
framework. If you're if you're if you
take spaceime as fundamental,
then it's hard to explain this
technology. It's just sort of like the
laws of physics simply don't allow this
stuff. And it's there's no way that we
can see in a space-time framework. Of
course, we still haven't united, you
know, really united things that that in
a deep way. We don't have a theory of
everything in certain time inside
spaceime. the standard model goes so so
far but you know there are things that
we might try to to do inside but still
it's hard to imagine this kind of magic
happening but if you switch frameworks
space time is just a VR headset
>> and consciousness
the creator of this headset so and we
can start to describe a layer of
software outside the headset then it's a
no-brainer that if you are the VR
designer you Oh, how it's how it's
designed, then you can do magic inside
the headset as I was describing the the
so
so I I'm actually it's almost scary the
technologies that can come out of this.
So the the trace logic is um also quite
dangerous. So I think understanding the
the trace logic and and and perhaps this
notion of agency um is opening up a
Pandora's box because if you think about
it, this is a way of thinking about
technologies that we simply have never
had before,
>> We we have all of our military systems
are designed with
physics inside spaceime. We've only used
what we know about the inside of the
headset. So we our our best military
equipment is because um you know we are
like the the really the the great player
of Grand Theft Auto. We know how to do
stuff inside the headset.
>> But as soon as you get outside the
headset and start playing with the
software itself,
uh the first you know the first country
to do that is is the winner in terms of
of technology. there's there's no
nothing that you could do to stop it.
So, this is a it's it's a it's actually
a Pandora's box um that that's happening
here. So, one can only hope that
[clears throat]
one of the big lessons
here is where did the trace logic come
from?
Where did the consciousness come from?
It comes from the idea that there is
that consciousness is fundamental and
each one of us is simply an avatar
expression of of a deep unified
consciousness. And and so what what
comes out of the trace logic is what
spiritual traditions have been saying
for a long time. And Jesus said it very
very clearly. You'll love your neighbor
as yourself.
>> Yeah. The implication being your
neighbor is yourself. Basically, we're
and and that's really the point the
trace logic does say all of us are in
fact the one consciousness looking at
itself through different headsets. So
someone who is smart enough
to begin to use
the trace logic outside of spaceime to
build technologies hopefully also is
smart enough to understand what this is
saying. that is that the person that
you're going to use this technology on
is you. That person is you.
>> And so be careful how you use this
technology because what you're doing it
the any harm that you choose to do is
harm that you're doing to um an avatar
of yourself. Ultimately,
>> you aren't your avatar. You you
transcend. But to the extent that you
don't want something to happen to your
avatar, you should not want something to
happen to the avatar of of another
person.
>> So I'm hoping that the the the that at
the same time that we get a
technological boost that we also get in
some sense a moral boost from from the
same place.
>> Yeah. I I suspect Don and and it seems
like that this is the only way I can
square the circle I'm about to describe
is within a lot of that same
conversation
one of the direct things you seem to be
hearing more and more is that
consciousness seems to be core to
whatever the UAP technology is and of
course that's very speculative and
handwavy but maybe it's something along
the lines of
if we do add another possibility
to our, you know, Markov matrix.
Maybe it's not just going to be some new
advanced physics technology. Maybe it's
going to be something that makes that
statement make sense. That there is
something about consciousness and
physics or about reality that's
intertwined in a way that right now
doesn't make sense to us. But maybe just
by unlocking one more gradation of
reality or one new possibility or
understanding suddenly there will be
some new noises. There will be some new
understanding of oh this is how these
pieces fit together. We we thought that
applied technology like this and my
qualia, my conscious experience are two
completely categorically different
things. But maybe this is the thing that
closes the gap or closes the circle or
something like that. And along with that
would come all kinds of epiphies and all
kinds of new um hugely ontologically
reorienting understandings in terms of
what we are. And it wouldn't just be
like a a conversation. It would be I'm
I'm talking about like a knowing like a
new sense or a new thing that um of
course I can't describe because it's
like it's like how do you describe what
you don't know? But but it's but it's I
don't know. I that's the nebulous sense
that I get.
>> Right. Well, first I completely agree
and in the following sense that what
this approach is saying is that what is
beyond spaceime is entirely
consciousness. It is entirely in some
sense psychological in the way that you
were talking about. So, so yeah to the
extent that the UAPs have been
associated with all sorts of
psychological phenomena that that also
follows immediately from this the
ontology of this whole approach of the
trace logic it's consciousness all the
way down. And so in in fact all the
technologies that look physical
everything that looks to us physical is
ultimately from from this point of view
psychological. The the very spaceime
itself is entirely a psychological
construct. Everything inside spacetime
is a psychological construct. Once you
understand that then that opens up the
technologies um that that would seem
impossible in a physicist physicalist
ontology. Um, and I again I don't think
that we can think big enough out outside
of the the box, but I see no reason why
we will be limited to to um
the the technologies that we have right
now are going to seem um pre-industrial
uh compared to to to what we're going to
have. And it will be by the way also you
know other experiences like people on
various drug experiences like DMT and so
forth. They there are some some cases
they seem to be um having
>> experiences that are
>> perhaps in higher dimensional spaces you
know not just three dimensions right
they
>> they might be seeing hyperdimensional
objects and and and so forth. And if
Einstein's spacetime, his curved
spacetime is the fundamental nature of
reality, then clearly seeing in into a
you know a 30-dimensional space is is
only a psychological hallucination. It's
not the truth. If if our ontology is
that maybe a string theory there's
11dimensional thing or something like
that, but but yeah, right now string
theory is not it seems to be on the
ropes um among the physicists
themselves. that it doesn't seem to be
working in um it's giving us a lot of
beautiful insights mathematically and
and beautiful insights physically but as
a fundamental theory of everything I I I
don't see physicists rallying around it
like they used to. So, so when you have
experiences in really high dimensional
spaces under now it's quite possible of
course that those any particular
experience is just hallucination. you're
just screwing up the brain and you know
if you hit me on the head yeah I'm going
to see all sorts of stuff but it's also
possible in in the framework I'm working
on that that could be a genuine insight
that maybe
>> if we take some drug um I mean so I I'm
perfectly open to saying some drugs just
screw your brain up and it's
hallucination and there's no insight
into a deeper reality period. Yeah,
>> but but I think that there it's
certainly possible and I'm not going to
claim claim right now any specific drug
is doing this, but I'd say it is at
least in principle possible in the
framework I'm working on to have a drug
molecule that is already in the brain
for example and we're tweaking it
>> and that then that's tweaking a
dimension parameter right now the
dimension parameter for space is d
equals 3. So D the the parameter D has a
value three in our headset
>> and we tweak this chemical now it goes
to five or 10
>> and all of a sudden um we have the same
kind of architecture but this one
parameter in how we build the headset
gets gets manipulated. So it could be
that some simple chemical manipulation
in the brain could switch from three to
10 because in when I'm actually looking
at the you know how how am I going to
actually build space time from marov
matrices so when we do these theorems so
we're trying to prove this theorem right
of how do we get Minowski space from the
theory of conscious agents
what are we doing it's not just a
theorem this is the first step in
building the headset. That's just
a headset projection
of the software outside of space time,
which is far more complicated.
>> So, so the big problem of neuroscience
hasn't even been started yet. And it's
crazy because it seems like every
dimension, no matter how deep we look or
how wide we look within this headset,
it's like hinting at that structure over
and over again. Like I'm sure you've
seen these how, you know, cliche images
at this point of how these big galactic
superclusters look very brain-like. And
to my understanding, they've done some
some deeper even like peer-reviewed
analysis of the similarities in
architecture between, you know, galactic
filaments and um galaxies and how
similar they look to the brain structure
in in not like a handwavy Yeah, that
looks similar way, but a very precise
way. And and it's the same thing when
you look down into the dirt, right? the
the the the
mycelial mat at the at the very root
level of the planet
looks the same.
>> So it seems like every level of
intelligence
>> at least within the the headset within
spaceime is showing us this fractal
layered intelligent structure at at
every level. And the question is is what
does that tell us about well there's
many questions but one of the questions
is what does that tell us about the
level of intelligence above this one?
Yeah, my um my understanding from the
trace logic now is um our headset is one
of the cheaper ones, one of the more
trivial ones. We we we have and and this
is a really important point and it's
it's one that's hard to come to grips
with emotionally.
It's it's very easy for us to think that
we're sort of at the top of the
intelligence chain. Um, I look down and
I see, you know, an ant crawling around
on the ground and the ant can't see what
I'm doing. It doesn't know much about
me. I I live in a whole world that the
ant could never conceive, I would think.
And so, it probably knows very, very
little about my world. And my world is
far, I would guess, far superior and far
richer than that of the ant. But now,
if you think about that, how much do I
know about the ant? But I don't know too
that that much about the I can do some
studies on it. But um it's quite
possible
that my headset
put put it this way. I'm I know that I
I'm very much rich very rich in my
experience and my complexity and my
guess is that the ant's headset isn't
telling it very much about me. Right?
I'm guessing that the ant's headset just
um doesn't grock Hoffman at all. But
given that logic, there's a chance that
my headset isn't grocking what I'm
interacting with when I see all I see is
an ant.
Maybe all the ant sees of Hoffman is an
ant. And it's not because Hoffman is
just an ant. It's just because the ant
headset can't see Hoffman very well.
Well, turnabout is fair play. Maybe I
all when I see something and I call it
just and I think it's it's trivial. I
could be interacting with an
intelligence that if I actually
understood it, I would fall before it in
in in terror or or amazement or whatever
because this thing completely transcends
me. But all I can see is an ant.
>> So it's is it's very easy for us to
mistake the limits of our headset
for an insight into reality. Totally.
>> That's the key point.
What you see inside your spacetime is
entirely a function of the limits of
your headset. It is not an insight into
the ultimate nature of reality. When I'm
seeing a ladybug,
that's it's that's the limit of my
headset. What am I interacting with? If
I actually knew what I was interacting
with, I might fall down and worship it.
>> But all I can see is a ladybug.
So, so, so, so we have to be very, very
careful to think of ourselves. The very
fact that we think of ourselves as at
the top of the food chain shows how
benited we are.
>> To the extent that I feel that I am
really smarter than everything I see,
that is the key evidence that I know
next to nothing.
>> So, what what this mathematics is
telling me is our headset is one of the
cheapest headsets that I could imagine
in the theory.
>> It's only got a d parameter of three.
There's no reason why the d parameter
could go couldn't go to a billion. Why
shouldn't one thing I I I am frustrated.
I'm sure many mathematicians are
frustrated. I can imagine a
three-dimensional cube. And it's very
helpful to imagine things when I'm
trying to solve problems.
Try to imagine a four-dimensional cube,
a tesseract.
>> I can't do it.
And I I you know and nobody can even a
brilliant mathematician has to work
around this limitation of our
imagination. They have to use
mathematics and and tricks to you and
proof theorem and proof to get to the
properties of these higher dimensional
objects.
>> Wouldn't it be nice if someone in the
comments is going to say yes I can I can
No. Yeah. I'm joking. I'm joking. Well,
someone probably will.
>> Yeah. Probably probably so. And I I hope
that someone can and maybe you know on
the right psychedelic perhaps someone
can actually go to a fourdimensional
space and really see a test. I would
love to get data
>> that you know for some you like a real
mathematician
saying you so we get someone who's a
credible mathematician that says yeah I
saw a tesseract and now we're talking
about something really interesting. So
if if you know some psychedelic can do
that if you know psilocybin can do that
or whatever that would be very very
interesting.
>> There there was just a sorry to
interrupt but I just wanted to share
this and I'll I'll try to find the
graphic for it. There is a someone made
an animation
where there's hidden information that
you cannot see unless you're on I think
it might be psilocybin or it's
definitely some tryptoine where there's
like they're basically like these
tracers moving and you can just see the
color of the tracers or something. But
if you but if you're on whatever
particular um
you know what whatever the alkaloid is
you can actually see that there's like
hidden information that reveals itself
under under that influence. So it could
it I I do suspect and to your point
earlier that that may be exactly what
we're doing with with a certain class of
substances that we are actually tweaking
and expanding the headset to some
degree. And I would love to say that I
think it's just a pure flow of
more real information, but I also think
there's probably interference from your
own mind and your own preconceived
notions about reality and your own
programming and your own fears and
thoughts and blah blah blah that's
getting all mixed in there. So, you are
getting more, but you're also turning up
the volume on your own psyche and and
every all at the same time. And that
that's sort of been my experience is
it's just like more of everything. More
of everything,
>> right? And and and again, you know, I'm
a hard no scientist, so I'll I'll say
this. Of course, we have to be open
>> all the time to the possibility that the
psychedelic drug is simply addling your
brain and there's nothing deep to see
here. On the other hand, we should be
open with rigorous experiments, no hand
waves, with with credible subjects where
we try to explore is there something be
beyond just adultling the brain. I think
the the mathematics I'm working on says
there's a good possibility that that's
that we might be able to find that kind
of thing and and if so we should we we
should study it. But it's
[clears throat] not enough to have
informal descriptions of psychonauts. We
we have to have more systematic
hard-nose rigorous experiments. Um and
you know if there are claims of
interacting with entities beyond space
time
>> y
>> then we need to substantiate those
claims with hardnose experiments where
information is exchanged from one person
to the entities to some other person in
a way that could not possibly have
happened any other way. So so I'm very
very hardnosed about all this stuff. You
have to be both there's a balance. You
have to be completely open to all these
possibilities that might seem bizarre
and then you have to be completely
hard-nosed about testing them. So, so
it's it's a balance, completely open,
but but no BS at all in in the
experiments and and and you have to be
your own harshest critics. And so that's
one reason why I'm I'm going after this
with mathematicians and and it's a
matter of theorem proof theorem proof
thing about the big bang getting quantum
um
probabilities out of this just going
down systematically the positive showing
how the positive geometries come exactly
out of this. So this is all and if at
any point we can't do it, it's game
over, right? This if if I if we can't
get general relativity from the trace
logic and this theory of agency that I
talked about, if if it's not possible,
if we can prove we can't do it, then um
I will have to say that um nice try, but
this wasn't it. Um back back to the
drawing board. So So this this is all
fun. I'm excited about it, but uh you
know, we've been disappointed many times
before. So, so we will see. It's got to
be theorem proof. Theorem proof. Not
>> But you have to you do have to be
willing to think out of the think big,
think out of the box. It's hard to think
out of spaceime. Um and to be rigorous
at the same time. And so that's that's
the the tight rope that you have to
walk.
>> Yeah. I I love it, Don. And I I love
everything you're doing. And I deeply
deeply appreciate that you are rigorous
when it comes to all of this stuff and
all the nuance that you put on all of
your thoughts, yet at the same time you
always display this epistemic humility.
And I yeah, I I just I'm just so glad
you're out there. I'm so glad you're
doing what you're doing. And someone who
seemed to agree with you that I would
not have thought of to put in this
context that you do put in this context
in the book is John Mack. And this is
another person is you know just hyper
aware of you know what a hallucination
is uh what various uh neurosis are and
what the you know the way that they
portray themselves uh in the psyche are.
And this is a person who was completely
unable to accept that people's
paranormal experiences in in his case
UFO experiences
were anything but genuine in most cases.
And then what's really interesting about
him that I actually didn't know
admittedly is that I didn't know he
eventually kind of flips away completely
from the nuts and bolts explanation of
the UFO phenomenon and gets very
interested in psychedelics and shamanism
and and sigh and consciousness. Um,
and of course there's just just this
giant overlap in the phenomenology of
those experiences, UFO abduction
experiences and DMT as you explore in
the book.
>> Yeah, I mean M was very uh, you know, a
very important figure not just in the
alien abduction phenomenon uh, but also
in how we we we think about it. Um, he
was a huge problem for those who were
kind of wanted to dismiss the abduction
experience as as a hallucination because
Mac knows all about hallucinations. Mack
was the
>> the head of the Harvard school of
psychiatry. I mean, this guy was no
wasn't just some little league
psychiatrist working in some small
village or something. This guy was the
top dog basically. I remember I saw an
interview with um with Mac before he
died obviously stupid thing to say um
with [laughter] yeah
>> more impressive than it was after
>> it wasn't like a channeling I saw an
interview with Mac um and some the
interviewer said to him um he was
quoting Carl Sean because everyone likes
to bring in Carl Sean of course because
he's the epitome of rationality and
whatever he says is the absolute truth.
Um, and this guy said to to John Mack,
um, well, Carl Sean says that these
abductees, they're just hallucinating.
And Mac simply replied, what the
does he know about hallucinations?
U, which is
>> right. U, because that's that's true.
It's easy for people to just, oh, I'll
just pluck this word. Hallucinations.
I've heard that. Kind of understand
basically what they are. Well, Mac
really understood what hallucinations
were and what they looked like. um he'd
seen countless patients having
hallucinations. He knew what was a
hallucination and what was seemed to be
not a hallucination when people were
lying or when people um were dreaming or
whatever. Uh and this clearly didn't
look like that to him. Um so he slowly
and very gradually and very cautiously
began to take their ideas seriously.
They weren't insane. um they didn't
exhibit the symptoms of any serious
psychological abnormality. They were
perfectly rational, just very very
traumatized people who were having these
inexplicable experiences. Um and he
assumed at first, as you were saying,
that it was this nuts and bolts
phenomenon that these were beings that
were flying into the landing on the in
the garden or whatever and sneaking into
the bedroom and plucking them from their
beds. Um but then he realized that
something very very different. These
experiences as he called them seemed to
be entering some kind of alternate
state of consciousness or being induced
into some alternate state of
consciousness. And many of his uh
subjects described entering some other
kind of world that was kind of parallel
to or just behind or somehow within or
or just outside our world that had more
dimensions
um than the normal waking world and that
was somehow subsumed. Our normal waking
world was in some way subsumed by this
other world which was always there but
we couldn't see. Um and then you know
being taken on tours of strange crafts
by strange beings some of which one of
his subjects which I also quote in the
book uh which is in his first book
abduction describes these small beings
that bound lit bound around. Now that
phrase, if anyone's familiar with
Terrence McKenna will know about these
beings that bound, you know, from the
walls or whatever, right? They come
bounding in, right?
>> That's so McKenna. Um, and these people
were, this is long before I'm presum
presumably these people, this was in the
80s and stuff. Um, so
the the experience clearly had many
parallels with the kind of experience
people have when they smoke DMT in that
that they enter this highly
technological environment uh and are
greeted by um or experimented upon by
these incredibly intelligent nonhuman
um beings uh and then they're brought
safely back at the end of it. Um, so, so
M started to see and I think it was, you
know, started to see that this was what
he began to see as more like a a
spiritual phenomenon in some way or
certainly a metaphysical phenomenon and
that couldn't be explained in its
entirety in purely materialist terms.
>> And I think this was kind of cemented
when he met this guy
>> um called uh Bernardo. I think his name
is Pesoto.
Uh, I've just done the audio book, so I
I should have that pronunciation right.
But anyway, he was this shaman guy um in
in the Amazon. Um, I completely forget
which country, but anyway. Um,
>> yeah, I just I just earlier read the
name of the tribe and I
>> Yeah, [clears throat] I I'll leave that
one to you.
>> That's Yeah, that's a difficult one.
What was it called? What were they
called? Who are who are Oh, Pesoto.
Yeah, that was in the intelligence
chapter, right? There we go. Uruu ew
people.
There we go. Bernardo Pesoto. Yes. Of
the uh in northern Brazil. So, yeah, I'm
not going to read from the book, but
yeah, this Uru Iwaw people literally
means people from the stars. Um
>> Yeah. Right.
Um and and they believe that a long time
ago beings arrived in spaceships and
taught their people how to plant corn
and you know do these kind of things you
know very practical things. Um and
Pesoto's view of these beings was
decidedly non-physical.
Um he himself had an experience of
seeing one of these beings think across
a lake or something at night staring at
him and he was scared obviously as you
would be. Um and he asked them, you
know, where are you from? Um where did
you come from? Uh and they simply
replied, we came from nowhere. Uh which
to him meant they must be everywhere.
So, these beings that are both nowhere
and everywhere uh at the same time. And
to me, that sounds like some kind of
intelligence that doesn't exist
physically in a normal way. Um and and
so Max started to think that maybe this
alien abduction phenomenon was um indeed
some inter an interaction with some kind
of non-physical
uh intelligence that was both everywhere
and nowhere. Um and he he he spoke to
McKenna. He he was interviewed by David
J. Brown um who who asked him
specifically about this about the
connections between the DMT state and he
definitely saw the parallels um between
the kind of alter state of consciousness
that takes you to another world um under
the influence of DMT and this apparent
alter state of consciousness that takes
you what he what he behind what he
called the the theater screen of reality
and into this alternate world occupied
by these beings. Um, so yeah, I think
there's there's a lot we can learn from
the abduction phenomenon without having
to um assume that we're talking about
these physical wet-bodied beings, but
rather something else.
>> Yeah, man. the the phenomenology
harmonizes just so troublingly well that
for me, you know, as someone who's, you
know, taken large amounts of tryptoines
and is interested in the UFO topic, I've
never had an encounter with a with an
alien being, but in reading so many
different experiences, you know, reading
books by Valet, reading even your
chapter, it's like, man, how how do you
dismiss the fact that even the entities
that are encountered by people in these
states, both psychedelic and abducted,
are a lot of times described very
similarly, bounding small creatures. Um,
you know, of course, the mantids, the
reptilians. Uh Rick Straman told me the
first time he broke through on DMT when
Terrence McKenna gave it to him, he had
a vision of grays like like it was like
reality ripped open and there were gray
aliens on the other side of like this
rip in reality just kind of looking at
him and and I think he was saying like
>> now do you see
>> now? He said that's that's what they
were saying to him and they're just
looking at him with these like
glistening cosmic eyes and he's just
like I see something. I I don't know
what I'm supposed to see. But yeah, this
like and then, you know, digging deeper
into aside from like the surface level
imagery in these experiences, the fact
that it immediately snaps into this kind
of sigh communication that doesn't
require words. It's just like
transmission of thoughts and you just
know how to do it and you know how to
receive it and you seem to know how to
give it back and interact. It's it's
almost as if some something is just like
a veil is taking off taken off of a
faculty that we already have. And um I
I'll kick it over to you before I ramble
further because um but but I will just
add this in is uh the most recent piece
of content I'm working on right now is
from uh Robert Monroe's book Journeys
Out of the Body.
>> And there's this chapter in the book
that like turns very speculative and
very um existential.
And he posits that in this chapter that
there's something unique about the way
sentient life evolved on planet earth.
Like we have this side capacity just
like all these other intelligent
entities, but we it's like vestigial in
us or something or it's like we don't
know that we have it and we just we we
somehow
evolved away from it or something like
that. And and I think that that is a a
plausible
argument because it does seem like it
can just suddenly be snapped back on
with the right molecular massaging or or
meditation or who knows what other
methods.
So, so in terms of the first of all in
terms of the the kind of entities that
are encountered
um and the the the similarity that so
many people experience the same types of
beings you said the the small giggling
mischievous elflike beings that aren't
really elves um in the classical sense
as we would see them on a Christmas card
or something but have that jovial
quality um but clearly non nonhuman,
clearly nonan animal. Um, two, these
insectlike beings, i.e. insecttoid,
uh, which generally are highly
technological advanced and intelligent
and generally seem more senior, uh,
through to
>> reptilians and then beings that simply
defy description. Um, the
>> the most
common explanation that you hear now,
uh, is that these are archetypes. Um,
and in one of the chapters of the book,
um, the anatomy of a machine elf, I I
break down this idea, um, the idea that
archetypes are quintessentially human
structures. These are embedded inherited
patterns
um that come from our evolutionary past
that allow us to respond to and interact
with living creatures in the environment
uh in an instinctive way. Um so they
provide us with these very stereotype
patterns of uh ways of kind of detecting
certain types of humans in the
environment and certain types of animals
such as snakes uh but also all the
different types of humans as well. So
the way you respond to your mother is
different to to the way you respond to a
stranger or to a baby or to an elder
within the group with a lot of
experience and knowledge. What you might
call a wise old man. Um these are these
are not difficult to explain um
neurologically. Assuming we try and keep
our foundation within neuroscience uh
and evolutionary neurobiology then the
archetypes kind of fall out of the
evolution of humans. But they're not um
they're nothing more than these
inherited instinctive ways of responding
to certain types of humans and other
animals in the environment. They don't
provide imagery. Um, it's one of the
great misconceptions that the archetypes
are images. They're not images. The
archetype, even Young never said that
the archetypes were images and he often
denied that they were images as did many
of his contemporary commentators. Um,
the archetypes can give rise to
imageries generated by the cortex. But
these are only images that your brain
knows how to construct or has learned
how to construct. So if my mother
archetype is activated for example which
is my inherited way of responding to my
mother wanting to be close to my mother
um um being distressed in the absence of
my mother and the uh these are the
inherited patterns my way of responding
to my mother. uh if that archetype is
activated, these subcortical inherited
neural patterns of connectivity are
activated, then I will I might see an
image of my mother. Um because it's it
becomes intimately connected to the kind
of the world that my brain has learned
to construct. Uh but the the archetypes,
they're not an explanation for machine
elves. They're not even an explanation
for insecttoid beings, although we
probably do carry insect archetypes that
allow us to detect and respond to
insects in the environment. Um, they
don't provide the imagery. So the so the
the Youngian model now that we can
connect it because Young of course was
operating long before we had this
detailed understanding of the
neurobiology. Um, we can we can under we
can kind of explain um you
um youngian archetypes with a with a
completely neurological foundation
without having to um kind of give it
cart blanch give the collective
unconscious and the archetypes cart
blanch to explain anything. It's like
it's like it's the in the book I
describe the the collective unconscious
like a magician's hat from which you can
you can you can pull any and any any
type of otherwise inexplicable
experiential or psychological phenomena
you can say oh that's that's the
collective unconscious that those are
the archetypes. Um but when you actually
dig down and analyze it and deconstruct
exactly what the archetypes are you find
that they are very limited in what they
can explain. They can explain some types
of phenomena uh but they can't explain
in my opinion these highly super
intelligent high technologically
advanced nonhuman nonan animal um beings
that have no relationship to humanity at
all either now or any time in our
history. So the archetypes really can't
help us here. Um so so so it remains in
my opinion very much an open question of
why when you perturb your brain with
this simple molecule. Um you might be
able to explain certain types of imagery
you might even be able to explain um the
induction of a dreamlike state and even
the the the appearance of other humans
or other animals because that's what the
brain naturally tries to do is it it
likes to construct models of humans. It
likes to construct models of animals as
it does in the dream state. People dream
about dogs and cats. If they live in the
west, uh if they live in the Amazon,
they dream about snakes. U they dream
about jaguars and they dream about fish
and piranhas and things, right? Your
dreams, they the beings you meet in your
dreams, the the beings your brain wants
to construct tend to be the kind of
beings your brain interacts with during
normal waking life. So why when you
perturb it with DMT does it suddenly con
start you know almost you know just
suddenly start constructing these
entirely nonhuman nonan animal beings
that don't communicate um with the
normal mode of communication that humans
have had for a long time which is
speech. Why does it suddenly start
constructing beings that um only
communicate via telepathy? As you said
this is an entirely nonhuman apparently
way of communication. So why would it
default to that rather than defaulting
to simply speaking as you do in dreams?
You you speak to people um in dreams
generally. Um so so yeah, I do think
there's there's there's certainly
something extremely strange going on.
Something that's not easy uh to explain
um going on. Uh I was speaking to
um what's his name? Uh Andre Emielen.
You know him? the Qualia Research
Institute
>> Andreas. So,
>> yeah. So, he's he's he he did a a kind
of very popular video called the
hyperbolic geometry of the DMT space a
few years ago. He's very interested in
the mathematics
um of of the DMT space and the kind of
the geometric structure and the
topological structure and whether we
might try to understand what that means
um about the nature of the experience.
But anyway, he was showing me this this
cool animation that he'd done which
which visualizes on a 2D screen uh the
rotation of a fourdimensional object. So
it contains all the points of a
fourdimensional object but projected
onto a 2D screen. So when you look at it
it's completely inexplicable, you know,
or or it's it doesn't make any sense. It
just looks like dots moving around. You
can your brain can't make sense. This is
a 4D object. But apparently when you
smoke DMT and you you look at this
object, um your brain suddenly
recognizes that this is a 4D object and
you start seeing it in 4D. I don't know
what that experience would be like. I've
not tried that experiment, but I'd like
to. Um but he said that it feels like uh
when you when it snaps into this 4D
object, it feels like um do you remember
that Ram Das quote where he says that
dying is like taking off a tight shoe.
Um it's like you're you're kind of
relaxing into the 4D space. It's like ah
um I'm back and it feels he said uh it
feels very perfectly natural uh as if
our in normal waking life we're kind of
folded compressed into this
three-dimensional
form this threedimensional structure our
world is compressed into this
three-dimensional form with DMT it kind
of relaxes out
and and there is a sense certainly of
familiarity and of of returning home as
if DMT feels like a homecoming. Even
though it's bizarre um beyond
description, it's still there's this
sense of ah I'm back. Uh and and they
often welcome you back. There's often a
party and there's bells ringing and
lights flashing and stuff. Um but yeah,
I think going back to your telepathy
point there, it is does feel overall
like the DMT space is intimately
connected to us in a way that we simply
don't understand.
So what do you think in the if you think
that there's something fundamentally
different about dreaming some and that's
more explainable more reducible to the
brain what are your thoughts on whatever
is going on with abductees who are on
the natch do you think that it could be
an indogenous DMT thing do you think it
could still be uh some external agency
interacting with the brain in a way that
makes it feel as though Um,
I mean, just that makes it feel alien, I
guess. And, and I, you know, when you
were talking about archetypes, too, I
have so many thoughts because I think
Jung
>> cloaked his true feelings to a degree to
seem more academically square for a lot
of his career. And then when you read
the red book and you get into his later
writings, it's clear he was like
extremely esoteric, very gnostic,
adjacent. Um, you know, somewhere in his
collected works, he says the archetypes
are the Platonic idols. Like they are
the Platonic forms. like they're they're
not just reducible to uh like he would
often say in other writings, you know,
like like um instincts and evolutionary
images and whatever that are uh that
have like stained the psyche from time
immemorial or or whatever. like he I
think on some level he was transposing
that idea into a realm that he could
feel okay about in the daylight, but
deeper down he was more of like an
idealist
gnostic platonic alchemical hermetic uh
thinker and and I think that that sort
of comes out later. But but um but
anyway, I I bring that up because I
would imagine that you've considered
this idea that part of the reason the
appearance of the phenomenon is so
mercurial a lot of the time and can
appear in these ways is because it kind
of uses archetypes as masks and it sort
you know in the way that you know it
presents itself can change. I mean this
is what people like Valet think
obviously um obvious to you and I maybe
not obvious to everyone but but yeah
before I continue
>> the the first question about people on
the Nash who experience abduction-like
experiences do you think there could be
a role DMT has there?
Yeah, I think I mean it's possible that
they are using I mean who knows, right?
I mean I'm obviously I'm speculating
wildly here, but I have speculated
before that perhaps they they they might
be using
potentially DMT wheing
with our neural machinery. And I think
that's what's happening here uh both
with DMT and with the abduction
phenomena is that they're they're
accessing our neural machinery in some
way uh and inducing our brain um to
construct these models because I think
when you enter the DMT state, the world
you're experiencing is still one that's
being represented in the brain, I think,
but I just don't think it's being
generated spontaneously.
Um and in the book I describe this as as
like a directed world. So it's not like
you're sense it's not like a sensed
world in that you're steing in in the
same way that you you sense the
environment and that you're you're kind
of receiving information through the
sensory organs and using that to inform
and modulate and constrain and test this
model being constructed by your brain.
uh nor is it a dreamt world that's
that's completely disconnected from
sensory inputs from external sensory
inputs uh but more of a directed world
uh in that the inputs the information is
being directed into the brain some
intelligent agent um the nature and
origin of which I don't know um is has
is somehow gaining access and DMT is
somehow allowing that intelligence to
gain access to your neural machinery and
basically to to to seize control to
commandeer your brain's worldbuilding
apparatus to construct uh these visions.
You know, that's how they communicate
with us. I don't think that
>> that when you see a an insecttoid alien,
it actually has an insecttoid form. Um
because it doesn't really make any sense
to me that a discarnate being of some
sort, assuming that's what it is. I
don't think that these insecttoids are
on another planet and it's simply a
communication technology in that way. I
don't think you're kind of like a portal
uh to another planet or something. I
think what's happening uh is that they
are taking on a form or as you say a
mask. They are giving themselves a form
so that you can recognize them as a
being. Um and and sometimes they're
quite explicit about this. Um, in one of
I was one of the trip reports I actually
quote in the book I think um these
this girl or guy I forget which but
anyway was smoke DMT and there were
these mantis like beings over him uh and
he said you know are you really mantises
u and they said no no we're not actually
mantises but we appear like this right
this is just a form we use and going
back to Bernardo Pesoto uh he also said
I mean he's coming from a very different
worldview um that the these these beings
use form
um because they that's what we
understand. We are a creature of visual
form. Um that's how we make sense of the
world. Um so we have for us to
understand their presence and note their
presence that these intelligences are
there they use these uh use these forms
and even John Lily uh when he was taking
large doses of ketamine um and entering
this what he called the extraterrestrial
reality um they these intelligence
within within that space also made it
clear to him in no uncertain terms that
his he was constructing the space uh and
he was con constructing their form um so
that they could interact with each
other. Um, so yeah, that's that's what I
think links all of these things
together. Uh, is is you've got this
thing this machine in our heads, this
worldbuing machine. Uh, and sometimes it
can be hacked under certain
circumstances. Whether that I don't
think that always requires DMT at all.
Uh but I think DMT is the most efficient
that tool that we that we have to
instantaneously generate this very fluid
and malleable
um and perturbable um neural states um
that allows these intelligences to gain
access and take control and use our
brain to construct their world. And just
[clears throat] before I finish, I will
just mention um there was a paper
published by the Imperial College
research team just in the
just the last few weeks that actually
demonstrated this um neurological state
in DMT. M
>> so you you have I forget what the title
of the paper was but it basically showed
that in the presence of DMT the brain
enters this state where it becomes uh
much more sensitive to external
perturbations. Um so you stimulate the
brain in some way whether it's through
visual sensory information or other
means or electrically or whatever and it
reacts it responds much more strongly.
the neural activity is can be
manipulated much more easily in the DMT
state. Um, and so this is precisely the
kind of state that I was proposing
existed in the presence of DMT which is
in the book but unfortunately the paper
wasn't in the book because it came out a
couple of months too late. But it's nice
to see that these,
you know, what to many would seem like
wild speculations on my part seem to be
borne out to some extent at least by the
neuroscience which is showing uh this
kind of highly sensitive malleable state
of the brain that these beings can
access whether using DMT or through
other means maybe even during the dream
state uh when the brain isn't being
polluted so to speak by sensory inputs.
or in the deep ketamine state in a
sensory sensory isolation chamber or
many other states potentially um can
allow these intelligences these
intelligent agents to gain access.
It's fascinating. It's fascinating that
this is about the time in the podcast
that all the uh evangelical Christians
start writing demons in the in the in
the uh comments. two two things I I want
to linger on Lily because there's a
there's an interesting connection to him
and Valet I never thought about until
just now but two before we go away from
the neuroscience one of the things that
I've struggled to understand as a lay
person that I should ask you
is that there seems to be like from from
the articles I've read the brain under
the influence of tryptoamines seems to
go into this more uh entropic state
where a lot of the usual network
clusters are not firing like they
normally do. And that's led a lot of
people to, you know, [snorts]
>> um, make the assumption that, look,
>> maybe, you know, it's it's clearly if
the brain was hallucinating, you'd be
seeing the brain going crazy with all
kinds of activity. That's not what we
see. Um so so first is DMT the same in
that respect as other tryptoines or is
is what happens in the brain on a DMT
trip different?
>> Um it's similar in some ways um but then
other ways it's very different. I mean
experientially clearly it's very
different. Uh so how do we reconcile the
differences? So yeah, so when
kind of in in broad terms when a
psychedelic when a tryptoine psychedelic
or other types of psychedelics enter the
brain, they stimulate certain
populations of neurons by binding to
these particular receptors. They make
the neurons more
um more sensitive, more excitable. They
allow information to start flowing
between um certain areas of the brain um
much more easily. So overall the brain
enters this as I said this more fluid
and dynamic state. When you you observe
that on a in an MRI machine for example
you will see this highly structured and
highly ordered patterns of neural
activity start to break down uh and the
whole the neural activity becomes more
fluid and dynamic and effectively more
apparently random. And this is where the
whole entropic brain Robin Kart Harris's
entropic brain hypothesis came from. Um
um and that kind of makes sense and it's
in uh to some extent explains many of
the effects of psychedelics. This
loosening up of the world. The world
itself that you experience often becomes
more fluid and dynamic, less stable,
less predictable. uh objects seem to
lose their identity or morph, you know,
the brain is basically losing control
over its world model. Um and so you go
from this state of order to this state
of disorder. The brain is nudged towards
um the chaotic realm. Um so Kart Harris
describes it as a nudge towards
criticality. So you have this the brain
is always trying to strike this balance
between order and disorder what we call
the edge of chaos which is where
complexity arises um and too ordered um
and information just simply can't be
processed right the the world becomes
perfectly stable and sort of
crystallized and that's not useful if
you if you want a world that's kind of
keeping up with all of the dynamic
processes unfolding in the environment
you want a world that is can respond
um to and rapidly change in response to
uh sensory inputs. So it can't be too
stable. At the same time, if it's too
unstable, then the world just becomes
completely fluid and dynamic and doesn't
function as a model of the environment
anymore. So you need to strike that
balance. Uh and the brain does that very
well by tuning the strength of the
connections between its neurons as well
as tuning the excitability of individual
neurons. What psychedelics do is they
nudge the brain uh towards the chaotic
realm but not into the chaotic realm
towards this point of criticality as
it's called uh where you lose order and
be and and kind of are tossed into the
the chaotic realm. Uh and so you go from
order to disorder. Now that explains
that shift towards disorder explains
many of the effects of psychedelics.
Um, as I said, you know, this this more
disordered world, it seems to match the
experience of people under the influence
of psychedelics. But with DMT, something
stranger seems to happen. It seems to
transcend that. You go from order to
disorder, but then you collapse into a
an entirely new order. Um, which is this
alternate world model. The DMT world is
not disordered. It's not entropic. Uh it
is highly ordered. Uh it is highly
coherent. It has it's ma has massive
structural dynamic and narrative
complexity that is
you know bewildering and and baffling
and confounding all at the same time and
all inspiring. Um so that that I think
is something that is very difficult to
explain. Um it's like the brain has
found a new channel. Other psychedelics
at normal doses tend to kind of nudge
the dial out of tune perhaps. But with
DMT, it's like finding a new channel on
the TV set, but then discovering that
the the antenna has been disconnected.
You're like, where did this channel come
from? Why why does the brain know how to
construct these entirely nonhuman alien
realities filled with these intelligent
beings that have no relationship to the
normal waking world that you've left
behind. Um, so I think but there are
going back to the neuroscience, the
neuro neuro imaging, there are some very
tantalizing
um results, you know, not just this most
recent study that I just described, uh,
but in a study a few years ago, they
actually measured the the flow of um
electrical activity through the brain.
um the flow of these these waves. You
have these when sensory information
through the eyes enters the brain, it
enters the brain through the back uh and
you have these uh what are called
forward flowing waves uh which represent
in predictive processing terms we don't
have to go into they represent um these
error signals flowing up the cortex from
the lowest levels at the back of the
brain towards the higher levels and then
you you experience you can also measure
waves flowing in the opposite direction.
Um so there's this balance of waves when
you have your eyes open you it um the
signal is dominated by waves flowing
from the back to the front. So this this
this flow of sensory information into
the brain basically. Um and way back in
I say way back but well kind of way back
now in the 90s um um Jordi Reeba um and
yeah Jordi Reeber who sadly passed away
but he was one of the most prominent
IASA researchers um and he noticed that
when he um put a an EEG headset on his
um subjects and gave them Iawaska uh
even when their eyes were closed uh He
noticed there was a stronger influence
on on of the electrodes of the back of
the brain over those at the front.
Again, suggesting that information was
flowing even though they had their eyes
closed, information was flowing from the
lower sensory cortices,
you know, in the normal way as if they
were viewing some other world. uh and
the Imperial College team quite a few
years later did much more sophisticated
EG experiments and actually showed that
the closed eye DMT state was effectively
indistinguishable from the normal open
eyes waking state. um
>> suggesting you know they could see the
information flowing uh from the back of
the brain right and the question is
>> what why first of all why why is the
brain process apparently processing
sensory information even though the eyes
are closed um uh of course
>> in Reeba's paper and others they say oh
this is
>> noise you know this is spontaneous
activity emerging from the lower sensory
cortices
uh My response to that is wait a minute
you know the this isn't this clearly
isn't spontaneous activity of the lower
sensory cortices we can use that to
explain you know form constants going
back to Hinrich Clover you know cobwebs
or geometric patterns you know that that
that kind of thing can be explained by
spontaneous activity of the lower
sensory cortices but not
complex alien realities filled with with
strange beings.
So where's So that doesn't make any
sense. Cortical noise just seemed like a
silly explanation, but of course that's
the best they had.
>> They couldn't say or maybe this is this
is sensory information from some some
intelligent alien intelligence, you
know, something like that. So but that
to me that that seems again like more
evidence that we're not seeing dreams,
we're not seeing hallucinations, we're
not seeing memories. you know that
sometimes happens when the brain um when
the brain the cortex becomes more fluid
and dynamic. It actually starts to lose
control over information flowing from
the temporal loes. Um and so you get the
flood of memories. you get these p these
um kind of reliving of of of
uh of past experiences that people often
have been describing for decades under
high doses of LSD for example by people
who relive past experiences
going back to their childhood for
example you know that can be explained
it's simply the the brain is losing
control of the flow of information from
these um hippocample temporal lobe
memory systems but that doesn't explain
it either that certainly doesn't explain
the DMT state. So again, the question is
where is this information coming from to
construct these entirely alien worlds?
Yeah. Well, I mean it's it's impossible
for me as someone who's, you know, uh
deeply fascinated with Platonism and
really mystical traditions the world
over. Nearly all of them talk about a
kind of like soul sense or eye of the
soul. And you know, I I don't even want
to say one of the few times I'll say
third eye in a non- tongue-in-cheek way.
Anybody who's
>> the name of your podcast,
>> I know, [laughter] man. I I have a love
I have a major hate with it. Um you know
you know I had never really had any kind
of
majorly impactful
literal third eye experience until I I
went to Peru and did Iaska. And on my
most impactful night of that of those
five sessions, I kept literally for the
only the only time in my life this has
ever happened. I mean, I was having
insanely vivid minds visuals. And this
was the only night that I wasn't in some
kind of like lower astral hell realm of
just, you know, deep uh torment. It like
every night was really really
challenging. But then the third night I
broke through to this much more luminous
intelligent um
and presence of some something that felt
like it was giving me like the teaching,
you know, kind of guru presence. And
during that period of time, Andrew, the
only time in my life this has ever
happened, I kept feeling like there was
something on my head, like right in the
center of my head. And I kept brushing
it away like what is on my head?
>> And then I started laughing to myself.
I'm like, is this the third eye?
like is this what this is? And you in
you saying that you know that this study
this neuroiming study on Iawaska
has very sightelike behaviors in the
brain like that that's very interesting
and I mean I would assume that this is
the same with a significant dose of any
tryptoine or do we not know that or
would you assume that based on the
similarities because I mean when you're
having these vivid mind's eye inner eye
other eye experiences is it is kind of
like you're seeing stuff but it's also
different. It's it's the phenomenology
is like the closest thing you can say is
I saw it but it's also not exactly like
seeing it with your physical eyes.
>> Yeah. I think firstly I think with other
tryptoines I don't think we know um I
don't think experiments have been done
that this particular
looking at these traveling waves that's
been done with DMT. I'd like to see it
being done with other dippines. I'd
expect you would I'd hope that you don't
see it. That would be really cool.
>> Oh, really?
>> Did Well, it would I mean because that
that would like there would be like
incontrovertible evidence that DMT was
doing something very different um if you
didn't see this flow of activity from
the lower sensory cortices under you
know psilocybin for example at a normal
dose or LSD. uh but I expect you might
um because I do expect that you do get
spontaneous activity in in the lower
sensory cortices and we know as I said
mentioned Hinrich Clover who developed
these form constants back in the the
middle of the well the early 20th
century now um this was all done with
measculine um we know that when you
stimulate the cortex or when you release
the lower sensory cortices that you do
get these spontaneous patterns emerging
and So, I expect you'd see some kind of
flow of information from the back. Uh,
but whether it's much stronger with DMT.
Um, I don't know. Um, but clearly that
these this isn't just um form constants.
Um, but yes, I it clearly is um like
seeing with your eyes shut. You you're
observing. You know, it's often
described with DMT that it's it's it's
not like a drug. It's more like an
observation. It feels more like a
technology.
>> Um that you've simply the your reality
channel has been switched to another
channel. Um and you're observing this
world that's been going on before you
arrived and will continue to do so long
after you've left and may well have been
going on for trillions of years before
our universe popped into existence.
Right.
