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We have to rethink religion and we have to rethink aliens. And I didn't believe in UFOs. Once I started to look at the data, I started to meet people who were part of a government program that we now
Religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka discusses links between ancient religious experiences, technology, and modern UFO encounters with host Mayim Bialik and co-hosts.
Key Takeaways
- Religion and UFO/alien narratives may share structural similarities worth studying academically.
- New technological infrastructures change how people interpret reality, a pattern traceable to Socrates' critique of writing.
- Historical religious texts contain descriptions that some interpret as early accounts of non-human encounters.
- The speakers frame the topic as an open question rather than established fact, emphasizing speculation.
What the video covers
- Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, a religious studies professor, argues that religion and UFO/alien experiences should be examined together.
- She explains that she came to take UFO reports seriously after meeting people connected to a government program and studying data.
- Pasulka references Vatican and Catholic archives, including reports of souls from purgatory, drawing parallels to modern UFO descriptions.
- The discussion covers how new technologies (from writing in Plato's time to today's AI) shift how humans interpret reality.
- Pasulka presents religion's function in culture, including prayer practices and the shared framework that shapes belief and behavior.
- The hosts raise questions about whether UFO sightings increase at historically significant times and whether ancient texts foreshadowed current events.
- Topics include prophets, oracles, and mystical experiences, framed as possible encounters with non-local consciousness.
- The conversation touches on split-brain theory and neuroscience as possible explanations for perception of non-ordinary experiences.
- The episode closes with speculation about a possible religious revival driven by science and an existential tension between technological progress and spiritual meaning.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Guest Welcome
- 06:30Technology, Interpretation, and Socrates' Critique of Writing
- 19:00Purpose of Religion and Academic Perspective
- 33:20UFOs as Modern Religiosity
- 53:00Catholic Archives and Purgatory Reports
- 77:30Prophets, Oracles, and Mystical Experience
- 96:40Split-Brain Theory and Perception
- 115:00Religious Revival, Science, and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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know about. But guess what? There's more. I've been to the Vatican archives. I started to see the similarities.
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Dr. Diana Walsh Pulka, professor of religious studies, examines the connection between ancient religions and modern-day UFO experiences [music] where thousands of years of religious texts actually describing alien encounters.
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I went to Catholic archives and I looked at reports of souls from purgatory. This got me interested in looking at Bailey abduction and modern-day reports of UFOs. people who are now experiencing things that might sound a lot like the
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descriptions [music] in many of these religious texts. There is something within the human body that responds to the practice of prayer.
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It actually changes [music] the brain within the Catholic tradition, a very sophisticated history and theology of non-human intelligence.
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Is the Vatican withholding information? There are probably a lot of things out there that we're going to be surprised by.
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[music] Hi, I'm Alik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're digging into the world of religious studies and how [clears throat] it connects to the modern-day experience of UFOs and nonhuman intelligence. And before you
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think another episode about aliens, what we're going to be broadening the conversation to include the entire course of history as we know it. We're going to ask the question why UFO sightings seem to increase at historically significant times, as well
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as the possibility that ancient religious texts prophesized current world events. We're going to look for those hints through the history of religious texts. Understanding that angel sightings might actually have been an experience people are having with non-local consciousness.
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What are the things that we allowed other people to tell us was the framework for reality? And have there always been hints that there is something outside of the plane of consciousness that we think we're operating in that might indicate that
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alien sightings, UFOs, and even government disclosure might be part of a much larger plan. One of my favorite parts of this episode includes a conversation about technology. Is it a new religion? [clears throat] Is it the Antichrist? and how can we fit in our
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understanding of advances in technology with our advances in understanding experiences that we may not yet be able to explain. Our guest is Dr. Diana Walsh Pulka. She's a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She's the author
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of so many books um but her most recent is the others UFOs AI and the secret forces guiding human destiny. Um we have so much to talk to Dr. for Pulka about and this is a conversation that really
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hits on our own personal theory of everything. It's a pleasure to welcome to the breakdown Dr. Diana Wash Pulka.
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Break [singing] it down. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. You're one of those people who has information in so many arenas that intersect into so many things that that Jonathan and I are curious about and
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that our audience is curious about. Um I I I wonder if you can sort of give us a framework for I guess what you believe is your unique ability to communicate regarding in particular things that are outside of what we would consider
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reality or the reality we know. Yeah, sure. Uh so I've been studying religion for a long time. I decided I wanted to study religion when I was uh 11 and so I did actually. uh grew up and uh have a PhD in religious studies where
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we don't by the way advocate for uh particular religion. We study religion academically. So I just want to be clear about that. Um so I say that if I were to bring a unique perspective to um media and uh technology which is what
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I've focused on in my work and the history of Catholicism. I would say that I look at the ways in which the things that we see inform our belief and behaviors about religion. So the things that we see, let
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me give you an example. So we are now our infrastructure. So how does the infrastructure and the technological infrastructure impact what we believe and what we how we see even? Um so that takes us to back even to Plato and
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Socrates. Uh Socrates gave the first that we know of the first actual criticism of externalizing memory and that was because writing was a new technology uh for him. This is how I describe it to my students. So Socrates
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was living in um you know ancient Greece in Athens and during the time of his life the new technology of writing was taking off. So in a sense it was like Silicon Valley in the 1990s. There was like you know all these young guys were
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like really excited about writing and what it could do for them and how they can monetize it. So they were really interested in monetizing it. And um Socrates said whoa whoa this might be bad. bad things might happen to us and
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the kinds of things that he described are interesting because they're happening today. So when we look at technology AI and these kinds of things and we see the trials that are happening the AI trials uh we see that there's a
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lot of damage that comes about when the infrastructure shifts to a new technological substrate and so writing was definitely that and that was ancient uh human beings changed Socrates predicted how they would change uh they would externalize he didn't use the word
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externalization of memory but if you read um Fedrris is where he talks about this this dialogue. In fact, his students started to instead of writing like we write like books and treatises and stuff, they wrote in dialogue in
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order to preserve an oral tradition. And so you can even see that there. They didn't they didn't want to, you know, have their brains uh and their their bodies completely changed by uh by writing. I look at the history of
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technologies and I see the kinds of uh shifts in the way we see reality. Not just how reality shifts. Maybe reality never shifts but the way we interpret reality shifts through new technological infrastructures. And I've been doing this for a long time. So I grew up in
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California uh not far from Silicon Valley. And uh my group of my cohort was in California was one one of the first to adopt computers. So I had a computer in the eighth grade. We were being beta tested, right? So they were like, I
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wonder how this new technology will impact kids. So we were there. Um so yeah, so that's my unique perspective I would say.
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I I wonder if you can um give us a little bit of a framework just from you know an academic perspective of what the purpose of religion is in the same way that we might ask what's the purpose of
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science fiction. What is the purpose of the stories that we tell the framework that we give to it and how does truth come into that equation?
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Okay, that's a great question. So the functions of religion. So again when I have you know students who are freshman they come in they take one of my intro classes and they say you know they I ask them what do you think religion does?
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You know what's religion about like why does it seem that every culture has a form of religion? Let's talk about that.
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So I give them the whole class to come up with you know their ideas about what religion is and I write a lot of those things down on the board. what recurs if you look at different religions let's
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take Buddhism Hinduism um Islam uh Christianity what recurs across these religions and one of the things they write down is there's a uh there's the discipline of prayer there's a type of prayer in Islam it's like five times a
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day um so you know in Judaism there's a whole day of prayer called Shabbat or Sabbath Jews just pray three times a day. The Sabbath is a day of rest which involves prayer, but we actually have prayer services, you know, also every
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day in Judaism. But yeah, I understand what you're saying. There's different sort of manifestations of the way that prayer makes its way into the function of religion.
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Yeah, but if it's a universal pattern within religion, why are people doing it? So, one of the things that we show is that it helps people. By the way, we can only say this today because we have science and so certain scientists are
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looking at brain activity uh that happens when people are either meditating or praying and it appears that there are certain portions of the brain that light up when um when people pray or meditate. So we can say and it
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actually changes the brain. So there is something within the human body that responds to the practice of prayer. So I think that religion has um evolved and we haven't gotten rid of it um for a lot of different reasons. One of which to
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keep this practice of prayer because it's very important and my work looks at now at why that's important. Um, and so that's one of the functions of of religion.
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When we think about the the thousands of years, let's say that we have like the Judeo-Christian text and that sort of thing, the notion is here's the answer to explain all of your questions, right? Here's the here's a source of comfort.
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I think that a lot of people assume that about religion. So we have a lot of assumptions about religion that it answers our questions and this and you know this um you know it gives us comfort but it doesn't. So if you go
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back into the actual biblical text say take the book of Job um that's a book that talks about suffering. Okay, so Job is a good guy. He's like perfect, right?
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And but yet he suffers horribly. And so his friends come around and they say, "Well, you must have offended God in some way." And so they go through, but no, he hasn't. So the question remains, why do good people suffer? Which by the
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way, you can see this in is a question in almost every uh major religious tradition like uh traditional religion.
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All right. So the question then persists in the book of Job until a young man Eli who comes along and he basically says who are you guys to question God like we don't know why you suffer God knows and
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we cannot know because whatever God is is incomprehensible to us and then in order to um restate that God shows up at the end of the book and restates yes it is a truth that you guys weren't here in
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the beginning of the world. Of course, I'm paraphrasing. Um, and you know, you can't know what I do or why I do it. So, in many religious traditions, once you actually lose your assumptions about them and go back into and when I'm
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saying lose your assumptions about them, we're talking about people like students who have practiced religion their whole lives. So, they those assumptions are not easily um dismissed. So, even if you happen to be a practicing Jew, um, or a
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practicing Christian, when we go back and we look at the text, the actual biblical text with fresh eyes, we begin to see that, you know, those kinds of things, we they're destabilized. Our assumptions are destabilized, which is good.
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[music] when we think about why people believe the things that they believe and you know when we think about let's say um you know any any ancient cultures or or or groups of people when we think back to Mesopotamia or we think about you
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know people kind of wandering about in a world trying to understand how we got here uh you know what we're here for why was the world created you know those kinds of questions tend to be encapsulated by a variety of traditions
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that are kind of trying to explain, you know, the reality that we're living in.
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But I think what we'd love for you to talk about is so many religious texts also indicate that there's more than just what we see. There's a different interpretation of this world that we were placed into. And I wonder if you
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can talk about from an, you know, kind of a historical perspective, what does it mean when we look into texts, right, that have hints into the possibility that there's other things uh besides what we just, you know, kind of can can
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see and touch and smell and and think about. Yes. So, religions are not materialist.
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They're not reductive and they don't, you know, they don't assume that we live in a world that uh everything is is open to us and we can, you know, like a scientist would assume, right? Um and that's okay. Uh a lot of scientists are
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religious. Religion functions in a way that allows us to know that there are things other than science can tell us, like things that are outside of the purview of science. And that's that's true. religion does function that way.
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That's one of its main functions in my opinion. Here's an anecdote to you know support what I just said. So one of the things that I found I do what's called field research which is ethnography.
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Let's talk about UFOs. My last three books are about that topic. So in the beginning um with the book American Cosmic I started to write that in 2012 and I didn't believe in UFOs and once I started to to look at the data uh you
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know about UFOs I started to meet people who studied UFOs and were scientists and were part of a government program that we now know about. Uh but back then we didn't know about it. Now this this blew my mind, right? So here I am studying
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religion and I think um you know you can't you know nothing can surprise me like in religion you see all kinds of things you know a man walking on water you know miracles you know things like this so I can't be surprised I was I was
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surprised because our US government was basically they had a program that was had been around for a long time and I was meeting the people who were members of the program and they were they believed in UFOs uh they studied UFOs
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and they had material, you know, that they showed me. I went to New Mexico with Dr. Gary Nolan. Um, we went together. I invited him to go with me.
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Jeff Krile wouldn't go with me, by the way. I invited him to go. We were blindfolded, by the way, because we went to a a crash retrieval space. Alleged. I recognized that, okay, the u the belief in UFO is a rising belief. And the
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reason is is because now we have science that tells us a lot of things maybe things that um could you know tell us religion doesn't have all the answers but here we have a new form of religion uh with a new kind of technology right
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so digital technology and so I started to see the belief in UFOs as a as a religiosity a new type of religion so you know it served the function of explaining, you know, what what we're dealing with. And for them, it was it's
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a lot more complicated than than it appears to be because the people who do look into UFOs like Dr. Gary Nolan or the person that we went with that was part of this program. Um, you know, they have various beliefs about life because
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of what they study and the obviously the cosmos like you know what's out there.
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Well, obviously now you know something that they're that may not be extraterrestrial but is definitely not human.
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Let's explore a little bit more something that is not extraterrestrial but not human. What were the what can you say about the government programs and what you experienced in New Mexico?
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I was doing ethnography which means that you meet people who believe these things and then I became part I was recruited in a sense into the group that studied this topic and the reason I was recruited was because by the way this is
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the same group that gary Nolan had talked to him as well um was because I had a whole database of historical accounts of um aerial phenomena that had similar patterns. You could say that the patterns matched with modern-day reports
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of UFOs. So, I was investigating cult communities of people who believe in UFOs. I was able to meet people who were involved in a government program who studied UFOs. And so, yeah. So, I was invited out there. They invited me, by
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the way, because and by the way, it's in my book, American Cosmic. Tyler is the person. Uh James was Dr. Gary Nolan. I didn't uh use their names. They didn't want their names known. Since that time, Gary Nolan has said, "Yes, that's me in
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Diana's book." So, um, so yeah. So, I was invited to go to New Mexico to an alleged crash site. I finally went. I put it off for a couple years, by the way, because it was weird. And I
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thought, do I really want to go there? Um, so I asked my colleague who was in religious studies to go with me and he said,"What?" He said, "That's out of my comfort zone." So I asked Dr. Gary Nolan
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and he wanted to go like today. And so I learned more about Tyler and what he did and his position and I learned that the government was studying UFOs. It was shocking to me to tell you the truth. I
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didn't know this. Um, and but I still didn't believe in UFOs. So it was a couple years later that um you know that this this belief and evidence for it started to sink in and I was like okay
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I believe in this now but I believe in it in a different way and I'm not advocating belief so I'm still a a religious studies professor. I am not going to say everyone believe in UFOs.
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uh the government in my opinion doesn't know what they are and uh the reason they came to me was to try to get more data about what they are and so uh we have people now in Congress representatives who are saying they
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believe they're interdimensional um maybe uh I don't know but I can say that there are definitely pattern matches between what we would call in the past uh things associated with aerial phenomena and things today. So some people like there's Dr. Latsky who has
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studied UFOs and is in the government and was part of one of these programs.
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He was the head of a UFO government program and he's talked about things associated with UFO events that appear to be he calls them paranormal. So they they appear definitely to be supernatural and so forth which then has
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crossover with these kinds of events when you see them in religious studies and the history the historical record.
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Can you give us an example of interdimensional or non-physical beings that are interacting with consciousness? Like what does that mean?
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And I know that you know it's not your job to explain atomic structure or you know fields of consciousness but what what do you think that means? And I guess what how does it relate to what you know from let's say you know other
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religious texts is the connection that there are you know references in religious texts to things that are similar or do these things not intersect?
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There are things in religious texts that intersect. So when you do look at the history of angel contact events, let's call them, in the history of Judaism and Christianity, these are the religions I know best. What you see is you see that
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they do not look like Renaissance paintings of angels. Okay? So they don't look like the people who are have European features and have wings and flowing robes and so forth. Sometimes they look like people in two instances in the Bible, but but for the most part
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they look different in which sometimes they're described as balls of light. Sometimes they are just described as light. Uh so take someone like Jon of Varc. Okay, so most people know who Jon of Arc is. She's a saint in the
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Christian tradition and when she was 15 uh she was in her father's garden and she had an experience where a ball of light showed up. She didn't know what it was and it talked to her. So a lot of
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people have experiences in modern-day UFO uh experiences. Uh they do have experiences that are just like this.
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Okay. So there are other types of things like aerial phenomena like in the Catholic tradition I wrote a book uh about the doctrine of purgatory and so I went through archives of the Catholic Church and I found a lot of archive
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records that described beings from purgatory souls from purgatory and how Catholics would then try to pray that they go back into purgatory. Oftentimes though, cath things happen to Catholics that they they couldn't understand. And so these are I I wrote these down
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because these were outside of the framework of their beliefs. So they would experience things like flying houses. They would call them flying houses or balls of light that were flying. Um and they would then think of these as in different ways basically. So
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that happens today. So people look up now they see of course are they drones are they planes what are these things but a lot of times they don't know what they are but when people have experiences say in the 1960s of
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UFOs uh they know they think it was a big shiny ball of light it looked like it was all on fire often there are little beings associated with these crafts sometimes there aren't often there are and you can see this in the Catholic
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historical record too If you look at another saint, in fact, this is a doctor of the church, Teresa Avila. So, she also had an experience that confused her at first. She saw a being that was about 3 feet tall and she describes it this
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way. And we know this because we have her autobiography and she discussed it as being real, not imaginary. A lot of the interaction of these beings with these people that have these experiences appears in their minds. So they have what would I think
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would be like telepathic communication with them. They don't see their mouths move, but they hear what they have to say in their minds. So again, you see this also with modern-day reports of UFOs. You see this in the Catholic
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historical record. If I'm going to connect these dots, right, and this is very compelling to me, one of the things that you have access to as a professor of religious studies, right, and as an expert in these sort of texts is you
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have the ability to take information that we might call sightings of experiences that people have had over thousands of years and see what the similarities are to people who are now experiencing things that if we were living thousands of years ago might
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sound a lot like the descriptions in many of these religious texts. Is that correct?
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Yes, that's absolutely correct. It's so fascinating because, you know, for so many of us, the foundations, even if we're not religious people, the foundations of our culture and the storytelling, you know, there's so many aspects of revelation, of of miracles,
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right, of of all of these things that we really want to put in the past, right?
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That was for those crazy primitive religious people. They didn't know anything about the modern world and oh they thought that God created lightning but we actually know what lightning is right or we know why earthquakes happen.
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So you have people with a set of explanations for something that what you're able to do is say wait a second.
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If we look at these descriptions and also the meaning that we ascribe to them, we start to see that there may be one universal pattern, right, that we're seeing and it just depends on the era, you know, what's culturally acceptable
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and what's intellectually appropriate to describe. Yes. So you can also see push back in history and today that shows that when people have these experiences, they describe them, but then people that like to interpret these experiences change the interpretation so that they
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they they domesticate them so that they're less scary. Have we been seeing aliens for thousands of years?
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I think to call them aliens is just to use another descriptor. So what what what word would you like to use?
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Right. Okay. So that's a good point. Um it's so we lose a lot in interpretation in the way in which we translate the experience into a framework that people can understand. So today and and so what I do in my work which
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is hard to describe because on the one hand I'm you know people don't like to be told about their religion from [laughter] you know from a non you know they so they don't like to be told that no your religion is really not about
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that all right so we have to rethink religion and we have to rethink aliens because people have grown up with Star Wars they've grown up with Star Trek They already have in their minds what aliens are about. They're not like that.
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So, if you actually start to look into the cases, you'll see that they look completely different. If you look into angel cases, cases of angel contact events like Teresa, like the big ones, the ones that we see all over when we
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Google angel and all the Renaissance paintings come up. By the way, those Renaissance artists are using aeros, you know, the cher the cherub is aeros, you know, the Greek gods and goddesses.
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They're using those artistic conventions to portray something that they looked at and they were like, "What is this person talking about? They didn't know how to represent it." Well, and historically, the the angelic representations, at least in the Old
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Testament, varied tremendously. and the kind of images that many of the the prophets experienced which were under either sleep or transances or meditative states, you know, those those were very trippy for lack of a better word. It's like it's a creature with four faces.
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What? Right. Like, you know, like it's got the head of a lion and the body of a bird. What? You know, like that's, you know, that that's outside of many people's kind of realm of un of understanding. But I think the the thing
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that that is sort of fascinating to me is, you know, how many things have formed our historical understanding and our cultural understanding of the nature of reality for thousands of years that may just be a difference in nomenclature
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and perspective, right? Like I can't imagine, you know, and I've, you know, been through the Old Testament many a time, you know, I can't imagine incorporating what I think about UAPs into my understanding of traditional text. But your book is incredibly
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compelling and this line of research is incredibly compelling because what you're asking us to do is kind of re-examine our definition of, you know, what is sane.
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One of the things I love most about our podcast is that we get to spend a lot of time here exploring big questions.
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Questions about who we are, what we believe, how we find meaning, and how people with very different perspectives can live together [music] in community.
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As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, I've been thinking about one of the ideas that makes that actually possible. Freedom of conscience. The freedom [music] to practice a religion. The freedom to question a religion. The freedom to change your mind or to have no religious
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beliefs at all. It's a uniquely powerful idea because it doesn't require everyone to agree. It requires that we respect each other's [music] right to arrive at our own conclusions. The Freedom from Religion Foundation works to protect that principle by defending the
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[music] us/breakdown or text breakdown to 511511. Remember, text breakdown to 511511. Help light the way forward.
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Message and data rates may apply. [music] What do religious leaders have access to that maybe we don't? Is there a way that we can acquire skills with which to then see these things? I mean, Jonathan and I spoke to Laura Burn who since she was a
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child experienced I mean, she describes them as, you know, kind of bits of of light, but she said it's more about what it feels like when she experiences them, which many people think sounds crazy, right? She can call them angels, but I'm
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I guess I'm wondering, you know, are there people who are more susceptible to being able to have access to whether it's angels, whether it's non-human intelligence or different dimensions?
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What's your perspective kind of historically about who has access to that? And I think Jon of Arc's a great example, right? Um, I also think of, you know, all of the witches and Salem and, you know, women historically who were
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seen as a threat because they perceived things that other people couldn't perceive. You know, for many for many centuries, right? Women were persecuted for being midwives because they seemed to have a knowledge that was threatening in some way. How do you see this sort of
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lining up historically? Well, first, if you look at it from the perspective of all the religions, right?
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So you take a lot of the religions and you place them side by side, you get to see these patterns. And so in every traditional religious tradition, you do have people who have what I would call a cultivated interior sense or cultivated
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spiritual sense. And within the Christian and even the Jewish tradition, um this was a this was thought to be a real thing. Okay. that you it came uh a lot of people had it. It would like come alive in adolescence like when you're
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about 11 or 12 and then it would be uh cultivated right and some people would have it like you know how some people are good athletes and some people are not as good right as you know they so
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they have gifts some people would have it more than other people and those were the people who were thought you know they would be a prophet you know a person spokesperson of God um an oracle in the Greek time period that you know
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they would uh be oracles and so forth. So yes, so in every we still have these people by the way today sadly. Um they don't have a place. So if they're in secular society and even in certain religious societies, uh this is
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another thing that I say that people don't like to hear that a lot of traditions, religious traditions have become secularized. So if you look at like certain Christian denominations and so forth, they're very they're, you know, their belief system is similar to
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the belief system of the secular culture. They don't believe in angels. They don't believe even though their text says that angels exist. Um and the doctrine probably of their churches say that angels exist. No, no, no. That was
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maybe in the first century angels appeared, but no, not anymore. So that that's a secularization process that's happened. So, so those folks who have the the internal sense, the interior sense, now when they have these things that they see, they could see, they
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could call them aliens, UFOs, you know, extraterrestrials, angels. Uh I know people in the same family who's h who have had an experience. One used to be an atheist and now is an agnostic, but calls it a plasma being the other is
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Catholic and she calls it an angel. So still even within the same household you can have a different interpretation of what this is what this type of thing is and so those people are now you know they think am I crazy um so it's a
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really sad situation for people with a developed interior sense what do you think the purpose is of certain people being given this kind of interior sense what does that do for us as a people So in order to answer that
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question, I always like to go back to the writings of Socrates and Plato. Plato was Socrates's student. And Socrates never wrote anything. As we said earlier, he critiqued writing. Um, and he critiqued it because he said that it could impede your direct connection
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to something that he called the good, which Christians, early Christians later interpreted as God. Okay? So they so they were very impacted and influenced by Socrates and the writings of Plato.
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So Plato comes along and so he wants to preserve the wisdom of Socrates. So he writes these dialogues. So in Socrates's time he believed and in fact he created a a home school basically. So he looked around and he said, "Wow, the kids of
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Athens, they're really not getting a good education." So he created the the school of Athens. And so what he did was he taught them philosophy. How? Now philosophy we tend to think of it in a certain way. But if you go back to
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Socrates, philosophy was literally a love of knowledge. It was a direct access to knowledge. And so um this was something that was a charismatic situation. So he was having a mystical experience of the good and he was trying
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to train young people to do that. Now why he wrote a book called the republic and it was about justice and his question was this. Could we live in a society of justice? His answer doesn't seem to be yes by the way but his answer
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is basically this. If we have people who are philosophers, not the kind today and sorry philosophers, not the kind that like you know teach you about you know ethics and so forth. No people like Socrates who are directly hooked in to
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knowledge of the good. Therefore they know good from bad. They know how to act. They they know how to be moral. Um so and do good acts and so forth. So he um so this is the answer to your
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question. There's a type of knowledge that's a moral knowledge that you could see it existing in religions often times when a prophet comes along. The hierarchy of whatever tradition doesn't want to listen to them, suppresses them and so
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forth. Socrates in fact was killed by the people of Athens for corrupting the youth when he was actually obviously not doing that. Uh then you can see this throughout time too. What do we know about the Catholic Church and what it
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knows about extraterrestrial or UFO, whatever we want to call them. Are is the Vatican withholding information?
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Okay, so that's a question that's always asked of me and this this is my answer.
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So first, I don't think so. So I'm not a representative of the Catholic Church. I am Catholic and I've been studying Catholicism my whole life. So I would say and I've been to the Vatican archives and I also uh went to the
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observatory and spent some time in with uh brother Guy Consul Manu invited me to to stay there for a bit. All right. So the question is you know is the Vatican do they know anything about UFOs? Are they hiding something? Um no. In my
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opinion no. Okay. And this is why I say that. First off, you have to understand that the Vatican is not secularized.
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Okay? They are not if they do see something that is um you know like what we've been talking about from they're going to interpret it as from a religious standpoint. They're not going to interpret it from a secular
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standpoint and say, you know, this is an extraterrestrial. They won't know that. Right? So, a lot of there's a lot of things that happen to Catholics, the Vatican, you know, like apparitions of the Virgin Mary and so forth, you know,
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things that look miraculous. They send envoys out to check it out and they spend a lot of time studying it. Um, but I don't think that they have uh things that they're hiding. I think that they would invite people to know that God is
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great, incomprehensibly great, and that God could create lots of different types of life in the universe, and that's not incompatible with Catholic theology.
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Interesting. So, Catholic theology believing in multiple types of life in the universe would incorporate a nonhuman intelligence, the and the existence of that.
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Yes. And in fact they have. So if you look at a very famous man Thomas Aquinus. So he's he created scholasticism which was a medieval focus by the way on Aristotle's work. So you know he went back to the Greeks too. He
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discovered it in there in the tradition and he revised it. Uh it's it's a theology of angels and theology of fallen angels and a theology of things that we just don't understand that happen to human beings on earth. things
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that might possibly be extraterrestrial, but he didn't say yes or no to that. He said God can do anything, right? So, we just don't know. So, always in that tradition, you'll see the possibility and the recognition that the creator can
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do anything that you know the creator wants. Back to Job. So there is though within the Catholic tradition a very sophisticated history and theology of non-human intelligence and also the interior sense that's not taught by the way I mean I went to Catholic school
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it's not taught in the Catholic school it's not taught unless you specialize in it at Catholic university it's not really taught there either so that's another secularization um process even though the Vatican is not secular One of the things that we we've
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encountered you know in a variety of individuals we've spoken to whether they be physicists or um you know yogis or you know deep meditators. There's something that happens when you're in a particular mental state for for lack of a better
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expression. And you know we kind of know a bit more about the neurohysiology and kind of the neuroanatomy of which parts of the brain you know tend to be upregulated or downregulated when we are um you know in in a certain meditative
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state and we know about theta waves and we know all these things and I I wonder if there's also something to you know when you talk about people having some sort of intrinsic you knowledge or or access to this kind of
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information. You know, I is it possible that, you know, over thousands of years, religions have tried to find different ways, right, to have access to these states that we now know place you in a position to receive a different kind of
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information, to receive information that is more intuitive. um you know [clears throat] maybe in information that is in some senses like interdimensional meaning it's beyond you know sort of this xyz you know sort of um you know vector system um is it
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possible you know that that's kind of what people who are experiencing these you know other beings or you know access to kind of other kinds of um interaction is that what people are possibly tapping into and is this then its own kind of
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new religion uh uh you know without the structures that that have been in place for thousands of years. It could be that definitely I do agree with you that people are accessing a certain part of their brain when they're having these
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experiences and you do see in the history of religions different techniques by different types of religions like Hinduism has yoga yoga literally means practice and there are hundreds of different types if not thousands of different types of yogas in
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order to access this part of you know this this interior state which um you know in in the Christian tradition there's a prayer obviously uh Sufis in Islam you know they have a dance that they do in order to access this so in in
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all of the different uh traditions there's this place this kind of category called mysticism and mysticism is what I talked about uh that Socrates was able to to have now the thing about Socrates's community was they wanted your physiology to be good so They were
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athletic. They ate only certain types of things. So, they were super healthy people. Um, you see this in different religious traditions. In certain religious traditions, you can't drink.
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Uh, you you have to, you know, you can't even have coffee and some or tea. Um, you know, so there you have to get your physiology. In Buddhism, it's true. Uh, I have a friend who went to a Buddhist
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monastery and she thought she was going to learn about, you know, the Buddhist texts and so forth, Dharmapata or or something like that. But instead they basically made all of the novice monks uh go on a fast and basically you know
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clean up their bodies so their bodies can be can tune in to this. So it is a physiological thing that's happening.
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You mentioned that the Catholic Church removed aspects of teaching about the inner world and the notion of extrensory perceptions or extra senses. Do you have a sense of why that is? You know, there's a theory obviously that it was
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control. If they had direct access to this type of information, then maybe they didn't need the structure of the church. What's your perspective on why some of that teaching was removed?
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Yeah, I don't I'm not conspiratorial about it. So, I don't think that, you know, the hierarchy was like let the people be, you know, not connected to God. I don't think that that's the idea.
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I think that it's a secularization process. So as the cultures after the 1700s in 1750, the enlightenment, after this happened in Europe, it impacted every single religion. And so, you know, science then became the dominating um ideology you could say. And so it you
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know and people started to change their faith not necessarily lose their faith but certainly the idea that the the teaching of the spiritual senses you can't see this sense we didn't you know at when I said earlier that it's now
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that we can actually say oh look parts of the brain do this now we can see that we weren't able to see that 30 years ago we weren't able to see that 50 years ago people just didn't believe in it because
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they didn't see it it's like you know things that people didn't think we could go to the moon. People didn't think we could go into space because that's crazy. You know, people didn't think we could fly. Look what happened to the
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Wright brothers, right? So, um yeah. So, you know, these kinds of things are are it's just a matter of time. So now that we have more access to understanding that you know where we can see the brain and see when it lights up and when it
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doesn't and you know identify kinds of what kinds of practices help gray matter right um then we can associate those with those practices. So the mystical practices have been super important destabilizing right to the hierarchy. Uh true but I think that it's just a
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process. I I do I do know people and I'm in agreement with this who believe that uh there's there will be a like a revival of religion and the reason is because of science. um because we can now see the benefits that people have by
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doing religious practice. Yeah. I mean I think that could go in a lot of different directions and I think obviously prayer and meditation you know those are really important components and we absolutely know you know the benefits of that. I think a lot of
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people though are also very very intimidated by the politicization of religion and the numerous conflicts even just in our lives right now that in many cases center around religious differences. You know, there's a lot of people who are specific in their not
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wanting to believe that uh aligning with one particular side or one particular practice gains you access let's say to you know riches in the next world or a reprieve from purgatory or you know from a forgiveness of sins. You know I think
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there's a lot of complexity to that but I think um actually I just read an article today about the increase in uh participation in in Catholic church. I think a lot of people are looking for religiosity without the politicalization
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of religion. And how do you get that right? How do you get the benefits of the practice of the structure of the community of uh the impact of prayer? We know and we've spoken to people who are studying it like Anna Yusum and Lisa
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Miller who are focused on how the our spiritual world and cultivating a spiritual world through the religious practice of prayer and connection increases our resilience increases our life quality decreases depression reduces anxiety I don't see how religion can't be
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political so if you look at the in the past you know to people who we couldn't say were religious now because we have a certain we have assumptions about religion but who were religious so we're talking about Socrates I mean he was so
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effective at what he was doing he was killed by Athens right for treason against the government uh you do have what's happening with the pope and Donald Trump today having a fight over the war in Iran and I love Lisa's work
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by the way um in the awakened brain so okay so once people start to do that they're going to say they're going to feel, you know, compelled to say things that will be interpreted to be political because they will say, "No, this isn't
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right or that's right." I don't think you can actually get around that. And I actually think that's good. I do think so because I think that the more people that act in ways that you know initiate this type of uh brain state you could
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call it or um you know thing that um is a hookup like Socrates said to the good I think the better off all of humanity would be. Uh but you're gonna have a lot of people who are gonna you know be
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political because of their you know like Martin Luther King basically this a good example you know he's he called out people for following laws that were unjust he said this is not just there is a natural law if Martin Luther King were
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to be on a desert island he was actually asked this question he what book would he bring he would bring Plato's republic so that says something about you know how Christians are influenced by this book.
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I want to circle back to some of the other ways and the overlaps between either religious historical experience and what people are experiencing as UFOs in the modern time. I was also thinking about you know this notion of purgatory
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m as you mentioned like there see you know I'm not a religious scholar so there's a lot I don't know but like from what I do it seems like purgatory and being abducted have this weird similarity in description where you're
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taken and evaluated. Is there an overlap or similarity from your perspective? Yeah. So um first I want to just make a comment about the political aspects of religion. So this in fact was what got me interested in looking at the topic of
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alien abduction and you know UFOs modern day reports of UFOs. So I wrote a book about the doctrine of purgatory which has seen a decline in people practicing devotions to souls in purgatory. So young Catholics today for the most part
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um don't do that. Whereas Catholics 40 years ago would do that. So I wanted to find out what was the decline. Why did that happen? And part of what I did was I went to like I said archives uh
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Catholic archives around the world and I looked at reports of souls from purgatory that you know people believe that they were encountering and things like that. And so I started to see the similarities. I actually didn't see them
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at first. I just took notes. So they described them first and then they provided a framework of interpretation.
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So here's an example. There was a nun in France. She was in her cell and a light would come down from the sky would penetrate the wall of her cell and come into her room. And she was like, "What's
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this?" And she she would tell the the head of the convent, you know, and the con they said, "We don't believe you." Well, this happened so many times that finally the mother superior said, "Okay, I'm going to stay up with you and we're
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going to look at this and see what this is." And so she saw it also. So you already have the description before you have the interpretation. So what happens was that the mother superior says, "This must be a soul from purgatory." So the
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whole group of nuns, all of the nuns at the convent uh for three days they prayed this soul back into purgatory and this stopped the the situation with the nun.
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Sorry for those of us who aren't super skilled in understanding purgatory. So you see a light that's in your room and it's like coming through walls and it's freaking you out.
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It's not just a a light flashing. There's like it's not like a light bulb wire situation. It's like coming through the wall. I'm picturing like Glenda the good witch before she manifests, you know, in Yeah. So, I'm sorry. So, why
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and and I understand that this doesn't have to be truth with a capital T, but for this group of nuns, why would the assumption be that it was a soul from purgatory? Why couldn't it be an angel from heaven?
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Because if it was an angel from heaven, it would it would behave differently because it would be it would announce itself. There's a cultural framework in place. It's like what we know when we sit down to have dinner. We have ways of
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eating, right? We don't just grab our food with our hands and and smash it in our face.
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I had Ethiopian food last night and I did eat with my hands. Okay. [laughter] So, we don't we don't usually do that.
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So, the thing is is that nobody tells you that. There's no handbook of how to eat dinner, right? We just learn it from the people around us. So, it's a cultural framework that's already in place. They are already aware of what
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angels are like. Okay. We got it. So, this is not behaving like a typical angel as it were. And so, the idea and I'm really I'm asking legitimately cuz I don't I don't know. The idea is that like this
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is like a soul or something that needs to go back to where it's supposed to be.
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Did it have a negative connotation? Meaning like did it feel bad and that's why it's purgatory related? Well, it appears that she didn't want it in her cell at night and so they because they didn't know what it was, they just thought it was a
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soul from purgatory and so they prayed and it went away. So that reinforced their interpretation.
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So you do have these kinds of things. So people do see things often they need to explain them right to themselves or to others and so they go with an explanation that is like a cultural framework. Today it would be a UFO. Well
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that was a UFO or something like that or an alien. That's how people interpret it today. But so so from this kind of research that I did I I then had this big list of these records. And so I
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published my book and I was like, "Wow, I wonder what these are and I wonder if there's any, you know, there's patterns." So I showed it to a friend of mine and he's the one who said that it
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looked like he said, you know, these look like Stephen Spielberg films. Like this looks like uh this looks like these look like UFOs. And honestly, it was I didn't I thought, "No, that can't be true." And so that's how I started to
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study UFOs. If we were to go back in history. I'm assuming that there are places in every religious text and in all of these reports for thousands of years of things that given the cultural framework were explained in a particular
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way. But if we look at them from a framework now of we have a situation where the government itself has admitted that there is research going into beings that we may not understand or experiences that we may not be able to
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explain. What we have is our cultural conversation now opens up into the one that you're having in the others, right?
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What is actually going on? And you know we've just we're still in the century or so of you know an entire movement of science fiction which many of us grew up reading or oh Isaac Asimov or you know
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or some Scott Cart like these are all amazing things that we can imagine but what if science fiction itself is the cultural framework for a different understanding of what's possible? Yeah, I think it is actually and because it's so embedded
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within our upbringing in our childhood. All of us have seen Star Wars, right? All of us love it. So we it's part of our like we use the language of Star Wars, you know, we know those kinds of
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things, you know, do do not try, you know, these kinds of things. So this is of course so you know if we see something we're going to then automatically look at it from the the perspective that science fiction has
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provided to us. Okay before we get more into science fiction never has this sentence been said. Let's go back to Ezekiel. So um if if we were to look at this as an example and you do talk about this as you know
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one of those texts that if we reread it from a completely different framework what are we actually experiencing that Ezekiel is writing about. So can you set us up a little bit like who was Ezekiel?
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We do have extra extra biblical sources that like this he was a dude who wrote you know he was a prophet very important obviously but can you set us up talk a little bit about some of Ezekiel's visions and how we might be able to
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reinvision those visions okay so Ezekiel is a prophet of the Hebrew Bible traditionally he lived um in the time period of before what's called 3rd century Judaism which is going to be what's called second temple Judaism. Um, and he's going to be a
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person who is um who has an experience of uh so the tradition that he's in is called the chariot tradition. So in Judaism in Hebrew is called the Merkoba tradition. Merkoba Merkoba being vehicle. Okay. And so this gets
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translated say if if you're Greek into the chariot tradition. So it's the Merkoba tradition. And the Merkoba tradition is a mystical tradition of Judaism which is a tradition that is about encounters with angels. Okay? And encounters with angels is is dangerous.
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So it's it's not something that is undertaken lightly. You have to work on your character. And it appears to me, although I don't know this for a fact.
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I'm not a scholar of Judaism. So I can't authoritatively say that the people who studied in the Merket tradition like Ezekiel had developed spiritual senses.
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Like there wasn't, you know, it's documented that this is going on in the school of Athens. But is it documented that? And by the way, this might be the same time period as Ezekiel.
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Yeah. Ezekiel was a Babylon era. So even a little bit earlier um and and you know just again I'm speaking as a you know a lay person you know what what is known about the prophets of our tradition and
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I'm assuming about other traditions as well is that these were people that weren't like other people right meaning these were people who had access to things that other people didn't that's why they were prophets right and whether it was let's say by modern distinction
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you know were they mentally ill were they having hallucinations right we can place all that on that you you know when you think about shamans and indigenous you know cultures right these are people who are separate from the regular people
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in some way that we may not even understand right yeah they definitely are separate they don't necessarily want to be though so you know I look at Jonah he did not want the task that he had before him but he
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did it anyway because he had to so they do have it appears that they have a spiritual sense And and so the access that he has is that he's able to have this experience of we don't know what it
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is, but as you described angels earlier in the Hebrew Bible, you know, it looks like it has uh wings. I think it has six wings and it has I think four faces and it's, you know, so it's a certain type
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of uh of cherub. So I think Thomas Aquinus identified it as a seraraphim. All right. So he sees this. Okay. And he says that it is like a vehicle. Okay.
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He's talking about it like a vehicle. It's it's in the air. It's all on fire.
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Um he has a a certain feeling about it. Um in the tradition. So along the same lines, there are other texts within the uh in Judaism, right? uh associated with the Hebrew Bible but are not part of the
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Hebrew Bible. And so this would be like the book of Enoch and so forth. So you have these extra texts that then go on to inform a tradition of angels and fallen angels.
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So good angels and bad angels basically. And this is going to go on to inform early Christianity as well and the whole Christian tradition. So Ezekiel is a very important book because it is in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is
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authoritative to Christians also. They they call it the Old Testament. And so this is something that a lot of people you can't say, well none of this happens in our tradition, in the biblical tradition. Well, no, it does actually.
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And there's a a huge extra tradition that is informative to the tradition, but is not necessarily biblical. So that's what makes Ezekiel and his experience important in in in mystical traditions and cobalistic traditions. This this was a thriving, you know, kind of esoteric
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information that was not meant for everyone. No. Not. No. Yeah. It's dangerous. Correct. It's very dangerous. And the notion was that it's not dangerous like, oh, we don't want women doing it, which was one of the rules. The notion was
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that the the information about what is on the other side is potentially catastrophic to the human mind. Like that's literally and that is also true of Plato of Socrates. These were not things to be taken lightly. Like the it's funny. I
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was talking to my my younger son who's 17 and he's studying Plato and he said the thought that you know that that we are basically looking at a projection of reality right which is this the cave right the people in the cave he said
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that kind of freaks me out and like that essence is why some of this kind of knowledge has been esoteric right or we've dismissed it or we've put it aside but the notion that this is obviously what you're an expert in the notion that
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we can revisit right the pattern of human history because we haven't been alive long at all in the scope of the universe whichever interpretation of creation you like we we are barely just here right we're barely visiting here so
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the notion that we can go back and say wait a second there are always things in human history that are outside of our current explanation understanding and even consist consistent access. That's astounding. And what if UAPs, UFOs, these conversations of exceptional
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sightings, exceptional sensations, exceptional experiences, and a feeling that when this happens, you are never the same.
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What does it look like in our current vernacular to try and understand that? It's fascinating.
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It is fascinating. And it's also happening at a level that's that is um unprecedented because if you think about it, it's being projected on screens everywhere.
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So the United States is disclosing basically Plato's cave, right? It's saying we we're in this cave, the United States government. And so this is really an interesting time, which is why I stuck with it.
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Is that how you see it? The government is now in a position to expose the projection of reality that we've all taken as true. But guess what? There's more.
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I don't think that the Okay, so listen, the government is probably unaware of the allegory of the K, right? Which is also in the republic. All right, so some people in the government totally know about it, but most of them are not going
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to know about it. Okay, so but the position is a powerful position. What's happening because of the infrastructure, the digital infrastructure is that that knowledge is now disseminated. It's decentralized. It's, you know, they can't kill everyone, right? So, Athens
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killed Socrates, right? Got rid of the problem. Okay? But look what happened. Writing took off. The dialogues, we still have the dialogues. We read them today. Um, so now we have the internet.
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Now we have phones that are able to take video of things in the sky and people are able to upload it on different social media. It gets viral, right? So, we've got the ability at this point in time for masses of people to be exposed
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to the allegory of the cave. And what happens when something uh that's that's out of that's beyond human comprehension, which is what happens to the man. He's taken out of the cave and he sees that he was in a
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cave and then he's going to think, "Oh gosh, am I going to go back and they might kill me?" Um, no. Now, we all see it. We're all the audience. We are all in the cave and we're all being able to
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document the disclosure of what this man sees when he goes out. And so I think that that's pretty unprepedented and that's why I say that this is a new form of religion. And I don't mean it in the
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sense that and it probably will get political. So when I say that the US government is disclosing now, do I think that they're going to give us the truth or are they going to give us their truth? So that's yeah that's where we
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get to a question and I think that we're gonna see what happens. It could be you know beyond you know what I think is is going to happen is something that I don't think any of us can predict. It
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kind of blows my mind to revisit, you know, possibly every instance of the foundations of Western civilization as we know it and to say, "Wait a second." And, you know, when we spoke to Brian Morescu, who talks about, you know, kind
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of the secret religion that led to what we now think of as, you know, western culture. We think of the formations of Christianity. We think of the body of Christ and the blood of Christ, right?
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all of these things there there is a history to them that that really is tapping into gosh religious structure and I don't mean God I mean religious structure and what we have created is the best attempt we have to encapsulate
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things that are inexplicable and religion as you have said is used over time to organize people and yes there are many benefits to prayer and I'm happy to talk about prefrontal cortex all day, but as you know, as Markx
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noted, it's also a really good way to control people and to keep them encapsulated. And it's a really good way to create borders. And you know, as someone who comes from a tradition with a million and a half rules about what we
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don't eat and how we don't do this, like it also like we do this and they do that. That's tribal, right? That's what tribes have done for, you know, for an enormous part of of human history. But the notion that truth with a capital T
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is bigger than all of that, right? And anyone who's had a near-death experience that we've spoken to, people who have had transcendental encounters, people who have done a lot of psychedelics and have had encounters that sound a lot
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like these other things, there's something that's bigger than all of religion. There's a wisdom that's bigger than all of it. So, we just keep trying to describe it. And I love this idea that we have the intersection now of the
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government's information about their own search for what is true and how it is colliding right with all of these other worlds.
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What do we think about the use of psychedelic iaska DMT 5me with the increased awareness of nonhuman intelligence? What have you seen and what have you seen maybe even historically that indicates that you know these may be pathways towards
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opening um are people finding access to that type of non non-human intelligence in that way? So first I'm aware of Brian's work. I know him. He's a colleague. Um but I disagree with the history. So it's not as in my
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opinion it's uh Christianity and the early churches aren't didn't they weren't engaged in um you know they weren't engaged in uh antigens.
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So there were some but but it wasn't the uh it's not historically correct to say that the whole church comes from that.
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And by the way, there's so many different churches in the Christian and church just like in Judaism. Um, and by the way, Judaism is also a tradition that I'm actually My mother's Jewish and her tradition is Jew Jewish. She's
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practicing Jew. Diana, that means you're Jewish, too. But we don't have to talk about it.
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[laughter] No, I know that. I'm aware of that. I'm aware of that. I'm claiming you as ours because you're pretty dope. [laughter] Thanks. I appreciate that. Um and I have been claimed no so by by lots of my
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friends. Uh okay. So the question of psychedelics is one that I'm asked about. Okay. And certainly within the history of traditions, especially um if you look at indigenous traditions here in the states, Native American uh religion, the church of Native Americans, uh pote is
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a, you know, an antioen that they use ceremonially to connect to what they believe to be sacred. And and you do see that in in all kinds of traditions. in the Celtic tradition. You see this um so and people are still doing it.
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Absolutely. Um so it is part of a lot of religious traditions as a way to access quickly um those states, those brain states. Um certainly that is the case in some although I would have to say that in some traditions
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it's not you shouldn't do that because that will then impede your ability to do it without the the antigen itself. So there's restrictions on that just like you see restrictions on alcohol, restrictions on um any kind of you know
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any kind of uh what is considered to be toxic for the body and so forth.
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Do you see any patterns or tendencies that these um events like the appearance of an angel or a UFO happen during specific pivotal historical moments?
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I think that they do happen for different communities. So what's really interesting is that you definitely see this with apparitions of the Virgin Mary. So a lot of communities now this isn't a global phenomena. This is you know it is now but it it wasn't in 1800
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or so forth. You know, the Virgin Mary appears in one specific place and it's for that community and that the people of that religion and it's because of uh something that's uh you could say is is very malevolent to the community itself,
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something that's either a political situation that they are being repressed for whatever reason. Um when communism was you know was spreading uh apparitions of the Virgin Mary appeared in lots of different places and it was specifically to cohhere that community
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to make that community stronger in the face of communism basically trying Yeah. Yeah. Basically trying to get rid of that religion. So, you do see these now that we're seeing this all over right now, especially in the US, this kind of
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like, you know, lots of people talking about UFOs. Um, that's really interesting. And I I hate to say it, but I just don't have an answer for it. So, what's happening? I think that there are a lot of things that are happening, and
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I've talked about it in the others that people in the 20th century, the early 20th century predicted would happen in the 21st century. And you know that is the the transformation of humanity really the transformation of the human
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being into something that the human being wasn't before. So that's why what I did was I took the work of some Catholic visionaries like TR Desardan who talked about the newest sphere which looks like the internet and then I
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compared them with Arthur C. Clark, a well-known science fiction author who talked about in his books childhood childhood's end, you know, the transformation and basically the extinction of homo sapiens and transformation into another line of homo sapiens. And so, um, both talked about
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the same thing, which made me think that that Shardon somehow influenced Clark. And I believe that's probably true. Um but yeah so they both talk about that this time period even Mary Shelley wrote a book about the 21st century being a
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complete transformation of the human being. What is the new human being? For Mary Shelley it was a pandemic that in the 21st century would wipe out all almost all humanity and but there would be pockets of human beings that would be
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left. Okay. and her book is called The Last Man. And Mary Shelley of course is the first person to write science fiction in 1800 uh Frankenstein, right?
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The modern Prometheus. Um so but beyond Mary Shelley, we have TR Desardon, a paleontologist and a Jesuit priest of the early 21st century. And he describes a new human being. He calls this human being the ultrahuman. And the ultra
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human is going to be part of a networked consciousness, the new sphere that's beyond the biosphere. Um, sits up on our stratosphere, I think, is how he describes it. Um, it looks really weird, which is why he was his work was banned
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by the Catholic Church in the early 20th century because they were like, "What are you talking about?" You know, it looks so weird. Um, but today it doesn't look so weird, right? A lot of people who create AI use the term newphere. Um
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he he didn't coin it but utilized it. So he was part of a group of European um intellectuals of of uh whom some were really into space and you know and uh getting humans off the earth. So he saw
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the ultrahuman as this new type of human but he also saw this within the framework of his Catholic faith and he believed that this was going to be uh salvific. So he believed that humanity was going to actually reconcile the
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hatred that it has you know uh perpetrated on itself and it was going to become something super so something ultra um Arthur C. Clark though. So he takes this idea and shifts it to saying that in the 21st century um an
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extraterrestrial consciousness is going to abduct the children of Earth into aworked intelligence and they were going to become something completely different and their parents were going to be the last humans. Look at any teenager staring at their screen and they have
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been abducted into aworked consciousness. Um, is that what you think has happened? Are are we the last actual human beings?
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Although I'm being sucked into my phone on a regular basis, so maybe I'm failing.
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I think that there's truth in each of these representations, which is why they attracted me. I thought, "Wow, these people seem visionary." Obviously Arthur C. Clark, you know, worked with Stanley Kubri on 2001 of Space Odyssey. And by
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the way, that that I that title 2001, that's year one of of the 21st century, right? That's year one. So basically, they're also predicting something. Now, what's interesting, what did they predict? They predicted two things. They predicted the coming of AI which was how
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and they also predicted the dis the imminent disclosure of UFOs by the US government which was managing the disclosure. Those two things happened in 2001 which was created between 1965 and 1968.
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I mean the the idea of the network could be twofold really. It's naturally the AI network, the algorithms that we're all uh faced with every day and are running many aspects of our lives. But also, it's the network of consciousness that
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we have become more aware to as humanity has increased a level of sensibility as our cultural vernacular has increased through the AI networks, information has shared and we've been told more, hey, wait a second, something else is possible. and the narratives and and our
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understanding of wait a second there may be something outside of our five senses is possible. People then increasingly become aware of that. They have experiences of that that feeds back into it. So it's like both the energy consciousness awareness and the
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algorithmic network happening simultaneously. Agreed. I don't think they had that language back then. So they couldn't discuss it like we can discuss it now.
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But they were certainly they certainly presented what looks like what's happening now. Also in that vein if this is happening more and more and if these anomalous phenomenon are happening around major historical periods, we may be being told that this is more of an
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enormous historical period than we even realize. Yes, that was Carl Jung's uh interpretation of UFOs. And so he wrote a book called I can't remember the myth of the flying saucer or something like that, but it was a great book. It's a
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great book. And he wrote that in the 40s, I believe came out in the 50s. And so he couldn't reconcile the fact that UFOs looked he believed that they were part of the unconscious but he also in fact he had
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to create a new term for them which he called the psychoid. It was something in the unconscious that also had real physical effects. He's got a very interesting take on it. So in the beginning he thought that the very image
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of a UFO which is circular. He said that it was an archetype, a new archetype.
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They appeared like technological angels. And he said that this augers in this new way of being with technology, humans co-evolving with technology. So he thought the UFO was an unconscious projection that humans, you know, have projected into the skies in order to
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somehow come to terms with their new way of being technological. That's what he thought at first, but then it kind of happened. What happened to him actually also happened to me. So he then started to meet people from the Air Force and
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the government and he started to realize that oh my goodness, there's more to this now. And he saw they showed him things on radar, you know, that you know this this unconscious projection actually has a counterpoint on radar.
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And so he was very shocked. So he had a conversation ongoing, a correspondence with a physicist where they and that physicist had these experiences. And so they together came up with the psychoid which was this idea of something that is
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an archetype but also has physical effects. This should comfort us. This is really not significantly different from what we talked about from texts from thousands of years ago which formed the religious you know cultural conversation that we have now. Meaning when you get into a
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certain state in particular in prayer in meditation you are entering into a different realm of consciousness and in that state you are able to access things that you cannot in your normal state.
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And I would argue, and this is sort of one of my reasons that I believe angels don't talk to me, there are certain people who do not have access to that.
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And yes, I know you can learn the skills, and we've had so many people on who are trying to teach me to drop in and blah blah blah. Yes, you can learn that, but there are people who are
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intuitively wired to be able to drop into that state easier. We're arranging an alien encounter for you any day now. they are able to access something and my belief my hope because I mean Dr. Dr. Pacil, I'm like if I
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can't name it and I can't test it in the lab, it is very hard for me to understand. I do I do believe that within our lifetimes or at least our children's lifetimes, we will find a way to better understand what it is about
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certain people that allows them to access this. And yes, those people are often our spiritual leaders, our shamans, they are the founders of great religions, right? They changed the world. But it's kind of the same potential conversation that there are
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people who have access to something, right? And depending on the cultural framework you place it in, it can have a completely different meaning. It can get you killed. It can get you, you know, uh, disappeared, right? if you have this
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information and I'm going to ask you know there are recently there's been so many some of them are anecdotal and some of them are real you know reports of suspicious disappearings of scientists and of people who are looking into
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things related to disclosure what do you make of that because this might be the first time in history that we can see in real time a cover up that is attempting to keep this information from getting out and I'm not saying that there's some
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truth that the government has and they won't let us have it But there's a lot of suspicious activity surrounding the guarding of who gets to know what information. And when we see scientists that are linked to nuclear research and
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aerospace programs and who in many cases have connections, we have to kind of wonder is this new era also one in which we are seeing in real time the powers that be saying we don't want you to have
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this information. for several of those scientists, they their information. I mean, they did want them to have that information, right? So, that information was important to national security. Um, I don't know what like, you know, I don't know what's happened to them um
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other than the ones that, you know, uh have been found dead. This isn't the first time, by the way, in the history of of eupfology in the United States. Uh the the most egregious example, I think, would be uh a physicist named Dr.
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McDonald in the 1960s who basically um said that, you know, there these aren't we can't call this swamp gas. Um we have to, you know, the these are unexplained.
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And there was definitely a campaign to discredit him and it had implications for his personal life and mental health.
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Um and you know he was he he was found dead. There was a shotgun near him. All right. So it was um you know it was called a suicide. By the way, I noticed this when I started to study the topic
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of UFOs that a lot of people um did have information, but you would you will never hear from them. So, they don't want to be known uh for this very reason.
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What is your understanding about the conversations we have about consciousness and about a place where information might exist in ways that, you know, we don't have access to, let's say, from our materialist perspective.
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And how does that play into, you know, the conversation about UFOs or UAPs? Yeah. So, I'll go back to the statement you made uh earlier about, you know, certain people have access to this and, you know, why do they do why do they
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certain people are able to see certain things that other people are not able to see? All right. Um, here's here's an answer to that or just kind of uh some observations.
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I have been reading the work of Ian McGillchrist and the split brain theory of you know uh that answers a lot of these questions uh about you know it doesn't give you the answer what is it you know what is this interface that the
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right brain has um so for those who haven't read his work he basically states that the left brain is you know functions to help us learn language and you know looks at things and pieces of things whereas the right brain is an
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attention center where it knows, you know, things that the left brain doesn't and it should actually be the one in charge because it has much more of a holistic information about our environment. And so it appears that and
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he has some good information by the way about scientists which I also my work corroborates that and I I did that in 2012 when I first looked at our space program. I noticed that both in the Russian and the American space
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programs that the scientists who were responsible for the rocket technologies and you know the really gamechanging types of thinking that got us off earth um they would get that they would get their information in ways in which uh
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Ian McGill would explain that he said you know it's never the leftbrain thinking that gets you these gamechanging uh you know kinds of ideas it's you're doing something like you're wa you're watering your garden or something and then the idea comes into your brain.
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This is exactly how it was described by the people who were the found foundational like um Constantine Silkovski who's on the Russian side, Jack Parsons who's on our side. Jack Parsons believed he was in touch with non-human intelligence. So did
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Chilcausski and by the way so do people in the space program now who are creating these kinds of technologies that help us you know go further and so forth. Not everyone. So I would say that yes there are people who are able to do
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that. Um I do also know another person um named Mark Stallman who has been using and creating AI forever. Right. So sper at least 20 years with AI, but um his godfather was Norbert Weiner who is uh kind of like a father of machine
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learning and um feedback loop kind of technology from the 1940s and 50s who by the way is Jewish and started to write about theology after his work was uh utilized by the military. And he said that AI was really it was going to and
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this he said it in the 19 basically in the 19 early 1950s that he warned us about it. Um, but g getting back to your point, Mark Stallman thinks that everyone is born with the ability to utilize this part of the brain, but
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unless one cultivates it by 12 or 13, it's gone. He says that he doesn't think that you can get it back. Yeah. So I do that I think you know I think there might be some type of neuroplasticity or
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grace or something like that. Right. That's easy to say for someone who had a religious revelation at 11 which you did. You got in there right under the radar.
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Well yeah I guess so. Right. [laughter] I just want to reflect and and you know punch something that you said here which was that builders of aerospace believe that they're getting their information from non-local sources.
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Not all of them Jonathan just some of them many who are believing and these are people who are making groundbreaking technology moving the world forward believe that it's coming from somewhere outside of their own minds.
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Okay. So, let me say this so I don't get email hate from um aerospace company people.
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Yeah, be careful here, Jonathan. So, they do send me nice emails and they they do like my work. All right. So, this is how I would state this. Yes, a lot of them believe that especially the early founders. Okay. And you can have
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you have the words of a Constantine Chikovsky basically saying that angels exist and they're giving us this information. We just have to be receptive enough enough to understand their language. That's what he said. And then you have Jack Parsons, another
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kettle of fish. Constantine is is Eastern Orthodox Christian. And then Jack Parsons is a cult. Okay? So, you know, his friend is Alistister Crowley.
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And so, you know, he's kind of the American version, but he also says the same thing. I'm getting this information. I'm doing these rituals and I'm getting this information from non-human intelligence. He does not think it's angels. Okay. Um all right.
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He said he says either it's extraterrestrial or it's like the gods and goddesses of Babylon. Um that said I did meet people when I started this research in the in aerospace companies who were doing this type of research now
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and they believe the same thing. When I started to research creativity and this was what led me to the awakened brain and this type of research. Um, I recognize that very creative people often think that they don't own their
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ideas, that their ideas are pre-exist, and that they they somehow then it comes into their brain. Yeah, they receive it.
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Thank you. Yeah, they receive these ideas paintings songs um, that type of thing. So, but four faces.
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That's right. That's right. Yeah. We're not in a position to know yet. So they think they're objectively outside of them. Whereas it just could be the brain state that they're in that then the the frontal cortex dampens down and doesn't
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associate it with their ego. So they're not, you know, they're not claiming it as their own. They can't claim it.
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Yeah. And that's that's a fascinating notion also, you know, I'm I'm ever the cellular, you know, uh person over here.
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You know, it's kind of like when when kids used to, you know, forgive me, describe what it was like to take mushrooms when we were all in junior high and high school. And it was like it's like everything is so clear and
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everything is so clear to me. And it's like, yeah, it's because like the phalamus is being told like h like hush up all the other input, make everything super clear. Meaning like you know the question is what is the what is going
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on, right? When we're interpreting information because that's still the shadow on the cave wall, right? So when it feels true and this is true of love, lust, right? Uh intellectual capability, if it feels true, what does that mean?
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What is it, you know, does that does that give it an an ultimate truth? If your body is creating or your brain is creating this state of truth and for people like science fiction writers who are constantly open to that and that
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flow state comes it can feel so true which is in another era they would be our prophets right they would be saying this is what's true [laughter] yeah exactly one of the things that Peter Teal has been quoted saying is that people who
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are blocking the building of AI he thinks are working in the shadows or for the dark side. He thinks a lot about light and dark. Um I'm curious about you know if he feels I don't know if you
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have insight into this if he feels like this technology is being given or is AI a form of the antichrist right is this the thing that is pulling us away from ourselves from other people from focus or is it the next phase of intelligence
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that just like writing we needed to receive is that one and the same I you know I would argue that that's exactly what Satan would look like. It would look like, look, it's going to be amazing and we're going to make you live forever and
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like we're going to be a cyborg. And like from my perspective as like the grumpy mom, I'm like, I fear that. I fear it. Go ahead, Dr. Basila. Make us feel better.
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Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sad. I can't make you feel better about this. That's sad. Okay, I'll [laughter] I'll try, but I don't think I can. So, um Okay. So I do engage with Peter Thiel's first. I don't know what he
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thinks about AI. Okay. So I just have to say that I do not know the mind of Peter Teal. Um but I do know what he said about the Antichrist. Okay. And he's been talking about it a lot. And one of
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the things that he identifies is that it's a deceiver. Okay? And he's right. So if you look at the biblical passage which most people would identify as like the the idea of apocalypse um it comes from the book of revelation which is a
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Christian text and it's informed by the way by second temple Judaism and the book of Enoch because it's filled with all kinds of angels and you know the interface of of our world with the other world. Okay. So it's a visionary text.
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It's a visionary text. is really an interesting book. Okay, that that said, um I happened to to have so I engaged with his conversation and I thought, you know, if we look at the text that he was using to describe the antichrist, I
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think that he didn't read them fully. I think that he he forgot certain parts of some of the texts. So, I'm talking about Lord of the world. Um, it's a a text that was written in the early 20th
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century um by a Christian um I can't remember his first name but his last name is Benson. It's a it's a great book about what's going to happen. Okay. And what's going to happen according to him is that
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first nation states will have no power against the encroachment of the antichrist. The Antichrist has a particular type of power, but it's not waged through weapons, and it's not waged in the ways that nation states will wage. And it's also super
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deceptive. It appears that if one doesn't So, it basically wipes out the the knowledge of the interior state and the interior senses. It it wipes those out so that people don't even know that they have them. And I think that we're
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in that time now where we do not know that we have like I told you, we've been completely secularized. Even religions have so that we do not know that we have this spiritual sense and our religions aren't teaching us about it for the most
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part. Some are, but for the most part they're not. And so um you know, so Peter Teal gets right the deceiver part of it. But I think that to fulfill the criteria if if we were to say and I'm
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not saying this, okay, I'm not saying this is that AI is the antichrist. What I'm saying is that if we were to choose an antichrist today, it would definitely fulfill the criteria because it is it literally is uh shaping the brains of
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youth and people who use it, even older people who are utilizing it. and the in the interior sense those those things associated with the interior sense like empathy it's taking them away yeah it is it is just erasing those now
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that doesn't seem like a good thing so I don't yeah so I hate to say that but no I don't think that's a good thing you heard it from Dr. Basila.
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It's it's interesting because his position is anyone who opposes the advancement of artificial intelligence is the antichrist. That's me. He believes that the technology is gifted by some divine presence. I I'm paraphrasing here, but he believes that it's meant to save humanity and that,
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you know, the next phase of humanity will be enabled through this technology. So it's interesting that you know there can be a totally different way of viewing it.
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There's no one way to view it. That's the problem. It's just like water. So we need water to survive, but water can be a tsunami.
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Okay. So they So he could be right. AI could possibly I I love AI. It helps me do a lot of things. It could possibly in the hands of people who know how to use it. It could possibly benefit us in
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incomprehensible ways that we cannot predict. Agreed on that. But what it's doing right now to people who sadly are not aware of what it's doing to them is bad. It's not it's not a good effect.
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Well, and I think also, you know, not to like be this person, we don't know like good bad like these are human terms, right? If you want to like take the like true right religious perspective, only God knows some power greater than all of
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us is in charge of everything. [snorts] But what we're setting up right now is we do we have this, you know, it's a it's it's an existential battle going on between what we see as progress that could be viewed as this incredible
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miracle and progress that can also be viewed as the beginning of the end of so many things that make us human. And I think that's where religion does become politicized, right? because then you get one particular religious perspective
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that says well our book says that this is right or our god says that this is the way and I think what's interesting is in many places this is it's like a secular fight of a different order well said I'm curious if as a person who
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has studied religion so much do you believe in God as you understand it so yeah I absolutely believe in God. Um I believe that there is a it's a it's Christianity as Christianity was practiced in the first century
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in my interpretation. It was influenced by Socrates and Plato that philosophy influenced it and it was also influ you know Jesus is Jewish. So it's a combination of a certain type of Judaism which is a second temp uh temple Judaism
Speaker A
and all of the and like the disciples like this was a group of of Jews meaning the framework was what if we you know form something new but the entire structure like there wasn't Christianity yet.
Speaker A
That's right. Yeah. So this is a it's a a living form of a religion that um I think still exists today but doesn't necessarily um exist in you know let's just say yes I believe in God [laughter] in that belief and this may tie back to
Speaker A
your experience when you were blindfolded and brought to New Mexico. How does that relate to your belief or not in extraterrestrial or nonhuman intelligence?
Speaker A
I think that just as there are species that we haven't discovered yet, right, on Earth and in the ocean, uh when we discover them, we're not going to be horrified and we're not going to say this is going to change my religion.
Speaker A
Okay? No, I believe that the cosmos is like the ocean, right? So there probably a lot of things out there that we're going to be surprised by, but do does it fundamentally change my belief? It doesn't. And I think that I do get asked
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a lot by various types of people, journalists, you know, people in the government, so forth. They say, "What's going to happen to people who are religious when we disclose extraterrestrials?" You know, [laughter] and I always say they already have a
Speaker A
category for that. So I think they'll be fine. I think secular humanists might have some issues, but I think religious people will be fine. So, I don't think disclosure is going to disrupt, you know, religious people.
Speaker A
That's such a good point. It's kind of like religious people already have the structure not only for, you know, what you're experiencing, but for the possibility of things that we can't understand. You know, when I explain to people that like my concept of God is
Speaker A
that it's a concept so large that you can't even understand it. That gives a lot of grace, right? There's a lot of grace in that because it does allow me to slot in both, you know, Newtonian physics and the theory of relativity as
Speaker A
well as quantum theory, right? It can hold everything. But for people, and this is why, you know, Jonathan, a lot of times we'll talk to materialists and I say to them, you sound more fanatical than I am as a person of faith about the
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fact that there is no God or there's nothing that we can't, you know, understand, that we can't measure. So I think that's actually really really interesting. The biggest surprise I think to all of us would be some confirmation of a larger understanding
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that there is an access to something bigger than yourself. In many cases it may be a plane of consciousness. It may be access to different kinds of communication. It could be telepathy. It could be you know whatever intuition
Speaker A
means that you know hopefully one day I'll learn. Um, but I think that's a really interesting uh, you know, Jonathan, it's kind of like when we started this podcast and it was the middle of COVID and people were kind of
Speaker A
freaking out and having anxiety and those of us who were no strangers to anxiety said, "Oh, we know how to roll with this. Like, I'm anxious all the time." But people who had never experienced anxiety were were kind of
Speaker A
really like on their back foot. Like, what is happening here? And I kind of see this the same way with disclosure.
Speaker A
If your God is big enough, if your concept of the universe is big enough, nothing should devastate the structure that you have created for what's true for you.
Speaker A
That's right. Yeah. Tell people where they can learn more about you. Obviously, you've had so many incredible appearances and we're just so thrilled we got to talk with you. Where can people learn more about the others and all of the other things?
Speaker A
Yeah, sure. Okay. So, I do have a Substack. Um, so people can go to my Substack. It's called Godsend. Um and it's D it's DW Pulka at Substack and uh I regularly write about current events and and religion and technology there.
Speaker A
And also they can get the others or any of my books wherever books are sold.
Speaker A
Amazing. Thank you so much Dr. Pasel. We really appreciate your time. Thank you. It was wonderful to talk with both of you.
Speaker A
[music] This is one of those episodes where we we got to talk about so many different aspects and like I'm still my brain is still trying to put them all together.
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Like one concept is that experiencing communication either from UAPs or things you can't explain that that is its own kind of religious identity, right? It's a new sort of religion. That's kind of one thing. The other thing, one of my
Speaker A
favorite points she made was that every cultural context explains unexplainable things according to what is appropriate for that time, right? But in theory, the notion of aliens visitation from interdimensional, like all of that may have always existed and
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people just called it different things based on what was appropriate. Like the nun story, right? I don't know why it had to be something from purgatory, but I don't have purgatory in my consciousness.
Speaker A
Yeah. What's in your consciousness will be the filter through which you see the world and interpret whatever that is.
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Um, I think a lot of people can get hung up on the word religion because it is less about the teachings of a particular inner world and more about the structure and institution of religion. and and we're separating those in this instance,
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right? Well, and this would be, you know, if we are to believe that these kinds of experiences are on par with other experiences that are, let's say, outside of the realm of this level of consciousness that we're now interacting
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in, then there's no reason to think that experiences now would be any different from experiences 4,000 years ago. It's the same. We're all the same. And you know, yes, I know brains change. They don't change that much. What changes is what god you
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believe in, what you're told to believe in, what you're told is acceptable. And science fiction blows that wide open, which is another concept that Dr.
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Pasulka talked about, right? Science fiction says we have access to dreams and imagination, which Jeffrey Kriel would say it becomes true when you think it right?
Speaker A
Yeah. How is our imagination the precursor for creating our reality? We think it's imagination, it's things being placed there and downloaded, right? It's all in kind of how you frame it. And in all sincerity, you know, not speaking flippantly, if you've ever
Speaker A
heard someone who, let's say, is in a psychotic state or someone who's having nonlinear thinking or someone who, let's say, is um in a a schizophrenic episode or something like that. Like there is often and we talked about this in the
Speaker A
Premonition Bureau, right? Like we talked about how do you when someone is not operating in the plane of kind of cognition that most of us have access to, right? They may be wrong, but they also may be right. I'd love to jump onto
Speaker A
Substack and unpack early childhood spiritual experiences to see how many people before 11 or 12 before 11 or 12 when our intuition and our insight is a little bit wider less uh clouded by the constructs of modern society. How many of us have had
Speaker A
experiences that either shape us or sometimes that we move away from but revisit? Interesting area of exploration. A very very quick search on the interwebs says that brain development in this in this pocket of time right between 11 and 13 has a
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tremendous amount to do with kind of like language processing and creativity and how that moves into something more concrete. This is the window she's talking about. And if you think again historically, you know, this is a a preubescent time, right? In in theory,
Speaker A
and yes, some people, you know, go into puberty before, but in theory, we're talking about a period of time. It's the last bit of kind of innocence, right?
Speaker A
Intellectual innocence before you're then sort of corrupted. If you like the logical song by Super you can listen to that as your soundtrack for this uh ending. You know, that's when you become logical. So if we can catch
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it right before that right which is also interesting because you know in many traditions there is a right of passage right in Judaism it's 12 for girls and 13 for boys right in in many traditions it's also like this is your last your
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last time that you have access to something before you enter the world of you know maturity and in many cultures and for most of history you were likely married off probably pretty shortly after that. Jonathan, can you think of
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anything that happened in your 11 to 12 region that seemed to signal, you know, some final access to something before you became a man?
Speaker A
I I don't think it was in that region, but I do remember a height of creativity as a younger kid engaged in a ton of imagination. And I was watching a TV show recently that like they had wrestling figurines and
Speaker A
the the kid was just like playing with them and making up narratives and you know how much of that is based on just like shows you've watched. But I would like be on the basketball court and I would be like it's this player and this
Speaker A
much time and I'd be on the ice and there would always be stories of like oh Wayne Gretzky is doing I was definitely not a Wayne Gretzky style hockey player but um you know it's like a countdown and 5
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seconds left and it was just like always something and was so active. I think this would actually be a great conversation also for us to have on Substack. You know, I started acting at 11 and a half professionally. So, I'm
Speaker A
also wondering like gosh, what bit of something, right, was I tapping into when I kept begging my parents like I want to be I want to be this creative person in this way. Um, I think it's very interesting and I do think it's a
Speaker A
very, you know, it's an important part of of um, you know, of life even outside of sort of, you know, western culture as we think of it. Um, so yeah, definitely uh, head over to Substack. Also, please make sure we say this, you know, every
Speaker A
time because it's really, really meaningful for us to communicate this. Please subscribe. It makes a huge difference for us. So, please make sure that you're subscribed anywhere that you listen or watch. Uh, anything else, Jonathan?
Speaker A
Well, that's it. See you next time. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you [music] next time.
Speaker A
It's my breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD [music] or two fiction and now she's going to break down. to break down. She's going to break it [music] down.
Topics:UFOsreligionDiana Walsh PasulkaaliensVatican archivestechnologyprophecyconsciousnessCatholicismMayim Bialik
