 Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have been witness to the unspeakable horrors of the defendant's heinous crimes. That's a clip from the new Netflix movie about Ted Bundy. For years, I've carried this guilt that I'm to blame for everything. And yeah, we're back to talking about the nature of evil. It's about another missing girl, isn't it? Ted, did you do it? No. Not because I'm drawn to it, but because avoiding it may be missing an opportunity to more fully understand what I keep calling this extended consciousness realm. Now as it turns out, today's guest, the very excellent Dr. Brian Hayden, has studied this evil, if you will, from a whole different perspective that traces it back to our earliest recorded history. And what he's discovered may cause you to rethink everything you think you know about evil. Ted Bundy is back in the headlines. They're doing this big movie and everyone's excited about it. Right. The secret story in Ted Bundy, if you really dig into it, satanic worship again. And then he meets other folks who are going, yeah, you know, I'm connected with these spiritual forces and he is now trying to make this connection with this benevolent spiritual power. Yeah, but I'm but he's buying into a system that he feels is going to be able to let him do what he wants to do. And so, and that system, that conceptual system, is really a product of secret societies and institutionalized religions. It's not, it doesn't exist before that. Unless there's a reality to it, right? Well, that's an open question. Is it one of our constructs? Another self-serving construct of secret societies? Or is there any reality to it? And that is an open question. Stay with me for my conversation with Dr. Brian Hayden. Today we welcome Dr. Brian Hayden to Skeptico. Brian is a member of the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions in archaeology and had a distinguished career at Simon Fraser University, during which he authored several important academic books and many, many papers exploring the prehistory of religion, ritual, and our relationship with the supernatural, just to name a few topics. Brian, welcome to Skeptico and thanks so much for joining me. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Let's start with the very basics. Improve on my intro. Who is Brian Hayden? Well, I'm an archaeologist, but I've always been trying to find find out what the archaeological remains represent in terms of what people did, how they organized their societies, why things changed over time, and you know, in the later half of my career, I guess I got much more interested in in their ritual life and how that fit in with everything else. Well, that's awesome. I might add that, you know, to try to find out some of these things, I've done a fair amount of traveling. Like in Australia, I worked with the Australian Aborigines and then also worked with the Mayan Indians. We do what's called ethnoarchaeology. So that's doing ethnography to find out what, you know, what you can, what that reveals for the archaeological remains. So I worked with the Mayan Indians for a number of years and then went to Southeast Asia to studying feasting and the remains that that might leave, how it fit into society as well. And I've also worked in the interior of British Columbia with the number of indigenous groups there. So it's been an interesting career. Interesting indeed. It's really is an amazing body of work. So many different points to grab on to it. But I thought I would share with people the path to this interview because I think that's part of the story, at least the story that I wanted to tell in this conversation. I originally became interested in your work because I was kind of exploring this thread of social engineering, secret societies, the nature of evil, human compromise as it relates to sexual stuff, you know, the whole pedophilia stuff and the pizza gate stuff and the pedopope stuff, which is all real stuff. If people care to investigate in law, people don't care to investigate it. But it's really what's happening right now in our society. And it's in the news if you look carefully beyond what is kind of the glossed over part. But I don't want to digress too far because that's the stuff I was interested in. And then I had a skeptical listener and I love when this happens. But this Nate stepped forward and said, Hey, there's this guy who's done some amazing academic research looking at the prehistory of this. And he was referring to you, Dr. Brian Hayden. And he said, you know, he's looked at secret societies going back to prehistory and this aggrandizement and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, Hey, that sounds great. But I'm a little bit skeptical because I know academics, particularly in Canada, kind of a lot of times have to stay between some very narrow lines. And he was like, No. And he sent me a quote from your book, very excellent book, shaman, sorcerers and saints, the prehistory of religion, which you wrote a few years ago. And here's the quote from the book that he sent, I think that aspiring elites increasingly sought to restrict access to ecstatic contact with supernatural forces in order to claim privileged divine directives. It's a mouthful, but it's really a powerful, powerful idea. And I was like, wow, this is great. I'm on board. This is a guy I have to talk to. And then literally two days ago, I'm kind of doing some more research and I'm trying to figure this stuff out. And I ran across another quote. And I know this interview is going on a little or this intro is going on a little bit. But I want to play for folks this next quote that I heard from a very nice interview you did on a podcast a few years ago called Conversations From The Pale Blue Dot. And let me play for folks this clip. And then I think we're going to have something to talk about. Inherent, what seems to be an inherent tension, an inherent proclivity for engaging in rituals and for believing in the supernatural stems from fundamental biological adaptation that may be a million or more years old. So there we go. So then I was kind of rocked back and said, uh, this is again, going to be another one of those materialist kind of jam it back into a very kind of narrow framework thing. So I sent you an email and I said, Hey, Brian, where should we go on this and use some really cool email back? Because I had referenced, for example, Dr. Dean Raiden, Dr. Jack Hunter, an anthropologist who is, he calls himself a paranthropologist because he's open to these extended consciousness realities and how they might affect our understanding of archaeology. And I also sent you a link to a show we did with Jan van Esselstein, who studied the Alche Shaman groups in Siberia for 30 years and reports back all these extraordinary extended consciousness supernatural experiences. I just want to lay out this groundwork for how we came to this interview because we have so many cool things to talk about. And now we just have to figure out where to grab onto this and launch us into a conversation. Okay. So where shall we begin? I think we shall begin with those two quotes of yours that I mentioned, one from your book and the other from the interview that you did. How do we resolve those two? How are we to understand what you're saying there? Well, I have to say that both of those are really from a, what you would call a materialist, if you like, but an ecological viewpoint. And I don't think you can dismiss the materialist aspects any more than you can dismiss physics from, you know, explaining how toasters work and how we get people to the moon and things like that. But it's not the whole picture either. So that's my background. I mean, my personal feeling is that physics and materialism and ecology does not account for the entire universe as we know it. But, you know, I have to say that for certain questions, like how do you get somebody physically to the moon, physics is the base, materialism is the base. But if you look at the great physicists, I'm not sure if you know of Ken Wilber's book, Quantum Questions, but that's basically a compendium of the mystical writings of the great physicists of the world, like Heisenberg and Schrodinger and Einstein and de Broglie and Max Planck and Pauley and Eddington, who is an astronomer. But all these great physicists, you know, they say that, you know, what we're really looking at is just superficial stuff. And it's very selective. And behind that, there is something more that's going on that we can't really have access to that kind of material. And also in more contemporary times, there's physicists playing around with something called the anthropic principle, which is also pretty mystical in many of its manifestations. But these deal with other aspects of the universe and other questions. None of these guys would say, no, we, you know, we don't need physics or materialism. If we want to get to the moon, they would always say, okay, well, that's a specific question we have to deal with. And so what I'm trying to say is that in in academics, in academic spheres, at least in my conception of academics, we have specific issues like getting to the moon or explaining human evolution, or social evolution, or cultural evolution, if you like, and that there materialism and ecology is the best framework for dealing with those questions. And so that's the framework that I've used, just like physics is the best framework for getting somebody to the moon. But Brian, I mean, that's interesting. I'm glad you bring up Heisenberg and Schrodinger. And those guys are great. I'm not sure I'm with you on how that history kind of evolves there, because they're going down one path. And then another group emerges, but then they're the shut up and calculate guys, right? So Oh, yeah, I agree. Calculate guys say rightly so, which is I think your point, they say, look, we can sit here and have these philosophical arguments all day long. But in the meantime, we have some incredible formulas, powerful mathematical models that we've that have fallen out of this work we've done in quantum physics that could provide a just as huge leg forward in technology. And they were right. And it did. And it led to computers and cell phones and the communication system we have. All this stuff is based on these very reliable quantum physics understandings that we have. But in the meantime, they sidestepped the philosophical question that the mystics like Schrodinger and the rest were talking about. I don't think the same actually applies in anthropology to a certain extent, you know, so shut up and calculate works in a limited sense. So does shut up and excavate, if you will, for archaeology. But when we start talking about the prehistory of religion and ritual and the rest of that, if we leave out our understanding of the relationship to the supernatural, we can't confine that to a materialist explanation that completely denies that consciousness even exists, which I think is is stunningly absurd to me that I admire the work that you're doing. But you're inside of an academic bubble that is it has this dogmatic understanding of consciousness that isn't just, you know, a shut up and calculate thing. It's wrong. It's been falsified. The best evidence we have suggests that the preconceptions they have about consciousness, let alone extended consciousness, is just completely falsified. Isn't that a huge problem? Well, no, it's part of the it's part of the spectrum of scientific views that exists. I mean, you know, Dean Raiden is an academic. He he's part of the spectrum. And you know, there are those shut up and calculate guys, but they don't represent everybody. And they don't represent, certainly my my perspective, I know I've worked with people that are what I would call hard scientists, you know, and, and they just don't have any truck with any of these issues of metaphysics or anything else. That's not my view. It's not Dean Raiden's view. It's not. It may be pretty common, but it's not the whole thing. So let's be careful there because then the same breath we can say, Hey, you know, in there's a lot of people now that are very drawn to the flat earth hypothesis. Yeah, it's funny. I was watching that I was watching the weather the other day, and I never watch it. But the guy actually went through some explanation for how the earth turns in relationship with the sun. And I go, My God, this is like a counter to their that's directly responding to the number of people who believe in the flatter theory. So my point is, we don't take those people seriously. And when we hear their ideas in this kind of intellectual discourse, we then make further assumptions about where they're coming from. And the same is true with the materialists who don't believe in consciousness or believe that consciousness is an illusion, you know, which was the famous Daniel Dennett thing for the longest time. I mean, 10 years ago, it was even more popular. Now, fortunately, you know, the cutting edge, if you will, of consciousness, science has kind of quietly moved away from that because it was such an absurd idea. But I don't think we should, you know, equate those two and put them on the same level of saying, Well, you know, everyone has an opinion. And now let me add really quickly here, Brian, because I don't want to, you are on the edge, you and I are kind of on the same side. You've had to battle your entire academic career to get your voice in there that even says, Hey guys, do we maybe even want to look at the fact that all these folks I'm talking to are reporting contact with the supernatural, right? I mean, so I want to know what was that like for you? And where do you come down at the end of the day on some, you know, in in the academic circle, I've sort of skirted that issue and I just sort of haven't, I mean, I've tried to, well, there's, I've tried to frame questions that don't directly address that problem. But in my personal life, you know, I have experienced a lot of things and you know, there's not too much doubt in my mind that there's synchronicity that's out there in the universe. And there's a lot of things that Dean Raiden was talking about, like precognition and a lot of things that we just can't explain yet. And so I haven't, I've tried not to deal necessarily with that and leave that serve as an open question from an academic point of view. What I have tried to do is look at the the way people use some of these innate feelings, innate proclivities to try to manipulate them and get more power for themselves in society. And that's why I started talking about some of the different personality types because I think there's a small group that really has manipulated themselves into position of power and we see that today, obviously with our political and economic system. The question is how they got there. And I refer these people as a grandisers and think that they're, they're always pushing for their own self-interest and they're always pushing to find ways of increasing their self-interests. And they've developed a whole series of strategies and I think control or claims to control or have exclusive access to the supernatural is one of those strategies that they've used to get control. So that's the way the problem, the academic problem that that I framed to try to deal with and to what degree the claims about the spirit world are real and to what degree they are political manipulations is pretty, you know, that's a whole another question that's open. And I, what I tried to show is that some of these claims are pretty self-serving like the claim on the plains Indians that, you know, if, if I as a leader of a secret society has sex with your wife then you can get some of my supernatural power by your relationship with her, you know. And so that's a claim about how the supernatural world is structured and how you can transfer power also through purchase which is also fairly transparently self-serving. But, you know, you have to question, you know, is this based in in real terms about the way the supernatural world works or is this a simple manipulation to, you know, a claim, an ideological claim about the ontology of the supernatural to promote individual self-interests. And I think you can find a lot of that kind of issue in secret societies. But it's really... Right, hold on, because let me jump in here. Because we've got a really, really interesting and important jumping off point and I think it's the both the challenge, if you will, and the opportunity of your research. Because we can go two ways. One, we can explore that topic right there within the confines of this kind of strict academic materialism. Of course, there is no such thing as a spirit world, of course. That's all just right? And then we have to kind of, and then that's kind of a strange conversation. Because on one hand you're lending credibility to that belief system, which sounds kind of strange, but you're reserving this, oh, but of course I don't believe any of that. And I'm just telling you, Brian, I appreciate this from you. That doesn't come through. When I talk to you, what I hear is someone who says, I think there's a reality to that. I don't know what that reality is, but I accept that there is a reality, but I can't really go there because I'm inside of these confines. But so the other way then to jump off is to say, okay, there is some reality to that spirit world. We don't know what it is. We don't know the ontology of it. When we probably never can, because we're on the wrong side of the equation, the wrong side of the telescope, if you will. But the best we can, we have to incorporate some reality of that into it. Otherwise, this just looks completely different, right? So which way do we jump on this? Well, as I said, I like both Jack Hunter's take on how we get at reality in terms of all these different worldviews or cosmic views of different cultures and different individuals, all having snippets of the truth, if you can ever even talk about the truth, snippets of reality, I guess. And Dean Raiden's approach saying, well, we've got to look at some commonalities here and see what's common across cultures. And that should give us one anchor. You know, to try to approach this from trying to make some sense out of all the variation that there is and all the different practices. So I think from my personal perspective, there is dealing, let me say it this way, dealing with questions of the supernatural and what's real and what's not is an extremely difficult question, because it's so complex. It's one of those questions that I've not tried to deal with in a comprehensive way. I've just tried to point out that, you know, at least part of the claims about the supernatural are bogus, especially from secret society perspectives. But there is an unknowable portion that may have some insights into ultimate reality in there, including these transcendent, these ecstatic experiences, which may have a window, open up a window into other dimensions that the content that comes through from that is so varied that it's unreliable. It may be varied, but in some respects it's so important to the overall question. It kind of dwarfs everything else. I mean, so do we really want to talk about some Indian chief who is trying to get it on with some young Mike, tell us some story about his talk to the gods, or do we want to talk about his real communication with the gods? You know, one of the links I sent you. That's the question, yeah. So I was just going to bring it down to a concrete level for the audience. One of the links I sent you was a show that I did with Jan Van Esselstein, who is this really interesting person. She runs a bookstore in Seattle. Here's her story, and a guy shows up in her bookstore and says, a Russian guy says, I've been studying the Ulche, the original Shaman in Siberia, for all these years, and I'd like to give a presentation at your bookstore. And she goes, great. She's so impressed that she says, we ought to invite some of the Ulche people over. So now this is an ongoing 30 years, 30 years in a row. She's invited these Ulche over. She studied them. She shared all this information with folks. So Jan's story then gets, so I really pushed her because I felt like that was my job. So the Ulche, great. They can do all these things. Where's their fucking iPhone? And she says, well, you know, I don't know. But I've sat in a room with the Ulche, with all the doors and the windows closed, and they've summoned up wind spirits, and all the papers in my house flew around in a tornado. And it wasn't just me, it was a group of a dozen people. And we all experienced it. And I walked out in nature with them, and they called the animals forward, and the animals came out of the forest like it was a freaking petting zoo. So, you know, this is the reality that they experienced that to me, Trump's the piddly stuff of is someone using their powers to get ahead or to, you know, beat somebody out of some money or some. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, absolutely. I mean, that kind of thing exists. Absolutely. And the question is, you know, what it tells us about the other dimensions, and how the universe is structured, how it functions, how it works. Yeah, and precognition as well, and telepathy, etc. And those are, you know, as I say, it's such a huge and difficult topic to deal with to try to sort out what's absolute and what's real and what's not is, for me, it was a difficult undertaking that I sort of backed off from. But, you know, I've had my own experiences and certainly had my own personal views on things like that. But from an academic point of view, I was just trying to point out that a lot of the stuff that did happen in these secret societies was smoke and mirrors and shams. And they put on performances not like the olchi, that sounded real. But the performances that they put on in these secret societies, at least a lot of them, were put on stage magic and meant to deceive people and convince them of supernatural powers that didn't necessarily exist. And that's part of the difference between real shamanism and the secret society stuff, because the secret societies recruit people on the basis of their wealth and their power, not on the basis of their shamanic abilities, okay, or their understanding of the supernatural, or their intuitive abilities. And so, as a result, perhaps, you need to have this kind of stage magic, because these guys, by and large, don't have those abilities. Or it's both. I mean, I think, so this is, I really appreciate your honesty and your ability to kind of talk about the full spectrum of the experience and the reality, because I did feel like you were kind of hamstrung, which I totally understand. I mean, your job within academia, you can only push the envelope so far. And believe me, I respect that you were out there pushing the edge. So I'm totally cool that now we're having this more broad spectrum conversation, because there's a lot of really interesting points. And you just hit on one of them, and I'd be very interested to get your opinion on this, because it's something that's really, I've tossed back and forth, and I'll give you a modern day example, and that's Uri Geller. So Uri Geller is this guy for people who don't know. He's originally in Israeli, this incredibly gifted psychic, if you will. Yeah. And there's many accounts that he has genuinely laboratory tested abilities. And these were tested by at Stanford Research Institute, by Hal Putoff and Russell Targ, two world-class scientists. And when people say that, oh, Uri Geller was able to trick them, no way, just go back and watch the videos that they did and the experimental protocols, very easy to control for. And Uri Geller showed this kind of psiability, psychic ability. And then I did an interview not too long ago with Jacques Vallée, where Jacques Vallée said, I was at the cafeteria table with Russell Targ and Uri Geller, and he demonstrated it to me, and I'm no fool, I get this. At the same time, and here's to your point, Uri Geller was clearly using stage magic when he went on stage and he was even outed as, you know, doing trickery and stage. So why is he mixing the two? And you could argue, you know, that maybe he had to, because to perform it, to deliver it on demand like that. But I also wonder if there's this other trickster kind of deceptive aspect to this. I mean, what is your take? What is going on? Why are these two things coexisting? And why are we trying to pull them apart and say there should be some pure shamanism, some pure connection to the spiritual, and yet we have these figures that are just mixing the two in this strange way? Well, shamans habitually mix the two as well, you know. I mean, there are some incredible accounts of shamanic precognition and things like that, but there are also lots of accounts of shamans using, you know, out and out trickery and stage magic to convince their patients that they have all these powers. And that's very effective in curing, by the way, you know, you get the placebo effect. And if people believe they're going to be cured, they tend to be cured a lot more effectively than if they don't believe they're going to be cured. So, you know, it's a mixture, as you say. And certainly, when you get into secret societies, I think they do include some people with genuine abilities, genuine supernatural abilities, I think. But the bulk of people that get initiated are on the basis, as I said, of how much wealth their family has rather than their shamanic abilities. And so those people, you know, yeah, you've got to use stage magic for convincing people that they have supernatural powers. And that's what the secret societies are all about. They've got to convince people that there are spirits, and that these spirits can create havoc in their community. And that the secret society has the power to hold these malevolent spirits at bay, like the cannibalist cannibal spirits on the northwest coast here, that could invade your community like zombies and destroy everybody and eat everybody as well. So, you know, they've got to convince people that this is a real possibility. And so they resort to anything that they need to to convince people of that, including putting people into ecstatic states of extreme hunger where they come back and, you know, and they they arrange for people to be bitten. They pay them off ahead of time. It's all arranged ahead of time. But and these wild spirits come back from the woods and they start destroying things and biting people. And so it's, you know, all of that staged. But it doesn't mean that there are no such things as spirits. As a matter of fact, virtually all the traditions, the secret society, shamanic, etc., they all maintain the reality of the spirit world and spiritual forces. And so that's one of the major commonalities. And, you know, it raises the question, okay, is this the baseline of supernatural reality that there are some of these forces that we call spirits out there? You know, you can make a good argument. Yeah, there are. But you're really bringing something interesting to the table here. And I really appreciate it. And let's explore this now, because when you say that part about the secret society, I think a lot of people are nodding their head and going, Yeah, all these phony baloney secret societies that I see nowadays or in the recent past, they seem to fit the bill. I knew that all along, whether they're talking about Scientology or Skull and Bones or whatever. But the contribution that you make that is so fascinating, is you say, no, hold on, guys, I'm talking about going back as far as we can look into prehistorical societies and right, and we're seeing the same pattern. So what is that telling you? Well, you mean the same pattern in terms of secret societies or spirituality? I'm sorry, the same, you're seeing the same pattern in terms of secret societies, this thing you're calling self aggrandizement, this social misbehavior is way back. I mean, isn't that fascinating? Well, I wouldn't say it goes way, way back in archaeological terms, but it goes, you know, I've argued that it goes back at least 30,000 years to the upper Paleolithic. The case I made, I think the strongest case that can be made is of the painted caves in southwestern Europe, like Lascaux, where, you know, they've called some of the galleries there the Sistine Chapel of the Paleolithic. And I think that's more appropriate than the original person that coined the phrase probably realized, because, you know, the Pope is the ultimate secret society head, if you like. And he's got all this fabulous stuff, the arch surrounding him, including the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo, that's for his exclusive use. And I think, you know, you could make the same argument for this gallery in Lascaux, which is a narrow corridor leading to a small enclave surrounded by lots of painting, high quality paintings, really masterpieces. And it's just a small little alcove that's suitable for one or two people to be in at once. And, you know, I think that's basically where these guys' heads of the secret societies were going to communicate with whatever spirits they were dealing with at the time. There are a lot of other indications of the existence of, you know, secret societies in the Upper Paleolithic, too. But I think this is one of the strongest ones that can be made. So back 30,000 years ago, but, you know, this awareness of or ability to enter into some sort of awareness of other dimensions, I think goes back much, much further, you know, at least a million years ago, I would guess, and is probably based in a more fundamental mammalian reaction towards starvation. I mean, this is my take on this common thing, because, you know, in all cultures, all human cultures, there is this awareness of a spiritual dimension. And so it's got to have some sort of biological basis that enables us to perceive this. It's got to be some sort of structure in the brain that opens up, you know, I don't think snakes have this ability. But we don't know that. I mean, that's again where we're kind of trying to, I feel like we fall into the next pothole, which is to try and jam it back into some, you know, neo-Darwinian kind of explanation for things that I think also fails, you know? I mean, well, I think you can't discount it any more than you can discount physics and going to the moon. I mean, I think you can discount it as being incomplete, you know. Yes, I agree with that. Yeah. So just look at neuroplasticity, you know, which is a topic we've looked into extensively. And already we know that the mind, the voice inside our head is structuring or restructuring our brain, which leads to a chicken-in-the-egg question of how is consciousness affecting the matter, the material? So, you know, we can no longer say, oh, it's just this kind of very simplistic kind of Darwinistic kind of thing. And then we have the whole popular thing in consciousness science now is panpsychism, right? So they've left consciousness as an illusion absurdity that just is a third grader would tell you is just ridiculous. And they say, okay, maybe, you know, there's consciousness stuff. Well, panpsychism doesn't really get you there either, but at least opens up the time frame to where we can no longer have to jam it into some biological evolutionary, you know, it's like the whole thing with epigenetics is another part of this, right? So they've, we now have established that somehow there are these traits that are passed along. So we want to use the term epigenetics to jam them back into genetics when any geneticist would tell you, well, we have no idea in the world how we could create a biological model for transferring that kind of information through genes. I think a much more parsimonious explanation is some kind of field theory like Dr. Rupert Sheldrick, or ultimately, it's idealism is that consciousness is somehow fundamental. Back to our friends Schrodinger and the mysticists who said, hey, give it up. It seems like consciousness is fundamental and matter is somehow emerging from consciousness in a way we don't understand. So that's a long, long kind of thing. But I just don't like when we then want to say, well, it must have emerged a million years. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe not. Well, yeah, of course. But I was, I was not trying to say that, you know, neo-Darwinian models explain everything. I was just saying that you can't eliminate them. You need that as a basis for some aspects of, you know, how the brain evolved. And, and the brain, you know, without a brain, we wouldn't be talking about all this stuff. And consciousness, obviously, some people have tried to dismiss it. But, you know, if people have realized how ridiculous that was, so you have to, you have to at least explain how the brain got to be the way it is. And the fact that you have all of these proclivities for language, for recognizing kinship, for recognizing some sort of supernatural dimensions of spirit world, you know, the fact that they're universal indicates that there's something in the structure of the brain that opens up those windows, if you like. And it's basically opening the window, but it's not saying, you know, what the content of the window is going to be or what's actually out there. So that is a whole other question and something else that needs to be addressed by other means. But at least you got the structure in place to be able to deal with these things. I'm with you. And I do total appreciate where you're coming from. And I want to get back to talking about your work. But I do have to digress again, because it's the nature of this conversation. And it's fun, particularly because you are so open to exploring this, given your position, which is quite unique. But if you've ever investigated the near death experience science, it's fascinating. And it's really kind of a case closed for the for the all the brain stuff you're talking about, because now we have people that, no matter whether you want to call them dead or not dead, or in whatever state, their brain is in a state that isn't supposed to support conscious memories, or the creation of conscious experiences in any model we currently have of neurology. Let me play a clip for you from an interview I did with Dr. Jeff Long, who was a radiation oncologist, and then by way of that got interested in near death experience. But what I want to point out to you in the clip is that here we're talking about a brain state that is not associated with what we normally associate with having a conscious experience. And yet, they are having a conscious experience. So just for fun, let me play this, and then we can get back to saying what that might mean about extended consciousness in the spirit world. Is that okay to listen to this for a minute? Sure, sure. When you're under general anesthesia, it should be impossible to have elucidic organized remembrance at that time. In fact, under anesthesia, you're typically so far under with general anesthesia, they often have to breathe for you. I mean, you're literally brain shut down to the level of the brain stem. And at that point in time, some people have a cardiac arrest, their heart stops, and of course, that's very well documented. They monitor people very carefully that are having general anesthesia. So I have dozens and dozens of near death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia. And at this time, it should be, if you will, doubly impossible to have a conscious remembrance. And yet they do have near death experiences at this time. And they're typical near death experiences. They have the same elements and a period of have them in the same order as near death experiences occurring under all others. I cut that off there under all other circumstances. So you get the general idea, you're still completely valid, what you're saying about our brain and this close relationship we all know and experience between our brain and our consciousness. But again, we're at this uncomfortable edge of where is this consciousness and how much of it is in our body? And how does that fit into this overall investigation that you've done in terms of how culture incorporates that in? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the interesting things about the near death experiences is that, you know, it's a it's an arguable insight or one of the very few situations where you can say, when you can try to use that as an insight into the nature of supernatural existences and consciousness, you know, surviving past, past individual biological life. So that, you know, it's a really interesting field. But it also requires special ways of dealing with it and investigating it. As Dean Raiden pointed out, you know, some of the if precognition is a feature, a lot of these things could be the result of precognition kinds of anticipation of what what's going to happen. And so that opens up in another can of worms, if you like. Well, I love I love Dean, I respect the crap out of him. And he is a true giant in not just the field of parapsychology, but in science in general. And I think 20, 30, 50 years from now, people are going to look back and go, why did we not listen to this guy more? But at the same time, I think that's just not a very good argument. By that argument, then there's nothing that we should like, if you listen to the interview I did with him, well, then why Dean, would we even go into the lab that you're going into and try and study or control anything if we want to appeal to the nature of things and the nature of our relationship to time and consciousness, you know, it's all up for grabs then, right? So we have to but it's an argument you have to deal with, you know, I mean, he raised the argument. So you you know, in good scientific procedures, you got to bat it back and forth and it may not be a very good argument, but you know, you have to come up with arguments to as to why it's not a good argument. Right. I'm just saying the argument then completely undermines the entire scientific endeavor. Then I don't know that it's much of an argument and that does if you're saying we can no longer rely on our controls, we can no longer rely on any anything we measure, then yeah, there you can, you could take that argument, but then you really don't have much to do after that argument. Maybe not. At any rate, that's off on another tangent. And yeah, but I just want to emphasize that I think the near-death experiences are one of the very few keys that we have to try to understand what these other dimensions this the universe might really be like how it operates and what the rules are from my experiences and this is my personal take. It's not an academic, you know, conclusion, but just sort of a personal observation is these other dimensions seem to work in ways that don't conform to normal material existence here. They're not amenable to experimentation or, you know, scientific proofs in the usual sense of, you know, you set up the right conditions and this should happen. That doesn't work that way. It seems to be much more haphazard and sometimes it seems to me almost like, you know, whatever, whatever synchronicities there are tend to take the form of jokes that the universe is playing on us with information. You know, like the other day, just very recently, a little anecdote, but I visited somebody in Sweden, an archaeologist, and 10 years ago, 12 years ago, whatever it was, I haven't been in touch with him for 12 years and I needed a reference that he had from his site and so I emailed him just the other night asking him for this reference that I haven't seen you for 10 years, I'm sorry, but, you know, and he emailed me right back within minutes saying, this is very strange. I have on my desk a paper that I have not looked at for 10 years because it's been buried on my desk and it's the exact same paper that you were asking about. Yeah, that's amazing. And, you know, neither one of us had thought about this or looked at it for 10 years and within minutes we were, you know, dealing with the same thing. And, you know, it seems like it seems like a joke that is being played and trying to explain how that would work, why it would work, you know, what's behind it is just beyond me. I just, how the causality involved, if there is anything you can call causality, it's just a bizarre world. Yeah, that's fast, that's awesome. You know, and I love the way you said it's like a joke and then you said to try and explain it and I thought to try and explain it ruins the joke. It's like, right, it's like when someone tells you a joke and you don't get it and then you go, well, wait, here's, you know, there's no longer a joke there. It's kind of the same, you know. Yeah, but you gotta wonder, you know, what's going on here, you know. I mean, it's our nature just to wonder how, how in the world did this happen? Of course. You know, Dr. Hayden, this has been been wonderful and again, I appreciate the openness. Since one of the original reasons I contacted you was to get your opinion on the nature of evil for lack of a better way of putting that, what are some of your thoughts about the nature of evil, both from a practical, I'm on a getter done, get what I want kind of thing that we all understand and then maybe approaching more of this murky middle ground of I'm being guided by some pretty benevolent forces, which is out there. I mean, people are saying that's why I'm doing it or that's what, that's who I'm serving. Yeah, you certainly get that in secret societies and some of them were really predatory, you know. And with human sacrifices and cannibalism and the whole stick, there's one analogy I make is with one particular African secret society where, in order to enter into some of the upper ranks, you had to kill and eat your eldest son. So, you know, to me, that smacks of Star Wars and, you know, extreme gang kind of situations. But to get back to your point about evil or question about evil, you know, you go back to most traditional societies at the tribal level and hunting and gathering level, they didn't have concept of evil. That was not part of the conceptual universe. There were spirits and people that could do you harm, whether intentionally or not, usually, you know, not necessarily intentionally, but, you know, there were definitely people that were harmful in those societies. There's one account of Inuit or Eskimo Shaman that went on a killing rampage because he couldn't marry the person he wanted to. And so he killed their entire family, etc. So, is that evil or is it just a really selfish, you know, obnoxious bastard? You know, to me, somebody who does, you know, harm like a psychopath, that would qualify in my definition as somebody that's evil. You know, I don't adhere to this concept of evil as being promoted by malevolent forces that are conjured up by secret societies or by dualistic religions like Christianity or Islam or Zoroastrianism. That's all constructive, you know, these secret society kinds of institutions for having somebody to beat on some evil, evil force that you have to combat. Again, let me interject because I want to get your opinion on this really in the more broad sense. Ted Bundy is back in the headlines. They're doing this big movie and everyone's excited about it. And I know my kids are excited about it and I'm like, they're teenagers, you know, why are we glorifying this? But that's kind of another issue. The secret story in Ted Bundy, if you really dig into it in a way that a lot of people don't like to acknowledge is satanic worship again. So he doesn't start with satanic worship, but he whatever is drawn into this, I don't want to say a lifestyle, but he's drawn into these horrible acts. And then he meets other folks who are going, yeah, you know, I'm connected with these spiritual forces. And Ted's like, Hey, great, sounds cool. I have the voices inside my head. And that seems to be consistent with where I'm at. And he is now trying to make this connection with this benevolent spiritual. Yeah, but I'm, but he's buying into a system that he feels is going to be able to let him do what he wants to do. And so, and that system, that conceptual system is really a product of secret societies and institutionalized religions. It's not, it doesn't exist before that. Unless there's a reality to it, right? Well, that's an open question. Is it one of our constructs, just like, you know, these another self-serving construct of secret societies, or is there any reality to it? And that is an open question. Agreed. And I think that's the jumping off point for me. It's like with the near death experience, you know, we're both in agreement that that kind of takes us in a different place because we're using scientific methods the best we can. But then we're reaching, as we both said, this kind of jumping off into the great unknown where we can't penetrate it. But certainly the accounts that we're getting back do suggest this hierarchy of this extended realm. And it doesn't just extend upwards, it extends downwards. And I'm always, I'm kind of going, I go by the, that what seems to make logical sense to me is the as above, so below, as below, so above. I mean, you don't have to look very far to see in this existence people who do horrible things for no apparent reason other than that it gets them some kind of gratification. And this is your work. This is your work. This is exactly what you've studied. I just, I just don't know. It just seems to me a quite a natural and easy extension. If we say consciousness extends beyond bodily death, then we might have to be open to the possibility that that goes on in those other. That's certainly a possibility. Yeah. So I mean, if, if that's a factor, and I've played with that in my, you know, those ideas and my own experiences as well. And, you know, it could be that it's an aspect of the, the spirit realms, if you like, that has evolved together with institutional religions. Brian, have you had any experiences in the field? Because we should remind people this is a guy we're talking to today who was in the field for years and years doing the work with studying with indigenous people, also studying sites where they were doing archaeological digs. So you're like a real, a real anthropologist. Were there any experiences in the field that really just set you back with regard to some of this stuff? Well, I, I tried to do some meditations at Chichen Itza and actually wrote it up in a, for a local publication at one point. And so I went up to the Templo Mayor in Chichen Itza at night under the full moon and did some meditation up there. And yeah, I had a very powerful experience of certainly presence of one of the former priests there that had sort of fed off the lives of other people. And I felt that he was still there and is still very actively engaged in the same kinds of things, even though he was, you know, just basically a spirit presence at the time. So that's probably the most significant thing that's happened to me in the field. That's pretty significant. Hey, it's, it's awesome. So, so Brian, again, our guest has been Dr. Brian Hayden, archaeologist formerly of Simon Fraser University, where he retired from after a very distinguished career and has written some amazing books. One of the ones we talked about was Shaman's Sorcerers and Saints, the Prehistory of Religion. Brian, what are you up to nowadays? It sounds like from the way that you said you're just in contact with a colleague in Sweden that you are not, quote unquote, retired, but you're still engaged in this work? Yeah, well, I've done some work in some Middle Paleolithic caves on that at Bruny Kelle in France, where they've discovered the earliest ritual structures on record, basically going back almost 170,000 years ago. And I've just been trying to tie up some loose projects that never got finished, one dealing with storage, another dealing with counting. So it's, yeah, sort of more, more pedestrian kind of archaeology. But yeah, well, except for Bruny Kelle. Bruny Kelle is really exciting. Well, and I think it also might get back to the very first point that you made. And now that we've come full circle, I can have any greater appreciation for your kind of shut up and excavate mentality, because there's value in that, right? I mean, somebody has to gather the data and interpret it the best way they can inside of certain parameters. And that moves the ball forward in a way that speculating about how the spirit's work cannot, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's been absolutely fantastic having you on. And I thank you so much for joining me. Best of luck to you with all that work. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks again to Dr. Hayden for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I'd have to tee up from this interview is one that I've asked several times, but I think we can return to it with a different spin this time. What is the nature of evil? And what do you make of Dr. Hayden's anthropological, sociological self-aggrandizement perspective? I was about to jump in there with my opinion, but I will resist the urge and wait for you to tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you on the Skeptico forum. I love meeting with people there. It seems like we can engage in deeper conversations. But if you want to try and track me down on Facebook or leave a comment on the YouTube video, that's fine as well. And of course, you're always free to email me. The important thing is that if this information is meaningful to you, if it connects with you, hey, follow up on that. There's a reason for that. Connect with me. Let's start a conversation. I love meeting people who listen to Skeptico. So many of you are so brilliant and have contributed to my overall understanding of these big picture questions that I'm trying to answer for myself. So I'm so grateful to you. And in that spirit, I ask you to expand this circle so that I can learn even more from more of you. Of course, along those lines, check out the Skeptico website, S-K-E-P-T-I-K-O.com. All of them are there available for free download. So please take advantage of that. And until next time, take care and bye for now. So thanks for watching this video. 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