 On this episode of Sculpticoke... A show about rules. When to break them. Still hanging out at the after party and with me... Tupac Shakur. Believe in Death Row East. Believe in that. Believe in God. Believe in Death Row East. And when to follow them. I accept the rules, you know. Laboratory ofness, fine. That's all I will look at. That's all I will base my argument on. I will never appeal to my own personal subjective insight. And you go a long way. It's enough to win. After this transition has been accepted, then we can review the rules of the game. That first clip was from 1996. Tupac Shakur, who I included because he was kind of for breaking rules and famously said play the game, but don't let the game play you. And the second was from our excellent, excellent guest, Dr. Bernardo Castro, who has been on the show before. I highly respect is truly one of the leaders in paradigm change from biological robot meaningless universe to wherever we go next. Now the rules game thing really has a lot of different meanings as this interview goes on. Stick around and I think you'll see what I mean. Welcome to Skeptica where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Acaris. And today I'm so excited to welcome back my longtime friend. A lot of years here, more than most people would probably even realize. And one of the great thinkers of our time when it comes to, let me get this right, an academic level argument for the mental nature of reality. Or what I like to say, the argument against the idea that we're all biological robots in a meaningless universe. I'm talking of course about Bernardo Castro. Fantastic Bernardo. It's great to have you here. Welcome. Great to be here, Alex. We haven't seen each other for too long. Last time we saw each other in person was 2016, wasn't it? It boggles the mind how long it's been already. It was up at, you were with Deepak Chopra. Yes. Up in... I've had powersbots at Deepak's. Yeah. And then you drove down, I think. You have to drove up. Same thing. I live right, I live very close to there. Yeah, yeah, same thing. Yeah, but no, it's awesome. So Bernardo, let's start with this. You have a new gig since we last chatted. You are now the executive director, head concho, Ascension Foundation. Tell us about that. Wow, that's something that had been looming in my life already for several years, but I had code feet. I didn't want to live the high-tech world, because for me it was not only the way I earned my living, but it was a family. The company worked for ASML, was like family for me. But yeah, eventually there came the lockdown, and then I lost that social aspect of my work anyway, and I had a health condition that made me re-evaluate the way I make my decisions, and now I don't make any choice based on what I stand to lose, but based on what still has to be done. And Fred Matz, who you see there to the left, who is the founder of Ascension Foundation, had been asking me for quite a while to do this with him and others, and in 2020 I decided to take the plunge, and now my life is first and foremost about philosophy of mind, ontology, and technology has been relegated to the level of a hobby. Now I build my own little computer in the attic late at night. You should remind people about your former life, because it's not only quite impressive, but it also gives you a certain grounding that we've often spoke about on this show. So maybe you want to just go over that part of your bio. Well, my first education was computer engineering. I have a doctorate in computer engineering. I was 26 when I got that. I used to work at CERN. That was my first job. I worked on the data acquisition system of the Atlas experiment, part of the Large Hadron Collider. Then I worked for corporate research at Philips. I founded a company that eventually was bought by Intel over a decade ago. It was called Silicon Hive. Now it's Intel Eindhoven. Then I went to ASML, which is a company that everybody, the whole world depends on. You never heard of them probably because it's not a consumer company. It sells to businesses like Samsung, TSMC, chip makers. I worked there for 15 years. I was doing strategy business development, technology and science-driven strategy. In parallel to that, I was doing philosophy as well for the past 15 years as well. Now for two years, the roles have been reversed. I do have a doctorate in philosophy, but philosophy always took a back seat in my life. If you count the number of hours, and now it's the other way around. I spend most of my time now in philosophy promoting mainly other people's ideas through essential foundation. I'm trying to wake people up to the notion that idealism, the worldview that entails mind being fundamental, is not only something that you need first-person spiritual insight to think is the truth. You can make an exceedingly strong case for idealism based purely on reason and laboratory evidence. That's what essential foundation tries to promote, this reality that you can make a rational and empirical case for idealism without direct introspective insight, without spiritual insight. The last time we spoke, you were, I guess, just becoming engaged in this battle, this struggle that you saw as necessary part of a paradigm change. If there is going to be this paradigm change from the ridiculous reductionistic materialistic to something else, whatever that else is, to opposing something else, that takes a certain grinding of the gears that you have to get in there and be busy doing and have to face forward publicly in order to do that. I pulled up, essential foundation, you're offering a free, absolutely free, totally free, 100% free, six-hour course, which I guess would be kind of a companion to a lot of the work that people can find on your excellent website, which is still at metaphysical speculations, but the URL is BernardoCastrip.com, and there's just a ton of stuff there. I guess, I mean, let's pump it a little bit, the course, and maybe any comment on what it takes to make a paradigm change to kind of grease those wheels that don't want to turn. Well, I think you cannot fight two battles at the same time. You cannot fight a battle for changing the rules of the game because the rules don't offer a level playing field, and they don't. And then for winning the game, so you can't do these two things at the same time, unfortunately. So the choice we've made was, okay, we accept the rules of the game as they are, which favor reasoning and laboratory empirical evidence over direct introspective insight and widespread anecdotal evidence. Now, are these rules fair? No. Do they offer a level playing field? No. But we chose our bet. So we chose to fight according to the existing rules, which do not offer a level playing field. But we think we can still win nonetheless, even according to the present rules of the game. So that's what we do, and that's what I've been trying to do now for years. I accept the rules. Laboratory evidence, fine. That's all I will look at. Reasoning, fine. That's all I will base my argument on. I will never appeal to my own personal subjective insight. I will only focus on rational reasoning. And you go a long way. It's enough to win. After this transition has been accepted and we are deep into that process now. There's a lot happening under the surface. After people realize, okay, that this is just really reasoning and evidence-based conclusions, then we can review the rules of the game, because we always mature even as a civilization. And we will see that there are things that we are throwing away. The baby we are throwing away together with the bathwater. But that comes later. And now we just have to fight according to the present rules. Okay, so we are going to make a smooth, but not totally smooth transition to kind of the skeptical portion of our show, which we were chuckling about. You'll understand kind of what's coming. And I appreciate that about you that we can... I love it, actually. Great. So here I've pulled up the very, very impressive academic advisory board. And there's a bunch of names on there that people recognize. Several have been on the show. But I wanted to bring attention to... I think you'll get a kick out of this. Professor Jeffrey Kripel, Rice University, because I wanted to play for you this clip. This is an interview that he recently did or was on. And he's there with Whitley Streber and Diana Walsh-Pasulka, who we will talk about. And so you know Jeff, obviously. Yes. Yes. No, personally. Do you know Whitley? No, I have never met Whitley. I know who he is, but I have never met him. No. Okay. So author of Communion, probably... This is Whitley Streber we're talking about. Author of Communion, probably the most important alien contact book ever published. And co-author with Jeff of The Supernatural, why the unexplained is real. And you know, the other thing I just add about Whitley, just to make sure you know, has shared contact experiences. So has alien contact experiences shared with other people to go, wow, yeah, that was... We all saw it together kind of thing. And also has after-death communication experiences that are verified in different ways. We can kind of take that for what it is. And then he has an implant as well, which we can talk about because it kind of crosses over into the physical, you know, you like the Jacques Valais, multi-layered, isotope kind of thing. Well, this has similar things to it. But with that, let's play this clip, because I think you're going to enjoy this and let me know if you can't hear this. That we all in some strange way agree on, or is this absolutely real? When I touch my face, am I touching me or is an idea creating the impression that I'm somehow here? You know, there's a book I'm sure you're all familiar with called The Idea of the World by Bernardo Castro, which Jeff introduced me to and which I have now read about four times. I'm going to hopefully get Bernardo on the show if he can ever realize that I'm not simply saucer Sam, but we'll see. That's not easy. So where are we now? Because we're looking at physical objects. They do things they shouldn't be able to do. They don't make sense. The implants in my ear, there's a piece of debris here in this office. Other pieces have been extensively studied, as we all know, more than we can even say. And yet, that's not the answer. I love Whitley. He's been on the show a couple of times, and then I've been on his show, but he doesn't like me as much anymore because I came down on him pretty hard on the Jesus thing. But tell us what you think. Well, first of all, will you go on Whitley's show? I would. Okay, I will, through the grapevine. It's not time to have conversations. I will talk to anyone. I mean, I think he obviously has a lot of respect for your work, and I think you two would enjoy it. But the main question, I guess, is how are you processing the UFO thing? Because, you know, I read this a couple of years ago in 2020, the phenomenon, a brief review you did of the movie, and it sounded like you were kind of taking baby steps into this thing. Where are you today and any thoughts on where you are versus where Kriple is versus where Whitley Strieber is? I think the UFO phenomenon or the UAP phenomenon, whatever you want to call it. I don't care about the name. It's one of the top three mysteries we have in front of us today. Number one is time, a mystery of time. That's an overwhelming mystery, because it's with us, well, all the time. And it holds the answers to many things. Understanding the nature of time is the way to understanding our true identity, the nature of reality, everything. That's number one. It's right up there. But number two, it may be the UFO UAP phenomenon, because it is something that defies not only known physics, it defies Aristotelian logic. The behavior of the phenomena is not a logical behavior a lot of the times. And to defend myself from the presupposition of what you're saying, I did write a book in which I was very open to the UFO UAP phenomenon many years ago called Meaning in Absurdity. And so I have been open about it, that I think this is a profound mystery, a real mystery that will only yield to us if we open our minds in a way that we can't even contemplate today because it would require revising even our logic not only our physics. It would require revising our understanding of reality itself, of consciousness, of everything. Two points to that because I think to me those are baby steps and kind of looking in the wrong direction. Two takeaways from Whitley and then we're going to talk about Dan Walsh-Pasolkin in a minute. It's not about UFOs or UAPs, which I hate because it's just a sigh up the UAP just to confuse people. I thought it was about UFOs, no, it's UAPs, this new acronym. It's not about that, it's about ET. And that's what Whitley's saying. Whitley's saying it's about my contact experience. Everyone who's at the forefront of this field, all those people in that interview are saying it's about ET, it's about contact. When Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico gave his subjects for the first time ordained by the great government drug-taking, experimenting arm that it had, when he gave them the DMT, they went into that other realm and there was ET. And ET said, we've been waiting for you. Glad you're here, right? So that's in our record. And then further when the famous near-death experience researcher Ken Ring, when he did the same, when he tried to cross-correlate the results of near-death experience accounts with alien contact accounts, he said, wow, there's so many similarities here. And that's work has been picked up more currently by Ray Hernandez in the free group who did the first academic survey of contact experiences and the same. So this is what matters from a consciousness perspective, because if you go and talk to the UFO people, if you will, they're all about consciousness now in a way that kind of always ticks me off because it's like they have this kind of kindergarten understanding or they just walked into this new world and they go, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. And they don't know quite how to deal with it. So that's why I guess I'm poking at you a little bit. Baby steps. UFO is about consciousness. It's about the question I always ask is, does E.T. have an NDE? That gets to the heart of it. What are your thoughts? I will admit to the accusation of baby steps. Yes, that's how I go about things. And it may be wrong because the urgency of our situation is just overwhelming. We may not have enough time for baby steps. Regarding the E.T. part, I sort of pre-assumed that every time we talk about UAPs, UFOs, whatever, there is conscious agency behind those things. So to me, it's to talk about the same thing. I don't think UAPs and UFOs are natural phenomena or mechanistic phenomena. They are guided by an intelligence. And my allusion to a logic that is not Aristotelian logic was a sort of implicit recognition of that because it's only conscious agents that use logic to determine their behavior or something that is beyond our logic. So I grant you that. What makes it interesting regarding the UAP, UFO phenomenon is agency. Now, you said E.T. Where I would take perhaps a step larger than most take is in not recognizing that it's a don't deal that E.T. is extraterrestrial, that E.T. is some kind of four-dimensional like we are biological entity from another solar system that came here in some kind of beryllium spaceship. I think there is a lot more mystery to the Earth, to our locus in space-time than we there imagine today. So is it foreign? It's foreign to our culture, to our civilization, to our world view, to our understanding of what is what and what is not. But it may be geographically speaking or cosmologically speaking from here too. And that to me is even more mind-boggling than beryllium spaceships coming from Ceres. Yeah. The problem I always have with that is two-fold and I guess we'll get to the first part of the fold in a minute in terms of who's controlling that narrative and what the dominant narrative is today. But the second thing I guess that I'd say and it's going to relate to the second main topic I want to talk about in terms of how we interface with science and that is that in this paper of yours that I'm going to quote in a minute, science isn't about proof, but science is about evidence. And I would say that science is about the burden of proof and that we are in this constantly changing game of where that burden of proof lies and whether it lies with what we might say is the kind of conventional or mainstream opinion or whether it lies with a new paradigm that's being established. And we can trace that all the way back to your idealism. I think the burden of proof has clearly shifted and you've been instrumental in shifting it to those who want to prop up, you know, scientific materialism, physicalism, that has been falsified and the burden of proof is on them to falsify idealism or to jump on board with Max Planck and consciousness as fundamental. But I don't want to digress too far because I would say the same thing is true here with the ET UFO thing. Number one, I'm glad you concede the point that we're not talking about UFOs. We're talking about the intelligence that is the agency, the intelligence, I would say, that is behind that technology that we're observing through the dials, as you like to call them, on our plane, our airplane, on our dashboard that tells us what we are sensing in the outside world. But the second part of that is that I think if we look at this from an anthropological standpoint, if we look at the evidence, cultures throughout time has been telling us they come from the stars. If we look at the Native American accounts here, I've interviewed Artie Sixkiller-Clarke, other people just recently. All these traditions are replete with stories, star people, star people, star people. They told us they came from the stars. The ancient art tells us they came with the stars. I say the burden of proof is on those who claim they are not from the stars and those who claim that the little pile of slag that Jacques Vallée walks around in her pocket and Whitley mentioned is on his desk is not evidence of a craft, of whether it's made out of whatever material is a craft. I think the burden of proof has clearly shifted. Maybe you don't agree, maybe you agree with me. I don't categorically state that they are not from the stars because I don't know and I don't think anybody knows. I would just be open to the possibility that they are not and to latch on to the very things you refer to that cultures throughout history have been talking about this and they have been saying that they are from the stars. Another way to look at the very same evidence is to realize that cultures throughout history have been talking about this. In other words, they have always been here which is consistent with the notion that they are from here because they have always been here and if it's an expedition, why is it taking thousands of years to meet the goals of this expedition? On the other hand, if they are from here, then there is no go, they are just from here. They are here because they are from here. They are the watchers. They have been here all the time. They watch whenever they want. They have planted in the garden and they can come back multiple, multiple species, multiple, multiple agendas. That's my read of the data. I want to play for you another clip from that same interview with the fantastic Diana Walsh Posalka. Do you know who she is? I heard her name but I don't know anything about her. She wrote a really important book called American Cosmic, Super Smart, very, very dialed into this thing, Buddies with Jacques Valais, Buddies with Gary Nolan, very, very connected and on the forefront of this whole thing. Let me play this clip. It'll take you just a minute to queue it up. Sure. So, I would say that I agree with John that we're just at the beginning, academics up. And I think that people who do religious studies have an insight into the historicity of the phenomena. It's been around for a long time. We have a lot of records to, you know, that are documenting the interface between humans and the anomalous. And that's very important. But part of the reason that American Cosmic did rattle some cages and I won't deny it is that I did field research. And I think that as academics going into this, now we feel safe enough, some of us, you know, to, now that the US government has acknowledged in June 2021 that there are these anomalous things. And so academics are now studying this. But I think that the academics who have studied this can offer some advice. And part of that is that we need to actually do the field research. We need to get into the places. We need to talk to people like you, Whitley, who've had experiences. And, you know, we need to do the kinds of things that we've always done. And we also need to acknowledge that why did American Cosmic rattle cages? Because there was misinformation and disinformation, which is there are two different things. Disinfo is intentional. And we have to acknowledge that that is part of the history here in the United States of this specific phenomena that are called now UAPs. And I think that academics have been afraid to identify that, but we can't do it with any kind of integrity if we don't say absolutely Project Blue Book was a disinfo campaign. You know, so, and we have to develop now skills in order to decipher any kind of thing that we might want to call truth. Because, you know, really that's what academics are trying to do. They're trying to uncover things that are historically accurate, you know, factual so that we can move on with knowledge. I think to jump in there with Diana before I bring up a topic. Field research is the way to go about it. Field research and less prejudice, less prejudged conclusions about what is allowed to be real and what is not. So I'm with her on that. There is nothing she said that I disagree with. Well, it might even talk about, because I brought it up on the screen before and then I just kind of mentioned it in passing. You know, one of the things you were drawn to in the movie that you reviewed the phenomenon was this analysis of some of the material that people have found, in particular credible people like Jacques Vallée. And that's the kind of stuff that would be included in the field research and that's the kind of stuff that I guess you're kind of calling for, right? Yeah. Yeah. So rigorous, methodologically correct field research. So, but here's the other jumping off point on that, that I really, I guess is a huge deal to me and is something I want to focus on in this interview and talk about. And that's that we are awash with disinformation, not just misinformation not just junk science. Science is awash within organized, very sophisticated and brutal at times effort to misinform, to mislead, to deceive people. And I think just as she said, we have to not only acknowledge that and acknowledge when it's happened but check ourselves and say, are we in the middle of that right now? Is what's coming down at us now? Is it misinformation? Is it not just junk science? Is it you get my point? What do you think about that? That things go wrong often is a fact because science is done by scientists and scientists are human. But to first acknowledge your point before I elaborate further let me give you a personal example. I had a debate with a famous physicist some time ago, Zabina Hosenfelder who is a materialist and tries to debunk everything that doesn't fit with materialism and extreme determinism. And in the course of that debate I accused her of having proposed theoretical entities, hidden variables that she never even defined. So how can we create an experiment to find those hidden variables if she doesn't even define what they are? And she said on that debate live to my face that she did define the hidden variables and she even mentioned the paper in which she claims to have defined the hidden variables and when you read that paper she does no such a thing. The paper is about a toy model hidden variables of an alternate universe that's much simpler than ours. She made absolutely no attempt to actually define plausible hidden variables. In other words, she lied to my face in order to save her face during a debate. Do I think that was malicious? No, I think she did it because in her mind that was the lesser evil. It was the lesser evil to outright mislead I would say lie than to acknowledge someone who is pushing towards a different conclusion from the same laboratory data that we both have in front of us. So is there disinformation? Yes. The world is awash with disinformation from all sides because as Thomas Kuhn once said back in the late 60s the data are not neutral. You always bring in your own world view to bear when you interpret the data. You never have neutral data and that's what's happening. We fool ourselves and each other through this information. What I don't think is the case is that there is an organized conspiracy that has been going on for decades or centuries. I don't take humanity that seriously. I don't think we are capable of that. I think we're just stupid. That's all there is to it. Well, she's saying something completely different and the data backs her up. So the history of Project Blue Book, are you familiar with Project Blue Book? Is an organized campaign to deceive at a very high level, at a very orchestrated level. At a level that is brutal. It's including going out and intimidating people, threatening people with death and the death of their relatives unless they go along with the story. So that happened. Do you know who Richard Doty is? Do you know who Lou Elizondo is? Do you know either one of those people? Lou Elizondo, I have heard about him. His predecessor, if you will, another counterintelligence agent named Richard Doty has come clean. He hasn't come clean because they never come clean, but has admitted to a disinformation campaign that had brutal psychological effects on some innocent American who had stepped forward and said, hey, I'm seeing these UFOs out on this military base and I'm kind of concerned. And they ran this whole mind game on him and the whole UFO community in order to discredit him and to create this false narrative. That has been acknowledged and put forth. And I've had people on the show like Colonel John Alexander who said, he should be in prison for he should be in Leavenworth, you know, military prison for that. And the latest iteration of that, which has just kind of exploded, is Lou Elizondo, which was part of this latest round of disclosure. You know, New York Times, Leslie Cain, Ralph Blumenthal from New York Times. I interviewed both of them on this show. Richard Dolan, everyone comes out and says, wow, this is the real deal. And I mean, I'm not the only one, I was like, gosh, guys, this sure looks like a political Psyop to me. It looks like a rerun of Richard Doty to me. And now that's all come to pass. Why would we believe a counterintelligence agent who's a professional liar? That's his job to tell us the truth about this important secret that they've kept secret for so long. So I really, this is fundamental to what I'm talking about here is, no, it's not innocent people making innocent mistakes. It's an organized, sophisticated attempt to control the narrative because the narrative that's coming forth with the UFO is very pointed. It has a different agenda, a definite agenda. The agenda is these things are a threat to our national security and we need a global response. That is from the beginning, Ben, where they've tried to take the story. But people have such a short memory that they forget that just a few years ago Barack Obama and George Bush and every one of them stood up and said, this is not real. This is not happening when they knew it was. So what's not real that these entities are a threat to us? Well, Barack Obama, in case you're not aware, categorically denied that these existed. He said, I've looked into... He said, I've looked into this. If anyone would know, I know. There's nothing here. There's nothing there. Every president has had to say this. This has been the official position, obviously, of the United States government and therefore the world government because they controlled for the most part the information lockdown about UFOs, the quarantine of information. That was the story when Diana Walsh-Basulka, who knows because she documents in her book her interface with the Invisible College and Jacques Vallée kind of gives her the inside scoop and says, look, here's how you got to play this game and here's how you got to be careful and here's how you do this and that. I mean, that was the going thing is that you do not talk about this. You do not acknowledge it. That was the official position. Do you think there are organizations or groups of people, humans here on our planet in the U.S. government, whatever, who know exactly what's going on, how these things work and what their agenda is and what it's all about? I think that's a different question. It's an interesting question, but it's a different question. The way I'd phrase the question is, can we conclusively say, prove, if you will, because this is kind of more of a social thing, prove that there was a group inside the United States government who was actively trying to mislead, misinform, deceive for a particular purpose the people of the United States and the people of the world. And the answer to that is absolutely yes. We have documentation of it. Why do you think they did it? What was the motivation? Well, Bernardo, we can take their explanation of it, which is what we've always heard. We're just trying to keep you safe. And the other thing they'll add is, you know what? You can't really handle it. You can't handle the truth, the famous quote. If we were to tell you there'd be mass confusion, our whole society would crumble, religion would crumble, all these things. You can't handle the truth. It's better that we kind of control this. So that's what they say, but why, you know, and again, I'll reference this to an excellent essay that you wrote. The essence of western culture is at stake here. It is free will. It is the American constitution. We the people, I shall decide if I can handle the truth. You will not decide if I handle the truth. So I don't go there. I don't go to where you are. I just go with, I don't agree with Colonel John Alexander on March, but throw the motherfuckers in jail in the constitution when they break the law. I don't want to hear your excuse for why you are just following orders or whatever else. It's idealistic, but how can we be anything other than idealistic with this truth? Yeah, there I am with you. I think we, at least, the elites far underestimate the ability of people to actually accommodate hard facts and to make good sense and integrate things that are mind-boggling at first sight. So there I am with you. I'm not trying to defend anyone but since it's skeptical, I'll try to play the other polarity of this discussion. There is a lot of nonsense and bullshit in the UFO community. You must acknowledge that. I've reluctant to just kind of blanketly acknowledge that for the reason that we just said is that we can clearly show that a lot of the confusion and bullshit and apparent just idiotic behavior and thinking was intentionally orchestrated. You just don't know the history here. Richard Doty, again, he's an intelligence, counterintelligence agent. He ran these guys in circles and then at one point as kind of the ultimate lark, the ultimate in your face, he goes on this very prominent U.S. show that says, yes, I am an ET. We like strawberry ice cream and at this point people were kind of, you know, so they are creating that and whenever they create it they're mixing it in with 90% true new information that you can't get anyplace else so you're drawn into it and then they're adding the absurd, they're ridiculous so you look like a fool. This is the game that they've played. It's documented over again. Dr. Diana Walsh Posolka, who is no slouch and is sitting up there with Jeff Kreipel and has the ultimate respect of people that you know like Jacques Vallée. She's telling to you straight and that is this game is a real hardcore game and it's in play. But here's the thing that we're going to talk about in a minute. It's not limited to UFOs. It just shines more clearly in the UFO space because it's been exposed. The question it raises is, okay, how do we know where to look then? How do we know what to take seriously and what not? Because even the absurd stuff, the in your face nonsensical stuff like alien messages written in binary obeying human ASCII code if that is planted then how do we know? How do we even begin? Unless we do field which entirely on our own starting from scratch. How do we know who or what to believe? We have to have some kind of safe port, safe harbors here that we can anchor or bolt on because we can't rebuild the thing from scratch. Nobody has the education, the time, the tools to start from scratch and derive any meaningful conclusion. What do we do other than throw our arms and just give up and say, well, I can't believe anything anyway. Well, that might lead into the second essay of yours that I wanted to bring up on the screen and talk about the anti-establishment sentiment from November 2020 because what I'm to answer your question directly heck, she just said it, which is that one, we have to acknowledge it and two, we have to start developing skills, resilience and toughness to combat it. What we can't do is pretend that it doesn't exist. Tell us what you were trying to get across in the anti-establishment sentiment because I think it's very important and a good article. I think there is legitimacy to the overall feeling you're finding many societies today that they have been deceived by intellectual elites, by the media, the liberal media and that sentiment is well justified to a large extent when we thought that the media was serious and there was consensus and safe harbors to use the same expression I just did back in the 80s what we didn't know is that we were seeing basically one spin of the story one side of the story that we took for the truth and with the internet and social media and our ability to share information and exchange ideas in a manner that is unmediated and unedited by the powers that be in the media, we started realizing that there are many other sides to every single story and that has led to a lot of polarization and a lot of bullshit let's acknowledge that too but the base motivation is valid, is correct it affects even my own field which is philosophy ontology we have been deceived with this notion that for instance materialism is a fact it's a done deal it's definitely true nonsense, nonsense materialism has always been internally contradictory and very very weak in terms of explanatory power it has always been a very very problematic idea it's just that a certain critical mass of people in intellectual elites decided that they would stake their career and their public personas on it so it gathered a lot of momentum but we were bullshitted and we continue to be bullshitted I just don't think that that is as malicious and as coordinated as I sense you think it is very very easily acknowledged we have been bullshitted and then there is legitimacy to a bad sentiment against intellectual and media elites okay let me ask you to play hypothetical for a second moving from Diana Walsh-Pasolka again as a case study in intentional, organized highly leveraged like by very powerful people disinformation so now we know that's on the table, that's in play we can document it if you were to imagine, speculate why someone might want to advance a materialistic agenda that has been falsified experimentally like you said if you were to kind of speculate about a potential what might that be the way it started it was a power grab it started materialism when it was proposed in the early days of science four centuries ago it was known and acknowledged by the Enlightenment folks to be a world view that didn't really work but that they needed to combat the church they needed always on record saying that materialism doesn't work but we need to keep using it because it's our weapon against the church that was in the 18th century in the mid 19th century after Darwin there was a perception among intellectual elites that there could be finally a total victory against the church such that the intellectual elite would have the power to steer a culture and move people and not the church because Darwin solved what was perceived then as the big problem which is how do we explain the variety of life other than a creator that made this as it is and then people actually started swallowing whole the notion that materialism is actually true even though it's not worked out and has internal contradictions so that was the motivation in the beginning together with getting rid of the greatest fear humanity has always had which is what will we experience after we die are we going to go to hell or are we going to go to heaven people have used this to control societies for millennia and that was off the table suddenly great great emotional payoff now today why does it continue I think it continues because of Stigmergy which is a conspiracy the other way around when you start your career and you realize that the people getting promoted are the people who pay lip service to materialism who portray themselves as the tough people who stare the bleak facts of meaningless in the face you emulate that behavior because you want to get promoted to and and this Stigmergy now is everywhere it pervades the media some years ago psychedelic research papers were published showing that brain activity only reduces with the application with the administration of psychedelics the media published the opposite result the guardian is on record and CNN is on record saying the opposite why because they took a figure from these papers that had a lot of red but it was not brain activity that was represented by the red it was functional connectivity something completely else and they put that picture saying look lots of red your brain lights up like a Christmas tree it was the opposite of the study and why is that it's Stigmergy because journalists feel that they are safe if they portray everything from the materialist perspective I think it's just cultural nonsense it's the dynamics of human stupidity could it be more because where I see that you went is yeah the church has all the power and it's about control if we don't want the church to have the power and in the process of reclaiming that power there's a power vacuum and power vacuums are always filled so is it possible can we contemplate a world where someone uses scientific materialism and starts deriving benefit from it in terms of the only thing that ever matters which is controlling people is providing rule acknowledge that this is used this way for the purpose of maintaining power I just think that it is not as coordinated as conspiracy theories would suggest I think there's a lot of personal motivation or small group thinking it's not a cabal I don't think it's following a set of rules written by someone at some point a century ago you're talking to the wrong conspiracy theorist because I would never say that I would say it requires almost zero effort Stalin's favorite thing about useful idiots all you have to do is throw a few pieces of cheese at the end of the rat maze and the rats come and they find their way through it and then you just have to continue to reward it takes almost no effort at all it takes a couple of dozen sock puppet guys each with a few hundred accounts you can kind of create and shape any of this stuff you make let me read for you in this same article that we were talking about it goes without saying that some scientific results are unreliable science is done by humans and as such just as imperfect as we all are but there are scientific conclusions so robust that they command broad consensus human activity is changing our climate and ways that threaten our survival save countless millions of lives COVID-19 is vastly more dangerous than the flu face mask and social distancing help contain the spread of respiratory diseases et cetera I'd love to know what's behind that et cetera because I disagree with almost everyone you had there but let me drill into this one because I really want to I want to call you to task here and you're going to defend yourself obviously but I think there's more at stake here than these kind of petty squabbles if you write about climate human induced climate change poses perhaps the single greatest existential threat our civilization has ever faced we or worse our children will pay an unimaginably steep price for inaction in this regard we must get our act together and globally oh I love that word scale to adapt some of our way of life live in emissions preserve what is left of our planet's natural ecosystem and ultimately save ourselves it's flat out criminal to ignore this or to use it for short term political gain okay here you go here's the here's the pushback so you are speaking now as a scientist and you're talking to the public and that's how you're doing it and that's what you're modeling to a certain extent and my pushback is the Diana Walsh Posoko pushback let me play a couple of clips not too long and then we'll have a little discussion not so much about climate change but maybe kind of about the underlying issues here so this is Dr. Judith Curry presenting in front of the United States Congress she is the former head of the Department of Clientology at Georgia Tech University highly respected University here in the United States and she is extremely highly respected in her field of climatology I thank the chairman the ranking members for the opportunity to offer testimony today prior to 2009 I felt that supporting the IPCC consensus on climate change was a responsible thing to do I bought into the argument don't trust what one scientist says trust what an international team of a thousand scientists has said after years of careful deliberation that all changed for me in November 2009 following the leak climate gate emails that illustrated the sausage making and even bullying that went into building the consensus I started speaking out saying that scientists needed to do better at making the data and supporting information publicly available being more transparent about how they reach conclusions doing a better job of assessing uncertainties and actively engaging with scientists having minority perspectives the response of my colleagues to this is summed up by the title of a 2010 article in the scientific American climate heretic Judith Curry turns on her colleagues I came to the growing realization that I had fallen into the trap of group think I had accepted the consensus based on second order evidence the assertion that a consensus assisted existed I began making an independent assessment of topics in climate science that had the most relevance to policy and what have I concluded from this assessment human cause climate changes a theory in which the basic mechanism is well understood but whose magnitude is highly uncertain no one questions at surface temperatures have increased overall since 1880 or that humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet however there is considerable uncertainty and disagreement about the most consequential issues whether the warming has been dominated by human causes versus natural variability how much the planet will warm in the 21st century and whether warming is dangerous let me pause there and give you a chance to respond and you can respond either to the climate issue if you feel like that's in your bailiwick or what I really want to highlight is the fact that she's doing what Diana Walsh Posolka is saying she's saying don't trust these mother fuckers look here's the model for how we have to understand this let's look at the descending voices let's look at the source data and make our own interpretations she's a climatologist, she's climbed on top of the data and she's given us a new look okay the very last thing she said is irating to me and the reason it is irating to me the statement was whether warming is dangerous you're talking to somebody to a Dutch guy who lives in a country that has more than 40% of its territory below sea level as much as 3.5 meters below sea level we are making plans for what our country will be in 2100 and that involves floating half the country on concrete barges including farms, fields, cows houses because we are going to lose half the country we are talking about making extremely hard decision to stop defending the country from this rising sea level because the Belgians are our neighbors and the Germans are not doing that so if we defend our coastline it will be flooded from the sides anyway if a big ice pack in Antarctica right now on land, not in the sea that is melting from underneath if that slides down and enters the ocean half my country is underwater and there will be three families and a few refugees and the government will put them here our plan is to defend Amsterdam and Amsterdam alone against the catastrophe that we see is happening so when somebody comes and says weather warming is dangerous I want to slap them in the face because they don't fucking know what they are talking about they don't live where I live so how dare them raise the question of whether they are going to appear if an ice pack in Antarctica slides down which it can do in five years I mean I find this outrageous now you yourself, you know that academic credentials are not everything and I know that as well I have two PhDs and I'm the first one to tell you that the most dangerous bullshit is the bullshit suffixed by the letters PhD I know what it takes to get there without being a wise mind just playing with numbers so when certain academic authorities tell us materialism is true we say bullshit, we know to do that we know to look through the appearances of credentials so why don't we do that consistently maybe a climate change denialist who has credentials didn't look carefully enough and look you brought a clip of the climate gate that exploded 15 years ago it's old news it's an old story since then and largely triggered by that event scientists have come back and looked at the data again and again and again and the evidence is overwhelming that things are warming up and the evidence is overwhelming that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gases so to disconnect the two requires a level of wishful thinking that for people like me who live in the front lines of the ones who will suffer when this thing plays out is irresponsible you showed me a note clip I didn't come prepared for it but I can show you overwhelming amounts of data that nobody questions anymore that indicate that warming is happening that the Netherlands will disappear half of it will disappear the Germans and the Belgians are not going to host us we have to float our country it's a reality we have to face in my country and people have to face in Florida and in Manhattan and Bangladesh will disappear from the face of the earth and there are millions of people there and there will be a drinking water crisis across the world people will die of thirst how can we play so cavalierly with this this really triggers me Alex I know you have never seen me go on an emotional parade like this but you now touched on an existential topic for me and everybody I love we are going to lose half our country and it's inevitable it's a matter of how fast will we have time to float or will we be refugees in Belgium in Belgium and Germany these are the stakes for me I don't know quite how to respond because we'd have to roll up our sleeves and get into a global warming debate which we could and we will a little bit but I really want to steer it to this other aspect of it that I think is behind what we're really talking about so number one I think specifically address one point you made because I think you're misinterpreting what she's saying in terms of does it matter and I think what she was referring to specifically is there are scenarios where we can have warming and not to an extent that would be catastrophic to our civilization so this is like an obvious point but it just gets washed in this kind of crazy kind of that we get into of exaggerating things so it's a matter of because she is not saying that there isn't a warming and that there isn't a human factor to the warming, she's saying that depending on how much warming we have it could be catastrophic or it could be not catastrophic or it could even be beneficial if it's only a slight warming like we've seen it in past in history. The other thing that I'd say just to kind of respond to the data and then I want to get into the globalization bullshit thing that this all addresses is the simplest way to measure this crisis is to measure sea level rise and she has published more recently that is 10 years old or longer she has published recently and continued to publish this is her field by the way Bernardo this is not your field she is when you said she has a PhD it's not that she has a PhD alone it's that she is actively engaged in dialoguing with colleagues who don't all agree with her but this is her bread and butter and all you'd have to do is go back turn back the clock 30 years ago they were predicting the same thing they were predicting that all these islands would be under water and that the model was clear that that's the direction that we're having there has not been a significant rise in sea level and that is the easiest way to measure point out that the global warming here is the graph that I pulled up on the screen and we can it ends in 2000 it ends more than in the mid 1990s it ends 25 years ago Alex I just pulled up the recent one for someone else you're looking at about a 1.3 centimeter increase in sea level over however you're saying is that we get the answers from sea level rise that's not how the models work if a certain threshold in temperature is crossed even if it's a minor point something degrees and it leads to certain ice packs sliding down the continent and into the sea you get a dramatic sea rise suddenly the models are complex there are many variables these are not linear models these are nonlinear models and the thick of what we know today we've learned the past 15 years that's when all the old models were thrown away because things were playing out a lot faster and yes it's not my area and I didn't come prepared to quote many other scientists and show many other graphs I could have it's not your area and it's not mine we are both quoting other people and it's a matter of how many people can really quote I didn't come prepared for it but yeah this affects me very very much maybe my culture it might it might not it might it might not that's her point and that point is undeniable it is logically undeniable the models have not proven to be at all accurate up to this point that's a given we can show over and over again how the predictions of the models have not have not followed course things are worse than the models predicted look it's not true whether it will affect us all or not the woman you showed the clip of at the time she recorded that clip didn't know either this was that was a four by three clip so it's decades ago what was 2015 what we know today we've learned over the the past few years in which the old models were proven to be way too conservative things are going a lot faster we trust models for everything else to some extent we trust long-term weather forecast for agriculture we coordinate our entire agriculture what we will plant when based on our models we trust models to put a man on the moon, satellites in orbit we trust models to develop medicines that will keep us healthy models for everything why won't we trust an overwhelming barrage of data and models telling us this shit is dangerous and I will lose my country will lose at least most of its cultural inheritance because and Rotterdam and Utrecht and then we will defend all of these will be underwater half of us will be refugees the models are telling us that and we are acting accordingly we are preparing to float the country so how can we still be busy with the notion maybe this is not dangerous darn we've passed that longer go longer go I want to move on to one other topic so I would say that the answer that I was going towards and I want to give you a chance to respond to this if you want but I don't think because it's not controversial but the answer that I was reaching for was that our friend Dr. Diana Walsh Posolko gave which is because they are rigging the game so I'm not you don't have to buy into they are rigging the game on global warming you just have to be open to it and you have to seriously entertain what that would mean I don't know if you have any response to that I thought you were going to show me the I'll show you the clip this from 2015 another congressional testimony that she gave us she's not been invited back since are we going to do nothing because there's a greater than 1% chance that climate change there is nothing in my testimony that said we do nothing I'm saying that what is being proposed is ineffective it's not going to do anything even if the U.S. is successful at meeting 80% reductions by 2050 this is going to reduce warming by about a tenth of a degree centigrade it's not going to do anything when it comes to climate change looking at data many years ago it is just not productive because the core of what we've learned we've learned a lot recently because the phenomenon has accelerated and the correlations have become much more clear but the correlation between the pace of industrialization and global warming is very tight and the speed of warming is unprecedented in history and we have core samples of ice from previous eras and it's undeniable the correlation is pretty undeniable if you look at more or less modern data so no I do not agree with that and I think it's a disservice maybe at the time she was speaking and that is possible and even reasonable there was more doubt than there is today no she speaks today she speaks today as a climatologist with others by her side saying the same thing so just the part that is kind of hard to take is that you are not heating the call of science which is to hear the dissenting voices but what to do that what you have to consider is what we've been talking about is that why would there be another agenda that is served by catastrophic climate change which is what's being pitched and that has to be analyzed independently of the data see that's what I'm suggesting is really what this is all about that's what if you listen to Diana Walsh-Pesulka that's where she's at she's like what we're saying about the UFOs you give me the data okay the first thing I do is what we call on skeptical level two what's the deception what's the conspiracy saying oh the aliens like strawberry ice cream at the same time he's revealing documents that have never been revealed before you go oh my god that's true so you have to understand how that game is being played in order to figure out if it's being played on you look I do take the heed of science to listen to dissenting voices but that that call of science doesn't force us to believe in what everybody's saying we can make up our minds based on data the opposition taking the point of view of this person the opposition the people who are saying there is undeniable correlation between climate change and human industrial activity they also base themselves on data now I didn't know we would talk about this today so I came empty handed I can't flash graphs for you and videos for you today I didn't know but you know type a search on Google to get the latest data the latest model and what other people are saying also based on data also based on model so take the heed of science the call of science as well and look at what the others are saying and the data they are using now as for motivation many times we say well now we didn't make campaigns anti-smoking campaigns because there was the big money the big company selling cigarettes so it was a conspiracy and then the oil conspiracy is a big one the oil companies are not allowing this or that to happen but in this case it is precisely the big money the big oil companies who short of Apple one of them is the largest company most valuable company in the world today they are the ones who stand to lose from the notion that burning fossil fuels causes climate change their business stands to lose a lot so who stands to gain Elon Musk alone I don't know here your time is you're already spending a lot of time with me which I appreciate I have one other topic I'm going to bring forth and it's much closer to home and in our wheelhouse it's Dean Raiden and I don't know if you had a chance to catch this interview that I had with Dean but it is without a doubt one of the most unsettling and disappointing experiences I've had in the 15 years that I've done Skeptico because I have a tremendous amount of respect for Dean Raiden but let me play you a couple of clips from this which I found very troubling was about his incredible science which he has he has brought forth in a way that is so in line with what is so important with you and me about biological control that's a meaningless universe and all that stuff here let me play this clip increase the strength of entanglement and then intentionally decrease the strength of entanglement but like I said at the top of the show paradigm change never goes exactly the way you think the latest plan his biotech venture that seeks to jab people in the arm in order to change their DNA of course to fix their brain which I thought were past the brain consciousness thing but anyways to fix their brain so they're not depressed so they don't have Alzheimer's and maybe they're a little bit more psychic than they were before and maybe they're even a little bit more connected consciously more like a hive mind kind of thing so I wrote a story which is designed an antidote to the way that psychic phenomena are usually portrayed in entertainment so think about the invasion of the body snatchers and the Borg and Star Trek and virtually every other example where you have a hive mind which is presented as the most horrific thing that you can possibly do and we're saying in the story no it is not only not horrific it is the best possible thing that we can do to because it pulls together something which is already interconnected but we sort of behave in an illusory way that we're separate and we're not really not connected it is that disconnection that leads to the kind of madness that we're currently seeing in Ukraine people literally shooting at each other and not appreciating the fact that at a deeper level everything really is interconnected including us so this is part of the plotline in the story where there is a tension between people who in this case take a genetic enhancement and become a group mind essentially everyone outside the group mind thinks that this is scary we need to stop that it's bad from inside this is the best thing that ever happened this is like the difference between homo sapiens and homo superior if we're going to survive we need to advance as a species and so the story is basically making the case that homo sapiens is dying and we have to we either die or we evolve well the evolution is going towards a new kind of human and if it needs a little genetic push to get there so be it so troubling troubling he is contemplating the covid jab I'm sorry it's his jab from his biotech company same thing it's altering your DNA in order to get those damn Russians in line because why are they running around there doing that thing with your Ukraine and all the rest of that so let's get everybody on the same page and these people that want to pollute and do all this other stuff let's get them all on this hey homo sapiens is out this is the ultimate transhumanist wacky crazy stuff and it's coming from Dean Raiden here's another clip from that interview later on so you know I'm not making it up so this this is part of a big and very fast growing industry of what will become modern medicine and people today are still some people are afraid of mRNA treatments they were afraid of it in the same way that people used to be afraid of transplants and prosthetics and all kinds of stuff this is simply the way whether they like it or not this is where medicine is going because it's extremely effective so later on Dean and I talked about what is now and I don't know if you're aware of this the overwhelming evidence that the vaccine the jab that was given is historically the most dangerous harmful in history and we just have the thing in the United States 1600 percent 16 times normal male athletes and the big 10 the football league over here which were tested heart condition you have pregnancies lost astronomical increase and then you have the database from the army that was public came out and had all these kind of things so and when I brought that up to Dean we actually talked about it in the interview and at first he was reluctant and then finally I kind of beat him down on the date and said it's publicly published database from your that anyone can go and access the database and he said well you know essentially we're going to break a few eggs if we're going to make an omelet so figuring out how to do this jab you in the arm change your DNA let's all be transhumanist hey that's part of the price we're going to pay okay in the interest in the interest of a productive discussion I'll try to take a different perspective I think you are interpreting Dean's original point about Ukraine and the fact that we are so separate and incapable of seeing the world through somebody else's eye you interpreted it like the Borg in a sense that the result of that would be a loss of individuality we would become a species of drones that take their tune from a leader but we lose our free will we lose our individuality but I didn't see the entire interview but based on the segment alone that you showed my original interpretation of what he was trying to say was that we need to experience more empathy so it's not about a loss of individuality it's not a loss of free will it's just a higher ability to empathize with another human being to suffer with another human being so we know what it is to be in somebody else's position yeah but Bernardo maybe I didn't give you the advantage maybe you just don't know this you hit you cold with it are you familiar with Dean Rayden's biotech startup in Idaho he's moved from California okay this is what he is pursuing this is not hypothetical kind of no they are in the middle of it raised millions of dollars let me let me pull it up just so you can see it and then we don't even have to talk about it I believe you so anyways it's called neuro genetics and that is his company and that's what they seek to do and he's using all of his knowledge about you know because part of what they derive from all the work that he's done is they start getting genetic markers on this stuff genetic markers for all sorts of parapsychological work and that's the future but the immediate thing for him is let's do a vaccine delivered virus that will change your DNA and shape it into this way that we want that is extremely troubling that is transhumanism that is what is that is how the agenda is being sold and I think when you write and talk about identity crisis and the problem in your country and these crazy laws that are being passed that you say hey I understand the spirit of it I'm all for social justice again what I think you are not seeing what you seem to be blinded to is that there is an agenda behind that that is unmistakably marching forward in a very particular direction and that direction is to make you less human and for someone to be in control of the direction that that's going so it's not a hypothetical for Dean he is ass deep sold his house in California took the millions of dollars and is in Idaho developing his biotech company if I separated from Dean for the moment and I just speak generically I do find it troubling the attempt to influence what is essentially human personality human mental life through a physiological delivery mechanism which is essentially what psychoactive drugs try to do and our success in doing that has been largely empirical in other words we don't really know how physiology and personality traits or mental inner life really correlate psychiatry has failed to find physiological even anatomical correlates to the most common mental disorders that afflict people worldwide so our understanding of how these two domains influence one another is very limited and that's why I think it is troubling not speaking of Dean specifically because I don't know anything about this company it's the first time I hear about it although I believe you that he has done it speaking in general I think it's troubling to try to influence mental inner life personality traits through a physiological delivery mechanism because we simply do not know enough we just do not know enough about how these two domains play with one another so I will concede you that generically this is a troubling thing to attempt but I will insist that the call forget the delivery mechanism forget his company the call for our civilization to try to develop our potential for empathy is timely is important and it doesn't reduce our humanity on the contrary it increases our humanity a human that isn't empathic is a human that lacks humanity for that it's called a psychopath and it's considered a disorder so more empathy I'm all for it but I think there are much more reliable time-honored less risky ways to try to evoke that in our society than a physiological delivery mechanism that we just do not understand that sounds scary to me well and I would suggest that it's deeper than that and it relates directly back to the core the heart the essence of your work and what you're doing at the Ascension Foundation and what we talked about at the beginning because I think we can never forget the part that you mentioned at the very beginning Bernardo which is that you are intentionally sidelining the spiritual aspect to all of this in order to advance the third I'm changing scientifically confined explanation Dean has jumped the shark he has not only sidelined that but he's pretending putting his fingers in his ears and pretending that such a sensitivity or a sensibility isn't necessary and it is God is watching whether that God is from within or whether that God is external there is a hierarchy to consciousness there is free will we all have an understanding of what is right and wrong even if that eventually merges into a global consciousness there is what the near-death experience science tells us what so much other wisdom traditions tell us is that we have the ability to steer this ship and we can't pretend that we don't so if you want to speak for a minute about how spirituality and our understanding of spirituality of non-religious from the light, the love that rises up within us how that might come into play here I think what we've learned after 2,000 years of Christianity is that preaching alone doesn't help we wouldn't be doing what we are doing now if preaching alone helped we wouldn't have one sovereign nation barbarically invading another sovereign nation both of which are orthodox Christians so it takes more than that what more how much more I don't know but I will say this the worst thing that has happened in the history of spirituality is the word spirituality because it has created a category for it that is different from reality the moment we use the word spirituality we sort of separate it from reality and I'm interested in reality and I think the properties of reality are such that it has many of the characteristics that go under the word spirituality in our culture but it's reality I'm talking about if you know what I mean I think reality is one in which the subjectivity in all of us is one and the same subjectivity in which empathy is a natural personality trait of human beings that hasn't been repressed through cultural narratives that guide our lives today hasn't been repressed by the materialist narrative that tells you your life is completely meaningless and the best you can do is just buy stuff in an addictive pattern of behavior because at the end it's offer nothing anyway so you might as well have fun while you can I think this is the disaster it's that narrative oppresses personality traits and the characteristics of our inner life that are just natural now how do we allow those natural spiritual but real characteristics to manifest how do we expand our relationship with the reality around us in a way that what we call spirituality becomes self-evident and as present as the sun up in the sky I don't know but I think it has a lot to do with changing the narrative and the narrative today is extremely unhealthy it's a narrative in which we try to deal with our anxieties particularly the fear of death by eliminating meaning along with it so we get rid of the fear of death because when you're dead you're dead there is no one there to feel pain or even be afraid but to get rid of meaning along with it and I think that price which may have the middle of the 19th century may have felt like a reasonable price to pay right now it's completely unreasonable because it's destroying us and it's making us destroy the world and the ecosystems around us and destroy each other and ourselves and emerging from that is extremely urgent yes we have to take care of our physical survival because if we are not alive then there's nothing we can do because once the dissociation ends and we are dead yes we are still who we have always been but we can't play a role in this dynamics here in this dream we call life but beyond staying alive and healthy I think that's the most important and most urgent challenge we have ahead of us is how do we get rid of a addictive and that's why it's so difficult to get rid of but suicidal narrative that is oppressing our nature oppressing our humanity if you ask me how to do that I don't know the answer the only answer I have is every day I wake up in the morning I know what I have to contribute on that day and I know that the next day it will be the same thing I take my cues from nature from the movements of the impersonal within me I know my life is not about me nobody's life is about them our lives are not about ourselves we are products of nature it's about the great dance of nature and I take my cue from that every day in the morning and I try not to take responsibility for the end result because who is my ego to take responsibility for the end result I only take responsibility for my little microscopic contribution and every day I wake up in the morning I know what to do that day and that's enough for me I pray because I believe in God I'm more comfortable using the G word that I didn't want to use in our previous interviews Alex I decided that it's a silly game to try to stay away from it because everything I've been talking about people can couple to the notion of a divinity anyway so yeah I pray to God that we survive this I think it's absolutely wonderful the way you strung together so many of the concepts that we're talking about in a very very lucid and powerful way in terms of what the agenda is, what the motivation is going forward in the paradigm change and how the paradigm change that you are still in the middle of engaged in that battle how it is fundamental to all the stuff that we are talking about and well we have this deep agreement on that level so I was going to wrap it up there but tell us about the God thing and how you understand that because that's going to throw a lot of people for a loop obviously it's a highly charged word how are you processing the idea of what I always call the hierarchy of consciousness kind of thing if I speak analytically I have this notion of a field of subjectivity that underlies all nature of which we are just dissociated mental complexes so there is a unity and that unity is mental there is one mind underlying all nature and everything happens within that and what we call the physical world is just how mental processes outside our individual minds present themselves to our observation so there is this idea of an omniscient unity underlying all nature that has been throughout the history of philosophy and religion associated with the concept of a divinity and although I have steered away from many years from the word God because there are probably 7.5 billion different definitions of God out there you know every person has his or her own or their own view of God of a divinity so if I use the word I don't know how people interpret it that's why I sort of stayed clear steered clear from that word and used more unambiguous words like a spatially unbound field of subjectivity underlying all nature irreducible and so on at the end of the day we are humans and humans are not just analytic philosophers humans speak from the heart not only from the mind and they don't just look for conceptually unambiguous and clear terminology they use terminology that evokes emotion and from that perspective the word God is better than a spatially unbound field of subjectivity that underlies all nature irreducibly so since I am talking to people in general not just analytic philosophers or scientists today I am going to start my 49th year soon I decided that I am not going to play that precious game anymore I would talk about God and my God is not the same as your God I don't understand it the same way as you do but I still use the word because the essence the core is there anyway so now I am comfortable with it and I am comfortable in saying that yes I pray to God God may not always know what it is doing but we may help you know that's great to me the interesting thing there is kind of one level down because I think it's easy to get to the almost non-dual God thing it's the steps in between that are hard so what are we doing with angels what are we doing with spirit guides what are we doing with all these hypothesized spiritual hierarchical beings that pop up again and again and that's the problem I see with the God thing I think it's pretty easy to get people on board with the big God it's the steps in between do you have any thoughts on that that could be an interview in its own merit I can give you a heart answer and or an analytic answer which one do you prefer or do you want both oh always both if I could get it so start with the least important one the analytic answer look our perceptual apparatus has evolved over 4 billion years of evolution to pick out the elements and states of reality that have a bearing on our survival that's what evolution is all about so we discern and pick out the states of the world around us that have a bearing on our survival whatever is going on out there that has no bearing to our survival wouldn't have evolved there would be no evolutionary drive to fix that genetic characteristic to develop a perceptual system without things that are irrelevant for our survival it wouldn't have happened in other words it is a statistical virtual certainty that there is a lot more going on than what we can perceive and then some people would say well but we have telescopes and microscopes and infrared sensors we can actually now pick out a lot more than our perceptual apparatus allows us to do yes but notice that all of that is still filtered out through our perceptual apparatus because we have to perceive the output of telescopes and microscopes and infrared sensors and all that so we are still limited in a paradigmatic way by the parameters of our perceptual apparatus as it evolved in other words it's a virtual certainty that we are blind to a lot of what's going on out there because it simply does not have a bearing on us could this extra lot of what's going on out there that we don't perceive that we don't even have words or parameters or categories for could that entail what has been metaphor metaphor metaphorically called angels, demons, spiritual entities and all that it would be silly to deny that it could there could be other dissociated complexities in the mind of nature that because they play out in a way that has no bearing to the survival of our own dissociative process, our own lives we didn't evolve to pick them out we don't have parameters even to talk about them or conceive of them to imagine them they can be literally there's a wonderful word in English that escapes me now incommensurable they can be literally incommensurable with all of our categories and we would be therefore completely blind to them so it is not only a possibility I would say statistical certainty that there is stuff going on that we have no idea of and it may include what people call spiritual entities now the hard answer even within me if I introspect deeply I can discern elements of my own mind of my own personality that have a degree of autonomy and sometimes wage war against one another any addict knows this there is the demon of the addiction and the angel of the cure that's trying to straighten you up every time you experience cognitive dissonance every time you repress something, a trauma, an idea every time you're ashamed of yourself these are all entities within the bus we call ourselves and they are fighting one another and they are pushing the rope in their own direction and sometimes one of them wins sometimes the other wins there is always a demon on one shoulder and an angel on the left shoulder and this is only within my own mind could there be transpersonal mental entities that are playing this game based on my own introspection I would say yes there is stuff that happens to me that I look carefully at and I think there is no way this is mine this is alien stuff this is strange stuff this doesn't come from me it's passing through me and I happen to recognize it when I'm introspecting carefully I think most people would just blame themselves when they are overwhelmed by a a wave of the impersonal within them because of the current cultural narrative of materialism that whatever happens in your mind is a product of your brain and therefore it is you they will blame themselves for that why in fact it may not, it may be a tsunami coming from somewhere else and you may be powerless to defend against that and it overwhelms you and it's not you and you can still take moral high ground and of course that gets into a discussion about how do we define legal responsibility criminal responsibility that is used as a defense and it's all very complicated but I do acknowledge the impersonal operating ways that are too subtle for us to even conceive of let alone perceive as a very nuanced and beautiful, beautiful answer which is what we'd expect you're the master after all how do we stay in touch how do we find out what you're up to, follow you take your course people take your course analytic idealism if they are interested in this stuff take the course first it is free, you don't even need to register there is no registration wall, pay wall anything it's six hours of material, we don't need to watch it in one go watch a little bit at a time and I think you should do that before even buy the first book because then you have to pay money because my publishers do ask for money and I publish with an official publisher I'm not taking seriously but yeah, you go to the Essentia Foundation website there is a lot of free stuff you go to BernardoCastruc.com my personal website most of it is free videos, interviews podcasts, all kinds of things so yeah, that's where you should go before you spend your money and then there's the books what's coming what's coming up in the book area do you have anything I just agreed with my publishers to write a new book that will be tentatively titled analytic idealism in a nutshell and it will not be very new material if you've read my previous 10 books but it will be an attempt to sort of encapsulate that in as straightforward and summarized story as possible without defacing it without doing injustice to it so it will probably be a short book I'm working on it and beyond that, there is another book in my head I don't know the title yet but something will come through me at some point in the future that we'll have to do with our western inheritance I want to write about that because it's an inheritance I was at odds with from most of my life I was even ashamed of for a certain period of my life and with maturity I have come to accept it all the things that come with it that I'm ashamed of like the horrible things western societies have done to others in the past maturity makes you accept that not in a new responsible way but you accept that part of your inheritance is dark and you don't give it free reign but you give it a right to exist, the past exists and and attempts to focus on what's good about our western inheritance beyond advice and on duality and all the wonderful things from the east that have kept us more or less sane during the dark times of the 20th century and early 21st century there is something that is always there is a pot of gold buried in the backyard we just have to dig it and one day I want to write about it That's exciting, can't wait for that one well you've never disappoint, you're having a huge impact for one person it's just unbelievable where you pop up nowadays you are really really changing the game, changing the paradigm and wow who could have ever hoped to do more than that nature is doing it through me awesome reconnecting with you Bernardo we'll do it again soon thanks to you Alex it was the most lively discussion we've had so far thanks again so much to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup for joining me today on Skeptico boy oh boy there's so many questions I could I could jump off on this interview as you might anticipate but I guess I'll stick to the main one which is what do you think the chances are that Bernardo can lead us towards this paradigm shift from scientific materialism physicalism what do you think that process looks like and is he somebody who can do it and given the dialogue we had here is that make him more likely or less likely to be able to do it so if you are in tune with what I'm saying then you'll know how to answer that question and if you are in tune with that question and if you're in tune with this show if you're a thinker and you like to think about this stuff and dialogue about this stuff join me on the Skeptico forum I'd love to talk to you there's an interesting dialogue going on over there I need really smart people who can get to level 3 on this stuff to join me if you are one of those people and you think like I'm overwhelmed with the amount of responses that I get to this show which I sometimes see for later I'm not so if you feel like you could add to this dialogue this conversation in any way then please join me I'd appreciate it and I think you'll I think you'll enjoy it and with that we can wrap up this episode until next time take care and bye for now