 What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contends with the sea. That's the extraordinary Jim Caviezel from the extraordinary movie The Thin Red Line. Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two? It's a movie that poses a lot of deep big picture kind of questions. The kind of questions that I find most motivating here on Skeptico. And as a matter of fact, and the reason that I played that clip and the reason I thought it was relevant is I wanted to take this opportunity in this rare solo show to tee up four questions that are driving me right now in terms of what I'm thinking about with future shows. So I'm going to get to those questions in a minute and I'm really hoping that you will give me some feedback on what you're thinking about these. I have some clips to go along with them, so I think you'll find it pretty interesting. But before I get to those questions, I also wanted to share with you a clip from a video I just produced about someone who I greatly admire and respect, the podcaster Miguel Conner from the very excellent Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. Here's a clip from the video interview with Miguel. And deeper we go, my beloved true seekers. Deeper into the wastelands of matter and graveyards of broken dreams. Please allow me to introduce myself and keep you company as yourself. No need, Miguel. I can do that. This clip you just heard is from a video that I've produced and just am releasing today on YouTube. I'm a little bit embarrassed for this because it's taken me well over a year to figure out a way to put this together and put it out. And it has some real flaws to it. And the project was supposed to be a much grander project where I would bring you some of the ideas from some of the podcasters I most admire and I think are really changing our understanding of truth and reality. And Miguel certainly fits that category and he's one of the first ones I started with. So let me play you a little extended clip from this new video, which you will find on YouTube. I think the beauty of podcasting is that you can literally have a PC and a mic and very little else. And you can connect with scholars in Oxford. You can connect with researchers in Australia. You can bring them into your room and then you can spread that information out. What I like about Gnosticism is that you can take it as psychologically, spiritually or materially. I mean, you don't have to believe that there's these giant archons in heaven oppressing your life. The archon can be the boss at your job. Write your own gospel and live your own myth. And for my life, I've got my myth that I'm trying to live in my gospel. Carl Jung said, we have inner archetypes and mythologies that reside deep within our unconscious. And when we bring those out, we can actually start changing the narrative of our life, changing our personas, changing how things go. And I think that tagline is what I really want people to know. I want people to have as much information as they can so they can write their own gospel and live their own myth. So they can, as I say in my show, create better than the creator gods and their butt slaves in the establishment. Because all of us have been programmed. All of us are living a story that was written by somebody else. And it was the ancient Gnostics who said enough of this. We're going to write our own narrative. We're going to create our own reality, not in this. Great stuff. Classic Miguel Gnosticism stuff. And I think, of course, that's an important part of this larger question, which I'm going to get to in just a minute. But I do want to stop and say, I hope you will check out the Truth Bump video that I produced and I have on YouTube. I hope to share it with people. I have some other ones in various stages of development. So if people really, really like it, I'll try and push forward with that. But I basically abandoned that project because it just didn't have any legs to it for me. But I throw that out there and offer it to you to help guide if there's anything there I need to pursue. And along those same lines, what I really wanted to do in this show was give a roundup of the four questions, I think, that are really driving me forward in terms of Skeptico right now. And as I've said all along about Skeptico, I've always viewed this as my personal journey shared with you. But that's holding something back because it's really a collective journey. Your input and your feedback really does make this an interactive process for me. But I like to hold on to the idea that this really is my personal journey and I decide where it goes. So if you'll allow me that little kind of egocentric kind of thing, I'm going to hold on to what I think are the four questions that are driving me forward in terms of Skeptico at this point. Question number one. Let me offer up this clip. I mean, for me it would be what's consciousness? Because that's totally battling. That's Richard, you know what I think? What I wonder whether there really is no such thing as consciousness at all. To that I've got to say like, oh wow. Perfect. You're laughing. I'm laughing like, you're like, bro, I was laughing. What is so funny about that? I mean, the idea that maybe consciousness is not there is probably the weirdest, stupidest idea ever conceived by human thought. I mean, where does thought take place? It takes place in consciousness. So here we have consciousness speculating about the possibility that consciousness does not exist and it may not be there. I mean, the very thought is that in your face contradiction and the fact that something like this is not only seriously entertained, but even verbalized by a person with the public exposure of the gentleman we just saw is a worrying sign of cultural sickness. That, of course, is the very excellent Dr. Bernardo Castro. And while it may seem that the question that falls out of that clip is, are we biological robots in a meaningless universe? As you know from listening to this show, that really isn't the question for me anymore. I mean, it really was my question initially a few years back. But now the question for me is something that Bernardo hit on there, which is how can this still be propped up as a real question among what are supposed to be the intellectual elites of science? It's really a strange, strange situation. And I think we have to continue to dive into that question head on, you know? Head on, not just keep proving them wrong, baby, proving them wrong, but saying, how and why are they promoting such nonsense? So that's question number one. You ready for question number two? It's from Dr. Jeffrey Martin, who I interviewed a few episodes back about his rather amazing research into consciousness transformation, enlightenment, awakening, whatever you want to call it. And it's common in most of the mainstream population of humanity around the world. There's just sort of this fundamental sense of discontentment that we all have at the root of our psychology. And it manifests in all kinds of ways, in the extremes, it's fear and worry and anxiety and stuff like that. But no matter who you are, no matter how great your life is, you still have this sense that something's just not quite right. And so your mind is constantly trying to figure that out in a normal, and this is normal, right? This is what psychology would consider normal and healthy. So it's just like this little shift that happens way at the bottom of your psychology, away from that fundamental sense of discontentment and towards a sense that everything is really okay. So the question for me here, and it's an absolute huge one, is there a reality to what he's describing? Is our normal, and I'm using air quotes there, psychological state to be this experience of fundamental discontentment? And actually, I don't even know how anyone can deny that. I mean, that's just everywhere. That's what our culture is. But the second part of the question is really the most significant, and that is, is there a way to change that? And let's mirror that to the first half of the first question. The question I didn't ask, are we biological robots in a meaningless universe? So the answer is obviously no, we're not. So we have this condition. We're in this predicament. And then is this predicament that our mind has created this continual dialogue of fundamental dissatisfaction with the way things are? And is it possible to change that state, that consciousness? Is it possible to raise it? Of course, this is what so many spiritual teachers throughout time have been telling us is possible, that there is a way to transcend that state. And I'm holding back from any kind of talk about extended consciousness at this point, right? I'm trying to confine it to our reality, if you will. And all these terms are, you can shoot holes in them, as we all know. But these first two questions have to do with our reality. So again, question two is, is it possible to awaken out of that state of perpetual dissatisfaction, perpetual discontentment with that internal dialogue that's going on in our head? I think that's an important question. That's question two. So the next two questions that are driving the Skeptico mission at this point have to do with this extended consciousness thing that I always talk about. And again, the words don't exactly match up. Extended from what? I mean, what are we to make of this reality and the other reality? And why would we have this kind of dualistic that's extended? This isn't all those problems, but you get what I mean, right? So the third question is teed up, I think, by the following clip from Ray Hernandez, who was recently on Skeptico, to talk about what he's discovered from the first scientific survey of folks who have had ET contact experience. This is the next two findings discussed the initial two, which is that these were overwhelmingly positive experiences. Number two, it resulted in a positive transformation of the experiencer. Number three and four is that these experiences were primarily not physical. They were primarily paranormal. That was number three. Number four is that these experiences involve a manipulation of space time. And that in turn leads to the hypotheses that these experiences might be interdimensional. And Jacques Vallée alluded to that over 45 years ago. So one of the things that's really interesting to pull out of that clip is this transcending of time and space. So we understand at this point that there is this extended reality. There's an NDE reality, an OBE reality, an ET reality, a psychedelic DMT reality, if you want to stay with three-letter acronyms. What is our relationship between this reality and that reality? And more importantly, if that other reality, if one of its key characteristics is that it transcends space and time, then what does it tell us about this reality that is confined to space and time? And does it suggest, as I think it might, that this reality is a lesser reality, if you will. Lesser in the sense that it's further away from the ultimate reality. And again, don't pick on my words here because there's no words to talk about this stuff. But the basic concept is there seems to be a lot of evidence pointing us to the ultimate paradigm shift that we really are looking at things from the wrong end of the telescope. We are in the unreal reality of time and space continuum where things have been locked down to work a particular way. So we get this particular experience. But anyone who's outside of that says, yeah, you guys are on this little tiny tip of this huge iceberg and that's okay. You can get that experience, but don't get too attached to it because it's really such a small part of the overall thing. So that is, I think, the third question for me is what is the relationship between this spacetime reality that we occupy and we play this science game in and we play this skeptical dialogue questioning game in? What is the relationship between that reality and some of these extended realities that we will never know, but we do get bits and pieces, fragments of information back from. So we do get information back from into eScience. We do get information back from ET contact. We do get information back from OBE. So I'm asking, you know, what happens if we filter that information through one very narrow filter and that is what is the relationship between our reality and the larger reality? That would be kind of the third question. And the fourth question is very much related to that and I think it's best teed up by this clip from my friend Gordon White at Roon Soup from an interview that I did recently, but I have to say I didn't, I noticed that I hadn't posted it on YouTube. So there is a YouTube for this as well and it actually has a video of me and Gordon. So it's a good YouTube to watch. You can kind of follow along kind of thing. So here is that clip. Here's the thing, the 20th century technocratic project and you include all the people in it like Bernays. So the technocracy thought it fell to these rich people to manage the development of the world and the West for our benefit. So it isn't even just necessarily keeping them alone and afraid. That is a side effect of, well, we are the technocrats, we are better at running the world. So our competing narratives are here in the church and here in the family and so on. And what we actually want, because where are all the doctors? Where are all the educators? Where are all of this kind of stuff? You need to get it from us and we will manage the society and you will eat the right food. And the population will grow or not at the rate that we determine the economy will work. This is the demonic goal. So it's funny. That's why I wanted to start there. On a human level, that's the kind of 20th century idea I think they're shooting for. It is demonic. Like if you want to go to a higher level when you're talking about, well, what are the kind of metaphysical implications? I have no idea if any of these people realize they are being ridden by demons. But nevertheless, the goal of this kind of project is in some literal sense, Titanic. So there's a lot there to pull apart. And the demonic part is going to rattle a lot of folks, I'm sure. But it is kind of interesting how this clip brings us back full circle in a way. So if the opening question was not, are we biological robots in a meaningless universe? But how does such a ridiculous meme remain intellectually viable? I think Gordon is kind of trying to answer that question and saying, hey, man, that's the program. That's the demonic game. But I broaden it a little bit and say the question for me is, what is the role of deception in this process? And I, like all of us, am reluctant in some ways to go there. Because I'm not sure it's the right question. But we keep bumping into that reality, that Gnostic reality, that I will create better than the creator gods because the creator gods are really making a mess of things. So there's so many layers to that. Because as appealing as that Gnostic sensibility is, it doesn't really give us any hope of transcending outside of this little street fight. I mean, certainly not in the way that we talk about when we talk about, for example, the recent interview I just did with David Sunfellow about NDE experiences and the potential that maybe exists for something that truly does transcend that back alley brawl between the creator gods and those of us who want to create better than them. So bringing that back to the question is, what is the role of deception in all of this? Why is there deception? Why is there evil, as we've talked about many times on this show? And I think this question, as I'm stating it here, for me gets to the deeper question of the nature of this evil. Because it's one thing to say that there's evil in the world and that it's an evil doer as our ex-president from many years ago, George Bush said. And again, I'm trying to bring it to more of a personal journey of who are we? Why are we here? Why are we clearly being deceived at various points in this process? What is the purpose of that? Who does that serve? And why does that seem to be so much a part of the process and tricksters and all the rest of that, almost at every turn? So there's four questions for you. There are four questions for me, I should say, because as I said, those are the four questions that are on my mind and are, for the most part, driving my thoughts and ideas in terms of who I'm talking to right now and who I want to talk to. And it isn't always, of course, a perfect fit because sometimes somebody pops up and I want to talk to them and they come on the show. But I do feel good sharing with you these ideas in these directions. And I'm certainly open to feedback and thoughts and ideas and discussion about these four questions. And maybe you have an answer. Maybe you can provide a shortcut to my learning here, which you've done many times in the past and I'd be totally open to again. So if you do have any thoughts along those lines, please join me. Skeptico Forum is always a good place where you can email me. You can find the links to all that stuff at the Skeptico website, s-k-e-p-t-i-k-o.com, where you can also find links to over 400 interviews all available there for free. So that's about it for this solo show, a unique one. I really don't plan on doing many of these, but there was an open spot in the calendar and it really turned out to be, I think, a fun opportunity for me to engage with you about this issue of direction and what's on my mind along those lines. So thanks as always for being there and staying with me and until next time, take care and bye for now. So thanks for watching this video and if it wasn't really a video, but just an audio, stored as a video, I apologize. But there's more videos out there as well, but please check out the Skeptico website. You can see it here. We cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality. A lot of shows up there, over 350 of them or so, all free, all available for download. So do check it out.