 And then there's John Eales golf game. He is reported to have once claimed to have shot a 38 under par round, as you might expect. No highlights to bring you from that round. That's a news report from CNN. Well, I guess if you can call what CNN does is news. But anyways, it's about obviously this fantastic golf round of the dear leader, Kim Jong-il, the late great Kim Jong-il. And it's a funny story and I thought it'd be kind of an interesting capstone to episode 500 of Skeptico. And in this episode, of course, you're going to hear a lot of the same stuff like it or not that you've grown accustomed to with Skeptico. A clip will explain my point is you got your book wrong. It's not that science needs spirituality. Science is doing everything it can to keep spirituality infiltrating where they're trying to go. So what I'm saying is is that you can sort of trace materialism to historical factors, cultural factors, which are not necessarily linked to the social engineering process. That is, by the way, our very excellent guest, Dr. Steve Taylor, who is a terrific guy. And we really synced on a lot of things, but not so much on some other things. Again, what you've come to expect with Skeptico. But I want to get back to the golf story because it's very Skeptico as well. First off, I gotta tell you, haven't heard the clip that first introduced me to the golf story. I don't even know this thing about Kim Jong-il. But a couple of episodes back, which will be coming up because the order that I'm putting these out is a little out of sequence. Matt Whitman, a guest from the Ten Minute Bible Hour. Terrific guest, really loved having this guy on. Anyways, we're talking about the credibility of different sources. And he brought up as an example. Well, yeah, well, of course, I mean, no one would believe the North Korean government issuing a press police saying that Kim Jong-il shot 38 under par, including, by the way, five hole in ones on that round. So we laughed and got our chuckle, made the point, kind of moved on. But as I a lot of times do, I got to thinking about that. And I said, is that really a real story? How did it come down? And the reason I did it, as I've explained so many times on this show is that I've been duped. So the first thing I did is just a quick Google search. Is this really a story that's out there? And yeah, it's this story that's turned into this meme and it's kind of echo chamber example of how wacky North Korea is. So next layer down, I found a link. Five top fake news stories about North Korea. And like, this is really interesting. I don't know how to make this any quicker. I'll try and make it as quick as I can. But in these five myths, what they start out with their number five on the list is North Korea beat Brazil in the World Cup and won the World Cup. And then they go on to say how this isn't really a myth inside of North Korea. The North Korean people don't really believe they won the World Cup by beating Brazil. They were just very, very proud that they even made the World Cup. It was actually shocking to the whole world that they did. Back in 2010, North Korea did represent their country in the World Cup. So right off the bat, I'm curious. Wow, that does seem like a myth that they have debunked. So then I continue to scroll down. It's the usual stuff. But number one on their list, Kim Jong Il scored a 36. Golf and they write, they being, by the way, young pioneer tours.com. This is our favorite, quite simply because it is the Godfather of all North Korean urban legends. And then they end with this again. The only problem with this story is that it was concocted outside of North Korea. And it was never ever, yes, never ever said in the country, a fake story, but great at setting the benchmark for how outrageous a story you can make before someone yells shenanigans. One of my favorite words are shenanigans. So I'm like, wow, that's curious. Who are these guys? Go to the about section. Young Pioneer Tours is an adventure travel company formed in 2008, based in mainland China, specializing in North Korean tours. Renowned and rated as one of the best North Korean travel operators with our unparalleled experience, fun way of doing things. And most importantly, their words, excellent relations in the country. Oh, good, you got excellent relations. Now I'm starting to wonder about the golf story. And through the magic of a duck, duck, go search, we arrived at the website of Eric Ellis. Who in 1994 was a foreign correspondent for Australian Financial Review and visited a Pyeongyang golf club and played around, which is kind of a long story. He had to kind of fake kind of credentials or what he was doing or some kind of stuff that you have to do. All this crazy stuff. Anyways, part of playing the round, he meets the, I guess you could say golf pro and in their conversation, the guy says, dear leader, Comrade General Kim Jong-il was a hell of a golfer. As a matter of fact, you know, he shot a 34 on this course, including five holes in one. So there you have it. There is the source of the story. And it really did come from North Korea. So it kind of debunks our pioneering tour, friends, whatever. But the story isn't over. See, the story is never over. That's what skeptic Ko has taught me. The story, at least the story ain't over when you think it's over. Because here's what else you can find if you search on this story. This is from golf.com, very respected in the field of golf. Josh Sands, June 1st, 2016, titled the article behind Kim Jong-il's famous round of golf. And he does the usual yuck it up with the US Open fast approaching. I'd like to set the record straight on one of history's most astounding rounds of golf, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, not Johnny Miller, not Jack Nicholson. He goes, Kim Jong-il, you get the story, get the setup. But here's the thing. He goes on to say how he recently was in North Korea. Went to the golf course. I could say golf course because there's only one golf course. Did a similar kind of thing that Ellis did kind of faked his way on. But here's the point of the story. I read from his article, a group of smiling cat. He's greeted us outside the clubhouse. So did the club manager, a stern-faced, chain-smoking man in a brown suit and a cap with a red star above its bill. After some cajoling through an interpreter, he agreed to field some of my questions. The first was a no-brainer. Had he witnessed the dear leaders fabled round, he chuckled but said nothing. What about the record-shattering score and those unforgettable five holes in one? This time, to my surprise, he answered. He was, of course, a staggering golf talent, possessed of an enchantingly rhythmic swing, but even for a player of his abilities, five aces, holes in one, in one round were out of reach. How that stat had entered into the official record was pretty simple, the manager said. The scorekeeper tracking Kim's round that day had relied on a relative to par system. Marking down zeros for par, one for bogeys and two for double bogeys. Unfamiliar with the scorekeeping shorthand, the North Korean state news agency covering the outing had read the five ones on Kim's card as holes in one. Now he goes on to say, forget the fact that Kim, a rake beginner, probably never sniffed a bogey all day long, blah, blah, blah, which is kind of interesting, but it's going to kind of throw us off track because, believe it or not, there's another twist to this story. There's a skeptical moment in this story and we've almost gotten there because when you hear that explanation, I said you there, but I'm going to say me. When I heard that explanation, I was like, oh, OK, that's it. That that explains it. I mean, it's outrageous. The whole thing was outrageous. The scorecard keeper made a mistake, a stupid mistake that no one would make it. I'd do anything about golf or would repeat if they knew anything about golf, but a more believable mistake. But now, because I've been duped so many times and because in the process, I've developed a little bit of spidey senses on this, this thing sat with me for a while and then it suddenly dawned on me. No, this is bullshit upon bullshit upon bullshit. And I thought of a couple of things that I thought I read in Ellis's original article, so I had to go back and here's what Ellis originally wrote. And remember, Eric Ellis is the guy who starts this whole story. There is no story before him. So one of the things he says is that when he lined up at the first hole, a three hundred and forty meter dog leg par four, the golf pro, the golf manager, whatever, said Kim John Il scored a two on this hole. And the golf pro explains that the dear leader shot a thirty four, including five holes in one and no hole worse than a birdie is one under par. So wait a minute, what about the Turquids in China who have quote unquote excellent relations with North Korea and insists that no North Korean ever said this story, it didn't originate from them. Well, if you're following the story, that was out long ago, but I just wanted to remind you. But what about the guy from golf dot com from golf magazine, who gets duped, right? He gets duped. He goes there and the interpreter says, oh, well, you know, yeah, that is pretty crazy. It turns out it was a scoring year. No, it wasn't a scoring year. It's just bullshit. It's just propaganda. It's just controlling the message. So my takeaway from this story is twofold. One, there's people who like to screw with the truth for all sorts of different reasons, and sometimes they're very nefarious. It still boggles the mind of everyone listening to the show that there is such a thing as North Korea that has mind controlled and imprisoned so many millions of people while the rest of the world just stands by with a so it goes kind of attitude, but number two, and I guess relevant to Skeptico 500 is follow the data wherever it leads, even if it takes a really long story to get there. So if I can, let me segue back to this interview coming up with Dr. Steve Taylor, because I did push on him really hard. But as you hear, it turns out Steve is an incredibly deep spiritual journeyer and has a wisdom about him that goes way, way beyond my rattling out about scientism and parapolitics. Let me play you another clip from this interview. A poem by Dr. Steve Taylor. If you had to sum up Russell's teaching in a couple of sentences, what would it be? Yeah. Well, actually, I wrote a poem based on one of his teachings and the poem is called Be Soft. So this is Be Soft based on Russell Williams' teaching. Be soft so that your mind doesn't clash with reality and you can absorb your experience with ease. Be soft so that disappointments and insults don't bruise you but bounce harmlessly away after your softness has absorbed their force. Be soft so that thoughts don't turn to fixed ideas and emotions flow through you without attaching themselves. And animosities doesn't longer long enough to form a grudge. And pain passes away before turning to trauma. Be soft so that you can bend with the wind without breaking and become moist with the rain without flooding. Be soft so that you pass through the world without leaving damage. Only the lightest of trails that will dissolve like a cloud and become part of the air that everyone breathes. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today we welcome Steve Taylor to Skeptico. Dr. Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University in the UK and chair of the Transpersonal Psychology section of the British Psychological Society. That sounds impressive. It really does. He's also a bestselling author. I started a podcast. He does a lot of media. He hangs out with Eckert Tolle and he does a lot of other cool stuff. Steve, welcome to Skeptico. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks, Alex. Great to be with you. So, Steve, let's talk about this new book of yours, Spiritual Science. Why science needs spirituality to make sense of the world. So let's dive right into it. Why don't you tell people the basic premise, where you're coming from? And, you know, maybe before that, even fill in a little bit more of your background. I kind of gave a sketch, but you really are out there. You've had a lot of accomplishments, a lot of recognition in terms of some of the terrific books you've written. You've really written a number of very popular, well-received books. I'm bringing up here The Leap, Clear Light, which is also the title of your podcast, Waking from Sleep. So a lot of cool stuff. And you have a website very nicely done. Steve Taylor, Spirituality and Psychology. So there's a lot too. What's going on with Steve Taylor? Tell us more about your background. And then we can dive into this book. OK, well, my background is quite kind of ordinary. I'm from sort of my family was kind of working class. I didn't have didn't have much culture or religion or spirituality in my background. But I must have had a kind of instinctive, impulsive spirituality in my nature. Because at the age of 16 or 17, I began to be interested in spirituality. I started to have what I recognize now are spiritual type experiences of expansion and connection and kind of upliftment and euphoria. But I didn't understand the experiences at the time, really. I felt I thought maybe there was something wrong with me. I thought maybe I was a bit crazy. But it was only later on when I began to, you know, read into read about mystical experiences, when I began to look into transpersonal psychology. Then I realized that I could make sense of my experiences. I realized that I was having kind of, you know, that kind of gave me a context to make sense of my own experiences. So later on, I was originally a musician for quite a long time. But later on, I decided I wanted to go back into education to become a psychologist to try to understand these experiences that I'd had. And then I found out about, you know, the field of transpersonal psychology and how it links Eastern philosophy and Western psychology. And that was my I realized that the straight way that was my home. That was where I belonged in academia. So I did a master's degree, a PhD. And I've always been interested in researching, you know, transformational experiences, or as I call them, awakening experiences. But at the same time, you know, being involved in academia, I've been very aware of the the scientism and the materialism which is inherent in academia, which kind of pervades the academic establishment. So if you have sort of esoteric views, if you believe in the existence of Psy phenomena, for example, you kind of like a bit of an outcast. You know, you're not really supposed to speak about these things in academia. So I've always been very aware of the kind of scientism which is inbuilt within academia. And as time has gone by, I've been sort of rebelling against that. I've been involved more and more into with investigating anomalous phenomena. And I've also been involved in investigating the assumptions which lie behind materialism and scientism. So now I kind of affiliate myself with the I guess you could call it the post materialist movement, which tries to examine the assumptions of materialist science and try to move beyond them in order to create a better paradigm, which makes more sense of reality. Great. And that is basically what this new book is about, spiritual science. Why science needs spirituality to make sense of the world. Why don't you sketch out for people kind of where you're going with with your theory that kind of threads the needle between materialism and panpsychism. And there's a there's a third way you're saying that's right. Well, first of all, you know, the book is mainly or partly about how materialism cannot explain the world or human experience. You cannot explain several basic aspects of human experience, such as consciousness, such as altruism, such as the influence of the mind over the body and so on. And materialism cannot explain seemingly esoteric phenomena, such as near death experiences, spiritual experiences, phenomena, it just disregards those experiences and tries to explain them away in terms of fraud or coincidence and so on. So yeah, panpsychism is one alternative to materialism, but I don't think it's a very good alternative. Panpsychism basically says that there is a I mean, there are obviously lots of different forms of panpsychism, but the most basic form of panpsychism suggests that there is a tiny element of mind in all material particles. So atoms have a tiny sort of flickering of consciousness or maybe the this kind of the the inner life of atoms is consciousness. Atoms appear exterior externally as physical entities, but they have this kind of inward dimension of consciousness. But that doesn't really help us much in terms of explaining reality. So I've suggested a philosophy which I call panpsychism and the basic idea of that is that the the the the ground reality of the universe is spirit or I sometimes call it fundamental consciousness. So everything emerges, all material things emerge from fundamental consciousness and human beings, individual consciousness emerges from fundamental consciousness. Our own consciousness is an influx of the fundamental consciousness of the universe. And the role of the brain, as I say, is to canalize fundamental consciousness into our own individual being. So there's a kind of a link to evolution there because through the through the progression of evolution as living beings become more physically complex, they also become more conscious. So there's a link between the complexity of physical form and the intensity of consciousness. So with with with us human beings, we have something like 100 billion blank brain cells and that enables us to canalize consciousness very intensely so that our own individual consciousness becomes very intricate, quite powerful and intense. And but there's obviously a future and evolution is obviously going to is obviously going to continue in the future. So in the future, there will be more complex living beings than us and there will be more conscious living beings than us. But my basic idea is that once you post, if you postulate a fundamental consciousness, which is the essence of reality, then all of the things we've mentioned earlier become easy to explain. You can explain altruism. You can have the basis for an explanation of consciousness and of psych phenomena and so on. You know, I was kind of with you on the evolutionary aspect of consciousness right up to the end when you said where it's where it's going and I don't know. So, you know, we had quite a little email exchange prior to this interview because, as you know, I've done so many shows on this scientism issue and on materialism and post materialism and all that. And, you know, I wanted to kind of take this in a slightly different direction as I outlined over and over again to you in these emails kind of trying to call off this interview, but let me share a story with you. Let me tell you a story. I did an interview a while back with a physicist named Dr. Donald Hoffman. Have you ever heard of Hoffman? And I'm not sure. Yeah, it sounds familiar, but I'm not familiar with his work. Well, he's quite a guy. He's very well respected in kind of mainstream science, but he's also very prominent in this kind of post materialist science kind of community because he's that's where he's that's where he's at. That's he's developed a mathematical model of consciousness that he believes shows mathematically undermines the consciousness materialism bullshit that we're kind of subjected to. So anyways, I'm doing this interview with him and I actually played him a clip from your buddy Eckhart Tolle, because I love Eckhart Tolle. I think he's wonderful. And I particularly like, you know, Tolle's let go of thinking, let go of knowing kind of idea. I think it resonates with people immediately. You know, why do I need to hold on to this idea that I I know something or that I that I'm thinking, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I lay that on on Hoffman, right? And he pauses for a minute and his tone really shifts now because we're talking about physics and all this shit. You know, we're talking about quantum physics and all this hardcore mathematical stuff, and now I've shifted into spirituality. Well, he doesn't miss a beat. He goes, yeah, because I really like and respect Tolle. Listen to a lot of his lectures and he goes, I spend a portion of my day every day in silence because I think it's important. But the question I really asked him was about whether or not his mathematical model was yet another abstraction of something that is beyond abstraction because it's fundamental, right? So he pauses and he goes, you know, I gave a lecture once and this guy came up to me at the end of the lecture and he laid this roomy quote on me. He said, the language of God is silence. All else is poor translation. So this guy's really starting to stick it to Hoffman after a lecture. You can only imagine he probably had this happen a couple of times. So so Hoffman is like, great, totally get it. And he says, I could totally respect that if and these are my words, not his people like you would shut the fuck up. So if that's your point, if your point is silence, then shut the fuck up. But here was his real point because he's not that kind of guy like I am. He said, look, I agree that consciousness is fundamental. I agree, therefore, that I understand the silence aspect of this. But if we are going to speak and we want to speak and we want to let our ideas be known and we want to share those ideas, then I want to be as precise as possible. That's what Hoffman says. I want to look for mathematical models that are as precise as possible. When I talk and Steve, that was my pushback on you. You know, I mean, I kept hitting you with thing after thing. And you're like, oh, I'm not so interested in that. I don't know about that. And to me, it seemed fundamental to really the premise of your book. You're the subtitle of the book is why science needs spirituality to make sense of the world. My counter to that is, fuck, no, science is doing everything they can. And they have been doing everything they can for the last hundred years to run away from spirituality, to systematically suppress control and, you know, obfuscate what is obvious is that we all have this greater consciousness, this greater sense of connection with the divine. So this idea that we're going to kind of that, oh, science is almost there. Let's cheer him on. You know, we're moving towards post-materialism. Hell no. Hmm. Yeah, I agree. I agree about the silence. I mean, William James, when he was one of the first psychologists to speak about spiritual experiences or mystical experiences, and he said that one of their characteristics is that they are ineffable. You can't describe them. And, you know, there's the old Zen saying that the finger that points at the moon is not the moon, so there's no point trying to describe the moon. But I'm not sure if that's completely true. I mean, Tolle's books, for example, they have a very powerful impact. They're just words, but they convey something which is beyond words. And I've met countless people who've had spiritual experiences while reading his book, and it is just words, but there's something beyond those words, which is communicating through those words. So I think words can be a very powerful channel. Music can do it, too. You know, an art can do it. Like maybe they can do it better than words because they are, you know, they are nonverbal. And that's, you know, as as for the rest of what you were saying, I agree that, you know, spirituality has been shut out of science. I think there's a there's a very big dichotomy between mainstream science, which is probably more materialistic than it's ever been before. And this kind of emerging post-materialistic science, which is, you know, moving in a completely different direction. So there's I think there's a schism within science. More and more scientists are trying to hold on to this rigid, cold materialism that says that we are just meat machines and that our consciousness will end when we die and that side phenomena cannot exist. Maybe because they feel threatened by this emerging post-materialist science, they're clinging to their values more strongly. They're clinging to their beliefs more strongly. And a lot of early scientists were quite spiritual guys, you know, like Newton, for example, Leibniz. They were very kind of interested in metaphysics and religion and spirituality. But yeah, so I think science, I think mainstream science, well, at some point, have to give way. I think they're the momentum of post-materialism is building up. And sooner or later, it will happen, you know, whether it's in a few decades, but at some point, I'm sure it will happen. No, I'm not sure it will happen. You know, the counter the counter hypothesis that I presented to you is to say, look at remote viewing and look at Stargate. And again, we didn't seem to really connect on this because you seem to just kind of gloss over the point. No, I didn't understand. I didn't understand where you go, where you were going with that. I understand now. I didn't understand the meaning of your for the sake for the sake of the audience, where I'm going now is in the 1950s, they started M.K. Ultra and it warmed up being over one hundred and fifty at least programs in all of these leading universities around the country. Harvard had a prominent program. Northwestern had a prominent program and many others. But the ones that a lot of people in the in our community like to point to is what went on at Stanford Research Institute and the program Stargate. A lot of people like to kind of carve Stargate out of M.K. Ultra because M.K. Ultra was so incredibly just evil, you know, in terms of what they did and the mind control they did on people and without consent to prisoners and unsuspecting people. But let's be clear, Stargate was under M.K. Ultra. And when you listen to Russell Targ and how put off the two principal investigators, they say, yeah, when Sydney came, Sydney was our boss. That is Sydney Gottlieb, the US's Mengele, you know, who ran the M.K. Ultra program and was well known for poisoning. You know, he was the go to guy and administering poison. Like if you're going to try and get Castro and stuff like that. All this stuff is in the record. But certainly people like to carve out Stargate, the remote viewing program as it's somehow different and it's it is, but it's not. But the point of all that is that, you know, how put off and Russell Targ, who are world class scientists in their own right, materialist scientists, if you want to call it that, they weren't wringing their hands over these questions of materialism. They were so far past that they had just they assumed that all that is total bullshit and they went on and all the science that was done in connection with that. And when you look at all the real kind of deep, deep state science that goes on, whether it's UFOs or whether it's Stargate or M.K. Ultra, none of that stuff, they're way past materialism. So the idea that that, you know, G. Golly G., you know, if we could just convince, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who, by the way, you know, you said you saw the interview with Bernardo Castro, where we got a good chuckle on, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is kind of one of the most public figures in science in the US, saying, yeah, you know, consciousness, I think we're going to find it's nothing, which it's just absurdity. I don't think it holds up to to reasonably assume that they are coming to that position logically and rationally. It just doesn't it doesn't hold up to that, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about specific programs, some of which were quite a long time ago. I mean, I think the seventies was kind of like a slightly different era, because certainly in the late sixties, there was this wave of experimentation with psychedelics, there was a wave of interest in consciousness and spirituality. And that kind of permeated into science as well. It was kind of like a little kind of blip in the history of materialism when science became a little bit less materialistic because of that influence. Well, I think after that, I think, I mean, I'm in the UK. I can maybe speak most clearly about the UK. I mean, when I was in education in the seventies and eighties, it was pure materialism. You know, the whole education system is pure materialism. The whole media was pure materialism. It was kind of in the air. You know, this materialism was in the air and everybody just sort of breathed in without realising. Even me, I remember when I was 18, I went to I saw an advert for a meditation class at a local library. And I went along with my friend. I remember the teacher saying, you are not your mind, you are not your brain, you are your consciousness. And the nature of consciousness is bliss. And I thought, what the hell is he talking about? What's this thing called consciousness? I assumed because of my education that I was just a brain and that my thoughts were just a product of brain of the brain. I assume that I was nothing more than physical matter. So, you know, it just shows you how deeply ingrained the materialist paradigm is and also, you know, it's in the media, you know, the serious mainstream media in the UK and I think in the US too, it's totally imbued with materialism. You know, sometimes some of the popular newspapers have stories about NDE's or about siphonometer, but kind of the serious media is totally materialistic. So what I'm saying is it's not just a few scientists. It's the whole kind of atmosphere of our culture that breathes materialism into our beings. I guess what I'm saying, Steve, is and I wanted you to respond to it's been my conclusion and it took me a long time coming. Hundred interviews where I was kind of banging on that door in the same way. Gee, why are these skeptics? Why can't they just see here's more undeniable evidence? Here's Dean Raiden with the Six Sigma result with experiments that have been replicated in labs across the world. Why? Why? Why won't they believe? Why do they believe weird things? And it was only when I started looking at the possibility that it is a social engineering project that it is intentionally designed that way to prevent us or to limit us from opening up to a larger reality of our extended consciousness potential. And you know, if you really follow the the logic of that, it's kind of similar to the logic of neodarwinism. It's like people are a lot easier to control if they believe that their life is meaningless, if they believe that they are just biological robots. It's it's a better control strategy. So why wouldn't you do that? So that is my hypothesis. But I or that's my position. But I'm backing it up over and over again to you with evidence. Stargate clearly shows that there's this invisible college going on. It's a joke. No one who's really on the inside believes this shit, yet they perpetuated on the outside science media. You know, that's the other thing on this show. Again, I banged my head against the wall for years with why is this near death experience research when it's published with inside the near test experience community and it's peer reviewed and it's in the Lancet and it's in, you know, it's done by medical professionals. Why does it come through the science media completely all skeptical bullshit? You know, why this is all, you know, not real kind of stuff. It's orchestrated. It's done on purpose. I just think that's the nature of fundamentalism. You know, Galileo tried to persuade his peers to look through the telescope, but none of them would take a look because they knew it would threaten their belief system. I think once you have a belief system that explains reality in a simple and apparently clear way, then it's very important for your identity. It gives you a sense of control over the world. It gives you a sense of understanding, a sense of identity overall. So you don't want to let go of that. You know, things like NDE's and Psyphenomena, they threaten people's worldviews and therefore they threaten people's sense of identity and they threaten their sense of control over the world. I think modern science is a bit like a colonizing enterprise. And once you've colonized the world, you have a sense of control over it. And you don't want to let go of that control. It's very powerful. So, you know, these fundamentalist scientists, they react just like religious fundamentalists. They won't consider any information which, you know, which damages their worldview because that would damage their sense of identity. I think it's as simple as that. Well, I don't think it's as simple as that. And I keep giving you, I keep piling on the evidence. You know, clearly, well, give me some evidence, give me some more evidence. Stargate, Stargate, for example. So sorry, Stargate. Well, for example, who is doing the controlling? Who are the people who are controlling us? You jumped questions, you jumped issues. First, you wanted, first you wanted evidence. So, because here, you know, the other point of evidence and people listen to this show all the time are absolutely sick and tired of this story, but I don't care. Got to repeat it because you haven't heard it because I threw it out there and you go, I'm not interested in that, not interested in that. So Gloria Steinem, the story about Gloria Steinem, I'll make it really quick because the audience has heard this so many times. You know, the number one person identified with the women's movement in the US and probably in the world. And, you know, we come to find out that she's CIA. And she's not CIA like she started the women's movement. And then the CIA got in there to kind of rig it. No, she's CIA from the beginning. She went to, they picked her out from high school. They sent her to college on a CIA fellowship that never existed before, after she started doing, you know, to counter the Sylvia, the Soviet student movement, she was assigned to go do that. She did that. She has all these and you could read all this. You could listen to her in her own words. Say, yeah, I work with the CIA, but, you know, they're really not so bad. And then you find the real story as you find her bosses saying, hey, she's great. So the question there, you know, and the latest pushback I always get from that is, but wasn't the women's movement a good deal? A good idea? And I'm like, yeah, we need it. We needed social change. We were in a very, very backward way in terms of how we looked at women. But what the fuck is the CIA doing? Managing, socially engineering, what our beliefs, what our social beliefs are. So you just start from that data point and then you just there are so many data points like that. I mentioned the doors to you and get into that. You know, Jim Morrison, who shows up at the ghost. Hey, great. Jim Morrison. You've just never investigated it. Jim Morrison shows up and first of all, do you know who Jim Morrison's dad is? I know he was an admiral in the Navy, wasn't he? He was a captain. Wasn't he the guy on the boat in the Gulf of Tonkin? Maybe, I don't know about that. Yeah, he was. So the Gulf of Tonkin, which is the famous false flag admitted, false flag operation that starts Vietnam, his dad is that guy. And then if you look at Jim Morrison, he shows up in Laurel Canyon, which, you know, the guy once done the whole thing of exposing that. But the thing that just super high level that people just need to know is this guy, you're a music guy. Imagine this, he cannot read or write music. He cannot play a musical instrument. But we are to believe that he showed up at day one. He had all the songs written, right? Which, again, it is very curious, you know, how we would show up. He's kind of propped up as this guy put for it. Fantastic performer and all the rest of that. But can't play a musical instrument, can't read or write music. And yet wrote all these songs, not just the lyrics to the songs, wrote the fricking songs. That is not to believe. That is social. That is another case of social. As a musician, I'm a musician. I'm not sure about that, because a lot of musicians hear songs in the head and they don't hear the chords necessarily, but they hear the melody in their heads. And that can happen to people who are not, we don't play musical instruments. I think that's what happened with Jim Morrison. He heard the basic melodies and the words in his head and he took them. Isn't it more likely that it's fake? Isn't it much more likely that it's fake? Well, why would, you know, why would he be brought into Laurel Canyon then? Why would he be? I mean, he was a he was a record writer. He was he was a degenerate. You know, he wasn't a part of the system. You know, he was a rebel. He tried to undermine the whole system. Oh, see, you're kind of creeping towards it, Steve. You ever heard of controlled opposition? Why was Gloria Steinem? Why was Gloria Steinem? So you go back to the Gloria Steinem story, right? That's all true, right? You can verify that. If you want, we can pause the video and you can go watch the video of her saying that, why did the CIA do that? Because they wanted to infiltrate the women's movement, presumably. No, it's not infiltrate, right? Because it's not like the women's movement. Gloria Steinem started her own thing under CIA direction, right? Yeah, which, well, I mean, she's just one example. I mean, the women's movement has been underway since the 18th century. You know, I mean, so why is the CIA? Why is the CIA who was number one? Gloria Steinem, who's behind Gloria Steinem CIA? Why? I don't know. I think maybe they just want to infiltrate the movement. I think there were lots of other prominent figures in the women's movement and they wanted to get, you know, see what was going on. They wanted to see what was going on. Maybe they wanted to direct it and control it. If you were in charge of the world and somebody has to be in charge, would you have an interest in kind of influencing the way things went? Presumably, yeah. So the explanation is no more than that. So, you know, you see a movement going on and you want to get in front of it. You want to make sure that you have the ability to influence it and control it. So you see the 60s and you see the music scene. You see these students and you know, you don't want a thousand Kent states. So, you know, what do you want? You want to have a foot in the door there. So, you know, you invent this stuff and the same thing with with Gloria Stein. But all that, you know, as all this relates to your book, it's that social engineering is always in play. So my conclusion from, again, the M.K. Ultra stuff and the Stargate stuff is they're hitting you in the face with invisible college and you have to make the leap to social engineering. But if you so that's our we're going to debate this, you know, because that's my debate. My debate is my point is you got your book wrong. It's not that science needs spirituality. Science is doing everything it can to keep from. Spirituality infiltrating where they're trying to go. They've done a pretty damn good job because like you alluded to a hundred years ago, Niels Bohr and Max Planck and everybody at Schrodinger, they all said consciousness is fundamental. I mean, we knew that for a hundred years. Yeah. But I mean, materialism really began in towards the end of the 19th century after Darwin's theory of evolution, once the religious worldview no longer seemed valid or viable. So scientists began to realize that they could not just scientists, but kind of intellectuals began to realize that they could explain the world and they could explain human behavior in purely physicalist terms. So they didn't need any supernatural explanations. They didn't need any biblical or mythical explanations of the world. But it was a gradual process. I mean, I think materialism really began to take hold after the First World War. Maybe it's because of the sheer destruction and damage of the First World War. People didn't believe in God anymore. And there was kind of an impulse to to make things simple, to simplify things, to take things down to their basic essence. So you had like trends like behaviorism in psychology, which disregarded human experience and human consciousness. You had the school of logical positivism in philosophy, which did a similar thing, which kind of just disregarded any metaphysical questions. So what I'm saying this is that you can sort of trace materialism to historical factors, cultural factors, which are not necessarily linked to the social engineering process. I mean, you could you could say, I mean, do you think that the the 19th century Victorians who initiated materialism were part of some was at the beginning of a social engineering project? No, I mean, I think the one thing I think that this is always in play. And it's in play to a lesser degree. And it's different at different times. I think it's completely wrong to interpret it as some smooth line that always moves in one direction. But yeah. So I get you in the church thing, you know, the whole church thing, you cannot exclude that from another way of controlling. You know, just look at the at the super high level, right? People are having spiritually transformative experiences like you document so wonderfully in some of your books. And then what is the role of religion? Well, it's to serve as a immediately jump in there and be the end of meter and say, Hey, wait, Steve, let me tell you. Let me tell you how to interpret that, because I don't want you going on your own and figuring out what that means. I'll tell you and, you know, pay me money, pray to God, be afraid. Let me make you really afraid of death. Let me make you really guilty and all these other things. I mean, that's another control matrix kind of thing. And science does the same, of course. Science says so mainstream science actually says these are not spiritual experiences. These are pathological experiences. These are aberrational experiences. Here's the medication to control these experiences. So, yeah, I accept that. You know, I think both science and religion control these anomalous experiences and they try to explain them and take credit for them in their own fashions. So, yeah, I can see that. And I think there's certainly a problem in our culture with the pathology, pathology, sorry, can't say pathologization of higher states of consciousness and spiritual experiences. A lot of that does come from psychiatry and for mainstream ideas about mental illness, seeing mental illness as a physical issue, rather kind of kind of mental or spiritual issue. So I think that that's a real problem. And where are you going with some of your work? People need to know you're also a poet, which I think is super cool. You mentioned your music background. So I don't want to just be hammering on this one book because you really have a larger kind of body of work and body of ideas that you're kind of putting forth that I'm very much, you know, grateful that you're out there doing this kind of stuff. What has been your work up to this point in terms of understanding these spiritually transformative experiences and how they're kind of making their way into people's lives? Well, I interpret it in terms of evolution. I've always been interested in the evolution of consciousness and I see my own work fundamentally as an attempt to contribute to the evolution of human consciousness as an attempt to facilitate an evolutionary leap in consciousness. So I mean, I've examined awakening experiences, which are temporary spiritual experiences when our awareness expands and intensifies and we feel a sense of oneness with the universe or with other human beings. And I've also investigated permanent transformations when people seem to shift into a permanent ongoing high estate. I call that shift into waitfulness. And one thing I've become more interested in over the years is the link between psychological turmoil and the shift into waitfulness. So I found that it's quite common or it's not uncommon for people who go through intense psychological turmoil due to bereavements, maybe a diagnosis with cancer, maybe a period of addiction or intense stress or depression. It's not uncommon for people to shift into a new state of being in the midst of that kind of turmoil or after that kind of turmoil. It's almost as if there is a latent higher self in some people which is waiting for the opportunity to emerge. And when the normal ego breaks down in the midst of intense turmoil and stress, then there seems to be an opportunity for this latent higher self to emerge. And that seems to be happening quite a lot. I've met many people who've gone through that shift, but they feel literally like they're a different person in the same body. You know, they look at initially they look at themselves in the mirror and don't recognize themselves because they've become a different person. And that again, I think that is connected to evolution. It's almost as if there is an unfolding of a new human identity, a new human state, which is manifesting itself in more and more people. I think it's manifesting itself in temporary spiritual experiences, but also in this unfolding of a latent higher self, which I think is probably the next stage in the in the unfolding of human consciousness overall. Let's talk about Toli for a minute. As I mentioned before, I have a lot of respect and love many of his books and lectures. What has been your relationship with him and what have you learned? And how has that influenced your work? I think he wrote the the forward of the introduction to this latest book. Did he not? Yeah, that's right. He's written the four to three of my books now because I've had three books published through his publishing imprint. I got Toli additions, additions. And I got in contact with him about 15 years ago when I wrote a book called The Fall. And my book The Fall is largely an examination of human history, archaeology and anthropology. And it's about the unfolding of human consciousness through history, through human history. And I suggest that the myth of the fall, which a lot of cultures have, is based on a real event. And the real event was the emergence of a heightened state of individuality in some humans, a new sense of separateness, a new sense of duality in certain human beings. And that was linked to the emergence of endemic warfare, patriarchy, monotheistic religion, and also technological developments and so on. But I sent the book to Eckhart because I thought it might interest him. I'd read the power of now and I thought he might be interested. So I sent the book to his office and he got in contact with me a few months later and said, Oh, I really like this book. It's fantastic. I want to help you promote it. And I'll give you an endorsement and we'll do an interview about it. I thought, fantastic. Just what I just want every author wants. And so we after that, we became friends. I went to Canada to do an interview for his internet TV station. And we tend to meet up whenever he's in England and sometimes in America and met him a couple of years ago in Los Angeles. But yeah, he's just basically, you know, like a lot of spiritually awakened people. He's very ordinary. You know, there's nothing, you know, extraordinary about him. He's just very simple. I've met a few spiritually awakened people, people who are awakened to a very intense degree. And there is something incredibly simple about them. There's really nothing to them. You meet some human beings who think, Wow, these these people are so complex. I can't understand them. It takes you a while to work people out. But with somebody like Eckhart, you know, there's nothing that you just work him out. You understand him, you see through him straight away. And he has a tremendous quality of stillness about him. If you spend time in his company, you naturally slow down. You naturally tune into his stillness. So it's a great experience to be in his company. And I think a lot of people experience that his talks as well. You know, this he once said to me that when he gives talks, it's not so much what he actually says. It's the feeling which people pick up on and this sense of stillness and presence which builds up during the course of the evening. Is that been a part of your spiritual development and growth or not so much? I mean, I'm totally cool with the idea that, you know, you just have this kind of friendship with him. Yeah, not so much really, because I think my own spiritual journey began before I met him, before I encountered his books. So I was already kind of setting my I think my own spiritual development occurred when I was younger. And yeah, so I don't think I've been sort of especially helped in my spiritual development by him. But I've been certainly I've been especially helped in my work through his through his support. Yeah, I had a my main spiritual teacher was a guy called Russell Williams and who was a spiritual teacher here in Manchester in England, where I live. And he was similar to Eckhart in some ways. He's very ordinary, very simple and he died three years ago at the age of 96 and just three years before he's ever helped him write his book. He only published one book in his whole lifetime. He was probably the the oldest ever first time author. But but like Eckhart, you somebody you just you spent time in his presence and there's this kind of radiance that comes from him and it just settles you down. It just tunes you in and it feels so right to be in these people's presence. It takes you beyond separation and beyond yourself. You know, it puts you in touch with the kind of radiance which is part of their being, it just spreads to you. And, you know, there's a whole sort of Indian tradition of Darshan or satsang, which is based on that principle that enlightenment spreads to the students of the teacher. So if you had to sum up Russell's teaching in a couple of sentences, what would it be? Yeah, well, actually, I wrote a poem based on one of his teachings and the poem is called Be Soft. Can you pull up the poem? We can pause a second. Well, it's great because he had a really interesting life. He was he was actually you've heard about Dunkirk in the Second World War. Of course. Yeah, he was there at Dunkirk and helping to sort of ferry the bodies back to the soldiers back to England. And, you know, he had an incredibly traumatic early life. Often at the age of 11, he had to start work at age of 11. How did you even come to know him? Well, he was in the local area and years ago, about 20 years ago, and I went to Gurgev, a Gurgev group. I was interested in Gurgev and I got friendly with a guy who used to go to the group and the Gurgev talks about being awakened and how most human beings are asleep. So I said to my friend, you know, have you ever met a man who's truly awake? And he said, yeah, there's this guy called Russell. He lives a few miles away. You know, he's a lot of people think he's enlightened. So that was it. It was just a word of mouth, because he never publicized himself. He never advertised himself. He never wrote anything until this book at the age of 93. So he was kind of like a very, very, quite a secretive, reclusive teacher, which not many people knew about. OK, so shall I read Be Soft, the poem? Absolutely terrific. So this is Be Soft based on Russell Williams' teaching. Be soft so that your mind doesn't clash with reality and you can absorb your experience with ease. Be soft so that disappointments and insults don't bruise you or bounce harmlessly away after your softness has absorbed their force. Be soft so that thoughts don't turn to fixed ideas and emotions flow through you without attaching themselves. And animosity doesn't longer, long enough to form a grudge and pain passes away before turning to trauma. Be soft so that you can bend with the wind without breaking and become moist with the rain without flooding. Be soft so that you pass through the world without leaving damage. Only the lightest of trails that will dissolve like a cloud. And become part of the air that everyone breathes. He also had a very simple teaching where he said that, you know, everything you do in your house, do it with care, do it very gently. So if you open a door, just do it softly as if you are paying respect to the doorknob as you walk upstairs, walk slowly and gracefully, you know, giving your respect and care to the banister. So it's very simple stuff, but it's quite powerful. Well, I thought that was just an extraordinary poem. You're to be congratulated. That is first rate stuff. So what was I'm fascinated. What was his departing with you? Like, how did he feel about the book? How did he feel about the poem? Well, I had asked him many years ago if he would write a book. I thought, you know, maybe you're getting old now, Russell, you're 85 or whatever it was. Maybe you should think about leaving a record of your teachings. And he would say, no, no, no, you know, there's no point because the essence of my teaching is nonverbal. It's like what we were saying before, it's about feeling. It's beyond it goes beyond words. So words will never capture it. That's what he said. We agreed for us to start recording the meetings. He held meetings twice a week. We started to record them. So at least we'd have some kind of record. But a few years later, when he was 93, he had a health scare. I can't remember what it was, but he said, oh, maybe, you know, maybe I should leave a record. So let's write a book. So. So I said, are you sure? He said, yeah, definitely. I want to leave something behind and may not be around for too much longer. So it was great. I spent a few days with him recording his life story. Then I typed up some of the meetings. I sent the manuscript back to him when he corrected it and edited it. And it was great because it was published in 2015. And in the following three years, he still met, he still held twice twice weekly meetings. But because the book was quite successful, people started to travel from America, from Israel, from Europe and so on. So the meetings became very vibrant and full of new people. And that seemed to take his teaching up to a new level. You know, he was very encouraged by the by the new energy, which permeated the meetings. And, you know, we thought he was going to live forever because he seemed very healthy. He was still driving until he was 92. People used to say to him, you know, how come you're so so healthy and so vibrant mentally because he looked great. He looked sort of 20 or 30 years younger than his age. And he was said, well, it's because I don't think he would say thoughts take up so much energy. You know, if you don't think you save so much energy. Great. So it was great. It was a great experience to spend time with him. And he died in a very peaceful way. You know, he got leukemia but died within three or four weeks. And he was completely at ease with with the idea of death. Well, that's that's wonderful. Stephen, I can definitely see how that would have informed. A lot of your a lot of your work. And I think it completely explains your kind of fold in naturally relationship with Toley. And I'm sure on some level, Toley recognized you and and through you. Russell as being kind of kindred spirits because your poem is very Toley in a lot of ways without being that at all. So, you know, you also have a foot in academia, as we mentioned at the beginning, you certainly have stellar credentials and have been recognized in your field and publish and all that. What's that like for you? That's what you do kind of for a part of your living. You know, how do you balance those two parts of your life? It's tricky because academia is so left brain and involves a lot of fairly mundane administrative tasks like marking and, you know, doing registers, like evaluating research proposals. And so sometimes I think, why am I doing this? So surely I should be spending all my time writing poetry or writing my other books. But one reason is because I feel like I am influencing, you know, the paradigm of our culture in the UK, particularly if you're an academic, you're seen as an expert. So you get a lot of media attention. People often contact you to say, oh, could you speak to us on the team on the BBC or can you give us a quote for this article in the magazine? So it gives you a certain degree of kudos, which I'm not really interested in that for its own sake, but it helps. You know, it helps me to sort of to bring an influence into our culture. And so I think I think you can contribute from you can contribute to the movement towards post materialism from within a materialistic culture, from within a materialistic institution, such as academia. So I feel like I've kind of infiltrated the institution and I'm trying to bring about some change internally, a bit like Gloria Steinem in the movement, although I'm not I'm not employed by the CIA. Got it. Got it. Good. I understand the connection. Well, it's it's been terrific. What are you what are you working on in the future? What's coming up next? I've got a new book coming out later this year called Extraordinary Awakenings. And it's based on my recent research into the kind of thing I was talking about earlier, the extraordinary transformation that can occur in the midst of intense suffering. So I've interviewed a lot of prisoners who've had spiritual awakenings, soldiers who've had spiritual awakenings and also people who've recovered from cancer. People have been, you know, a long term drug addicts and alcoholics, too. So it's been quite remarkable to interview a lot of people who have gone undergone this experience. So it's basically people who've been to the most extreme, you know, extreme degrees of human suffering have undergone this incredible shift into a higher state of awareness. What do you make of the crossover between the physiological psychological and spiritual in those things? Because, you know, you'll you'll hear this particularly in a lot of different ways. But like in near death experience, you'll hear people have a near death experience and there's a healing involved in it. And I was just on a show union of the unwanted podcast and this one woman Rosemary was telling about her extraordinary near death experience. And she was like bargaining at the end. She goes, OK, I'll go back, but I don't want any of this cancer thing. And I said, OK. So she went back and her cancer was completely gone. And her doctors were like, well, what what how was that possible? So how do how do we understand this kind of crossover between the physical between the material? Because something is going on there and the psycho spiritual. Yeah, I found that in my research, too. I met a few people who had gone who had chronic medical conditions, which suddenly disappeared after their awakenings. And also people who'd been addicts or alcoholics for a long time, they'd been through a lot of incredibly traumatic situations. One woman had been, you know, she'd been attacked multiple multiple times, raped many times and so forth. But she said that once her new identity established itself, she was free of all the trauma. So it happens on a physical and a mental level as well. The mental trauma and pain can pass away after awakening, too. Then one way that you could explain it is that a lot of a lot of illnesses are rooted in psychosomatic factors that cause in some way by mental attitudes or intentions or mental patterns. So once a person shifts to a different identity, they take on a new mind and that new mind doesn't carry any of the same mental patterns or intentions or attitudes. And so so the illnesses were associated with the previous identity. So when a new identity emerges, it's free from all of those ailments. So that's one thing. But also I think consciousness or the mind as it manifests itself in human beings is so much more powerful than the body. I think the body is an emanation of spirit, too. But it's a kind of like a less subtle emanation. I think mind carries fundamental consciousness very powerfully and intensely. So the power of the mind can affect the body to a tremendous degree. And possibly that explains why serious illnesses like cancer can suddenly disappear. Well, our guest again has been the very excellent doctor, Steve Taylor, who has been nice enough to stand against some kind of pretty hard ass poking for two people that pretty much agree on the basics of what he's saying. But hey, that's kind of my my stick. We had life would be so boring if everyone agreed. That is right, of course. Visit his website and check out these books. I think he's given you enough to find that there's going to be probably more than one of these that are just going to be fascinating to you. I'm dying to dig into this book on Russell Williams sounds so fantastic and his personal account with him. But that kind of deeper understanding of this broader spirituality is woven through all these books. Steve, it's been absolutely terrific having you on. And I appreciate you doing this with me. Thanks. I think it's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot. Thanks again to Dr. Steve Taylor for joining me today on Skipped Co. My question to tea up from this interview is what are your three favorite episodes of Skeptico that you've heard? It doesn't matter if you just listen to the last few or if you listen to hundreds and hundreds of what are your top favorite ones? What better way to celebrate episode 500? Let me know your thoughts. Let me hear from you until next time. Take care and bye for now.