 Well, you know, one of the reasons it's coming back, potentially we assume it's because of the name image alightness, and that might be the one thing in the off-season, get everybody to agree on if it brings that game back. Okay, right off the bat, I gotta tell you, this is gonna be a long way around the barn intro, but that clip is from ESPN College Game Day, and I feel like Wokeness has taken away every sports entertainment thing I ever had. You know, NBA's completely unwatchable NFL close behind, but I hold on to college football. I hold on to college football, even though I have to kind of blind my eye. Here's the point, though. Name, image, and alightness is the big news, and if you haven't heard about this, it's that now they're gonna pay players. So that's enough of an intro. Here are the actual guys, the jocks, talking about the situation, and the payoff comes at the end when the ESPN guy who's never played is just kind of a mouthpiece there when he butts in, and then I'll come back. I didn't get a dime, did you? I did not get a dime. I've never thought it was practical or fair for colleges to make billions of dollars off the backs and sacrifices of college athletes. Yeah, the college athletes have been the workhorses for this whole system. Like, you're building a whole economic system off the backs of these workhorses, and we couldn't benefit of it. I'm talking about they wanted to bleed every red penny out of every athlete they could, every student athlete, without giving them anything back outside of, you know, room and board and education, which a lot of people like to talk about, but it's nothing in comparison to what they're getting from the revenue-generating sports, like football and basketball. Pails is the comparison. But one thing I would say, Deso, and you know, I'm staunchly in favor of all of this. I don't know that there was any malicious intent. Okay, so a fair question might be what the hell does any of this have to do with my upcoming interview with the very excellent Gary Lockman. And here is the connection. Here's what we keep bumping into, and it is a clip from this interview I have coming up with Gary. Here it is. Well, the thing is, isn't this what everyone's been saying was supposed to have happened? The age of Aquarius is supposed to be with us, right? When all the strange stuff that was on the fringe, UFOs and paranormal stuff and cult activity and the breakdown of the mental rational consciousness. And this means all the kind of, we talked about post-modernism, it's post everything. Everything that was set in place during the modern period, when the rational mind had organized everything, everything was nice and set in place and linear and progress was happening and all that. That's all being taken apart. It's eating itself up. To me, it's like a jumping off point that goes in two completely different directions is like, I love what you said. It's beyond post-modernism, it's post everything. It's post-rational thought. But then you said, if I got this right, is being taken down? And then you said, or is crumbling kind of under its own weight? And to me, that is the debate. So the point I think is determining malicious intent. And I guess I'm still kind of processing the interview last time with Joe Atwell, because he's all about citizenry and what we need to do and all that. And I hesitate to go there. But the part that does ring true is, we do have to fucking figure out the malicious intent. I mean, the malicious intent in NIL and college football is just about as clear as it can be. I mean, they just stole billions of dollars every year from these athletes. Many of them, if you wanna go there, are kind of socially underserved, if you will. But however you wanna slice it and dice it, they just ripped them off over and over again year and year. And when they challenged it legally in court, which they did, they pulled every trick in the book. I mean, they moved the jurisdiction, got the judges, just follow it. Claret, Maurice Claret a few years ago. I mean, it's just, I mean, it's like so many other things that are unauthorized history of the United States. But I mean, this is just a clear example of yes, they had malicious intent. I mean, that's what you wanna call malicious, but they were out to squeeze like Beth said, every penny they could. So back to Gary. That's really the only question here is, you know, jump this way, jump that way. Are they trying to bring down the system or is the system crumbling? That's the question. And that's our job to figure out and act accordingly. Anyways, that's my idea. Here's my interview, Gary Lockman. 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, actually welcome back Gary Lockman to Skeptico. If you don't know Gary, he's a very, very accomplished author. I don't usually read bios, but you know, this will kind of catapult everybody into Gary's world. If you are unfamiliar with who he is, Gary Lockman is the author of 21 books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness, popular culture, and the history of the occult. He has written biographies of Alistair Crowley, Rudolph Steiner, Young Blavatsky, Swedenberg and Colin Wilson, as well as histories of Hermeticism and the Western inner tradition. So like I said, a lot of crossover with the stuff that we talk about here. And as I also kind of tip my hand a little bit to Gary, I'm anxious to pull him in a couple of different directions than I normally hear him talk about. He's, I think he's very adept at talking about a range of these topics. So we'll have a good time. Gary, thanks for joining me. Glad you're here. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on again. So, you know, I was, I bump into you every now and then because you do write so, you do write so many fantastic books. And then I was, I just kind of stumbled across this presentation you gave on consciousness to the Theosophical Society in England. And I thought it was really, really interesting. And I came across, it kind of sent me back to an earlier book that you wrote, The Secret History of Consciousness. And I wanted to read a quote from this book. And as I read it, I want people to keep in mind that this is 20 years at this point, right? Just about, no, just short of, but I was writing it 20 years ago. So in 2003, so. I think people will get where I'm going when I read this quote. One of my motives in writing this book is to argue that the current monopoly on consciousness by scientists and academic philosophers is unfounded and that a whole history of thought about consciousness and its possible evolution is left out of their quote, unquote, official accounts. There is what I call a secret history of consciousness. And I guess I have to admit with some little embarrassment, I was stunned. I mean, that's, man, that is powerful, but it's like double powerful to think you wrote that 20 years ago. I've been doing this show for the last 10 years and that's been the main theme of my show is that the monopoly of consciousness. Where were you then in your headspace? And this is so much part of this presentation that I saw, you know, how has that shifted? Where have we come since then? Well, where I was then most of the time was in the British Library back in the day and you know, reading and rereading and doing the research for the book. But I mean, fundamentally that book that allowed me to unload thoughts about everything I've been reading for the last, I don't know, 25 years, something like that. And I just felt and I still feel it's the case today that 99.9% 99% of the time when you have something about consciousness, it's either it's science, it's quantum, quantum something or other. And it's, you know, I don't know, science of mind, philosophy of mind, something like that. And that's fine, but it does seem to me to sort of monopolize or even ghettoize it because I think, I mean, in the sense, I mean, obviously philosophy has talked about consciousness but not necessarily in the same way as like philosophy of mind, John Searle and Dennis, who's Searle, you know, Bergson, people like that. I mean, they're kind of name check but they're what they sort of arrived at or, you know, their conclusions are not necessarily, unless you're doing that kind of particular philosophy, you know, it's split those guys over there, the continental philosophy, but we're doing the hard stuff over here. This is the real, that's the nice, nice soft, you know, that's fine, but this is the real kind of stuff here. And I still feel like that's today. I mean, I find you can't, there's two things. I mean, well, there's the three sort of size. There's the science talks about, or the three S's, science talks about consciousness a lot. We still, that's what we do a lot. And the spiritual side of it, which is often in opposition to science, but it has a particular kind of way that it talks about it. And there's the psychedelic, which is a sound, but it's a, you know, a PS. And then that's the consciousness too, but there's a whole other kind of area, I would say the existential, I mentioned Husserl and that whole area. And mostly because I've been, you know, very much influenced by the work of Colin Wilson, the British writer who, well, almost 10 years ago now, 2013, he passed away, but he wrote a great deal about consciousness from sort of phenomenological then into a kind of, I don't know what you would call a cult or mystical or paranormal kind of way and throughout the 70s and 80s and all of that. But that's all kind of, I don't know, there's a certain way it just seemed to me like that sort of got lost in the shuffle. And that's the area that I come out of. And so I'm for me, I'm just trying to have this conversation broadened because you can certainly find insights into consciousness and novelists and poets and people of that sort. It doesn't have to be sort of completely dominated by kind of the quantum world, I think. Yeah, and I guess that's what I really hooked into in reading that quote from the book is that it's like interesting, the first line that you gave me when you answered is like I was buried in the library, you know, which there's like two parts of that. One is, and it kind of relates to, you know, like everyone winds up talking about your background, you know, it's like you're giving a presentation to the Esophical Society of England and then you're doing another international presentation and, you know, the Washington Times, you know, or the, you're like, oh, I didn't want to say legitimate author because that's like de-legitimizing. But yeah, you're- Oh, have I finally made it, oh God, thank you. Hey, but that's the thing, that's the thing. So, you know, no one at the Theosophical Society, even though it was virtual, there weren't groupies in the background with old Blondie posters coming forward, looking for autographs. I mean, and- Yeah, the theosophical groupies you really have to watch out for them. But let's see. I'm telling you. The thing that I guess is noteworthy because you are, you connect this stuff to culture and very few people can make the kind of transition that you've made and fully make it. You know what I mean? Fully make it. And what I think it reflects in your work is something that I want to get into because I'm not always in sync with everything you write about, but there's a certain tenaciousness there. Certain tenaciousness that, fuck it. I could do this. I know I can do it. So I'm going to go fucking do it. And when you say, I was in the library. I was in the library for 20 fucking years. Yeah, I was studying this shit and I see a monopoly on consciousness that doesn't make any sense because that's the leap. You know, they had maintained this kind of really absurdity because the notion and you say this in the presentation which I think you do it very well and you've done it at other places is that at some level, at some philosophical level it's just kind of like the emperor has no clothes here. It's like, really? There's consciousness as an illusion? You're, of a whole night, you're really going to try and put that out there? I mean, did you respond to any of that? Well, I mean, of course. I mean, that was one of the things when you read about people like to get, I'd say John Searle, Daniel Gantt, Nicholas Humphrey. I mean, it's all this sort of explaining or explaining away which has been going on forever. It's nothing new. I mean, it's in a way, it's the sort of, as we say, it's kind of the fundamental drive of that scientific view which in itself isn't necessarily bad because it's trying to understand and here's certain paradigms, you know, to use an overused word, you know, that it does that. But in doing so, it has to sort of chop, it's very procrastin, and it has to chop things down to size to fit its method of inquiry. And that's rise to feel like, well, there's all these things. When I was thinking, I know in brain studies, they have qualia, but this is one of the problems. Okay, there's neurons are doing this or that. You and I, we're not saying, oh, that's neuron number 2672. It's lighting up next to blood. No, it's like, oh, that's green. Or, oh, I like that smell. Oh God, that's, where was that? That was at the seashore. So these are qualitative experience. I mean, we have the quantum, but we should have the column. But that would be giving way to this kind of quantitative way to try to understand these experiences. We can't, because these are experiences of a different nature. You know, and this is the thing where I just feel like that gets kind of lost. I mean, I'm sure the quantum things are doing whatever they're doing all the time, but whatever they're doing, it doesn't equate with the strange sort of experience of actually being conscious and being so conscious. And I mean, even that for starters, it's completely kind of, you know, very weird. But then we have all the other stuff that comes in later on, you know, the extended consciousness and that normal, whatever you want to call it, paranormal kind of thing. So there's all these sorts of things that they're part of our phenomenal experience. The world is like that for many people, but in order for whatever we want to call science to graph that, it has to chop it down to fit it in. And it gets rid of all the stuff that basically makes living worth living, you know. And that's where you step in and it's kind of like, yes, you're right, that's nice, all that qualitative stuff. We know that what's make human, but it doesn't really exist out in the objective world. Cool. Okay, and I'm done with that as a possible explanation. Have you ever thought about the conspiratorial or the potential conspiratorial aspect of it? Cause I'll tell you where I started. I started straight up just with the science, you know. So I was like Rupert Sheldrick, Dean Raiden, you know, they're looking at Psy, looking at the borders of consciousness. Let's look there because that's gonna kind of get to this question in kind of a boom data standpoint. But the more I got into it, and then particularly when I got into interested in near-death experience science, and I always have to add science in there cause now there's hundreds of peer-reviewed paper on near-death experience in hospital and all the rest of that stuff. Studies. Studies. Near-death studies, right? That's the thing, you just slap that on and then it's like, you know. Well, but really if you look at the science, it's like, okay, what were the competing theories? You know, it's a last gasp of dying brain. Well, we can get in there and we can measure that and we can measure the, you know, the release of endorphins, chemicals. We can release the DMT release. We can measure all that stuff and they have. And so, but I guess my point is where I got to the conspiratorial part, really what put me over the edge was, I don't know if you remember this, but probably 10 years ago when the near-death experience thing really hit and it hit with Harvard neurosurgeon, Evan Alexander comes out with a book, Proof of Heaven, and it's a phenomenal book in terms of phenomenally successful. New York Times bestseller, everyone's talking about it. And man, I mean, the cultural takedown on this guy was unlike anything I've ever seen. I mean, they were coming out of the woodwork and what was the, Sam Harris is always my favorite one. Sam Harris comes out and says, this book is alarmingly unscientific. And this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. And I remember talking to people and they go, but I thought you said he was a Harvard neurosurgeon. And I go, yeah, he's a neurosurgeon. So what business is this crackpot Sam Harris who doesn't even practice neuroscience? But that's the way it was at Esquire Magazine, major takedown. And so the big question there is, I've come to believe that there's a certain, I'm not saying it's the whole thing, that there's certain conspiratorial aspect, social engineering aspect to it, is that you thinking you're meaningless, that you're a biological robot that consciousness is an illusion, is kind of good for business in some ways. You know what I mean? You're not having an expanded sense of your fit in the universe beyond that, that might be useful for certain folks. Well, I mean, I just think there's people of that sensibility. And there's some people that are extremists or fundamentalists, I guess the Dawkins. You know what, to tell you the truth, I have to plead ignorant. I have to be one of the few people on the student of social media world too. I know the name Sam Harris, but I've never read or listened or heard anything. I don't think, who's all these other guys, Josh Brogan and people like that. I'm not thinking that's, I don't know them. They don't know me, I'm sure they don't know me. But I just don't, I haven't, I'm too busy doing my own things. I don't know what they're about. But I do know that, yeah, I mean, Wikipedia seems to be slanted towards that realm. It tends to call anything, slightly parapsudo, pseudo science or whatever. I mean, I noticed that and that kind of thing. I mean, it just seems, it's a hard road to hoe. You know, and it's always been like that. I mean, you mentioned, you know, with Michelle Jake Dean Raiden. I mean, I don't know, a year or two ago, I did a seminar with Dean Raiden and Alex Gray at the Omega Studios in upstate New York. And yeah, I mean, you know, it's there. The evidence is there, but the evidence has been there for a long time. I mean, in a way, it's just more of it is finer. It's more finely tuned. It's right there. You can't really ignore it. And if you are ignoring it purposely, you know, you're not looking through the telescope kind of thing, because I mean, not in any way to diminish the work that's going on now. But the reason I'm saying this is I did last year during the COVID sort of shut down here, the first one, which seemed such a long time ago now. I wrote a short book about precognitive dreams that I've been recording for the last 40 years, you know, which- Your personal precognitive dreams? Yeah, my own. Yeah, going back to the 1980s starting. And then also bringing in other people, like Don J.D., Don, JB Priestley, TC Lethbridge, Jung Synchronicity, and lots of other things coming in there. So it's called Dreaming Ahead of Time. It would have been out this summer, but Corona Mania hit and it was put back. So it's supposed to be coming out next year. But the reason I mention that is I talk about, talking with Dean Raiden about that kind of thing. And there's certainly enough evidence there to show that whatever may be behind it, whether it's retro causality, as Eric Bargo in his book, Time Loops, it's this remarkable book where he talks about this, or whatever might be behind it, it's something that, you know, it's on the record. But yeah, people who don't want to know this turn a blind eye to it. And they're still in a position where they can, see the woo-woo effect is still around, you know? You used to not be able to talk about sex. Now we can talk about it. So we can talk about the weirdest sex. It doesn't matter anymore. It's not salacious. It's not titillating. It's just, yep, this is how it is, and it's art we've liberated. We can talk about it. But we can't talk about this sort of thing without the X-Files music coming on. And the effect happening, which in one sense we want to keep, because it is strange and mysterious and weird, but it's the sort of thing that allows the, you know, the still entrenched authorities to say, ah, you know, what did I tell you? It's this strange kind of, you know, weird stuff. So there's certainly those two ways of looking at it. And fair enough, I think the pre-cognitive stuff is really interesting. I have a friend and a guy who's been on the show, Dr. Andy Pickett, who got a PhD at London, college London there, but is just like, yeah, I think he's from New Jersey originally. Really? That's the strangest beat you've come to me for. But Andy has, the unique thing about Andy is he's very meticulous about recording his pre-cognitive genius and is recorded and databaseed 8,000 of them at this point. Wow. And has the ability to, through his database, kind of go in and compare and he's done follow-ups. I don't know how he's had the time and persistence to do it, but all that stuff, you know, what I call extended consciousness, you know, because to, it does seem like, I don't want to just keep trying to drive home my thing, but I like how you say the kind of ghettoization of consciousness, I think that's happened, you know? But now we're beyond that. And I think that the real movement is to keep pushing, pushing beyond that and say, okay, that discussion is really a silly discussion to a consciousness, it's an illusion. I mean, it just, I think it was a conspiratorial absurdity at the beginning, but at the very least, can we acknowledge that the action is where we're at in terms of, you know, what is precognition? What is, Eric Wargo, I don't exactly, I don't think that supports that, but near-death experience, I think ET, you know, is incredibly important, and they just came out with the United States, you know, the preliminary assessment of, you know, which is such a phony title, but of the UAP, UFO. This shift is one of the greatest shifts in terms of the conch, from the consciousness standpoint, greatest shifts in our lifetime of now this disclosure that yeah, there is this ET's in the extended consciousness realm, which if anyone wants to just ignore everything else and kind of not read that headline into it, you're kind of missing the point. I mean, so that's what they're saying, and then it sends us in an entirely different direction as well, I mean, what does that mean? What is our place in the universe? Again is redefined. So I contrast that with, you know, this talk of traditional science and, you know, I'm still one funeral at a time. It's like, no, we are way past that. Well, the thing is, isn't this what everyone's been saying was supposed to have happened? The age of Aquarius is supposed to be with us, right? More or less, we're kind of, I don't know, it's all rather vague when actually we get into it, you know, when the meter ticks into it, but that's all supposed to be happening. And we certainly haven't a time, it seems, when all the strange stuff that was on the fringe, the marginalized weird stuff, UFOs and paranormal stuff and cult activity and, you know, weird politics and all that have become center stage, or at least they were during, you know, the administration of the previous president. Do you think it's any less so now? No, I was going to say that's the P-P-O-T-U-S. But, well, I mean, well, I mean, I just mean the sense that that's something we associate, I guess, which, and I'm, you know, not necessarily go down this row. I mean, the idea was like, okay, wow, that's over. Now we're back. And now, you know, things are crumbling around us and it's all very strange. So, no, I personally don't think it's over. I mean, nothing's ever over. I mean, it's not over, it's like, you know, what part of it, what part of the story were you involved in and then, you know, another story, so it's bubbling up. But, I mean, somebody I mentioned in the book I did about Trump, Dark Star Rising, Magic and Power in the Age of Trump, just briefly in there was this German Swiss philosopher named Jean Geppser, who can't go into detail about his ideas about consciousness. Again, like, you know, only people who know his work and this is mostly in cultural studies or sociology know it and, but he has something called the other, what he calls these structures of consciousness. Long story short, he said he died in the early 70s but he said, but we're going through 20th century so the beginning of and we are certainly, you know, going through an intensified period of is what he called the breakdown of the mental rational consciousness. And this means all the kind of, you know, we talk about post-modernist, it's post everything. Everything that was set in place during the modern period, you know, when the rational mind had organized everything, it was nice, it's set in place and linear and progress was happening and all that. That's all being taken apart. It's eating itself up. Deconstructionism, post-modernism does it. The right quantum did it with the physical Newtonian world already, you know, in the beginning of the century. Can I hone in on one little thing you said there? Because to me it's like a jumping off point that goes in two completely different directions. Is like, I love what you said that it's beyond post-modernism, it's post everything, it's post-rational thought. But then you said, if I got this right, is being taken down? And then you said, or is crumbling kind of under its own weight? And to me, that is the debate that my tribe is having is, is that being taken down? Is that an intentional effort to take that down? Or is it somehow organically crumbling because it needed to crumble and make way for some reason? I would see, well, that, there you go. That's a, I guess that's a philosophical or a critical question because in one sense it is being taken down, but you don't need a conspiracy theory for that. It's being taken down by itself. That's what I said. Movements like deconstructionism and post-modernism, they're all about the end of the big narratives. They're all, just by definition, post-modernism. It's the, in one way is it's the most vacuous term. It's like, whatever came after modernism. It's like, that's why it's like what I'm, they used to say, I'm interested in pre-next thingism. I'm before whatever the next thing is. And so there's stuff is all I'm after whatever that was. And it's like, that's fine. That gives you a linear temporal kind of placement, but what's your content? And both of those movements are contentless. Post-modernism contentless. It takes bits and pieces of other things and plays around with them. They'll crows them together, whether it's architecture or whatever form. Deconstructionism, by definition, it doesn't make anything. It takes things apart. Well, in that case, you have to have something that's made already that you can take apart. And what did they take apart? They took apart the Western tradition. That's what they've been doing. And somebody like Trump knows nothing about this. Just, he just got the whiff. Oh, reality is what we say it is. And that's in that book. What I'm saying in that book is that there's a few different trajectories of attacking the notion of a stable objective reality with a capital R or a stable objective truth with a capital T that is available for objective inquiry through the rational mind. That is so 20th century, man. That's like gone. And he ran with it. He doesn't know the first thing about post-modernism, all this kind of stuff. But he knew, oh, reality is what you make of it. And that's the positive thinking side, you know, Norman Vincent Peel and all that. That all ties in with a cult thought, with new thought and magical thinking. And so, and then the other side of it is the reality TV where, you know, he popped out of television. I mean, again, that's sympathetic magic, whatever you want to call it. And then these guys, you know, the whole Peppy the Frog kind of thing, which is supposed to have helped him get collected. You know, what happened to him kind of one wants to say naturally or led just to say kind of on its own where he popped out of television after being the guy in the apprentice where he hired and fired. Then he actually became the big guy who hired and fired. That happened by itself. But the reason he got to be in that was these guys helped him, you know, using the internet. And I mean, this is, again, this is what they say happen. But it's, we live in this strange time where that reality has just been kind of, you know, the seams, it's something that the aporia, which is what you do, you find the loose thread and you pull it. And in many ways, you don't need any kind of conspiracy theory about that. This is what makes our time strange. I'm just trying to characterize why our particular time is strange. I'm not saying there aren't any conspiracies. I don't know, they may be. I say away from them, I say, trap doors. You open a trap door and you keep opening trap doors. But they're all trap doors. I mean, it's the thread. It's the thread that you're talking about. In one sense, you don't need it because reality itself has become like that. Completely. I mean, that's the starting. Maybe there's a conspiracy behind making it so. Maybe that's the case. Maybe there's a conspiracy behind making reality. I mean, one of the people I talk about in Dark Star Rise and this lesson is that he was a professional conspiracy theorist for a while. He was inventing conspiracy theories for the Russian press and all of that. This is part of the whole, gigantic kind of, well, you could say conspiracy theory that Putin had installed over the Russian people. But that in a sense, it's sort of like an invented reality. You invent reality. So here's my thing. I like kind of, we could take this discussion in two ways. It's always gonna kind of loop back and the snake is gonna eat its tail and all that kind of stuff because fundamentally your understanding and you build this up with the data and the evidence and the philosophical data, if you can call it that, is that our reality is, at the very least we can say it's a lesser reality. It's a lesser reality. We are looking through the long end of the telescope and there's other people and this is what the extended consciousness literature comes back, right? So people have a near-death experience. And they come back and go, oh, I had a comparable download. I knew everything and now I'm back at this body and I don't, you know what I mean? Or in your pre-cognitive dreams. There's this expanded beyond space-time. I know more than I know now. And yet we always wanna shift gears and downshift and go, no, wait a minute, I'm back in charge here. Let me tell you how it all works. And so we can always shift to that mode and say, we don't know shit, which is always gonna be true. But here's the part that I guess is kind of tough though. So, and then let me make one other point about dark star rising. Brilliant insight. Brilliant insight that no one had. And for you to connect the Trump, you know, new thought movement, which again just kind of totally flies under the radar and even goes, oh yeah, that's great. That's, yeah, I have a picture of a range rover on my refrigerator because that's what I want. It's like, okay, but explore that philosophically, what that means in terms of how you see the world, how you see reality on the rest of this. But when you get to the conspiracy stuff, it's like, if we are gonna play that game, it's like the dark star rising. Where are we with Hillary and Mariana in spirit cooking, which connects directly to Alistair Crowley? I mean, don't we at least have to go, shit, man? Cause first of all, you wanna talk about conspiracy. Again, this is one that flies under the radar. Is this a conspiracy? Fuck, yes, it's a conspiracy. 400, you know, thousands of emails, the most incendiary emails are released four days before the election and they sink Hillary's boat. I mean, that's not like, oh, that just happened by chance, somebody released this. It's politics. It's politics, but it's also conspiratorial and it's also right into this world. I mean, you wrote a biography on Alistair Crowley and I know your biographies are kind of real biographies, but the connection to, you know, Mariana and Hillary in spirit cooking. I have to say, I mean, people have criticized me or at least brought to my attention that I have nothing to say about, which I have to say, I didn't pay any attention to that. No, not because I'm a Hillary fan at all, no, I mean, no. So I have to say, I don't know about that. I mean, I know what it is, the pizza gate sort of thing, but I have to say, I'm one of these people because I was a kind of necessary ignorance in order to sort of do my work. I have to sort of, you know, feel things out. So I have, again, I'm just, you know, pleading that I don't know enough about that to have anything intelligent to say about it. Fair enough. And I guess, hold on, because I wanna say something that this relates back to the first part is that I could be totally off on this, but that's the kind of tenaciousness that I think it takes to kind of make the transition that you did in your life to be kind of like Aaron and say, no, I can shut that off. And you wanna pull me into that world? I refuse, I'm staying here and this is my lane and I'm gonna run that lane, but I do wanna pull you in there a little bit. I do wanna pull you in there a little bit. No, no, no, I mean, I'm glad you do, but that's why I'm saying I'm doing it public here on live and admitting my ignorance that many people wouldn't do. You know, they would perhaps try to say something that sounded like they knew what they were talking about, which you can say I do that most of the time anyway, but that's true. But at least on this occasion, I'm being socratic and admitting my ignorance. So I mean, that's the thing. A lot of people that I guess were pro-Trump, they're sort of like, oh man, you're just doing this occult Trump stuff, but you're not doing anything about that kind of there. And I just have to say, I mean, the reason I wrote the book Dark Star is that my editor at the torture penguin asked me to do it and it was like, okay, go for it. So I followed that trail. I mean, I know there's broader kind of studies about that side too. I guess you could say, you know, occult politics on the left or I don't know, are they the left? Is Hillary the left? I guess she's the left side. Yeah, I don't think this is real. I did do a book earlier, occult politics in the occult, which the main argument of it is to say that there is a kind of progressive occult politics. You know, people like Madame Blavatsky or Annie Besanti was the head of the Theosophical Society. They were both very much involved with Indian independence. Victoria Woodhall who was the first woman to run for president in 1872. She was a mesmerist and a healer and a psychic. She also translated the Communist Manifesto and she had a Wall Street brokerage firm. She won these remarkable women in the 19th century and she was a free love advocate. So I'm just saying there is this kind of history of a kind of progressive, let us say, occult politics. And one of the most, one thing I was gonna say, just because I'm giving a talk about this actually in Denmark next month. So this is kind of on my mind. I just wanted to say the recent explosion or eruption of the id at the Capitol, you know, the barbarians entered in all that. That was kind of like the kind of burst of this kind of whatever you want to call it, the occult spell happening at that time for Trump and it was retreated, whatever. But that reminded me more than anything else of the attempt in 1967 to exercise and levitate the Pentagon. So, but that was from a leftist, that was an anti-war march. So I'm not equating it, but it was a similar sort of, you know, irrational kind of attempt at occult politics in a way. I'm just saying that to say like, yes, this stuff happens on that side of the political spectrum as well. Interesting, great, great stuff. And I like how you're holding the line. It's important. It keeps bringing us back to realizing where the line is when you keep holding it. You know, I'm not the political, I don't believe that. I think Trump is a brand, just like I think Biden is a brand. I don't think those are real. I don't believe in anything what we would call traditionally political. It just seems like such a farce. But I do want to make sure we get to the underlying questions here that I don't always see you kind of square off on directly. Like a couple of years ago, I wrote a book, Why Evil Matters? And the premise of the book was that science, it's right up your alley, but it's like science denies evil in one way. And then religion, you know, boxes it in, you know, it's this and then it might be our best lens to really kind of get a better understanding of what we're talking about when we talk about consciousness. Because when we move to talk about evil and somebody, well, that's just a social construct or this and then you start really nailing it down because there's a plenty of evil in the world. And that was the whole purpose. It was kind of as a thought exercise to say, okay, now I got you to a point where you go, okay, you know, the woman I interviewed who was sold into the Belgian sexual satanic cult there at six years old and they have pictures of it and you know, the Dutro thing and here's the woman who is there and you know, six years old, sold by her mother, raped a thousand times and then people go, oh yeah, that's fucking evil. Okay, now we can, so you know, you gotta drive the stake in the ground. But I say all that because like to me, one of the fundamental questions and this whole thing is, is there a moral imperative? Is there good and bad? Are there good thoughts, bad thoughts? In any context you wanna say, where do you come down on that? You know, is there a moral imperative? Is there good and bad? Well, I would say, well, fundamentally, yes. I mean, but it sounds what you just described to me, this poor woman, you know, it's horrific. What can you say? You can't say anything about it. But you can't say whether it's evil. No, no, no, no, well, I mean, again, you give this absolutely horrific, you know, person's existential experience, whatever I'm going to say is going to sound absolutely platitudinous and a truism after that. But at the same time, we're talking about this thing, evil, which, okay, one has to say, okay, what do you mean? Do you mean like there's the Prince of Evil somehow, a satanic, a dark principle that actually is actively evil or is evil the absence of good? Just like darkness is the absence of light. What do you think? We don't have a dark flashlight. Like, you know, some super villain might have a thing where you can shoot a beam of darkness at you, but we can't do that. We can dispel darkness with light. So, I mean, this is the Christian, this is the, you know, this is the argument, you don't have this argument, you know, when he did answer to Job and all that, you know. You know, my Latin isn't good enough, but it's like, you know, the privation of the good, provatio boni, you know, that's, it's the absence of good. Is there an active evil force in the world? This is the mannequin kind of thing. I don't know, but when you see some things, I mean, you know, Colin Wilson, as I said, who's worked, he wrote about evil. He wrote about serial killers. He wrote, he was writing about, he was writing existential studies Colors like Jack the Ripper and Peter Curtin, who's like, people that most people know about him, who's a Dusseldorf murderer, the film M that made Peter Lorre's name, the Fritz Lang film M is about him, but that's actually a tone down take on his life. Cause this guy was absolutely, I mean, what he did, but he was, but in his everyday life, he was actually quite nice, he was good to his wife and even arranged for her to get the reward money. So it's, people are strange. We are weird beings. And this evil, I mean, this is the thing that drove Dostoevsky nuts, you know, that's why it's the Ivan Karamazov and the brothers Karamazov says, you know, I, there may be a great cosmic plan in which in the end everything works out fine, but I can't accept it because I cannot accept what strikes me as the pointless suffering of a child. And he's talking, there's some, you know, horrific condition like the women you're telling me about. What cosmic plan necessitates that? Okay. But then his brother, Aleosha, who's the religious mystic, he has a vision in which all is good. And that's Dostoevsky's punchline in all of his books. There's somebody who gets this all is good kind of thing. It's completely irrational. It's beyond the rational mind. We cannot explain it. You have the experience and you feel like, yes, even that is good somehow. And it's not this worked out Hegelian plan where everything, you know, finally works out. No, no, no, it isn't, it isn't the suffering isn't gone. It's not suddenly evil turned into good, but somehow, somehow this overwhelming sense of yay saying, which Colin Wilson chartered down is both the outsider of people like Nietzsche and Blake and so many others that has experienced where it's this vital energy, life affirming sense of yes, that just trumps sorry to use that word, all of the pain and so forth. That word is no longer viable, right? But hey, no, that's great, Gary. And I appreciate it. And just so you know, I'm not Christian, I'm not religious. And kind of part of my investigation, this was a guy who is a clinical psychologist, you know, and I was doing this doing a bunch of shows and he wrote me an email says, hey, I love the show, but you don't have a fucking clue about evil. And he went on to describe how he had come to understand it through kind of channeled information. And that the important thing I think was that there's this extended realm in which it parallels our realm and that there is malevolence there, you know? So I don't know how to process it. And I love the way you're dancing with it. That seems to me to be really wonderfully important. And that's why we come back to you because you are, you know, you're not gonna be pinned down with a cheap answer. So let me then add to that. I mean, I was gonna say Swedenborg who I've written about, he said, the spirits are around us, you know, all the time and they're a dark, you know, evil spirits, you know, they're kind of the low life, you know, the kind of- As below so above, I mean, we don't have to look very far to see. Well, I mean, we've got nothing better to do than to create pain. This is the thing is there is some kind of, I don't wanna call it, there's some kind of, it's whatever it is, the life force gone sour and gone in on itself. And it becomes this kind of a little thing that does actually, it enjoys the pain and suffering of others. So I would say, yes, that to me would be, if you knowingly enjoy the pain and suffering of others, not in some kind of consensual, weird sexual kind of thing, but I don't mean that. I mean, some poor child that you've got trapped somewhere and that child's cries of absolute terror, you know, give you a free song, then that to me would be, you know, evil, I would say. Let me pull in a couple other days, extended consciousness things and see how you're kind of working them into your thought patterns. Reincarnation, I think is super interesting. And again, I like it because there's science, you know, you go to the guys at University of Virginia and they will blow you away at the science and you just have to throw up your hands and like you were saying about pre-cognition and Dean Rayden, you go, okay, so that is happening in this, you know, small R, big R reality, but so how do you process the reincarnation thing? What do you make of it? I have to say, I've never really, I've always had a perverse interest in this notion of eternal recurrence, rather than, I mean, I say perverse on purpose because, well, it didn't initially start. I mean, eternal recurrence is that we've had this conversation countless of times before and we will have the same conversation countless of times again. And this is a notion that's associated with the philosopher Nietzsche, the Russian PDU Spensky, who was most known as a student of Gergev, but he's a brilliant philosopher in his own right. He talked about it, but in a different way. But I was, I got interested in it because I read Nietzsche when I was in my teens and all that, but also in the late 80s, early 90s, I worked at the preeminent metaphysical bookshop, West of the Rocky, it's just a place called the Bodhi Tree. It's not there anymore, but it was very famous. It was made famous by Shirley McClain in the 80s that whatever, I think it was out on a limb or something. It was about her bad experience, which she was experiencing out of the body stuff and channeling a variety of things like that. And I started working there actually around the same time that I was working at this thing, harmonic convergence. Any case, I'm getting off point, but the reason I became kind of, I say perversely, kind of interested in eternal recurrence because everybody there was talking about who they were in their past life. And I said, nope, that's just it. No, you were just you. Sorry, that was more giving them a hard time about it. But I don't know, I mean, I was very, I mean, when I read a great deal of Rudolf Steiner, he reincarnation is a very, very central item in his system. And I don't know. I mean, how should I say, I know it's Ian Sanderson and I mean, those days are the early kind of people working on it. And I know today there's more, so there's enough kind of evidence in some way that points to it. So I don't know. I mean, I guess there's two different, well, there's more than two, but there's one is the kind of scientific where wherever it might be, the young boy suddenly has memories of something and it's rewarding and improving all that. And then there's the sort of philosophical, let's say, or the metaphysical kind of teaching about it. So, but I'm so busy, you know, with this world here and now that I don't think about where I was before. I dread having to worry about where I'm going next. Please, there's enough for me to deal with. I'm very existential in that way. You know, I think that's a lot deeper than you're kind of letting on and I appreciate that you're just dishing off with a laugh. I'm glad you reminded us of Shirley McClain in that whole era for people who weren't there or haven't read about it. That was the Zeitgeist right now. Who were you? I was ISIS. Everyone had these, you know, it really got to be so, it was comical, you know. Fast life regression, that was happening all the time. I mean, it was a fantastic place to be. In fact, I'm thinking, I have to write my memories of it before, you know, I don't remember anymore, but it was a fantastic time. But the other thing that you mentioned, I think is particularly interesting and it's often, you know, because the way you broke it down, I think is quite, quite spot on in that, you know, the scientific data, like you go look at Jim Tucker at University of Virginia, and Ian Steemson and all that stuff. And you just got to go, okay, yeah, okay, yeah, you got me, you know, you turned my arm of twisted my arm and I got to admit it. But the other thing is like, to your point, you go talk to some of the Zen people and some of the other Buddhist people and they go, no, you've missed the point. The point is there is only now, right? So any thought that you might have of past life, future life, you've already missed the point. So come back to, you know, and even if you're not like super Zen about it, you do see essentially what you're saying, which is my only job is to be completely engaged in, I couldn't be, I mean, yeah. But I'm talking about me personally. So it's not, I'm not prescribing for others. I mean, I know, I mean, other people, I mean, I write about this stuff, but I think in order to write about it, you have to be a bit sort of detached from it. You know, if you, too much, how should we say it? My left brain is interested in what my right brain is doing. It's trying to like talk about it, but no, I mean, I'm, I mean, no, you're interesting as you say Zen, I guess when I was a teenager, this was one of the first things I got interested in. Back in the very early seventies, it was like growing up in New Jersey, we got the tail end of, you know, the sixties and I was doing my own thing when I wrote in the seventies one or something like that. But yeah, reading D.T. Suzuki and obviously the Dharma Bumps and, you know, Kerouac's novel and Alan Watson and all that, but I just strangely enough recently went back, I came across some book of Suzuki's and I went to charity shop here in fact. And, you know, I mean, you know, having, I mean, I read this ages ago and having gone, you know, all this other stuff, a lot of it said, oh, I understand in a way what he's talking, at least what they talk about the Zen experience, which any Zen person would say, well, you've lost it already since you started talking about it. But it is this kind of right brain kind of way of seeing and being in the now, in the present and not being hurried and haranged by your obsessive left brain ego who always wants to do things. And I'm sadly one of these people who is like that. You know, I find it really difficult to sit and do nothing. I mean, I'm constantly and, but I'm, I have of late been consciously trying to do that more. And I've even started listening to Shaku Hachi, you know, bamboo flute music on YouTube, which I have to say, you know, this is one of the wonderful things about the online world that I have access to that now. That's awesome. What's next? What do you want to do for the next act? Well, I, in many ways, I want to take the long deferred and much needed rest. I've been saying for the last 20 something years, I need, but I have an idea for something like a memoir. I've, I mentioned that I'm, you know, talked about writing down these memories working at the Bodhi chain, things like that. Something along those lines. I mean, I'm actually at the moment, I'm working on a book about a fellow named Morris Nickel who started out as a Jungian. He was the first Jung's representatives in Britain and England, but then he changed his allegiance to Bergev and Hyspensky in the early 1920s. And he spent a year at Bergev's prairie, his Institute for Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau. For your listeners who don't know who Bergev is, he was this enigmatic, Greco-Turkish esoteric teacher in the first half of the 20th century. And he gathered around himself, quite a few intellectual and cultural people, the Russian philosopher Peter Hyspensky who I mentioned earlier, the writer Catherine Mansfield and people like that. And Nickel was student of his for a while at this strange place that he had in Fontainebleau outside of Paris in the 20s, where it was certainly a strange place and most of these people were sort of, you know, more or less, you know, well-off, well-healed intellectuals and writers and cultural people in England at the time who went there and they were mostly given all this very hard physical work to do along with all these kind of psychological exercises and things of that sort. So in any case, he sort of got lost in the shuffle of different people that came out of this time and I've been approached by someone to do a book about him and having written about Hyspensky and also Jung. And Nickel was also later in his life by the reader of Swedenborg, who I mentioned briefly, and I've written a book about him as well. So it seems like I might be the person to do it. That's fantastic. You know, I kind of get the feeling when I hear about the origins of these books you're talking about your vacation, Val. Forget about it. They're gonna keep, yeah. It's the old line from the Godfather. They keep pulling me back, you know? I mean, I, you know, necessity is the mother of production. That's my, that's my power phrase on that. So that's how it is. So I'm still waiting for the big one to happen. But no, I mean, I enjoy doing it and I enjoy giving talks. And I teach an occasional course for the California Institute of Integral Studies. I just did one recently this summer on my book, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. And so that's kind of fine too. Again, our guest has been very excellent, Gary Lachman. It's been terrific, terrific talking to him. And the website's very nicely done, number one, but also it has a lot of stuff there and it's nicely laid out, you know, which shouldn't be a big deal, but it is nowadays, you know? Well, I'm glad you said this. I'm actually thinking I need to revamp it. So I'm glad you said it. Well, you know, anyone, that's just kind of a personal thing. But what I liked is, you know, like you go over here and it's what you want. Interviews, articles, talks and other things. And it's all super accessible and there's, you know, just a line or two about what you're gonna find there. And then the links work and then, you know, it's just kind of nice and some of the photography is very nice. Just the facts, man. Just the facts. Well, it's been a great reconnecting with you and I really appreciate it. So, Gary, thanks again. Pleasure. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, good luck with the next one. Thanks again to Gary Lachman for joining me today on Skeptico. Question IT up is the obvious one, malicious intent. Question mark. Are they trying to break down the system or is the system just breaking down? Let me know your thoughts. Skeptico forum, come on over. Join me, Skeptico forum. If you are interested in getting an answer for me or getting a response from me or a dialogue with me, I, you just go to the Skeptico forum and I respond to everything there. Anyways, till next time, take care. Bye for now.